Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

  The plan to induct Mick Taylor into the Stones slowly, by way of album-sessions, was thrown suddenly into reverse, however, when Mick Jagger accepted an invitation from Eric Clapton to the debut performance of his new supergroup, Blind Faith. The concert took place in Hyde Park and – extraordinary innovation! – was free of charge to its audience. The result exceeded all expectations. A crowd of 150,000 carpeted the greensward, from Marble Arch back to the Serpentine. They could hear the metal thunder, that afternoon, in boroughs as distant as Fulham and Notting Hill.

  Jagger was astonished by the size – and benevolent spirit – of the Blind Faith audience. Being Jagger, too, he could not help but wonder how much larger an impromptu audience he himself might be capable of attracting. There and then, with Keith, he sought out a representative of the concert organizers, Blackhill Enterprises, and offered to appear at a similar event with the Stones, on the very earliest date it could be arranged. Within hours, an announcement went forth which seemed to confirm this new mood of generosity among rock stars. The Rolling Stones, with their new guitarist Mick Taylor, would give a free concert in Hyde Park on Saturday, July 5.

  They never intended it to inaugurate the era after Brian. Jagger had even rung Shirley Arnold at the Stones’ office, and asked her to try to persuade Brian to come.

  Her name was Helen Spittal – though, in the ordinary course of events, no one would have bothered to ask it. Her face was pointed and pale, her hair regulation madonna-length; round her neck, in the same state of readiness as a gunslinger’s Colt 45, she carried a cheap Instamatic camera. She was sixteen years old and, despite the fierce-elbowing competition all around her, was recognizably Brian Jones’s greatest fan.

  She had begun as merely a Stones fan, willing to get up at 5 a.m. and walk from her parents’ home in Hampton across to Barnes, in the faint hope of seeing the Stones emerge from Olympic Studios after recording all night. Albums full of Instamatic prints, taken in bad light, showed the invariable friendliness of these encounters – mostly with Mick Jagger. ‘I never used to see Brian at Olympic that much. Once when he was there, he came across and blew me up for being out so early in the morning by myself, and worrying my parents.’

  To Helen, Brian was never other than friendly, considerate – in a strange way, even fatherly. He would usually chide her for being out so early, or so late, and for neglecting her school work. With this, his greatest idolator, he, paradoxically, lost all pretence, posing for her Instamatic camera with a resigned and hangdog, ‘God I look awful’ grin. In one blurred London street shot, taken by someone else, the little girl he cuddles close to him could be his daughter or niece. His reputation as a sexual buccaneer is something which, to this day, Helen Spittal finds hard to accept.

  Knowing Brian’s fondness for Helen, and vaguely perceiving her beneficial effect on him, the Stones’ office gave her privileges allowed no other fan. Tom Keylock would tell her when they were next recording at Olympic. Shirley Arnold would relay her messages to Brian, and his back to her.

  ‘He’d often said he’d invite me down to Sussex, to see Cotchford Farm. A few days after he’d left the Stones, I got a message from Shirley that Brian wanted me to ring him. While we were talking, he suddenly asked me if I’d like to go down there and spend the day.’

  Every minute of that day remains vivid in Helen’s mind. She went by train to Haywards Heath, telephoned Brian from the station, and he sent a local mini-cab to collect her. She arrived at Cotchford Farm in dazzling sunshine. Brian was waiting for her in the driveway, with his two dogs. He wore the striped matelot shirt she always pictured him in, with red and black striped trousers and an old, scuffed pair of canvas shoes.

  Even Helen’s uncritical eye could not help but notice his poor physical state – in particular, the sagging paunch under his shirt. Brian himself was painfully conscious of this. Walking with her round the garden, proudly pointing out the sundial and Christopher Robin statue, he agreed to be photographed only on condition the prints never left her private album.

  Inside the house she made the acquaintance of Anna Wohlin, a twenty-three-year-old Swede who had moved in with Brian only three weeks previously. Anna had been visiting London regularly since 1962 and had become a fringe member of the Stones’ circle, chumming up also with Jimi Hendrix, Rod Stewart and the Yardbirds. Brian had known her vaguely for some months, but had only taken a serious interest in her early in 1969 as his affair with Suki Poitier began to wane. He had in fact bought Cotchford Farm with the intention of living there with Suki. But their relationship was founded less on passion than friendship and mutual commiseration for the loss of Tara Browne. Besides, Suki was a city girl who became uneasy if she ventured more than a couple of miles from Chelsea’s King’s Road.

