Mick Jagger (33 page)

OVER THE PRECEDING year, Britain’s attitude to drugs had received what nowadays would be described as a wake-up call. Young people, it had become clear, used narcotics in ever-increasing numbers, in the form of cannabis (which could be grown domestically as a houseplant), amphetamine uppers, or LSD. And the main conduit for this nationwide epidemic was plain to see—or, rather, hear. Pop music, both American and domestic, teemed with references to drugs and celebrations of the ecstatic and elevated states of mind they supposedly induced. The buzzword of the hour was psychedelic, a term originally coined by LSD’s American apostles to describe its sensory effects, but now applied to the muzzy, free-form style of avant-garde rock, the bands who played it, and the head-swimmingly brilliant fluorescent colors of “in” fashion and decor. One way or another, it seemed half the country was getting stoned.

Yet the police, largely conforming as they still did to Dixon of Dock Green’s benign stereotype, were woefully unprepared to deal with all this. Even in London, the Metropolitan Police’s drug squad, based at Scotland Yard, had just one inspector with an operational staff of six to cover the whole capital. Most regional police forces did not yet possess dedicated antinarcotics units; instead, general-purpose detectives and uniformed officers received hasty instruction in the appearance and smell of cannabis and where it was most likely to be found—i.e., among young people with very long hair, playing music very loudly.

The situation was a gift to Britain’s popular press, at this time a sector of Fleet Street quite separate and distinct from serious broadsheets like the Daily Telegraph, the Guardian, and the august Times. For Sunday papers in particular—traditionally the nation’s most widely read and sensational—pop stars and drugs in tandem provided a heaven-sent combination of circulation-boosting celebrity coverage with sanctimonious moralizing. And, to be sure, the moral issue did carry some weight. Was it not only right that young pop musicians who were role models to millions should be held to account for promoting and glamorizing drugs rather than using their enormous influence to help combat the problem?

For the present, no offensive was planned against the Beatles, whose recent music had positively reeked of pot, but who—despite their retirement from touring and John Lennon’s “bigger than Jesus” gaffe—remained inviolate. Instead, the pious indignation of the gutter press focused on the Beatles’ nearest rivals, a band who from their inception had set out to affront polite society; who were still at it as tirelessly as ever, whether urinating over petrol stations or being impolite on Sunday Night at the London Palladium; and who therefore just had to be involved in this new and most reprehensible of all pop-star vices up to their badly barbered necks.

The great bonus for Sunday scandal sheets, not to be found in the Beatles or any other pop band, was the raw sex the Rolling Stones’ front man had been peddling since long before drugs came along. Who was it who had put both fornication and masturbation at the top of the charts? Who, in his slight frame, awoke all Britain’s worst phobias about effeminacy while at the same time conveying the macho sexual threat of a beardless Bluebeard? Whose unnaturally large mouth and livid red lips in themselves almost ranked as a case of public indecent exposure? Who, come to think of it, had swooped down and carried off that innocent little songbird Marianne Faithfull? Above all, who was long, long overdue to be taken down a peg or three?

The British Sabbath’s leading purveyor of sanctimony and scandal was the broadsheet News of the World, popularly known as “the news of the screws” and commanding a six-million circulation that enabled it to boast “WORLD’S LARGEST WEEKLY SALE” on its archaic banner masthead. The paper presented itself as a tireless crusader against vice in public life, and specialized in sting operations by teams of undercover reporters, forerunner of today’s secret filming and phone hacking, at the climax of which the targets condemned themselves out of their own mouths. Traditionally these exposés had dealt with fraud or prostitution, but on February 5, 1967, new territory was broached. A double-page spread, headlined “SECRETS OF THE POP STARS’ HIDEAWAY,” identified a house in Roehampton, Surrey, alleged to have been used for LSD parties by various leading names from the charts, including members of the Moody Blues and Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones.

