A very dapper little old man has died, I thought, on Thursday of last week when I saw the news photo. Of the cancer mesothelioma, I read, taking in the man's soft, pallid skin, his pale blue eyes and small frill of ginger hair - what a shame.
Almost simultaneously, I realized that this was Malcolm McLaren, who has long lived in my imagination as the elegant, nefarious fop who actually did - with regard to genre, hype, and legend - invent the Sex Pistols.
The Pistols' front man, however, the tedious and meretricious John Lydon (stage name, Johnny Rotten) has spent the better part of 30 years since the band's violent dissolution casting McLaren, his former manager and mentor, as a "stupid egomaniac," "evil" and worse. Watch Julien Temple's 2000 hagiography of the Pistols, the film The Filth and the Fury and note that Lydon cannot stop speaking about McLaren, and is reduced to tears when he speaks too much.
It is like watching a man speak of his former lover and great love, with all of the emotions that sort of looking back evokes: anger, blame, wistful redaction and a lachrymose sense of terrible injustice and loss.
Lydon praised his old nemesis this week and said that he missed him, and of course he does. There is no Johnny Rotten without McLaren, or McLaren's former girlfriend, designer Vivienne Westwood (the mother of McLaren's child, the lingerie maven Joseph Ferdinand Corré), who styled Lydon so starkly, with such aesthetic acuity that his appearance, in the 1970s and at the apex of his fame, is as iconic as Elvis Presley styled by Warhol; as Grace Kelly through the eyes of Alfred Hitchcock.
Lydon was the artistic child of McLaren and Westwood, and as such, rebelled, parlously.
Throughout his 1994 autobiography, and the Temple film - in which McLaren appears in a full bondage suit, speaking dismissively about his "little creations" as his long-time girlfriend Young Kim administers oxygen - Lydon rails like Frankenstein's monster about the circumstances of his own creation.
And when he breaks down in the film while speaking of his best friend Sid Vicious's death, a death he blames partly on McLaren's negligence, he is shockingly persuasive about McLaren's nefariousness. Like McLaren, Lydon looks much older than he is (they both share a certain English tendency wherein one's advancing age and one's resemblance to pudding are closely correlated), yet he is still fierce, still possessed of that remarkable death glare he once used to control wild, near-homicidal crowds.
Seeing Lydon cry, then, is utterly disarming. I have long accepted, uncritically, anything he has ever said, however self-aggrandizing (he believes himself to be Shakespeare's Richard III), sophomoric (I believe the play is the only thing he has ever read), or cruel (he continues to revile Nancy Spungen, the 20-year-old girl whom Vicious stabbed to death with a hunting knife).
And one day, I simply tired of Lydon's monotonous and self-serving auto-narrative and his ceaseless loathing of McLaren. Like KISS's needlessly pompous Gene Simmons, Lydon has been sullenly pontificating about his own importance for too long. And, also like Simmons, who now resembles a still more butch Leona Helmsley, Lydon is, as he was once wont to sneer, "too old" to speak credibly or with authority about music, given that he appears to have lost interest after a strange, misguided passion for reggae in the 1980s and the formation and prompt disbanding of the cool, querulous PiL in the same decade.
McLaren, similarly, busted a few moves post-Pistols, including 1980s songs like Buffalo Gals and Madame Butterfly, but if you have been following the rather slender stream of obits, you will have noted his fame, like Lydon's, stands squarely and iconically in 1977. One expects that if travelling in London, one will still find his and Westwood's puffy-lettered SEX shop; with the entire crew standing outside angrily deriding Rod Stewart.
The Sex Pistols were a great band, but McLaren, regardless of what Lydon says about his self-invention, made them and their single LP - modelled brazenly on the infamous 1914 shocking-pink BLAST magazine that declaimed modernism as aggressively as the Pistols nailed punk - legendary, the stuff of filthy thrash clubs and a monstrous amount of highbrow speculation. (Greil Marcus's ponderous book Lipstick Traces matches the Pistols to cabaret, the situationists, Dada and more.)
McLaren did change the course of music forever.
But he was entirely too cavalier about his "little artful dodgers," as he called the Pistols) and their squalid legacy: "They hated everything and so do I," he once reminisced to Conan O'Brien.
McLaren felt that knives, swastikas and everyday Clockwork Orange Droog violence and demolition were fabulous. Formerly the manager of the New York Dolls, he allowed his new band, the Pistols, to sing of the Dolls as "poor little faggot(s)" - a modified knuckle-dragging, machismo being another hallmark of the male punk.
And his last words were a faint rebel yell: "Free [native American activist]Leonard Peltier!" I wish this Fagin - an unrepentant extremist to the very end - had, like Clarissa's Lovelace in Samuel Richardson's novel, said instead, "Let this expiate!"
McLaren's legacy is formidable, but there is real ugliness, sheer viciousness in the story of punk, of his dolls and playthings, and the savages who loved them.
Yet, one assumes that this ill, fragile man's heart was no longer "like a rock cast in the sea" (a line from St. Louis Blues sampled on his song About Her).
Surely he saw, in his own frailty, that hatred and destruction (as the song goes) are the opposite of art, and of life.