by Marc Spitz
Ertegün closed ranks around the band as well, determined to help them make the jump into the new decade as a viable rock and roll entity. Placing Bianca in Mick’s life seemed to be part of this master plan, somehow. In addition to an unmatched ear for great music that led him to nurture the careers of Ray Charles, Aretha Franklin, Solomon Burke, Wilson Pickett, Eric Clapton, and Led Zeppelin, Ertegün was also a matchmaker who knew she would inspire Mick. Ertegün’s father was the Turkish ambassador to various European nations as well as the United States. He knew how to work people and instinctively felt that Bianca and Mick, still smarting from Marianne Faithfull and his brief but eventful affair with Marsha Hunt, would make a good couple, not least of all because she was his virtual doppelganger. “When Mick first saw me, he had the impression he was looking at himself,” Bianca recalled in 1974, three years into her marriage to Mick. “I know people theorize that Mick thought it would be amusing to marry his twin. But actually he wanted to achieve the ultimate by making love to himself.” Like Marianne Faithfull before her, Bianca wasn’t as initially impressed with Mick and, upon being introduced to him that March at the after-party following the Rolling Stones’ sold-out show at L’Olympia in Paris, commenced playing hard to get. Again, as with Faithfull, Mick found this both a challenge and a turn-on. Bianca, then just twenty-one, attended the party with French record industry impresario Eddie Barclay, who’d worked with iconic chansons artists like Johnny Hallyday, Juliette Gréco, and Jacques Brel. The colorful mogul was more than twice her age. She was attracted to Mick, but well aware, like Marsha Hunt, of his reputation.
She turned down several lusty invitations to leave the party with him. He finally gave up, but as the tour moved on, he continued to pursue her via telephone, offering to fly her to the next venue in the next city on the tour. Bianca finally relented, convening with the band in Italy, and from that moment, they were inseparable. While Marsha Hunt was giving birth to Karis, Mick and Bianca were living together at his posh new estate outside of London, Stargroves, and plotting out their future. Bianca recently discovered that she, too, was pregnant.
When the media got word of Mick’s new lover, and the baby on the way, they began to froth. “She was pregnant at the time of the wedding, and almost nothing was known about her background. That combination of scandal and mystery is sure to set the press aflame,” Colacello wrote. The wedding reception was arranged in secret, with word sent hastily to various celebrities (Paul and Linda McCartney, Keith Moon of the Who, plus Mick’s parents, who flew in from England on a chartered jet), and promises of secrecy requested, but it was likely all a ruse. The press hounds were hardly thrown off. Reporters choked the narrow streets and clashed with police. It was front-page news worldwide, a cultivated event: the first tabloid wedding of the new decade; a virtual debut for Bianca. It was not without wit. Bianca was dressed, like Mick, in virginal white, and the pair exchanged vows and rings to the theme from the hit film Love Story. The pageant was intended to lift Mick out of the increasingly common world of rock stardom and place him somewhere else entirely. “He’d settled himself down nicely as an international gossip column face,” British journalist Nik Cohn writes. “To be photographed each time he got on a plane. He was seen at the theatre and opera, made friends in the very highest circles, and was responsible for establishing an entirely new vision of male beauty, based no longer on muscle or tan but on skinniness, outrageousness, belle-laide oddity. With the breakup of the Beatles, he became the most superstar superstar of all, after Elvis Presley, and media accepted him unquestionably as the oracle of all Western youth, to be consulted on whatever new issue might arise. Twelve months in a year, he traveled in search of amusement and got his face on front pages, haunted the smartest restaurants, guest starred at the choicest parties. Finally, he got married in St. Tropez and held a party for hundreds of beautifulperson guests, the assembled press of the world and the cream of the Rock establishment—a true Hollywood fantasia, at which he threw so many tantrums that his guests, half-admiringly, declared him ‘the new Judy Garland.’ ”
Keith and Anita were aghast at the St. Anne’s spectacle (which was followed by an opulent reception at the chic Café des Artistes). “It wasn’t so much the marriage,” Peter Rudge recalls; “it was the way Mick handled it. St. Tropez. Paparazzi. It was not the way they did things. Not the way Keith liked to be perceived.” The very idea of a Rolling Stone doing something as bourgeois as getting married was anathema. As late as 1967, Mick was dismissing marriage as “all right for people who wash.” Sure it was fine for Charlie and the older Bill Wyman, but it compromised all their hippie ideals of a new culture, a new political structure. Instead, Keith and Anita (who never married) now had to reckon with the Liz and Dick of rock and roll; recipients of cocaine as a wedding gift, and honeymooning on a yacht in Sardinia. Keith didn’t hate Bianca, as Anita, who’d allegedly cast various black spells her way, initially did. He merely didn’t get her. Four decades later, he writes in his memoir, still bemused about his inability to get her to laugh at a joke. He acknowledges being impressed by what Bianca would become; her campaigns for human rights get high marks from the elderly Keith, but the young pirate’s style was cramped. He was unable to breathe for all the jet-fuel fumes.
