Ladies and Gentlemen, The Rolling Stones....

Brian

I was still just a little in awe of The Rolling Stones in the mid-Sixties. The Beatles were richer and sold more records, but they had compromised their integrity with neat hair and command performances. In London, the Stones were the new potentates. Their hair styles, their attitudes, their clothes were aped by every young man with aspirations to style--from elegant, leisured aristocrats to schoolboys barely out of short trousers. It is hard to remember now just how vast, if transient, an influence they were. No other musicians in history had wielded such power for social revolution.

At the center of it was Brian Jones. He was the musically gifted Stone, the one who could pick up any instrument--from a saxophone to a sitar--and learn to play it in less than half an hour. He was the one who was playing pure, soaring rhythm-and-blues for a living when Mick Jagger was a mediocre student at the London School of Economics and Keith Richard was just another grubby, delinquent art student who thought he was Chuck Berry because he could pluck three chords on his out-of-tune guitar.

Brian epitomized the arrogantly hedonistic attitude that was the mainstay of The Rolling Stones' special appeal. He had left six illegitimate children--all by different women--in his wake. He had the longest hair. He was the first to wear make-up and outrageously androgynous clothes--chiffon blouses and Ascot hats. And yet he carried such an aura of street-guerrilla aggressiveness that no one would dare suggest to his face that he looked less than totally masculine. Where Brian led, the other Stones limped along behind.

Brian was still loving it all in 1965. He was living with Linda, the mother of one of his many children. He was the beautiful Stone, the one the fans screamed over while they told jokes about "old rubber lips" Jagger. Brian seemed to have become almost settled, almost content.

Until the foxiest blonde I had ever seen arrived in London.

Her name was Anita Pallenberg and no one ever seemed to know quite where she came from or who she was. When pressed, she would reveal that she was half Italian and half German and that she had worked as an actress with the Living Theater. She had tumbling, shining blonde hair, a long, lithe body and wickedly beautiful eyes, and she had only to walk along the street to cause a string of traffic accidents. She was no dumb blonde, either, and the combination of witty conversation and devastating looks rapidly turned her into the darling of aristocratic London.

And since all the well-bred, trendy young things in London were lionizing The Rolling Stones, it was inevitable that she would meet them.

She could, of course, have taken her pick of any of them: Mick's romance with Chrissie Shrimpton had become a scratching, brawling travesty of love. Keith, as usual, had no serious woman in his life, and Brian--well, Brian never refused a beautiful woman. The two other Stones--Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts--didn't count, of course. Even then, they weren't typical Rolling Stones; they were content to do their jobs well, live their lives as quietly as possible and stay out of trouble.

Mick, Keith and Brian all wanted Anita, but once she had met Brian, there seemed to be no contest. The two of them spent every spare second together, cuddling and giggling at private jokes, and within a few weeks, Brian had abandoned Linda and their baby to move Anita into his huge studio apartment in Earls Court.

As a couple, Brian and Anita exuded an almost surrealistic aura: They began to look, dress and think so much alike that they became one--single presence in silk and satin. They were, at that moment, the reigning Beautiful Couple of Europe, and they took full advantage of the power they possessed over even the young dukes and lords and other highborn friends and admirers who flocked to pay homage.

In a way, their arrogance was justified. Brian's band had fought the short-haired, nine-to-five establishment ideal and won. To cap it all, rhythm-and-blues had taken over from jazz as the dominant influence in British music.

Sometimes, though, their arrogance moved across the line to cruelty. Anyone who displeased them would be banished from the apartment as a matter of course--and then shunned by the rest of the crowd, who feared offending Brian and Anita.

Singer Marianne Faithfull tells the story of one memorable occasion when Linda, Brian's ex, showed up outside the apartment with her baby and tried to make Brian feel guilty about not paying her any child support. Inside the house, Brian, Anita and the others giggled and made fun, and Brian refused to even talk to her.

Another time, Anita persuaded Brian to be photographed in a full Nazi SS uniform with his jack boot grinding a doll into the dirt. Brian thought the uniform made him look exotic, and Anita told him that he should send the picture out to the newspapers and tell them it was an anti-Nazi protest.

When the picture was misconstrued by almost everyone, Brian and Anita were genuinely astonished that the world couldn't see the point or their little joke. The incident was symptomatic of the fact that Anita and the courtiers were cocooning Brian from the real world. Together they went ever further for their kicks. Their sexual activities were extraordinary, and they took up astrology and magic. Eventually, they were given some acid by one of their sycophants, and Brian and Anita went to bed to begin their first trip. That moment marked the peak of Brian's life--and the start of his personality disintegration.

On acid, he was able to write songs and play guitar the way he had always dreamed. "It's as though there are all sorts of amazing songs floating around in my head that I can't get out," Brian told me once. "Acid lets it all out. I hardly even know I'm writing when I'm on a trip." At that time, Brian was turning all the Beautiful People around him on to the drug, and there was something enormously alluring about the exotic, faraway, stoned world they seemed to inhabit. Keith was young and impressionable, and he had always been content to follow where Brian led. Brian turned Keith on to acid, and they were closer than ever, jamming better and writing songs. Suddenly, the most fantastic things seemed possible. Like millions of ordinary kids who were about to follow their deluded example, the two of them believed that swallowing a hallucinogenic drug had in some way expanded their consciousness and made the realization of every fantasy a real possibility. Brian and Keith and Anita grew so close on acid that Keith started spending more and more nights there, until eventually, it seemed only sensible that he move in permanently.

