Mick Jagger (44 page)

Marianne Faithfull, who expanded his mind more than LSD did but collapsed under the Tyranny of Cool. © John Kelly/Camera Press

Cleo Sylvestre, the north London schoolgirl who was his first love. © ITV/Rex Features

Marsha Hunt, the mother of his second daughter, Karis. © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

L’Wren Scott, a “high fashion Goliath” to Mick’s David. © Buzz Foto/Retna Pictures/Photoshot

Bianca, at one of her less elegant moments. © Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Carla Bruni, who went on to be France’s First Lady. © Rex Features

Mick and Chrissie, still happy, in a photo booth. Courtesy of Chrissie Messenger

Jerry Hall (seen here with previous beau Bryan Ferry). © Sipa Press/Rex Features

Anita Pallenberg in an unusually docile pose. © Cecil Beaton/Camera Press

Onstage moments in various stages of undress …

© Heilemann/Camera Press

© Robert Matheu/Camera Press

© Ken Regan/Camera Press

© Cinetext/Allstar

… sharing the mike with Tina Turner …

© Sipa Press/Rex Features

… Keith and Woody …

© Michael Putland/Retna UK/Photoshot

… and Amy Winehouse.

© Getty Images

Get the suit: Mick and Bianca at Jade’s wedding to deejay Adrian Fillary in 2012. © PA Wire/Press Association Images

Low-key Dad: with Jerry and two of their children (on the right ) at a school sports-day. © Glen Harvey/Globe Photos

With father Joe and daughters Karis (on the left ) and Elizabeth (right ) after being knighted for “services to music” in 2002. © Marge Large/Daily Mail/Rex Features

With Luciana Morad and their son, Lucas. © Rex Features

Putting on a brave face at Bill Wyman’s wedding to Mandy Smith. © Alan Davidson/The Picture Library

On the beach with Jerry after the Balinese wedding whose legitimacy he would challenge once she’d borne him four children. © Roger Bamber/Rex Features

Mick and Keith, aka “the Glimmer Twins,” rock music’s longest-lived performing and songwriting partnership. But it has not been without its squalls. “When are you going to stop bitching about Mick?” a journalist once asked Keith. “Ask the bitch,” he replied.

© Pictorial Press Ltd/Alamy

© The Canadian Press/Press Association Images

THE STONES’ CENTRAL role in Sympathy for the Devil was a reminder that they had yet to make a feature film of their own and, in particular, that Mick’s obvious potential as a screen actor still remained untapped. He was evidently keenly aware of this, and could be quite curt with interviewers who brought up Only Lovers Left Alive, the dystopian fantasy in which he was supposed to have costarred with Keith three years earlier. “I’ve forgotten about Only Lovers Left Alive and it’s about time everyone else did,” he snapped at the New Musical Express. “We’ll do a film at the right time, with the right director and in the right way. I want to do something of value, not another pop-stars-on-ice fiasco.”

Actually, finding the right screen vehicle for the Stones and him—or just him—was at the top of Mick’s agenda, right up there with getting back on the road in America. One short-lived idea, fired by his interest in Arthurian legend, was a film version of the anonymous fourteenth-century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight featuring himself as Sir Gawain. The script was to have been cowritten with his friend Christopher Gibbs and the budget to have come from the Stones’ collective coffers (a decision taken at a Round Table meeting at 46a Maddox Street, of which their two ordinary men-at-arms, Bill and Charlie, were blissfully unaware).

Efforts still continued to get Mick into Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, the rights to which were now owned by American producer Si Litvinoff. The photographer Michael Cooper came up with a script and a plan to shoot the film inexpensively on location around London, but then Litvinoff made a deal with Stanley Kubrick for the version eventually released in 1971, with Malcolm McDowell in the Alex role that seemed so perfect for Mick. Another idea was a screen version of The Master and Margarita, the Mikhail Bulgakov novel that had inspired “Sympathy for the Devil.” He was keen enough to portray Satan for real, especially if Marianne could play opposite him, but no one seemed to know how to make it happen.

It was his older friend, the handsome and sophisticated Donald Cammell, who finally brought him the right film project. As well as a successful portrait painter, Cammell was an accomplished screenwriter with one Hollywood production, Duffy, starring James Coburn, already to his credit. Early in 1968, he wrote an original treatment entitled The Performers with Mick specifically in mind. The story was of a young Cockney hoodlum named Chas, on the run from his own mob and forced to seek refuge in the house of a reclusive rock star named Turner. The action moved between the sadistic world of Chas’s gang boss, Harry Flowers, and the weird mansion where Turner and two live-in girlfriends initiated him into drugs, kinky sex, and transvestism.

