Since writing “Sympathy,” he had certainly become keenly interested in satanism and black magic and had amassed a large collection of books on the subject to add to his Cheyne Walk library. His particular interest was Aleister Crowley, aka the Great Beast, who had scandalized Edwardian Britain by openly espousing witchcraft and sorcery and founding a pagan religion called Thelema which flouted every moral code of the time. The Beatles had first resurrected Crowley by putting his bald head and crazed stare into the Pop Art collage on their Sgt. Pepper album cover. But in truth he seemed a more likely Stones aficionado with his bisexuality, his heavy drug use, his cult of prototype groupies known as Scarlet Women (a tag often given to Marianne after the Redlands bust), and his motto, in the face of no matter how much outrage or revulsion: “Do What Thou Wilt.”
Certainly, too, there were people around Mick who could keep his fascination with such things at a boiling point. Donald Cammell’s father had been a Scottish druid who’d known Crowley well and joined in secret rites at the Great Beast’s home on the shores of Loch Ness. Cammell himself, for all his civilized charm, had a dark side utilized to the full in Performance, some scenes of which could almost have had a cloven hoof working the clapperboard. Closer to home, Anita Pallenberg was rumored to be a witch—and not only for the spell she had cast over two, if not three, Stones in succession. She wore a garlic necklace to ward off vampires and, according to Spanish Tony Sanchez, would put the evil eye on anyone who displeased her, using a collection of bones and other relics she kept in a secret drawer in her bedroom.
After “Sympathy for the Devil,” not to mention Their Satanic Majesties Request, it was only a matter of time before Mick would be courted by Kenneth Anger, America’s leading filmmaker in the realm of black magic and the occult. Anger believed himself to be a reincarnation of Aleister Crowley as well as a magus, or master sorcerer, in his own right, and had the name Lucifer tattooed on his chest. He was also a homosexual, in whose films satanic imagery alternated with naked young men undergoing different unpleasant forms of mutilation. He was therefore not wholly disinterested in proclaiming Mick a channel for occult forces more powerful and chaotic than any Rolling Stones fan riot of yore.
For the past two years, Anger had been working on a screen epic entitled Lucifer Rising, intended to bring black magic out of the closet, as it were, and establish him as a serious filmmaker in the same league as Bergman or Buñuel. However, almost all the footage had recently been stolen by his current lover, a would-be actor and pop singer named Bobby Beausoleil. With what remained of Lucifer Rising, Anger began putting together a short called Invocation of My Demon Brother, for which Mick agreed to provide a musical score to be played on the newly modish Moog synthesizer.
But there his flirtation with Satan ended. It was clearly dangerous, as well as fundamentally repugnant to someone with so solid a Church of England upbringing, and anyway Kenneth Anger had started to be a bore. So one day, helped by Marianne, Mick carried his entire collection of magic books into the back garden of 48 Cheyne Walk and made a bonfire of them, thinking that was that.
The rebonding of Mick and Keith was further strengthened as they set about writing a new album that had to maintain the form they had recovered on Beggars Banquet. To avoid distractions from their respective old ladies, they went off by themselves to Positano in southern Italy—where, two years earlier, Marianne had awaited those nightly surreptitious phone calls from Mick in London. Now, at the tail end of winter, the town was almost deserted and they could write songs sitting outside cafés in the sunshine, Keith with his guitar, Mick with a harmonica. If anything brought back Keith’s old affection, it was realizing afresh what a fine harp player his Glimmer Twin was.
Two songs for the new album were already finished, each in its own way a future Jagger-Richard classic. The one they’d started on holiday in Brazil’s Mato Grosso, surrounded by cattle and gauchos, had metamorphosed into “Honky Tonk Women,” a lazy-paced sex hymn whose only clue to its origin was the clop of a cowbell before Keith’s opening riff. Mick’s lyrics returned to his usual milieu in the upper part of the Americas, eulogizing “a gin-soaked barroom queen” in a Tennessee blues capital which his over-Dixified accent strangulated into “Myemphyssss.” It went on to make one of rock’s first direct references to copulation (“I laid a divorc-ay in Noo Yawk Cit-ay . . .”) and one of the first ever to snot (“She blew mah nose and then she blew mah mahnd”).
