Chapter Twelve
Keith and Anita were not the only ones whose drug use had spiralled out of control. Brian Jones, who had taken up with fringy blonde nineteen-year-old Anitalike Melanie ‘Suki’ Potier, the girlfriend who survived the car smash that killed Guinness heir Tara Browne, was skating thin. Aware that the Stones were making plans to tour America without him, because he would not be permitted re-entry by US Immigration with drugs convictions to his name, he started to panic. Friends who tried to help him, including Paul McCartney, had their hospitality and kindness flung back at them. Brian was looking like a lost cause. As his supporters shrank away, it must have dawned on him that only the man in the mirror could help him. He pulled himself together enough to submit for treatment at the Priory Hospital in Roehampton, West London, long before it gained its reputation as rock’n’roll rehab. Down the line, any number of sapped stars would follow him there.
The psychedelic compounds he had first sampled at San Francisco’s Monterey festival in June the previous year were playing havoc with his health and making him more susceptible to asthma attacks.1 His dependence on the sedative Mandrax, he realised, was an addiction he had to conquer. While the downers did help him sleep, something that had eluded him for months, they were robbing him of the versatility, precision and co-ordination that hallmarked his musicianship. Pressure had been mounting for a while, and there was plenty to blame: the busts, brief imprisonment, humiliating publicity, band bickerings, the scornful spectre of Anita, his vain, deluded quest to win her back and the spiteful behaviour of a vindictive double act who should have known better. While many people down the years, including Brian’s own father Lewis, have blamed Anita for his downfall, others have gone so far as to say that Mick and Keith killed him – with passive aggression, intimidation and mockery.
‘I watched them do it,’ said an industry professional on a promise of anonymity: ‘I would stand up to be counted, but I can do without them coming after me. They could be vile gits, the pair of them, if you want to know. They wore Brian down. They took pleasure from it, and sniggered quite viciously about it. You could almost see them rubbing their hands with glee. The times I wanted to take Brian outside and shake him, tell him to stand up to their nonsense, the stupid couple of kids, and not let them get away with it. But the band was the most important thing to him. He wouldn’t give it up for anything – not until it was too late, and had convinced himself that he was better off out of it.’
‘All cruelty springs from weakness,’ wrote the Roman philosopher and playwright Seneca.2 Who had a point. We are well aware, today, of the causes and implications of bullying, and of why it is now regarded as a form of abuse, against which there are laws. Persecution, harassment, discrimination and prejudice are all forms of it. It is understood to be about gaining power, and is usually perpetrated by individuals with low self-esteem. They may resent their target, for all kinds of reasons. This causes them to project their own feelings of inadequacy on to them. The thing that all bullies have in common is their use of power to counterbalance their own psychological shortcomings and inferiority. Every time they attack someone weaker, they feel better about themselves. But only for a moment. Because that feeling of power is fleeting, so the bully has to bully over and over again. They know what they are doing, and that it is wrong. But they choose to ignore the ethical and moral implications, and they keep on doing it. If confronted, they invariably blame their victim.3
Brian simply didn’t know how to stand up to Mick and Keith, or how to confront their behaviour rationally and make them back down. He had no idea how to defend himself. He took more and more drugs to block out his torment, numb the pain and blur the circumstances. He didn’t know how to ‘kill them with kindness’, which is recognised now as a way of deflating bullies.
‘The problem with Mick is that he has no real allegiance to people,’ said publicist Keith Altham. ‘For example, when I came in, they had Les Perrin as their PR. Les was very well respected and much loved by clients and press alike. Then one day, Jagger summoned me to the Savoy Hotel to talk about getting rid of Les and me replacing him. “But Mick,” I said, “if you sack Les, that would be very bad public relations. People won’t like it. He hasn’t done anything wrong. Why not take me on as the foot soldier, and keep him on in a supervisory capacity?” “We don’t need two press agents,” growled Mick. He shows no loyalty towards people who work for him when their usefulness is used up. He always has to slam a door in your face. This is exactly what he did to Brian Jones. It’s that very ruthlessness, of course, that keeps him at the top.
‘When I eventually went to work as the Rolling Stones’ PR, someone said to me, “Congratulations on getting the job as Mick’s butler.” What did that mean, I asked. “Oh, you’ll find out.” And I did. I knew what I was dealing with the day I asked Mick for the phone numbers of the other Stones. “You won’t need those,” said Jagger. “They do as I tell them. Keith’s out of it all the time. Bill’s boring, and Charlie doesn’t do interviews. Everything goes through me.” And that was my experience of him.’
