Life

by Keith Richards; James Fox

  Once when he’d come back from rehab, I said, “He’s OK now. I’ve known him stoned out of his brain and I’ve known him straight and sober. Quite honestly it makes little difference. But there’s a bit more focus on him now.” I stand by that, basically. That was the weird thing about it, when you come down to it. All this shit and money he’d spent on this crap and on getting off of it, and no bloody difference. He’d just look you in the eye a little more maybe. In other words, it’s not about the shit, it’s something else. “You wouldn’t know, man.”

  I’ve been out in all weathers with Ronnie, and it shows. One rare occasion a year after our fight, after he’d laid down the crack pipe, required him to be in perfect order, to put no foot wrong. And he duly stepped up and he did a great job. I asked him to come with me to Redlands to be there when I met my dad again for the first time in twenty years.

  I was scared to meet Bert. To me he was still the guy I’d left twenty years earlier, when I was a teenager. I had some idea over the years that he was OK from relations who had seen him, who told me that he was hanging out at his local pub. I was scared to meet him because of what I’d done in the meantime. That’s why it took me twenty years to get round to it. In my mind, I was an absolute reprobate to my father—the guns, the drugs, the busts. The shame, the degradation for him. I had humiliated him. That was my thought—that I’d really let him down. Every headline that hit the goddamn newspapers, “Richards Busted Again,” made it even more difficult for me to get in touch with my dad. I thought he was better off not seeing me.

  There aren’t a lot of blokes that scare me anymore. But during my childhood, to disappoint my dad was devastating for me. I was frightened of his disapproval. I wrote earlier how the thought of it—the idea of not living up to his expectations —could still reduce me to tears, because when I was a child, his disapproval would totally isolate me, make me almost disappear. And that stuff was just frozen in time. Gary Schultz, who told me his regrets at not making amends with his dad before he died, talked me into it, although I’d always known I had to do it.

  It wasn’t difficult to track him down through relations. He’d been living in the back room of a pub in Bexley for all those years, never apparently needing anything from me, or certainly never asking. So I wrote to him.

  I remember I was sitting on the bed in my hotel room in Washington, DC, in December 1981, near my birthday, scarcely able to believe that I was reading his reply. We couldn’t meet until the European tour of 1982, a few months after that. And Redlands was the appointed place. In the meantime, I wrote to him.

  I am really looking forward to seeing your ugly mug after all these years!! I bet you’ll still scare the shit out of me. All my love, your son Keith.

  P.S. I also have a couple of your grandchildren to show you.

  Soon come

  K

  I had brought Ronnie with me as a humorous buffer, clown, just a sidekick, a friend, because I didn’t think I could handle it by myself. I sent a car to the pub in Bexley to bring Bert to me. Gary Schultz was there at Redlands too, and he remembers me, very nervous, counting down the time—he’ll be here in two hours; he’ll be here in half an hour. And then he arrived. And out got this little old bloke. We looked at each other and he said, “Hello, son.” He was completely different. It was a shock to see him. Bandy legs, limping a bit with his war wound. It was like looking at some old rascal; he looked like a retired pirate. What twenty years can do! Silver curly locks, an amazing combo of gray sideburns with mustache. He always had one.

  This was not my dad. I didn’t expect him to be the same as I had left him, a sturdy middle-aged chap, stocky, well built. But he was a completely different person. “Hello, son.” “Dad.” That breaks the ice, I can tell you. Bert walked away a little bit at one point, and Gary Schultz tells me that I said to him, “You never knew I was the son of Popeye, did you?” So it was “Come in, Dad.” And once he was in, couldn’t get rid of him. Still a pipe man, smoking St. Bruno flake, the same dark tobacco I remember as a kid.

  The weird thing is my dad turned out to be a great piss artist. Not when I was growing up, then it was maybe one beer a night, or on the weekends if we were out socializing. Now he was one of the greatest rummies I’d ever met, I mean, Jesus Christ, Bert! There are still stools commemorated to him in several pubs, especially in Bexley. Rum was his drink. Dark Navy rum.

