Mick Jagger (58 page)

Mick, however, loathed the finished film, was appalled by how he looked and sounded in it, and refused to attend its London premiere. The next morning, the British press echoed his sentiments a thousandfold. For most critics, the sight of rock’s foremost sex god wearing a wide-brimmed Australian slouch hat, his famous lips weighed down by a bushy chin beard, was too intrinsically absurd for his acting to be judged with any objectivity. Others were mystified that he performed only one song on-screen, a traditional Irish-Australian ballad called “The Wild Colonial Boy,” while the soundtrack consisted of songs written by Shel Silverstein and sung by American country star Waylon Jennings. Still others felt cheated because in his one very brief scene in bed with a young woman, both were fully clothed. Greatest ridicule was reserved for his Irish accent and for the homemade armor Kelly puts on to combat seemingly the entire state of Victoria police force. One reviewer wrote that in this Butch Cassidy–inspired climax, encased in his crude helmet and breastplate, Mick resembled “a cut-price sardine”; another rated him “as lethal as last week’s lettuce.”

Any hope that his worshippers among the Stones’ following would confound the critics was soon dashed. Ned Kelly failed dismally at both the British and American box office, though it did moderately well in Australia. There, too, his association with the Kelly legend would be seen as a benefit rather than an outrage: the breastplate in which he’d seemed so ridiculously sardinelike (with the initials “M.J.” scratched inside) was later put on permanent display at the City Library in Queanbeyan, New South Wales.

ON JULY 30, Les Perrin’s office issued a press release announcing that the Rolling Stones had terminated their professional relationship with Allen Klein and would no longer be recording on Decca or its U.S. affiliate, London. Whereas Decca had long realized the end was nigh, Klein appeared taken by surprise when the dismissal letter was hand-delivered to him at the Beatles’ Apple house. Just a month previously, he had told Variety magazine of his plan to give the Stones exactly what Ahmet Ertegun was promising: their own record label under the umbrella of a major American one.

If Klein received a shock, there was one in store for Mick even nastier than the discovery of the unpaid taxes. It now emerged that there could not be a clean break with Klein, since he owned the copyrights to everything the Stones had recorded on Decca/London since 1965. The agreement they had originally signed with Andrew Oldham had vested all rights to their master recordings with him. Oldham had then sold the rights en bloc to Klein, at a moment when Decca was also seeking to acquire them. That meant the manager Mick had jettisoned so skillfully owned all his greatest moments on record: “The Last Time,” Aftermath, “Satisfaction,” “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” Let It Bleed, “Sympathy for the Devil” … everything.

A couple of weeks after the Stones left Klein and Decca, Marianne left Mick. This time, no other man was involved: she waited until he went away on a European tour, then packed a small suitcase and took Nicholas back to her mother’s. Mick pursued her again and pleaded for them to try again, but she managed to stand firm.

Coming down to earth after their four years together was a scary business: she now had no singing career to fall back on, no money to speak of, a child to care for, and a ravenous drug habit to feed. As with Chrissie Shrimpton before her, there was no question of claiming a substantial part of Mick’s fortune for the many ways she had enriched his life as well as complicated it. However, he did not try to take back the cottage at Aldworth that was now her main refuge, so she did not end up either homeless or penniless. (Both states were to come, but entirely through her own efforts.)

Her first boyfriend after Mick was his total opposite in every way: a lanky Irish peer named “Paddy” Rossmore, whose “monkish, spiritual” habits had powerful appeal after the rock-star lifestyle and who, above all, answered her need for someone to talk to. Lord Rossmore also paid for her to see a Harley Street specialist to wean her off the mixture of barbiturates and alcohol she was substituting for smack. The pair went so far as to announce their engagement—even though both at the time were living with their mothers—but called it off before any matrimonial plans could be made. So harrowed was Rossmore by what he’d learned about drug addiction and its treatment (or in Marianne’s case, mistreatment) that he went on to found a rehab center in Ireland.

Even after the Rossmore interlude, Mick continued to bombard Marianne with letters and phone calls, pleading with her to come back to him. Her final dissuasion was to destroy her own beauty, mutilating her once-golden hair into a raggedy crop and gaining more than three stone in weight. Unaware of the change in her appearance, Mick asked her to come and see him at Cheyne Walk. When she walked through the front door, she saw his jaw drop and knew the stratagem had worked. “He finally realized I wasn’t on the market any more,” she would remember. “I never got another phone-call or letter from him.”