There was also “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” written and recorded before the release of Beggars Banquet and unusual among Jagger compositions in using scenes from his own life: “a recep-shun,” “a demonstra-shun,” even a visit to the Chelsea Drugstore, the newly opened King’s Road showpiece that was actually London’s first shopping mall. As often in his more reflective mood, it took the form of a sermon, first to a woman (“practiced at the art of decep-shun”) then to “Mr. Jimmy,” aka the Stones’ producer Jimmy Miller. It was also his most heartfelt blues performance since “Time Is on My Side,” arranged by Jack Nitzsche and background-vocaled by American soul divas Madeline Bell and Doris Troy. For the irony without which no Jagger pronouncement could ever be complete, the opening chorus was sung by an all-female section of the London Bach Choir.
Elsewhere on the album, Lucifer still seemed to be rising without any serious resistance from Mick. The very title, Let It Bleed, was an echo of Aleister Crowley’s so-called sex magic, created by intercourse with a Scarlet Woman during her menstruation. “Midnight Rambler” (conceived in Positano sunshine) was the monologue of a serial rapist and killer, inspired by the Boston Strangler, Albert DeSalvo, yet couched in tones even jokier than “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Keith’s principal—and stunning—contribution, “Gimme Shelter,” written at the height of his paranoia over Mick and Anita on the Performance set, had an apocalyptic menace and anguish (“War! Children! It’s just a shot away . . .”) that made “Sympathy for the Devil” seem more like Tea and Sympathy. Even the band’s respectful nod to their roots, a cover version of Robert Johnson’s “Love in Vain,” recalled the first legendary pact between a musician and Mephistopheles, and what fatal consequences resulted.
Along with everything else now on hold in The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus was the heart-tugging performance of “Something Better” that might have revived Marianne’s long-dormant pop career. Such was her notoriety as Head Stone’s consort that nowadays many people barely remembered her as a singer—still less that she and Mick had started out as collaborators, with “As Tears Go By.” Her last single had been “Is This What I Get for Loving You?” in 1967, a title which the impact of his trial on her had made all too appropriate. As some small payback for literary guidance, he could easily have written her a song or two or worked with her in the studio they had in their garden, but somehow it never happened. Turning his lover into an artistic partner, like John Lennon with Yoko, had no appeal for Mick. He was far too busy keeping the gold-spinning dynamo named Jagger-Richard efficiently turning over.
Then it happened that he came up with a tune for which, uncharacteristically, he could think of no words. He and Marianne were in Rome with Keith and Anita, and when no inspiration came from his Glimmer Twin either, Marianne offered to help. The result was “Sister Morphine,” a cry from a hospital patient to a nurse for a desperately needed shot of painkiller: “Aw, come on, Sister Morphine, you better make up my bed / ’Cause you know and I know in the morning I’ll be dead . . .” Although the extent of Marianne’s contribution has since been disputed (by none other than the man who supposedly “can’t remember anything”), she is adamant that the lyric was all her work, inspired by John Milton’s poem “Lycidas,” but with Keith also firmly in mind. Its Crowleyesque reference to “clean white sheets stained red,” for instance, came from the Brazilian holiday of the previous December. During the sea voyage to Rio, pregnant Anita had begun to suffer bleeding and received a morphine injection from the ship’s doctor—hugely impressing Keith for ha
ving made such a score quite legally.
Marianne claimed “Sister Morphine” as her long-overdue next single, and Mick agreed to produce it in Los Angeles, together with her Rock ’n’ Roll Circus track, “Something Better.” He was also now a good enough guitarist to play acoustically on the session, alongside Ry Cooder on slide guitar, Charlie Watts on drums, Bill Wyman on bass, and Jack Nitzsche on piano. “Sister Morphine” came out in Britain as the B-side to “Something Better” in February 1969, but the record was withdrawn from sale by Decca two days later on the grounds that it glorified hard drugs. Mick protested to Decca’s chairman, Sir Edward Lewis, that it portrayed their nightmare consequences, but Lewis (possibly still recollecting being called “a fucking old idiot”) refused to intervene.
