WHEN CLEOPATRA SYLVESTRE caught Mick’s eye at the Marquee Club, she was seventeen and still attending Camden School for Girls. The paradox of these clubs dedicated to black music was that very few actual black people frequented them—and those who did tended to be predominantly male. More often than not, Cleo would find herself the only young black woman in the Marquee’s audience. Anyway, she was an eye-catcher: tall and lovely in an American rather than British or Caribbean way, and always wearing something outrageous like a pink leather miniskirt she had made for herself, or a bright orange wig.
Though she lived in a council flat in Euston, Cleo’s background was richly cosmopolitan. Her mother, Laureen Goodare, a well-known West End cabaret dancer during the Second World War, had had a longtime affair with the composer Constant Lambert. Her godfathers were Lambert and the MP, journalist, and notorious homosexual Tom Driberg. Her close friend and frequent companion around the blues clubs was Judith Bronowski, daughter of the mathematician, biologist, and television pundit Dr. Jacob Bronowski.
Cleo had first seen Mick when he was still with Blues Incorporated; he would smile and say hello, but it wasn’t until after the Rollin’ Stones started that he came over and spoke to her. Still experimenting with their sound and look, the band had thought of using black female backup singers like Ray Charles’s Raelettes and Ike and Tina Turner’s Ikettes. Mick asked Cleo if she could find two black friends and audition as a backing trio, to be known as the Honeybees.
The audition, at the Wetherby Arms pub in Chelsea, was a disaster. Cleo could find only one other candidate for the trio, a clubbing companion named Jean who proved to be tone-deaf. Though Cleo herself had a good voice, the idea of a nine-strong, mixed-race-and-gender Rollin’ Stones progressed no further. But from then on she became a special friend to the band and, increasingly, a very special one to Mick.
She and Jean were their most faithful followers—groupies would be too crude—trailing them from places they now easily packed, like the Ealing Club, to those where they still struggled against anti–rock ’n’ roll prejudice, like Ken Colyer’s Studio 51 club on Great Newport Street. “Sometimes when they played to only about nine people, Brian would literally be in tears,” Cleo recalls. “But Mick was always the optimistic one, who said they had to keep going and they’d win everyone over in the end.”
She and Mick began dating, with all the conventionality—and chasteness—that word used to imply, during the brief intervals between his college hours, her school ones, and the Stones’ nightlife. “We’d go to the cinema,” Cleo remembers. “Once, Mick got tickets for the theater, but for some reason we never made it there. He rang me up one day and asked me to join Keith and him in a boat on the lake in Regent’s Park. A few times, I met him at LSE, where he used to work in the library.” Unluckily, she already had a boyfriend, who could not but know what was going on since he shared a flat with Mick’s sometime stage colleague, Long John Baldry. Their breakup was an early example of the threat Mick would later pose to so many men’s masculinity. When Cleo went to her ex’s flat to collect some records she’d left there, he was pressing clothes on an ironing board. He thrust the hot iron into her face so it burned her forehead, and hissed, “When you next see Mick, give him that for me.”
Cleo was formidably bright as well as beautiful, and remembers “quite heavy” discussions with Mick about politics and current affairs. He even suggested that when she left school, as she was soon to do, she should try to get into LSE so that they could see more of each other. She remembers his sense of humor and love of mimicking people, like the West Indian staff on the Underground shouting “Mind the doors!” “Bill Wyman had just joined the band, and Mick used to laugh about him coming from Penge.” The later stories of his stinginess are baffling to Cleo. “He was always so generous to me. Once, he bought me a huge box of chocolates that he’d spent all his money on, even his bus fare, so he had to walk all the way home to Chelsea.”
He was also welcomed into the Euston council flat where Cleo lived with her mother, Laureen, the Blitz-era cabaret dancer, and their fluffy black-and-white cat. “My mum thought he was great, even though the neighbors used to mutter about his long hair. I’d come home to find the two of them nattering away together. Mick used to practice his stage moves in front of our mirror.” Cleo, on the other hand, paid only fleeting visits to 102 Edith Grove—and never stayed overnight. Her main memory of his domicile is “trying to scrape the laboratory cultures out of the milk bottles.”
