November 1971–February 1972
“Hey, Chris, it’s Sid!”
I was sitting at my desk in Peter’s office, typing a letter and ignoring a big stack of papers that needed to be filed.
“Hi, Sid, what’s up? I was going to come by after work, is that okay?” Sid was my new best friend, a high-class drug dealer who sold to the “in” crowd in the Hollywood motion picture and record industries. He looked a lot like Santa Claus, big and round with a short white beard and collar-length white hair. And he always gave me free cocaine.
“Yeah, sure, that’s great, but look, I’m calling because I spoke to Marshall Chess last night,” Sid said. “Marshall is Leonard Chess’s son, he’s running Rolling Stones Records now, and he’s looking for an assistant. Are you interested in another job?”
“The Rolling Stones?” I said. I felt a rush of adrenaline and, God, did that feel good. How cool would it be to get back in the action and work for an English group again—and not just any group but, in my opinion, the second-greatest band in the world.
“I think it might be a good change for you,” Sid said, giving me Marshall’s number. I stared at that number for a long time, trying to think, the adrenaline still pumping. How could I leave Peter? We’d been working together since the Apple days, he’d paid for my plane ticket to LA and let me live in his house, and he was always so patient with me, so good and kind, putting up with my erratic schedule, long weekends, and periodic hangovers. But how could I turn down a chance to work for the Rolling Stones?
“Look, this is not going to be easy,” Marshall said as we talked in the office of his house set high above the Pacific Coast Highway. Very carefully, very strategically, he put the emphasis in that sentence on not. Thin, small, dark-haired, with nice eyes, a prominent but not unattractive nose, and a smile that made his eyes crinkle, Marshall was definitely an attractive, even sexy man, but his intensity scared me. I was accustomed to gentle, sensitive, tactful Peter with his polite English manners. Marshall was high energy and hard edged, his gaze unwavering, eyes narrowing as I detailed my work experience. His fingers tapped the table as if to hurry the conversation along.
“Mick and Keith will be living here for the next six or seven months, along with Bianca and Anita, and Mick Taylor and his wife, Rose. You’ll need to find nice houses for them, take care of daily business, book the recording sessions, attend to their personal needs, and then there’s the album to worry about: getting the cover designed, lining up photographers, the whole fucking thing. Charlie and Bill will be in town now and then, too, and they’ll need hotel rooms, limos, cash, dry cleaning, that kind of stuff. I’m hiring you as my personal assistant, so you’ll also be helping with the contracts, secretarial work, phone calls, and all the rest of it. Can you handle all that?” Marshall leaned back in his chair and actually took a breath.
“I can handle it,” I said. I’d had plenty of experience at Apple balancing the demands of the office, the studio scheduling, and various needs of the Apple artists, and I trusted my ability to handle the egos and demands of the Stones.
“I can offer you two hundred and fifty dollars a week,” he said. Well, now. Peter was paying me three hundred dollars a week, which wasn’t all that much money, even back then. But I weighed in the extra excitement of working for the Stones, along with the chance to add the experience to my résumé (and not being stuck in the office all day—freedom!), and took the job. Peter was sad to lose me, but he certainly understood the allure of the Rolling Stones. I found a replacement, Gloria, who ended up staying with him for many years, and as soon as I stopped working for Peter, Betsy and I became close friends, so it all worked out in the end, as things always seem to do.
My first responsibility as the Stones’ personal assistant was to find rental houses for Mick and Keith. I spent the next few weeks searching out the real estate listings and hoping to find the perfect house for each of them. Marshall was the opposite of a micromanager and seemed to trust that I knew what I was doing. I loved the freedom of waking up in the morning whenever I wanted, hitting the road in my trusty Toyota Corolla, and driving through the tree-lined streets of Beverly Hills. I was on my own, free to set my own schedule, and as I drove through the curving streets in the sunshine, the thick, salty presence of the ocean nearby—feeling the energy that always seemed to be hanging in the air—I fell back in love with LA. The smog wasn’t so bad back then and the trees didn’t droop the way they do now. LA was my town then and I loved it.
Finally, I found what I hoped would be the perfect house for Keith, a dark cottage-style home, on Stone Canyon Road in Bel Air, tucked away from the street and surrounded by big trees with a huge, sweeping front yard. I’d never met Keith Richard (who had dropped the “s” from his name at the time but would add it back on in 1978), but I’d certainly heard about his drug habits and outrageous ways, and I was guessing that his rough edges might need a comfortable place to rest and even, perhaps, soften, in this luxurious, elegant home. I went along with my instincts, and, thank God, Keith and Anita loved the house.