The remainder of the article was exclusively about Mick. The News of the World’s investigators described tracking him to a London club, Blaises, in Kensington, asking point-blank whether he took LSD, and being rewarded with full disclosure, not only about that but other types of drugs also. “I don’t go much on [acid] now the cats have taken it up,” he was quoted 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 …” The report continued: “During the time we were at Blaises, 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 Blaises, Jagger showed a companion and two girls a piece of hash and invited them to his flat for a ‘smoke.’ ”

Apart from the spelling of Mick’s surname, the account had not one iota of truth. He had not even been at Blaises Club when the News of the World team visited it, let alone unburdened himself in this wholly uncharacteristic way. The investigators had not been young journalists, knowledgeable about the pop scene, but old foot-in-the-door men to whom all Rolling Stones looked the same. They had certainly talked to a Stone that night, but one who was the utter opposite of Mick in his approachability, garrulity, and pathetic pleasure at finding someone to listen to him, let alone in the color of his hair. Even the untrendiest NoW reporters might have been expected to recognize Brian Jones after the paper had unearthed two of his illegitimate children a year earlier. But they hadn’t.

The irony wasn’t just that Mick indulged in drugs so little compared with Keith and, especially, Brian. Lately he had become increasingly worried about the extent of their consumption and their vulnerability to just such a retribution as this. “It’s all getting out of hand,” he’d muttered forebodingly to his art-dealer friend Robert Fraser just a few days earlier. “I dunno where it’s going to end.”

On the evening of February 5, the Stones were booked to perform on the Eamonn Andrews television show, with Mick joining fellow guests (comedy actor Hugh Lloyd and the singer of “Bobby’s Girl,” Susan Maughan) in a panel discussion afterward. When the subject of that morning’s News of the World story came up, he said it was all lies and that he’d be issuing a libel writ against the paper. The other panelists treated him frigidly, and Eamonn Andrews, normally the blandest of TV hosts, asked if he didn’t feel some responsibility to give his fans moral leadership. “I don’t think I have any real responsibility at all,” he replied. “They will work out their own moral values for themselves.”

The article was prima facie libel, fulfilling the law’s definition of bringing Mick “into hatred, ridicule or contempt,” with no possible defense of truth, justification, or publication in the public interest, and showing a clear element of malice. Even so, canny legal advisers might have cautioned him against rushing into litigation. They could have cited the case of the playwright Oscar Wilde—as controversial a figure in the 1890s as Mick was in the 1960s—who had taken the witness stand to deny a specific, untrue accusation of homosexuality despite being demonstrably homosexual, and had consequently wrecked both his career and his life.

They might also have cautioned that for a paper like the News of the World there was a well-tried way to avoid being held up to public ridicule for an idiotic mistake and having to pay whopping damages. The blunder at Blaises would not matter if could be proved that, although Mick may not have bragged about taking drugs to the NoW team that night, he nonetheless did take them in less public places, so the story was justified retrospectively. He would therefore have to drop his action or face humiliation in court. Unfortunately for him, such wise counsels did not prevail, and at the beginning of the following week, a writ for libel was served at the News of the World’s then offices on Bouverie Street, just off Fleet Street.

For someone always so cautious and coolly calculating, Mick’s next step was one of bewildering stupidity. The very next weekend, he and Marianne went off to the Sussex countryside to take LSD with Keith Richard.

In fairness, acid was not the primary purpose of the trip. “Lonely bachelor” Keith had recently bought a house—a half-timbered cottage called Redlands, bizarrely at odds with his rock ’n’ roll vagabond image—near the small West Sussex seaside resort of West Wittering. Mick and Marianne were to spend the weekend there with their two closest establishment friends, Christopher Gibbs and Robert Fraser, plus the photographer Michael Cooper. Brian and Anita had also been invited, but Brian said he was too immersed in his film score, though he’d try to join them on the Sunday. Keith’s incurable susceptibility to hangers-on had added two further houseguests, neither of them trusted insiders like the others. One was Nicky Cramer, a fey and rather solitary young man from the fringes of the Chelsea set; the other was a personage destined to pass into rock mythology as “Acid King David.”

