True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (53 page)

John Joseph: Uh-huh.

Interviewer: He lost his mind, I heard.

John Joseph: He lost his mind, yeah, he died in the bug house.

Interviewer: Yes, that's what I heard.

John Joseph: That's right, he died out there.

M
ICHAEL
O
NDAATJE
:
Coming Through Slaughter

“W
HERE TO
?”

“Inner London Sessions, Newington Causeway.”

“In trouble, are you?”

“No, not really.”

“With the law, then?”

“No, I'm a writer.”

“Writing about a trial?”

“Yes, Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones is on trial today.”

The taxi driver, a grey-faced old man with a nose shaped like a chicken's beak, turned to look at me over his shoulder, sniffed, and stared back through the rain-smeared windshield. We drove in silence along the oily Thames, past the Tate Gallery, then over Lambeth Bridge, past Lambeth Palace and the Imperial War Museum. I said, “It seems strange to me, as an American, but most English people appear to consider the Beatles a national asset, and the Stones a definite liability.” The driver glanced at me again, very much like a rooster eyeing a shoelace. “Exactly. The Beatles have some funny ways, of
course, meditation and all that, but at least as far as appearances go, they seem to be decent chaps. But the Stones—the look of them, and the way they carry on, with their drugs and young girls—the Stones are absolute dirt.”

At Inner London Sessions, an old grey stone courthouse, I paid the driver and walked down the black cinder motorpath under a large, dripping oak. In the bare, high-ceilinged entrance hall, a guard directed me upstairs to the public gallery, there being so many reporters present that they occupied all the courtroom space reserved for the press, as well as a row of seats normally used by witnesses. On the public gallery's four long wooden pews sat about a dozen schoolgirls, aged anywhere from twelve to sixteen, and maybe two dozen old people, men and women who looked as if they might have had nowhere else to spend the day. I took one of several empty spaces in the back row.

A great light globe hung from the blue and white domed ceiling, but it did little to dispel the gloom that pervaded the deep brown walls, the courtroom chairs, with their dark red leather back-cushions and seats, and the sallow visage of the bewigged, black-robed Chairman, or Judge, Reginald Ethelbert Seaton. It was the same R. E. Seaton who, at Inner London Sessions on November 1, 1967, nearly a year before, had sentenced Brian Jones to nine months in prison.

To the right of Mr. Seaton were the ten men and two women of the jury; to his left, in the witness stand, was Detective Sergeant Robin Constable, a handsome, stocky young man, with dark hair and pink cheeks. He was telling the court what he had done on the morning of May 21, 1968. At about 7:20
A.M.
, he said, he had called at Brian Jones' flat in Royal Avenue House, King's Road, Chelsea, in the company of three other police officers, one of them a woman. For about ten minutes they knocked, rang the bell, one of them shouted “Police!” through the letter vent, but though they heard someone “moving about” inside, no one came to open the door. Finally Detective Sergeant Constable (who, earlier in his professional life, must have been simply Constable Constable) noticed an open refuse hatch, climbed through it into the flat, and unlocked the door for the other officers. They set about to search the living and sitting rooms, while DS Constable went into the bedroom. There he found Brian Jones sitting on the floor on the far side of the bed, wearing a caftan. “I could just see the top of his head.” Jones extracted a telephone from beneath the folds of his caftan and placed it on the bedside table. “I was going to telephone my solicitor,” he said. The DS showed Jones a search warrant and asked why he had not opened the door. “You know the scene, man,” Jones said. “Why do I always get bugged?”

“What did you understand him to mean?” DS Constable was interrupted by Mr. Roger Frisby, counsel for the prosecution.

“I suppose, Why were we bothering him,” the DS shrugged. He went
through Jones' bedroom, searching it carefully, and had just finished when “Robin! Come here!” one of the other officers called. Taking Jones with him, the DS went into the living room, where Temporary Detective Constable Prentice was standing over a bureau, holding a ball of blue wool. “I've just found this wool,” said TDC Prentice. “Oh, no,” said Brian. “This can't happen again, just when we're getting on our feet.” TDC Prentice then opened the ball of wool, revealing a small lump of cannabis resin, or hashish, inside.