But still no house for Mick Jagger. I was having a hard time, to tell the truth, because I was worried about Bianca. I’d had only one encounter with Bianca, back in 1970 when I was spending a weekend at Mick’s country house in England. She was sitting on a kitchen stool, swinging her long, brown legs and looking seductively at Mick, when one of the houseguests came tearing down the stairs to announce that the upstairs bath was overflowing, and water was all over the place.
Bianca swiveled on the stool and said in a low, cool voice, “Oh, I must have forgotten.” She was completely nonplussed by the whole thing, and I got the distinct feeling that she had taken control of the house and of Mick. I looked at Mick as he looked at her, entranced, and I thought, Boy, is he hooked.
Bianca was accustomed to luxury, and I knew I’d better find the right house or I’d never hear the end of it. After weeks of scouring all the exclusive areas of Beverly Hills, I found the perfect house at 414 St. Pierre Road in Bel Air, just a five-minute drive from Keith’s house. A grand old mansion built in 1927 on a 6.5-acre estate, its best features were a large ballroom on the lower floor, a wood-paneled library, and a gargantuan bedroom suite, all decorated in heavy velvets and brocades.
The grounds were equally extravagant, with a swimming pool the size of a football field, another pool made to look like a river and big enough for a rowboat, tennis courts, four pink stucco guesthouses, and stately old trees with overarching branches and dense foliage. Newspaper tycoon William Randolph Hearst had bought the house for his mistress, actress Marion Davies; Howard Hughes had been a guest there in the grand old days of Hollywood, and John and Jackie Kennedy had honeymooned there in 1953. At least that’s what I was told, and I believed it.
Mick and Bianca loved it.
When I think back to those days, it seems so bizarre that we didn’t give any thought at all to security. None of the houses had walls or gates. The press wasn’t so pushy back then and fans, for the most part, were relatively well behaved. A few years earlier, when I was living with Leon, I remember a conversation he had with another musician. “Someday,” he said, “we’ll all live in gated houses.”
How paranoid, I thought at the time. Leon is so pessimistic. But of course he was right.
“C’mon, Chris, let’s go over to Keith’s.”
Mick and I were sitting on the floor of the wood-paneled study of the grand old Bel Air mansion I had rented for him. Bianca was out for dinner with friends, and their infant daughter, Jade, and her nanny, Sally, were upstairs in the nursery. The study was filled with deep-cushioned furniture and floor-to-ceiling bookcases. Heavy gold curtains lined the windows. Despite its elegance, though, the room had a musty, heavy, even slightly depressing feel.
I yawned and stretched. I was exhausted. I’d been working all day on the song lyrics for the Stones album Exile on Main street, and now the typed sheets were spread out in front of us on the floor as we listened to the acetates and checked them for accuracy. Mick had a pen in hand and was correcting the words I had typed in preparation to send them to the record company for the final go-through on the album. For the past week or so, it seemed that all I did was sit in front of the stereo, straining to decipher the lyrics—Mick’s words weren’t always easy to understand—writing them down and playing the same song over and over again to make sure I got it right. Then I’d type them, double and triple checking the finished version as Mick looked over my shoulder.
I looked at my watch—it was almost 10:00 p.m.—then gathered up the sheets of paper and grabbed my purse. I wasn’t all that excited to go to Keith and Anita’s place because I found it dark and depressing. I often stopped by there to do errands for Keith—deliver laundry from the dry cleaner, pick up a check to be cashed, get his signature on a legal document—but I rarely stayed for long. I wasn’t crazy about the hard-drug crowd that was always hanging around, and I wasn’t comfortable with Anita, who had a way of dismissing people with a flick of her hand and a few well-chosen words delivered in her heavy German-Italian accent. I didn’t take her bad manners or drugged-out behavior personally because I felt absolutely no connection to her. She was a man’s woman, not a woman’s woman like Pattie, and we pretty much ignored each other.
I liked Keith a lot. He had such a gentle way about him, and he was always kind to me and quick to express his gratitude for any little errand I would run for him. I worked for both Keith and Mick, but unlike Mick, Keith didn’t need much. He’d sign a bunch of blank checks, hand them over to me, and when he needed something—cigarettes, magazines, or cash for drugs—he’d call me. “Hey, Chris, would you have time to stop by the bank today?” he’d ask. I’d fill out the check for however much he needed and bring him the cash, the cigarettes, or the magazines.
“Thanks, Chris,” he’d always say with a smile and a little nod of gratitude. “Wanna hang out for a while?”
“Not today, Keith, sorry,” I’d say, making some excuse about having to get back to work at Mick’s place, where my office was set up.
Like Keith, Mick was a great boss, fun to be around and always telling me how much he appreciated my help. I’d type letters or lyrics, book studio time, hang out in the studio in case Mick or Keith needed anything, contact photographers for the album cover or the PR people to work on publicity, stuff like that. I also helped Mick with his personal life, responding to invitations to parties, returning calls to the Stones entourage of PR and businesspeople, making appointments for Bianca to get her hair done or her nails polished, or dealing with issues that affected Jade, such as finding a new nanny when Sally left suddenly.
