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  By the end of his first year at Tappan, Osterberg was well known, and his natural exuberance seemed to expand. Certainly, his classmates remember him as funny, analytical, always ready to challenge prevailing wisdoms. Several of the teachers were undoubtedly charmed; his impressive vocabulary and use of idiom endeared him to his English teacher, Mrs Powrie, and there were suspicions he was her teacher ’s pet. Several of his contemporaries recall him using phrases they’d never heard before - ‘men of the cloth’ or ‘hoi polloi’ - and today note the fact that he used them correctly, too. That ability to pluck words out of the air was memorable and helped him ultimately make the school debate team, the home of most of Ann Arbor’s brightest kids, although his talent for swimming and golf prevented him being regarded as a geek. Most tellingly of all, says John Mann, ‘His sarcasm was great. I just remember looking at him and having to think, what did he say? Then you realised he was being sarcastic. Most seventh and eighth graders weren’t ready - he was way over our heads at the time.’

  For all Jim Osterberg’s presence and charm, the jibes of kids like George Livingston and Rick Miller did have an effect; while confident in his own abilities, Jim seemed excessively ashamed of his background. Most of his acquaintances were more struck by how often he mentioned the trailer park than by the living conditions themselves; there was another large trailer park on Packard Street with its share of middle-class residents, and James Osterberg Senior’s status as a high-school teacher was an extremely respectable one in a town that set such store by education.

  Nonetheless, Jim Junior seemed sufficiently ashamed by his background to invent - as, perhaps, do many schoolkids - a more impressive one. Tappan pupil Don Collier remembers one occasion when Osterberg was talking about ‘his neighbourhood, the area of the very rich: Ann Arbor Hills’. Collier was impressed until the afternoon, a few years later, he offered to give Jim a lift home from high school. Only as Collier began to turn left into Ann Arbor Hills did Osterberg ask him to continue up to Carpenter Road and then to Coachville trailer park. Jim seemed matter of fact about the dramatic change in his living conditions. Perhaps he’d forgotten his impulsive fib about where he lived, three or four years before.

  By 1961, when Jim reached ninth grade, most kids in his junior high school class would have considered the notion that Jim was regarded as an outsider or a dork as faintly ridiculous. Instead, he was widely regarded as an impressive figure who was undeniably part of the classy set. In a preppy environment, Jim was more preppy than most, always nicely turned out in loafers, slacks, button-down shirt and nice sweater. It was a look to which many at Tappan aspired, but Osterberg managed it to perfection, and he convinced many that he was the product of inherited poise and fine breeding. Rather than being mocked for his trailer park origins, in these years he was more likely to irritate his peers with his sheer slickness and confidence: ‘Jim Osterberg?’ says fellow pupil Dana Whipple. ‘He had the highest quality line in BS of anyone I ever knew. He learned early on that you only had to keep one step in front of the other idiots in order to impress them.’

  Osterberg certainly looked around at his classmates and envied their middle-class charm, but it didn’t seem to occur to him that behind that façade they too had their own problems. For, as conversations with many of the kids who went through the school reveal, some of those confident exteriors had been erected to hide stories of shortages of cash, drinking problems and the anxious awareness that hard-won status could be easily lost.

  The 14-year-old Jim Osterberg possessed, in fact, a sense of what would impress his colleagues that was almost supernatural. His abilities were demonstrated by his campaign to become class vice president in ninth grade. Jim’s political platform was brave, for in a staunchly Republican environment he chose to champion Jack Kennedy and support unionisation - whatever his hang-ups about his father, he shared his liberal political convictions. Denny Olmsted, who was also a popular figure in the class, decided to run for class president, but was struck by Osterberg’s political sophistication: ‘He would’ve run for president, but he was a realist. He told me no one would win against Bill Wood, a popular guy who was running for president, but that he could make vice president. And he was absolutely right.’

  Olmsted, with Brad Jones running his campaign, put up a strong fight. But Osterberg knew exactly what would play with the Tappan audience: ‘I gave a speech,’ says Olmsted, ‘and there was this bit at the end where I walked away from the podium, and did this gesture with my eyebrows - it was something funny taken from a commercial. And it just infuriated Jim. He took me aside and said, “You had Bill beat, you had a better speech, a better presentation, then you did that stupid eyebrow thing and that’s gonna lose you the election!”’ Osterberg’s instincts were spot on; he waltzed into the vice president’s spot, a real feat considering his platform was based on restraining ‘evil big business’, while Olmsted lost to Wood. By now Jim had convinced many classmates that he was a potential future President of the United States.

