Few things confer mystery on an artist quite like an unfinished masterpiece. From Mozart, a piecemeal Requiem mass. From Antoni Gaudí, the bones of a Catalonian cathedral. And from John Curry – out of the smoking wreckage of Scandinavia – would come the Firebird. Unfinished, unseen; no trace of it remains; no performance was ever given. Its only witnesses were in Vail, where it briefly flew, before the long-crumbling edifice beneath it finally brought Curry, his company and his abandoned last creation crashing horribly to the ground.
It had only ever been the most slender of lifelines. From a wealthy Manhattan entrepreneur had come an offer no one had felt able to refuse. Sander Jacobs had made his fortune in real estate, fashion and cosmetics, but it was Broadway and the arts which brought him pleasure. During a conversation with Curry the previous July, Jacobs had made an extraordinary offer. In return for a $150,000 loan, Curry would deliver him a ‘full-length ice dance ballet of between 45 and 50 minutes’ based on Stravinsky’s The Firebird. The completion date was to be March 1985 and the money could not ‘be used to pay existing debts’. Clearly someone on Jacobs’s team had been doing their homework.
By 8 January – after spending Christmas in England – Curry had started work on the commission up in Vail. ‘An air of joviality prevails,’ wrote Cathy Foulkes in her diary. ‘There is a good deal of hugging and kissing going on.’ No one was fooling themselves, however. The shine was tarnished. Even the faces were different. JoJo had not returned, and, after criticising the Scandinavian debacle, neither had Bill Fauver. ‘Not required,’ he’d been told. ‘I was straight out to the tune of $5,000 wages and expenses.’ Shortly afterwards – with Lea-Ann Miller – Fauver headed for Australia with Torvill and Dean.
It was like he’d always said. ‘You never knew which John you were going to get.’ After Bergen, Fauver had got the unforgiving one. Lori Nichol, on the other hand, had just been reacquainted with the sweet one. After a chance meeting with Curry at Denver airport, she’d been welcomed back – six pounds lighter – alongside Gabriela Galambos, a strikingly beautiful 18-year-old from Switzerland. ‘After three days in Vail, John put his arm round me and said, “Gabriela, Would you mind losing a bit of weight?” I said, not a problem at all.’
John hadn’t changed. If anything – for reasons which would shortly become apparent – his moods were worse, and his absences from the rink were growing longer. As temperatures outside sank to -40°C Curry’s remaining skaters wrestled with Stravinsky’s perplexing score, hidden beneath layers of clothing.
‘John has just mentioned that with leg warmers pulled over my skates I look like a Shetland pony,’ noted Foulkes, wryly.
His tone implies hatred for the breed [and] after removing the offending articles I rejoin the rehearsal … Within the confines of John’s dictatorship, I am a pawn. Contrarily in ‘real’ life I am not easily manipulated … Others in the company join me in living this contradiction. I don’t think any of us know how to alter it.
In tantalising fragments, Curry’s vision for Firebird was unfolding. To Nathan Birch it felt like ‘the best work he ever did’. On one day they might work on the climactic high-speed ‘Infernal Dance’. On another, the girls would toss golden apples to one another in the ‘dance of the maidens’. Nothing about it was easy. During the long days – often starting before dawn – rehearsals would sometimes disintegrate in chaos. ‘Panic is not very far away,’ recorded Foulkes, adding: ‘There is some consolation in knowing that I have plenty of confused company, John included.’
During the evenings, there would be hot baths and, on rare occasions, a few hours reading Jane Austen aloud with Curry and Rob McBrien. Even after seven years, Foulkes remained apprehensive in her leader’s company. ‘I still have a difficult time with small talk and idle chatter around John. I am reticent about verbalising trivial considerations, superfluous ideas – general clutter.’ Curry, on the other hand was happy with his cup of Earl Grey, with three sugars and copious milk. ‘Just occasionally with John,’ recalls Fauver, ‘you’d get a glimpse of the sun through the thunderclouds.’
Returning from a New York trip, on Valentine’s Day 1985, he’d bought hearts and cupids for the female skaters. A special card had been printed, bearing a photograph of his smiling 14-strong troupe. That evening in his apartment ‘the family’ (as Foulkes called them) dined on gourmet food brought up from Denver by their friends Charles and Ann Cossey. For dessert, a cake had been produced bearing two candles for the company’s birthday. ‘Now we are two,’ mused Foulkes. ‘Just like Christopher Robin and equally unlikely.’
John does the honours and then settles back against the kitchen wall cradling one of the children in attendance. Matthew [the Cosseys’ son], under normal circumstances, is an uncontrollable bundle of youthful energy. Tonight, in John’s arms, he is completely calm. John looks meditative. I’ve never seen this side of him and it is enough to make me swallow hard. How very human.
It was no longer a quality that Elva Clairmont ever saw. During a February trip to Vail she’d found him ‘snappy and sarcastic and … irritated by my presence’. Around the same time, Lori Nichol had torn a hamstring during warm-up and been flown home to Canada at Curry’s expense. On every level it was a tragedy. For the first time, she’d felt trusted and admired. As Curry pondered who to cast as his Firebird, Nichol’s name had repeatedly topped the list.
Ultimately, no one would ever be the Firebird. Nor would his vision run in theatres, night after night, as skating’s first serious challenge to works like Swan Lake, a full-length ice ballet imbued with everything he’d ever learned from Solihull to the snowy wastes of Colorado. On 8 March, work on his Stravinsky adaptation was ended. Whatever it might have been was lost. Curry’s company was in terminal meltdown. ‘Overdue bills must be settled before we can perform,’ accepted Foulkes. ‘This comes as very harsh news when all one wants to do is skate.’
In the locker room of the Dobson Ice Arena, the skaters said their farewells. ‘John is there taking off his skates. This is always the worst goodbye. He gives me a hug and a kiss. I will miss him the most.’ There was pain ahead for Curry, too. Finally, he knew everything.
Splitting with Parnes and Singer had been easy. This time it was bloody, frightening and horribly complicated. Since the previous year – against Elva’s instincts – Columbia Artists Management (CAMI) had been acting as Curry’s exclusive booking agent without any conspicuous results. ‘After six months they had done absolutely nothing,’ she claims. Fully confident that Curry wanted to break with them (notwithstanding the complication of their $250,000 loan), Clairmont had quietly identified a potential new agent who already felt bullish about ‘$2 million worth of guaranteed bookings’.
When news of this proposed switch reached the Met – where Curry was due to perform that summer – Jane Hermann was displeased. As the venue’s fixer, she could not afford to flirt with disaster again. One lost night had been one too many and a trusted big-hitter like Columbia Artists had been proffered as part of the solution, not another problem. ‘By the end I thought they [Clairmont and Spungen] were incompetent,’ she says ‘CAMI was a big agency … If John had a future he needed the right people around him.’ Events now moved with horrible swiftness.
For some time, Curry had been playing a double game. To Clairmont, he’d appeared eager to dispense with CAMI’s services. In separate conversations with Hermann, however, he’d been more circumspect. By mid-February, he was ready to jump. According to his later testimony, the skater accused Clairmont of firing CAMI on 13 February without consulting either himself or their ‘adviser’ Jane Hermann. Curry’s hollow indignation was disingenuous, but it no longer mattered. His backing for Clairmont had been withdrawn. In the power struggle between two women, Elva had lost.
‘I knew John had had it with Elva,’ insists Hermann.
I’m sure I’d have said this company has now got to be managed like a proper business, with a company manager on the road, a fiscal officer, an agent to book you … professionals … you can’t have some little ditz running around … John didn’t need to sense this. I said it. I’m extremely candid. No one ever has any difficulty in knowing where they stand with me.
