Their Satanic Majesties

NICK KENT: “The rules were all changing. ‘Tame’ was out. ‘Audacious’ was in. The Zeitgeist pendulum had moved to the other end of the culture spectrum, the one diametrically opposed to notions of conformism and bourgeois uniformity. And the Rolling Stones were at the center of this cultural youth quake, its designated dam-busters."

ANITA PALLENBERG: “From when I first met him, I saw Mick was in love with Keith. It is still that way.”

ZACHARY LAZAR: “The Stones became a set of pictures in magazines: pouting young men in lavender and rust, oddly tailored suits made of suede. As if cities were moods, each stop seemed to bring out in them some new kind of flamboyance, the ceaselessly changing backdrops – Sydney, Tokyo, Munich, Rome – triggering an urge to live out another aspect of the total freedom that was the compensation for having given up their identities. They wore white suits, white shoes, acrylic blue shirts with polka dots, sideburns and tinted sunglasses,  They moved through everything in an increasingly arrogant fog, aware of secret jokes and ironies, except for Brian, who sometimes moved through it like someone already dead, standing onstage with a Vox guitar and bangs that covered his eyes.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “It is a stunning metamorphosis, when somebody changes from being young and unsure of himself to suddenly becoming a kind of young prince with all the power and privilege of royalty.  Mick and Keith made the transition very smoothly, just as if everything that was happening to them, no matter how enormous and quickly, was rather normal.”

KEITH ALTHAM: “Brian moves softly about the studio in painted shoes, red and black striped trousers and huge sheepskin waistcoat which makes him appear like some bizarre troglodyte… Brian was planning an excursion to Libya and indicated the glossy brochure he had bought on the country.  ‘Look at these fantastic Roman remains,’ he enthused. ‘I’m going to find somewhere in the middle of the Sahara where there are no photographers.’ Keith is clad in one of those unbelievable blue creations with many other colors that billow from his arms and fall in fringes almost to the floor.  He sits tuning his guitar and appeals desperately to the ceiling ‘Someone give me an E!’ Jagger sits perched upon a high stool in the control room surveying the music makers with an indulgent air, his leg twisted about the lower struts of his seat and leaning forward so that his spine sticks out through the thin purple shirt.  Marianne Faithfull sits cool and detached behind him, reading a copy of ‘A Treatise On White Magic’ from which she takes a little time out to talk a little with me.  I expressed an interest in the small book in her bag by poet-philosopher Omar Khayyam and she gave it to me.  The whole atmosphere in the studio was one of a friendly, unhurried meeting between five old friends who were not going to rush into anything that was not their best.”

KEITH ALTHAM: “Keith had acquired a cap during the evening’s recording with three badges resplendent on the peak. ‘The badge with the two white strokes stands for equal rights,’ he explained. ‘The photo in the other badge is of the Russian astronaut who was burned to death on re-entering the Earth’s atmosphere.’ The last badge depicted a latterday Hollywood blonde in surrealistic backgrounds – ‘and that,’ said Keith, ‘is lovely Rita!’”

KEITH ALTHAM: “Just what is going to turn up on this next Stones LP is still somewhat confusing, but there are likely to be quite a few surprises.  Marianne, for example, revealed that Mick has a book on nursery rhymes – ‘the I was going to St Ives and met a man with seven wives variety’ – and he was considering working some of them into the album.  Brian Jones had a thing about some 1930s discs owned by his father on which there was an organist called Harry Foote.  One particular title he mentioned was ‘Plum Blossom.’ In between-times, Charlie talked to Mick of Mick’s meeting with the Maharishi Yogi, and wanted to know what Mick asked him. ‘Oh, about the church and religion,’ said Mick vaguely. Charlie was skeptical about the little portrait that Maharishi carried of his guru. ‘It’s only something to help him remember he is carrying the thoughts on from another,’ said Mick.  There was a heated discussion in the control room between Glyn Johns, who abhors bullfights, though he’s never been to one, and Brian Jones interceded on my behalf for the defense. ‘It’s not a sport – that is an English misconception,’ said Brian. ‘It’s a spectacle the same way a Greek tragedy is a spectacle – it is life as it is death and sad as it is happy.’ Glyn was not to be convinced that the spectacle of any animal in pain was a desirable one and Marianne finally made a profound remark about, ‘Nature at the mercy of mankind,’ and we all forgot the subject.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “That was when the drug culture had started to explode. First came the Mandrax with the grass, then the acid in late ’66, then the coke sometime in ’67, then the smack – always. I remember David Courts, the original maker of my skull ring, still a close friend, coming out to dinner in a pub near Redlands. He’d had some Mandrax and some bevvies and now wanted to rest his head in the soup. I remember it only because Mick carried him on his back to the car. He would never do something like that now.”

