Mick Jagger

by Philip Norman

  Enigma was criticized for trivializing the Bletchley Park story by leaving out Alan Turing, the gay mathematical genius who was most instrumental in cracking Enigma, to create love interest between Kate Winslet and leading man Dougray Scott. But, mainly thanks to Winslet’s presence, it did moderately well at the box office. During filming, Mick had been exactly the hands-on presence Maggie Abbott had envisioned years before, paying visits to the cast and crew on location and joining in an anguished debate about rewriting the ending. He also was tireless in promoting it, even appearing on the cover of Saga, a magazine previously associated with retirement cruises and walking frames.

  He could hardly be criticized for underproductivity. In November came the fourth Jagger solo album, Goddess in the Doorway, accompanied by Jagged Films’ promotional TV documentary, Being Mick (subtitled You Would If You Could). But it was not quite the film which director Kevin Macdonald thought he’d been making in that year of extraordinary access. He’d been making cinema verité where what his subject actually wanted was a fairy tale. Everything awkward or spiky or adult had to be trimmed out so that being Mick would seem an existence as sunny and carefree as a teenager’s.

  In the approved cut, therefore, here were screaming crowds, police barriers, red carpets, and young female TV reporters, nearly swooning at the sight of him. Here he was taking his daughter Elizabeth to Elton John’s White Tie and Tiara charity summer garden party to mingle with the likes of Hugh Grant and the Enigma female lead, Kate Winslet. Here he was working with reverential young record producers, eerie throwbacks to the sixties with their long hair, straggly mustaches, and lumberjack shirts. Here he was in Cologne, watching U2’s Bono record a vocal for his album track “Joy,” receiving an emotional hug from his guest vocalist, being quizzed over a salad lunch about just how he and Keith had managed to write all those Stones songs, and being as uninformative as ever. (“Dunno . . . we just wrote ’em.”) Here he was reading an article on the restructuring of European finance in-flight to Miami to make another album track, “God Gave Me Everything,” at Lenny Kravitz’s house, a low-rise mansion with an all-through decor of burst-artery crimson.

  Many private, even intimate scenes were left in, most without the faintest icy breath of the Tyranny of Cool. Here he was giving a thoroughly relaxed, jolly party with Jerry at Downe House at the time they were supposedly separated. Here he was playing with his toddler son Gabriel, unable to stop a tiny forefinger being jammed unphotogenically up a nostril; here fitting Elizabeth and her little sister, Georgia, with earphones before their debut as his backup chorus; here giving an appreciative Georgia his “war voice,” like the clipped commentary in a 1940s newsreel: “. . . gled to be beck with their mothers and fathers, reunited after giving Hitler a biff on the nose.” Here he was, baseball-capped, taking part in the fathers’ race at Georgia’s school sports, watching Test cricket with his brother, Chris, and on Mustique with his father discussing long-ago athletic events in Dartford. Here he was on the phone to Karis, talking about her mother Marsha’s new career as a novelist; here voting in the 2001 General Election (“Name, please?” “Michael Jagger”); here in a study lined with leather-bound volumes like some lawyer’s office in a John Grisham story; here at Jerry’s house in France for Dave Stewart’s wedding, just before she waved him and the film crew off, thankful that he wasn’t her problem anymore.

  But neither of the two main strands in his life—what one might call the King George V elements—made it into the film. Apart from a frolicksome appearance by Woody at the Downe House party, there was no interaction with the other Stones. And although spectacular young women, including Sophie Dahl, had milled around Mick all through the filming, his only female companions on-screen were beautiful, wide-lipped daughters in various sizes. The one reference to this absent component came when his daughter Jade was arranging to meet him with a date (his not hers) yet to be decided. “Nobody younger than me, please,” Jade said half jokingly—but only half.

  There were a few close-to-introspective moments, as when he recalled toying with the idea of schoolteaching as a career and reflected that he’d used its essential quality in his very different profession: “If your father and grandfather were teachers, you can’t help telling other people what to do.” He said he lived the life he did for fear of turning “just an old fart” and that he had “a bohemian, artistic attitude to love and marriage.”

