Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

  That same day, the News of the World published a front page editorial, rebutting the ‘monstrous’ charge that they had planted Acid King David Snyderman in the Redlands party to kill off Mick Jagger’s libel action: ‘It was a charge made without a shred of evidence to support it … It was a charge made within the privilege of a court of law … which denied us the opportunity of answering back at the time … These outrageous allegations are of course totally unfounded. We have had no connection whatsoever with Mr Schneidermann directly or indirectly, before, during or after this case.’ The paper admitted that it had tipped off the police about Keith’s house party and said that the information had come from a reader. The allegations of following and spying on Mick Jagger, and that they had done this to influence the libel, were also totally untrue.

  The heavy cash recognizances extracted from Jagger and Richard had presupposed their remaining on bail until at least early September. But on July 4, Michael Havers received news which indicated further amends were being offered for their treatment at Chichester. The Lord Chief Justice, Lord Parker, had personally intervened to bring their two appeal hearings forward to the last day of the present law term, July 31.

  That summer’s climactic moment of pinching oneself, and finding oneself still awake, had its origins in a twenty-three-year-old television researcher named John Birt, recently recruited to Granada TV’s World in Action programme, one day to become Director-General of the BBC. A Merseysider by birth and allegiance, Birt had previously felt no special love for the Stones or their music. He none the less shared the outrage of all pop fans at what was now revealed as a concerted attack, through the Stones, by one generation on another. The subject, in Birt’s view, was one which should concern a hard-nosed investigative programme like World in Action. His executive producer, David Plowright, agreed, and Birt, for his first major TV documentary project, was assigned to set up a half-hour special about drugs, the establishment and Mick Jagger.

  Whatever form the programme took, it clearly could not be broadcast until after the hearing of Jagger’s and Richard’s appeals on July 31. ‘Funnily enough,’ Birt remembers, ‘it never entered our heads that the appeal would be anything but successful. Our whole format was predicated on the idea that Jagger must get off.’ Birt’s confidence remained even after a poll conducted among that larger multitude which derived its views from such papers as the News of the World, revealed that 46 per cent felt Mick Jagger had deserved his prison sentence.

  The format approved by Birt’s editors was hazardously simple – a ‘live’ television confrontation between Jagger, fresh from the Appeal Court, and members of the establishment which had lately been so intent on crucifying him: a summit-conference, as it were, between the generations in conflict. Birt got in touch with the Stones’ office and, after the usual ritual runaround, managed to see Jagger and put the idea to him. Jagger agreed in principle, but contact was then broken while the Stones worked on the new album that Judge Block had all but terminated. At last, in desperation, Birt managed to telephone Jagger at home. Jagger answered the phone himself and, without further prevarication, agreed to be the subject of a World in Action special on July 31.

  To preside over the encounter, it seemed natural to choose William Rees-Mogg, both for his position as editor of The Times, and his personal initiative in restoring moral perspective to the Jagger case. To speak for the Church, Granada approached Dr Mervyn Stockwood, the energetic and outspoken Bishop of Woolwich. To speak for Parliament – in the absence of any incumbent Minister – it procured Lord Stow Hill, who, as Sir Frank Soskice, had been Home Secretary in the first Wilson Government. Rees-Mogg, a devout Catholic, agreed to take part on condition a member of his faith appeared also. A Jesuit priest, Father Thomas Corbishley, was found to restore the ecumenical balance.

  July 31 was yet another day of cloudlessly brilliant weather. At dawn, a queue of girls had already begun to form outside the High Court in Fleet Street, hoping for admittance to the tiny chamber personally presided over by Britain’s Lord Chief Justice. The drowsy press buildings echoed to the racket of a portable record player on which someone was playing appropriate Stones songs like Mercy Mercy and It’s All Over Now.

  When Jagger and Richard arrived, disembarking from the same black Austin Princess limousine, they were cheered into the court precincts like royal champions. ‘How does it feel to be free?’ somebody shouted at Jagger. ‘Lovely,’ he shouted back. Wearing the same olive green double-breasted jacket he had put on for his trial, Jagger was then ushered alone into the Lord Chief Justice’s court. Keith had contracted a dose of chicken pox, and received permission to wait in a separate room for fear of spreading the infection to his judges.

