Life (54 page)
It literally was just bad luck. I don’t think he intended to shoot himself, really, just an idiot of seventeen who was stoned, angry, playing with a pistol. Anita didn’t recognize it as a shot, but she turned round and heard this gargling noise, she said. She saw there was blood coming from his mouth and her first instinct was to pick up the gun and put it on the desk, so it had her fingerprints all over it. One bullet in the chamber, one bullet in the mouth, and that’s it; it wasn’t like it was fully loaded. But then we had to move out of that house quite sharpish. Anita was in the papers every day and had to hide in a hotel in New York.
When the cops found out, they wanted first to question me, but I was in Paris. Hey, damn good shot with a Smith & Wesson from Paris. And Anita? I was going to make sure she didn’t go to jail when they lost interest in me. It was a miracle how that case just disappeared. I believe it was to do with the fact that the gun was traced back to the police, bought in some gun market in the parking lot of a police station. Suddenly it wasn’t an issue. The case was put down as suicide. The boy’s parents tried to bring a case for corruption of a minor, which didn’t stick. So Anita moved to New York, to the Alray Hotel, and began a different kind of existence. That was the final curtain for me and Anita, apart from trips to see the children. It was the end. Thanks for the memories, girl.
Jane Rose
In which I meet Patti Hansen and fall in love. I survive a disastrous first meeting with her parents. Grief is brewing with Mick. I fight with Ronnie Wood and dig out my dad after twenty years. Marlon’s tale of Gatsby mansions on Long Island. Marriage in Mexico.
S
tudio 54 in New York was a big hangout of Mick’s. It wasn’t my taste—a tarted-up disco club or, as it appeared to me at the time, a room full of faggots in boxer shorts, waving champagne bottles in your face. There were crowds round the block trying to get in, the little velvet rope saying you’re in or out. I knew they were dealing dope round the back, which is why they all got busted. As if they weren’t coining enough. But they were having a good time; they were just boys partying, basically. The weird thing is, the first time I met Patti Hansen was in Studio 54. John Phillips and I had run in there because Britt Ekland was chasing me. She had the hots for me. And hey, Britt, I love you, you’re a nice girl and everything like that— sweet, shy and unassuming—but my agenda is full, if you get my meaning. But she wouldn’t let go; she was chasing me all over fucking town. So we thought, the one place to hide, Studio 54! It was the most unlikely place to find me. And it happened to be Saint Patrick’s Day, March 17, which is Patti’s birthday. The year was 1979.
So we’re hiding away, saying Britt will never find us here. And Shaun, one of Patti’s mates, came over and said, it’s my friend’s birthday today. I said, which one? And she pointed out this blond beauty dancing with wild hair flying. “Dom Pérignon immediately!” I sent over a bottle of champagne and just said hello. I didn’t see her again for a while, but the vision stayed in my mind.
Then in December it was my birthday, my thirty-sixth, for which, in accordance with the craze of the moment, we repaired to the Roxy roller rink in New York for a party. Jane Rose had kept Patti on her radar all those months, having noticed, apparently, some spark that first night, and made sure Patti was invited. So I caught sight of Patti again, and she caught sight of me catching sight of her. And she left. And a few days later I called her and we got together. I wrote in my notebook in January 1980, a few days after that:
Incredibly I’ve found a woman. A miracle! I’ve pussy at the snap of a finger but I’ve met a woman! Unbelievably she is the most beautiful (physically) specimen in the WORLD. But that ain’t it! It certainly helps but it’s her mind, her joy of life and (wonders) she thinks this battered junkie is the guy she loves. I’m over the moon and peeing in my pants. She loves soul music and reggae, in fact everything. I make her tapes of music which is almost as good as being with her. I send them like love letters. I’m kicking 40 and besotted.
I was amazed that she was willing to hang out with me. Because I was hanging with a bunch of guys and all we did was go up to the Bronx and Brooklyn to these bizarre West Indian places and record stores. Nothing of interest to supermodels. My friend Brad Klein was there; I think Larry Sessler, Freddie’s son, was there. Gary Schultz, my minder, was there too. He was always known as Concorde, a nickname derived from Monty Python (“Brave, brave Concorde! You shall not have died in vain!” “I’m not quite dead, sir,” etc.). Jimmy Callaghan, my muscle for many years; Max Romeo, reggae star; and a few other cats. Nice to meet you, nice to know you, you want to hang with this bunch of assholes? Up to you, you know? But she was there every day. And I know something’s happening, but how it happens and when and who pulls the spring is another thing. That’s how we hung for days and days. I never put the hammer on hard. I didn’t make a move. I could never put the make on. I could just never find the right line, or one that hadn’t been used before. I just never had that thing with women. I would do it silently. Very Charlie Chaplin. The scratch, the look, the body language. Get my drift? Now it’s up to you. “Hey, baby” is just not my come-on. I’ve got to lay back and see the tension build to a point where something’s got to happen. And if they can hang through that tension, then we’re OK. They call it the reverse molecular version, the RMV, as it’s known. Finally, after an astonishing number of days, she lay down on the bed and said, come on.
