Mick Jagger (31 page)

Their September single, a new Jagger-Richard composition rather than one of the several unexploited Aftermath tracks, was equally provocative to student arsonists, proto-feminists, and defenders of good taste. Long-windedly entitled “Have You Seen Your Mother, Baby (Standing in the Shadow)?,” it featured Mick once again in mocking psychoanalytical mode—now managing to patronize two female generations at once—and a chaotic backing with the nakedly Beatle-ish touch of a brass section. Accompanying its U.S. release was a publicity picture of the band in drag, grouped around Bill Wyman in a wheelchair—the one and only time Bill ever took center stage. As a nod to antiwar zeitgeist, he and Brian wore American female military uniforms, but otherwise the effect was pure pantomime dame with Keith in flyaway spectacles like Dame Edna Everage before her time and Mick, swathed in moth-eaten fur, pouting from beneath a blowsy blond wig.

The real-life Stones and Beatles were not only total contradictions of Tom Wolfe’s aperçu; they were also as intricately linked as old European royal houses. In November, newly liberated from touring, John Lennon went to a show at a small London art gallery called Indica which Paul McCartney had helped to fund, and there had his first encounter with the Japanese conceptual artist Yoko Ono. Indica’s founder and director, John Dunbar, was an old Hampstead crony of Andrew Oldham’s, a friend of the principal Stones as much as the principal Beatles, and now husband of Marianne Faithfull.

IN THE TWO years since Marianne had recorded Mick’s first successful song, there had been no whisper of the love affair which would scandalize the sixties even more than John and Yoko’s.

“As Tears Go By” had given her a successful career in the persona Andrew Oldham invented for her: one step in driven-snow purity behind the Singing Nun. Managed first by Oldham, then by Tony Calder, she had released a handful of further singles and two albums and crisscrossed the country on pop package tours. At a time when British female pop artists mostly sang in faux-American soul accents and had little individual character, Marianne’s delicate beauty, polite-posh English voice, and intimations of both breeding and brains gave her a niche to herself. As one PR handout put it, “She likes Marlon Brando, Woodbine cigarettes and going to the ballet, and she loves wearing long evening dresses.”

On tour, as on record, Marianne was a figure apart, her air of innocent refinement mixed with a certain grandeur inherited from her Austrian baroness mother. Her fellow performers being almost wholly male and raveningly randy, she traveled with a chaperone and, on journeys between gigs, could usually be found sitting quietly at the back of the bus, absorbed in a Jane Austen novel or poetry by Wordsworth or Keats. In reality, her air of innocence could be misleading and the chaperone not infallible: she had brief affairs with the Stones’ friend Gene Pitney and Allan Clarke from the Hollies (but turned down the great Bob Dylan when he tried to seduce her by writing poetry to her).

All this time, despite constant contact with Oldham and Calder, she met up with Mick again only once, at a party given by the Ready Steady Go! TV show. The impression he made was not a great advance on the “cheeky little yob” who’d offered her his lap in the car after the “As Tears Go By” session. Exceedingly drunk (something that never became him), he talked to her in a facetious copy of Oldham camp, then deliberately slopped champagne down the front of her dress.

In May 1965, now aged eighteen, Marianne seemed to take a deliberate step away from the pop scene—and any prospect of further liaisons with its male power figures—by marrying John Dunbar, who at that point was still reading fine arts at Churchill College, Cambridge. (“Only a goddammed student!” a disappointed Bob Dylan lamented.) She was three months’ pregnant and the following November gave birth to a son, Nicholas.

The marriage proved of brief duration: a fact that had nothing whatever to do with Mick. Dunbar was too immersed in setting up the Indica gallery to have much time to be a husband or father, and Marianne found herself the main breadwinner from her pop earnings. Their flat in Lennox Gardens, Knightsbridge, swarmed with Dunbar’s artist friends, many of whom were hardened druggies; used needles would lie on the same kitchen work top where baby Nicholas’s bottles were prepared. Though Dunbar himself had been into LSD long before it became chic or illegal, he had the same paternalistic attitude toward Marianne that Mick had toward Chrissie Shrimpton, and forbade her to try so much as a joint.

