A Prince Among Stones (15 page)

Marguerite had been, it was said, the inspiration for Holly Golightly in Truman Capote's
Breakfast at Tiffany's
. I already knew Truman quite well through my New York friends C. Z. Guest and Mrs Paley: he used to stay in St Moritz at the same time as all of us were there and, indeed, came to London as well. He asked me early on whether the Stones would like it if he came and wrote a piece about them. I asked the band and they were very happy for him to do so.

He took along Jackie Onassis's sister Lee Radziwill – who had been at the White Ball – and spent time with the Stones. In the end, alas, he did not produce the article, which
Rolling Stone
magazine were hoping to publish. It was a disappointment for me, as I was hoping that Truman would answer the question which to me was the key question of an intelligent observer: what was it that constituted the Rolling Stones' great success and popularity? The magazine dispatched Andy Warhol to interview Capote about his impressions. He commented on Mick's ‘remarkable quality of being absolutely able to be totally extroverted', noting as I had that Mick's skill lay not in his singing ability but in his showmanship.

Marguerite introduced us to Tennessee Williams. She had taught Elizabeth Taylor, she said, to talk ‘Southern' for
A Streetcar Named Desire
(the
New York Times
once wrote that Marguerite herself had ‘a voice you could marinade ham in'). Williams possessed enormous charm; one could see what a great man he was. Unfortunately he was also a very close friend of Jack Daniel's and one had to be rather lucky, which we were periodically, in having good conversations with him.

We would organise parties for our friends who had travelled down from New York. Mick and Keith loved the local musicians who came and played. At one hotel, the owner, Jimmy Coleman, flew in daily deliveries of oysters from Brittany. Marguerite pointed out that it was a mark of great distinction when a family had somebody who had jumped off one of the bridges in New Orleans and committed suicide, and apparently one of the Coleman clan had duly obliged.

On one tour, Marguerite arranged for her friend Matilda Stream, one of the great ladies of New Orleans, who owned probably the best collection of Fabergé outside the English royal family, to organise a party for the Stones at her delightful old-fashioned plantation house on the banks of the Mississippi, where we had lunch, looking over the slave quarters and imagining how it must have been
ante bellum
.

At the luncheon, which was on a day when there was going to be a Stones show in the evening, Matilda took me aside and said, ‘Since this seems to be quite an occasion, I've decided that I will come to the concert and my son Spook shall take me there.' I had not thought to offer her any tickets because I could not imagine she would have wanted to go. I said, ‘Of course', and we gave her VIP tickets and placed her in boxes where we had all our friends. A young man who worked for me in my office in London, Alexander Ogilvie-Grant, had the job of looking after our friends, seeing that they were happy and making sure that they all left before the last song, to avoid the mad crush on the way out. Alexander asked me, ‘Surely they'd want to see the end of the show?' ‘No, no,' I said, ‘it's far more important for these people to get away
before
the crowd leaves.'

Half an hour after the Stones had started their performance I was wandering around backstage and noticed Matilda and her son Spook walking away. I caught up with them. ‘Matilda, are you enjoying yourself?' ‘No,' she said, ‘I am not. They are five ugly, and pointless young men, and I
loathe
their music.' So I said, ‘In that case, perhaps you are right to leave.' Compared to the usual star-struck response, I thought Matilda's was a refreshing, if unusual, attitude.

The often insurmountable gulf between the classical music world and the rock industry was made all too clear to me by Yehudi Menuhin. During one of the first Stones tours I was involved in, probably the first tour where I had managed to see to it that the band made some significant money from touring – which in the past, of course, they never had – there was a major concert coming up at Earls Court, which had some magnificent and startling décor, and a vast flower that opened up on the stage out of which the Stones appeared.

I had recently initiated a course of action, something that the Stones did from then on, where the band would give a significant sum of their profits to charity (which we always matched). When we were talking about potential recipients in England, I had suggested that an appropriate one might be the Yehudi Menuhin School in Surrey, and that we could perhaps set up a Rolling Stones Scholarship for some of the students there. The Stones were delighted with the idea.

I placed a call to Menuhin, and once I had had a discussion with one of his staff about the tickets to Earls Court that we were proposing to give the school as part of the arrangement, I asked Yehudi, ‘Will you want to come to the concert?' He said, ‘The awful thing is that I don't think I can come on that day, because the night before I am playing in Stuttgart and I may be obliged to play there twice, once in the evening, so I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to take up your offer. Though of course my music school will be very grateful for the Rolling Stones' generosity.'

On the day of the concert I received a desperate call from Menuhin's assistant, saying, ‘Sir Yehudi has just telephoned to say that he is not playing the second concert in Stuttgart tonight, so he would
love
to come, and he will be there.' I suggested that, given the shortness of time, as soon as Menuhin arrived in London he should come straight over to our house and have some dinner with us before going on to Earls Court, which was nearby.

Menuhin arrived terribly late, the poor man; his train connections had been delayed. He was rather lingering over dinner so I said, ‘I really think we should get going, because the Stones will be coming onstage very shortly, and that's what's exciting for you to see.' I was getting constant calls from the venue, saying ‘It really does look as if the band will be on in quarter of an hour', and a great panic set in. We rushed over to Earls Court, went at some pace through the backstage area, and just in time reached our seats next to the mixer. The show started almost immediately.

After no more than ten minutes, Menuhin turned to me and shouted above the music, ‘I can't take this any more. I'm afraid I have to leave. So would you come with me?' Josephine and I, unbelievably embarrassed, got up with him, as did a couple of the friends who had been at dinner with us, and back we trooped through the backstage area, where all of the Stones' wives, girlfriends and friends were, all longing to speak to the great violinist. But he didn't wait to stop and chat with them; we got straight into the car and were driven back to Holland Villas Road.

