By Craig Bromberg

Malcolm McLaren, Jewish? What were you expecting, bubeleh—a Scotsman in a kilt? Can you imagine the fury of the Sex Pistols issuing from anything but the mind of an alienated Jewish teenager, albeit one whose frame of reference includes British subcultures such as Teddy Boys, Rockers, Bikers, and Punks, not to mention a dash of French Situationism and a dollop of good old-fashioned shmatte salesmanship? This particular stew could only be the product of a tortured teenaged mind anxious to escape his family’s Jewish middle-class clutches.

But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. When you’re talking about the man who’s credited as the catalyst for so many careers—from his ex-common law wife, star fashion designer Vivienne Westwood, to the New York Dolls and the Sex Pistols, not to mention Boy George, Adam Ant and Bow Wow Wow—being in flight from your Jewishness is just a minor digression. Or is it?

Malcolm McLaren, son of Pete McLaren and Emmy Isaacs, was born in the 'burbs of postwar London January 22, 1946, nine months and two weeks after VE Day. Malcolm barely knew McLaren, who left home when he was two. Instead, he was raised by his grandmother, Rose Corrie Isaacs, the charismatic, formerly wealthy daughter of Portuguese Sephardim who had been diamond dealers back in the day. When Malcolm was six, his mum remarried a man in the rag trade, Martin Levi, who rechristened the family the Edwards. The Edwardses had a nice life. Malcolm’s step dad and mum owned a shmatte factory in London’s East End, Eve Edwards London Limited, and Malcolm lived in a fine suburban house. Unfortunately, Malcolm and his step dad never got on, and by the time he hit his teens, Malcolm couldn’t wait to leave home. For awhile, he tried working as a clerk for Sandeman’s Port & Sherry, then for a gentleman’s apparel store in the Burlington Arcade. But it was art school that finally caught his fancy, and after a stint at St. Martins, he wound up at Goldsmiths’ College, home to much of Britain’s rock intelligentsia.

However it wasn’t art but the conventional pressures of fatherhood that ultimately led McLaren—and Vivienne Westwood, the woman who would be mother his two children, and for the next twenty years, be his common-law wife—to take over the lease on a shop in the sleepy part of Kings Road in 1972. McLaren more or less inherited the store, then a popular modish boutique called Mr. Freedom, from its previous owner. He and Westwood now began successively plundering one British subculture after another in pursuit of what can only be called rock 'n’ roll clothes—a kind of haute couteur of the streets. The shop’s first iteration, Let it Rock, catered to Teddy Boys and Rockers; its second, Too Fast To Live, Too Young To Die, was aimed at Bikers (or at least kids emulating Marlon Brando emulating Bikers). It’s not too great a leap to think of Malcolm, circa 1975, as a Brit version of Ralph (Lipshitz) Lauren—recycling the recent past of rock 'n’ roll instead of, say, the American West.

But then the New York Dolls came to London, and everything changed. For McLaren, the Dolls weren’t just another rock band, they were walking mannequins for rock 'r’ roll haberdashery. It was love at first zipper, and when the Dolls went back to the States, McLaren followed, attempting, somewhat comically, to steal the band from its manager, Marty Thau. Fortunately, New York held other musical treasures for McLaren: From the dark heart of CBGBs to Richard Hell’s Rimbaudian ramblings with the newly formed Television, Gotham was alive with the sound of punk. When McLaren returned to London, he had finally sorted out all the chaos in his head and turned it into SEX, the latest moniker for his shop at 430 Kings Road. And it was from this maw of fashionable recycling that the Sex Pistols emerged.

It is precisely at this point that McLaren’s story begins to walk the uncomfortable line between creative ambition and creative destructiveness, from impresario-like behavior to confidence games and Svengali posturing. For while it is certainly true that the Sex Pistols came into being in and around SEX and that McLaren already had the managerial bug before the group came together, the popular myth that he and Westwood created the band—from the very first safety pin to the very last lyric of "God Save the Queen"—is deeply flawed, to say the least.

Indeed, while McLaren insisted the band was incompetent and implied that he was pulling the strings, more often than not, the truth was exactly the opposite. When the band catapulted to notoriety as a result of their famously foul-mouthed confrontation with a prime-time TV host, it wasn’t because McLaren orchestrated it, but because the Sex Pistols spoke their own minds in the most inappropriate way. (McLaren was initially petrified that "the boys" had blown it.) In fact, the Sex Pistols were and are inordinately talented. John Lydon is one of rock’s most gifted lyricists and performers, and Jones, Matlock, and Cook are much more than a motley musical crew. Nearly all of the Sex Pistols furors were the work of the band’s (and specifically John Lydon’s) hatred of rock posturing. McLaren didn’t coach John Lydon on his singing, didn’t kick Glen Matlock out of the band, didn’t push for Sid Vicious to join the band (or to kill Nancy Spungen), and certainly didn’t plan for the group’s U.S tour to become farce. He did manage to get the Sex Pistols a tidy sum from two record companies before striking it really big with Virgin Records for "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here’s the Sex Pistols," and he did get the band to star in an execrable film directed by soft porn director Russ Meyer. But the band’s achievements—to create a truly contemporary and modern sound with resonant, political messages—remain unbeaten to this day.

