Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  Formerly, Brian’s closest friends had been musicians, like Spencer Davis, Pete Townshend and George Harrison. Now, with Anita, he, too, was swept into the world of art galleries and dinner parties in tapestried Chelsea rooms. Anita found most pop musicians boring and their wives crushed almost into inaudibility by northern male chauvinism. ‘When John Lennon used to come to the house, he’d bring his wife, Cynthia. As soon as they arrived, Cyn would go upstairs, lock herself in the bog and not come out for the rest of the evening.’

  As well as a stunningly beautiful girl, Brian had found an accomplice whose penchant for mischief was more than a match for his own. Ronnie Schneider remembers what havoc the two of them caused in California when the Stones were having a day out at the beach, and everyone hired miniature power boats. ‘Anita in that power boat was deadly – she’d ram everyone into splinters. After a while, Brian turned his boat around and just headed out to sea. The lifeguards were ringing bells – the Coast Guard was about to be alerted. Brian just kept on going and going.

  ‘I said to him later, “Why did you do that, Brian?” He just grinned and said, “I was following the seagulls.”’

  As one unwilling eavesdropper can testify, Anita’s was the dominant role in the sex sessions that could last for days at a time. Dave Thomson, still occupying Brian’s spare room, heard noises which suggested Anita was initiating him into the more arcane sexual pleasures. ‘I actually saw her one night going into their room with a bloody great whip. I could hear her whipping Brian.’ Brian, for his part, had one deviant taste which surprised even Anita. He enjoyed setting fire to model cars and toy trains. The train-spotting craze of his boyhood was perpetuated by an elaborate miniature track layout, with which he would cover the entire living-room floor. Anita would photograph him as he crawled around, dousing miniature locomotives in lighter fluid and setting fire to them.

  Anita was behind the darkest of all their escapades. When Germany’s Stern magazine wanted to feature Brian on its cover, Anita persuaded him to be photographed in Nazi SS uniform, grinding a doll beneath one jack-booted heel. Stern rejected the cover and a furore broke out in the British press which Brian could not much appease by claiming he had meant to make an ‘anti-Nazi protest’ or, privately, that he’d been high on LSD at the time. ‘It was all my idea,’ Anita says. ‘It was naughty, but what the hell … He looked good in SS uniform.’

  Anita evidently brought out in Brian the latent femininity he had suppressed in relentless sexual buccaneering and his almost wilful fathering of children. ‘There was a legend that he broke out once, and jumped into bed with Mick. And one night, he got me to do him up in drag. You remember Françoise Hardy the French singer? Brian said “Can you do me up like Françoise Hardy?” So I gave him the full thing with make-up, clothes, a wig …’

  Anita would still go away on fashion jobs in France or Germany, arousing Brian to transports of jealousy – either devastated tears, such as he had wept to her in Munich, or the sudden peevish rage that could seize him. Like other girls before her, Anita suffered physical attacks, with his fists or any weapon that came to hand. ‘He would pick up anything – a tray of sandwiches, a whole table – and just throw it.’ When Anita accepted a film part with Volker Schlöndorff, Brian grabbed the script from her and tore it to shreds. She calmed him that time by suggesting he should compose the film’s musical score.

  To this inherent emotional instability was now added the effect of the LSD which Brian had regularly taken since his initiation in late 1965. The drug was already known to have a Russian-roulette quality, offering the entirely unpredictable alternatives of a good trip, when the world could shimmer like crystal, or a bad trip, through all the horrors of purgatory. For Brian – as some snapshots taken in a Soho basement show – a good trip meant grinning and cavorting like a little blond leprechaun. A bad trip brought hallucinations which left him crumpled up and whimpering with fear. ‘He’d see monsters,’ Anita Pallenberg says. ‘“Can’t you see them?” he’d ask me. “They’re all coming out of the wardrobe! They’re horrible!”’ At the album session, he refused to go into the studio where the other Stones were waiting. In his dazzled, horrified mind, the whole place was swarming with black beetles.

