PHILIP NORMAN: “But alongside the rock’n’roll madness, family life of a sort – some would say a very good sort – also carried on. Up to then, in the whirl of recording and touring, Richards had had little time to get to know his son, Marlon. Now he embraced the role of father with enthusiasm, and inborn skill, setting aside the whole of each morning to be with Marlon rather than sleeping off the previous night’s drugs and booze. Dominique Tarle photographed him striding around Villefranche harbor in his sail-wide white flares with Marlon clamped to one skinny hip, or taking the little boy on car rides into the mountains or cuddling him to sleep in the stern of his speedboat, Mandrax. One unintentionally surreal picture shows a litter of guitar equipment with Marlon’s pet rabbit peeping from it.”
BOBBY KEYS: “Those days started when Keith got up. He’d usually get up with Marlon in the
mornings and take care of him because Anita slept quite late. Then he’d put Marlon in the boat and come get
me. And Marlon loved the boat. He was around four or so at the time. Another thing, too: Keith Richards did not
sleep very much. I mean, a few hours
here and there, but that was about it.
‘Course that’s about what I was doin,’ too, because I was pretty much on
the same schedule as him, so when he was ready to go, he’d either pull up to
the dock and blast away on that air horn that he had on his boat or he’d be
standin’ there next to my bed goin’, ‘Git yer Texas ass up!’ And I’d come
runnin’ down to my dock, jump in his boat, and we’d go down to this little town
right near the border with Italy, a place called Menton. This would generally be about seven or eight
o’clock in the morning. He’d do this all the time.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: "We'd go to the harbour and look at all the boats and walk up and down talking about them. Or we'd go for coffee and pastries in the Villefranche square, and sometimes we'd venture further up into the hills. Simple family pleasures."
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “In the cool of the evening after everyone at Nellcote had enjoyed their siesta, Bobby Keys and Anita would sometimes go out together to reconnoiter the coast, looking for a high value place to burgle.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “People high on acid would decide to shoot out to the village; the whole thing was so crazy. There were these French cowboys that used to hang out outside the house and go up to people when they came out, and so they started to kind of put pressure on us.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “Jake, Charley and Marlon would often go out on the Riva motorboat with Keith and Tommy to water ski or swim in the middle of the bay. At Nellcote, the boys were known as ‘the Rollies’ because they rolled joints for the Rolling Stones, specifically Keith, who liked smoking hash just to pass the time of day. Nor were these simple twist ups. They were authentic English hash-and-tobacco joints made of five separate cigarette papers glued together at right angles with a rolled strip of cardboard torn from a Rizla packed as a filter.”
CHARLEY WEBER: “We could roll a long one, a short one, a fat one, whatever anyone wanted. We used to roll the joints, but we were too young to drink or smoke. The norm was that we would dance around the room and get crazy to ‘Brown Sugar,’ and everyone else would get stoned.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “It was a little pirate harbor, pirate village – which was like the deepest harbor in the Mediterranean, so there were all these warships there – Russian submarines, American submarines – German, American navy, they were all there. It was, I suppose, one of their ports – you know, like the Sixth Fleet, they were always there… And on the other hand there was also Onassis, and Agnelli, and all those boats – they were all harbored there in the bay, and we had these huge binoculars set on the whole fucking scene! And we were just watching the whole bit, and then we started to get a bit braver and started launching out into this bay.”
SPANISH TONY: “Keith had always been a fan of Errol Flynn, whose swashbuckling outlaw arrogance was similar to his own. He developed a fixation about Flynn's yacht. He would stroll down to it with Anita and me when the harbor was quiet, and we would climb aboard to explore her. He talked with the harbormaster about buying her, but it was explained that owing to the tragic death of Flynn’s son in Vietnam, mooring fees had not been paid on the boat for many years. More than $200,000 was now owed, and the harbormaster was desperate to keep her afloat until probate was settled and he could sue for his money. ‘What would happen if she just sank one night?’ asked Keith. ‘Why, then, sir,’ he was told, ‘She would belong under maritime law to whoever salvaged her.’ ‘You realize what that means,’ Keith said when we were out of earshot. ‘If we sink the boat, we can arrange with the salvage crew to buy her for about fifty grand. I’m going to leave it for a couple of weeks; then I’ll nip down one night and just unplug those bilge pumps. She’ll be in forty feet of water by the morning.’ When the time came, he decided he was too well known to risk performing the evil deed himself, so he ordered me to do it. I refused.”
