Mick Jagger (35 page)

If the tip-off about the Redlands gathering had come from the News of the World, none of the rank-and-file coppers involved in the raid was aware of it. John Challen, who’d answered the phone to the anonymous male caller, had no sense of talking to a journalist or of typewriters clattering in the background. And significantly, when rumors of the paper’s complicity began to circulate, Challen was ordered to check them out. After interviewing Dr. Dixon Firth, he and Detective Sergeant Cudmore went to the News of the World’s offices on Bouverie Street and asked an editorial executive whether the call had been made from there. They were told emphatically that it hadn’t.

THE CHARACTER WHO might have been expected to hog the limelight in the unfolding drama would in fact remain offstage and uncharacteristically silent. When Andrew Oldham learned of the raid, he left London before the press could reach him for comment and, in his own words, “went missing in California.” The first SOS call was to Allen Klein, who immediately flew from New York to coordinate Mick and Keith’s defense, avowing that “their problems are mine.”

Oldham’s detachment was a far cry from the onetime sixth Stone who used to pride himself on sharing every tribulation his boys went through. Mick in particular might reasonably have looked for help from that Svengali-PR brain which had done so much to create the predicament in which he now found himself. But over the past few months, and especially since the London Palladium incident, there had been a growing coolness between them. Everyone around the Stones noticed how Mick, that once-docile and malleable Trilby, no longer went to Oldham for guidance, but took decisions about both himself and the band on his own, then presented Svengali with a fait accompli.

Oldham, on his side, disapproved of Mick’s new upper-class social circle, blaming “the Robert Frasers and Anita Pallenbergs” for making the Stones’ internal politics and sexual tensions even more byzantine than when he himself had had a hand in them. His response to the Redlands bust was not to revel in the headlines, the way the old Andrew Oldham would have done, but to berate the victims for their recklessness, effectively saying it served them right. According to the second volume of his memoirs, 2Stoned, he had another reason for his low profile during the next four eventful months: he was terrified of being next in line to be busted.

Oldham’s withdrawal from running the Stones day to day had in any case been happening by degrees for some time. In his place as their press and media spokesman, he had hired someone who at first sight seemed to confirm how depressingly corporate he now was. However, events were to prove the middle-aged, gray-suited Les Perrin an inspired choice. A PR of the old school, Perrin was liked and trusted equally by his clients and by journalists, whom he encouraged to telephone him at home at any hour of the day or night if need be. Utterly straight in every sense, he would turn out to be the best mouthpiece Mick and Keith could possibly have in their coming ordeal—as well as one of the few people ever able to keep Mick in order.

For a time it seemed as if the trouble might be bought off, the way trouble around the Stones often was. A fixer within their circle—variously identified as a drug-dealer friend of Keith’s named “Spanish” Tony Sanchez and a shyster lawyer friend of Oldham’s—claimed to have contacts in the Metropolitan Police who could arrange for the various substances confiscated at Redlands to be lost before they reached Scotland Yard’s laboratory for analysis. With only a small technical offense in prospect, and that conceivably avoidable through evidence from his doctor, Mick had no need to risk charges of bribing a police officer, conspiracy, or attempting to pervert the course of justice. He went along with the idea for the sake of Keith and Robert Fraser, both of whom had much more to lose when the Yard’s chemists got to work.

According to Spanish Tony’s memoirs, published in 1979, the bribe demanded was $12,000. According to Robert Fraser, it was £7,000—about £50,000 by today’s values—of which Mick and Keith were to pay £2,500 each, while he, with considerably more hardship, scraped up the remaining £2,000. Keith has always believed the money was handed over by Spanish Tony to his Met contact in a Kilburn pub and that the subsequent unimpeded analysis of the substances just proved how doubly “bent” some British coppers could be. According to Marianne, however, Allen Klein got wind of the plan and wisely killed it.

Klein’s advice was that Mick and Keith should get out of Britain for a while, to avoid harassment by the media while the police deliberated when and with what to charge them. They decided on Morocco, a country still comparatively remote and unspoiled—despite having influenced Swinging London decor almost as much as India had—and with mythically liberal attitudes toward drugs and sex. Brian and Anita had gone there the previous year with Christopher Gibbs to buy ornaments and clothes in the souks, smoke hash, and listen to the indigenous music that fascinated Brian. His return with a bandaged hand had been attributed to a mountain-climbing accident: actually, he had gone to hit Anita in their hotel room, but missed and slammed his fist into a metal window frame.

