Life (29 page)

We lived together in this magnificent palace, the Villa Medici, with its formal gardens, one of the most elegant buildings in the world, that Stash had managed to pull off. His father, Balthus, had an apartment there, some diplomatic role via the French Academy, which owned the building. Balthus was away, so we had his place to ourselves. Down the Spanish Steps for lunch. Nightclubs, hanging out at the Villa Medici, going to the gardens of the Villa Borghese. It was my version of the Grand Tour. There was also this undercurrent of revolution in the air, a lot of political undertones, all half-assed except for the Red Brigades later. Before the riots in Paris the following year, the students started a revolution at the University of Rome, which I went to. They barricaded it, they sneaked me in. They were all flash-in-the-pan revolutionaries.

Me, I had nothing to do, really. Sometimes I’d go to the studio and see Fonda and Vadim at work. Anita went to work and I didn’t. Like some sort of Roman pimp or something. Send the woman to work, and hang about. It was weird. I was enjoying it, but at the same time there was that sort of itch. Shouldn’t I be doing something? Meanwhile, Tom Keylock is there with my Bentley. Blue Lena had loudspeakers in the grille, and Anita used to terrorize the Romans by putting on a woman policeman’s voice, reading out their number plates and ordering them to turn immediately to the right. The car flew a Vatican flag with the keys of Saint Peter.

Marianne and Mick stayed with us for a while. Hear Marianne on the subject.

Marianne Faithfull:
Now that’s a trip I’ll never forget. Me and Mick and Keith and Anita and Stash. On acid, at night in the full moon at the Villa Medici. It was just utterly beautiful. And Anita’s smile I remember. I mean, her wonderful smile in those days, which promised everything. When she was having a good time, she was so full of promise. She gave this incredible smile, which was quite frightening too, all those teeth. Like a wolf, like a cat that got the cream. If you were a man, it must have been very powerful. She was gorgeous because she was so beautifully dressed, always in the perfect costume.

Anita had a huge influence on the style of the times. She could put anything together and look good. I was beginning to wear her clothes most of the time. I would wake up and put on what was lying around. Sometimes it was mine, and sometimes it was the old lady’s, but we were the same size so it didn’t matter. If I sleep with someone, I at least have the right to wear her clothes. But it really pissed off Charlie Watts, with his walk-in cupboards of impeccable Savile Row suits, that I started to become a fashion icon for wearing my old lady’s clothes. Otherwise it was plunder, loot that I wore—whatever was thrown at me on stage or what I picked up off stage and happened to fit. I would say to somebody, I like that shirt, and for some reason they felt obliged to give it to me. I used to dress myself by taking clothes off other people.

I was never really interested very much in my look, so to speak, although I might be a liar there. I used to spend hours stitching old pants together to give them a different look. I’d get four pairs of sailor pants, I’d cut them off at the knee, get a band of leather and then put another color from the other pair of pants and stitch them in. Lavender and dull rose, as Cecil Beaton says. I didn’t realize he was keeping an eye on that shit.

I did enjoy hanging out with Stash and his degenerates—look who’s talking. They’d cover my fucking arse. I had no particular desire to get into that area of society, European bullshit high society. I’d use them when I could. I don’t want to knock the man; I always liked to hang with him. And, yes, I could say he’s so shallow you couldn’t paddle in it, and Stash would know exactly what I mean, and he knows he deserves it, little snipe. He got enough out of me, and I let him get away with a few things. I know exactly how tough he is. One kick up the bum and he’s gone.

I
used to believe
in law and order and British Empire. I thought Scotland Yard was incorruptible. Wonderful, I fell for the whole shtick.

The coppers I came up against taught me what it was really about. Amazing to think now that I was shocked, but I was. The busts we were subjected to were set against the background of massive corruption in the Metropolitan Police at the time and for the next few years, which culminated in the commissioner publicly firing a great many CID officers and prosecuting others.

It was only by getting busted that we realized how fragile the structure really was. They’re shitting themselves with fear now, because they’ve busted us and they don’t know what to do with us. It was sort of eye-opening. What had they got at Redlands? Some Italian speed that Mick had on script anyway, and they found some smack on Robert Fraser, and that was it. And because they found a few roaches in the ashtray, I got done for allowing people to smoke marijuana on my premises. It was so tenuous. They got nothing out of it. In fact, what they got was a big black eye.