  It was around ninth grade that Jim’s interest in music surfaced. Like many of his contemporaries, he became obsessed with Sandy Nelson and the Ventures, and in 1962 he formed the Megaton Two, a musical duo in which he played drums alongside a friend from the choir, Jim McLaughlin. McLaughlin, a sweet, unassuming boy, was a pretty decent guitarist, and for a time would be Osterberg’s closest friend, replacing Kenny Miller, who left for a private school. As we shall see, in Osterberg’s private life music was starting to become a dominating passion, but at Tappan it seemed strictly a secondary interest. Today it is his talent for politics, rather than his musical ambitions, that his contemporaries remember - dozens of them still recall his support for John Kennedy, and his prediction that he would be in the White House before the age of forty-five (‘He would be a huge improvement on what we have today,’ laughs fellow pupil Dan Kett).

  In 1962, during his final year at Tappan Junior High, Jim Osterberg was voted the boy ‘Most likely to succeed’ by his classmates. He signed dozens of his friends’ yearbooks, often with a joke, but the inscription on Ted Fosdick’s yearbook was serious. It was signed, ‘From the 43rd president of the United States: Jim Osterberg.’

  By the time Jim and his classmates reached tenth grade and moved down the road to Ann Arbor High, he was a well-known character at the huge new school, which was situated in impressive grounds directly opposite Michigan Stadium. The baby boom meant Ann Arbor High (more recently renamed Ann Arbor Pioneer) was packed to overflowing, with over 800 pupils in junior year, but even in this huge crowd Jim was widely recognised. A select few knew by now that an interest in music accompanied his obsession with politics. Rock ’n’ roll would eventually become the new vehicle for Jim’s ambitions, but any pupils who bumped into him in the sleek, clean corridors of Ann Arbor High - another elegant, moderne building, so high-tech that it even boasted its own planetarium - would still have taken him for a pillar of the establishment. ‘Straight’, was how a younger Ann Arbor High pupil, Ron Asheton, described him.

  In his junior year, Osterberg secured a coveted place as an entrant to the American Legion’s Boys’ State program. An intensive summer course based at Michigan State University in Lansing, it drew five or six pupils from each of Michigan’s most competitive high schools, all of them ‘selected for outstanding qualities of leadership, character, scholarship, loyalty and service to their schools and community’. Many of the schools had intensively trained their entrants for the event, which was modelled on the state’s political structure; each boy was assigned a dormitory, which took the role of a city, all of whose inhabitants would run for public office. Mike Wall was one of Jim’s companions from Ann Arbor High, and ran for lieutenant governor; Wall made it through two or three rounds while Jim’s campaign just kept on rolling. ‘He looked at this thing,’ says Wall, ‘and said to me, Hey, I’ve got this figured out. I’m gonna run for governor of the state of Michigan!’

  Up against boys who’d arrived with a party organi
sation and carefully constructed manifestos, Osterberg vanquished his opponents with almost embarrassing ease. He boasted formidable skills as a public speaker, but his progress through the system called for much more complex talents: ‘He had to be cunning, and really sophisticated,’ says Wall. ‘In any political convention you’ve got different coalitions, guys who are gonna throw their votes behind you. He was very shrewd, very cunning, and had the skills to capitalise on the moment.’

  It was at a Boys’ State conference in Little Rock just one year earlier, 1963, that a young boy from Arkansas named Bill Clinton had taken his first step to political fame, becoming the state’s delegate to the Boys’ Nation conference in Washington DC. Osterberg seemed to be destined for a similar distinction and made it through every round, finally winning his party nomination to compete for the top slot. Says Wall, ‘It was an incredible feat. He manoeuvred all the way through. He didn’t win governor in the end, that went to the other party, but it was an amazing achievement. But was that Jim? Hell, no. It was basically, Fuck you guys, I’m having fun. ’Cause I’m not a mainstreamer and you’re gonna vote for me anyway.’

