Intro to my Memoirs, Unchained Memories - Confessions of a Living Legend

Written by David Cammell

In 1972, Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola was spending Christmas in Gstaad when he met Timothy Leary. ‘The High Priest of Acid’, then a fugitive from prison in America. Subsequently, he was featured as the character ‘Prince Alexis’ in Leary’s book ‘The Intelligence Agents’, where he is described thusly: “Prince Alexis is slim, tall, with long black hair and translucent ivory skin. He looks, if it dares be said, like a fairy tale prince, holding himself with royal pride and tossing his mane in fiery, petulant arrogance. Scion of a most noble family, he has been educated everywhere and done everything at age 25.” Apart from his age (he was 29 at the time), the description is accurate.

Stash has been a source of fascination and speculation wherever he has cropped up around the world. So outrageous have been his escapades, and so seemingly glamorous the company in which he has shared them, that he has been cast by the international press into the role of ‘The Playboy Prince’. It is a role he has played with enthusiasm. Like all natural performers, he has the ability to seduce his audience, a significant part of which has consisted of many of the world’s most desirable women. To hell with the critics, the play’s the thing.

But ‘Playboy’ is only one of an extraordinary variety of roles he has played in his time. Others have included Rock’n’ Roll star, movie producer, writer and actor, yogi, guerilla leader, poet, racing driver, ruler of an island in the Indian Ocean, director of the Laotian National Dairy Corporation, automobile manufacturer, alchemist, and 'hippy de luxe’.

He has also had other roles falsely thrust upon him: drug addict, gunrunner, army deserter, spy, homosexual, and gigolo. Though there was no substance to the charges, they have involved him in hilarious misunderstandings and a lot of trouble.

His intimate friendships with the Beatles, The Rolling Stones (he was arrested once with Brian Jones, once with Keith Richards), with Roger Vadim, and Victor Lownes; his longtime association with Sbarro, the Swiss automobile genius; the essential mobility of his life, ranging from Hollywood, England, Europe, to India and the Orient; his ability to be as much at home in palaces as in opium dens, or performing in rock concerts and in movies, as studying in Indian ashrams or climbing alone in the Himalayas; to be in the right place at the climatic time; above all his genuinely outlandish and charismatic personality, has provided him with a unique perspective on the social history of our times. Like Candide, his life has been his career.