Cleo’s home became a refuge for the whole band, with Brian making himself at home in his usual way and competing with Mick for the fascinating Laureen’s attention. “Brian used to love having our cat on his knees and stroking it,” Cleo recalls. “When he left, his velvet suit used to be covered in white hairs, so my mum would run the Hoover over him as he stood there. One morning after an all-nighter, I took Mick and Brian back to our place for breakfast and my friend took Keith to hers. But my friend’s dad was a Nigerian and a bit militant. He said, ‘Get outa my house, white man,’ took a spear down from the wall, and chased Keith with it.”
Chronically hard up as they were, the Rollin’ Stones never turned down any job, however low-paying and hard to reach through the snow and slush. One night their Marquee audience included a Hornsey School of Art student named Gillian Wilson (in later life to become curator of the Getty Museum in California). “At the interval,” she recalls, “I went up to this character with outsize lips and asked if they’d play at our Christmas dance. ‘’Ow much?’ he said. I offered fifteen bob [seventy-five pence] each and Mick—though I didn’t know his name then—said ‘okay.’ ”
The Stones’ performance at Hornsey School of Art—which Gillian Wilson remembers lasting “something like four hours”—featured yet another drummer. Tony Chapman had gone and Charlie Watts, the dapper jazz buff with the Buster Keaton face, had yielded to Brian and Mick’s pleas and joined what he still regarded as just an “interval band” (leaving a vacancy in Blues Incorporated that was filled by a carroty-haired wild man named Ginger Baker). Despite his large wardrobe and impressive day job with a West End advertising agency, Charlie still lived at home with his parents in a “prefab” (utility prefabricated bungalow) rented from the local council in Wembley, Middlesex. With Bill Wyman on bass, this made the rhythm section solidly working class, in contrast with the middle-class, upwardly mobile tendency of the two main front men. At the time such things seemed of small importance compared to scoring an extra amp and a drum kit.
From that grim British winter, too, emerged another of the exotic non- or half Britishers to whom the Stones—Mick especially—would owe so much. In January 1963, the suppliers of blues music to unwary outer London suburbs were joined by Giorgio Gomelsky, a black-bearded twenty-nine-year-old of mixed Russian and Monegasque parentage, brought up in Syria, Italy, and Egypt and educated in Switzerland. By vocation a filmmaker, blues-addicted Gomelsky had managed various Soho music clubs as a sideline but, like Alexis Korner before him, had wearied of the jazz lobby’s hostility and decided to seek a new public farther up the Thames. With Ealing already taken, Gomelsky targeted Richmond, where a pub called the Station Hotel had a large, mirror-lined back room for dinners and Masonic functions. This he rented for a Sunday-night blues club named (after a Bo Diddley song) the Crawdaddy.
Gomelsky never intended to give a home to the Rollin’ Stones, whom he had seen die the death in front of about eighteen people when he ran the Piccadilly Jazz Club back in central London. The Crawdaddy’s original resident attraction were, to his mind, the far more competent and reliable Dave Hunt Rhythm & Blues Band (featuring Ray Davies, later of the Kinks). But one Sunday, Hunt’s musicians could not make it through the snow and Gomelsky, yielding to Brian Jones’s entreaties, gave the Stones a shot instead. Their fee was one pound each, plus a share of the gate. So few people turned up that Gomelsky had to go into the adjacent pub and recruit extra heads by offering free admission.
In the event, they
astounded Gomelsky, who was expecting the same “abominable” performance he had witnessed at the Piccadilly. Their saturnine new drummer and chilly-looking new bass player seemed to have had a transforming effect; while still evangelizing for Jimmy Reed and Muddy Waters, their style was no longer reverential but brash, aggressive, even provocative. Indeed, their two principal members now offered contrasting studies in how simultaneously to delight and goad an audience—Brian, barely moving but staring fixedly from under his fringe as if ogling every female and challenging every male in the room; Mick, mincing and head tossing in his off-the-shoulder matelot-striped sweater and new white Anello & Davide boots.
