For a man of such polar contradictions, John Curry chose his favourite places well. When the sun shone, Fire Island and Cornwall suited him perfectly. When it didn’t – when the snow fell – he would choose the mountains of Colorado. Given his bitter memories of Davos, it was an odd choice, but at 8,000 feet above sea level the tiny ski resort of Vail was about to provide the laboratory for his last, epic experiment on ice. Among the clouds, he would forge the ultimate expression of his vision. But the effort would expose his mental frailty – and his cruelty – like never before. And when it was over he would be broke, drained and determined never to skate again.
In the first days of 1983, no one could see that coming. Galvanised by the success of Pro-Skate, Clairmont had moved with reckless speed. When Curry returned from holiday, he was to find a startling offer on the table. Backed by Steve Leber – with a little support from David Spungen’s credit card – Elva felt ready to help Curry establish a permanent company in his name: the John Curry Skating Company.
Albeit well-intentioned, it was – in almost every respect – a formula for the perfect business storm. Although Clairmont and Spungen had a surplus of belief, they had a hopeless shortfall of capital for a project of this magnitude. Nor did they have any firm offers of work, despite which Curry was already asking for absolute creative control and a year-round group of 12 skaters, backed by an ice engineer, musical director, costume designer and company manager. Without Curry, his two partners had nothing. Saying no was not an option. Glorious optimism had blinded them just as it had blinded Parnes. Everything now hung on a difficult man with a lamentable track record and, henceforth, everything that he wanted he would have. Unknowingly, they had created a monster; a diva machine, which Spungen himself would shortly have to control.
John’s statement was ‘I’ve got one more shot and I want to do it with you guys.’ That was important to me. That mission statement by him became the thing that weighed down on Elva and I to make a lot of decisions that were for the good of going forward as opposed to making business sense … We thought at the very worst if we can’t tour, we could get a TV show out of it. We had no money. There was nothing. We just ploughed ahead.
Curry had needed no second invitation. For him, it was a near-fantasy last-chance scenario. As artistic director of the grandly named Symphony On Ice, he would be exposed creatively but the financial risk would lie elsewhere. He would also ask, and keep on asking, for whatever he wanted until someone said no. By mid-January, he was contacting his first-choice skaters. By the end of the month, Spungen’s credit card was creaking with the cost of 13 airfares to the proposed company training camp in Denver, Colorado. The roar of expectation was deafening. Above its thrilling clamour, no voices of reason could be heard.
This time, Curry was choosing his ‘corps de ballet’ with more care. There would be no place for Ron Alexander, and Brian Grant was not even considered. Nor, to her great distress, was the ever-loyal Lorna Brown. Curry no longer had time for women who did not resemble ballerinas. ‘I was devastated,’ she admits. ‘I was the thinnest that I could be, but that was my big thing with John. It wasn’t the skating. It was food.’
Old faces and new ones were heading for the Rockies. Each was infected by the same sense of impending adventure. No one had done this before. Something magical was brewing. They were young; they were getting paid $300 rehearsal money a week, and they would be working with John Curry. Among them were Minskoff survivors Cathy Foulkes, JoJo Starbuck and Patricia Dodd. At Denver’s South Suburban Ice Arena, they would be joined by, alongside others, the pairs skaters Keith Davis and Shelley Winters; Tim Murphy, an Irish-Italian 21-year-old from Boston; and the five-times American champion Janet Lynn.
Her presence alone was evidence of how Curry had been flexing his muscles. In 1983, Janet Lynn was an American superstar who, during the mid-1970s, had been one of the world’s highest paid athletes. In Curry’s eyes she had no equal. But she was also expensive, semi-retired and reluctant to work away from her Denver home. To make it work, Curry had waived his own fee to cover hers, but the entire operation was still moving 1,600 miles to accommodate this one member. Overnight, Denver had become a necessity not a choice, and, if there was one, none of this had featured on a business plan.
Within days, Spungen was dashing west to join them. For the next two years, he would rarely stray from Curry’s side, plugging leaks and pumping up deflated egos. Already there was a crisis. To defray rising hotel costs, an exhibition performance had been scheduled in Denver, for which Curry was demanding a New York choreographer and a full set of cast costumes. With outgoings already spiralling, his options were limited. Either he pulled the plug prematurely or he caved in to the skater’s demands. Wearily, Spungen reached for his credit card. What credit couldn’t patch, however, was Curry’s fragile mood.
After overhearing homophobic remarks from local ice hockey players, he’d fled from rehearsals and was refusing to return to the arena. Back at the hotel – in a tearful confessional with Spungen – Curry blamed loneliness, and the terror of failure. He also pleaded to be taken out of Denver. ‘There was no way to say no,’ explains Spungen. ‘Managing him was all constant logic and reasoning. If a problem would come up I’d call Elva in New York and she’d say, “Take a deep breath and go talk to John.” I can’t tell you how many times I did that.’
Within a few days, the entire caravan had been relocated. Following a frantic series of telephone calls, Spungen had settled on Vail, a purpose-built ski resort with its own ice arena less than two hours west of Denver. Finally the serious work would begin.
Out of desperation, Spungen had struck gold. From the moment he arrived, Curry’s spirits lifted. Ringed by snow-plastered mountains, Vail was alive with skiers. Every winter, the resort wallowed in around 300 inches of snowfall. Every night the slopes were manicured into runs that heaved with daytime activity. At dusk, as the lifts closed – and the air quivered at -30°C – the bars turned up the heat and let ‘happy hour’ run on towards morning. Every lungful of mountain air was a tonic. And in every direction, the white-toothed horizon pleased his eye.
