Branson. Tom Bower

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СКАЧАТЬ his announcement that Devo, an American new wave band contracted to Warner Brothers, had signed with Virgin. The announcement prompted Warner Brothers to issue a writ seeking to restrain Virgin from inducing a breach of contract and infringing Warner’s copyright. The articled clerk employed to deliver the writ found Branson in bed with two girls. Five weeks later, Warner Brothers was awarded an injunction. ‘I just want you to know,’ smiled Branson at the end of the trial, ‘that you’ve hung me on a precedent set by my grandfather.’ In 1938, Warner’s lawyers discovered, Judge Branson had found against Bette Davis, the actress, in similar circumstances. His calm acceptance of defeat was impressive. Similar to his fearless approach to money and debt, Branson’s undaunted use of the law ranked him as a potential big player.

      ‘Injunct them,’ he announced in a humourless voice back on the houseboat. Rough Trade, he discovered, a small distributor of records, was selling bootlegs of a Virgin recording. ‘I’m going to get them. Put out a press release and call Harbottle’s,’ he ordered his assistant. The organiser of the Sex Pistols antics had forgotten that Virgin Records owed its existence partly to selling bootlegs. ‘Rough Trade will be ruined,’ his adviser mentioned. Branson paused. He gazed at his two other shabbily furnished barges moored nearby, The Arthur for parties and another houseboat as a private bolt-hole. He enjoyed the barges’ discreet testaments to his wealth. ‘It’s hardly good publicity,’ continued his adviser, ‘when The Sunday Times is preparing its first profile of you.’ ‘Okay,’ agreed Branson reluctantly. The writ was not issued. His attention had switched to The Sunday Times’ interview. He would, he decided, meet the journalist in jeans and barefoot on the houseboat.

      The backdrop of Little Venice for a hippie millionaire was brilliant theatre for impressionable journalists and he agreed to meet only the most susceptible. He encouraged profiles of himself as the genial, happy-go-lucky face of capitalism, a ‘man of the future’, disguising his workaholic craving for success with the informal backdrop of his humble home. His genius was to disarm any accusations of disingenuity. A handful of sceptics were silenced by his unaffected warmth and the hilarious anecdotes repeated among his loyal employees about Branson’s parties and pranks, and about the spectacular antics performed on the unsuspecting on April Fool’s Day. Virgin’s association with fun won Branson admirers but, like so many clowns performing in the public arena, there were signs of the conductor’s deep-rooted unease.

      A recent Branson performance – sitting naked on the roof of the manor to attract the attention of a TV cameraman away from XTC playing below to one hundred employees and friends – had aroused embarrassment but he had been oblivious to his guests’ sentiment. Frequently, he thrust his nudity and sexuality into the public arena. All his staff, he was certain, were enthralled by his regular bulletins to anyone passing through the office about his painful circumcision conducted after a misdiagnosed illness; and he delighted in the playground humour of secretaries leaving pornography on his desk or flashing their naked breasts. Attracting attention had become a balm to fill the vacuum of a failing marriage evident by the relationships which both he and Kristen were enjoying with others.

      The marriage reached its crisis on his houseboat at the end of a drunken meal cooked by Kristen. Their guests, Kevin Ayers, an older, sophisticated rock musician, and Cyrille, his wife, had met Branson at a party, ‘a rich middle-class affair with all the usual drink, drugs and rock and roll’, recalled Ayers. After the meal, Ayers offered the Bransons cocaine. Taking drugs was not unusual for Branson: he had used marijuana and LSD, and cocaine might have been a predictable progression, although twenty years later Branson would deny taking the drug. Soon after, Ayers disappeared with Kristen into the bedroom while Branson stayed with Cyrille. Each would claim that the other partners had sex together but deny the same about themselves. Cyrille, however, complained afterwards, ‘Branson was so cheap, the bastard wouldn’t even pay my taxi fare home’; while Kevin Ayers delighted in stealing Kristen to embark on a long relationship. ‘Branson exploded,’ chortled Ayers later. ‘It’s pathological because he can’t stand losing. For a year, [Branson] kept up a battery of letters, telephone calls and chases across Europe pleading, “How can you leave me?”’ Branson loathed rejection. His unrelenting pressure to encourage his wife’s sense of guilt reflected the pain of his humiliation. At a concert in Hyde Park where Ayers was playing, Branson confronted the musician aggressively. ‘How could you do this to a friend, stealing my wife?’ he exploded, castigating Ayers as an enemy. Branson had forgotten that originally he had lured Kristen from another man.

