Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  Trial at a regional quarter sessions, under the old English court structure, was nowhere near as burdened with legal pomp and circumstance as the yearly assizes. This lower court – named for its traditional covering each ‘quarter day’ – featured no grey-wigged judge, walking in state to the courthouse, preceded by mace-bearer and chamberlain. At quarter sessions it was sufficient for a senior lawyer – a Recorder, sitting alone, or Chairman, sitting with lay magistrates – to preside over the case, sum up the evidence and give legal directions to the jury. The Jagger-Richard-Fraser trial was unusual in that the Chairman of West Sussex Quarter Session happened also to be a judge, sixty-one-year-old ex-Naval Commander Leslie Kenneth Allen Block.

  It was not in his metropolitan capacity in the Mayor’s and City of London Court, but as a Sussex landowner, dairy farmer and Justice of the Peace that Judge Block found himself charged with conduct of Britain’s most scandal-ridden trial since the era of Oscar Wilde. He was to rise to the occasion, even so, as a classic British judge, combining unworldly and fastidious remoteness from the matter he was trying with an intermittent desire to crack jokes for the amusement of the assembled barristers.

  The three-day trial, from June 27–29, turned Chichester from a quiet yachtsmen’s haven into a scrimmage to glimpse the main defendants that was by no means confined to hysterical little girls. Extra police by the hundred were drafted in to control the mêlée around the court buildings, of fans, reporters, TV crews and casual gawpers. Bright sunshine and abundant hot-dog and ice-cream stalls lent almost a carnival atmosphere. One quick-witted huckster brought a van with silk screen printing equipment to run off T-shirts inscribed ‘Free the Stones’ and ‘Mick is Innocent’.

  Counsel for the defence of both Mick and Keith was forty-four-year-old Michael Havers QC, a future Attorney-General, at that time one of the most eminent, and costly, ‘silks’ at the criminal Bar. Havers had been retained not for his eminence only but for his genuine indignation that Jagger should have been prosecuted so ruthlessly for what seemed a technicality and Keith on such apparently circumstantial evidence. It was disconcerting, none the less, for the two Stones, after fighting their way from their limousine into the court precincts, to observe Havers and the prosecuting counsel, Malcom Morris QC, talking together as amiably as members of the same club, fraternity and family.

  Mick Jagger was first to be called from the well of the old-fashioned courtroom into its elevated wooden dock. As the familiar doll-like figure appeared, dressed in a light green jacket, olive trousers, frilled shirt and multi-striped tie, an involuntary gasp came from the eighty-odd girls who threatened to over-balance the narrow public gallery. The police usher bellowed for silence but could not – and would never – still an undercurrent of female anguish like the constant soft rustle of tissue paper or chocolate box wrappings.

  The task before Michael Havers that morning was comparatively simple. Jagger’s plea of not guilty to illegal possession of amphetamines left only one possible defence. Havers must convince the jury that Jagger had got the four tablets on prescription from a doctor, even though no written prescription could be produced in evidence.

  The secondary part of Havers’s strategy was to emphasize the extremely marginal nature of the alleged offence. The tablets, though illegal in Britain, were sold openly in other European countries – were, indeed, recommended by their makers, Lepetit of Milan, as a remedy for mundane ailments like travel sickness. A law designed to curb criminal and habitual drug-pushers was being mobilized against someone whose offence, according to the evidence, was purely accidental, and could be repeated by any respectable citizen who bought travel sickness pills abroad and forgot to dispose of them before returning to Britain.

  In the quick verbal brush-strokes of what he clearly considered an open-and-shut case, Malcolm Morris QC outlined the circumstances of the police swoop on Redlands, the search of the upstairs bedrooms and the discovery of the four tablets in Jagger’s green velvet jacket. Detective Sergeant Stanley Cudmore then took the stand with his official notebook to testify that Jagger had admitted the tablets were his, and claimed they were a doctor’s prescription to help him ‘stay awake and work’. Sergeant Cudmore, under cross-examination, agreed that Jagger’s conduct throughout the raid had been ‘thoroughly adult and co-operative’.