Although the tables would soon be turned, Mick at first was odd man out. Brian, especially, treated him with thinly veiled contempt, knocking the fact that Mick hadn't experimented with acid like the rest of the crowd. Mick was guilty of the worst transgression of all: being straight For nuisance value, Brian and Keith started referring to Mick as Jagger rather than by his first name, and a rift began that looked as though it might break up the band.

Keith and Brian's closest friend during the LSD phase was young Tara Browne, heir to the Guinness fortune. Tara had often stayed at the apartment with Brian, Keith and Anita, where they would rap long into the night about mysticism and music and all the revolutionary things acid was doing for them.

It was also at that point that it dawned on Brian that Keith was falling in love with Anita.

He didn't worry unduly--he knew that Mick, too, was hot for Anita, but that she was faithful to Brian, always telling him she loved him. It was the beginning, though, of a time of change. Keith moved out of the apartment, because Brian was making it obvious he regarded him as a potential threat. Brian's deep-seated insecurity made him fear that the only woman he had ever loved would be snatched away from him.

Later, Keith dropped acid with Mick, and the trip marked the beginning of an alliance between them. This time it was Brian who was to be ostracized. Brian began to resent the power that his love for Anita gave her. He felt he was losing control of his life, losing Mick and Keith, losing his music because of a mere woman: Brian Jones, father of six illegitimate children, the man who had always been able to discard girls like cigarette butts, was being held in thrall by a chick.

I was married by then, and Gloria and I lived with our baby son in a little apartment in Maida Vale. Soon Brian was phoning every couple of days, asking me to visit--but I knew what he really wanted was dope, more and more of it.

Then Tara died when his Lotus Elan crashed into a parked truck, and the death of his best friend left Brian stunned and confused. Afterward, he would talk to me for hours about how meaningless life had begun to seem to him. At first, I understood his grief and shared it, but gradually, it began to turn to something else. Brian seemed unbalanced, paranoid, eaten up by misery and loneliness.

He talked about the false hope that acid had given him, all the while swallowing great handfuls of barbiturates and Mandrax to blot out his misery. One day I arrived at Earls Court to find Anita with bruises all over her face, and it was obvious that Brian had beaten her savagely. When I asked her what had happened, she said, "It's none of your business."

Another time, I dropped by to find Brian almost hysterical. "Anita's dead!" he screamed. "I can't rouse her!" Anita was lying in their antique bed. I shook her, then slapped her face, but got no reaction--she had taken too much of something. Brian and I carried her downstairs to my car and drove her to the hospital. They pumped her stomach, and when she came to, Brian was crying.

Then she started sobbing silently, with a terrible wounded look in her eyes. "You should have left me, Tony," she said.

Meanwhile, Keith and Mick were writing together with a brilliance and confidence they had never felt before. I started to see Keith frequently, and one day I said, "Seems like you and Mick hardly ever speak to Brian anymore."

"Well," said Keith, "he's burned out, isn't he?" There was icy malice in his voice. He turned away so I couldn't see his face. "The only problem now is what to do about him."

Professionally, too, the Stones had problems. They had always been treated by the media as direct rivals of the Beatles--both in image and in music. To some extent, the treatment was justified, and the careers of both bands seemed to be evolving along parallel lines. But in 1967, after months of music-business rumors, the Beatles had delivered their masterwork, an album titled Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. The album was dazzling and innovative and was hailed by critics as the greatest rock album of all time. The cover, photographed by Michael Cooper, set a new standard for album artwork, and the idea of printing lyrics on the jacket was one that was to be aped by every band in the world. Musically, it had an originality and imaginative quality that rock music had never seen before.

Mick realized at once that it made all previous records of both the Beatles and the Stones seem curiously outmoded.

"It's psychedelic, man," he argued with Brian. "Pretty soon everything is going to be psychedelic, and if we aren't in there next album, we'll be left behind. No one is going to want to listen to rhythm-and-blues anymore." Brian hated the new sound and he fought bitterly--and vainly--for the Stones to stay true to their roots, to keep on chugging out the high-energy rock 'n' roll that had sent audiences berserk in almost every country in the world.

"If he insists on recording that sort of crap, the Stones are dead," Brian told me bitterly.

But Mick won, and he conceived with Keith the idea of an album he wanted to call Her Satanic Majesties Request, a record that was to be a psychedelic satire on the queen. Brian's hurt was compounded because Anita had drifted to Keith. The album became the focus of everything that was going wrong with Mick, Keith and Brian.

That period marked the low spot of Brian's life. Again he started to sink into the morass of drugs. He would swallow anything that would stab or stroke his mind--until he was unable to recognize me or even speak. Sometimes he would arrive in the studio so zonked that he would just collapse on the floor like a wounded animal. As Ills confidence went, he seemed unable to play his guitar.

"I don't know what's happening to me," he told me, in a rare moment of lucidity. "My mind won't even let me play music anymore."

Keith and Mick were worried: The album wasn't working out, despite the work they were putting into it, and Keith was discovering that he couldn't ignite the fluid, articulate guitar that Brian had made an essential part of every Stones record.

"He's very tired," I tried to warn Keith once.

"We're all tired, Tony," said Keith. "But if he keeps on getting out of his box like this, we'll have to find a new guitar player. Can't you find some woman to look after him?"

One day I drove Brian to Olympic Studios in his Rolls. He babbled on and on about the conspiracy Mick and Keith were hatching to force him out of the band. It was obvious to me that he was becoming dangerously paranoid and that he desperately needed help.

We arrived at the studio to find Keith there with Anita--both making it cruelly obvious that they enjoyed being together. Mick was piqued at Brian's lack of interest in psychedelics and tended to ignore his musical suggestions and any songs Brian had written.

