by Leslie Armstrong
My cousin Elspeth was always going on trips to exotic places in hopes of meeting an improvement over the two husbands she’d already had. One spring in the late ’80s, while on vacation, she met a possible candidate. They’d spent only an evening together, but he was a real estate lawyer practicing in Connecticut, clearly solvent, and, other than his thick south-Boston accent, which offended her Cambridge ear, he was indeed a prospect. Could she invite him to dinner so my husband, Dewey, and I could check him out?
Why not? I wanted the best for Elspeth.
Ten days later, on the night of our dinner, Elspeth was all aflutter. What would I think? Would I mind the accent?
Why would I? I’d been born on the back side of Beacon Hill myself and loved most everything Bostonian.
The doorbell rang and as I opened it to admit our guest, I was almost asphyxiated by a blast of pungent cologne emanating from his hawkish face and the slicked-down waves of his well-greased, graying hair.
“Hello, I am Ahthuh,” he said.
Elspeth introduced him to Dewey and our other guests while we all reeled from the potency of his applied scent.
“I hear that you’re an ahkitect.”
“Yes, I am.”
“And you designed this apahtment?”
“Yes, I did.”
“It’s gawgeous.”
Through dinner he grilled me about my career. It was a tonic for me to meet anyone who thought being an architect was so exalted, so I played it up a bit, telling him that I specialized in designing facilities for the performing arts (true), had worked with Diane Keaton and Bette Midler (not quite true; my partner had had them as clients, but I had met them both), and had done several projects for James Taylor and Carly Simon while they were still married (true).
“So you know how to work with celebrities,” he announced.
“Yes.” (More or less.)
“I think I’ve got a great joab fa’ you. I will call you in a few days. Be prepayud.” And off he went back to Connecticut with barely a nod to my cousin.
It took half an hour for the air to clear once Arthur, his cologne, and his hair tonic hit the road. Elspeth was deflated but generous about my unintentionally stealing the show and hoped that the job Arthur had dangled before me would come to something.
*
Arthur called.
Keith Richards, lead guitarist for the Rolling Stones, and his ex-model wife, Patti Hansen, had contracted with an architectural design-build firm to purchase two wooded lots in southern Connecticut and have them design and build two houses on those two lots: one for Keith, Patti, and their daughters, and a smaller house for Keith’s father. In a design-build situation, the architect and contractors are on the same team, in bed with one another, and there is no one on board to represent the interests of the owners in the event of a dispute or difference arising between the two parties. Arthur was proposing that I take on the role of owner’s representative and perform this function.
I was a designer, not a businessperson, and I wasn’t crazy about the Stones either. My god of the guitar was Andrés Segovia. On the other hand, I was in a lousy business partnership that was going south fast and I needed paying work. Arthur would be sure I was paid well if Keith and Patti accepted me as their representative. Arthur made an appointment for me to meet them. He warned me that because Keith was inebriated much of the time, I would have only a few minutes on my own with him to earn his trust. I was okay with that. I grew up in a drinking family and drank a fair amount myself.
*
Like Elspeth, I had also had more than one husband by then. My second husband had died and left behind his 1970 “grabber orange” eight-cylinder Mustang convertible, one of the first of a generation of muscle cars. It could accelerate very quickly and go very fast. But it was not so good at slowing down and stopping. The steering was all over the place. It was like driving a super-speedy bowl of Jell-O. As a little girl, my oldest daughter had named the car “The Orange Truck.” I was hanging onto it till I could turn it and its myriad maintenance problems over to my son, then sixteen. Two years to go. Perhaps showing up in The Orange Truck might be a way to get Keith Richards’ attention, if not his admiration or his trust.
The formal part of the interview went well. Patti Hansen, Keith’s wife and mother of their two young daughters, was astonishingly beautiful in a wholesome Scandinavian way. She was well-spoken and smart and asked appropriate and relevant questions, which I answered as best I could. Keith, who looked much as I had expected—older than his years and somewhat debauched—dozed at a distance through the meeting. As we were saying our goodbyes, Keith admired The Orange Truck in the driveway.
“Would you like to go for a spin?” Yes, he would. The top was closed because it was early spring and cold. Keith got in the passenger seat, and within seconds the fumes of alcohol emanating from his body, combined with the smoke from his Gitane, were stronger even than Arthur’s cologne had been. The rolling bowl of Jell-O had turned into a mobile Irish saloon.
