Memories, Dreams and Reflections

The thing about the Stones is that they were very intense about everything: about writing, recording, and performing. The Beatles had a similar intensity in the studio, but they were never able to transmit that on to the stage. They were so unlucky with what they went through in the early days; not being able to hear themselves play. It was a complete fuck-up that we have to lay, I’m afraid, at Brian Epstein’s door.

One of the things a manager must do is make sure that theb technical aspects are taken care of when the musicians go on stage. Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp did it for The Who, Clapton’s crew looked after Eric. The basic responsibility of people who take care of any band, including mine, is to make sure that the sound is right so that the musicians can enjoy the experience. That’s vitally important, and Brian Epstein just didn’t get that together. He never made that leap from playing small venues in the north of England to playing Shea Stadium. It’s tragic to see the Beatles on stage with their tiny amps, unable to hear a thing. And naturally, after that last tour, they came back from all that and said, ‘That’s it! We’re never going out again!’ And then Brian Epstein got really depressed because he realised he was almost out of a job.

The Beatles completely evolved from the pop business. The Stones began as a Brit Chicago R & B group and then lurched into a more raunchy rig than the Beatles ever managed. When the Beatles stopped touring in 1966 they were still the lovable Fab Four – they were rock’n’roll muppets. The Stones were menacing and sexy. A lot of that had to do with the kind of music they played, with Andrew Oldham, their manager, pushing their bad-boy image and Mick and Keith’s natural bolshiness. But much of it, too, had to do with Mick’s savvy on the business side. They never had a manager in the sense of a daddy figure like Brian Epstein telling them what to do – Andrew was younger than they were and more reckless. They weren’t dependent on Allen Klein or Andrew – they were their own gang. Also, you have to take into account that the Beatles were the pioneers and nobody had invented proper speakers yet. It was so early on that nothing had been sorted out yet.

Mick might, very occasionally, put the Beatles down for their provincialism, which, if you’re from London and they’re from Liverpool, is a very natural reaction. But he’d never put their music down. Well, of ‘Yellow Submarine’ or those whimsical Beatle songs he might say, ‘Now that is a bit silly.’ I never thought so; I loved it, still do. Also something like ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, but these are obviously not the sort of things the Stones would be into.

Anyway, when you listen to the Beatles carefully, and the John Lennon stuff in particular, they aren’t all sweetness and light. There’s an edge to their music; there’s a real soggy, dark, dirty bit in it that bleeds through. Their sweetness is very superficial. You hear the undercurrent in Paul’s bass playing, you hear it in John’s harmonies, you hear it in the call-and-response stuff. Maybe not the first couple of records, but when you get to Revolver and Rubber Soul, things begin to darken. And there’s something very weird about Sgt Pepper, too. It’s not at all what it appears to be. I’ve found subsequently that listening to Sgt Pepper can be a bit of an unsettling experience. Pet Sounds still comes across as very beatific, so innocent and yearning, whereas Sgt Pepper really doesn’t.

Brian Epstein didn’t seem to get it that one of his jobs was to make sure that his precious boys were happy onstage and could hear each other and that they weren’t torn to pieces all the time by crazed fans. The most basic of needs, you know, just to make sure they weren’t being hounded day and night by cameras and reporters, with absolutely no time to themselves. These awful things kept happening and he wasn’t able to deal with them. That’s one of the reasons why Derek Taylor, their publicist, was so handy, because he was such a gentleman, and a hipster plus he had that ability to make people snap to attention. Invaluable, since Brian Jones would go missing in the middle of tours, recording sessions, negotiations, and nobody could find him. Epstein was a handy front for the Beatles in the beginning, because he seemed to be a gentleman – in appearance he was upper middle class. At first he was able to keep that together and where he did fall short he wasn’t that different from many of the early managers. It was new territory and they didn’t know what the hell they were doing.

