Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  On May 11, Mick Jagger telephoned Shirley Arnold in London and told her he was marrying Bianca two days from now in Saint Tropez. He then gave her a list of the seventy-odd people he had chosen as wedding guests. The list ranged from Paul McCartney to the Queen’s cousin Lord Lichfield. Shirley had to contact them all within twenty-four hours and get them on a specially chartered plane from London.

  Bianca was now four months pregnant, but that alone did not explain the headlong rush to matrimony. She would say later that she’d still felt unready to make such a binding commitment and that, despite her Catholic upbringing, she would have been quite prepared to have Jagger’s child as merely his girlfriend. The haste was all on Jagger’s side, indicating how the break-up with Marianne still affected him and how he missed the stable family life he’d enjoyed with her and Nicholas. Bianca none the less found herself characterized as a modern version of Delilah, the biblical houri who destroys Samson’s strength by cutting his Jagger-length hair. She was seen – even by generally tolerant Keith – as a disastrous threat to Mick’s image, to the Jagger–Richard songwriting partnership, to the whole future of the Stones as a band. Memories of what Yoko Ono had done to John Lennon and the Beatles were still all too fresh. Would the kingly head Stone likewise end up ceremonially planting acorns for peace or screaming musique concrète from inside a paper bag?

  The wedding, on May 13, was to consist of a civil and a religious ceremony. Since Bianca was a Catholic and Jagger nominally an Anglican, he had to agree to take preparatory instruction in his new wife’s faith. He did so willingly, in French, impressing the local abbé, Fr Lucien Baud, with his intelligence and receptivity. He seemed to want to do everything right. That, he said, was his reason for leaving the wedding arrangements so late – he wanted to stop it from turning into ‘a circus’.

  The world’s press had been let into the secret at an early stage. Planeloads of reporters and photographers took off from Heathrow airport on May 12 along with the chartered jet carrying Paul and Linda McCartney and their children, Ringo Starr, Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, Ossie Clark, Joe and Eva Jagger, the Stones PR man Les Perrin and his wife, Janey. ‘All the musicians were smoking drugs, even on that short journey,’ Janey Perrin says. ‘It worried the life out of me. “Right,” I said. “You, you and you – make sure you get rid of that before we land.”’

  The nuptial day began with a dispute between Mick and Bianca over the wedding contract they each had to sign. French law stipulates that a couple embarking on marriage must state whether their property is to be held in common or separately. A French marriage contract is a cold-blooded document listing everything of the bridegroom’s that the bride may or may not share. Jagger wanted Bianca to agree to waive any right to his possessions in the event of a divorce. Bianca was upset, and pleaded with Mick to call the wedding off. She would still have his child, she repeated, and they’d just live together. Mick grew angry, saying ‘Are you trying to make a fool of me in front of these people?’ So the contract was signed, witnessed by Mick’s assistant, Alan Dunn.

  Meanwhile, in the council chamber of the Hôtel de Ville, Mayor Marius Estezan waited to conduct the civil ceremony beneath a portrait of President Pompidou. In France, civil marriages are open to the public. The scrum of photographers and TV crews was only slightly less in the council chamber than in the sunshine outside.

  After twenty minutes’ delay, word was brought to the mayor that Jagger would not come unless the chamber was cleared of all but invited guests. The mayor replied that it was a public occasion and the public had a right to stay. Appeals to the commissioner of police produced the same answer. The mayor unhooked his official tricolour sash and said that if the couple did not appear in ten minutes the wedding would not take place.

  The ultimatum was telephoned to Jagger. ‘Then I’m not going through with it … it’s all off,’ Jagger retorted. Janey Perrin remembers hearing Les patiently remonstrating: ‘Don’t be silly. Don’t be silly …’

  Fifty minutes after the appointed time, bridegroom and bride entered the chamber together. Bianca wore a wide-brimmed white hat and a low-cut white dress whose clinging contours gave no sign of her pregnancy. Jagger wore a pale green three-piece suit and a flowered shirt, and looked wary and ill at ease. As they went to take their vows, fist-fights broke out among French photographers jockeying for the best vantage point. Bianca would later say, sadly, that, as far as she was concerned, her marriage ended before her wedding day was even half over.

