Mick Jagger (32 page)

A couple of days later, she and Mick went out shopping together; he bought a tricycle as a Christmas gift for Nicholas at Harrods and they had a late, long lunch at the San Lorenzo restaurant on Beauchamp Place. If they’d wanted to be seen by friends of Chrissie Shrimpton, they couldn’t have planned it better.

Until this moment, all Chrissie knew was that Mick had become increasingly remote and strange in his manner toward her. “With hindsight, I don’t blame him,” she says. “You can’t help going off people, and we were both very, very young. I knew the reason why he was getting fed up with me; it was because I wasn’t cool. He was taking acid by that time, and I was always scared to try it. It was also when Anita Pallenberg had just come on the scene, and these orgies started happening over at Brian’s. When I was first with Mick, I wasn’t allowed to look at anyone else or even be friends with girls he considered tarts. Now he wanted everyone to sleep with everyone else, and I refused to be a part of that. I remember him calling me ‘uncool’ and it being the most terrible insult.”

Pent up with her dog and six cats on the fifth floor at Harley House, still tortured by thoughts of the wedding and babies that might have been, and guilt-ridden over her estrangement from her father, Chrissie felt herself perilously near the state Mick had had such fun with in “19th Nervous Breakdown.” Mick suggested she should see a psychiatrist, of whom an abundance were to be found just across the road on Harley Street. She paid a couple of visits to an unsympathetic middle-aged shrink, who seemed mainly concerned to know whether her sex life with Mick was still healthy. A deeply embarrassed Chrissie said that it was. The shrink requested to see Mick also, then reported back to her that Mick was definitely still in love with her.

On December 15, the day of Mick’s shopping trip with Marianne, he and Chrissie had been due to go to Jamaica on holiday. When Chrissie telephoned the office, she discovered that their flights had been canceled.

But she still had no idea that he was seeing Marianne. “I remember thinking, ‘He doesn’t want me and I can’t live without him.’ ” Alone at the Harley House flat with her dog, six cats, and three songbirds chirruping in their Victorian cage, Chrissie took an overdose of sleeping pills. “It wasn’t just attention seeking or a cry for help,” she says. “I really wanted to die. I thought my life was over.”

She believes it was Mick who found her, though she has never been completely sure. When she regained consciousness, she was in St. George’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner. The nurses tending her called her by a name she didn’t recognize. To prevent the story leaking out to the newspapers, she had been checked in under an alias.

From there on, Chrissie says, less attention seemed to be given to her physical and mental state than to hushing up the fact that Mick Jagger’s girlfriend had attempted suicide. From St. George’s, she was taken “in a wheelchair, in the back of a lorry” to a private clinic in Hampstead, where, without any choice in the matter or even explanation, she was given some kind of sleep therapy. “The basement where they put me was so damp that I remember, as I lay in bed, my feet were wet. Every time I came round, I was put back to sleep. I asked to see my psychiatrist, but when I tried to ask him what was happening, he stuck a needle into my arm while I was speaking and knocked me out again.”

Finally, she managed to struggle to a pay phone and contact her mother in Buckinghamshire. The long estrangement with Ted Shrimpton over her cohabitation with Mick was instantly forgotten. “I’ll always remember that when my father arrived at this clinic, he was in tears—something I’d never seen before.” She also sent a plea to Mick to bring her her Yorkshire terrier, Dora. “He did bring the dog … and when he arrived, he was wearing a black fur coat and full makeup. Again, I don’t blame Mick for any of this. The way I was treated was probably thought to be the best, and no doubt cost a lot of money—and it was all semi out of his hands. But it was very frightening and very scarring.” Mick subsequently did speak to her mother, admitting that he’d been responsible for a radical change in her personality, and he didn’t like what she’d become. “From being strong and feisty and good fun, I’d turned into a neurotic mess.”

Only after Chrissie was released from the hospital, and recuperating at home in Buckinghamshire, did she learn from the newspapers about Mick and Marianne. When at last she nerved herself to return to Harley House to collect her possessions and six cats, she found the flat’s front-door lock had been changed and she had to telephone the Stones’ office and make an appointment. There was no further discussion or contact with Mick; instead, she had to deal with his brother, Chris, the near namesake to whom she’d always felt close, but who now treated her with icy indifference. “That was horrible, because I’d been so fond of him. He let me know I certainly didn’t have any right to be back there.”

