Jagger’s career and his private life were in a state of flux, matching the new decade. He said as much during the European tour, his inner uncertainty producing an interview of almost unprecedented candour. ‘You get to the point when you have to change everything – change your looks, change your money, change your sex, change your woman, because of the business.’
Changing his woman was proving a process far more painful than those casual words would suggest. He was still in love with Marianne, as well as bound to her by three years of familiarity and habit. Rather to his surprise, his love had stretched to pardoning her her fling with Mario Schifano and his own resultant worldwide humiliation. He had remained her protector the previous December, just after Altamont, when they appeared together before Great Marlborough Street Magistrates Court – still visibly estranged by Marianne’s Italian Prince Charming – to answer the drugs charge dating from the previous June. The arresting officers’ testimony unconsciously corroborated how Jagger had tried to shield and soothe Marianne during the bust, saying, ‘Don’t worry … it’s all right. Nothing will happen …’ The court fined him £200, but acquitted Marianne.
Back at 48 Cheyne Walk, the store of happiness continued to dwindle. Jagger was constantly absent, recording with the Stones, conferring with his new advisers – or seeing other women. Marianne’s heroin addiction deepened, her looks deteriorated, her behaviour grew erratic and irrational. In restaurants, as she herself admits, she would sometimes pass out face down in her food.
By the time Jagger left to go on a tour in August 1970, the pressure of changes about to be made had become unbearable. In the end, it was Marianne who took the initiative. ‘I knew it was the end of an era,’ she says. ‘I knew nothing could ever be the same again.’ So one night, taking Nicholas and a few clothes from the plundered wardrobes upstairs, she walked out.
For a time Jagger found solace in his ongoing affair with the actress and radio presenter Marsha Hunt. A stunning beauty under her mushroom cloud of Afro hair, she fascinated and amused him, yet offered no threat to his newfound bachelor independence. All she did say, quite straightforwardly, was that she would like to have a baby and wanted him to be the father.
His other affairs were numerous and short-lived. He fell into the habit of using his unfinished country house in Berkshire as a kind of illicit one-night hotel. Two years after buying Stargroves, he still had spent only a couple of nights under its Gothic roof. As caretakers he variously installed his parents, his younger brother Chris, and a young man named Maldwin Thomas who used to cut his hair in Knightsbridge. Maldwin grew accustomed to being awakened late at night by Jagger, with some temporary companion, demanding to be let into the guest cottage.
For months Jagger still did not accept that Marianne really had gone for good. He wrote to her and telephoned her constantly at her mother’s house in Berkshire. ‘In the end,’ Marianne says, ‘I let myself get fat. It was a conscious decision – I wanted to show I wasn’t in the market any more. When Mick walked in and saw me, his jaw dropped. I knew that really was the finish.’
* * *
The introduction was made formally, for once, after the Stones’ Paris Olympia show. ‘Mick – this is Bianca,’ Donald Cammell said, drawing the ever evasive rock star towards a young woman who had been watching the proceedings with the slightly contemptuous detachment of an Egyptian royal cat. ‘You two are going to have a great romance,’ Donald was inspired to add. ‘You were made for each other.’
Bianca Pérez Mora Macías was the daughter of a wealthy Nicaraguan commodities dealer. Her uncle was Nicaraguan ambassador to the Batista regime in Cuba. A distant cousin of her mother had been cultural attaché at the Nicaraguan embassy in Paris and afterwards ambassador in Bonn. Throughout Bianca’s childhood in Managua, Nicaragua was ruled, as it had been for forty years, by the corrupt and homicidal Somoza regime. Her father was apolitical but Bianca’s mother hated Somoza passionately. Women, however, were not supposed to have political convictions, as Bianca discovered when she and her brother, Carlos, joined student demonstrations in protest at the almost annual crop of opposition figures whom Somoza had eliminated.
Her parents divorced and her mother, inadequately provided for, was reduced to running a small restaurant in Managua. Though Bianca adored her father – whom she resembled in all but his green eyes – she rebelled fiercely against the principle of male domination he represented. She vowed she would never let herself be so dominated and so thrown aside.
