Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  To understand Jagger, as the wisest of his women, Marianne Faithfull, once said, it is no good looking for comparisons in the modern world. You must look back to Louis XIV, the Sun King, or to the gilded boy despots of ancient Rome and Egypt. Jagger created the concept of the rock singer as a twentieth-century god, and none has received more idolatry. Unlike almost all other of his kind, he has experienced no sudden fall from fashion, no painful process of self-reinvention and clawing back to the top. For almost four decades, his life kept on the same unreal plane of mass-worship, flattery deference and illimitable free will. The result is bound to be a vanity that no earthly instrument can measure. Jagger’s stage performance, at its best as well as most embarrassing, is always essentially a process of making love to himself. The main attraction of his first wife, Bianca, seemed to be that she looked uncannily like him; each morning when they awoke together, Narcissus could gaze into the pool.

  The real Jagger is hidden deep away, like the living organism inside a Dalek, behind riveted sheets of light-reflecting image. In 1962, when a teenage hustler named Andrew Loog Oldham became the Stones’ first serious manager, he noticed one priceless attribute in the shy LSE student vocalist still then known as ‘Mike’ Jagger. It was a talent for mimicry, both vocal and physical, that picked up and retained other personalities like Velcro. You can still see them all there in Jagger’s stage act – the walk from James Brown, the wiggle from Tina Turner. He can change personalities between press interviews, being thoughtful and serious for the Guardian, crude and blokeish for the Mirror, camply outrageous for Time Out.

  The real Jagger is utterly unlike the prancing, androgynous fawn that, to his inner dismay, became the emblem of insurrection and anarchy in the 1960s. The real Jagger is a slender figure, slipping unobtrusively into the back of a box at Lord’s to watch the cricket. The real Jagger is not reckless and defiant like the song lyrics he writes but incurably cautious, never quite liking to venture outside the Stones despite the varied solo careers – actor, writer, even politician – he might have had. The real Jagger is so nervous of his own extraordinary past that he affects to remember almost nothing that ever happened to him. The real Jagger is addicted to mingling with bluebloods but never quite able to repress a pinchbeck gleam of commonness, the old-fashioned word for naff. (Remember the photograph of him shaking hands with Prince Charles, his left hand still oafishly thrust into his trouser pocket?)

  Jagger’s love of top people is surpassed only by his devotion to the bottom line. In a world known for profligate extravagance and over-generosity, to be merely careful with money is to invite the reputation of a Scrooge. Jagger was always one of the most famously careful ones, along with Paul McCartney and Ronnie Wood’s former frontman, Rod Stewart.

  It was a peculiarly macho Sixties trait that he most resented spending money on women, especially those he happened to be casting away on to the scrapheap. Marianne Faithfull, the breathtakingly lovely ex-convent girl with whom Jagger spent four years – and who contributed incalculably to his cultural education and social advancement – left the relationship with little more than a heroin habit. Actress-turned-author Marsha Hunt who bore him a daughter, Karis, had to wait eight years before he was compelled to recognize the girl. Bianca was faced with a prenuptial agreement on her wedding morning, and received a divorce settlement of only around £500,000. Ironically, one of Jerry Hall’s initial attractions, apart from her yee-haw Texan looks, was her considerable wealth in her own right from modelling and ranching. Jagger found it restful to be with a woman seemingly above suspicion of wanting to get her hooks into his fortune.

  His attitude to money owes something to the American r & b stars who were the Rolling Stones’ first heroes and role models. Performers like Chuck Berry and Ike Turner are notorious for their almost pathological meanness, the reaction to having been exploited in their early years. British pop bands of the Sixties – even one as big as the Stones – suffered much the same fate. Two successive managers, Loog Oldham and Allen Klein, failed to secure the band wealth anywhere near commensurate with their status. Despite having dominated the decade, along with the Beatles, they ended it owing huge sums in income tax and were forced to become tax exiles in France.

  Since casting off Allen Klein in the early Seventies, the Stones have had no manager in the old paternalistic sense. What they have is a financial adviser who happens also to be a sprig of old European royalty, Prince Rupert Loewenstein. And they have a chief executive who combines his role with that of lead singer, giving equal focus and dedication to both.

