Dandy who got Princess Margaret so stoned she ended up in hospital
Expelled from Eton, he was the designer to the stars who invented 60s hippy chic — and partied so hard with the Stones even Keith Richards said he was crazy...
AN evening with Christopher gibbs was rarely uneventful. Few who were there can forget the 1967 party the flamboyant antiques dealer once threw for the beat poet Allen ginsberg at his Chelsea pad. The guests included Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, five Cabinet ministers and John Paul getty Jr along with his wife Talitha Pol, who wore a transparent dress and no underwear.
However, the normally fastidious host got his catering badly wrong when it came to the chocolate brownies handed out by a butler on a silver tray.
The chef had put far more than the specified amount of hashish in a recipe popular with hippies at the time, and Princess Margaret was among those who ended up in hospital. The Queen was told it had been ‘severe food poisoning’ and the scandal was kept out of the Press. gibbs, one of the most colourful characters of the Swinging Sixties and a man whom even Keith Richards described as ‘adventurous’, died in Morocco, last weekend. He was a day away from his 80th birthday.
Once known as the ‘King of Chelsea’, the courteous, cultured, Old etonian socialite, aesthete and dandy was the man who put a little class into grubby Sixties counterculture.
The oafish Rolling Stones were never the same after crossing his path. A young Jagger once confided to a fellow guest at a dinner party hosted by gibbs: ‘i’m here to learn how to be a gentleman.’ Whether he succeeded is debatable, but he is now Sir Mick.
gibbs was wearing flared trousers, floral shirts and kaftans before anyone else in London, and long before they became hippie chic. But he didn’t just show his rich and famous clients how to dress flamboyantly. The bohemian style guru who pioneered the ethnic look and pretty much invented ‘shabby chic’ also decorated their mansions with a faded but sophisticated grandeur that perfectly suited the times.
That is not to say gibbs’s influence was entirely respectable. Keith Richards used to visit his Chelsea flat and marvel at his ancient books, but he was mostly there to get stoned. And even the rock star famed for his gargantuan drug intake had to admit the soft-spoken antiquarian left him trailing in is wake.
‘He was crazy,’ Richards recalled. ‘He’s the only guy i know who would wake up and break an amyl nitrate popper under his nose.’
gibbs, he added, was ‘an adventurous lad... ready to jump into the unknown’ and ‘usually three feet off the ground on acid’ (the hallucinogenic drug LSD).
Princess Margaret wasn’t the only one who struggled to keep up with gibbs’s wild ways. One summer night in 1968, he was in a London nightclub with Jagger, Richards, Faithfull and friends when, at around 2am, he suggested they watch the sunrise at Stonehenge. The drug-addled party set off for Wiltshire in Richards’s chauffeur-driven Bentley, arriving in time to walk to the stones in what gibbs described as ‘a properly reverent manner’.
They were still all ‘gibbering on acid’, he recalled, when they went off to have kippers for breakfast at a Salisbury pub. ‘Lots of acid freaks trying to dismember kippers, get the spine out . . . imagine that.’
Chrissie, as friends called him, was an incorrigible name-dropper who admitted he was drawn to ‘the grand and the raffish and the fast and the chic’. As shrewd as he was genial, he also made a fortune from them. Besides the Stones, clients including Bob geldof, Bryan Ferry, John Paul getty Jr, the guinness family and the Rothschilds, who commissioned him to decorate their huge homes with the quirky, distressed treasures in which he specialised.
gibbs’s knowledge of antiques was as impressive as his eye for beauty. The beaten-up but ancient textiles, pottery and oversized furniture he sold provided the slightly dissipated splendour that Sixties celebrities craved. it never came cheap, but his clients could certainly pay.
gibbs’s answer to this was that people were paying chiefly for his impeccable taste. ‘i buy something if it sings to me,’ he said. ‘And i am very, very difficult to please.’
Yet, with his famous friends he was hugely indulgent. The man who did more than anyone to help the Rolling Stones into high society called the band ‘a merry company, funny, irreverent and open-minded’.
OTHERS in smart London circles were not nearly so smitten with the band and their entourage. The society photographer and designer Sir Cecil Beaton wrote in a 1967 diary entry: ‘Christopher gibbs is a delightful, intelligent and wellinformed young man. When he asked me to dinner, i thought it would be a quiet one with him.
‘On arrival, he said: “Mick Jagger’s bringing Marianne Faithfull but i can’t think where they are.”
‘At 10.15pm they appeared, Mick in a gold brocade coat with tight, coffee-coloured trousers. He shrugged, made no pretence of manners and settled down to look at a picturebook. Marianne, with suety face, drowned-blonde hair and smudged eyes, her dress torn under the arm, made “groovy” conversation.’
it got no better when they all drove off to a basement bar hangout for musicians at midnight and found more of the Stones’ posse.
‘i tried to talk to Mick,’ said Beaton. ‘He contorted his mouth and screwed up his face. He wanted “fewd”. Little plates of mush were brought. He put a cake of pap in his huge mouth. i was in a trance of fatigue.’
it is often said that if you can remember the Sixties, you weren’t there. gibbs was certainly ‘there’ but claimed bitterly that he remembered what happened only because — unlike the others in his louche circle — he usually had to get up the next morning and go to work.
So he was able to bear witness to many of the most notorious episodes involving the Stones.