In late-sixties London, Cammell’s mixture of gangsters and rock culture hardly strained credulity. The fearsome Kray twins, Reggie and Ronnie, had run organized crime in the East End for years while simultaneously hobnobbing with showbiz celebrities, politicians, even royalty, and becoming icons of Swinging London through David Bailey’s photographs. Ever since Andrew Oldham’s Reg the Butcher, the Stones’ entourage had included a sprinkling of villains who tended to be both psychotically violent and homosexual. The most prominent was David Litvinoff, reputedly a former lover of Ronnie Kray, though some said pint-size, hyperactive “Litz” and paranoid-schizophrenic Ronnie only used to go out picking up boys together. Litvinoff it was, after the Redlands bust, who established that Nicky Cramer wasn’t a police informer after beating him to a pulp.

The role of Turner offered Mick that long-sought chance to do something right outside the traditional pop-movie genre—perhaps even of value—and he took the shortest time he ever had, or ever would, to say yes. Cammell then pitched The Performers to his agent, Sanford “Sandy” Lieberson, a London-based American who also represented the Stones for film and TV and had done the deal for them to appear in Jean-Luc Godard’s Sympathy for the Devil as well as trying to set up A Clockwork Orange and The Master and Margarita for Mick.

Recognizing The Perfomers as a hot commercial proposition, Lieberson offered his services as producer and suggested Cammell should direct the film as well as script it. Every major Hollywood studio at this time had a British offshoot, focused mainly on the youth market, and, with Mick’s name attached, Lieberson had no difficulty in selling the project to Ken Hyman, UK head of production for Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, whose father, Eliot, owned the company. Commercial prospects looked even bonnier when the gifted cinematographer Nicolas Roeg came on board as codirector, and a top young British actor, twenty-nine-year-old James Fox—hitherto best known for upper-class roles like Tony in Joseph Losey’s The Servant—agreed to go working class and play the fugitive gangster, Chas.

The budget was set at $1.1 million, a more than respectable figure for 1968. Mick was to receive $100,000 for an eleven-week shoot on location in London the following autumn, plus 7.5 percent of the gross. Included in the fee was a soundtrack by Jagger and Richard which Warner would then release as an album on their eponymous record label. “That was when I first came into contact with Allen Klein,” Sandy Lieberson recalls. “His reaction when I told him about the soundtrack and album deal was ‘Over my dead body.’ I just told him Mick wanted to do it, so he had no choice but to negotiate. But he was one of the most obnoxious people I ever met.”

First in line, however, came the album intended to restore the Stones’ musical credibility after their unhappy detour into Sgt. Pepper–land. Having no tours, criminal trials, or psychological skirmishes with unwanted managers to distract them, the band had worked quickly and cohesively under producer Jimmy Miller, and the result was scheduled for British release by Decca in July. “Sympathy for the Devil,” its undisputed centerpiece, could have provided a thrillingly attention-grabbing concept for the entire collection, but the Stones had unfortunately queered that particular pitch for themselves with their feeble masquerade as “Satanic Majesties.” Instead, the album was entitled Beggars Banquet, a paradox suggesting Old English legends of kings waiting at table on serfs (Mick’s bedtime reading again) as well as the Stones’ own reputation as lords of misrule. But the content was as devoid of medieval minstrelsy as of Their Satanic Majesties’s feyness and artifice. As luck would have it, American music had created a new genre which allowed the Stones to return to their roots and yet stay at the cutting edge. Country and western had been as crucial as blues in the creation of rock, but previously had always been identified with naff rhinestone cowboys and right-wing rednecks. Now younger bands, interested in their heritage, had spiced it up as country rock, mixing the beat-making weaponry of Fender guitars and Ludwig drums with traditional instruments like violins, mandolins, slide guitars, or dobros; exchanging hippie smocks and amulets for western shirts, buckskin jackets, and ten-gallon hats. Bob Dylan’s backing musicians, the Band, had recorded an instant classic album, Music from Big Pink, exploring diverse forms of folk and hillbilly music, while Dylan himself embraced the form in his John Wesley Harding and Nashville Skyline albums, the latter with help from country colossus Johnny Cash.

Two young country-rock pioneers had come into the Stones’ orbit, initially as fans, then as instructors in the new form. One (fated also to be a victim) was an astoundingly pretty twenty-one-year-old named Gram Parsons, just recruited to the Byrds and about to play a pivotal role on their first country album, Sweetheart of the Rodeo. The other was twenty-one-year-old Ryland “Ry” Cooder, a slide-guitar virtuoso who had previously worked with the bluesman Taj Mahal and Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band. When Cooder showed Keith Richard the trick of “open G” tuning—so that the guitar strings play a G major without any fingering on the fretboard—he little imagined how he was shaping Rolling Stones intros forever afterward.

“Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man” apart, Beggars Banquet thus became a mixture of blues and country rock on which Mick’s accent veered back and forth between the Mississippi Delta and the Appalachian Mountains. “Parachute Woman” brought blues sexual imagery into the jet age (“Parachute woman … la-aynd on me tonight …”), while “Stray Cat Blues” was a leer at schoolgirl Stones groupies (“Ah can see yaw fifteen years old … no, Ah don’t want yaw ID …”) which nowadays might bring a knock on the door from the police. Blues purism went a little too far with “Prodigal Son,” a straight copy of “The Prodigal Son” by the Reverend Robert Wilkins, for which Jagger and Richard took songwriting credit, believing Reverend Wilkins to be dead. (He was in fact still very much alive and cut up extremely rough when he found out.) Brian Jones’s instrumental virtuosity featured for what would be the last time, notably on slide guitar in a ballad with the horribly ironic title “No Expectations.” As if feeling some vague premonition, Mick’s voice took on a melancholy that made it seem suddenly human again: “Never in mah sweet, short life have I felt … lahk this … befaw …”

His lingering desire to write a populist chant à la John Lennon was reflected in “Salt of the Earth” with its right-on leftist plea for “the hardworking people … the uncounted heads” (so long, of course, as they didn’t come too close). He was serious enough about it to fly to Los Angeles with Jimmy Miller to supervise the overdubbing of a full gospel choir. There he met America’s hottest new band, the Doors, and, in their classically beautiful lead singer, Jim Morrison, witnessed a performer who took risks he himself would never dare. The previous December, Morrison had become the first rock star to be arrested midshow, after telling his audience a policeman had sprayed him with Mace backstage. A year from now, he would be charged with indecent exposure onstage; three years from now, he would be buried in the same Paris cemetery as Molière, Colette, and Oscar Wilde, and attracting posthumous fans by the hundreds every week. Mick said he found Morrison “boring.” (To borrow the sixties’ most famous riposte, “He would, wouldn’t he?”)

The Beggars Banquet cover, art-directed by the Stones themselves, once again had nothing to do with either banquets or beggars, and plumbed depths of bad taste unimagined by even Andrew Oldham. It showed the grimy toilet wall of a Los Angeles car-repair shop scrawled with graffiti gibes at President Lyndon Johnson, Mao Tse-tung, Frank Zappa, and Bob Dylan, and a subtitle “Music from Big Brown,” parodying the Band’s country classic, Music from Big Pink, which was Keith’s particular contribution. Even though the actual toilet pedestal was barely in shot, both Decca and the Stones’ American label, London, pronounced the graffiti offensive and flatly refused to manufacture the cover. The Stones equally flatly refused to consider any alternative one, and in the resulting impasse the album lost its prime summer release slot—a major disappointment to Mick, who’d wanted it to come out on July 26, his twenty-fifth birthday.

Instead, he could only preview the album to his musician friends at a party at the Vesuvio Club (a venture into legitimacy by Keith’s drug dealer, Spanish Tony Sanchez, which was to burn down in mysterious circumstances not long afterward). Guests including John Lennon and Paul McCartney enjoyed a buffet featuring mescaline punch and a hashish-impregnated birthday cake, then listened to Beggars Banquet’s two lead tracks, “Sympathy for the Devil” and “Street Fighting Man.” Both were brilliant, the company agreed, but Mick’s triumph was spoiled when McCartney slipped the club deejay an advance copy of the Beatles’ epically long new single and Hades got elbowed aside by “Hey Jude.”

London Records were not so squeamish about releasing “Street Fighting Man” as the Stones’ next American single on August 31, although the argument for holding it back seemed even stronger than in Europe. Following the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. on April 4, race riots and vicious official fight-backs had convulsed major cities across the nation all summer. Mick’s (qualified) call to the barricades went on sale just days after the infamous Democratic Party convention in Chicago, when not only antiwar protesters but journalists and even delegates were beaten up in full view of TV cameras by Mayor Richard Daley’s crash-helmeted police. As a result, “Street Fighting Man” was banned by hundreds of radio stations, and so failed to make even the U.S. Top 40. That did not stop the coy urban guerrilla from becoming a bigger hero to all the wrong kind of people than he had been since “Satisfaction.”