Andrew Oldham was one of the festival’s organizers (it was where he had “gone missing in California”); Mick was a nonexecutive member of its planning board, along with Paul McCartney, and in normal circumstances the Stones might have been expected to join its headliners. However, with Mick and Keith about to go into court on drug charges, there was no hope of either being granted an American visa. With his trial less imminent, Brian did manage to get one, and took the stage at Monterey to introduce a young black singer-guitarist in an orange ruffled shirt named Jimi Hendrix, whose sexual showmanship made Mick seem almost decorous by comparison. Later, with his usual awesome imprudence, Brian joined Hendrix in sampling STP, a hallucinogen whose trips could last up to seventy-two hours.
Britain staked its own claim to the Summer of Love on Sunday, June 25, when the Beatles’ new single, “All You Need Is Love,” was unveiled on a TV program called Our World, broadcast by the BBC from London over the new satellite broadcasting system to a global audience of 400 million. The studio audience included Mick, Keith, and Marianne, seated hippie-style on the floor with Eric Clapton, Jane Asher, and Keith Moon. The sequence was supposed to represent everything Britain could show off most proudly to the world telly-watching community, and at the last minute it was realized this label might not be best applied to two Rolling Stones due in court on drug charges forty-eight hours later. But the Beatles might have refused to do the broadcast if their friends had been excluded, so rather than risk disappointing 400 million viewers, Mick and Keith were left in.
Their trial, like the Monterey Festival, lasted three days, and attracted a global audience like Our World’s, even if its content wasn’t quite so wholesome. With the caprice of a British summer, weather as gloriously sunny as California’s prevailed throughout. The ancient cathedral town of Chichester became almost a festival site on its own, with hysterical fans, jostling journalists, craning TV cameras, sweating police, hot dog wagons, T-shirt and souvenir vendors, and ice cream vans. But spiritually speaking, the Summer of Love was halted at the town limits, frisked, and turned away.
It was not quite the full majesty of the law ranged against Mick on that Tuesday morning, June 27. Under a court system that had lasted since medieval times, and would not be reformed until the early 1970s, quarter sessions (i.e., convened four times per year) dealt with only middle-rank offenders, leaving the most serious cases to the regional assizes. Although West Sussex’s midsummer quarter sessions were under the charge of a fully qualified judge, sixty-one-year-old Leslie Block, he presided in his capacity of wealthy local squire, chairing a panel of three lay magistrates and exchanging his accustomed shoulder-length wig and red robes for a plain dark suit. Even out of Gilbert and Sullivan costume, however, Justice Block would prove himself at one with the era that had pilloried Oscar Wilde. The judge’s surname, in short, was an all too accurate pointer to the consistency of his head.
Mick was first to be called, wearing a light green jacket, olive-colored trousers, frilled shirt, and multistriped tie—formal attire by his standards, but a string of extra offenses against the worn brown woodwork of the dock. His appearance brought a suppressed shriek from the young women in thigh-high minidresses who filled most of the forty-two public seats, prompting the first of many exasperated calls for order from Judge Block. Not since R&B club days, when Jacqui Graham used to record the minutiae of his cuff links, had fans been allowed this close.
Only here there was to be no vocal. Apart from confirming his full name to be Michael Philip Jagger, his address to be New Oxford Street, London, W.1, and his plea to be “not guilty,” Mick, as was his right, did not utter a word. His counsel, Michael Havers, outlined his defense—that possession of the amphetamines had been legalized by a verbal prescription from his doctor—but did not question him directly, thus sparing him cross-examination by prosecution counsel Malcolm Morris QC. The only oratory required from Havers concerned the triviality of the offense; how, although illegal in Britain, the pills were a proprietary travel-sickness remedy sold in pharmacies throughout Europe, and any respectable person returning from holiday with a toilet bag of foreign medicines could end up in the same predicament.