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STEPHEN DAVIS: “Reasoning that the sailors might have opium or hash to sell, Keith bought a sleek Riva powerboat so he could buzz out to the huge gray ships moored offshore… He ran the boat over rocks, crashed into other boats and ran out of fuel a few times. Since he had no radio, he drifted until someone rescued him. He named the boat ‘Mandrax.’”
BOBBY KEYS: “Keith also liked to pull into the harbor at
Monte Carlo, where this one guy would be, I forget his name, but he was
billionaire-zillionaire shipping guy in the same category as Onassis – you
know, he had the biggest private yacht on the south coast of France, had a helicopter
on the back of it and all this stuff – and Keith would cruise by and give him
the finger. Or make sharp turns and try
to splash the people on deck. This was
the Keith Richards I really got to know at that time because that fit with my
program. I liked to thumb my nose at the
elite, the rich – show ‘em your ass, give ‘em the finger, and tell ‘em to fuck
off. Splash ‘em with water and then move
on.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “We’d piss about; we’d go to Antibes. This boat could kick through. It had a big engine. And the Mediterranean when it’s smooth is a quick ride. The summer of ’71 was one of those Mediterranean summers where every day was perfect. You hardly needed to know any navigation; you’d just follow the coastline. I never had charts. Anita refused ever to board this boat on the grounds of my lack of familiarity with the submerged rocks. She would wait and watch for the distress flares as we ran out of petrol.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Keith drove a boat like he drove a car – you know, bouncing off trees, one prank after another – but he wouldn’t listen… so I’d be on the shore or in the house, hands together, praying it didn’t happen but just expecting him any minute to hit one of the boats or a metal marker or the jetty, just waiting for this explosion – you know, for the fuel to go up – but thank God by some miracle all that happened to him was he’d run out of gas. We’d hear this yelling from the bay. One of the boats would hand him down some fuel, or else we’d go out and rescue him.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Villefranche harbor is very deep and was a big hang for the American navy, and one day, suddenly, there was this huge aircraft carrier in the middle of the bay. The navy on a courtesy call. They did all the flag-waving around the Mediterranean during the summer. And as we were pulling away from our dock, we got this whiff of marijuana on a large scale blowing out of the portholes. Out of their brains. I had Bobby Keys with me. So we went to have breakfast, and when we came back we circled around the aircraft carrier, and there were all these sailors there who were glad they weren’t in Vietnam. And I was in my little ‘Mandrax.’ And we sniffed. ‘Oh, hi guys, I smell…’ And they threw us a bag of weed. And in exchange we told them which were the best whorehouses in town.”
