True Adventures of the Rolling Stones

by Stanley Booth

  Keith testified that he had driven down from London with Mick and Marianne for a weekend party attended by Michael Cooper, Christopher Gibbs, Robert Fraser, and Fraser’s Moroccan servant, Mohamed. (Fraser, in possession of heroin during the raid, had been found guilty and jailed along with Mick.) George Harrison of the Beatles and his wife Patti came late and left before the police arrived. Two other guests, not friends of Mick or Keith, also came—David Schneidermann, a Canadian familiarly known as “Acid-King David,” and a person described in The Times as “an exotic” from Chelsea, customarily seen in the King’s Road in red silk trousers and shirt, bells around his neck, and flowers behind his ears. His only known occupation at the time of the party was “forever blowing bubbles through one of those wire wands.” The group drove down more or less in convoy to Redlands, arriving there late Saturday night or early Sunday morning. The party finally broke up about five o’clock in the morning. The four bedrooms upstairs in the house were occupied, so Keith slept in a chair down-stairs.

  About eleven o’clock Keith awoke to find Schneidermann already up and Mohamed in the kitchen. Keith had a cup of tea and went into the garden for an hour or so. When he went back into the house he heard people discussing a trip to the beach. All but two guests, neither of them Schneidermann, went to the beach and were there between twenty minutes and half an hour. Keith walked the mile and a half back to the house; most of the others went by car, including Schneidermann, who had a minivan. Sometime during the morning the Harrisons left.

  In the afternoon Mohamed drove the others in a minibus down to the house of Edward James, the father of English surrealist art, at West-dean, on the Downs, a house reputed to contain a sofa shaped like Mae West’s lips. But they were unable to get in and returned to Keith’s about five-thirty. Keith went upstairs, had a bath, changed his shirt and got back downstairs between six-fifteen and six-thirty. Mohamed was preparing a Moroccan meal. By seven-thirty the meal was finished and the guests had collected in the living room. The television was turned to a film called Pete Kelly’s Blues, but the sound was off and records were playing. Incense was burning.

  “It just so happened,” Keith said a number of years later, “we all took acid and were in a completely freaked-out state when they arrived. They weren’t ready for that. There’s a big knock at the door. Eight o’clock. Everybody is just sort of gliding down slowly from the whole day of sort of freaking about. Everyone has managed to find their way back to the house. Strobe lights are flickering. Marianne Faithfull has just decided that she wanted a bath and has wrapped herself up in a rug and is watching the box.

  “ ‘Bang, bang, bang,’ this big knock at the door and I go to answer it. ‘Oh, look, there’s lots of little ladies and gentlemen outside. . . .’

  “We were just gliding off from a twelve-hour trip. You know how that freaks people out when they walk in on you. The vibes are so funny for them. I told one of the women with them they brought to search the ladies, ‘Would you mind stepping off that Moroccan cushion. Because you’re ruining the tapestries. . . .’ We were playin’ it like that. They tried to get us to turn the record player off and we said, ‘No. We won’t turn it off but we’ll turn it down.’ As they went, as they started going out the door, somebody put on ‘Rainy Day Women’ really loud: ‘Everybody must get stoned.’ And that was it.”

  The police did not know about the acid, so it wasn’t mentioned at the trial. But the immoral atmosphere, the sweet smell of incense, the naked girl. . . . “Would you agree,” Mr. Morris asked Keith, “in the ordinary course of events, you would expect a young woman to be embarrassed if she had nothing on but a rug in the presence of eight men, two of whom were hangers-on and the third a Moroccan servant?”

  Keith: “Not at all.”

  Mr. Morris, regarding Keith as if he were—in the words of that horror writer Poe—“a loathsome—a repulsive mass of putridity”: “You regard that, do you, as quite normal?”

  “Man, we’re not old men,” Keith said. “We don’t have these petty morals.” All the papers quoted that line, and the jurors, the justices and the judge would all remember that line.

  Mr. Havers made the error of bringing the rug to court. It was about eight feet long and five feet wide, orange on one side, with a fur back. Havers surely intended to show the jury that the rug was capacious, enough material there for three fur-and-orange dresses—but Woman Detective Constable Rosemary Slade said that she was the third officer through the door when the search party entered the house. She looked left and saw on the sofa a young woman in the nude. When she returned to the living room after searching the upstairs, the young woman was still there, but she was then wearing a rug around her shoulders.