I saw them ask Brian to overdub a guitar section on a number they had already worked on. Then, once he was shut into the soundproof studio, they collapsed giggling--because they hadn't even turned on the recording machine.

•

The transistor radio beside my bed crackled reluctantly into life as I turned it on to catch the early-morning news bulletin. "Police believe," intoned the announcer monotonously, "that a man found dead at Hartfield, in Sussex, early today was a leading member of the Rolling stones pop group...."

It was like a bucket of water in the face. "What?" I said to myself out loud, shaking my head in disbelief. Mick Jagger dead? How could he be? Mick, so strong, so full of life, dead? That meant the end of The Rolling Stones... there was no way the group could carry on without him. Mick was the Stones. I had to speak to Keith, I had to know what had happened.

Anita answered the phone. "Is it true?" I asked, speaking in Italian.

"Yeah," she said.

"Really?"

"Yes, really."

"Couldn't they have made a mistake?" I asked desperately.

"No. They found him in his swimming pool."

I was confused. I'd been both to Mick's house in Cheyne Walk and to the one in Stargroves many times, and I knew that neither house had a pool. "Are you sure?" I asked her again insistently.

"Yes, Brian's dead," she replied.

"Oh, God, I thought they said it was Mick."

"No," said Anita. "Thank Christ, it was only Brian...."

Keith

The world of rock is one of the last bastions of total male chauvinism. Almost without exception, women are bandied about, dropped, swapped and laid in a fashion that is almost primeval.

Keith Richard was not surprised, therefore, when Joe Monk--a Stones hanger-on--calmly offered him his girlfriend one day. Joe was a guest at Keith's Cheyne Walk home, Anita was away at a chalet she and Keith had bought in Switzerland and Joe considerately felt that Keith might be in need of a woman. "Thanks a lot," said Keith. "But you keep her, Joe. I can see you're fond of her."

The whole exchange was accomplished with about as much passion as declining the offer of a cigarette. Yet the idea seemed to play on Keith's subconscious, and some time later, when Joe was out auditioning for a play, Keith leaped into his Bentley with the girl and they raced off to die Lake District, for all the world like a pair of eloping young lovers.

The first anyone knew of the romance was when Keith phoned Mick from a remote mountain farm to say he wouldn't be able to make a photo session that day for the cover of the new album, Goat's Head Soup. Three days later, he came sheepishly back to London and immediately phoned me. "Have you seen Joe Monk around?" he asked nervously. "He's telling people he's going to shoot me."

"Why should he kill you?" I asked innocently. "He hasn't got the guts."

"I don't know," said Keith. "That Joe is a madman."

That night, we went to see the Faces in concert at the Sundown, in Edmonton. Afterward, there was to be a party, and Keith told guitarist Ron Wood, "There's a guy called Joe Monk, a spade. Have one of your bodyguards stand by the door, and if he tries to crash the party, don't let him in."

In all the excitement of the show, Woodie forgot, and afterward, as we sat chatting in the dressing room while the Faces changed, Joe burst through the door. In his turban and flowing cape, he looked like a Mongol warrior.

"See there," jabbered Keith. "I told you he was after me, Tony."

"Well, he hasn't made a move toward you yet," I told him. "So cool it."

"OK," said Keith, "but keep an eye on him. I think he's got a gun."

Suddenly, the girl who was the cause of the altercation slipped into the dressing room and wrapped her arms around Keith, kissing him gently on the lips. I went up to Joe. "You've really got Keith worried," I said. "He thinks you're going to do something to him."

"Don't worry," he said. "I won't."

"Well, Keith doesn't know that. Won't you come show him you haven't got a gun or a dagger or something? Just tell him there are no hard feelings."

Joe complied. "Don't worry, man," he said to Keith, "you're welcome to her."

Keith's bravado came back in an instant. He turned to Rod Stewart and boasted, "Yeah, well, I've got a knife on me, and I'd have killed that fuckin' spade if he'd tried anything." But Joe seemed genuinely hurt by Keith's betrayal of friendship. I felt sorry for him.

Keith arranged for me to give Joe his things from Cheyne Walk, and then Keith and the girl settled down together to a life of cozy domestic bliss. Later, a long, gentle, poetic letter arrived from Joe mildly reproaching Keith for stealing his girl and throwing him out on the street. "We're all brothers," Joe wrote, "and I thought you were a good friend."

Prostration wasn't a pose Keith cared to understand--to him, it was just a good chance to kick a rival in the head. He dashed off a reply to Joe: "Don't ever come to my house again. If I see you in the street, I'll spit on you, you fucking spade." Keith asked me to deliver the note to Joe.

"I can't do that," I told him. "You've already completely demoralized the guy--you've taken his girl away from him. Why dig the knife in even deeper?"

"Just do it, Tony," Keith said. I took the letter from him without further argument and tore it up in secret. Later, when Anita phoned to say she would be home from Switzerland the next day with their children, Marlon and Dandelion, Keith promptly threw the girl out. "Sorry, darling," he said. "But my family is very important to me."

•

With Anita back, life in 1973 carried on much as before--with everybody alternately flying up on coke and down on smack. In the midst of this chaos, it was time for the Stones to finalize plans for their seven-week tour of Britain and Europe. Keith knew he was in no condition to go on the road, but there was no time for a cure. Withdrawing would have meant being laid up for weeks. That was out of the question.

But Marshall Chess, head of Rolling Stones Record Company, had a solution. "There's a doctor from Florida who can get you off dope in a few days by changing your blood," he told Keith. "He did it for me in Mexico a while back and it worked perfectly."