  The mirage-like quality which the day had already assumed made it seem almost natural that the Lord Chief Justice of England, sitting in awesome conclave with two fellow Appeal judges, should appear as mild-mannered, amiable and reasonable as the little local judge had appeared hostile and ill-disposed. ‘He was such a nice, kind man,’ John Birt remembers. Birt was in court with his Granada TV team, still not altogether certain that World in Action would have a programme to put out that night.

  Two hours later, as Keith waited offstage, trying hard not to scratch his spots, Lord Chief Justice Parker squashed both his conviction and his sentence. The Appeal Court ruled that Judge Block had ‘erred’ in his summing-up to the Chichester jury by not emphasizing how flimsy was the evidence that ‘Miss X’ had been smoking cannabis. All three Appeal judges agreed that, had they tried the case they would have disallowed that whole lurid section of the prosecution’s evidence. Keith Richard, therefore, could not possibly be convicted, on the evidence, of ‘knowingly permitting’ what the prosecution had failed to prove ever happened in the first place.

  Still louder gasps of delight greeted Lord Chief Justice Parker’s pronouncement on the Jagger case. The court upheld Jagger’s conviction, since the amphetamines clearly came within Parliament’s definition of unlawful drugs. His prison sentence, however, was quashed, and a one-year conditional discharge substituted. ‘That means,’ Lord Parker told him, ‘you will have to be of good behaviour for twelve months … If in that time you do commit another offence, you will not only be punished for that offence but brought back and punished for this one also.’

  Jagger bowed his head as the Lord Chief Justice continued: ‘You are, whether you like it or not, the idol of a large number of the young in this country. Being in that position, you have very grave responsibilities. If you do come to be punished, it is only natural that those responsibilities should carry higher penalties.’

  From the High Court, Jagger was driven to a press conference at Granada TV’s headquarters in Golden Square. He arrived in fresh clothes, symbolizing his release from courtroom formality – mauve watered-silk trousers, a cream-coloured smock edged with maroon and green embroidery. With him was Marianne Faithfull, wearing the shortest mini-skirt most of the assembled press had ever seen.

  The press conference – filmed by World in Action as a prelude to its later, exclusive footage – shows Jagger, flanked by Ian Stewart and Les Perrin, very far from his usual cool and sardonic self. ‘He’d been given a lot of Valium beforehand,’ Marianne says. ‘And he still seemed very scared. You got the feeling he only had to say one word out of place and he’d have been taken straight back to Brixton Prison.’

  All questions relating to his drug offence, or drugs in general, have obviously been vetoed in advance by Les Perrin, though Jagger, in his slightly bewildered state, seems willing to answer almost anything. The camera settles on an elderly journalist with sideburns like white ear-muffs. ‘Do you think you do have a responsibility to the young in this country, as Lord Parker said?’ Jagger shakes his shaggy head as if to clear it. ‘I’ve been given that responsibility … pushed into the limelight. I don’t try to impose my views on people. I don’t propagate religious views, such as some pop stars do. I don’t propagate drug views, such as some pop stars d
o …’ ‘Do you resent the way you’ve been treated?’ another voice asks. Here, Les Perrin interrupts yet again. ‘Look – I’m going to have to cut this. We agreed in advance what was on and what wasn’t …’

  The conference over, Jagger and Marianne, accompanied by John Birt, were put into a white Jaguar with a professional stunt driver behind the wheel, and driven at speed across the Thames to the helicopter port at Battersea. A hired helicopter then lifted them away, down river to the place selected by World in Action for Jagger’s summit-meeting with the establishment. Birt has two recollections of the journey. One is the shimmering softness of London, spread out below them as they flew eastward. The other is his own acute embarrassment, wedged on the same small seat as Jagger and Marianne when they began to kiss and touch each other passionately.

