(Above: Shirley and Charlie Watts. Photo by John Schute for the Daily Mail in 1964, the year they married. The complete photo is embedded in the layout below in the September 1989 issue of Vanity Fair. )
(Above: The late Shirley Watts photographed by Annie Leibovitz in the drawing room of the home in Devon where she and her late husband, Charlie Watts, raised Polish Arabian horses. It was featured in my first story for Vanity Fair in the September 1989 issue.)
I was saddened to read of the death of Shirley Watts this week after she had experienced a short illness. She died on her farm in Devon, Halsdon Arabians, where she and her late husband, the Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts, raised Polish Arabian horses. It was also where she sculpted in her art studio. She loved her dogs, too. The photos below were taken by Annie Leibovitz of Shirley and Charlie when we went over to England to do a story for Vanity Fair on the Rolling Stones wives - or as I titled it “The Women Who Still Sleep with The Rolling Stones.”
The trip over here to London, where I now 32 years later live most of the year, was rather stressful as I was trying to navigate how to do my new job as a writer at VF. Talk about on-the-job training. Tina Brown, then Vanity Fair’s Editor-in-Chief, actually took the story away from someone to whom she had initially assigned it and gave it to me during my very first editorial meeting after my being put on the masthead. I had gone to Juilliard’s Drama Division in an earlier incarnation of my New York self and I suddenly remembered when I had been thrown into playing Edmund in King Lear those first few weeks at school in what someone referred to it as “The Test,” attributing it to the teaching technique of Michel Saint-Denis, who cofounded the Drama Division at Juilliard with John Houseman. My getting that Rolling Stones wives assignment raised eyebrows in that editorial meeting when Tina turned and gave it to me after telling Pam, her managing editor, to take it away from the other person - I had only arrived in the Conde Nast hallways a few days before - but it was less a knighting of the new guy and more a prove-your-mettle-mister move by Tina. Indeed, I quickly realized that this was no ordinary story profiling one person because I had to weave together five unwieldy stories about five women into one narrative, some more willing to be woven than others. I tagged along with Annie and tried to assert myself just enough to gain some time with four of the women during two days of photo shoots in London because I didn’t know enough back then to demand my own time with them. I had been the Executive Editor of Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine before Tina hired me, but that was more of a “Pop and pop operation,” as I often referred to it, more catch-as-catch-can with profile subjects, which was what I was attempting with the four women who were being photographed by Annie.
I instinctively adored Shirley because she refused to attend the photo shoots with the others but was willing to welcome us to her farm. She gave me more time and was both bemused and empathetic when I confessed my stress during those two photo shoots trying to figure out how to do my job. I told her how grateful I was for her being so welcoming and even simpatico. Shirley understood the need to find one's agency within the scrum of what passed for glamour. I always thought that rock and roll's appeal was about a kind of grand vulgar assertion for attention when all else fails. But Shirley and Charlie so happily ensconced on their beloved horse farm with their dogs and the loveliest of libraries were an assertion themselves against the vulgarity that afforded them all that. Vulgarity can be glorious. It can. But so can being its squire without being vulgar oneself. I learned that on that trip: how to be vulgarity’s squire - and I owe that to Shirley and Charlie.
She was so very open with me, to the point I heard later, it caused a bit of a rift with the other ladies because of some of the things she told me after Annie and Vanity Fair’s then Style Director, the late Marina Schiano, and their crews and I piled into our vans and drove out into the English countryside to that Devonshire manor house that belonged to Charlie and Shirley. Charlie remains to this day the chicest man I've ever been around although he shrugged off such an assessment. "I really just put any old thing on," he told me. "Not like Mick, with his fabrics and colors. He's like fucking Greta Garbo."
Charlie was very "house-proud," deservedly so. It was a lovely - eccentrically beautiful - place. At one point Annie had the inspired idea of shooting Shirley with her favorite Arabian horse in the house's drawing room. "Charlie would never stand for that," Shirley told us. So a plan was hatched for me to ask Charlie to give me a tour of the grounds and keep him away for about an hour. Alas, we got back a bit early and found his wife and all the photo equipment and her Polish Arabian horse, Halim, there in his beloved drawing room. He was not amused even though Shirley often brought Halim - Arabic for "gentle spirit" - into her sculpting studio to sculpt him. Charlie and Shirley exchanged a long, silent look. I could tell in that lovely long silence that coming home after a walk-about with a stranger to discover his wife having wandered into the drawing room with her horse was one of the reasons he finally loved her so. I like to think they are exchanging such looks now and, having died, are living in the long silence of their love.