Brian Epstein was so talented and had so many gifts and yet in many ways it was as if he really wasn’t paying attention. He fucked up. Beautifully. He was eaten up by what he called his ‘problem’. This was all long before it was cool to be gay. He was wrestling with real demons there, boy, as much if not more than our Andrew. But the difference was that Andrew seemed to enjoy his demons, let’s put it that way. Andrew embraced them, whereas poor Brian just beat himself into a bloody pulp over it. Nobody guessed that he was so terribly depressed and desperate. I had no clue anything was awry. The many times that I went down to see him in his lovely country house, they were beautiful idyllic afternoons. He seemed happy, and put up such a front you could never guess what was going on in the dark corners.

We talked and talked, about ballet, opera, the theatre. We talked about Margot Fonteyn and Nureyev, Vanessa Redgrave, Maggie Smith’s production of Miss Julie. At that time Brian was agonising over Up Against It, the Joe Orton script that he wanted the Beatles to do. He was worried it was too far out.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, flipping through the script. ‘Some of it is extremely provocative and nasty.’

‘C’mon, Brian,’ I said. ‘It’s Joe Orton; they’ll eat it up.’

‘Well, the Archbishop of Canterbury turns out to be a woman, the boys get dressed up as women, commit adultery and murder, and are involved in the assassination of the Prime Minister. Do you really think audiences can stomach this stuff?’

‘It’s farce, Brian,’ I told him. ‘And, let’s face it, at this point the Beatles could do with something edgy.’

I hadn’t, of course, actually read it, and when I did, I saw how tricky – unfortunately – it would be for the Beatles (with the exception of John). There were wonderful outrageous lines. The Archbishop of Canterbury was pure hysterical camp: ‘I’m Princess of the Church. Let me pass. I’ve some hard praying to do.’ The Stones maybe could have got away with it, but for the Fab Four it would’ve been a bit of a stretch.

Orton rightly anticipated that it would be turned down. In his diary he wrote scathingly of Epstein: ‘An amateur and a fool. He isn’t equipped to judge the quality of a script. Probably he will never say “yes”, equally hasn’t the courage to say “no”. A thoroughly weak, flaccid type.’

Too bad. I think if the Beatles had done Orton’s script, it would have really helped Brian – moved him up a level. Although Joe Orton made an unfortunate choice in a lover (who killed him), his take on the Beatles was spot on. He had the right cheeky attitude to the whole thing, and he came from the same milieu as the Beatles. It would have been brilliant if they’d filmed Orton’s script. Would have helped Brian exorcise some of his shit, too.

I know Brian Epstein really liked me because towards the end of one of these teas he asked me to marry him; not that he was exactly serious, but for a second I actually considered it. Come to think of it, I know exactly what stopped me. It was our Mick walking in and saying, ‘Come on, darling, we’ve got to go home now.’

Kit Lambert, who along with Chris Stamp managed The Who, was a wonderful maniac. I remember in the early seventies visiting Kit in some really dreadful, scabby flat in Notting Hill, before Notting Hill became fashionable. It was a trip, I can tell you, both of us doing lots of heroin and coke and alcohol – Kit loved alcohol. We had a whale of a time as Kit regaled me with stories about his dad Constant Lambert, the composer, acting out scenes from operas, scenes with divas and soirées with princesses and rent boys. I didn’t know Kit in his heyday; I only got to know him on the way down, which was more interesting I think, because in an odd way that’s when he was truly in his glory – he was a connoisseur of the lower depths, an area in which I am also somewhat of an expert. The only good thing you could say about Kit’s self-demolition was that he had a perverse kind of pleasure in all of it. He was such a fascinating pervert with a classical education. He used to say things like, ‘The destruction of Pompeii … one of the most magnificent events in history. Those two naked boys preserved in flagrante delicto for all eternity!’

Kit liked building things up, like a child with a sand castle, and then, oh, the mad joy of tearing them down. He enjoyed seeing everything in turmoil, going up in flames. Like Nero, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Pliny the Elder, he loved a great catastrophe – especially if he’d engineered it himself. He loved talking about his disasters – few understood that he relished them as perverse works of art.