At the time I was living with Lil. Suddenly I disappeared for ten days and took a room at the Carlyle, and Lil was wondering where the hell I’d gone. She got the message pretty quick. I’d been with Lil eighteen months by then, and we were quite handsomely ensconced in a nice apartment. She’s a great girl and I just dumped her.… I had to make it up to Lil.
I wanted to hear Patti’s version of these events, long ago.
Patti Hansen:
I didn’t know anything about Keith. I didn’t follow his music. Of course listening to the radio, you know who the Rolling Stones are, but it wasn’t music I listened to. It’s March ’79 and it’s my birthday and I’m in Studio 54 and I had just broken up with some guy I had been with for a few years. I was dancing with my girlfriend Shaun Casey, who saw Keith arrive and sit down in a little booth. It was after last call, and she said, it’s my best friend’s birthday, would you please give her a bottle of champagne because they won’t sell us any. And she said, oh, by the way, I’m a good friend of Bill Wyman, and she introduced Keith and me very briefly. I barely remember. And I went back to the dance floor. It was probably three in the morning. I don’t think he had ever been to Studio 54 or ever went back again; that was my place. And so he spotted me.
And then it was December ’79 and I was working with Jerry Hall at Avedon’s studio, and she said, there’s a big party for Keith Richards coming up and he’d like you to come. Jerry and I didn’t hang out; we did modeling together. I didn’t really know her and Mick. And I drank some vodka with a friend of mine and said, let’s go to this party at the Roxy and see this guy. Most of my boyfriends were gay, so it was nervous-making meeting some guy who wanted to meet me. Also it’s a setup, a little bit cheesy and whorey. But it’s also the end of the ’70s and I was twenty-three. So we went up and there was a wonderful awkward butterfly-filled-tummy moment, sitting there with him watching me, and all these people around him. The sun was coming up and my friend Billy and I decided to walk home. We went back to my place, and I guess I had given Keith, somewhere along the night, my number. And a few days later he called at two o’clock in the morning and said, what happened to you? And he said, hey, how about meeting me at Tramps? Some band was playing. One of my gay friends said, don’t do it! Don’t go. Don’t go, Patti. I said, I’m going; this is great.
And I was up with him for five days straight from Tramps on. We were in a car, we went to apartments, we went to Harlem looking at record shops. I remember on the fifth day, when I finally started seeing things flying, I think we went to Mick’s house; Mick was having a huge party. It was a big modeling time for me, I was on the cover of
Vogue
a lot, but I still didn’t like socializing, and it was pretty A-list at Mick’s place, and I said to Keith, I think I’m gonna go home now; this is it for me. After that I guess he went on with his usual biz and I the same.
Then the next thing I knew, I was out in Staten Island and I spent New Year’s Eve with my family. And I remember getting in my car and zooming as fast as I could back to my apartment in the city after midnight, to find blood dripping up to my apartment on the stairs. He was waiting, leaning against my door. I don’t know what he did, he had cut his foot or something. My apartment was at Fifth Avenue and Eleventh Street. And I think at that point he had been working at Eighth Street. We must have said we were going to meet there. And it was lovely.
He decided to fix us up at the Carlyle hotel. And I remember Keith making everything just right, lighting the place, putting curtains up, beautiful scarves on the lights. There were two single beds in there. Sex wasn’t a big thing. It was there, but it was very slow moving. On the other hand, I have boxes and boxes of love letters from the first day we met. He would do drawings in his blood. And I still look forward to those notes I get. Very charming and very witty.
All those first moments were so great. Then little by little, people started raising red flags. Keith was going back and forth, leaving me in the middle of the night to go back to Long Island. You have a family? You have a family in Long Island, you have a child? It was nerve-racking. I didn’t know he was with Anita, and I definitely didn’t know he had a girlfriend named Lil Wergilis at the time. A guy asks me to come to a party, I assume he’s single. I didn’t know he had all this stuff and history. I remember just feeling this guy needed a place to stay. People began telling me what I was doing wrong, what I was saying wrong. Oh, don’t make Keith those kind of eggs, don’t say this to him, don’t do this to him. It was very odd. Then my family would get horrible letters about Keith and they started worrying, but they always had trust in my judgment. I gave him the keys to my place and I went off to Paris to work for a few weeks. And I was wondering, is this happening? I really wanted to hang on to him; I really liked him. And I was excited when he called me in Paris, when are you coming home? And around March 1980, I went out to California and started doing a film with Peter Bogdanovich. But that was insane, having a relationship with Keith and trying to be a professional actress for the first time. And even Bogdanovich sent a letter to my family warning them about Keith, which I think now he regrets.