  Their destination, successfully kept secret from all press and television rivals, was a Georgian country house owned by the Lord Lieutenant of Essex, Sir John Ruggles-Brise. Jagger’s one stipulation – prompted, no doubt, by recent indoor experiences – was that the debate should take place in the open air. Accordingly, World in Action cameras were already set up facing a rustic seat at the end of the conservatory. While the other participants were chauffeured down from London, Mick and Marianne were taken into the house and shown to a bedroom to ‘rest’.

  ‘We thought they’d have at least an hour to themselves before we started filming,’ John Birt says. ‘Then, all of a sudden, I was told Jagger was needed right away. I had to go up and knock on the bedroom door and call him. There was a long silence, when it was very obvious what I was interrupting. Then Jagger’s voice said “Okay.”’

  It looked, in William Rees-Mogg’s words, like something Max Beerbohm might have drawn. Certainly, an element of some old-fashioned allegorical cartoon was present in the outdoor scene, the rustic bench, the four distinguished men from politics, journalism and the Church, pooling their collective intellect to communicate with the alien being in their midst. The fact that all four establishment members were hot and crumpled while Jagger, in his open-neck smock, seemed cool and comfortable, only heightened the sense of elderly emissaries, fidgeting before some boy potentate. On a level of pure symbolism – disregarding the fact it had been deliberately set up for the TV cameras – this was Mick Jagger’s moment of supreme triumph. The society which had mocked, abused and finally tried to destroy him, now cast itself down before him with all the apologetic reverence due to a misjudged Messiah. The editor, the peer, the bishop and the Jesuit earnestly entreated him to reveal ‘what the young people in this country really think’.

  ‘Er – Mick,’ William Rees-Mogg began with his somewhat pious lisp. ‘We know this had been a very difficult day for you … Perhaps I could begin by asking you this. You are often taken as a symbol of – ah – rebellion. Do you – ah – feel that society has a great deal in it today that ought to be rebelled against?’

  The grainy black and white of the old telerecording is as flattering to Jagger as a Beaton or Bailey lens. His face is calm and simplified to the needs of the occasion, the great lips deflated to a gentle smile, the eyes alert and, somehow, tolerant.

  ‘I didn’t think my knowledge was enough to start pontificating on the subject. I didn’t ever set myself up as a leader in society. It’s society that’s pushed one into that position.’

  Lord Stow Hill, the former Home Secretary, takes up the questioning.

  ‘In your approach to music – rhythm and so on – what is the way in which you yourself would wish to be understood?’

  ‘For my music,’ Jagger replies. ‘Just for playing music. That’s what I want to do. And, like anyone else, to have as good a time as possible.’

  So it continues in the blurred, unreal twilight, the bishop and Jesuit putting their points in turn, and the pop star replying, quietly, lucidly, while a breeze ruffles the curls around his face. Jagger, we realize, has reached a consummation of his talent for speaking with all voices simultaneously. On one level, he seems to be speaking for disaffected youth, of society’s ‘corruption’, of media bias and how the law protects only majorities. Yet he is speaking for the establishment also, in the establishment’s own comforting sociological formulae. ‘Our parents went through two world wars and a depression. We’ve had none of that … I’m sure you do your best. It may be, for your generation …’ Debating for its own sake clearly becomes more and more enjoyable. ‘You’ve just given a textbook definition of the English Constitution,’ he tells Lord Stow Hill. ‘It really doesn’t work that way at all.’

  ‘… But wouldn’t you say that some drugs – heroin for example – represent a crime against society?’

  ‘It’s a crime against a law,’ Jagger says. ‘I can’t see it’s any more a crime against society than jumping out of a window.’

  ‘But surely,’ Stow Hill persists, ‘a real crime against society ought to be punished to suit the case.’

  ‘People should be punished for crimes,’ Jagger says. ‘Not for the fears of society, which may be groundless.’ Game, set and match to the infinitely subtle being who has made himself living proof of his own point.

  With Mick and Keith’s chum Robert Fraser, the 1967 judiciary was on surer ground. All the testimonials as to Fraser’s character and breeding could not mitigate the seriousness of possessing heroin. His appeal against his six-month sentence was dismissed and he returned to Wormwood Scrubs as prisoner number 7854. With remission, he served four months, working mainly in the prison kitchen. The two liberated Stones felt understandable guilt for having landed their friend so literally in the soup. Both wrote Fraser loving and supportive letters while he was banged up, Keith signing off with his own prisoner number, ‘love from 7855’.

