A Prince Among Stones (22 page)

The British hospital was originally founded at the time of the Crimean War by a rich Roman Catholic, who was also involved in the formation of the new British national association of the Order of Malta. The Order's sovereignty having been interrupted by Napoleon's invasion of Malta in 1798, Malta was then handed over to England in 1802 by the Treaty of Amiens with the stated intention of giving it back to the knights after the war. This never happened, however, because the knights made too feeble a representation at the Congress of Vienna and consequently Great Britain kept control of Malta until the era of Dom Mintoff. Some people say that the abandoning by the English of their promise to hand back Malta is the reason for the phrase ‘perfide Albion'.

The Order kept going in Spain and Austria-Hungary and had retained its properties in Italy before, in the second half of the nineteenth century, setting up national associations in the main European countries. In England the Hospital of St John was therefore, in a way, partly founded by the Order at the same time as the National Association. To this day the Order's church is within the precincts of the Hospital, in St John's Wood, and all the publicity for the hospital concentrates on this historical past; indeed, it uses the Maltese Cross somewhat extravagantly. However, the Order has no actual power over the Hospital, except that it has the right to have two knights on the board and accounts for five of the fifty possible charity owners.

I was intrigued by a Roman Catholic order run not by the clergy – although the clergy provided spiritual comfort to the knights and patients – but by noblemen who had taken the three monastic vows. Friends of mine approached me and asked if I was interested in becoming a knight. I was, and since by then I had made a certain amount of money I was able to contribute to the good works of a worthy organisation. I was secretary-general from when I joined in 1981 for eight years, chancellor for six years, vice president for six years, and president for a further six years, twenty-six years in total.

I also became involved with ACN – Aid to the Church in Need. This is a charity set up in the aftermath of the Second World War by a Dutchman, Father Werenfried van Straaten (his first name meaning ‘warrior for peace'), initially to help German refugees from the eastern provinces left destitute by the war, and then expanded to help Christians around the world, especially in territories where they were being persecuted: by the Communists in the east of Europe, similarly in China and in the revived remains of the Ottoman Empire. Independently of my work with the ACN, Rudolf, during this time, was actively involved in smuggling bibles and other religious material to persecuted Christians in Eastern Europe, and was caught and interrogated on more than one occasion.

I was President of the British Association of the ACN from 1982 to 2006, and was able to bring a strong commercial focus to its operations, working to ensure that the UK became one of the top three fundraising countries. Working with the Order of Malta and the ACN has been a way of restoring some equilibrium to my life.

I make a regular trip to Lourdes to help with the pilgrimages there. It is such an odd place, a mixture of cheap hustling, of
bondieuseries
, pickpockets and sightseers alongside the real pilgrims. Many of those come regularly, either the sick in mind or body or their helpers, and many are helped greatly by the strong religious atmosphere and the fact that the sick give as much comfort to the healthy as vice versa.

The souvenirs on sale are often of the most astonishing and appalling taste: water bottles in the form of the Madonna with a detachable head, for example. I remember asking one of the souvenir shop owners how many of those items sold. ‘Oh, much the most,' he said. ‘Le bon goût fait rien à voir'. (An Italian friend of Dora's husband Manfredi once took the music industry's own Madonna to Mass at the Brompton Oratory and showed her the music of the creed which she sang impeccably at first sight.)

Mercifully, Eugénie-les-Bains is only an hour by taxi from Lourdes, and is the most attractive place to spend a quiet week or two: unspoilt countryside, very pretty house and wonderful food,
cuisine minceur
, which, when eaten, oddly enough decreases rather than increases one's weight. It was created there in the 1970s by Michel Guérard and his restaurant, Les Prés d'Eugénie, has maintained its three stars in the
Guide Michelin
, in which Eugénie-les-Bains is described as the ‘Premier Village Minceur de la France'.