I remember once he wanted to take me on a lig to the Cannes Film Festival on a yacht with lots of drugs. In spite of his fallen state he was always very posh. But I wasn’t in any condition to go to some fancy international event and display myself in my wretched condition, so regretfully I declined. Thank God. I would have made the most awful fool of myself, and in public. I had been doing that far too much in front of people as it was – along the lines of the famous Mandrax head-in-the-soup incident. Kit went and made a fool of himself in the grand manner, but then he was a man for whom flamboyant bad behaviour was a fine art. One of the curious things about Kit, of course, was that his father had been a great composer; and that leads us directly to Tommy, The Who’s rock opera. You can see why Pete with his transcendent – and overweening – approach to rock would have been so receptive to Kit’s idea, and I do think it was Kit’s idea – writing a rock opera. After Sgt Pepper everybody wanted a crack at the rock Gesamtkunstwerk, but it was not on. The only person who managed anything like it, and, in fact, preceded it, was Brian Wilson with Pet Sounds. And it was Pet Sounds that helped give Sgt Pepper wings.

Kit came to a sad end, alas. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage after falling down the stairs of his mother’s house in 1981.

Visits to Paul and Jane Asher weren’t quite as relaxed as those Mick and I spent with George and Pattie. With hindsight I can see that they were rather uptight. There were constant little frictions. Mick and I were very close and we would never have done anything like fret about windows being open or closed, or anything as petty as that, but this is what happens when couples start to come apart. In any case I was in a very different position to the one Jane found herself in. I’d done what Paul wanted Jane to do, and given up my career. I wasn’t going on tour with the Old Vic; I wasn’t taking any more movie roles and very few parts in plays. I gave up everything I’d been doing, apart from a little bit of theatre. Jane was a serious actress and wanted to continue her career, but Paul had other ideas. That’s why Linda was so perfect for Paul; she was just what he wanted, an old-fashioned Liverpool wife who was completely devoted to her husband. In a way, that’s what Mick wanted, too, and for a while I acquiesced, but in the end it kicked back very badly. On the other hand, Paul isn’t exactly the regular bloke he appears. For one thing, he was always intellectually curious. Not only was he into electronic music and Stockhausen and all of that, but he was into Magritte, pop art, the Expressionists and even avant-garde theatre. I believe it was Paul who first thought of Joe Orton as the screenwriter for the next Beatles movie. He’d been to see Loot, Orton’s outrageous phallic farce, and liked it. He encouraged Brian Epstein to arrange a meeting with Orton, and in Orton’s diary he describes getting on famously with Paul.

Arrived in Belgravia at ten minutes to eight … I found Chapel Street easily. I didn’t want to get there too early so I walked around for a while and came back through a nearby mews. When I got back to the house it was nearly eight o’clock. I rang the bell and an old man entered. He seemed surprised to see me. ‘Is this Brian Epstein’s house?’ I said. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and led the way to the hall. I suddenly realised that the man was the butler. I’ve never seen one before … He took me into a room and said in a loud voice, ‘Mr Orton.’ Everybody looked up and stood to their feet. I was introduced to one or two people. And Paul McCartney. He was just as the photographs. Only he’d grown a moustache. His hair was shorter too. He was playing the latest Beatles record, ‘Penny Lane’. I like it very much. Then he played the other side – Strawberry something. I didn’t like this as much. We talked intermittently. Before we went out to dinner we agreed to throw out the idea of setting the film in the thirties. We went down to dinner. The trusted old retainer – looking too much like a butler to be good casting – busied himself in the corner. ‘The only thing I get from the theatre,’ Paul M. said, ‘is a sore arse.’ He said Loot was the only play he hadn’t wanted to leave before the end. ‘I’d’ve liked a bit more,’ he said. We talked of the theatre. I said that compared with the pop-scene the theatre was square. ‘The theatre started going downhill when Queen Victoria knighted Henry Irving,’ I said. ‘Too fucking respectable.’ We talked of drugs, of mushrooms which give hallucinations – like LSD. ‘The drug, not the money,’ I said. We talked of tattoos. And after one or two veiled references, marijuana. I said I’d smoked it in Morocco. The atmosphere relaxed a little. Dinner ended and we went upstairs again. We watched a programme on TV; it had phrases in it like ‘the in crowd’ and ‘swinging London’. There was a little scratching at the door. I thought it was the old retainer, but someone got up to open the door and about five very young and pretty boys trooped in. I rather hoped this was the evening’s entertainment. It wasn’t, though. It was a pop group called The Easybeats. I’d seen them on TV. I liked them very much … A French photographer arrived … He’d taken a set of new photographs of The Beatles. They wanted one to use on the record sleeve. Excellent photographs. The four Beatles look different in their moustaches. Like anarchists in the early years of the century. After a while … I talked to the leading Easybeat. Feeling slightly like an Edwardian masher with a Gaiety girl. And then I came over tired and decided to go home. I had a last word with Paul M. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’d like to do the film. There’s only one thing we’ve got to fix up.’ ‘You mean the bread?’ ‘Yes.’ We smiled and parted. I got a cab home. Told Kenneth about it. Then he got up to make a cup of tea. And we talked a little more. And went to sleep.

