Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  Much of Driberg’s interest in Mick Jagger was that of an elderly homosexual, secretly addicted to the juvenile ‘rough trade’. But much was a genuine desire to understand, and perhaps find benefit in, a power which the older man was too good a journalist not to find awesome. Never in Driberg’s long career among influential people had he seen influence so systematically wasted. These Gay Hussar meetings were an attempt to persuade Jagger to put his power and influence to use through the medium of conventional politics.

  The thought of standing for Parliament was one which had long attracted Jagger – and would do so intermittently for some years to come. At Driberg’s prompting, he would discuss it seriously, with his usual articulateness, flattered by the MP’s interest in him though aware – as always – where that interest began. But even Tom Driberg, with all his oratorical skill, and bottles of Hungarian Bull’s Blood, could not extract from Mick Jagger even an undertaking to read the Labour Party manifesto.

  Jagger’s was not a unique malady. The same uneasy feeling had visited other pop stars in the top echelon – that fame and wealth and idolizing could become a form of deprivation; that, meanwhile, important things were passing them by. The Beatles had said as much: their years of touring had been like years in prison. To them, a convict’s bread and water seemed hardly more monotonous than their own unending surfeit, the ritual extravagance and ritualistic wastefulness that reduced a superstar millionaire’s habitat to the squalor of a cell with neither light nor air.

  None of the other Stones faced this problem of intellectual unfulfilment. Charlie and Bill seemed quite happy to fill up the long intervals between album-sessions with hobbies like photography or collecting antique silver. Even Brian, in his quieter periods, carried on boyhood pastimes like locomotive-spotting and collecting data on types of London bus. Two double-deckers he had bought were already housed in a northern transport museum; as his mental confusion increased, so did a compulsion to buy further vintage buses and charabancs. Shirley Arnold at the Stones’ office frequently had to deal with the indignant vendor of yet another bus which Brian had bought when drunk or stoned and had then totally forgotten.

  As for Keith, it seemed he needed nothing outside his existence as prototype of a rock star. In the same way that Keith onstage had inspired a whole era of guitarists to copy his wolfish silhouette, so his private lifestyle had become the model for an entirely new human species. It was an existence characterized, above all, by gigantic inertia – by hours spent in rooms devoid of light and stewn with album sleeves, liquor bottles and cigarette ends; by days, and most nights, passed in the tenacious pursuit of doing nothing but lying prone on a couch, near a lamp draped with a Batik scarf, drinking, smoking and ‘toking’, listening to thunderous hi-fi and tinkering with an acoustic guitar.

  Keith now lived with Anita Pallenberg, mostly at Redlands, the Sussex cottage whose half-timbered exterior still gave no hint of the orgiastic world within. From time to time, local people would glimpse the wrecked-looking country squire and his grimly beautiful blonde, driving in the ‘Blue Lena’ through West Wittering or, on rare occasions, coming out of neighbourhood shops. A villager who saw them often remembers the extraordinary blackness around Keith’s eyes, even before he took to wearing mascara, and how he always seemed to smoke cigarettes twice as long as normal. Lurid tales circulated about what went on behind the seven-foot boundary wall Keith had recently obtained planning consent to build – how he would zoom around his lake in a miniature hovercraft, or hunt water rats with a shotgun, accompanied by his giant deerhound, Syphilis.

  Though Jagger could live the same incubated rock star life for weeks at a time, quite happily, he continued to feel disturbing impulses – in tune with the new mood of student militancy – that he should be doing something more with his vast reputation than just making another album. What exactly he should be doing, though, continued problematical. The avenue of conventional politics, as suggested by Tom Driberg, involved dedication and self-denial that were clearly unthinkable. Far more attractive was the idea of total revolution, a concept grown so fashionable, it could be discussed even by twenty-five-year-old millionaires, sipping wine or tequila in their Queen Anne town houses. Thus far among would-be rock star revolutionaries, only one had put forward anything like a plan for effecting social change. John Lennon suggested putting LSD into the House of Commons water-supply, to see what good might come from freaking out the whole of parliament.