The entire hearing lasted barely thirty minutes. Detective Sergeant Stanley Cudmore took the stand to testify that, after Detective Constable (since promoted to sergeant) John Challen had found the tablets in the green velvet jacket, Mick had said they were his and that he needed them “to stay awake and work.” Cross-examined by Michael Havers, Cudmore agreed that Mick’s conduct throughout the raid had been “thoroughly adult and co-operative.” The sole witness for the defense was Dr. Raymond Dixon Firth, who repeated what he had told Challen when the two West Sussex detectives visited him after the raid: that he’d given Mick verbal permission to take the tablets and, in Dixon Firth’s view, this was a legitimate prescription.
Judge Block hardly seemed to be listening. After a whispered exchange with the lay magistrates beside him—two local farmers and a Worthing shopkeeper—he turned to the jury of eleven men and one woman. “These [Dixon Firth’s] remarks cannot be regarded as a prescription,” he said. “I therefore direct you that there is no defense to the charge.” The jury retired for six minutes before returning the prescribed guilty verdict. Rather than sentence Mick there and then, Block deferred the moment until after Keith’s and Robert Fraser’s trials, so keeping him in suspense for at least another twenty-four hours. His counsel’s application for bail was refused, and he was remanded in custody.
Robert Fraser was dealt with just as speedily and inconclusively. Following the analysis of his “insulin” tablet, he’d had no option but to change his plea to guilty of possessing heroin. His counsel could only throw him on the court’s mercy, citing his exemplary service with the British army against Mau Mau terrorists in Kenya, and adding that since being busted, he had fought to wean himself off hard drugs and was now “completely cured.” Again Judge Block deferred sentence until all three defendants had been dealt with, and remanded Fraser in custody also. He and Mick were allowed a brief meeting with their lawyers while Keith, still free on bail, drove at top speed back to Redlands to fetch Mick some clean clothes and creature comforts, including a book on Tibetan philosophy and a jigsaw puzzle. Mick and Fraser were each handcuffed to a police officer, loaded into a white van amid shrieks and camera flashes, and driven off to the grim Victorian prison at Lewes, thirty-eight miles away.
The original, wise plan had been that Marianne should not attend the trial and should stay well out of the media searchlight until it was over. That first day, as Mick stood in the dock, she had taken her son, Nicholas, to the home of the Small Faces’ Steve Marriott, accompanied—according to her book, Faithfull—by an occasional lesbian lover named Saida. Marianne was taking acid with Marriott and the other Faces when the Stones’ driver, Tom Keylock, arrived and told her Mick needed her to be around after all. Keylock drove her to Redlands to meet Michael Cooper, and they went on to Lewes Prison together, taking sixty cigarettes, a checkerboard, newspapers, and fresh fruit. There they found Mick and Robert Fraser sharing a room in the prison hospital. Fraser, an old army man, was stoical, but Mick was in tears. Cooper surreptitiously shot a few pictures—including one of Mick lying on his bed with a view to a future album cover—but a prison officer spotted his camera and confiscated the film.
The next morning, Mick and Fraser were returned to court, once more in handcuffs, to be held in a cell during Keith’s trial and brought back before Judge Block for sentencing when it ended. Among the day’s press reports, several had questioned the use of “bracelets” on individuals not accused of violent crime, who were never other than totally cooperative. A spokesman responded lamely that it had been because the Prison Service “had no orders to do otherwise.” As the police van arrived, a Daily Sketch photographer snatched a picture of them together in the backseat, manacled hands raised together to shield their faces from the flash. The image was afterward turned into a silkscreen print by the artis
t Richard Hamilton, whose title for it sardonically altered London’s “Swinging” prefix to “Swingeing,” or brutal. Four decades later, Swingeing London 67 would hang on permanent display at the Tate Gallery, one of the most famous and revealing Pop Art images of that otherwise myth-clouded season.
Keith’s trial, in front of a new jury, was to take the best part of two days and generate by far the most lurid headlines—most referring back in some way or another to the unspeaking and now unseen Mick. Keith was accused of “knowingly permitting” his home to be used for drug taking, a charge not necessarily provable through the traces of cannabis found in various containers around Redlands or even the “strong, sweet smell” of incense allegedly used to mask its distinctive odor. Instead, the prosecution set out to prove that Keith’s houseguests had been palpably under the influence of drugs with his full compliance, if not encouragement. This endeavor naturally focused on the only female among the party, who at the time happened to be wearing nothing but a fur rug.