It was the first time in six years that Mick had been without a permanent live-in girlfriend and he, too, seemed to find difficulty in adjusting. For one thing, his love of nightlife temporarily vanished: at the Stones’ office, he would give Shirley Arnold a one-pound note and ask her to go out and buy two lamb chops and some vegetables for his Italian housekeeper, Bruna Girardi, to cook as his dinner that evening. Even at 1970 predecimal prices, one pound did not cover both meat and vegetables; rather than risk his annoyance by requesting three or four extra shillings, Shirley would draw it from the office petty cash.

Initially, there seemed a natural candidate on hand to take Marianne’s place. Marsha Hunt, his so-called Miss Fuzzy, had been Mick’s semipublic lover for almost a year and, with her dignity, drug-free lifestyle, and uninvolvement in Stones internal politics, was not seen as any kind of threat by his financial advisers. After Marianne’s departure, Marsha moved into 48 Cheyne Walk for a couple of weeks, a time when Chris Jagger and his girlfriend, Vivienne, also happened to be visiting. Marsha saw how the change in his domestic circumstances seemed to have depressed Mick, but felt “he missed the child [Nicholas] and the dog more than the woman … He was very insecure, and needed the stability of a child.”

By Marsha’s account, they were at Mr. Chow’s restaurant in Knightsbridge one evening when Mick suddenly suggested they should have a baby together. She knew how much he longed to be a father—the more so since Marianne had miscarried their daughter, Corrina, while Anita had given Keith a son, Marlon. It was a very sixties rock-god proposition, Marsha recalls, designed not to interfere with his forthcoming tax exile or his image as the world’s number one stud. She would stay in London and have the baby while Mick played the role of absent father, flying them out regularly for visits in whatever tax haven he might end up. He made everything sound so plausible, and heartfelt, that she was unable to refuse.

She became pregnant almost immediately and, fearing Mick might have changed his mind, offered to have an abortion. But he insisted she should have the baby and that everything would be as he’d outlined. He said he wanted a boy, whom he proposed naming Midnight Dream (poor child) and sending to Britain’s most exclusive school, Eton College. There was no suggestion of marriage, on Marsha’s part any more than Mick’s; as she often said, she could never marry any man who didn’t get up until two in the afternoon.

She managed to hide her pregnancy for several months while still accepting music and modeling gigs—including a nude photo shoot for Club International magazine. And when the news finally did emerge. Mick’s involvement was never made public. One newspaper sniffed out the story but was dissuaded from running it by threats of legal action from Marsha and an expert PR smoke screen from Les Perrin. In private, Mick continued to be a model of tenderness and solicitude, although she was puzzled that when his parents came to tea at Cheyne Walk during her stay, he didn’t tell them they were soon to be grandparents.

Even now that Marsha was carrying his child, she did not expect him to be monogamous, and he fully justified her lack of expectation. All that summer—including before Marianne’s final exit—an unending stream of young women passed through 48 Cheyne Walk, some staying just a single night, or less, others lasting as long as a weekend, one or two later finding their way onto the largely female staff, led by Jo Bergman, who ministered to Mick’s every practical need. They tended to be American, usually Californian, aged around twenty-two, with a free and breezy attitude to sex that British girls had yet to learn. Bedding such beautiful nobodies from thousands of miles away was a typically judicious policy on his part, being less likely to attract the attention of the press, not to mention other bedfellows waiting in line. By an unwritten code, American groupies talked about their conquests only to one another, and there was as yet almost no kiss-and-tell market to tempt them. Not until decades later—by that time substantial matrons in superannuated hippie tea gowns—would they gurglingly recall their time as “Mick’s Girls” to tabloid newspapers or TV documentaries.

Perhaps the most famous, at least in retrospect, was Pamela Ann Miller—later Des Barres—a misleadingly angelic-looking twenty-one-year-old with a chin dimple to rival Kirk Douglas’s. “Miss Pamela” was already famous on the L.A. rock scene as a former lover of the Doors’ Jim Morrison and a member of Frank Zappa’s nonmusical groupie girl band, the GTOs. When she first met Mick, on the Stones’ ’69 American tour, she was dating Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page, but Mick enticed her away with tittle-tattle about Page’s infidelity: a mind-boggling instance of pot traducing kettle. The result was “a fabulous fling” with “the most thrilling, naughty, sexy man I ever met.” In after-years, the gurgling matron would describe how his lips left hickeys (love bites) all down her thigh, which she later showed off to friends as the groupie equivalent of a Victoria Cross.