JOE ORTON and JOHN LAHR, The Orton Diaries

While Brian Epstein came off as a shadowy, pathetic character.

Somehow I’d expected something like Michael Codron. I’d imagined Epstein to be florid, Jewish, dark-haired and overbearing. Instead I was face to face with a mousey-haired, slight young man. Washed-out in a way. He had a suburban accent.

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. I got heavily into drugs in spite of all the warnings, which, again, I can only see from a distance. The biggest warning of all should have been Brian’s headlong plunge, but I didn’t realise it, and by the time I did it was too late. I had my overdose in Australia, and that was the beginning of the end for Mick and me. It’s easy enough, after all, to rationalise how other people’s problems are different from our own, and honestly there was no logical reason why I would’ve compared my fate to Brian’s.

Some very odd things happened to me in Australia when I OD’d on all those sleeping pills. It sounds strange, but I have a feeling that those six days out, unconscious, did some very bizarre things to me. I always thought that I came through that with no damage, but I know that when I had my biopsy last year the results showed very old scarring on my liver – apparently the 150 Tuinol and six days’ unconsciousness caused serious liver damage. Other bizarre things happened. Before the OD I could speak French, and afterwards I couldn’t. An entire language had somehow got lost.

I’m always amazed at how scenes from the past get congealed into rabid set pieces. There’s the whole Redlands business. It’s so complicated and has an endless life of its own. Almost immediately it became an emblematic part of Stones history, but my position was much dodgier – my role was ambivalent and eventually had disastrous effects on me and on my relationship with Mick. It was a horrible ordeal, but initially it created a bizarre bond between us. I took the poison-pen letters and all those dreadful things in the papers too hard. I was too young and insecure to have all that hatred directed at me and didn’t know how to deal with it. I turned it all on myself. Mick’s attitude was much, much healthier. Like, ‘Well, they’re just idiots. I’m not gonna let this get in my way!’ Which should have really been mine, too, but I wasn’t grown up or secure enough to do that. Also I was slandered as the wanton woman in the fur rug, while Mick was the noble rock star on trial.

The 1969 festival at Altamont, the Stones’ infamous free concert outside San Francisco, is now seen as a rock’n’roll Black Mass. So many things about Altamont that now seem inevitable just weren’t at the time. Mick may have sung his pantomime songs about the Devil and the Midnight Rambler, but he was in a total hippie mood when he went out there to do that concert. He wanted more than anything to be part of the counterculture utopia. ‘Brothers and sisters, we are creating the blueprint for a new society’ and so on. That’s how it was, actually. People imagine the Stones came to Altamont to incite murder, to summon up Beelzebub and his satanic crew from the bowels of the earth. Not at all! It was meant to be a Hippie Love Fest. It’s one of the saddest things that it turned into its opposite.

Mick must have realised when ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ started that it was a mistake. Every time they’d play it on that tour, he’d say: ‘Something funny happens when we start this.’ He got off on it – as if something might happen if he said it. And then suddenly it wasn’t funny any more. It’s the same old thing: wanting to have power over people. And often they don’t think about whether it’s good power, whether it’s positive or negative – it’s part of being young and stupid. Something happened to him out there on that tour. He’d always been so sweet and gentle – he began to get harder after that. The fact that I’d gone off to Rome with the painter Mario Schifano while he was gone didn’t exactly help his mood when he returned.