I was the Stones’ go-to person, and I liked being right in the thick of things. With Mick, something exciting was always happening, and I was always included. Once again, I was part of the inner circle, a member of the elite club. There was no end of activities to keep me occupied, day and night. Working was part of the fun—how difficult is it to listen to rock music all day, type a letter here and there, organize studio sessions, call record executives, and sit in recording sessions half the night? That doesn’t mean there weren’t days when I wasn’t tired or angry or fed up with some or all of them, but most of the time I had so much fun it didn’t feel like work at all. I could show up at two or three in the afternoon, and if there was nothing pressing to do, I’d spend half the day lying out by the pool. There was no water in the pool, but still, it was a pool, the sun was shining, and I was working for the Rolling Stones. Life couldn’t get much better than that.
November and December passed quickly, and we were beginning a new year when Mick asked me if I wanted to go to a Chuck Berry concert.
“Sure!” I said, my standard response. I knew Mick had a lot of respect for Chuck Berry, one of the great pioneers of rock and roll music, and Keith idolized him. I was standing backstage watching the show with Mick and Keith when Chuck invited Keith to join him onstage. The sparks began to fly from the moment Keith swaggered out and the audience went wild. Chuck Berry put up with it for a while, but when he realized he was being upstaged and outshined, he didn’t look happy about it. From my position at the side of the stage it seemed as if Chuck pumped up the volume on his amp trying to outdo Keith (as if that were possible).
Mick was furious. “What the fuck?” he kept saying over and over again, his jaw tensed, brow furrowed, cheeks sucked in. I don’t know how long we stood there watching, but suddenly Mick was out on the stage with Chuck and Keith, dancing around in his sexy Mick dance, clapping his hands, knees bouncing together, pelvis thrusting, bottom wriggling. The crowd went berserk, which really pissed off Chuck Berry. Knowing that he’d made his point, Mick danced off the stage with Keith following right behind him. Minutes later we were in the limos, cracking up over the fact that Chuck Berry tried to screw around with Keith and got fucked royally.
It was sort of sad, actually. Chuck Berry had been one of their heroes, and they’d just seen his worst side. That happens in rock and roll, just as it does everywhere else in life. You idolize someone, put them on a pedestal, sing their praises, and wish you could be just like them, and then they do something that reveals their own insecurity or meanness of heart and you end up crushed. Even as we laughed about the whole thing, I felt bad for Mick and Keith. I felt especially bad for Keith, knowing that he wouldn’t be able to laugh it off and forget about it like Mick. Four years later, when Keith organized the Hail! Hail! Rock ’n’ Roll concert and film as a tribute to Chuck Berry, the two men apparently got into a heated argument over the song “Carol.” Later Keith said that Berry gave him “more headaches than Mick Jagger, but I still can’t dislike him.”
In spite of his rough, I-don’t-give-a-shit exterior, Keith Richards was a softie at heart. I adored him.
The Exile on Main street photo shoot is absolutely clear in my memory. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts were in LA for it, and we lined up Robert Frank, a well-known photographer and filmmaker, to take the pictures. Robert had already taken a Polaroid of me at Marshall Chess’s new place on Mulholland Drive. I love that picture, with my hair blowing away from my face; it appears on the lower-left corner on the back of the album cover and, I’ve learned, I’m sometimes referred to as “the mystery woman.”
We took limos down to LA’s squalid Main Street, where Robert had decided to take the photos. We followed him down the barren streets, glancing every now and then at the lost souls—the homeless, the drunk, and the destitute—peering at us from windows and doorways. At first they ignored us, but after a while people started following us down the streets.
“Hey, you Mick Jagger?” someone shouted.
Mick looked back, smiled, and did a small wave.
“You are, man, you are fucking Mick Jagger.”
“What are you doin’ here, man?” someone else shouted out. “Damn! This your band? Damn! It’s the fuckin’ Rolling Stones. We got the fuckin’ Rolling Stones here, walking down the damn fuckin’ street.”
As I watched the people following the Stones down Main Street, I flashed back to a conversation Pattie and I had at Friar Park one day. “You know, Chris, musicians are like Pied Pipers,” Pattie said. “They walk through the village playing their instruments and people just follow them to wherever they may be going.”
Men and women, young, old, black, brown, white, came out of the doorways and joined the little parade. As Robert snapped away and we led the group through the dirty and deserted streets of downtown LA, I had this amazing feeling of togetherness and unity with the Stones leading the way and the people of the street following along behind. Everything seemed connected—super-famous, super-rich superstars walking the streets with the impoverished citizens of Main Street, Los Angeles, seemingly breaking down the doors of difference, smiling in the warm winter sunshine, laughing, feeling good, happy to be alive. Of course, I was high on pot, along with everyone else, including the Stones, Robert Frank, Marshall Chess, and, from all appearances, the people we’d picked up along the way.