CHRISTOPHER GIBBS: “With acid there was an emergence of young people who dressed to die for.”

BRIAN JONES: “If you can’t dress out of Woolworth’s you haven’t got style.”

LAURA JACKSON: “In part to compensate for his insecurities, Brian’s answer was to accentuate his other attractions, especially his stance as the ultimate fashion symbol. Already the personification of irresponsible and dangerous glamor, extravagantly he pushed this to its androgynous limits, introducing laces and robes, flowing scarves and floppy brimmed hats to London fashion, such as hitherto had been the strict preserve of Ladies Day at Ascot. Frock coats and silk shirts, striped trews and furry waistcoats, not to mention dazzling candy-striped blazers from which he would protect himself with tinted oblong-shaped glasses, brought the camera zooming dementedly in on his exotic figure. To the delight of boutique owners, it also sent the masses on furious shopping raids as 1966 began the momentum for the psychedelic era and the explosion of flower power in the year to come.”

OSSIE CLARK: “When I finally graduated from the Royal College, I knew very definitely what I wanted to do, and it was quite easy to do it, really, because at that time, there was very little that was made specifically for young people.  So I began by making really feminine clothes for the young girls using fabrics that weren’t about at that time, like satin, lace and stuff.  You couldn’t buy that really, and I sold it in my shop on King’s Road called Quorum.  At first, it was derided by the press.  They thought it was a joke.  It wasn’t until people came along and started to wear them that they took it seriously and began to accept skirts up to here and snakeskin jackets and all my things, which were very different from everyone else’s.  I did just about anything to be different, just simply to be different.  That was half the motivation.  We all had this feeling that young could do anything.  And I think at the time that anyone with a good idea could get the money for it quite easily.  It was the first time that England was becoming a fashion center.  Brian Jones and Keith Richards took to wearing the satins printed by Celia [Birtwell] and the skin-tight jewel-coloured trousers from a stash of pre-war corset satin Alice Pollock found. I made them shirts with frills in chiffon, in crepe with a one-sided silver collar and a leather jacket of metallic blue snake.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “We decided, ‘Right, this is our mission,’ and at once began to build the walls of our New Jerusalem – somewhat along the lines of the defenses of Paris in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Free love, psychedelic drugs, fashion, Zen, Nietzsche, tribal trinkets, customized Existentialism, hedonism and rock’n’roll. And lo and behold, before too long there was a definite buzz going on... Hipness, decadence, and exquisite tailoring such as England had not seen since the Restoration of Charles II. A fusion of decadence and surging yobby energy. Rock raunch, hipster cool and I don’t give a fuck defiance deftly grafted on the languid world-weary pose of Romantic agony.”

SIMON WELLS: “The familiar chant of ‘you’re not hit ‘till you trip’ was flying around London’s hip elite, and for Keith and Brian LSD was an exciting opportunity to play Russian roulette with their consciousness.  Jagger, however, was wary.  Like Paul McCartney, he had monitored closely LSD’s debilitating effect of ‘ego loss’ on his peers, and he was still cool towards the prospect of an undetermined chemical neutering the driving component in his psyche.  After a party the previous month at which Keith and Brian had freaked out after taking some particularly strong acid, Mick commented to close associate, film director Donald Cammell: ‘This is all getting out of hand.  I don’t know where it’s all going to end.’”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “The 60's: Bengalis selling scarves with magic signs on them, two buskers in Elizabethan rags playing hurdy-gurdies and tiny drums, a couple of hustlers selling knock-offs of those big plastic Biba bracelets. Shop windows filled with bright Smarty colors. Miniskirts, sequined gowns, slinky thigh-high boots, brass earrings, boas. Everything sparkling, modern, dazzling.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “You had to be with the right people when you were taking acid, otherwise beware. Brian on acid, for example, was a loose cannon. Either he’d be incredibly relaxed and funny, or he’d be one of the cats that would lead you down the bad road when the good road closes. And suddenly you’re going there, down the street of paranoia. And on acid you can’t really control it. Why am I going into this black dot? I just don’t want to go there. Let’s go back to the crossroads and see if the good road opens. I want to see that flock of birds again and have a few astounding ideas for playing and finding the Lost Chord. The holy grail of music, very fashionable at the time. There were a lot of Pre-Raphaelites running around in velvet with scarves tied to their knees looking for the Holy Grail, the Lost Court of King Arthur, UFOs and ley lines.”

