by Marc Spitz
Capote could not have concocted a better opportunity to reintroduce himself in the 1970s. He wouldn’t even be the only dissolute writer in the touring party. Capote would convene with the Stones’ touring party in New Orleans and chronicle the goings-on at the venue, at the hotel, and aboard the band’s converted DC-7, aka the Lapping Tongue, as it was emblazoned with the new Rolling Stones Records logo. The idea was to do a modern version of The Muses Are Heard, Capote’s book-length 1956 New Yorker piece on the Everyman Opera Company’s mounting of Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess in Moscow.
The notion that Capote might have ever repeated such a heroic piece, much less in his older and dissipated state, was optimism of the highest level. But he certainly did have a history of mining the best detail from a chaotic entourage. The Everyman party had contained, according to The Muses, “fifty-eight actors, seven backstage personalities, two conductors, assorted wives and office workers, six children and their school teachers, three journalists, two dogs, and one psychiatrist.” Not to mention the American State Department and Russia’s Ministry of Culture. Surely a few British rock stars, their girlfriends, a traveling physician, some roadies, security guards, a film crew, and a few other literary titans wouldn’t be too much for him.
William S. Burroughs was going to cover the tour, but those plans fell through; still, if Capote’s famous photographic memory failed him or he needed to bond with a fellow famous journalist, there were others to pick up the slack. Novelist and screenwriter Terry Southern, Keith’s erstwhile drinking buddy, was embedded with the Stones as well, covering the tour for the Saturday Review. “Terry Southern became a Rolling Stone that week,” Rudge recalls. “The Stones actually let people come in and live the same life that they did. And they got caught up in it.” For Capote, the’60s were a much kinder decade to him, and by the ’70s, his health and business affairs had begun to deteriorate. He was mired in hipster speak, almost a caricature of the sharp cultural satirist he’d been in the previous decade. And everything was being recorded. Robert Frank, the Swiss photographer and filmmaker who’d designed the cover sleeve for Exile on Main Street, was also traveling on the tour, shooting everything, including, famously, the “plane fuck,” for a proposed documentary, which would never be released officially but would enjoy a long life as the cult bootleg Cocksucker Blues. Frank, like Rolling Stones Records president Marshall Chess and Capote, had a great pedigree as a chronicler of America; famous for shooting the beat film Pull My Daisy and publishing the landmark photo book The Americans, which, according to Kerouac, captured “that crazy feeling in America when the sun is hot on the streets and music comes out of the jukebox.” Frank seemed to approach it with an immigrant’s sense of work ethic.
Mick, more erudite than most knew at the time, was honored and flattered that artists and socialites would be following the Stones around as they did their thing. “Ahmet Ertegün understood the power of celebrity,” says Rudge, “the power of the media, and he also knew how much it attracted Mick.” It seemed too good to be true . . . and it was.
Capote met the tour in New Orleans and immediately feted Mick with an elaborate dinner, assuming the role of hometown host even though he’d not lived in New Orleans for decades. Once the heady mix of drink and anticipation faded, the author sensed he’d made a mistake. Capote, who had seen plenty of examples of fame changing people the closer they got to it, was bored and depressed by the Stones’ entourage, cavorting and mugging for the cameras as if they were as interesting as the band themselves. “I was twenty-six years old and really conscious of not ever wanting to be part of the movie—and I don’t mean the documentary; I mean the ‘movie,’ ” Robert Greenfield says. There was playacting going on at every stop, rock stars and their retinue mugging for the cameras and building a myth for the new world. “That famous photo of Keith posing in front of a sign that said KEEP AMERICA DRUG FREE,” Rudge says; “that wasn’t by accident.”
Capote, it was inferred by every sour look, had seen this movie before. He’d done decadence first and had done it better, from his persistence in Kansas, covering the murder of the Clutter family (immortalized in In Cold Blood) to his famous Black and White Ball at the Plaza Hotel, during the initial rise of the Vietnam conflict. And here they were, the war still going on, Nixon in the White House, jetting across the country with their own doctor, entire floors of hotel rooms closed off, two former policemen hired as security guards vetting everyone, an endless supply of pharmaceutical cocaine, and cameras everywhere. Capote alone found it depressing and decided, before informing anyone, that he would never write this story. Like a numb sleepwalker, he kept on with the trajectory, sharing hotels with the band but retiring early, and making sure that everyone around him was aware of his displeasure. “We didn’t get along,” Marshall Chess recalls. “You know how you meet people in your life who just don’t rub you right? He was so queeny. Overly queeny. He had a horrible, queeny, bitchy attitude from the moment he came on tour.”