The Lourdes pilgrimages usually involve 250 or so of us, including fifty sick people, known as ‘mallards' by the cheery helpers, their variation of ‘malades' . . . The helpers are often either superannuated school children or bossy prefects (irrespective of their age), and sometimes can be quite wearing.

Dora, however, put it all into perspective by pointing out, one time when I was grumbling about a forthcoming stint, that it was no different from when I had to join a Rolling Stones tour and that the end of pilgrimage party, where many of the sick and some of the helpers do ‘turns' and skits of their betters, could not possibly be worse than the Rolling Stones party that took place on a ferry plying between Denmark and Sweden where the bossy organiser tried to make me wear a Valkyrie's helmet and long peroxide plaits.

Father Gilbey came to Lourdes with us one year, and we were staying in the same hotel. Also in attendance was the Chaplain of the British Order of Malta, later Archbishop Couve de Murville. He was wearing a straw-coloured coat and collar, whereas Mgr Gilbey – like my son Konrad – only wore the traditional black soutane. He said to Mgr Couve de Murville, ‘What do you think you are wearing here? I can assure you that St Bernadette would disapprove . . .'

On medieval pilgrimages, I later learnt, pilgrims had to put up with repetitive, rather dull drumming, a constant quasi-musical noise all the time. Rock and roll has its precursors.

Rudolf learned to play the organ in church at the age of twelve and continues to play on and off. Konrad is also a good pianist and musically minded, and in his church in Venice he has wonderful polyphony as well as Gregorian chant. We were talking together about this and he said, ‘You know, music is no longer a major part of my life at all. I'm not interested in it apart from Gregorian.' I said I couldn't understand that because he was very careful about the polyphony. ‘Yes, of course,' he replied. ‘That's part of what I'm doing.' But I could not imagine he was no longer impressed by the Mass in B minor by Bach.

At a point when I was involved in a number of large fundraising galas for the Order of Malta, in conjunction with the Cirque du Soleil, I heard that Mel Gibson had financed the building of a small Catholic church in the Agoura Hills near Malibu, which celebrated morning Mass in Latin. As Josephine and I had a house in Los Angeles, I thought it would be interesting to see if he could be a sponsor of an Order of Malta event in London. I telephoned him, went over and had a long chat with him about the events and he agreed to become involved.

At the time Mel Gibson was about to release his film
The Passion of the Christ
. The Jewish lobbies were trying to stop its distribution since they objected to the Gospel's account, all written by Jews, about a Jew who was killed at the behest of other Jews.

He asked me if I would like to see an early version of the film, which was not yet completely finished. I said I would love to. And so I brought Mrs Nancy Reagan, Mrs Betsy Bloomingdale and Josephine along with me. We had a viewing on our own in his offices, which contained a large projection room. I then had further conversations with him about the film. Was he musically minded, I asked, because I had thought that Pasolini's film on Christ,
The Gospel According to St Matthew
, had been hugely influenced by using the St Matthew Passion. I told him that I had brought along a CD of the St Matthew Passion, as well as one of the St John Passion. ‘If you'd put those in the film,' I suggested, ‘It would lift the mood.'

I had discussed the film with my companions at the viewing and we had all come to that view that we had loved the film, and thought that the fact that it was spoken in Aramaic and Latin (but with English subtitles) was breathtaking. However, it seemed to us that it concentrated too much on the flagellation and too little on the Resurrection. I went a few times to Mass in Mel's church, but I was unable to persuade him to use the St John Passion, although he included some very good music at the beginning of the Mass.

When the Pope planned a visit to the UK in September 2010, the ecclesiastical organisers announced that they were going to hold three massive outdoor events: at Bellahouston Park outside Glasgow, in Hyde Park, and at Cofton Park in Birmingham, where he was to celebrate the beatification of Cardinal Newman, all at a cost of some millions of pounds. I suggested that if somebody like Michael Cohl, who had directed and marshalled all of the Rolling Stones tours from
Steel Wheels
onwards, was brought in, they would make money instead of having to pay it out, but they preferred for their own reasons – and inexplicably to me – loss to profit.
C'est la vie
.