The first time Keith ever met the Stones, he recalls, was at the Great Pop Prom at London’s Royal Albert Hall on 15 September 1963. ‘It was the first time the Beatles and the Stones had ever performed together on the same bill,’ he says. ‘The Stones opened the show and the Beatles closed it. It was part of an annual fundraising event for the Printers’ Pension Corporation, and was compèred by DJ Alan Freeman. Can you imagine the Albert Hall back then, sedate venue that it was, besieged by thousands of screaming teenagers? The Beatles performed on the main stage, and the Stones on a small dais in the round. I was standing in the [Sir] Henry Cole Room on the Grand Tier when these roughs came in. I’d seen the photos, so I wasn’t too taken aback. I got talking to Brian Jones, and found him really nice and intelligent, not at all like one of those oafs they were portrayed as in the papers. Then there was Keith Richards, who was picking his nose and flicking it at the flocked wallpaper. “You’re lucky they weren’t green ones,” Brian observed. “He eats those.”
‘I could see clearly from the start that this was Brian’s band. He had depth in his thinking. He was clean, well-mannered, kind and generous. He understood the value of press and publicity, and he was invariably accommodating and helpful to me when I was trying to do my job. There were some unpleasant traits with women, and all that stuff about girls being passed around members of the band: Marianne, Anita, and so on. But until the booze and the drugs kicked in, Brian was by and large a gentleman, exceedingly musical, and very much in control. They have tried to insinuate since that they got rid of him because of the booze and drugs. My feeling is that it was the other way round, and that he took to substance abuse in a big way after he realised they had it in for him. I always felt that, had they appreciated and included him, they would have been a much better band. They could have been making inventive and thrilling new music all these years, instead of resting on their laurels and going on endless tours to rehash the ancient hits, which is all anybody has wanted from them for about half their career. Brian was the truly musical Stone. A jack of all trades. He could pick up more or less any instrument and get a tune out of it. That gave them an edge that they lacked, after he died.
‘Stu used to say that the Rolling Stones would be over when Mick found his own identity.’
‘So he still hasn’t found it?’
‘What do you think?’
‘Would Keith still turn out to see the Stones today?’
‘I saw them at Shepherd’s Bush Empire on 8 June 1999, when they were halfway through the No Security tour and were doing a warm-up for the British dates. Tickets were changing hands for a grand each, and thousands of people turned up that night who hadn’t even got tickets. Just to be there, outside on the pavement. I was invited, so I went along. They were fantastic. They hadn’t made a decent record for about twenty-five years by then, but they were so good that I knew I didn’t want to see them ever again. Jagger, as ever, was amazing on stage. So charismatic. But I decided to leave it there. They’re a tourist attraction now, like the Eiffel Tower. People go because it’s there. Less Rolling Stones, more Stonehenge. Megalithic monuments. The music hasn’t evolved further. Perhaps, had Brian still been around, it would have done.’
Music should have helped Brian. Music was where he came in. It had aided his escape before: from the tragedy of his little sister’s death, from his cold, unaffectionate parents and from his fear that he was unworthy of love, because no one had ever loved him. Was that true? Could it have been paranoia talking? Either way, Brian was getting desperate.
It is always fascinating to talk to musicians about the dawning of music in their lives. What they have to share on the subject can sometimes sound fey or far-fetched, but only because describing it in words defeats them. Their eyes tend to glaze over at such questions, or they roll them in mock irritation. They tilt their necks and lift their faces skywards, as though in deference to some deity, or thanking stars. They have no idea where it comes from, they insist. George Michael and David Bowie could impart no more wisdom about it than Joe Bloggs on an open-mic night down the Railway Tavern. Nor do they know why they were ‘touched’ or ‘blessed’. They are grateful to God, Apollo, the Universe and whoever else for it, but they can never in a million explain it. I have been interviewing artists all my adult life. I always ask, and have never received a definitive explanation … because there isn’t one. But sometimes they will come out with some gem that distils the phenomenon of music in a whole new way.
I didn’t get the chance to ask Brian Jones. Born too late. I wouldn’t mind betting, however, that he would have said the same sort of thing: that the art of music had randomly favoured him. That it had reached out to him, enveloping and embracing him, awakening and coaxing emotions from him as nothing else could. That he willingly played host to the ghost that rippled through his senses, played on his lips and danced in his heart. They really do eulogise in this way. He’d say that he was thrilled by the feeling of it filtering into his fingers, igniting him. That he loved how it compensated for what he lacked. That it let him in on its complex language, and welcomed him into its secret world. That it gave him confidence. That it drew him back and back, on a voyage of discovery that both broadened his tastes and made a purist of him. Brian, we know, responded to the blues because he felt the blues. He knew pain and learned to translate adversity into notes that resonated with others. His virtuosity should have been his salvation. Powerful and vital though music was to him, it could not save him.
