VILLA NELLCÔTE I, MAY 27–JUNE 4, 1971
AFTER HAVING SPENT A WEEK fulfilling my lifelong fantasy of attending the Cannes Film Festival, I headed back to Villa Nellcôte where I knew Keith Richards would be waiting to greet me with open arms. After knocking several times on the front door without getting any response, I just took the liberty of letting myself into the house. Calling out Keith’s name as softly as I could to announce my presence, I slowly made my way through a huge and completely deserted living room that looked as though it had just been hit by a bomb.
Shipping cartons that had not yet been unpacked stood scattered amid priceless pieces of antique furniture. Along with a good deal of sand, a variety of children’s beach toys lay strewn across the very expensive Persian rug covering the polished wooden parquet floor. From the mantle of the ornate white marble fireplace, a ridiculous-looking life-sized cardboard cutout of a shirtless Mick Jagger holding a copy of Sticky Fingers over his crotch stood keeping watch over it all.
Stepping through an open doorway into the dining room, I saw Keith sitting at the head of the table. On either side of him were people I did not know. At the far end of the table, Anita was balancing Marlon on her lap. Apparently, everyone had just finished eating lunch. While Keith seemed somewhat pleased to see me, his reaction was nothing compared to the way he had greeted me before.
Although I did not know why, the mood at the table seemed as dark and stormy as the weather had been for the past two weeks in the South of France. Sliding into the nearest empty seat, I did my best to blend into the scenery. As always at Villa Nellcôte, this proved impossible to do.
Turning to me with an inquisitive look on her face, Anita said, “So, did you bring us anything?” Completely misunderstanding her question, I wondered if she was talking about some kind of a housewarming present. Before I could ask, Anita clarified her demand by saying, “Did you bring us anything to smoke?”
Dim as a fifteen-watt lightbulb, I still did not get what she was talking about. Scattered everywhere before me on the table, I could see boxes of Rothman’s and Dunhill International cigarettes as well as packets of Gauloises and thick yellow Boyards so powerful that a single puff could knock even the most serious nicotine addict for a loop. If Anita wanted to smoke a cigarette, all she had to do was reach out for one.
Losing all patience with me, Anita said, “Did you bring us something to smoke so we can all get high, yes?” Nodding my head, I said, “Yeah. Actually, I did.”
Reaching into the English schoolboy’s satchel I carried with me everywhere back then in lieu of a briefcase, I brought forth the little tobacco tin I had been given in Cannes by a long-haired hippie publicity man who did not want to take its contents back with him through customs to America. When Anita opened the lid of the tin and saw all the high-quality Afghani hashish that it contained, her eyes lit up like I had just given her the Christmas present of her dreams.
As though no one else was fit to do the honors, the tin was quickly passed all the way down the table to Keith. From out of nowhere, packets of red Rizla rolling paper suddenly appeared before him. In no time at all, Keith had expertly crumbled just the right amount of black and sticky hash into tobacco from a Rothman’s cigarette and created the perfect English joint.
Striking a wooden match against the side of a little box, Keith lit up and inhaled deeply. As he smoked, everyone watched him in utter silence. Was this stuff any good? More to the point, was this stuff good enough for Keith? As the final arbiter in all such matters at Villa Nellcôte, his opinion was the only one that really mattered.
After letting all the smoke back out of his lungs, Keith smiled so broadly that his entire face lit up with delight. Like everything else in this house, the hash was of the highest quality. Although it was purely an accident that I had come there that day bearing tribute, my gift had been accepted in full. Because Keith had given his unqualified seal of approval to what I had brought with me, I was now most definitely persona grata at Villa Nellcôte.
After the joint had been passed around the table several times and smoked down to a glowing roach so that another one had to be rolled and then passed around as well, no one seemed in any hurry to leave. From out of nowhere, several bottles of fine white wine appeared. Drinking and smoking, everyone started telling incredibly funny stories. Before I knew it, the rest of the afternoon slipped away in a pastel-colored haze.
At some point, Keith himself showed me to my room. Located on the far side of the house, it was connected by a door to the room occupied by a man with short dark hair whom Keith and Anita had met while hanging out with the remnants of the Living Theater in Rome. Even though it seemed a bit odd that I had to walk through his room to use the bathroom, we both agreed this would not be a problem for either of us. Because of the man’s very active sex life with a variety of local young men, I soon learned that the door was almost always locked.
Bright and early the next morning, I dutifully unpacked my little battery-operated tape recorder and walked out onto the back steps of the house so I could begin interviewing Keith. With his legs crossed beneath him and a newly rolled joint in his hand, he sat without a shirt or shoes basking in the warm sunshine of a perfect spring day in the South of France.
