Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  Thus reassured, the party stayed on at Redlands – all but three. Robert Fraser needed to get back to London urgently. With him and Ali in their van rode Acid King David Snyderman, clutching his attaché case of undisclosed Sunshine.

  Fraser was in a panic – and with good reason. To be caught in possession of heroin, the deadliest of all illegal drugs, meant almost certain imprisonment. There was, however, one chance based on the anomalous fact that the drug was legal if prescribed by a doctor to a registered addict. Fraser’s only hope was to persuade some doctor to give him a backdated prescription. Acid King David, too, was deeply agitated, as well as incredulous that the police had not hauled everyone straight off for interrogation and charging. ‘I advised him to get out of the country right away,’ Robert Fraser says. Acid King David did so that very night.

  When Fraser reached home, he sent an immediate SOS to Spanish Tony Sanchez, the Soho dealer who had sold him the heroin jacks – and had himself very nearly joined the Redlands party. Spanish Tony advised bribing the police analysts to say that the confiscated jack contained only glucose. He offered to sound out the various ‘bent coppers’ he knew in the West End division to see if the problem could be settled for money.

  Spanish Tony’s enquiries proved fruitful. All the substances taken from Redlands could be ‘lost’, he told Mick and Keith, for a bribe of £7,000. Andrew Loog Oldham, in California on other business, still knew nothing of the bust. The two chief Stones, for the very first time, were acting on their own initiative. Together they eagerly shelled out £5,000, and Robert Fraser managed to scrape up the residue. The money was put into a carrier bag and paid over by Spanish Tony to his police contact in a pub in Kilburn.

  The following Sunday, February 19, in addition to its continuing series ‘Pop Stars and Drugs’, the News of the World ran a front-page story confirming that insidious social evil with fresh, exclusive evidence. The Redlands raid was then described, without a single name (to observe the sub judice law) but otherwise in the most intimate detail. The story said that one ‘nationally known star’ had had pep pills taken from him; that ‘bottles and an ashtray’ had also been seized for analysis; that, as well as the two ‘nationally famous names’ likely to face drugs charges, a third had left the raided house just in time; and that ‘a foreign national’ was being watched for at air and seaports in case he should try to leave the country.

  Every line in the piece reeked of quid pro quo. It was plain that the News of the World had got the story exclusively in return for tipping off the police that the party was to take place. How had the moralists at Bouverie Street possibly got hold of details supposedly known only to Keith Richard, Mick Jagger and the others invited to join them at Redlands? The immediate conclusion was that one of the house party was a traitor. Excluding the staunch friends of the Stones, Christopher Gibbs, Robert Fraser, Michael Cooper and Moroccan Ali, suspicion naturally fell on the two who had come merely as hangers-on: Nicky Cramer, the Chelsea flower person, and Acid King David Snyderman.

  Nicky Cramer’s innocence was established with brutal efficiency. A mutual friend of Mick and Keith’s named David Litvinoff visited the unfortunate flower child and beat him up systematically. When Cramer still did not confess, he was pronounced in the clear.

  That left only Acid King David, the visitor from America who had become a Stones friend so very quickly, by stages that no one now could quite remember or explain. Elaborated by many theories suited to the drama of the moment, his persona became increasingly bizarre. Michael Cooper remembered looking into Acid King David’s luggage for hashish, and seeing he possessed a second passport in the name of ‘David English’. Cooper also remembered a strange talk with the American about firearms and espionage … ‘like he was into the James Bond thing, you know … the whole CIA bit’.

  With the story of the raid in print, there plainly was little hope that the police could be bribed to forget it. Probably there had been no hope even before Spanish Tony paid his police contact the £7,000, since there was no evidence that the money ever made its way to anyone in the West Sussex Constabulary. Even so, when a further week had passed and still nothing came of the matter, it seemed as if the money might have found its mark.

  The wisest thing meanwhile was to get as far away from Britain, and probable further notoriety, as possible. In this at least Mick and Keith were fortunate, finding themselves in a rare professional lull. The Stones had just released an album, Between the Buttons, and had no further group commitment until their European tour, beginning on March 25.

