Robert Greenfield's "A Day in the Life" is the tragic true story of a family that fell prey to drugs, infidelity and madness in swinging '60s London.
By by Charles R. Cross
"A Day in the Life: One Family, the Beautiful People, and the End of the '60s"
by Robert Greenfield
Da Capo Press, 352 pp., $24.95
Special to The Seattle Times
MAy 17,2009
In a way, Jimi Hendrix's brilliance played a role in the downward spiral that saw Tommy Weber fall from grace, and later end up in London's Wormwood Scrubs prison.
Weber was a bon vivant in swinging '60s London, and he lived in a rarefied world that kept him in contact with rock's elite. After an attempt to make a Beatles movie failed, Weber tried to relaunch his film career by documenting Hendrix's legendary "Christmas on Earth" concert in 1967. This project also went bust, despite Weber capturing a dozen hours of Hendrix playing, footage that was eventually lost.
Weber abandoned his film plans and became a drug dealer, a career move that kept him in contact with musicians, but eventually led to his arrest.
Weber's rise and fall, and that of his glamorous wife, Susan "Puss" Coriat, is minutely detailed in Robert Greenfield's "A Day in the Life." The pair were one of London's most glamorous '60s couples, and their friendships with the Beatles, the Stones, and fashion and art mavens are minutely chronicled here.
Puss was the more famous of the two in the day, known as an heiress, fashion model, actress and "it" girl due to her Ophelia-like beauty. That she would marry Weber, and that their house would become a landmark in swinging London, seemed almost preordained.
Equally fated, though, is the downfall that is presaged from the opening page. Drugs, infidelity and eventually madness creep in, which is why Greenfield finds the story of this one family such a telling parable for the entire decade. Puss goes off to chase gurus in India, while Weber chases heroin around the world and ends up dating the actress Charlotte Rampling.
All of this would play as a typical '60s sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll fable if it weren't for the presence of the couple's two sons, who end up as shellshocked passengers on this doomed voyage. That Charley and Jake Weber survived this childhood — and Jake ended up as an actor on NBC's "Medium" — is the most remarkable part of the story. Much of Greenfield's account comes from the boys' memories, as Puss carts them across India in a scene that reads like Esther Freud's "Hideous Kinky," while Tommy uses them as drug mules. Puss' descent to madness and an early death seems inevitable.
Greenfield's reporting skill is admirable, and when he quotes Puss' last letter to her sons, it is bone-chilling. As the author of two previous books on the Rolling Stones, Greenfield brings the decade to life as well as any writer, without ignoring the darkness that soon envelops this family. One scene, where the two boys smuggle cocaine for Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg, would read as comedy if it weren't for the two innocents involved.
Still, Greenfield may overreach simply by choosing this horrid family as '60s metaphor. If the Webers indeed represent that psychedelically colored decade, then, as the Beatles sang in the song this book shares a title with, "The news was rather sad."
Seattle author Charles R. Cross is the author of "Room Full of Mirrors," a biography of Jimi Hendrix, and "Heavier Than Heaven," a biography of Kurt Cobain.
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