Van and Michelle: A love story

We also found out that Michelle Rocca had changed her name to Michelle Morrison. And that they had two children.

How did we know all this? It was confirmed by the famously private singer in a statement. “For the avoidance of all doubt and in the interests of clarity,” he said, “I am very happily married to Michelle Morrison with whom I have two wonderful children.”

So the year ended with the oracle breaking his history of silence. The difficult and enigmatic east Belfast recluse who never speaks about his private life finally spoke up about it.

He must have been inwardly humming the words to a song from his 1991 album Hymns to Silence:

“I get up in the morning and I get my brief

I go out and stare at the world in complete disbelief

It’s not righteous indignation that makes me complain

It’s the fact that I always have to explain

Why, why must I always explain.”

Last Tuesday when someone texted me to say that Van had had a baby with an American woman called Gigi, I was almost taken in by the hoax. My initial reaction was sympathy for Michelle, with whom he had two small children, Aibhe (three), and Fionn Ivan (two). Still, nothing would entirely surprise one about Van Morrison. He is an odd fish (stories about Van’s odd fishness are legion). But to have a baby with this American associate so close after having a baby with Michelle beggared belief.

Even for him.

And so it proved. There was no brown-eyed boy. Van’s official website had been hacked and some wag had published an announcement to the effect that the 64-year-old Irish singer and Gigi Lee welcomed their son George Ivan Morrison III on Monday: “Little Van, born Dec 28, 2009 — the spitting image of his daddy. He is a dual citizen of Northern Ireland/United Kingdom and the United States,” the fabricated statement added.

I was on holiday in Egypt. I did what any half-decent journalist would do. I logged on to Perez Hilton’s site in Los Angeles. Some of the posts were hilarious. “All babies look like little old men, so is it really surprising that his spawn is the spitting image of him?” wrote one blogger. “They can time their naps for the same times,” wrote another.

(In a May 13 article about Morrison, the LA Weekly referred to Gigi as executive producer of the Astral Weeks tour. She is also credited on the Astral Weeks live show DVD as executive producer; all of which makes John Saunders of Fleishman-Hillard PR’s claim on the one o’clock RTE News on Thursday that the singer had never heard of Lee slightly puzzling.)

A friend of Van’s who was at the Hollywood Bowl concert for Astral Weeks last year told me that “Van was his usual self. He was the way he always was. There was nothing unusual about him”.

The main warning sign last week that something was perhaps amiss about the announcement posted on Van’s official website, however, was surely this: why would someone who is almost bizarrely private want something revealed in the first place?

“Why would Van have made something like this public?” a friend of the Rocca family told me when the news of the “baby” broke.

“It’s amazing. Who in their right mind would have done such a thing?”

Another friend of the Rocca family told me on Tuesday that “it was a blow to Michelle’s new-found happiness. It all seems so bizarre. I was led to believe they were happily married with two children”. The truth was, though, that they were.

But why did the notoriously litigious singer wait three days to say the baby story was a hideous hoax perpetrated by a hacker onto his website? Van, being Van, was never one to follow convention.

His marriage to flower child Janet Planet in 1970 was like something out of a heyday Bob Dylan song. There is a story — probably apocryphal, like a lot of stories connected to Van — that in the summer of 1971, she ordered her Celtic bard husband to pack their worldly belongings into the back of their car and prepare to leave.

Apparently, their babysitter had gone to a fortune-teller who had a vision that astronauts had seen a piece of California break off into the ocean. Janet’s fear deepened when she also dreamt that the Big One hit and their house in Marin County slid down a hill.

Van, Janet and their baby Shana Caledonia Morrison (born in 1970) drove to Albuquerque where they remained until, Janet told the LA Times in 1997, some astronauts circling the Earth at the time landed. While in New Mexico in fear of UFOs, Janet purchased a spider-web ring from a street seller, a ring that to this day she has never taken off.

I once had a conversation with Van, when we both had a few drinks taken, in 1995 in the Berkely Court hotel in Dublin about UFOs and his belief in them. Lest we forget, Van’s 1983 album Inarticulate Speech of the Heart offered “special thanks” to L Ron Hubbard, founder of the Church of Scientology.

Janet’s marriage to Van ended in 1973. In hindsight, Janet believed it all seemed like her life was somehow a fabled love lived. When she left their Marin County home, she recalled it as “a still autumn day”. The Earth goddess vanished like, in her words, “a castle made of clouds”.