  All he said about those headlines of mine was “You’ve been a bit of a bugger, haven’t you?” So now we could talk like grown men. And suddenly I had another friend. I had a dad again. I’d given that up; a father figure didn’t come into it anymore. It was a full circle. We became conspiratorial and friendly and we found out that we really liked each other. We started to hang and decided it was time for him to travel. I wanted him to see the world from the top. Showing off, I suppose. He devoured the whole bloody globe! He wasn’t in awe of it, he absorbed it. So then we began to have all the fun we hadn’t had the time for. World traveler Bert Richards, who’d never been in an airplane, never been anywhere except Normandy up until that point. His first flight was to Copenhagen. The only time I saw Bert scared. As the engines were revving up, I saw his knuckles whiten. He was clutching his pipe, about to break it. But he brassed it out, and once we were in the air he loosened up. The first takeoff is hairy no matter who you are. So then he started chatting up the stewardess and he was on his way.

  Next thing I know he’s on the tour and we’re traveling down to Bristol, me and my friend the writer James Fox in the back, my minder Svi Horowitz and Bert forward. Svi says to Bert, would you like a drink, Mr. Richards? And Bert goes, I think I’ll have a light ale, thank you, Svi. And I wind down the partition and say, what? On the Sabbath, Dad? and I fall back laughing at the irony of all this. And then in Martinique he’s got Brooke Shields on his knee. I couldn’t get a word in edgeways. They were all over my dad, three or four top starlets. Where’s Dad? Where do you think? He’s down the bar surrounded by the latest batch of beauties. He had some energy. I remember him playing dominoes with five or six of us right through the night, and everybody else was down under the table, and he was knocking back neat rum at the same time. He’d never get drunk. Always steady. He was kind of like me, and that’s the problem. You can drink more because it doesn’t really do much. It’s just something you do, like waking up or breathing.

  Anita meanwhile, a fugitive from the press for a while after the boy shot himself on the premises, had holed up in the Alray Hotel in New York on 68th Street, with Marlon. Larry Sessler, Freddie’s son, was there to look after them. Marlon’s life revolved not around schooling, at least not of the conventional kind, but around Anita’s new friends, the post-punk world centered on the Mudd Club, which was the anti–Studio 54 on White Street in New York. The world of Brian Eno, the Dead Boys and Max’s Kansas City was Anita’s hangout. Nothing, of course, had changed with Anita, and she probably remembers it as the worst of times for her, or counts herself lucky to be alive. It was very dangerous in New York at that time, not just from AIDS. Shooting up in Lower East Side hotels is no joke. Nor is the fourth floor of the Chelsea Hotel, specializing in angel dust and heroin.

  To try and provide some stability, I took over Mick Taylor’s rented house in Sands Point, Long Island, for them—the first of a series of mad movie-like mansions on Long Island that they lived in during this period. I would come to visit when I could, to see Marlon. I came out for Anita’s birthday in 1980 and found Roy “Skipper” Martin, one of a bunch of people Anita would bring out from the Mudd Club. Roy had a nightly spot there doing some extreme kind of stand-up comedy. Roy had cooked this huge meal: roast lamb, Yorkshire pudding and all that stuff—and then apple crumble and custard. I asked him, is this real custard? And he said yes, and I said, no, it’s not, you got it out of a tin. And he said, I fucking made it, it came out of a packet, Bird’s vanilla, that you make with milk. So we had a set-to. I remember I threw a glass at him across the table.


  I usually make an instant connection with my long-term, solid friends; I can spot them straightaway—some sense that we’re going to trust each other. It’s a binding contract. Roy is one of them, from that first night. Once I’ve made a connection, to me it’s the biggest sin to let a friend down. Because that means you don’t understand the whole meaning of friendship, comradeship, which is the most important thing. You’ll hear more of Roy because as well as being a good friend of mine, he’s still taking care of biz at my house in Connecticut. He’s been on a family retainer, for want of a better term, ever since about a year after that meeting.