As we drew up, I saw that the road was blocked by some vast television trucks drawn up outside our front door. ‘Ah, I thought they'd be here by now,' Menuhin said. ‘What do you mean?' I asked. ‘Well, you see, I said that I would give them an interview after I had heard the Stones. I knew you wouldn't mind.'

I was livid. But what could I do? Menuhin parked himself in my drawing room with half a dozen camera people and a pack of journalists. Luckily we had a library on the first floor, so Josephine and I were able to take our other guests up there, where we entertained ourselves for an hour or so while the interviews continued. There was a knock at the door. It was Menuhin, popping his head round to say, ‘Thank you so much, so kind of you. Now I must go because I have to leave for Brussels first thing tomorrow.'

When I picked up my copy of
The Times
the next morning, I found a ghastly interview with Menuhin from the night before, describing the Stones' show. The gist of it was,  ‘Meaningless cacophony. Overgrown children pandering to the worst emotions one can have, playing what they thought was music, and all I could think of was some barbaric ritual. Awful.'

We were giving a big party at Annabel's, Mark Birley's club, to celebrate the end of the tour. Keith was clearly the most upset about the article. ‘Surely he could have seen something in our music,' he said. ‘Yes,' I said. ‘All he had to do was to read the score. It would not have been difficult for him to do that.' I had, incidentally, suggested that to Menuhin, and he had assured me he did have the sheet music of the Stones' songs, but if he did clearly he had not looked at it.

I wrote a letter to him saying that naturally I was not commenting on whether he liked the music or not, but on his lack of manners in taking their money and not, as it were, drinking a toast to the hard work and professional performance he had witnessed.

Not long afterwards Josephine went to a dinner party given by Malcolm Sargent where the Menuhins were invited. Josephine said to Yehudi's wife Diana, ‘This thing about your husband being a man of deep goodness, how could he have justified not giving a generous interview by saying something more like, “It's not my kind of music but hats off to a great performance”? That would have been easy to do.' ‘Oh well,' said Diana Menuhin, ‘I'm sure he didn't really
mean
what he said.'

Our friend Princess Peg of Hesse, née Geddes – she had gone on holiday to Bavaria in the 1930s, where she met the German Prince Ludwig of Hesse-Darmstadt and married him shortly before the war – gave wonderful concerts at her house at Wolfsgarten, south of Frankfurt. She was a dedicated patron of the arts, especially music, and was a great supporter of Benjamin Britten and Peter Pears' Aldeburgh Festival.

‘What is Menuhin like when he stays with you?' I asked her. ‘He's a split character,' she told me. ‘In one way he is absolutely marvellous: excellent company, very intuitive, very pleasant. But suddenly he can change so quickly you don't know what's hitting you. He can be extraordinarily disagreeable. It's very odd. But I don't care. I like him, he likes me, and we have our wonderful concerts. But I'm not surprised by your story.'

After a show in Frankfurt, Mick was once taken by our friend Prince Rupert Hohenlohe, whose sister was an assistant of Princess Peg, to the Princess's house, where she asked Mick to engrave his name with a diamond on the famous window she had there, the window panes covered with amazing signatures from writers, musicians, politicians and the crowned heads of Europe.

Mick was, I am sure, not that bothered by Yehudi Menuhin's comments. Although I know he enjoys seventeenth-century Italian music – Corelli, Scarlatti – on CD, I am not sure that classical music plays a huge part in his life. Shortly after Mick and I had got to know each other, the great pianist Vladimir Horowitz was playing in London, for the first time in many years. I said to Mick, ‘I've got some tickets. Do you want to come, because you'll never have heard somebody of that age and that quality in the flesh.' He didn't want to, and came up with a series of excuses as to why.

I am sure Keith would have leapt at the chance to go to the concert. When I had first been in Keith and Anita's house in the South of France while they were recording
Exile On Main Street
, I noticed that, although they had barely unpacked – there were boxes and crates everywhere – he did have a pile of LPs out. And the ones that caught my eye were Bach's
48 Preludes and Fugues
. He had taken the trouble to bring them out in the luggage from England.

7

 

 

‘Corruption never has been compulsory'

 

Anthony Eden

 

 

 

All the time that I worked with the Stones I never changed my habits, my clothes or my attitudes. I did not pretend to be overwhelmed by or to enter into discussions about their music.

I was never tempted by the rock'n'roll lifestyle. Although I enjoyed a good vintage wine, I was never a heavy drinker, nor a drug-taker. I always aimed to maintain a strict discipline backstage, for security reasons, and tried to see that the band and the entourage did not get drunk or disorderly. I felt, and still feel, that remaining true to myself stood us in good stead whenever problems arose.

The Stones had their own dressing rooms or their own caravans where, in the privacy of their own space, Keith, Mick and the other artists could do whatever they wanted. What went on behind those closed doors was entirely their business. I understood that it was part of their own particular way of preparing for a show.

I went to see them backstage only if I needed to talk to them about some specific or current problem; if they needed to sign a document, perhaps, or if I had to bring somebody important along for them to see. I'd say to them, ‘I have the head of EMI Publishing coming to the show. He wants to meet you and I would very much like you to see him.' They would then emerge from their respective lairs, becoming friendly hosts to these outsiders.

We very soon formalised this policy of the ‘meet and greet'. At a specific time, just before they went onstage, the Stones would be on hand to meet – and greet – some of the people who were important for their career. It was quite often the only time that these businessmen would ever have the opportunity to come into direct, personal contact with the band. They could go back and tell their colleagues and their wives and girlfriends that they had met Mick Jagger. The Stones for their part would be on their very best behaviour. They knew that at a show not only did they have to give a superb performance but they also had to look like intelligent, with-it business people.