Mick Jagger

by Philip Norman

  Draconian restrictions were also placed on the press and broadcast media, who for the most part found themselves penned in the bleachers far behind the stage and unable to see the performance at all. Photographers and camera crews were allowed to shoot Mick in action only for a couple of minutes each, all under strict supervision and from the same fixed seventy-degree upward angle. If any attempted to depart from this or loiter when ordered to vacate their position, a man named Jerry Pompili would touch their camera with a long metal instrument like a cattle prod, instantly destroying the film inside.

  The tour’s second most important figure was the Stones’ director of security, Jim Callaghan, a man in every way unlike his British prime ministerial namesake, from his pugilist’s face to his crumpled, pale green dragon-embroidered caftan. But even Callaghan’s power was limited to saying no. In that whole giant, paranoid traveling circus, only one person had absolute power to say yes.

  That person was to be seen during the ritual couple of hours’ delay before each show jogging up and down the special warm-up area set aside for him backstage, seemingly oblivious to the ebb and flow of VIP guests and Keith and Woody’s relentless merrymaking. In his stage wardrobe, butterfly-wing feyness had been replaced by the severely practical and uncompromisingly masculine—American football player’s breeches, bulk-purchased on New York’s Canal Street at fifteen dollars per pair, together with protective knee pads, a low-key colored T-shirt, and shoes suitable for extended roadwork. Limbering and psyching himself up to face yet another eighty or a hundred thousand people did not prevent his being approached by a constant stream of subordinates, from Jim Callaghan downward, all seeking that unique, definitive “yes.” Sometimes he would accompany Callaghan on a quick inspection of the stage and the area immediately in front of it, where another Mark David Chapman might conceivably lurk. No one in the expectant multitude even noticed, let alone recognized, the diminutive figure with a camouflage hat pulled down low over its eyes.

  On this tour, his stage act was no longer notable for its outrageousness but for its athleticism. For more than two hours, he was all over the giant stage, slaloming in and out among his static bandmates, prancing along each of the forty-yard aprons in turn, climbing the scaffolding and hanging off by an arm and leg, or skidding onto his padded knees like a football player scoring a touchdown. There were no brief retirements into the wings for a restorative drag of something or other, no quieter interludes seated on a stool that a man pushing forty might be expected to need—no pauses at all except to introduce the other four, toss out a deeper-than-Dixie “A-aw-right!,” or swig from a plastic bottle of Evian water. The onetime epitome of decadence and self-indulgence now looked all about simplicity and clean living.

  Starting with “Under My Thumb,” he delivered most of the Stones’ golden oldies, a man pushing forty using the same voice, acting out the same charade he had as an eighteen-year-old. And even on humid, balloon-filled, onion-smelly afternoons in Philadelphia or Orlando, those oldies still stirred up all the wickedness of their innocent heyday—the “nana-nana-nana-nana-na” prelude to “Let’s Spend the Night Together,” for instance, getting much more reaction than “Start Me Up”’s “you make a dead man come.” Only toward the end did he look more like the old over-the-top Jagger, using a cherry picker to be swung out above his audience and sing “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” while pelting them with long-stemmed red carnations.

  With memories of Altamont never far away, the after-show escape was a military exercise, set in motion while the Stones still had an hour of playing time left. After the final encore, they boarded four identical yellow vans and were removed while any tardy assassin was distracted by a $12,000 fireworks display. Thanks to radio microphones, Mick could continue goading the crowds with cries of “A-a-aw-right!” while already halfway back to his hotel.

  At press conferences he was his usual regally bland self, tossing out the occasional well-honed epigram (“Touring’s like sex. You may enjoy it but you don’t wanna do it all the time”), studiously avoiding all political controversy, like Britain’s war with Argentina in the Falkland Islands (“None of my business”), and, in a literal sound bite, talking about “the diamond.” This was no thumping rock for Jerry Hall such as Richard Burton might have given Elizabeth Taylor, but a tiny chip set into his upper right incisor tooth. The story went that he’d first tried a tiny emerald in the tooth, but people had mistaken it for a speck of spinach. Journalist after journalist requested to view the minuscule sparkler up close and were willingly indulged; at last, he’d found a way of opening his mouth and literally not saying anything.