MICHAEL ENGLISH: “Brian was my favorite acid partner.  I nearly had a bad trip with him because I got involved in the passing of time.  Brian had a book called ‘The Expanding Universe,’ just a picture book that began with a girl with a cat in her arms, sitting on her chair, and the next picture, you see her from about a hundred feet away, and then you expand outward into outer space, so by the end of the book you are out in outer space with all the galaxies.  I was looking at that book, getting increasingly frightened at the way time was related to space, and the whole thing was too overpowering for me.  I damn near let go, and I think that was the closest I ever got to losing control.”

A.E. HOTCHNER: “Marianne contributed to the attention the Stones were getting by such behavior as posing in the nude for Salvador Dali, and by getting into a flap with a fashionable, staid London restaurant because she came to lunch without wearing a bra.  When a reporter asked her if she had an ambition in life, her reply got wide coverage: ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘it’s always been my ambition to be killed by some lover in a fit of passionate jealousy.’”

KEITH ALTHAM: “I was walking down Wigmore Street very early in the morning after a concert I was reviewing, and a black Rolls-Royce came towards me from the other side of the road.  It was fairly surreal as it was just me and this car.  Anyway, the back doors of this Rolls suddenly sprung open and this figure came running across the road towards me in a fur coat, and it was Marianne Faithfull.  She said, ‘Darling, I just adored your review of the Stones’ ‘Satanic Majesties’ album, absolutely wonderful trip!’ and she rushed away!  To this day I have never been sure if she was referring to the album or the review!”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “We went out almost every night dressed up in our finery – to the ballet, a club, gallery openings, the theater. It was the peaking of the London fashion parade and there were parties every night. We missed not a one. Mick was, in John Lennon’s words, the ‘king of the scene.’”

OSSIE CLARK: “Cheyne Walk – Chrissie Gibbs and Marianne.  Cocaine on the Georgian mantle piece in Jagger’s house, my first time… My first sight of Jumping Jack Flash was his tongue, which appeared from behind the curtain of the two changing rooms, followed by his face, which broke into the grin I was destined to know so well… There was no conceit, he was very natural, coy, camp almost, a joker, self-confident, sensuous lips, a winning smile broke over large teeth – I noticed the expensive cosmetic dentistry, the expressive blue eyes that creased up with laughter and the fake cockney accent… Marianne bought a suede suit trimmed in python with a fluted peplum and never asked the price.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I knew Mick and I knew Ossie. I thought they were made for each other and they were. Mick needed somebody who could express what he saw himself as being. They were kindred spirits. Mick had a vision in his head of what he wanted to be and Ossie implemented that vision.”

OSSIE CLARK: “Marianne Faithfull was a good customer – she bought everything without even trying them on – all the lovely chiffons and the silk blouse which became pin-holed with hash burns. She bought more – she was very generous.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I taught Mick to open up to a whole new world – theater, dance, pictures, furniture, fabrics, architecture – a whole new world.  I took him to the ballet for the first time and he loved it.  It was a particularly fortunate time because he was just developing his dancing technique on stage and at that time he was not a caricature.  He was amazing, truly amazing the way he moved, his natural instincts. And I though he really must see Nureyev because what he was doing was so similar to Nureyev’s style, and they even looked alike.  I think we would have gone to the ballet much more often, but it was just such a jam with all the photographers and the media.  That was inhibiting and it cut off a lot of things we might have done together.  But there were beautiful pictures and all sorts of new things for him to learn about without us having to go public.  I even got him interested in the beauty of lace.”

