Vivian Nicholson, 79, Dies; A Rags-to-Riches Story Left in Tatters
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Version 0 of 1. She went to London to collect her prize wearing borrowed stockings and cardboard in the soles of her shoes. There, as flashbulbs exploded, she became an international celebrity — the factory worker who had come into a fortune. Vivian Nicholson was just 25 when, in 1961, she and her husband, Keith, won the Littlewoods Pools, a sports-betting enterprise centering on British football — soccer in American parlance. The mother of four young children, she worked in a licorice factory in Castleford, a West Yorkshire town; her husband was a miner. The rags-to-riches-to-rags story of Mrs. Nicholson, who died on April 11 at 79, made headlines round the world. The press trumpeted the lavish life that ensued, and its precipitous end, as a cautionary fable worthy of Aesop: Mr. Nicholson was killed a few years later at the wheel of the powder-blue Jaguar he had bought with the prize money; Mrs. Nicholson wound up nearly destitute. At the time of their win, the Nicholsons earned 9 pounds a week between them — not much more than $250 today. But after they correctly predicted the outcome of eight football matches, they found themselves in possession of more than £150,000 — the equivalent today of about $4.5 million. They had had to borrow the five shillings it cost to place their bet. “I remember the exact amount we won so clearly — it was £152,300, 18 shillings and eight pence,” Mrs. Nicholson told The Observer, the British newspaper, in 2003. “Back then, even the eight pence meant something.” Mrs. Nicholson, widely known as Viv, remained a picaresque fixture of the British tabloids ever after, combining the looks of a gangster’s moll with the larger-than-life temperament of Auntie Mame. As fate buffeted her to and fro, she incited in readers successive waves of envy, censoriousness, schadenfreude and, ultimately, awe-struck admiration for her indomitable mien. Over the years, as was avidly reported, she owned an elegant home, a fleet of automobiles and wardrobes bursting with furs, shoes and haute couture; divorced two husbands and outlived three more; battled alcoholism; attempted suicide; moved to Malta to escape the tabloids; was deported from Malta after punching a policeman in a fit of pique, which made the tabloids; was the subject of an autobiography (1977, with Stephen Smith), a BBC television film and a West End musical, all titled “Spend, Spend, Spend”; made a second bonanza from royalties and lost that, too; descended into bankruptcy and subsisted on a modest state pension; had a career as a timorous stripper; was featured on the cover of a Smiths single, “Heaven Knows I’m Miserable Now”; became a Jehovah’s Witness; was disciplined at her nursing home for rambunctious behavior; and had remarkably few regrets. Born and reared in penury, at work in the coal fields at 12 and a bride before she was out of her teens, Mrs. Nicholson would be forever identified with the three-word imperative that burst from her lips on Sept. 27, 1961, the day she appeared in London to collect her winnings. When a reporter asked her what she planned to do with the money, she cried joyously, “Spend, spend, spend!” And so, from that day forward, she spent, spent, spent. Vivian Asprey was born in Castleford on April 3, 1936, a daughter of the large family of an alcoholic miner and his wife. By the time she was 12, she was at work “picking coal” — gathering loose pieces from the ground to sell. At about 16 she married her first husband, Matthew Johnson, with whom she had a son. She divorced him to marry Mr. Nicholson, with whom she had two sons and a daughter. After winning the Littlewoods Pools, the Nicholsons bought a house in an upscale community; furs, jewels and clothes; a gold watch; expensive perfume; a pony; tickets for overseas travel; boarding-school educations for the children; and a good deal else. Most conspicuously, they bought cars. The fact that Mrs. Nicholson did not know how to drive was no impediment, and before long, her son Howard Nicholson said by telephone on Wednesday, she was roaring through Castleford, a down-at-the-heels mining town, in a vast pink Cadillac with the top down. Mrs. Nicholson took pains to wear an outfit that matched whatever car she was driving. (Sometimes she bought the outfit to match the car and sometimes she bought the car to match the outfit, her son said.) And whether those cars were pink, green or any other hue, her beehive hairdo was likewise dyed to match. In 1965, Keith Nicholson died at 27 in a highway crash. He left no will, and Mrs. Nicholson was soon saddled with estate taxes. She fought in court for years to receive a portion of his estate and was eventually awarded some £34,000. But that, too, vanished quickly, for she gave something, it seemed, to any friend with a hard-luck story, and since 1961 she had been awash in friends she scarcely knew she had. “You’d think that money would be the panacea to everything,” Howard Nicholson said. “You think, ‘At least I can break free from the poverty that we’re living in.’ But it wasn’t really happiness, because it didn’t stop my father from dying; it didn’t stop the taxman from coming in; it didn’t stop all the false friends from trying to take money off of her.” She had few real friends. Old neighbors shunned her because she had breached the class confines of her hometown. New neighbors shunned her on precisely the same grounds. Distraught, Mrs. Nicholson attempted suicide on more than one occasion and once drank so heavily that she lay unconscious in a hospital for two weeks. She stopped drinking long enough to survive that bout, but would struggle with alcoholism, her son said, to the end of her life. She married three more times — to Brian Wright, who also died in a car crash; to Graham Ellison, from whom she was divorced in a matter of weeks; and to Gary Shaw, a violent man who died of a drug overdose. “Why did I marry them?” Mrs. Nicholson later said in an interview. “Because I had nothing to do and they asked me.” She went to work in a Manchester strip club, divesting to the strains of “Big Spender,” but was fired after she refused to part company with her bra and panties. By the 1970s she was back in Castleford, bankrupt. She later spent a decade as a saleswoman in a perfume shop. In old age, Mrs. Nicholson resided in a Castleford nursing home, where, the British news media reported, the management took her to task for hanging her lacy lingerie in full view on the washing line and for shinnying down the drainpipe to visit local shops, where she bought wine and chocolates for her fellow residents. Besides her son Howard, who confirmed his mother’s death, in Wakefield, West Yorkshire, from complications of dementia, Mrs. Nicholson’s survivors include two other children from her second marriage, Tim and Susan Nicholson; a son, Steven Johnson, from her first marriage; a brother, Geoffrey; two sisters, Maureen and Jess; about a dozen grandchildren; and four great-grandchildren. It was not the spending she regretted, Mrs. Nicholson said; it was not the accumulation of consumer goods, but instead the loss of something — far less tangible — she had possessed long before. “Winning the pools wasn’t lucky,” she told The Evening Standard of London in 1999. “Before that, Keith and I used to have five cigarettes to last us all week. So he would have a drag and then give it to me and I would have a drag, and I’d not eat much at dinner because we couldn’t afford it.” She added: “Sharing cigarettes, just holding one another and loving one another. That was when I had everything.” |