  The tour’s British leg ended with a giant open-air show at Roundhay Park, Leeds, on July 25, 1982. It seemed the climax to a triumphant comeback, proof that the Stones could go rolling on through the eighties, still as free of moss as Mick’s upper incisor was of suspected spinach. In fact, having created this template for a mega-earning future, they were not to tour again until 1989, or record together between 1985 and the decade’s end.

  At Roundhay Park, the backstage amenities that had to be laid out for them included a Japanese water garden with a stream, a bridge, a waterfall, and koi. The very sun umbrellas in this inner sanctum had to say “Welcome the Rolling Stones” in Japanese, even though no one present would be able to translate it. The show was emceed by Andy Kershaw, an outspoken BBC radio deejay who had little time for pointless superstar whims. Kershaw therefore recruited an expert in Japanese calligraphy from Leeds University to inscribe another message around the parasols. “Fuck the Rolling Stones,” it said.

  Which, prophetically enough, their singer was almost to do with his long-delayed attempt to go solo.

  JERRY DID NOT bring a breath of fresh air into Mick’s life so much as a gale. Visitors to his hotel room on the morning after a show usually found a twilit mess of rumpled sheets, strewn papers and books, and dirty breakfast dishes. These days, Jerry was often to be found there, exquisitely dressed, Dairy Queen–fresh, and, as like as not, chortling with laughter. One journalist arriving for an interview was surprised when she thrust a small whirring object into his hand: Mick’s electric shaver. “Neither of us can get it to switch off,” she explained. “Would you have a try?” What price now the Tyranny of Cool?

  Jerry dealt with the Machiavellian politics around Mick by simply disregarding them. Texan down-home charm is always hard to resist, but especially so when accompanied by spectacular blond beauty, six feet high. One of her earliest triumphs was winning over Prince Rupert Loewenstein, whose view of Mick’s paramours tended to be governed by their potential impact on his finances. Jerry nicknamed the assiduous Loewenstein “Rupie the Groupie” and soon had him eating out of her hand.

  Her exuberance and easygoingness, after Bianca’s reserve and supertouchiness, were only part of the tonic for Mick. There was also the fact—especially relevant in the aftermath of divorcing Bianca—that her supermodel career had made her independently wealthy; she couldn’t possibly just be after his money. Indeed, when he told her how he dreaded the effort of getting back into shape for the ’81 tour, she said he needn’t if he didn’t want to: she was rich enough to support them both.

  He did want to, of course—couldn’t live without it—so Jerry uncomplainingly became part of a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle that made Bryan Ferry’s look pale indeed. Since the Toronto bust, every customs authority in the world had the Stones logged on computer, and the sight of any one of them automatically triggered maximum alert. One Christmas Eve, Mick and Jerry landed in Hong Kong for what was supposed to be a romantic break together in a luxury hotel. The immigration official took one look at their passports and pressed a button, and they were instantly surrounded by armed police with obviously itchy trigger fingers. Drug-free as Jerry had always been, she found herself receiving the same sort of treatment when traveling alone on her modeling assignments; for the computer, her affiliation with the Rolling Stones was enough.

  The press had always liked he
r, and as Mick’s “lady,” it liked her even more—something that, one day, would stand her in good stead. She unfailingly provided wonderful copy with that extravagant yet entirely natural southern accent (so unlike the one Mick used) and her willingness to discuss their sex life, apparently without any repercussions from him. “Ah do all that stuff to liven up the bedroom,” she confided to one British magazine, making it sound like bucking broncos and lariats. “You know . . . suspenders and all that.”

  Fortunately, the member of the Stones’ inner circle who might have dimmed even Jerry’s sunny smile was no longer a force to be reckoned with. Keith had finally split from Anita, realizing he had no hope of staying off heroin while she was around, and that her urge to self-destruct was beyond his power to check. The final breaking point came at a house they were renting in Salem, Massachusetts, when a seventeen-year-old gardener named Scott Cantrell, rumored to be Anita’s lover, shot himself dead on her bed with one of Keith’s guns, apparently as a result of playing Russian roulette. Adding to an already unsurpassed store of rock-kid experiences, little Marlon Richard was in the house when it happened. Salem’s connection with a notorious seventeenth-century witch hunt reawakened the old rumors about Anita being a witch and prompted tabloid stories that she and her hapless toy boy had been involved in a local coven. For Keith, the once-bewitching, brainy blonde had become “like Hitler . . . trying to take everything down with her.”

