Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (120 page)

At approximately 7.30am, Keith awoke and proclaimed himself hungry again, insisting Annette get up and cook him something. She complained and he swore at her: “If you don’t like it, you can fuck off,” as she later recalled. Familiar with Keith’s temper even at the best of times, she put this down to the effects of his new favourite drug. “When he took Heminevrin, he acted drunk, and when he was drunk he wasn’t always very pleasant.” She also feels – though she will never know for sure – that Keith was somehow angry at her for making him go to the party, perhaps for leading him to temptations he didn’t need when he had wanted to avoid all that scene for a while. In the end, Annette cooked him some steak, which Keith ate in bed while watching more of
Dr Phibes.

When Keith finished the steak, Annette took the tray into the kitchen. When she came back he was, she says, asleep once more. (His routine, even without the brandy and champagne, had not changed much since Larry Hagman took him in to detox.) Though she says she did not see him take them, he had swallowed more – many, many more – Heminevrin to help him.

When Keith then started snoring, Annette moved to the sofa. It was not, she says, an uncommon scenario, though one cannot discount that she was made to feel unwanted and resentful by his outburst. She awoke at 3.40pm. “I went in to look at him and he was lying on his tummy,” she recalls. “His left arm was hanging off the side. And I was getting agitated, worried, because I thought he was going to wake up hungry. I had this menu from a Chinese restaurant and I sat there with this menu by the phone thinking, ‘Should I order something now, because he’s going to be hungry when he wakes up.’ Then I looked at the cat, Dinsdale. The cat was being very wary, not himself at all. Then I went in the bedroom again, and there was this awful quietness. You can normally hear when someone is asleep. But it was stone quiet, it was a silence I can’t describe. And then when I went up to him and turned the light on, turned him around, that was when I saw he was dead.

“He wasn’t breathing. I lifted his eyelids, and the eyes were in a funny way. I’d never seen a dead person before, but when I saw him I knew he was gone. There was no breathing, no heartbeat, no nothing. His skin had a big shifting. I was shaking, my whole body. I couldn’t believe it was true. I couldn’t get it into my head that he was actually gone.

“I panicked, of course. I can’t remember who I phoned first – the doctor, I think.” It was apparently Geoffrey Dymond, who then called for an ambulance. Which of them arrived at the flat first is uncertain. “I jumped on him, I sat over his belly, I pushed on his chest, I gave him mouth to mouth, I screamed at him to come back, I was hysterical, absolutely gone. Then the ambulance came and the doctor came, Dr Dymond. And when the ambulance people came they asked me to get out of the bedroom, they had these electric shockers, they didn’t want me to see what they were going to do.”

The resuscitation attempt made no difference. Keith Moon was dead.

Bill Curbishley was on his way back from a meeting with Polygram Films that afternoon. He had just finalised the funding for
Quadrophenia
, which was to be directed by a newcomer, Franc Roddam, with a credible young actor, Phil Daniels, starring as Jimmy, and was to be authentic in its recreation of London and Brighton during the mod heyday. There were plans also afoot for a movie,
McVicar
, the story of a former armed robber turned author who was a hero of Daltrey’s.
Who Are You
was off to a solid start in the UK and exploding in America, where it was the highest new entry this very week. Shepperton was positively booming with activity. There was every chance that the Who were going to be the first rock group in history to successfully invest their profits back into the music and media business. Curbishley had every reason to feel exuberant as he walked into the office.

He found his wife and partner Jackie instead tending the biggest disaster of their professional career. She had called Keith at around 5pm to try and set up a meeting and got Dr Dymond instead. He had given her the devastating news. Dymond also warned her to be ready for the press barrage; there was no way a corpse could be removed from a plush Mayfair apartment near so many hotel entrances and not attract attention. As Keith’s body was taken by ambulance to nearby Middlesex Hospital (not to be confused with his birthplace at Central Middlesex), where he was pronounced dead on arrival, a taxi was sent to collect Annette, who was in hysterics. Jackie Curbishley called Pete Townshend; fighting back tears, the group spokesman offered to call the others. Keith Altham came up to the office and began to field the phone calls that instantly came in from around the world as the word spread like wildfire.

John Entwistle was conducting an interview at his home in Ealing when he was interrupted with word that Pete was on the phone. He went next door and took the call. In total shock, he then resumed the interview, hoping to complete it quickly without giving the news away so as to be left alone to grieve. Instead, he was asked about the Who’s future plans, and immediately he broke down in tears. There
was
no future, he was forced to say. Keith had just died.

Pete’s conversation with Roger was terse. “He’s gone and done it,” said Pete. “Done what?” “Moon.” No more needed to be said.

The hardest call was to Keith’s mother. Kathleen Moon had been so very close to her son over the years, forgiving him his excesses even as she was embarrassed by them. He in turn had made his affection for her well-known; she was the only person he had ever been able to turn to, throughout his life, without having to put up a front. It was up to Pete Townshend to tell Kathleen that for her, every mother’s worst nightmare had come true.

Kim Moon, for that was still the name she used despite her divorce, came home from work that evening, and almost immediately heard the phone ringing. It was Ray Cole.

“Kim,” he said softly, “Keith’s died.”

