And then it was December ’79 and I was working with Jerry Hall at Avedon’s studio, and she said, there’s a big party for Keith Richards coming up and he’d like you to come. Jerry and I didn’t hang out; we did modeling together. I didn’t really know her and Mick. And I drank some vodka with a friend of mine and said, let’s go to this party at the Roxy and see this guy. Most of my boyfriends were gay, so it was nervous-making meeting some guy who wanted to meet me. Also it’s a setup, a little bit cheesy and whorey. But it’s also the end of the ’70s and I was twenty-three. So we went up and there was a wonderful awkward butterfly-filled-tummy moment, sitting there with him watching me, and all these people around him. The sun was coming up and my friend Billy and I decided to walk home. We went back to my place, and I guess I had given Keith, somewhere along the night, my number. And a few days later he called at two o’clock in the morning and said, what happened to you? And he said, hey, how about meeting me at Tramps? Some band was playing. One of my gay friends said, don’t do it! Don’t go. Don’t go, Patti. I said, I’m going; this is great.
And I was up with him for five days straight from Tramps on. We were in a car, we went to apartments, we went to Harlem looking at record shops. I remember on the fifth day, when I finally started seeing things flying, I think we went to Mick’s house; Mick was having a huge party. It was a big modeling time for me, I was on the cover of Vogue a lot, but I still didn’t like socializing, and it was pretty A-list at Mick’s place, and I said to Keith, I think I’m gonna go home now; this is it for me. After that I guess he went on with his usual biz and I the same.
Then the next thing I knew, I was out in Staten Island and I spent New Year’s Eve with my family. And I remember getting in my car and zooming as fast as I could back to my apartment in the city after midnight, to find blood dripping up to my apartment on the stairs. He was waiting, leaning against my door. I don’t know what he did, he had cut his foot or something. My apartment was at Fifth Avenue and Eleventh Street. And I think at that point he had been working at Eighth Street. We must have said we were going to meet there. And it was lovely.
He decided to fix us up at the Carlyle hotel. And I remember Keith making everything just right, lighting the place, putting curtains up, beautiful scarves on the lights. There were two single beds in there. Sex wasn’t a big thing. It was there, but it was very slow moving. On the other hand, I have boxes and boxes of love letters from the first day we met. He would do drawings in his blood. And I still look forward to those notes I get. Very charming and very witty.
All those first moments were so great. Then little by little, people started raising red flags. Keith was going back and forth, leaving me in the middle of the night to go back to Long Island. You have a family? You have a family in Long Island, you have a child? It was nerve-racking. I didn’t know he was with Anita, and I definitely didn’t know he had a girlfriend named Lil Wergilis at the time. A guy asks me to come to a party, I assume he’s single. I didn’t know he had all this stuff and history. I remember just feeling this guy needed a place to stay. People began telling me what I was doing wrong, what I was saying wrong. Oh, don’t make Keith those kind of eggs, don’t say this to him, don’t do this to him. It was very odd. Then my family would get horrible letters about Keith and they started worrying, but they always had trust in my judgment. I gave him the keys to my place and I went off to Paris to work for a few weeks. And I was wondering, is this happening? I really wanted to hang on to him; I really liked him. And I was excited when he called me in Paris, when are you coming home? And around March 1980, I went out to California and started doing a film with Peter Bogdanovich. But that was insane, having a relationship with Keith and trying to be a professional actress for the first time. And even Bogdanovich sent a letter to my family warning them about Keith, which I think now he regrets.
And if I didn’t know much about Keith, my Lutheran family in Staten Island knew even less. My brothers and sisters grew up on the other side of the ’60s, the ’60s of Doris Day. My older sisters wore beehives, the French twist. They missed that hippie era. I think my brothers tried marijuana, but I don’t think anyone did any kind of drugs in the family, even though they’re not teetotalers. They all have their own issues; we’re a heavy-drinking family. When Keith finally went to introduce himself at home at Thanksgiving, in the autumn of 1980, it was a disaster.
