Musicians were, of course, the first and most willing targets in this crusade, both domestic and visiting ones from across the Atlantic. On December 5, after the Stones played their final date of the tour at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, Brian and Keith attended one of Ken Kesey’s regular LSD parties, or acid tests, listened to Kesey’s sermon on the new consciousness and creativity it could unlock in them, and then tested it on themselves. For both, the experience fully lived up to expectations, and they urged Mick to try it without delay. But the cautious, health-conscious Mick—so unlike the out-of-his-head vinyl one who floated on clouds and saw “little men dressed up like Union Jacks”—preferred to hold back awhile.
If acid was a future threat to the Stones’ existence, another one, no less alluring and deadly, was already in their midst. Three months earlier, on the night of the Jagger goose step in Munich, a rangy blond fashion model named Anita Pallenberg had talked her way backstage and magnetized the Stone whose hair color matched hers. Three months on, she was living with Brian at his flat on Elm Park Lane, Chelsea, and already creating havoc with the band’s internal politics.
The exotic European influences that had always nurtured the plain English Stones, and their Kentish commuter-belt Casanova in particular, were back again with a bang. Twenty-one-year-old Anita had been born in Sweden of German-Swiss ancestry (including the nineteenth-century neoclassical painter Arnold Böcklin), had spent her childhood between Germany, Spain, and France, and had studied art in Rome and New York before settling in London as a model and occasional film actress. She already knew Mick’s art-world friends Robert Fraser and Christopher Gibbs, but had felt no curiosity about him or his band until she chanced to be in Munich on a fashion shoot when they were playing at Circus-Krone-Bau.
The immediate effect was to send Brian’s shaky self-esteem rocketing into the stratosphere—for not even Mick had ever managed to pull a bird like this. Anita was stunningly beautiful in the crop-haired, snub-nosed, long-legged way that perfectly suited skimpy sixties fashion, but with an extra, almost feral quality, “like a cheetah,” John Dunbar recalls. She was formidably intelligent, fluent in four languages, and knowledgeable about art and the obscurer byways of German and European literature. She also had a recklessness and appetite for devilment that would cause more than one of her new rock ’n’ roll friends to suspect her of being a witch. In Munich, she had picked out Brian as the Stone seemingly most like herself, so was taken aback when he begged her to stay with him because he couldn’t bear to be alone, and spent much of the subsequent night in tears.
As a further boost to Brian’s spirits, Anita seemed immune to Mick’s supposedly irresistible sex appeal and, indeed, showed the same tendency to challenge and even tease him that Charlie Watts’s wife, Shirley, did. He in turn made clear his view—to prove so very farsighted—that no good would come of her involvement with the Stones, and ordered Chrissie Shrimpton to have nothing to do with her.
From being an outnumbered outsider, Brian now found himself one half of Swinging London’s most famous couple, prototypes of the soon-to-be-dubbed Beautiful People. By early 1966, modish young men’s clothes had become scarcely distinguishable from women’s—ruffled-fronted blouses, huge floppy-brimmed hats, figure-hugging crushed-velvet bell-bottom hipsters with outsize belts, trailing fur boas, and knee-high suede boots. The hippie flower-child culture, blowing in from America’s West Coast, added even more gender-unspecific caftans, headbands, and multilayers of beads, bangles, and amulets. With their matching gold heads and virtually interchangeable wardrobe, Brian and Anita often looked less like lovers than identical twins.
However, their relationship was primarily and overwhelmingly physical. At the outset, their lovemaking sessions could go on for days at a time, another cause of Brian’s lateness for Stones recording sessions or shows. In the bedroom, Anita was in every way different from the shy English girls he had made such a career of impregnating. She was quite happy to indulge his existing sexual fantasies by tying him to their Moroccan bed and whipping him, and introduce him to new ones by making him up with her lipstick and cosmetics or dressing him (and herself) in the World War II Nazi SS uniforms which somehow or other had crept into their combined wardrobe.
