Dear Boy: The life of Keith Moon (121 page)

Roger Daltrey, who cried throughout the service, supplied the most poignant floral tribute, a champagne bottle embedded in a television set. Annette Walter-Lax was allowed the most personal, a heart-shaped bouquet of red roses placed atop the coffin. Annette met Kim that day for the first time. “You poor thing,” was the only thing Kim could think to say. Annette, who had been heavily sedated for the last few days while staying in hiding with her girlfriend Sally Arnold, eventually had to be helped away from the Garden of Remembrance after collapsing.

A wake was held at Hendon Hall. As drinks were poured, and stories told, the gloom lifted somewhat. It was hard not to tell a tale involving Keith without finding oneself smiling at the end of it. John Schollar realised he was shedding tears of laughter through his tears of sorrow when he saw Keith’s mother approach him. He immediately apologised.

“No,” Kit said reassuringly. In later years she would say she wished her son had stayed with the Beachcombers, that he’d still be alive if he had. “That’s Keith. If there’s something funny to say, say it. If Keith had known this was going to happen, he would have hired Wembley Stadium, sat in a coffin and blown himself up.”

If Keith had known
… That was Mrs Moon’s way of telling the wake that Keith had not intended to kill himself.

Cause for speculation will, however, always remain. The last few years had been an almost unbearable uphill struggle for Keith. His marriage had collapsed and he was estranged from his daughter. California had been a disaster, particularly for his health. The return to England was meant to signal a turn around, but he had spent a large part of the year back home in and out of hospitals, clinics and health farms, all of which failed to cure his addictions or help him find steady emotional happiness. He had been threatened with expulsion from the band, that which he loved most in his life, and informed that he would not be going on tour again in the foreseeable future, which was for him almost as bad. Though a new record had just been released, the group’s future remained desperately uncertain, and should they have decided to call it a day, he would have been at a total loss in life. His drumming ability, his biggest contribution to the world, had deteriorated of late, and given the energy required for it, it was not guaranteed to return to prior form as the years went by. His acting talents had not taken him beyond the occasional cameo appearance.
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His comic skills he had squandered in attempts to live up to his image as a hell-raiser. The fact that he was widely loved and adored just for being himself, a warm and wonderful human being, never seemed to register.

In the weeks prior to his death, he had bounced in and out of sobriety with ever-varying results. He was finding abstention to be the most difficult hurdle he had ever encountered, and it was far from certain he would ever get beyond it. He had taken to phoning some of those who had been closest to him, clearly confused and uncertain, and often in tears. The last night he spent alive, Keith went to a celebrity party honouring someone who became immortalised after dying young; it is not too contentious to suggest that only those rock’n’roll stars who
do
die young can be guaranteed immortality. Keith, on the other hand, was rapidly growing old. As he contemplated his future that night, what might he have seen? Was he genuinely excited about the film projects and ‘other’ enterprises that Shepperton offered? Or did he feel that the Who’s future, in the shape of retrospective movies and soundtracks, was ever more a slave to its past, that the greatest group in the world had come full circle and was about to grind to a halt? He hadn’t even wanted to attend this party in the first place, all too aware that it would be alive with ghosts of past glories, and the ‘anger’ Annette feels he possibly held toward her for coercing him into going could also have contributed to a final despairing decision.

And it’s vital to note that while Keith was never noticeably suicidal as such, he was prone to half-hearted attempts to do away with himself which were easily recognised as cries for love and attention. That he misjudged the intake necessary for another such performance cannot be ruled out.

We will, of course, never know his real thoughts at the end of his life. But personally I side with the majority who believe his death was a mistake. Keith Moon loved life too much to cut it short. He was a fighter, a winner, or at very least, until that fateful night, a survivor.

A quick look at the flip side of the argument for suicide shows all the reasons he would not kill himself. He was in love. He had just told friends of his intent to re-marry; he had even talked to his intended bride about having children. He was coming to terms with his age, showing real determination to tame his excesses, pleased with the band’s recent work, excited about the notion of film enterprise and still hoping to get himself back in shape to go on tour again. Several months earlier, when the band threatened him with expulsion and Annette walked out on him, he would have been at the lowest of low ebbs; then, if ever, would have been the time. Now, with a new Who album just released (and importantly, selling far better than its difficult birth might have justified), and Annette lovingly back by his side, he was on top of his world again.

