And I Don’t Want to Live This Life
Nancy Spungen: The Family Story Behind the Tabloid Headlines
Even people that weren't into the "music scene" couldn't help but sit up and take notice when punk rock and the Sex Pistols hit American shores.
To this day, there’s no consensus as to whether punk was great music by visionaries or mediocre musicians with great publicity. Either way, punk rock made a lasting mark on pop culture, and one of the largest marks was by the Sex Pistols.
The Sex Pistols were better known for their antics than their music. It’s hard to ignore a band with a lead singer named Johnny Rotten, a bass player named Sid Vicious, and an album title containing a slang term for “testicles.” Their signing party at A&M ended with band members vomiting on the managing director’s desk. (The label dumped them days later.) Their U.S. tour lasted only two weeks, ending with Rotten walking off-stage in San Francisco.
If the band had created headlines during their short career, though, nothing could match the frenzy in October 1978, when Vicious murdered his girlfriend, Nancy Spungen. Spungen was found in a pool of blood under the bathroom sink in their room at the Chelsea Hotel in New York, dressed only in black lingerie and stabbed in the abdomen. Searching the room, police found drugs (Vicious and Spungen were heroin addicts) and a bloody folding knife. Vicious was found wandering the hotel hallways and arrested.
For most people, the story was another sordid example of celebrities run wild. Spungen was vilified by the tabloids, another trashy dope addict, living fast and dying young. But there’s another side to the story, detailed by Nancy’s mother, Deborah, in the book, And I Don’t Want to Live This Life.
Despite her wild-child reputation, Nancy was born and raised in a stereotypical suburban home outside of Philadelphia, the oldest of three children of Frank and Deborah Spungen. But Nancy herself was anything but a typical child. Deborah tells of an infant that screamed hysterically every waking moment, stopping only when physically exhausted. She consulted her pediatrician, who prescribed phenobarbitol to help the baby sleep -- at the age of 3 months. At 6 months, when Nancy began crawling, and again would stop only when physically exhausted, doctors responded by increasing the medication, still insisting that this was a normal baby.
The family suffered years of increasingly difficult, obsessive, and even violent behavior from Nancy, along with years of vainly consulting doctors and specialists. Her parents were repeatedly assured that Nancy was normal, she would grow out of it, or worse, her problems were because of the way her parents “handled” her. Because she was gifted, Nancy was ineligible for programs able to handle her behavioral problems; because of her behavioral problems, she was unable to function in either public or private schools. Nancy was a teenager before a doctor suggested that she was schizophrenic – but the diagnosis appeared only in her school records, and her parents were never told. By the time the Spungens were told of the diagnosis, they were also told that Nancy was too ill to be helped by the treatments available. They were helpless to do anything but stand by and watch Nancy continue on her self-destructive course.
Deborah’s book details Nancy’s effects on the family with painful honesty. Their love for her is apparent, as well as their frustration not only with their limited options but with Nancy herself, and their unwilling relief when she moved out and was no longer a daily presence. Deborah makes no effort to put the best face on her family, and by doing so, turns them from one-dimensional tabloid fodder into neighbors and friends. Well-written and thoroughly engrossing, the book doesn’t just tell her story, but pulls you into it with her.
