Though McLaren felt secure in his mental domination of this awe-struck, to his mind sexually experienced older woman, he was uncomfortable when she provoked him by walking round the house naked. Unwilling to make a direct approach, he deployed an emotional cliché to seduce her – appealing to her motherly instincts. He slept on a mattress in the sitting room, and one morning he feigned a stomach ache, moaning and groaning until Vivienne surrendered her more comfortable divan and went to the chemist for medicine. On her return she nursed him until nightfall when, since he would not return to his own bed, she stripped and climbed in alongside him, unconvincingly claiming that she had no other recourse. Finally they consummated their two-year friendship, the twenty-five-year-old schoolteacher instructing the twenty-one-year-old virgin, who ‘refused to get out of bed for days’.
Habitually loath to acknowledge any emotional tie, McLaren jocularly dismissed the incident as the amusing sexual initiation of an innocent lad by a voracious nymphomaniac. Vivienne saw it differently: ‘He pursued me aggressively. It wore me out and finally I succumbed.’ Lust may have driven McLaren to lure her into bed, but her resistance was hardly staunch.
The loss of his virginity unsettled McLaren. He became possessive, insisting that Vivienne ditch her Italian friend. If a man came to tea or was seen in the street with her, he would ‘have a fit’. (He retains an extremely short and violent temper.) On one occasion, in despair, he shaved his head roughly, and theatrically emerged covered in blood. These masochistic poses appealed to Vivienne who, casting herself as the indispensable nurse to this lust-sick youth, reasoned that she could not leave him: ‘He thought I’d committed myself, but only because he’d been so confiding in me. He thought I’d just thrown him over and not realised the seriousness of the situation. He’d never had a girlfriend before me. And so I started to – I hesitate to use the right word – not fucking, and not making love, because I wasn’t in love with him – I guess you could say I started sleeping with him.’
Their sex life was irregular. Throughout their fifteen-year relationship, McLaren only sporadically indulged Vivienne’s appetites, partly in order to retain control over her. Though he became infamous for advocating sexual freedom and perversion, he was remarkably prudish about his own sex life. When pushed, the most he would say was, ‘I could never understand Vivienne’s attitude to sex,’ adding defensively, ‘As far as I know we had good sex and she was happy about that.’ Their working relationship dwarfed their sexual one.
Within weeks Vivienne discovered that she was pregnant. McLaren’s attitude to her changed immediately. He claimed to have been duped into thinking she was using contraception, and the prospect of imminent fatherhood distressed him. Since Vivienne was not in love with him, they discussed an abortion. In Britain in 1967, abortion was illegal. Most women who wished to terminate a pregnancy had to risk illness, even death, either from barbaric and dangerous do-it-yourself methods or at the hands of a backstreet abortionist, at considerable expense. An abortion was strongly recommended by the possessive Grandmother Rose, who disapproved of Vivienne, whom she dismissed both as a gentile and a scheming older woman from the wrong side of the tracks who was already burdened with another man’s child. She was determined to end the relationship.
Because Vivienne was close to her mother (‘perhaps everyone is except me, so maybe that’s normal,’ he conceded), McLaren tried to break communications between mother and daughter. Her parents were infuriated, regarding him as wilfully irresponsible. When he saw them approaching the house one day, he jumped out of the window to avoid a confrontation. His ‘benefactor’, as he referred to his grandmother, offered to pay for an abortion. ‘Vivienne was fairly for it,’ he says, but the deliberation continued for weeks, right up to the moment when, standing on the porch of a Harley Street doctor, Grandmother Rose’s cash in hand, Vivienne finally made up her mind and set off to Bond Street to buy a coat instead. McLaren felt trapped. He warned Vivienne that he would take no responsibility for the child, but by now she was too emotionally entangled to terminate her pregnancy.
In recalling his relationship with Vivienne now, McLaren describes an extraordinary parabola: from cold-hearted refusal that she ever meant anything to him, to the admission of deep fondness and even perhaps, in his own terms, love. What were his feelings for the woman who was carrying his child? ‘When she was pregnant I never saw her looking so beautiful … it was the time that I’d seen her look the most kind, the most open, the most centred and somehow as though she belonged … it was meant to be. I’ll never forget the vision of her being pregnant.’ This tenderly remembered vision of her is not typical of McLaren’s practised persona of cynical control.
Their child was two weeks overdue, and the stoic mother worked right up to the last moment, selling her jewellery and hoping that the baby would not arrive that day. Finally, she was summoned to the hospital in Streatham to be induced and, after an intense, short labour, her second son was born at teatime on 30 November 1967. She had been hoping for a daughter.
Grandmother Rose dissuaded McLaren from attending the delivery, and it was not until several days later that he went to the hospital to see his son. Having being quizzed about his absence by an officious nurse, he approached Vivienne’s bed. She recalls that his initial reaction was, ‘He’s not mine! He doesn’t even look like me.’ McLaren remembers, ‘I’ve never seen Vivienne look happier.’ Vivienne retains a poignant memory of her lover arriving in a snow-dusted Harris tweed greatcoat – bought on the way to the hospital at a second-hand shop on the Vauxhall Bridge Road – and often includes a description of it when sentimentally recounting her time in the maternity ward. The traditional Scottish cloth was to play an important role in her life nearly twenty years later.
The boy was christened Joseph Ferdinand Corré, the middle name after McLaren’s favourite Velázquez portrait, Archbishop Fernando de Valdés y Llanos in the National Gallery, and Corré being Grandmother Rose’s maiden name. While Vivienne called her son ‘Joe’, McLaren always referred to him as ‘Joseph’. In refusing to confer his own surname on his son he was distancing himself not only from paternity but also from his own parents, the former distance later underscored by Joseph being forbidden to call him ‘Dad’ or ‘Daddy’. The birth strained the relationship for McLaren, but it convinced Vivienne to commit herself to it.
In the autumn of 1967 McLaren had enrolled at Croydon College of Art and Design in South London to study painting, and he and Vivienne moved to a ground-floor flat in Aigburth Mansions, Hackford Road, near the Kennington Oval, which McLaren found from an advertisement in a sweet shop. The flat, in a terrace of three-storey pebble-dashed buildings, was in good condition by student standards, and the family was briefly happy there, entertaining Gordon and friends from Croydon on macrobiotic fare. Six weeks after the birth, Vivienne, needing money, reluctantly returned to work as a teacher, leaving Joseph in a crèche.
One of McLaren’s Croydon friends was Jamie Reid, the son of a radical Scottish family. Though his political commitment was temporarily debased by his association with McLaren’s disingenuous radicalism, Reid remained active, working after graduation for a community press in Croydon which served black, feminist, prisoner and trade unionist causes. At art school he stood alongside McLaren in the hope of changing the world; his companion was happy simply to play up and dress up.
In 1967, radical elements in the student communities across Europe were enthralled by a new publication, Guy Debord’s Societé de Spectacle. Debord was the chief theorist of the Situationist International, founded in Italy in 1957, which declared that artists should break down the barriers between life and art and, acting as provocateurs, create ridiculous situations in urban environments as a nihilist reaction to the status quo. Developing the Marxist critique that every aspect of capitalist life had been reduced to a commodity, the situationists fused it with the artistic agitation of dadaism, the absurdities of surrealism and the unrestrained hedonism of their times. The setting up of ridiculous spectacles was to be a modern expression of popular resistance.
Debord’s bestseller honed the arguments about the