Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  The death of the builder Frank Thorogood in 1995 gave the mystery a fresh twist. Tom Keylock, the Stones’ former driver and fixer, claimed Thorogood had confessed to him on his deathbed that he was responsible for Brian’s death. Angered by Brian’s threats not to pay him, he had apparently waited for the two women to leave the poolside, then, in a moment of drunken vengefulness, had pushed Brian’s head underwater and held it there. This in turn flushed out Anna Wohlin, Brian’s former girlfriend, who had subsequently returned to Sweden and married. Anna unequivocally named Thorogood as Brian’s ‘murderer’, claiming that the builder had become angry after some horseplay in the water between the two men. She said that as his woman friend Janet Lawson raised the alarm, Thorogood had been in the farmhouse kitchen, impassively lighting a cigarette as if aware Brian was already past help. Likewise, when a hysterical Anna tried to raise Brian from the bottom of the pool, Thorogood had been curiously slow to jump in and help her.

  Anna claimed to have been the centre of an elaborate cover-up by the Stones’ minders and PR man to protect them from yet further damaging involvement with the law. In the days immediately following Brian’s death she said she had been kept under wraps (chaperoned by Bill Wyman and his Swedish girlfriend Astrid) to stop the press from getting to her. Les Perrin, the Stones’ press officer, by her account, was a cold, threatening figure who alternately tried to browbeat and frighten her out of ever talking to the media. She also claimed to have been pregnant with Brian’s child, though not realizing it until after his death and soon suffering a miscarriage in her grief.

  An alternative account, from a supposed witness identified only as ‘Marty’, has Brian inviting several of Thorogood’s building crew over for drinks at the poolside. According to ‘Marty’, Brian deliberately taunted the men with his wealth and fame until they were almost ready to lynch him there on dry land. Instead, they all went into the water, and Brian became the victim of drunkenly brutal horseplay that went too far.

  His most faithful friend turned out to be his teenage fan, Helen Spittal. Just as she’d promised, the last photographs Helen took of him – on the day he said he hoped he would die at Cotchford – remained in her private album for ever.

  THIRTEEN

  ‘WE’RE GONNA KISS YOU GOODBYE’

  On July 8, 1969, while Mick Jagger slept away his jet lag in a Sydney hotel suite, Marianne Faithfull slipped out of their bed and across the twilit room to the dressing-table mirror. What she saw reflected there gave her the final impetus to end her life. She picked up the telephone, dialled room service and asked for a cup of hot chocolate. Then she took a bottle of 150 Tuinal sleeping pills and began methodically swallowing them, forcing each mouthful down with sips of chocolate. Having taken enough barbiturates to kill three people, the girl from the Renoir painting that had become a nightmare by Bruegel, settled down beside her still slumbering rock-star lover and waited for death.

  The experience of almost dying is one that Marianne – like others accidentally recalled to life – can describe in vivid, almost nostalgic detail.

  ‘I remember finding myself in this big, grey, still place where there was no climate at all – no wind or cold or sun, no weather of any kind. And Brian Jones was there. I remember talking to Brian, who was terribly pleased to see me. He said he’d woken up cold and frightened, not knowing where he was. He’d been looking and looking for a familiar face. “Oh, I’m so glad –” he kept saying. “I’m so glad that you’re here.”

  ‘We started walking along together through this great big, weatherless place, Brian and I – not so much walking as jogging with long, slow strides. Brian was talking in just the way Brian would, hopeless but funny as well. “Hey man – what a drag … Woke up this morning, reached out for the pill bottle and realized I was dead …”

  ‘We jogged along like this, right up to a place where the land stopped – like the edge of a plane. Brian turned to me and said, “I’ve got to go on from here alone.” Then, far away behind me, I could hear three voices calling to me. One was my mother’s. One was Nicholas’s. And the other was Mick’s.’

  Jagger had awoken, found Marianne unconscious and called help in the nick of time, not only to save her life but also prevent the brain damage that so massive an overdose could have caused. Of all sad mementoes to the Rolling Stones saga, none is more harrowing than the picture an Australian photographer snatched as Marianne was brought out of the hotel on a stretcher. The face under the rough blanket could be some dead child’s, preserved in a Victorian locket.