Gomelsky did not make them give back the spot to the Dave Hunt band. And from then on, Richmond on Sunday nights ceased to be a silent zone of shuttered shops and winking traffic lights. Early-sixties teenagers were desperately short of Sabbath amusements; consequently, the hundreds that descended on the Station Hotel were not just blues enthusiasts but of every musical and stylistic allegiance: rockers in black leather and motorcycle boots; Mods in striped Italian jackets and rakish trilby hats; jazzers in chunky knits; beatniks in polo necks; rich kids from opulent riverside villas and mansion blocks; poor kids from backstreets and council estates; and always girls, girls, and more girls, with hairstyles across the board, from bob to beehive. As they streamed through the nondescript pub into its red-spotlit rear annex, they shed factionalism with their winter coats and simply became Stones fans.
The club closed at ten-thirty, the same time as the pub, but by then the glasses in the nearby bars would literally be shaking. From the start, Gomelsky encouraged his members to forget the usual restraint of blues worship and to express themselves as uninhibitedly as Mick did onstage. A special Crawdaddy dance evolved, based on the Twist and Hully Gully, where partners were not needed (in fact were superfluous) and males rather than females competed for attention, wagging their heads and hips Jaggerishly or leaping up and down on the spot in a punk-rock Pogo fourteen years too early. The finale, in which everyone joined, was two Bo Diddley songs, “Do the Crawdaddy” and “Pretty Thing,” spun out to twenty minutes or more and floor-stompingly loud enough to wake the Tudor ghosts at Hampton Court Palace across the river. Yet, for now at least, excitement never turned into violence or destruction. The Stones in this glass house left it completely unscathed, the multimirrored walls suffering not even a crack.
Returning to his first love, Gomelsky began shooting a 35mm film of the Stones onstage at the Crawdaddy and, partly as a source of extra footage, arranged for them to cut further demos at a recording studio in Morden. During this era, according to rock folklore, a demo tape was sent to Saturday Club, BBC radio’s main pop music program, which responded that the band was acceptable but not the singer, as he sounded “too colored.” However, the show’s host, Brian Matthew—still broadcasting in the twenty-first century—denies ever having been party to such a judgment; in any case, the whole point about Mick’s voice was that it didn’t sound “colored.”
Their only other contact with the recording industry was a friend of Ian Stewart’s named Glyn Johns, who worked for a small independent studio called IBC on Portland Place, owned by the BBC orchestra leader Eric Robinson. Johns was allowed to record any musicians he thought promising, and at his invitation the Stones taped five numbers from their stage act at IBC. In return, he received a six-month option to try to sell the demo tape to a major label.
Giorgio Gomelsky became the band’s de facto manager yet, with extraordinary selflessness, never tried to put them under contract or even keep them all to himself. Continuing the fishy theme (crawdaddy is Deep Southern slang for “crawfish” or “langoustine”), they also began playing regularly on Eel Pie Island, situated on a broad stretch of the Thames at Twickenham. The island’s main feature was a dilapidated grand hotel with a ballroom whose sprung wooden floor had been famous in the Charleston and Black Bottom era. Here, a local antiques dealer now put on weekend blues marathons, featuring the Stones in rotation with other superstars of the future, then unrecognizable as such. They included a Kingston Art College reject named Eric Clapton—at this stage so nervous that he could only play guitar sitting down—and a raspy-voiced trainee grave digger from north London named Rod Stewart.
Gomelsky, besides, had other fish to fry. One of early 1963’s few talking points outside of the weather was that eccentrically barbered Liverpool band the Beatles, who had followed their mediocre debut single with a smash hit, “Please Please Me,” and were whipping up teenage hysteria unknown since the early days of Elvis Presley. Gomelsky had first seen them playing seedy clubs in Hamburg a couple of years previously, and even then had thought them something way out of the ordinary. When “Please Please Me” became a hit, he approached their manager, Brian Epstein, with the idea of making a documentary film about them.
Though the film proposal fell through, Gomelsky grew friendly enough with the Beatles to get them out to the Crawdaddy one Sunday night when the Rollin’ Stones were playing. Despite the enormous difference in their status, the Liverpudlians and the southern boys immediately hit it off—and, surprisingly, discovered musical roots in common. The Beatles had played American R&B cover versions for years before John Lennon and Paul McCartney began writing original songs; they had also been just as edgy and aggressive as the Stones onstage before Epstein put them into matching shiny suits and made them bow and smile. Lennon, never comfortable about paying this price for success, appeared positively envious of the freedom Mick, Brian, and Keith enjoyed as nobodies.