GIBBS revealed how, when the band’s guitarist Brian Jones and serial Stones girlfriend Anita Pallenberg visited him in Morocco in 1966, Jones had to go to hospital with a broken arm after a blow he aimed at Pallenberg landed on a metal window frame.
According to gibbs: ‘There would be terrible scenes with both of them screaming at each other.’
gibbs was also at Keith Richards’s home, Redlands, in West Sussex, during the infamous drugs raid in 1967 that led to Marianne Faithfull being escorted out wearing a fur bedspread, and Richards and Jagger being charged with drugs offences (they were acquitted on appeal). naturally, the group were recovering from a day-long LSD trip.
gibbs said: ‘i remember it as in a dream. We’d probably had a joint and there we all were, sitting around in this nice place having something to eat, when suddenly all these Sussex policemen were lumbering through the door.
‘i remember Miss Marianne clutching her peignoir about her, and people being taken off into rooms for questioning. The policemen weren’t rude exactly. Just quite policeman-like.’
The gibbs family had made its fortune in shipping and selling guano — bird droppings used as fertiliser. The fifth son of Sir geoffrey Cokayne gibbs KCMG, a civil servant and merchant banker, Christopher developed an early interest in antiques and began visiting Christie’s when he was still in shorts.
He followed his father to eton, where, by the age of 14, he wore velvet slippers and a monocle, carried a silver-tipped cane and handed out visiting cards. The next year, he was expelled for what he dismissed as ‘various offences... illicit drinking, raids on other boys’ rooms, that sort of thing’.
The ‘various offences’ also included leading a group of boys who shoplifted items from a local antiquarian bookshop and then sold them back to it.
After finishing his schooling at a crammer for ‘sensitive, difficult boys’, he worked as an estate agent, then did national Service in the Army for three months before being
discharged as medically unfit. When he was 20, his mother gave him £10,000 to set up as an antiques dealer in London. He returned from a stockbuying trip to Morocco with ‘rugs, lamps, djellabas [cloaks], wallhangings and the name of the best hash dealer in Tangier’.
Gibbs, who was once described as ‘the most avant-garde dresser this country has ever had’, clearly made an impression on the Stones. They were virtual unknowns when he was introduced to them by the art dealer Robert ‘Groovy Bob’ Fraser, another dissolute Old Etonian who took drugs with the Rolling Stones.
Jagger, a Kent grammar school boy with high social ambitions, was impressed by the impeccably well-connected and cultured Gibbs — especially when he whisked the singer and Faithfull, his girlfriend, off on a tour of British and Irish stately homes. A grateful Jagger taught him to drive in return.
In 1968, Gibbs introduced Jagger to a merchant banker, Prince Rupert Loewenstein, who became the Stones’ business manager for the next 40 years. In the same year, Gibbs even came up with the name — Beggars Banquet — of one of the Stones’ most famous albums.
He designed decadent sets for the British cult film Performance, in which Jagger starred as a fading rock star. Gibbs created a lavish marble bath in which Jagger’s character frolics with his two lovers — one played by Pallenberg — and a canopied bed inspired by the Princess And The Pea fairy story.
According to Cecil Beaton, who was taking pictures on the set, while filming a simulated sex scene on the bed, Jagger and Pallenberg ‘began to make love in earnest’. Meanwhile, Richards, then Pallenberg’s boyfriend, sat fuming in his car outside.
Gibbs never expressed any regret about his epic drug-taking, which continued well into later life. He praised LSD as it ‘blew away the cobwebs and removed lots of layers of armour’, and described the club drug Ecstasy as ‘absolutely delightful’.
He had a brief affair with the ballet dancer Rudolf Nureyev (whom he described as ‘quite vigorous and stagy’) and a longterm partnership — in both love and business — with Peter Hinwood. The latter is an antiques dealer and English actor, who played the muscular, well-oiled hunk Rocky in the 1975 musical comedy film The Rocky Horror Picture Show.
Despite having so little outwardly in common, Gibbs and Jagger stayed friends for decades. In 1984, the singer asked Gibbs to be godfather to his daughter Elizabeth.
Gibbs could be mercilessly frank about his best rock’n’roll friend. He once described Jagger as ‘a sort of blank as a human being...it’s a sort of emptiness’ that had ‘something to do with narcissism’.
He also begged to differ with friends who claimed that Jagger wasn’t a snob, insisting the singer would have loved to have been born with a title.
And he provided an insight into Sir Mick’s ruthlessness in befriending people — then dropping them when they were no longer useful. Gibbs called it Jagger’s ‘editing instinct’. Gibbs was no slouch when it came to courting influential people, either. He packed his lavish parties with fashionable London. For a 1967 fashion show at his London home, he gathered David Bailey, Catherine Deneuve and Marianne Faithfull. Private Eye’s then editor, John Wells, read the order of show, with Dudley Moore accompanying on piano. Gibbs played a central role in persuading Getty (a former heroin addict) to donate tens of millions of pounds to British galleries, particularly the National Gallery. He earned enough money from servicing the giant egos of the super-wealthy to amass at least four homes, too, including two in Morocco and another in Oxfordshire. When he cleared out the contents of his Oxfordshire manor house in 2000, the contents fetched £3 million at auction. He moved to Morocco more than a decade ago, complaining about the declining market for antiques. Rich collectors nowadays just wanted ‘a good car, a good sound system and a huge pink heart painted by Damien Hirst with dying butterflies on it which costs £400,000’, he sniped, waspish to the end.