The first time I went up to Staten Island to meet Patti’s family I’d been up for days. I had a bottle of vodka or Jack Daniel’s in my hand, and I thought I’d just walk in the house with it, la-la-la-la, I ain’t lying to you, this is your prospective son-in-law. I was way over the top. I’d brought along Prince Klossowski, Stash. Hardly your best backup, but I needed some charm, and bringing a prince into their home, I thought for some reason, gave me the perfect cover. A real live prince. The fact that he’s a real live asshole was neither here nor there. I needed a buddy along. I knew that Patti and I would end up together anyway, it was just a question of getting the family blessing, which would make it a lot easier for Patti.
I pulled out the guitar, gave them a bit of “Malagueña.” “Malagueña”! There’s nothing like it. It will get you in anywhere. You play that, they think you’re a fucking genius. So I played that beautifully and imagined I’d gotten all the women, at least, on my side. They made a very nice dinner, and we were noshing away and everything was polite. But to Big Al, Patti’s father, I was just kind of weird. He was a Staten Island bus driver and I was an “international pop star.” And then they were talking about that, about being a “pop star.” I said, oh, it’s just a disguise and all that. Stash has the story on this. He remembers it better because I was already pissed out of my brains. He recalls one of the brothers saying, “So what’s your scam, then?” I remember that suddenly I felt under the grill. Stash particularly remembers that one of Patti’s sisters said something like, “I think you’ve drunk too much to play that.” And then bang, I went berserk. I said something like, enough of this. And smashed my guitar on the table. Which takes some force. It could have gone either way. I could have been banished forever, but the amazing thing about this family is that they weren’t offended. A little startled maybe, but by then everybody had had a tipple. My apologies were very abject the following day. In the case of the old man, big old Al, a great guy, I think at least he saw that I was willing to take a chance, and he kind of liked that. He was a Seabee attached to a construction battalion in the Aleutian Islands in the war. He was supposed to be there building a runway and ended up fighting Japs because there was nobody else around. Eventually I took Big Al on at pool at his local favorite bar, and I let him think that he’d drunk me under the table. “I got ya, sonny!” “You certainly did, sir.” But it was Beatrice, Patti’s mum, who was the key to my acceptance. She was always for me, and I had great times with her later on.
This is how it looked for Patti the day she introduced me to her family.
Patti Hansen: I just remember being upstairs, crying, when the shit hit the fan. Something must have happened prior to that, because I remember I wasn’t at the table with them when it happened. I must have seen he was out of it and just wanted to go and crawl in a hole. It was a holiday dinner. Something was said and a guitar flew across the table at my parents. I don’t know what happened to him. He suddenly became this rock star, this person none of us had ever been around. And my mother said, something’s wrong, Patti, something’s very wrong. I know they were terrified, so worried about me. My father was a bus driver; he’s a quiet man anyway and he was recovering from a heart attack, and that was the first time he met Keith, with his leather jacket and his skinny little legs. I’m their baby, the youngest out of seven children. Who knows what Keith was doing, but it was mostly downers and alcohol, and I remember crying on the steps and him crying in my arms, and my family watching. They had never been around all this kind of stuff. They did handle it pretty well. We had other family there, my sisters, and then we had some neighbors. It’s
always a full house. The next thing I know, my mom is holding me in her arms and telling me Keith was going to take care of me, it’s OK, he’s a good boy. And then Keith was so dreadfully upset with himself. He was so apologetic and sent my mother this beautiful note saying he was very sorry for his behavior. I don’t know how she could have trusted him after that, but she did. I couldn’t stay. I went back with him in the car. And they must have been terrified that I was getting in the car with this violent nut. My other brothers were in California that night, but Keith went up against them later. He would puff out his chest to me. “Choose me, Patti, or them.” I said, I choose you! He would always do that to me. Just to make sure.