Later, the Beatles visited 102 Edith Grove, pronouncing it almost palatial compared to their own former living conditions behind the screen of a porno cinema in Hamburg’s red-light district. The rock ’n’ roll–obsessed Lennon turned out to know almost nothing about the Stones’ blues heroes, and had never heard a Jimmy Reed record until Mick played him Reed’s “I’ll Change My Style.” When, a few days later, the Beatles appeared in a BBC-sponsored “Pop Prom” at the Royal Albert Hall, they invited Mick, Keith, and Brian to come along and visit them backstage. To avoid having to pay for tickets, the three borrowed guitars from the Beatles’ equipment and passed themselves off as roadies. For the only time in his life, Mick found himself in a crowd of screaming fans who were completely unaware of his presence.
MOST YOUNG MEN of this era, whatever their calling, expected to be engaged by their late teens and married by the age of twenty-one. And in the beautiful, bright, and fascinatingly connected Cleo Sylvestre, nineteen-year-old Mick thought he had already found the woman for him. There would, of course, be huge problems in taking their presently casual (and still platonic) relationship to a more permanent level. Interracial matches were still exceedingly rare in Britain, particularly among the middle class, and heavy opposition could be expected from both his family and Cleo’s. However, he was prepared to face down any amount of disapproval and prejudice. As a first step, he wanted Cleo to come to Dartford and meet his family, certain that even his mother would be instantly captivated by her.
But Cleo did not feel nearly ready for such a commitment. She had only just left school and was about to begin studying at a teacher-training college near Richmond. She also had an inbuilt nervousness about marriage—and men—having witnessed stormy and at times violent rows between her own parents before their separation. “I told Mick it had nothing to do with how I felt about him,” she recalls. “It was just that the time wasn’t right. I wanted us still to be friends, but he said he couldn’t bear for it to be just on that level.”
The heartbreak, though real enough, was not to be of long duration. One night in early 1963, the Rollin’ Stones were playing yet another Thames-side blues club, the Ricky-Tick, hard by the battlements of the royal castle at Windsor. When Mick launched into Bo Diddley’s “Pretty Thing” (“let me buy you a wedding ring / let me hear the choir sing . . .”), his bandmates knew exactly whom it was aimed at.
Her name was Christine—aka Chrissie—Shrimpton;
she was seventeen years old, but very different from the usual schoolgirl blues fan. Her older sister, the fashion model Jean Shrimpton, was growing increasingly famous through appearances in once-stuffy Vogue magazine, photographed by the young East Ender David Bailey. While Jean’s looks were coolly patrician—more fifties, in fact, than sixties—Chrissie was a quintessential young woman of now with her Alice-banded hair, ethereally pale face, and thick black bush-baby eyes. The impassive pout essential to this look was enhanced by unusually wide and full lips, albeit not quite on the same scale as Mick’s.
Despite a noticeably posh accent and aura, Chrissie Shrimpton was less upper class than she appeared—and also more of a natural rebel than Mick had ever been. Her father was a self-made Buckinghamshire builder who had used his wealth to realize his dream of owning a farm in the high-priced countryside near Burnham. Though brought up with every luxury and given an expensive private education, Chrissie was an unruly spirit, constitutionally unable to submit to rules or authority. When she was fourteen, her convent school gave up the unequal struggle and asked her parents to remove her.
While fashion modeling took her sister, Jean, steadily up the social ladder, Chrissie consciously went the other way, dressing down like a beatnik and seeking out the raucous, proletarian R&B set. By day, she followed the only course open to young women without educational qualifications, training to be a shorthand typist at a secretarial college—her third—on London’s Oxford Street. At night, she roamed far from the Shrimptons’ Buckinghamshire farmhouse, becoming a regular at Eel Pie Island and the Crawdaddy, where she got to know both Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton well before first setting eyes on Mick and the Stones.
Mick Jagger Page 10