Mick Jagger (37 page)

The original, wise plan had been that Marianne should not attend the trial and should stay well out of the media searchlight until it was over. That first day, as Mick stood in the dock, she had taken her son, Nicholas, to the home of the Small Faces’ Steve Marriott, accompanied—according to her book, Faithfull—by an occasional lesbian lover named Saida. Marianne was taking acid with Marriott and the other Faces when the Stones’ driver, Tom Keylock, arrived and told her Mick needed her to be around after all. Keylock drove her to Redlands to meet Michael Cooper, and they went on to Lewes Prison together, taking sixty cigarettes, a checkerboard, newspapers, and fresh fruit. There they found Mick and Robert Fraser sharing a room in the prison hospital. Fraser, an old army man, was stoical, but Mick was in tears. Cooper surreptitiously shot a few pictures—including one of Mick lying on his bed with a view to a future album cover—but a prison officer spotted his camera and confiscated the film.

The next morning, Mick and Fraser were returned to court, once more in handcuffs, to be held in a cell during Keith’s trial and brought back before Judge Block for sentencing when it ended. Among the day’s press reports, several had questioned the use of “bracelets” on individuals not accused of violent crime, who were never other than totally cooperative. A spokesman responded lamely that it had been because the Prison Service “had no orders to do otherwise.” As the police van arrived, a Daily Sketch photographer snatched a picture of them together in the backseat, manacled hands raised together to shield their faces from the flash. The image was afterward turned into a silkscreen print by the artist Richard Hamilton, whose title for it sardonically altered London’s “Swinging” prefix to “Swingeing,” or brutal. Four decades later, Swingeing London 67 would hang on permanent display at the Tate Gallery, one of the most famous and revealing Pop Art images of that otherwise myth-clouded season.

Keith’s trial, in front of a new jury, was to take the best part of two days and generate by far the most lurid headlines—most referring back in some way or another to the unspeaking and now unseen Mick. Keith was accused of “knowingly permitting” his home to be used for drug taking, a charge not necessarily provable through the traces of cannabis found in various containers around Redlands or even the “strong, sweet smell” of incense allegedly used to mask its distinctive odor. Instead, the prosecution set out to prove that Keith’s houseguests had been palpably under the influence of drugs with his full compliance, if not encouragement. This endeavor naturally focused on the only female among the party, who at the time happened to be wearing nothing but a fur rug.

Marianne had not been charged with any offense, so her name could not be mentioned in court. However, thanks to the extensive coverage of the case before it came to trial, the whole world knew the identity of “Miss X,” as she was now futilely camouflaged. Moreover, thanks to Mick’s SOS call, she was not prudently hiding away but seated in open court, listening to herself being dragged through the mud by the Crown’s prosecution of Keith without any chance to answer back. So much for Sir Lancelot’s chivalrous self-sacrifice to save her from being thrown to the wolves.

A succession of West Sussex police officers, male and female, testified to Marianne’s “merry mood” throughout the raid and how at that moment on the staircase, she “deliberately let the rug slip, disclosing parts of her nude body.” Rather than just a giggly hash smoker, she was represented as a shameless hussy, surprised with eight men in an orgy which had not stopped at drugs. All at once, that rather low-key Sunday-evening scene in Keith’s living room was transformed into Britain’s juiciest sex scandal since the Profumo Affair in 1963. But even Profumo had not contained incidental detail as sweet. After this second day, a story began circulating that the when the police burst in, they had found Mick licking a Mars bar lodged in Marianne’s vagina. It was pure invention, inspired by the national fascination with Mick’s lips and tongue (though, according to Keith, a Mars bar had been in the room to satisfy the craving for sweets that drugs created). Yet it would become rock ’n’ roll’s most famous legend—the one thing about Mick that almost anyone in the English-speaking world was sure to “know”—as well as repositioning forevermore the homely chocolate snack whose best-known slogan was “A Mars a day helps you work, rest, and play.”

At 5 P.M., the court was adjourned again, and Mick had to face his second night in custody with Fraser in the Lewes Prison hospital. No orders to do otherwise still having been given, they were put back into handcuffs.