As a landscape, Vail was sublime. More importantly, its upmarket facilities dovetailed perfectly with the needs of both Curry, and his watchful minder. Unlike Denver, Vail had welcomed its unexpected guests, deluging Spungen with free ski passes for all, and favourable rates at top quality hotels and luxury condos. Even the ice was near-perfect – and cheap. At $15 an hour, the Dobson Ice Arena was not only a bargain, but its glass walls flooded the interior with natural light. ‘Skaters are used to being in cold, dark, windowless prisons,’ explains Starbuck. ‘We’d be going, “Oh my god, can you believe it?” You could see the sky. You could see the mountains.’
It was time for the hard yards to begin. Before they could be a company, they must each learn to skate again, refashioned in the balletic mould of their teacher. For almost all of them – Janet Lynn had remained in Denver – it would be an exhaustingly painful rite of passage. Every day would begin early – swaddled in layers to combat the pre-dawn cold – with off-ice balletic stretches. After this would come ‘class’, a highly technical period of study, performed in smaller groups, always watched and driven hard by Curry. Only then would rehearsals begin proper.
‘A full measure of concentration is required despite the early hour, inevitable fatigue and soreness,’ Cathy Foulkes would say later. ‘Anything less invites public humiliation through John’s scorn. Dreadful.’
Like all great art, Curry’s skating concealed masterful technique. In Vail, his awestruck young company were grappling with its secrets. For even the youngest, and best, of them it would be an ordeal. After eight hours on the ice, many could barely stand. ‘It was gruelling. Really gruelling,’ recalls Tim Murphy. ‘Growing up as a skater, it’s mostly about jumps and spins. But what he did was break everything down and shape us into something people would like to watch. In Vail, I was like a pig in poop. I was as happy as a man could be. I had never been happier.’
There was no reason for discontent. Curry was driving people hard, but – so far – with untypical restraint. As the weeks passed, there were few tears and no walkouts. Life in Vail was all but perfect. ‘The way we lived was amazing. We kind of owned that town,’ says Murphy. ‘We were all so full of ourselves. At least, I was anyway. We’d go to a bistro and order bottles of champagne. We kind of took over. We used to skate 6 a.m. till 2 p.m., have our skis at the rink, then run to the lifts at two to see if we could get one long run in.’
Although Curry occasionally skied, he rarely socialised. While his ‘kids’ (as he called them) crowded into the smoke-filled Sweet Basil restaurant, Curry retreated alone to his room with his records. Only Foulkes seemed to make any impact. ‘If he pushed people away, she didn’t take no for an answer,’ noticed Murphy. ‘She made sure he was eating.’
Ever since the Cambridge, their bond had been deepening. Back in Denver, when Foulkes had been ill in the night, it had been Curry who took her to hospital. Up in Vail the two would convene secretly in Curry’s room after rehearsals; sometimes for ‘tea and cookies’, sometimes to climb into bed and read Shakespeare. During rehearsals, he was often brutal to her, and yet no one else enjoyed such intimacy. ‘He destroyed her sometimes,’ remembers one of the troupe. ‘He gave her more kindness and cruelty than anyone else.’
‘John moves as no other,’ Foulkes wrote in her diary.
I can watch him skate for hours, totally mesmerised. His fluid transitions from one seemingly inevitable position to the next becomes intoxicating, at times hypnotic. Technically it is the complete mastery of his centre that makes him unique. Every movement is initiated from this point; energy emanates from and flows through it. The visible result is a grace liberated from distractions – in essence a purity. White. The rest of the company is at best ivory, achieving illumination only at odd moments.
In late February, Elva Clairmont flew out from New York to see how Curry was progressing. ‘John had blossomed,’ she noted. ‘He had become relaxed, positive and outgoing, and he exuded self-confidence … On the ice, the company now worked as an ensemble, gliding across the arena in breath-taking formation … graceful movements, soft arms, everything working as an elegant whole.’ On a trip up into the mountains, Curry pleaded with her to make Vail a permanent home for a permanent company. Only one component seemed lacking. As yet, there were still no concrete bookings for Symphony On Ice.
Unreality loomed again. To ‘make payroll’, the company had staged sellout ‘work in progress’ performances in both Denver and Vail, but a proposed tour of the Philippines had crashed. So, too, had a lucrative television special. At an ill-tempered meeting in Toronto, Curry had vetoed the production and walked out after hearing that Toller Cranston might be involved; and that it was to be staged on an Alberta glacier. Despite being under contract, he was also insisting that both Steve Leber and Michael Cohl – the two men who’d underpinned Pro-Skate and Vail – be disconnected from his young company.
Curry’s grasp of business had always been feeble. In the deoxygenated mountain air, it was clearly becoming unhinged. By early March, the project was running on hope. Keeping 12 skaters in Vail was costing $10,000 a week with no sign of any meaningful income. Just how much of this Curry knew – or surmised – is unclear. Some things he was told. Others, he was not. As Clairmont shored things up back in New York, Spungen carefully spoon-fed their solitary asset. ‘We’d tell John’s “people” and they’d be involved in decisions about whether to tell him A or B.’ Bad news always had to be rationed. Sometimes there were things it was best he didn’t know.