While Cramer was at least a friend of friends, almost nothing was known about this twenty-four-year-old American whose lean face and shortish curly hair gave him slightly the look of some American art-house movie actor, a younger John Cassavetes or Ben Gazzara. His surname was Snyderman, though over the weeks to come it would be rendered in legal depositions and court reports as “Schneiderman” or “Snidermann.” He had arrived in London from California only a couple of weeks previously, but in that time somehow became friendly with all the front-rank Stones, and of particular indispensability to Keith. As his nickname implied, Acid King David possessed one sovereign virtue—an encyclopedic knowledge of all the newest strains of LSD combined with an almost magical ability to procure them. Christopher Gibbs later recalled him as “an upmarket flower child” constantly dazzling the Stones’ inner circle with ever more exotic chemical come-ons: “What? You mean you’ve never heard of dimethyl tryptomine?”

The highlight of the Redlands weekend party was to be a new California-made variety known as “Sunshine,” said to provide a more tranquil and relaxing kind of trip than usual, which Acid King David had promised to give out to Keith’s guests. If Mick could not see the folly in such a plan, just at the moment when the News of the World would be gunning for him, one might expect a highly intelligent, clear-minded man like Gibbs to have done so. “All I can say,” responds Gibbs, “is that, to all of us at that time, the English countryside seemed like a safe place to be.”

ON THE NIGHT of Friday, February 10, Mick, Marianne, and Keith were at Abbey Road studios, watching the Beatles work on the new album that had been evolving since their withdrawal from touring six months previously. The track being recorded was “A Day in the Life,” a John Lennon song partly inspired by the death of Tara Browne and peppered with seemingly blatant drug invitations, from its drawn-out wail of “I’d love to turn you on!” to its chaotic unscored orchestral passages suggestive of acid-induced delirium. The recording of these orchestral parts in Abbey Road’s cavernous Studio 1 was a gala occasion, to which the Beatles invited other pop A-listers like Donovan and Mike Nesmith of the Monkees along with the two Stones and the chief Stone’s new lady. To heighten its merry atmosphere, the forty classical musicians involved wore evening dress embellished with carnival novelties like clowns’ red noses, rubber gorilla paws, false mustaches, and funny hats including—in another unwitting prophecy—miniature police helmets.

The taping lasted into the early hours of Saturday; then Keith and his weekend guests—Mick, Marianne, Robert Fraser, Christopher Gibbs, and Acid King David Snyderman—drove in convoy the fifty miles down to his West Sussex cottage. Alongside Fraser in his white van—normally used for transporting artworks—sat his young Moroccan manservant, Mohammed, who was to act as cook. Other than possibly Brian and Anita the next day, no other guests were expected. It was to be a traditional country-house weekend in every respect save that the participants wore caftans and beads rather than Barbour-oiled coats and green wellies.

Sunday morning at Redlands was spent sleeping late, drinking, eating, smoking, listening to music, and basking in the synthetic Sunshine which Acid King David had brought along in a businesslike attaché case. There was also plenty of genuine sunshine, though the weather was cold, and in the afternoon—once more true to country weekend routine—the party decided to blow away the cobwebs by going out for a drive in Robert Fraser’s van. Not far away was a house which had once belonged to the surrealist art collector Edward James and was open to the public. As part of Mick’s cultural education, Marianne wanted to show him a sofa which James had commissioned from Salvador Dalí in the shape of movie goddess Mae West’s lips—the sexiest ones ever known pre-Jagger.

The Edward James house turned out to be closed, so instead the two Stones, two art connoisseurs, one girlfriend, one photographer, and two hangers-on went for a long walk through the neighboring woods and along West Wittering’s shingle beach (where Michael Cooper took a photograph of Keith and Acid King David in an affectionate man-hug). On returning to the cottage, they found two surprise visitors: George Harrison and his wife, Pattie. However, the low-key atmosphere was not to George’s taste and he soon left in his customized Mini, taking the acquiescent Pattie with him. By a similar stroke of good fortune, Brian Jones had still not turned up with Anita.

At around 5 P.M., Detective Sergeant John Challen answered the telephone at West Sussex Regional Police Headquarters in Chichester, just six miles from West Wittering. A voice on the line informed him that a “riotous party” was going on at Redlands and drugs were being used. The informant, a man, declined to give his name and hung up before DC Challen could extract any further details.