As I was not an ardent Stones fan, I didn’t know quite what to say to Keith, but we talked about cars, how I was saving The Orange Truck for my son, and how I thought I could contribute to the building of his new houses. As we zoomed along the narrow Connecticut roads, I feared I might qualify for a DUI simply by inhaling the air inside the car. Fifteen minutes later I returned Keith safely to his temporary residence and drove back to New York. The next day Arthur called to say I had the job.
*
At first it wasn’t all that interesting. I monitored the work of the design-build team and their various consultants, plus Keith and Patti’s landscape architect and Mac II, their interior design and decorating firm. I chaired weekly meetings at Keith and Patti’s interim house, took notes, and issued minutes recording the progress of the various disciplines. I approved and/or rejected invoices submitted by each participant, then submitted the week’s paperwork to Keith and Patti’s financial advisors. At our meetings Keith generally stayed in the background, nursing a highball glass of Jack and ginger. Despite his distance, he seemed to be listening.
At one meeting Keith showed up with The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich in hand. He was actually reading it! I knew because the bookmark was moved farther into the book with each subsequent meeting. At another meeting I thought I was hearing a Bach partita on solo guitar somewhere in the background. It was Keith, at his usual distance from the meeting table, playing Bach softly to himself while Patti and the rest of us dealt with the issues of the day.
Although Keith kept his distance, more out of shyness than disinterest, the rest of us got to know each other fairly well. Patti was worried about her mother’s heart condition. My husband, Dewey, was a cardiologist. I offered his assistance and he soon became indispensable to her mother. Patti invited our younger daughter, then close in age to her Theodora, to come up with me when both girls were out of school and they became friends. I became particularly close to the very blond and very talented interior designer, John Schaberg, assigned to the project by Mica Ertegun, queen of Mac II Interior Design.
As an architect I had been condescending about decorators and interior decoration, but watching Mica and John work with Patti, I realized that I could never do for Patti what they were doing. They generated a physical expression of Patti’s sense of herself, and of her and Keith as a couple. All we, as architects, could do was to provide an enclosure to house their stagecraft. The elements of their stagecraft were furniture, upholstery fabrics, draperies and drapery fabrics, bolsters and throw pillows, rugs and carpets, paint colors and finishes, decorative lamps, and ornamental bric-a-brac. However, what Mac II couldn’t and didn’t do was design kitchens and bathrooms. They always hired outside people for that.
Wait a minute, I thought, that’s what we do!
We had done new bathrooms for Blair House, the presidential guesthouse in Washington. We had done Martha Stewart’s first commercial show-and-tell kitchen in Westport. We had designed the kitchens and bathrooms in every house or apartment we’d renovated, most of which had been published.
John Schaberg and I had taken to going back and forth to the weekly meetings together. I sounded John out about my firm doing the kitchen and bathrooms for Keith and Patti. Yes, it might be a slight conflict of interest for me, as the owner’s rep, to take on an aspect of the actual design. On the other hand, there were so many people in the mix already, why would they want to add more? I was already a known quantity with a proven track record in this area of design. John said I had to convince Mica. He would support me. Mica bought in and for me the fun began.
*
Before the big house was finished, Keith, Patti, and the girls moved into the newly completed smaller house designed for Keith’s father, who had not yet arrived from the UK. It was there that I learned the rudiments of Keith’s daily routine. He woke close to midday, dressed, and went to the kitchen to make himself a greasy, chock-full-of-cholesterol plate of fried steak and hash-brown potatoes, then began the day’s drinking: Jack Daniels and ginger ale, one after the other, while he worked, until around 5 p.m., when he had ingested so much alcohol he had to lie down. He napped until around 6:30, then started on the evening’s serious drinking while he worked with friends and fellow musicians who came by. His evening pleasure was 100-proof Rebel Yell bourbon on the rocks.
Would I like to try it? Yes, I would, and did. It was amazing, almost like a very fine cognac. I’ve always loved the taste of bourbon. Rebel Yell was bourbon supreme. I went home and ordered bottle after bottle for friends and relatives, for some of whom Rebel Yell remains their whiskey of choice.
Despite his drinking, Keith was not the dissolute animal that his public persona suggested. He was super intelligent, sensitive, and thoughtful, careful and caring both of his immediate family and the people who worked for and with him. And he had the physical constitution of a rhinoceros. Still, I wondered how Patti tolerated his drinking so much. But she seemed okay with it. He wasn’t doing drugs, she said, at least not hard drugs. Patti ran a tight ship. She was a terrific mother and wife, and an active member of her sprawling Staten Island-based Norwegian-American family. Patti was as close to a saint as anyone I’d ever met. My kind of saint: smart, feet on the ground, and full of heart.