  Fraser died (of AIDS) in 1986, having never quite recovered from his crushing by the Stones. Fittingly, the art crusader lives on in one of the Sixties’ defining images, Richard Hamilton’s Swingeing London, now owned by London’s Tate Gallery and reproduced in dozens of books and countless prints and postcards. Hamilton’s painting of a snatched press photograph freezes the moment when Fraser and Jagger were driven off to jail, handcuffed together. Through the open car door, the pop star and the old Etonian cower back, their manacled hands raised to shield their faces from exploding flash bulbs. The era of so-called love and peace was to receive no more bitter salute.

  A few weeks after Mick and Keith’s release, the News of the World published a brief paragraph announcing that Mick’s libel action against the paper had been dropped. Right up until its closure for illegal phone-hacking in 2011, the NoW claimed credit for tipping off the police to raid Redlands, so simultaneously saving itself a colossal sum in damages and striking a blow for public morality.

  There was never any serious attempt by the British police to locate Acid King David, still less bring him back to Britain to stand his trial and resolve the mystery of who and what he really had been. And, beyond a rumour that he might be in Canada, nothing more was ever heard of him. As time passed, the drugs charges fell into abeyance and with more and more people who had played a role in Mick’s career emerging to give interviews or write books, one might have expected some American publisher’s catalogue to announce a forthcoming memoir entitled I Was the Acid King. Yet it never happened.

  In 2004, a man named David Jove died in Los Angeles, aged sixty-four. Jove was an eccentric figure on the fringes of West Coast punk culture who produced one of the earliest cable shows with his New Wave Theater Group, directed music videos and held fancy-dress happenings at his cave-like studio in Fairfax. His real surname, jettisoned during the late Sixties, was Snyderman. He left behind numerous images of himself on the internet, surrounded by his New Wave Theater cronies, camouflaged by face-paint – but still unmistakably the weekend-guest Michael Cooper photographed hugging Keith Richard on West Wittering beach a few hours before the bust. David Jove was Acid King David.

  In January 1967, Snyderman had been a failed TV actor, drifting around Europe in the American hipp
ie throng with Swinging London as his final destination. At Heathrow airport, he had been caught with drugs in his luggage and expected to be thrown into jail and instantly deported. Instead, British Customs had handed him over to some ‘heavy people’ who hinted they belonged to Britain’s internal security service MI5 and told him there was ‘a way out’ of his predicament. This was to infiltrate the Rolling Stones, supply Mick Jagger and Keith Richard with drugs and then get them busted. In return, the charges against him would be dropped and he’d be allowed to leave Britain without any questions being asked.

  With his encyclopaedic knowledge of LSD, it had been easy for him to gain entry to Keith’s circle, get himself invited down to Redlands with the ‘Sunshine’ that was meant to have been the incriminating evidence, then slip away and call the police. Things had gone somewhat awry when, instead, the raiders had found amphetamines in Mick’s jacket-pocket, and also Robert Fraser’s heroin. Nonetheless, the desired end result of busting two Stones had been achieved, and Snyderman had been able to leave the country with his remaining acid stash, as promised.

  In fact, at Redlands just before the raid, he had come close to giving himself away when – his guard possibly lowered by drugs – he’d started talking enigmatically to Michael Cooper about spying and espionage, ‘the James Bond thing … the whole CIA bit’. Three decades later in LA, he confessed to a friend that he’d been recruited by America’s Federal Bureau of Investigation, specifically an offshoot known as Cointelpro (Counter Intelligence Program) set up by the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover in the 1920s, to protect national security and maintain the existing social and political order. For almost 40 years, Cointelpro operated against so-called ‘subversive’ elements, from Communists and socialists and Soviet spies to the Civil Rights movement, black radicals, the campaign against the Vietnam War and feminists, unhindered by any normal restraints of democracy or morality. Its methods, for which it would finally be wound up by a Senate investigation in 1971, included illegal surveillance, black propaganda, burglary, forgery, conspiracy and harassment.