SAD NEWS: Marlon Richards Son of Keith Richards Involves In A Serious problem
Keith Richards’ son is the real hero: By 10, he’d watched his mother’s lover die and was minder to his father yet he grew up to be NORMAL
Even if he didn’t have the famous name, you would realise within a few moments of meeting Marlon Richards that you were in the presence of the offspring of rock royalty.
The angular face is pure Keith, of course, but he has an attitude of rare and dramatic intensity, too.
What’s more, all his friends are famous people — Kate Moss, Liv Tyler and Johnny Depp are the key gang members in his social circle.
However, Marlon Leon Sundeep Richards is far more than just another chip off the old rock. For unlike the children of Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood, his was not a childhood protected by any maternal influence.
Instead, and quite extraordinarily, this child of two heroin-addicted parents was raised on the road as a Rolling Stone. He learned to count by pushing the buttons in hotel elevators; his first words, famously, were ‘room service’.
As his mother Anita Pallenberg fell into a path of hopeless self-destruction, he was taken, at the age of six, out of her orbit and used as a roadie by his besotted father.
They shared hotel rooms and young Marlon would wake his father up for gigs, get rid of groupies, tidy away his drugs and distract police interest by saying his father wasn’t there if they knocked on the door.
Worse was to come: as a nine-year-old he witnessed the aftermath of Pallenberg’s boyfriend shooting himself.
All in all, it sounds like the perfect recipe for producing a spoilt, self-destructive brat.
But, in his own way, Marlon has proved just as much a rebel as his father, going on to gain four A-levels, marry young — and start a family, which he cherishes.
In what is an obvious reaction to the deficiencies of his own parents, he is an extremely hands-on father to his three enchanting blonde children Ella, Orson and Ida by model Lucie De La Falaise.
This week, Richards was photographed for the first time with his daughter, Dandelion, after a meal with both her and Marlon at the Ivy restaurant.
Dandelion, with whom Marlon enjoys a good relationship, was sent to live with Richards’ mother in Dartford in Kent for 20 years and is therefore often presumed to be the most poorly treated of the Richards offspring. Really, Dandelion had a lucky escape.
As Keith Richards basks in adulation following the recent release of his somewhat self-satisfied autobiography, Life, one quickly realises in the short sections contributed by his son, Marlon, that he, not Keith, is the true hero of the book.
Indeed, the details of his dysfunctional upbringing are by far the most fascinating and haunting undercurrent.
Marlon, at 41, now lives mostly in a farmhouse in West Wittering — near Redlands, Keith’s moated Elizabethan home — and works as a gallery curator, graphic artist and photographer
Yes, there have been plenty of wild times — you don’t get to inhabit Kate Moss’s inner circle unless you can keep up with her — but the way that he has lived his life is what you might call an intelligent riposte to his hedonistic parents.
He’s a very bright lad,’ says a Stones insider. ‘Marlon has brains to burn — that’s what everyone will tell you. Everyone knows him to be the sharpest of the bunch.’
Given the horrors he endured as a child, that is nothing short of miraculous. Even his birth was surrounded by trauma and drug abuse.
Anita announced that she was pregnant with Marlon 11 days after her former lover, Brian Jones, was found dead in his swimming pool.
At the time, she and Keith were drifting into heroin. The child, born in August 1969, was named Marlon at Anita’s suggestion because Marlon Brando had called her to congratulate her on her role in the film Performance when she was in hospital.
Right from the start, little Marlon became a part of the Stones’ touring circus and so, at two, was among the crowd who headed to the South of France, where the band were to record their legendary Exile On Main Street album.
By the time they left France in 1971, Anita was pregnant with a second child, Dandelion Angela. In those early days of Marlon’s childhood, there were family holidays, albeit hardly conventional.
Anita says that she remembers little Marlon, aged around four, smoking joint after joint of marijuana while in Jamaica (though Marlon thinks this may be just one of his mother’s tall tales).
