A Prince Among Stones (25 page)

He delivered me to the Microsoft offices. This time it was an American corporation of which the band clearly approved: ‘Start Me Up' became the music that launched Windows 95.

11

 

 

‘I must put my foot in a bit of truth, and then I can fly free'

 

Andrew Wyeth

 

 

 

The decade from 1995 onwards marked a period of stability and continuity for the Rolling Stones. On a regular cycle of two or three years a studio album would be produced and a world tour would follow. The Stones, now four in number with Bill having departed, were supported by a set of sidemen musicians who remained constant: Darryl Jones on bass, Chuck Leavell on keyboards, a horn section based around Bobby Keys, who had played the saxophone solo on ‘Brown Sugar', and the backing singers, Lisa Fischer, Bernard Fowler and Blondie Chaplin.

After all the machinations, upsets and alarms of the previous ten years, the Stones machine was purring along, to the extent that each tour was, perhaps inevitably, becoming more and more a
Best of
celebration, the most popular songs supplemented by a few numbers from whichever the new album was and a solo set from Keith, before which he would remark that it was a chance for the audience to go to the bar.

I asked Tim Rice to have a rummage through the Stones' back catalogue to see whether there might be an opportunity to create a stage musical out of Mick and Keith's string of hits, as Queen had done working with Ben Elton to create
We Will Rock You
. Tim came up with the idea of a musical about Machiavelli with the working title
Sympathy for the Devil.

We got quite a long way into the project. Tim worked up a scenario and showed it to Cameron Mackintosh, who was interested, as I recall. I read the first draft and thought it could be great fun, but told Tim he would need to underline why Machiavelli might be thought of as being a devil, since not everyone would be as familiar with his work even if they knew the name. Without this being made clear, he would only emerge as a minor participant in a fascinating period of history. Then Mick objected to the whole enterprise: I think he had just finished another exhausting tour and did not want to head off into yet another intensive year or two putting on a musical. We shelved the idea.

 

This relative stability in terms of the band's touring and performing did not mean there were not other problems. Mick was coping with his long relationship with Jerry Hall.

Generally I tried never to preach to the band about their personal life. I didn't think it was my job: bank manager, yes, nanny, frequently, psychiatrist, on occasion, but relationship consultant, never. However, as it became obvious that Mick and Jerry were on the verge of splitting, I asked him if he really wanted to draw a line under their relationship, as it had clearly been so good for him. He said he did.

I switched from agony uncle to financial adviser. ‘Do you want to pay her what now appears to be normal, even for a cohabitation?' He said yes. ‘Fine. Firstly you have to stress that you didn't get married in Bali' – where he and Jerry had gone through a bizarre ceremony of sorts in 1990 – ‘and that has to be made clear.' At the time the law was different in England and cohabiting gave no rights at all. I had to inform his lawyers of this and Mick pretended that this was a wicked scheme of mine, which it most certainly was not. Thankfully, he and Jerry reached an out-of-court settlement, since it would have taken a year or two to go through the courts, arguing over whether the Balinese ceremony was valid or not, with all the attendant strain and unpleasantness, appalling both for the parents and particularly for their four children.

Mick was a leopard whose spots never changed. During one tour, I had invited a friend who was a devoted Stones fan to come along with a group of his family and friends to the end-of-tour party at the HÔtel Georges V in Paris. During the course of the party I happened to notice Mick slide out of the proceedings and slip upstairs accompanied by my friend's attractive eighteen-year-old daughter.
Plus ça change.
When her father approached us, we rather timorously commiserated, but all he said was, ‘Well done, daughter!'

A liaison with a longer-lasting impact occurred in Rio, when a very sociable young man, the son of another good friend, told me that he was planning to throw a party, which he wanted the Stones to attend, on a Good Friday. I told him, ‘You can't have a party on Good Friday and have all the Stones fans screaming and shouting – what would your father think?' ‘Oh,' he said, ‘everything is very late in Brazil: it won't start until after midnight so it won't actually be Good Friday.' I said, ‘No, but it will be Holy Saturday so that is not ideal either. In any case do what you want but I will not be there.'