A castle made of clouds would be a good phrase to describe the internet hoax on Tuesday. Still, when I read it first, I almost believed it. A later comment, not on his website, from a spokesperson for Van, said that the exact location and date of the birth was being kept secret. In fairness, Van had something of a history where the having of babies in secret was concerned.

In July 2006, I wrote on the front page of the Sunday Independent that Van and his partner Michelle Rocca had had a baby in January and had managed to keep the birth of the child — Aibhe —a secret for nearly seven months.

The then 45-year-old former Miss Ireland wore baggy clothes and frumpy dresses to hide her condition from the public. In 2006, she attended Charles J Haughey’s funeral on June 16 in Dublin. In July, she accompanied Van when he was the headline act at the Midlands Music Festival in Ballinlough Castle, Co Meath.

In September 2007, Michelle gave Van another child when Fionn Ivan was born in Mount Carmel Hospital in Dublin. Some argued that it was a testament to hermetic Van’s intense aversion to publicity that he could hide the birth of not one but two children.

I used to know Michelle very well in the early to mid-90s. I was introduced to her by her brother Patrick in Lillies one night and we hit it off straight away. She liked to go out and have fun. She had three kids (Danielle and Natasha by ex-Arsenal footballer John Devine, and Claudia by airline tycoon Cathal Ryan). She invited me over to meet them at the house she was living in Booterstown in Dublin. I called them the Rug Rats. Michelle Mary Teresa Rocca was a good mother. Her home life was non-stop grind of bringing the three kids to school, cleaning toilets, cooking, picking the kids up from school, putting the kids to bed, cooking.

She was bringing up her three children on her own without help. She was an independent woman. Michelle, like Kipling’s cat, was happy to walk by herself in life.

I was a regular visitor to the house. The wording on the framed poster hanging on her kitchen wall — “Don’t Let The B******s Grind You” — was very much the single mother with three kids who sued her ex, Cathal Ryan, and as such took on the might of the Ryan Empire.

Then in 1995 she moved to Clyde Lane in Ballsbridge, next door to Van’s place. She used to let me play all her boyfriend’s old blues and gospel CDs.

She also let me wear one of Van’s Prada frock coats to Lillies one night when he was away on tour. The Sunday Independent first revealed their relationship on June 27, 1993: they met at a dinner party at Leixlip Castle, the home of the Hon Desmond Guinness.

The story went that she thought Van was, in fact, Val Doonican. Val the Man doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?

The beauty queen and the mystical visionary with the baker’s belly, skin the colour of boiled cabbage and the gruff manner, got on like a whole street of houses on fire. The 17-year age gap never seemed to matter. She certainly calmed him down. Rod Stewart once recalled an experience with Van in the days before Van had met and become romantically involved with Michelle and was single: “He started chatting up Rachel [Hunter], not knowing she was my wife,” Rod said in an interview a few years ago. “When he found out who she was, he started on her sister ... Bloody nightmare.”

Van was intense and full-on — something of an acquired taste — but he was not without his charms. One night, Michelle invited myself and a new girlfriend out to dinner in Fitzers in Ballsbridge. The dinner went well until Van asked my partner what was her star sign. When she told him, the singer was not happy. “Gemini? That’s not good. That’s my ex-wife’s star sign! Jesus!!!” he harrumphed. Michelle thought it was hilarious. And it was.

Most nights or days out with Michelle and Van were like pages from an F Scott Fitzgerald novel. I recall being at a boozy lunch with Van, Michelle and Marianne Faithful in Cookes Cafe in the mid-Nineties where someone knocked a coffee all over Faithful and she stormed out. Then there was the party in Sandymount that was winding down at 4am — Van, Michelle and myself and my girlfriend had gone straight there after Lillies closed — when Van kindly interceded to stop me being assaulted by a guest.

I recall another night in the Shelbourne in 1995 Van introduced Michelle to Mick Jagger, who unwisely barely raised his head in acknowledgement. She soon put manners in him. “I’m Italian, Mick. I believe you have an affinity for a certain Italian girl,” Michelle reminded him, a waggish reference to Jagger’s latest fling with Italian supermodel Carla Bruni. The Rolling Stone had a puss on him for the rest of the evening.

On her night, at the top of her game, Michelle Rocca was the funniest — and the best fun — girl in the world. She once did press-ups in the front room of my parents’ house in Churchtown, in front of my mother, when I joked that she was getting fat.

