How William Rees-Mogg saved Mick Jagger
In the end, the February 1967 raid on Redlands – Keith Richards’s Sussex home – would be the making of Mick Jagger. Publicly traduced as a degenerate and a menace to society; arrested and charged in a drugs bust; banged up in Wormwood Scrubs, Jagger became the subject of one of the most famous newspaper editorials in post-war Britain. But he emerged a man reborn.
The Redlands drug bust was to be a seminal moment in the growing moral panic of the time among the public and the Establishment about the use of drugs and the growing influence of pop stars on young and impressionable minds.
Now, 57 years on, a new play about the event, Redlands, has opened at the Chichester Festival Theatre. Billed as a ‘riotous, psychedelic and hugely entertaining account of possibly the most bizarre English court case ever held’, the play concentrates on the role of the barrister Michael Havers, described at the time as ‘the most expensive silk in the country and the pinnacle of the establishment’, who defended Jagger and Richards in the ensuing drugs trial.
On February 5, a week after the release of the Rolling Stones’ fifth album Between the Buttons, the News of the World published a story as part of a three part series ‘Pop Stars: The Truth That Will Shock You’. It described a reporter, at the fashionable London nightclub Blaises, witnessing a member of the Rolling Stones allegedly consuming Benzedrine tablets, displaying a piece of hashish and inviting his companions back to his flat for a “smoke”. The article claimed this was Mick Jagger. In fact, it was Brian Jones. Two days after the article was published, Jagger filed a writ for libel against the News of the World. It was a red rag to a bull.
A week after the News of the World story, Jagger, his girlfriend Marianne Faithfull, and a group of friends, gathered to spend the weekend at Redlands, the Grade-II country house in West Wittering, Sussex, that Richards had acquired only a few months earlier.
There was the photographer Michael Cooper; Robert Fraser, London’s most fashionable art-dealer; the Old Etonian aesthete and antique dealer Christopher Gibbs; and Nicky Kramer, a hanger-on later described by the Times as ‘an exotic’, who would wander up and down the Kings Road bedecked in beads, bells and flowers and whose only known occupation was ‘forever blowing bubbles through one of those wire wands’.
Also in the party was a Canadian, David Schneiderman, known as ‘the Acid King’. He had turned up in London just a few days earlier, carrying an attaché case stocked with ‘White Lightning’, a particularly pure variety of LSD manufactured by Owsley Stanley, San Francisco’s foremost ‘underground chemist.’
The day passed in a haze, with Schneiderman dispensing a tab of ‘the sacrament’ to everybody present, followed by an excursion to the nearby house owned by the surrealist Edward James, and to the beach, before returning to Redlands, where the party was briefly joined by George Harrison and his girlfriend Pattie Boyd.
Everybody was coming down gently. In the kitchen, Mohammed, Robert Fraser’s Moroccan manservant, was preparing a meal, and Harrison and Boyd had just left to return to London when there was a loud banging at the door. Richards looked through the window. Standing outside, as he later described it in his book Life, were “this whole lot of dwarves, all wearing the same clothes, dark blue with shiny bits and helmets.”
Bemused, Richards opened the door, to find Chief Inspector Gordon Dineley of the West Sussex Constabulary, along with 18 police officers, brandishing a search warrant. Richards invited Dineley to “Come inside and read it to me over the fireplace.” I’d never been busted before, and I was still on acid. Make friends. Love.’
PC Don Ambridge, one of the officers involved in the raid, later remembered that on entering the house each policeman had been instructed to ‘grab someone’ and search their rooms and their possessions. He was assigned Robert Fraser. “A very affable guy,” Ambridge remembered. “Good as gold.”
In Fraser’s room, Ambridge found a Victorian pill box containing 24 white tablets. Fraser told him they were for his diabetes. Ambridge handed the box back to Fraser, remembering to take a handful for analysis - just in case. They were found to be heroin.
In Jagger’s room, the police found four amphetamine tablets in his jacket pocket that he explained he had purchased legally in Italy. In Schneiderman’s room, police found an attaché case, containing a number of tightly wrapped packages. Schneiderman told them it was film he didn’t want exposed. They handed him back the case. The packages actually contained ‘dope, cocaine and hundreds of hits of white lightning’.
The raid was clearly a set up. The following Sunday, the News of the World, ran the story ‘Drug Squad Raids Pop Star’s Party,’ saying that ‘several stars, at least three of them nationally known names’, were present, adding that ‘the information on which the application for a search warrant was based was received only a few hours before the party started.’ But who was the informant?
Among the Stones’ circle, suspicion quickly fell on Nicky Kramer. A friend, the mercurial David Litvinoff, who, in the spirit of the times, had one foot planted in the world of the Stones, and another in the world of the Kray Brothers, took it upon himself to beat the truth out of the hapless flower-child. When it became apparent Kramer was innocent, suspicion switched to Schneiderman.
But who exactly was the mysterious ‘Acid King’, and what was his role in the bust?
Scheniederman was a quintessentially 60s figure, whose ‘mission in life’, according to the writer Ed Ochs, who became a close friend, was to spread LSD “among the intelligentsia of all the major English speaking countries in the world. He was a brilliant, genius person, who could talk his way into any party anywhere on the planet.”
