True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (38 page)

“Well, let's try it—” Sullivan was saying, “I won't ask you what you're gonna sing now, we'll just shake hands.”

“Okay,” Mick said, “we'll just shake hands.”

“Mick don't care,” Richard said. “He'll tell Ed Sullivants, Take that fifty thousand and buy you some shoes!”

The cameras rolled again, and Sullivan asked, “What are you gonna sing now?” Audience, Stones, cameramen all laughed.

“He a old man,” Richard said, “and what he think of rock and roll it really like this”—gesturing thumbs down—“but he
need
the Rolling Stones for his
ra
-tings.”

Sullivan and Jagger at last succeeded in shaking hands, and the Stones started “Love in Vain,” Mick in an orange and black satin shirt with long trailing bat-sleeves and a wide black choker with dangling tiny gold coin medallions, glinting in the lights on the monitor. “That's beautiful,” Richard said, “that choker.” He lifted his ropes of beads and said, “I wear my pearls every day, honey. I say, if you got 'em, wear 'em.”

“Love in Vain” ended, and Richard had to leave. He blessed us all and told me he hoped I sold “one billion.” He was far too pretty to have gone on washing dishes at the bus station in Macon.

Before “Honky Tonk Women” started, Sam came up to Kathy and told her that the Stones wanted some chicks. “Just pick out some nice ones and ask if they'd like to meet the Stones, you know—”

“Okay,” Kathy said. The song started, and there was a very pretty young girl, dressed in brown shirt and pants, very excited, standing up applauding. “That's the sort of girl Mick likes,” Kathy said. “He really digs those young innocent-looking ones—but I don't think I can handle Sam's pimping duties for him.”

“Honky Tonk Women” ended and the taping session was over. Kathy told Sam she thought he'd better handle it. In a moment he was leading away, back to the dressing rooms, the big blond in buckskin.

Michael, Lil, and I went out, the pretty little girl in the brown outfit ahead of us, smiling, lucky to be left with her dreams, into the purple dusk. Michael was going to his home in Elk, California, for the layoff between now and Detroit on November 24, six days away. We drove to Lil's apartment, on a side street off Sunset, to pick up Michael's green canvas duffel bag. He carried it across the sidewalk to the car, Lil watching him—not sorry, I thought, to see him go. I told her I'd call her later so she could help me mail my contract (since she's a local girl and knows the post offices) and took Michael to the airport in the same green Dodge Charger I'd driven before we left town.

On the freeway Michael was talking about women and how much he loved them and how sad it was for him and his wife to break up, but she was a writer and very jealous of his talent and so it didn't work out. He said he loved his little girl, he loved all women. “This girl Lil, she's a great girl,” he said, “don't you think so?”

“Yeah, she's fine,” I said. “I try not to get involved with people
myself, because it's all too fucking sad, you'll get your heart broken enough times without going around looking for trouble.”

“I've really been having a great time with women on this tour,” Michael said. “I'm in love with them all, I guess I love all women.”

Lots of luck, I thought. I let him out at the airport. It was night now and I switched the lights on and headed back into the city. Just off the freeway a billboard displayed a big book, a big can of paint, and the message, “Harold Robbins paints with words in
The Inheritors
—The best word in paints: Sinclair.”

The car was almost out of gas, so I stopped at a service station. The attendant was Indian, with blue-black raven hair, a redneck haircut, no feathers, greasy green coveralls. I wondered what tribe he was from but couldn't bring myself to ask, Who were your people, once-proud Red Man?

I paid for the gas, drove to the Hyatt House and called Lil. She told me to come over. I took the contract down to the desk and the night manager let me Xerox it on the hotel's machine. Soon I was at Lil's door. She opened it and said, “Oh! I thought you were the guy next door, he's got some records the postman left with him because I wasn't home.” I came in feeling as if I were the wrong person. The apartment was decorated to the hilt, like a set for Marlene Dietrich in a very lush Von Sternberg movie. The front room was furnished with ostrich plumes, fans, cushions, black gauze curtains. Lil was highly perfumed and wearing a blouse that almost contained her bosom. She played Frank Sinatra records and we talked about singers—Sylvia Syms, Anita O'Day—and smoked excellent hashish. I didn't know exactly what Lil did, except that she had designed covers for record albums. She showed me collages she had made with photographs of the Stones' faces and of parrots, dancing girls, various images that she seemed to want me to “understand” in all their symbolic complexity.

