Mim Scala - Diary of a Teddyboy (Headline) | Uppers Culture Books & Magazines

The 1960s, as you have no doubt read two or three hundred times, brought with them an explosion of youth, culture, colour and excitement, a rollercoaster thrill-ride.etc. etc.

The histories of that age generally focus on the famous faces and the notorious images, reducing the era to a very broad caricature of itself - like in the documentaries that always use the same fucking image of the same hippy dancing around the same park blowing bubbles. Hence for most people, even some who were there, the 60's is BeatlesTwiggyTimLearyWoodstockAltamont. The same few characters at the same few events.

You wouldn't believe it to read most biographies, but history is not made by the famous alone. The unfamous and infamous too play a large part, and usually have the best stories. Emmett Grogan, Simon Napier Bell, Pete Meaden - names rarely touched on in documentaries, but people whose lives ran in and out of every notorious strand of the notorious decade. Emilio "Mim" Scala is another.

Don't be put off by the title. Teddy-Boy was just one of Scala's acts of self-creation. The book focuses on the period between the mid 50's and mid 70's. In those years, a London boy from a working class background (albeit wealthy working class - Scala's grandfather won the Irish Sweepstakes, and the family owned a celebrated ice cream business) had sudden and unprecedented access to a bacchanalian world of debutantes, movie stars and gangsters.

Scala may not himself be famous, but the names that he drops are. Sometimes they are dropped with great effect - as when his orgy with Micahel Caine et al (in this case, et al means Warren Beatty, Steve McQueen, and Terence Stamp) in a sauna , on Roman Polanski's stag night with a bunch of Playboy Bunnies, is interrupted by a drunken Richard Harris:

"Come on you filty bastards, come with me. I know where the real action is"
- whereupon he staggered out of the heat. As morning came, we discovered what had happened to Richard. He had burgled Sharon Tate's hen party, the only male present at that gathering of twenty of the most beautiful girls in London.

Generally, however, the name-dropping gets to be a pain, and reads more like a laundry list than a description of the beautiful people. I'll spare you another excerpt, but no doubt it involves Salvador Dali, Brian Jones, and Peter Ustinov. And some cake.

Gripes aside, it is a fascinating social document on the most part. As with most histories of the era, the most interesting stuff is near the beginning, in his descriptions of the cusp era between the '50's and '60's, when bohemianism seemed to be the province of a few classy sophisticates, rather than every hairy hippy in the free world. Great stories about debutante balls and Kings Road coffee houses are complemented by pics of Scala in 1958 - looking a lot like most people's idea of perfect modernism circa 1964.

By page 100, however, the hippy years have settled in, with a vengeance, and the rest of the book is spent in lengthy descriptions of crystals, Land Rover expeditions across North Africa, and frankly tedious tales of acid trips.

If you're like me, you find listening to other people's acid stories about as interesting as other people's dreams - i.e. not at all. Perhaps, however, you are more selfless, and find the journey to spiritual enlightenment more interesting than stories about Playboy bunnies at wild parties. If so, read the whole thing. Everyone else, stop when he names the Land Rover after Gandalf's Horse in Lord of the Rings. Either way, worth the price of admission.

Comments:

bomber	mar 6 2003 7:00AM

this books a good read, and can be picked up for one pound in the bagain book shops.....shamefull

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Mim Scala - Diary of a Teddyboy (Headline)

Why are you reviewing a book about Ted's on a Mod site we will no doubt be asked - read on and all shall be answered.

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