Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  The Warner Brothers executive who had visualized Performance as a film on the lines of A Hard Day’s Night would doubtless have been spellbound by the early scene in which James Fox as Chas, the young Cockney hoodlum, ritualistically pours acid over the Rolls-Royce of a hostile barrister, then shaves the head of a bound and gagged chauffeur, whistling a cheerful barber’s shop air. The scene in which Chas’s gang boss, a bald, hairy-chested brute, given to sententious utterances about ‘Old England’, huddles in his vest under a pink satin counterpane while his half-naked catamite preens himself nearby, might also have given warning that the film starring Mick Jagger was something other than all-round family entertainment.

  When Jagger came on set, early in October, Donald Cammell’s production team was ensconced in the cavernous Mayfair house that was to be the home of the reclusive pop idol, Turner. With Christopher Gibbs as set-designer, the house quickly assumed the appearance of a Rolling Stone habitation: vampire-dark, hung with exotic drapes and, in certain visible places, none too clean. Here, hiding out from his gang boss, Chas was to undergo initiation into drugs, wigs and other weirdness by Turner and two female companions.

  The requirements of playing Turner had caused Jagger to agonize at length over whether it might not do his real life pop image irreparable harm. For most of the picture, Turner had to wear full female make-up, lipstick, powder and rouge. At the climax of the magic mushroom trip administered to Chas, Turner underwent transformation from pop star to underworld gangster, with his hair slicked back like a Fifties Teddy boy.

  But most of all, Jagger worried that the character developed in Donald Cammell’s script – the morose and playful, pretentiously bookish superstar hermit – bore not the slightest resemblance to himself. Long discussions with Cammell and the film’s director, Nicholas Roeg, could not find a coalescence of Turner and Mick Jagger that would hold up for a minute before the cameras. Then, as always, his mimic’s gift came to his rescue. The Turner he chose to play was an amalgam of two close acquaintances. In appearance, black-clad and brooding, festooned with outsize silver belts and baubles, Mick turned into Keith Richard. In voice and mannerisms, he turned himself almost uncannily into Brian Jones.

  As Turner’s girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg, at least, was perfectly cast. Everyone who knew her recognized the rangy blonde, dressed only in a marmalade-coloured fur, teasing the bewildered Chas with her green eyes and long, golden legs. Her role in the strange house, impermanent, indifferent, laughingly malevolent, corresponded exactly to her role within the Stones. Her part in disorienting the painfully straight young gangster chiefly lay in confusing him – as she had apparently confused Brian – about his sexual identity. At one point in Chas’s ordeal, Anita holds a mirror up to his face, reflecting it above her own bare breast. The scene was to have a lasting effect on James Fox, and make more than one bystander remember the old whispers about Anita’s supposed power as a sorceress.

  It began as a joke between Mick and Keith that Donald Cammell’s script required Turner and his girlfriend to make lingering love, together with an androgynous French girl, in the star’s huge carved and canopied antique bed. After shooting had begun, however, Cammell realized that Keith was deeply uneasy about Anita’s role as Mick’s lover and, in particular, their simulation of sex together for the camera. ‘And, of course, Anita didn’t help his insecurity,’ Cammell remembered. ‘She seemed to be teasing Keith about wanting Mick, the way she’d teased Brian about wanting Keith. While we were shooting at Lowndes Square, Keith hardly ever came near the house. He’d sit outside in his car and send in messages.’

  In the event, their screen encounter brought a resolution of the love-hate feeling which had so long smouldered between Anita and Mick. As the cameras turned, under a perfect alibi of fiction, the two began to make love in earnest. In its final, much-edited version, the film shows little more than Anita’s lips nibbling Jagger’s huge ones, and a cinematically fashionable tumble and twist of limbs. However, the off-cuts were illicitly spliced together into a separate short feature which, a few months later, won a prize at a festival of blue movies in Amsterdam.

  Keith knew what had happened, though – like Brian before him – he somehow could not bring himself to accuse Anita outright. His retaliation was endlessly to postpone working with Mick on the single Jagger-Richard song required for the film – a song sung to Chas by Turner, transformed to a hallucinogenic gang boss. ‘Keith just refused to get down to it,’ Cammell said. ‘I kept asking Mick “Where’s the goddammed song?” Mick kept saying “It’s okay, it’ll be ready” but he knew very well what Keith was doing, and why.’