The doctor would carry out the blood change for Keith in a villa called Le Pec Varp, in Villars-sur-Ollon, Switzerland. Keith would fly there directly after the Stones' concert in Birmingham on September 19. He would then be cured in time to play with the Stones again in Bern on September 26. Marshall was going to Switzerland with Keith to have his blood changed at the same time.

There was still the early part of the tour to stagger through, plus promotion for Goat's Head Soup. Being strung out on smack had never particularly impaired Keith's ability to function. But one evening came close to disaster.

On September sixth, Mick hired Blenheim Palace, Winston Churchill's birthplace and one of the most magnificent of England's stately homes. There was to be a lavish promotion party for the album, and all Mick's favorite young lords and ladies, influential disc jockeys and journalists had been invited.

Anita didn't want to go; she rarely left the house now and loathed the very idea of parties. But Mick was putting on the pressure. "You've got to come, Keith," he said. "The whole band must be there. It's important."

Finally, Anita capitulated. She pulled on her old jeans, slipped on a sweat shirt and climbed into the back of the limo with Keith, Marlon and me. On the way (continued on page 104) Rolling Stones (continued from page 98) to Blenheim, she took a couple of snorts of smack. By the time we got there, she was asleep. Keith shook her, and she gazed out the window in horror at all the beautiful girls climbing out of their Rolls-Royces in exotic gowns of chiffon and satin. "That's it!" she exploded. "I'm not going in there in jeans with everybody else dressed up like that."

Keith, irritated, said, "You've got loads of jewelry and expensive clothes at home, and you've had all day to get ready."

"Fuck off," she hissed. "I'm not coming in. I'll wait for you here in the car--but don't you dare go in there for more than an hour."

Keith and I set off with Marlon. As soon as we arrived, we bumped into saxophonist Bobby Keyes. I was still only snorting dope then, but Keith and Bobby both fixed. They went into a back room that had been set aside for the Stones to shoot one another up. I was left outside on sentry duty. Ten minutes later, Mick skipped past me, and I could hear him pleading with Keith, "Come on, man, you've got to just show your face."

Downstairs, the party was in full swing, with magicians, fire-eaters and mimes performing around the fountains of the patio while the Stones mingled among the guests. Keith and I sat down quietly at a table, sipping champagne. Bianca came over to us, chatting merrily, obviously delighted that Anita hadn't shown up. A short while later, some primitive instinct made me glance toward the door, where Anita was storming in like a harridan. "Look who's coming," I whispered to Keith.

His face turned white. "Hello, darling." He smiled at her.

"Don't you fucking darling me," she screeched. "You're supposed to be back in the fucking car."

Bianca, bewildered, could only stutter, "What's the matter, Anita? Where have you been?"

"Where have I been?" Anita screamed, so that all heads turned. "It's nothing to do with you where I've been, you stupid bitch. Come on, Keith, we're going."

Mick heard the commotion and hurried over to Keith. "Hey, man, cool it," he whispered. "Just grab her and get out of here or this ruck is going to be on the front page of every newspaper in the country tomorrow."

"OK, OK," said Keith, furious. He grabbed Anita by the sleeve and hauled her out of the party by a side door.

I grabbed Marlon and ran after them. I climbed into the back of the car. Both of them glared at me so fiercely I figured I'd be better off in the front seat, beside the chauffeur.

As we drove onto the main road, all hell broke loose in the back seat. Whop! Keith punched her hard in the face. She leaped across the seat, grabbed him by his hair and jerked him to the floor.

"What should I do?" yelled the driver.

"Just drive," I told him. I had seen such displays before.

Every time I glanced in their direction, Anita screamed and lunged at me. "You Spanish bastard. It's your fault as well. You're fired."

Little Marlon was peering out the window, pretending not to notice what was going on. Every ten minutes or so, throughout the two-hour drive, Keith and Anita would attack each other again. He'd punch her in the face. She'd sit there sobbing. Then she'd work up the courage to scratch at his eyes. "Look what you're doing to Marlon," Keith exploded at one point.

"Fuck Marlon," she screeched. "Fuck you, fuck Tony and fuck the driver. Just get me home."

An hour later, things were somewhat calmer, but then Anita started demanding heroin. Keith told her he didn't have any. I knew, in fact, that Bobby had given him some at the party. "I'm sure Tony can get you some, though," he said. Thanks a lot, I thought.

When we arrived at Cheyne Walk, she bolted straight up to her room, and I could hear her tearing everything apart, in case there were any crumbs of heroin about that she had forgotten. "You'll have to go up and calm her down," I told Keith.

When Anita heard him coming, she opened the door and threw a boot at him, screaming, "Get out of here! I can't get through the night without some drugs. I can't make it without anything."

"You'll have to get hold of something for her," Keith pleaded. I hustled around for a couple of hours, finally managing to buy a couple of grams of low-grade heroin at an exorbitant price.

I phoned Keith immediately. "Thank God," he said. "Come back right away and give it to her."

"I can't give it all to Anita," I explained. "I need some myself to stop me getting withdrawal symptoms in the morning."

I had expected Anita to be apologetic when I returned, but, if anything, she was angrier than before. When I went into her room, she simply snatched the heroin from my hand and told me to get out.

"But I need some," I began.

"Get the hell out of here!" she screamed.

Keith suggested I hide in the kitchen until Anita fell asleep, and then he would give me some of my heroin back and I could be on my way. But minutes later, Anita swept into the kitchen and ordered me out of the house.

"I must have the money for that dope now," I said. "Otherwise, I'm not going to be able to get any dope for myself."

"That's your hard luck," she said.