*
One afternoon in mid-September I got a frantic call from Keith himself. The damper in the fireplace in the new house had come loose and fallen from its ledge in the chimney onto his right hand, almost crushing his fingers. He was in a legitimate panic. Any damage to those guitar-playing fingers could mean the end of his career. Would I please come to Connecticut the next day to see if I could get it stabilized? Of course. I wasn’t sure there was much I could do on the spot, but I knew I had to go. However, I also had to complete a complicated fee proposal for a new state-funded project in upstate New York for which our firm was particularly qualified. Going to Connecticut first thing in the morning meant staying at the office till well past midnight to finish assembling the material for the proposal.
At 1:30 a.m. I left the office, hailed a taxi, and as it headed north on Tenth Avenue, I fell fast asleep. I awoke with a bang (literally) to find my taxi perpendicular to the line of traffic, entangled with another taxi, and blood everywhere. Mine. I felt my face and realized that my lower jaw was disconnected from the rest of my face, and my upper jaw was mobile and pliant. The taxi driver got out of the taxi and came around to the back to survey the damage, peered inside the back window, and withdrew in horror. Fortunately, I had just read John Irving’s Hotel New Hampshire and knew exactly what had happened: The impact of my taxi hitting the other taxi had thrown me forward into the steel-and-glass divider separating the driver’s section of the cab from the passenger’s section and had shattered my jaw. That I hadn’t bitten off my tongue, as had Irving’s character, was a plus. Thanks to Hotel New Hampshire, I didn’t panic because I knew that my jaws would have to be wired together for at least six weeks, after which I’d be fine. But for the moment I couldn’t speak and had to get news to Dewey that I was alive and would soon be taken to a hospital, assuming someone had called for an ambulance. I dipped my finger in one of the pools of blood and wrote on the window: pls. call 212 799 1923. Tell my husband that I’ve been in an accident but am OK.
The wreck was only a few blocks from our house and Dewey soon arrived. He opened the door on my side of the cab, thinking he was going to help me out and walk me home, took one look at me, went to the curb, and threw up. The ambulance came. I was put in a horse collar and whisked to the trauma center at New York Hospital on the East Side. There they did a tracheotomy while I was on a gurney in the corridor, and a maxillofacial surgeon was summoned in the middle of the night to do a temporary reassembling of the nine separate pieces of my jaw and mouth. Full reconstructive surgery would have to wait until the facial wounds had healed a bit.
I woke the next morning in the ICU. The medical and nursing staff seemed particularly attentive. It turned out that when Keith and Patti heard of the accident, they sent the biggest vase of flowers money could buy, with their names plastered all over the gift card. But because patients cannot receive flowers in an ICU, the vase had landed at the nurses’ station. I was an instant celebrity!
Four weeks later, with my mouth still wired shut and looking like Frankenstein, I returned to Connecticut to resume my duties. Patti was mortified by the sight of me. She said that as a model she couldn’t imagine having her face mangled as mine had been and still was. I told her there were some advantages to being an architect and maybe this was one. Over the winter, thanks to the brilliant job done by my surgeon, I healed.
*
Later in the winter it was time for Diane Devore, the landscape architect, to take Patti on a field trip to two of the big tree nurseries in New Jersey to select the specimen trees that were to populate the grounds, in accordance with plans and schedules developed by Diane’s office and approved by Keith and Patti. Keith was keen on this aspect of the project and insisted on coming along. Diane was worried about how Keith would respond to being cooped up inside a limo for most of the day and asked if I would come to entertain him and to be sure he didn’t drink too much and derail the day’s agenda.