Marianne, however, was determined to try everything, and quickly gravitated to Swinging London’s most beautiful couple, Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg, who were more than willing to abet her. The pair still lived in Courtfield Gardens, Chelsea, in a cavernous flat halfway between a medieval manor house and a Moroccan souk. On every available surface and much of the floor were strewn clothes, his, hers, or, most likely, theirs, either freshly brought from nearby King’s Road (whose boutiques were more than happy to give away merchandise to a Rolling Stone and his “old lady”), worn once, and then discarded, or clammy from being worn too many times without a wash. Amid this opulent squalor were signs of Brian’s nerdy side, such as books about London buses, a model train layout, and a collection of vintage Dinky miniature cars. With no prospect yet of unwelcome surprise visits by the law, pot and pills lay around in full view.

With their matching golden heads and floor-length robes, Brian and Anita seemed to Marianne “like two children who had inherited a decrepit palazzo.” Having both exotic European ancestries and intellectual curiosity in common, Marianne and Anita got on well, though Marianne always professed herself “terrified” by the sardonic beauty who at one moment was Brian’s dominatrix, at the next a seemingly helpless victim of his physical abuse. Like others at their court, she pretended not to notice when Anita’s hippie finery was topped off by brutally bruised arms or a black eye.

Usually Marianne would find Brian absorbed in efforts to catch up with the Jagger-Richard songwriting partnership, scribbling lyrics in notebooks or putting embryo songs on tape, then erasing them because they never seemed good enough. The flat had no front doorbell; instead visitors had to stand in the street and shout until their host or hostess appeared on a first-floor balcony. One day while Marianne was there, the mother of one of Brian’s two illegitimate children named Julian appeared, hoping to shame him into paying maintenance. She stood in the street, holding the baby up entreatingly with both arms, while Brian and Anita looked down from the balcony, laughing like tsarist nobility at comical peasants.

For all Brian’s pot-fumed hilarity, Marianne noticed how “a doomed look had begun to set on his face. Inner demons had started eating that Renaissance angel’s head …” On acid, his paranoia increased to the point where he heard voices plotting against him even in gurgling water pipes or the fizz of electrical wiring, and, with yet more horrible foresight, he was painting a mural of a graveyard on the wall above his and Anita’s bed.

Keith would almost always be there, too, “exuding lonely bachelorhood” since his breakup with Linda Keith, having walked the four miles to Chelsea from St. John’s Wood. Mick put in only occasional appearances from far-distant Harley House, somewhat like a boss checking on his workforce, and soon departed, unnerved by all the drug use and appalled by the squalor of the kitchen.

By the winter of 1966, Marianne and Dunbar had separated and Marianne and baby Nicholas were on their own at the Lennox Gardens flat. Disillusioned by the superficiality of her pop career, Marianne wanted to progress to acting but recently had had to turn down a plum offer, playing opposite Nicol Williamson at the Royal Court Theatre in John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence, because her management said it paid too little. One day, Andrew Oldham dropped by to see her, accompanied by Mick. Despite all Mick’s recent sneering at women, she noticed how he took in the chilly basement with its single small electric fire and sensed his genuine sympathy for her predicament.

Early in October, Keith and Brian invited Marianne to a Stones concert, with Ike and Tina Turner as the support act, at the Colston Hall in Bristol. Backstage, she found Mick in a corridor being taught by Tina Turner, the sexiest dancer in the cosmos, to do the Sideways Pony. As she watched him being bossed around by Tina—told he was useless, in fact, but taking it good-humoredly—she still had not the smallest inkling of what lay ahead.

AFTER THE COLSTON HALL show came the usual hanging out back at the Stones’ hotel, with Keith, Brian, and trusted courtiers like the photographer Michael Cooper. As Marianne recalls in her autobiography, Faithfull, she smoked joint after joint until she was “speechless and unable to move.” Gradually the others drifted away, leaving only her, Mick, and one of the Ikettes, Ike and Tina Turner’s backing dancers, who hoped to be Mick’s companion for the night and took an annoyingly long time to realize that three was a crowd.

By now it was getting on for morning, and despite the October chill, Marianne proposed a walk in the park next to the hotel. To discover if Mick was anything more than the rude little yob of their previous encounters, she gave him a viva voce test in the Arthurian legends, so many of which are rooted in Bristol’s West Country hinterland. He not only answered every question correctly but proved himself a modern Sir Lancelot when they returned to his room by unlacing her dew-soaked boots and placing them on a heater to dry before they got down to making love. Marianne was “completely moved by his kindness.”