  Sergeant John Challen testified that he was in an upstairs bedroom and had just found on a small bedside table a pudding basin containing ash and cigaret ends when he saw the young woman come upstairs with a policewoman. She let the rug drop. Challen: “She had her back to me. She was naked. I heard a man in the bedroom, using the telephone, laugh.”

  Woman Detective Constable E. D. Fuller testified that she went upstairs with Marianne. “I followed her upstairs, and at the top of the stairs there was a uniformed police officer, and in a bedroom there was a man using the telephone. She allowed the rug to drop and said, ‘Look, they want to search me.’ There was laughter. The clothing in the room appeared to be hers. I searched her as far as necessary and we returned downstairs. She was still wearing only the rug. Her behavior generally was that she seemed unconcerned about what was going on around her.”

  Mr. Havers deplored the testimony regarding the girl who was “not on trial or able to make a defense.” He said, “I am not going to allow this girl into the witness box. I am not going to tear that blanket of anonymity aside and let the world laugh or scorn as they will.” Everybody who cared knew who the girl was anyway, especially after the Mars Bar rumor got around. When the police arrived, so the story went, Mick had been eating a candy bar that Marianne was holding without the use of her limbs—how do these things get started?

  On the last day of the trial, Keith was the only witness. He accused the News of the World (they’d taken credit for tipping off the police after an anonymous caller told them about Keith’s “drug party”) of having hired Schneidermann, who Keith said planted drugs in his house to ruin Mick’s libel suit against the paper. (Later Keith decided he’d been turned in by someone who was working for him at the time, but you seldom know for sure.) Keith said that no one to his knowledge was smoking cannabis and that Marianne had been preparing for a bath and behaved in a perfectly normal and decorous fashion.

  In his final instructions to the jury, Judge Block told them to put out of their minds any prejudice they might feel about the way Richards dressed or about his observation on “petty morals” and to ignore everything they had read in the newspapers about two of the house party admitting to or being convicted of possession of drugs. He asked the jury also to disregard the evidence as to the lady who was alleged by the police to be in some condition of undress and not to let that prejudice their minds in any way.

  After being out for an hour and five minutes the jury came back and pronounced Keith guilty. Mick and Robert Fraser, who had been taken between court and prison in handcuffs, were brought up to join Keith in the dock for sentence.

  The judge gave Keith one year’s imprisonment and ordered him to pay £500 toward prosecution costs. Fraser was sentenced to six months in jail and £200 costs. “I sentence you to three months and one hundred pounds costs,” the judge said to Mick, who burst into tears. There were yelps of pain from the gallery, crowded with teenagers.

  Mick was taken off to Brixton Prison, Keith and Fraser to Worm-wood Scrubs. Of his experience there Keith said, “Now Wormwood Scrubs is a hundred and fifty years old, man. I wouldn’t even want to play there, much less live there. They take me inside. They don’t give you a knife and fork, they give you a spoon with very blunt edges so you can’t do yourself in. They do
n’t give you a belt, in case you hang yourself. It’s that bad in there.

  “They give you a little piece of paper and a pencil. Both Robert and I, the first thing we did is sit down and write. ‘Dear Mum, don’t worry, I’m in here and someone’s workin’ to get me out, da-da-da.’ Then you’re given your cell. And they start knockin’ on the bars at six in the morning to wake you up. All the other prisoners started droppin’ bits of tobacco through for me, ’cause in any jail tobacco is the currency. Some of them were really great. Some of them were in for life. Shovin’ papers under the floor to roll it up with. The first thing you do automatically when you wake up is drag the chair to the window and look up to see what you can see out of the window. It’s an automatic reaction. That one little square of sky, tryin’ to reach it. It’s amazing. I was going to have to make these little Christmas trees that go on cakes. And sewing up mailbags. Then there’s the hour walk when you have to keep moving, round in a courtyard. Cats comin’ up behind me, it’s amazing, they can talk without moving their mouths, ‘Want some hash? Want some acid?’ Take acid? In here?

  “Most of the prisoners were really great. ‘What you doin’ in here? Bastards. They just wanted to get you. ‘They filled me in. They been waitin’ for you in here for ages,’ they said. So I said, ‘I ain’t gonna be in here very long, baby, don’t worry about that.’

