Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

  Allen Klein’s influence was powerfully evident throughout the American tour that began on October 29 with the now customary warm-up shows in Canada. That same week, Klein’s office announced an expected gross of $1.5 million, the largest box-office sum in pop touring history. Only the Beatles, in 1964, had touched a million dollars (and in the process caused such alarm to the US Internal Revenue that much of the money remained frozen in a protracted wrangle over the Anglo-American tax treaty).

  Klein himself was present at most of the tour dates, dressed in a button-up cardigan with leather facings that caused Oldham much amusement behind his chubby back. In Klein’s absence, tour business was administered by his nephew, Ronnie Schneider, a young accountant whom all the Stones liked for his volatile humour and squeaky, excitable voice. Obedient to Uncle Allen’s instructions, Ronnie Schneider received each night’s box-office percentage in person and put it for safe keeping under his bed.

  Also present on the tour was Klein’s personal promotion man, Pete Bennett – an individual whose immaculately Mafia-like aspect undoubtedly played a part in his legendary powers of persuasion over radio disc jockeys and producers. It was Pete Bennett who had implanted Get Off of My Cloud in the American Top Ten within a fortnight of its release. That much could already be said for Allen Klein’s management. There was also the benefit – most keenly enjoyed by Oldham – of being escorted in public by a gigantic, Sicilian-looking man in a black sharkskin suit who would, from time to time, reflectively pat what seemed to be a handgun bulging under his left armpit.

  The British photographer Gered Mankowitz – whose playwright father had written Oldham’s seminal fantasy, Expresso Bongo – travelled across America with the tour, adding to an excellent portfolio that had begun with the sleeve photograph for Out of Our Heads. Mankowitz shared a hotel room with Pete Bennett, whom he remembers sitting on the toilet with the door wide open, in old-fashioned sock suspenders, describing what trouble he had getting shoes hand-made for his oddly paddle-shaped feet.

  ‘A lot of that tour was quite depressing,’ Mankowitz says. ‘Mick was very down – he seemed to be missing Chrissie Shrimpton a lot. Charlie Watts missed his wife, Shirley. He’d be on the phone to her in Sussex every night, and hang up practically in tears.’

  During their stay in New York, girls constantly invaded their hotel, the Sheraton City Squire, bribing bellboys and floor waiters for access by giving ‘head’ in stairwells and service elevators. Shortly after the hotel management insisted that the Stones transfer to the Sheraton Lincoln Square, New York was plunged into a total blackout. At the height of this, Bob Dylan arrived to pay Brian Jones a visit, accompanied by members of the electric band with which he had lately outraged his pure folk fans. Brian, Dylan and his guitarist Robbie Robertson drank, smoked and played together by candlelight, until someone knocked a candle over and set fire to one of the beds.

  ‘Brian saw a lot of Dylan in New York,’ Gered Mankowitz says. ‘Where the other Stones were concerned, he seemed to be getting more and more remote. I remember a terrible scene with Brian one day when we’d all stopped on the road to eat. Brian said he wasn’t hungry, and just sat in the car. When everyone else came out of the restaurant, Brian decided he was hungry and marched inside by himself. “Come on, Brian,” the others were saying. “We’re running late. We’ve got to go.” Brian just sat there, taking no notice.

  ‘Finally, someone – I think it was that huge guy, Pete Bennett – just picked him up by the scruff of the neck and the seat of his pants, carried him out to the car and dumped him in.’

  Outwardly, at least, Brian continued to personify the Stones’ dangerous, irrepressible glamour. Brian had been first to adopt the new London fashion of frock coats, flowing scarves and floppy-brimmed hats such as were previously seen on the heads of society women at Ascot. Cameras zoomed in avidly on this exotic figure, like a character in a Grimms’ fairy tale, who seemed bent on extending the Stones’ decadence to actual transvestism, with his wild white fedora and pressed-down gold fringe, his capes and furs, striped trews and high-stacked alligator boots. Brian made news again in Los Angeles when he appeared in public with a stunningly long-legged girl of exactly matching blondeness, just arrived from London to join him. Her name, the press discovered, was Anita Pallenberg: she was a German film actress and fashion model. According to some reports, Brian had already announced their engagement.

