The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones. Stanley Booth

with a game smile to the fervent delivery, the smile becoming more glazed as the gaps widened. Celebrity Code is a great and ancient language, difficult to learn, and I never heard anybody speak it better than Jo Bergman.

      The conference was to be in the San Souci (sic) Room at the Wilshire; we entered it through a labyrinth of bars and luncheon rooms. The Los Angelesization of Los Angeles had not yet reached the Beverly Wilshire, where the San Souci Room glowed softly in the gentle radiance of its crystal light fixtures, the harsh Southern California sun shut out by damask and organdy drapes, but it seemed near: outside the window an air hammer was making a racket that threatened to become mayhem, as if at any moment the bit might come through the wall. ‘What’s that god-awful noise?’ Jo asked the hotel’s man, whose blue pin-striped suit we were following into the room.

      ‘Ah, what time’s your meeting?’

      ‘Eleven-thirty.’

      ‘They’ll be stopping at eleven.’

      Fifty or sixty folding chairs had been arranged in semi-circles before a long table; to the right were a bar and another table with tea and coffee services and fruit salad and little cakes, big bouquets on the tables. I wandered around the room making notes, the air hammer stopped, Steckler showed up, and the press began to arrive. They all appeared to be in their early twenties, most of them carrying notebooks, cameras, and tape recorders, all dressed in the current style, achieved by spending large sums of money to look poor and bedraggled, like a new race of middle-class gypsies. They ate like gypsies, snatching up the cakes and fruit and drinks.

      Close to eleven-thirty, three television crews arrived, their dress running more to business suits and ties. With one of them was Rona Barrett, the televised Hollywood gossip, a small woman whose large blonded hairdo was frozen within a layer of spray shellac. She perched on a folding chair, a cultured pearl among the suede and denim.

      At noon the Stones stumbled into the room in single file like drunken Indians and arranged themselves at the long table. Flashbulbs popped. Television cameras hissed. The Stones sat and scratched their heads.

      With the Stones, sitting next to Keith, was another young Englishman, wearing a burgundy-colored leather jacket, dark glasses, and piratical dark greasy locks. He was Sam Cutler, a recent addition to the Stones’ entourage whose function, other than to carry whatever Keith would not want to be caught carrying, was unclear.

      Finally the flashes stopped and for a long moment there were no questions, no one could think what to ask, the confrontation was enough: three years ago when the Stones last toured the United States, most of the people now here to interview them were teenagers screaming in darkened arenas their adoration of the Stones, who were going in the interim to be arrested, to swap women, to break up, to die, and yet here they are, elbows on the table.

      The younger reporters, most of whom if the place had been raided would probably have gone down for possession of dope, did not look like any the Stones had seen before at an American press conference. But this generation, like every other, contained mostly dull-normal people who needed others to live their lives for them. Luckily there are always a few people who can and do live other people’s lives for them. They are the stars of the time, and at this time no public figure was so loved and hated as Mick Jagger, what a name, a name to open sardine tins with. Jagger sat smiling in lime-colored trousers, an open-throated black silk shirt with green and white flecks, some kind of large animal tooth hanging on a chain below his strong but delicately fashioned – like a silver necklace – collarbone.

      If the questions here were like most of the ones I had been asked about the Stones, they would be short and direct: Are you queer? What kind of dope do you take? Did you kill Brian? But the first questions, fielded by Jagger, revealed only that the Stones’ new album, Let It Bleed, would be finished and released in about three weeks, and that the Stones had no real plans for a record label of their own. ‘That’s about all we’ll get, the label,’ Mick said. ‘Unless you hire a fleet of lorries and sell the records for half price there’s no point in it.’

      The meeting, it appeared, would be friendly and dull, without the conflict that once characterized the Stones’ encounters with the press. So the great feeling of unity with the Stones this crowd would have had three years ago watching them meet the press on television was missing, and a reporter was moved to ask for a reply to the statement in Ralph Gleason’s column of the day before that ‘the price of tickets for your concerts was too high and that a lot of people who would like to see you can’t really afford it.’

      Without seeming to defer in the slightest degree to the prattling of a middle-aged jazz columnist, Mick generously said, ‘Maybe we can fix something up for those people.’

      ‘A free concert?’ someone asked, but Mick said he didn’t know and evaded the issue with aristocratic ease: ‘We can’t set the price of tickets. I don’t know how much people can afford. I mean, I’ve no idea.’

      Someone else asked whether the U.S. State Department gave the Stones any trouble or asked them to sign anti-drug statements before allowing them to enter the country. Mick said, ‘Of course not, we’ve never done anything wrong,’ and through the laughter and applause Rona Barrett asked, ‘Do you consider yourself an anti-establishment group, or are you just putting us on?’

      ‘We’re just putting you on,’ Mick said.

      ‘Taking you for a ride,’ Keith murmured, reptile eyelids drooping.

      Rona presses on: ‘How did you enjoy eating at the Yamato last night?’

      ‘She was under the table,’ Keith explained, but it didn’t stop her.

      Mick told a questioner that the Stones hoped to hire Ike and Tina Turner, Terry Reid, B.B. King, and Chuck Berry as supporting acts for the tour, and the question of a free concert returned. These young reporters seemed to suggest even more strongly than had Ralph Gleason that the Stones had an obligation to a new community, formed largely in the Stones’ image. It seemed the sort of thing that the Stones in their independence had never flirted with, and Mick avoided the subject again: ‘If we feel that’s what’s got to be done, then we’ll do it. I’m leaving that very fluid, you notice, I’m not committing meself.’

      ‘And how is Marianne Faithfull?’ Rona Barrett asked Mick. If you didn’t know better, you would have thought she was the only reporter interested in the Stones’ personal lives.

      Three days after Brian Jones died, Marianne Faithfull, Jagger’s régulière for the past two years, in Australia with Mick to appear in a movie, looked into a mirror and saw not her face but Brian’s. Then she took an overdose of sleeping pills. Only luck and prompt medical attention saved her life. After recuperating in Australia and Switzerland, she returned to Mick’s house in London, where she was now, feeling neglected.

      ‘She’s all right,’ Mick said to Rona. ‘How are you?’

      Rona, undaunted, wanted to know of any plans Mick had to run for public office: ‘I’m not feeling very messianic,’ he said, laughing.

      Other people asked more questions about festivals and free concerts. The subject would not go away; this year the popular imagination had been outraged or delighted, captured anyway, by the pop festivals, mammoth exhibitions of drugs, sex, and music. Last year’s spectacle was the police violence in Chicago during the Democratic Party’s nominating convention; the year before that, we had the discovery by the mass media of the widespread use among the young of psychedelic drugs; this year there had been giant music festivals at such places as Woodstock, Hyde Park, Atlanta, Denver, the Isle of Wight, Dallas, where people came without paying, whether or not tickets were sold, went naked, had sex and took drugs openly with almost no arrests because there was no way short of war to arrest hundreds of thousands of people. It seemed that the World War II babies had grown into a force traditional society might be unable to restrain. There should be, Keith said about the festivals, ‘ten times more of them.’

      But, someone still wanted to know, what about the prices of the tickets to the Stones’ concerts?

      Mick, Keith, and Sam Cutler began talking at once,