On the weekend of 16 February – two days after the company’s birthday cake – ‘Hermann advised Curry of CAMI’s termination along with several other facts of which she had only just become aware’. The ‘facts’ would eventually amount to a very sobering list.
In total, the John Curry Skating Company was over $1 million in debt. Among the big figures were the $250,000 CAMI advance; $105,000 owing to Sander Jacobs for the aborted ‘Firebird’ project; $224,000 to West Nally; $49,376 in back taxes; $48,547 to the Musicians’ Union; and $64,590 owed to Curry directly for monies borrowed from his company, Frozen Assets. In addition, the failure to pay the Chicago musicians had led to a local blacklisting followed by the threat of a national boycott of all future Curry productions.
Among the smaller debts were telling sums of $4,100 to Kevin Kossi; $9,000 to JoJo Starbuck; $1,749 to Patricia Dodd and $4,000 unpaid legal fees following the sacking of Keith Davis. Choreographers, car hire firms and costume supervisors were all waiting for money. Even the estate of George Gershwin was hanging on for $1,500 in unpaid royalties.
Given this turmoil, it was hardly surprising if the Firebird was refusing to fly. Or that rehearsals had been abandoned. Most of the skaters were missing pay and, as the details spewed out, Curry’s co-directors were left dangerously isolated. ‘Jane Hermann was the worst thing that happened to us,’ says Clairmont today. But the tragic numbers were hardly Hermann’s fault.
As the news sank in, the troupe co-signed a letter to Clairmont and Spungen citing ‘financial delinquencies’ and ‘a spirit of recrimination’. While thanking the pair for their ‘tremendous achievement’, the skaters urged both to consider their positions. ‘If anyone clings to the status quo,’ the letter added, ‘the company will dissolve.’ It was brutal, but it was merely a prelude. At, or around the same time, Clairmont took a telephone call from Curry in her New York office. A few minutes later, when she passed the phone to Spungen, they had both effectively been sacked.
I asked if he would speak to me directly and he acquiesced. So I went over to Nancy Streeter’s. Jane Hermann is there. His agent is there. It was like an interrogation. John would say, ‘I heard a, b and c’ and I would explain what ‘a, b and c’ were all about. Every question posed I had an answer. Maybe not one he wanted to hear but totally above board. In the end he just said: ‘This is simple. I can’t work with you any more’ … Some of the most powerful people in the industry were saying, ‘John, we can make this continue for ever for you. Come with us and be our friend. Or stay with Elva and David and see what happens’ …
Neither would ever see Curry again. The trio would be bound together for months, however, by a complex chain of legal aftershocks. Since Curry couldn’t actually fire his former partners, he had formally resigned his directorship on 22 March. Amidst the revelations it now seemed that Curry’s truncated three-year contract with West Nally – the investors behind Symphony on Ice and Tokyo – had never been formally assigned to the John Curry Skating Company. Away from this bewildering carnage, only one thing seemed absolutely clear. Curry’s pre-emptive resignation had left his former partners exposed to massive debt. Far less certain was whether their former friend could ever skate again, even if he wanted to.
Curry had always lived his life in distinctly separate orbits. Boxing off his world made sense to him; helped him cope. This way, nobody knew everything. This way, he could stay detached. Yes he had sensed impending meltdown. But by shutting it out he’d been able to continue, wrestling with Stravinsky in the mountains, one pure world untainted by one much less so. If it had been foolish to ignore the warning signs, that was who he was. He had believed. So too, surely, could the suits. Somewhere there would always be another saviour. That’s what he did. He made people fall in love with him.
Recent events had unstitched all that. Neat compartmentalisation was no longer possible. Orbits were colliding. Legal threats were in the air. There were sworn statements to give, attorneys to hire and creditors to appease. To Curry it was like an icicle had been plunged into his artistic soul. Scared and homeless, he turned to Nancy Streeter for guidance. Nancy had never wavered, even when he had. Quietly she had been drip-feeding donations into his ailing company. Now she would provide both a shoulder, and a list of influential New York contacts, to help put her ‘son’ straight.
Throughout March – as so often before – Curry laid low in her apartment. By mid-April, he’d retreated to his mother’s home in Warwickshire, from where he penned thanks to his steadfast Manhattan landlady. ‘At the age of 35 I find my life is anything but “together”,’ he wrote. ‘I must and will do something about that. Being at home in England makes me feel better – the countryside is bursting into new life and the air is fresh and sweet. I’m almost afraid to say it but it looks as if my problems are moving towards settlement. I’ll keep you posted.’
Curry’s caution was well-merited. If anything, his tribulations were getting worse. According to Clairmont and Spungen’s rose-tinted projections, Curry’s company had been on course to gross $3.4 million in 1985, and $3.6 million the year after. All that was now dust. Uncertain of his contractual status, the Met had cancelled its two-week summer booking. At the same time, a US producer planning to televise Firebird had pulled out citing the ‘strong element of uncertainty’.
Unperturbed by the background rumblings, however, the Kennedy Center in Washington was still holding two weeks free for him from 8 August. After two months in England, Curry leapt in. Performing as the John Curry Skaters – not as the John Curry Skating Company – he would return to the ice. But this, too, would be bloody.
Behind the scenes, the lawyers had been inching towards an amicable and legally binding resolution; ‘some sort of nominal fee for turning the company over to him, or whoever he had behind him,’ explains Spungen. By accepting this, however, Curry and any subsequent backer would have assumed responsibility for over $1 million worth of debt. Unsurprisingly, someone on his team had seen a better way. Under a new company name, Curry could waltz free of his liabilities, taking with him, to Clairmont’s horror, the same skaters, costumes and choreography that her own creditors had paid for.
Midway through his Washington comeback, her legal team struck back. Under the gaze of District Court Judge Thomas F. Hogan, a motion was filed for injunctive relief claiming breach of contract, intentional injury to business and trademark infringement. Curry, it was claimed, had absconded with a fully formed product someone else had bankrolled. By incorporating his own name in the title of his new company, he had also violated the prior trade name of the John Curry Skating Company. In effect, Curry’s use of his own moniker as a skating ‘brand’ was under frontal attack.
Judge Hogan was buying none of it. Curry’s ‘right to use his name will not be lightly wrested from him’, he ruled. At two separate hearings – in August and October – the complaint was dismissed and Curry’s shows in Washington had been allowed to proceed. Once again, he’d escaped. Once again, others would mop up the mess. He was free. But he would never run a company again. And the financial cost had been ruinous.
High in the mountains, the joy was bleeding away. On the surface, rehearsals for the Kennedy Center had gone well. Curry’s rich vein of creativity had continued. But beneath it everyone knew the end was coming. Foulkes had found him ‘preoccupied and distant’. Although the sun still streamed into the Dobson Ice Arena, the old spark was missing. ‘Like Fleetwood Mac without the original players,’ thought David Santee. ‘The show wasn’t what it had been. I don’t think I even went to rehearsals. My recollection is that it was over at that point. John had taken so much and that was it.’
With his ownership of earlier work under scrutiny, Curry had worked demonically on new material. Some of it was among his best. And no one could ever say that it had been stolen. When the Washington run opened, there were five ‘world premiere’ pieces, and at the heart of their best was Patricia Dodd – balletic and beautiful and finally elevated to a sumptuous duet with Curry himself. ‘A closely danced pas de deux that depicts a farewell suffused with erotic memories,’ said one review. Tellingly, their dance was called Remember Me. To the very end, Curry would always be a master of the oblique.
