His comments to the media about Brian were gracious and heartfelt (in contrast with Paul McCartney’s and George Harrison’s flip responses to John Lennon’s death, eleven years later): “I just say my prayers for him. I hope he becomes blessed, I hope he is finding peace . . . Brian will be at the concert. I mean, he’ll be there. I don’t believe in Western bereavement. You know, I can’t suddenly drape a long black veil and walk the hills . . . I want to make it so that Brian’s send-off from the world is filled with as much happiness as possible.” The Oscar Wilde line, however, came from the Who’s Pete Townshend: “It’s a normal day for Brian. Like, he died every day, you know.”
Given the length of the Stones’ layoff, and the changes in rock tastes and presentation in the meantime, there was no knowing how many people would turn out to see them in Hyde Park. Brian’s many loyal fans might well refuse to accept Mick Taylor in his place and, despite the tribute theme, could boycott the event in their thousands. Even Mick felt nervous about how he would go over, and didn’t anticipate a crowd anywhere near Blind Faith’s 150,000 the previous month.
He spent the forty-eight hours leading up to Saturday, July 5, compiling a fourteen-song playlist with Keith and rehearsing the band in what would be the first-ever stage versions of most. For convenience, they used the Beatles’ basement recording studio at 3 Savile Row, with John and Yoko running their world peace campaign on the floor above. Three floors higher was Allen Klein, preoccupied with Beatle problems to the exclusion of all else and still unaware that the Stones were no longer in his pocket.
The weather continued to be glorious, but London’s unusually high pollen count gave Mick a bout of hay fever, something he had not suffered since his schooldays, which developed into full-blown laryngitis. On the following Monday, he was due to fly to Australia to begin filming Ned Kelly, having just heard that his still-unresolved drug case would not prevent him from traveling. The filmmakers were starting to fear rock-star unreliability and hinting at legal action if he did not arrive on the set on time, fit and ready for work. Even so, there was no question of the show being called off.
What he wore onstage clearly was of critical importance. By 1969, rock stars performed in hippie clothes as colorless and shapeless as their fans’, but this gig, more than any before, demanded some sartorial splash on his part. He first asked the couturier Ossie Clark to make him a snakeskin suit, but realized it would be too purgatorially hot. Then at the Mister Fish boutique he found a white cotton suit whose ruffle-fronted, puffy-sleeved, flounce-skirted jacket looked feminine even beyond the gender-blurring modes of the day. It had been made for the American cabaret star Sammy Davis Jr., but Mick borrowed it for the Hyde Park show, trying it out first on Princess Margaret and the other posh guests at Prince Rupert’s white ball (where only Marianne had defied the dress code by wearing top-to-toe black). The Fish outfit was light and summery and also fitted the new, solemn mood, white in many cultures signifying bereavement.
By early Saturday morning, it had become clear that Blind Faith’s concert had been the merest sideshow and that around 250,000 people were gathering in Hyde Park to welcome back the Stones. Blackhill Enterprises had provided a workmanlike stage well over six feet high, with a canopy and a thirty-foot scaffolding tower to house some of the extra speakers needed for so vast an open-air auditorium. Obedient to Mick’s wish for a natural look in keeping with the surroundings, potted palm trees decorated the stage, with a color blowup of the Beggars Banquet album gatefold group picture as a backcloth. On Mick’s orders, too, there was no backstage VIP enclosure. The Stones would wait in a suite at the Londonderry Hotel, at the Apsley House end of Park Lane, and when their moment came, would be delivered to the stage by armored truck.
The other innovation—copied from Californian festivals as detailed by the Grateful Dead’s Rock Scully—was to recruit fifty Hell’s Angels as stage-front security. The purpose was to show that, despite recent flower-power detours, the Stones remained as edgy as ever; outlaws of rock, guarded by black-leather-clad, dangerous motorbike outlaws of the road. These British Angels, however bore only a superficial resemblance to their genuinely ferocious and much-feared American counterparts—in fact, were not an official chapter of the international Angels brotherhood. Though adorned with the regulation tattoos, metal studs, Nazi helmets, and swastikas, they were a weedy-looking bunch whose only payment for acting as stewards was to be a free cup of tea each.