Pro-Skate, at least, was delivering some revenue. In March, the infant professional series regrouped for a short Canadian tour, and, since most of Curry’s skaters were involved, activities at Vail were put on hold. For the younger ones – skaters who’d missed out on Olympic selection – it was a genuine chance to compete and win. Behind the scenes, however, even Pro-Skate was in trouble. Sustained efforts to break into the American arena circuit had floundered, and a key Canadian sponsor had jumped ship. Suddenly Elva’s vaunted cash cow had developed a limp and Curry’s patience had snapped. Deeming Leber and Cohl to be at fault – and unsympathetic towards his vision – he wanted them gone. After two more exhibition shows in April – one in Vail and one with the peerless Janet Lynn in Denver – Curry said goodbye to his troupe and flew to London. Clairmont and Spungen could sort out the mess or it was over without ever really having begun.
In every sense, Curry had never been an easy man to find. Shortly before Brigadoon, his acting coach George Baker had air-mailed pleading ‘be a dear and answer my questions, otherwise you’ll get three pages of Edith Sitwell to do in one breath’. Years had passed since he’d written to Heinz Wirz, and his correspondence with Nancy Streeter had shrivelled. Even his friendship with Penny Malec was in hibernation. ‘He’d come and go in my life. He was very elusive,’ she says. Or, as Richard Digby Day describes it, ‘Obsessively private’.
Back in London, Curry burrowed deep. No one seemed quite sure where he was living. Or who – if anyone – he was living with. Unshackled from his company, he’d finally acquired a Yamaha motorcycle to go with his much-loved black leathers. When feeling brave, he burned up to Warwickshire astride it to see his mother in the sleepy village bungalow he’d bought for her just a few miles south of Stratford-upon-Avon. Mostly, he rode it around London – L-plate flapping – often turning up for meetings in a cream flannel suit, slip-on sneakers and helmet. ‘He drove poorly,’ says his brother Andrew. ‘Absolutely terribly in fact, with no conception of what was going on around him which, considering what he did, I found very strange.’
For a short while, Curry had stayed with Penny, only for them to fall out about acting. ‘We had terrible cross arguments about that,’ she recalls. ‘I said, “Well are you going to train?” and he said, “No, I can just do it” and I knew he couldn’t.’ After that, he’d taken a smart Chelsea flat, flitting between London luxury and weekends away with friends. ‘I had no idea where he was living,’ says Digby Day. ‘I never went anywhere where he lived; never saw his digs. We always met in public places.’
Gillian Lynne’s fine homes in Chiswick and Gloucestershire had become favoured bolt-holes. Few people tolerated him more; or had a better grasp of his fears. Throughout the previous year, her own reputation as a choreographer had soared. In both New York and London, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s musical Cats had won awards, and sold tens of thousands of tickets. Along Broadway, Lynne had seen the storm that was coming. Within a year of opening in Manhattan, four male cast members – ‘brilliant boys’ – had died of AIDS. Although worried for him, neither she nor her actor-husband Peter Land, would ever judge the choices Curry made. Life in their company – deep in the English countryside – sparkled with laughter, and it suited him inordinately well.
‘You would know when John was going to go off on one of his rampages,’ she says.
Most of the time he was this absolutely lovely, gentle, sweet, person, but then you’d get up in the morning and say hello to him in the kitchen, and you could always tell by the look in his eyes. I’d say, ‘Oh Johnny, I hope you’re careful’. And then off he went on his bike, after which we wouldn’t see him for a few days until he’d come back exhausted. We never asked questions and he never told us anything. He just couldn’t help it. Those who have to have it rough and hurt each other, I think it’s either in them or it isn’t. But his promiscuity didn’t go with the taste of the man. I never understood it.
Although they now rarely exchanged letters, Heinz Wirz knew all about what he called his friend’s ‘promiscuous crap’. Since the late 1960s, the Austrian had watched with growing anxiety. ‘I mean he’s had everyone sexually, oh yes. An incredible amount of gay lovers. Incredibly active. He would often say he’d been to see Nureyev and they went here and there and had something to eat. I often asked if they’d been lovers and he said, “Oh, I don’t talk about that”.’
No relationship was more covert, however, than the one with Alan Bates. Few people knew about it, and the two men were rarely seen in public. Although no tangible evidence exists, it seems inconceivable that the two were not in regular contact during this summer of 1983. At the age of 48, Bates was enjoying a golden spell. Playing the spy-traitor Guy Burgess in Alan Bennett’s An Englishman Abroad had earned him a coveted BAFTA. It was a role he’d been particularly well qualified for. Publicly, Bates was a married father of teenage twins. Privately, and very secretly, he engaged in numerous, secret homosexual liaisons, of which his relationship with Curry was just one.
Within the skater’s tight inner circle, everyone knew. Open speculation, however, was discouraged. For the director Richard Digby Day it was, like many aspects of Curry’s life, a cause for some concern. ‘Bates was a butcher version of John. He would not have been a reliable partner for anyone,’ he explains. ‘It was not in his nature to be that thing. There was no security there for John.’ For Gillian Lynne, there seemed a simple reason for their chemistry. ‘I would think sex, wouldn’t you,’ she asks. ‘They were both very special men, very classy men. But it’s always the one you can’t get easily that you truly hunger for and because Alan was both it must have been absolutely maddening [for Curry] to fall in love with him. That’s really not easy, is it?’
It must have helped their bond that Curry was acting again. Thanks to Digby Day, he’d been cast as Orlando in a production of As You Like It at the Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre. Throughout May and June – in front of 1,200-strong audiences – his travails back in the Rockies were ameliorated by good reviews and the respect of his peers. ‘He played the part with very considerable charm and warmth,’ says Digby Day. ‘He wanted to be taken seriously. He didn’t just want to be in light comedies and farces.’