Marianne had not been charged with any offense, so her name could not be mentioned in court. However, thanks to the extensive coverage of the case before it came to trial, the whole world knew the identity of “Miss X,” as she was now futilely camouflaged. Moreover, thanks to Mick’s SOS call, she was not prudently hiding away but seated in open court, listening to herself being dragged through the mud by the Crown’s prosecution of Keith without any chance to answer back. So much for Sir Lancelot’s chivalrous self-sacrifice to save her from being thrown to the wolves.
A succession of West Sussex police officers, male and female, testified to Marianne’s “merry mood” throughout the raid and how at that moment on the staircase, she “deliberately let the rug slip, disclosing parts of her nude body.” Rather than just a giggly hash smoker, she was represented as a shameless hussy, surprised with eight men in an orgy which had not stopped at drugs. All at once, that rather low-key Sunday-evening scene in Keith’s living room was transformed into Britain’s juiciest sex scandal since the Profumo Affair in 1963. But even Profumo had not contained incidental detail as sweet. After this second day, a story began circulating that the when the police burst in, they had found Mick licking a Mars bar lodged in Marianne’s vagina. It was pure invention, inspired by the national fascination with Mick’s lips and tongue (though, according to Keith, a Mars bar had been in the room to satisfy the craving for sweets that drugs created). Yet it would become rock ’n’ roll’s most famous legend—the one thing about Mick that almost anyone in the English-speaking world was sure to “know”—as well as repositioning forevermore the homely chocolate snack whose best-known slogan was “A Mars a day helps you work, rest, and play.”
At 5 P.M., the court was adjourned again, and Mick had to face his second night in custody with Fraser in the Lewes Prison hospital. No orders to do otherwise still having been given, they were put back into handcuffs.
The next morning, June 29, brought Keith before the court at last, looking positively Wildean in a black frock-coated suit and high white polo neck. In the Stones’ whole career thus far, his speaking voice had been an almost unknown quantity. Now at last the contrast could be savored between that bony, menacing face and the pleasant, rather educated voice, devoid of any of Mick’s class affectations, that issued from it. Equally surprising were his humor and quick-wittedness against witheringly hostile cross-examination, which for much of the time put an invisible Mick back in the dock alongside him.
Only now did the mysterious Acid King David “Schneidermann” enter the backstory as alleged owner of the “large supply of cannabis” found at Redlands. Keith gave a winningly plausible description of the hangers-on who always beset the Stones to explain why this most casual American acquaintance had joined his weekend houseguests (though, of course, not mentioning what had made Acid King David so very persona grata). The court heard how at the time Mick was suing the News of the World for untrue drug allegations and how everyone around the Stones now believed Acid King David to have been planted by the paper to give out drugs, then tip off the police, so killing off the libel action. Cross-examining, Malcolm Morris QC asked whether Keith seriously accused the NoW of “a wicked conspiracy . . . to have Indian hemp planted at your house . . . because it did not want to pay libel-damages to Mick Jagger.”
“That is the suggestion,” Keith replied.
Once again, the prosecution strategy for proving that drugs had been used was to suggest a simultaneous sex orgy, with Keith implicitly as ringmaster. At one point, the crushingly supercilious Morris asked whether he wouldn’t have expected “Miss X” to feel embarrassed “if she had nothing on but a fur rug in the presence of eight men, two of whom were hangers-on and the third a Moroccan servant.” “We are not old men,” Keith retorted in a genuinely Wildean moment. “We are not worried about petty morals.”
Judge Block’s summing-up was worthy of any periwigged dotard in half-moon spectacles ever created by W. S. Gilbert. Having allowed hours of legally sanctioned smut and innuendo about the defenseless Marianne, generating all those lip-smacking banner headlines, Block now ruled that none of the Miss X evidence was admissible and instructed the jury, in all seriousness, to disregard it. But the genie was out of the bottle or, rather, the Mars bar out of its wrapper. He also came as close as a quarter sessions chairman could—and that was very close—to signaling the verdict he expected the jury to reach. After retiring for just over an hour, they pronounced Keith guilty as charged.
