Mick Jagger

by Philip Norman

  According to Spanish Tony’s memoirs, published in 1979, the bribe demanded was $12,000. According to Robert Fraser, it was £7,000—about £50,000 by today’s values—of which Mick and Keith were to pay £2,500 each, while he, with considerably more hardship, scraped up the remaining £2,000. Keith has always believed the money was handed over by Spanish Tony to his Met contact in a Kilburn pub and that the subsequent unimpeded analysis of the substances just proved how doubly “bent” some British coppers could be. According to Marianne, however, Allen Klein got wind of the plan and wisely killed it.

  Klein’s advice was that Mick and Keith should get out of Britain for a while, to avoid harassment by the media while the police deliberated when and with what to charge them. They decided on Morocco, a country still comparatively remote and unspoiled—despite having influenced Swinging London decor almost as much as India had—and with mythically liberal attitudes toward drugs and sex. Brian and Anita had gone there the previous year with Christopher Gibbs to buy ornaments and clothes in the souks, smoke hash, and listen to the indigenous music that fascinated Brian. His return with a bandaged hand had been attributed to a mountain-climbing accident: actually, he had gone to hit Anita in their hotel room, but missed and slammed his fist into a metal window frame.

  In the end, a party of eight gathered in Morocco in March 1967 in what would prove a vain attempt to take the heat off Mick and Keith. Brian and Anita were invited, along with two other Redlands bust victims, Robert Fraser (in a state of dire anticipation over the analysis of his “insulin” tablet) and photographer Michael Cooper. To allay any press suspicions that the two main bustees were bolting from the UK together, Mick and Marianne flew to Tangier while Keith traveled overland in his new blue Bentley Continental, chauffeured by his driver, Tom Keylock, with Brian, Anita, and a mutual friend named Deborah Dixon.

  This four-day road trip down through France and Spain was to prove fateful and, for one of the car’s occupants, fatal. At Toulon, Brian developed pneumonia—probably a combination of acid and his chronic asthma—and had to be admitted to a hospital. With atypical selflessness, he insisted that Anita should not wait around for him to recover, but that she and Keith should continue the journey together by themselves (Deborah having also dropped out). Keith did not mean to take advantage of the situation, but during the drive through Spain, Anita gave him a blow job in the back of the Bentley while chauffeur Keylock kept firmly eyes-front. The pair spent that night together, but agreed to treat it as just a fling, since Keith did not want to mess up his new understanding with Brian. Afterward, Keith went on to Morocco alone while Anita returned to meet Brian and start the journey afresh from London, this time by air.

  In Tangier first, then Marrakesh, the Stones’ party fell in with a group of expatriate celebrities, most of whose drug consumption made even Brian’s seem mere toe dabbling by comparison. These included the venerable American novelist William S. Burroughs, author of Junkie and Naked Lunch, and the English writer and artist Brion Gysin, who contributed a recipe for “marijuana fudge” to the cookbook written by Gertrude Stein’s lesbian lover Alice B. Toklas. Pop stars with drug charges hanging over them could have picked wiser company.

  They also encountered the legendary royal photographer and stage designer Cecil Beaton (sixty-three at the time and known as “Rip Van With-It”) who spent a night enjoyably slumming it with the “ragged gypsies” and made a date to take pictures of Mick and Keith by their hotel pool the next day. Beaton’s famously bitchy diaries describe sitting next to Mick at dinner, his skin of “chicken-breast white,” “inborn elegance,” and “perfect manners . . . He has much appreciation and his small, albino-fringed eyes notice everything . . . He asked ‘Have you ever taken LSD?’ ‘Oh, I should,’ ‘It would mean so much to you: you’d never forget the colors . . . One’s brain works not on four cylinders but four thousand . . .’ ” Meeting him again in the next morning’s harsh sunlight for their poolside photo session, Beaton could hardly believe it was the same person: “his face a white podgy, shapeless mess, eyes very small, nose very pink, hair sandy dark . . . He is sexy yet completely sexless. He could nearly be a eunuch.” Mick, however, was to take an unaccustomed backseat during the events of the next seventy-two hours, observing rather helplessly, in his normal voice rather than the hushed, soulful one assumed for Cecil Beaton’s benefit, that “things are gettin’ fuckin’ heavy.”

