Respectable society received another stinging slap in the face on January 22 when the Stones appeared on Britain’s most popular television variety show, Sunday Night at the London Palladium. Something like ten million people each week watched this hour-long feast of jugglers and trampolinists and a concluding star spot that might be filled one Sunday by Frank Sinatra and the next by Dame Margot Fonteyn. In an invariably spectacular finale, the top of the bill star mounted a circular stage among his fellow performers and high-plumed show-girls, interspersed among giant letters spelling out SUNDAY NIGHT AT THE LONDON PALLADIUM. The stage, with its cargo of artistes and giant letters, then slowly revolved, amid swelling violins and cheery waves of farewell.
Since the Beatles’ famous appearance in 1963, most major pop acts of the moment had done the Palladium show and waved goodbye from its revolving stage. It was therefore on a simple head-hunting basis that Lew Grade, boss of the ATV network, pressured his old friend Tito Burns to persuade the Stones to appear. ‘I had to talk them into it,’ Burns remembered. ‘They weren’t very keen. But it was the biggest show on television. Lew Grade was supposed to be grateful to me for evermore.’
Two hours before the show went out, Tito Burns received an anguished telephone call from the London Palladium. At rehearsals, the Stones had flatly refused to stand on the revolving stage and wave goodbye to the audience. Burns hurried to the Palladium to find Mick Jagger, in a floral shirt, engaged in furious argument with Andrew Loog Oldham, the Stones’ studio engineer Glyn Johns, and the show’s producer Albert Locke. It transpired that Jagger was the one who would not revolve and wave. In his own words, he refused to let the Stones become ‘part of a circus’.
‘I did my best to persuade him,’ Tim Burns said. ‘I said it was part of a tradition, it couldn’t do any harm.’ But Jagger remained adamant. Albert Locke stamped off to devise an alternative finale with the Stones walking offstage while everyone else revolved and waved. Oldham, meanwhile, had disappeared from the theatre. ‘He went off to his clinic, I think,’ Tito Burns said. ‘He used to go to this clinic every so often and get himself put to sleep for three days.’
The story of the Stones’ ‘insult’ to the London Palladium, their fellow artistes and Lew Grade’s revolving stage was prolonged well into the following week. On Thursday, the Mail still had enough angry readers’ letters to fill a whole extra page. ‘Who do they think they are?’ wrote a typical correspondent, (Mrs) E. M. Smith of Clive Yale, Hastings, Sussex. ‘I have never seen such a repulsive turn.’ (Mrs) E. M. Smith would be more astounded still ere long.
On February 5, the News of the World published a full page exposé headlined THE SECRETS OF THE POP STARS’ HIDEAWAY, and couched in the dramatic, staccato prose of reporters working under cover like ace detectives to penetrate a difficult and dangerous underworld.
The underworld in this case, somewhat surprisingly, was Roehampton, a London suburb best known for a hospital specializing in artificial limbs. According to the News of the World, wild LSD parties had taken place in Roehampton at a house rented to a fairly famous pop group, the Moody Blues, but frequented by a much more famous figure, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.
On learning this, the NoW sleuths had naturally wished to seek out Mick Jagger and confront him with his heinous crime. They described their long vigil at a club he was said to frequent – Blases, in Kensington – and their triumph when the familiar Rolling Stone came into the club, consented to be interviewed and freely admitted everything they put to him – a confession made all the more spectacular by the News of the World team’s tendency to confuse LSD with hashish.
‘I don’t go much on it now the cats have taken it up,’ they quoted their – very talkative – interviewee as saying. ‘It’ll just get a dirty name. I remember the first time I took it. It was on our first tour with Bo Diddley and Little Richard …’
‘During the time we were at Blases,’ the investigators continued, ‘Jagger took about six benzedrine tablets. “I just wouldn’t stay awake at places like this if I didn’t have them,” he said … Later at Blases, Jagger showed a companion and two girls a piece of hash and invited them to his flat for a “smoke”.’
Confusing LSD with hashish was not, alas, the News of the World sleuths’ only blunder that night. All the time they thought they were talking to Mick Jagger, they were actually talking to Brian Jones.