Keith wandered in and whispered to me that he would give me some smack if I'd come back an hour later. So I hung around for a while, but still Anita's bedroom light was on. Early in the morning, though, I could feel cold turkey creeping up on me, so I rang the bell in desperation. I had no money; although I rang for 20 minutes, Keith refused to open the door, and I was forced to stagger home to begin the agonies of withdrawal. The next morning, they were apologetic, and they gave me some heroin, but I never quite forgave them for that little piece of ruthlessness.

On September 17, I flew to Switzerland to arrange final details of the blood change. By a stroke of luck, the taxi I hailed when I landed in Geneva had a Spanish driver. Since my French is poor, I hired him to work for me for the week as translator and chauffeur. I hired two nurses and a maid for the villa. The doctor was to be paid $5000, plus all expenses, to supervise the course, and I booked him into Le Renard Hotel in Villars-sur-Ollon for a week. I paid $317 for the rental on Keith's villa and collected $2500 from Keith's accountant for my own expenses, then I returned to Geneva to meet Keith, Anita and the kids at the airport.

On the way back to Villars-sur-Ollon, the driver casually mentioned that he was taking a little short cut through France. "Stop him, Tony," whispered Keith. "They've still got warrants out for Anita and me in France, so once we cross the border, we're done for."

"I think we'd better go the long way round, thanks all the same," I told the driver in Spanish.

We settled in at the villa and soon the doctor drove up with a nurse. A short while later, Marshall arrived. "You can have a cure as well, Tony," offered Keith. "I'll pay for it."

I was frightened of the radical-sounding blood-change cure and, anyway, I had some methadone that had been prescribed by my doctor, so at least I was in no danger of suffering immediate withdrawal symptoms. I decided to return to (continued on page 196) Rolling Stones (continued from page 104) England and leave them to their cure.

Eight days later, the Stones performed at the Olympiahalle in Munich. I flew over to meet them and was astonished to find Keith and Marshall both looking as fresh-faced and healthy as schoolboys. "How the heck did that doctor do it?" I asked Keith.

"It's quite simple, really," Keith explained. "He just changed our blood little by little, so that there was no heroin in our bodies after 48 hours. There was no pain at all and we spent the rest of the week just resting and building our strength up."

Later that night, I saw him accept a snort of coke from Bobby. I reproached him for his foolishness. "Yeah, well," said Keith, "it doesn't matter if I get hooked again now. I can give it up any time I like without any bother."

Mick

Altamont, the 1969 California concert that erupted into violence, had frightened Mick, made him take stock and ponder what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. At first, he had considered quitting rock and taking up politics. He had always been driven by a need to scale new heights, and he knew he couldn't take rock-'n'-roll stage performances any further. He had broken barriers, destroyed taboos, and now, like an aging boxer, he was doomed to gradual decline. "But it his become my life," he said. "There's nothing else I really want to do." He decided to consolidate his position--keep on as the greatest rock star in the world as long as he could. He knew he would hive to stay in perfect shape to survive, and he cut down on booze and dope and look up cycling, running and tennis. He wasn't about to end up like Elvis.

The European tour proved decisively that the charisma of the Stones remained undimmed. On the first due, Helsinki, the usual total mayhem ensued. By the time Jagger and his men hit Hamburg ten days later, they were pumping it out with the power of an express train. Riot squads had to be drafted to deal with 1000 window-smashing fans.

In Berlin, all hell broke loose: 50 arrests. On September 20, 1970, the Stones played the first of two shows at L'Olympia in Paris. The Parisian kids had yet to realize that Mick Jagger had long ceased toying with ideas of revolution, and they used the gig as an excuse to bombard the long-suffering gendarmes with bricks and iron bars. There were many arrests.

Mick was tired and considered skipping the party held in his honor afterward. But he was very aware of the need to be his own public-relations man, and he knew that the French record-company executives would be piqued if he snubbed them. So he went along to sip a few glasses of champagne and to be nice to people, hoping he would be able to make a discreet exit after about half an hour. And then he saw her.

"Hi, Mick," said Eddie Barclay, a record-company executive and old friend. "I'd like you to meet Bianca. She's going to be my wife." Mick looked and could not believe his eyes. The girl took his breath away. She looked exactly like him--the same full lips, the same high cheekbones, the same look of sophistication and decadence, the same slender, tiny-boned body. She was perfect and he wanted her.

"Sure," said Barclay. "Dance with her if you want. But remember, she's going home with me."

Bianca was flattered by Mick's attentions and pleased that the whole room stared when they danced. It had been the same when she lived with actor Michael Caine. People had admired her, treated her with respect because she was the woman of a rich, powerful, famous man. Mick was fastidiously polite to her, treating her in a slightly awed, little-boy way--like a princess.

He suggested an intimate club where they could meet later, and she slipped away without a word to Eddie. Mick followed half an hour later, enormously flattered that she had dropped her fiancé to be with him. It appeared that she had fallen as instantly for him as he had for her. Only later was Mick to discover that Bianca was insecure and needed constant reassurance of her charm and power to attract beautiful men--that in the future, she would feel as little compunction about humiliating Mick as she had felt about walking out on Eddie.

"I'm a bit destructive," she was to admit later. "I used to be destructive in a relationship because I was scared of it gelling out of hand. It wasn't really to destroy other people but to protect myself."

But on that balmy September night, it seemed to Mick that he had at last met the woman of his dreams. She was a perfect lady, refusing to sleep with him at first, telling him that, yes, she too had never been quite so happy in her life. He had a few days to spare before the next gig, and so they spent every second together, dining in candlelit restaurants, walking around the fairy-tale gardens of Versailles, holding hands like kids. Mick offered her a little coke and she snorted it so clumsily that he thought she had probably never tried the drug before. He said nothing, thinking only how different she was from the other girls he had known.

