Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  By 1967, Cointelpro had switched its focus to the subversive effect of rock music on America’s young, particularly the kind coming from Britain, most particularly the kind played by the Rolling Stones. Getting two Stones busted for drug possession would ensure they were denied visas for any further US tours in the foreseeable future. Britain’s security services had been more than happy to assist in the thwarting of these public menaces. And once they were nailed – so Snyderman had been given to understand – the next ones on the hit list would be the Beatles.

  Though Snyderman had done everything asked of him, and afterwards been discreet to the point of changing his identity, his reward was what he called ‘a lifetime of fear’. For the rest of his days, even after Cointelpro no longer existed, he half-expected those ‘heavy people’ who’d spirited him out of Britain in 1967 to come after him and make sure he never did blow his cover. He always carried a handgun and was suspected of having murdered an actor named Peter Ivers when Ivers defected from one of his TV shows. Not long after turning into David Jove, he had married a comedienne named Lotus Weinstock, whose brother Joel also subsequently discovered his real surname. Jove gave Joel Weinstock a few hints about the Redlands story, but threatened to kill him if he ever breathed a word of it.

  When Jove died in 2004, he still had not broken his silence, though by that time two of his principal victims in the Redlands bust, Mick and Marianne, knew his true identity. In both cases, the revelation came through an Englishwoman named Maggie Abbott, who had been part of the Stones’ social circle in the Sixties, and later, when based in Los Angeles, worked as Mick’s film agent. Abbott subsequently became a friend of David Jove, by then a film- and video-maker and extrovert character who, paradoxically, always seemed afraid of becoming too famous.

  Maggie Abbott introduced Marianne to Jove in the 1980s, after Marianne had emerged from long years of drug-addiction and self-degradation to become one of the pop world’s most celebrated survivors. In her autobiography, Faithfull, she herself describes the severe shock of meeting and recognizing this (unnamed) figure from her past. Afterwards she identified him to Maggie Abbott as ‘Mister X – the guy who sold us out’ (i.e, at Redlands).

  Abbott also shared the secret – or attempted to – with Mick backstage during his solo tour of Australia in 1988. Having revealed the Acid King’s real name, she assumed that Mick would show some curiosity about the person who caused him the most terrifying experience of his life. But she had reckoned without his indifference towards even the most monumental moments of his career in his constant desire to stay ever current and youthful. He cut Abbott off before she could recount the full Snyderman/Jove story, saying he was ‘cool’ about it and it was ‘all in the past now’.

  PART THREE

  TEN

  ‘SING THIS ALL TOGETHER – SEE WHAT HAPPENS’

  The man with whom Marianne Faithfull began living at the end of 1966 might easily have exchanged his flowered shirts and Cecil Gee jackets for the frock coat and heavy watch-chain of the Victorian paterfamilias. Social revolution might be going on at every level, but it had yet to disturb the age-old idea of male superiority and the role of women as objects for decorative and domestic use. Boy pop stars almost all came from the class whose men still called themselves masters in their own homes. In the aristocracy of new-found wealth and money, each twenty-three-year-old was an encrusted male chauvinist, demanding total female subservience, total fidelity (which need not be reciprocated), and the silently efficient management of meals and servants.

  There were times, in their early days together, when Jagger goaded Marianne to such despair, she would simply bolt from their Harley House flat. ‘Somehow, I always used to grab up the same things – a five-pound note and a lump of hash. I really did try to run away several times. But Mick would always catch up with me on the stairs and bring me back again.’

  As traumatic as the Redlands drug bust was, it had a cementing effect on that early erratic relationship. It allowed Marianne to discover the Jagger whose innate chivalry put her career before his own and tried, in vain, to prevent her reputation from being dragged through the gutter. It allowed her to see how Jagger’s outward, disdainful cool masked an inward need for domestic stability and happiness, and how, divorced from his audience and courtiers, he was the most normal and natural of people. She had also discovered, visiting him on that first traumatic evening in Lewes Prison, how instantly and helplessly he could dissolve into tears.