      Branson was lonely. Unsatisfied in his own company, he often telephoned Simon Draper late at night to discuss business or arranged breakfast conferences in Draper’s home in Holland Park for ten people. At weekends, he would drive to Draper’s country home, knowing that his cousin had a dinner party to which he was not invited, and impose himself. To avoid a moment’s solitude, he invited his employees to his mother’s house in Majorca. Branson demanded full attention from the Virgin family. He received nothing less. Few rejected their employer’s summons.

      Solace was found among his employees. One-night stands with secretaries were the topic of constant gossip in his office about the ‘passing flavour’. Pretty young women were the common currency in the music world and the young, unmarried millionaire who enjoyed partying was a magnet for those seeking fun. Most remained discreet about their relationships. Branson was kind and won the women’s respect. Despite the temptation of money, few were inclined to kiss-and-tell.

      But there was talk about Branson’s strange sexual antics. Crossdressing appeared to be a passion, suggesting something unusually important about Branson’s single homosexual experience soon after his arrival at Stowe. In adulthood, he happily dropped his trousers at parties to reveal fishnet stockings and lacy suspenders; he dressed in women’s clothes and allowed himself to be photographed kissing a man; he performed solo drag acts on the dance floor; and he cavorted naked covered in cranberry sauce. ‘He had this thing at parties,’ recalled Carol Wilson, a senior executive in Virgin Music, ‘of exposing himself all over the place.’ Alison Short, an assistant, was puzzled why he dressed as a woman and was ‘always throwing water over my breasts and rubbing me down’. Regardless of whatever clothes he was wearing, he could rarely resist propositioning women, even those attached to other men. Like a caricature on a seaside postcard, he drooled over big breasted women and few were more amazed by his habit than Tom Newman, the rock guitarist, who stood at the bar of the Warwick Castle, a public house in Maida Vale, with Maggie Russell, his attractive friend, amused by Branson’s unsuccessful attempt to poach. But in 1978, after two years as a bachelor, his fortunes changed.

      In starkly similar circumstances to his introduction to his first wife at the manor, he spotted Joan Templeman. The Roman Catholic daughter of a Glasgow carpenter, Templeman had been married for twelve years to Ronnie Leahy, a musician in Stone the Crows whom she had accompanied to a recording at the manor. Leahy would say that the marriage was solid and his wife displayed no hint of unhappiness. Yet Branson was smitten by the Notting Hill shop assistant. The opportunity so close to his home and office was too good to miss. Although upset by Tom Newman seducing his girlfriend, Mundy Ellis, and his wife, and distraught that Kevin Ayers had taken Kristen, he was prepared to entice Joan Templeman, a married woman, by siege.

      In Branson’s mind, Joan Templeman, five years older than himself and whose two brothers were well known in local pubs, was ideal. Besides her good looks, she was socially and intellectually unthreatening, comfortably domestic and yet cool. Whenever Leahy was on tour, Branson sought invitations to dinner parties to meet his quarry. Eventually, his persistence was rewarded. Although in late 1977 Branson promised Leahy that he would leave Joan alone for three months to allow the couple to attempt reconciliation in New York, he reneged and flew over, untroubled by Leahy’s distress.

      Manhattan was cold and to celebrate their decision to live together, the owner of Virgin headed for the sun in the Virgin Islands. In Branson’s version, he whisked his true love around the idyllic islands on a trip financed by an estate agent to discover his paradise called Necker, an isolated lump of barren rock lacking water, people and animals. Branson would СКАЧАТЬ