“Truman got a little intimidated at a certain point,” Rudge recalls. “It was quite wild—and got quite loud late at night. He wasn’t young. He thought ‘It’s three in the morning and people are still going crazy. It’s not somewhere I feel comfortable.’ ”
Worse, the question of why exactly to write this piece became an issue. The way Capote saw it, there were stakes when it came to The Muses Are Heard: It was a genuine cultural exchange in which changing notions of eroticism, race, and popular music on both sides provided rich material. The Stones’ tour of ’72, unless you were twenty-five and strung out, just seemed like a long, sloppy party. This, the crestfallen writer soon realized, was merely decadence, and more of that was not what he required.
The Stones didn’t know what to make of Capote either. Only their brawny Texan sax player Bobby Keys seemed to charm him. Sensing perhaps his dispassion, Keith would sometimes try to rile him, pounding on his door one night, inviting him up to a party. “Keith said, ‘Oh come out we’re having a party upstairs,’ ” Capote recalled years later in a Rolling Stone interview. “ ‘I’m tired, I’ve had a long day and so have you, and I think you should go to bed.’ ‘Aw, come to it and see what a rock group’s really like.’ ‘I know what a rock group’s really like Keith, I don’t have to come upstairs to see,’ and apparently he had a bottle of ketchup in his hand. He had a hamburger and a bottle of ketchup and he just threw it all over the door of my room.”
Answered Prayers, the purported follow-up to In Cold Blood, was already taking on the legend of a great lost work, and Capote knew the ramifications of failing to complete yet another piece. When asked about Answered Prayers during the late ’60s, Capote, no longer the fire-eyed, spry terror he’d been in the ’50s and early’60s, would sigh heavily and inform them it was “two-thirds” done. Some rumored it hadn’t been one word written. Based on the sensation of In Cold Blood and the hit film version of his novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s, 20th Century Fox had snatched up the film rights. Now they were asking for their advance (reportedly two hundred thousand dollars) to be returned. Out on the road with the Stones, the writer responded to the building pressure by slowly growing as mean as a snake. “He was loaded,“ Greenfield says. “Nobody knew this, but he was taking prescription drugs. At first he couldn’t get close enough on the tour, he was all atwitter, but he definitely became one of the most mean-spirited people I’ve ever met in my life—nasty about everybody.”
Capote was two decades the twenty-eight-year-old Mick Jagger’s senior, not of the rock and roll era, but he liked what he called “beat music.” One might expect him to be impatient with the rock star. Jagger, after all, played at being a southerner; Capote was the real thing.
Jagger played at being gay. Capote was one of the few true celebrities of the era who was out of the closet. More likely, Capote understood what Mick was offering too well to work up any interest in unraveling a second layer. He, too, after all, had become famous in his very early twenties; the dust jacket photo for his first boo
k, Other Voices, Other Rooms, created a minor scandal, as it showed Capote, beautiful and androgynous and haughty, much like the young Mick. The Capote portrait was shot by Cecil Beaton, who years later found himself fascinated by Mick. He would photograph Mick and paint his portrait in the late ’60s.
Capote, with his thinning hair and booze-doubled chin, would stare at Mick Jagger in his blue eye shadow and sometimes merely see that youthful hauteur evaporating. They were, in a way, both navigating a vulgar age they didn’t really understand anymore.
Mick was an actor, he determined. “One of the most total actors that I’ve ever seen,” he’d later tell Andy Warhol. “He has this remarkable quality of being absolutely able to be totally extroverted. Very few people can be entirely absolutely altogether extroverted. It’s a rare, delicate, strange thing. Just to pull yourself out and go—wham! This he can do to a remarkable degree—but what makes it more remarkable is that the moment it’s done, it’s over.”
By the time the tour hit New York on the eve of Mick’s twentyninth birthday that July, Capote’s commitment to the gig was over as well. You can see a lack of warmth when he enters the backstage area with Radziwill in Cocksucker Blues. The idea of some kind of synergy of legends quickly proving to be a huge flop, Mick cooled to Capote as well. He had other, more practical concerns, after all. Mick was doing lots of good coke daily (you can see him snort a rail in Cocksucker Blues). He was on edge, indulging in fears of assassination, both abstract (the zeitgeist, shootings, politically motivated everywhere) and concrete (the Hells Angels took a post-Altamont hit out on him). “We had a doctor come on tour to keep any of us alive if we were shot onstage. We had a specialist travel with us, carrying a big suitcase.”