The next morning, June 29, brought Keith before the court at last, looking positively Wildean in a black frock-coated suit and high white polo neck. In the Stones’ whole career thus far, his speaking voice had been an almost unknown quantity. Now at last the contrast could be savored between that bony, menacing face and the pleasant, rather educated voice, devoid of any of Mick’s class affectations, that issued from it. Equally surprising were his humor and quick-wittedness against witheringly hostile cross-examination, which for much of the time put an invisible Mick back in the dock alongside him.

Only now did the mysterious Acid King David “Schneidermann” enter the backstory as alleged owner of the “large supply of cannabis” found at Redlands. Keith gave a winningly plausible description of the hangers-on who always beset the Stones to explain why this most casual American acquaintance had joined his weekend houseguests (though, of course, not mentioning what had made Acid King David so very persona grata). The court heard how at the time Mick was suing the News of the World for untrue drug allegations and how everyone around the Stones now believed Acid King David to have been planted by the paper to give out drugs, then tip off the police, so killing off the libel action. Cross-examining, Malcolm Morris QC asked whether Keith seriously accused the NoW of “a wicked conspiracy … to have Indian hemp planted at your house … because it did not want to pay libel-damages to Mick Jagger.”

“That is the suggestion,” Keith replied.

Once again, the prosecution strategy for proving that drugs had been used was to suggest a simultaneous sex orgy, with Keith implicitly as ringmaster. At one point, the crushingly supercilious Morris asked whether he wouldn’t have expected “Miss X” to feel embarrassed “if she had nothing on but a fur rug in the presence of eight men, two of whom were hangers-on and the third a Moroccan servant.” “We are not old men,” Keith retorted in a genuinely Wildean moment. “We are not worried about petty morals.”

Judge Block’s summing-up was worthy of any periwigged dotard in half-moon spectacles ever created by W. S. Gilbert. Having allowed hours of legally sanctioned smut and innuendo about the defenseless Marianne, generating all those lip-smacking banner headlines, Block now ruled that none of the Miss X evidence was admissible and instructed the jury, in all seriousness, to disregard it. But the genie was out of the bottle or, rather, the Mars bar out of its wrapper. He also came as close as a quarter sessions chairman could—and that was very close—to signaling the verdict he expected the jury to reach. After retiring for just over an hour, they pronounced Keith guilty as charged.

The three defendants were then placed in a row and sentenced in ascending order of celebrity. Robert Fraser received six months’ imprisonment and was ordered to pay £200 in costs; Keith received a year with £500 costs and Mick three months with £200 costs. While the other two remained impassive, he crumpled up and clutched his forehead with one hand. “I just went dead,” he would recall. “I could think of nothing. It was just like a James Cagney film except everything went black.” The savagery of his sentence caused hysteria among the young women present and was hardly less shocking to police officers involved in the raid, like John Challen. For a first offender with such a borderline drug, the usual penalty would have been a fine or probation. It was plain Judge Block shared the public perception of Mick as the new Antichrist—a view which his immaculate court conduct had done nothing to moderate—and, in that fine old judicial phrase, had determined to “make an example of him.”

The sentences began from that moment. Mick was allowed a fifteen-minute meeting with a weeping Marianne while the police dealt with crowd-evasion problems that normally fell to Stones roadies. The court building was by now effectively under siege, with a highly vocal, six-hundred-strong crowd massed around its rear entrance. While a decoy police Land Rover inched through this keening, camera-flashing throng, Mick, Keith, and Fraser were snapped into handcuffs again, hurried through the front vestibule, and put into a squad car, which pulled away without obstruction. Just outside Chichester—where the rejected Summer of Love still sat weeping at the roadside—they transferred to a prison van with a seven-officer crew.

Her Majesty’s prison system absorbed Jagger and Richard with a smoothness and efficiency that suggested some forethought. It had been decided that both should do their “porridge” in London but, like criminal siblings or members of dangerous gangs, in institutions as widely separated as possible. Mick therefore went to Brixton Prison in south London while Keith and Robert Fraser were assigned to Wormwood Scrubs across the Thames in Hammersmith. The two establishments were equally tough but with different characters, to which their newest arrivals seemed to have been matched. The Scrubs historically specialized in more flamboyant types of wrongdoer like the Edwardian con man Horatio Bottomley and Lord Alfred Douglas, the “slim gilt soul” who landed Oscar Wilde in the dock. Brixton was more political, having over the years confined several notable Irish republicans and British fascists; it also happened to be where Mick’s fellow London School of Economics alumnus Bertrand Russell served six months as a conscientious objector during the First World War.