Apparently completely at peace now that he and Anita and Marlon had landed safely in this stately pleasure dome by the sea, Keith never dodged a single question I asked him. Nor did I ever have to prompt him to tell me more. His focus and level of recollection were so extraordinary that a simple question about what he had been doing at art school evoked an astonishingly detailed, nine-paragraph answer.
At some point in the proceedings, Anita decided to join the conversation to offer a few choice comments about Brian Jones. In the tiny leopard-skin bikini that was always her outfit of choice at Nellcôte, Anita looked good enough to make a dead man come. Unlike me, Keith remained so centered that not even Anita could distract him.
The session was so intense that when I finally turned off the tape recorder an hour and a half later, I felt as though I had just done a full day’s work. When I asked Keith if we could do this again tomorrow at the same time and place, he said we could just pick it all right up from where we had left off whenever we next sat down to talk.
I then spent days waiting for this to happen. Fortunately for me, I happened to be living at Villa Nellcôte during what I would later come to call “the garden period.” Because the only intoxicating substances being passed around on a regular basis were smoke and wine, every day seemed like an excuse for another party.
Depending on how Keith felt when he came downstairs in the morning, he might have someone bring around the motorboat so we could all go water-skiing in the bay. Or he might spend a few hours sitting in the sun on the back steps reading the day-old English newspapers that had just been delivered to the house. Lunch out on the patio was always a major production. What with all the fuming hash joints and bottles of ice-cold white wine being passed around the table, the meal would sometimes go on for hours.
Once it was over, Keith might want to go for a drive in his red Jaguar XK-E. Stopping at some deserted beach just before sunset, he was more than happy to spend half an hour skipping stones off the water so they bounced again and again before disappearing beneath the surface. The point being that if Keith was happy, then so was everyone else at Villa Nellcôte. Whatever he chose to do on any given day became the central activity in which everyone else wanted to be involved.
Actually knowing who all these people really were or what they were doing at Nellcôte turned out to be a question no one could answer. If Keith said someone was cool, nothing more needed to be asked about them. With the possible exception of Anita, the single most impressive-looking person in the house was Tommy Weber, a long-haired race car driver who seemed to have stepped right out of the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night.
Tommy’s two young and completely adorable sons, Jake and Charley, also known as “Boo-boo,” were also there. This was a somewhat sad story because their mother, a beautiful young woman who called herself Ruby Tuesday, had only just taken her own life. Despite the fact that he was still mourning her loss, Tommy seemed to be having an extraordinary amount of fun at Nellcôte. One day he impressed everyone by telling us how he had just picked up a woman and then had it off with her on Errol Flynn’s yacht, which was moored nearby.
And then there was Spanish Tony Sanchez. With his dark shirred hair and sharp-boned face, Tony, or “Spanish,” as only Keith ever called him, would not have looked out of place selling stolen goods on some crowded street corner in Soho. Although Tony seemed a pleasant enough fellow, what I did not know then was that he was not just Keith and Anita’s friend but also the long-standing dealer by appointment to the Rolling Stones.
Desperately in need of money some years later, Tony would write a scurrilous and curiously inaccurate book about his drug-filled days and nights with Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards, Anita Pallenberg, and Mick Jagger. By then, Tony’s time of service with the Stones was long since over. And although Keith so terrified the man while standing beside him at a urinal in a club in London one night that Tony actually pissed on himself, he somehow managed to pass away some years later in a remarkably peaceful manner.
Accompanying Tony at Nellcôte was his girlfriend, Madeleine. Despite never having very much to say, she also seemed quite nice. Two years after her stay in the South of France, Madeleine would be turning tricks in Brighton for fifteen quid a night to support her heroin habit. She would later be found dead by her close friend Marianne Faithfull.
Wearing a full white racing suit adorned with a Grand Prix emblem, Keith’s good friend Stash also came to stay for a while at Nellcôte. Born Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola in Switzerland, Stash had attended an English boarding school, become an actor, and then played in a band that had opened for the Rolling Stones at the Olympia in Paris in 1964. As I later learned, he was the son of Balthus, the world-famous painter of prepubescent girls whose genius as an artist apparently included imagining himself to be a count, which may have explained why Stash liked to refer to himself as the heir apparent to the long-defunct Polish throne.
It was not just the complete lack of pertinent background information concerning my fellow residents at Nellcôte that kept me in the dark about them. The rhythm of daily life in the house was so removed from ordinary reality that I was completely oblivious to much of what was actually going on around me. All I could really think about was when I would get to talk to Keith again.