We met at 9 a.m. on a freezing weekday morning in late January outside their New York apartment on West Fourth Street. I had attended an early-morning networking breakfast and was inappropriately dressed in a skirt and heels, but I had my ski jacket on top and sneakers and socks in a bag, as I knew we’d be doing plenty of walking. When I arrived Diane and Patti were already inside the long, white stretch limo that was to take us to New Jersey, but no Keith. He had been recording well into the night before. We would have to wait. Eventually Keith showed up, looking more degenerate than usual. He fell into the passenger seat beside the driver and crashed. However, he awoke just as we arrived at the first nursery—super alert and raring to go. One of the top guys from the nursery led us down row after row of midsize deciduous trees of various types and shapes. Diane would point out the finer specimens as we went along. Keith was knowledgeable and passionate about the trees. He had strong opinions and made the final choices. I knew very little about trees and even less about what made a tree a good specimen to be uprooted, balled, trucked to and replanted in another microclimate. There was much to learn. But I was far too cold in my little skirt, stockings, and sneakers to appreciate the opportunity. On the way to the next and even bigger nursery, we hit a gas station and a convenience store where sandwiches and hot soup were sold. As I was reaching for the soup, I noticed that Keith had pulled a flask from his hip pocket and was taking a swig. Neither Patti nor Diane was in sight. So I asked if I, too, could have a swig to warm up. Of course, Keith said, and passed me the flask.
So fortified, we piled back into the limo and headed to the next nursery. The sun had disappeared. The sky was steel gray. It was even colder than before. We still had fifteen trees to select. There was no shelter from the frigid wind that was ripping through my street clothes and biting into my skin. I hunkered down, face buried into the collar of my ski jacket, hands deep in its pockets, and trudged along the endless rows of leafless trees. At some point Keith, without a word, slipped me the flask. Diane caught me taking more than a swig. I didn’t care. I felt the bourbon coursing through me and warming every molecule of my frozen body. Soon the cold in me abated, and I became overwhelmed by the lonely majesty of all those trees, hundreds of them, marching in straight lines toward the winter horizon. Thereafter Keith and I walked side by side in silence, passing the flask back and forth until it was empty. So much for me preventing Keith from drinking too much.
*
By June of 1991 the big house was complete. The curtains were hung, the at-home sound studio was fully equipped, the swimming pool was up and running, and the new specimen trees had been planted to flesh out the gash of clearing made at the start of construction. Keith and Patti hosted a party for all of us who had worked on the project and for our significant others. Dewey and I drove up to Connecticut in the late afternoon in The Orange Truck, top down, with John and his partner just behind us. Food, drink, and good spirits were plentiful. I had a couple of drinks and had loosened up enough to tell Keith how much his passion for Rebel Yell had changed the drinking habits of many friends and family members, myself included. He suggested I have a shot with him to celebrate. I did.
And then another.
And another.
All of a sudden I felt a bit woozy. I said a quick goodnight to Keith and lurched off in search of Dewey to tell him I thought we’d better head home and soon. Fortunately, Dewey had drunk next to nothing and could drive. On the way back to New York, I got increasingly drunk as the miles ticked by. By the time we got home, I was thoroughly plastered. Our apartment was in a townhouse, and I was going to have to get up the four steps at the entrance and three flights of stairs inside before finding my bed. My son, the future owner of The Orange Truck, was home with a bunch of his buddies. They were in his room at the top of the first flight of stairs. I stumbled up the first flight. Clutching the banister at the landing, I tried to sneak onto the second flight when the door to my son’s room opened.
“Hiya, Ma. How was the party? I told my friends that you’d been drinking with Keith Richards. Come in and tell us about it.” I knew his friends and waved weakly as he took my arm and led me into his room. What I didn’t know was that he and his buddies had stolen a street sign from the sidewalk outside the house, and it was lying on the floor in my path. As I staggered into the room, I tripped on the shaft and fell flat on my face in front of five teenage boys.
Luckily I didn’t pass out then and there. Somebody helped me to my feet. I tried to make some kind of excuse, to apologize, but couldn’t speak. My tongue was paralyzed.
Some example I had set for my son and his four friends! I am sure Patti Hansen, tolerant as she was, would have never sanctioned that one.
*
After that party I never saw Keith and Patti again, not because I was drunk but because there was no real reason for us to stay in touch. We led different lives. It would have been a stretch for both of us to find a context in which continuing a relationship would be natural and spontaneous. That said, Keith and Patti were the most thoughtful and considerate people I have ever worked with. They never used their money, or their status as celebrities, to treat any of us who worked for them as other than equals. Their graciousness and courtesy were beyond measure. And I have never lost my taste for Rebel Yell.
Leslie Armstrong is a practicing architect and interior designer as well as a writer. She has published three books: The Little House, Collier Macmillan (1979); and Space for Dance: An Architectural Design Guide (1984), and in 2020, Girl Intrepid: A New York Story of Privilege and Perseverance, a memoir.
Hawaii Pacific Review 