Mick’s numerous foes were now enjoying the pleasantest mental pictures of what awaited him and Keith inside: screaming guards, vile food, gang rapes in the showers, and above all, the ritual savage shearing of their hated hair. But while there was as yet no idea that they would serve less than their full term, orders appeared to have been given to go easy on them. Though both underwent full induction as prisoners, checking in all their personal possessions, exchanging their names for numbers (Mick’s was 7856) and their Carnaby threads for heavy blue serge suits and black shoes, no attempt was made to cut their hair or otherwise molest them. Far from leaping on them in sadistic delight, their fellow inmates proved sympathetic, even respectful. At The Scrubs, Keith was treated like a hero and offered cigarettes, chocolate, even hash. At Brixton, Mick was allotted a cell to himself, which, he later said, “wasn’t so much worse than a hotel room in Minnesota … We had very, very good treatment, though no different from the other prisoners. They all wanted our autographs. The other chaps [sic] showed a great interest in the case and wanted to know all the details.”

In the London Evening Standard, a Jak cartoon showed him standing on a cell gallery in a convict’s arrow suit with a shifty-looking man in dark glasses close behind him. “I’m his agent,” the man was telling a warder. “I get 25 percent of everything.”

THE JUDGMENT AT Chichester unleashed a storm of protest, mostly but by no means all from Rolling Stones fans or the young. In London, an all-night vigil was held around the Eros statue in Piccadilly Circus to express solidarity with Mick and Keith in their prison cells, while two hundred less sedentary souls marched to Fleet Street and shouted insults at the News of the World for its supposed role in their downfall. In clubs and discos all over the country, deejays called for moments of silence or played nonstop Stones music. In New York, when the news came through, there were angry demonstrations outside the British consulate. The image of Mick being paraded in manacles like some eighteenth-century horse thief even sparked a brief fashion trend. At a Carnaby Street store named I Was Lord Kitchener’s Valet, sets of plastic handcuffs went on sale under a sign saying BE FAITHFULL WITH A PAIR OF JAGGER LINKS.

Melody Maker voiced the outrage of the UK music press with a front-page editorial denouncing the sentences. There was also a surge of sympathy and support from fellow musicians, though hash and hippie woolly-mindedness together produced little practical help. One bright idea that went nowhere was a giant Free the Stones benefit concert whose proceeds would be spent on an “avalanche of flowers” to bury Judge Block. The most eloquent fraternal gesture came from the Who, the Stones’ nearest rivals on the concert circuit since the Beatles’ withdrawal. While the trial was in progress, they recorded cover versions of two Jagger-Richard songs, “The Last Time” and “Under My Thumb,” to be rush-released on their own Track label with all proceeds going to charity. Full-page advertisements in London’s two evening papers, the Standard and the News, explained why: “The Who consider Mick Jagger and Keith Richard have been treated as scapegoats for the drugs problem and as a protest against the grave sentences imposed on them at Chichester, The Who are issuing today the first of a series of Jagger-Richard songs to keep their work before the public until they are free again to record themselves.”

This was a world where many people over thirty were still indifferent to pop music. Mick’s and Keith’s convictions made it a national topic that the Beatles never quite had, drawing in even upmarket newspapers that previously had managed to ignore the subject. A range of prominent voices from the older, nonrock generation spoke out against Judge Block’s justice, some predictable, like the jazz singer George Melly and the libertarian drama critic Ken Tynan, others unexpected, like the playwright John Osborne and the right-wing journalist Jonathan Aitken. Britain’s so-called traditional sense of fair play can sometimes be exaggerated, but it was now undoubtedly stirred—on Mick’s behalf in particular. Singing a few louche pop songs, neglecting to visit barbers, peeing up garage walls, even enjoying Mars bars from unusual angles, clearly did not merit anything like the retribution that had been dealt out to him. A letter writer to The Times summed it up by quoting from lines written by the poet A. E. Housman after Oscar Wilde’s trial in 1895: