The punk godfather's last act of spite: The Sex Pistols creator Malcolm McLaren's son launches bitter legal battle over his 'monstrous' father's will

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Theirs was perhaps the most outrageous relationship in showbusiness, one that was doomed to fail miserably from the moment they met in a squalid South London squat in the Seventies.
Malcolm McLaren, who achieved worldwide fame as the seditious creator of the Sex Pistols, claimed to adore punk designer Vivienne ­Westwood — at least in the first few days of their relationship.
But he famously remarked that he ‘was totally incapable of being a parent’.

A father's final insult? Malcolm McClaren and his son Joe Corre did not get on, leading to a battle over his will

Now, the couple’s son Joe is revealing just how extraordinarily dysfunctional McLaren was as a father.
For this week it emerged he is taking legal action to contest his late father’s will.
McLaren died of mesothelioma — a rare form of cancer — in Switzerland in April. He was just 64.

 The will, written on his deathbed, leaves ­everything to his long-time girlfriend, softly ­spoken, 37-year-old Korean-American Young Kim, a Yale graduate. He did not leave his son a penny.
It is not as if Joe needs the money, estimated to be something over £1 million in assets, plus homes in Paris and New York.
After all, he has been an extraordinary success himself, founding the Agent Provocateur lingerie business, which he sold three years ago for £60 million.
However, Joe argues that his father was too ill to know what he was doing in his final days.
He told me this week he is ‘driven by a sense of duty’ to find out whether McLaren was compos mentis when he wrote the will.
Young Kim is distraught by the challenge. She told me in a tearful phone call from New York that she desperately wants to resolve the dispute before it goes to court.
So was McLaren mentally incapable of writing his will? Or was his relationship with Joe so dysfunctional that his son was the last person to whom the godfather of punk would have ­considered leaving his estate?
To get at the truth, we have to go back to that encounter between McLaren and Westwood in the ­Clapham squat.
A schoolteacher with a young son called Ben from her failed marriage to Derek Westwood, a factory apprentice, she was given to wandering about naked and making grand pronouncements about culture. McLaren was 19, an art student and a virgin — until she seduced him.

High life: Joe Corre and Kate Moss

In his later years, he liked to repeat — with a characteristic mixture of wonderment and ­malice — what happened next.
Within three weeks, Westwood was pregnant. So McLaren’s grandmother — who detested her — gave her money to have an abortion. ­Westwood made an appointment but, on the way to the clinic, had second thoughts.
‘Vivienne did not co-operate and I admired her for it,’ McLaren recalled. ‘She spent the money on a cashmere twinset instead.’
Did he ever stop to think how this story might affect Joe? Was it a deliberate barb to wound his son, with whom he had never established a functional relationship?
Indeed, their relationship seems to have been so bad that you have to ask whether it is likely McLaren would have left money to his son.
The pair were constantly falling out — contact seems to have been no more than intermittent and for a long time they did not speak at all.
‘My son and his family don’t like me,’ McLaren observed in 2008. He suggested this was because Joe knew he should have been aborted.
‘Unquestionably, it turned him into a raving psychotic. Unquestionably,’ he said.
To say relations were icy is an understatement. As Young Kim told me from New York this week: ‘They rarely saw each other. Joe wanted nothing to do with him when he was alive.’
Some say Joe even held McLaren responsible for the failure of his ­marriage to Serena Rees, co-founder of Agent Provocateur. McLaren ­introduced her to the man she ran off with: Paul Simonon, former bass ­guitarist with punk band The Clash.

People who knew McLaren think the snub in the will, however undeserved and nasty, was entirely in character — a final, bitterly sick joke from the master of sick jokes.

The legal challenge means that ­probate can’t be declared and McLaren’s assets are unable to be released, so Young Kim has no ­material means of ­support. Meanwhile, Joe’s relationship with his father is being scrutinised by lawyers.

Mother and son: Joe Corre and Vivienne Westwood

Even a cursory examination of his childhood proves what a mixed ­blessing it was to be the heir to two counter-cultural icons.
Either McLaren nor Westwood seems to have taken much of an interest in anything as dull as family life. McLaren didn’t see his baby son until three days after he was born — a nurse at the hospital greeted him by sarcastically asking if he was a long-distance lorry driver.
The boy was named Joe Corre at McLaren’s suggestion, after the grandmother, Rose Corre, who had wished him aborted.
‘Perhaps it started there: Joe grew up feeling strange, alienated by a name that had nothing to do with him. But I gave him the only name I believed in — my grandmother’s,’ said McLaren.
Despite having had a baby together, McLaren and Westwood never really revived their intimate relationship.
‘We didn’t really make love much after Joe was born: Vivienne was not a very sexual woman,’ said McLaren.
However, she had other lovers, which outraged McLaren. The two of them were at the forefront of what became the punk movement, with their infamous shop Sex in ­London’s Kings Road.
McLaren was carving out a career as a music impresario, first with the New York Dolls and then with the Sex Pistols.

