Rolling Stone Keith Richards' frugal (and gorgeous) wife

I generally write one blog post a month and here I am, writing my second in 24 hours. 

I read this morning that Rolling Stone Keith Richards, 80, and his wife, Patti Hansen, 67, are celebrating their 40th anniversary.

There’s little about Richards you don’t already know, but here’s a story I’ve always wanted to tell about Hansen.

We were living in Manhattan in the late 1970s, the heyday of designer jeans, when she, as they say, “burst upon the scene” as a model for Calvin Klein. Her image was everywhere  — in tv commercials, and plastered on subway walls, on the sides of buses, at bus stop shelters, and on Times Square billboards. As a native New Yorker and one of the world’s best-known models, she got lots of free PR in her hometown. Having grown up in working class Staten Island, Hansen had a strong accent identifiable to any New Yorker as unique to the city’s smallest and most remote borough, and she never tried to disguise it. Even then I sensed she was down to earth, unlike the other models who hung out at Studio 54 who came across as plastic, pretentious and vapid. Not to mention Hansen was (and she still is) gorgeous.

She and Richards married in 1983, as her modeling fame (and the designer jeans craze) was waning. They moved to Weston, Connecticut, half a mile from my house in neighboring Wilton, and raised two kids, who attended the public schools. They still live there.

One day in the 1990s, I was browsing in a liquor store in Georgetown, an unincorporated area where the borders of four towns, including Wilton and Weston, come together. As I was looking around, I overheard a discussion between a clerk and a blonde with a Staten Island accent who, when I looked closer, was Hansen. She told him she was having a party and was looking for a bottle of Bailey’s Irish Cream. 

He went to the shelf and got one. She asked the price, and when he told her, she replied, politely, she didn’t want to pay that much and asked if he had another Irish cream-based brand that cost less. He did — Carolans -- and the price difference, if I remember correctly, was something like $3. She bought a bottle of Carolans, thanked the clerk for his help, and left.

The clerk and I looked at each other and laughed. There she was, the wife of one of rock music’s biggest stars worth millions, quibbling over $3. Like the good Staten Island girl she was, she couldn’t bring herself to pay that much more, so she bought a cheaper knock-off brand.

The esteem I had always had for her rose even higher that day. She hadn’t let fame or money go to her head. 

 

If she and Richards are throwing a party to mark their anniversary. I hope she will give herself permission, just this once, to splurge on the good stuff, because 40 years is something worth celebrating.