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| gypsy |
Article from a March 1981 issue of Us Weekly, by the Stones' cook/nanny in 1971
Cocaine on the sofa, gold albums in the bathtub - my secret life with the
ROLLING STONES
It all started in 1971, with a phone call from an employment agency. "There's one position open," the man explained apologetically, "but I'm afraid it's a live-in job with the Rolling Stones."
Perhaps any other proper young Englishwoman who'd just completed a Cordon Bleu cookery course might have refused. But not Janie Villiers. "I think I actually fell on the floor," she recalls. "I'd queued up for hours for a chance to see them perform, and now I was asked to live with them." In theory, Villiers was to cook for Stones guitarist Mick Taylor, who'd joined the group after Brian Jones' death in 1969. In practice, however, she ended up as cook, nanny, private secretary and confidante to the entire entourage. Villiers lasted a year with the Stones. Today she lives and works in London.
By Janie Villiers
"If I can't go, my silk scarf's not going either!" screeched Bianca Jagger. "You can just unpack every suitcase until you find it!"
Standing in the hallway, surrounded by 20 suitcases crammed full of the extravagant silk and sequinned clothes he had assembled for the Rolling Stones' American tour, Mick Jagger burst into tears. "I was going to wear it for my act," he complained. "You can't expect me to find it now."
Outside their house in Cheyne Walk, London, limousines were waiting to whisk Mick off to the airport - and this was the moment Bianca had chosen to storm down the stairs and create a scene. She'd started a war of silence two days before, when Mick told her she'd have to stay home and look after their baby daughter, Jade. Bianca was furious. She'd already spent weeks closeted with top designers, planning her wardrobe for the tour. This was her revenge - forcing her husband to unpack each case until he found her wretched patterned scarf.
I stood there, embarrassed, as the world's greatest rock star wept like a child - manifesting the frustration that marked the beginning of the end of his marriage.
By then, the spring of 1972, I was fairly used to the tears, trauma and tantrums that were an inevitable part of life with the Rolling Stones. For a year, I had tasted both the glamour and the terrible isolation of their way of life. I'd become a Rolling Stone myself, rolling with the whole entourage between Hollywood, the south of France, Switzerland and London.
My job started in California, where the Stones lived for three months while finishing their album Exile on Main Street. The whole of Los Angeles seemed gripped by Stones fever, and fans were desperately searching for their idols' hideaway. But no one had traced them to Beverly Hills' Stone Canyon, where they all lived on the same block.
But what a difference in their homes! Mick Taylor, his girlfriend Rose and their daughter, Chloe, were existing miserably in a gloomy little ranch house. Across the street, Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg had turned their rented house into a cozy, warm home, strewn with their three-year-old son Marlon's toys. A few minutes away, Jagger, Bianca and Jade were rattling around in a palatial 30-room mansion.
My life with them soon settled into an uneasy routine. Being a cook seemed the least part of my job. There was the dry cleaning to do, business letters to write, ordering the limousine, telling the press they couldn't have an interview - even answering the phone, which always seemed to ring in the middle of the night.
Cooking itself was no simple matter, particularly when preparing a Cordon Bleu mean. I'd be bringing the sauce to the crucial stage when one of the Micks would saunter in and shove a child in my arms. I became an expert one-armed cook.
Word about my feasts spread quickly, and soon all of them were coming around for dinner, usually at midnight. But I also had to learn to keep my temper when a meal would be canceled at the last minute. Once I'd spent two days preparing blanquette de veau, a complicated veal dish with white sauce. Just as I ws about to put it on the table, Eric Clapton rang to invite them all out, and I was left starting at my wasted efforts.
Of course I always used the best of everything - the best cuts from the best butchers, the best wines and champagnes. The Stones would order Chateau Lafite 1962 by the crate (it then cost $25 a bottle). But they'd often open a bottle and not drink it. I found it so wasteful that I started using it in my boeuf bourgignon - until the local liquor store found out. The owners were so horrified that they refused to supply us anymore.
Sometimes I'd make a big stew and bring it around to the other houses. That's how I first met Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg. He answered the door wild-eyed, his hair all tousled and his trousers halfway down his bottom. At first I thought he was exactly like his image - the scruffy Stone who did drugs and didn't give a damn about appearances.
Well, he was doing drugs - coke and grass - but to my astonishment, he turned out to be the warmest, kindest Stone of them all. He was a great family man - reading Rupert Bear to Marlon at night, always concerned about what time Marlon went to bed and whether he was eating the right food.
Pallenberg, his big, strident, blonde German girlfriend, was pregnant with her second child when we met. We quickly became friends and often took long walks in the Canyon, where she would reminisce about the Stones' early days. "Everything was fresh then," she'd say. "We weren't snobby or pretentious and we didn't take on airs. Now the only thing the women are interested in doing is outdressing and oudoing each other."