“Yeah, you already told me that,” she blurted out, thinking of her recent dream. Then it hit her. She wasn’t dreaming. This had to be the truth.

The shock of it caused her hair to fall out.

K
eith’s face stared out from the front covers of the tabloid press and the quality papers alike that Friday, September 8. The
Daily Mirror
sizzled with the surprisingly appropriate headline ‘Drugs death drama of pop wild man Moon’.
The Times
gave him an official obituary, the ultimate mark of establishment respect. And the
Guardian’s
well-respected music critic Robin Denselow, echoing the immediate views of many Who fans who recognised the integral importance of each individual member, wrote that, “Without Moon, it is impossible to conceive of the Who continuing.”

That same day, 24 hours after Keith’s death, Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and John Entwistle locked themselves away in a meeting at Shepperton and emerged with a press statement. Townshend wrote, in part: “We are more determined than ever to carry on, and we want the spirit of the group to which Keith contributed so much to go on, although no human being can ever take his place.”

Daltrey elaborated. “We can’t bring Keith back but, if he could have his say, he would want us to go on with the same ideals he helped to establish.”

There are those who might have thought such a statement of intent premature. Keith’s body was hardly cold and already the group were looking ahead, beyond and without him. Even among those who thought they did want the group to continue – and I say ‘thought’ because no one is usually certain about the future the day after losing a loved one – there was the feeling that this was, perhaps, a touch eager. Surely nobody was forcing them into an instant decision?

But everybody must cope with bereavement the way they feel best. The three remaining members of the band had known each other a full eight years longer than they had known Keith, and they concluded that day that they loved each other and what they had stood for too much to let go. They were a Truly Great Band, in it for life. Keith Moon had exercised the only escape clause that existed.

They were, also, a large corporation. The Who Group of Companies, as the administering business was called, had recently invested a million pounds in a studio complex, had just finished one film, had another about to begin, and a third in the offing. They owned PA and trucking businesses and recording studios. A considerable number of people were in their employment. It is rare for a business of such magnitude to dissolve itself, particularly when on the crest of a wave, just because of the death of one of its directors. Immensely complicated, too. It seemed that the Who had little choice but to continue. In case people were getting the wrong idea, however, their publicist Keith Altham stressed that “It would be completely inappropriate to take on a new drummer.”

While the group was deciding upon its future, the circumstances of Keith’s death were rapidly being pieced together by a voracious yet courteous British media that treated Keith’s loss like that of a statesman – which in regards to his culture, he certainly was. A post-mortem was carried out at Westminster Hospital that Friday by pathologist Professor Keith Simpson, who reported a drug overdose; the specific drug, he warned, would not be known until the inquest was held.
¹⁰²
When Keith Altham, who had initially put forward the notion that Keith had died of natural causes [as if one normally does at age 32), then admitted that Moon was taking Heminevrin to help him sleep, Saturday’s papers reported a Heminevrin overdose as if it was fact.

The Sunday Times
immediately contacted what it called “one of Britain’s most distinguished experts on alcoholism”, a Dr Max Glatt, who was scathing in his appraisal. While noting that Heminevrin would probably have been a very good treatment for Moon if given to him in hospital, he insisted that, “This drug is widely misunderstood by general practitioners. It is suitable for use for a limited period of days but should not be used by patients who are not confined to bed. It is quite wrong to give it in this way.” One reason for such strict conditions was because of the risk of patients drinking alcohol while on it. “Alcohol actually multiplies the effect of the drug,” said Glatt. “It does not just add to it. Together they depress the central nervous system and the collapse of breathing and circulation may follow.”

The Sunday Times
, in that report on September 10, noted that as well as being a sedative, and in addition to treating alcohol withdrawal, Heminevrin was used for drug withdrawal too. It reported Keith Altham as insisting that Moon did not use heavy drugs. “He did not need to,” the newspaper then acerbically opined. “Heminevrin was heavy enough.”

Moon’s popularity among the younger generation, at a time when so many of the old guard were being shunned or ridiculed, was evident at the annual Knebworth Festival that took place that weekend. Blondie’s drummer Clem Burke kicked over his kit at the end of the group’s set, crying, “That’s for Keith Moon.” The Tubes closed their show with a Who medley. At RAK studios, where
Who Are You
had floundered, the Jam recorded a version of ‘So Sad About Us’ for the B-side of their classic single ‘Down In The Tube Station at Midnight’. The back sleeve showed Keith Moon in his young and handsome prime. It was a touching memorial from a group that had never met him.

Keith’s popularity among his own generation was on display at his funeral on Wednesday, September 13, at Golders Green Crematorium. The service was kept secret and private to avoid a media circus, to which extent it was successful. Among the fellow musicians to attend were Eric Clapton, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman. Many other stars, respecting the wishes for a small gathering and/or not wishing to draw media attention, and some of them in denial as well, sent their commiserations in the form of flowers. These came from various ex-Beatles and other Stones, from Led Zeppelin and David Bowie, and even from those with whom Keith was not particularly friendly, like Fleetwood Mac and the Moody Blues. Keith’s favourite charity, Make Children Happy – an apt slogan for his life – sent a display of rosebuds.