  Being Mick was picked up in America by ABC and shown at peak time during the Thanksgiving holiday. Although generally panned in the media as “vanity TV” and “pure Hello! TV,” it won a huge audience there, as it had on C4 in the UK, and left most of its audience liking Mick more, if still not remotely understanding him.

  Goddess in the Doorway fared less well despite all manner of promising ingredients. Several of the album’s tracks had been cowritten by Mick and his young producer, Matt Clifford, and there was studio backup from Pete Townshend, Lenny Kravitz, Bono, and the Haitian hip-hop star Wyclef Jean. Townshend praised the content for sounding nothing like the Stones, but in fact, “God Gave Me Everything,” recorded at Kravitz’s blood-red Miami mansion—with lyrics dashed off by Mick just before the session—was like a premium Stones track of the early seventies as well as his best solo performance since “Memo from Turner.” Goddess in the Doorway received a five-star “instant classic” rating from Rolling Stone’s editor in chief, Jann Wenner, but failed to chart significantly either in America or Britain. There hasn’t been another Mick Jagger album since.

  July 12, 2002, was the fortieth anniversary of the Stones’ debut at the Soho Marquee Club, when “R&B vocalist Mick Jagger” in his off-the-shoulder matelot-striped sweater had first edged uncertainly into the spotlight. The amazing milestone was marked by a compilation double album called Forty Licks—a sly pun on guitar soloing and that ever-active Lapping Tongue—which for the first time combined Stones tracks in their ownership with the pre-1971 catalog still controlled by their former manager, Allen Klein. For, despite periodic ligitation by Mick, Klein’s grip on all-time Jagger-Richard classics like “The Last Time” and “Get Off of My Cloud” and “19th Nervous Breakdown” and “Paint It Black” and “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” and “Satisfaction” had proved more unbreakable than any Enigma code.

  There was also a yearlong Licks world tour, sponsored by the online financial corporation E*TRADE and featuring the artiest stage set to date. Jeff Koons, the American artist famous for his stainless-steel balloon animals, contributed a graphic, and an animated video showed a naked young woman astride the Lapping Tongue, then being lapped to oblivion by it. Where once the most serious health hazard on Stones world tours had been diarrhea and gonorrhea, now there was severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), a pandemic impartially affecting East and West which had put the band’s rehearsal base of Toronto into virtual isolation. They took part in the Molson Canadian Rocks for Toronto Concert to raise funds for the stricken city, and later made their first-ever appearance in Hong Kong as another morale booster for a SARS emergency zone.

  On the tour’s American leg, a Texas billionaire paid them $7 million to play for five hundred people at a private party. And the personal gifts always showered on Mick included one of special significance. At the Wiltern Theater, Los Angeles, he was joined onstage by Solomon Burke, the blues legend whose “Everybody Needs Somebody to Love” used to be the Stones’ favorite show opener. Now weighing four hundred pounds, Burke had to be helped from the wings, wrapped in his trademark regal cloak. In the finale, he took off the cloak and draped it around Mick, as if he were handing on the mantle of R&B’s supreme monarch. The honor took Mick by surprise, and the heavy cloak almost knocked him over.

  Nor was the Stones’ fortieth Britain’s only significant anniversary that summer. It was fifty years since the Queen’s accession to the throne after the death of her father, George VI. And in addition to the expected round of royal visits and banquets, showing how immeasurably times had changed, there was a marathon pop concert
on the grounds of Buckingham Palace, opening with Brian May from Queen standing on the palace roof to play “God Save the Queen” on electric guitar. The Stones could not join Paul McCartney, Cliff Richard, and Brian Wilson at this royal command rave-up as they were in Toronto, rehearsing for their Licks tour. But after the live concert was over and Buckingham Palace glimmered in a garish blue son et lumière, what was its mega-volume overture? First, that pioneering fuzz-box riff, less guitar than diabolic pipe organ: “Duh-duh duh-duh-duh da-duh-duh . . .” Then that much-loved, unlovable voice in sarcastically soft register, those prodigious lips remolding every syllable: “Ah cain’t git no-o . . . Sa-tis-fack-shern . . .”

  All the British parents who had fulminated about “obscenity” back in 1965 little thought they were listening to an alternative National Anthem.