On the day, almost on the hour, that Mick and I were charged, on May 10, 1967, Brian Jones was simultaneously busted in his apartment in London. The stitch-up was orchestrated and synchronized with rare precision. But due to some small glitch of stage management, the press actually arrived, television crews included, a few minutes
before
the police knocked on Brian’s door with their warrant. The police had to push through the army of hacks that they had summoned to get to the door. But this collusion was barely noticeable in the farce that unfolded.

The Redlands trial, in late June, was in Chichester, which was still in 1930 when it came to the judicials. On the bench was Judge Block, who was probably sixty-odd, about my age now, at the time. This was my first ever show in court, and you don’t know how you’re going to react. In fact I had no choice. He was so offensive, obviously trying to provoke me so that he could do what he wanted. He called me, for having used my premises for the smoking of cannabis resin, “scum” and “filth,” and said, “People like this shouldn’t be allowed to walk free.” So when the prosecutor said to me that surely I must have known what was going on, what with a naked girl wrapped in a rug, which is basically what I was being done for, I did not just say, “Oh, sorry, Your Honor.”

The actual exchange went as follows:

Morris (The Prosecutor):
  There was, as we know, a young woman sitting on a settee wearing only a rug. Would you agree, in the ordinary course of events, you would expect a young woman to be embarrassed if she had nothing on but a rug in the presence of eight men, two of whom were hangers-on and the third a Moroccan servant?

Keith:
  Not at all.

Morris:
  You regard that, do you, as quite normal?

Keith:
  We are not old men. We are not worried about petty morals.

It got me a year in Wormwood Scrubs. I only did a day, as it turned out, but that was what the judge thought of my speech —he gave me the heaviest sentence he thought he could get away with. I found out later that Judge Block was married to the heiress of Shippam’s fish paste. If I’d known about his fishwife, I could have come out with a better one. We’ll leave it at that.

That day, June 29, 1967, I was found guilty and sentenced to twelve months in prison. Robert Fraser was given six months and Mick three months. Mick was in Brixton. Fraser and I went to the Scrubs that night.

What a ludicrous sentence. How much do they hate you? I wonder who was whispering in the judge’s ear. If he had listened to wise information, he would have said, I’ll just treat this as twenty-five quid and out of here; this case is nothing. In retrospect, the judge actually played into our hands. He managed to turn it into a great PR coup for us, even though I must say I didn’t enjoy Wormwood Scrubs, even for twenty-four hours. The judge managed to turn me into some folk hero overnight. I’ve been playing up to it ever since.

But the dark side of this was discovering that we’d become the focal point of a nervous establishment. There’s two ways the authorities can deal with a perceived challenge. One is to absorb and the other is to nail. They had to leave the Beatles alone because they’d already given them medals. We got the nail. It was more serious than I thought. I was in jail because I’d obviously pissed off the authorities. I’m a guitar player in a pop band and I’m being targeted by the British government and its vicious police force, all of which shows me how frightened they are. We won two world wars, and these people are shivering in their goddamn boots. “All of your children will be like this if you don’t stop this right now.” There was such ignorance on both sides. We didn’t know we were doing anything that was going to bring the empire crashing to the floor, and they were searching in the sugar bowls not knowing what they were looking for.

But it didn’t stop them trying again and again and again, for the next eighteen months. It coincided with their learning about drugs. They’d never heard of them before. I used to walk down Oxford Street with a slab of hash as big as a skateboard. I wouldn’t even wrap it up. This was ’65, ’66—there was that brief moment of total freedom. We didn’t even think that it was illegal, what we were doing. And they knew nothing about drugs at all. But once that came on the menu in about ’67, they saw their opportunity. As a source of income or a source of promotion or another avenue to make more arrests. It’s easy to bust a hippie. And it got very easy to plant a couple of joints on people. It was just so common that you expected it.