The two seldom enjoyed absolute privacy, since Brian was always inviting friends, or even chance acquaintances, to crash out at the flat and live there at his expense for as long as they liked. Among these floating tenants was a young Scots film student named Dave Thomson, whom Brian had met in Glasgow when the Stones were playing there. In collaboration with Thomson, he was supposedly writing a feature film script to be shot in Scandinavia and the French Camargue—although, when talking about it in the Charlie Is My Darling documentary, he’d been unable to provide any coherent synopsis.
A side of LSD downplayed by its advocates was its power to focus on the weak spots in its user’s psyche and expand these into visions of peculiar customized hellishness. As such, it became the worst trigger yet to Brian’s insecurity and paranoia about his situation in the Stones. Allen Klein’s arrival, engineered largely behind his back, seemed yet another dastardly ploy to throw his lost leadership in his face and strengthen Mick and Keith’s new power base (though there was no evidence thus far that Klein regarded him as a problem). Even his triumph at winning Anita rapidly soured to dread that she would tire of him and—as might have been expected in the first instance—make a play for Mick. Once the first lovers’ idyll had passed, they began to have rows, far surpassing any of Mick’s with Chrissie, in which Brian’s penchant for violence soon resurfaced. Anita would appear publicly with a black eye under the blond urchin cut or bruised arms inside the jewel-studded Afghan coat, which, like most victims of domestic violence, she blamed on falling over.
After Brian’s first meeting with Dave Thomson in Glasgow, Thomson had seen him listening at the keyhole of a hotel bedroom where, he suspected, Mick, Keith, and Andrew Oldham were plotting against him. To his young Scots lodger he poured out the piteous tale of how, having stolen away his band and perverted its blues ideals, “They” were now trying to get rid of him altogether. Thomson also received worried representations from Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman, the Stones’ second division, who were untouched by any of these internecine feuds and pressures, but worried at the career threat they presented. Charlie told Thomson of an American doctor’s chilling diagnosis on the band’s 1964 tour when Brian had to be hospitalized in Chicago: if he carried on drinking his present two bottles of Scotch per day, never mind all the drugs, he’d be dead inside two years.
Paranoia soared almost off the graph in January 1966, when the Sunday News of the World published revelations about the child Brian had sired by his Cheltenham girlfriend, Pat Andrews, before making his way to London. A week later, another Sunday scandal sheet, The People, weighed in with a story about Linda Lawrence, from the Windsor–Edith Grove era, and the second unsupported baby to whom he’d quixotically given the name Julian. This was not publicity that even Oldham wanted for the Stones, and it automatically branded all the others with something of which they were totally innocent. In particular, wherever the dread name “Rolling Stones” was spoken or written—as had been proved by the pissing incident—most people thought first and exclusively of Mick.
Brian’s discovery of LSD did have one seemingly beneficial side effect. It brought him closer to Keith than they had been since the Edith Grove days—which by definition meant shutting out Mick to an unusual and exhilarating degree. The fact that he and Keith had sampled acid first in each other’s company made them feel like fellow pioneers venturing into the unknown and gave them a new, consuming interest in common. Acid was the first sociable drug, which explained its special appeal to America’s flower children: users were encouraged to have an experienced friend or friends nearby to provide encouragement, reassurance, or actual rescue in the event of a bad trip. So Brian and Keith continued to take it together, see its marvelous visions or endure its periodic horrors together, a
nd have obsessive discussions about the experience from which Mick was excluded.
As it happened, Keith had just been dumped by his first real girlfriend, Linda Keith, and was in a brokenhearted state that no one who saw him onstage, putting the boot in to rioting Glaswegians, could have imagined. Rather than pick a new girl from the hundreds available, he sought the solace of old mates. Since his oldest mate was still deep in a relationship (in fact, engaged to be married), he gravitated to Brian, back in their old common stomping ground of Chelsea. He became one of the most regular visitors to Brian and Anita’s new flat in Courtfield Gardens, to take acid, listen to music, or simply hang out. Brian was pathetically pleased by this return to the old atmosphere of 102 Edith Grove and—in the worst mistake of his short life—encouraged Keith to get to know Anita better and Anita to consider Keith as great a mate as he did.
