True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (41 page)

Pete and Edith dropped me at Cynthia's. I had her key, but the chain was on the door. She let me in, all wrapped with black gauze. She asked where I'd been and I said I'd been to see a television producer and had fallen asleep on his couch. I undressed and got into bed, exhausted. “I think I'll take this negligee off, I don't really need it,” Cynthia said, slipping it off and sliding up against me. “Argh,” I said, and fell asleep.

I woke at eleven o'clock, when Cynthia got up, and someone rang the doorbell many times while I lay with my head under a pillow, insisting that I would go on sleeping. But it was no use. The Stones were now at the Plaza, so I called and asked for Jon Jaymes. “Come on over,” he said, and told me my room number. Now that the Stones were here I was feeling guilty about being away from the action, so I got dressed and ready. Cynthia had put on her model face and garb, and I was impressed, she looked just like one of those girls in the magazines, except perhaps for something unusual about the eyes. I asked her to come along and have lunch.

When we got downstairs I started looking for a cab. But Cynthia said, We don't need a cab, it's only about a block and a half to the Plaza. But I'm carrying a suitcase, I said. You can carry it that far, Cynthia said. I did, but it seemed silly, arriving at the Plaza on foot, carrying your own suitcase, like Woody Guthrie arriving at a hobo jungle under a railroad bridge.

We came in the back door. I told the two men at the desk my name, they went away and came back all smiles, Sorry to keep you waiting. A bellman took my suitcase and up we went to the thirteenth floor and a small double room overlooking Central Park. You could see the dark naked branches of the trees against the fallen snow and the circular ice rink with tiny figures in bright-colored coats and mufflers skating silently far below us.

The bellman left, and Ethan Russell looked in and said that nothing was happening, the Stones were still asleep. I no longer felt guilty about
being away from the action, since there wasn't any, so Cynthia and I began to dally. I discovered that she was wearing wonderful purple underpants, decorated with drawings and names of the signs of the zodiac. A few moments passed, and Cynthia gasped. “I'm sure I'd get over being frigid if I were around you for a while,” she said, slipping off my lap to kneel beside the bed. “You deserve to be thanked.” But she had only begun to thank me when there came a loud knock and the door opened: “Maid service.” Luckily I had chained it. We gave up for the moment and went downstairs to eat.

At the Edwardian Room they wouldn't let me in without a tie. “Try the Palm Court,” the headwaiter said.

“No no, you must have tie and regular sport jacket,” said the Palm Court's headwaiter.

“But at the Edwardian Room they said to come here.”

“No no, you cannot—”

“But I'm a guest—”

“No no, you cannot—”

“But we're
hungry
” Cynthia said.

“Ah,” said the headwaiter, “we cannot let such a beautiful lady go hungry—I lend you a tie.”

I put on the Palm Court's skinny black necktie and the headwaiter seated us. “Thank you,” Cynthia said.

“Madam,” he said, “I am from Verona, a city of romance.”

We ate salads and went back upstairs. I sat down on the bed, Cynthia sitting beside me. I was just starting to be rewarded when the door opened. I went into the bathroom to tuck in my shirttails. I heard a voice: “Hi, I'm Michael, who are you?”

“Don't start,” I said, coming out of the bathroom.

“Detroit was far out,” Michael said. “There were two thousand kids at the airport and the shows were great, very aggressively political crowds—”

We sat around talking as the day grew darker and the lights came on, the skaters in the park moving to unheard music on an island of white in the blackness, and it was time for Philadelphia. Cynthia wanted to go to the show, but I told her there wouldn't be room in the limos. She didn't believe me, but she let me walk her home. Inside her apartment, I sat on the couch in the living room, and Cynthia said, “I never got a chance to give you your reward.”

Afterward, she went away to wash and came back smiling, brushing her damp clean hair. It was a pleasant moment. Cynthia was not going to get what she wanted, and I was not going to get what I wanted, but neither of us knew it yet. I struggled away from her, promising to come back after the show—I wouldn't—and walked in the cold, slicing wind back to the Plaza.

Michael and some of his friends were in the room he and I were supposed to share but wouldn't because Michael was staying with another girl. After belittling Michael for his womanizing, here I'd been doing the same thing. Michael danced around the room, telling me about Cecil Beaton taking photographs of Mick while I was out. I started to make a few notes, but as I began to write, the call came that we should go downstairs and board the limousines.