If only he could have found something to make his own. He did try, on his various excursions to northern Africa, where the rhythms and sounds of local music enchanted him. Gripped by palinacousis,4 he had been toying with the idea of returning yet again to spend time exploring Gnawa, the ancient folk music of Morocco. Its name derives from that of Guinea, the predominantly Islamic West African country on the Atlantic coast. Notorious for its slave trade during the eleventh century, that land’s musical tradition arose out of the howlings of the enslaved. The deeply spiritual music that evolved over centuries comprises healing chants, strange rhythms and hypnotic dance. Its principal instruments are solid iron castanets known as qraqeb, a three-stringed lute called a hajhuj, hejhouj or sentir, and large tbel drums. This music, hugely popular today, has been celebrated annually since 1998 at the Gnaoua World Music Festival of Essaouira, Morocco, drawing massive audiences. Jimmy Page and Robert Plant are aficionados. They call it ‘world music’ now.
Brian rocked the casbah5 ahead of all of them in his ambition to harness Gnawa and combine it with other disciplines to create a thrilling new hybrid. He planned to capture voices, drums and other instruments on tape, transport the recordings to a New York studio and embellish them with layers of rhythm and blues, funk and jazz. He and producer Glyn Johns went to stay at the Marrakesh mansion of oil heir Paul Getty Jr, which was to be their base while they worked. But Brian hit the hashish as soon as they landed. He never emerged from the haze. Left to his own devices, Johns tried to glean what he could from local bands. The project disintegrated. Another Brian brainwave bit the dust.
Back in London, on 12 May 1968, he performed with the Stones as part of the NME’s Poll Winners’ concert at Wembley’s Empire Pool alongside Lulu, Cliff Richard and the Shadows, Dusty Springfield, the Bee Gees, Status Quo and the rest, and managed to rise to the occasion. That brief flare of focus and control would not last. Few could have guessed that ‘this would be the last time he would play live with the Rolling Stones’. Was it? We can’t count The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus6 concert show in December 1968, ‘they’ say, because that was filmed before a private audience, various members of whom took part in the show. But it should be counted, as Brian’s unofficial swansong. Although conflicting excuses circulated, it must have been because he died mere months after filming it that the Stones and their management cancelled its release.
Brian’s romance with Suki staggered along. The more she adored him and lavished him with love and devotion, the worse he treated her, lashing out as though punishing her for the manner in which Mick and Keith were treating him. Rumours about their contemptible behaviour towards him in the studio, unplugging his amp, switching off his microphone and ridiculing him ‘behind his back’ but effectively to his face turned out to be true. Ostracised and unable to stand the persecution, he would drug to the nines to drag himself there, but was ineffective when he arrived. He started missing rehearsals. When he managed to get to the studio at all, he contributed less and less. What made them stoop to such cruelty? It is hard to fathom.
It would have felt, to Brian, like a concerted campaign to grind him down and drive him out. Long in the habit of penning copious handwritten notes, he wrote begging letters to Mick, said Marianne Faithfull and others, pleading to be given another chance. Did those pleas fall on deaf ears? We can assume so, given that John Mayall’s Bluesbreakers guitarist Mick Taylor had already been approved as Brian’s replacement. Baby-faced ‘Little Mick’ was only twenty at the time. He would light up the Stones’ next six albums – Let It Bleed, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, Sticky Fingers, Exile on Main St., Goats Head Soup and It’s Only Rock ’n Roll, regarded by many as their definitive run – before quitting abruptly in 1974. We know why, too. We will get there.
Hurt has to go somewhere. Brian was taking his out on Suki, who in his blurred mind’s eye morphed into Anita every time he looked at her. His beautiful, feisty, relentless Anita, the one true love (he convinced himself) who haunted him. After a particularly vicious row in Tangier, poor Suki could take no more. She attempted suicide, smashing a mirror and ripping through the veins in her wrists with its jagged edge. When the ambulance arrived, Brian made no move to accompany her to hospital. He was said to have shown negligible concern, and seemed to brush the incident off as an inconvenience. Was he stoned, or were there shards in his heart?