  America’s revulsion, although it remained strong in the faces of individual policemen, had been somewhat moderated on a civic level by respect for the Stones’ dollar-earning power. Denver, Colorado, thus commemorated their coming with an official ‘Rolling Stones Day’. Even Boston, that sepulchre of East Coast conservatism, was moved to present them with the Freedom of the City.

  These blandishments did nothing to soften the truculence with which the Stones continued to delight their American audiences. In America, even more than Britain, they had become the perfect antidote to the Beatles’ impish good manners. ‘The Beatles want to hold you hand,’ wrote Tom Wolfe in a famous epigram, ‘but the Stones want to burn your town.’ Though Wolfe had swallowed not one but two PR myths, his judgement confirmed the Stones’ appeal to an audience for whom pop music was very far from a question of simply having fun. This second 1965 tour took place against a background of increasing turbulence throughout America’s formerly peaceful schools and university campuses, and increasing student protest against the now palpable horrors of America’s war in Vietnam. It was a revolt fuelled by pop music – by the bitter, tongue-twisting polemics of Bob Dylan, the sweet-voiced reproaches of Joan Baez. To the American establishment, long hair, Mod clothes and guitars ceased to be merely absurd and became, quite possibly, subversive. Nor could there be any doubt who the ringleaders were. Find an anti-war demonstration, a march or sit-in, and you would find a Rolling Stones song somewhere near. The fact that the Stones themselves, through Mick Jagger’s cautious tongue, abstained from all political comment, could hardly be accounted relevant. Their music was the missile: with every play of Satisfaction or Get Off of My Cloud, another life of steady dates, early nights, short hair and fraternity meetings went up in flames.

  The final concert, before an audience of 14,000 at Los Angeles Sports Arena, went ahead despite real fears that only four Stones might be available to take the stage. On December 4, onstage at Sacramento, Keith had idly touched a live microphone with his metal-inlaid guitar neck and received an electric shock which left him unconscious for seven minutes.

  Later that night in Los Angeles, Keith and Brian underwent further initiation from the new species of Rolling Stones fans, attending the second ‘Acid Test’ party given by the Acid writer Ken Kesey and his followers, ‘The Merry Pranksters’. Keith and Brian both passed the test required, which was to sample a man-made drug so new it had not yet been declared illegal: lysergic acid diethylamid, known for short as LSD.

  In the fifteenth century, the Pallenbergs were Swedish, a wealthy clan whose most notable member was painted by Holbein, seated among bags of gold. Anita’s great-great-grandfather, Arnold Böcklin, a German Swiss, emigrated to Florence to become a painter renowned in the nineteenth-century neoclassical school. Her grandfather and father were painters also, based in Rome but with family and social contacts in Germany, Spain and France. Anita and her sister grew up fluent in four languages and accustomed to the company of painters, writers and musicians.

  As a teenager, she studied picture restoration, medicine and graphic design. In 1963, aged twenty-one, she went from Rome to New York by boat, travelling with her boyfriend, an Italian photographer named Mario Schifano. She had meant to continue studying art, and spent some time in Jasper Johns’s studio, observing the great man and washing his paintbrushes. She also helped Schifano and other fashion photographers by standing in for models who were late or indisposed. Pictures began to appear in top fashion magazines of the girl with the cropped blonde hair, the lean thoroughbred body and the snub-nosed, unsettling smile.

/>   By 1965, Anita Pallenberg was accepting magazine assignments in all the major European capitals and had appeared in several films made by the young German director Volker Schlöndorff. Her main social sphere, however, continued to be the art world. In London, she knew Robert Fraser and, through Fraser, met the antique dealer Christopher Gibbs. ‘Anita in those days was absolutely electrifying,’ Gibbs says. ‘Whenever she came into a room, every head would turn to look at her. There was something kittenish about her, a sense of mischief – of naughtiness. When I talked to her, I discovered she was highly intelligent and extremely well read. She’d read obscure German romantic novelists like Hoffmann as well as all the usual Hermann Hessery.’