Inevitably, this was a coda awash with anti-climax. The skaters had been given barely five weeks to prepare. Previously, they’d have had ten. Opening night had been plagued by soft ice, burst pipes and blue-spouting fountains. Falls and stumbles had peppered the evening. ‘Ragged and under-rehearsed’ was the verdict of one critic. Others could find no fault in any of it. ‘Undimmed in its glory,’ said the Washington Post. ‘It was, if that’s possible, more spectacular, more artistically rewarding and more elegantly performed than the show Curry brought us last summer.’
Hidden among the audience for one performance had been Tim Murphy. Curiosity – and respect – had brought him back. ‘I pretty much cried all the way through,’ he admits. ‘Not because I regretted my decision – I didn’t – but because it was so beautiful. I always knew we’d had a tiger by the tail, but I’d never actually seen it. You can’t see a dance that you’re in, and now I was seeing it and it was like wow. This is unbelievable.’
Washington clearly agreed. Every night the Kennedy Center was rocked by standing ovations. Like a decade before, L’après-midi d’un Faune was at the heart of their triumph. ‘It was in the first show and it was in the last show and every one in between,’ says Foulkes. ‘But I knew it was for the last time in Washington.’ On 24 August 1985, Curry, his 13 skaters and Charles Barker’s full orchestra took their final bow. They would not be coming back. Virtually none of Curry’s sublime work would ever be seen again. It was a tragedy, but the model was broken. In just three weeks their final run had lost a catastrophic $400,000.
If Clairmont and Spungen allowed themselves a bitter smile of schadenfreude, it was understandable. Their much-derided alliance with Curry had seen him fêted in London and New York. Without them, his new backers – whoever they were – had withdrawn in weeks. ‘I’m sure a lot of people hate Elva, or blame her, but the main thing is: it happened,’ says Kevin Kossi. ‘And there’s only one way this could have happened. You take a bunch of crazy risk-takers and a bunch of artists and put them together. Real business people would have said it doesn’t make money. Therefore it ain’t happening.’
None of which seemed to have been grasped by Curry’s fickle skaters. As the sulphurous mud flew, barely one of them reached out to their former paymasters, and Spungen especially – who’d laboured from Kalamazoo to Copenhagen – found that collective slight almost unbearable:
There wasn’t a deep enough hole for me to crawl into. All of that time, all we’d been through, and no one bothered to pick up the phone and call me an asshole. I’d have loved 12 people to yell at me for everything wrong they thought I’d done. Instead, it was a dome of silence. There were also accusations of stealing money. We were with them when they were with us. Where did we put it? Where did it come from? From the 2,000 people in an 18,000-seat arena? Is that where we got it from? The worst thing was that total closure. It was as if we never existed.
Time has mellowed that antipathy. Today most of Curry’s survivors speak with fondness for Spungen and respect for Clairmont. ‘It was she who spearheaded this fearlessness,’ admits Starbuck. ‘Maybe she screwed up. Maybe she just kept saying yes to John and it eventually caught up with her, but the ride was really great while it lasted.’
It would be horribly costly for them both. Clairmont had lost $124,000 and ‘suffered humiliation, ignominy and financial ruin’. ‘I was an outcast in the world I loved,’ she says. With his own losses spiralling towards $150,000, Spungen was forced to file for personal bankruptcy. Shunned by the world of skating – ‘through inference and innuendo’ – he grew a thick beard and took the dusk to dawn shift driving Yellow Cabs around weekend Manhattan. ‘Elva and I never did it for ourselves,’ he says finally. ‘There’s no evidence otherwise. And, yes, I loved the guy … but I pitied him as well.’
That autumn, no one seemed too sure where Curry had gone. Almost all of his old hiding places were fading away. AIDS had poisoned the well of Fire Island, and he never went back. In October, the Mineshaft club had called time on its Dionysian entertainments. Within a year, the Anvil would follow, closing its doors on jockstrap contests and ‘uncut night events’ deemed too risky by the health inspectors sweeping through New York’s blighted gay haunts. A scene that had once entranced him was now in its death throes.
Failure had hurt him badly and he possessed neither the desire – nor the energy – to start again. Between spells at Nancy Streeter’s apartment, there were trips to London for meetings with his agent, Jean Diamond. If she could find him any acting, he would take it. There was a simplicity to theatrical work, which he craved. Slowly he resumed the coaching lessons he’d let go. In one he was asked how he might be reincarnated. As a magnificent jewel on a velvet cushion, he’d replied. At others, he still struggled with the weakness of a voice confined by a lifetime’s introversion. ‘I think if I’d spent a quarter of the time on myself that I spent on skating, I’d be a little more comfortable,’ he’d once said.
Simpler diversions now yielded pleasure. Returning to Manhattan from England, he would include boxes of Weetabix in his luggage. When the ponds froze on Central Park, he might quietly glide between the reeds and the mystified ducks; mostly alone, but once – to her delighted surprise – with Patricia Dodd. As his days passed, so too did the legal impediments that prevented his return. But he had no intention of going back. In his mind, he’d been the victim of monstrous fraud and injustice. The names of his former partners were rarely ever mentioned again. There were new friends now; new escape tunnels to wriggle through.
Patricia Crown had first met Curry through Nancy. A New York lawyer, she’d been instrumental in steering the skater through his recent ‘divorce’, a process that had seen them grow close. ‘Very, very close,’ she says. ‘Physically, he was one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever laid eyes on.’ It helped that Crown was single at the time. It helped more that she was also bright, sympathetic and had a country house out at Amagansett on Long Island, just two blocks from the growl of Atlantic surf. For Curry, it was the ideal place to recharge. After the mountains, the healing sea and the circling gulls.
‘In the past I’d shut it down in the winter, but with John we kept it open and went for weekends,’ recalls Crown.
It was desolate, and desolation appealed to him. We’d light a fire. He’d taken his records out there and we’d listen to music. We’d walk on the beach and collect wood for the fire. He’d cook. He was the most wonderful, inventive cook. You could put him in front of any fridge and he’d make the most fantastic meals. He could never take people out. It was not within his means.
A state of calm was descending. Curry’s mania had either gone into remission or back into its box. Now that he was no longer obligated by self-imposed demands, the smile had returned and to Crown he appeared the quintessence of English charm.
I don’t know how anyone could not have fallen in love with him. There was a beauty about the way he moved and spoke and an enormous sensitivity in everything he did. He wrote beautifully and was a very, very funny person and brought that quarter-turn perspective to everything which allowed him to see things differently.
Between trips out to Amagansett – once in a February snowstorm – Curry and Crown’s friendship deepened. In New York they were the Thanksgiving guests of Mia Farrow and Woody Allen. As a gift, he bought a foot-high pine cone for his host. ‘He was rather enamoured of Mia,’ says Crown. ‘And although his means were limited his eye and imagination were not.’
During the fall, to enjoy the purpling leaves, the skater and his lawyer travelled to a former Shaker colony in Massachusetts where procreation and sexual contact had been forbidden. ‘I could have been a Shaker in another life,’ he told her. His affair with Shaun McGill was now clearly over. ‘John knew he was not successful with intimate relationships,’ she says. ‘There were no partners that I knew of in New York.’
Around Christmas, 1985 – according to an interview given 18 months later – Curry ‘hung up his skating boots’, he thought for good. At the Broadmoor Arena in Colorado Springs, with the ‘Sunset’ movement booming out from Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite, Curry skated alone and then stepped from the rink. ‘I had done it for 30 years. I had accomplished everything I set out to accomplish. I was happy to stop.’