(Above: Charlie and Shirley adopted a rescued five-year-old greyhound named Suzie from the charity Forever Hounds Trust. Shirley was a patron and long-time supporter of Forever Hounds Trust, and gave a loving home to many of its rescued dogs over the years.)
(Above: Charlie and Shirley from EquineInk.com.)
Here is their excerpt from that story I wrote for Vanity Fair in 1989:
Mr. and Mrs. Charlie Watts have also hurtled upmarket, but in a less high-profile fashion. Charlie is one of Mick's best friends, and his secret soul mate in the way he wants to live. Browsing through Country Life magazine five years ago, Charlie found the ideal home. Halsdon, once the residence of a local Devon squire, John Henry Furse, is set above the valley of the river Torridge and surrounded by green hills and meadows. There he and his artist wife, Shirley, are content to live their solitary human lives amongst a menagerie that includes fifteen Arabian horses, eighteen dogs, and two cats.
It was the mention of the Victorian sculptor's studio, ideal for Shirley, plus ample stable space, that caught Charlie's eye after their long sojourn in tax exile in France. In the entrance way stands the only human bust Shirley has ever sculpted. "That's my brother," she says. "Charlie won't let me sculpt him and he's got such a perfect face for it."
"I think I'm pretty good," says Charlie with self-deprecating irony, "you know, an artist or something, and then I come home to bloody Rodin."
At forty-eight, after a long career of being the Stone in the background, the laconic one pounding on his drums, the slow fuse behind the fireworks of Keith and Mick, Charlie Watts has emerged into a delightfully incongruous middle age. During my visit he wears a blue bow tie and dapper velvet slippers. On the day Christopher Simon Sykes is there to photograph the house, Charlie is wandering around in immaculate white flannels, white shoes, and a striped blazer.
"What are you wearing those for?" asks Shirley.
"I'm going to watch the cricket," he replies.
"But that's tomorrow," she observes.
"I know," counters Charlie. "I'm just practicing."
Separately Charlie and Shirley are quite handsome; together they are an extraordinarily sexy couple. It is as if they have waited their whole lives to be fifty. "I think Charlie was always a fifty-year-old man," Shirley tells me in the stables that house her Arabian horses, including two European champions. She strokes a gray named Halim, "gentle spirit" in Arabic. "Charlie's tastes were never the same as the rest of the crowd. To tell you the truth, I was always surprised he was a part of that band."
Charlie was almost an unwilling rocker—single-mindedly eschewing sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll's other accoutrements. And Shirley is a most unwilling rock wife. "It was quite appalling being pitched into the life of the Rolling Stones," she remembers. "I really got lost for about twenty-five years and I've never been able to cope with it. There's been lots of anger, much of it very, very deep. I like the people in the group—up to a point. But I've always hated the way rock music and its world treat women and particularly the Rolling Stones' attitude. There is no respect."
To some extent Shirley has only survived the rock-wife problem by opting out of it. Her maiden name, appropriately, was Shepherd, and horses and dogs have been her version of the stabilizing family. "I started gathering them around me out of loneliness, I suppose." Back when the other Stones were busy sowing their wild oats, Charlie was ribbed for being so faithful to Shirley. But now he has the pleasure of shared memories and what it was like to live through the struggle and success.
"Would you like to see the rest of the house?" she asks. "It was in one family for over three hundred years before we bought it. We got it just in time. The place was about to fall in before we refurbished it." She could be talking about her own life, this woman who has survived being around the Stones for a quarter of a century. When Shirley is asked how the group's drug abuse over the years has affected her, she is understandably hesitant. "It affected my life very, very deeply," she finally whispers. "Very, very deeply. But I can't really say anything other than that because it wasn't my problem."