True, it only takes a moment of decisiveness to do away with oneself, but those who knew him well, even the few who saw him in his darkest depression, were adamant that Keith never ever contemplated taking his life for real. It simply was not in his character.
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On Monday September 18, at Westminster Coroner’s Court, coroner Dr Gavin Thurston heard Professor Simpson’s testimony that the post-mortem had revealed 26 undissolved Heminevrin tablets in Keith Moon’s stomach amidst a total of 32. The drug level in his blood was twice the danger level. (Keith’s alcohol blood level contained merely the equivalent of a pint of beer, which would have been the couple of glasses of wine and champagne he had drunk the night before. There was no report of any cocaine.) “The quantity was enormous,” Simpson said, referring to the Heminevrin, “and constituted a vast overdose.”

There were just two other witnesses for one of the entertainment world’s most popular characters. Annette Walter-Lax spoke in a near-whisper as she told the court of Keith’s last hours: Keith had been sober at the party, had come home early from the movie, had a light supper, watched
Dr Phibes
, gone to bed and taken some pills, woken at 7.30, got up and then had her get up and make breakfast, presumably taken more pills (“I did not actually see him take any tablets,” she told the court) and never woken again. She had discovered his body shortly after getting up at 3.40pm.

In regards to his taking too many pills, which she said he often shoved down his throat without liquid to help them, she observed that, “He had a great resistance sometimes because of his hyper-energy. Sometimes when he found it difficult to sleep he would take one or two more and then he would sleep. He would take more than the prescribed dose but
he would not take more than he knew was safe.”
The last part of that statement (italics added) is evidently untrue of a man she had seen overdose on various pills and substances several times. Her subsequent observations on his character were similarly contradictory: “He was very energetic, very sunny. He could also be very calm and relaxed.” All of which was true. But the subsequent assertion that “He did not suffer from depression” was not. Though most of the world might have believed her from what they saw of Keith in public, Annette had seen him forlorn and abject often enough to know that he had tremendous problems in that regard.

Dr Geoffrey Dymond also painted a picture of a contented man unlikely to make a fatal mistake. He said Keith’s general health had been excellent and he was usually very cheerful, that occasionally he was very tense, but not depressed. He did, however, observe that Keith had such great difficulty in sleeping that he had occasionally been called out in the early hours of the morning to administer injections. This highly unusual practice – which by his reported use of the plural suggests it happened more than once, though Annette does not remember him being called to Curzon Place beyond the first occasion – was not followed up on. But by its very nature, it raises eyebrows. People of excellent general health who are not depressed do not normally call on doctors to sedate them.

Adding to the confusion, Dymond confirmed that he had prescribed Heminevrin after Keith had been admitted to hospital for exhaustion and a couple of fits, the presumed result of alcohol withdrawal – which certainly indicates that he knew something, if not necessarily a lot, about Keith’s past. “I think he was taking four or five tablets every night instead of two and I warned him of drug dependency and asked him to cut it down,” he said in court. One is tempted to observe that any confirmed alcoholic in the process of withdrawal is already an expert on – and a victim of – ‘drug dependency’; it was surprising that the doctor did not recognise the temptation for an addict to replace one such dependency with another.

Upon hearing the evidence, Dr Gavin Thurston concluded that Keith died from a drug overdose, and in a repeat of Pete Meaden’s inquest, noted that without any evidence to suggest suicide, he was compelled to record an open verdict. Keith’s death certificate, issued the following day, described the cause of death as follows: ‘Chlormethiazole (Heminevrin) overdose self-administered but no evidence of intention. Open verdict.’

As if exacting revenge on Keith for successfully lying about his age all this time, the year of his birth was mistakenly recorded as being 1945 on that death certificate. All of a sudden, newspapers that had been quoting him as 31 when he died were now stating that he was 33. Even in death, he dodged the truth.

Celebrity deaths attract conspiracy theories like nothing else, and in Keith’s case some of them emanate from surprisingly close to home. Almost no one that I spoke to from within the Who organisation while researching this book ever mentioned the overdose. They all understand that Keith choked to death instead. Pete Townshend and John Entwistle have even gone on record about this.

Their logic is quite straightforward and highly plausible, when viewed as follows … Keith took way too many Heminevrin after having had a steak breakfast, his third meal in less than 12 hours. The sedatives immediately knocked him out. The food was not properly digested. In his sleep Keith, no stranger to throwing back up his pills or his food or his drink, tried to vomit up large, undigested portions of steak; he was in such a stupor from the number of sedatives he had swallowed that his system could not follow through with his stomach’s rejection of the undigested food.

But the fact that no such evidence was revealed in the post-mortem nor the supposition even discussed in Coroner’s Court suggests that the theory was concocted down the line, perhaps by osmosis. (After all, Mama Cass has been similarly described both as suffering a heart attack and choking on a bacon sandwich. That she died in the same flat as Keith could well have had a ripple effect on Moon’s own perceived demise.) Rock stars have many medical privileges, as Keith had long been aware, but falsifying post-mortems is not usually among them.
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