Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  He claimed to have been baffled by the mystery complaint (eventually diagnosed as anorexia nervosa) which whittled his nineteen-year-old bride down to the shape of an Ethiopian famine victim, with legs described by one female reporter as ‘matchsticks with the wood scraped off’. From the very beginning, married life was carried on at separate addresses, with Bill, by his own account, constantly on the phone to Mandy, begging her to seek medical help. The upshot seems to have been that a millionaire rock star, lord of the manor of Gedding and Thormwood, was seldom able to be with his wife without her mother, her sister and, frequently, aunts and uncles, too, seated at the other end of the sofa. Using the Daily Mail as a confessor, he finally poured out a list of marital grievances almost as numerous as those against Mick and Keith: how the marriage had been barely consummated, how Mandy cared too much for publicity, how her mother upset the Gedding Hall servants, how he returned from the Stones’ last tour to ‘an empty flat’, how the Smith family even laughed and joked around him on the evening after his father’s funeral. The liaison with Mandy at thirteen, he concluded, had been ‘morally wrong – but it happened’. A friend says, ‘I think the whole thing with Mandy fucked him up more than he knew.’

  Five months after his divorce, he married Suzanne Daccosta, a thirty-three-year-old Californian fashion designer whom he had met in France more than a decade previously. ‘This is like a spring clean for me and a fresh start in my life,’ he said. ‘I’m so happy I can’t describe it. It feels like the first time I’ve ever been married. We want to start a family as soon as possible …’ On the same day that Bill wed Suzanne, Mandy called a press conference in full football kit to announce her own imminent marriage to Tottenham Hotspur star Pat van den Hauwe.

  Could the Stones go on without him? Could Hamlet be played without the speech of the second gravedigger? The band’s original five-man line-up might have undergone amazingly few changes over four decades. But it had long since let in extra hands, hired-gun guitarists and keyboard players, to marginalize its once-crucial rhythm section. On the Stones’ next tour, Bill’s role on bass was taken over by American session-player Darryl Jones, with not a single desolate wail nor disappointed scream from the audience. Not until Geri Halliwell left the Spice Girls would there be a more poignant demonstration of someone being ‘history’.

  For his old, unsatisfactory life on the road and in the studio, Bill substituted the diary-jammed routine of an all-purpose showbiz star, playing pro-celebrity cricket matches, winning TV pop trivia quizzes, turning out at gala benefits in aid of cancer research, albeit with fag still doggedly pasted to his lower lip. He promised a sequel to his autobiography, Stone Alone, which by the end of almost 700 pages still had reached only the year 1969. He became that emblematic modern figure, the older husband on his second marriage who joyfully submits to all the domestic routine he avoided during his first one. At La Colombe D’Or, the inn near his home in Provence, he can often be seen devotedly tending his three little girls, Catherine, Jessica and Matilda.

  The only part of his life on hold has been music. In the early Nineties, a Bill Wyman solo album entitled Stuff – its fifty-six-year-old voice sounding weirdly like that of a robotic sixteen-year-old – found a public only in Japan. ‘All the publicity over Mandy and quitting the Stones cut no ice with any of the British or American record labels,’ an associate says. ‘They decided he didn’t have anything to say in the modern market.’ To his rescue, ironically, came Andrew Loog Oldham, reappearing on the London music scene after two decades in America and Colombia. With his old Sixties associate, Tony Calder, Oldham relaunched Immediate, the record label they had floated on the back of the Stones’ success twenty-seven years previously. Bill Wyman’s Stuff album became the new Immediate label’s first major release, supplemented by an updated mix of his hit single, Si Si Je Suis Un Rock Star. But, alas, the Oldham venture lasted only a few months.

  Bill Wyman is a rock legend none the less, always able to garner a round of nostalgic applause when he takes the stage in Travelin’ Wilbury style supergroups with the likes of Georgie Fame, Gary Booker and Albert Lee. ‘Of all the Stones I knew,’ Oldham says, ‘Bill’s the one most at peace with himself today. He’s certainly more so than Keith … and he’s got to be more so than Mick … I’m sorry now I said he had no taste and nicknamed him Mister Formica. Because, you have to admit, Formica does wear pretty well.’