In 1960, at the age of seventeen, she won a scholarship from the French government to study at the Institute of Political Science in Paris. Her mother encouraged her and her brother, Carlos, to leave Nicaragua, saying that if Carlos, especially, stayed on there he would probably be killed by the Somoza regime.
In Paris, Bianca was diverted into a social whirl that ultimately prevented the completion of her political science thesis. She became the girlfriend of Michael Caine, the British actor, who brought her to London, showed her off at the Dorchester, and took her shopping for clothes at Thea Porter’s Soho boutique. When she met Mick Jagger, she was deeply in love with Eddie Barclay, the head of France’s leading record label. Barclay was a much older man in whom, Bianca admitted, she saw a father figure. Since he was already married, she believed the affair was hopeless. She fell for Jagger not just because he was famous and fascinating and funny and clever, she later said, but also because he was young.
Her effect on him was mesmerizing. Until the Stones left Paris, he spent every possible minute of the day and night with her. She flew to join him in Rome and travelled with him for the rest of the tour. He asked her to return to England with him; she agreed. He had never made so many rapid, irrevocable decisions.
Bianca’s arrival sent shock waves through the Stones’ entourage, where those accustomed to compete for Jagger’s monarchic attention and favours now found themselves eclipsed and ignored. There was consternation especially among the Stones’ women, that travelling purdah compartment where Anita Pallenberg ruled like a blowsy blonde begum over Mick Taylor’s wife, Rose, and Bill Wyman’s Swedish girlfriend, Astrid Lundstrom. Anita instantly hated Bianca with a passion that some attributed to her own lingering designs on Mick. While pretending expansive friendship towards Bianca, insiders recall, she did everything possible to undermine her. She would borrow Bianca’s couture clothes, on the pretext that her own were still unpacked, and then leave the exquisite capes and jackets strewn about the floor. According to Spanish Tony Sanchez, Anita approached him to dig up dirt on Bianca – preferably that she was really a man who’d had a sex-change operation.
Rome has never been the ideal place for a celebrity to begin a clandestine romance. This particular celebrity knew no way of setting foot outside that would not bring a horde of paparazzi in ravening pursuit. The harassment grew so bad that Jagger ran up to one cameraman and punched him. The result was a heavy fine for assault and a house rule that, in future, paparazzi must be dealt with by Jagger’s bodyguards. That was the method in Vienna, while Jagger escaped by shinning over a wall. The outcome was only to be expected. By the time he returned to London with Bianca, the story of their courtship was international news. At Heathrow airport, Jagger took refuge in sardonic cliché, alleging they were ‘just good friends’. Bianca, fixing her tormentors with a dark frown, declared, ‘I have no name. I do not speak English.’ By November 1970 she was living with him at Stargroves, where the Stones had gone to try to finish their new album, Sticky Fingers. ‘They could hardly get any work done, with Mick the way he was about Bianca,’ Shirley Arnold says. ‘She’d come into the studio and give him the eye … he’d leave the other Stones and follow her upstairs.’
That same month, in St Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, Marsha Hunt gave birth to a baby daughter whom she named Karis. Though the press suspected who the father was, Marsha – for the moment – refused all inducements to name him. ‘We had a baby on purpose …’ was all she’d say. ‘Now he’s no longer involved w
ith us. At first I thought I cared for him a lot, but I found out afterwards I didn’t really know him at all …’
In 1970, Bill Wyman discovered that he owed £118,000 in back income tax. It was doubly a shock to the most provident and sensible Stone to find himself facing the vengeance of British tax law against all high earners who do not put away half their income religiously until the day the government asks for it. Bill, with his mathematical mind, instantly grasped the hopelessness of his position. ‘Once you owe £118,000 you never catch up. All the money you earn to pay that off, you get taxed on as well. You’re working for the government forever. And it’s your fault, even though you’re not to blame. All you’ve ever done is take advice. You have to trust somebody.’
