True Adventures of the Rolling Stones by Stanley Booth Page B

Sussex, had been Keith Richards’ country home since 1965. In 1967, along with Mick Jagger, he was arrested here. This morning the place seemed, in the pale spring sunlight, like a veterans’ hospital, and Keith and I like two old soldiers, taking frequent medications and talking about the past.
    â€œMy great-grandfather’s family came up to London from Wales inthe nineteenth century,” Keith said, “and so my grandfather, my father’s father, was a Londoner. His wife, my grandmother, was mayoress of Walthamstow, a borough of London, during the war. It was the height of fame for the family. They were very puritan, very straight people. Both dead now.
    â€œBut then you come to Gus: my mother’s father, Theodore Augustus Dupree. He was a complete freak. He used to have a dance band in the thirties, played sax, fiddle, and guitar. The funkiest old coot you could ever meet.
    â€œThat side of the family came to England from the Channel Islands. They were Huguenots, French Protestants who were driven out of France in the seventeenth century. And in the mid-nineteenth century Gus’ father came to Wales, to Monmouth.
    â€œGus was so funny. He had seven daughters, and they used to bring their boyfriends home, and they’d be sitting round all prim and proper, and he’d be upstairs dangling contraceptives out the window. There’s so many stories about him that I don’t remember even one solid story. In the fifties, the
late
fifties, he was playing fiddle in a country and western band round the U.S. air force bases in England. Real double-string stuff and everything. He’s a friend of Yehudi Menuhin. Gus admired him, got to know him. He’s one of these cats that can always con what he wants. I should imagine he’s a bit like Furry Lewis. And from living with all these women, he has such a sense of humor, because you either go crazy or laugh at it, with eight women in the house. It was his guitar I used to turn on to when I was a kid.
    â€œMy grandmother used to play piano with my grandfather until I think one day she caught him playin’ around with some other chick, and she never forgave him, and she refused ever to touch the piano again. And she’s never played it to this day, since the thirties or forties or whatever. I think she’s even refused to fuck him since then. Very strange.
    â€œMy mother and father were together for a long time before they got married. I think they met in ’34, maybe even ’33, got married in ’36. They separated in ’63. This is the strange part of the story, far as I’m concerned. They separated right after I left home, virtually within months. Mainly because my old man, I guess, I should imagine, for a woman, he’d be incredibly boring to live with. He worked, still does, I believe, at an electronics factory, as a supervisor or something, he’s worked his way, been there since he was twenty-one or so. Always very straitlaced, prudish—never got drunk, very controlled, very hung up. I should say he was very hung up. And the bastard—what’s really weird about it, because I like him still, I find certain things about him rather endearing—he’s refused to acknowledge me since he split with my mother, because, I think, I was still on friendly terms with my motherafter she split. So he immediately gets all uptight, I guess, and thinks— I dunno, I’ve written to him a couple of times. I wrote to him when I got busted, ’cause I wanted to explain that thing to him, I didn’t want him to just get it all out of the newspapers. But I didn’t get an answer, which rather pissed me off. Haven’t heard from him since ’63. Seven years.”
    â€œWere you very close to him as a kid?”
    â€œNo, it wasn’t possible to be that close to him, he didn’t know how to open himself up. He was always good to me.”
    â€œWas he strict on things like