  They were. Brian guessed that some hanky-panky had gone on between Keith and Anita after they’d left him in the hospital in Toulon, but could not bring himself to confront Keith about it. Instead, he took it out on Anita to a point where she began to fear for her life. The crunch came when he returned to the hotel with a pair of tattooed Berber whores he had picked up and tried to force Anita into a group-sex session with them. (In Faithfull, Marianne claims to have already hired a local prostitute for a three-in-a-bed session with Mick.) The incident finally spurred Keith into becoming Sir Galahad, with a blue Bentley Continental in place of a white horse. Next day, Brion Gysin was deputed to take Brian off to shop and listen to the open-air musicians in Jemaa el-Fnaa, Marrakesh’s teeming city square. While he was out of the way, Keith and Anita fled together in the Bentley back to Britain.

  On March 18, the Daily Mirror splashed the story that Mick Jagger and Keith Richard were to be charged with drug offenses. Two days later, the formal summonses arrived. Mick—his address given as “New Oxford Street, London W.1,” actually the office of the Stones’ new PR, Les Perrin—was charged with possessing four tablets containing amphetamine sulfate and methylamphetamine hydrochloride contrary to the Dangerous Drugs (Misuse of) Act 1964. Keith was charged in his real surname, Richards, with “knowingly” allowing Redlands to be used for cannabis smoking. The cases, together with those of Robert Fraser and the vanished Acid King David, were to come before Chichester magistrates in May.

  Meantime, the Rolling Stones were committed to a three-week European tour between March 25 and April 17, taking in Sweden, West Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Poland, Switzerland, Holland, and Greece. Amazingly, the tour went ahead and kept every date on its schedule, despite conditions more nightmarish than any rock band had ever faced before—or has since. Mick and Keith’s bust had been headline news in every country the Stones were to visit; at every frontier, as a result, they faced stringent searches by customs officers with far more expertise than West Sussex Police for the further sackfuls of drugs they were presumed to be carrying. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, those law-abiding, acid-free “other ranks,” fell under the same dark suspicion and suffered the same rough handling as their chiefs.

  At Malmö Airport in Sweden, they were turned over to an elite customs unit known as “the Black Gang,” who grabbed the unfortunate Bill for the same detailed strip search they gave Mick, then became highly excited over a heavy equipment chest for which the key could not be found. Mick was ordered to unscrew its back—a new kind of screwing on tour for him. The absence of any trace of drugs in the band’s luggage only seemed to increase trans-European officialdom’s hostility. At Paris–Le Bourget, a simple misunderstanding over passport procedure caused a scuffle between their driver, Tom Keylock, and immigration officials.

  In addition, the audiences in each country were wilder than the band had ever seen before—screaming almost in exultation that, after all the ambiguities surrounding Mick, he had proved himself a true Rolling Stone after all—and the crowd-control measures adopted by police and security guards more brutal. Even in historically neutral and well-behaved Zurich, a demented boy knocked Mick over, then started jumping on him.

  If all this wasn’t enough, the band’s rhythm guitarist had just enticed away the girlfriend of its lead guitarist and his best friend, yet there hadn’t been time to resolve the matter before the tour began. After Keith and Anita’s exit from Marrakesh, a hysterical Brian had made his way to friends in Paris, then returned to London, determined to win Anita back but still reluctant to sever his relationship with Kei
th. Somewhat hedging her bets, Anita had gone off to make another film, Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, leaving the two rivals for her hand to swap guitar licks onstage, one irradiating embarrassment, the other brokenhearted reproach. As Mick went through his moves, there was almost as much psychological tension behind his back as hysteria at his feet.

  His own situation with Marianne Faithfull—for the present—seemed stable by comparison. There had been no awkwardness with Marianne’s husband, John Dunbar, from whom she had been separated for some time before she and Mick got together. Indeed, Dunbar was along on the European tour, one of the select few permitted “access all areas.” As a sideline to his Indica gallery, he had started a stage-lighting company with a young Greek electronics wizard named Alexis Mardas (later to find fame with the Beatles as “Magic Alex”). Mick had asked the pair to create a sequence of special effects for the Stones and come on the road to operate them personally. So each evening John Dunbar found himself putting the man now living with his wife in the best possible light.