Otherwise, the question of security hardly arose. Hyde Park had its own substantial police station, including mounted and dog-handling sections, which stayed on full alert but would be exercised hardly at all. In the whole day, there were just twelve arrests for minor offenses, a handful of knives were confiscated, and four hundred people had to be treated for heat exhaustion.
The Stones were preceded by a string of not-too-threatening support acts: King Crimson, Family, Screw, the Battered Ornaments, the Third Ear Band, and, for old times’ sake, Alexis Korner’s latest blues band, New Church. In the absence of a VIP enclosure, special guests sat on either side of the stage or in the scaffolding tower. Among them were Paul McCartney with his new wife, Linda, and Eric Clapton with his new girlfriend, Alice Ormsby-Gore (Mick’s penchant for the upper classes had proved catching). Marianne and Nicholas drove with Mick to the Stones’ base camp at the Londonderry, then were ushered to front seats on the right side of the stage. Marianne’s hair was still cropped short for her role as Ophelia; in her own words, she “looked like death . . . dope sick, coming off smack, anorexic, pale, sickly and covered in spots.” On the tower she could see a figure with an enormous Afro, dressed in a skimpy suit of white buckskin. Mick had been unable to resist having Marsha Hunt there, too.
Everyone in the grass-sprawling multitude, it is safe to say, had wondered how he would present himself to them after all this time. None could have guessed it would be in a white garment which, despite matching bell-bottom trousers, resembled nothing so much as a little girl’s white frilly party dress, set off by a metal-studded leather dog collar and full makeup. Still less could they have imagined that, having greeted them with a Dixie Mama–ish “Well, a-a-a-aw-RIGHT!” the ruched and beflounced figure would go to the rear of the stage and return with seemingly the least relevant object at this moment—a small hardback book.
“Okay . . . now listen, will you cool it for a minute?” he instructed rather than requested, as if he were suddenly his father, Joe, taking some huge, torpid gym class. “ ’Cause I really would like to say something for Brian . . . about how we feel about him just goin’ when we didn’t expect it.” The “something” was a reading from Adonais, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s 1821 poem about the death of John Keats—no brief quote but two hefty stanzas, declaimed in serious, level tones from which all traces of slurry Cockney and camp Dixie had miraculously vanished:
Peace, peace! he is not dead, he doth not sleep—
He hath awakened from the dream of life—
’Tis we, who lost in stormy visions, keep
With phantoms an unprofitable strife,
And in mad trance, strike with our spirit’s knife
Invulnerable nothings!—We decay
Like corpses in a charnel; fear and grief
Convulse us and consume us day by day,
And cold hopes swarm like worms within our living clay . . .
The One remains, the many change and pass;
Heaven’s light forever shines, Earth’s shadows fly;
Life, like a dome of many-coloured glass,
Stains the white radiance of Eternity,
Until Death tramples it to fragments.—Die!
If thou wouldst be with that which thou dost seek!
Nor did the poetic mood end there. On the stage was a stack of brown cardboard boxes containing 2,500 white butterflies, which, as Shelley’s words died away, were shaken out into the crowd. These symbols of Brian now more than Mick—who more thoroughly broken on a wheel?—had been purchased for £300 and permissio
n to release them obtained from the Royal Parks authority on condition that they were all sterilized and included no leaf-munching cabbage whites (they were in fact mainly cabbage whites). The heat had caused many to expire inside their boxes, but a goodly number fluttered free to ravage gardens throughout the neighborhood.
The Stones’ opening number was “I’m Yours and I’m Hers” by the albino Texan Johnny Winter, which had been a particular favorite of Brian’s but was hardly the most tactful choice on Mick’s part with Marianne and Marsha both looking on. And from the first notes of even this straight-ahead heavy-metal rocker, the band’s underpreparedness was painfully obvious. Keith’s and Mick Taylor’s guitars, so harmonious at first meeting, turned into a pair of pneumatic drills fighting a grudge match to the death. Charlie’s drumming and Bill’s bass, each seemed have melted into Jell-O. Only Mick’s frilly white figure seemed fully awake and on the beat, walking the invisible Travelator he had stolen from James Brown all those years ago, singing into two globular hand microphones taped together. “The tempo!” he kept hissing over his shoulder at Keith. “Get the tempo together!”
