“Mick says he used to playact and tell everybody to fuck off—’Now I’m being myself, and everybody tells me to fuck off.’ He’s great, so natural and sweet when we’re alone, he’ll tell me something he’s going to tell Jo and ask me how it sounds, does it make sense, and I say, Sure, and I don’t know what he’s talking about. I mean, he’s asking me, I can’t believe it. But then one other person can come in and he’s completely different; you can’t communicate with him at all.”
On the monitor, under the lights, behind Mick and Keith, both of them in black shirts, the tinfoil was glamorous. “But Terry Reid is the greatest,” Kathy said. “He’s ten times better than Mick.”
The Stones had gathered around the drum kit, waiting to rehearse, nothing happening. Then the stage manager said, “Here we go, gentlemen,” and the band track for “Honky Tonk Women” started. Mick skipped to the microphone, turned and started to sing. The others pretended to be playing, Keith taking all the solos. The record ended, Mick stopped singing and said, “Thank you, Mr. Sullivan, yes, we’ll do another one, Mr. Sullivan,” shaking hands with Sullivan, who wasn’t there. But then, as if on cue, he was there; as they started taking the set apart and putting up another for the second run-through, Ed Sullivan appeared, a man resembling a fire hydrant, lighting a Winston, shaking the stage manager’s hand. In Ed Sullivan’s day there was hardly a comedian on television who didn’t imitate his strange inflections, his unpredictable grinding of consonants, his stiff, spastic movements. Going from person to person, shaking hands, he seemed to be propelled by a silent mechanism that soon sat him down in a—chairr, to watch the changing of the—tssett! The tinfoil was being replaced by large flame-shaped pieces of plywood, painted white. Mick, laughing, leapt in the air, trotted over to us, and said, “D’you see that set?”
Sullivan, rising from his chair, asked, “Is Mick here?”
Mick stepped to Sullivan’s side—one step—they shook hands and walked away together, Sullivan talking.
Michael and Lil were going to the Farmer’s Market for a bite to eat, and they asked me if I’d like to come along. I wondered about getting back in, but I was hungry, and we walked across the parking lot to the Market. There were many stalls where they sold all kinds of vegetables and flowers and prepared food of different nationalities. We ate delicious Mexican and kosher food and went back to TV-Land. At the desk a woman asked us if we were on a list, and we said we were with the Stones and had just been out for lunch, so she quite reasonably let us pass. We went down the hall the same way we’d come out—but the place was so big and there were so many great orange doors that we forgot which way to go. Two guards, one old and tall, the other younger and squat, were coming down the hall. “Where you going?” the short one asked.
“We were with the Rolling Stones and we’ve sort of lost them,” I said. “Just went out to lunch and lost our way back.”
Neither of the guards said anything, and I turned to the tall one to see if I could make contact with him. “Could you show us the way to soundstage 31?” I asked, and suddenly like in a dream he grabbed my arm, saying in a light, dry, intense old-man’s voice, “I’ll show you the way you’re going—you’re going right back out the way you came.”
I was frightened by this old lunatic who was tugging at my sleeve, trying to drag me away, and I started to pull away from him, all this happening in the underwater silence that seems at times to accompany violence. As I twisted my arm free, he started attacking me with his fists; weird, light blows like falling leaves, weightless as his voice, started raining down on my head. I was so embarrassed, humiliated, at being in this predicament, attacked by a mad helpless old man in a guard suit, that I threw my hands over my head and huddled against a wall. A puff of smoke would have toppled the guard, who stood flailing at me, his silly old hands flopping around my head and shoulders as Lil screamed in piercing tones, “Stop it! Stop it!”
Finally he stopped. “If you don’t believe us, come to the front desk,” Michael said to the other guard, who appeared a bit embarrassed himself.
I was trembling with the desire to throttle the old geek, but he was a weak old maniac and no great boot to destroy, and I knew if I did him in I probably wouldn’t get to write the next scene. So I said, “You’re an old man, you ought to know better than to behave like that.” And he, lost in his mad fantasy of defense, like the last raving Confederate soldier, said, “I seen you swing at me. Come on! Come ahead! See what you get! Come at me!”
The other guard cleared his throat and said, “Well, if you are who you say you are, soundstage 31 is through the second door yonder.”