  IN THE QUEEN’S Golden Jubilee Birthday Honours, announced some weeks previously (and actually compiled by the Blair government), Mick had been given a knighthood for services to music. Ever since Harold Wilson had cannily made the Beatles Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire thirty-seven years earlier, successive administrations, Tory and Labour, had sought popularity by showering gongs among entertainers. But as almost every other name in the pop superechelon had received knighthoods—Cliff Richard, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Bob Geldof—Mick had always noticeably been passed over. With George Harrison now deceased, the only one behind him in the line was Ringo Starr.

  Accustomed as the British were to the debasement of the honors system, enough of his old notoriety lingered for the award to produce widespread disgust. One might almost have been back in 1965, with outraged colonels and civil servants returning their MBEs to protest against the Beatles’. Such an accolade seemed disproportionate for a career apparently lacking the necessary charitable good works—indeed, exclusively given over to egotism, selfishness, and greed. He had in fact been associated with numerous charity events, from the Nicaraguan earthquake appeal to the recent SARS benefit concerts, but, thanks to the Tyranny of Cool, had never drawn public notice to them. Thus, few disagreed with the acid observation of Charles Mosley from the honors system’s bible, Burke’s Peerage and Baronetage: “He should go in for a bit of charity. What about unwed mothers?”

  The outrage of old military men in the shires was nothing, however, to that of Keith Richards, for whom Mick’s acceptance of a knighthood was a betrayal of everything the Stones had always stood for. In public, Keith complained of conduct unbecoming a onetime lefty LSE student, adding that it was “ludicrous to take one of those gongs from the establishment when they did their very best to throw us in jail.” In private, he admitted feeling such “cold cold rage at [his former Twin’s] blind stupidity” that he almost pulled out of the Licks tour. “[Mick] said, ‘Tony Blair is insisting that I accept this.’ I said, ‘You can always say no.’ . . . But quite honestly, Mick’s fucked up so many times, what’s another fuckup?” Lest Downing Street be considering him for the royal sword touch, he added that he “wouldn’t let that family near me with a sharp stick let alone a sword.”

  Interviewing the now Sir Mick for BBC2’s Newsnight program, Robin Denselow cautiously mentioned that Keith was “not happy” about the honor.

  “He’s not a happy person,” Sir Mick replied.

  September 2002 found him back on the screen again, almost forty years after Performance. In The Man from Elysian Fields, he played Luther Fox, boss of the upmarket Elysian Fields escort agency—one service that, in real life, he’d never needed. Despite a strong cast including James Coburn, Anjelica Huston, and Andy Garcia, and being called “a work of elegance” by America’s hardest-to-please critic, Roger Ebert, the film did poorly in its home market and went straight to video in Britain. The suave Luther seemed an awkward fit for Sir Mick, though it did give him two lines with powerful personal resonance. One was “I’ve been blessed to live a life without boundaries”; the other, “You’re lucky to have a wife and children; don’t let their love slip through your fingers.”

  On a fashion shoot the previous year, he had met the American fashion stylist and designer L’Wren Scott. At thirty-four, she was twenty-three years his junior, and at six foot three, the tallest woman ever to excite his ardor. Thanks to the internal punctuation mark that gave her first name the appearance of a French noun (suggesting the tiniest of birds), she was known among couture colleagues as the Apostrophe. Even though in her company Sir Mick was reduced to the size of a semicolon, they’d begun dating.

  L’Wren had started life as Luann Bambrough, one of three adopted children of a Mormon insurance salesman living near Salt Lake City. In her teens (like Jerry Hall before her) she had escaped to Paris to become a model; her first name duly Frenchified, she then moved back to L.A. to work as a stylist for the fashion photographer Herb Ritts, superintending the wardrobe and hair of stars like Ellen Barkin, Sarah Jessica Parker, and Julianne Moore. A marriage to a London property developer had ended shortly before she met Sir Mick.