Joe and his half-brother Ben were raised in Clapham, South-West London, partly by Vivienne’s ­parents. They were later sent to boarding school.

By the time punk was over, so were McLaren and Westwood. He went to the U.S., where he began an affair with the actress Lauren ­Hutton. It seems he barely gave his son a backward glance.

‘I was totally incapable of being a parent. Can you imagine a brat like me, with no understanding of responsibility, bringing up a child?’ he asked.

Support: Sir Bob Geldof and Joe Corre at the funeral of Malcolm McLaren

Joe came to hate him, according to McLaren. ‘My son talks to me through gritted teeth — I’m excommunicated,’ he declared. He claimed  he was not welcome at Joe’s
40th birthday.
Joe blamed McLaren for his ­mother’s financial troubles in the early Eighties. He believed his father had skipped out of Britain, leaving her liable for debts he had run up.
They were so poor that Joe would help his mother stitch clothes by candlelight in a back room. By the early Nineties, Westwood’s ­fortunes had been transformed: she was wealthy, feted and had ­reinvented herself as a hugely ­talented fashion designer.
At this point, Joe and his father were briefly speaking once again. Joe had saved £30,000 to set up a lingerie store and asked his father what he thought.
McLaren advised him to spend the money on a business plan and to pitch the concept to investors, lawyers and accountants.

Following this advice, Joe spent all his savings on trying to ‘pitch big’, but nobody wanted to invest. Again, he turned to his father for advice — and to ask if he could lend him some money.
McLaren’s answer was that he’d prefer not to. His son was wild with rage. ‘It drove me nuts!’ raged Joe.
Relations, already bad, were ­poisoned by this refusal.
‘I’d had it with him,’ said Joe, adding that he could not even stand the sound of his father’s voice.
Despite this setback, Joe went on to found Agent Provocateur and make his fortune.
Meanwhile, McLaren was living with a new girlfriend in Paris.
He said Young Kim was a virgin when they met and he felt the age difference was too big an issue.
‘I feared I might spoil her life,’ he said. ‘But I’ve come to respect her greatly for her mind, her body and, frankly, her tenacity.’
Kim says they were together for 12 years, but Joe insisted this week he thinks it was only five. She is not impressed by what she sees as his attempt to rewrite history.
‘I was with Malcolm for 12 years and we lived together for nine. We were together, and by that I mean we were always physically together.
‘We were glued to each other. ­Malcolm would say we were like Siamese twins, we could not be apart. We were so close.
‘I was not there the couple of times when he saw Joe. I had no place there, but still I don’t know why Joe would say it was only five years. It is hard to see his motivation.
‘It has been incredibly upsetting for me. Everything is so sad. I never expected Malcolm would die. I thought we would have another 20 years together at least. He was so wonderful. I still don’t know how to live without him.’
Despite these problems, Joe was invited by Young Kim to say his goodbyes in Switzerland. ‘I was very happy to make my peace with him,’ says Joe. So what of the idea, put about by Joe, that McLaren was unfit to make a will?
All Joe will say is: ‘Both myself and my uncle Stuart (McLaren’s brother) are interested to discover and understand the facts and truth about it, driven by a sense of duty as a brother and a son.’
What is clear is that if McLaren had not written a will, he would have died intestate and so under the law his assets would have gone to his son as next of kin.
Duncan Lamont, of lawyers Charles Russell, says that the odds in the legal battle over the contested will are stacked against Joe.
‘This is a rare situation,’ he says. ‘What you have to be able to prove if you want to challenge a will is that the person who made it was not of sound and proper mind — that they didn’t know when they made the will what they wanted to do with their money.
‘It is hard to challenge because it is difficult to demonstrate that. For someone to take legal advice and then to decide to ­proceed makes me think this ­situation may be more complicated than we appreciate.
‘Of course, it may be cruel that the family doesn’t get any money and it may be upsetting for them. You can understand why they would want to do it.
‘But in the law they will have to prove testamentary incapacity, which is not easy to do at all.
‘Of course, Malcolm McLaren was famously eccentric and that won’t help. He might even end up making legal case history. That would be quite a way to remember someone as anti-establishment as him.’