  Jagger tried to turn back again, but was propelled by Les Perrin to the mayor’s table, almost dragging Bianca behind him. The civil marriage was accomplished at last, amid a clamour of automated shutters that obliged the mayor to raise his voice to an exasperated squeak. The official witnesses were Roger Vadim, the French director, and the film star Nathalie Delon. Behind them stood Keith, apparently having a whispered row with Anita.

  Up the whitewashed hill, Jagger’s theological instructor, abbé Baud, waited inside the pretty fishermen’s chapel of St Anne, facing a congregation whose numbers Les Perrin had controlled by the simple expedient of locking the front doors. When the newly-weds emerged from their hired Bentley, hard pressed by Paris-Match photographers, they had to hammer at the church door for admittance. They were heard at last and let in, and the religious part of the proceedings began. The bride was given away by Lord Lichfield. In his address, the abbé referred to his talks with Jagger. ‘You have told me that youth seeks happiness and a certain ideal and faith. I think you are seeking it, too, and I hope it arrives today with your marriage.’ At Bianca’s request, the organist played Bach’s wedding march and the theme from the film Love Story.

  The reception took place in a small theatre next to the Café des Arts. Lord Lichfield, in his other capacity as society photographer, moved around snapping the famous faces. Bianca, reappearing in a full skirt and a sequinned turban, managed to upstage even Brigitte Bardot. An awkward moment occurred when Keith Richard hurled an ashtray through a window, but it passed off when Keith passed out on the floor. Later, the bridegroom took the stage for an impromptu performance with Steven Stills and Doris Troy. Bianca, seemingly upset, returned to their hotel suite alone. The party went on all night, heedless of the various small children slumped half asleep amid the marijuana smoke. It is debatable which was the more melancholy sight: those neglected superstar children, or Joe and Eva Jagger, wandering around still trying to find an opportunity to give their son his wedding present.

  News of the wedding first reached Marianne Faithfull as she was en route to Paddington to catch a train down to her mother’s in Berkshire. In her shock, she staggered into an Indian restaurant, ordered a meal and began drinking heavily. Some time later, she passed out into a plate of curry and was removed to spend the night at Paddington Green police station.

  ‘Next morning, when they let me out, they realized I was famous and asked me to sign the visitors’ book. It was a brand-new police station: the only other signature in the book was the Home Secretary’s, after the official opening.’ Marianne signed her name under the Home Secretary’s and walked unsteadily out into Marylebone Road.

  Before leaving Britain, Keith and Anita had both undergone treatment for heroin addiction. Keith took his cure at Redlands with the famous ‘Dr Smith’, while Anita was conveyed to a clinic in Middlesex. No hope existed for either unless they could be kept scrupulously apart.

  Withdrawal from heroin – the cold turkey of John Lennon’s bleak song – has been compared to rolling naked on a bed of barbed wire while simultaneously swallowing a bottle of disinfectant. ‘You sweat … you scream … you hallucinate,’ Keith says, with what might seem scientific detachment. ‘I can remember being sure that behind the wallpaper there was a needle and some smack, if only I could get to it.’ Every so often, ‘Dr Smith’, a nurse with the cheerful manner of a district midwife, would pop another drug-substitute capsule under his tongue.

  ‘In seventy-two hours, if you can get through it, yo
u’re clean. But that’s never the problem. The problem is when you go back to your social circle – who are all drug pushers and junkies. In five minutes you can be on the stuff again.’

  Keith’s new home on the Riviera was Nellcôte, an enormous Roman-style villa, built by an eccentric English naval officer, on a hill above Villefranche-sur-Mer. Its steep garden was full of rare and exotic plants, its balustraded terrace commanding spectacular views of the mountains and Cap Ferrat. The rent was a thousand pounds per week with an option to buy for two million pounds if its new tenant found it agreeable.