There were food fights in La Stampa and George’s Bistro. There was always lots of drink. Another time after a gig in Galway, we sat up all night with the band drinking in the Great Southern Hotel. Though Van was abundantly wealthy, he and Michelle took the stinky train back to Dublin with me the next morning.

She had the measure of him. One night in 1994 in La Stampa, I joined Van and Michelle’s table after I had come from the Billy Joel concert in the RDS with Patrick Rocca. Van put his hand out for payment from me when the bill came. When I offered him the money, Michelle said with a laugh that she would cut his hand off if he took it. There was a running joke with Michelle that when Van opened his wallet, bats flew out.

She definitely got him to open up more and be more comfortable in his skin. “My father was a collector,” he told Michelle when she interviewed him for Vox magazine in 1994 (I transcribed the tape for her). Another night in the Conrad Hilton she had Van give me an impromptu singing lesson. “Anyone can sing!” he announced. Not so, I proved. A friend of mine, Ian Galvin — then a chief buyer at Brown Thomas — started styling Van Morrison’s clothes.

“My friend Marianne Faithful rang me to say to me ‘you have got to change his look. He looks like he wears clothes that he slept in’,” Ian told me yesterday.

“Van has kept the look I gave him ever since. The three-quarter length slim coat, the hat, the glasses, the white coat and the black jeans. He was dressed up, but he didn’t look too contrived.”

Ian also styled Michelle and Van in his designer duds on the cover of Van’s 1995 album Days Like This. (Still Van had in the early Seventies immortalised his love for Janet Planet on the album cover of Tupelo Honey. He also idealised Janet in the lyrics of such songs as Ballerina, Beside You, Crazy Love, You’re My Woman and The Way Young Lovers Do. Van was not averse to penning odes to the ladies in his life. During the late 1970s when Van was dating a Danish girl, Ulla Munch, who lived in the Vanlose district, he wrote The Vanlose Stairway for her.)

The London Independent described Van and Michelle on the cover of Days Like This as “almost a Hello! magazine moment” by Van’s standards. In the summer of 1996 there was almost Michelle Rocca’s Hello! Goodbye! moment.

The Daily Mirror newspaper broke a story that she had been two-timing Van with Angus Gold, who at the time was racing manager in Newmarket for Sheikh Hamdan Al Maktoum, one of the world’s richest men.

When the Angus Gold story broke in 1996, Michelle retreated behind the walls of Clyde Lane.

In July, 2000 Gayle Killilea wrote in this newspaper that “that fateful night four years ago when the tabloids stalked Gold and Rocca in the Berkeley Court was in fact a faithful night. In other words, Michelle Rocca and gorgeous racehorse manager Angus Gold did not seal the deal. And I have it from all the horses’ mouths”, Gayle said, adding later: “The only problem is, with Michelle and Angus, they didn’t take the path of lust. Lost maybe. But lust definitely not. They really were just friends.”

Following the 1996 Daily Mirror story, Van and Michelle’s engagement was broken off. However, the pair reunited some months later. Indeed, Van stood by Michelle during her High Court case against her former partner Cathal Ryan in early 1997. He attended the court with her on many days. Ian Galvin, who also spent a lot of time with Michelle during that time, says: “She was the It Girl of the time in Dublin. She had great spirit and great heart but unfortunately she paid a very high price for it. Looking back on it now she really didn’t have anyone managing her — like a media adviser — and hence she got herself into trouble with the Gold affair. There were the huge insecurities that she had.”

In an effort to cope, she went to the Rutland Centre, but there was to be no peace as a tabloid newspaper outed her. As a consequence, the raven-haired beauty appeared to pull the shutters down and and walk away from public life. Michelle vanished from the face of the earth. She withdrew into a private world with the reclusive Mr Morrison.

Like the rest of us, she was on the happiness hunt, and knew that she would not find it on Dublin’s often destructive social scene.

I never saw her, or heard from her again until I met her at little brother Bernard’s wedding in 1997 in Dublin. The following year, in August 1998, I bumped into her backstage at the Bee Gees concert in the RDS in Dublin. “It’s the return of the ghost,” she laughed, like the old Michelle I knew and loved. She told me she had just finished reading Carl Jung. She then talked at length about Jung, Freud and Deepak Chopra while dancing to Saturday Night Fever with me and her other brother Patrick.

It was obvious (though unsaid) that the most important things in her life were her children and Van.

Not much has changed since — apart from her name.