In June 1966, Mick moved on from his temporary billet with Lionel Bart but, surprisingly, opted to stay in north London rather than follow Brian back to Chelsea, where so many of the Stones’ upmarket friends were also to be found. For fifty pounds per week, he rented a fifth-floor flat in Harley House, an Edwardian mansion block on Marylebone Road, the busy traffic artery connecting King’s Cross, Euston, Marylebone, and Paddington rail stations. Across the road was Harley Street, with its exclusive private doctors, dentists, and clinics; to the rear lay Regent’s Park. Living in this grand but rather impersonal environment, far from trendy SW4, seemed to underline how the new Brian-Keith-LSD alliance had consigned him, however temporarily, to the margins.
Number 52 Harley House was supposed to have been where Mick and Chrissie set up home as newlyweds. After finding the flat, however, he informed her that he no longer wanted to get married, just to live with her there. It was, perhaps, not such a surprising decision for a young man, not yet twenty-three, at whom half the girls in the Western Hemisphere were now hurling themselves like moths at a fluorescent tube. Chrissie was devastated by this change of heart, and made her feelings known in her usual fiery fashion. But as a sixties dolly bird, she accepted having no real say in the matter; if she wanted to keep him, she must do what he wanted.
The price she had to pay was a heavy one. Until now her cohabitation with Mick had been diplomatically concealed from her parents by a supposed bed-sitter and female roommate in Olympia. But doing so openly with him without first becoming Mrs. Jagger was what many British people in 1966, including Ted and Peggy Shrimpton, still termed “living in sin.” So shaming a prospect was it to Chrissie’s father that he told her if she went through with it, she’d no longer be welcome at the family’s Buckinghamshire home. She still has a letter from her mother, less intransigent but no less subservient to male authority: “Daddy says Mick can’t live as a married man and not be married . . . You’re being used . . . I wish I could wave a magic wand and make it all right for you.”
Chrissie would have ample time to reflect on the vanished dream of coming to Harley House as a bride, as on her banishment from her family. For Mick’s continual absences with the Stones meant that she spent weeks, even months, there alone.
To begin with, at least, he seemed to find the separations as hard as she did. Photographer Gered Mankowitz remembers him talking constantly about Chrissie, and how much he missed her, on the (largely sex-free) December’s Children American tour. She herself recalls how he would telephone her at every opportunity—a complicated process across the Atlantic in those days—send her telegrams, and write her “hundreds” of letters. Even from distances of thousands of miles, she says, “he was very controlling, very paternalistic, very caretaking. I used to go to the Scotch [of St. James club] every night when he was on tour. He arranged for a car to be sent for me at three in the morning and I’d be taken home. And then he would ring me as soon as I got in to make sure I was there.”
Having never been especially close to Mick’s parents, Chrissie did not feel they were particularly grief-stricken to lose her as a daughter-in-law. The highly respectable Joe and Eva Jagger did not care for this alternative arrangement any more than did the Shrimptons, but even Joe no longer had any control over his older son’s behavior. Chrissie’s one seeming ally was Mick’s brother, Chris, with whom she felt a certain affinity, both in their names and situations as younger siblings of stars. Now eighteen, Chris looked very much like Mick and had a good, albeit more conventional, singing voice, but he nurtured no ambitions to capitalize on his surname by going into music, preferring to develop interests in acting and writing. The brothers still had as good a relationship as when they used to play cricket or climb ropes as small boys; despite Mick’s exalted state, he took care to stay in touch with Chris, and would often have him stay at Harley House, where Chrissie was expected to look after him.
So that she wouldn’t be lonely, Mick bought her a Yorkshire terrier she named Dora and a collection of cats that eventually numbered six, even though (despite Rave’s story about the kitten named Sydney being his “first pet”) he himself hated cats. “He couldn’t stand them,” Chrissie remembers. “They used to drive him mad. They’d pee on his shirts.” A certain Romford service-station manager named Charles Keeley might have considered this proof of justice in heaven.