  Morocco was the obvious choice of sanctuary. To lessen the risk of harassment en route, they agreed to travel separately, meeting up, with Robert Fraser, Michael Cooper and other friends, in Marrakesh. Mick and Marianne would fly from Paris while Keith would drive down, accompanied by Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg.

  A rapprochement between Keith and Brian had lately occurred, thanks mainly to Mick’s absorption in his affair with Marianne. Keith still felt it keenly that he had no steady girlfriend, and had, paradoxically, turned back to Brian for the kind of bachelor companionship they used to enjoy at Edith Grove. For some weeks past, indeed, he had been staying with Brian and Anita in their galleried studio apartment in Courtfield Road.

  Brian welcomed him, delighted to have Keith back in his gang again, with that implied rejection of Mick; scarcely less pleased at the obvious mutual affinity between Keith and Anita. These weeks before his world disintegrated were a good time for Brian, with Keith and Anita as a new power axis, and his prestige as a musician higher than ever. To allay his jealousy, Anita had arranged for him to write a soundtrack score for the film she was to make with Volker Schlöndorff. The film, entitled A Degree of Murder, featured Anita as a female assassin. Brian had thrown himself enthusiastically into the project, hiring Glyn Johns to recruit notable young freelance session men like pianist Nicky Hopkins and guitarist Jimmy Page. His finished score, using an eclectic range of instruments – with eerily atmospheric passages played by Brian himself on dulcimer, sitar and autoharp – was pronounced brilliant by Volker Schlöndorff, Glyn Johns and everyone else who heard it.

  In the general Moroccan exodus, therefore, Brian, Anita and Keith travelled as a natural threesome. Keith had a hankering to make the entire trip in the Blue Lena, as he called his sky-coloured Bentley Continental. With Tom Keylock along to share the driving and handle frontier formalities, the 2,000-mile journey down through France and Spain promised fun, relaxation and harmony.

  The Blue Lena crossed the English Channel without incident, stopping in Paris to pick up a fifth passenger, Donald Cammell’s girlfriend Deborah. They continued southward then, with France only faintly discernible outside the boom of the in-car stereo, Brian and Anita lounging in the back like fur-wrapped, blond Borgias, and Keith up front, laughing indulgently at Tom Keylock’s Cockney patter. The chauffeur claimed, while in the paratroops, to have suffered wounds necessitating a skin graft from his bottom to his nose – as he frequently boasted, ‘Most of my arse is on my face.’ (A quick-witted girl in the Stones’ office was once inspired to retort, ‘That must be why so much shit comes out of your mouth, Tom.’)

  All went smoothly until the Bentley reached Toulon. Brian, who had been showing signs of asthmatic unease on the mountainous route, suddenly developed a high fever and was admitted to hospital with pneumonia. He insisted, however, that Anita should go on into Spain with Keith and the other two. When he felt better, he would fly straight to Tangier to meet them at the Hotel Minzah.

  It was clear to Tom Keylock, even from the evidence of his rear-view mirror, as the Blue Lena passed Montpelier, Béziers, then Perpignan, that Keith and Anita were becoming something more than friends. Keith by now realized the inevitable, though he tried to avoid it with vague plans for getting off with the other female passenger, Deborah. At Valencia, he and Anita spent the night together but next morning tacitly agreed to treat it as just a pleasant interlude. ‘I was still very wary,’ Keith says, ‘
and trying hard not to fuck up the new thing I had going with Brian.’

  No journey with Keith Richard could be entirely devoid of drama, as Anita discovered when they stopped in Barcelona and went to a night club. Keith got into a furious row with some waiters who would not accept his Diner’s Club card without seeing his passport. While Keylock fetched the passport, Keith, Anita and Deborah were taken to police headquarters and interrogated until six o’clock the next morning. Back at their hotel there was a message from Brian, ordering Anita to return to Toulon and fetch him. She decided to pretend the message hadn’t reached her.

  They crossed by ferry from Malaga to Tangier a few days later, and checked into the Hotel Minzah. The desk clerk handed Anita a sheaf of Brian’s frantic telegrams and telephone messages. Keith – still trying valiantly to play a straight bat – urged Anita to fly back to Toulon with Deborah to collect Brian while he and Tom Keylock went on to Marrakesh.