ANONYMOUS: “Mick was sneaky. He was always doing more stuff than he let on but because he was doing it by himself and would never share his drugs with anybody if he could help it, no one knew. Let me tell you something. When he drinks, he is an addict as far as I’m concerned. He’s an alcoholic. He’s pathetic when he drinks.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “In those early days at Nellcote we’d do our promenades down by the harbors, or to the Café Albert in Villefranche, where Anita would drink her pastis. We were obviously conspicuous in those parts, but we were also pretty hardened and unworried by what people thought.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “We would record from late in the afternoon until five or six in the morning, and suddenly the dawn comes up and I’ve got this boat. Go down the steps through the cave to the dockside; let’s take ‘Mandrax’ to Italy for breakfast. We’d just jump in, Bobby Keys, me, Mick, whoever was up for it. Most days we would go down to Menton, an Italian town just inside France by some quirk of treaty making, or just beyond it to Italy proper. No passport, right pass Monte Carlo as the sun’s coming up with music ringing in our ears. Take a cassette player and play something we’ve done, play that second mix. Just pull up at the wharf and have a nice Italian breakfast. We liked the way the Italians cooked their eggs, and the bread. And with the fact that you have actually crossed a border and nobody knew shit or did shit about it, there was an extra sense of freedom. We’d play the mix to the Italians, see what they thought. If we hit the fishermen at the right time, we could get a red snapper off the boats and take it home for lunch.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “We’d pull into Monte Carlo for lunch. Have a chat with either Onassis’ lot or Niarchos’, who had the big yachts there. You could almost see the guns pointed at each other. That’s why we called it ‘Exile on Main St.’ When we first came up with the title it worked in American terms because everybody’s got a Main Street. But our Main Street was that Riviera strip. And we were exiles, so it rang perfectly true and said everything we needed.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “There was a lot of boating and people would go to Monte Carlo to gamble - Bobby Keys especially.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Bobby Keys and Jim Price started working with us on ‘Sticky Fingers’ and when we moved over to France, Bobby and Jim and Nicky Hopkins were just there. Almost as if they appeared through the wallpaper. Didn’t need much beckoning. It was great, we used to go to Italy for breakfast! We’d come out of the basement after about 12 hours of working and Bobby, Nicky and me and whoever’s left would zoom off in the speedboat with me as skipper and get something to eat. I’m a good sailor.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “Anita was always the center of attention. How could she not be? The woman was a natural wonder, as well as a force of nature. Though she rarely went swimming, the outfit she preferred to wear around the house was a microscopic leopard-skin bikini that left nothing to the imagination yet made everyone wonder how she might look without it.”
KEITH RICHARDS: "I was with Spanish Tony in Beaulieu, the next town along from Villefranche, and we got pulled over by the harbor master and his bosun. Anyway, they took us into the office. They were big guys and Spanish Tony smells trouble and says: 'Get ready. They're gonna do us.' I said: 'Right, I'll watch your back' and Tony went into action. Talk about Bruce Lee! Tony leapt onto this table, picked up a chair, and put the both of them down. Within two seconds these guys are groaning and going 'Zut alors!' and all this shit. 'Mon Dieu!' 'Sacre bleu!' and other curses in French. I stood on while Tony finished off the other and we split."
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “Like an Eagle Scout intent on earning as many merit badges as possible, Tommy Weber cemented his standing in the house on Saturday, May 22, 1971, by escorting Richards and Pallenberg through Monte Carlo on the day before the Monaco Grand Prix.”
TOMMY WEBER: “I knew the documentary film crew shooting the event and I had a photographer’s pass, and Keith and Anita had privileged passes, which meant we could go anywhere… We were allowed to walk the whole circuit of Monte Carlo from the start to the finish line.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “At a time when no one outside Mexico was drinking it, Tommy was also ‘carrying a bottle of tequila, which we consumed on our way ‘round the circuit.’ Greeting many of the drivers like old friends as he and Richards, who had always loved fast cars, and Pallenberg, who just liked to have fun in the most outrageous manner possible, they ‘staggered around in a haze of tequila with these cars.’”
DOMINIQUE TARLE: "Keith is the perfect friend we all wish to have. Children knew that, they would hang around, play and be comfortable with him all day long."
KEITH RICHARDS: "Kids can get used to anything. Go tell it to the gypsies. What's so weird about it? What am I going to do? Send Marlon to a prep school in a silly little uniform? This is what dad does. He was my navigator. At five years old he could read a map - to tell me when we're getting near the border, because I've got to dump the shit, you know what I mean?"
JO BERGMAN: “Anita is a Rolling Stone. She, Keith, Mick and Brian were the Rolling Stones. Anita is not a ‘wife of.’ Her influence has been profound. She keeps things crazy. It’s a totally different situation when she’s around. If you have Keith by himself it’s easy because you’re dealing with a rational human being. In some ways Anita is very unconscious in a sense where she’s almost primeval.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: "We all lived like a family at Nellcote. A dysfunctional family and Keith was in charge and pulled the strings."
KEITH RICHARDS: “Let’s face it, Anita and I were pretty fuckin’ wild, ha! But we all get along today.”
