Who said American lives (or those of transplanted Englishmen) have no second acts?
That’s right, it was F. Scott Fitzgerald, after his most acclaimed novel, “The Great Gatsby.” Just a few years later, he published what he considered his best novel, “Tender Is the Night.” Unfortunately, at the height of the Depression, America was less interested of the travails of the rich. It sank without a trace. Hence his melancholia.
If Scott Fitz had lived only a couple more years, he might have revised his opinion. His posthumous Hollywood novel “The Last Tycoon” won raves and in the ‘70s was made into a movie starring Robert De Niro.
Unfortunately, he didn’t live to see this second act, but two legends of our youth have, and while both have now reached their final acts, they survived long enough to prove F. Scott wrong.
I’m talking, of course, of cultural maestros Malcolm McLaren, who passed in early April, and Dennis Hopper, who is currently battling prostate cancer while institutions like L.A.’s Museum of Contemporary Art are racing to get out Hopper retrospectives before the 73-year-old is no longer with us. Ironically, I know -- or knew -- both of them.
Let’s deal with McLaren first, though Hopper is by far the more important. McLaren was a true son of the postwar world, born in London a bare six months after victory in Europe. The next decade in England was depressing -- it was the era of the playwrights and filmmakers of the "angry young man” school, from John Osborne’s “Look Back in Anger” to Lindsay Anderson’s “The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.” Debt was high, jobs nonexistent, youth “on the dole.” It’s no wonder movies were in black and white … that’s how the world looked.
Finally, young people could take it no more and, following American singers like Elvis Presley and films like “Rebel Without a Cause,” decided to take things into their own hands. The result was the so-called “skiffle” movement of the late ‘50s, which posited that anyone could be a star, leading numerous kids to pick up everything from washboards to upside-down tin drums. Inspired art-school students like John Lennon and Keith Richards picked up guitars and the rest is history -- the British Invasion.
While McLaren was too young to participate in skiffle, the lesson that anyone could be a star was not lost when he, too, later headed off to art school. Eventually, he opened a radical clothing store on the Kings Road in London called just SEX.
I got to know him from my own days in punk. As many of you know (“A Beer Run for the Ramones”), when I got to college in New York in the early ‘70s, I made friends with rock manager Marty Thau, who would go on to be the first person to bring the Ramones, Blondie and other seminal punk bands into the studio. But he began his career as a manager with the famous (infamous?) first punk band, the New York Dolls.