The following summer, her American boyfriend came to London to manage the Granny Takes a Trip boutique on King’s Road, and on an impulse she decided to join him. When she walked into the shop, she heard a shout of “Lady Pamela!” and saw Mick there, trying on clothes. A second fabulous fling ensued, conducted at Cheyne Walk or the flat of her boyfriend—who quickly discovered what was going on but made no attempt to stop it; indeed, regarded it almost as a compliment. One day when Mick turned up, Pamela was in the bath and answered the front door naked to find him standing there with Charlie Watts. With old-fashioned propriety, he clapped a hand over Charlie’s eyes.

Cheyne Walk’s temporary tenants were not exclusively female. Also quartered there during these first post-Marianne weeks was the Texan sax player Bobby Keys, one of the outer ring of musicians henceforward to appear onstage with the five Stones. Keys had met them on their first American tour, in 1964, when he was part of Bobby Vee’s mohair-suited backing band. Bumping into him at an L.A. studio five years later, Mick had invited him to solo on a Let It Bleed track, prophetically named “Live with Me.” Together with trumpet and trombone player Jim Price, he now composed the horn section Mick wanted for the first Atlantic album and for the Stones’ return to touring Europe in August and September.

The stocky, hilarious Keys, a teenage friend of the great Buddy Holly, palled more naturally with Keith (they had been born on the same day of the same month in the same year) but esteemed Mick as “a world-class harmonica player, the equal of any black guy I ever heard,” and “the best country singer in rock ’n’ roll.” He was even so a little apprehensive when Mick invited him to crash at Cheyne Walk while working on the album. Like many others around the Stones, he suspected Mick might be partly gay or bisexual, and had to suffer a good deal of ribbing from his fellow unequivocal “straights.” “People said, ‘Ah, you’re gonna live at Jagger’s … guess you’ll be sleepin’ with one eye open.’ I thought, ‘What am I gonna do if he makes a move on me? If I hit him, there goes the gig.’ ”

Of course, no such awkwardness ever arose. It was a harmonious, low-key couple of months, hinting at Mick’s loneliness at the time and his need for society more amusing than dreamy-eyed Californian nymphets. The domestic ménage consisted of his housekeeper, Bruna (whom even the ebullient Keys found intimidating), and his driver, Alan Dunn, whom he would periodically instruct to dress in full Edwardian chauffeur’s uniform with jodhpurs and peaked cap. When the housemates weren’t in the studio or out at clubs, they played chess or listened to music in the garden studio, or Mick held forth about vintage wines or the poems of Shelley and Keats. “I sure learned a lot from that ol’ boy,” Keys remembers. When a female visitor appeared, he would be “a tactful Texan” and make himself scarce.

One day, Mick even persuaded him to attend a cricket Test match at the Oval ground, largely by telling him that alcohol was available there all day during games. Keys’s wife happened to be in London and wanted him to go shopping that afternoon, but he fibbed that the Stones needed him in the studio. He hadn’t bargained for the fact that all three British TV channels gave saturation coverage to Test matches, and Mick’s appearance among the spectators, however unobtrusive (as it always was), would be bound to attract the cameras. “So while I’m supposed to be workin’ my ass off, she sees me on TV, drinkin’ beer and tryin’ to understand the goddammed game of cricket.” Hardly one’s usual idea of being led astray by Mick Jagger.

For a time, just like Performance’s Turner, he had two live-in female companions, albeit in this case both Californian rather than French and polyglot Danish. The first to be installed, a bubble-haired blonde named Janice Kenner, had found herself alone with Mick in the back of his car and received a well-tried Jagger line: “Do you like waking up in the city or the country?” Replying “the country,” she had been spirited away to Stargroves, there acquitting herself well enough to be asked to wake up in the city with him as well. Soon afterward, he also brought home Catherine James, a solemn-looking twenty-two-year-old who had taken the same roundabout car ride via Berkshire. The two coexisted at Cheyne Walk without rancor, each fixing on a distinct role for herself: Catherine was Mick’s girlfriend while Janice was his cook, but available for the occasional “romp.” In fact, their easy relationship rather irked Mick, who preferred the women around him to be at loggerheads for his attention. One day, to their bemusement, he got them to plaster each other with strawberries and whipped cream like a polite English garden-party version of mud wrestling.