ELIZABETH WINDER: “Like many philanderers, Mick was also a serial monogamist and preferred the comfort of living with women.  Cautiously, Marianne moved into Harley House.  The ghost of Chrissie Shrimpton hung heavy in the air – stray straight strands of chestnut hair, strips of Glorene lashes still sticky with glue, little square bottles of Givenchy L’Interdit with the lingering scent of fizzy orange and powedered makeup.  A Victorian birdcage with a brass bird that sang, a rocking horse from Harrods named Petunia.  It was eerily childlike yet shot through with the pain of Chrissie’s shattered dreams.”

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “Entering the Cheyne Walk house was like stepping into a pasha’s harem, or an opium den. Blinds shut out the midday sun, and only a small table lamp illuminated the huge living room, with its walk-in fireplace and massive furniture.”

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “Faithfull and Jagger seemed dwarfed by their Brobdingnagian surroundings. There was a faint impression of both Mick and Marianne themselves being the children of the house rather than the owners. And, like children out on a spree, they had the money to spend on what they fancied. One game they enjoyed was dress up. Just as Anita Pallenberg routinely exchanged clothes with both Brian and Keith, Marianne and Jagger enjoyed rummaging through each other’s closets in search of just the right thing to wear. The slightly built Mick, who now wore heavy Kohl makeup around his eyes, would wriggle into Marianne’s dresses, blouses, skirts and furs, top them off with a feather boa and lots of jewelry – and then slink about the house. If Marianne was lucky, he might entertain her with his Tina Turner impersonation.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “It was the first very social phase of my relationship with Mick. There was a lot of staying up all night and Mick holding court. Anybody who came into town would come and see him. It was a big posh house. Neither of us cared for the décor, but since it was rented there wasn’t much we could do about it. Christopher Gibbs came up with a way to around this with masses of Moroccan hangings that I draped all over the sofas, the walls and the floor. Not too good for the hangings but it was wonderful for what we wanted: a lot of lying about looking great. In the middle of all this North African splendor was a huge glowing green Perspex flying saucer that I had bought from Robert Fraser’s gallery in Duke Street.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Mick was an impeccable host, always jumping up to get things, juggling conversations, finding something new and amazing to dip into. And, of course, he always had fantastic records. He’d play wonderful old blues and Motown, Hank and Audrey Williams duets, Sun Ra and Joe Tex. He was the greatest in-house deejay in the world. I’d have all my fairy-tale books spread out on the bed: Edmund Dulac, Arthur Ransom, Rossetti, Heath Robinson, all those bizarre Victorian illustrators. Faces coming out of trees, talking fish, the King of the Mountains of the Moon and his bewitched court.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “At about 10 o’clock at night everyone would be famished and we’d stagger out to Alvaro’s for some wonderful pasta. But once we got there we’d be so stoned we could barely manage more than a mouthful. I’d stare at the exquisite china and watch the tiny dragons crawl over the fettuccine while Anita and Robert talked about shoes and art in Italian.”

BARRY MILES: “At Granny Takes A Trip, the fashion windows were extreme and were changed regularly.  One time a large American Indian stared out stoically at the World’s End Pub over the road; another time it was a stylized dollybird looking rather like Twiggy.  The most spectacular was the front half of an American car protruding from the window as if the back half was still embedded inside.  Granny’s was the place for really frilly shirts – you could buy them with frills that buttoned on over the regular shirt buttons.  Granny’s and Hung On You sold crushed velvet pants, long lapel satin and silk shirts and soft chiffon and silk scarves.  A glance at album sleeves from the period shows that most of the groups, from the Beatles and the Stones on down, patronized both stores liberally.”