Of course, what burns most brightly burns out quickest so the Sex Pistols were not destined to last, regardless how McLaren may have tried to fan the flames—even condoning songs he knew would be particularly offensive to Jews (e.g., "Belsen Was A Gas") and prodding Sid to every greater heights of provocation before his final injection. McLaren never cared about any of that: He wasn’t a manager but an artist—albeit one whose canvas was other peoples clothes, music, and movies.

Indeed, it took awhile before McLaren’s post-Pistols artistic career took off but that is because he immediately fell back into "managing" as soon as the Sex Pistols ended. Bow Wow Wow was the name of the band, a conduit for his fascination with pirating music via cassette tapes (thanks to the Walkman, a sexy new technology in 1980) and child pornography. (For a while, he couldn’t decide whether to start a child porn magazine called Chicken or to write a memoir to be titled "The Great Jewish Bastard.") At first, McLaren hired Adam Ant to be the lead singer, dressing him and his band in Westwood’s latest pirate fashions—430 Kings Road was now called Seditionaries—but when Adam couldn’t quite grasp the right attitude, McLaren fired Adam from his own band, hiring in his place a 14-year-old Burmese girl (Annabella Lwin) he hoped to turn into a sexpot teen lead singer. That choice alone was so provocative that on the verge of the band’s commercial success, McLaren decided he was bored of managing and began to put into place his own recording plans. (Not, however, before auditioning a certain Boy George to fill Annabella’s shoes.) and turned his attention directly to his own recording career. To some extent, this was another move necessitated by expedience instead of artistry: by the mid 80s, McLaren had been in and out of court so many times, he had become a managerial untouchable.

In the end, McLaren did finally become the artist he had always wanted to be—albeit sometimes at the cost of being The Great Jewish Bastard he has often been. To date, his discography includes six major albums, several of which are bona fide cult classics, and still eminently listenable. 1984’s Duck Rock mixes South African mbaqanga with the sounds of South Bronx’s World Famous Supreme Team, and resulted in one song, "Buffalo Gals," selling over half a million units. Fans, an aborted attempt to create a staged hip-hop opera musical, is a top café/lifestyle album, bringing Tosca, Carmen, Madame Butterfly, and classics to the street. The less successful Waltz Darling brings the same formula to a wider cast, including Bootsy Collins, Jeff Beck, Viennese waltz, and hundreds of humpback whales. This was followed by the breakthrough Paris, McLaren’s own recherche du temps perdu starring Catherine Deneuve, Sonia Rykiel, and any Gauloise-soaked voice he could bring to his blender.

Despite McLaren’s terrible voice (fortunately not often heard), some of these are very good records, but McLaren’s ambition was never to be a recording star so much as a Hollywood producer. A New York museum show touting his virtues as an impresario helped burnish the reputation he desired a kind of postmodern Diaghelevbut when it came time to the ultimate test of his talents in Hollywood, one movie project after another flopped, and McLaren found himself on the outs with the Hollywood elite. (A relationship with model Lauren Hutton didn’t go that well either.) Worst of all, once his former artists (Johnny Rotten, Glen Matlock, Steve Jones, Boy George, Adam Ant, Annabella Lwin) became famous enough to burnish their own reputations, they repeatedly repudiated their former Svengali in public. We’ve succeeded, they said. We never needed Malcolm. And when the Sex Pistols reunited in 2000, they never even called to say hello. It must have hurt.

Indeed, the last few years have been particularly hard for McLaren. For a while, he tried to start a Singaporean karaoke girl band, Jungk, then he sold (but never finished) another memoir, and concocted a bunch of new film and stage concepts but somehow it all flew beneath the radar, the one thing a provocateur must never do. Another museum show, this one on "Authenticity and Karaoke," was mounted to the usual pile of clippings, but the things McLaren once stood for--marketing in the guise of provocation and anarchy--had come increasingly to seem like the peculiar English eccentricity one might have expected from the Sitwells and Mitfords, not a modern pop star cum postmodern artist.

In 2000, McLaren pushed his eccentricity a little further than anyone expected, entering the race for London’s first popularly elected Mayor. Advocating such wonderfully dotty ideas as homes for the homeless designed by the homeless, a flag for London, decriminalized pot and brothels, and the creation of a London Sports Week, he was drummed out of the race within a month or so. These days, he is dabbling with music created on GameBoys. Still, one hopes Malcolm keeps at it. After all, it’s always nice to have an English Eccentric to poke fun at occasionally. McLaren’s home page on the Web is nothing more than his name, his signature, an e mail address and these words: "Malcolm will return shortly."

Here’s hoping that’s a promise.

Craig Bromberg is the author of The Wicked Ways of Malcolm McLaren. Buy it online at Amazon.com.

Discography

Albums produced by or directly involving Malcolm McLaren:

The Sex Pistols Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols Great Rock N Roll Swindle

Bow Wow Wow See Jungle! See Jungle! Go Join Your Gang, Yeah, City All Over! Go Ape Crazy! I Want Candy When the Going Gets Tough, The Tough Get Going

CDs by Malcolm McLaren:

Duck Rock (1983) Fans (1984) Waltz Darling (1989)

Craig Bromberg is an author and content strategist; he wrote The Wicked Ways of Malcolm McLaren.