  In September 1965, Anita had gone to West Germany on a fashion job. She was in Munich on the night of a Rolling Stones concert and, on an impulse, decided to try to meet them. After the show, she persuaded a Swedish photographer to smuggle her backstage. ‘That’s how I met Brian. He was the only one of the Stones who really bothered to talk to me. He could even speak a little German. There had been some kind of disagreement within the Stones, Brian against the others, and he was crying.

  ‘He said, “Come and spend the night with me! I don’t want to be alone.” So I went with him. Almost the whole night he spent crying. Whatever had happened with the other Stones had absolutely devastated him.’

  She saw Brian again in Paris, when the Stones played the Olympia, and in London on her fashion-modelling trips. Their one-night stand in Munich became a love affair, even though Brian then had a steady girlfriend – a French model named Zou Zou – and Anita was constantly on the move around Europe. ‘I fell in love with Brian – in love all the way. He was a great guy, you know. Talented, funny and with that instant quality of “Let’s do it. Let’s try anything.”’

  In those early days, she was conscious that the other Stones regarded her with suspicion. ‘You could see them exchanging looks like “Who is this weird bird?” Mick, especially, was very hostile. But he could never make me feel uncomfortable. Even today, I can squash him with just one word. But he was the one most against my seeing Brian and being around the Stones. He told Chrissie Shrimpton she wasn’t to have anything to do with me.’

  Brian returned from Los Angeles apparently on top of the world, carrying an antique mountain dulcimer and an immense lump of California Gold hashish presented to him by an American well-wisher. Anita had gone back to Munich on a modelling job, but was to rejoin him in a few weeks and live with him at his new mews house, behind the ABC Cinema, Fulham Road.

  Even in Brian’s absence, this house tended to be somewhat crowded. The spare bedroom was occupied by a young Scots film student named Dave Thomson, whom Brian had befriended the previous year in Glasgow. Frequently, too, there would be visits by Brian’s French model girlfriend, Zou Zou. When Anita passed through London en route to join the Stones in Los Angeles, Brian had arranged with Thomson that she should stay for a few days while applying for a British work permit. Shortly before Anita’s arrival, Zou Zou had flown in unexpectedly from Paris, intending to use Brian’s room as usual. Dave Thomson had managed to get rid of her in the nick of time.

  A few days after the Stones’ return, Thomson was astonished to find himself taken on one side by the normally taciturn Charlie Watts. According to Charlie, Brian had been so full of pills and drink in America that he’d missed playing on several studio sessions, including the one for Satisfaction. In Chicago he had been admitted to hospital – where only Charlie and Bill Wyman had troubled to visit him. An American doctor had afterwards told Charlie that if Brian continued to drink at his present rate, he could kill himself within a year.

  Even before the tour, as Thomson well knew, Brian would routinely drink two bottles of whisky a day, and swallow handfuls of pills, mostly the uppers that were indispensable to any pop star’s all-night life. A doctor he used was among London’s most bountiful providers of drugs on prescription, the model for the Beatles’ in-joking song Doctor Robert. ‘And there was hash and grass,’ Thomson says, ‘just lying on tables all over the house.’

  Dave Thomson’s regard for Brian was something exceptional in the Stones’ retinue of hangers-on and gofers. And he had good reason to believe that Brian’s insecurity came from definite, as well as wildly indefinite, sources. He remembers, after their first meeting in Glasgow, going back to see Brian at the Central Hotel, and finding him listening at the door of a room where Oldham and the other Stones were talking. ‘They’re all in there,’ Brian had whispered. ‘They’re trying to get rid of me.’

  ‘I thought he was just being paranoid,’ Dave Thomson says. ‘Then, one time, I got a lift down to London in a car with Andrew, Mick and Keith. All the way down, Andrew was talking about how they could sack Brian from the Stones, and making catty remarks about him.’

  Thomson was also privy to Brian’s frequent, and futile, attempts at writing the original songs which, he believed, would give him back equality in the Stones with Mick and Keith. The knack eluded Brian, even when Oldham tried shock therapy on him as with the other two, locking him in a hotel room with Gene Pitney and a piano. All Brian’s musical intuition, his natural command of half a dozen instruments, could not conjure up the requisite facile pattern of chords and rhymes. Under Dave Thomson’s influence he began to think, instead, about composing for films. The two were now collaborating on a surrealist scenario, to be shot in Scandinavia and the French Camargue.