How right she was - I soon saw many examples of what she meant. The most hilarious was Rose's relentless aping of Bianca. At one time Bianca started wearing riding suits and carrying a little riding crop, which she used to emphasize what she was saying. So Rose got one, too. I was playing on the floor with Chloe once when they both came in - identically dressed. When Bianca started lashing a pillow with her whip, Rose attacked a chair with hers. Bianca never seemed to realize whe was being mimicked, and Rose never realized how ridiculous she looked.
Anita's own looks - and Keith's, for that matter - were marred by awful black teeth. This, she explained, was a side effect of heroin. "We've both decided not to have our teeth fixed," she said. "We want to leave something ugly and unglamorous about ourselves to show people like Bianca and Rose we're not trying to fake the agony."
Anita herself never bothered much about clothes, often wearing the same outfit for several days. On the other hand, I never saw Bianca wear the same thing twice during my entire year with them. Yet Anita was hardly a slob. Her comportment was beautiful, and she walked like a model
Of ocurse, when it came to walking, no one could rival Jagger's sexy sashay. Incredibly, the Jagger prance is totally unself-conscious. I became sure of it when I met his mother a few months later. Mrs. Jagger had invited me to her home for lunch and, when I arrived, she was shaking fish about in a pan of oil. As I watched, her bottom did a Jagger wiggle, her front leg came forward, her shoulders suggestively swayed. There was gray-haired Mrs. Jagger, looking like her son doing his onstage strut.
The Jaggers' California mansion fitted my idea of a Stones dwelling - all silks, satins, huge tapestries and subdued lighting, surrounded by vast, untended gardens, taken over by weeds. On my first visit, Mick ushered me in and sat very close to me on a large velvet sofa. I was obviously being sized up.
Suddenly, Bianca came in, dressed to the nines, and I caught my first glimpse of her antics. While Mick totally ignored her, she paced around the room, flaring her nostrils, pouting and looking very suspicious indeed.
Despite this awkward introduction, I began to feel sorry for Bianca over the next few months. She'd married her man but was never sure of him. Once, in their London house, I found Mick in the garden with Marsha Hunt, the beautiful black singer and mother of his illegitimate daughter, Karis. The sun was shining and Mick was chatting with his ex-girlfriend and romping with Karis on the grass. It was all very casual - theyoften came to the house when we were in London.
Then I happened to see Bianca standing in the doorway, unnoticed by anyone. She looked like a little waif in her white silk dressing gown, and I could see the hurt on her face. She seemed to be thinking: Here is Mick's past and here is what I may one day be myself - a visitor to the house with my little girl. Bianca disappeared into the house again without anyone noticing.
When I first started working for the Stones, Jade was eight weeks old. She was a bit of a crybaby until she'd see her father - then she'd gurgle at him with a big smile on her face. Mick was enchanted. He'd make the most ugly faces and stick out his tongue out, trying to make her laugh. You could tell he enjoyed being a father. He'd frequently throw her in the air and carry her through the house. It made an incongruous nursery scene - Jagger in a silk chiffon shirt, white satin trousers and the green eyeshadow he wore in the evenings, dancing with his child while I tried to change the diapers.
If he was comfortable as a father, Bianca found it difficult to cope as a mother. She saw less of Jade than Mick did, and she carried the child with an awkward kind of fireman's grip. Once, in Cheyne Walk, she actually dropped Jade down the stairs. The baby landed on her head and everyone rushed to see if she was all right. However, Bianca's first remark was, "Don't tell Mick." She wanted him to think that she was a good mother.
In fact, the Stones were quite protective of their children. Kidnapping was their greatest fear. Anita usually had a little derringer tucked into one of her boots. And Keith once insisted on showing me his gun collection while we were at his Swiss chalet. He handed me one and I idly asked if it was loaded. "Of course it is," he replied. "What's the good of having a gun for protection if it isn't loaded?"
Another thing that took some getting used to was the rolled-up $20 and $50 bills I'd find stuffed in the sofa. I was a bit naīve at the time. Rose had to tell me they were used to snort cocaine. I'd also been finding little piles of what looked like talc, and I'd promptly vacuum them up. When Rose caught me doing this, she said, "Janie, we like you very much, but you're costing us a great deal of money. You just sucked about a gram of coke into the Hoover."
Using $50 bills for straws was no problem for the Stones. Cash was literally everywhere. In Cheyne Walk, for instance, the Jaggers kept a battered old suitcase in the middle of the sitting room. I never knew exactly why they kept it there, but it was stuffed with crisp, new $20 bills. Once Bianca rang up and asked, "Could you see if there's a brown paper bag on the edge of the bathtub? There should be eight hundred dollars in it."