Nevertheless, by July he was back in Regent’s Park as Lysander in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. ‘I hate it mostly,’ he told Nancy Streeter. ‘But the audiences go crazy and eat it up. Such is life … I don’t think I’m a very good Lysander, but who knows. Life here in London is pleasant enough. I have had little or no social life, which I guess is fine. The best thing about it all is my motorbike …’
No mention was made in Curry’s letters of events in Manhattan. Few gay men, however, will have been unaware of them. Just as the skater was grappling with Shakespearean syntax, banner-carrying Gay Pride protesters were taking to the streets in New York and San Francisco demanding: ‘AIDS Research – Not AIDS Hysteria’. Everywhere, tabloid fear fuelled by ignorance was stifling rational debate. As it did so, this mystery virus was leeching ever outwards. In California that month, the first AIDs-dedicated hospital ward had been opened. Within hours, every bed had been taken by dying young men.
Across America, terrified and bewildered homosexuals were going into retreat, and checking the health of their former lovers. On Fire Island, especially, people talked of little else. What had started as an American footnote was rapidly spilling out across the world’s front pages. In Britain, the previous year, few people had been interested. By August 1983 it had graduated to a full-blown national scare story. The ‘gay plague’ – as Fleet Street helpfully dubbed it – was winding back the clock on two decades of hard-won sexual freedom. Already secretive, Curry pulled his fears ever deeper, and drove on. Sometimes it was better not to know.
From elsewhere in New York there was better news. Curry’s cherished vision for Vail was not dead. Clairmont and Spungen had found a new investor. Someone else appeared willing to risk money on the mercurial Englishman. This time it was West Nally, a worldwide company packaging televised sports events, with a long-standing interest in the American skater Janet Lynn. During the Sapporo 1972 Winter Olympics, Lynn’s artistry had become something of a Japanese national obsession. If she and Curry were prepared to perform in Tokyo – together with Symphony On Ice – West Nally would put $200,000 on the table for three huge shows and a television special. ‘The deal was complicated but seemed to suit our mutual purposes,’ noted Clairmont.
It was a staggering step forward. It was also a huge amplification of scale and risk. The Tokyo performance was to be staged in January at the modernist Yoyogi Stadium, with live music supplied by the New Japan Philharmonic Orchestra. It would also be shown nationwide on Japanese television. Throughout August – around his performances in Regent’s Park – Curry agonised over the details of his new show. This had always been the part he relished. Music. Costumes. Choreography. Skaters. Ideas never daunted him – only people did that – and in London that summer his deep competitive instincts had already been stirring. At the Victoria Palace, Robin Cousins had premiered his own ice spectacular, Electric Ice, prompting faint sniffs of admiration in a letter to Foulkes:
Far too much disco movement. Ghastly costumes … but for all that it was/is an effort and had some merit … Robin sort of disappeared in the crowd and was quite disappointing … He needs space for all the speed which of course he was unable to generate … I cannot believe the summer is almost over, and that we shall be back in Vail in two weeks and performing again in about six.
Clairmont’s quest for more work had borne more fruit. Starting in late September – as a warm-up for Japan – a four-week tour of Canadian venues had been stitched together for the company. Once again, it bore the tell-tale signs of desperation. Many of the venues would be small and remote. To get Symphony On Ice into Vancouver and Seattle, the promoters had also insisted that Dorothy Hamill be on the bill. Merely securing her services – according to Clairmont – had added $8k (plus expenses) to the cost of those two shows. It was money they didn’t have. Equally, without her, they had nothing. Against expectations, however, Hamill had been thrilled to be asked.
Almost eight years had elapsed since she and Curry had left Innsbruck with Olympic gold. After a White House reception and hometown tickertape welcome in Connecticut, Hamill had pursued the big money offered by Ice Capades. While Curry remained defiantly poor but artistically aloof, she’d become a high-earning burlesque ice queen; what she called ‘a performing monkey living out of a suitcase’. By 1983 she was ‘burned out with the ice shows’, living in Los Angeles and married to Dean Martin’s son. ‘I never had the maturity or the knowledge to even think of doing what John did,’ she says. And then the call came in from her agent.
Not for the first time, Clairmont had got lucky. Hamill’s disillusionment ran sufficiently deep to override a manager who thought the fee was derisory. ‘He would have been happier if I was doing the hula,’ Hamill later wrote. ‘I tried to explain that it wasn’t about the money. Sometimes [my agent] made me feel like a racehorse … He didn’t understand my need to grow.’ In June, she had slipped into London to watch Curry performing as Lysander in Regent’s Park. After dinner they had skated alone to ‘Pennies from Heaven’ and a Chopin piano piece on the ghostly midnight ice of the Queen’s rink. It was her own private midsummer dream. If Curry wanted her from September, she was in.
Hamill’s was not the only new face. From Robin Cousins’s show, Curry had poached the versatile ensemble skater Dita Dotson. From Boston, he’d called up the gifted, but inexperienced 19-year-old Nathan Birch. Alongside them were veterans like JoJo Starbuck, Patricia Dodd, Tim Murphy and Cathy Foulkes. The pairs skaters Keith Davis and Shelley Winters had also been recalled alongside Mark Hominuke, Lori Nichol and David Santee.
For the entire 12-strong ensemble, three weeks of furious concentration lay ahead. Whatever balance Curry had achieved in London rapidly slid away under the pressure. For Nathan Birch, in particular, that meant an induction of shocking intensity. Earlier in the summer – in a letter to Foulkes – Curry had strongly hinted that he harboured feelings for his fair-haired new recruit. As rehearsals got underway, those feelings were buried under the onslaught of a deadline.