  Brian and the Stones’ power axis were not entirely estranged. There would still be times when, for inscrutable reasons, Keith would go off Mick and swing back to his old partner in bedsitter guitar duets. Keith still had no steady girlfriend or settled home, and would stay for lengthy periods in Brian’s spare room relegating Dave Thomson to the living-room couch. Thomson remembers that Keith was there, and at his most mischievous, during a surprise visit by Brian’s ex-girlfriend Linda Lawrence, infuriated by his involvement with Zou Zou and his failure to provide for his third son, the second Julian.

  ‘Linda suddenly marched past me into the house. Brian was upstairs, hissing, “Get rid of her, man!” Keith just thought the whole thing was a laugh. He kept teasing Brian about how ugly the kid was and what a big head it had.’

  If Brian could remain indifferent to his three illegitimate offspring, he was none the less haunted by terror that their existence might be discovered and exposed in some newspaper like the News of the World. ‘Brian really wasn’t that much worse than other people in the music business,’ Dave Thomson says. ‘All the groups had the same attitude to the girls who ran after them. They were just pieces of meat.

  ‘Brian was always terrified that the girls he went with on the tours might be under age. After every tour, he used to worry about being hit by paternity suits. Remember, there was no Pill in those days. The girls just used to tell the guys to pull out at the last moment. I remember Brian telling me how he’d come all over some girl’s hair.’

  At times, there seemed to be something else gnawing at Brian – an anxiety deeper even than what was happening to him in the Stones. At the Fulham mews house, for several months, he would not go out of doors until after dark. A ring of the telephone late at night would make him deeply agitated. ‘I remember once,’ Thomson says, ‘when Bob Dylan rang through from the States at about three in the morning. Brian wouldn’t believe it was Dylan until Albert Grossman [Dylan’s then manager] came on the line to say it was.

  ‘Brian once said to me, “They’re out to get me, Dave – someone in America and someone over here. I don’t know who they are, but they’re out to get me.”’

  * * *

  With Anita Pallenberg’s arrival in London to be his live-in girlfriend, Brian seemed to recover his old, arrogant spirits. ‘He took me with him to meet her at Heathrow,’ Dave Thomson says. ‘We drove out there in the Rolls-Royce Silver Cloud Brian had just bought from George Harrison. The idea was that we’d go straight on down to see his parents in Cheltenham, to show them the car. Brian had to prove
to his father that there was a future in being a musician. I got the impression that he still desperately wanted his family’s good opinion.’

  As Brian led Anita from the Heathrow arrivals building, an airport photographer stepped forward. That picture, of the gold-haired, wide-eyed pop star and his stunning new possession in her fun fur coat, flowered miniskirt and long, suede-booted legs, nestling submissively against him, would seem to be the very essence of a young man’s blessed good luck. ‘We didn’t drive down to Cheltenham after all,’ Dave Thomson says. ‘We drove straight back to the mews, so that Brian and Anita could go to bed.’

  Brian’s transformation continued in the weeks that followed. The morose outsider whom Dave Thomson had seen slumped in an armchair, endlessly playing Nina Simone albums, now sat demurely upstairs before a multifaceted mirror while Anita tinted his hair to a pallor indistinguishable from hers. To her, as to some sympathetic nurse, he confessed his many neuroses about the way he looked. Did it matter that his legs were so short? Could one see the caps he had on his teeth?

  Anita meant more than beauty to Brian: she meant restoration of power. She was an instant boost to his sagging morale within the Stones. For not even Mick Jagger could show off a bird like this. Brian had seen Mick’s unease in Anita’s company; his wariness of her ability to deflate him with a single sultry look or offhand phrase. Mick might not like Anita, but he could not help but be impressed with her standing with people like Robert Fraser and Christopher Gibbs, and Tara Browne, the young heir to the Guinness millions, and almost everyone on that high social level where he himself still felt so very far from comfortable.