  The villa’s airy, elegant salons were transformed, like all his previous habitations, into the environment Keith found most comfortable – that is to say, the semblance of a motel room recently ransacked by the police. Album sleeves, wine bottles, discarded clothes, half-smoked joints settled as usual on the grand piano and the marbled mantelpiece. Baby Marlon voyaged, nappy-less, along brocaded sofa rims. Nellcôte was the centre of the Stones’ exile, its familiar squalor lending continuity – comfort even – to the others’ expatriate lives. It was the meeting place for employees, business advisers, record-company people, fellow musicians, and all the multifarious freaks whom this added distance – from London or California – seldom deterred in their supplicant eagerness to hang out with Keith and the Stones. ‘In all the time we were in that place, we were never by ourselves,’ Anita says. ‘Day after day, it was ten people for lunch … twenty-five for dinner …’

  Though Bill and Charlie both lived nearby, they chose – no doubt wisely – to keep their households private and their public profile low. Jagger had rented a villa in St Tropez, but he and Bianca spent the greater part of the summer in Paris, staying at Mistinguett’s favourite retreat, L’Hôtel. From June to September Keith’s most steady companion was Mick Taylor, who lived with Rose in a much less grand house up the hill from Nellcôte. One weekend when the crowd of hangers-on there was particularly large, Keith and Anita knocked on Taylor’s door and said, ‘Can we come in for some peace and quiet?’

  For the first few weeks, Keith seemed content to absorb himself in the Riviera pursuits of eating, drinking, sunbathing, swimming, and sailing his boat, Mandrax, with whomever he could rouse from the Nellcôte floors to act as his crew. Heroin had not killed his taste for the outdoor life – as a two-, a five-, even a ten-year junkie, he would remain physically superior to Mick at his most ostentatiously clean-living and sportif. ‘Mick got very into tennis while we were in France. He took it very seriously. I hadn’t bothered since the tennis-club days, when I’d go with my mum and dad in Dartford. But I could still go out on a court and beat the shit out of Jagger any time.’

  He also found time for fatherhood. Two-year-old Marlon, thus far, had seen little home life outside the tumbled hotel suites where Shirley Arnold would put him to bed. Marlon learned to walk on a Rolling Stones concert stage; the first words he learned to speak were ‘room service’. In Villefranche, he was finally allowed to become a child. Keith devoted the best part of every day to him, carrying him around clamped to the skinny chest that once admitted no encumbrances but its guitar strap and dangling cocaine spoon.

  By early May, as his conduct at Jagger’s wedding showed, Keith was starting to chafe against his new life. More trouble broke out in June – a fight between Keith and the Beaulieu-sur-Mer harbourmaster, who had tried to stop him hitting an Italian motorist after a minor traffic scrape. According to Spanish Tony Sanchez, a Nellcôte house guest, Keith pulled a toy gun on the harbourmaster and was very nearly shot by the official’s own very authentic firearm.

  It was inevitable, as the months passed, that he and Anita should pull each other back to the only possible cure for their shared, oversurfeited boredom. A supply of cocaine arrived with Spanish Tony, hidden in a toy piano the dealer had brought for Marlon. Heroin was obtained for them by a French pusher with contacts in the Corsican underworld that ran the narcotics trade in Marseilles. Now they were ‘shooting up’ rather than ‘snorting’, buying the drug in £4,000 consignments that rarely lasted longer than a month.

  All summer long, the waterfront cafés of Villefranche swarmed with drug pushers of every kind and complexion, avid to supply – and, if they were fortunate, join – the orgies rumoured to take place each night up at Nellcôte. If rumour was to be believed, these orgies did not belong to ancient Rome so much as the wilder hillbilly regions of Kentucky. One English student, hoping to peddle his mite of hashish, found himself drawn into a French conversation that made the Mars bar legend sound positively conventional. ‘Zat’s right …’ his neighbour nodded. ‘Les poules … chickens. Zey do it with chickens …’ He was not referring to the Nellcôte cuisine.

  The strain of tax-exile life began to tell on even the most law-abiding publicity-shy element in the Stones’ circle. In June 1971 Charlie Watts’s wife, Shirley, was involved in an altercation with a customs officer at Nice airport and sentenced, in absentia, to six months’ imprisonment for assaulting him. The Aix-en-Provence appeal court later reduced her sentence to a suspended fifteen days, allowing her to re-enter the country. Charlie was, understandably, devastated by this first blot on his family name.

  It all added weight to Keith’s insistence that France was having a bad effect on them, and that the best cure was to get into a studio and start work on a new album. The Stones had been followed to France by their ‘Mighty Mobile’, a £65,000 trailer studio, equipped with every technological marvel, including closed-circuit television. Nellcôte, in addition, had a basement that could be converted into extra studio space.

  A new album was certainly due in early 1972, when Jagger planned for the Stones to tour America again. Atlantic wanted a special blockbuster to launch the tour and also counteract the flood of inferior compilations Decca were putting on the market (not to mention the proliferating bootleg albums recorded illegally at concerts).