But the fluffs, lurches, and whistles of feedback could not have mattered less. All that concerned the assembled quarter million was that the Rolling Stones were back, reborn on that golden afternoon next to Bayswater Road as surely as the Beatles had come to an end on their chill Mayfair rooftop five months earlier. Mick Jagger was back, somehow more sex-soaked and shocking with his white dolly dress and poetry book than ever in his career before; the unchallenged simultaneous king and queen of rock.
There was one great difference, however, from live shows three years before. The Stones’ music seemed to have lost its old power to unleash violence and mayhem. “Satisfaction,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” even “Street Fighting Man” thundered out in turn, yet brought no shadow to the sea of happy faces and waving arms, and dwindled away among the treetops and Park Lane hotels. The stage’s six-foot-plus height kept it mostly free of the female invaders whom Mick once had to dodge like on-heat meteor showers. Occasionally, a lone figure would manage the ascent via the shoulders of friends, then be instantly collared and carried, squirming, into the palm-fronded wings. This was done by the band’s own minders rather than the Hell’s Angels, who remained below the stage throughout. A confidential police report later called them “totally ineffective” as stewards and a threat to no one.
For the first time, too—discounting that now-buried Rock ’n’ Roll Circus moment—Mick’s performance featured an element of striptease. The frilly dress was torn off and thrown aside after about half an hour, soon followed by the metal-studded dog collar, leaving only a skimpy violet T-shirt and white bell-bottoms, with a constant wink of bare midriff between. The strangely intimate space in the eye of that vast crowd became an arena for showmanship (if man is the right middle-of-word) that no Jagger audience had ever witnessed before. Sometimes he rolled and writhed on the stage as though actually in the grip of “Midnight Rambler” ’s rapist-killer, sometimes punished it with his belt; at one barely believable moment, he knelt with the double hand mike rearing between his thighs, leaned forward, spread his hair over it, and seemed to fulfill the ultimate narcissist fantasy of sucking himself off.
The finale was an eighteen-minute version of “Sympathy for the Devil,” backed by a troupe of African tribal drummers in full costume—even this darkest of all his masquerades seemingly purged of all malignity by sunshine and good vibes. At its end, the “mayne of wealth and taste” showed masterly crowd control yet again, winding things up like a parent mollifying overtired children: “Aaw-right . . . We gotta go . . . We ’ad a good time . . . We ’ad a good time . . .”
While the heat-drunk 250,000 dispersed, as peaceably as they had assembled, the five tons of rubbish strewn on the grass was picked up by an army of volunteers (rewarded with a copy of “Honky Tonk Women” apiece), leaving the park tidier than after a normal Saturday.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
The Balls of a Lion
THE FOLLOWING MONDAY morning, with his usual unstoppable energy, Mick flew to Australia with Marianne to begin shooting Ned Kelly. They had no sooner reached Sydney than she became the second of his lovers (Chrissie Shrimpton had been the first, in 1966) to try to kill herself.
As Marianne would later recall, several factors had brought her to this extremity: her feeling of isolation in her life with Mick, the side effects of drugs she was taking, the shock of Brian Jones’s death, the humiliation of sharing the stage with Marsha Hunt in Hyde Park (and knowing Mick had had a tryst with Marsha that same evening under cover of a Chuck Berry–Who concert at the Royal Albert Hall). Nor had it helped to be playing Ophelia in Hamlet and driven to the point of suicide night after night by another charismatic but unreachable swain, “lov’d of the distracted multitude.”
The tipping point came after they had checked into the Chevron Hilton hotel, overlooking Sydney Harbor. While Mick was asleep, Marianne looked into the dressing-table mirror and thought she saw Brian’s face looking back at her. She wanted to jump from the fourteenth-story window, but found it painted shut, so instead she swallowed 150 Tuinal barbiturate tablets, enough to kill three people, washing them down with sips of room-service hot chocolate.
