MOON GIRL by MANDY MOON - Sample Chapter

This is a sample chapter that Keith Moon’s daughter, Amanda De Wolf, and I wrote in the hope of enticing literary agents to represent us and get a deal with a mainstream book publisher. Unfortunately it didn’t happen, and neither of us was prepared to go with a specialist music company or the self-publishing route. We picked a fairly obvious period to write about, the dramatic week in which Kim, Mandy’s mum, left her husband for good.

GOODBYE DAD, HELLO MAC

I would have just turned seven when mum decided to leave my father for the final time. It was August 1973, another hot day in an endlessly hot summer made all the more unbearable because, unusually, my father was home for weeks on end. By ‘home’ I mean he was based in the UK, not that he was at home [Tara, the Moon’s house in Chertsey, Surrey, UK – Ed.] every night as he sometimes stayed in London, never letting mum know where he was, but when he was at Tara there was trouble afoot more often than not.

         The Who were recording and rehearsing their Quadrophenia record that summer and wouldn’t go back on the road until October, and this was the reason he was always likely to be around, and the more often he was around the more turmoil there was. When he went off on tour for a few weeks a state of calm descended on the household, less noise, less chaos, less uncertainty, less danger. Mum was always happier when he was away, like a great weight had been lifted from her shoulders, at least temporarily. I think if it was up to her she’d have preferred to leave him for good when he was out of the country on the road somewhere. That way she could have arranged it properly, had time to deal with all the practicalities involved, but it didn’t happen that way. In fact, it couldn’t have happened at a worse time really.

         The summer term had ended but even before that Dermot [Kerrigan, Kim’s mother’s son, therefore Mandy’s uncle, but only a few months older than her, who was also living at Tara – Ed.] and I were not attending school consistently. The mood in the household was simply not conducive to getting children up early, giving them their breakfast and taking them to school by 8.30, just like every other family with young kids at the school we went to. How mum explained all this to the teachers I have no idea.          Nowadays you read about ‘broken families’ whose kids don’t attend school because their parents are poor and can’t feed them or spend all their money on drink and drugs. Well, we were just like that – a ‘broken family’ – except that we lived in a big house in its own grounds in a posh part of Chertsey in Surrey and our father was supposedly earning plenty of money, but it still disappeared on drink and drugs and heaven knows what else. We might just as well have been a poverty-stricken ‘broken family’ on a run-down council estate for all the difference it made.

         I’m pretty sure now that mum made the decision to leave Keith and never come back to him because one of their fights actually involved me, at least indirectly, and this incident happened one night just before she decided we would leave Tara for good. Dad had turned off all the lights in the house for some reason and he began to throw things around madly in the dark. He was obviously drunk. Something hard hit me on the side of my left leg and cut me, not badly but enough for me to cry and need medical attention, and I still have the scar. Mum was furious that he’d hurt me, scared that it might happen again and maybe worse, and it degenerated into yet another terrible screaming match. I guess it was the last straw for her.

         Mum didn’t tell me she’d finally made the decision to leave dad and never come back, not at first anyway. We had left a few times before, sometimes in the middle of the night when dad was sleeping. Mum knew that when he’d taken a handful of sleeping pills on top of the brandy then nothing was going to wake him up for hours on end, so the early morning was a good time to make a break.

         On one of these occasions Dermot and I had been taken to Verwood in Dorset where Billy, my grandfather on my mum’s side, lived with Trisha, his second wife, who died in a car accident. Dad was frightened of Billy because he stood up to him. To Billy Keith Moon wasn’t some big rock star, he was just some idiot that his daughter had stupidly married, and he wouldn’t stand for any of dad’s nonsense. So, there was no way that dad would ever come to Verwood and try to get us to come back. Billy would just have smacked him in the teeth.

         This last visit to Billy’s lasted for two months or so and I hated it because it was obvious they didn’t want me there. I’d have preferred to stay with Nanny Kit, my other grandmother [Keith’s mum – Ed.], in Wembley, in the same house where dad grew up. I would have been much happier living with her than Billy but the truth is what I really wanted to be was alone somewhere with mum, just the two of us.
         But back to the morning when we left Tara, I remember waking up and mum not being there. It was always the scariest feeling, not knowing where she was and being alone in the house with dad, though of course he didn’t get up when I did. He certainly wasn’t a morning person! It was unusual for mum not to be there, most unlike her to leave me with dad. Many bad incidents had happened over the years and when they did and mum scarpered she always took me with her. This time she didn’t, so I didn’t know what was happening. Joan, my grandmother, was there, of course, but she wasn’t much use in the mornings either. Most nights she threw back the booze as much as dad, matching him drink for drink which is saying something.