By ’71, the personal and cultural gap between Mick and Keith, begun on the set of Performance three years earlier, was even wider. They no longer kept the same hours, and a surplus of interlopers prevented either of them from enjoying any real fraternal intimacy. Keith had Anita, and Gram Parsons, the great southern aristocrat in a pills- and loose joints-bedazzled Nudie suit. And all three had heroin. Mick may have experimented with heroin at this time, wondering what the fuss was about, what had taken away his brother and creative partner, but he could do nothing about Parsons. Now permanently ensconced in the Stones’ traveling retinue (following them on his own dime and constantly strumming and doping with his new best friend, “Keef ”), Parsons made Mick beside himself with jealousy, according to Richards’ memoir.
“I don’t know that Mick was jealous of Gram,” says Chris O’Dell, who worked for the band at the time (and later chronicled her life with the Beatles and Stones in her 2009 memoir, Miss O’Dell). “If anything, Mick might have disapproved of the fact that both Keith and Gram got so loaded! And it was probably more so when Gram was around.”
Far too together to do smack (Mick’s experimentation with heroin might have been nothing but a fact-finding mission: “What is this thing that’s tearing me away from my brother?”), he almost perversely went as far in the other direction as possible—the land of cocktails and coke spoons, town houses and jets—as if to thumb his nose not just at Keith and Anita, but at the newly ruptured and exhausted Beatles. “Lennon and Jagger were seen as more intriguing figures than your run-of-the-mill hotel suite–trashing rock star,” Anthony Haden-Guest says, “but Lennon disdained the attention so Jagger became the focus.”
And Bianca was the ideal travel companion through this new demimonde. Flashbulbs didn’t seem to blind her.
The arrival of Bianca also marks the moment the Stones ceased to be a truly British band. By the spring of 1971, Mick and his fellow Rolling Stones were permitted to spend no more than ninety days in England, lest they pay 90 percent of their income to the government. Lowenstein instructed the band to establish residency and begin work on the follow-up to Sticky Fingers in France.
There may be elements of racism or at least nationalism in the curiosity—and certainly the hostility—that was aimed at Bianca as packing ensued. Marsha Hunt would have probably suffered the same fate, even with her rock and roll credentials. Yoko Ono certainly did when she fell in love with John Lennon and “lured” him away from his white, English wife. ”The press turned me into something I was not. They wouldn’t accept the fact that Mick had married a foreigner. So from that moment on I was a bitch,” Bianca told People in the mid-’70s. Bianca, a citizen of the world, was, however, at home in France, London, or New York, having
left Managua as a teen to study and explore. She’d always intended to be a woman in power; she figured she’d become a diplomat or a film director. Instead she became the wife of a Rolling Stone. The power is the same, the means unusual. Mick’s second daughter, Jade, born to Bianca, arrived in October of ’71; her birth, like the wedding, generated pages and pages of tabloid coverage. The Stones were bigger than ever. The wedding, the children, the odd courtship and canny shunning and baiting of the tabloids, changed Mick Jagger and changed the nature of rock and roll.
With more people than ever before watching his moves, his fashion risks, and his creative decisions, it behooved Mick and the Stones to produce a masterpiece. By mid-1971, the band could not be less united in their task to do so. “I think [Bianca] has had a bigger negative influence on Mick than anyone would have thought possible,” Keith has said. “Mick, Anita, and I used to go around an awful lot before he met Bianca. Mick marrying Bianca stopped certain possibilities of us writing together because it happens in bursts; it’s not a steady thing. It certainly made it a lot more difficult to write together and a lot more difficult to just hang out.”
Ultimately, marrying Bianca—marrying anyone at all for that matter—was perfectly in keeping with Mick’s almost perverse unpredictability and determination to not be shackled to the rules of rock and roll like his ideologue partner. When questioned about the odd juxtaposition of being a raunchy rocker as well as a (for a time, anyway) happily married man, Mick gleefully quipped, “Everyone’s life is contradictory, innit?”
11
“Infamous”
“The 1972 tour was the first great viral campaign,” says Peter Rudge of the band’s return to the North American touring circuit and to an infamousness that even the Stones of 1967 could not imagine. The lasting myths of ’72 are largely due to a lengthy magazine article and a film project, both designed to document the tour, and both never officially released: Robert Frank’s Cocksucker Blues (named after Mick’s notorious contract-breaking would-be single) and Truman Capote’s sequel of sorts to his classic New Yorker tour reportage, The Muses Are Heard. Frank’s film was shelved. It’s still never been formally viewed, although I don’t know one Stones fan who hasn’t seen the bootleg at least once. Capote’s article, assigned by Jann Wenner, editor in chief of Rolling Stone, was never finished or published. Both have contributed immeasurable to the Rolling Stones’ lasting notoriety, and both may have been manipulated into glamorous exile by Mick. “You let everyone know they can’t see it or read it,” Rudge says. “Mick got all that.”