  SEVEN

  ‘IT’S DOWN TO ME; THE CHANGE HAS COME …’

  The place is a busy roundabout in west London, opposite the Sixties landmark, the Cherry Blossom boot polish factory. A black Rolls-Royce detaches itself from the traffic and sweeps to a stop on the forecourt of the Talgarth service station. Half a dozen pairs of eyes idly settle on the figure that alights from it and walks, with tentative, tripping steps towards the air-supply line. ‘… Mick Jagger, isn’t it?’ someone whispers. His companions stare incredulously at the meagre body, festooned with fashionable scarves and bangles like a hurriedly dressed doll; at the mounds of hair combed down around cautious eyes and drawn-in lips; at the spindly legs on too-high boot heels, almost stumbling. Can it be only this which threatens their daughters, girlfriends and young wives? The notion is so confusing that Jagger is not molested, shouted at or even overtly recognized. The moment passes in embarrassed conspiracy not to see or be seen.

  Not since ancient Greece had gods formed so visible and numerous a class as in Britain in 1966 under the pullulating Olympus of the pop music industry. And, as in those mythical times, the gods came in every shape and size. There were tall ones, short ones, fat ones and skinny ones. There were some with fresh faces, and others afflicted with scrofulous acne. There were even those in the mop-top multitude with thinning hair or clumsily positioned toupees. There were those who received the rites of worship accorded all under twenty-five, despite having the raddled and debauched appearance of middle-aged child molesters.

  Fan adoration made allowance for these varieties, oddities and mutations. Behind the screams lay remembrance that the hitmakers of the moment were, after all, only quartets of lads from Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham or Stoke Poges. Screams were emitted as much on principle as anything: they stopped as suddenly as they began, leaving only drenched mascara behind. Doctors and psychologists who analysed them – usually for a fat fee in a Sunday tabloid newspaper – were unanimous in pronouncing them fundamentally harmless.

  Where Mick Jagger was concerned, however, the doctors and psychologists could offer no such comfortingly simplistic diagnosis. Elvis Presley at his most scandalous had not exerted a power so wholly and disturbingly physical. Presley, while he made girls scream, did not have Jagger’s ability to make men feel uncomfortable. The effect was more akin to a male ballet dancer with his conflicting and colliding sexuality: the swan’s neck and smeared harlot eyes allied to an overstuffed and straining cod-piece. Small wonder that lorry drivers at the Talgarth service station, that day in 1966, stared uncomfortably off toward the boot polish factory.

  Combo, the male pop fan magazine, expressed the prevailing confusion as early as 1964 with a story ‘categorically denying’ rumours that Mick Jagger was about to go to Sweden and have a sex-change operation.

  That conundrum continued throughout the personality which Jagger offered to his public. On the one hand, there was the loutishness, assiduously cultivated: the Christian name cut down to its curt proletarian root; the surname, so befitting jagged doings, derived – or so he liked to claim – from an old English word for ‘knifer’ or footpad. On the other hand were the teasing intimations of sensitivity, intelligence, even intellect; the sense that, even as he climbed the hit parade, Mick Jagger was also steadily scaling the ladder of society.

  No one better illustrated how the ancient redoubts of the British class system had dissolved under pressure both from without and within. Trendy magazines like Nova, Queen and London Life, teemed with stories about youthful peers and baronets, prised from a stately heritage, democratized in Carnaby Street and launched into the King’s Road as hustling impresarios, gentlemen’s outfitters or restaurateurs. Just as potent were the tales of working-class boys, propelled upward by fashion or
photography to mingle, unabashed, with the international jet set. The word of the moment was ‘classless’, applied without discrimination to the clothes and hairdos and, above all, the curious, teeth-clenching accents common to those whom hopes of cashing in on the seemingly endless youth boom had moved upwards or downwards. Classlessness was simply degrees of affectation and, as such, produced snobbery more rigid and hierarchical than any it claimed to replace. Mick Jagger, alternately slurring Cockney and lispingly public school – with both incarnations clearly directed as social betterment – was classlessness incarnate.

  Jagger’s face seemed to express the sensation, common to so many, of finding oneself young, beautiful and rich in an era increasingly inclined to worship youth, beauty and spending power. What made his expression so piquant was that it responded to such idolatry, not acquiescently, as young gods and Beatles should, but with indifference, even hostility – a smouldering ill-will which silk clothes, fine food, wine, women and every conceivable physical pampering somehow aggravated. The real pleasure of being Mick Jagger, one felt, was in having everything but being tempted by nothing: a drained and languorous, exquisitely photogenic ennui.