         Mum had evidently had some lunch and gone to see some friends in Egham, then checked into the nearby Great Fosters Hotel at Thorpe Green. It was like she’d woken up that day and just said to herself, ‘I’ve had enough. I can’t take it any more’. She must have called from the hotel and rang up Tara to speak to her mother because Joan put Dermot and me in a cab and we were driven to the hotel where mum was waiting for us. I ran into her arms and hugged her. It was such a relief to see her. I never went back to Tara again, ever, but mum went back to fetch some things the next day. She told me later that she was really scared dad would find her there but he was in the pub down the lane, the Golden Grove, and didn’t see her, not at first anyway. Later she told me how she ran around the house collecting paperwork and things before fleeing in a taxi and being so afraid of what dad would do to her if he caught her. She managed to fill a suitcase with our clothes, running around the house and then getting away from Tara before he could stop her.

         We stayed at the Great Fosters Hotel for a couple of weeks. It seemed only natural that Dermot would be with us there too, as if he was my brother, but he went back to Verwood after a while. The hotel was amazing, an ancient Grade I listed building with a maze and history dating back to Henry VIII, and the gift shop had dolls of him and all his wives. It was big, beautiful and we felt safe at last. It was supposedly haunted but I didn’t experience anything like that. While we were there mum was on the phone all the time to the Who’s managers trying to get some money from them to pay our bills. We also spent a few nights at another hotel near Runnymede but that wasn’t so nice.
         When we moved out of the hotels we stayed with a couple named Molly and Bob who were friends of Kim’s mother Joan and who lived near Egham. I didn’t know who they were but they were very kind to us and had model horses for me to play with which was great and they had a dog. I really missed the dogs at Tara and pretended to be a dog most of the time, even eating and drinking from a bowl on the floor… not too emotionally sound already, I guess! I also used to sleepwalk at their home and would stand at the top of the stairs, so I am told, which was disconcerting for the adults so they locked me in my room.

         After about a month there we moved to a little house on Campbell Close, a cul-de-sac in Twickenham. I really liked living there, on a tiny street. It was one of five terraced cottages, quite sweet really, just the opposite of Tara, and I liked having my own room upstairs and looking out from the front window at people and dogs coming and going. We could walk down to a nearby shop which was a treat for me because Tara was really isolated, other than the pub at the end of the road. I suppose I craved normalcy and structure, which is why I liked being at Nanny Kit’s, just a normal house in a normal street with a normal family.

         Mum was renting the house in Campbell Close for £20 a week and she and I were alone there which was lovely, but after a week or two dad somehow found out where we were living and left things by the front door. I vaguely remember an incident where there were supposedly bad men with guns who had been ordered by dad to take us back to Tara. I remember I was kept away from the windows. I was never quite sure if that was real or just another story, like the story about dad setting some heavies on to Mac [Ian McLagan, the keyboard player of the Faces, whom Kim would marry in 1978 – Ed.] who was coming over to see mum a lot soon after we moved there. I heard later that dad did pay this heavy to break Mac’s fingers, but Pete Townshend heard about it and paid the heavy not to.

         It slowly dawned on me that Mac was courting mum, and mum was happy about this. They’d known one another for a long time, way back from when he was in the Small Faces I guess. So it was only a matter of time before we moved in with Mac, into another big house that wasn’t normal, in his case a five-bedroom Gothic style house in half an acre overlooking Richmond Park on Fife Road in East Sheen.

         I remember mum and Mac listening to lots of Marvin Gaye songs there, very romantic! Unlike dad, he treated her really well which must have been wonderful for her after all she’d had to put up with. It seemed like we would be there for a while so I started at another primary school in Twickenham. Mum and I took the bus, but I was usually late! I was made to stay in at lunch for being late and mum got so upset, telling the teachers it wasn’t my fault. She would come to the school and sit in at lunch but she had to be told it didn’t work that way!

         I do remember waking up at that house one night and no one was home. It was the middle of the night and I went outside and wandered down the road calling for mum. A kindly neighbour took me in and I slept in their front room until we heard mum yelling down the street for me at about four in the morning.
         After we moved in with Mac in East Sheen I remember dad coming to the house. It only happened once I think, but it was traumatic for everyone. Dougal [aka Peter Butler – Ed.], dad’s PA and driver, brought him over in his pink Rolls-Royce. I answered the door. It was frosted glass but I recognized his silhouette and was scared even before opening it. He asked Mac to babysit while he took mum out. Mac said no he wouldn’t do that and asked him to leave but dad insisted on seeing mum, so they spent some time together in the front room while Mac and Dougal and me waited outside in the back garden. Then dad left. I was always kind of afraid he would come back again but he never did, so this was the last time I ever saw him, and I didn’t even say goodbye.