  “And that afternoon, they had the radio playing, this fucking Stones record comes on. And the whole prison started, ‘Rayyy!’ Goin’ like mad. Bangin’ on the bars. They knew I was in and they wanted to let me know.

  “They took all the new prisoners to have their photographs taken sitting on a swivel stool, looked like an execution chamber. Really hard. Face and profile. Those are the sort of things they’ll do automatically if they pick you up in America, you get fingerdabs and photographs. In England, it’s a much heavier scene. You don’t get photographs and fingerprinted until you’ve been convicted.

  “Then they take you down to the padre and the chapel and the library, you’re allowed one book and they show you where you’re going to work and that’s it. That afternoon, I’m lyin’ in my cell, wondering what the fuck was going on and suddenly someone yelled, ‘You’re out, man, you’re out. It’s just been on the news.’ So I started kickin’ the shit out of the door, I said, ‘You let me out, you bastards, I got bail.’ ”

  Mick was released from prison first, and The Times was watching: “Mr. Jagger smiled and waved from his chauffeur-driven Bentley as he left Brixton Prison yesterday at 4:20 P.M. As the car with darkened windows drove along Jebb Avenue, which leads from the jail, and into Brixton Road, Mr. Jagger sat in the back seat by himself, wearing a beige sports coat and a yellow shirt. He smiled at photographers and a small group of girls, most of them in school uniform, who were waiting to see him leave.

  “The car then drove to West London to pick up Mr. Richards at Wormwood Scrubs gaol, in Shepherd’s Bush. When it arrived at 5:10 P.M. Mr. Jagger looked pale. After spending five minutes in the gaol the car came out again with Mr. Jagger and Mr. Richards in it. It stopped for half a minute as photographers thronged around. Mr. Richards, wearing a dark blue Regency-style suit, gave photographers a grin. The car drove off towards London.” Their immediate destination was a meeting with their lawyers in King’s Bench Walk, then on to the Feathers, a Fleet Street pub where they talked to reporters. They were freed on bail amounting to £7000 apiece.

  Mick, wearing a button that said MICK IS SEX, drank an iced vodka and lime and said, “There’s not much difference between a cell and a hotel room in Minnesota. And I do my best thinking in places without distractions.” Marianne later said that when she and Michael Cooper visited Mick on his first night in Lewes Prison, he was almost in tears; but there were no reporters in prison. Mick said that while in jail he had written some poetry “connected a little with the circumstances” and that he might write a song about it. “We don’t bear a grudge against anyone for what has happened,” he said. “We just think the sentences were rather harsh.”

  Keith said of being a criminal: “It’s just like bein’ Jimmy Cagney.”

  Handcuffs—“Jagger links”—went on sale in short but trendy Carnaby Street.

  The case was the occasion for much comment in the press. The court action was approved by some newspapers and periodicals and dis­approved by others, including the New Law Journal and The Times, whose editor, William Rees-Mogg, with his editorial “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?” risked contempt charges for commenting on the case while it was under appeal. After an editorial in the Sunday Mirror asking why Mick and Keith’s appeals were being put off, as they were, till October, before which time they could not travel out of the country, the Lord Chief Justice stepped in and the appeals were scheduled to be heard on July 31.

  On the day the appeals date was changed, Brian was observed by devoted fans leaving his Courtfield Road flat with Suki Poitier, who had been the girlfriend of Brian’s friend Tara Browne, the young Guinness heir who was killed the year before in an automobile accident. Suki looked like Anita (less hot in the eye and sharp in the tooth) and so looked very much like Brian, who was leaving the flat on his way to the Priory, a psychiatric hospital in Roehampton. Not even at such a posh zoo as the Priory were they prepared for a patient who arrived with chauffeur, entourage, and concubine, demanding (unsuccessfully) a double room. Brian had told his doctor, “I need treatment. I’m ill. I can’t live any longer if life goes on like this.”

  One of the many things bothering Brian was that the raid on Keith’s house and all its pursuant miseries—as well as Brian’s own drug charges, on which he would stand trial in October—had come about because he had been babbling in Blaise’s. A News of the World spy in the hip King’s Road boîte observed Brian taking pills and showing some girls a chunk of hashish, inviting them to his flat for a smoke, talking about taking LSD. For some reason the resulting story identified Brian as Mick.