The Stones’ arrival in America, eight years after their first landing at JFK, drew the kind of mainstream attention not seen since the early days of the British Invasion. “I can’t even remember the Beatles,” Mick told Life magazine in 1972. “It seems so long ago. That was another era.” The three-year gap created a hunger to see them live. Sticky Fingers, which they did not tour in the States, had been a major hit. Stevie Wonder, then absolutely on fire, both creatively and commercially thanks to the chart-topping “Superstition” single, was going to open the shows. As with the “Would you let your daughter marry a Rolling Stone” scandal of’65, Mick’s wedding to Bianca exposed him to people who didn’t own a single rock and roll record. “The baby boomers were now getting older,” says Robert Greenfield, then a Rolling Stone reporter who was embedded with the Stones for their 1972 American tour (Greenfield’s account of the tour would produce the Stones-lit classic STP, or Stones Touring Party). “The band had not been in America in three years—an enormous amount of time in those years. Everything was changing so rapidly. All of a sudden the straight media has perceived the Stones as something that is newsworthy and legitimate. Their arrival in every city on that tour was front-page news.” The tickets, assigned to those who presented postcards for a lottery, sold out instantly.
Harnessing this new media power and control that Mick and Keith’s generation was now enjoying in their thirties was part of the band’s 1972 campaign. Perhaps Elvis was more famous and Elton John and Led Zeppelin sold more records, but in ’72, nobody in rock and roll would court more media attention than the Rolling Stones; simply put, it was the year that the Stones opened their doors to the mythmakers. “This is their just desserts. They’re more than happy to do the publicity, do the interviews. You can’t have all these media guys on tour without them giving them access, which they did,” Greenfield says. “They’d hired Gibson and Stromberg, the rock and roll publicity firm; they were traveling with their own press corps. Every magazine was there. Ken Regan and Annie Leibovitz taking photos. I’m there for Rolling Stone. The world has changed and the Rolling Stones are now crossing over into show biz. They’re it. Ahmet Ertegün and Marshall Chess are behind the scenes engineering everything he can to make the band as big as possible. And then Jann brings Truman on board.”
Like the Stones, Capote was a commercial phenomenon as well as a genuinely edgy property. This wasn’t exactly Rona Barrett or some other lightweight entertainment reporter coming out to tag along. “It was a fusion,” manager Peter Rudge recalls. “Although we attracted the so-called celebrities, they were in their own right counterculture celebrities. These were not people considered mainstream culture or who were regarded by middle America as thoroughly good people. Robert Frank. Truman Capote. There was a like-mindedness. They had the same principles. The same references.” The straight media’s attention, if anything, gave the Stones a harder ride across America. Even more people knew they were coming to town, and the local police forces and hotel managers prepared in advance. Entire floors needed to be booked in order to guarantee any kind of lodging at all. Transporting drugs was a constant challenge. They were, as Keith describes them in Life, a “pirate nation.” “The manifestation of evil to many people,” Rudge says. “They wanted to lock your daughters up. The police harassment, trying to find a hotel to take us, they genuinely didn’t understand what we represented.”
Capote, however was the wildcard. His classic 1957 New Yorker profile of Marlon Brando, “The Duke in His Domain,” did more than anything to puncture the myth of the lean, beautiful, mumbling star who’d changed the way Hollywood actors operated. Brando was furious with “The Duke in His Domain,” which depicted the star heavier, with thinning hair and a slew of neuroses, binging on apple pie in a lonely Japanese hotel room. Surely Capote would turn this same unsparing, unsentimental eye on the Stones. How could they possibly benefit from letting him in? And what would the Stones really offer someone like Capote? Unlike the Stones, who were, with the release of the double album Exile on Main Street, at the top of their powers, the literary hero shined brightest a decade earlier. The 1970s were not shaping up to be kind to him, with blown deadlines, creative blocks, drink and drugs, and depression. He was in trouble. He needed real material, not more folly; but the less-disciplined Capote could not resist. The two forces were drawn together by a stronger pull. “I’m gonna give you the answer in two words: star fucking—it’s an interesting concept and it occurs at the highest level,” Greenfield says. “Mick certainly knew who Truman was.” Jagger was willing to take the risk of being exposed, because even a debunking would put him in the same strata as a Marlon Brando or Marilyn Monroe, and 1972 was all about posterity. “I think Mick was fascinated by them and they were fascinated by him,” says Chris O’Dell.
Capote was a friend of Ertegün as well as Andy Warhol, who’d designed the cover for Sticky Fingers. He was bemused, if not by the Stones, certainly by the attention of the magazine editor. “Wenner kept sending me these telegrams about it,” Capote remembered later in an interview with Andy Warhol for Rolling Stone. “And then I just sort of thought ‘Oh well,’ and then I just got kind of caught up in it.”
Wenner assigned photographer Peter Beard, husband of Capote’s best friend, air kissing princess Lee Radziwill (sister of Jackie O.), to shoot the tour, and after premiering in Rolling Stone, it would be released as a splashy book.
