the drive, and the clowns I was with amused themselves by tearing off and throwing lemons. I threw one or two myself, just to be sociable, but I come from a place where the people are proud but poor, and I can’t really enjoy throwing food unless I’m trying to hit someone with it.
After a while we went into the house, a wood-leather-and-stone robber’s roost with stone floors, a big stone fireplace, no softening touches. The kitchen had a refrigerator big as one in a commissary at a turpentine camp, but it was stocked with beer instead of pigfeet and Big Oranges. We drank Heinekens and waited for the rehearsal to end. Belmont, Steckler, and Sandison were lounging in chairs around the living room. I didn’t know why any of them was here. I had come to speak to Keith and Mick about the letter I needed to get a publisher, to go on living, to write a book. I lay down on a leather couch, gazed out the window, and saw, coming down the valley-side, a small brown fawn.
Soon the music at the back of the house stopped and the Stones came out. I followed Keith into the kitchen. He opened a 35-millimeter film can and with a tiny spoon lifted out a mound of white crystals, and didn’t see me until he had the spoon halfway home. His hand stopped, I said, ‘Caught you,’ and he shrugged, raised the spoon and sniffed. Then I said, ‘Um, Keith, what about the, ah, book?’
‘I’ll talk to Mick about it.’
Time passed, nothing happened. In the living room the people were still slouching about. Keith stood with one hand loose on forward-slung hips, the other shoving a beer into his mouth, looking like a baby with its bottle. I found Mick sitting at a piano just outside the door of the rehearsal room. ‘What about the book?’ I asked.
‘I’ve got to talk to Keith about it.’
Then I went back to Keith and said, ‘Have you talked to Mick yet? We got to go.’
‘Hey,’ Keith said to Mick, who happened to be walking past, ‘what about this book?’
‘What about it?’
They strolled into the kitchen as daylight faded. Finally we really were leaving, and I said to Keith, ‘So?’
‘You write the letter,’ he said, ‘and we’ll sign it.’
So far so good, I thought, back at the Oriole house eating bouillabaisse. I had never eaten bouillabaisse before, and though I enjoyed it, I was still wondering what to do next. Write the letter and they’ll sign it. Then what? Will they leave me alone to make a contract and write a book?
I tried to digest bouillabaisse and these questions while sitting after dinner with Jo, Sandison, Steckler, and the Watts family. The night was cool, and in the fireplace four gas jets were blasting a stack of wood logs to blazes. A couple of people stopped by, one with a large vial of cocaine, so after everybody else had gone to bed, Sandison, Steckler, and I were up talking. Steckler had no coke but was excited to be away from home. He was in his late thirties, in this crowd an older man, and he worked for Allen Klein, who as the manager of the world’s two most popular acts, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, may have been the most powerful man in show business; but Steckler, so close to all that power and money, seemed naive, too earnest about the poetry and truth of rock music. He had a neat brown haircut, a baby-pink face, and sincere eyes that would do many unpleasant things but would never lie to you.
‘Who’s Schneider?’ I asked him when the logs were white powder, the fire four blue jets of flame.
‘Klein’s nephew.’
‘Besides that.’
‘He worked for Klein until a few weeks ago. They had a disagreement and Ronnie formed Rolling Stones Promotions to do this tour.’
‘What besides this tour does he do for the Rolling Stones?’
‘Not a thing,’ Steckler said.
After everyone else had gone to bed, I carried a typewriter from the office to the kitchen, closed all the connecting doors, and wrote a letter to myself from the Rolling Stones, assuring me of their cooperation, with their names typed below, spaced to leave room for their signatures. Then I took the typewriter back and tiptoed to bed.
FOUR
One night this guy comes into the bar with his cap on sideways, you know. And this is Elmore.
WARREN GEORGE HARDING LEE JACKSON: Living Blues
Valentino, a scarred grey tabby cat who once belonged to Brian Jones, yawned and stretched on the terrace. Keith and I were sitting on a Moroccan carpet in the side yard, nine-month-old Marlon, born last year, 1969, crawling naked in the grass, little yellow baby-turds shooting out his ass. His mother, the flashing-eyed Anita, was still upstairs in the tapestry-bedecked bedroom where she and Keith slept, on the dresser in a silver frame a small photograph of Brian. Inside the lid of the downstairs toilet was a collage of Rolling Stones photographs. These people didn’t try to hide things. The first night I spent at Keith’s house, Anita tossed a blanket beside me on the cushion where I was lying. ‘You don’t need sheets, do you,’ she asked.
‘No, I’ll be fine,’ I said.
‘Mick has to have sheets,’ she said. ‘Put it in the book.’
Redlands, a thatch-roofed house in West Witterling, near Chichester in West Sussex, had been Keith Richards’ country home since 1965. In 1967, along with Mick Jagger, he was arrested here. This morning the place seemed, in the pale spring sunlight, like a veterans’ hospital, and Keith and I like two old soldiers, taking frequent medications and talking about the past.
‘My great-grandfather’s family came up to London from Wales in the nineteenth century,’ Keith said, ‘and so my grandfather, my father’s father, was a Londoner. His wife, my grandmother, was mayoress of Walthamstow, a borough of London, during the war. It was the height of fame for the family. They were very puritan, very straight people. Both dead now.
‘But then you come to Gus: my mother’s father, Theodore Augustus Dupree. He was a complete freak. He used to have a dance band in the thirties, played sax, fiddle, and guitar. The funkiest old coot you could ever meet.
‘That side of the family came to England from the Channel Islands. They were Huguenots, French Protestants who were driven out of France in the seventeenth century. And in the mid-nineteenth century Gus’ father came to Wales, to Monmouth.
‘Gus was so funny. He had seven daughters, and they used to bring their boyfriends home, and they’d be sitting round all prim and proper, and he’d be upstairs dangling contraceptives out the window. There’s so many stories about him that I don’t remember even one solid story. In the fifties, the late fifties, he was playing fiddle in a country and western band round the U.S. air force bases in England. Real double-string stuff and everything. He’s a friend of Yehudi Menuhin. Gus admired him, got to know him. He’s one of these cats that can always con what he wants. I should imagine he’s a bit like Furry Lewis. And from living with all these women, he has such a sense of humor, because you either go crazy or laugh at it, with eight women in the house. It was his guitar I used to turn on to when I was a kid.
‘My grandmother used to play piano with my grandfather until I think one day she caught him playin’ around with some other chick, and she never forgave him, and she refused ever to touch the piano again. And she’s never played it to this day, since the thirties or forties or whatever. I think she’s even refused to fuck him since then. Very strange.
‘My mother and father