  There were those, of course, who whispered that Jagger’s real passion was for the social cachet Marianne conferred – that he was chuffed beyond words to be living with the daughter of a real baroness. ‘You could see it on Mick’s face every time they were at a party together,’ Donald Cammell said. ‘It was pure possession. “Look what I’ve got, isn’t it fantastic!”’

  The end of the drug case was the start of a new life together, in the house that Jagger had eventually chosen. Deciding he could not bury himself in the country like Keith, Bill and Charlie, he had opted, instead, for one of Chelsea’s most desirable locations, paying £40,000 for number 48 Cheyne Walk, by the Thames near Albert Bridge. The house was of the tall, narrow, asymmetrically elegant Queen Anne type, modestly squeezed in along the ‘Walk’s’ many more showy and forbidding residences.

  Nicholas, Marianne’s three-year-old son by John Dunbar, would live with them at Cheyne Walk, Jagger insisted. He had, from the beginning, shown a fatherly fondness for Nicholas, and was determined to give the little boy as stable and secure a home as possible. ‘Mick always thought it was terrible that John Lennon would never let Cynthia have a nanny for their son, Julian,’ Marianne says. ‘In fact, he could do everything for Nicholas that a nanny could – but he still insisted we had to have one. He interviewed all the applications himself. You’d have thought he’d been dealing with servants all his life.’

  Christopher Gibbs designed the interior of the house and supplied tasteful – and very costly – antique furniture from his Chelsea shop. Marianne made additional purchases, sometimes on a scale more suited to her Sacher Masoch ancestors’ salons in Vienna. For one sumptuous crystal chandelier she paid £6,000 – a sum which Jagger, under normal circumstances, would have parted with only in direst agony. ‘Look at that!’ he kept saying to their first visitors, staring upwards. ‘Six thousand quid for a fuckin’ light!’

  It was only when they flew into Heathrow airport together from Ireland, and were unable to find a taxi-driver in the entire rank willing to drive them to Chelsea, that Marianne realized the extent of their joint notoriety. Though the establishment might have pardoned Jagger his drug offence, the public at large continued to thrill with voyeuristic relish at stories of sex orgies and misplaced Mars bars. For Marianne, the chaste creature who had sung As Tears Go By and made charity appeals on Radio Caroline, living out of wedlock with the infamous Jagger was a fall from grace. ‘I know that, even to this day, people in Britain bear me a grudge. They think I let them down in some way – that they put their trust in me, and I betrayed them.’

  Notorious they might be – but fashionable, too, in a way that Jagger on his own could never quite become. ‘Mick prided himself on being so cool, but he realized he’d got nothing on the real upper class for coolness,’ Marianne says. ‘The cool they had was centuries old. They were the most restful people to be with because nothing we did ever seemed to shock them. Especially the older ones, like Tom Driberg or Diana Cooper. Everything we were doing they’d seen before, in the Twenties. “Cocaine!” they’d say. “My dear, I was at dinner parties in the Twenties when every silver salt cellar was full of cocaine!”’

  By far the most revealing portrait of Mick and Marianne together at Cheyne Walk is a profile written for the Sunday Telegraph magazine by Gina Richardson, a gifted young journalist who died tragically soon afterwards in a road accident. She describes the elegant house shut in at midday by heavy drapes; the carpet, tapestries and smouldering joss sticks, and the two central figures whose
doll-like smallness give them ‘the air of children left in charge while grown-ups are away’. She confesses to finding Jagger physically mesmeric, but feels the effect is rather spoiled by his habit of slopping round the house in slip-on mules, ‘like a housewife’.

  From Richardson we learn that Marianne has taken Mick’s cultural education in hand, with visits to the theatre, opera and, especially, the ballet. He was always saying how much he wished he could have been Nureyev. The most lasting impression of all was produced by the Royal Ballet’s Paradise Lost, in which the principal dancers appeared through an outsize pair of lips, uncannily like Jagger’s own. ‘Mick thought the set, by Kenneth Macmillan, was absolutely fantastic,’ Marianne says. ‘It was like seeing himself there on the stage.’ Almost the same design would turn up, five years later, as the logo of the Rolling Stones’ own record label.