  She remained in a coma for six days. For most of the time Jagger stayed at her bedside – at this moment, ironically, more her protector than he had ever been. When a British journalist bluffed his way into St Stephen’s hospital and actually got into Marianne’s room, Jagger had to be restrained by Les Perrin from physical assault. ‘I’ll get him …’ he kept babbling to Perrin. ‘I’ll get him.’

  The despair that had engulfed her was not wholly Marianne’s own. For six weeks, up to Brian’s death and the Hyde Park concert, she had been playing Ophelia in Hamlet at the Royal Court Theatre. ‘I’d willed myself into a suicidal state of mind, quite apart from what was going on around me. And I’d cut my hair very short. All the business about Brian and Ophelia seemed to get mixed up in my mind. When I woke up in that hotel suite and looked into the mirror, I thought it was Brian’s face looking back at me.’

  She tried to explain it to Jagger after she had returned to consciousness and found him beside her, holding her hand. What she could not explain – nor he begin to comprehend – was that dying, after Ophelia’s and Brian Jones’s fashion, seemed the only remedy for living with Mick.

  Marianne convalesced in Sydney throughout the two months that Jagger spent in Australia, trying to portray the country’s principal folk hero on film while simultaneously making plans to save the Rolling Stones from imminent financial catastrophe.

  It was already clear that Ned Kelly was an ill-omened project, conceived on free-spending Sixties euphoria and nurtured largely by the publicity around its star. Jagger did his best with the role, working at his Irish accent and bush-ranger’s scowl, completely in the dark – as all film actors are – about the shape or quality of the finished picture. The production was hampered by the outrage of many Australians at seeing their nation’s Robin Hood portrayed – as some put it – by ‘a limey pantie-waist’. There were even threats from a present-day outlaw gang to kidnap Jagger and cut off his hair. Out at the location, conditions were often chaotic, with Jagger protesting to Tony Richardson about the awful script and Marianne’s understudy, Diane Craig, forced to go before the camera without having learned her lines. In one scene a prop pistol exploded, badly gashing Jagger’s left hand. When he visited Marianne in hospital he pretended the bandage was part of his Ned Kelly costume.

  In September, after filming had ended, they flew to Indonesia together for a holiday intended to repair the ravages of the summer. It worked – as long as they were left alone together. Back in London, Jagger was plunged into fresh preoccupations. And Marianne found her predicament to be as desperate as ever.

  Once again, her warmly and chaotically passionate nature found itself trapped into the congealing gold of a public image as hard and bland and all-protecting as if Jagger’s personality truly were encased in amber. ‘The worst thing of all about being with Mick was this rule he laid down that you must never show emotion, in case people realized you weren’t cool. Over the months, everything used to get bottled up inside me. I remember, on one of those holidays with everyone in Morocco, being in the middle of the Atlas Mountains and suddenly just bursting into tears.’

  In three years, inevitably, their mutual physical attraction had dwindled. Marianne could resign herself to the fact that, when Jagger lay beside her in their Moroccan-draped four-poster at Cheyne Walk, it was usually just to pore over the latest book she’d got him to read. She could resign herself to the knowledge that, as his desire for her decreased, he more
and more frequently exercised the droit de seigneur he held over half the women of the Western world. ‘Mick’s other affairs did bother me. But that wasn’t as bad as the feeling of being pinned against the wall by the whole superstar thing. I sometimes think it might have helped if there had been more drink around instead of just dope. If Mick and I had got drunk together a few times, we might have stood a chance.’

  He could still be an artfully persuasive lover, wooing her back from fury or estrangement with gifts and flowers. One of Marianne’s minor grievances was his attitude to money. To keep up the Cheyne Walk house – as a woman must keep house for her lord and master – he allowed her only £25 a week. Yet he had bought a country cottage for her mother, Baroness Erisso. And he was always kind and generous to her son, Nicholas.

