Ain't It Time We Said Goodbye (20 page)

Although I had come to talk to Keith Richards about the
Rolling Stone
interview, I had no idea if he would even know who I was. After all, we had not spoken a single world to one another on the entire tour. While breaking into the dressing room with him in Brighton had been great fun, dropping by unannounced at his palatial home in the South of France was something else again. For all I knew, the man might very well send me packing before I could even begin to explain why I was there.

As I stood waiting in the front hallway for the young French woman who had greeted me to go find “Monsieur Ree-chards,” all these thoughts kept churning through my head. Making it all just that much worse, the house was so big that her search seemed to take forever.

And then, without warning, Keith was suddenly standing before me. Looking much healthier and a lot happier than when I had seen him last, he cried out, “Bob Greenfield!” That Keith actually knew my name was an utter shock. This feeling was compounded a hundredfold when Keith stepped forward and hugged me like some long-lost comrade with whom he had soldiered through the war.

As absurd as this may now seem, a feeling of well-being suddenly coursed through my entire body. Like a pilgrim at Lourdes, I had just been cured by the magic healing touch of the star. The great Keith Richards, he of the get-out-of-me-bloody-face-before-I-smash-you-over-the-head-with-me-guitar persona, not only knew who I was but was actually glad to see me.

When Keith said, “So, how are you, man?” I was still so totally blown away that I began to stammer. Regaining my composure, I told Keith I was fine and that it was great to see him but I needed
to spend a few days covering the Cannes Film Festival before he and I could start doing the
Rolling Stone
interview together, so would that be cool with him?

With Keith, it was all cool, man. Whenever I was ready, he said I could come back and stay in the house so we could “hang out together and talk and really get this thing done right! Know what I mean, man?” Despite having only a very vague idea of what he was talking about, I told Keith I most certainly did.

Before I knew it, I was back outside the house again and hopping behind the wheel of that car like it had always been my own. With the spirit of 007 coursing through my veins, I turned on the ignition, slid the stick into first, put one foot down on the clutch and the other on the gas, and sped out through the front gates of Villa Nellcôte, spewing gravel behind me in every direction.

Finding my way back to the same twisting stretch of narrow mountain road, I began driving faster than I ever had before while shifting smoothly through all the gears like my brain was now equipped with synchromesh. As I sped past one slowpoke French driver after another, I could not even be bothered to throw them the finger. Instead, I just waved dismissively at them like the great Stirling Moss on his way to yet another Grand Prix win.

When I finally clambered out of the car after arriving in Cannes in world-record time, I was still as high as a kite on an adrenaline rush of major proportions. Although I had never expected this to happen, I was now back in the charmed circle of those who then surrounded the Rolling Stones.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

VILLA NELLCÔTE I, MAY 27–JUNE 4, 1971

AFTER HAVING SPENT A WEEK
fulfilling my lifelong fantasy of attending the Cannes Film Festival, I headed back to Villa Nellcôte where I knew Keith Richards would be waiting to greet me with open arms. After knocking several times on the front door without getting any response, I just took the liberty of letting myself into the house. Calling out Keith’s name as softly as I could to announce my presence, I slowly made my way through a huge and completely deserted living room that looked as though it had just been hit by a bomb.

Shipping cartons that had not yet been unpacked stood scattered amid priceless pieces of antique furniture. Along with a good deal of sand, a variety of children’s beach toys lay strewn across the very expensive Persian rug covering the polished wooden parquet floor. From the mantle of the ornate white marble fireplace, a ridiculous-looking life-sized cardboard cutout of a shirtless Mick Jagger holding a copy of
Sticky Fingers
over his crotch stood keeping watch over it all.

Stepping through an open doorway into the dining room, I saw Keith sitting at the head of the table. On either side of him
were people I did not know. At the far end of the table, Anita was balancing Marlon on her lap. Apparently, everyone had just finished eating lunch. While Keith seemed somewhat pleased to see me, his reaction was nothing compared to the way he had greeted me before.

