You don't expect Morrissey to walk into the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel wearing dark aviators. It's one of those rare Los Angeles afternoons when the Santa Anas blow the smog out over the Pacific and glorious sunlight blankets the city.
We exchange greetings and make our way past the Polo Lounge (the hotel's landmark restaurant/bar), down a carpeted staircase, and through a gilded, underground mini-mall with rows of shops selling alligator valises and silk cravats. When we step out into the garden, Morrissey smiles. He seems to drink in each individual plant-the bird-of-paradise flowers, the blooming, fragrant lantanas.
"It's so beautiful," he remarks.
Something about the way he walks as we head toward a private cabana by the pool implies that Morrissey (the man for whom the term miserablism was coined) is not even remotely brooding. His gait is almost sprightly.
"Did you see anyone famous in the Polo Lounge?" he asks me.
"No. Just a lot of self-possessed rich people," I crack. Later that night, I'll spy Colin Farrell hopping around on crutches while simultaneously drinking and smoking, but the sprawling, pink palace (immortalized by the Eagles in "Hotel California") is no longer even remotely a rock'n'roll haven. It stinks of money, old and new (mostly new). The good life is lived here. Sure, it's close to the home Morrissey has owned for the past six years (a Spanish-style estate that was built by Clark Gable for his wife, Carole Lombard, and was later owned by F. Scott Fitzgerald), but as we sit down beside a pair of topiary sea horses, order tea, and stare out at the potbellied sunbathers, I wonder why Morrissey chose this place over, say, the Chateau Marmont or his favorite English-style pub, the Cat and Fiddle, both just a few miles down Sunset Boulevard. As he re-engages the media to promote his first album of new material in seven years, You Are the Quarry (out May 18), is Morrissey trying to project a new image-that of a shades-wearing, sun-worshipping, dare I say, well-adjusted gentleman? Though he was in danger of becoming something of a has-been in the late '90s, Morrissey in 2004 has emerged from self-imposed exile as an exalted elder statesman of British pop. An institution. As far as I can tell, he knows this. And he wears it surprisingly well.
"Amazing to find soy milk at this hotel," he says, lightening his English breakfast tea from a porcelain creamer.
"Maybe they fly it in from somewhere," I suggest. Morrissey laughs. (It feels weird even typing those two words.)
"Are you happier?" I ask him. "Were you ever clinically depressed?"
He nods. "I think I was quite clinically depressed. I feel so much happier now."
"Is it a natural change? Something that comes with age?"
"With age," he says, "you can put things into perspective and realize how absurd people are. When you're younger, you feel that if a person is a lawyer or an accountant or a high court judge, they must actually know something.'"
"But they probably just saw a job opportunity," I say.
"Absolutely."
"They can still screw your life up, though."
"Unfortunately, yes," Morrissey says. "But that's the fascist society we live in. I don't know why you're laughing."
"I guess to keep from crying."
"Feel free to cry," he says. "You'll feel a lot better."
After a shockingly abrupt split between Morrissey and Marr, the band dissolved in 1987, the very year that their closest contemporaries-R.E.M., U2, and the Cure-broke through to the masses. Marr went on to collaborate with a mixed bag of artists (Bryan Ferry, the Pretenders, Talking Heads), all of whose sole distinction seemed to be that they were past their prime. By the early '90s, Morrissey was in the odd position of being able to sell out arenas like Madison Square Garden and the Hollywood Bowl in minutes, though he never received priority treatment from his American labels and rarely heard himself on the radio. "My success, if you want to call it that, has never had anything to do with the record company," he says. "Ever. Ever. Ever."
As a solo artist, an increasingly marginalized Morrissey took even more fire. In 1988, "Margaret on the Guillotine," the closing track on his solo debut, Viva Hate, made him the subject of a police investigation for allegedly inciting a bloody coup against then U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (no charges were filed). In 1992, the influential British music paper NME branded him a fascist after he draped himself in the Union Jack and performed in London's Finsbury Park in front of a backdrop featuring photographs of young skinheads. In 1996, Smiths drummer Mike Joyce and bass player Andy Rourke sued Morrissey and Marr for 25 percent of record royalties. Rourke settled, but the British High Court awarded Joyce an estimated 1 million pounds. Possibly riled by Morrissey's courtroom behavior (he held up a copy of the popular Smiths biography, Morrissey & Marr: The Severed Alliance, and icily informed Joyce's attorney, "There are two names on the cover, Morrissey and Johnny Marr. Did you notice that?"), the presiding judge made a point to publicly dismiss his Smiths-era financial wrangling as "devious, truculent, and unreliable." (For the record, this is one subject that Morrissey cannot make peace with. "There isn't enough time in infinity," he says.) Worse, his sixth solo studio album, Maladjusted, released in '97, was greeted with almost universal indifference.
"The last album was not a showstopper," he admits. "The sleeve was dreadful. I look like a mushroom or a leprechaun. It was designed by the record company [Mercury], and they were collapsing. There was a terrible dark cloud over it. I also find that, in the media, most writers say exactly the same thing. So, if they recognize a cloud above you, then they'll say, 'Oh, yes, there's the cloud.'"
"'He's lost it,'" I suggest.
"Yes."
In 1998, without a label or management, nearly 40, and fed up, Morrissey disappeared. He'd moved from Dublin to Los Angeles in 1996, and on rare occasions had been spotted at a rock show (the Libertines at the El Rey, the Sex Pistols at the Greek Theatre) or at the Cat and Fiddle for a Sunday afternoon pint. While remaining gracious to fans who made pilgrimages to his front steps (I know one who licked his mailbox), Morrissey has spent much of his time away, promoting animal rights, working closely with the Los Angeles Animal Police and People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals. Among his causes: protesting the abuses of baby elephants in Thailand; exposing the experiments conducted on dogs and cats by the Iams pet-food company; joining fellow PETA campaigner Pamela Anderson and a turkey named Chloe for a meat-free Thanksgiving dinner in 2002. "A lot of people aren't interested in animals, so I have to tread very lightly because I don't want to become a crashing bore about these things," Morrissey says. "You won't see me being arrested outside McDonald's. I just do what I can. I think that animals need all the help we can give them."
"Morrissey helped put PETA on the map," says Dan Mathews, the organization's vice president of campaigns. "The Smiths' Meat Is Murder was a benchmark in defining animal rights as an edgy youth movement and has created legions of vegetarians."
Morrissey launched a world tour in 1999, called ¡Oye Esteban! which affectionately acknowledged his newly discovered Latino fan base, then was relatively quiet until he appeared twice in 2002 on CBS' The Late Late Show (during which host Craig Kilborn fawned over his visibly uncomfortable guest in a manner usually reserved for the likes of Doritos girl Ali Landry). "I'm looking for a deal," Morrissey claimed in a December 2000 interview. "And I'm open and free and available-not free, but I'm available." A lack of either takers or acceptable offers gave Morrissey the dubious distinction of being the biggest unsigned act in rock history.
"I'm assuming that you express your personal feelings through your lyrics," I tell him.
"Yes," he says. "It's always been absolutely and exclusively about me."
"It must have been hard to lose that direct outlet after so many years."
"It was very frustrating," he says. "But I absolutely believe in fate and I knew that it would end. I felt like I was being carried along by something, and perhaps it's all the better that there was a gap."
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