Even so, the hedonistic surroundings inevitably had an effect on the boy. Charley Weber, a friend of Keith’s, says: ‘Marlon was a bit wild. He would eat ants and Keith would say: “He wants to eat ****ing ants? No problem, man, let him eat what he wants.” ’
In March 1976, a little brother was born, named — somewhat confusingly — Tara. But it was Marlon whom Keith doted on, and when the Stones went on tour a few weeks later, it was his eldest son, then seven, whom he took as his ‘road buddy’.
On that tour, Marlon performed several tasks. He had to guide Keith around the roads of Europe and warn him in advance of any borders so that his father could pull over, shoot up with heroin and dump any unused drugs.
Other times, he would give his father a nudge and say ‘Dad, time to pull over, you’re falling, you’re slipping’, when Keith was slipping out of consciousness.
He acted beyond his age,’ Keith says with typical understatement in his memoir, and soon everyone involved with the tour realised that having Marlon around was a positive advantage.
Who better to wake Keith — irritable and drug-befuddled — and get him dressed when it was time to go on stage? Especially since Keith liked to sleep with a gun under his pillow.
Marlon, in one of the five short pieces he contributes to the memoir, recalls: ‘I was the only one capable of doing it without getting my head bitten off.’
‘I don’t remember too much bacchanal, really,’ he continues. ‘We shared a room with two beds. I’d wake him and order breakfast from room service. Ice cream for breakfast or cake. And the waitresses would often be very condescending to me — oh, poor little boy — and I’d tell them to **** off. I found that really annoying.
got wise pretty quick to the hangers-on and people who’d try to get to Keith through me. I got used to getting rid of them, too, saying: “Look, I don’t want to see you here, go away.” Or: “**** off, Dad’s asleep, leave us alone.” They wouldn’t say anything to a kid, so they’d obey.’
As for the drugs, Marlon recalls: ‘I found them repulsive, but I did learn to clean them up and not to touch them and not to leave them lying around.’
When Tara was discovered cold in his cot by Anita, having died from cot death, Keith writes that having Marlon to look after was the only thing that kept him going.
A few weeks later, back in the UK, there was almost another fatality when Keith fell asleep at the wheel of his Bentley while driving Marlon back from Knebworth. Luckily, no one was seriously hurt, although there was a dent left on the dashboard from Marlon’s nose.
When they arrived home, Anita was in such a whirl (‘off the rails, lethal and crazy,’ says Keith, ‘like Hitler, she wanted to take everything down with her’) that little Dandelion was sent to live with Doris, Keith’s mum.
Marlon’s fate, though, was governed by Keith’s need for him — a situation that condemned the boy to the most extraordinary period, which one hesitates to describe as a childhood.
They all moved to London, to a rented flat in Chelsea, and Keith and Marlon would hide in the kitchen while Anita raved about wanting her drugs.
Keith details with pious pride that his attitude was that he should stay loyal to the mother of his children. He was no role model, though — once taking a drug that kept him awake for nine days in a row.
Marlon came along for the ill-fated Stones tour of Canada in 1977, when the band were busted for drugs.
After Keith was arrested for possessing heroin, and sent to rehab in America, Marlon went to live in New Jersey with Pallenberg, who took up a 17-year-old lover, Scott Cantrell.
In Keith’s memoir, Marlon remembers that Cantrell kept telling him that he was going to shoot Keith.
‘That upset me, so I was kind of relieved when he shot himself,’ he says, of the horror he witnessed on July 20, 1979.
Marlon was watching television when he heard a pop from upstairs. ‘Then Marlon believes Scott was playing Russian roulette, inspired by the film The Deer Hunter. Even so, there were rumours that Anita was involved in black magic, and Cantrell’s parents tried to bring a case against her of corrupting a minor.
Traumatised, she moved with Marlon into a hotel in New York, before settling in a house on Long Island, found by Keith who sent along his friend Roy Martin to be their mentor.