For both of them, however, it initially seemed no more than just another casual fling. With a failed marriage behind her, Marianne was in no hurry to commit herself again. And if she did so with anyone, she wanted it to be with Keith Richard. To her bookish mind, especially in the dazzle of LSD, Keith resembled the poet Byron, “the injured, tormented, doomed Romantic hero with wild hair and gaunt visage … an eruptive, restless presence … a fusion of decadence and surging energy.” Yet in all those acid-dropping nights together at Courtfield Gardens, she had never dropped any hint of how she felt about him. Partly this was because she sensed his own inadmissible fixation on the girlfriend of his new best mate. He clearly worshipped Anita Pallenberg and longed as devoutly as any Camelot knight errant to rescue her from Brian’s ill treatment, but was constrained by loyalty to a brother Stone from making the slightest move.

Mick, too, seemed to have his sights set elsewhere. After ending things with Chrissie Shrimpton—a moment that everyone around him, bar Chrissie, now knew to be imminent—he had ambitions to date British cinema’s sexiest new face, Julie Christie. But that night at the Ship Hotel, Bristol, with its quiz about Guinevere, Mordred, and Excalibur, proved impossible to forget. When the tour ended, he telephoned Marianne and, from that moment, began secretly visiting her at her Lennox Gardens flat.

For Marianne, he was a welcome change in every way from John Dunbar, the only other man with whom she’d ever been in a serious relationship. Whereas Dunbar had been too cool and hip to show her the affection she demanded, Mick continued to be as loving, kind, and considerate as when he’d saved her boots from the foggy, foggy dew. Whereas Dunbar had been deeply into drugs, Mick was only marginally and manageably so; where Dunbar was ascetic, Mick’s love of luxury, refinement, and shopping almost matched Marianne’s own; whereas Dunbar had been vague and disorganized, Mick was decisive and effective; whereas Dunbar had an artist’s indifference to money, Mick was rich and—especially in the first flush of romance—munificently generous. Marianne’s son, Nicholas, now aged one, acquired a variety of expensive new toys, and electric heaters glowed throughout the once-chilly little Knightsbridge flat. “I needed a friend,” Marianne recalls. “Mick was a friend who happened to be a millionaire.”

In Faithfull, she would write that, from the very beginning, she “realized in some part of my mind that Mick was bisexual” and sensed the “sexual undercurrent” between him and Andrew Oldham. Indeed, his more feminine qualities of sensitivity and intuition were part of his appeal after the one-dimensionally macho males to whom she was accustomed. She would later claim that one night when they were in bed together, he even confessed to a fantasy of performing oral sex on Keith (who happened to be asleep in the next room). Here, Marianne could wholeheartedly concur: in Faithfull, she would confess that throughout her whole time with Mick, she remained secretly lusting after Keith.

In the run-up to Christmas 1966, she departed with Nicholas and his nanny for a holiday in Positano on Italy’s Amalfi coast. With her she took a copy of the Stones’ just-released compilation album, Big Hits: High Tide and Green Grass, whose tracks included Mick’s version of “As Tears Go By”—his feminine side at its most delicate and sensitive. Whenever she played the album, it seemed, the phone would ring and it would be Mick surreptitiously calling her from London. Torn between his seductive wooing and Keith’s Byronic decadence, she even sought advice from the Stones’ business manager, Allen Klein: the only known occasion when that hawk-eyed moneyman was asked to play agony aunt. Klein told her that if she did manage to pair off with Keith, it would “destroy” Mick.

On returning to London, she headed straight for Brian’s flat, where she found Keith and the doomed young Guinness heir, Tara Browne, the latter now just days away from “blowing his mind out in a car.” There was no sign of Anita or any other female, and as Marianne dropped acid with Brian, Keith, and Tara, it was plain that the trio thought sex with her would be part of the trip. Two of them, however, quickly became too stoned to do any such thing, while even the priapic Brian managed only a brief grope while the others slumped, insensible, nearby. The party then dispersed, but a few hours later Marianne and Keith met up again and spent the night together at the Mayfair Hotel—“the best night I’ve ever had in my life,” she would later say, implicitly including the thousand and one with Mick that were to follow. However, the next morning all Keith wanted to talk about was how smitten Mick was with her.