  The Beatles, to their eternal credit, were making one gigantic, ill-starred effort to carry through the revolutionary precepts of hippydom. Their Apple organization, founded in the summer of 1968, was an attempt to use their collective millions to help young people in every branch of the creative arts. Apple, in Paul McCartney’s phrase, would be ‘a kind of Western Communism’ – a business without greed, run only for mutual stimulation and enjoyment, fuelled by the amity and open-heartedness that was the prerogative of everyone under thirty.

  Philanthropy such as the Beatles were now splashing forth, over youthful musicians, writers, film-makers, poets and Punch and Judy men, had no appeal for the calculating and practical head Stone. Marianne Faithfull remembers that when the ex-Animal Chas Chandler first brought Jimi Hendrix from New York to London, he approached Jagger as a possible co-sponsor, and Jagger ‘simply turned and ran’. Hendrix’s subsequent rise to fame had, if anything, deepened Jagger’s disinterest in helping new recording talent. He seemed jealous of Hendrix, even suspecting him of trying to steal Marianne from him late one night at a West End club.

  Since the break with Andrew Loog Oldham in October, 1967, the Stones’ management office had been in Maddox Street, close to Piccadilly. A small, top-floor suite, formerly maids’ quarters in a Georgian town house, it was far from the opulence with which the Beatles had surrounded their new business family. It had been the best the Stones’ staff could do after weeks of being turned down by landlords all over the West End. They got Maddox Street only by luck, through a friend of a friend, by pretending it was to house a music publishing company, and by scrupulous avoidance, at all times, of the phrase ‘Rolling Stones’.

  To run the Maddox Street office, Mick Jagger approached Jo Bergman, the American girl who had worked for Brian Epstein in the Beatles’ fan club and, later, as Marianne’s assistant and companion. Petite and cosy, with an air of high-powered calm, Jo was to assume most managerial functions for the Stones in Europe, presiding over a tiny staff whose mainstay continued to be their old fan club secretary, Shirley Arnold.

  Shirley remembers with what keenness Jagger took on his new role of employer and businessman. ‘He loved coming in for boardroom meetings with lawyers and accountants, or when Allen Klein was in town.’ At Maddox Street there would be none of the slackness and promiscuity which characterized the Beatles’ Apple workforce. ‘Mick was always utterly meticulous,’ Jo Bergman says. ‘He liked to know everyone was doing things – for him, of course – with total efficiency.’ When, on rare occasions, his eye alighted on a secretary for reasons other than stenographic, the ensuing business was conducted as discreetly as a Bourbon king with a scullery-maid. Only the girl’s flushed face and half-unhinged false eyelashes would give the game away.

  To Maddox Street, along with the equally apportioned Rolling Stones fan mail and hate mail, were diverted the frequent ivory-white envelopes, hand-delivered from hotels like the Connaught or Dorchester, and containing fulsome appeals to Mick Jagger to read the enclosed synopsis, treatment or full shooting script. It was a fact tantalizing to film producers on both sides of the Atlantic that, in four years as a nonpareil crowd-puller, and despite embodying female fantasy at least as potently as Rudolf Valentino, Jagger still had not starred in a feature film.

  The grandiose five-picture schedule announced by Allen Klein had by now dwindled to a faintly recurring rumour among music journalists that they might still do something with the script of Only Lovers Left Alive. Klein, meanwhile, blocked all outside offers, insisting that his orig
inal plan would still be carried through. There had, besides, been a little too much real life drama lately for the Stones to want to manufacture any before the camera.

  It was natural that a spirit as flirtatious and procrastinating as Jagger’s should enjoy the wooing of film moguls, the expensive lunches, the agreement in principle to play ambitiously unlikely roles, the enthusiasm to read scripts which, as a rule, he would close after the second or third page. Lately, however, in his restlessness and wish to extend himself, he had given the whole question of movie acting concentrated thought. It weighed with his competitive nature that Marianne was following up her pop success with a career on the legitimate stage and in films. She had appeared in Chekov’s Three Sisters at Chichester Festival Theatre, to unanimous critical acclaim, and was now to star in a new Roger Vadim film, Girl on a Motorcycle.