  I’d be nowhere without my mates: Bill Bolton, my distant muscle on the road, built like a brick shithouse; Tony Russell, my minder for the past many years; Pierre de Beauport, guitar tech and musical adviser. The only trouble with true friends like that is we keep jumping in front of each other to save each other. Me, no, me, I’ll take the hit. True friends. Hardest thing to find, but you never look for them—they find you; you just grow into each other. I can go nowhere without knowing I have some solid backup. Jim Callaghan in the past, and Joe Seabrook, who croaked a couple of years before I wrote this, were just that. Bill Bolton’s married to Joe’s sister, so it’s all in the family. Cats that I’ve been through thick and thin with are very important to me.

  For some reason all my close friends have been jailbirds at one time or another. I hadn’t taken this in until I saw them on a list together with their thumbnail CVs. What does that tell us? Nothing, because each circumstance is so different. Bobby Keys is the only one who’s been to jail several times, for, as he says, crimes he didn’t even know he committed. We all stick together, me and my dastardly crew. We just want to do what we want to do without being bothered by all of that other crap. We love “The Adventures of Keith Richards.” It’ll come to a sticky end, I’ve no doubt. It’s like a Just William,* really. Roy, for example, ran away to sea at fifteen years old, from Stepney in the East End of London, which tells you a lot. He went into gold smuggling in the early ’60s. A free spirit, Roy. He used to buy the gold in Switzerland and put it in special jackets and around his knickers, forty kilos of it, and fly it to the Far East, Hong Kong, Bangkok. Heavy gold bars made by Johnson Matthey, .999. One day when Roy got out of the taxi after flying for twenty-five hours, he couldn’t get up because of the weight. He was on his knees at the taxi door, and the hotel doormen had to rush out and help him in. Roy was banged up, for other reasons, in the famous Arthur Road prison in Bombay, as it appears in the book Shantaram. No charge, no trial. Defence of India Regulations. And he escaped. He wanted to be an actor, and he was an actor in fringe theater for a while, which is probably why he was doing stand-up in the Mudd Club. Roy is one of the funniest guys I know, and occasionally he went out of control with manic energy, and it is manic energy. Nobody else going to do it? I’ll show you. Once, in the Mayflower Hotel, there were loads of people after a show and suddenly I hear this knock at the window, this is about sixteen stories up, and there’s Roy clinging to the sill, knocking on the window, going, “Help, help.” There’s police cars going by and people below calling, “Hey, up there. Someone’s got a jumper.” That’s not funny, Roy. Get your ass in. Underneath him there was a very narrow brick ledge. He just had his toes on it. There are guys who should not be alive.

  After the ’81 tour I persuaded Roy to look after Marlon and Anita full-time. One of his briefs was to see whether he could get Marlon to go to school. Bert joined them after the 1982 European tour. What a ménage à trois that was. Bert, Marlon and Roy, living in the Gatsby mansions with Anita coming and going. Bert always thought Anita was nuts. And yes, she was pretty far out; she just carried on, out of her brain all this time. It was like some crew stranded on half pay in a series of huge, deserted mansions. Harold Pinter meets Scott Fitzgerald. Roy was a sailor anyway. Bert and Marlon weren’t, but they were all adrift, let’s put it that way, in this foreign country, though Marlon was so used to foreign countries he didn’t really care which one he was in. Roy lived with Bert from 1982 until he died. I put them there while I was on the road. I only ever visited there off and on, pop in and say hi. So I should have Marlon describe what gothic adventures came to pass in those lost years on the shores of Long Island.

  Marlon: The worst part was growing up in New York, because in the late ’70s it was a scary place. I didn’t go back to school for all of 1980. We lived in the Alray Hotel, in the middle of Manhattan, which wasn’t too bad. It was like Eloise at the Plaza. We went to movies. Anita used to take me round to see Andy Warhol, William Burroughs. I think he lived in the men’s showers at the Chelsea Hotel. It was all tiled, and there were washing lines with used condoms on them, hanging across the room. Very strange man.

