Mick Jagger (41 page)

On December 8, the Stones’ new album was finally released in Britain, appearing in America a day later. It had taken ten months, four more than Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, and survived pressures the Beatles never had to contend with: not just the trial and imprisonment of its main performers and sole songwriters but also the loss of a manager and producer, equally brilliant and successful as both. The title was Their Satanic Majesties Request, a play on the perception of the band as devils incarnate and also the continuing uncertainty over their international travel. Inside old-style black British passports there used to appear a message in elaborate copperplate script, addressed to foreign frontier officials with the hauteur of empire days: “Her Britannic Majesty’s Principal Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs requests and requires in the name of Her Majesty all those whom it may concern to allow the bearer to pass freely without let [obstruction] or hindrance.”

Their Satanic Majesties’ aspirations were all too obvious. Its cover—photographed by Michael Cooper, who’d also shot Sgt. Pepper’s famous pop art collage—showed the five Stones in mystical robes, seated hippie fashion on the ground with Mick in the middle wearing a conical wizard’s hat. The image had a shimmery lamination which made their faces (all but Mick’s) appear to move when it was tilted. If one peered closer, the four Beatles materialized like ectoplasm, as though in acknowledgment of the wholesale larceny within. For here were all Pepper’s spontaneous-seeming innovations calculatedly trotted out again—the droning Indian ragas, wheedling Mellotrons, tinkling temple bells, and beefy brass bands, the vaudeville sound effects and comic voices (including Mick’s at one point rather unwisely demanding “Where’s that joint?”). The difference was in the music.

Of ten tracks, only “She’s a Rainbow,” an upbeat, multichrome “Ruby Tuesday,” was a song that could be instantly understood and hummed. The rest were little more than extended electronic doodles, with Mick’s voice so distorted and monotonous and strangely muted that often he hardly seemed there at all. “Sing This All Together,” later reprised as “Sing This All Together (See What Happens),” was a labored attempt at a hippie campfire chorus featuring more incognito backup vocals by John Lennon and Paul McCartney which the bell jingling and tambourine bashing unfortunately concealed. “On with the Show” began with sound effects from a Soho strip club, then turned to a faux-posh Mick monologue in the style of the Temperance Seven. “2000 Light Years from Home” had been started in his prison cells in Lewes and Brixton and, with his verbal gifts, might have aimed at Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, if not quite De Profundis. Instead, he droned cosmic claptrap about “freezing deserts” and “fiery oceans” as if singing through a megaphone with a clothes peg attached to his nose.

The track list did, however, contain a major surprise. One night, punctual, orderly Bill Wyman had arrived at Olympic at the time arranged for the session to find, as so often, no sign of any of the others. While waiting for them to drift in, he had improvised a song on the piano which he titled “In Another Land.” Steve Marriott of the Small Faces helped him record a tremolo-heavy rough track which, to his surprise, was worked on some more by Mick and Keith, then pronounced good enough to go onto the album. Still more flatteringly, it later became a Stones single in America. But for Bill, triumph was to be outweighed by chagrin. First, Mick took him aside and said that, as a quid pro quo for developing “In Another Land,” Jagger and Richard wanted a share of the publishing. Then the news that someone else in the band wrote songs was kept jealously under wraps. On the album credits, it was attributed to “the Rolling Stones”; only on its American release as a single did Bill get an individual credit.

A few weeks earlier, a new and avowedly serious music paper had started in San Francisco, with a name making no bones about its founder-editor Jann Wenner’s favorite band. Nonetheless, the fifth issue of Rolling Stone was brutally frank about Their Satanic Majesties Request. “Despite moments of unquestionable brilliance,” wrote reviewer Jon Landau, it put “the status of the Stones in jeopardy … With it, [they] abandon their capacity to lead in order to impress the impressionable. They have been far too influenced by their musical inferiors [sic] and the result is an insecure album in which they try too hard to prove they can say something new … It is an identity crisis of the first order and one that will have to be resolved … if their music is to continue to grow.”

Mainly on the strength of advance orders, the album grossed $2 million in the United States within ten days, outselling the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour and reaching No. 2 there and No. 3 in the UK. But reviewers on both sides of the Atlantic voiced the same disappointment, bafflement, and fears that for whatever reason—prison, drugs, hippie virus, Beatle-fixatedness, the nonparticipation of Andrew Oldham—the Stones had lost it.