BARRY MILES: “International Times was launched with an all-night rave, a ‘Pop op costume masque drag ball et al’ held at the Roundhouse, a huge circular Victorian building in Camben Town. For your five shillings in advance, people were promised: ‘Strip trip/happenings/movies/Soft Machine/ Pink Floyd/ Steel band’ and a ‘sur prize for the shortest-barest.’ Marianne Faithfull won the ‘shortest-barest’ contest in a nun’s costume that didn’t quite cover her ass. Paul McCartney, dressed as an Arab, circulated without being hassled. Monica Viti and Michelangelo Antonioni seemed in a state of shock. Films by Antony Balch, William Burroughs and Kenneth Anger played continuously, and the lack of heating on the cold October night made everybody dance. It was the Pink Floyd’s first large gig and they pulled out all the stops, ending the night dramatically by blowing the fuses on the entire building and plunging everyone into complete darkness. In the middle of the hall was a mountain of jelly, which people ate at midnight.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I met the Beatles straight away.  I met Paul McCartney via Peter Asher, and I met John Lennon because Paul and John were close friends of John Dunbar.  Lennon and John took thousands of acid trips together.  Lennon’s attitude towards me changed a lot when I went off with Mick.  He didn’t like that at all.  I’d see him and he was always in such a wild state on acid it scared me.  He really scared me, actually.  All the motion that came out on the Plastic Ono Band was there for years for all to see.  He had huge numbers of demons.  Maybe we all do, but he had more than most.  I sang on ‘All You Need Is Love.’ I went to a lot of Paul’s sessions – I was there when he did ‘Lovely Rita’ and ‘Fixing A Hole.’ Always late evening.  That’s when I saw John Lennon mostly.  He was very forbidding.  He didn’t like other people being there.  I was always very shy and quiet.  Even with the Stones I didn’t want to be noticed.  I sang on ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want,’ but I wore a dark green floppy hat so you couldn’t see me.  At least Paul was welcoming.  I liked Linda McCartney very much but she didn’t like me.  She wasn’t sure whether I’d had an affair with Paul.  She thought everybody had because he had a lot of affairs.  Not me though.  I wasn’t one of his affairs.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “One night we went to see Jimi Hendrix at the Speakeasy. This was a few months after I’d seen him at the Seven and a Half Club. He was by now the toast of the town and on the verge of displacing Mick as the great sex symbol of the moment. After the show, Jimi came over to our table and pulled up a chair next to me and began whispering in my ear. He was saying anything he could think of to get me to go home with him. All the things he wanted to do to me sexually. Telling me he’d written ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ for me. Saying ‘Come with me now, baby, let’s split! Whatchya doin’ with this jerk, anyway?’ I wanted more than anything to go off with him, but I was a coward. And Mick would never ever have forgiven me. Throughout this whole scene Mick remained a model of Brit sangfroid.”

BARRY MILES: “One very durable aspect of the 60s counterculture was the personal growth movement…  Let’s not forget the Maharishi’s Transcendental Meditation, Krishna Consciousness, the Naropa Institute (the Tibetan Buddhist followers of Chogyam Trungpa), Scientology, the Process, various Zen Buddhist sects including the tantric fire-eating members of Kailas Shugendo (Yamabushi) and the quite bread-makers of Tasahara.  There were scores of Hindu swamis, mostly in competition with each other and denouncing the others as frauds.  There were also western witches, wiccas and wizards, the followers of the OTO, the Golden Dawn Society, the Great Beast Crowley, the followers of lay lines and the flying saucer watchers.  No other period can have produced such a quantity of such imaginative speculation and belief in so short a time.”

DONOVAN: “The search within, using powerful sacred plants, took us part of the way, but some of us searched for a teacher of meditation.  The Beatles and I read in the Buddhist Sutras and Vedic Classics of the Mantra which leads within and ends all suffering through the opening of the third eye.  This would be the most useful Bohemian gift to the world, no question about it.  First ‘we’ would have to get it for ourselves.  We knew no guru to teach us, then he arrived in England to give a talk.  It was Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.  I arrived at where he was staying, initiating.  The house was empty of furnishings, American women in saris, the men in suits.  All around the wall, sitting cross-legged, were those to be initiated.  Five hairy guys from a band sat waiting.”