They were from a company called Head Limos, which catered mostly to rock stars and was supposed to supply dope and the latest eight-track stereo tapes for your en route entertainment. The car that Michael, Ethan, Tony, and I rode in had no dope, three tapes (Blind Faith, Chicago, Gladys Knight and the Pips), and a vague driver who missed the turn to the Lincoln Tunnel and had to U-turn to get back on the trail. I dozed on the way to Philadelphia, noting only the giant chain-fenced complex with huge signs—USAF Spacetrack Aero Defense Command and RCA Defense Electronic Products—and thinking that to compete with this sort of thing you really need big amplifiers.

The Philadelphia Spectrum was one more giant basketball arena, seating seventeen thousand. There were swarms of girls around the back entrance, where big metal doors opened for the limos. Inside, the back-stage was dark, with big men in dark suits standing around, giving the place a precinct-boss smell. Michael and I walked down a narrow hall to B. B. King's dressing room. B.B. and his band were there, the musicians sitting and standing around, drinking beers from a picnic cooler, B.B. operating a new Sony tape recorder he had bought in Memphis. As we talked he recorded several voices around the room, then played them back. The musicians, hearing their voices, laughed like aborigines.

I watched B.B.'s set from the press box, where a few hippie types were smoking dope. Then I went downstairs and took up a position by the right side of the stage. When the Stones came on and started to play the entire crowd started to jump, and I jumped along with them. During the first couple of songs I found myself dancing with a pretty blond girl, but the crowd surged forward and she went backstage. I climbed up and stood behind Keith's amplifiers. The atmosphere was becoming frantic as the kids tried to give themselves to the Rolling Stones. Down front a girl fainted and was lifted onstage, where she opened her eyes and waved to her friends. Just across the amps from me, a rent-a-cop, about to throw a boy back into the crowd, was stopped by Tony, who helped the boy climb down.

The show was hard and fast without “I'm Free,” but it seemed, in spite of all the action, like an old-fashioned rock and roll show of the fifties, people having a good time within the imposed limits. Ripping up seats expresses frustration, but it doesn't change much besides the seats.
As the lights came up and “Honky Tonk Women” started, I felt close to despair—it seemed that the tour had lost its focus; I didn't know what the Stones were trying to do, and I didn't know what I was trying to do. Whatever it was, it had something to do with love and something to do with death—and rape, murder, suicide. But it seemed that what was happening on the tour was not the transcendent expression of our feelings, but our attempt to have a good time, express the energies of our youth, in spite of the disadvantage of terrain. Onstage there were beefy men in light cotton jackets and Hush Puppies, Jon Jaymes' special security force, though I didn't know that yet. As the kids were crashing the stage full force and the evening was reaching its most hectic point, Jon grabbed me, yelled, Keep this till I ask you for it, and from his left armpit handed me a blue steel .38 caliber revolver. I slipped it into my jacket pocket, and as the last notes of “Street Fighting Man” rang in the rafters and the rose petals Mick had thrown floated down on the sweating ravers, we ran out the back, climbed in the cars, and roared out into the night.

Five limousines spread out on the turnpike at a hundred miles an hour. The show had revived us; there was no way you could fail to be excited by the great rush of energy. We talked loudly about music, sang Jimmy Reed's “Baby, What You Want Me to Do” and Fred McDowell's “You Got to Move” in the middle of which we heard the moaning siren of the State Patrol—on the New Jersey Turnpike in the wee wee hours.

All five limos whipped to a stop on the road-apron. I started to get out, and the driver said, Better stay in the car. I opened the door and looked out to see the cop reining his motorcycle and a man in a golf jacket, one who had been onstage, getting out of a limo. He hit the ground running toward the cop, taking something from his back pocket, holding it up—I saw the glint of a badge—and the patrolman waved him away, cranked his bike, sped off, and we were back on the road at a hundred miles an hour, passing the cop, gone like a cool breeze.

When we arrived at the Plaza the limos let us out at the back, where the doors were locked. The Plaza's not what it used to be, I said. It's not so bad, Mick said. Scott Fitzgerald used to like it, I said, but that was a long time ago. They didn't lock the back door at night when he liked it, Mick said.

