Life

by Keith Richards; James Fox

  I just can’t be seen with you.…

  It’s too dangerous, baby.…

  I just can’t be, yes I got to chill this thing with you.

  —a song called “Can’t Be Seen”

  We visited Achmed, a legendary hashish dealer of those early drug days. Anita had met him first with Chrissie Gibbs on her previous visit, a small Moroccan man with a Chinese jar on his shoulder walking along, looking back at them, leading them through the medina, up the hill towards the Minzah, opening the door into a tiny little shop that was completely empty except for a box with a few pieces of Moroccan jewelry in it and a lot of hashish.

  His shop was on the stairs, called the Escalier Waller, going down from the Minzah, little one-story shops on the right-hand side that backed onto the Minzah gardens. Achmed started off with one shop, then he had two above it. There were steps between them—internally, it was a bit of a labyrinth—and the higher ones just had a few brass beds with gaudy-colored velvet mattresses on them, on which one could, having smoked a lot of dope, pass out for a day or two. And then you’d come in and he’d give you some more dope to make you more passed out. It was almost like a basement and it was hung with all of the wonders of the East, caftans, rugs and beautiful lanterns… Aladdin’s cave. It was a shack, but he made it look like a palace.

  Achmed Hole-in-Head, we used to call him, because he said his prayers so often he had a hole in the middle of his forehead. He was a good salesman. First thing, he gets the mint tea, and then a pipe. He was somewhat on the spiritual side, and as he gave you your pipe he would usually tell you some thrilling adventure of the Prophet in the wilderness. He was a good ambassador for his faith and a cheerful soul. Also a typical Moroccan little shyster. He had gaps in his teeth, and he had this great smile that never left. Once he started smiling, it was there all the time. And he kept looking at you. But he had such good shit, you kind of went to the land of milk and honey there. And after a few rounds of this, it was almost as if you were on acid. In and out he went, bringing sweetmeats and candies. And it was very difficult to get out. You think you’re going to have a quick one and then do something else, but very rarely would you do anything else. You could stay there all day, all night; you could live there. And always Radio Cairo, with static, slightly off the tuning.

  The Moroccan specialty was kef, the leaf cut up with tobacco, which they smoked in long pipes—sebsi, they called them— with a tiny little bowl on the end. One hit in the morning with a cup of mint tea. But what Achmed had in large quantities and which he imbued with a new glamour was a kind of hash. It was called hash because it came in chunks, but it wasn’t hash strictly speaking. Hash is made from the resin. And this was loose powder, like pollen, from the dried bud of the plant, compressed into shape. Which was why it was that green color. I heard that a way of collecting it was to cover children in honey and run them naked through a field of herb, and they came out the other end and they scraped ’em off. Achmed had three or four different qualities, decided by which kind of stocking he put it through. There would be the coarser ones, and there would be the twenty-four denier, very close to the dirham, the money. The high-quality one went through the finest, finest silk. It was just powder by then.

  That was my first touch of Africa. Within the short buzz from Spain over to Tangier, you were in another world. It could have been a thousand years ago, and you either went, “How weird,” or you went, “Wow! This is great.” And we loved to be transported. We were already heavy-duty smokers. One could say we were going round as hash inspectors. We used to do so much of it. “We must reconsider our ideas on drugs,” wrote Cecil Beaton in his diary. “It seems these boys live off them, yet they seem extremely healthy and strong. We will see.”

  Anita’s dilemma, apart from the guilt of this betrayal and her passionate and destructive attachment to Brian, was that Brian was still very wobbly and sick and she felt she should look after him. So Anita went back to get Brian, took him from Toulouse to London for more medical attention and then, with Marianne, who was coming to join Mick in Marrakech for the weekend, brought him, at first, to Tangier. Brian had been doing a lot of acid and he was in a weak physical state from his pneumonia, so to stiffen him up, Anita and Marianne, the nursing sisters, gave him a tab of acid on the plane. Anita and Marianne had both been up all the previous night on acid and, according to Anita, when they finally got to Tangier, some incident at Achmed’s in which Marianne found her sari (the only item of clothing she had packed) unraveling and herself suddenly exposed naked in the Kasbah caused panic to set in—especially in Brian, who ran back to the hotel, seized with fear. There they huddled in the corridors of the Minzah Hotel, on straw mats, grappling with hallucinations. Not a good beginning to Brian’s recuperation.