As to Patti’s three brothers, the toughest challenge was Big Al Jr., and he really, at the time, did not like me at all. He wanted to fight; he wanted an OK Corral. So one day at his house in LA I said, let’s cut the crap, Al, let’s go outside, let’s take it on, let’s do it now. You’re six-foot-what, and I’m five-foot-this. You’ll probably kill me, but you’ll never walk the same again because I’m fast. Before you kill me I’ll sever you and your sister. Your sister will hate you forever. He threw in the towel. I knew that was the kicker. The rest about the macho bullshit didn’t mean anything. That was his way of testing me.
Greg took a little longer. He’s a nice guy, he’s got eight kids, he’s working hard for a living and keeps having babies. This is a religious family that I’m married into; they go to church, they form prayer circles. We have different ideas on religion. I’ve never found heaven, for example, a particularly interesting place to go. In fact, I take the view that God, in his infinite wisdom, didn’t bother to spring for two joints—heaven and hell. They’re the same place, but heaven is when you get everything you want and you meet Mummy and Daddy and your best friends and you all have a hug and a kiss and play your harps. Hell is the same place—no fire and brimstone—but they just all pass by and don’t see you. There’s nothing, no recognition. You’re waving, “It’s me, your father,” but you’re invisible. You’re on a cloud, you’ve got your harp, but you can’t play with nobody because they don’t see you. That’s hell.
Rodney, the third brother, was a naval chaplain at the time I met Patti, so I took him on on theology. Who actually wrote this book, Rodney? Is it the word of God or is it the edited version? Has it been tampered with? And of course he’s got no answer to that, and we still love to joust about these things. It’s very important to him. He likes the challenge. He’ll come back with another thing the next week, “Well, the Lord says…” “Oh, he does, does he?” I had to fight my way into Patti’s family, but once you’re in, they’d die for you.
It was good that I had such a distraction of the heart at that time because there was a bitter current beginning to flow between me and Mick. Its onset seemed quite sudden, and it was shocking to me. It dated from the time I finally kicked heroin. I wrote a song called “All About You,” which was on Emotional Rescue in 1980 and on which I sang one of my then-rare vocals. It’s usually taken by the lyric watchers to be a song of parting from Anita. It seems like an angry boy-girl song, a bitter love song, a throwing in of the towel:
If the show must go on
Let it go on without you
So sick and tired
Of hanging around with jerks like you.
There’s never one thing a song’s about, but in this case if it was about anything, it was probably more about Mick. There were certain barbs aimed that way. It was at that time when I was deeply hurt. I realized that Mick had quite enjoyed one side of my being a junkie—the one that kept me from interfering in day-to-day business. Now here I was, off the stuff. I came back with the attitude of, OK, thanks a lot. I’ll relieve you of the weight. Thank you for carrying the burden for several years while I was out there. I’ll make recompense in time. I’d never fucked up; I’d given him some great songs to sing. The only person it fucked up was me. “Got out of there, Mick, by the skin of my teeth,” and he’d got out of a few things by the skin of his teeth too. I think I expected this burst of gratitude: sort of, thank God, mate.
But what I got was, I’m running this shit. It was that rebuff. I would ask, what’s happening here, what are we doing with this? And I’d get no reply. And I realized that Mick had got all of the strings in his hands and he didn’t want to let go of a single one. Had I really read this right? I didn’t know power and control were that important to Mick. I always thought we’d worked on what was good for all of us. Idealistic, stupid bastard, right? Mick had fallen in love with power while I was being… artistic. But all we had was ourselves. What’s the point of struggling between us? Look how thin the ranks are. There’s Mick, me and Charlie, there’s Bill.
The phrase from that period that rings in my ears all these years later is “Oh, shut up, Keith.” He used it a lot, many times, in meetings, anywhere. Even before I’d conveyed the idea, it was “Oh, shut up, Keith. Don’t be stupid.” He didn’t even know he was doing it—it was so fucking rude. I’ve known him so long he can get away with murder like that. At the same time, you think about it; it hurts.