Back in England and spending more and more time languishing at Redlands while lord of the manor Keith was in London, impotent in his flashy motor outside the house where Mick and Anita were shooting Performance, Brian was seized by the idea of getting a country retreat of his own. The haven he found, near Hartfield, East Sussex, ninety minutes inland from Redlands, was perfect. Here at last was the hideout in which to take stock, come to terms with his divorce from the Stones and work out what to do next. He had no way of knowing that Cotchford Farm, where Alan Alexander Milne had created charming, eternal stories about a teddy bear called Winnie the Pooh, had itself been the setting of much misery.
I could barely believe my eyes when I switched on the television on Saturday 13 November 2021. I selected from the movie menu the 2017 film Goodbye Christopher Robin starring Domhnall Gleeson as A.A. Milne, Margot Robbie as his wife and Kelly Macdonald as Olive the nanny. It was none of these actors who caught my attention, however. It was Will Tilston, the child playing eight-year-old Christopher Robin Milne. Staring out at me from the screen was Brian Jones as a little boy. The resemblance was remarkable.
Billed as offering ‘valuable insight into the darkness shadowing the creation of a classic children’s tale’, the film seemed to reflect Brian’s own sad boyhood. It occurred to me that his purchase of Cotchford Farm was not symbolic of going forward, it was about looking back. Less investment in a post-Stones future, more the purchase of a childhood he’d never had.
Brian was enchanted by the rambling, timber-framed sixteenth-century house that sat at the end of a private lane on the edge of the Ashdown Forest. Milne had bought it in 1925 as a country home for himself and his family. Beloved places in the Winnie the Pooh stories that he wrote there – places such as Poohsticks Bridge, Pooh Corner, Galleon’s Lap and the Hundred Acre Wood – were all based on actual locations. There were statues in the garden of Christopher Robin and of his friend Owl, and a sundial with its stone stand featuring carvings of Piglet, Eeyore, Tigger, Kanga and Roo, characters dear to generations of children including Brian. The estate also boasted nearly ten acres of land, its own woods, fields and a paddock, landscaped gardens, a summer house and a fish pond. The previous owners, an American couple by the name of Taylor, had also installed a large, heated swimming pool.
Christopher Robin Milne wrote in his autobiography, The Enchanted Places: A Childhood Memoir: ‘Cotchford was different. Cotchford was ours, and on an autumn morning we drove down to take possession. No. I have got it wrong. It was Cotchford that took possession of us.’ It had the same effect on Brian, who couldn’t say no to it. He snapped it up in November 1968. Eight months later, like A.A. Milne, he would breathe his last there.7
I struggled to concentrate on the film, preoccupied as I was with the actor’s likeness to little boy Brian. The Christopher Robin character seemed uncannily imbued with Brian’s own melancholy. The uncomfortable truth was that Milne regenerated his son into something that did not exist. He conjured stories that turned private father-son moments and childish fantasies into public property. Christopher Robin was already desperately unhappy when he was sent away to boarding school, where he was bullied and ridiculed for his winsome appearance, stuffed companions and disagreeable fame. He would reject the Pooh fortune in adulthood. All that he wanted was to be a real person, not a shadow of someone else’s interpretation.
Brian would not have known any of this. He had bought not only a country house, but a whole new lifestyle. Suki moved there with him, but her tenure was over within months. When she left during the spring of 1969, Brian wasted no time in moving in her replacement: a twenty-two-year-old dancer, yet another beautiful blonde Anita clone, by the name of Anna Wohlin. The couple had first met five years earlier, when Anna had travelled to the UK from her native Sweden as an exchange student. She had lodged in Wales, but subsequently moved to London. She got to know Brian when she danced at the Speakeasy, or was it at the Revolution? All clubs taste the same after a few wines. Now here she was, living with him as the lady of the house, conversing over the marmalade about livestock. The dark horse! He intended to get some for his paddock, he told her. He already had a family of cats breeding enthusiastically, as well as a cocker spaniel and an Afghan hound. He loved walking them through the woods and along the country lanes to the Hay Waggon, his local on Hartfield High Street. He’d have a pint, play pool and chew the cud with neighbours there. He also befriended folk who lived in cottages on the Cotchford Farm estate, including his gardener. He was particularly close to his housekeeper Mary Hallet (or Hallett), who had been born on the estate.