Most of the first day of the prison sentence was induction. You get in with the rest of the inductees and take a shower and they spray you with lice spray. Oh, nice one, son. The whole place is meant to intimidate you to the max. The Scrubs wall is daunting to look at, twenty feet, but someone tapped me on the shoulder and said, “Blake got over it.” Nine months earlier the spy George Blake’s friends had dropped a ladder over the wall and spirited him away to Moscow—a sensational escape. But having Russian friends to spirit you away is another thing. I walked around in an orderly circle with so much rabbit going on it took me a while to get a touch on the back. “Keef, you got bail, you sod.” I said, “Any messages? Give ’em to me now.” I had to deliver about ten notes to families. Tearful. There were some mean mothers there and most of them were warders. The head bugger said to me as I got in the Bentley, “You’ll be back.” I said to him, “Not on your time, I won’t.”

Our lawyers had filed an appeal and I’d been released on bail. Before the appeal hearing, the
Times,
great champion of the underdog, came unexpectedly to our assistance. “There must remain a suspicion,” wrote William Rees-Mogg, the
Times
editor, in his piece “Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?,” “that Mr. Jagger received a harsher sentence than would ever have been handed down to an unknown defendant.” I.e., you’ve cocked it up and made British justice look bad. In actual fact we got saved by Rees-Mogg, because, believe me, I felt like a butterfly at the time and I’m going to be broken. When you look back at the brutality of the establishment in the Profumo affair—something as dirty as any John le Carré story, in which inconvenient players were framed and hounded to their death—I’m quite amazed it didn’t get more bloody than it did. In that same month my conviction was overturned and Mick’s was upheld but his sentence quashed. Not so lucky Robert Fraser, who had pleaded guilty to heroin possession. He had to do his porridge. I think that the experience in the King’s African Rifles had more effect on him than Wormwood Scrubs. He’d thrown loads of guys into jankers—army for the glasshouse—which is slopping out the bogs or digging new latrines. It wasn’t as if he had no idea about confinement and punishment. I’m sure Africa was a bit rougher than anywhere else. He went in very bold. Never flinched. I thought he came out very bold too, bow tie, cigarette holder. I said, “Let’s get stoned.”

The same day we were released, the strangest TV discussion ever filmed took place between Mick—flown in by helicopter to some English lawn—and representatives of the ruling establishment. They were like figures from
Alice,
chessmen: a bishop, a Jesuit, an attorney general and Rees-Mogg. They’d been sent out as a scouting party, waving a white flag, to discover whether the new youth culture was a threat to the established order. Trying to bridge the unbridgeable gap between the generations. They were earnest and awkward, and it was ludicrous. Their questions amounted to: what do you want? We’re laughing up our sleeves. They were trying to make peace with us, like Chamberlain. Little bit of paper, “peace in our time, peace in our time.” All they’re trying to do is retain their positions. But such beautiful English earnestness, this concern. It was astounding. Yet you know they’re carrying weight, they can bring down some heavy-duty shit, so there was this underlying aggressiveness in the guise of all this amused curiosity. In a way they were begging Mick for answers. I thought Mick came off pretty well. He didn’t attempt to answer them; he just said, you’re living in the past.

Much of that year we struggled haphazardly to make
Their Satanic Majesties Request
. None of us wanted to make it, but it was time for another Stones album, and
Sgt. Pepper’s
was coming out, so we thought basically we were doing a put-on. We do have the first 3-D record cover of all time. That was acid too. We made that set ourselves. We went to New York, put ourselves in the hands of this Japanese bloke with the only camera in the world that could do the 3-D. Bits of paint and saws, bits of Styrofoam. We need some plants! OK, we’ll go down to the flower district. It coincided with the departure of Andrew Oldham—dropping the pilot, who was now in a bad way, getting shock treatment for some insurmountable mental pain to do with women trouble. He was also spending a lot of time with his own label, Immediate Records. Things might have run their course, but there was something between Mick and him that couldn’t be resolved, that I can only speculate on. They were falling out of sync with each other. Mick was starting to feel his oats and wanted to test it out by getting rid of Oldham. And to be fair to Mick, Andrew was getting big ideas. And why not? A year or two before, he was nobody; now he wanted to be Phil Spector. But all he’s got is this five-piece rock-and-roll band to do it with. He would spend an inordinate amount of time, once a couple of hits had rolled in, trying to make these Spector-type records. Andrew wasn’t concentrating on the Stones anymore. Added to that, we could no longer create coverage in the way Oldham had done; we were no longer writing the headlines, we were ducking them, and that meant another of Oldham’s jobs had gone. His box of tricks was exhausted.