Bill’s was a modest debt compared with those of Mick and Keith, whose incomes from song copyrights had, at least, equalled their share of the Stones’ collective earnings. ‘I just didn’t think about it,’ Jagger said later. ‘And no manager I ever had thought about it, even though they said they were going to make sure my taxes were paid. So, after working for eight years, I discovered nothing had been paid and I owed a fortune …’ All the rearguard actions fought by the accountant would be likely to reduce the whopping sum by no more than a fraction. The Inland Revenue, if necessary, was going to get blood out of the Stones.
There was only one alternative to gritting their teeth, paying up and wiping out all profits from their last US tour. By absenting themselves from Britain in the financial year 1971–72, explained Prince Rupert Loewenstein, they could escape all tax on their income in 1969–70. The same oracle would work, retrospectively, for every subsequent year they could prove non-residence in the United Kingdom.
The choice of France was an almost inevitable one in those days when tax exile still carried a cachet vaguely associated with W. Somerset Maugham. To Jagger – especially in light of his recent experience there – Paris was the only possible substitution for London. In France, the Stones, far more than the Beatles, had always been the height of chic. There were, moreover, positive fiscal advantages for a pop group serving an international market to be domiciled in a country relatively free of restrictive exchange controls. And, on top of everything else, there was the sunshine, the food and the booze.
In September 1970, discussions began between Prince Rupert and France’s leading financial lawyer, Maître Michard-Pellissier, about the feasibility of a mass migration by the Stones to Paris the following April. Discussions continued in October when the Stones passed through on tour – and were, apparently, not jeopardized by the street riots they sparked off. An early whiff of the plan reached the London Evening Standard via its Paris correspondent, Sam White; then the subject was replaced in the headlines by the riddle of Mick Jagger’s new Latin-American love.
The official announcement came in March 1971, at the start of a short British tour designed to give it maximum impact. Even the lordly Times and Telegraph sent reporters up to Newcastle upon Tyne to hear that the Stones were quitting Britain to settle together in France. Their decision, it was emphasized, had nothing to do with income tax, nor should any such unkind thing be adduced from their planned exit in April, just before the start of the new British tax year. ‘It’s not a case of running away from the tax man,’ their PR man Les Perrin said. ‘The Stones like France tremendously.’
‘If you know me,’ Jagger added with a grin, ‘you know I’ll probably be back in Britain more times than I have been in the past …’ He looked vaguely French, in his floppy blue cap and grey suede maxicoat. Bianca accompanied him on this journey of valediction to Coventry, Manchester and Glasgow; they posed together, revealing an almost eerie facial resemblance to one another and conversed in French for most of the time.
Essentially rootless as he had always been, Jagger found no difficulty in shutting up his two little-loved English properties and contemplating a tax exile’s life. The move was far harder for Bill and Charlie, with their settled homes – harder still for Mick Taylor, who had earned no very large sums yet but was none the less compelled to uproot his wife and new baby and follow the others abroad. As for Keith, he simply refused to acknowledge how quickly the days to April 5 were running out. He continued to lie prostrate beside his batik-draped lamp at 3 Cheyne Walk, as if he had all the time in the world.
Where the Stones were to settle in France remained undecided until only a week or so before their departure. Paris was ruled out at an early stage after it was hinted that Jagger, as a convicted drug user, might be subjected to twenty-four-hour police surveillance. The search then moved to the Riviera. A task force from the Stones’ office, led by Jo Bergman, travelled to Cannes and began inspecting likely properties for rent up and down the Côte d’Azur. It was rumoured that estate agents were being asked to provide bathrooms able to accommodate up to eight people for ‘Roman-style orgies’. A visit by the team to Mougins, an exclusive hamlet sheltering Pablo Picasso and Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, produced such alarm among the inhabitants that the mayor fought his next election campaign solely on a pledge that he would never permit Rolling Stones within the town limits.
By mid-March, only Charlie Watts had seen a property to his liking – a characteristically well-hidden farm in Provence. The others were to live together in Cannes while Jo Bergman continued the search for orgy-sized bathrooms. Jo had agreed to emigrate with them, leaving the London office in Shirley Arnold’s charge.