  Mick was already at the appointed hotel, with Robert Fraser and Michael Cooper, waiting for Marianne to join him from Naples. Two days later, Brian and Anita arrived from the airport. Brian had recovered from his pneumonia but looked haggard with fatigue and suspicion. He clearly guessed something had happened between Anita and Keith, but would not – could not – accuse Keith outright. He took out his insecurity in the usual way – by beating Anita up in the privacy of their suite. Her make-up, fortunately, hid the worst of the bruises.

  The week that followed put everyone else, as they’d hoped, into a more stable, relaxed frame of mind. The party shopped in the casbah and the big central square, drank mint tea and Scotch and Coke, smoked grass and Gauloises, dropped acid and lounged like ordinary tourists round the hotel pool. To that chlorine-scented court came Brion Gysin, the avant-garde painter and Cecil Beaton, photographer of more conventional royalty, who coveted Mick Jagger as a subject, if nothing else, and whose famous diaries record the scene with penetrating unworldliness.

  On the Tuesday evening I came down to dinner very late and, to my surprise, sitting in the hotel lobby, discovered Mick Jagger and a sleepy-looking band of gipsies. Robert Fraser, one of their company, wearing a huge, black felt hat, was coughing by the swimming pool … It was a strange group. The three ‘Stones’: Brian Jones with his girlfriend Anita Pallenberg – dirty white face, dirty blackened eyes, dirty canary drops of hair, barbaric jewellery – Keith Richard in eighteenth-century suit, long black velvet coat and the tightest pants; and, of course, Mick Jagger …

  I didn’t want to give the impression that I was only interested in Mick, but it happened that we sat next to one another as he drank a Vodka Collins and smoked with pointed finger held high. His skin is chicken-breast white and of a fine quality. He has an inborn elegance.

  … By degrees the shy aloofness of the gang broke down. We got into two cars … [My] car was filled with pop art cushions, scarlet fur rugs and sex magazines. Immediately the most tremendous volume of pop music boomed in the region of the back of my neck. Mick and Brian responded rhythmically and the girl leant forward and screamed in whispers that she had just played a murderess in a film that was to be shown at the Cannes Festival.

  … We went to a Moroccan restaurant. Mick … is very gentle and with perfect manners. He has much appreciation and his small, albino-fringed eyes notice everything. He has an analytical slant and compares everything he is seeing here with earlier impressions in other countries.

  … He asked: ‘Have you ever taken LSD? Oh, I should. It would mean so much to you: you’d never forget the colours. For a painter it is a great experience. One’s brain works not on four cylinders but on four thousand.’

  … By the time we reached the hotel, it was three o’clock … Mick listened to pop records for a couple of hours, and was then so tired that he went to sleep without taking off his clothes …

  At eleven o’clock, he appeared at the swimming pool. I could not believe it was the same person walking towards us. The very strong sun, reflected from the white ground, made his face look a white, podgy, shapeless mess; eyes very small, nose very pink, hair sandy dark. His figure, his hands and arms were incredibly feminine.

  None of them was willing to talk, except in spasms. No one could make up their minds what to do, or when.

  I took Mick through the trees to photograph him in the midday sun … He is sexy, yet completely sexless. He could nearly be a eunuch. As a model he is a natural.

  Their wardrobe is extensive. Mick showed me the rows of brocade coats. Everything is shoddy, poorly made, the seams burst. Keith himself had sewn his trousers, lavender and dull rose, with a band of badly stitched leather dividing the two colours.

  Brian, at the pool, appears in white pants with a huge black square applied on the back. It is very smart in spite of the fact that the seams are giving way. But with such marvellously flat, tight, compact figures as they have, with no buttocks or stomach, almost anything looks well on them.

  The Stones’ party occupied the hotel’s entire tenth floor. Brion Gysin remembers a collective LSD trip in one or another suite, with Elmore James music wailing, Keith strumming along on guitar, Mick pirouetting dementedly round the room and Brian Jones – ‘like a little celluloid kewpie doll’ – with Tom Keylock murmuring intrigue into his ear. When trays of food were brought in, everyone rode the trays around the floor like toboggans.