The pollen count was high that hot summer, but Brian was taking care of his health. He had respirators installed in each room, and made sure he didn’t run out of inhalers. Apart from a modest amount of alcohol and his sleeping pills, Anna insisted, Brian was not taking anything. He was more than happy in his new environment, she said, and was focused on the future. The subject of marriage was broached, as were children. So soon? Who needed the Stones when one had all this. Brian wasn’t happy about the direction in which the band were taking their music. He was ready to go his own way. While, in common with his bandmates, he had experienced problems obtaining his money when he needed it, he must have been unaware of the truly precarious state of their finances. The band was in fact going steadily broke. As a result of the deal they had done with their business manager Allen Klein, royalties from the sales of all their albums released in the US were funnelled through Klein’s company ABKCO in New York City. It had now dawned on Mick that all the money flowing into ABKCO wasn’t coming back out.
There was only one thing for it, as far as their new financial advisor Prince Rupert Loewenstein was concerned: they were going to have to go back on tour. Not the hop-and-a-skip trailing around the European capitals and nipping over the pond to do the modest-venue short-haul flings through a few American cities that they were used to. They were going to have to up the stakes, get big-time and hit the US concert circuit full-on. They couldn’t, however, do this with Brian. With a drug conviction hanging over his head, US Immigration were never going to allow him in. Thus were the Stones presented with the perfect excuse to fire him.
When Mick, Keith and Charlie came to Cotchford on 8 June 1969, Brian was ready for them. They informed him that they wanted him to leave the band, and were surprised when he agreed to it so serenely. He also accepted their offer of a £100,000 pay-off. He was dignified about it, and did not haggle for more. There was to be an annual allowance on top of that, they promised, at an amount to be agreed. While no one knows for sure, this is sometimes quoted as £20,000. Because of the band’s multiple issues with Klein and the problems they experienced getting their hands on what was rightfully theirs, we don’t know whether Brian, or his estate, was ever paid.
What the world remembers is that Brian Jones drowned in his swimming pool on 3 July 1969 at the age of twenty-seven. Which is curious in itself. Given that Brian was dead well before midnight, the date of his death should have been recorded as the day before. A comparable anomaly would occur eleven years later, when John Lennon was gunned down outside the Dakota building, his Manhattan apartment block, on a date preserved to eternity as 8 December 1980. But John was killed at around 22:50 Eastern Standard Time. In Liverpool, his place of birth, it was ten to four the next morning. Given that John was British, fans felt it would have made more sense to record his death as having occurred on the following day; especially as he had been born on 9 October and was obsessed with that number, which recurred throughout his life.8
What many still question is the verdict, recorded at East Sussex coroner’s court, of ‘death by misadventure’. The coroner’s report concluded that Brian died as a result of ‘drowning by immersion in fresh water associated with severe liver dysfunction caused by fatty degeneration and ingestion of alcohol and drugs’. The post-mortem had revealed that Brian’s liver was double the normal weight for a man of his size and build. And that was that. The case was closed, and Home Office records were sealed by the court for a period of seventy-five years. Why? What of their content was so explosive and potentially damaging? Who stood to be harmed by publication of them? Allen Klein, who had no faith in the police investigation, was said to have ordered his own. But that was the last that anyone heard of it. Did it happen? If so, what was the outcome?
In the absence of evidence, conspiracy theories flourish. Of those proven to have been present on the night of the drowning – builder Frank Thorogood, who was staying at the property; Stones fixer, lackey and driver Tom Keylock, a man of questionable morality who had been fired by Keith and then fobbed off on Brian; Thorogood’s girlfriend Janet Lawson and Brian’s partner Anna Wohlin – only Anna remains alive. Was Brian killed by thuggish Thorogood after a scuffle over unpaid wages? Had the disgruntled builder meant only to scare him, ducking him under a few times until he ‘gave in’? Or had Keylock been contracted to kill Brian because he had become a liability and an embarrassment? Keylock claimed, ahead of his own death in 1994, that Thorogood made a deathbed confession to him personally. ‘It was me that done Brian,’ Tom reported that Frank had said to him. Could that have been a cover-up? Could Brian’s death even have had some sacrificial connotation? Believe it or not, this was mooted. Get a grip.
Fifty-three years on, the hangdog house is less inclined than ever to yield its awful secret. And there he lurks to this day, just to be sure. Rustling among the leaves, swirling like lung-choke mist, whispering into the brittle night, lips stiffer than the wings of frozen wrens. Don’t ask, he’ll never tell you. He’s jangling voodoo bones in his pockets, just like the ones Anita keeps in her drawers back home. Does she still wear the garlic? He wonders. What kind of person would live here, in this sanctuary of peril and death? Had you been the next to move in, wouldn’t you have filled in the pool with earth? Who could knowingly swim in a hole another human had drowned in? Anita could. Hmm. He sees them coming, whoever they are. That’s his gasp beneath the water, shimmering cold. Those are his fingertips, trippling up your spine. Keeping Brian’s memory alive. Never letting it drift away. May the others forever be tormented by him. It is all that he asks.