  To Helen Spittal, the young Swede seemed like yet another stand-in for Anita Pallenberg with her rangy figure, pale blonde hair and huge, star-lashed eyes. Anna herself would maintain that, on the contrary, Brian had fallen in love with her as a person in her own right, that their relationship had brought him happiness and emotional stability, and that they planned to marry and start a family.

  Certainly, the household at Cotchford seemed cosy and happy enough. Brian got on well with his housekeeper, Mrs Hallett, and his gardener, Mick. Always fond of animals, he had acquired an Afghan hound named Luther, a cocker spaniel named Emily and three spaniel puppies. One day, while out driving with Anna, he saw an injured cat lying in the road after having been hit by another driver. Brian tenderly scooped up the cat, drove it to the nearest vet and paid for it to be nursed back to health.

  A trusting, home-loving young woman, Anna cooked Brian’s meals, pandered to his every whim and made herself scarce whenever his rock star friends drove down from London to visit him. One she specially remembered was John Lennon, himself still unwillingly shackled to a supergroup, who urged Brian to get out of the Stones and repeated his terse advice, ‘Don’t weaken’, many times subsequently over the telephone.

  The only blot on the landscape seemed to be the builder Frank Thorogood, who seemed to have an almost mesmeric hold over Brian. Thorogood regarded himself as one of the family, eating dinner with Brian and Anna every night, ordering groceries for his building crew on Brian’s account, inviting them to help themselves to fresh vegetables from the farm’s kitchen garden. According to Anna, Thorogood even made a clumsy attempt to seduce her. Nor was the costly restoration work proving to be of high quality. One day as Anna stood in the kitchen, a newly installed ceiling beam came crashing down, missing her only by a few inches.

  Since Helen Spittal clearly offered no threat, Anna welcomed her in a friendly way and the two became good friends as the day progressed. Anna told Helen that Brian was now completely off drugs and was terrified when any of his visitors – like Keith – brought them into the house. When Anna had moved in, she said, Brian had gone through her luggage and even her toilet things to make sure they did not contain even mildly illegal substances.

  For most of the afternoon, the three sat beside the swimming pool, drinking wine and talking while Frank Thorogood moved around in the distance on what seemed to Helen to be somewhat desultory building work. She asked whether Brian was going to the Stones’ free concert in Hyde Park, two Saturdays from now. He said he didn’t think so. ‘The way the Stones feel about me now,’ he added, ‘I’d probably be the only one they charged to go in.’

  He talked a lot about Creedence Clearwater Revival, saying that was the kind of music he wanted to play from now on. He insisted on taking Helen into the house to hear Proud Mary on the stereo system he kept in his bedroom. While it was playing, she remembers, Brian looked out of the window and saw Frank Thorogood in the garden. ‘He suddenly went all strange. He said something like “That man’s not doing what he’s supposed to be doing …”’

  Later, Helen sat downstairs on Brian’s lime green velvet sofa while he talked about his plans for a new group and meditatively strummed a Gibson Firebird guitar. ‘He was asking me abo
ut my exams at school. I told him I’d got an English exam the very next day. He got quite annoyed – he told me I ought to be at home, revising for it. Then he insisted I ring my parents, to let them know I was all right.’

  In the evening, the girls watched Top of the Pops on television. Anna cooked a chicken for dinner, which was served in the dining room. Brian didn’t eat, but wandered back and forth, under the low beams, drinking from the bottle of red wine in his hand. He kept saying how much he loved being at Cotchford – how when he died, he wanted to be buried there.

  Wednesday, July 2, was an uneventuful day at Cotchford Farm – hot, sunny and quiet but for the coo of doves and the drone of bees. It was a day on which the high pollen count brought suffering to asthma and hay-fever victims all over Britain. As she worked around the house, Mary Hallett could hear Brian wheezing in distress and the frequent hiss of the decongestant inhaler which, in this long hot spell, he had seldom let out of his sight.

