Nine Curzon Place: A Tragedy in Three Acts
Goin' down now
Don't ask me how far down
Don't ask a drowning man how far down
All I know's I'm goin' down.
—Harry Nilsson
Act I
The lights come up on Harry Nilsson, standing center stage with a suitcase in one hand. His newsboy cap is squashed down on his mess of blonde hair. His beard is scraggly and unkempt. His sensitive eyes shine with a mixture of good humor and immeasurable disquietude. The scene is a small London flat in the early nineteen seventies and the idiosyncratic American songwriter looks relieved to finally have a permanent place to sleep in this city. After crisscrossing the Atlantic one too many times, he finally decided to buy this flat, number twelve at nine Curzon Place, Mayfair. It's right in the heart of the city and essentially across the street from the Playboy Club, something which he is all too happy to point out to his friends.
Ringo Starr and his business partner Robin Cruikshank enter stage right. Their interior/furniture design company, ROR, has been hired by their friend Mr. Nilsson to decorate his new home. They take turns shaking his hand and then begin to dash about the place, quickly whipping it into shape with the hippest of seventies accoutrements.
Act II
A warm late July night in nineteen seventy-four. The flat a nine Curzon Place is filled with police, moving from room to room with jumbled purpose, like ants at a picnic. In the bedroom, a large shape lies under a white sheet on the bed. A ham sandwich sits on a plate on the nightstand.
The shape under the sheet is one Ellen Naomi Cohen, better known to the world as Mama Cass. Nilsson is back in L.A. for a bit and she had been staying in his flat while playing a number of solo shows on this side of the Atlantic. She had received standing ovations at her two Palladium appearances on recent nights and was thrilled by the prospect of her horizons broadening beyond the confines of her old band. She went to bed happy and filled with champaign and she never woke up.
Standing at the front of the stage, Dr. Anthony Greenburgh, the medical examiner, makes an unfortunate comment to the press about the ham sandwich, which fuels endless media speculation and decades of urban legend. The simple fact, though, is that Mama Cass didn't choke on the sandwich. She died of myocardial degeneration—basically her fluctuating weight had caused her heart to simply stop beating.
In L.A., projected in shadow on the curtain, Nilsson hangs his head.
Act III
A mild September morning in nineteen seventy-eight. The infamous wild man of The Who, Keith Moon, reclines in bed in the flat at nine Curzon Place. Once again, Nilsson is out of town and letting a friend stay at his home. Moon smokes cigarettes and watches the movie
The Abominable Doctor Phibes, occasionally harassing his girlfriend, Annette Walter-Lax. When she objects to his demands for her to cook him steak and eggs, he yells, "If you don't like it, you can just f
uck off!"
She storms out of the room, and perhaps in response, Moon downs thirty-two tablets of clomethiazole, a sedative he had been prescribed to alleviate his alcohol withdrawal symptoms. Unfortunately, six of this tablets are enough to be lethal and he soon loses consciousness. When Annette returns that afternoon, he is dead. The stage goes dark.
Spotlights now illuminate a sequence of brief scenes: Grief-stricken over the loss of his friend and disturbed by the seemingly cursed nature of that bedroom, Nilsson sells the flat to Pete Townsend. A series of residents come and go from the flat throughout the eighties as it grows more and more worn out looking. The nineties come and it sits vacant.
In L.A., projected in shadow on the curtain, Nilsson collapses to the floor and dies, both broke and broken.
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Afterword
For anyone interested, I've posted three wonderful Nilsson tracks below, each one reflecting a different side to his often dark, yet oddly humorous and upbeat songwriting. All three tracks come from his penultimate release,
Knnillssonn, which was the last album he put out while still the owner of the flat at nine Curzon Place. It's an absolutely brilliant attempt at a comeback album which, sadly, was completely eclipsed by the death of Elvis Presley shortly after it after it came out.