The incense kept burning, and we kept smoking, and Lil played peculiar music and finally announced that she was famished. I was too, what with the length of the day, Ed Sullivan, apoplectic guards, and all that, so I said, “Let me sign my contract and mail it and we'll go eat.” I was so stoned that moving was torturous, and the back of my neck felt as if it were dissolving in hot water. I took the folded contract out in its sky-blue wrapper and once again read every word, trying to believe that after all the years since I was fifteen and, at Waycross High School, decided that I was going to be a writer, and if I failed, I would die trying—after all the time when I couldn't make a living at it and Christopher and I had clung to straws of straight jobs and journalism—here was the contract, its thighs open before me, and all I had to do was sign it (or so, even if I didn't really believe it, I devoutly hoped) and I would be paid real money, the kind you can live on. I couldn't
sign my name at first and wrote it several times on a sheet of notebook paper, then signed the contract and put it in an envelope addressed to my agent. I was also sending a copy home. “Where's the post office?” I asked.

“There's a box on the corner,” Lil said, which wasn't what I'd had in mind for such a grand document, but I had some stamps and decided to risk it. Lil asked what sort of eating place I wanted to go to and I told her someplace where they left you alone. I know just the place, she said, and she did. On the plane to Oakland, in the
L.A. Times' West
magazine, I had read a story about it: Musso and Frank's Grill, a restaurant on Hollywood Boulevard favored by writers including Scott Fitzgerald, Robert Benchley, and William Faulkner, where in the 1920s Charlie Chaplin, too busy to leave the movie set, would send his Rolls every day to pick up his lunch. Hollywood Boulevard, in those days, “was . . . strangely appealing . . . with an avocado grove toward Sunset, a stream running down Franklin, a eucalyptus tree in the parking lot and a manager at a marble-fronted Owl Drug Store on Highland, who wore a morning coat with a carnation in the buttonhole. . . .”

In 1969, the place was probably very much as it was when Dorothy Parker, Nathanael West, and S. J. Perelman ate there. You got a table with clean white linen and it was understood that you had come in because you were hungry and thirsty. No music, only warm friendly ghosts. The waiter brought us drinks (tiny needles of ice in my gimlet) and delicate whitefish and roast spring lamb and sand dabs and cognac and coffee. As we ate Lil told me a story which, if I weren't hearing it in such a pleasant and comfortable place, would cause me to tremble. It concerned the time that Lil Leonards was in Los Angeles, her hometown, reading the best-selling war novel by Moses Ringer, a book called
Flying Backwards.
It seemed to her a good and funny book, and it seemed the man who wrote it must be a fine fellow indeed, and just the sort one would like to meet. “So I wrote him a letter,” Lil said, “telling him that I was sitting at a bus stop on Sunset Strip, wearing a wet bathing suit, reading his book, and—”

“Were you?” I asked, naive child.

“Of course not,” she said. “I told him a lot of things and he answered my letter and we got to know each other and he flew me to New York.” She told me the details of how she had put him in a position where he'd had no choice. I was terrified by the story, but we finished the meal. Lil told the waiter how good it was and he asked her, “Have you ever been here before? I know
you
have,” he said, meaning me.

“I've never been here before,” I said.

“I thought you were a regular,” he said. That cheered me up. We went back to Lil's, where the night turned mauve. We smoked hash
until I was once again swimming in a sea of warm molasses. Lil asked me what I thought of the Stones. I said that they were a new band in a way since Brian died.

“Yes,” she said, “now they know that they will die—”

Lil brought out some unpublished poetry by Jim Morrison and began to read it aloud. Since I just came over to mail a letter, I thanked her and left. It was after midnight, but when I reached the Hyatt House I drove past, deciding to check on the Oriole house to see what was happening.