Anyone with the remotest knowledge of the real Jagger could have told the luckless hacks how impossible it would have been for him to swallow ‘bennies’ publicly and pull out lumps of hashish, let alone indulge in the matey confessions quoted. Anyone who knew Jagger knew that his attitude to drugs was as coy and cautious as to women, hairdressers, clothes and the colour of his cars. Though he certainly smoked hash, it was always with the utmost discretion. The irony was that Jagger himself felt uneasy about Brian and Keith’s reckless use of LSD, its effect on them as people as well as the obvious risk of a police bust. Just a week earlier, he had left Keith’s house in Sussex, muttering dark forebodings to Donald Cammell. ‘This is all getting out of hand,’ Cammell remembered him saying. ‘I don’t know where it’s all going to end.’
On Sunday mornings at Harley House, it was Jagger’s habit to cover his and Marianne’s bed with all the newspapers, both heavy and pop. The News of the World was the first thing he read, in mild amusement first, then stupefaction and finally outrage so intense as to scatter his usual caution to the winds. That Sunday evening, he was due to appear on the Eamonn Andrews television talk show. When Andrews cautiously touched on the drugs question, Jagger announced that the whole story was a lie and he would shortly issue a libel writ against the News of the World.
It was, in Robert Fraser’s phrase, ‘the Oscar Wilde mistake’ – rushing to law to refute a particular allegation of sins one had committed in general. An equal mistake was to imagine the News of the World, taxed with a claim that could cost it punitive damages, would simply pay up and apologize.
What the News of the World very naturally did was try to establish that, even if Jagger had not taken LSD in Roehampton and swallowed ‘bennies’ at Blases, he none the less took drugs and was as such a menace to society. If that could be proved, his libel action would not stand a chance. The sub judice law now prevented the News of the World from publishing further revelations before the libel case came to court. If, however, the police should discover any of the same pop stars to be taking drugs, there would be nothing to stop a fair and accurate report of the subsequent proceedings. Nor could any libel jury in Britain convict any newspaper for revealing what was proved, however tardily, to be true.
With hindsight, the wisest thing for Jagger to have done at this point would have been to lock himself in his Harley House flat and spend the weeks until his libel case came to court living like a Trappist monk. What he actually did may seem incredibly stupid and arrogant. But, in fairness, he could have no conception of the forces now ranged against him.
The next weekend, he drove with Marianne to spend the weekend at Redlands, Keith’s cottage near West Wittering, Sussex. The party also included Robert Fraser, Christopher Gibbs, the photographer Michael Cooper, Beatle George Harrison and his wife Pattie. Along with log fires and country rambles, the main attraction of the weekend was to be a young American named David Snyderman, who had materialized from California just a few weeks earlier. Fondly known as ‘Acid King David’ this personage dispensed a rare and sought-after type of LSD called Sunshine, compounded by a noted San Francisco chemist and imbibed in pellets of bright orange. ‘I can picture him now,’ says Christopher Gibbs. ‘A sort of upmarket flower child who knew more about drugs than anyone the Stones had ever met. “What!” he’d say. “You mean you never heard of dimethyl tryptomine!”’
Call it arrogance, call it naivety or just a young Sixties pop star’s well-founded sense of being invulnerable. At all events, the drug-hating Jagger hardly could have been in a worse place as establishment Britain was poised to take its long-dela
yed revenge – in a country cottage among several confirmed drug-users, under pressure from the others to let Acid King David Snyderman give him his first taste of LSD.
Eleven guests were in the convoy that followed Keith’s Bentley down to Redlands that Saturday night for what was supposed to be a quiet, uneventful Sunday. Apart from Acid King David, only two of the party did not rank as trusted friends. One was a Moroccan named Ali who travelled with the gay Fraser as his servant. The other was Nicky Cramer, a King’s Road character who had somehow attached himself to the party and whom Keith was too soft-hearted to disinvite.
On Sunday morning, Acid King David went around the guests’ bedrooms like a hippie Jeeves, dispensing trays of tea and enough Sunshine capsules to send everyone off into a languorous trip without even the bother of sitting up. It wasn’t until early afternoon that people began drifting down to Redlands’ high-raftered living room, relaxed and exhilarated by visions their Californian protégé had furnished. The winter’s day being mild and sunny, it was decided to go on a tour of the Sussex countryside, stopping off to look at the house of the surrealist art collector Edward James.