Four months later, he was back in England, hungry for work. Living out of a suitcase, he flitted from friend to friend – Alan Bates included – often disappearing and returning days later without explanation. After years as his companion, the ex-dancer Gillian Lynne was surprised by nothing. Curry had been her flyaway guest in the South of France, New York, London and Gloucestershire. ‘You’d think, “Oh dear, off we go then” and off he went.’
When she could, Lynne – and others – would help him prepare for auditions. By May 1986, none of them had led to a job. In a letter to Cathy Foulkes, congratulating her on passing her legal exams, he told her he would be appearing as Zach in A Chorus Line at a small theatre at Matunuck on Rhode Island. ‘I shall sing and dance. Cross your fingers for me.’ Puzzlingly, it was never mentioned again. To stave off boredom, he retreated to his mother’s bungalow in Binton, decorating her living room and tending the roses.
Gradually, too, he was rediscovering his pen. In tireless redrafts of self-penned limericks, Curry found an unexpected outlet for his love of the absurd:
Charlie Stoke was a hell of a bloke
He always ate kippers for tea.
He rode on his horse, as a matter of course
From eleven till quarter to three.
Running his skating company had obsessed him. Without it, there was proper time for Nancy again. Perhaps he already knew how much he would soon need her. From Warwickshire, he wrote remembering ‘the 4ths of July that I have spent with you’. ‘Best of all was 76 watching the fireworks from Brooklyn Heights and feeling part of it all … my love of America and my feelings for you and your family are all so closely woven together – thank you dear Nancy’. Gainful employment, he told her, was imminent. ‘Lots in the wind,’ he said. The money would be useful. By his own estimation his legal costs now stood at $120,000.
Travelling light helped. Living for free helped even more. In London, he had a new shelter when required. Peter Farmer was a 50-year-old artist and theatre designer, with a sharp sense of humour and a fine collection of records and books. Although he no longer recalls how or where they met, Curry had become a welcome guest at his flat off Kensington High Street. ‘Peter Farmer was a bit of a charmer,’ ran one of Curry’s verses.
No rent would ever be asked or expected (Curry’s room was tiny) and their friendship flourished along its own eccentric lines. ‘I never knew when he’d come or for how long,’ says Farmer. ‘He was quite a lost soul. If John was there, John was there. He never formally moved in or out. Sometimes he slept with me. Sometimes he slept on the sofa. We both slept on the floor sometimes.’
Although the two were lovers, neither man exerted claim over the other.
We were not possessive. There was not the drama of high romance or breaking up. He’d meet other partners. He was not frustrated in that way. He’d meet someone and they’d be the person, and we’d have to put up with that for several weeks and there’d be a declining again. He was really only interested in working. He was such a workaholic and from that your life suffers. He also knew he couldn’t act terribly well, although whether he acknowledged that, I don’t know.
Curry was living in perpetual motion. In London he had Peter Farmer and others. In New York, he’d briefly taken an apartment on West 76th Street. Instead of the ice, he now slid between people and landscapes, with no discernible dip in his mood. The pressures were gone. If there were frustrations, he was not unhappy. ‘Floating around’, as Farmer put it, seemed to suit him. ‘There was a danger of taking his moods too seriously,’ he adds. ‘Sometimes he just wanted his own way. He was very straightforward. He liked cooking. He liked gardening. He liked an ordinary life and he had a uniquely wonderful sense of humour.’
He was also fastidiously precise. Gillian Lynne had noticed his ‘meticulous cleanliness’. He and Farmer had even enjoyed mild spats about washing the glasses correctly. To Curry, stains and smears were unacceptable. ‘It had to be perfect. Things had to be neat and I think that reflected the exactitude of skating. He was also very secretive; very private; a bit of a mystery person really. He always liked reading a quiet book. Didn’t like loud parties. We just liked each other and if he trusted you, then he trusted you a lot.’
By the late summer, despite the optimism of his letters to Nancy, Curry hadn’t worked for a year. In a cheery letter to Foulkes (‘greetings from jolly old England’) Curry bemoaned his failure to land a part. ‘These months in London flew by – unfortunately that is all they did.’ From American public broadcasting had come a proposal for an ice skating show which he had declined. ‘Majic [sic] on a shoestring budget again I’m afraid. And I really don’t want anything else to do with skating.’
As Christmas approached, he was desperate. Finally, however, there was an offer on the table. That year, the pantomime at the Liverpool Playhouse was to be Cinderella. If he wanted it, the part of Buttons was his; paid employment until 31 January. By mid-November, he was stepping out of Lime Street railway station into a raw wind blowing straight off the Irish Sea. Few English cities can be as bleakly damp as Liverpool in winter. Few parts seemed more ill suited than Buttons. To his own surprise, he adapted happily to both. ‘Rather a handsome city,’ he told Nancy, adding that ‘his four songs and dancing’ seemed to be going rather well.
It was a long way from the New York Met. Instead of Manhattan’s elite, Curry stepped out every night in a bell-hop’s suit to entertain 600 raucous children guzzling popcorn. As the unrequited lover of Cinderella, Curry’s role required him both to galvanise the audience and make them laugh. Neither task came naturally, but neither was he a dud. ‘He wouldn’t have done it for eight weeks if he hadn’t enjoyed it,’ notes Andrew Curry, who, with Rita, and his partner Celia, had travelled north to see the infant hordes yelling ‘behind you’ at their illustrious family member.
Backstage – with John facing a night alone at the city’s Edwardian hotel, the Adelphi – Curry’s fellow cast saw a more familiar side to the skater. ‘There was a sadness about him,’ recalls Clovissa Newcombe. ‘Not quite a regret but a deep sensitivity. Very shy. Very private. He told me he’d never belonged to a group of friends as a young man, and this was clearly not the most comfortable thing for him to do. But on stage he was very elegant, very classy. You could see the skater in him.’
It was more difficult for Curry than anyone could ever know. As Christmas and New Year passed, January dragged a chill off the River Mersey, which ate into his bones. When the house lights came up and the cleaners mopped away the debris, Curry’s stage smile was swept away with it. Peter Farmer was right. He was secretive. Now he had the biggest secret of all. Seeing his family in Liverpool had been lovely, but he couldn’t tell them. Heinz Wirz was different. When his friend arrived from Switzerland, Heinz would know what to say.
It had been years, and Wirz brought treats. Two boxes of rich Swiss chocolates for Curry’s incorrigibly sweet tooth. A joint of marijuana for when Wirz had gone. Curry’s gift to his former lover was much harder to swallow. On the darkened steps of the Adelphi Hotel, the skater heaved off his burden. Finally the tests had let him down. He was HIV positive.
It is impossible to be certain when – or where – Curry was diagnosed. Since he never, or rarely, discussed his sexuality he was unlikely to do the same with his condition. Although Wirz was quite probably the first person he’d told, the revelation was not an invitation for open discussion. Two days later, when Heinz received a letter from Liverpool, it made no mention of their conversation. The shutters had been slammed down. ‘You made me feel so happy and I thank you for that,’ Curry wrote.
Unless absolutely necessary, few others would be told, and – even with those who knew – all discussion of his illness would be off limits, unless broached by Curry himself which was unlikely. There had already been one strangely coded telephone conversation with his mother, which arose directly out of Wirz’s trip to Merseyside. That, too, had been dripping with the unspoken.
We had the best talk we have ever had and I think it will be a great help in the rest of my life – and hers. While we spoke I cryed [sic] very deeply – the first time for years – and I told her many things that have been causing me distress, Mother spoke very calmly and with great compassion. I felt very much lighter and quite drained at the end of it all – I even spoke about my fear of ‘aids’ – so you can tell it was a much more personal conversation than we have ever had before. All this could only have taken place after your visit.