  It was an attitude richly conveyed by the Stones’ new single, 19th Nervous Breakdown. The song was a lampoon of upper-class girls at upper-class parties – ‘dismal, dull affairs’ – and, by implication, their foolish efforts to insinuate themselves into the queue trying to catch Jagger’s eye. ‘It seems to me that you have seen too much in too few years,’ he sang, doubtless with the same mock psychoanalysis he used in real life to deflate some luckless, pushy deb.

  Glimpses of the other Jagger, sensitive, poetic and vulnerable, were positioned among the Stones’ recorded output with tripwire delicacy. The B-side of 19th Nervous Breakdown was As Tears Go By, the song originally written for Marianne Faithfull, now scored for strings – in obvious imitation of Paul McCartney’s Yesterday – and lisped by Jagger with all the pathos of Tiny Tim in his chimney corner. Choirboy innocence featured also on Lady Jane, a mini-madrigal written by Jagger for the Stones’ next album, even though the title had been inspired by Lady Chatterley’s Lover (it was Mellors’s word for Connie’s vagina) and the chorister in question seems to be addressing various members of an Elizabethan seraglio.

  The fourth Rolling Stones album, Aftermath – released in April 1966 – confirmed Jagger’s new individual eminence while apparently preserving the Stones’ interior democracy. The difference was that all fourteen tracks were Jagger-Richard songs, with lyrics written almost entirely by Jagger. Even Andrew Loog Oldham’s presence was diminished, owing to sudden independence of spirit on Decca Records’ part. Decca had refused to accept the album’s original title, Could You Walk on the Water?, and the accompanying sleeve photograph of the Stones immersed up to their necks in an urban reservoir. Oldham’s customary sleevenote extravaganza was dropped also, in favour of straightforward commentary by Dave Hassinger, the RCA studio engineer. Oldham’s credits were limited to ‘producer’ and, under his old alias ‘Sandy Beach’, designer of a bright-pink substitute cover.

  On Aftermath, Jagger’s shifting poses of scornful misogyny and little-boy winsomeness mingled with virtuoso playing by Brian Jones on a range of instruments seldom seen before in a pop recording studio. The opening track, Mother’s Little Helper – a satire about a pill-addicted housewife – featured Brian on Indian sitar, an instrument also adopted by George Harrison, but played here with a feel for its strange, hot, jangling dissonance that Harrison could not bring to the Beatles’ Norwegian Wood. On two tracks, Lady Jane and Waiting, Brian played dulcimer, a tiny stringed instrument, half-mandolin, half-harp, given to him by the American folk singer Richard Farina. On two more, Out of Time and Under My Thumb, he played marimba, the African xylophone.

  Brian’s intros and solos and inter-verse embroidery gave Aftermath a visual quality that no Stones album would ever quite recapture. Through Brian, Jagger’s songs of callow male triumph took on the chameleon colours of ‘Swinging London’ six months in advance of the Beatles’ Revolver. Most evocative of all was – and still is – Under My Thumb, with its marimba notes circling downward to a strange pot-pourri of electric keyboard, asymmetric drum brushes and offkey guitar.

  Under My Thumb, with its crowing victory over a recalcitrant female ego, was not a song likely to gladden the heart of Chrissie Shrimpton. Still less, Out of Time, insistently taunting, ‘You’re obsolete, my baby. My poor old-fashioned baby …’ Now that Mick was so famous and fashionable, he felt he should be seen with a girl more famous and fashionable than Jean Shrimpton’s younger sister. Jagger the pop star wanted no part now of the commitment which Jagger the less cautious economics student had made eighteen months before, and which Chrissie regarded as still binding. Even in its happiest phase, their relationship had been stormy. Now the battles went on continually, often before an audience uncomfortably aware, as she was not, that Chrissie’s time was running out.

  Their lives were intertwined in a way that Jagger still shrank from trying to unravel. They had lived together for almost a year, first in a cramped basement in Bryanston Mews, subsequently in Jagger’s much plusher £50 per week flat at Harley House, a Marylebone Road mansion block. Chrissie had even left her secretarial job at Decca to work for Andrew Loog Oldham. As Mick Jagger’s girlfriend, she was herself something of a personality. Mod, the latest American fan magazine, ran a regular column by Chrissie, ‘From London With Luv’, describing the Stones-Beatles social circle in terms of cosy domesticity. ‘Mick and I went down to visit George and Pattie Harrison last week … We sat in John’s private cinema, had hot chocolate and watched a film called Citizen Kane … I think Stevie Winwood is the best singer we have. (Ouch! Mick has just hit me.) … Recently I had my 21st birthday. Mick gave me a huge rocking horse which I named Petunia …’

  A picture spread of Jagger in another American teen mag tells a somewhat different story. We see Jagger variously seated before a gilded Victorian mirror, lounging against a G-Plan shelf unit (on which a claret bottle basket is deliberately visible) and at breakfast, surrounded by ‘outsize cups of Cantonese design’. The scene is worthy of one of those Edwardian young men about town whose only domestic companion would be a discreetly gliding gentleman’s gentleman.