“Hey, you got anything to smoke?” I heard more than once, and we just laughed, because they knew we did, and we knew they did, and no drugs changed hands that day because there was no need.
As the sun descended in the west, sinking beneath the tall empty buildings and vacant parking lots, we drove back in the golden light to Beverly Hills, back to the big mansions and the expensive drugs and the quiet streets, looking forward to an evening of good food and wine. We were no longer thinking about the disconnect between us and them, the street people who were returning to their dark doorways and boarded-up windows, content to have had their brief but unforgettable experience of brushing up against fame.
One night in mid-February, three or four weeks before the Stones left Los Angeles for a break before their tour, Keith, Mick, Anita, and I were at Keith’s place drinking and passing a joint around. I went to the bathroom, just off the living room, and sitting right on the bathroom sink next to the toilet was a silver spoon. The middle of the spoon was all black, burned from cooking heroin. I stared at it, fascinated. I’d tried heroin once or twice, but I’d never injected the drug—shooting up was too risky, too crazy, too far-out. I’d seen what the drug had done to the Dominos, but as I stared at that black spoon I couldn’t help wondering what it would feel like to shoot up heroin.
I had a sudden, terrible thought. Shit—I hope that’s not the silver that came with the house. Because if it is, the thoughts kept spinning, then guess who is going to get stuck, once again, cleaning up after them and making things right with the real estate company. Memories of the Dominos breaking every bit of glass in their rented flat in London flooded over me. Breaking glass was one thing, but using the sterling silver spoons to mix up heroin was something altogether different.
I walked out of that bathroom feeling really depressed. Maybe it was the fact that I wasn’t getting enough sleep. Maybe it was all the coke I’d been snorting. Maybe it was the damn spoon. I don’t know what it was, but all I wanted to do right then was go home and sleep for three days.
Keith was sitting on the sofa, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, reading the Rolling Stone magazine I’d bought for him a few days earlier. Anita was fiddling with one of Marlon’s toys; just two and a half years old, Marlon was asleep in the back bedroom. Mick was smoking a joint, smiling in his cocky way.
“Listen to this fucking article in Rolling Stone about Harrison’s Bangladesh concert,” Keith said. He started reading from the article.
“‘The Concert for Bangladesh is rock reaching for its manhood.’ ” Keith raised an eyebrow. “ ‘Under the leadership of George Harrison, a group of rock musicians recognized, in a deliberate, self-conscious, and professional way, that they have responsibilities, and went about dealing with them seriously.’ ”
Keith looked at Mick and then at me. “Do you believe that shit? But wait, it gets better. Harrison is ‘a man with a sense of his own worth, his own role in the place of things … with few parallels among his peers.’ ”
“Bollocks.” Keith laughed, tossing the magazine on the coffee table. “What a fucking load of shit.”
I knew that Keith wasn’t really amused. He could be terribly insecure. A few weeks earlier he had asked me to listen to his song “Happy.” “Do you think it’s okay?” he asked me, clearly nervous about my reaction. “Yeah, it’s great,” I said. “It’s really a great song, I love it,” I added because he still looked like he wasn’t convinced it was any good. He seemed to relax a little, but I knew he’d be asking the same question again. “Is it okay? Is it any good?” What a paradox Keith was—a sweet, sensitive soul who wrote songs about needing love to be happy and yet he lived his life as if he couldn’t give a shit about anything.
But at that moment I wasn’t too interested in Keith’s feelings. I sat at the far end of the sofa, my legs and arms crossed, smoking a cigarette and drinking my Scotch and Coke as if it were straight Coke. I was pissed. Sure, I knew they were just being competitive, but I couldn’t stand listening to them make fun of George. I wanted to jump into the conversation and tell them to leave him alone. But what could I do? I worked for the Stones now, not the Beatles. This is weird, I know, and particularly strange in the context of the Stones’ remarkable longevity, but at that moment I had a sinking feeling that I was beginning my climb down the ladder. I’d started at the very top with the Beatles and now I was on the rung below. I found myself thinking at that moment that the Stones were sometimes a little too raw, too raunchy, too negative. I liked their music, and I liked each of them individually, but if I had to choose, the Beatles would win.
“You know,” I said, trying to smile but having a hard time of it, “George is my friend.”
Mick looked over at me as if he had forgotten I was there. “Oh yeah, Chris, you’re a Beatle person, aren’t you? Sorry about that.”
We let it go, then, but after I dropped Mick at his house and headed home through the dark canyons, I felt a sudden, intense longing to see Pattie and George. Mick was right. When it came right down to it, I was a Beatle person.