  We went to Marrakech, the whole troupe, including Mick, who was waiting there for Marianne. Beaton was twitching about us, admiring our breakfast arrangements and my “marvelous torso.” Beaton was mesmerized by Mick (“I was fascinated with the thin concave lines of his body, legs, arms…”).

  When Brian, Anita and Marianne got to Marrakech, Brian must have sensed something, although Tom Keylock, who was the only person who knew about Anita and me, wouldn’t have told him. And we’re pretending barely to know each other. “Yeah, we had a great trip, Brian. Everything was cool. Went to the Kasbah. Valencia was lovely.” The almost unbearable tension of the situation. That was recorded by Michael Cooper in one of his most revealing photographs (which is at the head of this chapter), and a chilling image in retrospect, the last picture of Anita and Brian and me together. It has a tension about it that still radiates —Anita staring straight at the camera, me and Brian looking grimly away in different directions, a joint in Brian’s hand. Cecil Beaton took one of Mick and me and Brian, who is clutching his Uher tape recorder, bags under his eyes, malevolent and sad. It’s not surprising that little or no work was done. I don’t remember doing or composing anything with Mick in Morocco, which was rare at the time. We were too occupied.

  It was obvious that Brian and Anita had come to the end of their tether. They’d beaten the shit out of each other. There was no point in it. I never really knew what the beef was. If I were Brian, I would have been a little bit sweeter and kept the bitch. But she was a tough girl. She certainly made a man out of me. She had had almost nothing but turbulent, abusive relationships, and she and Brian had always been fighting, she running away screaming, being chased, in tears. She had been used to this for so long, it was almost reassuring and normal. It’s not easy to get out of those destructive relationships, to know how to end them.

  And of course Brian starts his old shit again, in Marrakech in the Es Saadi hotel, trying to take Anita on for fifteen rounds. His reaction to whatever he sensed between Anita and me was more violence. And once again he breaks two ribs and a finger or something. And I’m watching it, hearing it. Brian was about to sign his own exit card and help Anita and me on our way. There’s no point to this noninterference anymore. We’re stuck in Marrakech, this is the woman I’m in love with, and I’ve got to relinquish her out of some formality? All of my plans of rebuilding my relationship with Brian are obviously going straight down the drain. In the condition he was in, there was no point in building anything with Brian. I’d done my best.… Now it was just unacceptable. Then Brian dragged two tattooed whores—remembered by Anita, incidentally, as “really hairy girls” —down the hotel corridor and into the room, trying to force Anita into a scene, humiliating her in front of them. He started to fling food at her from the many trays he’d ordered up. At that point Anita ran to my room.

  I thought Anita wanted out of there, and if I could come up with a plan, she would take it. Sir Galahad again. But I wanted her back; I wanted to get out. I said, “You didn’t come to Marrakech to worry that you’ve beaten up your old man so much he’s lying in the bath with broken ribs. I can’t take this shit anymore. I can’t listen to you getting beaten up and fighting and all this crap. This is poi
ntless. Let’s get the hell out of here. Let’s just leave him. We’re having much more fun without him. It’s been a very, very hard week for me knowing that you’re with him.” Anita was in tears. She didn’t want to leave, but she realized that I was right when I said that Brian would probably try and kill her.

  And so I planned the moonlight flit. When Cecil Beaton took that picture of me lying beside the pool at the hotel, I was actually figuring out an escape route. I was thinking, “Right, tell Tom to get the Bentley ready, suggest somewhere after sunset, we’re getting out of here.” The great moonlight flit from Marrakech to Tangier was in motion.