In the end, a party of eight gathered in Morocco in March 1967 in what would prove a vain attempt to take the heat off Mick and Keith. Brian and Anita were invited, along with two other Redlands bust victims, Robert Fraser (in a state of dire anticipation over the analysis of his “insulin” tablet) and photographer Michael Cooper. To allay any press suspicions that the two main bustees were bolting from the UK together, Mick and Marianne flew to Tangier while Keith traveled overland in his new blue Bentley Continental, chauffeured by his driver, Tom Keylock, with Brian, Anita, and a mutual friend named Deborah Dixon.

This four-day road trip down through France and Spain was to prove fateful and, for one of the car’s occupants, fatal. At Toulon, Brian developed pneumonia—probably a combination of acid and his chronic asthma—and had to be admitted to a hospital. With atypical selflessness, he insisted that Anita should not wait around for him to recover, but that she and Keith should continue the journey together by themselves (Deborah having also dropped out). Keith did not mean to take advantage of the situation, but during the drive through Spain, Anita gave him a blow job in the back of the Bentley while chauffeur Keylock kept firmly eyes-front. The pair spent that night together, but agreed to treat it as just a fling, since Keith did not want to mess up his new understanding with Brian. Afterward, Keith went on to Morocco alone while Anita returned to meet Brian and start the journey afresh from London, this time by air.

In Tangier first, then Marrakesh, the Stones’ party fell in with a group of expatriate celebrities, most of whose drug consumption made even Brian’s seem mere toe dabbling by comparison. These included the venerable American novelist William S. Burroughs, author of Junkie and Naked Lunch, and the English writer and artist Brion Gysin, who contributed a recipe for “marijuana fudge” to the cookbook written by Gertrude Stein’s lesbian lover Alice B. Toklas. Pop stars with drug charges hanging over them could have picked wiser company.

They also encountered the legendary royal photographer and stage designer Cecil Beaton (sixty-three at the time and known as “Rip Van With-It”) who spent a night enjoyably slumming it with the “ragged gypsies” and made a date to take pictures of Mick and Keith by their hotel pool the next day. Beaton’s famously bitchy diaries describe sitting next to Mick at dinner, his skin of “chicken-breast white,” “inborn elegance,” and “perfect manners … He has much appreciation and his small, albino-fringed eyes notice everything … He asked ‘Have you ever taken LSD?’ ‘Oh, I should,’ ‘It would mean so much to you: you’d never forget the colors … One’s brain works not on four cylinders but four thousand …’ ” Meeting him again in the next morning’s harsh sunlight for their poolside photo session, Beaton could hardly believe it was the same person: “his face a white podgy, shapeless mess, eyes very small, nose very pink, hair sandy dark … He is sexy yet completely sexless. He could nearly be a eunuch.” Mick, however, was to take an unaccustomed backseat during the events of the next seventy-two hours, observing rather helplessly, in his normal voice rather than the hushed, soulful one assumed for Cecil Beaton’s benefit, that “things are gettin’ fuckin’ heavy.”

They were. Brian guessed that some hanky-panky had gone on between Keith and Anita after they’d left him in the hospital in Toulon, but could not bring himself to confront Keith about it. Instead, he took it out on Anita to a point where she began to fear for her life. The crunch came when he returned to the hotel with a pair of tattooed Berber whores he had picked up and tried to force Anita into a groupsex session with them. (In Faithfull, Marianne claims to have already hired a local prostitute for a three-in-a-bed session with Mick.) The incident finally spurred Keith into becoming Sir Galahad, with a blue Bentley Continental in place of a white horse. Next day, Brion Gysin was deputed to take Brian off to shop and listen to the open-air musicians in Jemaa el-Fnaa, Marrakesh’s teeming city square. While he was out of the way, Keith and Anita fled together in the Bentley back to Britain.

On March 18, the Daily Mirror splashed the story that Mick Jagger and Keith Richard were to be charged with drug offenses. Two days later, the formal summonses arrived. Mick—his address given as “New Oxford Street, London W.1,” actually the office of the Stones’ new PR, Les Perrin—was charged with possessing four tablets containing amphetamine sulfate and methylamphetamine hydrochloride contrary to the Dangerous Drugs (Misuse of) Act 1964. Keith was charged in his real surname, Richards, with “knowingly” allowing Redlands to be used for cannabis smoking. The cases, together with those of Robert Fraser and the vanished Acid King David, were to come before Chichester magistrates in May.