Mick professed himself unbothered by the storm of ridicule and reproach. “It’s just an album, not a landmark or a milestone or anything pretentious like that,” he told the NME. “All we have tried to do is make an album we like with some sounds that haven’t been done before. It doesn’t mean we’ll never release any more rock ’n’ roll.” He added that the album should be treated as “a sound experience rather than a song experience”—which was a bit like calling a play a scenery experience rather than a dramatic one—and insisted he was as proud of it as of anything the Stones had ever done.

Not for many decades would he concede that they had been “out to lunch.” And in any case, the lunch break was soon over.

MICK AND MARIANNE were never comfortable at his Harley House flat with its too-palpable echoes of a previous relationship. After a year, Mick decided to move back to Chelsea, renting a house in Chester Square while he looked around for somewhere to buy. As much as a home for Marianne and himself, he wanted a symbol of just how far he’d come since squalid flat-sharing days in Edith Grove, and by March 1968, he’d found it.

Back then, just £50,000 secured the freehold of 48 Cheyne Walk, an eighteenth-century town house in the exclusive row whose white walls and ornate black wrought-iron balconies front the Thames Embankment between Chelsea and Albert Bridges. By a long way Chelsea’s most prestigious address, “the Walk” had at one time or another been home to writers Elizabeth Gaskell, Henry James, and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, painters J. M. W. Turner and James McNeill Whistler, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, actor Laurence Olivier, and suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst. Piquantly for its first resident rock star, Oscar Wilde had lived at number 34 at the time of his arrest and trial in 1895.

Number 48 dated from 1711 and was a particularly beautiful and unspoiled example of the Queen Anne period, wood-paneled throughout and with many original features like fireplaces and balustrades, though, as customary with even wealthy abodes built at that time, the rooms were rather small and narrow. Part of the attraction for Mick was a substantial summerhouse in the back garden which he could convert into a music and rehearsal room.

The house was redecorated (by society interior designer David Mlinaric) and furnished with an extravagance mostly dictated by Marianne—for these were still days when Mick found it hard to refuse her anything. If he balked at the Regency double bed or the “Louis XV” bath, allegedly dating from 1770, she would remind him he now resided at one of London’s best addresses and had a duty to live up to his position. Hence the chandelier in the front hall for which she persuaded him to pay £6,000. “Look a’ that!” he’d marvel as he opened the door to visitors. “Six grand for a fuckin’ light!”

Occasionally, he’d dig in his heels, making Marianne realize that “he thought more about money than anyone I ever knew.” Once in Morocco, he doggedly refused to buy a white fur rug she’d set her heart on, even though it didn’t cost that much. And the concept of investing in artworks was still alien to him. Through his connection with the Robert Fraser Gallery, he heard that a Balthus painting was to be offered for sale at a bargain price by the artist’s son. Marianne urged him to make it the basis for an art collection like his canny friend Paul McCartney’s, but he refused.

In these first days in their wood-paneled Thames-side retreat, he seemed utterly besotted with Marianne. Friends like the director Donald Cammell later recalled “the sense of sheer possession” when he looked at this “bird” who was not only stunningly beautiful but classy and intellectual beyond his dreams. They had rows almost from the beginning, usually stemming from Mick’s belief—inculcated first by his mother, and hardly challenged by the dominant element of his audience—that all females were put on earth to be his slaves. However, the rows were never as bitter as those with Chrissie Shrimpton used to be, and he usually knew how to defuse them. Even at Harley House, Marianne remembers, his male chauvinism would sometimes make her bolt out of the flat and down the stairs, grabbing up “a £5 note and a lump of hash” as she went. Mick would run after her and cajole her back by making her laugh.

Marianne continued to expand his mind more than any hallucinogen ever had, taking him to the theater, ballet, and foreign-language films; above all, telling him about books. A typical buying spree under her tutelage piled his bedside table with Alfred Lord Tennyson’s Le Morte d’Arthur, the collected sayings of Confucius, a guide to Jungian philosophy, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, and poetry by Yeats, Dylan Thomas, and e.e. cummings.