  Finally, near desperation, Cammell himself sat down with Jagger to write a song they called Memo from Turner. When the Stones met to record it, Keith’s antagonism remained all-pervading. ‘With Keith against it in the studio, the song sounded just awful – still and lifeless,’ Donald Cammell remembered. ‘But without the song, we couldn’t end the picture. Keith knew he had the power to sabotage the whole thing.

  ‘In the end, I got Mick alone. I took him into a pub in Berwick Street and said, “Mick, for God’s sake, what about the song?” Standing there at the bar, he suddenly burst into tears. It was a thing he could always do for maximum effect – just like John Gielgud. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I blew it.” It was then that I realized he’d decided to get the song finished. From then on, after all that indecisiveness, the decisions were made like lightning.’

  Memo from Turner was re-recorded by Jagger with a studio full of high-powered session musicians, including Stevie Winwood and Jim Capaldi. This left Performance devoid of any Stones music, since its musical director, Jack Nitzsche, used American session men – notably slide guitarist Lowell George – to play over the film’s opening and closing credits.

  While Jagger worked on Performance, Marianne spent much of her time in Ireland, at a house in County Galway, rented from Molly Cusack Smith, Master of the local hunt, the Galway Blazers. It was a setting chosen to afford maximum peace and tranquillity during the middle and late phase of Marianne’s pregnancy. She was determined to take every care, remembering how casual she had been while carrying Nicholas, and because her doctor had warned there might be complications. She thus remained unaware of the drama between Mick, Keith and Anita, engrossed by happy thoughts of what a father Mick would make. They both wanted a girl and had already chosen a name for her – Carena.

  In the seventh month of pregnancy, despite all her care, Marianne lost the baby on which she and Jagger had pinned inordinate hope. Such things are never other than devastating. Like any other young couple, they cried out the cruel disappointment in each other’s arms: two child-like figures, in that grown-up house, between whom the bond of love and sympathy could never be so strong again.

  On December 5, Beggars Banquet was released, four months late, clad in a tasteful buff-coloured sleeve adorned only with the title, the artists’ name and ‘R.S.V.P.’. The fight over the lavatory-wall sleeve had gone on well into October, with Decca continually postponing release dates until it seemed the Stones might not release an album at all in 1968. The result was inevitable: while the critics and public went wild about Beggars Banquet, the Stones themselves were only bored by it.

  Their attitude was made plain in the album’s launch-party – a mock-ceremonial banquet at the Queensgate Hotel, attended by dignitaries such as the future British ambassador in Washington, Lord Harlech, and concluding in a custard-pie fight. Lord Harlech evidently enjoyed the pie-throwing. So did Les Perrin, whom one cameraman snapped, towering above the fray, oozing missile in hand, his usual decorum quite forgotten. Another lens caught Brian Jones slamming a pie into Mick Jagger’s face, with what, bystanders agreed, seemed somewhat excessive force.

  The mood of sarcastic bonhomie continued in a Christmas special Jagger had undertaken to do for BBC television – the famous Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus. Recorded over two days, December 11 and 12, at the old Ready, Steady, Go studios in Wembl
ey, it featured the Stones in live performance with superstar friends such as John Lennon, Eric Clapton, The Who and Jethro Tull as supporting acts, interspersed with jugglers, lion-tamers and clowns. A certain similarity might have been detected to Magical Mystery Tour, the Beatles’ TV special shown almost exactly a year previously, save that where the Beatles had sadly flopped, Mick Jagger was determined to have a hit.