  The disintegration of their love was reflected by the country house they had planned to live in together, in those far off days, eighteen months ago, when Jagger’s greatest joy seemed to be whirling Nicholas round by the arms or pushing his swing higher and higher towards the sun.

  Christopher Gibbs, the antique dealer, had been commissioned to find a property no whit less grand then Bill Wyman’s new Suffolk mansion, Gedding Hall. ‘The whole process took an extremely long time,’ Gibbs says. ‘As Mick, Marianne and I were setting off to look at a house I’d found, Marianne would say, “Let’s have lunch in Henley on the way.” “But Marianne,” I’d say, “Henley isn’t on the way. We’re going to Shropshire.” “But it could be on the way,” she’d say. The result was that a two-hour journey would take six or seven hours.’

  Gibbs’s most promising find was Stargroves, a mock-Gothic folly, near Newbury, Berkshire, which had belonged to the eccentric Sir Henry Cardon and was now on the market for the extremely small sum of £20,000. ‘Mick and Marianne drove down to look at it in pitch darkness, with a great carload of people that included the author Terry Southern. Anyway, dark or not, the chemistry was right.’

  Elaborate plans were put in hand for the restoration of Stargroves, both inside and out. An elderly groundsman, acquired with the property, shuffled round with Marianne, listening dazedly to her schemes for making mazes and medieval herb gardens. Jagger, however, seemed to lose interest in the place almost as soon as he’d bought it.

  For him, too, this was a time of great depression and anxiety. Even his talent for shutting out unpleasantness could not blind him to the high level of Marianne’s drug-intake. Nor could his famous ‘cool’ restrain him from furious anger when her grande dame carelessness with hash or pills opened up the road to Brixton Prison all over again. Already, thanks to Marianne, one bust for marijuana hung over their heads, jeopardizing the whole strategy Jagger had worked out to save the Stones from ruin. Worst of all, the hash and speed and coke had begun to affect Marianne’s looks. The lovely, misty face had grown haggard, the great, liquid eyes vague and foggy, the voice hoarse with fag smoke. To someone who measured life in looks and profit, it must have hurt to see such a prize become such a liability.

  Matters were only made worse by the arrival of Keith Richard and Anita Pallenberg to live at number 3 Cheyne Walk, only a couple of hundred yards to the east. The move had been intended to facilitate Mick and Keith’s songwriting partnership as well as to liberate Anita from the restraints of country life. For £50,000, the undead king and queen of rock acquired the Queen Anne residence of a former Tory government minister, Anthony Nutting. They moved in in August, 1969, the month that Anita gave birth to their first son, Marlon.

  Marlon Richard opened his eyes to eighteenth-century wood-panelled rooms, transformed by Anita into replicas of Moroccan hashish-dens, their elegantly wrought ceilings supporting beaten metal lamps inlaid with fake rubies and emeralds. The second-floor drawing room, where Tory ladies had once sipped tea, was now devoted to tripping – or, possibly, more exotic rites – before an altar formed by the fireplace and two giant candlesticks. From the ceiling hung a ball of multi-faceted mirror glass that could be made to turn slowly, drenching the walls and moulded cornices, and whatever figures lay below, in wriggling patterns of coloured light.

  Keith and Anita, in their secret black and midnight hours, had long since ridden the speedball rollercoaster to the seeming shelter and level-headedness of pure heroin. Like all before them, they had no thought of becoming addicts. ‘Heroin is like a slow process of seduction,’ Keith says. ‘You try it, and you stop. You find you don’t feel any worse than after a dose of flu. You say “Hey – they’ve been lying to me. I’m not hooked!” That’s when you are hooked. Your body needs it and you’ll do anything to get it.’

  Keith and Anita were the last encouragement Marianne needed to throw caution to the winds. By late 1969 she, too, had begun taking heroin, believing she could stop whenever she chose. ‘People always assume I was already a junkie when I was with Mick – but I wasn’t. At that stage it was still an experiment. I went into it with my eyes wide open.’