  They began to be photographed everywhere together, L’Wren tactfully dipping at the knees to reduce the disparity in their height. The joke, in fact, became not how small he was but how unreasonably tall she was. And in a remarkably brief time, the girlfriends as young as daughters, or younger, faded from contention. It really seemed that the Apostrophe had brought his wandering spirit to a full stop. Speaking from near Salt Lake City, her adoptive mother, Lula (not L’Ula), commented: “L’Wren is very independent and would not take any nonsense from anyone, no matter how famous they were. It does not surprise me at all that she’s tamed Mick. She is very much her own woman and it would be my guess that that is why Mick likes her.”

  In 2005, they were still together, like a high-fashion David and Goliath, at Hollywood’s Golden Globes. Sir Mick picked up the Best Original Song award for “Old Habits Die Hard,” written with Dave Stewart and featured in the remake of Alfie. In his acceptance speech, he thanked L’Wren for not wearing heels that night.

  The past few years had brought a steep decline in record sales thanks to free music downloads on personal computers and the competitive allure of DVDs and video games. Where once rock tours were seen as promotional campaigns for new albums, they were now every major act’s main source of income. And such was the weight of baby-boomer nostalgia that legendary bands who’d split up in acrimony decades before now found themselves offered fortunes for reunion tours—an experience Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour likened to “sleeping with your ex-wife.”

  But none of these reunited old stagers, from Floyd to the Monkees, could compete with the Stones on the road, any more than could contemporary superbands like the Kaiser Chiefs, Franz Ferdinand, the Backstreet Boys, or the Foo Fighters. The world tour around their album A Bigger Bang, between 2005 and 2007, broke their own record to become the world’s highest grossing yet at $558 million, with input from three different commercial sponsors, Tommy Hilfiger menswear, Sprint communications, and Castrol oil. Following the formula of the past three decades, mammoth shows alternated with more intimate ones in clubs or theaters, where the now-sixty-plus Sir Mick would still be bombarded with invitations from compliant young women in the form of notes, flowers, or the occasional flying bra.

  On February 18, 2006, in a free concert on Copacabana Beach, Rio de Janeiro, they played to a crowd three times as big as Woodstock’s, an estimated 1.5 million. When no deaths were reported, it could be said that the ghost of Altamont had been laid to rest. Two months later, they made their first-ever appearance in the People’s Republic of China (originally planned for the 2003 Licks tour but canceled because of the SARS outbreak). At the government’s request, “Brown Sugar,” “Honky Tonk Women,” and “Beast of Burden” were omitted from their show as too sexually suggestive, though the last named seemed more suggestive of their audience’s predicament under communism.

  In October, two nights at one of their smaller venues, New York’s Beacon Theater, became a cinema documentary, Shine a Light, named after a
song from Exile on Main St. and directed by Martin Scorsese. Since releasing Mean Streets with its Stones-heavy soundtrack in 1973, Scorsese genuinely had made cinema “the new rock ’n’ roll”; his keenness now to capture them in the flesh conferred huge prestige, as even Sir Mick and the Tyranny of Cool freely acknowledged. More pertinently, The Last Waltz, Scorsese’s documentary about the Band’s farewell concert in 1976, still stood as the best live-performance film ever.

  The Beacon Theater shows were a benefit for former president Bill Clinton’s foundation and were introduced by the man whose saxophone playing and sexual antics in the White House had given even the U.S. presidency a claim on being “the new rock ’n’ roll.” Among the first-night audience were his wife, Hillary, now a member of the Senate, and the former president of Poland, Aleksander Kwas´niewski. Beforehand, all the Stones, Keith included, lined up for a simpering meet-and-greet that would have sickened their young outlaw selves to the soul.

  Sixty-three-year-old Sir Mick’s performance was unchanged from when he was twenty-three—same tossing hair, staring eyes, and letter-box lips; same jacket shrugged halfway down his arms like a rebellious schoolboy; same stripperish bottom wiggling with fingers locked behind head; same flashes of girlish bare midriff. Donning a guitar, he duetted with Jack White, from Stones sound-alike band the White Stripes, on “Loving Cup,” making White’s enunciation seem almost BBC-perfect by comparison (“Goo me a liddle dranke . . . and Ah fawl down drernke”); then came a predictably sexy shimmy with Christina Aguilera on “Live with Me,” then a version of “Champagne & Reefer” with Buddy Guy, showing the many who did not realize that no white man (except Brian Jones) ever played blues harmonica better.