  Towards the summer’s end, Jagger did finally succeed both in finishing a script and liking it. The film was to be called Performance. Its writer and putative co-director was Donald Cammell, the Stones’ old painter friend from Paris. It told the story of a young English gangster, on the run from members of his own mob, and his encounter with an eccentric and reclusive pop star. Jagger, after practically no hesitation, agreed to play the pop star, Turner. The theme music was to be written by Jagger and Richard and played as a soundtrack by the Rolling Stones. Largely on this basis, Cammell was able to raise £1.8 million in financing from the Warner Brothers Corporation. To Warner Brothers it seemed a safe enough investment. They presumed they were getting a happy, zany pop music picture like the Beatles’ A Hard Day’s Night.

  Marianne was considered for the part of Turner’s girlfriend before it finally went to Anita Pallenberg. The choice was obvious – and, in any case, the film’s winter shooting schedule would have been impossible for Marianne. That summer, she had discovered she was going to have Mick Jagger’s baby.

  This time, the raid on Brian took place at 7:30 in the morning. He had moved from Courtfield Road and was living temporarily in a rented flat at Royal Avenue House, a King’s Road mansion block. Awakened by thunderous knocking and pealing on the front door bell, he took one look through the security spy-hole, then dived for the telephone. His panic-stricken words to Les Perrin – ‘They’re coming in through the window, Les’ – were not far short of the truth. A policeman was actually climbing into the flat via its interior rubbish-chute.

  When Jo Bergman reached Royal Avenue House, shortly before 9 a.m., a smiling policeman let her into the flat. Three more hefty officers stood over Brian, in his skimpy kimono, showing him a lump of cannabis which one of them had taken from inside a ball of brown wool in the living-room bureau. Brian’s reaction was one of the incredulous dismay. ‘Oh – no,’ he moaned. ‘This can’t happen again, just when we’re getting on our feet.’

  Later that same day, May 21, Brian went to Great Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court, charged with possessing 44 grains of cannabis resin. He was released on £2,000 bail pending trial, once again, before Inner London Sessions. He also faced punishment for breach of the probation order placed on him by the Court of Criminal Appeal.

  He spent that night in the care of Allen Klein’s nephew, Ronnie Schneider, sleeping in Schneider’s room at the London Hilton. ‘The hotel didn’t want to take him,’ Schneider says. ‘I told them that if they wanted to throw Brian out, they’d have to throw me out, too. He went to sleep in the spare bed, crying and holding my hand. Next morning, we had a big meeting with the lawyers on Brian’s case. Brian kept coming up behind me and kissing the back of my head. He told me I’d saved his life.’

  The second bust plunged Brian back to zero, cruelly, at the very point when his efforts to rebuild himself as a person and a musician seemed to be paying off. True to his Appeal Court undertaking, he had kept clear of drugs; he had left his psychiatrist’s care and was now obliged only to make the statutory regular visits to his probation officer.

  In the studio, too, he had revived, feeling a surge of optimism in the Stones’ return to their r & b roots and in the obvious quality of their new producer, Jimmy Miller. Leaving his Mellotron and flute and Moroccan pipes, he had gone back to playing bottleneck blues guitar with an impassioned elegance already defining several tracks for the album that would become Beggars Banquet. The sessions were being filmed by the French director Jean-Luc Godard as part of a polemical drama-documentary about glamour and violence in the Sixties. With Jean-Luc Godard at Olympic Studios, and cameras turning over every night, it was natural that Anita Pallenberg should frequently drop by – but even that had not seemed to shake Brian’s composure. He had assured several people vehemently, ‘I’m not interested in Anita any more.’

  Now, once more, he was the piteous, impossible Brian of four months ago, whose only defence against the horrors crowding in on him was Scotch and pills and snatching up the telephone. ‘Whenever the phone went at 2 a.m., I’d always know who it was,’ Jo Bergman says. ‘He’d spend perhaps an hour talking to me about some tiny thing that was on his mind. As soon as he’d rung off, he’d ring straight back and talk for another hour about the same tiny thing. Then he’d ring back again, horror-struck to think he’d woken me up. Next morning, I’d discover I was one of half a dozen people Brian had been ringing up through the night.’

