Douglas Brinkley on Johnny Depp: Vanity Fair

“That’s Keith [Richards]!,” Depp enthuses. “He recorded some of these after his ’77 heroin bust in Toronto. He thought he was headed to jail for 30 fucking years for trafficking.”

Depp, as if recounting a favorite outlaw fable, then goes on to tell how the Ontario Provincial Police and a team of Royal Canadian Mounties stormed into Keith Richards’s room while he was sleeping and confiscated 22 grams of heroin. (Richards eventually had his sentence reduced from trafficking to possession and was put on probation for a year.)

Depp tilts his head toward the hut. “Listen to this,” he urges, nodding in adoration. Richards, alone on piano, is now singing a haunting rendition of Hoagy Carmichael’s “The Nearness of You.”

“I played this one from a boom box when Lily Rose was born,” Depp says, referring to the day a decade ago when his partner, Vanessa Paradis, the French-born singer and actress, brought their daughter into the world. “This is her birth song. She arrived to this, man.”

Welcome to Deppville…”

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