  During forty-eight hours of almost continuous filming, the Rock and Roll Circus presented its carnival-hatted and decibel-drowned big-top audience with many remarkable sights. There was John Lennon, dressed as a be-ruffed and stockinged juggler, accompanied by Yoko Ono in the black vestments of a witch. There was the blues musician Taj Mahal, in bewildering propinquity with the concert pianist Julius Katchen, the black fashion model Donyale Luna and the Merry Prankster Ken Kesey. There was the unprecedented novelty of seeing John Lennon play his song Yer Blues with an ad hoc group comprising Eric Clapton on lead guitar, Keith Richard on bass and Mitch Mitchell, from the Jimi Hendrix Experience, on drums, while Yoko crouched nearby, enveloped in a black bag. There was the more predictable surprise, during The Who’s performance, when water spurted from Keith Moon’s drums. There were the varied sideshow astonishments of seeing Mick Jagger dressed as a ringmaster, posing with a tiger; Keith Richard as a vampire-faced, moustachioed stage-door Johnny; Brian Jones in a top hat sprouting satyr horns – a lecherously colourful figure, divorced from the small, defeated voice which gasped out his only line of dialogue: ‘Here come the clowns.’

  There was, finally, the Stones’ own contribution, begun so far into the second night that most of the audience had gone home: a transfixing performance which ranged from old r & b favourites like Route 66 to a Jumpin’ Jack Flash set about by lights which could actually damage eyesight, and, climactically, six takes of Sympathy For the Devil, with Jagger wrenching off his red T-shirt to reveal Satan daubed on his chest. The superstar cast then joined the stupefied audience to sing Salt of the Earth from a prompt-board, swaying from side to side.

  Rock and Roll Circus was not televised that Christmas – nor ever. The veto was Mick Jagger’s. He liked the film but not the way he himself looked in it, and he felt that the Stones had been upstaged by The Who.

  On December 18, an apparently reconciled Mick and Keith took a ship for Rio de Janeiro, accompanied by Anita, Marianne and three-year-old Nicholas. They were to spend a month travelling through Latin America, reportedly enlarging their knowledge of magic by hobnobbing with headhunters and pygmies in the Amazonian rain forests. ‘We are very serious about this trip,’ Keith told the Sunday Express, ‘We are hoping to see a magician who practises both black and white magic. He has a very long and difficult name which we can’t pronounce – we just call him “Banana” for short.’

  It was in fact to be a perfectly normal holiday. Mick had suggested Majorca before Marianne reminded him he was now a millionaire. To Keith, the most restful part was the sea voyage from Lisbon to Rio, among middle-aged people who drank pink gin, dressed for dinner each night and regarded the Jagger–Richard party as some sort of mysterious addition to the ship’s entertainment programme. ‘We used to see the same couple in the bar, who kept saying to us, “Who are you? What’s it all about? Come on, give us a clue. Just give us a glimmer.” That’s when Mick and I started to call ourselves. The Glimmer Twins.’

  Nicholas Dunbar remembers the holiday chiefly for the time he spent with his mother and Mick, living in a simple hut at the edge of a long, white beach. Every day, Mick would take him off to play or paddle, all the time gently helping him over the hurdles from babyhood to boyhood, showing him how to undo his own buttons to pee. ‘I remember his voice saying, “Mind your feet on the sharp stones. Put on your sandals.”’

  Their only experience with magic occurred by accident, when they blundered into a celebration of macumba – voodoo rites which no outsiders were permitted to see. ‘I remember when you and Mick got stoned,’ Nicholas would say to Marianne in later life. ‘I mean – I remember when those people started throwing stones at you.’

  Back in London, at one of the parties that still happened every night, Miles, from the Indica Bookshop, caught a glimpse of his old Cheltenham friend, Brian Jones. There was the usual frock-coated finery, the gorget and flowered cravat, the wide-brimmed hat pressing his gold fringe down around his eyes and cheeks. There was the usual girl companion, blonde like himself – or like someone he both longed and dreaded to forget. In the midst of the party, Brian and the girl had both nodded off to sleep, their big hats and weary child faces together, amid the dancers and noise, innocent as babes in the wood.

  Late one afternoon in January, 1969, John Lennon and Yoko Ono slipped furtively from a white Rolls-Royce, into the foyer of the Dorchester Hotel. The couple were by now almost indistinguishable, save for John’s beard and Yoko Ono’s air of continually propelling him forward. Five minutes later, in a bedroom overlooking Hyde Park, they finally came face to face with Allen Klein.