  Brian was at the Priory twenty days. The day he left, one week before Mick and Keith were to appeal their sentences, a full-page advertisement appeared in The Times. It contained a petition of five suggestions to the Home Secretary, of which the key proposal was the last: “All persons now imprisoned for possession of cannabis or for allowing cannabis to be smoked on private premises should have their sentences commuted.” Sixty-four people—including Ph.D.s, Nobel Prize winners, the Beatles (flashing their MBE’s), and Graham Greene—signed it.

  On July 31, Keith and Mick’s appeals were considered by the Lord Chief Justice’s court. Keith had the chicken pox and waited in another room where he wouldn’t contaminate the Law. After two hours, with Havers and Morris arguing for and against the appeals, the court adjourned for five minutes and returned to quash Keith’s conviction for lack of evidence. Since Mick had been clearly in possession of drugs without a prescription, his appeal against conviction was dismissed, but his appeal against sentence was successful, and the court granted him a conditional discharge, meaning that if he kept out of trouble with the law for the next twelve months, what had happened would not count as a conviction. If he committed another offense during that time, he would be sentenced for both offenses.

  The experience of going to court and to jail had not been pleasant for Keith, but for Mick, who was not so much as Keith a natural outlaw, it was more difficult emotionally and more expensive. He had paid out several thousand pounds, an attempt to bribe police into dropping charges that failed to reach the right people. “Everybody has been burned before,” the Byrds, at one time Gram Parson’s group, had sung. “Everybody knows the score.”

  After the appeals and a hot, crowded press conference at Granada Television in Golden Square, Mick was flown by helicopter to a country house in Essex. Waiting in the garden for a televised interview with Mick were William Rees-Mogg, the editor of The Times; Father Corbishley, the Jesuit; Lord Stow Hill; and John Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich. Their general desire was for Mick to admit that his case proved the healthy state
of English justice, and the heavily tranquilized Mick, mush-mouthed, would not agree, but he was unable to mention anything specific to which he could object except persecution of homosexuals and capital punishment, both of which had already been legally brought to his position. The meeting’s only conclusive note was Mick’s: “I am very happy today.”

  Whatever the legal significance of the case, it came down in many people’s minds to a battle between opposing ways of life. On August 14 the Daily Mail reported that Mick and Marianne had been publicly snubbed twice in three days, at a party at Kilkenny Castle and by taxi drivers at Heathrow Airport, who refused to carry them. “My kids have to ride in this cab,” one driver said. The Stones were snubbed also by the BBC, which refused to show on one of its music programs a film the Stones had made to introduce their new single, “We Love You.” Conceived by Mick in his cell, the record began with the actual sound of a prison guard’s footsteps and the slamming of a cell door. It was going to prove not very commercial in England, but in the United States it would go to number one faster than any of the Stones’ previous records. The film parodied the trial of Oscar Wilde, with Mick as Wilde, wearing a green carnation; Keith as the Judge with a wig made of pound notes; and Wilde’s lover “Bosie” played by Marianne Faithfull in a miniwig.

  One or two of the Beatles appeared as background singers on “We Love You.” Keith and Mick had sung backing vocals and Brian had played tenor saxophone on the Beatles’ recent single, “All You Need Is Love.” Back in April, while the Stones were floundering in a sea of heartbreaking and lawbreaking (even Bill Wyman had been in the news; Diane, his wife, had left him in February, telling the press, “I’m not prepared to share him with thousands of strange women”), the Beatles released a lavish album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, on the cover of which they appeared, dressed as Sgt. P.’s L.H.C.B. in colorful satin uniforms, among a crowd that included Mae West, Karl Marx, Sonny Liston, William Burroughs, and a doll wearing a pullover knitted to read “WMPS Good Guys Welcome the Rolling Stones,” around a grave that represented and, as it turned out, did signify the death of the Beatles. “The era of playing on each other’s records” may have been, as Mick would say, a joke, but at the time the Beatles might have been, as John Lennon had recently said, more popular than Jesus. Lennon’s statements resulted in much outrage, an extreme example of which was the burning of Beatles records sponsored by radio station WAYX in Waycross, Georgia, where Gram and I used to live. In a public apology, Lennon said he meant that the Beatles were “having more influence on kids and things than anything else, including Jesus.” They were certainly an enormous influence; everywhere you began to see boys with long hair, flashing the V-sign for some undefined victory that would come someplace besides Vietnam.