And if I didn’t know much about Keith, my Lutheran family in Staten Island knew even less. My brothers and sisters grew up on the other side of the ’60s, the ’60s of Doris Day. My older sisters wore beehives, the French twist. They missed that hippie era. I think my brothers tried marijuana, but I don’t think anyone did any kind of drugs in the family, even though they’re not teetotalers. They all have their own issues; we’re a heavy-drinking family. When Keith finally went to introduce himself at home at Thanksgiving, in the autumn of 1980, it was a disaster.
The first time I went up to Staten Island to meet Patti’s family I’d been up for days. I had a bottle of vodka or Jack Daniel’s in my hand, and I thought I’d just walk in the house with it, la-la-la-la, I ain’t lying to you, this is your prospective son-in-law. I was way over the top. I’d brought along Prince Klossowski, Stash. Hardly your best backup, but I needed some charm, and bringing a prince into their home, I thought for some reason, gave me the perfect cover. A real live prince. The fact that he’s a real live asshole was neither here nor there. I needed a buddy along. I knew that Patti and I would end up together anyway, it was just a question of getting the family blessing, which would make it a lot easier for Patti.
I pulled out the guitar, gave them a bit of “Malagueña.” “Malagueña”! There’s nothing like it. It will get you in anywhere. You play that, they think you’re a fucking genius. So I played that beautifully and imagined I’d gotten all the women, at least, on my side. They made a very nice dinner, and we were noshing away and everything was polite. But to Big Al, Patti’s father, I was just kind of weird. He was a Staten Island bus driver and I was an “international pop star.” And then they were talking about that, about being a “pop star.” I said, oh, it’s just a disguise and all that. Stash has the story on this. He remembers it better because I was already pissed out of my brains. He recalls one of the brothers saying, “So what’s
your
scam, then?” I remember that suddenly I felt under the grill. Stash particularly remembers that one of Patti’s sisters said something like, “I think you’ve drunk too much to play that.” And then
bang,
I went berserk. I said something like, enough of this. And smashed my guitar on the table. Which takes some force. It could have gone either way. I could have been banished forever, but the amazing thing about this family is that they weren’t offended. A little startled maybe, but by then everybody had had a tipple. My apologies were very abject the following day. In the case of the old man, big old Al, a great guy, I think at least he saw that I was willing to take a chance, and he kind of liked that. He was a Seabee attached to a construction battalion in the Aleutian Islands in the war. He was supposed to be there building a runway and ended up fighting Japs because there was nobody else around. Eventually I took Big Al on at pool at his local favorite bar, and I let him think that he’d drunk me under the table. “I got ya, sonny!” “You certainly did, sir.” But it was Beatrice, Patti’s mum, who was the key to my acceptance. She was always for me, and I had great times with her later on.
This is how it looked for Patti the day she introduced me to her family.
Patti Hansen:
I just remember being upstairs, crying, when the shit hit the fan. Something must have happened prior to that, because I remember I wasn’t at the table with them when it happened. I must have seen he was out of it and just wanted to go and crawl in a hole. It was a holiday dinner. Something was said and a guitar flew across the table at my parents. I don’t know what happened to him. He suddenly became this rock star, this person none of us had ever been around. And my mother said, something’s wrong, Patti, something’s very wrong. I know they were terrified, so worried about me. My father was a bus driver; he’s a quiet man anyway and he was recovering from a heart attack, and that was the first time he met Keith, with his leather jacket and his skinny little legs. I’m their baby, the youngest out of seven children. Who knows what Keith was doing, but it was mostly downers and alcohol, and I remember crying on the steps and him crying in my arms, and my family watching. They had never been around all this kind of stuff. They did handle it pretty well. We had other family there, my sisters, and then we had some neighbors. It’s always a full house. The next thing I know, my mom is holding me in her arms and telling me Keith was going to take care of me, it’s OK, he’s a good boy. And then Keith was so dreadfully upset with himself. He was so apologetic and sent my mother this beautiful note saying he was very sorry for his behavior. I don’t know how she could have trusted him after that, but she did. I couldn’t stay. I went back with him in the car. And they must have been terrified that I was getting in the car with this violent nut. My other brothers were in California that night, but Keith went up against them later. He would puff out his chest to me. “Choose me, Patti, or them.” I said, I choose you! He would always do that to me. Just to make sure.