  Midway through the afternoon, Mrs Hallett remembered, Brian took a phone call which made him forget his asthma and put him in a state of euphoria. ‘He came running up to me and said, “My money’s coming through from America at last! Everything’s going to be all right!”’

  Frank Thorogood, as usual, had three or four of his workmen dispersed around the grounds. At about 6 p.m., the crew drove away and Thorogood retired to his pied-à-terre above the garage, where he was to spend the evening with a young woman named Janet Lawson. Anna Wohlin would later remember Brian’s annoyance that Thorogood was using the flatlet ‘like a hotel’.

  Brian and Anna spent the early part of the evening drinking and watching Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In show on television. Brian still fulminated against Thorogood, threatening to have the Stones’ office stop all further payments to the builder. But at about 10:30 p.m., his mood suddenly changed. He walked over to the garage flatlet and asked Thorogood and Janet Lawson to join Anna and him for a drink beside the swimming pool. Thorogood would later testify that Brian already seemed fairly drunk, that his gait was unsteady and his speech slurred.

  Thorogood and his lady friend made their way to the rustic bench at the pool’s shallow end where Brian and Anna were already seated with bottles of brandy, whisky and vodka. Two spotlights, which Thorogood’s men had just installed, shone down on the blue-tiled, motionless water.

  The four between them almost finished the brandy and vodka and drank about half the bottle of whisky. From time to time Brian would swallow a black pill, a legally prescribed downer such as he always took at night to calm his nerves and fears and ease him towards sleep on the mingling streams of music and alcohol.

  But tonight, the downers seemed to have lost their usual calming effect. Still in a state of euphoria that he was to be paid off from the Stones at last, Brian found it increasingly difficult to sit still. At around midnight, he stood up and announced he was going in for a swim. Janet Lawson – who, ironically, happened to be a trained nurse – told him he shouldn’t go into the water after drinking so much. Anna, too, protested, saying she was tired and wanted to go to bed. Brian took no notice of them and went into the house to change. When he reappeared in his swimming trunks, Thorogood, the minder he did not know he had, offered to go into the water with him.

  Thorogood, as he would later admit, was also very drunk, but managed to play the part of rock star’s faithful pal, helping Brian to mount the springboard over the ten-foot deep end. Hitting the water was hardly a shock, since Brian had turned the thermostat up to eighty degrees. Both men as they swam seemed ‘sluggish’ to Janet Lawson, she would later say, but they seemed to be feeling no serious ill-effects.

  Anna also agreed to swim but quickly came out, complaining that she was cold, and went into the house to change. Janet, who could not swim herself and was bored with watching, followed Anna inside. A few moments later, as he would later testify, Thorogood emerged from the pool and walked towards the house in search of cigarettes.

  As Thorogood appeared at the back door, he met Janet on her way outside again. He later remembered that, as he reached the living room, the telephone began to ring. Anna came running downstairs, calling out that it was for her. At that moment, they both heard Janet shout for help.

  The builder and the Swedish girl rushed out to the pool. The spotlights showed Brian at the deep end, lying face down at the bottom, his golden hair floating around him like a spread fan.

  Shirley Arnold’s parents in South London had just acquired their very first telephone. It rang for the first time sometime after midnight on July 3. Shirley herself picked up the receiver.

  ‘It was Tom Keylock’s wife. She said something like, “Brian went into the swimming pool but he didn’t come out again.” I thought she meant he’d wandered off into the woods or something, and they couldn’t find him. Even when I put down the receiver, I still thought she was saying Brian had got lost.

  ‘I rang her back a few moments later and said “Have they found him?” “No,” she said. “You don’t understand. He’s dead.”’

  Thorogood had initially tried to contact Tom Keylock, but had found Keylock neither at home nor with his alternative masters. Earlier in the day, he had driven down from London to West Wittering to pick up two guitars which Keith Richard needed for that night’s recording session. Though the journey took Keylock quite close to Cotchford Farm, he saw no reason to call in there. Since the Stones’ session would not begin until very late, Keylock took his time on the journey, stopping to have a meal at a place he can remember now only as ‘some sort of country club’.

