records. He was becoming totally absorbed in a musical atmosphere. I knew Brian had musical ability, but I was very chary that he could achieve success. To me the most important thing was his security. I was unsatisfied to see him just drifting, and I saw no security or success likely to come from jazz. But to him – a religion it was, he was a fanatic. He went back to London for good when he was about twenty.’
At about the same time, two other young men were coming to London, where they would meet Brian, and none of them would ever be the same.
‘Brian’s fall wasn’t my fault or because of drugs,’ Anita said. ‘It was Mick and Keith.’
THREE
Why is the jass music, and therefore, the jass band? Jass was a manifestation of a low streak in man’s tastes that has not yet come out in civilisation’s wash. Indeed one might go farther and say that jass music is the indecent story syncopated and counter-pointed. Like the improper anecdote, also, in its youth, it was listened to blushingly behind closed doors and drawn curtains, but, like all vice, it grew bolder until it dared decent surroundings, and there was tolerated because of this oddity . . . on certain natures sound loud and meaningless has an exciting, almost an intoxicating effect, like crude colours and strong perfumes, the sight of flesh or the sadic pleasure in blood. To such as these the jass music is a delight . . .
New Orleans Times-Picayune, 1918
I woke up under a Wizard of Oz bedspread, magenta and turquoise, with Dorothy and the Scarecrow and all the rest of them in a balloon. There were a pair of single beds in the room, where rich little Du Ponts used to sleep. David Sandison spent the night in the other bed, but he was already up. I showered and dressed looking out over Los Angeles, invisible under a dense elephant-colored cloud. Then I strolled the length of the house to the kitchen and looked in the refrigerator. It was odd to wake up in a big characterless house on a sunny morning when you couldn’t see the rest of the world around you for the noxious vapors and to open the fridge and find bottles of raw milk and whole-grain bread. California. It was ten o’clock, and I was sitting at the circular breakfast bar eating an orange and whole-wheat bread with blackberry preserves, recording things in my midget legal notebook.
Jo Bergman told me as I passed the office, where she and Sandison were working on the publicity kits for this morning’s press conference, that Ronnie Schneider had gone back to New York for a few days. I figured that should make him easier to avoid.
Jo, David, and I left early for the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where the press conference would take place, in one of the limousines that were on duty around the clock at all three of the Stones’ L.A. abodes – our place with the Watts family on Oriole Drive, the Laurel Canyon house where Keith and the two Micks were staying, and the Beverly Wilshire, where Bill Wyman and Astrid would be until Jo could ‘get them a house together.’ This did not imply any question of her getting them separate houses; it simply meant until Jo got them, rented for them, a house. ‘Together’ was Californian, or Hip, as obscenity used to be Army. There were certain words and phrases used by people who liked to think themselves hip, au courant, and the hip people in London or Los Angeles or Katmandu, the farthest spot in the world from Coral Gables, Florida, all used them, but you heard them used most, and regular English used least, in California. Out here whole neighborhoods had been talking for weeks, since they learned the Stones were coming, without resorting to even the most basic English: ‘Far-out dudes, man.’ ‘Heavy.’ ‘What a trip.’ All of which might mean nothing or might be code for some mysterious poetic message, like Catullus speaking from the grave about Mick’s sullen grace, Keith’s cold killer beauty.
Jo, born in Oakland, California, reared in the United States and England, had spent most of her adult life working for celebrities, and spoke a mixture of Hip and an even more esoteric language, Celebrity Code: ‘Did I tell Mick the telegram—? She’ll kill me— A baby, that’s really far out!’ she would say, all in a kind of intense breathless Lady Macbeth rush of pleasure and excitement, even genuine wholehearted concern, speaking this tongue in which words, phrases, entire paragraphs were omitted, leaving anyone who didn’t know the code, or the private affairs of the celebrity being talked about, leaning forward listening with a game smile to the fervent delivery, the smile becoming more glazed as the gaps widened. Celebrity Code is a great and ancient language, difficult to learn, and I never heard anybody speak it better than Jo Bergman.
The conference was to be in the San Souci (sic) Room at the Wilshire; we entered it through a labyrinth of bars and luncheon rooms. The Los Angelesization of Los Angeles had not yet reached the Beverly Wilshire, where the San Souci Room glowed softly in the gentle radiance of its crystal light fixtures, the harsh Southern California sun shut out by damask and organdy drapes, but it seemed near: outside the window an air hammer was making a racket that threatened to become mayhem, as if at any moment the bit might come through the wall. ‘What’s that god-awful noise?’ Jo asked the hotel’s man, whose blue pin-striped suit we were following into the room.
‘Ah, what time’s your meeting?’
‘Eleven-thirty.’
‘They’ll be stopping at eleven.’
Fifty or sixty folding chairs had been arranged in semi-circles before a long table; to the right were a bar and another table with tea and coffee services and fruit salad and little cakes, big bouquets on the tables. I wandered around the room making notes, the air hammer stopped, Steckler showed up, and the press began to arrive. They all appeared to be in their early twenties, most of them carrying notebooks, cameras, and tape recorders, all dressed in the current style, achieved by spending large sums of money to look poor and bedraggled, like a new race of middle-class gypsies. They ate like gypsies, snatching up the cakes and fruit and drinks.
Close to eleven-thirty, three television crews arrived, their dress running more to business suits and ties. With one of them was Rona Barrett, the televised Hollywood gossip, a small woman whose large blonded hairdo was frozen within a layer of spray shellac. She perched on a folding chair, a cultured pearl among the suede and denim.
At noon the Stones stumbled into the room in single file like drunken Indians and arranged themselves at the long table. Flashbulbs popped. Television cameras hissed. The Stones sat and scratched their heads.
With the Stones, sitting next to Keith, was another young Englishman, wearing a burgundy-colored leather jacket, dark glasses, and piratical dark greasy locks. He was Sam Cutler, a recent addition to the Stones’ entourage whose function, other than to carry whatever Keith would not want to be caught carrying, was unclear.
Finally the flashes stopped and for a long moment there were no questions, no one could think what to ask, the confrontation was enough: three years ago when the Stones last toured the United States, most of the people now here to interview them were teenagers screaming in darkened arenas their adoration of the Stones, who were going in the interim to be arrested, to swap women, to break up, to die, and yet here they are, elbows on the table.
The younger reporters, most of whom if the place had been raided would probably have gone down for possession of dope, did not look like any the Stones had seen before at an American press conference. But this generation, like every other, contained mostly dull-normal people who needed others to live their lives for them. Luckily there are always a few people who can and do live other people’s lives for them. They are the stars of the time, and at this time no public figure was so loved and hated as Mick Jagger, what a name, a name to open sardine tins with. Jagger sat smiling in lime-colored trousers, an open-throated black silk shirt with green and white flecks, some kind of large animal tooth hanging on a chain below his strong but delicately fashioned – like a silver necklace – collarbone.
If the questions here were like most of the ones I had been asked about the Stones, they would be short and direct:
