A Day in the Life: One Family, the Beautiful People, and the End of the Sixties

In this roving relationship biography, journalist Greenfield (Exile on Main St.) documents the end of swinging London and the psychedelic 1960s through the breakdown of a high-society, scene-hopping married couple. Tommy Weber and Susan ""Puss"" Coriat were pure products of their times: Tommy was a racecar driver-turned-drug supplier (for no less than the Rolling Stones); Puss's experimentation with LSD and quest for a spiritual guru would lead to schizophrenia, involuntary hospitalization and electro-shock therapy. The couple's two young sons, caught between their coke-addled father (Tommy once taped a pound of cocaine to each of them to get through customs) and their mother's steady mental decline, prove remarkably resilient. Following the couple's divorce, Tommy and his sons lived with Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards (and his hangers-on) in the south of France, where Tommy got heavily into heroin; Puss's thwarted plan to meet them there in 1971 would presage her suicide by sleeping pills. Capturing the tenor and tone of the era, Greenfield's dysfunctional family is just as mesmerizing as his previous big-name subjects like Jerry Garcia and Timothy Leary.