  Marianne herself was back in London, looking forward to a year that promised only to fulfill her long-held ambition to become a straight actress. Despite her much greater familiarity with drugs than Mick’s, and Detective Sergeant Cudmore’s pointed sniffing of the air around her, she had not been charged after the Redlands raid or mentioned by name in the subsequent press reports. While Mick and the Stones struggled round Europe, she was preparing for her stage debut in Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Royal Court Theatre, in a stellar cast including Glenda Jackson. Her role as the sweet, innocent youngest sister, Irina, who marries a baron and yearns to go to Moscow, was exactly what the British public expected of her.

  When the Stones reached Italy, Marianne found herself missing Mick so much that she decided to fly out to Genoa and surprise him at his hotel after the night’s show. It was an experience that cured her of ever wanting to go on the road with him again. The Genoa show was a particularly violent and chaotic one, and when Mick came into the hotel room where she waited in bed, “he was possessed, as if he had brought in with him whatever disruptive energy was going on at the concert . . . he walked over to the bed and began slapping me across the face.” Her first thought was that he’d found out about her one-night stand with Keith at the Mayfair Hotel weeks before. But the violence ceased as abruptly as it had started, and neither of them ever mentioned it afterward.

  All the time, a stream of negative reports came back to Britain, casting the Stones as agents provocateurs, with no mention of the hassles to which they were subjected, and creating the very worst atmosphere for Mick and Keith’s court appearance on May 10. In Dortmund, West Germany, they happened to share a hotel with the Olympic long-jump champion Lynn Davies, who complained to reporters that a “stream of obscenities” from their table during breakfast had made him feel “sick and ashamed to be British.” Mick’s response, at a Paris press conference, was unusually quotable, albeit hardly calculated to please his gym-teacher father: “The accusations are disgusting and completely untrue. I deny that we were badly behaved. I cannot remember when we have behaved better. We hardly used the public rooms at this hotel. They were crammed with athletes, behaving very badly.”

  Ironically, the Stones were also acting as ambassadors for Britain, taking rock to Poland, a Communist-bloc country where even mild popsters like Cliff Richard were regarded as symbols of capitalist decadence. At Warsaw’s forbidding Palace of Culture, the band found themselves playing to two thousand of the party faithful and their children, seated in rows and applauding timorously—rather as speeches by Stalin used to be—while several thousand disappointed fans ran amok outside, and police responded with armored cars, tear gas, and water cannons. Afterward, the musicians tried to make amends by driving through the city, throwing bundles of albums through their car windows. In Athens, their show took place four days before the Greek royal family was overthrown by a cabal of fascist army officers. Such was the anticipatory paranoia at Panathinaikos football stadium that the audience was kept back forty feet from the stage and Mick couldn’t perform his new end-of-set trick, tossing out red roses from a bowl.

  On the way back to London, he said he’d had it with live shows and never wanted to tour America again. His wish would very nearly be granted.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Elusive Butterfly

  IN THE COMING court ordeal, there was an option for Mick that his lawyers were not slow to point out. The four amphetamine uppers he was charged with possessing technically belonged to Marianne; she had bought them at an all-night disco during their romantic escape to San Remo, slipped them into a side pocket of his green velvet jacket without his knowledge, then forgotten about them. She was more than willing to testify as much, but Mick wouldn’t hear of it. Ever the chivalrous knight, and his father’s son, he said his career as a rock star could withstand a drug bust but hers as a serious actress could not, and he wasn’t about to let her be “thrown to the wolves.” A vain hope, as it would prove.