  * * *

  The end of the decade, looming unreally beyond September, added fresh urgency to the manoeuvre that Mick Jagger had long been secretly plotting and preparing. It was a manoeuvre compared with which Sinbad’s unseating of the Old Man of the Sea from his back seemed relatively straightforward. The Rolling Stones wanted to break away from Allen Klein.

  Klein, in 1966, had promised he could earn them greater sums than pop stars had ever earned before. That promise Klein indubitably had kept. At an initial rough estimate by Mick Jagger’s parallel accounting system, something between ten and seventeen million dollars in record royalties and tour grosses had been collected by Klein’s company on the Stones’ behalf. But the money wasn’t in their bank accounts. What they had received – a trifling million or two – they had spent in the blithe Sixties’ belief that there was plenty more where that came from. Between them, they had frittered away fortunes, but that was not the worst part: they also had spent as if each pound and dollar wholly belonged to them. By mid-1969, the day of reckoning was at hand for careless living right back to 1966. The British tax authorities had begun taking an active interest in their affairs.

  The appointment of Prince Rupert Loewenstein as Mick Jagger’s personal financial adviser eighteen months previously, further underscored Jagger’s mood of disenchantment with Klein. Loewenstein it was who gave the party at which Jagger first wore his Hyde Park dolly dress; in subsequent conversation he had proved himself a man of business infinitely more to Jagger’s socially conscious taste than an uncouth accountant from New Jersey. Prince Rupert was an authentic sprig of Austrian royalty whose Savile Row suit, but for history’s accident, might have been a gold-braided uniform and his pince-nez a haughty Hapsburg monocle. History having decreed that Prince Rupert should manage empires rather than possess them, he had wisely developed certain useful plebeian attributes, principally a voice with the swift, calculating click of an abacus, and eyes in which visions of imperial glory had been replaced by the less subtle colours of a Las Vegas fruit machine.

  Prince Rupert Loewenstein waited in the wings to become the Stones’ business manager as soon as Klein could be persuaded to pay over their money and terminate his management contract. The moment for such a change could hardly have been less opportune. In a few months – mid-1970 to be exact – the Stones would reach the end of their contract with Decca Records. Since, as was well known, they would rather commit hara-kiri than re-sign with Decca, there was bound to be spectacular competition among other record companies to acquire them. Klein, on visits to London, was already to be heard boasting about the deal he intended to do. At the same time, Prince Rupert looked into the possibilities offered by the anti-Klein methods of courtly correspondence and mandarin politeness.

  Klein in normal circumstances would bitterly have resented – and taken rapid steps to counteract – any such subtle erosion of his power. But Klein was deeply preoccupied elsewhere. Since the previous May, his attention had been concentrated on four individuals who, even at this point of dissolution, managed yet again to thro
w the Stones into eclipse. Three of the four Beatles had now accepted Klein as their manager, allowing him to move into the Apple house and begin his great work of recouping their mislaid millions. All summer the British press had teemed with stories of the carnage wrought by Klein among Apple’s defenceless hippies, and of his boardroom skirmishes with Beatle stakeholders like EMI, Sir Lew Grade and the Triumph Investment Trust. Few of these stories even mentioned that Klein managed the Rolling Stones also. The exception was the Sunday Times, whose formidable Insight team compiled a lengthy examination of Klein’s business methods based on his relationship with Andrew Oldham, Eric Easton and the $1.25 million Decca advance. ‘The Toughest Wheeler Dealer in the Pop Jungle’, as Insight dubbed him, issued a writ for libel forthwith.

  The Stones might want no further part of Klein. But they still bitterly resented his treating them as also-rans to the Beatles. By August, relations between Klein and them were, to put it mildly, distant. When Keith Richard exchanged contracts for 3 Cheyne Walk, he needed £20,000 to make up the purchase price. Tom Keylock was sent to see Klein in New York with instructions not to come back without the money. ‘I just kept on walking until I was in Allen’s office,’ Keylock says. ‘He was so amazed I’d managed to get to him, he agreed to give me the money for Keith.’