Keith: “They told me that ’Street Fighting Man’ was subversive. ’Of course it’s subversive,’ we said. It’s stupid to think you can start a violent revolution with a record. I wish you could.”
Either you’re dead, or you move along.
Mick Jagger
* * *
A Different Persona Every Time
The Rolling Stones were at loose ends in the early fall of 1968. Their new album was delayed, and they were unable to tour because of Brian Jones’s drug problems. The Jeff Beck Group was London’s hottest band. Ex-Yardbirds guitarist Beck, brilliant but moody, had Rod Stewart on vocals and young Ron Wood on bass. They were about to invade America to great acclaim, paving the way for Led Zeppelin later in the year.
Donald Cammell had been shooting the first half of his film, now called Performance, in London since mid-July. Mick Jagger was about to disappear into his movie role as the retired rock star Turner for the month of September. Anita had landed the role of his consort, the script called for sex scenes, Cammell was a student of the polymorphous perverse, and Keith was feeling weird about it.
The Stones’ organization in this critical period was headed by Jo Bergman, who had been brought to the U.K. by Brian Epstein and then switched to working for Marianne Faithfull. Mick Jagger was unhappy with Allen Klein’s control and decided to set up an independent management operation in late 1967. Marianne gave Jo to the Stones.
According to Peter Swales, a young promo man who worked with the band at the time, “Jo Bergman ran the office with a lot of strength. She had serious entrée and ability to fix things, like a friend in the consular section of the American Embassy who could facilitate Keith’s visa problems. Jo was abrasive, manipulative, devious, and there was always some question among the staff about her loyalty because she was close to Allen Klein. But Jo was the boss because she controlled the lines of communication, especially with Mick, who made himself available by phone twice a day. Ian Stewart ran the Stones’ rehearsal studio and storage space in a basement in Bermondsea, South London. I loved seeing Stu because he was so honest about things. You hear that he wasn’t embittered about the Stones, but I beg to differ. He always spoke about them sarcastically, didn’t take their music seriously, regarded Mick as a bit of a ponce. Stu loathed Brian, yet always claimed he was the greatest guitarist in England—at least in his prime.
“Before I was formally hired, they sent me to Cheyne Walk to talk to Mick. I was shown upstairs to the lounge, and there was Mick, dancing in front of a full-length mirror with music blasting. I was amazed, and unnerved too. The room was done in Moroccan textiles, with a Buddhist altar overlooking the river. We sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the fire and Mick handed me a joint, which I reluctantly smoked with him despite these lurking feelings of intimidation. Mick was full of unrealistic marketing schemes in the wake of their troubles with Decca. He wanted to know if I thought Beggar’s Banquet could be distributed from the backs of lorries, and I had to say no, I didn’t think that was feasible.
“By the time I came along, Brian Jones was just a wreck. I mean, I was shocked. He was on the borderline of obesity, in his body and his face, although his hair hid that a bit. He perspired all the time and smelled of brandy. He seemed like both a sweet, gentle man who spoke beautiful, pristine English and an utterly pathetic creature who was seeing a psychiatrist for severe paranoia. My experience, contrary to what else one hears, was that Mick Jagger bent over backwards to try to accommodate Brian. They didn’t really want to dump him—that wasn’t on their agenda at all. It was just that he’d become completely unreliable. He was a passenger in the band, but he couldn’t even remember to get on the bus.
“We never saw much of Keith, who hardly ever came to the office. Mick was always in and out, a different persona every time. He’d show up in a proper brown pinstriped suit for business meetings with Sandy Lieberson, who was producing Performance. Sometimes he came in jeans, looking disheveled, stealing my Rothmans and smoking them like a woman, very camp. He was so totally secure in his masculinity that he could really camp it up with the best of them.”
* * *
The Only Performance That Makes It
Mick and Anita began working on Performance early in September 1968. Filming continued for seven weeks, following the improvised mind fuck of the second half of Donald Cammell’s script—an occult stew of hallucinogenic sexual confusion. The collateral damage from the filming had fatal consequences for the Stones, their women, and almost everyone connected to the movie. Performance would be delayed for years, was then heavily censored, would get bad reviews when finally released.