  Perhaps it was the sense that he’d secured admission to the upper tier of high school kids that made it easier to turn his back on them, for in his last couple of years at school the boy ‘most likely to succeed’ no longer seemed so painfully reliant on the approval of his peers, and the snobbery of his junior high years seemed to disappear. Ricky Hodges was one of Ann Arbor High’s few black students. On his first day at the new school he was staggered by the wealth on display: ‘At that time the high school had two parking lots - one for the students, and one for the teachers. And if you were to drive into the student parking lot you’d think it was the teachers’ parking lot because the students had all the better cars!’ Hodges assumed that Osterberg - or ‘Ox’, as he called him - was one of the wealthy, ‘ritzy’ kids, but was surprised to find that, in a school where black and white communities co-existed without any interaction, Jim would often come over and chat, ‘and that was unusual. No doubt about it.’

  For the first time, there were signs of physical fearlessness, of standing up for people. In Jim’s junior year, there was an end-of-term talent contest in the spacious, wood-lined auditorium. One girl was singing a cappella when an older student started to heckle: ‘Something about it being a stupid, mushy song,’ says Ron Ideson, who was sitting next to Osterberg. ‘Jim swung round and hit the heckler as hard as he could with his fist, three or four times, angrily saying “Shut up!” Jim cared nothing for his own safety, he was standing up for the performer on stage, and I doubt he knew her personally.’

  The ex-Tappan kids noticed a change in Jim’s demeanour, the fact he was not quite as consciously trying to join the establishment. He ran once more for student office in 1965, this time shooting for the position of president. His campaign literature listed all of his achievements: participation in the swimming, track and golf teams, membership of the AC math, English and history programmes, his role in the Ann Arbor High debate team and his participation in a recent State Model United Nations assembly. For this election, however, he boasted a new distinction: the fact he played drums in a ‘professional rock ’n’ roll band’, namely the Iguanas, an expanded version of the Megaton Two. Whether it was the fact he was aiming for higher office, or that he was regarded as slightly more left-field than was the case at Tappan, this year his political talents proved inadequate to the task, and he lost the election to David Rea, a tall, handsome, football-playing, valedictorian BMOC - Big Man On Campus.

  In a time of conflicting influences, the academic pressure from his parents, the lure of politics and the excitement of The Beatles, whose arrival in 1963 attracted his attention, Jim’s desire to achieve was obvious but still unfocused. Jannie Densmore was Jim’s girlfriend at the time, and she recalls ‘vague memories of his home life not being that great. And he was an overachiever, I remember his devotion to his music and also political things, being a leader. I always thought he would do something larger than just grow up, marry, live and die in Ann Arbor.’

  In the months that she went out with Jim, before she left to join her mom’s new husband in New Orleans, Jannie was never invited back to Jim’s trailer. The same applied to his other two or three girlfriends from junior high and high school. For some reason, Jim had been nervous about asking Jannie out in the first place, enlisting Clarence ‘Rusty’ Eldridge as a co-conspirator and raiding the Eldridge family’s drinks cabinet before their first date: ‘We got an empty Miracle Whip jar, poured a little bit from the top of each bottle into the jar, filled it up with orange juice, went over to Jannie’s house and ended up getting plastered,’ remembers Rusty.

  One evening, after telling his parents he was going down to the Colonial Lanes bowling alley with his friends, Jim headed instead for a romantic tête-à-tête at Jannie’s house. He raided the drinks cabinet, only to be caught as her mother returned early. The half-loaded Osterberg and girlfriend fled for the bowling alley, where they ren dezvoused with their alibi, Jim McLaughlin: ‘He was totally drunk, and he loved it. He was smiling, giggling, off in his own little world. She wouldn’t even look at him or me - she was so mad she couldn’t even sit still!’

  With both Jannie and Jim McLaughlin, Jim Osterberg seemed to maintain a certain degree of separation, of control; both were aware of his incredible ability to be different things to different people. It was possibly instinctive and, engagingly, sometimes had no other purpose than to entertain. For in an environment where ‘jocks’ would mock weedy kids in the shower, or a ‘goon squad’ would victimise kids with long hair (sometimes, according to Ann Arbor High pupil Scott Morgan, administering forced haircuts on the spot), Jim Osterberg was increasingly seen around the corridors and classrooms in the guise of ‘Hyacinth’, an alter ego developed from a poem he’d written, in which he had imagined himself as a flower. ‘It would just crack you up,’ laughs classmate Jimmy Wade. ‘He would walk out, have his arms outstretched, and just look at you like he was a flower, bend a little, shake his arms as if there was a slight breeze, do it in a manner that you had to laugh!’ Lynn Klavitter concurs. ‘It was pretty crazy! But that’s the way he was!’ By 1965, the 18-year-old Jim’s hair was just a little bit longer and flopped over his forehead. It wasn’t long enough to identify him as a greaser or rocker, but just enough to mark him out as not purely an aspiring schoolboy politician any more.