‘There was not a night I didn’t dissolve in tears alone in my room,’ recalls Birch.
There was not a day I wasn’t made an example of … I was the newest skater at that point and couldn’t pick up a step to save my life. I couldn’t skate in a group. I couldn’t do anything right. At first I felt completely outcast, but then slowly the others helped me gain a perspective. As a group we were forced to band together and be strong for one another.
Almost every day, Curry singled out a different victim. Only Starbuck and Hamill seemed immune. For the rest, humiliation and ridicule were commonplace. On one occasion, it would be Foulkes in a locker room sobbing, ‘Why is it always me, why is it always me?’. On another, it would be Dodd lamenting, ‘I am not cold, I am not cold. I’m a warm person.’ Everyone took their medicine. No one answered back. ‘I used to stand there, not shaking although the inside of me felt like a volcano,’ says Lori Nichol. ‘I remember crying all the time but it was like skating with an angel.’
‘The moment he walked into the rink, the air changed. It got heavy and thick,’ recalls Starbuck.
We’d be goofing around and then we’d button up because we didn’t know which guy was going to appear. The lost in thought guy. The ‘I’m going to get someone guy’. The fun-loving guy. The beautiful artist guy. But he didn’t need to be that way. We were all there for him. No one was looking to skip a rehearsal or sleep in. We were all on his team, just maybe he didn’t realise it …
Every one of them felt the same. ‘It was exhilarating,’ remembers Hamill. ‘These women were ballet dancers, and I found it really very difficult and humbling. The ugly duckling inside of me was trying to become a swan.’ Out of the endless, limb-jarring hours, movement and music were coalescing into routines of finely engineered beauty. Alongside crowd-pleasers like Tango Tango, Skaters Waltz and Faune were numbers crafted around Gershwin, Copland, Rossini and (as a nod to modernity) Jean Michel Jarre. Not even Curry’s perplexing mood swings could pollute what was coming together. ‘We were all a bit serious,’ explains Dotson. ‘I thought what we were doing was beautiful.’
Nothing like this had ever been done before. Ignorant of the shambolic finances, Curry drew hope from Spungen’s beaming optimism, and a pioneering aesthetic overrode his gloom. Living for free in Vail luxury, as the trees glowed autumn-red, more than compensated for any passing anguish. Out of the pain, and the endless rehearsals, something magical seemed to be forming. And however hard Curry lashed them – and however tempting it might be to do so – no one was packing their bags.
As the first snows peppered the tops of the mountains, a coach wound its way down through the tree line. Back in Vail, Curry’s project had been unassailable; untested; beyond review. Ahead of his company, across the plains of Canada, were venues they had never heard of, inhabited by audiences who’d never heard of John Curry. If they could somehow survive the dodgy motels and the clueless one-night stands – if Curry could hold it together for four weeks – then anything might be possible. Away from the security blanket of the Dobson Ice Arena, however, that seemed unlikely.
The plan had been a simple one. A handful of shows in major venues – like Vancouver and Seattle – stitched together by smaller ones in towns like Kalamazoo. There would be no live band, no set and no bespoke lighting. Wardrobe would be a girl with an iron. The music would be played off a cassette and piped through loudspeakers into charmless ice hockey stadiums girded by billboards for beer and burger joints. A few solitary spotlights would follow the action. Or try to. The men would share a locker room. Likewise, the girls. Very occasionally, Curry would have space to himself. Mostly, he would not. It was the vision of hell from which he’d once fled on the ‘tour of champions’. But for once, Curry’s tantrums were the least of Clairmont’s considerable problems.
It was a painful revelation, but outside New York John Curry was a commercial nonentity. As ticket sales bombed, panic-stricken promoters had to choose between cancelling dates, reneging on guarantees or renegotiating the price. Even as the troupe’s bus snaked out of the Rockies, performances were being scrapped and the entire itinerary was being redrawn.
To drum up interest, Starbuck and Curry jetted on a crazed publicity blitz, but nothing could fill the lines of empty plastic seats; nothing could disguise the hollow sound of half-full arenas. Had the tour been properly promoted, things might have been different, but it had not been. Twenty-eight venues in around 35 days was too much. Curry’s tour bus was rolling through the night into a vast continent of stone-walled indifference.
‘It was horrifying,’ recalls Tim Murphy.
We had a series of dances designed for a stage and we were playing hockey rinks with no advance advertising. Zero. So we’d sometimes play to 50 people. All the bells and whistles of a big national hockey league venue and 50 people scattered around. It was a classic out of town run. Very soon we’d be thrown into the most glorious venues in the world but here we were practising in front of Coca-Cola vendors.
Ironically, the ordeal was to be the making of the John Curry Skating Company. Somewhere along the endless highway – and the nail-biting plane flights – a sturdy team ethic was displacing the patchwork of egos which had preceded it. However small the audience, however rutted the ice, each skater always performed to their maximum. Night by night, they grew tighter and more confident. ‘You learned to be professional,’ says David Santee. ‘You learned how to get the job done.’ A standing ovation from a few dozen curious farmers had value, too.
‘We were in the wrong spot,’ Santee adds.
It was a really rough, tough tour. Very clearly we were a dance company on ice and yet we’re in Saskatchewan in the wilds of Canada. There just wasn’t the market but even so, we were getting better and better and better. We had to go to places like Thunder Bay to draw people because it was closer to the States, but I know we played the Edmonton Coliseum and got 500 in a 17,000-seater building. Really tough.