  The monocled young rakes who would leave their Mayfair eyries to sport in the mire of Soho or Seven Dials had not enjoyed female flesh in as much quantity, and with such small regard, as this pale London lordling in his Harley House ‘pad’. The fastidious sneer to be seen on Jagger’s face in almost any female company hinted at how easily sex presented itself to him, and how little he esteemed the girls who offered their bodies, in any position, for however brief a proprietorial grip on his arm. It was part of his peculiar appeal, that aura of sexual surfeit so intense as to produce a kind of exhausted virginality.

  On tour, Chrissie could not help but guess, Mick was as active as any of the Stones in the sexual orgies that filled out time between one concert and the next. Their latter American tours had witnessed the advent of the groupie: a type of girl who would tenaciously follow this or that English group, intent on bedding one of them, or all of them (or, in some spectacular cases, all simultaneously). Brian Jones told the story of going into another group’s hotel suite to find its four members occupied with a single groupie. ‘Come on, Brian,’ one of them had shouted. ‘There’s room for you as well …’

  Mick hid such things from Chrissie as he hid them from the world, behind the impenetrable mask of his cool. Journalists who interviewed him noticed his growing adeptness at side-stepping questions, or else answering them with an open-faced candour which only later revealed itself as the vehicle for no information whatever. This convenient amnesia blanketed his home and school background and all specifics of his time at the LSE. As far as the world could gather, Mick Jagger had been born and bred a star and, under the closest scrutiny, remained just as bright, remote and featureless.

  The mask could slip – as when
, in a fit of rage against Sir Edward Lewis, he called the Decca chairman ‘a fuckin’ old idiot’; or when, on the Stones’ 1965 European tour, he outraged the German press by goose-stepping around the stage in time to Satisfaction. There were also the moments when his cautious and self-conscious nature gave way to something altogether different, feline and outrageous – in the recently revived theatrical term, ‘camp’. He had once let himself be photographed in a BBC make-up department, sitting under the dryer with his hair in a net like some middle-aged housewife. When the Stones took over a whole edition of Ready, Steady, Go as hosts, Mick appeared with Oldham, miming to Sonny and Cher’s I Got You Babe, exchanging fond smiles and stroking each other’s hair.

  His closest friend outside the Stones was David Bailey, the young cockney photographer, who had become almost as famous – and outrageous – as a pop star. When Bailey shocked Britain by getting married in a pullover, Mick Jagger was his equally untailcoated best man. Bailey’s photographs in American Vogue had long since taken him to the heart of the, rather older, New York in-crowd ruled by Andy Warhol and Baby Jane Holzer. The Stones played for Baby Jane’s birthday party at the New York Academy of Music, prompting Tom Wolfe to an early effusion of New Journalism on the subject of Jagger’s mouth. Warhol remembered the style Jagger could get with ordinary cheap Carnaby clothes, ‘putting together pants and jackets that no one else would think of doing’.

  There was another side to Jagger’s cautious nature, seen only by those select few friends he would agree to meet in pubs and restaurants. He hated, in almost any circumstances, to part with money. His extreme thrift was all the more noticeable in a milieu where wild spending, on clothes and cars and country estates, was part of the glamour passed on to fans. ‘The Mojos shared out £100 to go shopping,’ ran a typical fan mag piece, ‘– and that’s not peanuts!’ Jagger’s income already equalled all the Mojos’ combined, yet he remained studentishly frugal, offering a sort of quasi-Marxist indifference to money as his alibi for always letting others pick up the tab. Even in this outwardly affluent post-Klein period, when all the Stones were following Beatle precedent and investing in country houses, Jagger remained the sort of person who would call round at David Bailey’s studio and ask if he could sleep on the couch.