  Fortunately, Hyacinth’s eccentricity was complemented by Jim Osterberg’s position within the school hierarchy, and his role on the executive committee organising the graduation talent show meant that his alter ego was engaged as MC for the event on 10 March 1965. Ricky Hodges (whom Jim describes as ‘a very funny black guy, not unlike a local Chris Rock’) was co-presenter, but he claims his role was simply that of straight man. After a couple of rehearsals at Ricky’s house and at ‘Ox’s’ trailer, Hyacinth and Hodges opened the show. Ricky produced a watering can, and sprinkled imaginary water over his partner, who slowly unfurled and then blossomed into life. Hodges and Hyacinth proceeded to transfix the 2,000 pupils who filled the auditorium, trading jokes and improvising lines; Hodges’s humour was quick-witted, while Hyacinth was simply surreal, prancing around, giggling, skipping across the stage. Today, of course, it sounds quite camp, and Jim Osterberg is slightly defensive of his pioneering alter ego (‘I didn’t even know what a gay person was!’), but it was a hilarious, brave performance that had the high-school audience doubled over with laughter.

  One younger boy, soon to become one of Ann Arbor’s hottest singers, was mesmerised by the performance. He enjoyed the couple of numbers that Jim played with his band the Iguanas, who were also on the bill, but he was most impressed by Hyacinth’s prancing, offbeat antics: ‘Nobody expected anything like this,’ says Scott Morgan. ‘Hyacinth was so entertaining, so charismatic. It was like a preview of what he was to become.’

  Three years later, Morgan would see Jim Osterberg’s public unveiling of
Iggy Stooge at Detroit’s Grande Ballroom. He would remember Hyacinth, and realise he’d seen this all before.

  Four decades on from that talent show, the class of ’65 weave their way tentatively through the banked seats filling Ann Arbor High’s huge auditorium. The area is in semi-darkness, thanks to holiday restoration work on the electrical system, but it’s still possible to make out an impressive, beautifully designed performance space, which puts to shame many provincial theatres or arts venues. The night before, Jim Osterberg’s reunited class members had met up at Colonial Lanes bowling alley for their forty-year reunion; tonight there will be a formal reception. Very occasionally you can see flashes of old high-school rivalries, the odd mention of ‘snooty Tappan kids’, but it’s an overwhelmingly warm, textbook friendly event, rich with tales of people happily wed to their high-school sweethearts, or who’ve indulged themselves with early retirement, or who’ve gone on to successful careers in academia, engineering or the law.

  Most of Jim’s classmates smile at the mention of his name, and recall his political views or his goofy humour; perhaps two or three recall him as a misguided, eccentric creature whose music could never hold a candle to their favourite Detroit rocker, Bob Seger. Many of the women spontaneously volunteer recollections of his engaging wit and entrancing blue eyes, and maintain that his accounts of being an outcast, or a dork, are quite simply ‘bogus’, as one classmate, Deborah Ward, puts it: ‘Let’s face it, he wasn’t Eminem.’

  Mim Streiff is an elegant, ebullient woman who in her high-school senior year dated Sam Swisher, one of the tallest, wealthiest and classiest boys in Jim’s year. She shares her schoolmates’ warm memories of Jim, a ‘super-smart’ boy, ‘a natural, in the top echelon’, who claimed he would one day be President of the United States. But as we walk along the dark, brick-lined hallways, with their impeccable terrazzo floors and art deco signage, Mim smiles, before she dissects Jim’s achievements forensically - almost brutally: ‘I think Jim tried everything. He was not quite the best at golf; he wasn’t quite an athlete. He wasn’t quite the best at swimming. He was good, but he wasn’t the top debater. He wasn’t the coolest guy, and he didn’t date the coolest girls. But he still wanted to be the coolest. He kept trying . . . but he never quite made it to the top.’