They did not find Edward James’s house, but still spent a pleasant couple of hours driving round the empty lanes and running through the woods around Keith’s estate, down to a small shingle beach. Michael Cooper photographed Keith, in sunglasses and Afghan fur coat, gambolling over the pebbles, seemingly without a care in the world.
The cars came back to Redlands at about 6 p.m. Shortly afterwards, George Harrison decided he was bored, and he and Pattie drove off to their psychedelic bungalow in Surrey. With George gone, it now seems, a lucky talisman was removed from the house. Keith for one is still convinced that subsequent events could not have happened with a Beatle, almost sacredly immune to official persecution, still on the premises.
The eight males in the party assembled in the living room that was part Olde England, part joss-scented Marrakesh bazaar. Marianne Faithfull had gone upstairs for a bath. She had brought only one set of clothes with her, and these were now muddy and crumpled after the day’s country ramblings. So, rather than get dressed again, she came downstairs wrapped in a fur rug taken from one of the beds. After supper – a Moroccan buffet, prepared by Robert Fraser’s servant Ali – the company gathered round the TV set, listening to Bob Dylan music while they waited for the Sunday night film, Jack Webb in Pete Kelly’s Blues. It was, in Christopher Gibbs’s words, ‘a scene of pure domesticity’.
At about 7.30 p.m., a force of nineteen police officers in assorted vehicles made its way up the long wooded drive that separates Redlands from the main Chichester road. The tip-off they had received had left ample time for the raid to be plotted at West Sussex Regional Police Headquarters and a search warrant to be obtained at a special sitting of Chichester magistrates. The force included three policewomen for the searching of women suspects. (Three women, Marianne, Pattie Harrison and Anita Pallenberg, were supposed to have been in the Redlands party.) The force was commanded by Chief Inspector Gordon Dineley of the West Sussex Constabulary, in full uniform and white-braided cap.
No one inside Redlands heard the police convoy arrive. The first sign of intruders was a single face, flashing briefly at one leaded window-pane. ‘Keith looked up and said there seemed to be some little old lady outside,’ Marianne remembers. ‘He thought it must be some fan, trying to get autographs.’
A violent knocking at the front door then began. Keith got up reluctantly from his cushions to answer it. The others, in their gentle, slightly hilarious stupor, looked up a moment later at what seemed to Marianne to be another, this time wholly ludicrous, LSD vision. Chief Inspector Dineley stood in their midst, sombrely magnificent, like some celestial commissionaire, announcing that, pursuant to the Dangerous Drugs Act, 1964, he had a warrant to search the premises.
There ensued a brief pause while the victims gaped up at the police, now pouring in through every crevice, and the police looked upon a scene that was to be described later, under oath, as one of scarcely believable decadence. They looked at the half-timbered walls, hung with Moroccan drapes; at the huge tapestried cushions underfoot; at the TV set, mutely flickering while Bob Dylan’s voice wailed and sneered out of twin stereo speakers; at the small, almost child-like figures in embroidered robes, lounging among pillows and wine bottles; at the hair tangled around chalk-white faces turned up to them, still not quite seriously; at the particular face that was engraved like a Wanted poster on the mind of every police officer in Britain. ‘Poor Mick – he could hardly believe his bad luck,’ Marianne says. ‘The first day he ever dares take an LSD trip, eighteen policemen come pouring in through the door.’
Marianne, a girl alone with eight men, wearing only a fur rug, was the detail which was to give the scene its immortality. The rug was, in fact, extremely large; it could – as Keith says – have covered three girls Marianne’s size. Nevertheless Detective Sergeant Stanley Cudmore testified later that, as he studied her closer, trying to detect the usual symptoms of cannabis smoking, Marianne made a deliberate attempt to provoke him by letting the rug slip, ‘disclosing parts of her nude body’.
Chief Inspector Dineley, meanwhile, was inquiring formally if Keith Richard was the owner of the invaded premises. Keith – whose dignity remained unimpaired throughout – agreed that he was and requested the Chief Inspector politely not to let his raiders walk all over the valuable cushions under their feet.
