Bored once again with Vivienne and dreary London, McLaren decided that he wanted to ‘get the hell out of England’, and in November 1974 he announced that he was leaving for New York – never to return. He had set his sights on managing the New York Dolls, with whom he was still obsessed, and chasing Addie Isman, who had returned to the States. In his six-month absence, Vivienne went out with other men, including playwright Jonathan Gems, a decade her junior. Gems was attracted to Vivienne’s sci-fi looks, which to him evoked ‘the blonde Aryan in Metropolis’. Her outrageous creations – be it rubber bondage gear or sexually explicit T-shirt – were now her everyday attire, worn to the launderette, the supermarket and the shop, as well as out on the town at night.
It was clear to Gems that Vivienne was lonely and ‘desperate to get involved in things. She felt left out.’ On their first evening out together he took her to his new play, The Dentist, at the Royal Court in Sloane Square. Coming out of the theatre, Vivienne was silent. Gems assumed that ‘she must have hated it, but then she admitted that she had only been to the theatre once before, to see Oliver!, the musical.’ They moved on to a pub, where Vivienne ‘picked up two sailors, which left me humiliated. What she used to do was get really drunk and pick up a guy – just like a man picks up a girl – and she was always into tough types.’ On another occasion, Gems invited her to see Nicholas Nickleby by the Royal Shakespeare Company at the Aldwych Theatre, but he had to cancel the arrangement. For weeks, Vivienne ignored his calls. Gems asked a colleague of hers what was wrong. ‘You don’t treat Vivienne like that – it’s like a terrible sin!’ she explained mischievously. Vivienne, says Gems, regarded herself as ‘the diva, the queen, and I’d always been a supplicant to her, which is why she liked me. But as soon as I did anything assertive, I was dumped.’ Gems had been useful to Vivienne. He had introduced Vivienne to the world of bourgeois theatre culture, and his girlfriend Jean Seel, a fashion graduate of the Royal College of Art and a designer for the boutique Alkasura, had gone round to Nightingale Lane on many occasions to teach her to cut patterns. But now he was no longer a compliant acolyte, she had no use for him.
In 1975 Vivienne also met Nils Stevenson, an art student who worked on a stall in Chelsea’s Beaufort Street market, a few hundred yards up from 430 King’s Road. He was attracted by Vivienne’s ‘dynamic and uncompromising attitude’, and describes himself as having had a crush on her. She would drive to Richmond, where he was living in ‘a posh house owned by a big-time drug dealer’, and they would go clubbing together. ‘She was awfully naïve about sex,’ he recalls. ‘Snogging her was like snogging a schoolgirl. She didn’t quite know what to do.’
Though Vivienne had become the powerful embodiment of McLaren’s latest wheeze, her role was to be dramatically superseded by an unflinchingly tough shop assistant. The punk icon and actress Jordan, née Pamela Rooke, made her first pilgrimage to TFTLTYTD in 1973 from Seaford, a sleepy Sussex town with a large retired population on the south coast of England. She was to become the most eccentric and original character of the punk movement, and usurped Vivienne as its female icon, much to her chagrin.
Jordan’s short, sexily curvaceous figure (the antithesis of Vivienne’s spiky physique) had been ballet-trained, enabling her to maximise the impact of her modest five foot four inches height. Expelled from school, by 1973 she had created a look, largely culled from charity shops, that was part Bowie, part fifties rocker. She would team, for example, a gold lamé skirt held out with stiff net petticoats with a circle-stitched, conical fifties bra (worn with nothing over it) and gold winklepickers. Her toilette was fastidiously complicated, taking at least two hours to complete every morning. Dramatic strokes of black kohl defined her eyes, recalling the feline maquillage of Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra, and in contrast to her white peroxided hair, which was swept up like spun sugar into a brittle beehive. A whiff of acrid hairspray hung in the air behind her click-clacking steps.
This astonishing composite was a triumph of artifice over nature. Mainstream fashion was promoting a healthy, natural, outdoor beauty, but Jordan had no truck with such insipidity. Throughout 1973 she made regular pilgrimages to 430 King’s Road, acquainting herself with Michael Collins, a homosexual drug addict who managed the shop from 1972 to 1982. Determined to land a job at the cult boutique, she preposterously reasoned that in order to do so, she should train at Harrods. So, despite her appearance, she served as a sales assistant on the fashion floor of the Knightsbridge store, calling in at SEX on her way home to Seaford. ‘I went to talk to Michael for ages, and I remember being really precocious, and I tried to sell myself to get the job,’ she recalled. Collins fobbed her off, but a few days later he summoned her to start work that afternoon. Jordan became the physical personification of the store in its next two guises – sexual fetish and anarchic punk – and was to be cast as the celluloid icon of punk in Derek Jarman’s bleak 1978 film Jubilee.
Unlike Vivienne, Jordan was not beholden to McLaren. She dressed sexually in order to educate and arouse, rather than to act as his billboard. She would combine, for example, a T-shirt sloganed ‘Venus’, the Roman goddess of love, with black knickers and ripped black stockings held up by suspenders against her bare thighs. Every morning, in this state of virtual undress, she proudly boarded the commuter train from Seaford and headed into London. ‘I was constantly being harassed or hit,’ she remembers with deadpan candour. ‘Men would slide too close to me, and one woman threatened to hit me as my clothes were upsetting her child.’ Observing the verbal and sometimes physical savaging that Jordan endured every day, one considerate British Rail conductor allowed her to travel alone in a first-class compartment. ‘Jordan would take on anybody,’ remembers Ben Kelly. ‘Robert Plant {the rock star} had a go at her standing there in rubber and underwear – that was a big mistake! Don’t try it, she’s much too sharp for you. She had a cutting tongue … Men worshipped her.’
Just as the infant Vivienne had bemoaned the arrival of her sister Olga, she now viewed this independent and handsome female as a threat to her centre-stage role. Jordan’s first impression of Vivienne was of ‘an imposing figure who was rather cautious about me’. This was an understatement. ‘Intimidating’ is the word most often used by those who visited SEX, and it was Jordan, rather than Vivienne, who most powerfully instilled this atmosphere. Standing by the rubber-dressed bed, clad in a studded leather bra, girdle and stilettos, her hair topiaried and lacquered up six inches above her crown, she would knowingly scan the customer through thickly kohled eyes, without a hint of humour or solicitation. What had you come to buy? A spanking? A harangue? A humiliation? ‘If you want the epitome of imposing and intimidating,’ she says, ‘that’s what I was. People had to have courage to walk into that shop.’
To be fitted for a bespoke rubber bodysuit demanded bravery. The customer was invited behind the screen, where Jordan or Vivienne took numerous measurements. Men and women from all walks of life – prostitutes, bankers, truckers, fashion-victims – underwent the ordeal. One day Jordan was behind the screen with ‘a proper businessman’ who was frantically struggling, in a puff of talcum powder (used to