  The only witness for the defence was Dr Raymond Dixon Firth of Wilton Crescent, Knightsbridge, Jagger’s doctor since 1965. Dr Dixon Firth testified that ‘some time before February’, Jagger had rung up to ask about some tablets he said he’d bought on his way back from the San Remo Pop Festival, and had been taking to help him cope with a period of intense personal strain. The doctor realized the pills were amphetamines and gave Jagger permission to go on taking them, provided he did so only in an emergency. This, in Dr Dixon Firth’s opinion, was a valid prescription which put Jagger in absolutely legal possession of the amphetamines. He added that if Jagger had come to his surgery for something to enable him to ‘stay awake and work’, the doctor would have prescribed exactly that same drug.

  Judge Block turned and conferred briefly with his three fellow magistrates – two more Sussex farmers and a newsagent from Worthing. Then he addressed the jury of eleven men and one woman.

  ‘These [Dr Dixon Firth’s] remarks cannot be regarded as a prescription,’ he said. ‘I therefore direct you that there is no defence to this charge.’ The jury retired for a token six minutes before returning its obligatory verdict of guilty. Judge Block turned back to Jagger, now standing and gripping the edge of the dock. ‘I propose to defer sentencing you until after the trial of your two friends,’ the judge continued. ‘In the meantime, you will be remanded in custody.’ The police warder who had appeared beside him took Jagger’s arm and steered him to a police cell below the courtroom, to await the end of the day’s proceedings.

  The trial of Robert Fraser lasted an even shorter time. Fraser, on the advice of his counsel, William Denny, had changed his plea to Guilty. All that could be done, therefore, was to plead the mitigating circumstances of Fraser’s distinguished military career in Kenya during the Mau Mau emergency and the hard work and flair by which he had afterwards founded his London art gallery. Knowing the layman’s view of drug addicts as helpless and spineless beings, Mr Denny took pains to stress how desperately Fraser had wrestled with his heroin addiction – how, after one traumatic cure, he had lapsed back into the habit but had, none the less, found courage and resolution enough to telephone his doctor for help. He was now ‘completely cured’, his counsel said. ‘There is no reason why he should ever go back on to heroin again.’

  Fraser’s sentence also was deferred until the end of Keith Richard’s trial. He, too, was remanded in custody and removed to a police cell, pending his and Jagger’s departure to spend that night in prison. A brief period was allowed for each to confer with his solicitor. Keith, still on committal bail, had meanwhile driven at top speed back to West Wittering where Jagger had spent the previous night, to fetch him some clean clothes, a book (on Tibetan philosophy) and a 184-piece jigsaw puzzle.

  Jagger and Robert Fraser were then each handcuffed to a prison officer, bundled rapidly into a grey police van with other remand prisoners and driven, through the crowd of distraught girls and craning camera-lenses, to begin the thirty-eight-mile journey to the Victorian prison at Lewes. It was a brutal measure to adopt with individuals who, despite their shocked bewilderment, were never other than peaceful and co-operative.

  At Lewes Prison, the two were placed together in a room in the prison hospital. Jagger, as he later admitted, was ‘deathly scared and in tears’. Before lights out – at an hour when a Rolling Stone customarily thought of getting up – two visitors were brought in to see him. One was Marianne Faithfull, bringing him sixty cigarettes, a draughts board, newspapers and fresh fruit. The other was Michael Cooper, carrying a miniature camera in the hope of photographing Jagger behind bars. A prison officer spotted the camera as he was leaving and confiscated the film i
nside.

  Next morning, June 28, Jagger and Robert Fraser were awakened before seven, given a meagre breakfast, then handcuffed again for their return to Chichester. Some of the more sympathetic newspapermen were already asking whether the two really had to be led to and from court, manacled like murderers or psychopaths. A prison spokesman eventually replied it had been done because their guards ‘had no instructions to do otherwise’.

  At Chichester, Jagger and Fraser were put back into a cell under the courtroom, waiting to be brought up and sentenced if Keith Richard’s trial should be concluded that day. Though uncomfortable and boring, their eight-hour wait was not devoid of comfort. Permission was given for a local hotelier to bring in their lunch – roast lamb for Jagger and, for Fraser, cold salmon salad. Both finished their meal with a dish of strawberries and cream.