It was appropriate that Bianca made the call - she was the most tightfisted of the Stones' women. I could run up a $150 dry-cleaning bill for Mick Taylor, and Rose would never question me. But Bianca demanded receipts for everything.
On the whole, she was better at keeping track of her money than she was of her man. She'd been quite jealous in California, but when we returned to London, the cracks really began to show in her normally impeccable mask. Once I walked in and found her standing on the stairs, practically wringing her hands. Mick was away and Bianca was always much nicer when he wasn't around. She clutched my arm and said, "I'm under a tremendous strain here. Nobody knows what a strain it is to keep a house together, and it's just adding to the tension that already exists between Mick and me."
Hers wasn't the only confession I had to hear in London. Mick Taylor was developing serious problems. He's walk around the house muttering about his loneliness, worrying that the group was taking over his life. The atmosphere of tension got worse. He would spend hours playing the same riff over and over on the piano, while Rose would march about slamming doors. Once she actually collapsed in my arms, crying about not being married to Mick, anxious about the responsibility of the child.
The tension began to tell on me. With Rose and Bianca both havingdifficulties, I had to spend more time with their children. The best way to keep the kids busy, I found, was to give them a bath - they loved to play with the Stones' gold records in the water. The discs were getting all bent and rusty, but no one seemed to care.
As bad as the London days were, they were carefree compared to the next stage. To rehearse for their coming tour, the Stones had rented a big, empty movie theater in Geneva. With the exception of Bianca, the whole entourage flew to Switzerland.
Leaving London was especially disastrous for Mick Taylor. Cooped up in a hotel room, he and Rose fought all the time. At one point, Rose took me aside. "Mick has just seen a doctor," she confided, "and we all have to be very careful. He's on the border of a nervous breakdown."
That touched me off - I became quite depressed. For the first time, I began to wonder how long I could hold out in this madness. I was getting much too involved in everyone's problems.
Bianca arrived a few weeks later and immediately set off for the rehearsal. When we got there, however, the door was locked and the band was playing too loudly to hear us. Bianca started banging frantically on the door with her skinny little fists. "Right, this is it!" she screamed, her face all contorted. "I've come all the way from London to see him and he won't even open the door! Tell him it's over. I'm not coming back." She'd started marching off when Mick opened the door. We persuaded her to come back, but the atmosphere was very frosty.
While I was in Geneva, I got better acquainted with the other two Stones, Charlie Watts and Bill Wyman. Of course, to say I got better acquainted isn't saying much - they both kept to themselves and rarely socialized with the rest of us. Charlie was a nice guy, much older than the others, but a bit remote. Bill, on the other hand, was just plain sour. He took on airs and seemed to look down on the rest of the world. He also ahd an impossible girlfriend, Astrid, who was a whining hypochondriac and complained nonstop about everything.
At this time, Keith was very concerned about Anita, who'd gone to a Swiss clinic to have her second child, Dandelion. To relax, he'd take his son the Alps and build snowmen. Actually, Keith got more excited about it than Marlon. Watching Keith make snowballs, jump up and down and wrap his red scarf around the snowman's neck, I thought there couldn't be much wrong with him.
But he also had his wild side. I got a true glimpse of it later on, when Rose and I flew out to California to join the Stones on tour. We caught up with Keith at a pre-concert party, held in a record producer's home. There he was, stoned out of his head, with two gorgeous girls in his arms. I could see he'd just given one of his treasured Indian necklaces to one of the girls and I felt very embarrassed, especially since I'd just seen Anita and the baby. He looked a bit embarrassed himself, but it was only later that he dropped the pop star facade and inquired about Anita in his old, concerned way.
I suppose the concerts in the Los Angeles Forum marked the beginning of the end for me. Until now, I'd only been involved in the Stones' domestic life. As harrowing as that was, their public side was even worse. For instance, the security at the stadium - rows and rows of gun-toting men - was rather intimidating. I went backstage to meet the group and encountered another unsettling sight: skinny little Mick Jagger, dressed in a skin tight Lurex suit, surrounded by bodyguards who looked as if they'd been recruited from the Mafia.
It had been arranged that I'd stand at the side of the stage with Chloe and a couple of the saxophonists' kids. "I'm going to give you a signal," said Jagger. "I'll bring my arm over my head and point straight at you. When you see me do that, take the kids and run."
He wanted us to leave before the end because he didn't want the children caught up in a mob scene. Unfortunately, I became so engrossed in the concert that I missed the signal. When I saw him repeat it in the middle of "Jumping Jack Flash," I grabbed the kids and ran to the limousine. I then knew why he was so concerned about the signal, and I realized if I'd missed the second one there would've been trouble. As we drove off, hundreds of fans rushed at the car. I also realized why the Stones maintained such rigorous isolation in their private lives: These people were absolutely crazy!
