John Simon Ritchie was born around 1955 (plus or minus two
years). He was born in England, and spent his teen years in
London. A high-school dropout, at a young age he was recruited by
Malcolm McLaren to join a band that McLaren had created to
exploit the disaffected youth of London. That band was called the
'Sex Pistols', named in part after McLaren's boutique, 'Sex.'
Sly was approximately 19 when the Pistols made it to the very top
of the music industry in 1975 with songs like 'Anarchy in the
U.K.' and 'God Save the Queen', which made number one on the
charts despite being censored (The Billboard chart had a blank
spot at Number One). The Sex Pistols were a smartly packaged
group representing rebellion and anarchy, even as they were
basically about making money. Sid, however, was no act: cruel,
nasty, self-destructive, he personified that which the Sex
Pistols purported to represent
Raised in southern England by his mother, Anne Beverley, now 63,
a troubled single mother who had her own history of heroin use,
Sid was lonelier offstage than his bad-boy persona suggested.
"Deep down he was a shy person," wrote photographer
Dennis Morris in a pictorial history of the band, 1991's Never
Mind the Bollocks. "I think he was frightened of the
audiences. . . . Sometimes he showed no emotion at all." At
16, after his first few one-night stands, says Beverley, Sid told
her, "Mum, I don't know what people see in sex. I don't get
anything out of it."
The daughter of an upper-middle-class Philadelphia businessman,
Nancy had problems "almost since birth," says her
mother, Deborah Spungen. "She was volatile." An
emotionally disturbed high school grad, she abused drugs and
repeatedly attempted suicide. But when she met the 19-year-old
John Simon Ritchie in 1977 at a friend's London flat, she could
hardly be described as aimless. "Nancy came to England with
the express wish, much like a groupie, to bed a Sex Pistol,"
says Pamela Rooke, a buddy of Sid's who was working at a punk
clothing shop on London's trendy Kings Road at the time.
"And in a way, Sid was easy meat."
Nancy, who had worked as a prostitute in London, figured out how
to turn him on. They moved into Rooke's flat, not far from
Buckingham Palace, sharing a mattress on the dining room floor.
"Everybody wanted to be with Sid, but unfortunately he came
with Nancy," says Rooke, now a veterinary nurse on the
southern coast of England. "She was unbelievably
thick-skinned, one of the most unlikable people I've met.
Everybody could see through her--except Sid."
The two were archetypally codependent. "Sid didn't have any
normal, ordinary relationships, and I think the sex part overtook
him," says Rooke. "I always saw him as being the child
to Nancy as mum. She was one of those doting people, and he had
never had that in his life." Predictably, Nancy's
overbearing presence soon led to friction with the band. Lead
singer John Lydon (then billed as Johnny Rotten) "would
plead with him to get rid of her, but to Sid she was like a
crutch," writes Morris. "When they were together he was
like a kitten, but without her he would go crazy." In time,
says Nils Stevenson, the Sex Pistols' tour manager, Sid came to
"dislike everything-- except heroin and Nancy." Things
came to a head in 1978, on the Pistols' only major tour.
Throughout the American concert dates, Sid "was
erratic," according to Morris. "No one knew why. It
seemed he missed Nancy. Sometimes he wouldn't eat at all. He'd
drink heavy and take lots of drugs." Fed up, John flew back
to Britain halfway through the tour. Nancy joined Sid in New
YorkCity.
After the couple moved into the Chelsea Hotel in August, their
relationship took an even stormier turn. "There was a
violent episode four days before she died," says Deborah
Spungen. "She said he'd been hitting her. I spent the next
days worrying. And then she didn't call. And never called
again."
On the morning of Oct. 12, responding to a report of a domestic
dispute, police entered their Chelsea Hotel room and found
Spungen, clad in blood-soaked bra and panties, crumpled under the
bathroom sink, dead of a single, deep stab wound to her abdomen.
Sid, in a drugged haze, was charged with her murder and released
on $50,000 bail. In several telephone calls to Deborah Spungen
after his arrest, Sid "never said he was sorry," she
recalls. "He never said anything about it happening at
all." Ten days later, Sid attempted suicide, slashing the
full length of his forearm with a knife and reportedly screaming,
"I want to be with my Nancy! I want to be left alone!"
After Nancy's death, Beverley flew to Manhattan to be with her
son who, despite a stint in rehab, was still nursing his drug
habit. On Feb. 1, 1979, fearful that he would be arrested in a
drug buy on the street, she bought a supply of heroin for him,
and was with him in the Greenwich Village apartment of a friend
that night while he injected it. Afterward, "I swear to God
he appeared to have a pink aura around his whole body," she
remembers. The next morning, when she brought him a cup of tea,
"he was lying there quite peacefully. I shook him until I
realized he was very cold and very dead."
Late one night, a few dayslater, Beverley climbed the wall to a
cemetery outside Philadelphia and, against the wishes of the
Spungen family, scattered her son's ashes in the snow over
Nancy's grave. Although authorities never officially determined
whether Sid's death was by accident or design, Anne Beverley has
little doubt. As evidence, she offers the worn piece of paper on
which Sid scrawled a poem, simply titled "Nancy," to
his departed love: "You were my little baby girl/And I knew
all your fears/Such joy to hold you in my arms/And kiss away your
tears/But now you're gone/There's only pain/And nothing I can
do/And I don't want to live this life/If I can't live for
you."
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