Her own problem was alcoholism and she is quite open about that. She checked herself into a rehabilitation center four years ago for six weeks. "It's strange, though, my treatment has had a much different effect on me than it does with most. Most people feel that once they get out, Alcoholics Anonymous meetings are a lifeline for them. But I went to one and had to leave. I just couldn't talk about myself anymore; I didn't want to hear about anyone else's problems anymore.'' Now she sculpts hours each day, mostly her own dogs and horses. Halim is even allowed into the drawing room, where he stands regally for his artist mistress. While he was being photographed he fertilized the Oriental carpet. "You're ruining the rug,'' Charlie told Shirley. "It's my room," she replied coolly. "It's my rug."
The house is also filled with the smells of incense and dog fur. The dog pack, all eighteen, are locked inside the kitchen because of their overwhelming excitement when infrequent visitors arrive. Their barks bounce off walls crowded with dozens of paintings of more horses and dogs. Shirley and Charlie serve as separate tour guides. Now there's a kerchief tied across her head and she's wearing jeans; later, when she dons her riding gear, a stately severity appears. Charlie, in his vest and bow tie and slippers, is, effortlessly, the dashing gentleman that Mick puts so much effort into being.
"I really just put any old thing on," he says. "Not like Mick, with his fabrics and colors. He's like fucking Greta Garbo."
Charlie's study is as well ordered as his drumming. There is no sign of his passion for the American Civil War; instead it is lined with his neat collections of ornate boxes, memorabilia from the Nelson and Hamilton families, rare books, eighteenth-century erotic literature, stuffed birds. Atop his desk is perched the largest, a sparrow hawk. "It flew into the house and broke its neck," Shirley whispers. "Broke Charlie's heart too."
Shirley's drawing room is across the hall. Upstairs are her immaculate collections of Victorian dolls, all bought by Charlie from his numerous antiques-dealer scouts, and a menagerie of glass figurines. The drawing room contains more photos of dogs and horses and the occasional family member, and in the comer stands a life-size wooden Arabian horse once used by a London saddlemaker. Shirley's easel stands in the window with a poem about horses pinned to it. On the windowsill is an etching of a naked boy entwined with a leopard. The inscription reads, "To Shirley and Charlie with much love, Astrid Wyman, 1986."
The dogs continue their chorus from the kitchen. "We sleep with them, the dogs," Shirley says shyly. Across the hall, Charlie turns up his radio to catch a cricket match. "Well, we allow ten of them up in the bed with us at a time. I started it out of loneliness when Charlie was working, but now he's the one who really likes it. I'll shoo them away at times, but he always calls them back up."
Charlie cocks his ear closer to the cricket. He never tunes in to rock music. In fact, he claims never to have listened to a Rolling Stones album after it was finished. ''The only way I can tell if we've made a good record or not is if we're still talking at the end of it. We were all still talking at the end of this latest one, so I guess it's a good one. We had a lot of fun. But I never listen to rock 'n' roll. Never liked it. I listen to classical. Or jazz. Especially Miles Davis." Davis and Fred Astaire and Stravinsky are Charlie's heroes.
The dogs have been freed from the kitchen and are now running wild about the grounds, playing loudly outside the window. Released, they seem to trumpet Shirley's recently won sense of freedom.
"Charlie and I have a farm in France, where we lived until twelve years ago. It was a great mistake coming back to England. I've had twelve very unhappy years. I'm just now beginning to get in touch with some happiness in my life. That's because I've realized that my life doesn't have to be tied to Charlie's anymore. And, oddly enough, that has brought us closer because he doesn't have to be so responsible for everything now. When we came back from France it was difficult for our daughter, Serafina, too. Being in school and being taunted for being the daughter of a Rolling Stone. Kids would say her father was a junkie and things like that. Awful. She's twenty-one now, though, and attempting to start a life of her own."
Shirley finds Rolling Stones concerts "frightening because of the sheer power of the people in the band." She adds, "I've never felt that connected to the group. At Bill Wyman's wedding to Mandy Smith I just felt embarrassed the whole time. I'm trying not to pass judgment, but my honest opinion is I found it appalling.
"I much prefer my life here with the horses. I love the hunt. The sense of power one gets on a horse. I don't approve of hunting, but it does fulfill something in me. It's a very primeval instinct. When you hear the hounds—they call it the music—when you hear the hounds' music, it's bloodcurdling it's so thrilling. And it affects both you and the horse. There's nothing like it. It's dangerous. It's exciting." She catches herself and laughs. "It sounds rather like a rock 'n' roll concert."