Nonetheless, knowing how much Chrissie wanted to add a white Persian kitten to the menagerie, Mick nobly went off alone to buy her one as a surprise twenty-first-birthday present. “He had a new midnight-blue Aston Martin, and he brought the kitten home in that—without a traveling basket. He came in and said, ‘It’s in the car . . . I can’t get it out. It’s under the seat.’ I was expecting a little white ball of fluff and I put my hand under the seat and was clawed by this skinny little ratlike thing. It was a Siamese . . . he’d got the wrong breed. It was terrified, and you know how they scream. This one even screamed when it was eating. So we took it back and swapped it for another in the litter, a girl. I called her Grace.” Her other twenty-first present from Mick, not an ideal mix with her cat pack, was a Victorian birdcage with three singing birds, “because I loved the dawn.”
Chrissie was by now, despite herself, something of a celebrity. Finally yielding to pressure to emulate her older sister, she had been photographed by David Bailey modeling the first collection of a new young designer named Ossie Clark for Vogue’s Young Idea section. In America, Mod magazine featured a Chrissie Shrimpton column, “From London with Luv,” concocted by the Stones’ office without her permission (or, indeed, her knowledge) and filled with rose-tinted chitchat about home life with Mick. “I think Stevie Winwood is the best singer we have. (Ouch! Mick had just hit me!) Recently I had my twenty-first birthday. Mick gave me a huge rocking horse which I named Petunia . . .”
Yet Mick and she were never a famous couple like Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg. Even when they were engaged and planning to marry, Mick continued metaphorically dropping Chrissie’s hand in public, refusing to talk about her to the media or admit they were seriously involved, taking time during the most insignificant interviews far outside London to denounce “all those stories about me and Chrissie Shrimpton.” On the rare occasions when he was photographed at their Harley House flat—lounging against a decor lifted whole from Terence Conran’s new Habitat store or disdainfully sipping coffee from “an outsize cup of Cantonese design,” as one caption writer breathlessly noted—Chrissie was nowhere to be seen.
Once he was out of Chrissie’s sight, any attractive young female was fair game and supposedly panting to surrender to him, though it didn’t always happen that way. Rave magazine’s Maureen O’Grady remembers being alone with him in a dressing room and finding herself the target of a pointed come-on. “He asked me whether the trousers he had on were too tight round the buttocks and crotch. ‘No, they’re fine, Mick,’ I told him. ‘Are you sure?’ he kept saying. ‘What about here . . . and here . . . and here?’ ”
Not long afterward, she met the Stones in Scotland for a Rave photo shoot during their current tour with the Hollies. Unable to afford the plush Gleneagles Hotel, w
here the band was staying, she asked her photographer to find her a cheap local B&B. The photographer reported back that nothing was available, whereupon Mick offered her the spare bedroom in his suite. “I said ‘no thank you’ and went out and found a perfectly nice place nearby,” Maureen remembers. “Later, the photographer told me that Mick had asked him to say there were no B&Bs in the neighborhood so that I’d have no alternative but to stay in his suite. It made things even more difficult for me that I knew Chrissie . . . in fact, she phoned me while we were there to check on what Mick was up to.”
For her own peace of mind, Chrissie did not inquire too deeply into what went on on the road and, in this era before paparazzi and tabloid kiss-and-tell, could remain—mostly—in blissful ignorance. “I think I only knew he was unfaithful to me about three times, though I know there must have been many more times when I didn’t find out. And when I did, he would be so regretful. I remember him playing ‘I’ve Been Loving You Too Long,’ the first time I heard that beautiful song—which I still find hard to listen to—after I’d found out about something. And I can remember him lying on the floor and crying all over my feet because I’d threatened to leave him.”
His long absences on tour in America brought the worst such forebodings, despite his blizzards of phone calls, letters, and telegrams. Nor were matters really helped when she would be flown across to meet him at some stop on the tour route, usually New York or Los Angeles. “I think I’ve still got a list he made for me of things I had to do when I was going to the airport . . . ‘Don’t speak to any reporters . . . Have you got your passport? Make sure you keep it in your handbag . . .’ I have to say I rather liked all that.” But joining Mick in the bosom of the Stones was always horribly uncomfortable. “They’d obviously been up to loads of things that the girlfriends weren’t supposed to know about. It felt like coming into a room when you know people have just been talking about you and everything suddenly goes quiet.”
Mick Jagger Page 23