If it is true that a few individuals would have liked to see Brian conveniently dead, plenty more would have preferred their meal ticket to go on living. He was also rumoured to be in talks with John Lennon and Jimi Hendrix about forming a new rock supergroup. Although the notion has been ridiculed by serious music writers, is it that far-fetched? Even if it did not involve those specific fellow rock stars, wouldn’t this suggest that Brian had plans and plenty to live for, thus dispelling the notion that he could have committed suicide?
In 1994, an episode of BBC’s Crimewatch revisited the unsolved mystery. Interviewed for the programme, Home Office pathologist Dr Chris Milroy stated that Brian’s 140-milligram blood alcohol level – no more than the equivalent of about three and a half pints of beer – was ‘not that high’. The negligible trace of amphetamines in his urine did not prove that the drug was in Brian’s body, he said. Huh? Anyway, there was no evidence that Brian was intoxicated by drugs. The pathologist concluded that it was ‘quite likely’ that Brian had been drowned deliberately. Asked about the absence of bruising or other injury, Milroy responded that, had Brian’s head or shoulders been pushed down forcefully below the water level, such action would have caused no visible damage.
Fifteen years later, after new evidence and witness statements collected by investigative journalist and BBC producer Scott Jones over a period of four years were presented to police, it was announced that the case would be reopened. The following year, however, in October 2010, the police released this statement: ‘This has been thoroughly reviewed by Sussex Police’s Crime Policy and Review Branch, but there is no new evidence to suggest that the corner’s original verdict of ‘death by misadventure’ was incorrect. As such, the case will not be reopened.’ Nine years on, in July 2019 – the fiftieth anniversary of Brian’s death – a new Netflix documentary revisiting the conspiracy theories was announced, inspired by author Terry Rawlings’s 1994 book Who Killed Christopher Robin? And Sky News interviewed a woman called Barbara Marion, who had discovered only seventeen years earlier that Brian Jones was her biological father. Not that she had a shred of a memory of him. Yet she had this to say: ‘I don’t think his death was investigated as it should have been.’
Anna Wohlin suffered nightmares for years after Brian’s death. She was adamant that he was still alive when he left the water. By the time a doctor arrived on the scene, she said, he was dead. Could a slip of a girl like her have pulled the heavy body of a grown man from the depths of a swimming pool? Although there was a trained nurse in the house, a local woman called Janet Lawson, she was unable to assist. Why, was she out of it? Fresh hash cakes were kicking around, apparently. Anna wrote a book about her involvement thirty years after Brian died, and maintains that the truth was hushed up to protect the Stones’ image.9
‘Brian is still portrayed as a bitter, worn-out and depressed man who was fired because of his drug habit … and who died because he was drunk or high,’ she said in 2013. ‘But my Brian was a wonderful, charismatic man who was happier than ever, had given up drugs and was looking forward to pursuing the musical career he wanted.’
After his death, she wrote a letter to Mick Jagger. She is still waiting for a response. She remarks that it ‘felt so unfair he was alive and thriving … a reminder he and the other Stones were continuing as if nothing had happened, while Brian was gone forever.’
The Stones’ management ushered Anna off the crime scene and insisted that she return to Sweden just days after the tragedy. Bill Wyman told me that they had to hide her in a wardrobe at one point. She was thus prevented from attending his funeral. Suki Potier was there, however, her previously blonde hair darkened and covered with a headscarf. Soon after she got home, Anna claimed, she discovered that she was pregnant with Brian’s baby. She miscarried and fell into depression, deprived of both father and child. She then pulled herself together and decided to return to London, to bid a formal farewell to Cotchford and collect her things. She arrived to find that the place had been stripped bare. She was never reunited with her possessions.
The death of Brian Jones continues to fascinate and enthral more than half a century later not only because accounts of those who were present conflict, but because it begs questions that can never be answered. He cannot rest in peace. Obsessive fans won’t let him. The more macabre among them call for his body to be exhumed, in order to establish once and for all that he was murdered. What would be the point? There is no one left to hold accountable, other than the remaining Rolling Stones.