It would be four years before mother and son spoke like that again. Thankfully, Curry was keeping busy. The work – albeit unglamorous and badly paid – was beginning to flow. From Liverpool he travelled directly to Belfast, where the Lyric Theatre was staging an adaptation of Hard Times. For years, Curry had methodically been working his way through the novels of Charles Dickens. It would be a joy, he told Wirz, ‘to speak some of the great man’s words’. Nothing else about Belfast was quite so pleasant.
Outside the theatre was a sectarian war zone. ‘This week alone six men [dead]. Last week eight,’ he wrote. A few yards from his digs in Adelaide Park, a restaurant was blown up. Shortly before he arrived, a blast had shattered windows at his lodgings. Inside the Lyric, the four-strong cast had taken four parts each and Curry floundered with the gravelly northern inflections of fictional ‘Coketown’ and its merciless headmaster, Thomas Gradgrind. There was also a huge amount to learn. But neither the ‘armoured cars that look like grey rats’ nor the workload seemed to bother him. If a jobbing actor’s life was what he wanted, he had found it. ‘Great fun,’ he told Nancy. ‘My favourite theatre experience so far.’
It was exactly 21 years since Curry had won his first medals. As hard as he tried, he couldn’t quite rip skating from his blood. Alone in his room, Curry watched the World Championships on television and bitched mercilessly about the skaters in his letters. ‘Isn’t the Canadian girl terrible? – Miss Piggy,’ he griped to Wirz. ‘All in all there was little of great beauty … PS If you can, please put a “special” cigarette in [your] letter.’ From London, he heard news that Shaun McGill was in England for a televised version of Sleeping Beauty on ice along with Foulkes, Dodd and Nathan Birch. ‘It might turn out nicely,’ he noted. ‘I hope so.’ But it was not for him. None of it was. Vail was another life, and in Northern Ireland he’d found another man.
Like Curry, David Delve was in his late thirties. Unlike Curry, Delve was an actor who knew his trade. In the 1970s he’d featured in the BBC’s Poldark. In the 1980s he’d turned up in Blackadder and Agatha Christie whodunnits, adding to a string of theatre credits which included Guys and Dolls and the Royal Shakespeare Company’s triumphant 1985 reinvention of Nicholas Nickleby, a production that had taken him from Stratford to Broadway, and which Curry had almost certainly seen. Delve was a priest’s son, thoughtful, calm and kind, and in Belfast – where the actor had been visiting a friend – the two had struck up a rapport, which soon deepened.
‘I think it’s fair to say we fell in love but how far John goes into love, I don’t know,’ admits Delve.
He said he was, but was he? It certainly started quite quickly. We had a night on the Isle of Man just talking. He liked to talk. But in his life at this time he was a bit of a fish out of water. He didn’t know where to live. A lot of his contemporaries had died and he didn’t want to go back to the States any more. He was trying to find what he could and couldn’t do. You provided what he might require for that particular moment.
With Hard Times finished in Belfast, Curry returned to England where Delve’s ‘minute’ flat in Kilburn gradually became his home. Everywhere he landed, he seemed to have less in his bags. What few possessions Curry had ever owned (apart from his motorbike) were carelessly scattered between London, Warwickshire and New York. These days, even his physical presence seemed fragmented. That May, for two weeks, he sang Irving Berlin classics in Let’s Face the Music at The Mill at Sonning Theatre, a restored eighteenth-century flour mill on the River Thames near Reading. The following month, Hard Times enjoyed a fringe revival at the King’s Head in Islington.
It was good to be occupied. Without work there was too much time to think. In the early summer, there’d been more bad news from America. The lover of his old friend Billy Whitener had been diagnosed with AIDS. So, too, had another New York companion. ‘Bill is alright [but] what a terrible time, Nancy,’ he wrote, adding sadly that he was too broke to help with either man’s medical costs. In London he vaguely harboured hopes of buying his own place, telling Delve that Nancy would stump up his deposit. Nothing now remained in the US account of his company, Frozen Assets. The only thing left was ‘the wretched ice machine’, for which he could no longer afford the storage.
During a live BBC radio interview, broadcast on 28 June, Curry sounded weary and disenchanted. ‘I came back from the USA with empty pockets … I lost everything I made … I made the mistake of trusting some people who I really shouldn’t have trusted,’ he said, adding that he really was finished with skating. ‘If I went on the ice I’d be terribly rusty and I wouldn’t like people to see me in that condition.’ Acting and singing were the future now.
When asked to select his favourite songs, Curry’s choices seemed uncharacteristically bland. Only with hindsight could the clues be discerned. ‘All the men come in these places and the men are afraid,’ sang Tina Turner in ‘Private Dancer’. And from Phantom of the Opera the line ‘Silently the senses abandon their defences’. It seemed unlikely Curry had not chosen his lyrics with care. Or that a message was not there for those who truly listened. ‘He was really just a little boy lost,’ thinks Delve.
Meanwhile, if Curry still yearned for stardom he hid it well. In a letter to Nancy, his complaints about lousy Equity pay were tempered by genuine optimism. ‘I feel that [money] will come and that I am laying very good foundations for my career.’ Undeterred by the empty seats in Islington, he still auditioned furiously and by the autumn he was touring as Orsino in Twelfth Night and the hapless young Marlowe in She Stoops to Conquer. The reviews, as they had been in Belfast, were warm; no more. Light comedy, it seemed, might be the way forward. ‘The silly ass in Just William would have suited him,’ thinks Delve. Even Penny Malec – previously unconvinced by his Shakespearean forays – was moved to tell Nancy that ‘John was an excellent fop … I think character acting will probably be his forte.’
Sadly, no amount of minor success could staunch the gush of bad tidings. In early November, news reached Curry that Roger Roberts had joined the list of the dying. In New York, he’d fallen from his bicycle and the wound hadn’t healed. That had been the start. Among Curry’s jumble of photographs was a snap of his tousle-haired Welsh friend, gloriously bronzed and squinting against the Fire Island sun. It was terrible news. The man had appeared indestructible. But then so had Liberace and America’s 4,135 other AIDS victims that year. So had John Curry.
In Britain there were fewer dead, but the mood of public disgust still bordered on terrifying. ‘People were being thrown out of their homes because their parents didn’t want to know them,’ recalls Delve. A senior policeman had accused gay men of ‘swirling about in a human cesspit of their own making’. Tolerance was unwinding. Secrecy and shame were taking its place. If asked, Curry would say Roberts had liver cancer. With homophobia on the rise, it would be foolish to expect compassion. And yet, despite the risks, many gay men were still indifferent to precaution. ‘We thought we were immortal,’ rues Peter Farmer.
At Delve’s Kilburn flat, the disease was casting its own shadow. Before they’d even met, the actor had been aware of Curry’s reputation. During his stint in New York with the RSC, Delve had spoken to one crew member who’d had casual sex with Curry, adding that ‘he was always down at the Anvil’. Nor was Delve unaware of the skater’s masochistic urges. Since falling in love with Curry, however, Delve had remained faithful. With AIDS off the leash, it made sense to be monogamous. Delve, too, was losing his dearest companions.
In the flat upstairs, the actor’s closest school friend lay dying of AIDS. Curry fumed at the time Delve spent ministering to him. ‘There was this thing that you were his somehow,’ he explains. ‘He did not like the attention I would pay to my own friends.’ It was hypocrisy of the highest order. After a year together, Curry had still not told Delve that they were sharing both a bed, and – in all probability – a virus. When he finally mustered the courage to inform him, the actor was stunned.