  In 1979, after one or two inconclusive affairs (the baddest Stone being not that highly sexed as well as essentially monogamous), he had met a twenty-three-year-old American fashion model named Patti Hansen, recently the face of Calvin Klein on giant billboards in New York’s Times Square. He had pursued her with all the ardor of his romantic nature, bombarding her with love letters, some written in his own blood. Patti, surprisingly, had not turned tail and bolted, and the two were now permanently together. With upbeat natures as well as Vogue covers in common, Patti and Jerry became friends and allies—closer, in fact, than their respective Glimmer Twins would soon be.

  Despite having come out so much on top in his divorce, Mick still seemed to harbor great resentment toward Bianca, describing her as difficult and “devious,” and rejecting any idea that they might ever become friends. It particularly irked him that she intended to continue using his surname, even though claiming it had brought her nothing but unhappiness. He had no doubt she intended to exploit it to the full to make up the shortfall in her alimony.

  Still, a veneer of civility had to be maintained for the sake of their daughter. Mick received regular access to Jade—an area in which Bianca could really have been difficult or devious if she’d chosen—and remained as loving and attentive a father as ever. Jade joined him for some of the ’81 American tour, watching from the wings with the restive air of any ten-year-old visiting Dad at work.

  Jerry handled her unofficial stepmother’s role with the same aplomb as she did everything else. During the stop in Orlando, to play the Tangerine Bowl, she left off her makeup, scraped her hair into a ponytail, and took Jade and a group of other tour children off to spend the day at Disney World. Mick admitted that he’d have liked to go with them, but couldn’t face the kerfuffle that would result. “I do enjoy a good Big Dipper [roller coaster],” he added almost wistfully as he jogged up and down in his football player’s breeches, preparatory to facing the next eighty thousand.

  As things turned out, the uses to which Bianca put the Jagger name were not to distress Mick by earning her piles of money, or encroach on his territory in any way. For a time, she pursued her screen-acting career, appearing in one or two minor roles but scarcely justifying Andy Warhol’s view of her as a modern Greta Garbo. Then, in 1979, she returned to her native Nicaragua as part of a Red Cross delegation looking at the country’s reconstruction since the 1972 earthquake. Despite the aid that had been poured into it—not least via Mick and the Stones—it remained one of Latin America’s worst poverty black spots, and the grip of the corrupt Somoza family as secure as ever.

  From that moment Bianca’s life—hitherto about little but clothes and finding wealthy men to protect her—changed completely. Studio 54 lost its queen and the people of her own and neighboring countries, similarly oppressed by poverty and vicious despots, found a passionate, selfless advocate.

  In 1981, while Mick was gearing up for his American comeback, Bianca went to Honduras with a party of U.S. congressional delegates to observe the plight of refugees streaming over the border from civil war–torn El Salvador. As they watched, a Salvadoran death squad armed with M16 rifles rounded up a group of forty refugees and marched them away. Bianca and the other delegates followed the squad and shouted that only killing them, too, would stop them telling what they’d seen. As a result, the captives were released.

  Her international profile was raised still further when Nicaragua’s Somoza clan was finally overthrown by the revolutionary FSLN Party, or Sandinistas, and the U.S. government—fearing the spread of communism in Latin America—began lending covert support to a right-wing counterrevolutionary alliance known as the Contras. Bianca took part in lobbying against this policy and was a leading voice in the subsequent furor, when the Reagan administration was discovered to have secretly sold arms to Iran, its supposed archenemy, to fund the Contras. So the world finally did see a Jagger getting involved in politics and speaking out fearlessly.

  JOHN LENNON’S ASSASSINATION did not sour New York for Mick and certainly did not make the city feel too dangerous for him to continue to have a home there. But getting together with Jerry awakened the first serious interest he’d ever shown in accumulating property. By the early eighties, he was spending equal amounts of time in two different overseas locales, each in its own way satisfying his insatiable thirst for social status.