But still they didn't make love, and Mick was more entranced than ever. Bianca was holding back, making excuses, letting him know that he hadn't totally captured her, and he was as aroused and intrigued by her as he had originally been by Marianne Faithfull. The Stones flew to Vienna for the next gig, and Mick arranged for Bianca to fly to Rome a couple of days later, when they played there. He sent a limousine to the airport to meet her and arranged for a separate room for her. "This," said Keith, "has got to be the real thing."

He was right. Mick and Bianca made love for the first time that night, and for both of them, it was the best thing they'd known. For the remaining ten clays of the tour, Bianca traveled with The Rolling Stones, sleeping in Mick's bed, watching every one of their shows. They were together incessantly.

Journalists covering the tour were eager to find out every detail about this woman who seemed to have replaced Marianne in Mick's life. Photographers were everywhere. When one of them tried to snap their picture in Rome, Mick ran toward him and punched him in the face. The photographer called the police and Mick was later fined $1200 for assault. In Frankfurt, a bodyguard smashed another photographer's camera while Mick and Bianca escaped over a wall, giggling like two kids after a particularly daring prank. When they returned together to London after the tour, the reporters were especially eager to talk to Mick about his love life. Marianne had just been divorced by John Dunbar on the grounds of her conduct with the head Stone. But as newspapermen crowded around them at Heathrow, Bianca would only say, mysteriously, "I have no name, I do not speak English."

Mick couldn't resist his favorite romantic euphemism: "We're just good friends."

Soon after Mick and Bianca returned to London, he phoned me at my apartment to ask if they could come over to say hello. I was surprised, because Mick had been slightly frosty toward me ever since my brief romance with Marianne. I suppose he's having trouble getting hold of coke, I thought cynically. But as soon as they arrived, it became apparent that Bianca just wanted to chat with somebody who spoke her native language, Spanish. "It's such a strain, being with so many brilliant people and having to be witty and charming in a foreign language," she said. I understood why Mick had fallen so hard for her. She was different from the women who hung around The Rolling Stones.

I asked Bianca if she'd like a hit of cocaine. "Oh," she said when I brought out my ornate snuffbox filled with the powder, "it's white."

"Of course," I said. "What color did you expect it to be?"

"Surely it should be pink," she replied, like a connoisseur of wine who has just been served a Nuits-Saint-Georges when she expected Blanc de Blanc. "The best coke is always pink." She was wrong, of course, but I smiled and nodded. Mick grinned one of those grins that split his face in half like a shattered coconut. She laughed, too, and suddenly it hit me: They were twins. Mick could love this woman because she was he. She looked the same, thought the same, and making it with her was the closest he could possibly get to his ideal: making love to himself.

Anita hated Bianca from the start. She still harbored a deep desire for Mick herself, and the presence of this new woman posed a threat to her relationship with Keith, dreary though it was. Wives are often threatened when a close friend of their husband finds a new woman: it unsettles the husband, makes him question his own relationship.

On the tour, Anita would borrow clothes from Bianca and then "forget" to return them or just leave them bunched up and filthy in Bianca's hotel room. By then, Anita, like most junkies, had stopped worrying about everyday irritations like baths, and the clothes were frequently in such a repugnant condition that Bianca could only throw them away. Mick made it clear he didn't want Bianca to fall out with Anita. "You'll have to sort it out between yourselves," he said. "Anita is one of the Stones now. Put up with her as best you can."

Back in London, Anita made ever more flagrant passes at Mick. Keith was in the next room when I caught her pinching Mick's ass and trying to tickle him. When Mick brought Bianca along, though, there was an entirely different reception waiting. Mick wanted to talk with Keith about a song they had been working on together the previous night and he left the girls together to chat, as Anita and Marianne had always done. But Anita refused to look at Bianca and stalked out of the room.

"Why has Anita got it in for Bianca?" I heard Mick ask Keith. "I mean, it's so obvious. Bianca is getting really upset."

"Oh, don't worry, man," said Keith. "You know what Anita is like. It's just her moods. She'll get over it."

When Keith mentioned Bianca's reproach to Anita, she stepped up her campaign of hatred. "It's up to us, Tony, to get rid of Bianca," she told me. "That chick is going to break the Stones up just like Linda Eastman broke up the Beatles. We've got to do something for the sake of the band."

"Why me?" I asked querulously.

"Because she trusts you," said Anita. "Let Mick know she's lying about her age. She says she's twenty-five, but I'll bet a million pounds she's thirty-five if she's a day. I'll bet her tits are all droopy. She's certainly got something to be ashamed of--nobody has ever seen her with her clothes off."

Anita's schemes were bizarre--Bianca was a man who had had a sex-change operation, she said. She offered me a fortune if I could dig up some proof from the press or the police.

"That's ridiculous," I said. "There's no way Bianca could ever have been a man."

"Well, get something, damn you," said Anita. "Just gel something from the cops or the papers that we can show Mick. If you don't pull your finger out, he's going to fucking well marry her, and that'll be the end of The Rolling Stones and the end of you."

"I'm sorry, Anita," I told her eventually. "I like Bianca; I know she's a bit stuck-up, but I don't think it's any of my business to go causing trouble for the two of them."

"It doesn't matter, anyway," she said. "I've put a curse on her. She won't be around much longer."

Anita must have been too stoned to say her abracadabras. Bianca stayed very much alive and Mick confided to Keith that they were getting married. "Good luck, man," said Keith. "If you love her, that's all that matters."