On an earlier papal visit to Britain, I had attended the Mass celebrated by Pope John Paul II at Westminster Cathedral with half a dozen members of the Order of Malta. The notables and bigwigs at the Mass were being ushered by, amongst others, Alan Dunn and his brother Arnold, who ran the Stones' logistics and crew. Alan and I were amused that the Rolling Stones were, in a way, represented at such an event.

Through my involvement in both the Order of Malta and the ACN, I had been invited to two papal audiences, as part of large groups from both organisations. However, my first papal audience had been when I was far younger, in my early twenties. Travelling through Europe with my friend Michael Dormer (this was the trip when Michael and I encountered Baron Wrangell and his wife) I had packed a tailcoat since I knew Michael had arranged the audience in advance. He, in his early twenties, was already a Knight of Malta, and had been able to clear this through the British chargé d'affaires at the Vatican.

As it was high summer, the audience took place at Castel Gandolfo, the Pope's summer residence on the shores of Lake Albano, south-east of Rome. We were in a small group of half a dozen or so, and went through reception rooms one after the other, ever nearer the papal presence. We would be deposited in one antechamber and await a higher cleric to collect us and show us into another antechamber. Finally, after forty-five minutes or so, we found ourselves outside the room where the Pope, Pius XII, was waiting.

Once ushered in, we knelt in turn and kissed the Fisherman's Ring. The Pope had been briefed about each of our backgrounds, and he talked to me in German (he was an extremely good linguist, and had served as Apostolic Nuncio to Germany in the 1920s); he knew some of my relations well. Five minutes later we were ushered back out. At the time the Pope was a figure of enormous mystique, compared to the global presence and celebrity of a John Paul II. Michael remembers that he was very tall and regal, and that kissing the ring was like kissing a block of ice.

The whole process of the audience, including the hierarchy of access, was in the back of my mind when we created the ‘meet and greet' as a way of controlling all the people who wanted to meet the band on tour. The system of VIP passes allowed us to control not only who could get close to the band, but where they could go and, indeed, precisely how close. Those ultimately admitted to the inner sanctum would receive their five minutes' audience with the Stones, although for the corporate executives from the Midwest, rather than kissing the Fisherman's Ring they would be more likely to genuflect before Keith's silver skull's-head ring: a different kind of religion altogether.

10

 

 

‘It is easier to forgive an enemy than to forgive a friend'

 

William Blake

 

 

 

Despite having managed to pull Mick and Keith back from the brink of sabotaging the deal with CBS in Paris in 1983, the next phase in the life of the Rolling Stones was tenuous to say the least. There was a strong possibility that as a functioning unit the band might implode.

Mick was flexing his muscles, testing out his solo career by releasing his first album,
She's The Boss
, in 1985. It came out a few months before he appeared at Live Aid that July, performing in Philadelphia with Tina Turner, as well as on the video of
Dancing In The Streets
with David Bowie. Keith and Ronnie Wood did also put in an appearance in Philadelphia, as part of Bob Dylan's band, but it was telling that the Stones as a band did not perform together on the great ‘global jukebox'.

This marked the beginning of what Keith has since dubbed ‘World War III', a conflict that was to concern everyone who was connected with and involved in the Stones. Ronnie has said that he was worried that if Mick discovered that he was massively popular in his own right he might decide that he did not need the Rolling Stones as a vehicle – and, of course, as a solo artist Mick would have a much higher percentage of any proceeds from his solo album sales and touring. Keith in any case was unhappy with Mick's solo record deal, and doubtless shared Ronnie's fears.

Charlie was, in his own words, ‘in a hell of a mess', having, to everyone's surprise, including his own, got himself mixed up in drugs in his forties and so was unable to act as an intermediary and go-between to help bridge the growing divide between Keith and Mick.