  The first was France’s Loire Valley, a region famous for its wines and the historic châteaus that give their names to the most exclusive vineyards. In the tiny village of Pocé-sur-Cisse, near Amboise, he bought a château named La Fourchette (the Fork) dating from 1710—the same year as his old house in Chelsea—and once owned by the Duc de Choiseul, finance minister to King Louis XVI. Quite small, as châteaus went, La Fourchette was surrounded by fruit trees somewhat reminiscent of Mick’s native Kent. History buff that he was, he discovered that, unlike many smaller Loire châteaus, it had not been built for a rich nobleman’s mistress; interestingly, too, it lacked a back staircase, suggesting its eighteenth-century occupants had kept no live-in servants. With it came a private chapel that could be converted into a recording studio. The property was utterly secluded and peaceful (save for the grunt of the wild boars bred on a neighboring farm), yet Paris was still within easy reach, and from nearby Tours an air taxi could whisk him across to London in only seventy minutes.

  The quiet of Pocé-sur-Cisse was not disturbed by its new rock-star seigneur. While at La Fourchette, Mick kept the lowest of profiles, driving around in an old Opel station wagon or a modest Nissan Micra, training for his tours on the poplar-lined back roads to Tours. Workers in local fields and vineyards grew accustomed to the sight of him shadowboxing, karate-chopping, or—an essential preshow exercise—running backward at high speed. Impressively to the French, his houseguests were not just family and music friends but eminent cultural figures like John Richardson, the art critic and biographer of Picasso. Richardson was full of admiration for the classic walled garden which Mick commissioned the society landscape designer Alvida Lees-Milne to lay out. He later recalled long, leisurely meals at “big trestle tables under the chestnut trees . . . the children having buns, the adults smoking joints . . .” There were also spectacular cross-dressing parties, for which Mick particularly enjoyed borrowing the more extravagant items from Jerry’s wardrobe.

  Like Keith, his preferred holiday destination had long been the West Indies, though on a more rarified level than Jamaica’s ganja belt. Since 1970, he had been paying regular visits to Mustique, a tiny island in the Grenadines owned by a British aris
tocrat, the Honorable Colin Tennant (aka the third Baron Glenconnor), and a favorite retreat of the Queen’s divorced sister, Princess Margaret. Other wealthy and titled people had homes on the island, and applicants to join its charmed circle were vetted as strictly as at any old-school Pall Mall Club. Trust Mick to zero in on the one place in Britain’s former empire where its upper classes still ruled triumphant.

  He had holidayed on Mustique while still with Bianca (as Jerry had with Bryan Ferry), and in that era—more than welcome, of course, to the ruling elite—had bought a small property which initially was not much more than a shack on the beach. This he now set about developing into a Japanese-themed six-bedroom villa with extensive grounds that included a koi pond and a series of pavilions connected by a walkway. The house was named Stargroves, after the Gothic folly in Berkshire he’d bought for Marianne Faithfull back in the sixties (and which, to Jerry’s relief, he’d finally sold). The Mustique Stargroves was to have a somewhat happier history, though it, too, would end up being for rent.

  Despite all the changes that Jerry brought to Mick’s life, one thing remained unalterably the same. It inspired a lugubrious bon mot from one of his on-the-road press officers, a man often required to smuggle some casual companion out of his hotel suite before journalists could be let in. “Does Mick play around?” the PR said with a hollow laugh. “Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?”

  For the rock star pushing forty, teenagers continued to have irresistible appeal. Around the time of the aptly named Some Girls album, he began dating a seventeen-year-old he had met, with Jerry by his side, at one of Ahmet Ertegun’s glittering parties. As well as belonging to a distinguished aristocratic and literary family—an irresistible combination for Mick—she was beautiful and highly intelligent, with a wicked sense of humor and a cynicism about the rock world that came as a refreshing change from goggle-eyed worship. She still lived at the family home in Kensington, where one evening her older sister answered the phone to someone calling himself Mick Jagger. “Yes, and I’m the Queen of Sheba,” her sister replied.