‘Excuse me sir, but are you one of the Rolling Stones?’ I hesitated
Gillies MacBain recounts his run-in with Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull at the Guinness mansion in 1960s Ireland
THE job that I had been offered near Dublin was as a temporary caretaker and guide at Castletown Connolly in Celbridge, reputed to be the largest house in Ireland.
I had been there once before. I had gone, out of curiosity, to the auction of its contents, when the Connolly-Carew family who had built it in 1722 were moving out. Now it belonged to Desmond Guinness, founder of the Irish Georgian Society, a distant cousin of some kind to my former employer Lady Honor. He had bought it and all its land for £166,000.
Mr Guinness had also made a brief appearance at Sketchley’s exhibition.
“You must come,” he had said, with enormous emphasis, “and help us open up a vista.”
“I am not sure about that,” I had replied, mindful of the overgrown laurel shrubberies under the trees at Laragh, “I have unopened vistas of my own.”
At this he laughed uproariously and was gone in an instant, leaving me both flattered and snubbed at the same time. That was his way.
Amelia the art historian had told me what day I was to begin and given me permission to bring the dog, but how to get there was my own problem. In the end I went by taxi, dressed in my best and only tweed suit, and taking my bedding, a suitcase, a folding card table (Castletown was largely unfurnished since the auction), and the dog. My fellow workers would be student volunteers, but I had demanded, and been given, the unprecedented deal of £8 per week, plus my keep.
The avenue at Castletown approaches the house from the side, unlike the usual Georgian device of having the drive up to a house in an ‘s’ shape so that those on either side of a carriage are afforded, in turn, the chance to be impressed by a facade. I had intended to arrive in style, but even so, as the taxi turned from the avenue of lime trees into the gravel forecourt, I was taken aback to be met by two photographers and two others who looked like reporters.
As the taxi disgorged the dog, the green baize table, the battered suitcase and the bundle of bedding, one of these came up to me.
“Excuse me sir, but are you one of the Rolling Stones?”
I hesitated at the unexpected question. Eventually I said “No”.
The hesitation proved fatal. Perhaps I sometimes speak with a slight lack of conviction? Out of the corner of my eye I saw the questioner nod to the cameraman. I was not believed. They had seen straight through my pretence. I tried the front door, which was barred, and rang the bell, and waited, and waited. From behind me there was a noticeable ‘click’.
Eventually Amelia came to the door, and out on to the steps. She did not open the door to let me in, but came out instead and shut it behind her. She said to the hovering four:
“You’ll get one photograph, and that will be all.”
They signified their grateful assent.
At this point there emerged out of the front door, Desmond Guinness’s wife Marie-Gabrielle (‘Mariga’) in an Edwardian tennis dress, Mick Jagger of the Rolling Stones in a cloak and a browband, and Marianne Faithfull, in head-to-toe black leather (Hell’s Angels biker gear).
Mrs Guinness moved purposefully, while the other two followed in a sort of glide, as if in a dream, or not quite conscious of touching the ground as they went. We all stood to one side, while the dreamers arranged themselves in a pose on the steps, looking straight ahead as though unaware of the hovering photographers.
Disregarding their agreement with Amelia, the photographers then went ‘click, click, click, flash, flash, flash’ in a greedy fusillade.
“The dog,” urged the older reporter of the two, “get the dog in the picture.”
Everyone looked at me and I brought the dog up to the step on which the musicians were sitting and said: “Sit.”
Murphy sat. But as soon as I went away again, he naturally came with me. Three times I took him to the step and said: “Sit.” Three times the same thing happened. Wolfhounds can be very stupid.
Mick Jagger came out of his daze and looked fondly at the dog.
“Hold his collar then,” the reporter suggested.
So I sat down with Murphy, on the step above, as the photographers tried to compose a convincing picture of Jagger as ‘an Irish chieftain’ — with a leather-clad biker girlfriend and slightly more appropriate wolfhound.
The session ended as suddenly as it had begun, as the party got up and went to the car, which reversed away. The photographers ran after the car, still shooting and flashing, while Mrs Guinness, poking her own little camera through the open front window as she drove with the other hand, shot back.
Mick Jagger had just that week flown out of England after a successful appeal against a sentence for possession of drugs. He had dramatised his departure by leaving in a helicopter from the south coast of England without saying where he was going. This drove the press wild.
In fact he had taken refuge with the Guinnesses at Leixlip Castle.
In the photograph on the front page of that evening’s Dublin paper I appeared centre front staring into the middle distance, with Murphy fondly paying attention to me, while Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull were gazing fondly at the dog.
Sketchley was impressed, and said he nearly fell off his bar stool when it was shown to him. In the caption I was named as ‘art historian’, but I knew as little about art history as I did of the goings-on in the England of the late Sixties. The idea that Jagger was completely ‘stoned’ would not for a moment have occurred to me.