However, another, more dangerous kind of craziness was to surface over the next few days. Once Mick Taylor came into my room, white as a sheet. "It's really awful, Janie," he said. "We've just had a threat on our lives." A man had telephoned him in the suite, saying he knew which route the Stones were taking to their next concert and promising that he'd take care of them.
That afternoon I was alone in the suite when the phone rang. A man said, "We're going to make sure you never play again." A little later, someone called from the lobby, claiming to be a relative of mine. His name meant nothing to me and I hung up, but a few minutes later there was some hard hammering at the door. Petrified, I grabbed Chloe and crawled across the room to the phone. The hotel security took him away, but the experience shook me up.
Eventually, Bianca was allowed to join the tour, and I somewhat foolishly hped that peace might be restored. Instead, she walked around in a constant snit, refusing to associate with Jagger's friends and surrounding herself with a coterie of gay designers. She was upset by rumors of a liaison between Jagger and Carly Simon. By the time we all returned to London, th situation was unbearable.
For me, the final blow came soon afterward, when Mick Taylor cracked up. One night he took his favorite guitar - the one he'd used for Exile on Main Street - smashed it over a vase of flowers, then spent the rest of the night weeping on the edge of his bed.
It was time to take stock of my life, especially of my life with Chloe. The child was nearly two then, still not talking, and developing the nervous habit of pulling out her short blonde hair. It was apparent that she wassn't seeing enough of her mother, and was getting too attached to me. A few days after Mick smashed his guitar, I said my goodbyes.
In the years since, I've bumped into the Stones occasionally. They've been friendly, but I've never thought twice about going back. At this point, I don't think it's humanly possible. The Stones have continued rolling around the world, and it's impossible for anyone to catch up with them again.
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| VoodooChileInWOnderl |
Mmmmh is there any way to use the same words with another redaction? Just my imagination  
...and the words in the same row were: Gypsy, cocaine, sofa, gold, bathtub, secret life, Stones... I would add "paradise" and the sentence is done  |
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| nankerphelge |
"I also realized why the Stones maintained such rigorous isolation in their private lives: These people were absolutely crazy!"
Look at us all
Ain't that the truth!! |
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| gypsy |
quote:
VoodooChileInWOnderl wrote:
Mmmmh is there any way to use the same words with another redaction? Just my imagination
...and the words in the same row were: Gypsy, cocaine, sofa, gold, bathtub, secret life, Stones... I would add "paradise" and the sentence is done
Aww. Thanks. |
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| LadyJane |
Awesome article gyps.
Like Nanky said, is it any wonder we are all crazy??
I wouldn't have it any other way.
LJ. |
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| GotToRollMe |
Great article, thanks Gypsy!
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| gypsy |
I thought it would be some shocking tell-all, but it just proves that the Stones are actually quite normal. |
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| nankerphelge |
Originally hired as Mick Taylor's cook!
That's job security right there... |
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| jostorm |
Fantastic read, thanks!!!
Always knew Mick Jagger was a total wooz....and then I read the bit about the nanny using Chateau Lafite 1962 to make gravy (fuck, if that ain't blasphemy!) and started crying myself..... |
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| PartyDoll MEG |
Very entertaining read..Thanks Gypsy! |
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| pdog |
quote:
nankerphelge wrote:
Originally hired as Mick Taylor's cook!
That's job security right there...
No shit... Even Keith's doctors didn't have that type of job security... |
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| texile |
this is one of the first articles i ever read about the stones..i loved the craziness it hinted at.
i'm misty-eyed with memories. |
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| glencar |
I just ordered "Get Carter" which is by the Stones' security guard from the 70's. Maybe these inside jobs aren't the best thing for us to read... |
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| corgi37 |
Brilliant read. |
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| Mahatma Kane Jeeves |
Thanks
Great article! |
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| Lazy Bones |
An enjoyable read. Thank you.
This was priceless...
"Janie, we like you very much, but you're costing us a great deal of money. You just sucked about a gram of coke into the Hoover." |
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| glencar |
quote:
Lazy Bones wrote:
An enjoyable read. Thank you.
This was priceless...
"Janie, we like you very much, but you're costing us a great deal of money. You just sucked about a gram of coke into the Hoover."
That place must have been a mess before Janie got her Hoover. |
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| Saint Sway |
quote:
VoodooChileInWOnderl wrote:
...and the words in the same row were: Gypsy, cocaine, sofa, gold, bathtub, secret life, Stones... I would add "paradise" and the sentence is done
sounds like a Trump beauty pageant
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| jaggergurl |
great read, thank you gypsy for posting it!  |
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