Stardust Memories

by Ray Connolly

  December 1969

  Keith Richard

  There were four births and four deaths during the Rolling Stones free concert at Altamont, California, last week. Even the Stones were shocked, said Keith Richard, as he reflected on the events at his Cheyne Walk, Chelsea home yesterday.

  ‘I thought the show would have been stopped, but hardly anybody seemed to want to take any notice. Oh yes, there were the people selling acid. That’s the way it is at those free concerts.

  ‘There are so many people there that the police just stay away, you know. They just try to keep the traffic moving ten miles away. In a way those concerts are a complete experiment in social order — everybody has to work out a completely new plan of how to get along.’

  The crowds of between three hundred thousand and five hundred thousand were policed by Hell’s Angels, the Californian motorcycle gangs, and according to press reports it was they who were responsible for much of the violence. One boy was stabbed to death by a group of them when he produced a gun.

  ‘The violence just in front of the stage was incredible. Looking back I don’t think it was a good idea to have Hell’s Angels there. But we had them at the suggestion of the Grateful Dead who’ve organised these shows before, and they thought they were the best people to organise the concert.

  ‘The trouble is it’s a problem for us either way. If you don’t have them to work for you as stewards, they come anyway and cause trouble. Last week was my first experience of American Hell’s Angels. I believe the alternative would have been the Black Panthers. I wouldn’t like to say whether they would have been any more vicious.

  ‘But to be fair, out of the whole three hundred Angels working as stewards, the vast majority did what they were supposed to do. which was to regulate the crowds as much as possible without causing any trouble. But there were about ten or twenty who were completely out of their minds — trying to drive their motorcycles through the middle of the crowds.

  ‘Really the difference between the open air show we held here in Hyde Park and the one there is amazing. I think it illustrates the difference between the two countries. In Hyde Park everybody had a good time, and there was no trouble. You can put half a million young English people together and they won’t start killing each other. That’s the difference.’

  He moved into his Chelsea mansion in August. It cost £50,000 freehold (’I drive a hard bargain’) and had previously been the home of Anthony Nutting, MP. There’s a blue plaque on the house next door which says that George Eliot lived there, and just a few houses down the road Mick Jagger owns a similar-styled house. I wonder whether there will ever be blue plaques on the homes of Jagger and Richard.

  It’s the first house Keith has owned in London and he lives there with his girlfriend, Italian film actress Anita Pallenberg and their four-month-old baby Marlon.

  He met Anita through Brian Jones. ‘I think she turned up in Munich or something like that,’ he says vaguely. Or did he bump into her in the Scotch (of St James’s) when all the disco scenes were raving. Anyway it was quite a while ago, he thinks. About 1965.

  ‘Anita was with Brian and then there was a whole scene in Morocco when Anita and I left Brian behind — which didn’t really help matters. It happens to everybody at some time during their lives. I had a chick run off with Jimi Hendrix once. I think he’s a nice cat actually.

  ‘I have no guilt feelings about Brian. He was completely responsible for himself as we all are. There are some people who you just know aren’t going to get old. There was this friend of ours called-Tara Browne who died about three years ago and, at the time, Brian and I agreed that he, Brian, wouldn’t live very long either. I remember saying “you’ll never make thirty, man” and he said “I know”.’

  The tour of America has excited him enormously. The generation gap has, he feels, accelerated and polarised enormously quickly in the few years since the Rolling Stones were last there.

  ‘Sometimes,’ he says, ‘we had to travel on ordinary commercial airlines to get from one town to the next and we’d have middle-aged fellows coming up to us saying “what’s wrong with my son who keeps locking himself in the bathroom and turning on?”

  ‘But even though I was foolish enough to get caught, and in doing so advertise the fact that I smoked pot, I feel no responsibility for what anybody else may do with their bodies, or what they may put into it.

  ‘We were down in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, to cut a few tracks last week and you couldn’t even get a can of beer. It’s a dry county. And people there are going through the same thing for a beer that people everywhere else are going through for pot or grass or acid or whatever. And they’re driving about hiding six-packs of beer under their seats. Getting caught with a bottle of whisky is like being caught with a needle in your arm.’

  POSTSCRIPT Although never actually caught with a needle in his arm, Keith Richard was found guilty of possession of heroin in Canada and forced to own up to his addiction. Eventually his relationship with Anita ended and he is now married to someone else. Keith has always presented the black side of the Rolling Stones to the general public, but he has a certain wit and winning charm.

  January 1970

  Joni Mitchell

  The money you get paid as a singer is all out of proportion. In America they pay you to sing — but they don’t pay the birds to sing in the trees. So it really is ridiculous. But I don’t want to give to charity just to appease my conscience. I really want to be sure to do some good with my money — although I do get pangs of conscience when I’m buying jewels and there are children starving in Biafra. Really I’d like to help with the balance of nature. It would be good to help clean up some river or something so the fish could live in it again. I really want to do my part to make the world get better. My music is how I like to help people: with my money I’d like to help the land.’

