For years, it was speculated on as to who inspired the sharp-suited, homicidal gunman played by James Fox in the gangster movie half of Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roegs cult classic. It was only towards the end of his life that Cammell, who committed suicide by gun, identified Jimmy Evans: a pro thief and gunman who protected Mick Jaggers friend, art dealer Robert Fraser, when he was in prison after the Rolling Stones 1967 drugs bust. It was little wonder the underworld was slow to credit Evans: Performance was regarded with bemusement, starting as a crime story but turning into a hallucinogenic clash between the rock and crime subcultures. And then there was Evans problematic reputation: in The Profession of Violence, John Pearsons classic work on the Krays, hes described unnamed as a "London villain who... had started an underworld vendetta by firing a sawn-off shotgun into the groin of his young wifes lover. The wounded man was the brother of an important London gangster who was an ally of the twins." The important London gangster was the feared and formidable Freddie Foreman (see below). The Krays outlandish scheme to kill Evans - with a cyanide injection on a spring - on Foremans behalf contributed to their final arrests. It was after this that East London safecracker Evans instructed Cammell, Anita Pallenberg and the Stones set in the ways of the underworld. But it wasnt until the early noughties (over 30 years later) that his biographer, Martin Short, told him Performance had actually been made. When I interviewed him about his biography, The Survivor, he was perplexed by the film. Anyway, he reflected on scenes where the epithet poof is painted on a wall before Chas shoots a treacherous friend, and becomes sexually ambiguous under the influence of mushrooms, Performance is a load of b*ll*cks - I aint a poof! Jimmy Evans (now deceased) spoke of his wish to create a film screenplay based on The Survivor. Among the multiple scenarios was a false accusation that Evans was Jack the Stripper (the London serial killer who inspired Hitchcocks Frenzy), countered by his own fantastic theory that the Stripper was Superintendent Tommy Butler, who caught the Great Train Robbers. I suggested that, as his was such a phantasmagorical view of the 1960s, the film should have an animated backdrop like Sin City. Thats a cartoon, he reflected disapprovingly, this is a true story. But then that was the old-school underworld: every story was true to the person telling it. The movies only introduced one more layer of legend.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