From the beginning, all eyes had been on Curry. No one knew how he’d react. In Vail, it had been easy for him to find solitude on his terms. On the tour bus, that sanctuary would be denied him. He would also be dealing with the setback of ghostly venues, followed, at times, by nights in no-star hotels frequented by prostitutes. For the most part, however, he’d been subdued. In Windsor, Ontario, the brief appearance of Alan Bates had helped and in Vancouver, to the horror of Clairmont, he’d briefly found himself back in the company of his former lover Ron Alexander. ‘I remember seeing him as we left the arena in Vancouver,’ recalls Patricia Dodd.
He was by his car at the back of the car park. He’d been to the show and we knew he wanted to be involved. John was looking at me, and he knew Ron was over there, and I knew John knew he was over there, but we just stayed walking – John and the rest of the company. I felt, we can’t go back to all that again. The shouting and the fighting.
Alexander had gone for good, but Curry’s resurgent feelings of paranoid isolation had not. On a bus journey to Kalamazoo he buried his head under a coat simply because no one had chosen to sit next to him. At the town’s hotel, he’d stormed out of the purple-painted honeymoon suite (with mirrored ceiling) insisting the entire company be rehoused elsewhere.
Everyone could see his distress. No one knew how to help. Although Starbuck or Foulkes, might proffer a soft embrace, Curry’s alienation went unabated. Nothing they did or said could ever persuade him he was liked, or that their work had any merit. It was Curry’s eternal paradox; that he wanted to create but was devoured by the act of creation.
‘Skaters are very touchy-feely,’ explains Starbuck. ‘I wanted to be that way with him, but John was not touchy-feely. If he was in a good mood I’d grab his arm and he’d link up. But mostly his body language said, Don’t touch. Obviously I’m flattered if anyone thought I was closer to him than the others. The truth is we all wanted to be close with him.’
If anything, the Canada trip had made it worse. The tighter his skaters bonded, the more excluded Curry felt. And the closer the Japanese commitment loomed, the more terrified he became. ‘The tour has been exhausting – nearly over,’ he wrote to Nancy Streeter on a card from Manitoba. Fatigue was plucking at everyone’s nerves. Were he to flee, Clairmont and Spungen’s fragile house of cards would tumble. It was hardly surprising if they shielded him from their catastrophic accounts.
In Windsor alone, two out of four shows had been cancelled, and the promoters had withheld box office receipts as compensation. Although the skaters had been paid, Curry himself had received only a fraction of what he was owed. Everywhere they looked, debt was piling up. ‘It was heartbreak,’ says Spungen. ‘It was a financial disaster,’ says the tour’s wardrobe supervisor, Gayle Palmieri.
At first I didn’t know if we’d ever finish that tour. I remember feeling so relieved to have got through the first performance. Then I thought, I like these people. Then soon after, I love these people. I never wanted it to stop. They were all so dedicated. And even though John could be really snarky, he loved them a lot. This was family. This was blood.
Silently, and without fanfare, Curry had proclaimed that love on almost every night of the tour. With two torn Achilles tendons, Cathy Foulkes could skate, but barely walk. ‘There was no replacement for Faune,’ she says. ‘I never had an understudy.’ Instead, Curry would carry her tenderly to the rink and nurse her through each performance. When it was over she would sink her swollen feet into a bucket of cold water. Without Foulkes, his signature piece was simply unthinkable. Without the ice, he had nowhere to go.
Whatever pain he was in, Curry’s nerve had held. As the tour wound up in November 1983, there was no flight to London; no disappearing act on Fire Island. During the preceding months, Clairmont had networked so feverishly that Curry’s prospects had been radically changed. Escape was no longer even an option. The following April, she had secured Symphony On Ice a precious run at the Royal Albert Hall in London. Three months after that – in July – the troupe would perform at New York’s Metropolitan Opera House followed closely by the Kennedy Center in Washington.
These were hallowed venues. Ever since Larry Parnes had promised him Sydney Opera House, this was the level at which he had wanted to dazzle. Behind the scenes, however, lay a patchwork of transactions that would have shocked even his long-abandoned British manager. To help pay for the Canadian tour, money had been borrowed against the Royal Albert Hall advance. And although the vaunted New York Met had offered a $50k guarantee for a week of summer shows, their insistence on Dorothy Hamill’s presence in the troupe had, according to Clairmont, already swallowed up half of that.
Once again, momentum was swamping logic. A show for the Met, demanding newly commissioned choreography, would require months of rehearsal. Every week Curry’s company stayed together – either on the road or in Vail – was still costing a minimum $10k. Prestige was flattering, but without sustained block bookings it made little business sense to hold these skaters together. Lacking the courage to terminate Curry’s ambitions – and convinced it might yet come good commercially – Clairmont and Spungen drove on.
‘There’s a madness that overtakes you when you have a dream,’ reflects Elva. ‘You think this is the time,’ adds Spungen. ‘It’s like, we are in this. It can only happen with him. We’ve got to push it as far as he’ll let it go to keep the company together.’
As Christmas approached, strategy again deferred to necessity. For the final two weeks of December, the company returned to Vail, where the long hours of rehearsals resumed at the resort’s ice arena. Both inside and outside, a deceptive wintry calm prevailed. Curry seemed happy, cooking a Christmas Day dinner and handing out cards to his company. Four days later, on the anniversary of his father’s death, he arrived at Narita airport, Tokyo, accompanied by his co-star Janet Lynn. Twenty-four hours after that, the city was rattled by an earthquake.