Nowadays, no major rock star dumps a long-term girlfriend with impunity. As his partner or common-law wife, she can claim to have contributed to his success and, as such, to be entitled to a substantial part of his fortune. Should this tactic fail, she can make a lucrative book deal for her memoirs, sell interviews at high prices to tabloid newspapers and magazines, haunt the TV talk-show circuit, and in general be a rankling embarrassment forever afterward. But for twenty-three-year-old Mick, all such things were still mercifully far in the future; he could cast off Chrissie with as little difficulty as a once-worn satin shirt.

Marianne had returned to Italy with Nicholas and her backing guitarist, Jon Mark, to appear at the San Remo Song Festival. On an impulse, she telephoned Mick and asked him to join her. They met at Cannes Airport, and to escape the press, Mick chartered a boat with a skipper and crew, and they spent an idyllic week with Nicholas cruising along the Riviera coast. Though the Mediterranean mostly stayed millpond smooth, there was one day when a heavy swell blew up and the boat began to pitch and roll alarmingly. When Nicholas started to cry, Mick climbed into the bunk with Marianne and him, cradled them both in his arms, and was comforting and reassuring.

In San Remo, the two gave an interview to the Daily Mirror journalist Don Short, tacitly admitting they were now together. There, too, in a local discotheque, Marianne bought some mild uppers from the deejay so that she and Mick could keep dancing until dawn.

The news that the wicked, unkempt chief Rolling Stone and the young woman who’d brought virginity and refinement to the pop charts were now an item caused less of a media furor than might have been expected. Marianne was separated from her husband, so there was no question of enticement by a sex-mad fiend, and she had a one-year-old child, which dealt with the virginity issue. Moreover, the news blackout around Chrissie’s attempted suicide had been 100 percent effective. There was little for journalists to write other than that Beauty and the Beast had been reincarnated in Swinging London.

When they returned from San Remo, Mick wanted Marianne to move into Harley House with Nicholas without delay. Marianne agreed, despite some squeamishness about occupying rooms he had so recently shared with someone else—which, indeed, still contained some of Chrissie’s possessions, including Petunia, the rocking horse he’d given her for her twenty-first birthday. Christopher Gibbs, the Stones’ antique-dealer friend, was brought in to remove all traces of uncool 1965 and give the place a mystic Moroccan makeover like Brian and Anita’s. Anything Marianne wanted, for herself or her son, she could have. Even so, she felt it a wise precaution to keep her old flat in Knightsbridge.

Few types of romance are more exhilarating than those between total opposites—at least in the rosy beginning, as the lovers introduce each other to their alien worlds and take on the added mystique of all-knowing teachers and guides. And from its genesis in a spot test about Camelot, this affair between an Austrian baroness’s intellectual daughter and a Dartford gym teacher’s son had a certain schoolroom flavor. Marianne, whose musical tastes had hitherto tended toward the twee and folksy, now received a crash course in Mick’s blues and soul idols, from Robert Johnson and Slim Harpo to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Mick, whose literary adventures thus far had not gone much beyond James Bond, was inducted into Marianne’s numerous favorite books, both ancient and modern, and also her passion for mythology, magic, and the occult.

Literature was not the only area in which Beauty far outdistanced the Beast. Despite unrelenting peer pressure on every side, Mick still did almost no drugs beyond the occasional “little smoke” that seldom seemed to affect him much—though he remained as bad as ever at handling alcohol. When he did take acid, Marianne noticed, he remained impressively in control; unlike Brian, he seemed to have no deep-seated fears or insecurities for the drug to ferret out and blow up to big-screen size. For their first trip together at Harley House, five floors above the hurtling Marylebone Road traffic, they both donned their finest hippie clothes and Mick put on a record of an Indian raga. As the acid took hold, he began to dance—not the sexual strutting and posturing of his stage shows but with “pure beauty and exaltation … He had become Shiva. I hadn’t realized until then that I was living with somebody who at odd moments could turn into a god.”

The mystical mood evaporated when Andrew Oldham’s new recording protégés, the Small Faces, unexpectedly showed up with their guitars and asked Mick to join them in a jam session. But as interruptions went, it could have been worse.

NINETEEN SIXTY-SEVEN, THAT most horrifically memorable year of Mick’s life (whatever he may say), kicked off with a flurry of small scandals that in the coming months—along with every previous scandal—would pale into insignificance.