  From there we moved to the Mick Taylor–vacated house on Sands Point, Long Island, for about six months. The first filmed version of The Great Gatsby was shot there, in which Sands Point is East Egg, with many acres of lawns and a huge beachfront and a saltwater pool, all decaying. We used to hear ’20s jazz music coming from the gazebo, dinner parties and clinking glasses and laughter that dissipated as you walked towards it. There were certainly mob connections in this house. I found family snaps in the attic of Sinatra and Dean Martin, all the Rat Pack, hanging out there in the ’50s. This was where Roy first turned up, before he came to live with us for good, this crazy Englishman who Anita brought from the Mudd Club, where his act was to drink a whole bottle of cognac on stage while telling jokes and blabbering on and reciting a poem by Shel Silverstein called “The Perfect High,” about a boy called Gimmesome Roy, and slowly peeling off his clothes. All for two hundred dollars and a bottle of cognac. Anita brought him home to the big house, and we put him up in the attic at first, but he completely wrecked the room in a drunken rant. He was terrifying. We had to kick him out of the house, essentially. He would drink a bottle of cognac in the morning and sing, so we just shifted him into the doghouse, which was like a shed. He had an affinity for the Labrador at the time and he would spend the hours singing away with the dog. It was a mild spring, so it wasn’t too bad.

  Anita collected other fringe acts too. The writer and beat poet Mason Hoffenberg often used to live there with us. This little bearded Jewish gnome who would sit naked out in the garden and sort of spew down at people who drove by. He was going through his naturist stage, which was a bit terrifying for Long Island. We called him the garden gnome. He stayed for quite a while that summer.

  Roy became a permanent fixture in late ’81, having been on tour with Keith, a kind of official minder to us when we moved to Old Westbury, another huge mansion where we lived from 1981 until 1985. It was an enormous place with only the four of us living there and semi-derelict, absolutely no furniture and no heating but with a beautiful ballroom I used to roller-skate around, its walls hand painted on canvas in the 1920s but now peeling. In fact, by the end of our stay the whole edifice, with its two main staircases and two wings, looked like Miss Havisham’s.

  The only furniture was a big white Bösendorfer piano that Roy used to play on and do his Liberace routine. And I had my drum kit at the other end of the ballroom, so we sort of jammed. We had a good sound system and all Keith’s records, so we’d put a record on and mess about and then Roy would open a tin for dinner. What tin do you want tonight, Spam or…? So I became a vegetarian after that. No, I don’t want any more Spam, Roy, thanks a lot.

  Anita was going through a very self-destructive period at this time. She was in a dark place. If she went to New York she would drink a lot when she got back to calm whatever she had taken and go into violent alcoholic rages. Despite this, interesting people were coming all the time via Anita—Basquiat, Robert Fraser came down, and Anita’s punk friends, like the fellows from the Dead Boys and some of the guys from the New York Dolls. It was quite crazy. I don’t think Anita got any credit for the fact that she did contribute to the punk movement. A lot of them, at least New York ones, would come and spend weekends at our ho
use. She’d come back from the Mudd Club and CBGBs with a car full of pink-haired nutters. Nice people generally, just nerdy Jewish kids, really.

  Every now and again Roy would go up to the office in New York with receipts and come back with big envelopes full of hundred-dollar bills, and that would be the money for the month. It was hilarious. So when I got my allowance, what did I do with this brand-new crisp hundred-dollar bill? I just wanted to go and buy some comic books, and I was waving this thing around.

  They got quite used to us in Long Island. Roy would go ninety miles an hour everywhere, screaming. And he drove huge Lincoln Continentals, those big pimpmobiles we used to rent. Roy would write them off once every two months and we’d get another one. He used to have his two days off, where he’d say, right, I’m going away for two days, don’t bother me. And he’d just go off on a drinking binge and he’d come back with bruises or all cut up. On one spectacular outing Roy got into some argument in a bar in Long Island. He left the bar, came back ten minutes later and drove the car right through the bar windows, crashed three cars outside and a bunch of motorcycles. He then got out of the car, walked back into the bar he’d just wrecked to make a telephone call. Next day he was arrested and put in jail and we bailed him out. But Bert was very patient with all that. Oh, Roy in trouble again? Luckily for Roy, it was a town with a private police force, so every time Roy would get into a car crash they’d just sort of drop him off at home. Bert used to go down in the evening to a Hells Angels bar by the train station in Westbury. And he’d sit there with all these Hells Angels, these guys with the caps and the leather, for hours and hours and hours. He’d sit there with Roy, and Roy would entertain everyone, yodeling and screaming.