True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

At a dirt road on the valley side of Laurel Canyon there was a gate, but it was open and we drove up, the dark green valley walls around us. The house was stone, with a swimming pool and big paved drive where two limousines and two rented sedans were parked. From the far end of the house across the pool came muffled sounds of electric guitars and a harmonica.

  A lemon tree was growing by the drive, and the clowns I was with amused themselves by tearing off and throwing lemons. I threw one or two myself, just to be sociable, but I come from a place where the people are proud but poor, and I can’t really enjoy throwing food unless I’m trying to hit someone with it.

  After a while we went into the house, a wood-leather-and-stone robber’s roost with stone floors, a big stone fireplace, no softening touches. The kitchen had a refrigerator big as one in a commissary at a turpentine camp, but it was stocked with beer instead of pigfeet and Big Oranges. We drank Heinekens and waited for the rehearsal to end. Belmont, Steckler, and Sandison were lounging in chairs around the living room. I didn’t know why any of them was here. I had come to speak to Keith and Mick about the letter I needed to get a publisher, to go on living, to write a book. I lay down on a leather couch, gazed out the window, and saw, coming down the valley-side, a small brown fawn.

  Soon the music at the back of the house stopped and the Stones came out. I followed Keith into the kitchen. He opened a 35-millimeter film can and with a tiny spoon lifted out a mound of white crystals, and didn’t see me until he had the spoon halfway home. His hand stopped, I said, “Caught you,” and he shrugged, raised the spoon and sniffed. Then I said, “Urn, Keith, what about the, ah, book?”

  “I’ll talk to Mick about it.”

  Time passed, nothing happened. In the living room the people were still slouching about. Keith stood with one hand loose on forward-slung hips, the other shoving a beer into his mouth, looking like a baby with its bottle. I found Mick sitting at a piano just outside the door of the rehearsal room. “What about the book?” I asked.

  “I’ve got to talk to Keith about it.”

  Then I went back to Keith and said, “Have you talked to Mick yet? We got to go.”

  “Hey,” Keith said to Mick, who happened to be walking past, “what about this book?”

  “What about it?”

  They strolled into the kitchen as daylight faded. Finally we really were leaving, and I said to Keith, “So?”

  “You write the letter,” he said, “and we’ll sign it.”

  So far so good, I thought, back at the Oriole house eating bouillabaisse. I had never eaten bouillabaisse before, and though I enjoyed it, I was still wondering what to do next. Write the letter and they’ll sign it. Then what? Will they leave me alone to make a contract and write a book?

  I tried to digest bouillabaisse and these questions while sitting after dinner with Jo, Sandison, Steckler, and the Watts family. The night was cool, and in the fireplace four gas jets were blasting a stack of wood logs to blazes. A couple of people stopped by, one with a large vial of cocaine, so after everybody else had gone to bed, Sandison, Steckler, and I were up talking. Steckler had no coke but was excited to be away from home. He was in his late thirties, in this crowd an older man, and he worked for Allen Klein, who as the manager of the world’s two most popular acts, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, may have been the most powerful man in show business; but Steckler, so close to all that power and money, seemed naive, too earnest about the poetry and truth of rock music. He had a neat brown haircut, a baby-pink face, and sincere eyes that would do many unpleasant things but would never lie to you.

  “Who’s Schneider?” I asked him when the logs were white powder, the fire four blue jets of flame.

  “Klein’s nephew.”

  “Besides that.”

  “He worked for Klein until a few weeks ago. They had a disagreement and Ronnie formed Rolling Stones Promotions to do this tour.”

  “What besides this tour does he do for the Rolling Stones?”

  “Not a thing,” Steckler said.

  After everyone else had gone to bed, I carried a typewriter from the office to the kitchen, closed all the connecting doors, and wrote a letter to myself from the Rolling Stones, assuring me of their cooperation, with their names typed below, spaced to leave room for their signatures. Then I took the typewriter back and tiptoed to bed.

  4

  One night this guy comes into the bar with his cap on sideways, you know. And this is Elmore.