  Les Perrin’s wife Janey was someone else Brian turned to constantly, for reassurance, a sympathetic ear, or just human company. ‘He’d ring me about anything,’ Janey Perrin says. ‘He’d ring to say he’d got a toothache … a headache … that he couldn’t turn the tap off in the kitchen. Once, he sent me an eighty-six-word telegram. Another time, he rang me from the Dorchester and said he was going to commit suicide. I was so exasperated, I said, “All right, Brian – go into the bathroom and do it, so as not to make a mess.” That brought him round a bit. Another time, he swore while he was talking to me. He rang back almost in tears, to think I’d heard him use a foul word. In the end when he rang up, he wouldn’t say, “It’s Brian.” He’d say, “This is your other son.”’

  What chiefly terrified Brian between May and September, when his case came to court, was that the other Stones might secretly be planning to go on tour without him – perhaps even with a new guitarist in his place. In August, the British music press reported that Eric Clapton had been asked to join the Stones when his supergroup, Cream, disbanded at Christmas. It was a constant theme of Brian’s late-night telephone calls to anyone who would listen: how his drug bust had given them the perfect excuse to get rid of him. At times, the Chelsea police seemed only walk-on players in that longer-term conspiracy by so-called friends to steal his stardom first, then his woman, and finally to eject him from the band he had created.

  In fact, despite their exasperation with Brian, and their severely limited capacity for unselfish action, Mick and Keith both genuinely sympathized with him in this new, undeserved crisis, and made intermittent efforts to show him moral support. For all they knew, indeed, Brian’s busting could presage renewed police attacks on either or both of them. Their sympathy was, perhaps, too sudden for Brian to recognize it as such. Spanish Tony Sanchez remembers a summer day at Redlands when Mick Jagger took Brian into the house for a serious talk about his approaching trial. Shortly afterwards, Brian rushed through the open French windows, shouting, ‘I’ll kill myself’ and jumped straight into Keith’s water-filled moat. Jagger plunged in to rescue him before realizing that the water was only four feet deep. The two staggered out together, Brian laughing hysterically, Jagger enraged at the ruination of his new velvet trousers.

  One sensible decision reached by the others on Brian’s behalf was that, until his reappearance before Inner London Sessions, he had better be as far as possible from the Chelsea police, his dangerous social circle of junkies and the pressmen who would now be dogging his every move. One of his casual girlfriends, Linda Keith, had recently attempted suicide at his flat; two more were visiting him in hospital, often at the same time. There were also insistent demands from the mother
of his elder son called Julian for money to buy the lad a toy typewriter.

  It was Keith Richard’s well-intentioned idea that Brian should live at Redlands with Suki Poitier, under the care of Keith’s own chauffeur, Tom Keylock. There he remained from July to late September, apparently content to be surrounded by reminders of Anita. There the others would meet and try to rehearse, although Brian had lost the will for anything beyond his own desultory, and somehow secretive, accoustic strumming. He managed to keep off drugs but compensated by drinking more heavily than ever. One Sunday, when Mick and Marianne had driven down to see him, he flew into a drunken fury, lunged at Mick with his fists, then threatened him with a carving knife. Marianne remembers his panting, bloated face – the face which, to Jo Bergman, only too clearly denoted its astrological sign. ‘He was a double Pisces. His face really did seem to be turning back to water.’

  The breach seemed healed on September 24, when Mick and Keith both attended Inner London Sessions to see Brian treated with wholly unlooked-for clemency. The jury found him guilty of possessing cannabis. But the Chairman, Reginald Seaton, decided it had been ‘a lapse’ from previous sincere efforts to stay straight. Brian was fined £50 with £100 costs. Afterwards, Mick and Keith posed for photographs with him, their arms round his shoulders: two decolleté young gods of 1968, flanking someone who might have been an older, unwell relative.

  From time to time, in his miasmic anxiety and depression, Brian would remember his plan to return to Morocco and record the ethnic music that had so excited him there – in particular, the wonderful Joujouka pipers in the foothills of the Rif. Even that bright memory seemed stained by the thought of how friends had betrayed him. To return to Morocco meant returning to the day when he had lost Anita; when he had returned from the Djemaa el Fna to find her and Keith and Tom Keylock and the Bentley all gone.