The price of fame... can be fairly expensive

November 7^th – What is it about the rock/pop music industry that attracts more, far more, than its fair share of dubious characters? Let’s set aside the performers, they’re a faction all their own, and just look at those on the periphery, those managers, personal assistants and promotions staff that surround-to-suffocation the performer; it’s almost a brand of legalised stalking.

Whenever I’ve had to deal with someone who is in the upper echelons of showbiz (or who considers themselves to be so) I always dread the arrival of the tag-along with clipboard and mobile ’phone. How bad can it get? I’ve had face-to-face, two-foot-apart conversations with the talent only to have the hanger-on do all the talking for them. Any questions, requests, descriptions, explanations are all repeated by the clipboard and answers forthcoming from the talent are all relayed back via the clipboard…that’s how bad.

What we were all aware of back in the 60’s/70’s was the number of nefarious characters that hung around the edges of both stage and band, using muscle and lack of patience in order to bend the available aura that attracted the slightly unbalanced, like moths to a lamp, to the vortex that was the talent; those suppliers of sex, drugs and booze, in order to divert these supply chains past them first where the rake off could be made. There’s many a place (dive) I’ve gigged where you felt distinctly ill-at-ease with the management and their support staff; really quite unnerved. Together with this darker side, and with flower-power and the beautiful people being to the fore, a high number of same-sex predators were also very evident at just about every gig. The beautiful boys in the band were their target and they were nothing if not persistent. It was unusual not to be propositioned at least once a gig, and although the explanation that one didn’t bat for the other side was politely taken as a refusal it was still not uncommon for folk to come back to the dressing room an hour later, after you’d finished the gig, to see if you’d changed your mind in the interim.

It’s a given, really, that the amount of attention and fuss that’s made of you, if you are in any way even slightly seen as famous, has to be a factor in turning one’s head thereby turning one from a mere mortal into a god (unfortunately only in one’s own opinion) and let me assure you that even in this deluded state, hell hath no fury like a star overshadowed…

This, as we know from the legion stories to come out of the pop/rock scene, can manifest itself in many ways; murder, drug O/D, strange sexual practice mortality, paedophilia, bestiality, necrophilia, the list goes on…and unfortunately on. There really is no shortage of ways these chosen ones choose to shorten their career or free-life on this planet, and some can be really…odd; take the case of Rod Lauren.

No? Not familiar? Let me refresh.

Mr. Lauren was a B movie actor and one-hit-wonder pop singer who was most active in the 1960’s. To say his career was less than stellar is an understatement; his one-hit-wonder pop song, If I Had a Girl only reached number 31 in the Billboard Hot Hundred (so hardly gold record status…or, indeed, anywhere close) and the majority of his film work was in TV, albeit with Mr. Hitchcock, so hardly ranking in the IMDB five-star listing. During his filming in the B movie, Once Before I Die he met and married another cast member, Nida Blanca, who was a big thing in the Philippines movie industry…BIG. She starred in over 163 movies, numerous television shows, and took 16 awards for movies and 6 awards for television during a film career that lasted 50 years. To complete the overshadowing of her husband’s meagre output she was named one of 15 Best Actress of all Time by Yes Magazine. One would like to think that hubby was satisfied enough with being associated with a lady of such stature and that they lived happily ever after…weeellll…not quite.

When the very attractive, very active, very rich Ms. Blanca was found stabbed and beaten to death in the back of her car, and the health of her marriage and terms of her will were understood, Mr. Lauren (aka R. L. Strunk…you couldn’t make this stuff up, could y’) became chief  suspect. Out of the country when the arrest warrant was issued on this day in 2001, Mr. Lauren defeated two attempts at deportation by the Philippine government who had collected evidence that Mr. Strunk had hired a hitman, Philip Medel, to murder his wife before the will could be enacted…which would mean he would be cut out of a share of the 85 million peso (£1.25m) worth of Philippines properties, a San Juan condominium worth 10 million pesos (£143,000) and a house in California worth $300,000 (£187,000).

Mr. Medel admitted to the deal and then reneged on it, claiming police coercion, but served time for it anyway, dying in prison because of it. Mr. Strunk committed suicide by jumping off’f a second floor balcony in Tracy, CA…the second floor of the Tracy Inn of all places; so, from unfulfilled property millionaire to hotel chain suicide victim via accessory to murder suspect in the short space of six years; it would seem stardom, even undesirable and in small doses, is a strange pathway to stumble along aint it?