Mick Jagger (28 page)

After this, Only Lovers Left Alive fell by the wayside; nor did any of the four other supposedly Decca-funded film projects announced by Klein take its place. Instead, Mick found himself back with the Stones on the relentless live-show treadmill through autumn until early December: the UK and Ireland, followed by their second North American tour that year to back up a second U.S. album in six months, December’s Children (and Everybody’s), and a new single, “Get Off of My Cloud.”

To whet the appetites of prospective feature film producers, the documentary maker Peter Whitehead was hired to travel with them on the Irish leg and shoot a black-and-white cinema verité record much as the American Maysles brothers had done on the Beatles’ first American tour. Whitehead unfortunately disregarded the band’s usual pecking order, dwelling at such length on Charlie Watts—who came across as the far most interesting as well as best-looking, like a monosyllabic Oliver Reed—that the documentary was eventually titled Charlie Is My Darling.

Brian, typically, regarded himself as the central figure and spoke to the camera with a hushed earnestness that had his bandmates falling about satirically behind his back. “Let’s face it,” he mused at one point, little knowing what somber truth he spoke, “the future as a Rolling Stone is very uncertain …” The best bits with Mick revealed his talent as a mimic: at different times, he took off Elvis Presley, the voice-over on a BBC bird-watching program, and the guitar intro to the Beatles’ “I Feel Fine.”

The previous year had seen Britain’s already crowded fan-magazine market joined by a new full-color weekly called Rave (a word then suggesting harmless enthusiasm rather than drug-crazed rioting). Among its contributors was Maureen O’Grady, who had worked for the more down-market Boyfriend when a ravenous Mick used to come around her office at lunchtime cadging leftovers from the secretaries’ packed lunches. Mick, in fact, had helped her get the job with Rave and she was considered to have a special in with him. With Out of Our Heads at No. 2 on the British album charts, behind the Beatles Help!, her editor tasked her with compiling “10 New Facts About Mick Jagger.” The compiler being blond and extremely good-looking, Rave’s readers received an unusual—for him—dose of specificity:

1. Mick, who bought his girlfriend Chrissie a white Mini for her birthday, is now getting one for himself, probably in grey—or a Bentley.

2. His latest and most favorite buy: a pair of white suede lace-up shoes.

3. Mick is now living apart from Keith in his own flat in London NW.1.

4. Mick now has his hair cut about every two months. He likes it long at the back and quite short at the front, “so it doesn’t hang in my eyes when it gets wet while I’m onstage.”

5. Mick shares a tiny kitten with Chrissie, his first real pet. Its name? Sydney.

6. These days the only ready-made things that Mick buys are socks and jackets. All his shirts, trousers and shoes are specially made for him.

7. Mick doesn’t go to the Cromwellian Club any more. “Too many of my friends have been barred.” He goes now for the Scotch club in St James’s where he likes to meet the “Fab Four.”

8. Mick no longer likes dancing much. “One two minute dance in one evening is enough. I’d rather sit and watch.”

9. Mick is mad about Swedish Ingmar Bergman. His latest “good” film being “Compulsion” [sic] with Catherine Deneuve who, by the way, is married to Mick’s good friend David Bailey.

10. All Mick’s conversations are punctuated with “Help!” Asked if it was because of the Beatles, Mick said, “Funny, I thought I was saying that before they existed.”

Rave’s front covers were provided by the huge tribe of young male pop stars Britain now boasted, each photographed in close-up, purified of his facial blemishes, and tinted a livid brown and pink. Three in particular appeared so often it became almost like a rota—Mick, Paul McCartney, and Scott Walker of the Walker Brothers, the vocal trio whose “Make It Easy on Yourself” finally ended “Satisfaction” ’s reign at the top of the UK charts. Walker (real name Scott Engel) was a fey-looking American whose deep baritone could make the tritest pop lyric seem profound. Mick regarded him as an archrival almost equaling the Beatles, the more so because Andrew Oldham harped on continually about Walker’s voice and stage presence. “One night when I was at the Scotch, someone started flicking things at my table … cigarette ends and peanuts,” Maureen O’Grady remembers. “It was so dark, I couldn’t see at first who was doing it. Then I saw Mick sitting across the way in a booth with Chrissie Shrimpton and realized it was him. He was annoyed because he thought Scott Walker got more Rave covers than he did.”