“Jones spoke, then,” said Mr. Frisby, whom the law required to prove that Brian was
knowingly
in possession of the hashish, “before he had seen what the wool contained.”

“Yes, sir,” the DS said. TDC Prentice had then passed the wool to him, and he had asked Jones, “Is this your wool?” Jones' answer was, “It could be.” He merely shrugged in reply to all further questions. His only other comments were, “Why do you have to pick on me? I have been working all day and night, trying to promote our new record, and now this has to happen,” and, after being taken to Chelsea Police Station, where he was charged with illegal possession of a substance restricted by the Dangerous Drugs Act of 1964, “I never take the stuff, it makes me so paranoid.”

“No more questions,” said Mr. Frisby, and retired to his high-backed chair.

“Detective Sergeant Constable,” said Mr. Michael Havers, Queen's Counsel, rising to speak for the defense, “you remarked that Mr. Jones was sitting, when you entered his room, on the floor beside the bed. Was there anything sinister in that? A man may sit where he wishes, in his own room, may he not?”

“There was nothing sinister,” said the DS. He had testified fluently with Mr. Frisby, looking rather proud in his grey check sport coat and red tie; now he had a dogged, tight-lipped smile, and you could see him stop and think before he spoke.

“When Temporary Detective Constable Prentice called ‘Robin! Come here!', what was his manner? Was he excited, would you say?”

“I suppose so.”

“He was excited. When you and Mr. Jones came in, TDC Prentice was standing over the bureau, holding the wool. Was there anything else in the bureau?”

“There were a woman's stocking and a man's sock. In the top drawer with the wool there was a Rolling Stones record.”

“Do you know who lived in the flat before Mr. Jones?”

“Miss Joanna Pettet, the actress. She had lived there about six months.”

“Is she an American?”

“She is English, married to an American.”

“Has she to your knowledge ever been involved with drugs?”

“No, sir. We investigated her at Scotland Yard, and at our request she was investigated in Los Angeles by the FBI. She has no drug record.”

“Did she say the wool was hers?”

The corners of DS Constable's smile turned down. “She said it might be. She had no knowledge of the cannabis.”

“Let's see,” said Mr. Havers, touching his hand to his wig as if he were trying to remember. “When you came in, TDC Prentice was holding the wool?”

“He was.”

“And he did not show what was inside it?”

“No, sir.”

“What did you think it contained?”

“I . . . didn't know.”

“Certainly you didn't, but what did you think? You had come to search for drugs. TDC Prentice called you excitedly. Surely you did not think it had nothing to do with drugs.”

“No, sir.”

“The point,” said Chairman Seaton, seeing the point, “is that when TDC Prentice called, it was obvious to you that it had something to do with drugs. So it should have been obvious to the accused as well.”

“No more questions,” said Mr. Havers.

“Court will adjourn for a ten-minute recess,” said Mr. Seaton.

About half the spectators left the public gallery for the recess. I moved to the low balcony wall and stood looking down into the court-room. In the front pew, two old ladies who had been sitting next to a group of schoolgirls were talking. They looked like the kind of women who live alone, or with each other, in city apartments. “. . . spend a lot of their money on records. I don't think it's good.”

“No, neither do I. Some of the words—”

“They say Frisby's a wonderful prosecutor.”

A policeman wearing a blue uniform and black mustache was sitting in a chair by the gallery door. I asked him some questions, and he told me that English courts were not very different from those in America, except that a jury could bring in a verdict based on a majority, rather than a unanimous, decision. If this jury found Brian guilty, he could be fined £1000 and sentenced to ten years in prison. The policeman was not a betting man, but if he were, he told me, he would not bet on the defendant. “Second offense,” he said, shaking his head. “They'll stick it to him.”

As we were talking, people started coming back in. I sat down beside a pretty girl with long auburn hair. She looked about sixteen. “Are you a Stones fan?” I asked her.

“I'm not, actually,” she said. “I happened to be here, so I decided to look in out of curiosity. I'm training to be a police youth counselor.”