We walked around the block in the icy cold. Inside, I went to Jon Jaymes' room and gave him his gun back. Tony stopped by to tell Jon that he wanted two things: a knife and a blackjack. You'll get them, Jon said.

We assembled—the five Stones, Tony, Sam, Ronnie, Astrid—in the lobby, preparatory to going out for something to eat. “Are you going?” Charlie asked me as we went out. “I hope you behave yourself.”

“Come on in,” Mick said, opening the limousine door. “Too bad you missed last night's concert, it was good. Here's a tape.”

Mick turned up the volume control of a portable tape recorder he was holding on his lap. “Who made it?” I asked.

“A kid. It was confiscated.”

“By Schneider?”

“Yes,” Mick said. “He's awful.”

“I saw you on
The Ed Sullivan Show”
I said. “That was very amusing.” The show had aired only two nights ago, but it seemed a very long time. A track had been added to make it sound as if the Stones had been accompanied by an unceasing barrage of screams.

“Topo Gigio was very good,” Mick said. Topo Gigio was a puppet-mouse who did a comedy routine with an Italian ventriloquist.

“Eddie Albert, too,” I said. Eddie Albert had recited a prayer for the nineteen-seventies, very depressing.

We went to Reuben's, a delicatessen that stayed open late for show business types and crapshooters. Nick and Nora Charles had eaten there once in
The Thin Man.
The sandwiches on the menu were named after famous folk, one of which, the #32, was the Ed Sullivan. I pointed it out to Keith. Yeah, he said, the Ed Sullivan, I'd love to eat him—and coming from preposterous-looking Keith the statement had more of a cannibal than a sexual connotation. The walls were decorated with autographed pictures of celebrities and glum-looking stuffed fish on wooden plaques. A weary little old waiter schlepped around the long table taking orders, trying to explain the kosher menu to Tony. When the food finally came, it was terrible, canned orange juice, stale toast, cold soup.

As we ate, Ronnie wondered aloud how we were going to get from Miami to the West Palm Beach Pop Festival, where the Stones would play Sunday night, the last date of the tour. There were no planes from New York to West Palm Beach, all the planes stopped in Miami. Ronnie had looked into renting a plane for the last half of the tour, but the price was prohibitive.

“Jerry Wexler has a yacht down there,” I said. “We could go from Miami to West Palm on his yacht.”

“How big is it?” Keith asked.

“Big enough to take us.”

“But we've still got all that equipment, guitars and stuff,” Keith said, “and we'll need something that can take us out afterwards—”

“Where we going afterwards?”

“It's a secret,” Keith said, “but we're going to the Deep South.”

“Oh, yeah? And what in your opinion is the Deep South?”

“Muscle Shoals, Alabama. Goin' down there to record for a few days. Ahmet set it up.” Ahmet Ertegun was the president (and Jerry Wexler
the vice president) of the Atlantic Recording Corporaton, the biggest independent record company in the business, a great rhythm & blues success story. “We'll be down there four days,” Keith said, “but don't say anything about it, to Michael or anyone in the press, 'cause it really is a secret.”

Mick and Ronnie were talking about record companies, how to make the best deal—Ronnie was always discussing deals because that was how he made his living. “Why do you have to deal with them other motherfuckers at all?” Tony asked. “Why mess with record companies and distributors? Why don't the heads put out their own shit?”

“Because it's too complicated,” Keith said. “There's too much involved. You'd have to do all the pressing and distribution yourself, have to own a fleet of trucks. That's the problem. Phil Spector tried it, he cheated and bribed and did everything he could to get started, and that's cool, but he couldn't do it, it didn't work.” He paused for a moment, then said, “Still it must be possible. How do bootleg records get around, how does grass get around, that's the way it's got to work—”

When we got back to the Plaza it was nearly five o'clock in the morning, and the
New York Times
for Wednesday, November 26, was in a stack by the elevators. I put a dime on the stack and took a paper, but the elevator man, coming to take us up, said, “That's fifteen cents,” and I saw a little handwritten sign,
PAPERS
15¢—a 50 percent price increase for the privilege of getting the bad news in the lobby of the Plaza. I said good night to the group and went up to my room. The park was wreathed in grey morning mist. There were gilt-wrapped chocolate mints and a fresh carnation on the nightstand, sheets turned back, a whole set of attentions you don't get at the Holiday Inn. I lay back on the bed and looked at the paper.