  WARREN GEORGE HARDING LEE JACKSON: Living Blues

  VALENTINO, a scarred grey tabby cat who once belonged to Brian Jones, yawned and stretched on the terrace. Keith and I were sitting on a Moroccan carpet in the side yard, nine-month-old Marlon, born last year, 1969, crawling naked in the grass, little yellow babyturds shooting out his ass. His mother, the flashing-eyed Anita, was still upstairs in the tapestry-bedecked bedroom where she and Keith slept, on the dresser in a silver frame a small photograph of Brian. Inside the lid of the downstairs toilet was a collage of Rolling Stones photographs. These people didn’t try to hide things. The first night I spent at Keith’s house, Anita tossed a blanket beside me on the cushion where I was lying. “You don’t need sheets, do you,” she asked.

  “No, I’ll be fine,” I said.

  “Mick has to have sheets,” she said. “Put it in the book.”

  Redlands, a thatch-roofed house in West Witterling, near Chichester in West Sussex, had been Keith Richards’ country home since 1965. In 1967, along with Mick Jagger, he was arrested here. This morning the place seemed, in the pale spring sunlight, like a veterans’ hospital, and Keith and I like two old soldiers, taking frequent medications and talking about the past.

  “My great-grandfather’s family came up to London from Wales in the nineteenth century,” Keith said, “and so my grandfather, my father’s father, was a Londoner. His wife, my grandmother, was mayoress of Walthamstow, a borough of London, during the war. It was the height of fame for the family. They were very puritan, very straight people. Both dead now.

  “But then you come to Gus: my mother’s father, Theodore Augustus Dupree. He was a complete freak. He used to have a dance band in the thirties, played sax, fiddle, and guitar. The funkiest old coot you could ever meet.

  “That side of the family came to England from the Channel Islands. They were Huguenots, French Protestants who were driven out of France in the seventeenth century. And in the mid-nineteenth century Gus’ father came to Wales, to Monmouth.

  “Gus was so funny. He had seven daughters, and they used to bring their boyfriends home, and they’d be sitting round all prim and proper, and he’d be upstairs dangling contraceptives out the window. There’s so many stories about him that I don’t remember even one solid story. In the fifties, the late fifties, he was playing fiddle in a country and western band round the U.S. air force bases in England. Real double-string stuff and everything. He’s a friend of Yehudi Menuhin. Gus admired him, got to know him. He’s one of these cats that can always con what he wants. I should imagine he’s a bit like Furry Lewis. And from living with all these women, he has such a sense of humor, because you either go crazy or laugh at it, with eight women in the house. It was his guitar I used to turn on to when I was a kid.

  “My grandmother used to play piano with my grandfather until I think one day she caught him playin’ around with some other chick, and she never forgave him, and she refused ever to touch the piano again. And she’s never played it to this day, since the thirties or forties or whatever. I think she’s even refused to fuck him since then. Very strange.

  “My mother and father were together for a long time before they got married. I think they met in ’34, maybe even ’33, got married in ’36. They separated in ’63. This is the strange part of the story, far as I’m concerned. They separated right after I left home, virtually within months. Mainly because my old man, I guess, I should imagine, for a woman, he’d be incredibly boring to live with. He worked, still does, I believe, at an electronics factory,
as a supervisor or something, he’s worked his way, been there since he was twenty-one or so. Always very straitlaced, prudish—never got drunk, very controlled, very hung up. I should say he was very hung up. And the bastard—what’s really weird about it, because I like him still, I find certain things about him rather endearing—he’s refused to acknowledge me since he split with my mother, because, I think, I was still on friendly terms with my mother after she split. So he immediately gets all uptight, I guess, and thinks— I dunno, I’ve written to him a couple of times. I wrote to him when I got busted, ’cause I wanted to explain that thing to him, I didn’t want him to just get it all out of the newspapers. But I didn’t get an answer, which rather pissed me off. Haven’t heard from him since ’63. Seven years.”

  “Were you very close to him as a kid?”

  “No, it wasn’t possible to be that close to him, he didn’t know how to open himself up. He was always good to me.”

  “Was he strict on things like your going out as you got older?”