•

The tiny whitewashed Chapel of Sainte Anne is perched on a hill in St.-Tropez, overlooking the vast azure sweep of the Mediterranean. The white yachts of the new jet set Hock to the water, and to the north are the mountains and the lush, cool forests of pine and tumbling streams.

Mick and Bianca stumbled upon this holy place by accident as they ambled around the town one day, hand in hand.

"Marry me here," he said, "and we'll sail away in a big while yacht and spend our lives making love and looking after our beautiful children."

"I love you," she replied, kissing him.

Mick was bubbling with excitement when lie called Dartford to invite his parents to the wedding. "You must come," lie told his mother. "I've booked a suite for you and Dad at our hotel in St.-Tropez."

On the other end of the line, Eva Jagger sobbed at the thought of finally becoming a mother-in-law. "Oh, I'm so happy, Mick," she said. "So happy."

"Just one thing," Mick added. "Don't tell anyone about the wedding. We're trying to keep it very quiet."

Marrying in the little church proved more complicated than they'd expected. Sainte Anne's was Roman Catholic and Mick was Church of England. He studied Catholicism for four weeks under the guidance of the church's pastor, Abbé Lucien Baud, to prepare for his marriage. "It's not a question of his becoming a Roman Catholic," Father Baud said. "He is merely acquiring an understanding of our faith. He is a very serious, intelligent man. He is an Anglican, of course, but I don't think a practicing one. He has a great sense of religion, that boy. He really has a feeling for it."

Rumor of the impending nuptials spread rapidly, but when Mick and Bianca were photographed leaving a boutique in St.-Tropez on April 18, Mick said, "We're definitely not getting married. No way." The wedding was scheduled for May 12.

Mick wanted only close friends at the ceremony: Keith, his brother Chris, Roger Vadim, Natalie Delon. Bianca insisted on an occasion, however, and they chartered a jet to fly in about 75 friends from London. Mick phoned to invite me and swore me to secrecy. "We don't want the whole place swarming with reporters," he said. "That would ruin everything." I was amazed at his naïveté. Did he really suppose that he could stick the cream of Britain's superstars and aristocrats on a special chartered jet without the press's finding out?

Mick phoned me again the night before the wedding. "How are you coming, Tony?" he asked. "You will be coming on the plane tomorrow, won't you?"

"Sure," I said, "I'm really looking forward to it. By the way, I know it's a bit late, but we were wondering what you would like in the way of a wedding present. I've got a little surprise for you, but if there's anything special you really want, don't be embarrassed about asking."

"Well," he said, "you know what I'd really like, don't you, Tony?" And I knew lie meant cocaine. "I'd be grateful," he said. "A guy needs a little c-o-k-e to get him through his wedding day."

I didn't know what to do. There was no coke in London: The narcs had just wiped out three of the biggest dealers. I had a friend who was a dentist in the Midlands, and he'd swapped me coke for advance pressings of Rolling Stones albums in the past. Though he had to keep a strict record of the cocaine he used, he got around the problem by giving patients another type of anesthetic but entering in his record book that he had given them cocaine. In that way, he managed to stash away at least a gram of cocaine a week.

When I phoned him to explain the problem, he was eager to help. "Sure," he said. "I've got about three grams here. You can have it right now if you like. But you'll have to pay for it. I'm not going to just swap it for a record this time."

"No problem at all," I said. "I'll happily pay you the going price."

I phoned Mick at once in St.-Tropez and he was ecstatic. "Fantastic," he said. "Look, I'll send a private jet across to Heathrow to pick you up and you can bring me my present tonight. I'm not going to get through this gig without it."

"You're joking," I said. "That'll cost a fortune. It's ridiculous."

"No," he said. "I want you here straightaway, and I'm not taking no for an answer."

"Hang on," I said. "I'll just double-check that I can get everything arranged that quickly."

The dentist panicked when I asked him if I could send a friend to the Midlands that night to pick up the package. "No, definitely not. It's in my office," he said. "I'm coming down to London tomorrow morning, anyway, so I can let you have it at ten A.M.--but not a second earlier."

"Fuck," said Mick when I told him.

•

A veritable Who's Who boarded the jet at Gatwick-Paul McCartney with Linda; Ringo Starr; Eric Clapton with his aristocratic girlfriend, Alice Ormsby Gore; Keith Moon; Peter Frampton; Donyale Luna; even Robert Fraser. The press laid siege to the airport and everything that moved got interviewed (I was caught by CBS).

We drank champagne all the way to Nice, and at the other end, a bus waited to whisk celebrities to the wedding. As the dope bearer, I got special treatment. A chauffeur with a mile-long Cadillac held a placard with my name on it. When I approached him, he said, "Yes, sir, Mr. Jagger asked me to collect you. He wants me to take you to him."

This posed a slight problem. I had paid a friend to carry the cocaine for me, and he was now ensconced in the bus. We finally caught up with it and flagged it down on a busy highway, much to the merriment of the assembled celebrities.

There was much jeering from McCartney and Clapton as I grabbed my smuggler and pushed him into the limo. We arrived at length at the Hotel Byblos, which is where all the Stones were staying. Situated between the sea and the forests, the Byblos is one of the great hotels. Guests stay in small villas around a central sky-blue swimming pool.

Keith grabbed me the second I climbed out of the car. "Thank God you've made it," he said. "I haven't had a snort for days. Anita's only got her heroin-substitute tabs and she's going balmy."

He half dragged me into their villa and I pulled out some coke that I had brought for myself. They bottle took huge snorts from my bottle, and then Keith lolled back on the bed. "You didn't just bring this little bit, did you?" he asked. "Where's my stash?"

"You didn't ask me to bring anything for you," I said. "Anyway, you can keep the rest of my bottle if you're really desperate. I've got to nip out for a minute."