  As the evening wore on and the trip wore off, Brian and Anita began squabbling again. Anita grabbed some sleeping pills and locked herself in their bedroom. Brian beckoned to Tom Keylock and asked the chauffeur to go out and find him a local whore. The others left him to it, racing off in various cars for an all-night trip into the Atlas mountains.

  Next morning, the atmosphere around the pool was electric. Brian, the night before, had gone into town, returned with two tattooed Moroccan whores, and tried to force Anita into a group sex orgy. When she refused, he had beaten her up so severely she thought he meant to kill her.

  Anita now sat in a poolside chair, locked in a passionate stare with Keith, ducking up and down in the water. Even Mick Jagger could not detach himself, as he would have much preferred, from the mounting tension. ‘It’s getting fuckin’ heavy,’ he kept saying to Robert Fraser in the intervals of packing and complaining about his hotel bill. Then Tom Keylock came in to report that a posse of British journalists was about to fly in from London. The obvious risk was that they would collar Brian and get him to blurt out something scandalous about the case pending against Mick and Keith. So Tom Keylock deputed Brion Gysin to take Brian out into the Djemaa el Fna, the big central square, to record Moroccan music, drink mint tea, buy souvenirs and get lost.

  While Brian was away, Keith Richard came to a decision. ‘I was so disgusted with the way Brian had treated Anita, I just threw her in the back of the car and split.’ Anita tells the same story – not of being stolen but rescued. ‘I was in fear of my life. I was hysterical. Keith saved me.’

  Tom Keylock drove them back to Tangier, where they boarded the ferry for Malaga. There, the Spanish Customs almost put paid to their escape. Searching for drugs, half a dozen officers stripped the Blue Lena down to the chassis. The small piece of hash Keith had on him was successfully concealed by Keylock in the most obvious hiding-place – under the flap to the petrol tank.

  Two nights later in Paris, Donald Cammell was awakened by a frantic knocking on his apartment door. It was Brian, without luggage, babbling, ‘They left me. They just went off and left me …’ Mixed up in the story he poured out to Cammell was something about a carved wooden pipe he’d bought that afternoon with Brion Gysin in Marrakesh. He’d come back with the pipe to find Anita, Keith, Tom Keylock and the Bentley all gone.

  The fugitives, meanwhile, had driven back as far as Madrid, then caught a plane for London, leaving Keylock to bring home the Blue Lena at his leisure. They were now at a small flat Keith maintained in St John’s Wood, hiding out until Anita could pluck up nerve to go back to Courtfield Road for her clothes.

  The hope that
Spanish Tony had managed to buy off the police was dashed, virtually at the moment Keith re-entered Britain. On March 18, the Daily Mirror splashed the story that Mick Jagger and Keith Richard were to be summonsed on drugs charges arising from a raid on the latter’s country house. Once more, through hand-in-glove co-operation with Scotland Yard, Fleet Street could pre-empt the process of the law. Four days later, as the Mirror had promised, the summonses came. Jagger was accused, with Robert Fraser and the vanished Acid King David Snyderman, of possessing substances unlawful under the Dangerous Drugs Act, 1964. Keith was accused of ‘knowingly permitting’ his house to be used for those drugs’ consumption. The case was set down to be heard by Chichester magistrates on May 10, with the option of summary trial or referral to the next West Sussex Quarter Sessions.

  An aggrieved Spanish Tony later sought out his police contact and asked what had happened to the £7,000 which Jagger, Richard and Fraser had paid as a bribe. All he could elicit was that the money had not got to ‘the right man’ before revelation of the bust in the News of the World and other papers had made a cover-up impossible. ‘That’s what I feel most bitter about,’ Keith says. ‘In America, you pay off the cops as a matter of course. It’s business. But in Britain, you pay them off and they still do you.’

  Brian Jones was now back in London also, recovered from his hysterics and determined to regain Anita with a bravura display of masculinity. Discovering she was at Keith’s ‘crash pad’, he drove there and hammered on the door, which Keith then suddenly opened. Brian came hurtling in and sprawled on the front hall carpet.

  Anita would not go back to Brian – nor was she yet ready to move in with Keith. Another film part – in Roger Vadim’s space fantasy, Barbarella – was about to take her to Spain on location. Keith had to tour Europe with the Stones, sharing a stage for the next three weeks with Brian and his smouldering reproach.