Ironically, when Marianne recorded that croak of seemingly terminal morphine addiction, she had not yet tried the drug’s more seductive, quick-acting, and deadly cousin, heroin. To drive away the clouds that piled above her golden head—darkened now still more by the loss of baby Corrina—she had settled into a mixture of cocaine, pills, and alcohol, consciously bingeing on each in reaction to Mick’s eternal restraint. She would later say that even getting blind drunk together a few times might have helped break down the wall that now seemed to separate them.
According to her autobiography, getting into heroin was a deliberate decision to become genuinely as bad as she had been painted after Redlands and “Sister Morphine”; a two-fingered retort of “You ain’t seen nothin’ yet.” She took her first sniff not in some rock god’s joss-reeking den like the Performance house, as one might expect, but amid the cheery bottle clink of a Berkshire country pub. It was on a day when she and Mick drove down to see how work was progressing on Stargroves, and he had no idea what she had done. “All the other drugs I had taken were in a quest for sensation,” she would write, “but this was a cessation of all sensation, an absolute absence of pain.” Smack, too, for all first-time users, does not derange or disorient, but seems to put one in perfect balance with oneself and the whole universe. No subsequent rush will ever match that miraculous first one, although the convert will spend his or her life—literally—trying to recapture it.
Nor was it necessary to have sex with the pusher Spanish Tony Sanchez to continue the experiment. For in a twin Queen Anne house to Mick’s at the other end of Cheyne Walk, Keith and Anita were already well advanced on it. Mick at first had no suspicions, since smack is white powder identical to cocaine and snorted in the same way. “Don’t you think you’re doing too much of that stuff?” he would sometimes protest mildly, echoing his line to Anita in Performance: “You shoot too much of that shit, Pherber.” Marianne would reply that she was only chipping (using occasionally) and he believed her.
Anyway, he had a new habit of his own, in the one area where he never practiced moderation. In September 1968, Britain’s three-centuries-old theater censorship had been abolished and an American show called Hair had opened in London’s West End, taking advantage of the new freedom to depict anti–Vietnam War propaganda, drug taking, swearing, and full-frontal nudity. Among the stars of this “tribal love-rock musical” was a black American singer-actress with a huge puffball Afro by the name of Marsha Hunt.
Born in Philadelphia, Marsha had studied at the University of California, Berkeley, before coming to London in 1966, aged twenty. Her first career had been as a blues singer around the same club circuit Mick had left not long earlier—often directly in his footsteps, first as a backup vocalist for Alexis Korner, then with Long John Baldry in a band called Bluesology, whose organist was Reg Dwight, later Elton John. She also lived for several months with John Mayall, whose Bluesbreakers nurtured several young guitar virtuosi, notably Eric Clapton (whose wife, Pamela, would later be chosen by Mick as a suitable friend for Marianne).
It was the time of the slogan “Black Is Beautiful,” when for the first time black women began appearing on the covers of glossy magazines. Marsha, with her delicate face, enormous curly halo, and air of gravitas, became London’s incarnation of Black Is Beautiful, featuring on the front of the Weekend Telegraph Magazine with a royal crest tattooed across her bare breasts. Leaving the cast of Hair, she was signed by Track Records, whose roster included the Who and Jimi Hendrix, and began a relationship with the future glam-rock icon Marc Bolan.
Ever since his platonic love affair with Cleo Sylvestre, Mick had always had a weakness for beautiful young black women. Not long after the Weekend Telegraph Magazine cover came out, Marsha was rung up by the Stones’ office and asked to appear in a publicity picture for their next single, “Honky Tonk Women,” posing in “tarty clothes” alongside the whole band. She declined, explaining that she preferred not to look as if she’d “just been had by all the Rolling Stones.” Mick then called her up in person and, a few nights later, paid a surprise visit to the Bloomsbury flat where she was staying. As she did an amazed double take, he grinned, pointed his finger like a pistol, and went “Bang!” Marsha was not a Stones fan and, in comparison with the elfin Marc Bolan, thought Mick “not beautiful or even striking.” What won her over, she would recall, was “his shyness and awkwardness.” They spent the rest of that night just sitting and talking about the blues clubs and characters they both knew so well. She noticed how his voice, slurrily Cockney at first, became softer and genteeler the more he relaxed.