         Dougal told me later that when they got back in the car dad cried his eyes out. He told Dougal he knew now that he’d lost mum for ever. I guess he must have finally realised that it was all over. Whenever mum had left him before there was never another man involved, but this time there was and that made all the difference. Deep inside I knew it too.

         Something had told me the break with dad was permanent after we moved in with Mac at Fife Road in East Sheen. This wasn’t like any of the other times we’d left dad. This wasn’t temporary, it was the future. The madness was finally over, and it was like a great big black cloud had been lifted, such a massive relief for me and mum. In front of me was a life that might just be normal – or so I thought.

MOON GIRL: My Life In The Shadow of Rock's Wildest Star

MOON GIRL

My Life in the Shadow of Rock’s Wildest Star

by Mandy Moon

with Chris Charlesworth

It was a childhood in which nothing made sense. My uncle was only eight months older than me and seemed like my brother, and my maternal granny told me she was ‘too young to be a granny’. I lost count of how many homes we lived in and how many schools I attended, and as a result had no friends of my own age. Sometimes we were very rich, at other times we had no money at all. We had about 12 cars. My mother called the last house we lived in as a family an ‘upside down egg box’. She was very beautiful, very loving but very tormented. And then there was my father…

* * *

MANDY MOON, now Amanda De Wolf, is the daughter and only child of Keith Moon, The Who’s original drummer, who died in 1978. Universally regarded as having set the benchmark for hedonistic behaviour in the world of rock’n’roll, ‘Moon The Loon’ was an incorrigible clown, revered equally today for his exceptional skills as a drummer as for sticking two fingers up to authority. He was also a reckless spendthrift, a serial womaniser and addicted to drugs and alcohol.

Born in 1966, Mandy lived with Keith and her mother Kim, a former model, until 1973 when her parents separated. Mandy naturally left with her mother, staying in a series of hotels and a rented home in Twickenham until Kim formed a relationship with Ian ‘Mac’ McLagan of The Faces and moved into his mansion on Fife Road in East Sheen, near Richmond. It was here, in 1975, that Mandy saw her father for the last time.   

Shortly after Keith Moon’s death Kim married Mac who became Mandy’s stepfather. They moved to California, firstly occupying a beach-side house at Trancas in Malibu that Mandy had inherited – the only significant asset of her father’s estate. When this had to be sold to pay off Keith’s debts to the IRS and elsewhere they moved to another property in Malibu and then to Woodland Hills in the San Fernando Valley where Mandy went to High School. Their next stop was Pasadena, where Mandy remained after Kim and Mac relocated to Austin, Texas. As Keith Moon’s sole heir Mandy benefited from an ongoing royalty stream from his estate and this, their most reliable source of income, paid for their home and lifestyle. Kim died in a car accident in 2006, McLagan from a stroke in 2014. Mandy, who inherited nothing from either, still lives in California and has two children of her own.

While the financial benefits derived from Keith Moon’s share of The Who’s record royalties cushioned her day-to-day existence, her father’s legacy was not without its dark side. In telling a story that is as unconventional as it is captivating, Mandy Moon reveals what it was like to be the daughter of rock’s wildest character and how elements of that character came to impact on her own life. Twice married and a recovering alcoholic, Mandy survived not just the trials of her bizarre childhood but also painful reminders of her background that troubled her as an adult. “It wasn’t easy being Keith Moon’s daughter,” she says. “Of all the crazy rock stars of the sixties my father was the craziest. But it’s important for people to realise that you can make it out of a family like mine and stay intact.”

Mandy Moon’s strange but inspirational story will appeal not just to fans of The Who but to anyone interested in reading about how the children of privileged but irresponsible rock stars come of age. Additionally, those faced with a personal history of drugs, alcohol and familial eccentricity that at times bordered on outright madness can learn how Keith Moon’s daughter came to terms with the trauma of having a father who – unlike her – never grew up.

* * *

There is a famous photograph of me and my father. Obviously posed, he’s lying on his back with a cigarette holder in his mouth amidst a pile of empty beer bottles, his eyes focussed somewhere above his head which is propped up by bottle crates. He’s wearing a white shirt and his legs are wrapped up in what looks like an American Confederate flag. By his side is a beer keg, on the other a flagon of cider and there’s a half-full Courvoisier bottle nearby too. I’m aged six, wearing a white smock dress that mum made for me. I’m looking down at him with a sort of seen-it-all-before expression, a slight grin, bemused but not really amused. I think it was taken at Tara, the house near Chertsey where we lived in the early seventies, and when I look at it now I can’t help but wonder what possessed my father to be photographed like that with his child. What was he thinking? What was going through that befuddled mind of his as he lay there, acting the part of a drunken fool, while I looked on? I suppose I was too young to know what ‘normal’ was but even at that age I sensed that this wasn’t normal. Was there any other father in the whole wide world who would do such a thing?