To start with, there was the continuing fallout from Brian’s pre-Christmas appearance on the cover of West Germany’s Stern magazine, wearing a black Nazi SS uniform and red swastika armband, with one jackbooted foot planted on a small, naked plastic doll. Nor was it hard to guess the instigator of the stunt: Anita Pallenberg had been in Munich at the time, making a film called Mord und Totschlag (A Degree of Murder) for her director friend Volker Schlöndorff, with Brian in tow. To allay Brian’s paranoid jealousy of Schlöndorff, and give him some creative status outside the Stones, she had arranged for him to write the film’s score. His wide-eyed assertion that the Stern cover was “an anti-Nazi protest” convinced no one.

Then on January 13, the Stones released a new single entitled “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” a solo Mick composition plainly inspired by Marianne and the Ship Hotel, Bristol. There had, of course, been innumerable previous pop songs about nocturnal trysts, from Johnnie Ray’s “Such a Night” to Elvis Presley’s “One Night,” but never one with so barefaced an invitation between the sheets. The furor was even greater than over “Satisfaction,” especially in America’s Puritan belt: when the Stones previewed the song in New York on The Ed Sullivan Show, Mick was forced to change the crucial phrase to “Let’s spend some time together,” though the rest of his heavy-breathing lyric (“I’ll satis-fah yo’ ev-ery need / And now Ah know you’ll satis-fah me …”) went out unedited. Yet on the flip side, this aural phallus could be heard back in virgin choirboy mode, singing Keith’s ballad “Ruby Tuesday” as if his heart would break while Brian, so recently seen as a baby-crushing SS Obergruppenführer, piped a nursery-innocent descant on the recorder.

The next weekend, the Stones were back in London to top the bill on Britain’s most popular television variety show, Sunday Night at the London Palladium. The show had been the making of the Beatles, but the Stones had never yet appeared on it; their inclusion was implicitly a chance win over the nation’s parents even at this late stage. All such hopes vanished during Sunday-afternoon rehearsals at the theater for the 8 P.M. live airing. By hallowed tradition, headliners appeared last, then joined the other acts to wave good-bye from a revolving podium with giant letters spelling out SUNDAY NIGHT AT THE LONDON PALLADIUM. Mick, however, informed the producer that the Stones would not get onto the podium and wave. So, close to transmission time, tempers quickly flared with the producer threatening to drop them from the bill and Mick doggedly refusing to become “part of a circus.”

Andrew Oldham was called to the Palladium to intercede, together with the Stones’ new UK booking agent, Tito Burns. In a reversal of all known precedent, Oldham told them to bow to custom and ride the podium with the comedians, jugglers, trampolinists, puppeteers, and high-plumed dancers as every Sunday Night star from Frank Sinatra to Buddy Holly had uncomplainingly done before them. But Mick would not yield: Trilby was defying Svengali and thinking for himself at last. Instead, a compromise finale was devised, with the Stones off the podium but still—Mick especially—somehow managing even to wave good-bye with an edge of sarcasm and disrespect.

January also brought a new Stones album, Between the Buttons. Since Aftermath’s creative breakthrough nine months earlier, they had toured almost nonstop with little time to spare for recording or for Jagger-Richard to write anything else as strong as “Let’s Spend the Night Together” and “Ruby Tuesday.” If the album lacked its predecessor’s Beatle-challenging color, energy, and satirical bite, there were still a few good things: “She Smiled Sweetly,” afterward covered by the Love Affair, “Yesterday’s Papers,” covered by Mick’s protégé Chris Farlowe, and “Something Happened to Me Yesterday,” partly sung by Keith rather than Mick (though in a voice much like Mick’s) against a Trad-jazzy backing which, a few years earlier, would have caused them far more anguish than the London Palladium’s revolving podium.

With hindsight, this last lighthearted track seems eerily prophetic of the “something” so soon to happen to them both. “He’s not sure what it was,” sings Keith’s Mick-clone lightheartedly, “Or if it’s against the law … What kind of joint is this? …” At the end, real arch-mimic Mick chips in with a spoken passage mocking the type of avuncular British bobby, epitomized by television’s Dixon of Dock Green, whose main function until now has been helping old ladies across roads, giving directions to lost tourists, and making sure bicyclists show enough light after dark. “If you’re out tonight, don’t forget … if you’re on your bike, wear white … Evenin’ all.”