Sandwiched between September concerts in Douglas, Isle of Man, and Finsbury Park, north London, was a six-day visit to West Germany and Austria, the bomb-dealing enemies of Mick’s babyhood, now transformed into Western Europe’s front line against nuclear onslaught from Russia. Backstage at Munich’s Circus-Krone-Bau arena, he warmed up by doing a Nazi goose step in time to “Satisfaction,” which proved such a good match that he continued it out in front of the audience. The resultant mayhem destroyed forty-three rows of seats and damaged 123 cars outside, but produced relatively little comment and no real censure from the British press. In those days, long before political correctness and the European Union, sending up the Third Reich was as permissible for a Rolling Stone as for any other entertainer; certainly, on the scale of offensiveness it ranked far below peeing on a garage forecourt or appearing tieless at a wedding.

Allen Klein’s drive to release the maximum possible Stones product in America was reflected in the new album coinciding with their pre-Christmas return on tour. December’s Children (and Everybody’s) was mainly just another grab bag of covers that none of the band felt happy about releasing. There were, however, two solid Jagger-Richard compositions, “Get Off of My Cloud,” the current new single, and the band’s own version of “As Tears Go By,” which Mick and Keith—mainly Mick—had written to order for Marianne Faithfull a year earlier. Such a soft, ladylike ballad was the last thing anyone expected from the barbarously macho Stones. And Mick, that supposedly superhuman stud and masturbator, somehow managed to sound even more shyly virginal than had Marianne.

With Klein directing operations, everything in America this time around was done on a vastly more impressive scale. The release of December’s Children (and Everybody’s) was announced to New York by a billboard picture of Mick and the Stones at their shaggiest and moodiest, towering a hundred feet above Times Square. “The sound, face and mind of today,” ran the accompanying message (written by Andrew Oldham—who else?), “is more relative to the hope of tomorrow and the reality of destruction than the blind who cannot see their children for fear and division. Something that grew and related. Five reflections of today’s children. The Rolling Stones.”

For the first time, the Stones were to have their own private tour aircraft rather than taking interminable scheduled flights, with all the waiting around, being pestered for autographs by fans, hassled by police and officials, and insulted by fellow travelers which that entailed. In their growing entourage, too, they now had their own personal photographer, Gered Mankowitz, the nineteen-year-old son of the playwright Wolf Mankowitz, who had caught Oldham’s eye with his recent portfolio of Marianne Faithfull.

In reality, things were rather less glamorous than promised. The tour aircraft was no luxury jet but a twin-propeller Martin whose gimcrack cabin had all the stage equipment piled amidships. Flights between shows were mainly overnight, leaving little opportunity for sexual adventure. “In fact, the only one I remember getting lucky wasn’t Mick or even Bill but Ian Stewart, the roadie,” Gered Mankowitz says. “And that was only because he took the precaution of chatting up the stewardess.”

Throughout the tour’s five-week duration, Allen Klein came and went in a selection of knitwear that caused even more covert hilarity among Oldham, Mick, and Keith than Brian’s to-camera soliloquies in Ireland. During Klein’s absences, his interests were watched over by his Italian-American associate Pete Bennett, who looked and spoke like a cartoon mafioso but did undoubtedly possess formidable powers of persuasion. The previous July, when Mick and Keith were in New York for talks with Klein, Bennett had asked casually if they fancied seeing the Beatles’ concert at Shea Stadium, the New York Mets’ baseball ground, later that day. As a result of a single phone call, they had found themselves watching the show from the players’ dugout.

Gered Mankowitz recalls how, during a meal stop on one of the tour’s road journeys, Brian played his familiar trick of waiting in the limo while the others ate, then strolling into the diner after they’d finished, sitting down and scanning the menu at leisure. When the others’ protests as usual produced no response but a dreamy smile, Pete Bennett lifted him off his seat by the scruff of the neck and carried him bodily out to the car.

IN 1965, SO far as most Britons were concerned, drugs had not been a part of everyday life for a good half century. Only the oldest could recall how in unregulated Victorian times chemists’ shops used to sell opium as children’s cold remedies, upper-class women (supposedly including the Queen herself) would relieve menstrual pains with cannabis, and English literature’s greatest superhero, Sherlock Holmes, could mainline cocaine without fear of his frequent visitor, Inspector Lestrade. Since then, the “dope fiend” had been the least threatening of social evils and—for all but a very few in the upper reaches of the aristocracy and the lower ones of show business—recreational drugs had come to mean a straight choice between nicotine and warm, flat beer.