It wasn’t so much that he was a bad father, more that he hadn’t the foggiest idea how to be a father in the first place. No father was less suited to the role of fatherhood than mine. He simply didn’t know what to do. He had no idea how to communicate with children. Sometimes he’d look at me and grin but be lost for words. He just didn’t know what to say to me. I think he loved me in some curious way but he didn’t know how to show it. It was almost as if he was embarrassed to be affectionate towards me in the normal way that parents are with their children. After all, that wasn’t the way ‘Keith Moon of The Who, the Wildman of Rock’ was supposed to behave, was it?

Much later, after he’d died, I saw a photograph of him dressed as a ‘Lollipop Man’, ushering children across a road in Battersea. It was probably done for publicity but he was evidently involved in a campaign to have a zebra crossing located near a primary school there. He’s surrounded by children the same age as I was when I last saw him. That picture made me cry.

* * *

Aside from the many books about The Who, Keith Moon is the subject of several books devoted to him alone; most notably Dear Boy: The Life of Keith Moon by Tony Fletcher (Omnibus Press, 1998) and Moon The Loon by Peter ‘Dougal’ Butler (Star Books, 1981). At 596 pages, the former has sold over 200,000 copies worldwide and is widely acknowledged as among the greatest rock biographies ever written. The latter, written by Moon’s PA and driver, is a popular and extremely funny anecdotal memoir that, like Dear Boy, is still in print after several editions. There have been at least five other books on Keith Moon, making him the omnipresent rock drummer for music biographers, a legendary figure from rock’s golden age about whom there is an enduring fascination and a great deal of affection among fans.

MOON GIRL is the first book about Keith Moon to have been written by a member of the Moon family. It will be approximately 100,000 words in length, and will detail Mandy’s strange relationship with her famous father, her relationship with her mother Kim and stepfather Ian McLagan, her childhood and teenage years, and her life as an adult. As part of ‘The Who Family’ she has met several times with Pete Townshend, Roger Daltrey and the late John Entwistle, and she discusses her feelings about The Who and accepting music industry awards on behalf of her late father. Through McLagan, who went on to play keyboards for The Rolling Stones and Bob Dylan among many others, Mandy also came into close contact with other A-list rock stars, most notably the members of The Faces: Rod Stewart, Ron Wood, Ronnie Lane and Kenney Jones. When she, Kim and Mac visited the UK they often stayed at Ron Wood’s home, The Wick at Richmond, which is now owned by Townshend. Mick Jagger, then married to Jerry Hall, was a close neighbour.

* * *

I was vaguely aware that my father was famous, that he played the drums in a rock group that was very successful. He was away a lot, often for weeks on end, and mum didn’t seem to know when he’d return or even if he’d return. When he did return he slept for most of the day and only came alive at night, usually after I’d gone to bed. He certainly wasn’t a morning person!

He was very loud, raised his voice a lot, laughed a lot at his own jokes and played music at top volume. I don’t think I ever saw him relax. He didn’t know how to slow down. I don’t think I was ever alone with him. Mum wouldn’t have trusted him to look after me, not for a second. He and mum fought a lot. I think she was happier when he wasn’t there, when some sort of order could be restored to our life of chaos. The truth is she was frightened of him – and so was I.

* * *

Mandy Moon, who plays the drums herself, is the mother of two children of her own, now aged 16 and 19. Her grandmother, Keith Moon’s mother Kitty, died in June 2019 aged 98, and at the end of her life lived at Denham in Buckinghamshire with the family of her daughter Lesley, the younger of Keith’s two sisters. His elder sister Linda now lives in Australia.

In MOON GIRL Mandy Moon writes candidly about her family and her life in the world of rock’n’roll, the financial benefits of being the daughter of a rock superstar, about issues in her personal life, including how she overcame her own addiction to alcohol, and how – after keeping her thoughts to herself in the 40 years since the death of her famous father – she finally feels able to reveal the truth about her extraordinary life.

MOON GIRL is the unflinching autobiography of the daughter of one of the world’s most notorious rock stars.

* * *

When Pete Townshend and Roger Daltrey perform as The Who nowadays they have a screen at the rear of the stage on which photographs and footage of them as a young group are projected. When my dad appears on the screen, sometimes singing ‘Bell Boy’ from Quadrophenia, the audience always cheers wildly, just as it does when Pete mentions his name from the stage. “We never could replace him,” says Pete. I am proud of him but my pride is tempered by heartbreak because he was never the father I needed.

“Keith Moon was your father! Wow! THE Keith Moon?” That’s what people say when they are introduced to me and find out who I am. Then they ask what he was like, and I can’t tell them, I can’t explain as the song goes. Now, finally, with this book I can try to explain what it was like to have Keith Moon as a father.

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