I knew only too well that Keith and Anita would have no compunction about grabbing the $2400 stash of coke I had hidden in my trousers for Mick if I didn't beat it before they talked me into giving it to them.

Mick was alone in his room. We chatted about marriage and he seemed pensive. "The whole fucking thing is more hassle than it's worth," he said.

He'd had a furious row with Bianca over their marriage contract. In France, a couple can choose joint ownership of their possessions or individual ownership. Bianca had plumped, unsurprisingly, for 50 percent of Jagger's multimillion-dollar fortune. Mick had insisted on an individual-ownership agreement or the wedding was off. With a bitter curl of her lip, Bianca reluctantly capitulated.

They were unable simply to marry in Sainte Anne's, after all. They had to go through a legal ceremony in the town's council chamber before their union could be blessed in the church.

The longer Mick and Bianca delayed, the more crowded the council chamber became. Fans, reporters and photographers were milling about, buzzing, waiting for the show to begin. Mayor Marius Estezan, the man who was to conduct the civil ceremony, proved to be a pretty good warm-up act, preening like a peacock as he fielded a hail of questions and posed for photographers.

But when Les Perrin, Mick's press officer, called the hotel to warn Mick about what to expect at the council chamber, Mick blew up. "Get rid of them," he yelled. "If there's going to be all that crowd, I'm not going to get married. I do not wish to wed in a goldfish bowl and I am not the king of France."

It was then 4:20 and the wedding had been scheduled for four o'clock. Perrin tried to clear the chamber but to no avail. Under French law, weddings are open to the public.

"If the bride and groom are not here by four-thirty," announced Monsieur Estezan, "I shall go and there will be no wedding."

Perrin phoned Mick to explain the situation. "Fucking hell," said Mick. "I wish to God I'd never said I was going to get married in the first place." But he relented, Perrin persuaded the mayor to stay on and the guests began to arrive. Keith was wired and fighting everyone who got in his way?--one photographer had his camera smashed and an autograph hunter had his book hurled to the floor.

In the midst of the mayhem, Joe and Eva Jagger, Mick's parents, arrived. They looked frightened and sat uncomfortably between Lord Patrick Litchfield and Ronnie Wood, trying hard to appear inconspicuous.

Then Mick and Bianca drove up, almost an hour late by this time, and as soon as they stepped from their car, they were captured by camera lights and riddled by a volley of questions from the veritable babel of international reporters. "Fuck this," Mick muttered. "I'm not going through with it." And Bianca, wearing a white V-cut suit that almost bared her nipples, began to cry--much to the delight of the gathered newsmen.

"You've got to get it over and done with," Perrin whispered, and Mick relented. He told the press to take their pictures and leave them in peace, but he was just as ineffectual with them as he had been at Altamont. They got their pictures and stayed anyway.

The ceremony was over in minutes. Mick and Bianca signed the register and their signatures were witnessed by Roger Vadim and Natalie Delon.

As the hapless couple left the council chamber to climb into the Bentley for the drive to the church, Mick was again mobbed by photographers. A small group of student revolutionaries was staging a protest at the $60,000 extravagance of the wedding: The man who had promised to blast apart the status quo was spending his loot on a bourgeois bean feast for the indolent rich. The kids kicked his car and showered him with insults. Mick didn't care anymore; he had cut himself off from the debacle.

At the church, Perrin was determined to prevent the press from ruining at least this part of the ceremony. So tight was security that Mick and Bianca were accidentally locked out. The bridegroom thumped at the heavy oak doors as autograph hunters pulled at his clothes. "Les, Les, let me in, damn it!" he screamed to no avail. At length, the door was opened and the disheveled couple slipped inside.

It wasn't the usual crowd you would find in church; Father Baud was obviously unhappy about the flagrant indecency of girls in see-through tops, microskirts and hotpants in his house of worship. As he spoke, the organist played Bach and a schmaltzey medley from the film Love Story. The music had been selected by Bianca.

Lord Litchfield led Bianca down the aisle and gave her away.

The priest liked Jagger, and he smiled paternally as he told him, "You have told me that you believe youth seeks happiness and a certain ideal and faith. I think you are seeking it, too, and I hope it arrives today with your marriage. But when you are a personality like Mick Jagger, it is too much to hope for privacy for your marriage."

As dusk settled on one of the least languid days, in St.-Tropez history, there was a party for hundreds of people at the fabulous Café des Arts. I stared as Brigitte Bardot undulated through the crowd. As a beauty, Bardot is in a class by herself--just as dazzling offscreen as she is on. I am used to beautiful women, but this one left me speechless.

Bianca wore a diamanté turban and a diaphanous waistcoat that made her effectively naked from the waist up. In St.-Tropez that season, boobs were in.

The party Was decadent in its extravagance--all the caviar and lobster and champagne you could consume. A local band played, dismally, but then there was a reggae set from the Rudies and a few songs from Terry Reid. At last, Mick went onstage to sing with Doris Troy, P. P. Arnold, Steve Stills and a stageful of other stars. They were magnificent.

Bianca, piqued at the way Mick was pointedly ignoring her, slipped back to the Byblos alone. Joe and Eva Jagger had also found it difficult to speak with their egocentric son. They had wandered around all evening, waiting for a chance to hand him his carefully wrapped wedding present. They left still holding the package. "I hope," Mrs. Jagger said to a reporter, "that my other son doesn't become a superstar."

"Whop! Keith punched Anita in the face. She grabbed him by his hair and jerked him to the floor."

"Mick cut down on booze and dope, took up cycling and running. He wasn't about to end up like Elvis."