“Well, we are,” Michael said sincerely.
“Come on, let’s get out of here,” I said.
We went through the door and slipped into our seats beside Kathy. Nearly all the seats in the audience, maybe three hundred, were filled now, mostly with kids. Wyman had come in from the doctor’s. He was smiling, he looked fine, wearing a red shirt, red suede pants, and a little brown suede vest of the sort he was partial to. Astrid sat down next to us. “He’s still pale and trembly,” she said. “The doctor gave him a vitamin shot, but he’s very shaky. He’ll talk to Stephen in the morning. That’ll help him. He was the same way when Stephen was in South Africa with his mother. Bill had fever, he was all trembly—people can’t understand him.”
Coming in to sit in the row behind us was Little Richard (Penniman), the Georgia Peach. Richard was in green velvet, ropes of pearls on his bosom, hair puff-coiffed, got him a do, honey, Sheaffer Thinline mustache, cocoa makeup—he called himself “The Beauty.” He was with two handsome black friends, a man and a lady. I said hello to Richard and told him that I was from Macon, where I did in fact graduate from high school. “Honey, you are jokin’! Did you know Otis Reddings?”
“Yes,” I said, “Just before he died, we—”
“I give him his start! I give Otis Reddings his start! I was his idol! I give—you know Jimi Hendrix? I give Jimi Hendrix his start! He started out playing guitar with me in my band! I give the Beatles their first tour! I give the Stones their first tour! In England! Mick digs me, he came to see me—Mick! Come here!”
Mick loped over, shook hands, “ ’Ello, Richard—”
“Why don’t you tell the man to have me on his show, honey? Tell him he’s had Liberace, now he can have the bronze Liber ace—”
“Ohhh, Richard,” Mick said.
“Rolling Stones insert, take one,” a voice called over a loudspeaker, and Mick said, “I gotta go.”
The lights changed and Ed Sullivan was barking at the camera: “You y’ngs’ers know, and of course your parents also, the Rolling Stones are the sensations of the of the of the—of the world, actually. Their last date with us was January sixteenth, 1967, with Pet Clark, Allan Sherman, and the Muppets. So let’s have a big hand for the Rolling Stones! ’S ’ear it!”
And the Stones mimed while Mick sang “Gimme Shelter” to a backing track. As the song ended, Sullivan walked into camera range and shook hands with Mick: “Wonderful to have you here, and what are you gonna sing now?” Mick gazed into the sky as if he’d spotted a blue-bird and said, “We’re gonna go put on our flimsies and sing ‘Love in Vain’ and ‘Honky Tonk Women.’ ”
The voice on the loudspeaker said, “Shelter—take two—stand by.” Mick stood by, fidgeting thumbs across fingertips.
In the audience there were a boy in a red and green leprechaun suit and a fake long white beard and a tall, tanned, big-bosomed, blond girl, naked except for a few scraps of buckskin. She was dancing and clapping as Mick started to sing again. Kathy saw me watching her and said, “Mick saw her before you came back in and said, ‘Go’s that cow?’ ”
On the monitor Keith grimaced, striking his guitar, ear-tooth shaking. “That Keith Richards is really a funky-lookin’ cat, ain’t he,” Richard said.
When the second take ended, the Stones went to change. Richard asked me if I worked for the Stones, and I told him I was writing
a book, travelling with them. He asked if my wife was with me, and I said, “No, she’s at home.”
“And you out here carryin’ on, misbehavin’—”
“No, I’m bein’ have,” I said.
“You should get the Stones to promote your book for you! They should carry it around with them wherever they go! Listen to me! They can help you with that! Ed Sullivants came all the way out here from New York just to tape the Stones! Mick didn’t want to go to New York, he and Keith wanted to stay out here and write music and rest, so Ed Sullivants had to come all the way out here!”
The Stones were back, wearing different clothes. Sullivan greeted them. “Mick, it’s great to have you here with us, and what are you going to sing?”
“Ah, we’re gonna sing ‘Love in Vain,’ ” Mick said.
“All right,” the loudspeaker voice said. “Let’s take it.”
A camera rolled in and Sullivan said the same thing. Mick started to repeat himself too, but it was silly answering the same question the same way, and Mick laughed.