  Above them, Keith Richard now sat in the dock, wearing a black Beau Brummell suit and white polo-neck shirt, his well-worn, twenty-four-year-old face expressionless under a heaped black pompadour as ragged as if he, too, had spent the night on a prison bench. Now there was no tissuey rustling from the girls in the public gallery. The court was plunged into spellbound silence, broken only by the voice of Malcolm Morris QC, and the sound of frantic scribbling in the packed press bench. Even the dignified man from The Times could let none of this get away.

  For the first time, the jury received a full account of the raid on Redlands, the discovery of eight men and ‘a young woman’ listening to pop music while watching television, and the ‘strong, sweet, unusual smell’ which the police had at once detected. ‘… In the drawing room where Richard was entertaining his guests, one of them had a large supply of cannabis resin,’ Malcolm Morris continued. ‘The behaviour of one of the guests may suggest she was under the influence of cannabis in a way that Richard could not fail to notice … You cannot have any doubt at all that he was permitting his house to be used for the purpose of smoking cannabis.’

  The supplier of ‘that large supply of cannabis resin’ continued to have an apparently charmed life. ‘He is a man not before the court, and, indeed, not now in the country,’ Malcolm Morris told the jury. ‘You are not concerned with the name or identity of anyone at that party other than Keith Richard.’ Only after pressure from Michael Havers – and a little vernacular joke from Judge Block, who observed that the man had ‘done a bunk’ – was Acid King David Snyderman’s name finally heard in court. Even then, it was his surname only, and rendered phonetically in most reports as ‘Snidermann’ or ‘Schneidermann’.

  Resuming his major theme, Malcolm Morris told the jury they would hear from a Scotland Yard Drug Squad officer, Detective Inspector John Lynch, that the effect of smoking cannabis was tranquillity, happiness and ‘a tendency to dispel inhibitions’.

  ‘You may think it could have had exactly that effect on one of Richard’s guests. This was the young lady sitting on the settee. All she was wearing was a light-coloured fur rug which, from time to time, she allowed to fall, disclosing her nude body. She was unperturbed and apparently enjoying the situation. Although she was taken upstairs, where her clothes were, to be searched, she returned wearing only the fur rug and, in the words of the woman detective looking after her, in merry mood – one apparently of vague unconcern.

  ‘We are not concerned’, continued the QC, ‘with who that young lady was or may have been. But was she someone who had lost her inhibitions, and had she lost them because of smoking Indian hemp?’

  One can only marvel at this attempt to condemn Keith Richard on a drugs charge by implying he had simultaneously been holding a sex orgy. In doing so, Malcolm Morris was handing the press an already die-stamped banner headline – one of those scraps of smutty innuendo which, once lodged in a million or so minds, make questions of guilt and innocence scarcely relevant. Not even the Christine Keeler case had given Fleet Street what Malcolm Morris QC gave it on June 28, 1967. At the mention of ‘nudity’ there had been excitement enough among the journalists present. At the mention of ‘a fur rug’, there was something not far removed from collective orgasm.

  No doubt could exist as to the nude girl’s identity. Marianne Faithfull had been in court throughout the proceedings, sitting next to Allen Klein and Les Perrin. Though both sides in the case had agreed she should not be named, every newspaper could use her photograph in quite legal juxtaposition with its story of the raid, the rug-wrapped girl and her shameless attempts to arouse policemen in the course of their duty. Already, by some mysterious means, a rumour was travelling the length and breadth of England that, when the police entered Keith Richard’s sitting room, they had interrupted an orgy of cunnilingus in which Jagger had been licking a Mars bar pushed into Marianne’s vagina. The Mars bar was a detail of such sheer madness as to make the story believed, then and for ever after. No one needed any explanation of the line that appeared gnomically on Private Eye magazine’s next front cover: ‘A Mars bar fills that gap.’