We had a long, heated discussion into the night. It was almost like him saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I have AIDS’, so I was shocked, but I don’t lose my temper. My father was a priest and people would come to me with their problems, so I tried to reason it out but anything unpleasant he wanted to dismiss; he wanted to blow it away. We continued in the full knowledge that he was HIV. It’s like suddenly your partner has cancer. So you deal with it.
Delve was lucky. For whatever reason, he had not been infected, but by the spring of 1988 his relationship with Curry was over. In a letter to Nancy, the skater said he’d been thrown out. ‘All very unexpected and strange.’ But Delve remembers it differently. ‘He just didn’t come back one time,’ he says. ‘I honestly don’t think he had a clue where he wanted to get to any more.’ Once again, the acting work had dried up. Television dramas didn’t want him, and while picking up a sock his recalcitrant back had clicked and laid him low for a month. It was the least of his worries.
Gradually, Curry’s letters back to Nancy Streeter were getting longer, and more frequent. In New York, cutting edge medical research was underway which might benefit him. None of it would come cheap, but Nancy would help, and Curry well knew how to touch her generosity.
In a carefully planted line in March 1988, he’d mentioned seeing a Manhattan specialist if, or when, he could afford the flight. Four weeks later, he was heading back from a New York consultation penning thanks back to her for the ticket. Throughout his competitive years, she had been his rock until the day – as with David Delve – he’d drifted away. Now, in unspeakable circumstances, the skater’s 58-year-old benefactor was firmly back on his team, with both her love and her money at his disposal.
In New York and London, Curry was discreetly canvassing medical opinion. Recent trials of a new drug called azidothymidine (AZT) had suggested that replication of the HIV virus could be slowed, leading to a delay in the onset of full-blown AIDS. In the United States, it had just become the first government-approved inhibitor. No one knew precisely what its side effects might be. No one was seriously touting it as a cure but any hope was better than none. In London, Curry had been told he could have it on the NHS, but not if he travelled abroad. Uncertain how to proceed, he talked to Nancy Streeter.
[My doctor] said that I was in the top health range of those people who are HIV positive. He thought my blood was in good condition and that I was perfectly fit. He said, ‘If you were to do nothing you would probably live for five more years without any illness and perhaps much longer. Perhaps you would never become ill’ … he thinks I should go to some kind of counselling and he wants me to find a lover! All in all I was quite surprised.
Once again, Curry’s address had changed. On the sunny terrace of a rented flat in West Kensington, carnations flourished and the evening fragrance of honeysuckle filled his rooms at dusk. Time to ‘dream and scheme’ he told a friend. Very quietly – and despite everything he’d said – Curry had returned to the ice. The previous December he’d skated on New Year’s Eve at Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria. Earlier in the year, David Delve had watched him giving a private lesson at dawn down at Richmond rink. Since then, the National Skating Association had persuaded him to run a series of classes for pre-teen children in London and Solihull. They were oversubscribed and noisy, and Curry had loved it.
By mid-May, he was back in Manhattan preparing for a low-key comeback. As a guest of the Ice Theatre of New York – an organisation built in his image – he performed two solos at the Sky Rink of such stunning intensity reviewers were left gasping for words. ‘Mr Curry remains his incandescent self,’ noted Anna Kisselgoff, in the New York Times. Although Curry alone knew what propelled him, one prescient observer had detected a ‘ghost of melancholy’ in his movement to Verdi’s Attila.
‘Watching him,’ wrote Mindy Aloff, in the Nation, ‘one marvelled again at how intimate and immediate and how much of an art, ice skating can be … his ten minutes swept by like ten seconds.’ John Curry, she concluded, had the tragic demeanour of a clown, ‘dramatic, infinitely expressive and quite alone’.
The following month – to mark the opening of a new skating facility – the Ice Theatre performed the same show in Andorra. ‘A pretty part of the world, but nothing sensational,’ Curry wrote on a postcard. He wasn’t there for the mountain views. Since their split before the 1976 Olympics, his former coach Alison Smith had stayed out in Spain, and Curry’s trip facilitated a reunion up in the Pyrenees.
Two years before, she’d proudly watched him at the New York Met. During the curtain call, he’d raised his hand towards her box and made her take a bow. In every way, it was she who had ‘set the bird free’. But still he could not tell her of his illness. That news would have to come later. ‘When I did hear, it just killed me,’ she says. ‘He was one of those people, like Heinz, I really thought we were going to grow old together.’ After Andorra, the two great friends never saw each other again.
For the next few months, Curry trod water. There was still no work and, as yet, he was undecided about the merits of AZT. According to some reports, high doses caused damage to bone marrow and muscle tissue. He also had growing concerns about his illness leaking to the press. For over two years, stories had been written speculating on the health of rock singer Freddie Mercury. High-profile AIDS victims sold newspapers, and one talkative health worker might easily unstitch his cover. Curry had tasted public humiliation in Britain before. He would not be exposed to that again.
There was another, more pressing, reason for silence. The previous year, the United States had implemented a travel ban preventing HIV-positive foreigners from obtaining permanent immigration status or entering the United States without special waivers. It wouldn’t directly affect Curry – he’d held a green card since the late 1970s – but it was a horrible sign of the times and it would remain in force until 2009. By mid-November, he was already on his way back there anyway. Moving targets were the hardest ones. Killed or cured, he would keep this secret for as long as he could.
Brian Grant was dead. Now, so was Roger Roberts. Faced with a double leg amputation and a slightly extended lifespan, or a swift morphine-comforted exit, Roberts had chosen death. It was all too close, all too soon. ‘John was furious with Roger for getting AIDS,’ says Penny Malec. ‘He was also terribly angry with him for dying.’ Years before, the Fire Island three – Whitener, Curry and Roberts – had talked about retiring together into the Californian sunset. Never had Curry’s aversion to sentimentality been so tested. Or his need for distraction so pronounced.
That Christmas he’d surrendered to a boisterous Streeter holiday. Three days later – ‘refreshed and happy’ – Curry flew to Baltimore for a ‘Happy New Year USA’ television special. In the two years since his company broke up, Tim Murphy and Nathan Birch had set up on their own. It was young and fragile but The Next Ice Age was devoted to perpetuating Curry’s vision. JoJo Starbuck would be there. Likewise his old flame, Shaun McGill. Each of them had reasons to be apprehensive but during rehearsals at the Inner Harbour Ice Rink, Curry’s composure never wavered.
It was a relief, he told a watching journalist, to have someone else calling the shots. ‘I don’t have to worry every morning about what I’m going to tell everyone to do.’ Nor, as yet, were there any glaring signs of physical diminishment. If symptoms had surfaced, only Curry and his doctors knew what they were. Everyone declared HIV positive was alert for them and the watchfulness alone was exhausting.
Liquid bowels, falling weight, swollen glands, forgetfulness, sores around the mouth, anus and genitals, blotches on the skin. It was the devil’s own checklist and every clear day was a blessing; just as unexplained tiredness and night sweats were a curse. Very shortly, Shaun McGill would be watching for them, too. Around 1989, at the age of just 27, the virus was already replicating itself in the blood of Curry’s Canadian ex-lover.
Once it was there, death was almost a certainty. The only questions left were when, and how. Typically, in the days immediately after infection, there would be a few non-specific symptoms. Unusual muscle aches, perhaps. Or an unexplained rash. Often these early signals went unnoticed, and after a week they would disappear. Sufferers then became asymptomatic, their bodies giving no outward clues to the presence of a predator that was slowly dissolving their immune system.