Although I did not know why, the mood at the table seemed as dark and stormy as the weather had been for the past two weeks in the South of France. Sliding into the nearest empty seat, I did my best to blend into the scenery. As always at Villa Nellcôte, this proved impossible to do.

Turning to me with an inquisitive look on her face, Anita said, “So, did you bring us anything?” Completely misunderstanding her question, I wondered if she was talking about some kind of a housewarming present. Before I could ask, Anita clarified her demand by saying, “Did you bring us anything to smoke?”

Dim as a fifteen-watt lightbulb, I still did not get what she was talking about. Scattered everywhere before me on the table, I could see boxes of Rothman’s and Dunhill International cigarettes as well as packets of Gauloises and thick yellow Boyards so powerful that a single puff could knock even the most serious nicotine addict for a loop. If Anita wanted to smoke a cigarette, all she had to do was reach out for one.

Losing all patience with me, Anita said, “Did you bring us something to smoke so we can all get high, yes?” Nodding my head, I said, “Yeah. Actually, I did.”

Reaching into the English schoolboy’s satchel I carried with me everywhere back then in lieu of a briefcase, I brought forth the little tobacco tin I had been given in Cannes by a long-haired hippie publicity man who did not want to take its contents back
with him through customs to America. When Anita opened the lid of the tin and saw all the high-quality Afghani hashish that it contained, her eyes lit up like I had just given her the Christmas present of her dreams.

As though no one else was fit to do the honors, the tin was quickly passed all the way down the table to Keith. From out of nowhere, packets of red Rizla rolling paper suddenly appeared before him. In no time at all, Keith had expertly crumbled just the right amount of black and sticky hash into tobacco from a Rothman’s cigarette and created the perfect English joint.

Striking a wooden match against the side of a little box, Keith lit up and inhaled deeply. As he smoked, everyone watched him in utter silence. Was this stuff any good? More to the point, was this stuff good enough for Keith? As the final arbiter in all such matters at Villa Nellcôte, his opinion was the only one that really mattered.

After letting all the smoke back out of his lungs, Keith smiled so broadly that his entire face lit up with delight. Like everything else in this house, the hash was of the highest quality. Although it was purely an accident that I had come there that day bearing tribute, my gift had been accepted in full. Because Keith had given his unqualified seal of approval to what I had brought with me, I was now most definitely persona grata at Villa Nellcôte.

After the joint had been passed around the table several times and smoked down to a glowing roach so that another one had to be rolled and then passed around as well, no one seemed in any hurry to leave. From out of nowhere, several bottles of fine white wine appeared. Drinking and smoking, everyone started telling incredibly funny stories. Before I knew it, the rest of the afternoon slipped away in a pastel-colored haze.

At some point, Keith himself showed me to my room. Located on the far side of the house, it was connected by a door to the room occupied by a man with short dark hair whom Keith and Anita had met while hanging out with the remnants of the Living Theater in Rome. Even though it seemed a bit odd that I had to walk through his room to use the bathroom, we both agreed this would not be a problem for either of us. Because of the man’s very active sex life with a variety of local young men, I soon learned that the door was almost always locked.

Bright and early the next morning, I dutifully unpacked my little battery-operated tape recorder and walked out onto the back steps of the house so I could begin interviewing Keith. With his legs crossed beneath him and a newly rolled joint in his hand, he sat without a shirt or shoes basking in the warm sunshine of a perfect spring day in the South of France.

Apparently completely at peace now that he and Anita and Marlon had landed safely in this stately pleasure dome by the sea, Keith never dodged a single question I asked him. Nor did I ever have to prompt him to tell me more. His focus and level of recollection were so extraordinary that a simple question about what he had been doing at art school evoked an astonishingly detailed, nine-paragraph answer.