  Four police witnesses for the prosecution gave evidence to support the idea that, in addition to being high on cannabis, Marianne was also a shameless nymphomaniac. Woman Detective Constable Rosemary Slade, indeed, testified that when the search party arrived, ‘Miss ‘X’ – as Marianne was futilely described – had been ‘completely naked’. Woman Detective Constable Evelyn Fuller described her ‘merry mood’ and ‘apparent unconcern’ when taken upstairs to be searched, and how, once alone with Miss Fuller, she had ‘deliberately let the rug fall’.

  The rug itself made a dramatic appearance in Michael Havers’s cross-examination of Detective Sergeant Stanley Cudmore, after Sergeant Cudmore’s assertion that ‘one could see she had nothing on underneath it.’

  ‘Was it a large rug?’ Havers enquired.

  ‘Quite large,’ Sergeant Cudmore said.

  ‘Was it bigger than a fur coat?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘But it’s a bedcover, isn’t it?’ Havers said. ‘Six foot square. Here – take a look.’ With the help of his junior counsel, the QC then stretched the brown and white mottled rug with its garish orange lining across the barristers’ bench.

  ‘It’s enormous,’ Michael Havers said. ‘You can see – it’s about eight and a half feet by five.’

  Havers opened Keith’s defence with an address to the jury, complaining bitterly of his opponent’s smear tactics against a person who, being accused of no crime, had no chance to speak in her own defence. ‘She remains technically anonymous, but the effect of all this is that she has been described as a drug-taking nymphomaniac. How would you [members of the jury] feel if, in another place, witnesses were going into the box and discussing your behaviour, and you could do nothing about it?

  ‘Do you expect me to let that girl go into the witness box? I am not going to allow her to. I am not going to tear that blanket of anonymity aside and let the world laugh of scorn, as it will. This is a girl whose name has not yet been dragged into the mud. If I cannot call her into this court, I propose to call no one who was at that house.’

  When the court adjourned for the afternoon. Keith was released on continuance of his £250 bail. Jagger and Fraser again handcuffed together and removed for a second night in custody. An agency photographer took what would become a celebrated picture of Jagger, dishevelled and scruffy, raising his and Fraser’s joined arms to shield his face from flash bulbs. Society had got him where it wanted him at last – manacled, in an open tumbril, receiving the curses, boos and catcalls of the mob.

  Next morning, it was time for Keith to go into the witness box. An almost audible shudder greeted this least prepossessing defendant, with his fancy clothes and the pale, sickly, wolfish face that seemed living testament to all the depraved goings-on the prosecution had described. The very last thing expected from such an apparently self-incriminating figure was articulateness and candour, and a wit which, several times, left even a cross-examining QC outmanoeuvred.

  Michael Havers’s first line of questioning was designed to show the jury how little direc
t control a Rolling Stone had over what went on around him – and how commensurately little responsibility he ought to bear for the behaviour of those in his retinue. This necessitated a brief history of the Stones, from Keith and Mick’s first meeting at the age of six to the ‘complete lack of privacy, and constant work’ which, for all of them, had lasted since 1963.

  ‘Do you need any sort of protection from your fans?’ Havers asked.

  ‘Oh yes,’ Keith replied. ‘I need an army.’

  ‘And why do you need that protection?’

  ‘I’ve been strangled,’ Keith said, touching his neck reminiscently. ‘They just get hold of your tie or scarf, and pull … My clothes have disappeared,’ he went on, grinning apologetically as a rustle of laughter ran around the court.

  ‘And in the course of your travels you have to go to parties and are always meeting people?’

  ‘Yes, I meet thousands of people.’

  This led neatly to the subject of Acid King David Snyderman, whom Keith said he had met only twice, briefly, before Acid King David had been invited to Redlands. In any case, he added, the whole idea for a weekend party had been someone else’s. Keith himself had only heard on the previous day that it was going ahead. The point was well made that if pop stars did not organize their own parties, they could hardly be expected to know everyone they subsequently found enjoying their hospitality.

  At Michael Havers’s prompting, Keith gave his account of what now sounded an altogether normal country weekend – the cars arriving late on Saturday, the bacon and egg supper, the next morning’s late lie-in (excluding Acid King David’s dispensation of LSD) and the afternoon drive, which had ended just before the drug squad’s arrival. At that point, Keith said, he had been upstairs, bathing and changing, and had no idea what his guests were doing.