But thirty years later, Performance would be called the best film ever made in England. Some believe that when advanced technology renders Rolling Stones CDs as obsolete as Edison cylinders, say in a hundred years, Performance will stand as the glittering Stones-related document of London in the late 1960s.
Cammell wrote Performance to test the affinities between the sadistic violence of London’s criminal gangs (the Krays, the Richardsons) and the sadomasochism Cammell saw in Brian Jones and others in the London pop world. The Chelsea Set, of which Cammell was a member, mingled art dealers, actors, musicians, aristocrats, and villains, providing the back-story of the film.
Performance tells the story of Chas, a psychopathic enforcer for Harry Flowers, a homosexual mobster loosely patterned on Ron Kray, half of the notorious Kray twins who had ruled London gangland. The first half of the film, lurid with homoerotic innuendo and tortuous imagery from Francis Bacon’s paintings of naked male torsos, places Chas in his milieu of extortion, beatings, and revenge. (Production of Performance happened only because both Krays were in prison for murder.)
When Chas kills a former friend, he’s marked for death by his own gang and forced underground. Through a ruse, he becomes a lodger in the Notting Hill house of Turner, a retired rock star, and his weird girlfriends. Reclusive Turner, out of boredom, decides to mess with Chas: turn him on, break up his macho pose, and see what’s underneath. He manipulates Chas with his seductive world of smoke and mirrors, sex and drugs, music and the occult.
Performance is an extended tribute to the avant-garde masters of the sixties. Jorge Luis Borges, William Burroughs, Georges Bataille, and James Brown are constantly referenced. The script—an explicit homage to Borges—calls for hundreds of jump cuts and flashbacks derived from the cutup method derived by Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Burroughs’s obsession with the legendary dope-crazed Assassins of Hassan Sabbah is a leitmotif of the film. Satan is openly evoked as Jagger/Turner sings Robert Johnson’s “Come On in My Kitchen.”
Performance is about the madness that occurs when personal boundaries dissolve and people merge into each other. As they trip on magic mushrooms, the chi of the two men transmigrates. Cammell shows a mystical confluence as rock star/hashishin and gangster/assassin interfuse. As Chas’s gang closes in on him, he shoots Turner as the ultimate madness. The camera follows the trajectory of the bullet as it burrows through Turner’s brain, evoking a flash image of Borges, whose stories celebrated outlaws, their knives and killings. Chas is led to his fate in a white Rolls-Royce, but it’s Turner’s face that looks out the car window as it drives off.
Performance had been written the year before in St. Tropez by Cammell, with the help of Deborah Dixon. Anita remembers working on her dialogue while they were at the beach, loose pages blowing away and landing in the water. As the son of Aleister Crowley’s biographer, Cammell was interested in magic, not politics, but his screenplay makes many subtle points about the class system. In London, Cammell recruited David Litvinoff to help with the cockney gang-speak that gives the script its immediacy. Litvinoff was the link between the Chelsea Set and the (gay) underworld, and he used his own beatings at the hands of the Kray gang as material for the script.
Cammell had worked on a couple of mid-sixties movies but was frustrated at the utter failure of the film world to capture the visceral excitement of the ti
mes or anything even remotely hip. He’d been talking to Mick about doing a film for two years, and in the end it didn’t take much convincing. Cammell’s magnetic personality encompassed interests in literature, cinema, art, metaphysics, philosophy. “If he said, ’Come with me to hell,’ ” one friend said of Cammell, “you’d say, ’Okay—how bad can it be?’ ” When Mick signed on to play Turner (for $100,000 and 7H percent of the net), Cammell and Sandy Lieberson, acting as producer, persuaded the new management of Warner Bros.–Seven Arts to finance the project. They were given a large budget and an extraordinary amount of freedom to create what the studio hoped would be a mystery film about a pop star played by Mick Jagger. It was an extraordinary leap of faith by Warners. Donald Cammell had never directed a film, Sandy Lieberson had never produced a movie, and Mick Jagger had never starred in one, yet the studio agreed to an unsupervised shoot. Performance was made by a group of amateurs with no one looking over their shoulders, probably the main reason for its authenticity and greatness.