  He had always been a glutton for books. Nowadays, in the prevailing fashion, his reading tended towards the philosophical, the spiritual and mystical. He would send regular orders to his friend Miles at the Indica Bookshop, for such required underground classics as The Secret of the Golden Bough or Charles Henry Fort’s Book of the Damned. He was particularly interested, Miles remembers, in books about fairies, goblins and elves. Like every other pop celebrity that summer, he and Marianne based their whole lives on astrological data, and used the Chinese I Ching Book of Changes to make even quite mundane decisions, casting the hexagram for reference points within the volume which – its hippy devotees said raptly – had baffled even the intelligence of Confucius.

  Both of them were swept up in the Beatles’ brief flirtation with Transcendental Meditation and its founding guru, the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. On August bank holiday weekend, 1967, Mick and Marianne joined the Beatles’ famous pilgrimage with the Maharishi to undergo initiation at a teacher training college in Bangor, North Wales. They did so against the advice of better informed underground figures like Miles, who had heard from friends in India that the Maharishi might be a little less than divine. The weekend was cut short, however. On bank holiday Monday, news came that the Beatles’ manager, Brian Epstein, had been found dead of a barbiturates overdose in London.

  Britain’s two pre-eminent pop groups, though still rivals in public were closer friends than ever in private. Hippydom had much to do with it: in kaftans and beads, the Beatles seemed no longer such naive provincials, the Stones no longer such metropolitan sophisticates. Now they were brothers, with a common enemy. The viciousness with which Mick and Keith had been prosecuted was a portent of times when even Beatles would lose their talismanic charm and be busted like anybody else. The Beatles and Brian Epstein had joined Graham Greene, John Osborne, David Hockney and other creative heavyweights in writing to The Times, calling for the legalisation of marijuana and, by implication, protesting against the two Stones’ punishment.

  Ferocious Top Twenty competitors as the Beatles and Stones remained, they nowadays even helped one another secretly in the record-studio. Mick had been present with Marianne at the indoor carnival that culminated in John Lennon’s Sgt. Pepper masterpiece, A Day In the Life, and had joined in the background chorus on All You Need Is Love. In August, Lennon and McCartney lent their voices anonymously to We Love You, the Stones single whose title was Mick and Keith’s ironic afterword to Chief Inspector Gordon Dineley, Malcolm Morris QC, Judge Block and the News of the World.

  The Beatles’ growing discontent with Brian Epstein had, to a large extent, stemmed from the seemingly more effective performance of the Stones’ manager, Allen Klein. In 1965, indeed, Paul McCartney had proposed employing Klein in a consultative capacity, to maul EMI Records on the Beatles’ behalf as he had mauled Decca for the Stones. Though Brian Epstein successfully fought off that scheme, he was never able fully to recapture his protégés’ confidence. They had heard too many stories from Mick Jagger about the miracles Klein could do.

  For a brief time after Epstein’s death, serious discussions took place between the Beatles and Stones about some kind of joint investment in a studio and management office, both to be run by the Beatles’ aide, Peter Brown. The latter idea, for some reason, caused Klein acute heartburn, and he flew to London instantly to warn Brown off. On the same visit, he made yet another clumsy lunge at his true heart’s desire, turning to Brian Epstein’s brother Clive and growling, ‘How much d’ya want for the Beatles?’

  Merger discussions went as far as finding a site for the prospective studio – a disused brewery in Camden Town, next to Regent’s Park Canal. The Beatles, abetted by their electronics wizard ‘Magic’ Alex Mardas, had all kinds of airy-fairy plans. ‘We’ll need a hotel as well,’ Paul McCartney said. ‘… So that the groups will have somewhere to stay when they’re recording. And we’ll build a heliport, so that foreign groups can land at Heathrow and be brought straight here …’ When practical Jagger asked what it would all cost, John Lennon looked at him in surprise. ‘Oh – we won’t pay for it,’ he said. ‘We’ll get someone else to pay for it … Like that computer,’ he said, turning to McCartney. ‘Whatever did happen to that computer they gave us?’