At some point in the proceedings, Anita decided to join the conversation to offer a few choice comments about Brian Jones. In the tiny leopard-skin bikini that was always her outfit of choice at Nellcôte, Anita looked good enough to make a dead man come. Unlike me, Keith remained so centered that not even Anita could distract him.

The session was so intense that when I finally turned off the tape recorder an hour and a half later, I felt as though I had just
done a full day’s work. When I asked Keith if we could do this again tomorrow at the same time and place, he said we could just pick it all right up from where we had left off whenever we next sat down to talk.

I then spent days waiting for this to happen. Fortunately for me, I happened to be living at Villa Nellcôte during what I would later come to call “the garden period.” Because the only intoxicating substances being passed around on a regular basis were smoke and wine, every day seemed like an excuse for another party.

Depending on how Keith felt when he came downstairs in the morning, he might have someone bring around the motorboat so we could all go water-skiing in the bay. Or he might spend a few hours sitting in the sun on the back steps reading the day-old English newspapers that had just been delivered to the house. Lunch out on the patio was always a major production. What with all the fuming hash joints and bottles of ice-cold white wine being passed around the table, the meal would sometimes go on for hours.

Once it was over, Keith might want to go for a drive in his red Jaguar XK-E. Stopping at some deserted beach just before sunset, he was more than happy to spend half an hour skipping stones off the water so they bounced again and again before disappearing beneath the surface. The point being that if Keith was happy, then so was everyone else at Villa Nellcôte. Whatever he chose to do on any given day became the central activity in which everyone else wanted to be involved.

Actually knowing who all these people really were or what they were doing at Nellcôte turned out to be a question no one could answer. If Keith said someone was cool, nothing more needed to be asked about them. With the possible exception of Anita, the single most impressive-looking person in the house was
Tommy Weber, a long-haired race car driver who seemed to have stepped right out of the pages of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s
Tender Is the Night.

Tommy’s two young and completely adorable sons, Jake and Charley, also known as “Boo-boo,” were also there. This was a somewhat sad story because their mother, a beautiful young woman who called herself Ruby Tuesday, had only just taken her own life. Despite the fact that he was still mourning her loss, Tommy seemed to be having an extraordinary amount of fun at Nellcôte. One day he impressed everyone by telling us how he had just picked up a woman and then had it off with her on Errol Flynn’s yacht, which was moored nearby.

And then there was Spanish Tony Sanchez. With his dark shirred hair and sharp-boned face, Tony, or “Spanish,” as only Keith ever called him, would not have looked out of place selling stolen goods on some crowded street corner in Soho. Although Tony seemed a pleasant enough fellow, what I did not know then was that he was not just Keith and Anita’s friend but also the long-standing dealer by appointment to the Rolling Stones.

Desperately in need of money some years later, Tony would write a scurrilous and curiously inaccurate book about his drug-filled days and nights with Brian Jones, Marianne Faithfull, Keith Richards, Anita Pallenberg, and Mick Jagger. By then, Tony’s time of service with the Stones was long since over. And although Keith so terrified the man while standing beside him at a urinal in a club in London one night that Tony actually pissed on himself, he somehow managed to pass away some years later in a remarkably peaceful manner.

Accompanying Tony at Nellcôte was his girlfriend, Madeleine. Despite never having very much to say, she also seemed quite nice.
Two years after her stay in the South of France, Madeleine would be turning tricks in Brighton for fifteen quid a night to support her heroin habit. She would later be found dead by her close friend Marianne Faithfull.

Wearing a full white racing suit adorned with a Grand Prix emblem, Keith’s good friend Stash also came to stay for a while at Nellcôte. Born Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola in Switzerland, Stash had attended an English boarding school, become an actor, and then played in a band that had opened for the Rolling Stones at the Olympia in Paris in 1964. As I later learned, he was the son of Balthus, the world-famous painter of prepubescent girls whose genius as an artist apparently included imagining himself to be a count, which may have explained why Stash liked to refer to himself as the heir apparent to the long-defunct Polish throne.