  Joni Mitchell is a poet, a singer and a fervent anti-pollutionist — pollution being the most fashionable thing to be ‘anti’ at this moment. Perhaps that sounds more cynical than I intend it: but it does seem to me that, every few months or so, the whole of that section of society around which youth culture is modelled, takes up some new social evil or phenomenon, preaches platitudes to the converted, and then quickly forgets about it and moves on to something new.

  I met Joni Mitchell this week and, when there was a lull in the conversation, she played me what she called a little bit of her Ecology Rock and Roll — a track from her new album where she sings a biting refrain that goes ‘We paved Paradise and put up a parking lot’.

  ‘That really happened,’ she says. ‘When I was in Hawaii, I arrived at the hotel at night and went straight to bed. When I woke up the next day, I looked out of the window and it was so beautiful, everything was so green and there were white birds flying around, and then I looked down and there was a great big parking lot. That’s what Americans do. They take the most beautiful parts of the continent and build hotels and put up posters and all of that and ruin it completely.’

  Joni is twenty-six and responsible for writing what I reckon to be one of the most sensitive songs of the sixties, ‘Both Sides Now’. She wrote it during the period of her marriage break-up three or four years ago, but it didn’t become generally well known until the Judy Collins recording was issued about a year ago.

  ‘I was brought up in Alberta and while I was at college began singing at small night clubs. When I was twenty, I went back east to Toronto to try to sing for my living. I was working steadily until I met another folk singer from Detroit. We were married and went to live in Detroit, which is really a very decadent and internally decaying city — very unstimulating. And then my marriage was dissolved, mostly because of our separate careers.

  ‘It’s difficult to maintain a relationship when you’re married to your career, like I was to mine, and he was to his. We tried to work as a duo, but our ideas didn’t go together. We held each other back in our modes of expression by trying to compromise. I was divorced at tw
enty-two, but really I don’t want to talk about that.

  ‘My husband and I had an understanding about it, and the people who were most upset were my friends in Canada. In many ways Canada is more like England and they don’t accept divorce and separation as easily as they do in the States.

  ‘I don’t like talking about my life. It seems to me that what you may say at one time may be quite different from what you might say two weeks later. I hardly ever do interviews at all. I don’t care if I need them for my career or not. I remember when I was about fourteen I was going to a prom and having my hair dried at the hairdressers and they gave me a movie magazine to read. It was all about the marriage of Sandra Dee and Bobby Darin breaking up. And I thought “what a bummer it must be to have a life that is so public, to have people know so many things about you”. To read all those things doesn’t appeal to me personally, so I don’t like to contribute to that kind of reading.’

  Her singing voice has a shrill, piercing untrained ring about it, but her imagery is acute and rich. ‘I think I’m both poet and singer,’ she says. ‘My words can stand up by themselves without being sung and I’m working on a book of poetry now which I hope to have finished by the summer.’

  Two albums and a series of concert tours of the States have left her quite well off and she now owns a house in Laurel Canyon, near Los Angeles. But she feels her public life is so full that she has to short-change her friends. Her particular friends at the moment are the members of the Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young supergroup and she’s knitted scarves for them all.

  Sometimes she speaks with a bald naïveté which disarms. Her shyness bothers her because it means that she can’t feel as relaxed at parties as she’d like to, and she gets very nervous before going on stage, but she thinks, too, it’s the reason for her gift. ‘My mind isn’t quick and sharp in certain ways. Not on social levels, anyway. And now because of my stature as an artist I tend to intimidate people, and then because of that they try to intimidate me.’

  She was an only child and her creative interests were always encouraged. But at nine she spent half a year in hospital with polio (’I had to learn to walk again’) and passed the time by singing to a captive audience of a little boy of six in the bed across the room. From then on she began to get more interested in writing.

  The conversation lags and she makes for her immediate and automatic escape: would I like to hear some more music, she asks. I say I would, and this time I catch the phrase ‘Pull up the trees, put them in a tree museum, and charge the people a dollar and a half to see them.’

  POSTSCRIPT The ecology movement mushroomed overnight at the beginning of 1970 and I suspect that I was being less than fair to Joni Mitchell in implying that she was jumping on to a fashionable bandwagon. She and I never really hit it off, due largely to the constant interruptions of her manager. Despite that, I became a very big Joni Mitchell fan and wrote my first novel to her accompaniment. In recent years she has been less than successful, but still writes and records good music.

  February 1970

  Britt Ekland

  We had champagne for tea: Britt Ekland and me. She said she was quite technical, as she undid the wire to the cap, but not very strong in the wrist, and so I must get the cork out. And after much silent, smiling perseverance, cheek puffing and hernia risking — pop! out it came and landed like a bazooka shell on the bed.

  I don’t have champagne for tea every day, and nor does she. ‘But,’ she said, ‘when I knew you were coming I figured I ought to offer you something, and I only have two cups, one was dirty, and I didn’t feel like washing it, or going out to buy some milk. Anyway I don’t make tea very well, so I thought the best thing to offer you would be champagne.’

  She’s been living in a bedsitter since Christmas — an L-shaped room actually, but a very fine one, as you can imagine, with a bathroom and kitchen attached and right in the heart of Mayfair. But for a month she’s been looking for something better, something bigger.