Inside the host’s blood, the white ‘helper’ cells which had kept them healthy were being ambushed and destroyed. Dispiriting regular checks measured the speed of this annihilation. When sufficient damage had been done – and that could take anything from one to 15 years – the body was defenceless. Tuberculosis, pneumonia, cancer and chronic organ failure were among the horrors that might then follow. In Britain, Curry had already been warned that his ‘helper’ cell count was low, possibly following a bout of shingles. In New York, Patricia Crown – one of the very few who ‘knew’ – pleaded with him to try AZT.
I asked him if I could speak directly to the doctor about it, and John gave me that permission. The doctor then gave me very generously of his time, during which I asked him whether he would give his own child AZT in similar circumstances. He said that he would and I urged John emphatically to change his mind which he did. For a while.
Nancy’s peerless Manhattan contacts had paid off again. With her husband Frank on the board of trustees at the New York Hospital on the Upper East Side, she’d identified a young medic who could help. Thirty-three-year-old Jonathan Jacobs wasn’t promising a cure, but his fury at the hostile marginalisation of the city’s gay men – and his radical pastoral programme to alleviate their stress – had struck a chord with Nancy. At her urging, Curry had joined his list of patients.
‘There was a sweetness about him,’ says Jacobs. ‘He was always very deferential; very polite and dignified. Appreciative, accepting and courageous. His closeness to Nancy was very special.’ Every month, Curry slipped into the unit on 68th Street for a blood test. Eventually, like almost every other victim, he experimented with AZT, taking five pills a day and hoping that anaemia, headaches and muscle problems wouldn’t be a consequence. ‘For years we thought it actually worked,’ admits Jacobs. ‘It was difficult to separate signs of advancing disease from side effects, and on those huge doses it was not unusual to have side effects … but we had nothing else, so we encouraged people to take it.’
Curry’s reluctance to take AZT was forgivable. For a man in denial, medication of any sort was an unwelcome and expensive unknown – initially $7,000 for a year’s supply. And if the rumoured side effects proved correct, his ability to perform might be impaired, thereby increasing his dependency on others.
As it was, his financial reliance on Crown, Streeter – and also, periodically, Gillian Lynne – was rising. Throughout May, he had kicked his heels at the Streeter apartment. Every sniff of work was pursued. Following a short break in France, he’d returned to campaign fiercely for a part in the Peter Nichols farce Privates on Parade. After three auditions, he was in.
Between July and September, Curry was back under the nightly spotlight at the off-Broadway Roundabout Theater. As Lance Corporal Charles Bishop – alongside the Carry On star Jim Dale – Curry played the conscience-stricken member of an army ‘song and dance’ unit entertaining British troops stationed in post-war Malaya. As one half of a homosexual couple, it was perfect casting. It was also uncharacteristically revealing. Every night he was required to appear naked in a communal men-only shower scene.
Built around female impersonation, crude jokes and lashings of gay innuendo, the play lampooned a fading Empire through the camp antics of the troupe’s misfit showmen and their cross-dressing ‘Jungle Jamboree’. From day one, its director Larry Carpenter had found Curry to be ‘a hard worker, accessible and funny’. There had been no inkling of diva, and the skater’s HIV status – which Carpenter had become aware of – had stirred no anxieties. ‘I suspected that John was “playing” very hard at night after the shows, but it never affected his work.’
According to one review it was ‘a gloriously funny evening of caustic social and political commentary’. Although Curry’s performance passed largely unnoticed (Nancy Streeter thought him ‘not so good’), the revival had still picked up the 1990 Drama Critics Circle Award for Best Foreign Play. On 30 September, however, after 94 performances, the run quietly ended. Again, Curry wasn’t to blame. New York simply wasn’t ready to laugh about homosexuality, and the skater – wearing white linen, Reebok trainers and exuding good health in the publicity pictures – was out of work again. He was also 40 years old.
If it was any consolation, AIDS, and the baffled search for a cure, had become a worldwide obsession. Around the time Privates on Parade folded, an estimated ten million people in 145 countries had been infected. Erroneously, a dead French-Canadian flight attendant had even been pinpointed as ‘patient zero’, and at the opening of Britain’s first hospital ward for HIV sufferers, two years earlier, Princess Diana had offered her bare hand to be shaken by a dying AIDS victim. Both stories made international headlines.
Although American police officers still donned long-sleeved rubber gloves for gay demonstrations, the princess’s gesture was symptomatic. In the West, fear was moderating. Toilet seats were no longer deemed a health risk. Women and even children were dying now. So, too, were heterosexual men, haemophiliacs and careless needles users. By the late 1980s, 87 million Americans had received a copy of the government-sponsored booklet ‘Understanding AIDS’. New, and cheaper, drugs were being hastily trialled and rushed on to the market and the first ever World Aids Day had been staged just before Christmas 1987, backed by the World Health Organisation.
The notion of ‘safe sex’ came too late for Roger Roberts, Shaun McGill and John Curry, but by minuscule increments the stigma was lifting. Support groups were forming. Funds were being raised. Big public events were tearing away the veil. In November, Curry himself had taken part in one – ‘Skating For Life’ – turning out on a makeshift rink off Lexington Avenue in New York alongside Robin Cousins and his former rival Toller Cranston.
‘He did not look at all well,’ thought Cranston. ‘Our one and only conversation took place in the men’s dressing room, where our close proximity forced him to say hello. After his terse greeting I responded, “Well, hello John. Speaking to me this decade, are you?” That was all either of us said.’
Cranston was from another age; another box. Curry could handle the rumours and the snide comments. Three years had passed since his diagnosis, and – to his eyes, if not other people’s – there had been no physical change. Once again he chose to spend Christmas with the Streeters, seeing out the 1980s behind their curtains in traditional festive style. ‘Another year has passed and we made it,’ he wrote in his card to Nancy. ‘Thank you for all your love and help and for being you.’ Apart from the continuing defiance of his immune system, Curry had few reasons to be cheerful about what lay ahead.
Between January and May, he was out of work. Desperate for privacy, he’d found an ‘adorable’ apartment in the Chelsea district on West 23rd Street. ‘He was not a taker,’ says Patricia Crown. ‘But people were very generous to him; people like me and Nancy were happy to make his life a little easier.’ Gradually, it seemed, Curry was withdrawing. Although the acting classes – and the medication – continued, the auditions had dried up. Curry’s name was no longer hot. Added to this, there ‘was also a sense of fatalism among all gay men at this time,’ thinks Crown. ‘I remember going with John to buy new white shirts because he was attending yet another funeral.’
In the early spring, a lifeline landed from Baltimore. The company founded by Tim Murphy and Nathan Birch – The Next Ice Age – wanted him to choreograph for a concert at the city’s rundown Northwest Ice Rink. For three weeks, Curry moved into their ‘dump of an apartment’, happy to engage in trivial banter, no longer insistent upon luxury accommodation. ‘I liked him at the end,’ remembers Murphy. ‘All of a sudden he thought my jokes were funny. We had a deck out the back, which he called the best room in the house. I liked being in his company. He liked being in mine. This was a different, kinder John.’
Down at the rink, months of stifled longing were bursting free. To the lush strains of Johann Strauss’s ‘Blue Danube’, Curry fashioned a piece for just four men: himself, Birch, Murphy and Shaun McGill. ‘I really want this piece to be about friendship,’ he told them. This time, there would be no bullying, and no sulks. By opening night, he had fashioned what Murphy branded a ‘masterwork’; a piece of such elaborate beauty that their audience, crammed on to hard wooden bleachers, had risen to their feet. ‘It was four men skating together,’ says Birch, ‘so in its own odd way it was shocking for some people to see. But it was not sexual at all. It was pure perfect movement.’ It was also a poem fuelled by Curry’s unuttered sense of loss, something the Baltimore Sun had unwittingly captured in its review:
As the music starts, the quartet drifts on to the ice holding hands and arranged in a sculptural mass. The feeling is like seeing a sleigh pass before your eyes. As the music builds … the dancers entwine and interlace themselves in mind-boggling configurations … Mr Curry’s work is full of brilliant nuance.