  By the time he reached Olympic Studios with Keith’s two guitars, the Stones had been contacted, and were sitting round in an incredulous daze. ‘We think Brian’s dead,’ Mick Jagger told him.

  Keylock and Les Perrin arrived at Cotchford Farm together, shortly after 3.30 a.m. They found the garden overrun with police. Brian’s body had already been removed. At the poolside there remained only the towel on which, apparently, his companions had rested his head while trying to revive him.

  The size of the police contingent, and their overtly sceptical attitude, clearly indicated suspicion that drugs were involved somewhere. As Les Perrin walked round the pool-edge, he spotted Brian’s asthma-inhaler lying on the grass. ‘Very clever, Mr Perrin,’ was the sarcastic reply of the officer to whom he pointed this out. ‘You’re working like a good PR man. What did you do – drop it down your trouser-leg?’

  Keylock, meanwhile, drove off to collect Frank Thorogood from East Grinstead police station and hear the builder’s account of how Brian Jones had died. Thorogood said he had made three attempts to reach Brian before getting a grip on his hair strong enough to raise him to the surface. Thorogood and Anna Wohlin had together lifted him from the pool, and Janet Lawson, with her nurse’s training, had attempted artificial respiration, pumping water from Brian’s mouth and massaging his chest. When this had no effect, Anna had tried the ‘kiss of life’ method. At one point as she knelt over him, she had felt Brian’s hand grip hers. There was no other movement.

  The story broke in that morning’s Daily Mirror – a brief stop press item, under a ‘3:30 a.m., latest’ sticker, by Les Perrin’s old Fleet Street crony, Don Short. London’s two evening papers, the News and Standard, confirmed it at midday in identical one-inch banner headlines, BRIAN JONES DEAD IN POOL TRAGEDY.

  It was a story to delight the simplistic heart of every mass-circulation feature writer. The following day’s Mail, Mirror, Express and Sketch, in addition to front-page follow-ups on Brian’s death, all carried lengthy inside spreads, chronicling his boyhood in Cheltenham, his rise to fame as a Stone, his illegitimate children, his drug busts, the bizarre coincidence of his having died at the House at Pooh Corner. The Express story took its headline from Alexis Korner’s assertion that, since Brian split from the Stones, ‘he had never been happier’. The Mail ended by quoting portentously from Winnie-the-Pooh’s search for his hidden treasure trove. ‘“That’s funny – I know I had a
jar of honey there …” Brian Jones had the honey, labelled for all to see. But when he reached for it, it never seemed to be there …’

  Of the many pop celebrities asked to comment on Brian’s death, only two managed anything memorable. George Harrison said, ‘I don’t think he had enough love or understanding.’ Pete Townshend of The Who, with somewhat greater insight, said, ‘It’s a normal day for Brian … like, he died every day, you know.’

  The Stones themselves, taxed with that perennial newshound’s question, ‘How do you feel?’, could only mumble that they felt devastated, and try to carry on with the day’s business, an appearance on BBC-TV’s Top of the Pops show to launch their new single, Honky Tonk Women.

  Afterwards, all of them drifted back to the Maddox Street office as if reluctant to lose the solace of being together. ‘They were all in a terrible state,’ Shirley Arnold says. ‘Charlie was crying. Mick kept wandering to and fro and tripping over a dog’s bowl that was on the floor.’ Shirley herself had spoken to Brian by telephone on the day of his death, and had afterwards written him a long letter saying she’d always do anything she could to help him. Mick Taylor – who had never met Brian – could only sit there, inwardly noting ‘a sense of inevitability, as if everyone had been half-expecting it to happen.’

  The immediate question was whether they should go ahead with the Hyde Park free concert in two days’ time. Jagger said it was too late to cancel an event on which thousands were depending – and for which he, personally, had already accepted some considerable inconvenience. The day after the concert, he was due to fly to Australia to start work on Ned Kelly. The film’s producers, in a state of agitation since Jagger’s cannabis bust, had only just learned that his bail from Great Marlborough Street Court would allow him to travel abroad. They now feared that the free concert on July 5 would give him an excuse not to be on set, as promised, on July 9. They had even hinted that, if he sang in Hyde Park on Saturday and didn’t appear in Australia the following Monday, they’d sue him.