Interview
Acid with Pink Floyd and harems with Paul McCartney …
the wild life of Stash, the playboy prince
Melanie
Xulu
He wooed Nico, saw Syd Barrett lose his mind and got
busted for drugs with the Stones. Now, at 81, Prince Stanislas Klossowski de
Rola has become a TikTok sensation
Fri 1 Sep
2023 08.00 BST
He was a
friend of the Rolling Stones and Pink Floyd, a flatmate of Paul McCartney and a
lover of women including Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg and Nico. He
resides between a 1,300-year-old castle in Italy, a mountain residence in
Switzerland and a summer home in Malibu. And now at the age of 81, Prince
Stanislas Klossowski de Rola – popularly known as Stash – is a TikTok darling.
“The audience is all young people and they’re all absolutely fascinated,” he
says on a video call in his castle, looking like a particularly dashing wizard
as he shows me his “magical grimoire” of tantric paintings and antique Turkish
swords.
Born into a
long line of ancient nobility (Lord Byron is a distant relative) and the son of
the notorious French-Polish artist Balthus, the aristocrat’s life has been a
rock’n’roll fairytale full of worldly quests and romances. He was a dandy in
swinging 60s London, who acted for Luchino Visconti, drummed for rock’n’rollers
Vince Taylor and the Playboys and modelled for actual Playboy; he was pictured
in the studio with the Beatles, and also leaving court with Brian Jones after
getting busted for drugs.
In mid-July
he took to TikTok to tell of these escapades and more, and has amassed more
than 125,000 followers and millions more viewers – he is the platform’s latest
“granfluencer”, older people who embrace social media to share their history
and wisdom. As well as recalling celebrity encounters – he also featured as
Harry Styles’ dad in Gucci’s Mémoire d’une Odeur campaign in 2019 – he shows
off his collections of antiques and oddities, from ancient maps to rare books,
with a flair for storytelling: speaking about occult magician Aleister Crowley,
he describes a man who “played with entities that sabotaged his entire life and
are still active from another dimension”. Stash’s most popular video, of his
antique knife collection, has more than 2m views.
The prince
got his start in music alongside Vince Taylor – the ill-fated inspiration for
David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust – whom he met in Paris in 1964, and he forged his
friendship with Brian Jones when Taylor and the Stones shared a bill in Paris
the following year. He once made music with Jones, which has never been
released. “I’ve been looking for the tapes,” he says. “Our music preceded
Satanic Majesties and that whole direction of psychedelia the Stones went
down.”
After
getting arrested with Jones for possession of marijuana and cocaine, the prince
moved into Paul McCartney’s residence in St John’s Wood, where they entertained
what Stash has described as “harems of girls”, with Beatles fans camping
outside and sometimes bursting in through the gates.
Then, at
the end of 1967, Stash, Syd Barrett and a few friends went on an acid-fuelled
trip to the Black Mountains in Wales, a trip that Barrett is said to have never
fully recovered from. “I was with him when he went to the other side,” he
confesses. “We were on acid together – it’s a weird story.” He likens it to
Luis Buñuel’s surrealist film The Exterminating Angel, in which a group of
high-society friends find themselves at a dinner party and are inexplicably
unable to leave. “It was really a magical thing. He fell into a psychedelic
crack. Believe me, other dimensions can open up.”
Stash’s
rise to TikTok virality was the idea of personal branding image specialist and
adviser to the stars, Sandy Grigsby. An American team came over to Europe to
film the videos, characterised by Stash’s deep, knowledgable voice and often
psychedelic get-ups (silk scarves, tunics, big rings, etc) all smoothly edited
with drone footage and layered over the latest music trending on TikTok.
“Have you
seen the latest numbers? It’s absurd! It all came much to my absolute
amazement,” says the prince. He was initially apprehensive though. “It’s not my
generation, and it’s not what I do. This absolute obsession with the phone is a
very modern disease of our time. Mercifully, most of my life it was not
something one did. I’ve never felt compelled to subscribe to it.”
Why does he
do it? “I’m getting rather long in the tooth now,” he says, with a youthful
sparkle in his eyes. “I’ve had a book in the works for over 40 years but I’ve
been rather shy in the past.”
Another
reason Prince Stash has taken to TikTok is to preserve his historic
Montecalvello castle. He envisions it becoming an “institution which is
self-sustaining and benefits the public – a sort of live-in museum”. Collecting
oddities and antiques runs deep. “My parents were big collectors,” he says,
with “family artefacts passed down through the ancestors. There are scandalous
and very colourful figures in my ancestry – my maternal ancestors came from a
warlord tradition, Swiss mercenaries who had their own armies.”
As our
conversation wraps I ask for the best piece of advice he’s been given over his
long and colourful life. He chuckles. “Tony Williams, the lead singer of the
Platters, told me: never let a girl make you come before a show because it
ruins your high-range. But I don’t think you can print that!”
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