All these things eroded our relationship, but there were other more fundamental problems. As much as I loved Mick, the actual life, the big rock star life, wasn’t really for me. Mick, however, couldn’t live any other way, and I wouldn’t expect him to, it’s just part of his nature.

I love Bob Dylan’s attitude to the sixties. ‘I am the sixties. You want ’em? You can have ’em!’ Oh, God, that made me laugh so much! But, you must know by now he’s a sly dog and as slippery as an eel. He’s like some sort of creature that, as soon as you identify what it is, it turns into something else – a chameleon! Bob has a clever, oblique way of talking about himself. And because he’s so mentally agile he can see-saw about the sixties as much as he likes. He knows you can never take him out of the sixties, however much he grumbles, so his ambivalence about his decade is just a prank. If you take him out of the house of cards it would collapse. He just wants to be the Joker in the pack.

Bob’s old records are so embedded in our lives everybody gets nervous when a new Dylan record comes out. There’s so much expectation. When Modern Times was released, I talked to Polly Harvey and I told her how wonderful it was and she said, ‘But, oh, I’m scared! I’m scared!’ And I said, ‘Don’t be! It’s all right! It’s more than all right!’ We always hope it’s going to be this great thing – and there have been some clunkers, haven’t there? Some real downers, too. Time Out of Mind was very negative, but, as always, there were a couple of great tracks I loved, like ‘I’m Sick of Love’. I know that feeling – you want it but you get so sick of that old roller coaster.

Bob’s been competing with himself since 1966, trying to outdistance his own mythology. I was listening the other day to his radio show. He was talking about fathers and there was this bit where Bob says, ‘Well, you know, manic depression and depression and bipolar disorder, these are really all just the blues.’ He sees everything in a mythical context. The contemporary world is ersatz, a fallen model. And then he played Lightning Hopkins. It was a wonderful moment. I thought, ‘Yeah, man, that’s exactly what these people are doing, taking away the lightning, taking away the blues.’ The blues have that wonderful irony. I’ve naturally got them, I’m never going to be able to be rid of them – I couldn’t bear it, I wouldn’t be me.

On his show, Bob does his radio voice, the smooth, soft-talking deejay. Old possum Bob. That’s what I like so much about the Dylan radio show, that he’s playing a character – I love that he’s gone to the trouble to create a new persona. Of course, he’s always been good at manufacturing personae – brilliant. I love to see that he hasn’t lost his touch. I keep thinking that I want to send him an e-mail from Marianne in Paris saying: ‘Love the radio show, love the character. Don’t change a thing!’ But what Bob really likes to hear is young people criticising him. Because he loves saying what he really thinks. They’ll say: ‘Why don’t you play more new music, Bob?’ And he says things like: ‘Well, Scott from Arlington, the thing is, there’s a lot more old music than there is new music.’ That’s an argument I wouldn’t have thought of, and so very typical of him. He basically thinks modern music is crap, but he does play it occasionally. He played a Blur track the other day called ‘Coffee & TV’, but most of what he plays is stuff you’ll only hear on some old hipster like Hal Willner’s answering machine, the wildest, oldest stuff you can imagine.

Bob still thinks of me as the angelic Marianne of the mid-sixties and whenever he sees me drinking and smoking he gets a bit cross. I’d like to say I’ve reformed – I have actually, I hope that doesn’t disappoint – but unlike Bob I haven’t found God in the process. Bob is very religious but when it gets to God and all that, I feel I have to say to him: ‘You know, Bob, I’m really not religious actually.’ I know I shouldn’t say those things, but I feel I have to. I’m not a pagan or a witch or anything dark or satanic, I’m just a humanist like my dad. But it’s all over the place. Religion, God, Christ on the cross. And if they’re not Christians, they’re Scientologists. Look at Bono, too, with his big cross and everything. I understand that people have to do what they have to do to get through, but I don’t think you have to impose your thing on other people. But I do know that when you make that kind of statement to Bono, you’re kind of left out, they cut you out of their plan. ‘Oh, well, if she’s not Christian …’ They look askance. ‘Must be something wrong there.’ That’s such nonsense. Christians have always done that. If you’re not part of them, then you’re against them, and I’m not against them, I just don’t want to be them.