  ‘I cannot live here,’ she says, ‘it is too small and I must have somewhere where I can have my child and a place for the nannie. But today landlords can ask whatever they want, and get it. London is a place where actors and actresses get screwed. I mean you can’t get anything for under fifty guineas a week, and if you’re not working, and I’m not at present, and not getting expenses, then that is a lot of money to pay.

  ‘This place is okay for a while. It’s better than a hotel. It’s expensive because they say it is fitted with very antique furniture, and believe me the bed feels quite antique, but it’s only rented on a week’s notice.’

  She has been going out with the Earl of Lichfield for about two months. ‘What can I say? We are just going out, and that’s all there is to it. We are not planning to get married and we do not live together. I don’t like all that publicity that some actresses get about who they are going out with. I think it takes longer than two months to find out how you feel about things and what you want to do.

  ‘It’s a different thing if you marry someone, even though you may not know them, because you can find out all the things you don’t know about afterwards. I’d only known Peter [Sellers] for ten days when I married him and all the things I should have found out earlier I learned afterwards, but that didn’t make any difference.

  ‘The nomadic life that I lead in this kind of work is very bad for any relationship. I mean I shall be going away to Spain to make a new film [A Thousand Nights and Daybreak] and I shall probably be away for two or three months. What kind of life is that, leaving someone behind? It’s bad enough having to leave your child. It’s a very lonely life really, but I wouldn’t want to change it.’

  She’s very different from the girl I was expecting to meet — the one-dimensional character of the newsreel. I mean she’s brighter, and chattier, less affected, than one suspects, and she’s a good mimic, full of delicious expressions, both verbal and facial, and all the time very good entertainment.

  She’s really quite small, but her legs are enormously long, and although she disguises it by wearing her hair back but down around the frame of her face, her ears stick out. In a way she reminds me of Bambi, except that, as she puts it, she ‘has no problem with her bosom’. No, no problem at all.

  She’s wearing a dark-brown Yves St Laurent jump suit, which she thinks is very chic, and which unzips right down the front, and her hair is very blonde.

  She has made eight films (four have not yet been shown in Britain) but still she’s able to shelter under a shade of anonymity when she’s out in the streets or riding the buses, which she says she does all the time. The thousands of news pictures of her with Peter Sellers have not given her face a public notoriety.

  She is now in her mid-twenties and preparing to restart her life based in London. At the break-up of her six-year marriage in 1968 she went to Rome with her daughter Victoria, but things didn’t work out as she’d hoped and after two years she had decided that she would rather be in London.

  ‘When I came back just before Christmas I’d hardly got into my hotel room before all my old friends started phoning me and coming to see me. I could go back to Rome and live there for six months and no one would phone. I have no friends there.’

  Her little girl, who is five, is staying now with Britt’s mother in Stockholm. ‘It’s very good for her to be there, but for me it is a miserable arrangement because either you have children or you don’t, and if you do then they should stay with you. But I couldn’t keep dragging her around the world. Last year I took her to Switzerland, to Italy, to New York, to Puerto Rico, back to New York, to Sweden and then to England. I thought it was bad for her.’

  As she talks, she insists that we have the radio playing softly in the background. She’s quite an enormous authority on pop music, not the top-forty stuff but the heavier sounds, and wherever she goes she takes her stereo equipment which, she admits, costs her a fortune in excess baggage. Apart from that, she travels light. She has, she says, practically no p
ossessions.

  ‘I think I have just one piece of furniture — a bed, which is in Rome, where I have a flat, and which is covered in big red cushions. When Peter and I separated I left nearly everything behind, and most of the stuff I did take was put into six big trunks and is being stored at Harrods. Everything I have is packed in those suitcases over there’ … and she points to two large cases, a bag containing a hairdryer, a hold-all full of wigs and boots and shoes, and a typewriter.

  ‘Clothes I have, but the wardrobe space here is so cramped that I have to hang things up on the wall the day before I want to wear them. Oh, dear, isn’t it sad to think that this is all I have here.’

  She talks almost non-stop, drifting from one subject into another and then another: ‘I watched Tom Jones on television last night. I think when he sings he is so sexy … did you see that programme where they were asking poeple in the street about their sex lives? You wouldn’t believe it. These women telling them everything. I think they must all be frustrated lovers. I wouldn’t tell anyone anything about sex. I think it is too private. You don’t do it in public unless you are a loony, so why talk about it? No, I’m not a frustrated anything. I suppose people are all exhibitionists and that sort of programme gives them a chance to talk about themselves and show off.

  ‘Sometimes when one felt very, very frustrated and wanted to really do something — well, I suppose one would have worn a see-through blouse. But that’s not enough nowadays. You’d probably have to show your bottom in see-through to create a stir, or perhaps even the lot. It’s a shame because it used to be so simple. It’s very hard. Tits and bums you can see on the screen frequently in almost all films. So they’re not really exciting any more. It seems that the people who make films today forget that young people, say of sixteen, have never even seen a bosom except maybe in a pornographic bookshop or by peeping through the bathroom keyhole when their mother was taking a bath. And it doesn’t seem right that they should see it for the first time on the screen.’