DONOVAN: “When Maharishi knew I was there, I was upgraded and led into the little breakfast room where he was initiating, into the low-lit room, and he gave me the great gift of my mantra.  I fell deep down inside like Alice down the rabbit hole.  Bliss Consciousness dawned and I knew the books were right about everything.  Afterwards an aide said ‘Maharishi, the next ones are here.’ ‘What are their names?’ the Guru asked. ‘The Grateful Dead, Maharishi.’ The Guru laughed and said, ‘They should call themselves the grateful living.’ I strolled out into the sunshine, as those hair guys silently shuffled in.  In my limo, I lit up a joint and mused about my mantra, as the long car floated through the rainbow spray of the sprinklers on the perfectly manicured lawns.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “The Tantric Art thing was the only thing that interested me really in those days.  I mean, I had no time to meditate then; I still don’t find much time, really.  Don’t know about you lot!  I strayed from the path, I admit it.  If someone is involved in what’s going on around them, they aren’t gonna get caught up by a bunch of Indian hustlers.  If you’re looking for a guru, forget it – they find you, you don’t find them – a guru looks for his fucking apprentice.  One day somebody’ll tap me on the shoulder and it’ll be a bloke in a turban saying ‘You!’ and until that happens I’ll forget it – you know, I’ve got too much else to take care of, quite honestly.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “There were some fascinating people. Captain Fraser, who’d had a commission in the King’s African Rifles, the strong arm of colonial authority in East Africa, was posted in Uganda, where Idi Amin was his sergeant. He’d turned into Strawberry Bob, floating around in slippers and Rajasthani trousers by night, and gangster-sharp pin-stripes and polka-dot suits by day. The Robert Fraser Gallery was pretty much the cutting edge. I’d sometimes drop by his flat in Mount Street – the salon of the period – in the morning if I’d been up all night and I’d just got the new Booker T. or Otis Redding album. And there was Mohammed, the Moroccan servant in the djellaba, preparing a couple of pipes, and we’d listen to ‘Green Onions,’ or ‘Chinese Checkers,’ or ‘Chained and Bound.’ Robert was into smack. He had a cupboard full of double-breasted suits, all superbly made… and he used to keep spare jacks loose in these suit pockets, so he’d always be going to the cupboard and going through all the pockets to find the odd spare jack. Robert’s flat was full of fantastic objects, Tibetan skulls lined with silver, bones with silver caps on the end, Tiffany art nouveau lamps and beautiful fabrics and textiles everywhere. He’d float around in these bright-colored silk shirts he’d brought back from India. Robert really liked to get stoned, ‘wonderful hashish,’ ‘Afghani primo.’ He was a weird mixture of avant-garde and very old-fashioned.”

 

ANITA PALLENBERG: “The first time I met Robert was at a rather stuffy reception in London – the surroundings were very grand, the place filled with Lords and Lady doo-dahs, and there, across the room, was this guy in a bright green suit, green shirt, green tie, green shoes, and his fly open.  ‘That’s someone I’ve got to meet!’ I thought.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “When Anita first met Gibby – Christopher Gibbs – he’d just come out of jail for taking a book from Sotheby’s, aged eighteen or something – always a passionate collector and with a very good eye. I’ve always loved Gibby in his own way. I used to stay at his apartment in Cheyne Walk on the embankment. He had a great library of books. I could just sit around, look at beautiful first editions and great illustrations and paintings and stuff that I hadn’t had time to get into because I’d been working on the road. He’s the only guy I know what would actually wake up and break an amyl nitrate popper under his nose. That even took me out. He’d have on by the side of the bed. Just twist that little yellow phial and wake up. I saw him do it. I was amazed. I didn’t mind the poppers, but usually later at night.”

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “Gibbs’ house was a dreamlike vision straight out of the Arabian Nights.  At every turn there were Moorish lanterns, leather camel saddles, and jewel-like Persian carpets – all viewed through an acrid haze of burning incense.  Guests draped in caftans or Victorian lace luxuriated on huge embroidered cushions strewn about the floor.”

JOHN MICHEL: “It was a wondrous room, a temple of the Mysteries. [Gibbs’ parties] attracted the confused, the catatonic, and the ecstatic. Night after night gathered the select pipe-dreamers of sixties Chelsea: poets and mystics, artists and musicians, courtesans, hustlers, and hangers-on.”