At the time I was cutting “All About You,” I took Earl McGrath, who was nominally running Rolling Stones Records, to look at the wonderful view of New York from the roof of Electric Lady Studios. I said, if you don’t do something about this, you see that pavement down there? It’s yours. I virtually picked him up. I said, you’re supposed to be the go-between with Mick. What’s going on? You can’t control this. Earl’s a lovely bloke, and I realized he wasn’t cut out to do some of this stuff between Mick and me on a bad night. But I wanted to let him know how I was feeling about this. I couldn’t bring Mick up there and throw him off, and I had to do something.
I was losing Ronnie too, but temporarily and for other reasons. More to the point, Ronnie was getting lost. He was freebasing. He and Jo were living up in Mandeville Canyon, around 1980, and he had a little gang, a clique that did it with him. Crack cocaine, this stuff’s worse than smack. I never did it. Never, never. I didn’t like the smell of it. And I didn’t like what it did to people. Once in Ronnie’s house, he and Josephine and everybody else around him were freebasing. And when you’re doing that, that’s it, that’s all there is in the world. There were all these fawning people around Ronnie, stupid blokes in straw Stetsons with feathers. I went into his john, and he was in there with loads of hangers-on and snide little dealers, and they’re all on the phone in the john, trying to get more of whatever crap it is they’re freebasing. There’s somebody else flaming up in the bath. I walked in, sat down and took a crap. Hey, Ron! Not a word. It was like I wasn’t there. Well, that’s it, he’s gone. Now I know what I’ve got to do; I’ve got to treat the man differently from now on. I said to Ronnie, what are you doing this for? Oh, you wouldn’t understand. Oh, really? I heard that phrase from potheads many years ago. And then I think, OK, well, I’ll understand or not, but I’ll make up my own mind.
Everybody had wanted Ronnie off the US tour in ’81—he was just getting too out of it—but I said, no, I’ll guarantee him. That meant I personally guaranteed to insure the tour and promised that Ronnie would not be misbehaving. Anything to get the Stones on the road. I figured I could handle him. And then in Frisco, the middle of October 1981, we’re on the tour, the J. Geils Band along with us, and we’re at the Fairmont Hotel, which looks a bit like Buckingham Palace, with an east wing and a west wing. I was in one wing and Ronnie was in the other. And I heard there was a big freebase party going on in Ronnie’s room. He was being irresponsible to the max. He had promised me he wouldn’t be doing that shit on the road. The red curtain came down. So I went downstairs, marched through the central lobby of the Fairmont. Patti was saying, don’t go mad, don’t do it. By then she’d torn my shirt off. I said, fuck it, he’s putting me and the band’s life on the line. If anything went wrong it was going to cost me a few mil and blow everything. I got there, he opened the door and I just socked him. You cunt, boom. So he fell backwards over
the couch and the rest of my punch carried me over on top of him, the couch fell over and we both nearly fell out the window. We scared ourselves to death. The couch was going over and both of us were looking at the window, thinking, we could be going through here! After that I don’t really remember much. I’d made my point.
Ronnie’s been in and out of rehab many times since then. I put a sign on Ronnie’s dressing room on tour not long ago that read, “Rehab is for quitters.” You could take it any way you want. To mean keep going to these joints that actually do nothing for you, all you’re doing is paying a lot of money and you walk out and do the same thing. They have rehabs for gamblers, which is the one Ronnie went to. Ronnie’s idea of rehab was mainly a strategy to get away from the pressure. In recent times, he’s found a smooth little rehab place—he tells me these stories, this is straight out of the horse’s mouth. I’ve got this great one in Ireland. Oh yeah, what do they do there? It’s great, nothing. I walked in and said, well, what’s the regime? “Mr. Wood, there isn’t one.” The only rule is, there’s no phone calls and no visitors. This is perfect! You mean I don’t have to do anything? No. In fact, they let him go down the pub for three hours every night. And he’s in there with people that are in for gambling, people that are actually hiding, like he is, just to get the day-to-day living off their back.
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