  For Klein, it was an emotional moment. His desire for the Beatles, undiminished after four years, had seemed no closer to fulfilment in the eighteen months since Brian Epstein’s death, notwithstanding the managerial chaos which Epstein had bequeathed: Klein had merely been one entrepreneur among many, watching the Beatles’ Apple venture slide into disaster, and longing to apply drastic remedies. He had seen John Lennon with Yoko at the Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus and, recognizing his isolation from the other Beatles, had bombarded Lennon’s mansion with telephone calls, all to no avail. Then, in January 1969, Lennon had confessed to Rolling Stone magazine that, if Apple went on losing money at its present rate, he would be ‘broke in six months’. Allen Klein’s moment had come.

  This short meeting with John and Yoko at the Dorchester was, despite his own nerves, a virtuoso Klein performance. At its conclusion, Yoko sat down and, at John’s dictation, typed a note to Sir Joseph Lockwood, Chairman of EMI: ‘Dear Sir Joe – from now on, Allen Klein handles all my stuff.’

  George Harrison and Ringo Starr met Klein a few days later, and were similarly impressed. His offer seemed irresistibly sensible. He would go into Apple and clear out the spongers and spendthrifts. He would then make them richer than even they, the Beatles, had ever dreamed, by gaining them control of the companies Brian Epstein had set up around them, and by renegotiating their royalty rate with EMI. George and Ringo, too, liked Klein’s blunt manner and his picturesque fiscal imagery. ‘Ya shouldn’t even have to think about money,’ he told them. ‘You should be able to say “F.Y.M. – Fuck you, Money!”’

  Paul McCartney, however, no longer saw Allen Klein as the Beatles’ only possible saviour. McCartney never liked rough diamonds; he had, moreover, almost persuaded the others to hire his prospective father-in-law, the New York lawyer Lee Eastman, to take over Apple and fight the two boardroom battles they now faced. McCartney attended only one meeting with Klein, and walked out soon after it had begun. This, apparently, mortified Klein almost to the extent of abandoning his dream. ‘It was an ego thing,’ his nephew, Ronnie Schneider, says. ‘He wanted all four of them to like him. I told him that was crazy. “What the hell!” I said. “It’s a majority decision.”’

  McCartney’s dislike, and the Eastman family’s contempt, merely stiffened the others’ resolve to bring in Klein as their manager. It was in vain even for Lee Eastman to point out how low Klein’s reputation stood in New York as a result of the Cameo-Parkway affair, and that he now faced prosecution from the US Internal Revenue Service on ten counts of failing to file income tax returns.

  As with the Stones in 1966, Klein had offered his ‘Let me show you what I can do before I take a cent of your money’ ploy. He would work unofficially, in ‘co-operation’ with the Eastmans, looking into Apple’s financial plight while they dealt with boardroom strategy, but taking no percentage until all the Beatles were ready to put their trust in him.

  The news brought a curious response from Mick Jagger, who had recommended Klein to the
Beatles so many times over the years, but who was now heard to tell John Lennon on the telephone: ‘You’re making the biggest mistake of your life.’

  Jagger had returned from South America with a deep tan that faded almost as quickly as his pleasure in the unpretentious life. Plans were now under way to re-shoot Rock and Roll Circus in circumstances guaranteeing that the Stones would not be upstaged again. The circus-ring this time was to be the Colosseum in Rome. Ronnie Schneider, at Klein’s office, had actually booked the immortal ruin as backdrop for Mick’s second take. ‘I went to Michael Lindsay-Hogg [the director] and told him “Okay, you got the Colosseum.” But he said he wouldn’t know what to shoot there.’

  Problems were reported, too, from the Warner Brothers Corporation, whose executives had now seen Performance and realized it was no happy-go-lucky pop farce. At an early screening, the wife of one WB man was so overcome with nausea, she actually vomited. Despite angry representations, that included a telegram jointly from Donald Cammell and Jagger, Warner Brothers refused to consider releasing Performance until it had been extensively cut and re-edited.

  Early in 1969, Jagger was offered a second film – a starring role this time, and one so bizarrely out of character, he could not help be both flattered and challenged. He agreed to play Ned Kelly, in a film about the nineteenth-century Australian bandit and folk hero. The director was to be Tony Richardson, whose Woodfall Film company had made, among other things, the excellent Charge of the Light Brigade. As an extra inducement, Marianne Faithfull was given the supporting part of Kelly’s girlfriend. Shooting was to begin in Australia, the following July.