Keith moved himself and his furniture out into the hallway, plugged his stereo into the sockets there and sat down in his armchair – naked. It was altogether easier for the hotel to let him return to his room to make a noise.
But that was Keith. For all that he spent like there was no tomorrow, he didn’t crave everyday possessions. “He would walk out of a hotel room and leave his luggage behind, and at the other end buy new gear,” says Annette. And for all that he could afford luxury, he reserved the right to live like a slob. Defending his hotel destruction in the mid-Seventies, he announced, “People ask me if I act like it at home, and the answer is yes.”
One night when Skip Taylor drove Keith home from the studio to the Bel Air house, “He walked down the driveway, and he just dove in to the pool, swam to the other end, got out, said, ‘Okay, cheerio then.’
Watching Keith start the day with his regulation glass of Courvoisier, Annette would beg him to stay sober for the business meetings he set up in Hollywood, knowing how pleasant and impressive he could be that way. “But I think maybe his confidence didn’t allow that. And once he had one, he wanted two, three, four and five, and he couldn’t stop. And by the time he got in to talk to these people, he was absolutely drunk.
“If you have a meeting and shake hands and say ‘Yes,’ then you can go out for a drink together and celebrate and get drunk and then go home and fall over
An even better outlet for Moon’s infatuation with Newton was an idea mooted with the great director Sam Peckinpah and Keith’s fellow inebriates Ringo and Harry. Together, they would remake Soldiers Three, the 19511951 movie starring Newton, David Niven and Stewart Granger as army comrades in nineteenth-century colonial India.
She accompanied him by limo over Laurel Canyon, up to a quiet road in Sherman Oaks. There they parked outside 3650 Knobhill Drive, and he showed her the house they were to call their home for the best part of the next two years.
“It was a dump,” says Annette. “It had this strong neon green carpet, black wallpaper with huge green and yellow flowers, green walls. The kitchen was dark green. It was awful.” There were problems with rodents and scorpions. Even the requisite swimming pool was substandard, with only enough space between it and the high garden wall for a few lounge chairs and nothing else.