There was a door on the left of the courtroom leading to the jury chamber, and one on the right that led to a waiting room where the witnesses could not hear the testimony that preceded them. When court was once more in session, Mr. Frisby called Temporary Detective Constable Prentice to testify. He came out of the right-hand door, a small cop in a dark suit, took the stand, and repeated, almost word for word, the story we had heard from Robin Constable. He was followed by the last witness for the prosecution, who was wearing a white blouse and green plaid jumper. Woman Detective Wagstaff, looking as if she might have been a grammar school teacher, read the official police version from a little yellow pad. When she was dismissed, Mr. Havers addressed the jury.

In a moment, he said, Brian Jones would take the stand. They would have the opportunity to see and hear him, and to judge for themselves what sort of fellow he was. They certainly deserved this opportunity, and, indeed, Mr. Jones was eager to tell his side of the story. But they also deserved to be told fully and frankly all the facts relating to this case. It was a fact that Brian Jones had been arrested before on drug charges. He had appeared in the same court as today and before the same chairman. He was, on that occasion, guilty, and said so. He had been sentenced to prison, but the Court of Appeals, partly because of medical advice, decided that he should be fined and put on probation. Since that time he had been under the care of a court-approved physician. “I tell you all this,” said Mr. Havers, “because it really is an important part of this case. To have spent months in all the worry and anxiety of court trials and litigation, with the threat of prison hanging over one—to have passed through all that and to be working and co-operating with the police and the parole board—and then suddenly to find oneself again, through no fault of one's own, in the same predicament—ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I ask that you listen with sympathy to the testimony of this young man—he has been under a great strain.”

Then, as the girls in the front row of the gallery leaned forward, gripping the balcony rail, Brian came to the witness stand. He was dressed sedately, in a grey pinstripe suit, white shirt, and dark paisley tie; but there was no way to disguise the luxuriant, shoulder-length, blond mane.

There is a photograph, made a long time ago, before there were Rolling Stones in the world, which shows Brian as a thin, almost crewcut boy in a sweater. He looks like a high school newspaper reporter, but his face is dominated by an expression of mad, wicked glee. Since then he had gained weight and hair, and his face had grown more wild. A few months before, in Joujouka, Morocco, Brian had recorded an album of music played by participants in the rites of Bou Jeloud, the name under which Pan, “the little goat god,” there survives. Brion
Gysin had written a text to accompany the music. Watching the faces of the jury as they looked at Brian, I thought of a passage: “Who is Bou Jeloud? Who is he? The shivering boy who was chosen to be stripped naked in a cave and sewn into the bloody warm skins and masked with an old straw hat tied over his face, HE is Bou Jeloud, when he dances and runs. Not Ali, not Mohamed, then he
is
Bou Jeloud. He will be somewhat
taboo
in his village the rest of his life.”

Brian's face was a sick white, and his voice trembled; three times he was asked to speak louder as, in answer to Mr. Havers' first questions, he admitted to being Lewis Brian Jones, aged twenty-six, a professional musician since 1963, when he joined the Rolling Stones. He had been arrested before, pleaded guilty, been sentenced to prison, appealed, and he was now on probation, seeing a doctor regularly. He had not used cannabis since the first arrest, eighteen months ago. He had used it rarely and experimentally and its effect—he had been having personal difficulties at the time—was to make him more unhappy. Inclining his head slightly to the right, with a small pale hand he brushed away the yellow hair that fell into his eyes. He had been staying in the flat at King's Road while a house he had bought was being decorated. He had taken over the flat a couple of hours after Joanna Pettet had left. Taking a first look round, he had seen a stocking, a sock, and a bottle of ink in the bureau. He did not recall seeing the wool, though the prolonged shock of this experience may have caused a mental blank. The Stones had been recording at this time, working at night when there was less disturbance, sleeping during the day. He had been in the flat eighteen days, but had spent about half the time at a friend's house. The night before the police raid he had taken a sleeping tablet prescribed by his doctor and had gone to sleep at about half-past one.