  Andrew Loog Oldham now lives permanently in Bogotà with his Colombian wife, Esther and their son, Max. Despite the earthquakes and endemic drug wars, he says he finds it peaceful there, ‘a bit like Britain in the mid-Fifties’.

  Oldham has been asked the same question many times over the past three decades. Does he ever regret letting go of the Rolling Stones? Doesn’t he lie awake at night, sweating and cursing himself for no longer having a piece of the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band? His answer is always the same. ‘No – not ever. How many times can I go on saying no? The Rolling Stones were just one strand in the things I was doing at that time. In a lot of ways, they took me where I never wanted to go. I’ve never regretted my life without them for a single second.’

  The mid-Nineties attempt to relaunch Immediate Records with Bill Wyman on its roster did not work out, thanks mainly to Oldham’s heavy concurrent ingestion of drugs and alcohol. Not long afterwards, he had a drug-induced vision that finally brought home what he was doing to himself. Walking along New York’s Fifth Avenue early one morning, he saw a white horse cantering between the Algonquin and Royalton hotels, fifteen storeys high. ‘I tried to go “ha-ha” and blink it away,’ he recalls. ‘But it wouldn’t blink away.’

  That experience spurred him to go on a seven-week detox programme with an American herbalist who was also a Scientologist. Later, both he and his wife, Esther, went on a forty-day purification course prescribed by the Church of Scientology. Both are now committed Scientologists, and follow a strict diet calculated according to their blood types.

  In 2000, he published his autobiography, Stoned, a long-awaited work that was expected to rattle a good few skeletons, particularly in the Jagger closet. But both it and its equally racy sequel, 2Stoned, remained coy about their relationship, admitting they’d once shared a bed but insisting it had been only in schoolboy innocence.

  The middle-aged, non-boozing Scientologist Andrew Loog Oldham has never entirely lost his old ‘style to the point of self-destruction’. Emerging from a London hotel lift recently, he suddenly found himself face to face with Paul McCartney. McCartney did a startled doubletake, dimly remembering wild days in the early Sixties, when the Beatles and Stones jointly ruled the world, and one wicked young hustler was inside the glorious loop with them.

  ‘Don’t I know you?’ McCartney asked.

  ‘No,’ Oldham replied. And swaggered off into the crowd.

  EIGHTEEN

  ‘SOME GIRLS GIVE ME CHILDREN …’

  The Rolling Stones at Wembley Stadium, June, 1999. A fitting encounter, you might think, between two of the most notorious old hags in British popular culture.

  Wembley from a distance may still look a proud enough place with its triumphal avenue for Cup Final heroes, its towering fortress walls and wedding-ice art deco domes. But venture nearer and you discover the reality – the rusting turnstiles, the grim stone stairways, the concourses reeking of stale beer and onions. On the terraces, the incalculable human traffic of seventy-six years has left the floor coated in a kind of primordial black slime. It sucks at your heels as you sit there on your demeaningly small metal seat, inhaling the vast outdoor fug of nicotine and Carlsberg Special Brew. If ever a great British institution cried out for the wrecker’s ball, this is it.

  The same might be said of tonight’s headline attraction, a supergroup just as huge and history-packed and decrepit. Once, undisputedly, the world’s greatest rock ’n’ roll band, kings of Wembley or any stadium you cared to name; now, a quartet of old reprobates, staggering on too-high heels, back to draw yet again on what
someone aptly called ‘the biggest cashpoint in the universe’. And at their head, a man who now knows how horrifically sudden can be the descent from idol to Aunt Sally.

  Few modern reputations have seemed to crumble so disastrously as that of the artist once known as Michael Philip Jagger. As recently as a decade ago, Jagger was still adulated as a twentieth-century sexual icon with the combined allure of Valentino and Nijinsky, respected as the dynamo who kept the Stones rolling from age to age with his phenomenal physical fitness, admired for having risen from proto-punk callowness in the 1960s to become – in the words of his most incendiary song lyric – ‘a man of wealth and taste’.

  Then, in the early and mid-Nineties, all that carefully crafted image and autodidactism and social climbing suddenly went to hell. Jagger’s repeated undignified flings with women in their twenties finally goaded Jerry Hall, his helpmeet of twenty years, to petition for divorce on the grounds of ‘multiple infidelity’. His response was to counterclaim that their wedding, nine years previously in a Balinese woodcarver’s hut, had no legal validity. To the press and public, the Nijinsky of the rock stage metamorphosed into a randy old skinflint vainly seeking to renew his youth with girls young enough to be his daughter; pathetically unable to commit himself even to a woman who had borne him four children, and willing to resort to any strategem that might stop her getting her hands on his money.