After his rare Christmas high, Curry sagged. Rarely had he appeared so low; or been so far from his comfort zone. As Japanese television crews and reporters swarmed around Lynn, he retreated glumly to his hotel suite. ‘I have the most horrible feeling that John is going to fall apart here,’ Spungen confided to Clairmont. Nerves everywhere were on edge. Once his hotel had stopped quivering, Curry had gone to the Yoyogi Stadium for dress rehearsals, where a full orchestra in tuxedos sat awaiting his instruction. No black despair could resist this. No expense had been spared. From the outside, Yoyogi was a sixties masterpiece in concrete origami. Inside, each musician sat on a glass stage embedded with glowing lights. Vast grids of spectacular spots and lasers swept the ice. Finally, he even had his own personal conductor.
Two months before, Charles Barker had been a 29-year-old freelance violinist working in New York. After a speculative invitation, he’d flown to Vancouver to watch Curry’s company in action. ‘It was the most beautiful thing I’d ever seen in my life,’ he remembers. ‘It was tableaux in motion. Unbelievable. I’d seen ballet a lot, but this was better. Faster. They could glide. I thought great, what have I fallen into? How could I even think of saying no?’
Utterly bewitched, Barker had given up a family Christmas to be in Tokyo ahead of the skaters. By the time Curry led his excited troupe out for rehearsals, he’d been working his Japanese musicians for three days. Everything was ready; from Artie Shaw to Albinoni. Standing in his tails he lifted his baton, and the overture from William Tell rolled out across the ice. ‘I remember in that dress rehearsal looking over at JoJo and she was clearly filled with effusive delight … they all appreciated what I was doing. They all liked what I was doing.’
That night, Symphony On Ice was broadcast live on Japanese television. To the watching millions, it was a triumph. Behind the scenes, it had been an evening of nerve-jangling madness. As he prepared himself, 60 red roses had arrived in Curry’s dressing room from a Japanese ballerina. Up in the enormous auditorium, Elva Clairmont had found herself sitting next to the Emperor of Japan’s brother.
During the interval – after Janet Lynn and Curry had brought the 10,000-strong crowd to its feet – a number counter had been noticed, rising and falling on the television screen during the live broadcast. The louder people clapped, the higher the number. To enhance the spectacle, a clap-o-meter had apparently been installed in the stadium. Unknown to Curry, Lynn or Hamill, their performances were being rated according to the volume of the applause.
‘It was rather humiliating, certainly for me,’ recalls Hamill. ‘We don’t like surprises. Things like that can catch you off guard and I was very upset about it. When I think about it now, I still break into sweats. I had no business to be competing against Janet Lynn for applause.’
As tempers rose backstage, the evening forged on. Undetected by the audience, every skater was battling to make critical, tiny adjustments. Back in Vail, they had mapped out these routines on a much smaller piece of ice. Here at Yoyogi the surface was enormous and the orchestra was isolated at one end. Covering the ground – and being seen – without drifting from the beat was proving a challenge.
For the musicians, too, it was a struggle. During a solo to music by Stravinsky, the Japanese pianist had become so lost that Curry was required to improvise until the musician relocated his part. ‘I also did this little solo Gershwin thing,’ says Murphy. ‘I recall taking the first step and I couldn’t see anyone in the audience. It was about 30 feet to the first row. The pianist had a single spot and he looked a quarter-mile away. I felt like I was in outer space by myself. I had never felt so lonely.’
A few hours later, as the company’s ladies sipped celebratory champagne in chiffon and silk, Curry was nowhere to be seen. With a sponsor’s dinner looming, Clairmont tried calling the skater’s hotel room but got no reply. Seriously alarmed, Spungen was dispatched to bang, unsuccessfully, on his door. ‘David then went and got the manager to give him a key and went in to find John under his duvet, which was very scary because David thought the worst, as [John] was absolutely suicidal that night; very miserable. He wanted to end it all. A lot to do with his loneliness, I think. The troupe was a family and he was like the austere father who didn’t know how to tell them he loved them.’
By Curry’s darkened bedside, Spungen had found a postcard bearing the image of Jesus Christ. Alongside it, according to Clairmont’s subsequent account, there was a half-empty bottle of vodka and some unspecified pills. ‘I told him, “John, John, we’re here for you,”’ remembers Spungen. ‘I would never give up on him because it was my mission to bring him through it.’ Once again, Curry came round.
On 5 January, following three stunning shows in Tokyo, the circus moved on for an improbable one-off performance in Hawaii. After Japan’s winter chill, the promise of Pacific sunshine visibly lifted Curry’s young troupe. From Curry himself, the prospect evinced little more than the monosyllabic grunts of a man in despair.
His solo work appeared to be growing in emotional intensity. Away from the spotlights, however, Curry was becoming increasingly remote. Fifteen years earlier, Arnold Gerschwiler had sent Curry to a doctor, hoping to ‘cure’ his homosexuality. At the age of 34, the skater had mental health issues that undoubtedly merited professional treatment – but none was sought, and Curry’s weakness for marijuana, far from engendering a euphoric high, was almost certainly exacerbating his naturally depressive inclination. There was also another, more tangible, reason for Curry’s slump. And his name was Keith Davis.
