Keith Richards‘ manager Jane Rose flat-out lied to MTV.com’s Kurt Loder on 4.3.07 when he called to check on the story about Keith mixing his dad Bert’s ashes with some cocaine and then shorting the mixture up his nose. Rose said the snorting story was “untrue” and “made in jest,” but yesterday Richards told an anonymous Daily Express reporter that he “did inhale his father’s remains — just not with blow. ‘The cocaine bit was rubbish,’ Richards is quoted as saying. ‘I said I chopped him up like cocaine, not with.'”
The fibbing may not have been Rose’s idea entirely. When the story was retracted it was presumed that former Disney publicist Dennis Rice or some other lackey in the pipeline had strongly urged the Richards’ camp to make the Bert story go away because dad-snorting would turn off the family audience that Disney was looking to pull into Pirates of the Caribbean 3: At World’s End, which Richards had a small cameo part in.