The country was therefore totally unprepared for the upsurge in drug taking, this time among the modish young, which first became noticeable about halfway through 1965. For the newspapers, initially it meant no more than a random series of quasi-humorous stories in the Just Fancy That mold—garden centers having to be cleared of morning-glory flowers when their seeds were found to possess hallucinogenic properties if chewed, or newly prevalent mauve-colored pep pills nicknamed Purple Hearts after one of the highest decorations for American soldiers in the current Vietnam War.

Little more consternation at first greeted the reported resurgence of marijuana, dried cannabis leaves otherwise known as pot or grass, hand-rolled into a working-class cigarette paper and smoked as what—like the historic roast beef of Old England—was called a joint. Pot had been illegal since the 1920s, but since almost nobody knew what it looked or smelled like, it could be smoked quite openly in pubs and clubs, even on plane journeys, its distinctive fragrance passed off as Turkish cigarettes. The police were equally unschooled in recognizing the telltale fumes. One night when Mick and Chrissie arrived at a film premiere with Andrew and Sheila Oldham in Oldham’s new Rolls-Royce, the constable who opened the car door for them received a billow of pot smoke full in the face. He merely coughed and wished them a pleasant evening.

In youth-speak, the meaning of stoned had changed from being drunk to being under the influence of this new manifestation of swinging Britain. And of all alluring advertisements for it, none seemed more potent than a band whose second name was a variant of stoned and whose first no longer suggested the inability to gather moss, but rolling a joint. With an album called Out of Our Heads and a single called “Get Off of My Cloud” simultaneously topping the charts on both sides of the Atlantic, the Stones were seen as pop’s first public converts to the pot-smoking fad and Mick as its first, unignorable mouthpiece. (In reality, neither title had been meant to suggest pot: they were out of their heads only through music, and “Get Off of My Cloud” was just another Jagger way of saying “Look but don’t touch.”)

In early 1966, the British press was intrigued, but again not especially alarmed, by reports from America of an entirely new drug, a laboratory-made hallucinogen named lysergic acid diethylamide, whose initial letters were also the symbols of Britain’s old pounds, shillings, and pence currency—LSD. Known for short as acid, it was said not to fuddle the senses, like pot, but to create literally “mind-expanding” powers of perception and imagination in the user. Because of LSD’s previous use in psychiatry, it had not yet been made illegal and, indeed, was preached as a kind of secular gospel by bohemian intellectuals like the Harvard academic Dr. Timothy Leary, the poet Allen Ginsberg, and the writer Ken Kesey.

Musicians were, of course, the first and most willing targets in this crusade, both domestic and visiting ones from across the Atlantic. On December 5, after the Stones played their final date of the tour at the Los Angeles Sports Arena, Brian and Keith attended one of Ken Kesey’s regular LSD parties, or acid tests, listened to Kesey’s sermon on the new consciousness and creativity it could unlock in them, and then tested it on themselves. For both, the experience fully lived up to expectations, and they urged Mick to try it without delay. But the cautious, health-conscious Mick—so unlike the out-of-his-head vinyl one who floated on clouds and saw “little men dressed up like Union Jacks”—preferred to hold back awhile.

If acid was a future threat to the Stones’ existence, another one, no less alluring and deadly, was already in their midst. Three months earlier, on the night of the Jagger goose step in Munich, a rangy blond fashion model named Anita Pallenberg had talked her way backstage and magnetized the Stone whose hair color matched hers. Three months on, she was living with Brian at his flat on Elm Park Lane, Chelsea, and already creating havoc with the band’s internal politics.

The exotic European influences that had always nurtured the plain English Stones, and their Kentish commuter-belt Casanova in particular, were back again with a bang. Twenty-one-year-old Anita had been born in Sweden of German-Swiss ancestry (including the nineteenth-century neoclassical painter Arnold Böcklin), had spent her childhood between Germany, Spain, and France, and had studied art in Rome and New York before settling in London as a model and occasional film actress. She already knew Mick’s art-world friends Robert Fraser and Christopher Gibbs, but had felt no curiosity about him or his band until she chanced to be in Munich on a fashion shoot when they were playing at Circus-Krone-Bau.