Two years earlier he had been arrested on a drug-dealing charge in Toronto, skipped bail and fled to New York. It was there, Ochs told me from his home in California, that, by Schneiderman’s own account, he met Keith Richards, dealing him LSD. ‘Keith said, if you’re ever in London, look me up.’
Passing through Heathrow, his attaché case full of drugs, Schneiderman was busted. He was offered a deal that Ochs says ‘he couldn’t refuse’; face arrest and deportation, or set up the Rolling Stones. It was not lack of diligence on the part of the police that he was able to leave Redlands unscathed – by Schneiderman’s own account, climbing out of a window, and fleeing Britain for Spain the next day.
Assuming a variety of pseudonyms – David Britton, David Jordan – he eventually settled in Los Angeles under the name David Jove, going on to work as a producer of films, pop videos and a cable-TV show, New Wave Theatre.
Ochs, who wrote a biography, Freedom Spy: David Jove and the Meaning of Existence, says Schneiderman would change the subject when anybody asked about Redlands. “He told me he regretted it. It was not the high point in his life.” He died in Los Angeles in 2004 at the age of 61.
In Life, Richards maintains it was Patrick, his Belgian chauffeur, who had tipped off the News of the World about the party, who in turn tipped off the police, who ‘used Schneiderman’. “The News of the World,” he wrote, “got to [Patrick]. Didn’t do him any good. As I heard it, he never walked the same way again.”
It was Marianne, the only woman at the party, whose reputation would suffer the most in the ensuing media furore. She had taken a bath and was sitting downstairs wrapped in a capacious white rug when the police arrived. “Obviously a drop-out type”, according to PC Ambridge’s account.
Named only as ‘Miss X’, ‘the ‘Naked Girl Found at Stones Party’, as the headline in the London Evening News had it, would be branded as the scarlet woman, giving rise to the salacious Mars bar story that would haunt her for the rest of her life.
The first she heard of that was when Mick Jagger told her he had heard it from a prisoner in Wormwood Scrubs. “Somebody made it up,” she once told me. A subject of such tawdriness that she could hardly be bothered to dignify it with an explanation. “A dirty old man’s fantasy.”
In May, Richards, Jagger and Fraser appeared at Chichester Magistrates Court. Jagger was charged with possession of amphetamines, Fraser with possession of heroin and Richards with allowing cannabis to be smoked on his property.
Jagger was subsequently fined ￡200 and sentenced to three months imprisonment; Richards was sentenced to one year in prison and a ￡500 fine. Both were released on bail the next day pending appeal. Fraser was sentenced to six months imprisonment.
Among those appalled by the sentences was a surprising figure – the editor of the Times, and a bastion of the Establishment, William Rees-Mogg.
On July 1, Rees-Mogg published an editorial, Who Breaks a Butterfly On A Wheel, quoting from Alexander Pope’s Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot, arguing that it was Jagger’s celebrity and an impulse to appease public feeling that had resulted in a wholly disproportionate conviction.
“There are many people who take a primitive view of the matter, what one might call a pre-legal view of the matter,” Rees-Mogg wrote. “They consider that Mr. Jagger has ‘got what was coming to him’. They resent the anarchic quality of the Rolling Stones’ performances, dislike their songs, dislike their influence on teenagers and broadly suspect them of decadence.
“As a sociological concern this may be reasonable enough, and at an emotional level it is very understandable, but it has nothing at all to do with the case. There must remain a suspicion in this case that Mr. Jagger received a more severe sentence than would have been thought proper for any purely anonymous young man.’
The following day, Jagger was helicoptered by the TV programme World In Action to the lawn of an English country house, to take part in a discussion with Rees-Mogg, the Jesuit priest Father Thomas Corbishley, Lord Stowhill, a former Home Secretary and Attorney General, and Dr John Robinson, the Bishop of Woolwich.
Arranged on benches facing Jagger, like supplicants at the oracle of Delphi, the four worthies questioned him on finding himself “a symbol of rebellion that mother’s deplore”.
“One finds oneself that society, more or less, has pushed one into this position,’ said Jagger, demonstrating his facility for adjusting his elocution to whatever the circumstances demanded.
“They were like figures from Alice, chessmen”, Keith Richards wrote, “a bishop, a Jesuit, an attorney general and Rees-Mogg. They were earnest and awkward, and it was ludicrous.”
He might also have added they were obviously charmed.
The symbol of rebellion that mothers deplored was just a nice, misunderstood middle-class boy after all. What court could possibly imprison the Rolling Stones now? Richards’s sentence was duly quashed, and Jagger’s reduced to a suspended sentence. Clothed in the approval of the establishment, Mick Jagger went forth and prospered .
That August the Stones released a single, We Love You. Their riposte to the trial, the video of the song showed Richards dressed as a judge, and Jagger the accused in the dock.
“We don’t care if you hound we, and lock the doors around we,” the lyrics run. “We’ve locked it in our minds ‘cause we love you/ you will never win we, your uniforms don’t fit we, you’re dead and then we’re in - cause we love you.”
It peaked at number eight in the British charts.
Redlands runs at Chichester theatre until Oct 18; cft.org.uk