  Keith, therefore, turned his villa over to the Stones, their session musicians, and all the extra personnel needed to build and maintain the improvised basement studio. Thus the album that was provisionally entitled Tropical Disease, and only later renamed Exile on Main Street, began late in 1971 as the biggest house party of Keith Richard’s hospitable career. ‘I can remember fifty people sitting down to lunch,’ Mick Taylor says. ‘It was like a holiday camp.’

  Jagger arrived from Paris leaving Bianca ensconced in their suite at L’Hôtel. Now eight months’ pregnant, she had refused to endure the longueurs of a Stones recording session and renew her former acquaintanceship with Anita. She would say later that she was scared of everyone to do with the Stones except Bill and Charlie, and that, while not wanting to be anywhere near Anita, she was tormented by rumours that Mick was having an affair with her.

  Jagger was visibly torn between his obligations to his wife and to his band, and tried to keep the peace by dashing back to be with Bianca whenever possible. ‘Mick’s fucked off to Paris again,’ Keith would tell the others peevishly, reawakening speculation that Bianca had eclipsed a love affair that long predated the one with Marianne.

  Recording in the basement of even a palatial French villa proved hideously difficult. Space was so limited that Nicky Hopkins, the pianist, had to sit in a separate cubbyhole. The power, as usual in France, flickered and faded eccentrically. The current chef, a Frenchman named Fat Jack, interrupted artistic flow by blowing up the kitchen. Keith and Anita were so strung out on heroin one night that they set fire to their own bed. Recording was interrupted again when a sneak thief walked into Nellcôte through an open door and stole most of Keith’s treasured guitar collection.

  On October 21, Bianca gave birth to a daughter at the Belvedere nursing home. Jagger announced that she would be called Jade ‘because she is very precious and quite, quite perfect … I’ve always been a good father,’ he added, ‘and this kid makes it easy to be.’ He phoned Keith to say that he would not be back in Villefranche for another three weeks. The Stones were to go on recording instrumental tracks, and he’
d fill in the vocals when he had time.

  There is a legend – half corroborated by Anita Pallenberg – that Exile on Main Street was recorded with power illicitly diverted from the French national railway system. Its more vital energy was tapped from a physique in which the most murderous of all drugs could not dull or smother the instinct to make marvellous sound. As Keith himself puts it, ‘While I was a junkie, I still learned to ski and I made Exile on Main Street.’

  On May 12, 1972, it was announced that the Stones’ $29 million lawsuit against Allen Klein had been settled out of court. No details were given, other than that ‘all outstanding differences’ between the parties had been resolved, and both wished it made clear that Klein’s company ABKCO Industries no longer had any part of managing or representing the Rolling Stones.

  The action might have continued for years longer, dragging the Stones’ frozen royalties with it, but for the intervention of Klein’s nephew, Ronnie Schneider, acting unofficially for Mick Jagger to procure a quick settlement. Jagger’s offer, relayed through Schneider, was to drop the lawsuit if Klein would release the cash he was holding and pay token damages. Since Schneider thoughtfully tape-recorded his talks with both his uncle and Jagger, it is possible to listen in on the transactions. ‘… we’ll meet ’im if ’e likes,’ Jagger’s voice says. ‘… the ’ole thing’s just gotten to be a drag …’ ‘The money’s there,’ Klein’s voice says. ‘… the payments are guaranteed …’ At one point he adds, rather plaintively, ‘I believe Mick Jagger still likes me …’

  Things did not go well thereafter for Klein. He had lost the jewel in his managerial crown in 1971 when Paul McCartney brought a successful action in the High Court to dissolve the Beatles’ partnership. Though still in titular control of Apple and of the two least accomplished Beatles, George Harrison and Ringo Starr, the ‘Robin Hood of Pop’ seemed to have spent most of the arrows in his quiver. In 1979, the United States Internal Revenue Service indicted him on six charges of tax evasion on $216,000 allegedly made from selling Beatles promo albums. Thanks largely to testimony by his old ‘enforcer’ Pete Bennett, he was convicted, fined $5,000 and given a two-month prison sentence. His attention moved from music to feature films (such as The Greek Tycoon) and productions for the Broadway stage, though he continued to control the US rights on all the Stones pre-Seventies records, music publishing and films.