Just how nuanced only Curry himself knew. The ‘dashing coda’ in which his ‘rakishly flung figure is supported by his trio of cohorts’ had an ominously funereal ring, but the skater’s physical condition had rung no alarm bells. To Birch it seemed as if ‘he had aged a little bit’, but the Washington Post had noticed nothing. Curry’s solo work was ‘outstanding’, they said under the headline: ‘Brilliance in the rink’.
If it was to be his last headline for skating, and his last piece of original choreography, Curry had left his public with a dignified flourish. ‘I skate now because it’s fun,’ he’d recently told a reporter. ‘I’ve discovered a freedom and happiness in it which I thought had disappeared.’ Not everyone had been embraced by his spirit of friendship, however. During the Baltimore show, Patricia Dodd had performed two solos, without comment from her former mentor. ‘He wasn’t talking to me and there was an anger. I saw he was slimmer, but I didn’t put it together. He knew that he was dying, and I didn’t.’
Back in New York, nothing had changed apart from the weather. Unable to find work, Curry pulled even deeper into himself. ‘He’d walk around the city, go to acting classes,’ says Crown. ‘I don’t think he socialised intensively at this time. He had this loner streak and he could be prickly. He could decide he didn’t want to talk that day, or see people.’
When lured to Manhattan social functions – especially around beautiful women – he could still be ‘vibrant and energetic’, still a fountainhead of charm. ‘Every time you took him some place it burnished your status as well as his own,’ thinks Crown. ‘He was very successful at having people want to take care of him … Yes. I fell in love with him. But I also thought Elva had been in love with him. He liked beautiful women … He liked beauty.’
By September, Curry’s funds, as well as the lease on his Chelsea apartment, had run out. At Crown’s invitation, he moved in with her on West 13th Street while building work at her new place uptown was completed. ‘It was a pretty tense period for both of us,’ she admits. ‘He was so screwed up. There was such mental complexity. I loved him unreservedly, but he found it very hard to accept this. I’m sure people with such low self-image do not think themselves worthy of love.’ Alongside his course of AZT, Curry had unenthusiastically agreed to weekly sessions with both a psychiatrist and a cognitive therapist. While one probed his past, the other urged him to ‘live for the moment’. For almost the first time, he was revisiting deep-buried memories from behind the doors of 946 Warwick Road.
‘He had talked about his family before, but rarely,’ says Crown.
He didn’t like his father. His father humiliated him. He’d say: ‘Here’s Michael, he’s my oldest. Here’s Andrew, the middle son. Here’s John, we were hoping he’d be a girl.’ There were terrible stories of humiliation. After his father’s death he told me that everyone was delighted. ‘We were all so happy. We were free of him.’ Nothing I ever heard about his father was positive.
Almost every day, Curry still drew comfort from his skating. Up at the Sky Rink, he glided alone or gave lessons to both bumbling beginners and aspiring competitors. ‘We paid him, but not very much,’ recalls Moira North, founder of the Ice Theatre of New York. ‘This was not a stellar thing, but he was always professional and correct. Not a diva at all.’ Alizah Allen had been one of his students. Between the ages of ten and 12, she’d surrendered herself to his guidance. From the mandatory straight back, and the controlled arms, very little had changed since 1976.
‘He told me that if you skate beautifully to the point of distraction, all the tiny imperfections will be ignored. He was very invested in making me put emotion in, whether it was a story or a feeling I was expressing. He helped my body become an instrument moving to the music.’ Being only a child, Alizah saw little evidence of physical decline. Others could now see it all too clearly.
‘I remember the terrible day in New York,’ says Gillian Lynne. ‘It was winter weather’.
We’d all agreed to meet for brunch at Mortimer’s on Madison Avenue, and Peter [Lynne’s husband] and I were early and having a coffee when the door opened and in came John. He had a woolly hat on and I saw him look around the room and – from his expression – I saw him gear himself up to say it. I can see that hat and the big black coat he loved. John didn’t cry, but Peter cried; burst straight into tears. I felt like it but hung on. John just sat there looking desperate and I decided there and then that the minute he needed it, we would help.
Nancy Streeter’s help was already flowing freely. In late February, Curry had secured the part of a vicar in an obscure Tennessee Williams play (You Touched Me) at the Drury Theater in Cleveland. As rehearsals got underway he’d told her: ‘Lots of hanging about. Still, I am working. Here enclosed are some more hospital bills … Oh well!’ Like Privates on Parade, however, the play stalled and had closed by early April. And like Patricia Dodd in Baltimore, one reviewer had innocently noticed a change in John Curry. ‘He is superb … but so wan and sedentary that one could never imagine [he] is a champion figure skater.’ Finally, it was becoming impossible to hide.
As Curry’s weight fell, the skin on his face was beginning to tighten around his skull. Around Greenwich Village, he’d known dozens of men with the same spectral look: the dark-hollowed cheeks; the receding eye sockets; the oddly prominent teeth. Curry knew exactly what it meant. On his arm at about this time he had found ‘a small brown patch’. It was the moment he’d known would come. Nothing was more symptomatic of full-blown AIDS than Kaposi’s sarcoma, the cancerous lesions that blossomed on the skin and gums. Almost five years after diagnosis, the virus had won. ‘It was a horrible shock,’ he said later. ‘I started to prepare myself to come home.’
Since Christmas he’d been living alone, and rent-free, in Patricia Crown’s old apartment. When it came to it, there wouldn’t be much to pack. After Cleveland, the phone had stopped ringing. ‘He had very few artistic outlets,’ says Crown. ‘He had less energy and was starting to need a higher degree of care.’ Fleetingly, in mid-May, there had been an unexpected validation; a happy opportunity to savour what had been – and what might have been – when he was handed the prestigious Capezio Dance Award at a glossy ceremony in Manhattan.
Finally he was recognised as the dancer his father had forbidden him to be. Scanning the list of previous winners, Curry saw the names of Fred Astaire, Bob Fosse, Jerome Robbins and Nureyev. Now his name was there, too. After a tearful speech and celebratory dinner party at the Streeter apartment, he honoured his hosts, Nancy and Frank, for all they had done. ‘Without your love and help over the YEARS!! I would not have been in a position to even be considered. Thank you both for being such a happy part of life.’
Six weeks later Curry was gone, leaving his dance award in Nancy’s care. He would never be back. ‘The AZT is some that I have left over,’ he added, before flying out to London on 1 July 1991, taking no more luggage than he’d arrived with 20 years before. Back then he’d been coming to New York to live. Now he was returning to England to die. As the plane banked, he could see an unbroken line of surf stretching north to Fire Island. Behind him was the last performance he ever committed to tape. Knowing how glorious he had been, it is still almost impossible to watch.
For an obscure television special – in front of hugely grotesque letters spelling HOLLYWOOD – Curry skates for three minutes to Mozart’s Concerto for Flute and Harp. Wearing an austere black outfit, he gives a performance of exquisite grace and heart-breaking simplicity. Tape degradation, however, has drained all colour from the image and what survives is starkly monochrome and hissing with distortion.
As the music ends, he smiles broadly in silhouette, raises his arms and flutters his fingers. At that moment – with its echo of a night in Innsbruck – the focus sharpens, and Curry’s ravaged face can clearly be seen. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, John Curry,’ booms the voice of the announcer. Cheering bursts out. There is a brief shot of an audience clapping. And then it is over.