After years of touring, Mick had also suddenly developed an anxiety about flying. “I remember flying with him and when the plane took off, he’d tell me, ‘This is the power turn. It’s the most frightening part.’ He wasn’t phobic, but a bit nervous about it.” He couldn’t hold Capote’s hand and stroke his ego. It was bad enough having to follow Stevie Wonder every night.
S.T.P. ended with a sold-out engagement at Madison Square Garden and a posh after-party at the St. Regis Hotel (attended by Bob Dylan, Dick Cavett, and Tennessee Williams). After the tour wrapped, the Stones flew to France. Capote retreated to Sagaponeck to sort through his notes and see if he might complete something. Drinking, staring at the ocean, trying to get inspired. The abortive piece had a title: “It Will Soon Be Here.” It was the title of a painting Capote had liked depicting a rural family preparing for an oncoming storm. According to Capote’s biographer, Gerald Clarke, “The title had an ironic symbolism. In the twentieth century, things had been so turned around that instead of rushing from the storm the Stones and the chaos they represented—the young descendents of those god-fearing farmers were running toward it—despite to be engulfed in the maelstrom.” He’d appeared on Johnny Carson, where he contemptuously referred to the Stones as “the Beatles.” The quip that Mick was “about as sexy as a pissing toad” took on a life of its own, but privately Capote was again unable to produce. He finally telephoned Wenner to tell him that he wouldn’t be submitting the story. “I hadn’t really made up my mind. I had all the material there, and it was sitting there and it was bothering me and I kept thinking, ‘Well it would be so easy really to do it.’ Finally the time came that just made up my mind that I wasn’t going to do it and I just told him.” It’s truly our loss that Capote was never able to apply his great gift for presenting physical detail, dialogue, and pretense to another lengthy feature. Reading the minutia present in The Muses Are Heard (“he took off a pair of horn-rimmed glasses and polished them with a handkerchief ”) provokes an almost painful sense of lament when one thinks of what could have been.
Seven years later, in 1979, Rolling Stone sent Warhol to interview his friend for an extensive feature essentially about why he didn’t write the piece. In that story, one line has more truth about the Stones than anything Capote could have penned: “I just don’t know where it goes from here. Because I don’t know where the Rolling Stones go from here. I don’t know if that particular group and the particular thing that they do can go on for more than a year or two. I think Mick’s whole career depends on whether he can do something else. I’m sure he’ll go on. I just don’t know in what area.”
The Frank film had been shelved as well, some of the footage surfacing two years later in the quadraphonic virtual concert event Ladies and Gentlemen, the Rolling Stones, which toured movie theaters in America in 1974. “Marshall Chess realized they’d never be able to release Cocksucker Blues—they already at that time couldn’t get into three countries because of their drug bust—they didn’t need any more problems you know—and to verify a lot of what people heard about the Stones—Marshall asked me if I could do anything with this footage,” says director Rollin Binzer. “Robert is a wonderful guy and his vision was always sort of on the dark side.”
The absence of any real scrutiny allowed the tour to pass into legend and ultimately fuel the Stones’ bad-boy image without ever showing people any anticlimactic activity. Frank and his two-man crew shot every bit of onstage transcendence plus backstage debauchery, but, more tellingly, captured the crushing boredom of tour life as well. Yes, Keith Richards and Bobby Keys toss a TV over the balcony of the Continental Hyatt House in West Hollywood. Yes, Mick and the band play shakes and percussion instruments while a roadie lifts a naked girl up to his mouth aboard the band’s jet, dubbed “the Lapping Tongue.” But really it’s the waiting, the ordering room service (“Do you have any apples? Blueberry?”) and the hours before and after sound check that take up most of the road time. It’s frequently not the drugs that cause bands to burn out, to overdose, to break up; it’s all that waiting.
When talk show hosts inquired about his experiences on tour with the Stones, Capote, even deeper into his dissolution, made several damning remarks, and contemptuously referred to his subjects as “the Beatles,” implying that all British rock icons were interchangeable. And yet, none of this would have been as damaging as a full-bore “The Duke in His Domain”–style feature; which might have genuinely tarnished the Stones’ cool at a time when it was most crucial to solidify it. Is Mick Jagger responsible for this birth of viral culture; where scandal and novelty, even a failure to produce a work of art, gain more media traction than the art itself could have ever hoped to? And if so, why now? Did Mick somehow realize that the Stones, as the ’70s progressed, were moving at jet-speed towards a creativity-compromised state where they would need all the help that they could get?