The three defendants were then placed in a row and sentenced in ascending order of celebrity. Robert Fraser received six months’ imprisonment and was ordered to pay £200 in costs; Keith received a year with £500 costs and Mick three months with £200 costs. While the other two remained impassive, he crumpled up and clutched his forehead with one hand. “I just went dead,” he would recall. “I could think of nothing. It was just like a James Cagney film except everything went black.” The savagery of his sentence caused hysteria among the young women present and was hardly less shocking to police officers involved in the raid, like John Challen. For a first offender with such a borderline drug, the usual penalty would have been a fine or probation. It was plain Judge Block shared the public perception of Mick as the new Antichrist—a view which his immaculate court conduct had done nothing to moderate—and, in that fine old judicial phrase, had determined to “make an example of him.”
The sentences began from that moment. Mick was allowed a fifteen-minute meeting with a weeping Marianne while the police dealt with crowd-evasion problems that normally fell to Stones roadies. The court building was by now effectively under siege, with a highly vocal, six-hundred-strong crowd massed around its rear entrance. While a decoy police Land Rover inched through this keening, camera-flashing throng, Mick, Keith, and Fraser were snapped into handcuffs again, hurried through the front vestibule, and put into a squad car, which pulled away without obstruction. Just outside Chichester—where the rejected Summer of Love still sat weeping at the roadside—they transferred to a prison van with a seven-officer crew.
Her Majesty’s prison system absorbed Jagger and Richard with a smoothness and efficiency that suggested some forethought. It had been decided that both should do their “porridge” in London but, like criminal siblings or members of dangerous gangs, in institutions as widely separated as possible. Mick therefore went to Brixton Prison in south London while Keith and Robert Fraser were assigned to Wormwood Scrubs across the Thames in Hammersmith. The two establishments were equally tough but with different characters, to which their newest arrivals seemed to have been matched. The Scrubs historically specialized in more flamboyant types of wrongdoer like the Edwardian con man Horatio Bottomley and Lord Alfred Douglas, the “slim gilt soul” who landed Oscar Wilde in the dock. Brixton was more political, having over the years confined several notable Irish republicans and British fascists; it also happened to be where Mick’s fellow London School of Economics alumnus Bertrand Russell served six months as a conscientious objec
tor during the First World War.
Mick’s numerous foes were now enjoying the pleasantest mental pictures of what awaited him and Keith inside: screaming guards, vile food, gang rapes in the showers, and above all, the ritual savage shearing of their hated hair. But while there was as yet no idea that they would serve less than their full term, orders appeared to have been given to go easy on them. Though both underwent full induction as prisoners, checking in all their personal possessions, exchanging their names for numbers (Mick’s was 7856) and their Carnaby threads for heavy blue serge suits and black shoes, no attempt was made to cut their hair or otherwise molest them. Far from leaping on them in sadistic delight, their fellow inmates proved sympathetic, even respectful. At The Scrubs, Keith was treated like a hero and offered cigarettes, chocolate, even hash. At Brixton, Mick was allotted a cell to himself, which, he later said, “wasn’t so much worse than a hotel room in Minnesota . . . We had very, very good treatment, though no different from the other prisoners. They all wanted our autographs. The other chaps [sic] showed a great interest in the case and wanted to know all the details.”
In the London Evening Standard, a Jak cartoon showed him standing on a cell gallery in a convict’s arrow suit with a shifty-looking man in dark glasses close behind him. “I’m his agent,” the man was telling a warder. “I get 25 percent of everything.”
THE JUDGMENT AT Chichester unleashed a storm of protest, mostly but by no means all from Rolling Stones fans or the young. In London, an all-night vigil was held around the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus to express solidarity with Mick and Keith in their prison cells, while two hundred less sedentary souls marched to Fleet Street and shouted insults at the News of the World for its supposed role in their downfall. In clubs and discos all over the country, deejays called for moments of silence or played nonstop Stones music. In New York, when the news came through, there were angry demonstrations outside the British consulate. The image of Mick being paraded in manacles like some eighteenth-century horse thief even sparked a brief fashion trend. At a Carnaby Street store named I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, sets of plastic handcuffs went on sale under a sign saying BE FAITHFULL WITH A PAIR OF JAGGER LINKS.
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