They had met for the first time in 1982 when Davis – and his skating partner Shelley Winters – had competed in the fledgling Pro-Skate championships. As Curry began casting for his new company, the Canadian pair had been priority recruits. From the outset, Clairmont had nursed doubts about Curry’s motivation. ‘I had a strange feeling that John’s interest was too intense to be professional,’ she later wrote. ‘Keith was a handsome, well-built boy … he was also deeply entrenched in a monogamous relationship with a boy from Ontario. I had a strange premonition that this attraction – if that’s what it was – would end in disaster.’ Even Winters had seen it coming. ‘John had a different agenda when he recruited us. But he was not a stupid man, and he would not have had anyone in his company who was not good enough.’
What precisely happened between the two men is almost impossible to discern. If any letters were ever written they have not survived and Curry’s infrequent correspondence with Nancy Streeter and Heinz Wirz no longer dwelt on his private concerns. What seems clear, however, is that – after a brief and unspecific physical friendship – Davis had lost interest, but Curry had not; and that by the time they reached Japan these unrequited feelings for the muscular Davis had become dangerously obsessional.
‘On that earlier Canadian tour we were in hockey rink dressing rooms with a shared bathroom,’ recalls Winters.
I’d gone in to use a mirror and John came in, devastated. Very emotional. Very upset. I went in to a stall to get some tissue and he sat on my lap and I was handing him tissues, saying, ‘John you’re our boss. I don’t think everyone should have a relationship with the boss.’ He was upset that a relationship had ended, not on his accord … He was used to getting his own way. When he was shunned, he became incredibly bitter … very mean with a lot of people.
For Winters, it presented a dilemma. Working with Curry was a skater’s dream, but her loyalty to her ice partner Davis had been forged over two years of performance skating. Up to a point, she would bite her tongue, but that would prove increasingly awkward. At the Dobson Arena, during morning class, Curry would sometimes address the company with his back turned on both of them. ‘A little ball of being really wicked towards us had started,’ she says. And when Davis had the temerity to entertain another man in his Vail condo, Curry – communicating through Spungen – ordered the ‘rival’ to leave.
Behind closed doors, away from prying eyes, the two skaters were locked in a grim, private war. On one occasion, after Davis had apparently slapped his face, Curry was seen sobbing uncontrollably. On another, after Patricia Dodd had been out for a mountain drive with Davis, Curry fell into an irrational rage.
I thought, ‘Oh God, John is thinking we’re having a relationship’, and he blew up in floods of tears, all over Keith and the frustration. I guess I knew Keith was torturing John with this; and that I was a vehicle. But then John could get obsessed with people. One time, when Ron Alexander had been ill, I heard he put him in New York’s most expensive hospital and dropped over $100,000 on his medical expenses.
With rumours spreading that Curry was threatening to fire Davis unless he slept with him, Spungen struggled to manage his star. The skater, he would say later, was like ‘a windscreen wiper of volatility’ and as the company deplaned at Honolulu airport, Curry’s dark side was in the ascendant. Washed by Hawaiian music and garlanded with flowers, the skaters were bussed to a mid-price hotel, which he refused to enter. At the company’s expense, the entire party – around 15 people – were moved to the shiny city-centre Hilton, where he vanished into a palatial room while his troupe headed for the surf. ‘John wasn’t partying or playing,’ remembers Starbuck. ‘We didn’t see much of him there at all.’ For Clairmont and Spungen, the perfect storm was now overhead. There were no contingencies in their funding. They were spending money they didn’t have. And very soon they would be spending even more.
As the plane’s cargo had been offloaded on to the runway, a generator required to make the ice had been damaged. For four days and nights, technicians had been battling to get things ready in a venue without air conditioning. Although it was still working, another day would be required to freeze enough water. The skating surface would also have to be smaller – tiny by their recent standards – and the performance had been postponed by 24 hours. In despair, Curry refused to attend rehearsals, leaving his skaters to restage all the ensemble numbers at the Blaisdell Center without him.
‘I quite liked him missing rehearsals,’ reflects Winters.
We could sit on the beach or get a day off. But I knew that people were very worried because John was not answering phones and things. He was so depressed that it would not have surprised us if … well, he was hanging on by a thread and the tip of this iceberg was the relationship he couldn’t have. I also think Keith had a ‘friend’ come visit him in Hawaii …
Perfunctorily, the company duly fulfilled their obligation. On a rectangle of half-frozen slush, Curry had temporarily forgotten his woes, and his fellow skaters had vamped with panache. ‘It was nothing more than doing a bunch of circles,’ says David Santee. ‘It was like doing the Indy 500 basically.’ As the audience filed away, a mood of weary finality infected the group. Privately, Spungen was seething over Curry’s indifference to the financial strain imposed by his demands. Publicly, he said nothing, preferring to mollify rather than confront. As a result, Curry’s self-pity had blossomed. In a plaintive aside, he complained that ‘the skaters have each other but I’m all alone’, but no one had the courage to tell him why.
‘I just wish I could talk to him one more time,’ says Starbuck, fighting back tears.
You wanted to squeeze him and tell him how great he was, but then, he could turn around and be this evil person. I think he loved and hated himself too. It was like he couldn’t control himself; as if he behaved in a way to make you dislike him because he felt he almost deserved that.
Hawaii was no place he wanted to stay. The rest of his company lingered on for a week’s frolics, but by 6 January Curry was back in New York heading for the ‘Hotel Streeter’. As quickly as the smothering gloom descended, it had vanished again. Nothing that had happened in Tokyo or Honolulu remotely threatened his plans for the Royal Albert Hall or the New York Metropolitan Opera House. At those two magnificent venues, he felt sure, people would finally bow down and embrace his vision. It would be good to be busy; better still to be back up in Vail. Somehow, New York had lost its zing and – with terrifying dread inevitability – AIDS had finally reached its fingers directly into his life.