Most of those present, including Mick Jagger, believed at this stage they had no real cause for alarm. Though all had taken LSD, no one was in possession of a single Sunshine capsule. The entire supply remained in Acid King David’s attaché case – which, as it happened, lay in full view in the centre of the living room.
Only Robert Fraser had cause to fear the outcome of the impending body search. In one trouser pocket, Fraser carried a carved wooden box containing twenty-four heroin jacks, supplied to him by Keith’s favourite pusher, Spanish Tony Sanchez. In another pocket, he had a lump of hashish and some amphetamine uppers. Despite his muzzy state, Fraser knew he must, if possible, hide the heroin jacks at least. Casually he slipped a hand into his trouser pocket to open the box, and began to shake the small white tablets out into the lining.
Police officers were now all over Redlands, opening cupboards, turning out drawers, peering darkly into book matches and plastic sachets of in-flight mustard and mayonnaise which Keith had collected on various foreign tours. In the bedroom she shared with Mick, a giggling Marianne was being searched – or rather, since she was naked, scanned – by Detective Constable Rosemary Slade. A male detective had already taken charge of the green velvet jacket Mick had brought with him but had not worn since that pre-Christmas cruise with Marianne along the French Riviera.
Down in the living room, Jagger, Richard, Michael Cooper, Acid King David, Nicky Cramer, Ali the Moroccan, Robert Fraser and Christopher Gibbs stood in line to be frisked. The police had by now distinguished between their quarry and the ‘gentlemen’ present, and indeed treated both Gibbs and Fraser almost apologetically. The first find was on Acid King David – a small tin and envelope full of cannabis, and what the policeman concerned entered in his notebook as ‘a ball of brown substance’. When a policeman put out a tentative hand to Acid King David’s briefcase, the American shouted, ‘Please don’t open the case. It’s full of exposed film.’ The PC respectfully obeyed.
By the time the young officer assigned to search him was patting his pockets, Robert Fraser had managed to shake all twenty-four heroin tablets free of their carved pillbox. The policeman found the box, examined it and asked what the traces of white powder in it were. Fraser replied that he was diabetic; the box contained his insulin supply. The tablets were then retrieved from his pocket lining and shown to a senior officer, who seemed ready to accept Fraser’s story that they contained only insulin. ‘He handed them back to me. Then he said, “I’d better keep just one back for analysis.” At that moment, I knew I’d had it.’
Jagger was then shown his green velvet jacket and the small glass phial that had been discovered in one of its pockets. The phial contained the final four of the amphetamine uppers given to Marianne Faithful three months earlier by her French disc jockey friend.
In a moment of impressively quick thinking, Jagger recognized the pills, realized they were Marianne’s and decided to take the blame. He agreed that the jacket belonged to him, and, when asked if the tablets were his also, replied, ‘Yes. My doctor prescribed them for me.’ He even named a doctor – Dr Dixon Firth – in Wilton Crescent, Knightsbridge. Asked why he needed tablets, he said, ‘To stay awake and work.’
The phial was added to the raid’s other spoils – two carved pipes, a pudding basin that had been used for a bedside ashtray, Robert Fraser’s heroin jack and Keith’s American book matches and mustard sachets. Keith was then formally cautioned that if any of these items contained unlawful drugs, he could face additional prosecution for allowing their use on his property. ‘I see,’ Keith said drily. ‘You pin it all on me.’ And with mutual farewells – for neither side ever complained of discourtesy on the other’s part – Chief Inspector Dineley and his task force left the house and disappeared into the wooded Sussex night.
A moment or so later, the telephone rang. It was Brian Jones, calling from London to say that he’d stopped work on the music for Anita’s new film, and they could join the party within a couple of hours. ‘Don’t bother,’ Keith told him. ‘We’ve all just been busted.’
The atmosphere among Keith’s house party was curiously calm. Christopher Gibbs remembers ‘a rather philosophical feeling – like “It had to happen and it’s happened.”’ They supposed the raid to have come from no other source but the British policemen, wishing to collar a Rolling Stone on any pretext whatever. If anything, they felt they had come off rather lightly. The failure to find Acid King David’s LSD store was no more than astounding good luck. Whatever charges might follow the analysis of Marianne’s pep pills and the Moroccan hash pipes had to be relatively trivial.
Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The Page 22