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “Just a few steps away from Cheyne Walk was Christopher Gibbs’ stately brick-and-stone manor, once the home of the American painter James McNeill Whistler.  It was here, in dimly lit rooms decorated in the Moroccan style and redolent of incense, that Gibbs played host to the most famous names in the worlds of music, art, fashion, cinema, business, and politics.  When Allen Ginsberg passed through London on his way back from Italy that summer, Gibbs threw a party and invited Princess Margaret as well as several of her titled cousins, five cabinet members, a smattering of Oxford and Cambridge intellectuals, and his uber-wealthy neighbors Paul Getty II and Getty’s comely wife, Talitha (Talitha Getty, who, as usual, wore a transparent dress with no underwear, would succumb a few years later to a heroin overdose).   None shone brighter than Mick and Marianne – she braless in a tight purple blouse and miniskirt, he wearing a mulberry tunic with flouncy Victorian sleeves.  It was while they were chatting with the Queen’s only sibling that a butler began passing around a silver tray heaped with brownies made from a recipe in the Alice B. Toklas Cookbook.  In this particular case, however, the cook decided to double the amount of hashish normally called for in the recipe.  According to one of the guests that evening, John Michel, what the guests were ingesting was ‘very toxic, very dangerous.’

JOHN MICHEL: “People began freaking out.  All these ladies and lords, curators of the British Museum, various members of parliament, were rushed away in their chauffeur-driven cars to have their stomachs pumped.”

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “Even with their significantly greater tolerance for drugs, Jagger and Faithfull bolted outside and began sprinting up and down Cheyne Walk – ‘very high but very happy,’ he told Michel.  Fortunately for all concerned, the British press never got wind of the incident.  If they had, Michel said, ‘the impact of the scandal on the government and on the royal family would have been enormous.’"

ANITA PALLENBERG: “The way I saw it, Mick and Keith pretty quickly realized that those people all had something that the Stones wanted, and the Stones had what all of these kind of decadent aristocrats wanted – all these girls and that kind of action and singing and playing music.  It seemed to them so romantic at the time, and so it kind of fell together – they both had what the other one wanted – so it was very compatible because of that and quite exciting really, and very nice, too.  And it was a crash course in good manners for the Stones as well.  Not that they became ‘well behaved’ or anything like that – I mean, they were still outrageous – but they could see that there was a different background, and some of the courtesies, for instance, were actually rather charming.  It also actually made the Stones wiser much more quickly.”

DAVID CAMMELL: “It was a strange mixture of aristocrats and gangsters, politicians, creative people, destructive people, all in a kind of exciting mélange.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Listening to ‘Revolver’ always brings back memories of when we were all much younger and madder.  Any excuse to get together, get high, get dressed up, or play each other our latest faves.  In and out of each other’s houses and at many different clubs, Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton dropping by Cheyne Walk, Mick and I visiting Brian Epstein; day trips to George Harrison and Patti Boyd’s multi-colored hippie cottage, evenings at Paul McCartney and Jane Asher’s.  The sixties was a great motley cast of characters in an ongoing operetta with multi-hued costumes to match.  What I remember most is how beautiful everybody was, and, of course, the beautiful clothes: we dressed up like medieval damsels and princes, pirates, pre-Raphaelite Madonnas, popes, hussars, mad hatters and creatures visiting from other planets.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “For a while, I had a great time with Mick, and everything was all right.  When we were together, we had a lot of power.  And that’s probably where it all started to go wrong.  Mick and I started to get more and more press coverage all the time.  Whatever we did was reported in detail.  We were the beautiful couple of the sixties, and for me it was very, very exciting.  To be very young, very free, very rich and very careless.”

GERED MANKOWITZ: “Jagger loved her. What man didn’t? She was this exquisitely beautiful, dangerous combination of convent girl, English rose, and pop star all in a very sexy body. Marianne looked at Mick and he just fell apart. Marianne was truly classy. She never, ever said anything remotely about her social standing or her family background. But her bearing was regal, and certainly fit Mick’s purpose socially. But I think lust was more important. Love and lust and animal magnetism that made for a really magnificent love affair, because that’s what it was. From the beginning it just sort of had to be.”

