Sid Didn't Kill Nancy

Sid spelled trouble wherever he went—a wicked, sexy kind of trouble you can’t resist. He was the ultimate DIY Punk Idol: someone easy to assemble and therefore become. Sid didn’t just wear the clothes; he acted them. He single-handedly reinvented the classic Havana tuxedo into an outlaw costume by styling it with a pair of black drainpipe jeans and what would become the ubiquitous Punk garter that he wore so sweetly around his left thigh. His vocal performance on “My Way,” with its venomous tirade against his former friend, Johnny Rotten, outpaced—and many say, outsang—Sinatra’s. Martin Scorsese seemed to think so, as he included it in his film, “Goodfellas.” Paul Anka, the original lyricist, has been quoted many times saying that Sid’s is his favorite version.

Sid made sex purposely corny and mundane—making it easy to overcome adolescent inhibitions. Everyone wanted to sleep with Sid (except for Marianne Faithfull, who was being cast by Russ Meyer—“King of the Nudies”—to play his mother in Who Killed Bambi?, the aborted Sex Pistols movie. She insisted he take a bath first.) Provocative and dangerously sexy, he stretched the limits. So typically young and foolish, his vanity was sublime and wonderfully cheeky. Making love seemed a too-distant subject. “Who cares about love?” Sid once said to me. “Love is for people preparing to die.” But he was willing prey for Nancy—Nancy, who taught Sid all about sex and drugs and the lifestyle of a New York rocker.

His defiance toward accepted values made him a serious threat in the band, and the music industry made no attempt to hide their feelings. Throughout his short career, they conspired against him with whomever would help, including Johnny Rotten. They said he was capable of anything.

But to kill Nancy? I was stunned when I first heard this and I still can’t believe it. Sid was capable of a wide range of self-destructive acts, but I didn’t think that he could kill someone, especially his girlfriend, unless it was a botched double suicide. No! I don’t believe Sid killed Nancy. She was his first and only love of his life. As everyone knows, you may argue with your first (he lost his virginity to Nancy), sometimes might want to beat their brains in, leave them, move on, and be with others—but you never get over them. No. Sid was the sucker. The stupid, clumsy fool that night at the Chelsea Hotel. He passed out on the bed, having taken fistfuls of Tuinal. All around him, drug dealers, friends of Nancy came and went from Room 100. Money was stolen and Sid’s knife (similar to that of 007’s) was taken from the wall where it was hung and seemingly used by someone defending themselves in a struggle with Nancy. Nancy was no pushover. I tried having her kidnapped in London and put on a plane back to New York. Probably, she caught this person stealing money from the bedroom drawer.

I was positive about Sid’s innocence and acquittal. But Sid’s trial was going to cost a fortune, and with the Sex Pistols account drained, I thought he could sing for his supper at the Sands in Las Vegas and pay the bills. Sid already had several hits under his belt—covers of Eddie Cochran’s “C’mon Everybody” and “Something Else” as well as “My Way.” During the preparations for Sid’s trial, my conversations with various promoters had me contemplating Sid performing in Las Vegas. After all, Sid was the only Punk candidate who could fill Elvis’s shoes.

Sid’s mother, Anne, was kind enough and helped him wherever she could. A small-time drug dealer, she smuggled heroin in her vagina to Sid at Riker’s Island, a detention center in New York where he was awaiting trial for the murder of Nancy. A dutiful mother, she aided him in his last breath, killing him, and killing herself years later.

Sid Vicious’s face has peered out of more T-shirts, posters, documentaries than any other rock star of his era. His uncanny ability to imitate art and yet at the same time naturally claim it as his own is a Warholian dream. At my store, Sex, on the King’s Road in Chelsea, Andy Warhol pleaded desperately for a T-shirt with Sid’s name printed on it, “Malcolm, just do it for me, just one!” Later, Andy would paint Sid’s portrait for the cover of an art magazine. Sid was the Sex Pistols’s problem—but alas, the rest of the band could never agree that he might also be their Savior.

Malcolm McLaren began his career in fashion and entertainment in the early 1970s when he opened a store in London with Vivienne Westwood, kickstarting punk fashion. He then founded and managed the Sex Pistols, and worked with artists like Boy George, Adam Ant, and Bow Wow Wow. In 2006, Fast Food Nation, a film which McLaren conceived and co-produced, débuted at the Cannes Film Festival. Presently, McLaren is developing a stage musical about fashion for Broadway.