  It was the Jagger-led Stones who evolved the concept of big-stadium rock and tours that rolled around the world like giant boulders, earning millions first, then tens, then hundreds of millions. Rolling Stone tour statistics are in a class of hyperinflation unseen since the Weimar Republic. Their 1996 Voodoo Lounge tour grossed somewhere around $250 million – a final grand looting, so it was mistakenly thought, that would persuade them at last to hobble away into retirement. But eighteen months later, they were off again on the Bridges to Babylon tour, destined to last two years and circumnavigate the globe twice. Between the official end of Bridges to Babylon in late 1998 and their delayed UK shows a year later came the No Security tour-within-a-tour which found them playing ‘smaller’ (i.e. 15–20,000 seat) arenas across the US at ticket prices ranging between $100 and $900. American rock critics dubbed it the Millionaires Watching Millionaires show.

  Other rock dinosaurs of the Sixties and Seventies confine themselves to cranking out their old hits onstage and make no effort to compete in the contemporary music market. But the Stones sell as many records today as they ever did. In 1992, they signed with Virgin, choosing it as the major label with the most avant-garde output (and deaf to the wild inappropriateness of its name so far as they were concerned). Their albums since have maintained a steady average sale of between five and six million. A hot new band might sell eight million with their debut album but would be unlikely to pull it off half a dozen times in a row.

  Concert promoters like Harvey Goldsmith who were thought to be getting rich off the Stones in fact found themselves squeezed down to ever smaller percentages. In recent years, the band has stopped dealing with individual promoters and assigned world rights in their tours to an American company, TNA, which designs and oversees the whole globetrotting machine (although the ultimate control freak Jagger still personally approves early detail). More and yet more billions are creamed off the sponsorship of their tours by commercial brand names, as if they are some cash-strapped arts or sporting institution rather than the world’s highest-grossing performance band. Over the two-year span of Bridges to Babylon, concertgoers had three different trademarks rammed in their faces: Sprint communications, Tommy Hilfiger clothes and Castrol oil.

  As might be expected from past, bruising encounters with British income tax, the Stones’ main corporate assets rolled out of their native land long ago and are securely rolled up in a network of tax-sheltering foreign companies distributed across the world. Three Dutch-based companies, for instance, are thought to control the Rolling Stones trademark, the lapping-tongue logo and the publishing rights to Jagger’s song output in partnership with Keith Richards. Another Stones company, Marathon Music, one of the last to linger in Britain, was recently acquired by the Prudential Corporation of America.

  Jagger’s estimated personal wealth of $150 million is constantly topped up by royalties from thirty-five years’ worth of Rolling Stones hits, most of them written by Richards and himself. He is said to have £40 million invested in stocks, a fine-art collection valued at £30 million and a fleet of classic cars worth £2 million. Giving Downe House, their £4 million Richmond home, to Jerry hardly left him without a roof over his head. He still has La Fourchette, a chateau in the Loire Valley near Amboise, valued at £1.2 million; a brownstone house in New York’s Upper West side, valued at £2.5 million; and Stargroves, his Japanese-style house on Mustique (named after a Gothic folly he once ow
ned in Berkshire), valued at £3.6 million and periodically to let at £7,000 per week.

  The recent hyperactive touring years have also seen him embark on a vigorous programme of personal expansion and diversification. His career as a screen actor wisely on hold (remember Ned Kelly? And Freejack?) he has set up a production company, Jagged Films, whose initial projects included a Dylan Thomas biopic and the screen adaptation of Robert Harris’s Second World War novel, Enigma. His passion for cricket has been channelled into an internet provider company, Jagger Internetworks, which is acquiring rights to major matches all over the world, notably the Champions Trophy in Sharjah. His growing status as an art collector has brought an association with Charles Saatchi, the ex-adman who has fostered a generation of young British painters as iconoclastic and over-hyped as young rock stars used to be. Jagger is believed to have profited from Saatchi’s guidance and to be an investor in a Saatchi holding company, Landau Enterprises.