  ‘I think it’s still in Ringo’s garage,’ McCartney said vaguely.

  For Jagger, this entente with the Beatles was not without ulterior purpose. His conversion to flower power made him hanker to turn the Rolling Stones into a psychedelic band such as the Beatles had effortlessly become. The Stones’ long delay in finishing their album in progress stemmed mainly from Jagger’s insistence that it must touch all the same mystical chords as Sgt. Pepper.

  It was an obsession which led the Stones rapidly to their artistic nadir. We Love You is a single that loses all ironic point in its feeble attempt to echo the Beatles’ summer anthem All You Need Is Love. Even the cell-door that slams midway in the song seems like a direct crib from the coffin lid crashing down on the final chord of A Day In the Life.

  To promote their new single, the Stones borrowed another device pioneered by the Beatles – a short film sequence whose screening on BBC-TV’s Top of the Pops show saved the musicians themselves the bother of appearing. The film employed even heavier-handed irony, featuring Mick Jagger as the persecuted Oscar Wilde, with Marianne as Lord Alfred Douglas and Keith Richard as a highly unlikely Marquess of Queensberry. Predictably, Top of the Pops refused to screen it.

  To be fair, no record album ever has suffered the handicap of having its three main musicians variously on trial and in prison, nor involved simultaneous internecine strife between musicians and manager, nor had to contend with the thousand-and-one incidental conflicts and vexations which beset the Stones during their ten-month labour to produce music expressing love, peace and flower-garlanded happiness. That any finished album at all emerged seems miraculous. As with an amateur dramatic production in which actors forget their lines, the scenery falls down and the producer has a heart attack, one must try to focus on the positive aspects.

  The Stones themselves to this day regard Their Satanic Majesties Request as the lowest of low points in their career. ‘It was one of the three times we came really close to splitting up,’ Bill Wyman says. Though Keith likes the album better than he once did, it still mainly evokes indecision, compromise and almost terminal boredom. ‘It ended up as a real patchwork. Half of it was “Let’s give people what we think they want.” The other half was “Let’s get out of here as quickly as possible.”’

  Sgt. Pepper was the all-powerful, ultimately suffocating influence. The Beatles had covered their retreat from concert performance with a studio show whose myriad technical effects only heightened the atmosphere of live circus or vaudeville. The Stones’ – at least Mick Jagger’s – intention was the same, touched with some native belligerence, of course, in place of Beatle whimsy, but having no greater overall ambition than to muscle in on their friends’ enchanted island.

  So Mick and Keith, when they were not in court or detained at Her Majesty’s pleasure, cudgelled their brains for incandescent imagery and riffs that would have the mesmeric
power of Hindu mantras; with half an eye still lingering on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, Mick Jagger set about developing a vocal style as tuneless as if he had a clothes peg attached to his nose. And when inspiration failed – which it did, almost continuously – there was always the same recourse to divine help. They turned the stereo needle back to A Day In the Life, Within You Without You or Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.

  By early July, when Jagger and Richard were on bail pending appeal and Brian Jones had begun undergoing residential psychiatric treatment, scarcely anything on the – still untitled – album was in a satisfactory finished state. The Beatles, for all their carte blanche at Abbey Road studios, worked in harness with a producer, George Martin, whose musicianship they still respected as a formative and disciplining force. Gifted engineer as Glyn Johns was, he remained, in the Stones’ eyes, little more than a knob-twiddling functionary. Johns would frequently arrive at Olympic Studios no more certain than the girls on the doorstep that the session would take place as scheduled.

  The delays were not wholly due to outside influences. Glyn Johns could see through his control-room window how deliberate the Stones’ vacillation and tinkering often was, and what a combustible effect it had on Glyn’s companion at the control-desk. To external pressures, the Stones added their own barely concealed wish to do it badly, and thus defy, provoke and alienate their manger, Andrew Loog Oldham.