  “He tried to be, but he kind of gave up, you know? I think because of my mother, who had this tendency to give in to me, especially as I got older. And also because—I think he just gave up on me. I’ve disappointed him incredibly.”

  “You turned out to be a Dupree instead of a Richards—”

  “Exactly. I really didn’t turn out to be anything like he wanted.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “As far as I know, he still lives in, where we all used to live, this fucking horrible council house in Dartford. It’s eighteen miles to the east on the edge of London, just outside the suburbs where the country starts creeping in. He really had no sense of taking a gamble on anything. Fucking soul-destroying council estate. A mixture of terrible apartment blocks and horrible new streets full of semi-detached houses, all in a row, all new, a real concrete jungle, a really disgusting place. And because he wouldn’t take a chance on anything, he wouldn’t try to get us out of there, which is what I think eventually did my mother in as far as he was concerned. I’m gonna have to go and see him one day, just because I’m not gonna be as stubborn as him. One day I’m just gonna get hold of him and try to make contact, whether he likes it or not.”

  “He hasn’t married again?”

  “Far as I know, no. I can’t even imagine him gettin’ himself together to find another woman. He’d just rather stay bitter and feel sorry for himself. It’s a shame. As far as I’m concerned, I’d like to have him down here. He’s a gardener, he could look after the place, and he’d love to do it if he was really honest with himself. And I’d really dig it if he’d just live here and look after this place.”

  (Ten years later, Keith would make his father part of the family again, but with no false feeling on either side. When, in 1983, Bert Richards answered the phone at Keith’s house in Jamaica, the friend calling said, “You must be so proud of him.” “Well . . .” Keith’s father said, refusing to commit himself.)

  “How did you feel about school?”

  “I wanted to get the fuck out of there. The older I got, the more I wanted to get out. I just knew I wasn’t gonna make it. In primary school you didn’t do that much, but later, when I went to that fucking technical school in Dartford, the indoctrination was blatantly apparent. I went to primary school, which in England is called, or was then, infant school, from five to seven. When I started going to school, just after the war, they taught you the basics, but mainly it was indoctrination in the way schools were run, who’s to say yes to who and how to find your place in class. It’s what you’ve let yourself in for for the next ten years.

  “When you’re seven you go to junior school. They had just started building a few new schools by the time we’d finished the first one, so we went to a new one nearer where we lived. That’s where I met Mick, ’cause that’s where he went too, Wentworth County Primary School. He happened to live near by me, I used to see him around . . . on our tricycles.

  “In junior school they start grading you each school year, each section of kids into three sections, fast, average, and slow. When you’re eleven you take an examination called the eleven plus, which is the big trauma, because this virtually dictates the rest of your life as far as the system goes. It probably includes more psychology now, but then they were just trying to see how much you knew and how quick you learned it and whether you could write it down. That decided whether you went to grammar school, which is where you receive a sort of semiclassical education for the masses, or to what they call a technical school, which I ended up in, which is actually for kids that are usually pretty bright but that just won’t accept discipline very well. The school for kids that don’t stand much of a chance of doing anything except unskilled or semiskilled labor is called secondary modern. For those who had the bread there were plenty of public schools, but this was the system for state education.

  “After eleven I lost touch with Mick because he went to a grammar school and I went to this technical school. I lost touch with Mick for—it seemed a long time, actually it was about six years.”

  Keith Richards, the youngest of the original Rolling Stones, was born on December 18, 1943. Michael Philip Jagger was born in the same year and the same town, Dartford, on July 26. When she was four years old, Mick’s mother had come to Dartford from Australia, where six generations of her family had lived. “The women in my family went to Australia to get away from the men,” she said. She married Joseph Jagger, a physical education teacher who came to Dartford from a family of strict nondrinking Baptists in the north of England. Their son Michael was from an early age interested in athletics and in earning money.