Absorbed in the Stones, and himself, though he was, he took enormous pride in Marianne’s apparently blossoming theatrical and movie career. He helped her learn her part as Irina in Three Sisters, reading the roles of the other two sisters, and on opening night sent her an orange tree for her dressing room—much to the annoyance of her costar Glenda Jackson, who had to share the same cramped space. Throughout the run, he would often slip into the rear stalls to catch its last few minutes, and afterward find a new way of telling her how good she’d been.

He also loved the entrée into the theater and film world that Marianne gave him, and the especially delectable adulation of stars from those other media whom he himself secretly adulated. One evening, the crowd in their new Moroccan-style Queen Anne living room included both the Hollywood actress Mia Farrow, fresh from starring in Rosemary’s Baby, and Britain’s greatest playwright, Harold Pinter. Despite Pinter’s forbidding appearance, he enjoyed pop music and, when a record was put on the hi-fi, got up to enjoy a good bop. An embarrassed Mia Farrow had to explain that “it isn’t cool to dance at Mick’s.”

With Marianne’s son, Nicholas, now aged two and a half, Mick assumed the role of surrogate father, taking on the job of finding a nanny, so Marianne remembers, “as if he’d been hiring servants all his life.” He became the same masculine presence to Nicholas that his own father had been to him, authoritative yet untyrannical; establishing routines and boundaries a million miles from rock-star lifestyle; playing football and cricket with the little boy in the back garden; providing such essential pieces of guidance as how to undo his own trousers to pee.

Marianne’s mother, Baroness Erisso (who had the same Christian name as Mick’s mother, Eva), was delighted by the arrangement—and not solely because of the financial security it brought her daughter. The baroness had never hit it off with her son-in-law, John Dunbar, or understood why Marianne should want to marry a penniless aesthete. Mick handled her perfectly, deploying his quietest voice and most irresistible old-world courtesy, encouraging her to talk about her days as a Max Reinhardt dancer and all the other adventures and misadventures which had brought her to a cramped terrace house in a Reading backstreet. For Marianne, his meanness over the Balthus was more than wiped out when he bought Baroness Erisso a cottage in the pretty Berkshire village of Aldworth, presenting it to her as a fait accompli, so as not to offend her proud nature, and with no strings attached.

He continued to be friendly with John Dunbar, whom these days he often saw in the company of John Lennon. The potentially tricky matter of giving Dunbar regular access to Nicholas was managed good-humoredly and without causing undue distress to the boy, though the handovers sometimes failed to happen as arranged if Mick suddenly decided he wanted to do something en famille. Once Dunbar arrived to collect Nicholas only to find that Mick and Marianne had taken him away on holiday without any prior warning. The usually supercool Dunbar was furious, confronting Mick later and calling him “a tencent Beatle.”

So far as Marianne and Mick’s friends knew, Chrissie Shrimpton was history, disinvented as utterly as some Russian commissar after a purge. But that wasn’t entirely true. Chrissie now lived in Knightsbridge, sharing a flat platonically with the singer George Bean, who had recorded one of Jagger-Richard’s earliest songs. Ironically, she had gone on to date Steve Marriott of the Small Faces, the band on which Andrew Oldham had been concentrating since the breakup with the Stones. Marriott was even shorter than Mick—indeed, the contrast with mannequin-height Chrissie was so extreme, she nicknamed him Peter and made him call her Wendy, as in Peter Pan.

For some months after Mick dumped her for Marianne, Chrissie says, he would turn up at her flat without warning and want to have sex—something she still found impossible to refuse him. But if they saw each other at a party, he never acknowledged her. And after about a year, the visits ceased.

The Stones now had their own office at 46a Maddox Street, just off Piccadilly, staffed by trusted figures like Shirley Arnold and Ian Stewart, who’d been with them since their blues-club days. The attic rooms had belonged to Lillie Langtry in the 1880s when she was mistress to the future King Edward VII. Visitors used an old-fashioned lift with a polished wood interior, said to have been installed by that portly prince to save himself the effort of climbing the stairs.

Though the setup was meant to service all five Stones, there was never any doubt as to its chief executive. Mick took positive pleasure in telling Marianne he was “going to the office,” especially relishing the weekly meetings between the band and their various advisers in the specially designated boardroom. Before long, he brought in a curly-haired young American woman named Jo Bergman, who’d previously worked for the Beatles, to be his personal assistant. For his bandmates, it was often galling how he always took priority with the staff and how his personal expenses, like sending flowers to Marianne during her theatrical stints, were charged to the Stones’ collective account.