Meantime, the Rolling Stones were committed to a three-week European tour between March 25 and April 17, taking in Sweden, West Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Poland, Switzerland, Holland, and Greece. Amazingly, the tour went ahead and kept every date on its schedule, despite conditions more nightmarish than any rock band had ever faced before—or has since. Mick and Keith’s bust had been headline news in every country the Stones were to visit; at every frontier, as a result, they faced stringent searches by customs officers with far more expertise than West Sussex Police for the further sackfuls of drugs they were presumed to be carrying. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts, those law-abiding, acid-free “other ranks,” fell under the same dark suspicion and suffered the same rough handling as their chiefs.

At Malmö Airport in Sweden, they were turned over to an elite customs unit known as “the Black Gang,” who grabbed the unfortunate Bill for the same detailed strip search they gave Mick, then became highly excited over a heavy equipment chest for which the key could not be found. Mick was ordered to unscrew its back—a new kind of screwing on tour for him. The absence of any trace of drugs in the band’s luggage only seemed to increase trans-European officialdom’s hostility. At Paris–Le Bourget, a simple misunderstanding over passport procedure caused a scuffle between their driver, Tom Keylock, and immigration officials.

In addition, the audiences in each country were wilder than the band had ever seen before—screaming almost in exultation that, after all the ambiguities surrounding Mick, he had proved himself a true Rolling Stone after all—and the crowd-control measures adopted by police and security guards more brutal. Even in historically neutral and well-behaved Zurich, a demented boy knocked Mick over, then started jumping on him.

If all this wasn’t enough, the band’s rhythm guitarist had just enticed away the girlfriend of its lead guitarist and his best friend, yet there hadn’t been time to resolve the matter before the tour began. After Keith and Anita’s exit from Marrakesh, a hysterical Brian had made his way to friends in Paris, then returned to London, determined to win Anita back but still reluctant to sever his relationship with Keith. Somewhat hedging her bets, Anita had gone off to make another film, Roger Vadim’s Barbarella, leaving the two rivals for her hand to swap guitar licks onstage, one irradiating embarrassment, the other brokenhearted reproach. As Mick went through his moves, there was almost as much psychological tension behind his back as hysteria at his feet.

His own situation with Marianne Faithfull—for the present—seemed stable by comparison. There had been no awkwardness with Marianne’s husband, John Dunbar, from whom she had been separated for some time before she and Mick got together. Indeed, Dunbar was along on the European tour, one of the select few permitted “access all areas.” As a sideline to his Indica gallery, he had started a stage-lighting company with a young Greek electronics wizard named Alexis Mardas (later to find fame with the Beatles as “Magic Alex”). Mick had asked the pair to create a sequence of special effects for the Stones and come on the road to operate them personally. So each evening John Dunbar found himself putting the man now living with his wife in the best possible light.

Marianne herself was back in London, looking forward to a year that promised only to fulfill her long-held ambition to become a straight actress. Despite her much greater familiarity with drugs than Mick’s, and Detective Sergeant Cudmore’s pointed sniffing of the air around her, she had not been charged after the Redlands raid or mentioned by name in the subsequent press reports. While Mick and the Stones struggled round Europe, she was preparing for her stage debut in Chekhov’s Three Sisters at the Royal Court Theatre, in a stellar cast including Glenda Jackson. Her role as the sweet, innocent youngest sister, Irina, who marries a baron and yearns to go to Moscow, was exactly what the British public expected of her.

When the Stones reached Italy, Marianne found herself missing Mick so much that she decided to fly out to Genoa and surprise him at his hotel after the night’s show. It was an experience that cured her of ever wanting to go on the road with him again. The Genoa show was a particularly violent and chaotic one, and when Mick came into the hotel room where she waited in bed, “he was possessed, as if he had brought in with him whatever disruptive energy was going on at the concert … he walked over to the bed and began slapping me across the face.” Her first thought was that he’d found out about her one-night stand with Keith at the Mayfair Hotel weeks before. But the violence ceased as abruptly as it had started, and neither of them ever mentioned it afterward.