The Stones’ farewell to London was a concert at the Round House on March 14, followed by a televised appearance at their old haunt, the Marquee Club. Keith – by now in a state of open insurrection – sat at home in Cheyne Walk until almost the moment the cameras were set to roll. Then, furious and barefoot, he flung himself into his Bentley, drove to Soho, left the Bentley on a double yellow line, and stamped in to his place on the stage. It was unfortunate that the Marquee had the same manager, Harold Pendleton, who had provoked Keith often in the past. It was still more unfortunate that Pendleton wanted a large neon sign reading MARQUEE CLUB behind the Stones as they played. The upshot was that Keith – repeating history – swung his guitar at Harold Pendleton’s head, and had to be dragged from the club backwards, his bare feet trailing on the ground.
On the day of departure, Jo Bergman’s task force descended on 3 Cheyne Walk, picked up everything around Keith – furniture, bottles, half-full ashtrays, clothes, scarves, Marlon’s toys – packed it all into cartons, transported it across the Channel, and rearranged it in the same pattern around Keith as he subsided into his new home in Ville Franche.
On April 7, two days into their official exile, the Stones signed a new recording contract with Kinney Services, American parent company of the New York-based Atlantic label. They had chosen Atlantic for its reputation in soul music and because, of all the record-company moguls who had wooed them over the past year, Atlantic’s president, Ahmet Ertegun, had created easily the most favourable impression. Armenian by birth, son of Mustafa Kemal’s ambassador to Washington, Ertegun looked like a diplomat with his neat beard and highly polished alligator shoes. But there was no greater devotee of the blues and soul music which had made Atlantic’s name.
Ertegun had unblinkingly met Prince Rupert’s terms for an advance on six Rolling Stones’ albums to be delivered over four years. These would be released on the Stones’ own label, Rolling Stones Records, but manufactured and distributed by Atlantic. The head of the new label would be Marshall Chess, whose father, Leonard, had founded the famous Chess label in Chicago. Multimillion-dollar dealing and purist sentiment seemed, in all respects, to have made the perfect match.
It was no more than natural that, for the new label’s logo and visual accompaniments, Mick Jagger should employ the world’s most famous and infamous artist, Andy Warhol. Warhol’s design left no doubt as to whom the new deal had most gratified. Jagger’s own lips sagged open in a livid red escutcheon from which his unmistakable tongue slavered forth as if to lap up the promised millions. It was – and remains – among the m
ore brilliantly suggestive examples of corporate identification. Marianne Faithfull found it particularly evocative, remembering how much Jagger had admired a stage set like an open mouth at the Royal Ballet, years previously when she was educating him.
On April 16, the new label released its first product, a single with three tracks: Brown Sugar, Bitch, and Let It Rock. A week later came Sticky Fingers, an album whose packaging, no less than its contents, flaunted the new era of liberty. The sleeve, also designed by Andy Warhol, showed a denim-clad crotch, its fly a real zip fastener opening to reveal Mick Jagger’s lips and tongue. The reverse of the sleeve was the backside of the jeans.
Brown Sugar was an instant Jagger-Richard classic, fusing Keith’s indolently repetitive opening riff with Jagger’s hip-shaking Dixie drawl in a paean of racist sexism that could have been about brown Mexican heroin, or cunnilingus on a female plantation slave with Jagger as Simon Legree wondering ‘How come you taste so good?’ Brown Sugar was the stickiest treat to be found on Sticky Fingers. But for Wild Horses – a poignant memory of loving Marianne – the rest was little more than a glossary of drug jargon. ‘Cocaine eyes’, ‘speed freak hive’, ‘cousin cocaine’, ‘sister morphine’ were smuggled into the ear, wrapped in slickly inventive guitar and sax work. Even the album’s serial number was a nudge-nudging ‘COC 59100’.
Decca, meanwhile, had sought to clog the market by releasing a compilation of old Stones tracks entitled Stone Age and packaged in a sleeve much like the one for Beggars Banquet that Sir Edward Lewis had banned three years earlier. The Stones hated the compilation so much, they spent £700 on press advertisements warning their fans that it was substandard.
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