  “When I was twelve years old,” Mick said, “I worked on an American army base near Dartford, giving other kids physical instruction—because I was good at it. I had to learn their games, so I learned football and baseball, all the American games. There was a black cat there named José, a cook, who played R&B records for me. That was the first time I heard black music. In fact that was my first encounter with American thought. They buried a flag, a piece of cloth, with full military honors. I thought it was ridiculous, and said so. They said, ‘How would you feel if we said something about the Queen?’ I said, ‘I wouldn’t mind, you wouldn’t be talking about me. She might mind, but I wouldn’t.’ ”

  We talked in many places—movie sets, motel rooms, airplanes, at Mick’s house on Cheyne Walk, with Marsha Hunt, the Afro-American actress, pregnant with Mick’s first child, wearing her bosom Scotch-taped into a hippie-Indian dress.

  One night at Keith’s London house, a few doors up from Mick’s, Keith, Mick, Anita, and I were talking, and Anita mentioned that Mrs. Jagger often speaks of how Mick used to enjoy camping and the outdoor life. In a high-pitched, proper voice, imitating Mrs. Jagger, I said, “As a child, Mick was very butch.”

  “Yeah, I was butch,” Mick said. “But she was always butcher.”

  “Technical school was completely the wrong thing for me,” Keith said. “Working with the hands, metalwork. I can’t even measure an inch properly, so they’re forcing me to make a set of drills or something, to a thousandth-of-an-inch accuracy. I did my best to get thrown out of that place. Took me four years, but I made it.”

  “You tried to get yourself thrown out how? By not showing up?”

  “Not so much that, because they do too many things to you for doing that. It makes life difficult for you. I was trying to make it easier for me.

  “At this time rock and roll had just hit the scene. That also played a very heavy part in my decision. The first record that really turned me on out of the rock and roll thing was ‘Heartbreak Hotel.’ ”

  “Did you see Blackboard Jungle over here?”

  “Yeah, that was the first ripping-the-seats-up, Teddy Boys type of scene here. I was very young at that time. I did the first school year, I did the second year, I did the third year, and at the end of the third year I’d fucked up so much that they made me do the third-year course again, which was r
eally to humiliate me. It meant you had to stay down with the younger kids and couldn’t take the G.C.E. examinations, which in this country are very important in getting a job. I didn’t take the fucking things at all. I did the third year again, and I did the fourth year, and at the end of the fourth year—remember, everybody else was at the end of the fifth year—I made things so bad—culminating in a spate of truancy which they wouldn’t take from me—they kicked me out.

  “The particular thing was splitting constantly very early in the day, and just generally turning out contrary to their demands, and millions of things, like I used to wear two pairs of pants to school, a very tight pair and a very baggy pair which I would put on as soon as I got near the school, because they would just send you home if you had tight pants on. That’s another thing about English schools, you had to wear the school uniform . . . the cap, very strange contraption, like a skullcap with a peak on it, school badge on the front. And a dark blazer with a badge on the breast pocket, a tie, and gray flannel trousers. I refused to go to and from school with those fucking clothes on.

  “But in kicking me out, they as a final show of benevolence fixed up this place for me in art school. Actually that was the best thing they could have done for me, because the art schools in England are very freaky. Half the staff anyway are in advertising agencies, and to keep up the art bit and make a bit of extra bread they teach school like one day a week. Freaks, drunks, potheads. Also there’s a lot of kids. I was fifteen and there are kids there nineteen, in their last year. A lot of music goes on at art schools. That’s where I got hung up on guitar, because there were a lot of guitar players around then, playing anything from Big Bill Broonzy to Woody Guthrie. I also got hung up on Chuck Berry, though what I was playing was the art school stuff, the Guthrie sound and blues. Not really blues, mostly ballads and Jesse Fuller stuff. In art school I met Dick Taylor, a guitar player. He was the first cat I played with. We were playing a bit of blues, Chuck Berry stuff on acoustic guitars, and I think I’d just about now got an amplifier like a little beat-up radio. There was another cat at art school called Michael Ross. He decided to form a country and western band—this is real amateur—Sanford Clark songs and a few Johnny Cash songs, ‘Blue Moon of Kentucky.’ The first time I got onstage and played was with this C&W band. One gig I remember was a sports dance at Eltham, which is near Sidcup, where the art school I went to was.