  The preliminary hearing took place before Chichester magistrates on May 10. Mick, Keith, and Robert Fraser pleaded not guilty to the charges against them and were bailed in the sum of £100 each to appear at West Sussex Quarter Sessions for trial by jury the following month. Magistrates at this time had no power to impose reporting restrictions if media coverage seemed likely to prejudice the trial in the higher court. So, while Mick and the other two reserved their defense, journalists could report the prosecution’s account of the police raid in full with all its insinuations and innuendos. The sole restriction concerned the fourth defendant—named in the indictment as David Schneidermann [sic]—who had fled Britain with his charmed attaché case of LSD on the night of the bust and afterward seemingly vanished into thin air. Because Acid King David was not in court, the magistrates ruled it would be “unfair” for his name to be made public.

  At four o’clock that same day, Scotland Yard’s drugs squad raided Brian Jones’s Chelsea flat. They found Brian, dressed in a Japanese kimono, sitting among the debris of an all-night party. The sole remaining guest was a twenty-four-year-old Swiss nobleman and aspiring pop singer, Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola, known for short—rather unfortunately in this instance—as Stash. More focused and knowledgeable searchers than their West Sussex colleagues, the Yard team quickly turned up eleven incriminating items, including a pile of hashish, some methedrine, and a glass phial containing traces of cocaine. When the latter was shown to him, Brian reacted with seemingly genuine horror. “No, man, that’s not mine at all,” he protested. “I’m not a junkie.”

  The synchronization of the raid with Mick and Keith’s court appearance in Chichester made clear that Britain’s antidrug agencies, such as they were, had declared open season on the Rolling Stones. And this time there was no doubt about police collusion with the press. A crowd of journalists watched the raiders go in, and Brian and Stash being taken away for questioning at Chelsea Police Station on the otherwise carefree, swinging King’s Road. There Brian was charged with possessing cocaine, hashish, and methedrine and Stash with possessing cannabis—even though none had been found in his pockets or around the divan where he’d been sleeping. Next morning, the pair appeared at Great Marlborough Street magistrates’ court, around the corner from carefree, swinging Carnaby Street, and were bailed in the sum £250 each until June 2. At that hearing, both elected trial by jury and their case was set down for Inner London Sessions on October 30 with the same bail conditions.

  For a young man who had been pampered and flattered as Mick had these past five years, it was salutary to realize how urgently he now needed friends and allies—and how thin on the ground they suddenly became. The Stones’ UK record label, Decca, refused to lend the slightest help or support despite the millions of records they had sold. Thanks to Andrew Oldham’s tape-leasing deal, Decca regarded the band as freelancers rather than in-house artists as the Beatles were to EMI; sour memories also still lingered of the $1.25 million advance which All
en Klein had bludgeoned out of them in 1965.

  With Oldham still inexplicably absent from the battlefront, it fell to Klein to organize solicitors for Mick and Keith in the lower court and procure a top Queen’s Counsel to represent them at West Sussex Quarter Sessions. This was Michael Havers, a future Conservative attorney general and lord chancellor and father of the actor Nigel Havers. The Stones’ publicist, Les Perrin, also proved invaluable by lobbying his contacts in Parliament about the inequities that the case had already thrown up. And to be sure, Mick and Keith’s treatment was already causing disquiet among those not usually considered their natural allies. On May 19, Home Office minister Dick Taverne opined that unrestricted reporting of magistrates’ court hearings risked creating prejudice against the defendants at their later jury trial, and cited the Jagger-Richard case as a recent glaring example.

  Coincidentally, in the run-up to their trial a new kind of pop music experience took place five thousand miles away in Monterey, California. An open-air festival on the lines of the jazz one staged at Newport, Rhode Island, it had one radical innovation: the star-studded bill of Jefferson Airplane, Simon and Garfunkel, Country Joe and the Fish, Scott McKenzie, the Mamas and the Papas, Eric Burdon and the Animals, the Who, Otis Redding, and Janis Joplin that performed for the fifty-five-thousand-strong audience all gave their services for free. Well organized, laid-back, and peaceful—unlike almost all its successors—the Monterey Festival established the idea of American and British rock musicians as a kind of hippie high command, abolishing the music’s exploitativness at a plectrum stroke, promoting hysteria and violence no more, but benign coexistence. Its afterglow seeped across America, then the Atlantic, to become the first, and quintessential, event in what would come to be known as the Summer of Love.