  We set Brion Gysin up, had Tom Keylock order him to take Brian into Marrakech into the Square of the Dead, with the musicians and acrobats, to do some recording with his Uher tape recorder, to avoid what Tom had told him was an invasion of press hunting for Brian. And in the meantime, Anita and I drove to Tangier. We left late at night, Anita and I, with Tom at the wheel. Mick and Marianne had already left. In some written work, Gysin recorded the devastating moment when Brian got back to the hotel and called him: “Come quickly! They’ve all gone and left me. Cleared out! I don’t know where they’ve gone. No message. The hotel won’t tell me. I’m here all alone, help me. Come at once!” Gysin writes, “I go over there. Get him into bed. Call a doctor to give him a shot and stick around long enough to see it take hold on him. Don’t want him jumping down those ten stories into the swimming pool.”

  Anita and I got back to my little pad in St. John’s Wood, which I’d hardly used since I’d moved into it with Linda Keith. It was quite a difference for Anita after Courtfield Gardens. We were hiding out from Brian there, and that took a while. Brian and I still had to work together, and Brian made desperate attempts to get Anita back. There was no chance of that happening. Once Anita makes up her mind, she makes up her mind. But there was still this intense period of hiding out and negotiating with Brian, and he just used that as an even bigger excuse to get more and more out there. It’s said that I stole her. But my take on it is that I rescued her. Actually, in a way, I rescued him. Both of them. They were both on a very destructive course.

  Brian went to Paris and fell onto Anita’s agent—howling that everyone had left him, fucked off and left him. He never forgave me. I don’t blame him. He quickly got himself a chick, Suki Poitier, and we did somehow manage to tour together in March and April.

  Anita and I went to Rome that spring and summer, between the bust and the trials, where Anita played in Barbarella, with Jane Fonda, directed by Jane’s husband Roger Vadim. Anita’s Roman world centered around the Living Theatre, the famous anarchist-pacifist troupe run by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, which had been around for years but was coming into its own in this period of activism and street demos. The Living Theatre was particularly insane, hard-core, its players often getting arrested on indecency charges—they had a play in which they recited lists of social taboos at the audience, for which they usually got a night in the slammer. Their main actor, a handsome black man named Rufus Collins, was a friend of Robert Fraser, and they were a part of the Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga connection. And so it all went round in a little avant-garde elite, as often as not drawn together by a taste for drugs, of which the LT was a center. And drugs were not copious in those days. The Living Theatre was intense, but it had glamour. There were all those beautiful people attached, like Donyale Luna, who was the first famous black model in America, and Nico and all those girls who were hovering around. Donyale Luna was with one of the guys from the theater. Talk about a tiger, a leopard, one of the most sinuous chicks I’ve ever seen. Not that I tried or anything. She obviously had her own agenda. And all backlit by the beauty of Rome, which gave it an added intensity.

  One night when she was doing Barbarella, Anita ended up in prison. She was with some guys from the Living Theatre when she was pulled over for drugs, and the police thought she was a transvestite. They put her into the tank, and as soon as they opened the door everybody went, “Anita! Anita!” Everyone knew her—talk about connections. And she’s hissing, “Shut up!” because her story was she was the Black Queen and she couldn’t be arrested—a bit of a theatrical number that she thought would appeal to the enlightened Romans, or somehow divert them. She’d had to swallow a whole lump of hash when they caught her, so by then she was pretty high. They put her in a room with all the other queens. And eventually the next morning someone bailed her out. Those were days when police didn’t really know how to handle the gender-bender varieties. They didn’t really know what was going on.

  Anita’s friends were, as ever, a hip crowd of the period—people like the actor Christian Marquand, who directed Candy, the next film Anita worked on that summer, which starred, among a large cast of stars, Marlon Brando, who kidnapped her one night and read her poetry and, when that failed, tried to seduce Anita and me together. “Later, pal.” There were Paul and Talitha Getty, who had the best and finest opium. I fell in with some other reprobates, like the writer Terry Southern, with whom I got on well, and the picaresque, scarcely believable figure of the period “Prince” Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, known as Stash, son of the painter Balthus. Stash was an Anita connection from Paris who had been sent by Brian Jones to try and get Anita back. Instead he fell in with the poacher—me. Stash had the bullshit credentials of the period—the patter of mysticism, the lofty talk of alchemy and the secret arts, all basically employed in the service of leg-over. How gullible were the ladies. He was a roué and a playboy, liked to look upon himself as Casanova. What an amazing creature to sweep through the twentieth century. He played with Vince Taylor, an American rock and roller who came over to England and never quite made it, but had a big success in France. Stash was in his band, playing tambourine with one black glove. He loved his music. He loved to dance, in this weird aristocratic way. I was always convinced Stash was going to break out into a minuet. He wanted to be one of the lads. But he could also do “I’m Prince Blah-blah.” All hot air.