As I came into the living room, Jo, Mick, and Ronnie came out of the office. Kathy, Mary, Sam, Tony, Keith, Gram, Mick Taylor, and Charlie were around. Gram was passing around a 35-millimeter film can of cocaine. Soon he and Keith were sitting at the piano singing. Mick joined them, and I relaxed in front of the fireplace, talking to Kathy about my peculiar evening with Lil. A couple of girls came in, one of whom, blond and rather pretty, was Linda Lawrence, Brian's old girl-friend. With her was a small boy wearing snakeskin boots, a velvet suit, and long blond hair—Brian's son, Julian, looking exactly like him, like a miniature Brian, same hair, same face, same eyes. Linda sat down before the fire, a joint was passed her, she took a couple of hits, and Julian went by, bouncing a large many-colored balloon in the air.

“Want something?” Linda asked him.

“No.” He shook his head and went on across the room, following the balloon, keeping it in the air with his tiny hands that were, like his father's and grandfather's, almost as wide as they were long. Gram and Keith were on the piano bench, Mick on the couch, leaning over the back, the three of them singing unintelligible hillbilly songs. The room had a rhythm, but Julian didn't seem part of it. He wasn't bouncing around the room like a child, he was quietly and lightly, in an almost unearthly way, walking or dancing around the room, like a silent ballet dancer, following the balloon, which leapt and danced over his head, leapt at the touch of his fingers.

W
e are in the trailer with the condiments and cookies, Mick in the doorway head down in the bright movie lights, his burgundy newsboy cap hiding his face, listening to the radio interviewer. “Mick, do you and the Stones intend to go on touring?”

“Yeah, we aim to stay on the streets. We dug doing this tour, actually, more than the others. We got into playing a bit more, we could hear ourselves occasionally.”

“What do you think of this gathering?”

“It reminds me of when we were in Marrakech the—Keith and I were in Marrakech the last time, outside the city walls, there were a great many musicians and dancers, very medieval.”

Sam Cutler, sitting at the trailer's kitchen table with Keith, Chip Monck, and Rock Scully, his eyes red in a grey-white bristly face, says, “You should go on about five
P.M.
Sunset's at twenty to six.”

“Are you ready to split, Keith?” Mick asks.

“I'm stayin'” Keith says.

“Okay. See you soon.”

We step down from the trailer. Ronnie is standing by in his grey business suit. Keith is staying. He likes it here. I can't get over feeling that it is a pity, even if we could save the world it is a drag to have to go into the desert to do it, which I suppose Moses must have felt also. And it is cold, the cold has finally reached us even in California, after days in Muscle Shoals, Alabama, where the people were sincere and polite and we had as a result a peaceful and pleasantly exciting time. Now we are back among the limos, the lead suits, the ring of the cashbox, the smell of the shill. And so we are out of gas, Bill Belmont scurrying around looking for a cop; the driver, hands folded, gazing heavenward like the Holy Mother in a pietà—as if he were (it is a look we have seen before) delighted to be singlehandedly bringing the whole of an enormous enterprise to a halt through his own ineptitude. An enormous enterprise—to save the world is a joke phrase but how
could you express what we are about, much less explain—I was about to say why salmon take such pains to spawn or grunion run headlong out of the sea on their little wobbly tails, but those are fish and we are—what are we? Who could say, and who could say how old was this instinct that led us to dance and get high and go mad? What brings us here is an impulse toward freedom as old perhaps as life, but still strong enough by the time man could threaten all life on earth to touch Brian Jones, he was more than a little touched by it and set out with a fanaticism that swept along Keith and Mick and Perks and Watts the noted brush-drummer, and Stu, and in fact all of us now standing around in the early morning hours of the day before Pearl Harbor Day's twenty-eighth observance.

As the limo is loaded with fuel Belmont has found somewhere, Mick is asking the Maysles brothers if they'll be staying. “There should be filming starting at dawn,” he says.

“Oh, sure,” David says. “We'll stay.” Al looks at him. They have been with us all the last sleepless night in Muscle Shoals, across the country with us, behind us in another car as we drove out from San Francisco, and now Mick on his way back to the hotel asks them if they'll be staying for a second sleepless night.