“Cut,” the loudspeaker said.
“Ed Sullivants offered Mick fifty thousand dollars to be on this show!” Richard said. “Mick don’t care about the money, he just want to entertain the people!”
“Well, let’s try it—” Sullivan was saying, “I won’t ask you what you’re gonna sing now, we’ll just shake hands.”
“Okay,” Mick said, “we’ll just shake hands.”
“Mick don’t care,” Richard said. “He’ll tell Ed Sullivants, Take that fifty thousand and buy you some shoes!”
The cameras rolled again, and Sullivan asked, “What are you gonna sing now?” Audience, Stones, cameramen all laughed.
“He a old man,” Richard said, “and what he think of rock and roll it really like this”—gesturing thumbs down—“but he need the Rolling Stones for his ra-tings.”
Sullivan and Jagger at last succeeded in shaking hands, and the Stones started “Love in Vain,” Mick in an orange and black satin shirt with long trailing bat-sleeves and a wide black choker with dangling tiny gold coin medallions, glinting in the lights on the monitor. “That’s beautiful,” Richard said, “that choker.” He lifted his ropes of beads and said, “I wear my pearls every day, honey. I say, if you got ’em, wear ’em.”
“Love in Vain” ended, and Richard had to leave. He blessed us all and told me he hoped I sold “one billion.” He was far too pretty to have gone on washing dishes at the bus station in Macon.
Before “Honky Tonk Women” started, Sam came up to Kathy and told her that the Stones wanted some chicks. “Just pick out some nice ones and ask if they’d like to meet the Stones, you know—”
“Okay,” Kathy said. The song started, and there was a very pretty young girl, dressed in brown shirt and pants, very excited, standing up applauding. “That’s the sort of girl Mick likes,” Kathy said. “He really digs those young innocent-looking ones—but I don’t think I can handle Sam’s pimping duties for him.”
“Honky Tonk Women” ended and the taping session was over. Kathy told Sam she thought he’d better handle it. In a moment he was leading away, back to the dressing rooms, the big blond in buckskin.
Michael, Lil, and I went out, the pretty little girl in the brown outfit ahead of us, smiling, lucky to be left with her dreams, into the purple dusk. Michael was going to his home in Elk, California, for the layoff between now and Detroit on November 24, six days away. We drove to Lil’s apartment, on a side street off Sunset, to pick up Michael’s green canvas duffel bag. He carried it across the sidewalk to the car, Lil watching him—not sorry, I thought, to see him go. I told her I’d call her later so she could help me mail my contract (since she’s a local girl and knows the post offices) and took Michael to the airport in the same green Dodge Charger I’d driven before we left town.
On the freeway Michael was talking about women and how much he loved them and how sad it was for him and his wife to break up, but she was a writer and very jealous of his talent and so it didn’t work out. He said he loved his little girl, he loved all women. “This girl Lil, she’s a great girl,” he said, “don’t you think so?”
“Yeah, she’s fine,” I said. “I try not to get involved with people myself, because it’s all too fucking sad, you’ll get your heart broken enough times without going around looking for trouble.”
“I’ve really been having a great time with women on this tour,” Michael said. “I’m in love with them all, I guess I love all women.”
Lots of luck, I thought. I let him out at the airport. It was night now and I switched the lights on and headed back into the city. Just off the freeway a billboard displayed a big book, a big can of paint, and the message, “Harold Robbins paints with words in The Inheritors—The best word in paints: Sinclair.”
The car was almost out of gas, so I stopped at a service station. The attendant was Indian, with blue-black raven hair, a redneck haircut, no feathers, greasy green coveralls. I wondered what tribe he was from but couldn’t bring myself to ask, Who were your people, once-proud Red Man?