  We lived together in this magnificent palace, the Villa Medici, with its formal gardens, one of the most elegant buildings in the world, that Stash had managed to pull off. His father, Balthus, had an apartment there, some diplomatic role via the French Academy, which owned the building. Balthus was away, so we had his place to ourselves. Down the Spanish Steps for lunch. Nightclubs, hanging out at the Villa Medici, going to the gardens of the Villa Borghese. It was my version of the Grand Tour. There was also this undercurrent of revolution in the air, a lot of political undertones, all half-assed except for the Red Brigades later. Before the riots in Paris the following year, the students started a revolution at the University of Rome, which I went to. They barricaded it, they sneaked me in. They were all flash-in-the-pan revolutionaries.

  Me, I had nothing to do, really. Sometimes I’d go to the studio and see Fonda and Vadim at work. Anita went to work and I didn’t. Like some sort of Roman pimp or something. Send the woman to work, and hang about. It was weird. I was enjoying it, but at the same time there was that sort of itch. Shouldn’t I be doing something? Meanwhile, Tom Keylock is there with my Bentley. Blue Lena had loudspeakers in the grille, and Anita used to terrorize the Romans by putting on a woman policeman’s voice, reading out their number plates and ordering them to turn immediately to the right. The car flew a Vatican flag with the keys of Saint Peter.

  Marianne and Mick stayed with us for a while. Hear Marianne on the subject.

  Marianne Faithfull: Now that’s a trip I’ll never forget. Me and Mick and Keith and Anita and Stash. On acid, at night in the full moon at the Villa Medici. It was just utterly beautiful. And Anita’s smile I remember. I mean, her wonderful smile in those days, which promised everything. When she was having a good time, she was so full of promise. She gave this incredible smile, which was quite frightening too, all those teeth. Like a wolf, like a cat that got the cream. If you were a man, it must have been very powerful. She was gorgeous because she was so beautifully dressed, alw
ays in the perfect costume.

  Anita had a huge influence on the style of the times. She could put anything together and look good. I was beginning to wear her clothes most of the time. I would wake up and put on what was lying around. Sometimes it was mine, and sometimes it was the old lady’s, but we were the same size so it didn’t matter. If I sleep with someone, I at least have the right to wear her clothes. But it really pissed off Charlie Watts, with his walk-in cupboards of impeccable Savile Row suits, that I started to become a fashion icon for wearing my old lady’s clothes. Otherwise it was plunder, loot that I wore—whatever was thrown at me on stage or what I picked up off stage and happened to fit. I would say to somebody, I like that shirt, and for some reason they felt obliged to give it to me. I used to dress myself by taking clothes off other people.

  I was never really interested very much in my look, so to speak, although I might be a liar there. I used to spend hours stitching old pants together to give them a different look. I’d get four pairs of sailor pants, I’d cut them off at the knee, get a band of leather and then put another color from the other pair of pants and stitch them in. Lavender and dull rose, as Cecil Beaton says. I didn’t realize he was keeping an eye on that shit.

  I did enjoy hanging out with Stash and his degenerates—look who’s talking. They’d cover my fucking arse. I had no particular desire to get into that area of society, European bullshit high society. I’d use them when I could. I don’t want to knock the man; I always liked to hang with him. And, yes, I could say he’s so shallow you couldn’t paddle in it, and Stash would know exactly what I mean, and he knows he deserves it, little snipe. He got enough out of me, and I let him get away with a few things. I know exactly how tough he is. One kick up the bum and he’s gone.