What are we to make of the revelation of Jan Bell, the daughter of Frank Thorogood, the man who made that killer ‘deathbed confession’? She said that Mick and Keith had turned up to Cotchford to force Brian to relinquish his claim to the name ‘the Rolling Stones’. Having coined it himself, he had made it known to the others that he intended to continue to use it. The encounter, Bell declared, got ‘heated’, and Keith threatened Brian with a knife. Did she witness this? Did her dad tell her about it? Might not her motive have been to clear her late father’s name?
Then there was the housekeeper, a Mary Haddock, who was named in the BBC’s 7 July 1969 report as having raised the alarm. It was she, the Corporation stated, who found the musician’s body at the bottom of his pool. But nurse Janet Lawson said that she found him, while Anna Wohlin insisted that she had been the one who dived in, pulled Brian out and gave him the kiss of life. Mary Haddock’s name appeared in several reports, when in fact she had not been present that night. She probably didn’t exist, however. The Cotchford housekeeper to whom Brian had grown close was called Mary Hallet(t). The two Marys namechecked must have been one and the same. This was probably no more than a case of sloppy reporting.
It has been written ad nauseam that the only individuals present that fateful night were Brian, Anna, Frank Thorogood, Tom Keylock and Janet Lawson. Mick Jagger contradicted this, insisting that there had been ‘a party going on’. But Jagger wasn’t there. ‘Lots of famous people were present,’ ‘they’ said. If so, why has none of them ever piped up? Even a police constable admitted that there were more guests in attendance at Cotchford that night than had officially been accounted for. Another PC made reference to another ‘six or so other associates’ on the premises, none of whom has ever been publicly identified. Did they scarper? What were they afraid of, if so?
Yet another piece of the puzzle has Suki Potier’s name on it. A few accounts confirm that Suki was at Cotchford that night, but that she left ‘about half an hour before Brian died’. Who observed her arrival and departure? Who timed it? What was she doing there, and how come she left? Why didn’t East Grinstead police ever interview her? Still weirder, she apparently returned to the house not long after the drowning, and remained there for several days. What was that about? She and Brian were history … or were they? We can’t ask her. She and her husband were killed in a car crash in Portugal in 1981, when Suki was thirty-three. Having survived one car smash, she was taken by another. Horrific symmetry.
On the night of Brian’s death, Frank, Tom, Anna and Janet gave witness statements to the police. They all said that Brian had been drinking. Lawson added that he was taking medication to help him sleep. They all said, too, that they had got out of the pool and had returned to the house, leaving Brian in the water alone. But Thorogood was in there with him when the women went back to the house. Another discrepancy.
In 2008, Scott Jones tracked Janet Lawson down and persuaded her to talk. The former nurse, who was twenty-six at the time of the tragedy, had not discussed it with anyone for forty years. She told the journalist and producer that her original statement, taken at East Grinstead police station, had been ‘a pack of lies’: ‘The policeman suggested most of what I said,’ she said. ‘It was a load of rubbish.
‘Frank was not doing the building work properly,’ she went on. ‘Brian had sacked him that day. There was something in the air. Frank was acting strangely, throwing his weight around a bit. In the early evening, Frank, Anna, Brian and myself had dinner – steak and kidney pie.’ Wait: Brian sat and partook of an amiable meal with a fuming individual whom he had only just fired?
After supper, Janet said, they went out to the garden for a swim. Brian asked Janet to bring him his asthma inhaler, and she returned to the house to look for it. While she was gone, Brian drowned. Could he therefore have died of an asthma attack in the pool, brought on by the high pollen count, which must have caused him to become breathless and go under?
Janet’s conclusion, forty years on, was that Frank Thorogood had killed Brian, though unintentionally. She came to believe that it was horseplay that got out of hand. Where had she been all those years? She had quit nursing, she said, and had left the NHS. Other, sinister but probably unrelated goings-on had prompted her to go into hiding. She later changed her surname to Tallyn. She died of cancer in 2008.
When Mick Jagger was asked in 1995 whether he felt guilty about Brian Jones’s death, his response was defiant. ‘No, not really,’ he said. ‘I do feel that I behaved in a very childish way, but we were very young, and in some ways we picked on him. But unfortunately, he made himself a target for it. He was very, very jealous, very difficult, very manipulative, and if you do that in this kind of a group of people, you get back as good as you give, to be honest.’
Keith was more philosophical. ‘There are some people who you know aren’t going to get old,’ he said. ‘Brian and I agreed that he, Brian, wouldn’t live very long … I remember saying, You’ll never make thirty, man,” and he said, “I know.”’