The first half of the film had been shot around London that summer after Cammell brought in cinematographer Nicholas Roeg to codirect. While Cammell rehearsed the actors and dictated the action, Roeg blocked the cameras and actually shot the film. James Fox, who played Chas, was given an education in thuggery at the Thomas a Becket pub in South London, headquarters of the British boxing world. The old Harrow boy, who normally played posh types, emerged as one of the chaps, with a body taut as cable. His character was modeled on an East End tough named Jimmy Evans. Real Chelsea villains like John Bindon—famous for biting a man’s ear off in a fight—were recruited to play members of Harry Flowers’s gang.
Cammell and Roeg shot in sequence, and the first half was finished by mid-August 1968. The exterior shots of Turner’s house were filmed in Powis Square, Notting Hill Gate. The interiors, decorated by Christopher Gibbs with his Delacroix mélange of antiques and orientalia, were shot in an elegant house in Lowndes Square, Knightsbridge, that had previously housed a crooked gambling club. The doors and windows were sealed shut for the production, and Cammell conjured a hermetic, occult environment for his actors to play their fateful parts.
Mick and Cammell had talked endlessly about the characters in the film, especially Turner. “Turner was an amalgam,” Mick said, “with more than a bit of Brian Jones.” Turner (played by Mick with his hair dyed almost black) whispered in Brian’s semiprecious lisp and moved through the darkened rooms of his house with Brian’s devious detachment. His “secretary,” Pherber, was completely patterned on Anita Pallenberg, who won the role of herself after the American stars Warner’s wanted became unavailable. Mia Farrow, their first choice, broke her ankle as she was about to come to London. Tuesday Weld actually arrived in London, but her shoulder was accidentally broken by Deborah Dixon during some New Age “therapy” for Weld’s chronic backache.
Anita got the part. Pregnant when she signed the contract for Performance, she had an abortion a few days later and went on with the film.
The role of Lucy, the young girl in Turner’s ménage à trois, was played by Michelle Breton, a boyish, twenty-year-old waif who Cammell and Dixon had met in St. Tropez and taken into their ménage, Cammell being big on threesomes. Breton was the free-spirited paradigm of the hippie kid that Cammell needed to balance his two jaded rock stars.
Where the first half of Performance closely follows Cammell’s script, the second half was mostly improvised on the set, depending on how the players interacted. It was pure Theater of Cruelty, Antonin Artaud made flesh in the film’s most famous line, spoken by Turner to mind-blown, disoriented Chas:
“The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.”
Now Cammell threw out the script the studio had financed and approved. Dialogue was made up on the spot. Anita wrote most of her own lines. From the beginning, Mick and Anita relentlessly teased James Fox, trying to break him with psychic jujitsu, the same way Turner tries to break Chas.
Anita thought Fox a total square and was openly contemptuous of him. She’d laugh in his face and mock him without mercy. Mick and Marianne had a social friendship with Fox and his girlfriend, Andee Cohen, that involved lots of flirting and sexual tension. Fox had been warned by his father, a prominent talent agent, that the film’s advocacy of drugs and bisexuality would hurt his career; his girlfriend was so worried she broke up with him. “Mick’s a ruthless tease,” Cammell said later, “and he worked on Jimmy Fox for three days until he had a crack-up.” Spanish Tony found Mick and Fox smoking dusty DMT in the greenroom, to give some extra flash to the drug scenes they were about to do. Halfway through the shoot, Anita slipped some acid into Fox’s coffee without telling him, which sent Fox off the deep end. “I was a real brat,” she said.