Mick awoke just in time to get her to St. Vincent’s Hospital, where doctors managed to flush out the barbiturates before they could cause brain damage. The police naturally had to be involved and—with memories of fur rugs and Mars bars still fresh—initially treated the episode as a drug orgy gone wrong. Rather than a Samaritan, Mick found himself briefly a suspect, undergoing hard-faced questioning about where Marianne had got the huge stash of Tuinals and whether he had had any part in feeding them to her.
A couple of hours later, he was holding a packed press conference for media from all over Australia, greeting them with a raucous Cockney “Ma-a-awnin’!” as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Director Tony Richardson apologized for their slight lateness, explaining that Marianne had “collapsed” as a result of the long flight from Britain. Mick showed no anxiety to be anywhere else as he declared that he took his role as Ned Kelly with total seriousness—though he hoped it would also be fun—and joked about the “incestuous relationship” he would have with Marianne in the role of Kelly’s sister.
It was a different story later, when the exact nature of her collapse became known and St. Vincent’s was besieged by the same media pack Mick had charmed that morning, but no longer playing by the same civilized rules. When one photographer sneaked through security and into her room, Mick had to be physically restrained by his PR, Les Perrin. Marianne would have seen no Tyranny of Cool in the enraged figure struggling in Perrin’s arms and shouting, “I’ll get him . . . I’ll get him!”
Though the doctors had saved Marianne’s life, she remained in a coma for six days, seemingly beyond all medical efforts to revive her. Her mother, Baroness Erisso, flew from Britain to be at her bedside and, fearing all hope was gone, summoned a Catholic priest to administer the last rites.
For Marianne, the time passed in a vivid dream of meeting and talking to Brian Jones in some transit area between life and death. In her clear recollection of the encounter, Brian made no reference to having been murdered, but was just faintly perplexed at finding himself no longer alive. Two days into the coma, on July 10, his funeral took place in his genteel hometown of Cheltenham. There were five hundred, mainly distraught female, mourners, and the floral tributes included an outsize wreath “from Mick and Marianne with love.” The officiating clergy asked the congregation to pray for the lifeless-seeming young woman on the other side of the world along with the Rolling Stone about to gather infinite moss.
Eventually, as Marianne recalls, she heard three voices calling her into the land of the living once more—her mother’s, her son Nicholas’s, and Mick’s. When she opened her eyes, Mick was at her bedside, holding her hand (although, pragmatic as ever, he had managed to start some filming in between hospital vi
gils). “You’ve come back” were his first words. “Wild horses wouldn’t drag me away,” she weakly replied.
When she became stronger, her mother had her moved to the more tranquil surroundings of a hospital run by nuns. (“Get thee to a nunnery,” Hamlet cruelly tells Ophelia at the height of her psychological torment.) Mick returned to the Ned Kelly set, where Marianne’s role as Kelly’s sister, Maggie, had been taken over by the Australian actress Diane Craig. He remained full of anxiety about her and wrote to her constantly from the location: “beautiful letters,” as she would recall, “full of remorse, asking for forgiveness.”
The film was mainly shot around Birdwood in New South Wales, where Mick’s mother, Eva, had been born and spent her first two years before coming to Kent. It had caused much controversy in the Australian press, not only because a Pommie pop singer had been chosen to play a national folk hero, but because Kelly’s actual field of operation had been the neighboring state of Victoria.
During the shoot, Mick lived on a small farm near Palarang, some thirty miles from Canberra, sharing the onetime overseer’s modest quarters with Tony Richardson and producer Neil Hartley. July in New South Wales is the coldest month of the year, and much of the action took place out of doors, taxing all Mick’s secret reserves of athleticism and stamina. The production did not have the same good feeling as Performance and, going on from Marianne’s suicide attempt, suffered so much ill luck one might have thought “Sympathy for the Devil” had been ritually sung on its first day. There was recurrent illness among the cast and crew, some of the costumes were destroyed in a fire, and Mark McManus, playing Kelly’s henchman Joe Byrne, narrowly escaped serious injury when a cart in which he was riding accidentally tipped over. Then, in the second week, Mick squeezed the trigger of a prop pistol and it backfired, causing quite a severe burn to his right hand. Despite being in some pain and able to use the hand only with difficulty, he insisted on continuing work.