Rock manager supreme Simon Napier-Bell once said that the best thing a rock star can do for his back catalogue is die young. Once the possibility of further releases has been extinguished, his fans will value him even more highly and his – the band’s – stock will soar. Look at Queen. Leaving aside John Deacon – who retired not long after Freddie Mercury’s death, insisting that there could be no more Queen without their frontman – Brian May and Roger Taylor have had a thirty-year career as Freddie’s tribute act, hashing out the hits of yore. No, Brian Jones was neither the frontman nor the vocalist. But what he was, to purists, was the genesis, backbone and essence of the Stones.
‘My first ever out-of-town job was for the London Evening News, when I went to Cheltenham to cover Brian Jones’s funeral on 10 July 1969,’ Stuart White tells me. The esteemed Fleet Street journalist who rose to become the California-based West Coast Editor of the News of the World had never previously attended any funeral, let alone the farewell of a celebrity. ‘The photographer was David Stephens,’ Stuart recalls. ‘We went down to Cheltenham together in his open-top MGB. But when we got there, David and I were somehow separated.’
A ‘scrum’ is remembered with disgust by bassist Bill Wyman:
‘The press was so bad at the funeral,’ he said. ‘I mean, everybody’s around the grave, you know, and they’re putting the coffin in and all that, and the preacher’s reading out and all his family and relatives are all like tranquilised and everything. Everybody’s crying, upset. There’s thousands of fans everywhere. There’s kids running up to you asking for autographs, and there’s press guys with cameras everywhere, like all leaning over you and getting snaps in the grave … there was no respect at all.’
Blame it on the press. Stuart White recalls infinitely more civilised behaviour on the part of fans and journalists alike: ‘I followed the fourteen-car cortège, and was close to the family in the graveyard. I recall a quite unbecoming decorum by the usually wolverine British press pack. I mean, they’ll monster someone at a court hearing, but a funeral? And the funeral of a star, at that? Nope, it was calm and respectful. What’s this, a Rolling Stone railing against alleged unseemly behaviour? The Stones personified unseemly behaviour! There were also flocks of ten, fifteen, nice, upset girls in their early, mid- and late teens. I chatted to a few of them. Then I saw Brian’s huge, very American-looking coffin covered in floral tributes.’
The Stones’ wreath was a tall floral arch representing the gates of heaven – what were they thinking? – with a life-sized guitar made of roses. The card read simply, ‘From the Stones’. It was reported that the casket was of silver and bronze (it must have been plated, otherwise surely it would have been too heavy to lift), and had been a gift from ‘Brian’s friend Bob Dylan’ (was it really?). Come the moment of no return, it was lowered into a twelve-feet-deep hole.
‘A few words were said at the graveside before the interment,’ said Stuart. ‘There were no stand-out guests as far as I could tell. Not even the other Stones. No Mick or Keith, anyway. Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts were hovering, but they were very low-key.’
Mick had taken off for Australia with Marianne to shoot Ned Kelly. ‘I wasn’t understanding enough about his drug addiction,’ he confessed to Rolling Stone magazine twenty-six years later, in 1995. ‘No one seemed to know much about drug addiction. Things like LSD were all new. No one knew the harm. People thought cocaine was good for you.’
Where was Keith? It is reckoned that he remained in the recording studio. Anita was heavily pregnant, with only four weeks to go until the 10 August birth of their son Marlon Richards. It was the reason, ‘they’ said, that she stayed away.
Stuart identified ashen-faced Lewis and Louise Jones, Brian’s parents, and his sister Barbara arm in arm with Suki Potier.
‘Being at the graveside, looking at the coffin and thinking, Brian Jones is in that, was a very strange feeling for me,’ said Stuart. ‘The bloke I’d seen on telly, on Thank Your Lucky Stars performing their first record, ‘Come On’, on Top of the Pops and on Ready Steady Go!, was as dead as a doornail right in front of me. It unsettled me. Because they seemed invincible, did pop stars. Especially the Rolling Stones. They were like creatures from another planet, the way they dressed, the gorgeous girls who followed them about and the stories that swirled around them. Covering the funeral of one of them seemed unreal.
‘It was strange. Because I was so young myself, and it was sort of in the psyche that young people didn’t die. Certainly not gilded, rich and famous ones. Brian Jones was only twenty-seven years old. That hit home. The day of his funeral was the day I grew up, I suppose. I started looking at life in a different way. All of a sudden, it was no longer about endless possibilities.’