Things got really complicated when Cammell started to shoot the sex scenes. The bathtub scene alone took two days to film on a closed set. Anita had already seduced Mick three days into filming, according to Tony Sanchez, after secretly wanting him for years. At Cammell’s urging, Mick and Anita made love in the set’s big bed while he called the action and Roeg shot them with a 16mm Bolex. After the camera stopped rolling, they kept going, kept at it in the greenroom while the crew waited in disbelief. Word got around. Keith heard it from Robert Fraser and was freaked out. He and Anita were living in Fraser’s Mount Street flat, rented to Anita for an enormous sum paid by the production. But Fraser had neglected to move out, and he and smoldering Keith were both there when Anita got home from the day’s work. Keith, working on the songs for Let It Bleed, hated the film that had thrown his woman into bed with his best friend. He ignored Cammell’s request to write some music for the film, refused to visit the set, realizing that a confrontation with Mick would harm the Stones. Instead, Keith waited for Anita in his Bentley, parked in front of the house, and worked on the melody to “You Got the Silver.” Anita Pallenberg was a woman with rules of her own, but this was an almost public sexual humiliation. Keith sunk into a depression that he began to treat with heroin and cocaine speedballs, which quickly became his favorite drug for writing songs.
When the horrified studio executives saw the rushes of Cammell’s explicit sex scenes, especially the soft porn threesome sequences of Turner, Pherber, and Lucy, they shut down the film. Sandy Lieberson had to beg them to resume production. Then the lab processing the 16mm footage complained that it contravened England’s obscenity laws and insisted they were required by law to destroy the film. Cammell and Lieberson managed to get the negative back, but had to watch the lab’s director censor the print with a hammer and chisel.
Later, unknown to his stars, Donald Cammell edited his footage of Mick and Anita into a thirty-minute blue movie and submitted it to a porno festival in Amsterdam, where it won the Golden Schwantz.
The pressure only built as the production continued through October. “Memo from Turner,” the Jagger/Richards song that limned the obsessions of Performance, providing the artistic high mark of the film (in what could be considered the first modern music video), was unfinished. Keith wouldn’t work on it, and Mick’s demo lyrics about licking policemen’s balls had to be rewritten. Donald Cammell was the only man in England who could pressure Mick Jagger, getting up his nose to finish the lyrics and record a new arrangement so they could finish the film.
Anita: “Donald could reduce Mick to tears over not coming up with the right piece of music, or the feeling that he wanted for a scene—and then to tears of joy when he finally hit it. Mick and I would be terrified by his tirades and rages, but when we got it all right, it was great. And even through all that, Donald and Keith still remained friends.”
When the film ended, everyone went into deep shock. Keith and Anita went back to Italy and it was rocky. Marianne knew everything and was doing so much cocaine Mick feared for the baby, now almost to term.
Marianne Faithfull: “It was soon after Performance finished shooting in the fall of 1968 that drug use among o
ur inner circle took a quantum leap. It’s when things become completely unacceptable to the human spirit that you turn to alcohol, to drugs, to help you get through. It was right after Performance that Anita went off her rocker for years. Into an abyss.”
She wasn’t the only one. The events around Performance set off a chain reaction of disasters that kept exploding. James Fox freaked out, underwent a religious awakening, disappeared for years. Michelle Breton became a heroin dealer, disappeared, was soon presumed dead. David Litvinoff killed himself in Christopher Gibbs’s house. John Bindon, later convicted of murder, became a junkie and died young.
Only Mick was okay, perhaps even stronger than before. He emerged from the film with a new persona he never let drop, the untouchable rock shaman, the magus of the airwaves, the midnight rambler in love with his own beauty and power.
As for Donald Cammell, he knew he had a masterpiece. Everything in his film had been real but the blood and the bullets. He and Nick Roeg vanished into their editing room, but it would be a year before they showed a working print to Warner’s. Their cut was so violent, and violently edited, that an executive’s wife vomited at the screening and the whole audience fled in revulsion.
Performance was shelved until 1970.
* * *
The Baby’s Dead
At the end of September 1968, Brian Jones was back in a London court, looking fat and wiped out, pleading not guilty to having a chunk of hash in a ball of wool. Mick and Keith arrived to support Brian, who was duly found guilty. The girls in the gallery cried out at the verdict, and Mr. Jones had to be helped back to his seat. Suki was sobbing, and Keith seemed freaked out. If the judge sent Brian to jail, the Stones would finally have to replace him. But Brian groveled, his psychiatrists testified, and miraculously he was let off with a fifty-pound fine and a scolding.
Old Gods Almost Dead Page 29