  Contempt for women might not be anything new with Jagger, but his perceived contempt for his public had never reached such a pitch before. The Stones’ summer 1999 return to Britain had actually been scheduled as part of their Bridges to Babylon world tour a year earlier. It was called off after tax changes in Gordon Brown’s 1998 Budget threatened to erode a tour gross conservatively estimated at $300 million. The 300,000 fans who had already bought tickets learned that they would not see their idols until sometime in the next and more favourable tax year.

  Although the decision was presented as a collective one by the band, everyone knew, or thought they did, who wielded supreme executive power within it. The nation that had first raised Jagger to superstardom (as well as handcuffing him and flinging him into prison) bridled under the outrageous snub. Not since the late 1960s had there been as many negative Jagger headlines, and even then they did not so insistently rhyme Jumpin’ Jack Flash with ‘cash cash cash’.

  This Stones Wembley Stadium concert on a muggy, overcast June evening is thus an almost visible mountain for Jagger to climb. The audience who have waited almost a year for their tickets to be honoured seem in anything but a party mood. A good third are female, today’s genuine Honky-Tonk Women who drink beer from the bottle, smoke and swear as lustily as any man. Short shrift here, you’d think, for the Stones’ extensive male-chauvinist back catalogue, Under my Thumb, Brown Sugar, 19th Nervous Breakdown, Stupid Girl and all the rest. Their $4 million stage set, flanked by gold Hindu goddesses and giant braziers, arouses puzzlement rather than awe. Wasn’t punk rock meant to have blown away all such pomp and hubris more than twenty years ago? Even the ubiquitous Jagger logo – the tongue sagging lasciviously from overstuffed, ungracious lips, reproduced on tickets, programmes, posters, T-shirts, red fabric waving-mitts – seems to have lost its old power to tickle and titillate. This is a night, you feel, when Mick really had better watch his mouth.

  Then comes the big surprise. Almost since Rolling Stones concerts began, audiences have been resigned to waiting two or even three hours before the band can be bothered to play. But this evening, we are barely thirty-five minutes past the scheduled show time. The giant Hindu goddesses suddenly take on an eerie golden glow, like ropey special effects in a Ray Harryhausen film. White neon light frames the oval video screen suspended above the stage. There on film are the four Stones, clad in maxicoats, with every facial line airbrushed out, loping along in a formation that might have been choreographed by Quentin Tarantino – Reservoir Dogs with the faces of Marcel Marceau mimes.

  And here they are in the etched and weathered flesh: Charlie Watts, at fifty-eight paradoxically the youngest looking of the four, wearing the same glum look he’s had since the year of the Profumo Scandal; Ronnie Wood, at fifty-two the ‘baby’ of the group, with the elfin frame, silver bangles and ink-black pompadour that, you feel, the Arts Council could usefully fund as a perfectly preserved specimen of 1970s rock stardom; Keith Richards, at fifty-six no longer the Human Riff so much as the Walking Cough, his white shirt split all down a skeletal ribcage, his scanty hair dyed blue and hung with what seems to be old-fashioned women’s suspenders and metal mousetraps. And, in the eye of the human storm, where he has lived for almost forty years, he-e-ere’s Mick.

  Even for one more than usually well versed in all Jagger’s multifarious schticks and posturings, it is an impressive moment. At this distance you cannot see the granite-grooved face, the sunken-in eyes, the lips no longer full and saggy but pinched and bloodless. You can see only the undiminished hair in its endlessly modish cut; the taut frame and knock-kneed, flat-footed walk, more like that of a gawky schoolgirl than a fifty-six-year-old grandfather. You can see only the sparkly jade-green frock coat and, underneath, the turquoise croptop showing the same strip of bare flat stomach that all the young kids do.

  This is a new Jagger – one that generations of Stones fans who have wriggled deliciously under the whips of his scorn or apathy would scarcely recognize. His first spoken words into the microphone are not the time-honoured raucous ‘A-a-awright!’ or sardonic ‘Good evening, Wembley!’ but a heartfelt apology for arriving almost a year late. ‘I’m sorry it’s taken so long,’ he says in his plain-spoken middle-class English voice (one of the wide choice of accents he has available), ‘but we really appreciate your waiting.’