Later I heard that Mick had gone to the party, met a very pretty and sweet girl there and nine months later she had a baby (Dora later told me that the little boy was, and is, very nice and good looking). At some point during the tour the singer Bryan Adams, who was performing as the support act and was a friend of the mother, saw Mick at a show, and said, ‘I suppose congratulations are in order.' All part of the wonderful world of rock'n'roll.

I was reminded of a story about the late 10th Duke of Marlborough – known as ‘Bert' – who was sued in a paternity suit by the wife of Captain Cunningham, who ran the Oyster Bar in Curzon Street to which we all used to go. Apparently Bert walked into his drawing room, threw down the newspaper in which it was reported and said to his wife, ‘I really can't be bothered with this tiresome case.'

In the past there were many illegitimate children within the aristocracy. Usually they remained unrecognised and had to fend for themselves, since, in the words of Princess Liselotte of the Palatinate, the Duchesse d'Orléans, about her brother-in-law Louis XIV's illegitimate children, they were ‘mouse-droppings', a reference to the expression ‘mouse-droppings always want to mix with the pepper'. She was horrified when her own (legitimate) son wanted to marry one of the Sun King's (illegitimate) daughters. On hearing of the engagement she slapped her son's face in front of the entire court; the slap was reportedly heard ‘several paces away'.

Of course attitudes can change. In my own case my forebear, Frederick I, Elector Palatine (the Victorious), legitimated his mouse-droppings, the first Counts of Loewenstein, by
matrimonium subsequens
which is what is required by Canon law; to be valid this requires both the parents to be free and to have been free to marry since the birth of the child, which was true in his case.

A lawyer friend of mine once passed comment on Mick's fecundity when we were discussing his separation from Jerry. He now had seven children by four different women, having only been married to one of them, Bianca. The lawyer's remark when we discussed the money that Mick had to give to the Brazilian boy was, ‘Could you not teach your esteemed friend and client one simple word – “vasectomy” . . . ?'

Even what had seemed to be a pretty durable marriage, Ronnie and Jo Wood's, foundered over Ronnie's very public relationship with an eighteen-year-old waitress, whom the papers delighted in describing as a ‘Russian rose', although she spoke in perfect Estuary English. Not even Jo had been strong enough to keep Ronnie on the straight and narrow. This sparked a string of relationships with young women, whom Ronnie clearly saw as muses, since he said after splitting from one of them, ‘I'm like Picasso, painting up the ladder after leaving his mistresses at the bottom after a row.'

My two sons having chosen to enter the priesthood, only my daughter, Dora, had the opportunity to make a church marriage, and in 1998 we celebrated her wedding at the Brompton Oratory, where Josephine and I had held ours. Her husband was Manfredi della Gherardesca, whose forebear Ugolino of Pisa's fate was recorded by Dante in
The Inferno
and subsequently relayed as part of Chaucer's
Monk's Tale
, so that was all to the good, and certainly better than a mention in
Hello!
(as opposed to
Hell!
).

In August 2000 Josephine and I became grandparents when Dora gave birth to a son. He was given the first name Aliotto, which Manfredi had discovered in the Gherardesca pedigree, a name which had been last borne by an ancestor of his who died in the early thirteenth century and was not a saint. That problem was solved by adding in a few more names, some of which were saints, including Rupert, since there was a St Rupert, Bishop of Salzburg, though he only had altars in the locality. At the time I remarked that Otto would make a convenient nickname in northern lands, while Alio would work, I supposed, in the West or the East flavoured with garlic.

Josephine and I were extremely happy at Aliotto's birth since our chances of descendants were so limited. My old friend Leo Ferdinand Henckel-Donnersmack had been very brusque about my concerns: ‘since you have Loewenstein cousins with male descendants you have no concern as to what sex your grandchildren would belong to'. Aliotto's sister Margherita arrived two years later.