They began an affair in deepest secret but, since Marsha was a fellow recording artist, could also be seen together in public without arousing suspicion—in any case, London still had almost no paparazzi. Mick’s name for her, to which surprisingly she did not object, was Miss Fuzzy. He liked it that she didn’t go gooey-eyed and weak-kneed in his presence like most females, but had a crisply forthright manner (“butch,” he called it) as well as an educated and inquiring mind and a natural classiness. Best of all, despite all the dope smoking that had gone on in and around Hair, she was completely straight. Marsha would later recall him often talking about Marianne’s increasing drug use, how much it upset and worried him, and his powerlessness to stop it.
If Marianne’s singing career had stalled, her acting one still seemed to be on the rise. In the spring of 1969, she was invited to play Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a new production by the eminent film and theater director Tony Richardson. Although married to Vanessa Redgrave, the most adored young British actress of the day, Richardson was bisexual and had an obvious crush on Mick; nonetheless there was no question of Marianne’s having been chosen on any basis but merit. Hamlet was to be played by thirty-year-old Nicol Williamson, described by the great drama critic Kenneth Tynan as “a young contender for the title of best actor in the world,” and the top-drawer supporting cast included Anthony Hopkins as Claudius. The play was to have a limited run at the Roundhouse, a converted tram shed in Camden Town which had become London’s foremost arena for experimental theater and music; it would also be filmed for cinema release.
The parallels were only too painfully obvious between Marianne and the young woman tormented by the vagaries of the revenge-obsessed Prince of Denmark (who at one point is said to be “lov’d of the distracted multitude” like some prototype rock star) until finally her sanity unravels and she effectively commits suicide by drowning. And, indeed, the British stage had never seen quite such a haunted and heartbreaking Ophelia, with her death-white complexion and dark-ringed eyes; an incarnation of that dubious style known as heroin chic three decades too early.
It was, unfortunately, not just makeup. To get her through the scene where Ophelia’s insanity is revealed, Spanish Tony Sanchez would deliver a nightly heroin jack to Marianne at the theater. In readiness for the almost inevitable reaction, called “pulling a whitey,” a bucket was positioned in the wings so that she could vomit into it directly as she came offstage. In Faithfull, too, she admits to carrying on an affair with Nicol Williamson during the run, and frequently playing Ophelia’s anguished scenes of unrequited love with the Prince of Denmark just after having sex with him in her d
ressing room.
Performance might be languishing in Warner Bros.’ vaults, but the hearsay accounts of Mick’s brilliance in it led Tony Richardson to offer him a second major screen role. Fresh from both critical and commercial success with The Charge of the Light Brigade, Richardson was to make a film about Ned Kelly, the nineteenth-century Irish-Australian outlaw, or bushranger, who became a folk hero much like the American West’s Jesse James. In preference to the many fine antipodean actors around, he proposed casting Mick as Kelly. Even for so practiced a mimic, portraying an Australian desperado in a big-budget action movie represented a huge leap into the unknown; nonetheless, Mick accepted the challenge with none of the agonizing that had preceded his Turner self-portrait. Though he would later bitterly regret being talked into Ned Kelly by Richardson, at the time it looked like the fast track to film stardom that Performance hadn’t provided.
Shooting was to begin on location in New South Wales in July, when Mick’s schedule was still empty of performing commitments with the Stones. He would also for the first time be acting opposite Marianne, who’d been cast as Kelly’s sister, Maggie, a rather less alluring role than Ophelia. She took it mainly in hopes that going away together—far from the political and sexual intrigues of the Stones’ court—might somehow revive their relationship.
Since receiving a conditional discharge for his minuscule drug offense two years previously, Mick had had not the smallest brush with the British police. But now suddenly there was evidence of a renewed attempt to break a butterfly on a wheel. One day as he was driving himself down King’s Road, he was pulled over and his Rolls given a thorough search for drugs—which, of course, yielded nothing. Then, on the evening of May 28, the day his role as Ned Kelly was announced, he emerged from 48 Cheyne Walk to go to a recording session and beheld a carload of police led by a contradictorily titled officer named Detective Sergeant Robin Constable.