  It is no mirage. Mick Jagger has turned into Mr Nice.

  Ronnie Wood’s mock-Tudor hunting lodge is just a mile or so across Richmond Park from Downe House, the twenty-six-room mansion Jagger ceded to Jerry Hall when their marriage was annulled. Before the annulment, Ronnie and his wife Jo would regularly visit Jagger and Jerry. Since the annulment, they still regularly visit Jagger and Jerry. ‘We were over there for a meal the other night,’ says Jo Wood, a pouty-pretty blonde like a younger Barbara Windsor. ‘It cracked me up so much, I started to laugh. Mick says, “Wossamatter with you?” I said “You two! You get on far better now than you ever did when you were married.”’

  When the doughty Texan supermodel finally dragged her rock star consort into Britain’s High Court, in July 1998, two experts in Indonesian matrimonial law were co-opted to help a High Court judge rule on the Balinese marriage that never was. But far more intriguing, and typical of the real as opposed to the mythic and self-mythologizing Mick Jagger, is the split-up that never was.

  Anyone who was ever on a Rolling Stones tour can attest to the scale of Jagger’s libido. The question ‘Does Mick play around?’ draws an unfailingly strong response from those whom fate, kindly or otherwise, has brought into his orbit. ‘Huh? What? Are you kidding?’ almost splutters his first wife, the much maligned Bianca. A one-time Stones PR man replies with an epigram honed during long hours of resentful discretion. ‘Does Mick play around? Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?’

  The relationship with Jerry Hall, whom he wooed away from rival singer Bryan Ferry in 1977, brought nothing even remotely resembling monogamy, according to insiders. Jerry would be around for the major Stones concerts, but out on the road Mick carried on as before. Indeed, it was an area in which his usual scrupulous regard for appearances deserted him. One Stones aide remembers him giving a string of important press interviews in his hotel suite while in the adjacent bathroom a female companion crouched behind the shower curtain.

  Times had changed, however, from the groupie scene of the 1960s when girls who slept with rock stars talked about it only with hushed gratitude to their best friends. The era of the paparazzi and kiss-and-tell memoir brought Jagger a notoriety he had scarcely known three decades before, even when he stood in the dock at Chichester Assi
zes in one of the most notorious drugs trials of the 1960s.

  His alleged romantic dalliances became the leitmotif of his life with Jerry, attracting increasing amounts of publicity that seemed to bother him proportionately less and less. He was variously said to be involved with American actress Uma Thurman, supermodel Elle McPherson, American sex-therapist Natasha Terry, Hungarian porn star Orsolya Dessy, Italian model Carla Bruni, Czech model Jana Rajlich and British model Nicole Kruk. All were enviably youthful and beautiful, although the pillow talk, in some cases, must have been fairly dire.

  Jerry, friends say, had acquiesced to an open marriage that allowed both Jagger and herself, if she chose, to have affairs on the side. But the deal was that there must be no children on the side. This broke down in 1998 when Luciana Morad, a twenty-nine-year-old Brazilian lingerie model, announced that Jagger had made her pregnant in the course of an eight-month clandestine affair. The baby was born in May, 1998 – a boy, significantly possessed of full and pliant lips. Jagger initially denied paternity but changed his tune after being compelled to take a DNA test. Morad’s lawyers were initially said to be claiming £6 million for the child’s upkeep, though they would ultimately settle for $6,000 per month. His mother named him Lucas, expressing the (perhaps over-optimistic) hope that his father would also put his name down for Eton.

  Jerry, throughout the whole saga, seemed to preserve her Texan charm and poise, referring to her errant mate as to a slightly ludicrous child – ‘Oh, that danged Mick! Ain’t he jest too much!’ But in private there were heavy scenes, for example when Jagger was found to have revisited his old Italian flame, Carla Bruni, a few days before an assignation with Morad. ‘I saw Jerry and Mick together at one of Elton John’s dinner parties,’ a friend recalls. ‘Jerry just sat there glaring at him all evening. He responded by getting drunker and drunker. He ended up doing backing vocals while Elton sang.’