12
“The Ballad of a Vain Man”
Sometimes the difference between a hit single that will be played somewhere, on some radio station, every single day until the end of time, and a hit single that will almost never be played again once it slips from the charts is simply a matter of our continued ability to wonder about it. The most enduring hits are mysterious. We ask, “What is it about?” “Who inspired it?” Phil Collins “In the Air Tonight” jumps immediately to mind. They’re pretty rare in pop. “You’re So Vain,” Carly Simon’s No. 1 hit single from 1973 (and nearly forty years later, her signature tune) is one of these songs as well. It even sounds a little sinister if you break down its sonic components. The bubbling introductory bass notes, the result of studio bassist Klaus Voorman (a friend and favorite sideman of the now separated Beatles) limbering up his fingers.
The spitting of the muffled “son of a gun.”
The strummed acoustic chords, perfectly rhythmic but sinister enough to avoid being coffeehouse folky.
The piano offering countermelody.
A gentle drum beat holding it all down.
Then the first verse, in which Simon, then only twenty-seven, sounds as world-weary as Fitzgerald’s Nick Carraway as she watches her mystery subject walk into a cocktail party where all the female guests fantasize about being the one to take him home and win his heart: “And all the girls dre
amed that they’d be your partner . . .” She repeats the last lyric for emphasis but it’s unnecessary as the wistful “clouds in my coffee” bridge and the hear it once/ know it forever chorus are about to power the ballad into eternity. Mick appears on the second verse, just after the guitar solo. The backing vocals are uncredited but unmistakably Mick Jagger’s. “His voice cuts through like a shot,” remarks Keith Altham. And this presence got the mystery going. “How did this relatively new artist manage to get Mick Jagger, the biggest rock star in the world, to sing on her album?” And from there listener’s first wondered, “Is he the one who thinks the song is about him?” Had “You’re So Vain” been half as beautiful and masterfully arranged and executed, it would still be a cause célèbre. But it also happened to be one of Mick Jagger’s best vocal performances of the sometimes fallow early to mid-1970s.
This also marks the beginning of a long period where Mick first begins to wander from the Rolling Stones. Over the next decade and a half, he would record duets or add significant vocals to records by John Phillips (whose lost classic Pay Pack and Follow would also feature Keith Richards and Ron Wood), John Lennon (the funky bootlegged favorite “Too Many Cooks,” recorded during a 1973 jam), Bette Midler, Michael Jackson, David Bowie, and Daryl Hall of Hall and Oates. Ten years into his career as a professional singer, Mick was the perfect singing partner. He knew what notes to hit and when to pull back.
Mick and Carly Simon were drawn to each other much in the same way that Mick was drawn to Bianca. People kept remarking that they looked alike.
“Apparently he’d seen a picture of me on my first album,” Simon tells me. “I don’t want to call it narcissistic but he was intrigued by that. That made him want to meet me.”
Carly Simon was considered a new artist, but she’d been performing since the early ’60s as one half of the family act the Simon Sisters. Raised at the northern tip of New York City, the privileged child of the publishing magnate Richard Simon of Simon and Schuster, she honed her perceptive lyrical skills at Sarah Lawrence. She knew the swinging London scene of the mid- and late’60s, living with British scenester Roger Donaldson in a flat on Portobello Road. When that relationship ended, she moved back to New York City and pursued opportunities in journalism before signing with Elektra Records at the height of the singer-songwriter era of the very early ’70s. She had a brief affair with Cat Stevens, the muse for her first big hit, “That’s the Way I’ve Always Heard It Should Be,” and opened for Kris Kristofferson, whom she’d also been rumored to be involved with. Her second Elektra album, released in 1971, produced a classic in its own right, in the title track “Anticipation” (later a popular commercial jingle for Heinz ketchup). Jingles had actually been an early way for Simon to generate income, so she had an innate knack for getting to the salient point with speed and certainty that was uncommon among some of the more star-gazing figures of the early ’70s singer-songwriter scene. “When you are writing about beef jerky you have to write about why beef jerky is so good,” she says today. “I was less into the right side of my brain at that point.”