  The energy and resourcefulness with which Jerry Hall sought a wifely share of these varied treasures made her into something approaching a national heroine. Here was glorious proof of the new ethos that a woman jettisoned in her forties, by even the most powerful man, had other options than just shrivelling up in despair. Indeed, although privately resorting to therapy, the public Jerry positively bloomed. She made the cover of Hello! magazine, was painted nude by Lucian Freud, signed contracts to renew her modelling career and became the face of Thierry Mugler perfume, joined Tatler as a contributing editor, became a judge of the Whitbread literary awards and announced plans to market replicas of the engagement ring Mick had given her via the American TV shopping channel QVC. Far from moping at home over tear-stained Stones albums, she was noted out and about with property developer Guy Dellal and old Harrovian film producer George Waud. Perhaps her most stylish flourish came when Jagger first claimed that their marriage had no legal standing and therefore no divorce settlement was in order, Jerry faxed his lawyers a synopsis of the memoirs she intended to write unless paid enough to suppress the literary imperative.

  Whatever strings or garrotting wires she pulled, they were indubitably the right ones. Her settlement from Jagger is believed to have been worth £10 million, made up of a £4.3 million lump sum and £105,000 per year in maintenance. In addition, their four children, Elizabeth, James, Georgia May and Gabriel, will each receive £25,000 per year until they reach the age of twenty-five. Jagger had the, for him, novel experience of hearing a woman he was parting from describe him as ‘very, very generous’.

  The whole parting process, indeed, had an amicability to which Jagger was entirely unaccustomed. During the summer-long tussle between their lawyers over the financial settlement, they were constantly seen around together, not only as dutiful parents with their children but at clubs, restaurants and first nights. Jerry even accompanied Jagger when he returned to his unloved alma mater, Dartford Grammar School, to open a new arts centre bearing his name. Directly after the court decision annulling their marriage, they left with the children for Jerry’s house in the South of France, a tiny place whose sleeping arrangements could not possibly have kept them that far apart.

  Although Jerry remained mistress of their Richmond house, Jagger kept his own apartment there for several months and continued to preside over family meals and outings. According to friends, he telephoned Jerry two or three times daily and plied her with gifts and flowers. It did not seem to bother him that public sympathy remained firmly with Jerry, nor that she seemed increasingly adept at stealing the limelight from him. In the summer of 2000, she made her acting debut when she replaced Kathleen Turner in the West End production of The Graduate. The part of the older femme fatale Mrs Robinson required Jerry to appear nude onstage, and was perhaps her most resounding declaration that life after Jagger went bustlingly on. He turned up to support her on her first night, and was observed to be cheering and clapping lustily. According to one report, he even offered to stay at home and babysit for her during the play’s run. ‘He’s wonderful, kind and supportive,’ Jerry told Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour, adding with a resigned chuckle, ‘He just isn’t very much of a husband.’

  No one denies, however, that he’s an excellent father – if a little inclined to the same Victorian strictness as his own father, Joe – and that he dotes on the granddaughters who are only a little younger than his youngest daughter, Georgia. Despite the humiliating court orders and the DNA test which eventually obliged him to recognize his son by Luciana Morad, he could not resist meeting Morad in a London park, and pushing little Lucas around in a buggy. He was always a generous, attentive son to his unshakably straight parents and was devastated by the death of his mother, Eva, early in 2000. He is widely read, hugely well informed about current affairs, witty and charming, and a model employer – ‘except’, says a former aide, ‘on the days when he looks through you as if he’s never seen you before’.

  On the road he is seen as an unregenerate despot, ruling the Stones’ organization with an iron hand while Richards remains ever the lovable, easy-going old rock ’n’ roll reprobate who cares for nothing but the blues and his next bottle of Jack Daniel’s. Onstage, Richards plays his ‘elegantly wasted’ role to the hilt, staggering about with his headdress of metal clips and his driftwood guitar like a drunken Medusa in a mid-Channel gale, sometimes lurching to the mike to delight the crowd with yet another rasping aphorism about his own wickedness.

  Jagger, as chief executive, was always held responsible for the long-time inequality within the Stones that saw Richards and himself, the so-called Glimmer Twins, lord it over the others like officers and other ranks. Bill Wyman’s resignation from the band in 1994 was no sudden fit of pique but the culmination of thirty-four years as a bass-playing lance corporal. Ronnie Wood, who joined as lead guitarist in 1974, was kept merely on a salary and at one point became so hard up that he had to fall back on his original vocation as a painter and illustrator. It wasn’t until the 1989 Steels Wheels tour that his fellow second-rankers Wyman and Charlie Watts persuaded the high command (i.e. Mick) to grant him a share in the profits, so allowing him to maintain his Richmond hunting lodge, his stud farm in County Kildare and his own private pub.