Shortly before Margherita was born we had been to Windsor for Princess Margaret's funeral. Johannes Thurn und Taxis once rightly said that funerals were preferable to weddings since by and large one knew whom one was going to see at funerals but nowadays one increasingly did not know whom one would see at weddings.

The ‘tickets' for the funeral were rather strange since the women's, as well as the men's, said ‘morning coat' or ‘lounge suit'. If taken literally it would have made an excellent cabaret scene in the Weimar Republic. Also there was a flimsy note attached saying, ‘You can get a cup of tea in St George's Hall after the service'. I did not think that David Ogilvy, the 12th Earl of Airlie, who was Lord Chamberlain to Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, would have allowed such wording to pass through under his white staff.

In Princess Margaret's later years Josephine and I had spent a week or so with her in Germany. Every other year we would go to stay with the odd relation and do some sightseeing. When we stayed in Coburg she was fascinated. When I asked her whether the Queen Mother had been there, she said, ‘No, you see, Mummy never liked the Germans, because one of her brothers was killed in the First War and another was badly wounded.' Princess Margaret was very much at home in Germany and basically came to life as a German princess.

In Dresden, when being shown round the treasures of the Grünes Gewölbe, she noticed that the cipher of the Polish King Augustus the Strong, who founded the museum in the 1720s, was ARP: Augustus Rex Poloniae. She said to me in a stage whisper, ‘Of course in the circumstances it might be tactless to explain to the Director what ARP means to us', remembering the air-raid precautions wardens who had bravely patrolled the city streets of Britain during the Luftwaffe bombing raids of the Second World War.

It was an elevation to the Establishment that caused another flurry of sparks to fly between Keith and Mick. Tony Blair decided to give Mick a knighthood, for services to the music industry.

I heard about the imminent knighthood from Jon Benjamin, who was in the Foreign Office. I first met Jon in 1988 when Mick was doing a solo show in Indonesia. I answered a knock on my hotel door in Jakarta and was amazed to find a small man with curly hair. I said, ‘Morning', quite cautiously. ‘Jon Benjamin, I'm second secretary at the embassy,' he announced. Up until then I still imagined that the British embassies were being run by the kind of gents with whom I was familiar. Jon was not at all part of old school tie network. He was stage-struck and found every possible way of helping us during our stay there. We made firm friends as he continued to climb the Foreign Office ladder, becoming British Ambassador to Chile in 2009.

After the call from Jon, I told Mick, who was secretly thrilled, but said in a nonchalant way, ‘Well, I can't take the knighthood until the end of this Stones tour. We'll have to wait and see. I think next year would probably be better.' I called Jon Benjamin back and asked him what he thought about Mick's response. He said, ‘The man's crazy. He'll never be offered anything again. He'll never get any help, nothing. He either takes it or refuses it, but we're not prepared to be played around with.' I rang Mick to tell him ‘I'm afraid it's either take it or leave it', which he understood.

Then, of course, he had to deal with Keith's reaction. Keith was, not surprisingly, scornful. He called it a ludicrous honour considering the Establishment had thrown them both in jail, and came up with some wonderful bons mots, saying that he did not want to go on stage with someone wearing a coronet, and ‘sporting the old ermine. It's not what the Stones is about.'

He declared it was a complete betrayal of everything the band had been. ‘The idea of
Sir
Mick Jagger is grotesque,' he said. ‘I've never heard of anything so absurd. Thank God I live in America!' He was absolutely furious. But the fact was that the knighthood was going to happen, so I could only try and calm him down. I don't think Charlie and Ronnie cared, but Keith really minded.

Later he mellowed and said he thought Mick should at least have held out for a peerage instead and become Lord Dartford. If a knighthood was ever offered to him, he said, he would ‘tell them where to shove it'.