"My nephew, who is now in his 40s and was a teenager at the time, just told me he remembers exactly what happened. Somebody at the table asked for Keith to play, which he did, and then the family went on talking. So he got a little angry,"
"Everyone thinks I'm this jock of a woman, but I didn't play any sports," she says, laughing. "I didn't even let my kids play baseball because I was afraid they were going to get hit by balls."
"Some would call it rank hypocrisy. Others will find it unbelievable, but guess what? Keith - former junkie and all-round roué - has been a strict father."
According to his daughter Theodora, 29, the Rolling Stones' lead guitarist was a stickler for good manners and proper behaviour.
She and her sister Alexandra, 28, were not allowed to wear lipstick until they were 16. Singing at the dinner table was frowned upon.
Boyfriends had to beware of going too far. When Richards caught one suitor getting "too hot and horny" on the porch with his 16-year-old daughter, he told the lad: "Cut it out or I'll cut it off."
In one of the many sitting rooms, in the house they have in Connecticut, there is a gilt-encrusted baby grand piano given to Richards by a Russian princess (“who obviously liked him a lot,” says Hansen); it sits beneath a portrait by Johnny Depp of the rock-star husband himself, cigarette dangling from his mouth: a painting made with layers of rolling papers.
In keith hosue Hansen shows, hand on the knob, pauses and opens . “It's not like Keith goes down here anymore,” she says, rolling her eyes as only a woman who has been married to a man for 27 years could.
We head down into the basement, the stairway walls lined with gold and platinum records, and emerge into what must be every aging Rolling Stones fan's secret fantasy: a virtual barroom filled with rock paraphernalia and table games of every sort.
Keith used to record down here, but no more: Patti moved most of the amps and mixing boards out (though there are guitars and saxophones and keyboards all over the house). On one wall, there is a giant framed bus-shelter poster of Hansen's totally hot Gap ad from 1999.
On another, every single Rolling Stones cover—except of course for the one that is on the newsstand as we speak (the reissue of Exile on Main St. topped the charts all over the world). “I will have to find a spot for it,” she says sweetly
"Keith was constantly making me mix tapes -Patty says- and he would do beautiful drawings on them," Hansen says of their courtship. "That was his method of communication." He created collages with pictures of her from magazines, Polaroids, and notes written in his own blood. "It looks disgusting when it dries, but he loves the color red," she deadpans. How would he get the blood? "Maybe he cut himself shaving?" she teases, then grimaces. "Or picked a scab?" She has kept these mementos. "I have everything in boxes. Thousands of those tapes. I've saved everything."