  But insiders – on recent Stones tours at least – portray a somewhat different dynamic to the Glimmer Twins. They say that Jagger, for all his surface arrogance, is essentially decent and reasonable, as befits someone who seldom took drugs and now even refuses to drink on tour. But anyone who crosses Keith, an abstainer in neither area, risks unleashing dark and frightening forces. Even Ronnie Wood, his best mate and tireless fellow carouser within the band, admits to having been ‘thumped’ by him in the past. The film director Julien Temple, who made the Stones’ Undercover video in 1984, describes a harrowing encounter with the Human Riff in a cloakroom of the George V Hotel in Paris. ‘Keith got me up against a wall and put a swordstick to my throat. The point he was making was that he didn’t think he featured enough in the video.’

  Rather like former iron regimes in eastern Europe, the old order within the Stones has yielded to irresistible pressure from the young. Jagger’s daughter Jade, by his second wife Bianca, is utterly unlike her cautious father, a let-it-all-hang-out beauty who combines a career as a jewellery designer with parenting two small daughters, dating eligible young men like the publishing heir Dan Macmillan and posing for magazines wearing nothing but knickers, a necklace and a pair of alligator-skin boots. One journalist who interviewed Jade found her ‘rather cross’ and offered to come back later, but – shades of 1967! – was told, ‘Let’s go upstairs and smoke a joint and it’ll be okay.’

  A second wave of children, borne by Jerry, Pattie Richards and Jo Wood, turned Stones tours into gemütlich affairs, with nannies and governesses in tow. The chirpy Jo, a former pin-up model, became in many ways the most successful Stone wife apart from Shirley Watts (who wisely stays at home at her Arabian stud farm in Dolton, Devon). On tours, the Woods’ suite is always known as ‘Party central’. Jo
turns each soulless master bedroom into a miniature home, bringing her own pillows and bath towels, arranging Ronnie’s art materials, personal hi-fi and favourite ornaments, setting up a portable stove as a healthier alternative to room service with a supply of organic soups, pasta and cereals.1

  Ignoring all previous social distinctions, the children have grown up to be good friends, especially Elizabeth Jagger, Keith’s son and daughter by Pattie, and the Woods’ spectacular daughter, Leah. Some are already filtering into the organization. Jo Wood’s son Jamie, by a former marriage, runs the backstage furnishing company that assembles the Stones’ peripatetic backstage area, the pub-like ‘VIP lounge’ and the twilit inner sanctum where Ronnie and Keith play twelve-bar blues and smoke themselves into inaudibility before each show. (Woe betide Jamie if everything isn’t in exactly the same place, from the scarf over Keith’s lamp to the ashtray at his elbow.) Leah Wood has matured into a promising singer and during the Bridges to Babylon tour did a guest-spot onstage with her father and surrogate great-uncles.

  Almost every Rolling Stones tour in history has kicked off with a scandal, real or manufactured. Since they became pop’s founding anti-heroes by urinating on garage forecourts or turning up tieless at the Ritz, negative press has been the band’s natural rocket fuel. But with the Jerry affair came headlines that, suddenly, were no longer a turn-on but a put-off, or even a throw-up. As Bridges to Babylon rolled forth with its huge capital investment, there were concerns that anti-Jagger feeling among feminists of both sexes could have a serious effect on ticket sales.

  It may, of course, be pure coincidence, and Jagger himself would doubtless vehemently deny having sought to protect his band’s revenues by making himself less supercool, Sixties-sneery, snobbish and opaque, more gracious, humble and accessible. But the sea of newsprint and TV footage around Bridges to Babylon suggested otherwise. Everywhere you looked, the old devil seemed to be assiduously courting sympathy. Gone was the effete figure, lounging on the couch at a hundred uninformative press conferences. Gone was the bleating, up-and-down voice, so brilliantly captured by Phil Cornwell on BBC2’s Stella Street. Gone were the sullen pout, the tossing head, the air of amused disdain towards those who adored him just as much as those who detested him.