I paid for the gas, drove to the Hyatt House and called Lil. She told me to come over. I took the contract down to the desk and the night manager let me Xerox it on the hotel’s machine. Soon I was at Lil’s door. She opened it and said, “Oh! I thought you were the guy next door, he’s got some records the postman left with him because I wasn’t home.” I came in feeling as if I were the wrong person. The apartment was decorated to the hilt, like a set for Marlene Dietrich in a very lush Von Sternberg movie. The front room was furnished with ostrich plumes, fans, cushions, black gauze curtains. Lil was highly perfumed and wearing a blouse that almost contained her bosom. She played Frank Sinatra records and we talked about singers—Sylvia Syms, Anita O’Day—and smoked excellent hashish. I didn’t know exactly what Lil did, except that she had designed covers for record albums. She showed me collages she had made with photographs of the Stones’ faces and of parrots, dancing girls, various images that she seemed to want me to “understand” in all their symbolic complexity.
The incense kept burning, and we kept smoking, and Lil played peculiar music and finally announced that she was famished. I was too, what with the length of the day, Ed Sullivan, apoplectic guards, and all that, so I said, “Let me sign my contract and mail it and we’ll go eat.” I was so stoned that moving was torturous, and the back of my neck felt as if it were dissolving in hot water. I took the folded contract out in its sky-blue wrapper and once again read every word, trying to believe that after all the years since I was fifteen and, at Waycross High School, decided that I was going to be a writer, and if I failed, I would die trying—after all the time when I couldn’t make a living at it and Christopher and I had clung to straws of straight jobs and journalism—here was the contract, its thighs open before me, and all I had to do was sign it (or so, even if I didn’t really believe it, I devoutly hoped) and I would be paid real money, the kind you can live on. I couldn’t sign my name at first and wrote it several times on a sheet of notebook paper, then signed the contract and put it in an envelope addressed to my agent. I was also sending a copy home. “Where’s the post office?” I asked.
“There’s a box on the corner,” Lil said, which wasn’t what I’d had in mind for such a grand document, but I had some stamps and decided to risk it. Lil asked what sort of eating place I wanted to go to and I told her someplace where they left you alone. I know just the place, she said, and she did. On the plane to Oakland, in the L.A. Times’ West magazine, I had read a story about it: Musso and Frank’s Grill, a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard favored by writers including Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, and William Faulkner, where in the 1920s Charlie Chaplin, too busy to leave the movie set, would send his Rolls every day to pick up his lunch. Hollywood Boulevard, in those days, “was . . . strangely appealing . . . with an avocado grove toward Sunset, a stream running down Franklin, a eucalyptus tree in the parking lot and a manager at a marble-fronted Owl Drug S
tore on Highland, who wore a morning coat with a carnation in the buttonhole. . . .”
In 1969, the place was probably very much as it was when Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West, and S. J. Perelman ate there. You got a table with clean white linen and it was understood that you had come in because you were hungry and thirsty. No music, only warm friendly ghosts. The waiter brought us drinks (tiny needles of ice in my gimlet) and delicate whitefish and roast spring lamb and sand dabs and cognac and coffee. As we ate Lil told me a story which, if I weren’t hearing it in such a pleasant and comfortable place, would cause me to tremble. It concerned the time that Lil Leonards was in Los Angeles, her hometown, reading the best-selling war novel by Moses Ringer, a book called Flying Backwards. It seemed to her a good and funny book, and it seemed the man who wrote it must be a fine fellow indeed, and just the sort one would like to meet. “So I wrote him a letter,” Lil said, “telling him that I was sitting at a bus stop on Sunset Strip, wearing a wet bathing suit, reading his book, and—”
“Were you?” I asked, naive child.
“Of course not,” she said. “I told him a lot of things and he answered my letter and we got to know each other and he flew me to New York.” She told me the details of how she had put him in a position where he’d had no choice. I was terrified by the story, but we finished the meal. Lil told the waiter how good it was and he asked her, “Have you ever been here before? I know you have,” he said, meaning me.
“I’ve never been here before,” I said.
“I thought you were a regular,” he said. That cheered me up. We went back to Lil’s, where the night turned mauve. We smoked hash until I was once again swimming in a sea of warm molasses. Lil asked me what I thought of the Stones. I said that they were a new band in a way since Brian died.
“Yes,” she said, “now they know that they will die—”
Lil brought out some unpublished poetry by Jim Morrison and began to read it aloud. Since I just came over to mail a letter, I thanked her and left. It was after midnight, but when I reached the Hyatt House I drove past, deciding to check on the Oriole house to see what was happening.
True Adventures of the Rolling Stones Page 28