Fueled by tequila, a libation no one I knew in England was then drinking on a regular basis, my second interview session with Keith took place right after lunch a few days later. While we were talking to one another, our conversation seemed utterly brilliant to me. When I played back the tape later that afternoon, I realized that the gaps between my questions and Keith’s answers kept increasing in direct proportion to our continuing intake of tequila. By the end of the interview, the two of us were communicating in monosyllabic grunts that would have made no sense whatsoever on the printed page.
Despite how badly I needed to talk with him again, days passed without another session. Realizing that Keith was not about to sit down with me again until he was good and ready, I stopped emerging from my room bright and early each morning with my tape recorder in my hand. On some level, I cannot say I was all that unhappy because in that house, the music never stopped.
On a daily basis, cartons of albums that had not yet been released on either side of the Atlantic were delivered to Villa Nellcôte and then stacked up beside a turntable on which classic old soul, the blues, George Jones, Merle Haggard, Buddy Holly, and Chuck Berry were always going around. Long before it became the rage, Keith was crazy about reggae. Over and over, he would play a song with an infectious beat called “Funky Jamaica” by the JA Horns that really knocked him out.
Since no one on the planet was ever going to tell Keith Richards what kind of music he was going to play in his own house, I forced myself to stay up later than everyone else one night so I could put James Taylor’s Mud Slide Slim and the Blue Horizon on the stereo without being laughed at. As I was lying back against some cushions and listening to it in a far corner of the darkened living room, the back patio doors suddenly swung open and in came Keith.
Stooped over like a peasant gathering grain in a painting by Millet, he slowly began picking up the toys that Marlon had left scattered all over the living room floor during the day. In many ways, it was what any loving father would do before retiring for the night. Only as Keith performed this task, he happened to spy a rather large and distinctly ominous-looking capsule that was lying in plain view on the Persian carpet.
Whether it was a leaper, a creeper, a black beauty, or some consciousness-expanding psychedelic substance, I had no idea. But without breaking rhythm or even pausing to consider the consequences, Keith picked up the pill and popped it right into his mouth. Shooting me a cynical look that left no doubt as to what he thought of my current musical selection, Keith then kept right on moving up the stairs. Despite how hard-core I now knew the man could sometimes be, even I was not prepared for the performance Keith put on at lunch the next day.
Within the music business by this time, word had gotten out that the Stones were planning to tour America once they had finished recording their new album. Like moths to a flame, various rock ’n’ roll entrepreneurs made it their business to journey to the South of France to offer their services in putting the tour together. Earlier in the month, David Geffen had done his best to persuade the Stones that no one was better suited for the job than him only to have Mick Jagger decide otherwise.
Seated across from Keith at lunch this day at Nellcôte, the candidate in question was Jon Taplin, a Princeton graduate who was then managing The Band and who would go on to become a well-known film producer. Although he seemed perfectly pleasant, not to mention a far more competent businessman than anyone who had ever taken the Stones out on tour before, something about him rubbed Keith the wrong way.
As Taplin began detailing precisely how he would handle the tour of America to a tableful of people, none of whom he had been introduced to by name, Keith looked decidedly bored. Reaching for his acoustic Gibson Hummingbird guitar adorned with tiny flowers and butterflies on the pick guard, Keith leaned his head in close to the strings to make sure they were properly tuned.
Over and over again all week long until it seemed like he was trying to hypnotize himself, Keith had been playing “The Jerk,” a Curtis Mayfield and the Impressions sound-alike that had been a big hit for Don Julian and the Larks on the Money label in 1964. With his eyes shut and his head cradled against the body of his guitar, Keith started strumming the song’s basic riff while mouthing the lyrics to himself.
Although Taplin did his best to keep right on pitching, he soon realized that no man was a match for Keith Richards when he was in this particular mood. Knowing he was not going to get the deal, Taplin quickly left the house once lunch was over. As though he had never even been there, Keith just kept right on playing the song over and over again.
Against such a force of nature, I stood no chance at all. And so when several more days passed without Keith sitting down to talk to me again, I knew there was nothing I could do about it but wait. At Nellcôte, everyone else still seemed to be having a fine time. Unlike them, I had an interview to do with Keith. But no matter how hard I tried, I could not get him to cooperate with me. For me, what had been rock ’n’ roll heaven had now become rock ’n’ roll hell. Trapped in the ninth circle where only the very worst sinners could be found suffering for eternity, all I could do was wait.