JOHN BIRT: “When we arrived at Battersea, the helicopter wasn’t very big, and was quite rudimentary.  It had one pilot in the front and quite a small old seat in the back in which there was me, a big lad at six foot two, with the slender Jagger and the pretty slender Marianne Faithfull.  It was a very tight squeeze indeed and Marianne was in the middle, and she was all over Jagger throughout the majority of the flight.  Seemingly oblivious to my being there, she was kissing and fondling him, not to any extreme, but both of them made out as though I was not there.  It was quite an embarrassing thing.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Mick was very much in love with me then, as I was with him, and looking back on it, I think that what I represented for Mick was some sort of wish fulfillment.  He had this fantasy of having a girl friend who as an idealized fairy princess, and I was like that then.  I had long blonde hair and that sort of face, I belonged to royalty since my mother was a baroness, I came from a distant country, and it’s ironic that the very quality in me that Mick loved so much was something that I disliked about myself terribly, something I wanted to crush.  I thought it was a sappy image, and I didn’t realize, being as young as I was, that it would pass soon enough, and that if you could look like a fairy princess for a few years in your lifetime, enjoy it.  Don’t try to change it.  But I didn’t have the maturity to see it like that.  I wanted to change.  I wanted to be grown-up and worldly, and maybe I turned to drugs to hurry it along.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I certainly didn’t think I was going to get into smack.  I dabbled, I tried it once or twice.  Mason Hoffenberg, the poet, wit and savage philosopher who collaborated with Terry Southern on the scandalous novel ‘Candy,’ gave me heroin when I was playing Ophelia, and I threw up every time I went off stage.  That was the real experience of what happens to the human body when it takes poison.  The cure is always in the disease, as Bill Burroughs used to say.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I had acting, love affairs and drugs. I’d had my first line of coke at an apartment in Kensington. Robert Fraser put out six large lines of cocaine for us and gave me a hundred-dollar bill. I said, ‘What do you do?’ And he said, ‘You put it in your nose and you snort it.’ I knelt down and snorted all six lines. His face was a scream: half amazed that I’d done it all and half appalled. I didn’t know the drug etiquette. I quickly learned it.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I always wanted to be a serious artist.  I couldn’t imagine how I was going to do it, but I very much wanted to do it.  And that’s why I started acting.  That’s why I did Chekhov and Hamlet, because I thought, Well, perhaps this is the way I can be a serious artist.  And I was.  I could have gone far, but I didn’t.  I always was doing that.  I was always going so far and then getting frightened by my own power and running away.  It’s something I’ve done for years.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “’The Three Sisters’ opened at the end of April 1967. My dressing room, which I shared with Avril Elgar and Glenda Jackson, was terribly small, and for my first night Mick sent me an orange tree. Glenda Jackson was very sniffy about that. She thought it was outrageous. ‘A tree? A bloody tree in this poky little dressing room? Couldn’t he have sent you a basket of flowers like everybody else?’ It did, of course, take up about half the room and everybody’s clothes got snagged on it, but it was sweet. A small, perfectly formed orange tree. But a tree nevertheless.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Mick was initially supportive of my acting, but I sensed it was something he’d rather I not do.  I was the consort – my career would distract from the image he wanted to create.  I had absolutely no wish to compete with him, but eventually I decided acting would be okay since it was far enough away from what he did.  I thought it wouldn’t affect him, but, fuck me, then he wanted to act too!  He can’t help it; he’s just got to compete.  I stopped working, but then other issues began to raise their ugly heads.  The Devil, as we know, makes work for idle hands.”

DAVID DALTON: “Marianne’s heroin addiction began, in the way these things often do, very unintentionally. She was coming back from a day in the country with Mick and she was late for the theatre. She asked Mason Hoffenberg if could she do a little smack, and, we don’t know why this would help, but it did… During ‘Hamlet,’ she would do heroin during the intermission and come back as this stoned out, pale, Pre-Raphaelite, mad Ophelia. Absolutely perfect for the ‘60s.”

ELIZABETH WINDER: “Past portrayals of Ophelia were chaste and demure, but Marianne shed all that virgin timidity.  Her powdered skin implied late nights and hedonism, with pompadour hair, smoked-out eyes, and a mouche that hinted at sexual experience.  Hair piled high in Bardot flax, sprigs of thyme and purple daisies tucked behind her ears, then loose for the mad scene like a Hyde Park hippie.  Half lush voluptuary, half late-sixties twiglet, Marianne paved the way for decades of eroticized Ophelias.”