Mick Jagger (45 page)

By now, it was clear that Brian Jones, with his drunkenness, drugginess, and horrible vulnerability to police raids, had become too big a liability to continue with the Stones and that, hampered by such a “wooden leg” (in Mick’s phrase), they could never complete their postprison and Satanic Majesties renaissance by returning to the American tour circuit. Why then not simply fire him, as the Beatles did their original drummer, Pete Best, as the Yardbirds had Jeff Beck, as any top band would have done without compunction to a member who’d become more trouble than he was worth?

The answer is that the other Stones were all essentially nice people who shrank from inflicting such a blow, however necessary for their collective survival. Even the usually selfish, calculating Mick could not forget the passion for the blues that had first brought them together, or that the band had originally been Brian’s and, without his initial enthusiasm and drive, would never have got off the ground at all. Thus, long after he had ceased to be a viable member of the lineup, his bandmates did their best to maintain an outward show of unity and—as far as it was possible for spoiled, egocentric young rock gods—to look after him.

He was still awaiting trial for the cannabis allegedly found in his flat on May 21 and also for breaching the probation order made after his previous bust in December 1967. To reduce the risk of further police raids during these summer months on bail, it was clearly advisable to get him right away from London. Since he had nowhere to go but his parents’ home in genteel Cheltenham, he and his girlfriend, Suki Poitier, were installed at Keith’s Sussex cottage, Redlands, with Tom Keylock, the Stones’ driver-bodyguard, to keep an eye on him. It was in no sense an exile or banishment; the other Stones would periodically meet up at Redlands for rehearsals, even though Brian was seldom in a condition to do more than woozily strum along. In between, he swilled brandy laced with Mandrax, ill-treated the uncomplaining Suki, and scanned the music papers, terrified of reading that he’d been replaced without the others telling him—by Mick’s late guitar tutor Eric Clapton, perhaps, now that Cream were set to disband.

Mick’s relief at having Brian out of the way was tempered by moments of concern that surprised even Marianne, the only person to whom as a rule he showed his sensitive, caring side. One day at Cheyne Walk, while casting a hexagram from the I Ching Book of Changes—a regular domestic routine in any sixties pop-star home—she read a prophecy that Brian would suffer “death by water.” Mick became alarmed, and insisted they both drive down to Redlands at once. But the kindly gesture misfired. Fastidious as ever, he did not fancy the dinner Brian and Suki had cooked, instead going off with Marianne to a local pub. Brian took it as a mortal insult and there was a fistfight between the pair which ended with Brian jumping into Keith’s four-foot-deep pond and Mick hauling him out to the ruination of a pair of new velvet trousers.

On September 26, Mick and Keith both attended Inner London Sessions to support Brian publicly yet again—and see him treated with unexpected clemency. Despite strong evidence that the cannabis had been planted, he was found guilty of possession, but the court decided it had been a lapse from sincere efforts to clean up and he escaped with a £50 fine, plus £105 costs. Afterward, the other two joined him to face the paparazzi with arms protectively draped around his shoulders.

In the wake of this atypical good luck came a musical project that concentrated Brian’s mind as the Stones no longer could. On visits to Morocco, Brion Gysin had turned him on to the Master Musicians of Jajouka, a pipe-and-drum ensemble from a remote village in the Rif Mountains whose playing could induce trances and was even said to possess healing powers. In a resurgence of his old earnest musicological self, Brian planned to record Jajouka’s mystic pipers in situ, then overdub a rock accompaniment to show the affinity between North Africa’s and North America’s musical traditions. He had already made two trips to Jajouka with recording equipment, but both times had got too stoned to capture anything usable.

In August, just before his last court appearance, he’d returned with Suki to witness Jajouka’s centuries-old Rites of Pan Festival, when a young boy was ritually garbed in the skin of a freshly slaughtered goat. This time, a professional sound engineer had accompanied him, and the Master Musicians were finally in the can. The tapes would later be released as an album, Brian Jones Plays with the Pipes of Pan at Jajouka, an early instance of what we now call world music. Twenty-one years later, Mick would follow his footsteps back to Jajouka and (not quite the same thing) co-opt the Master Musicians as session players for a Stones album.

Brian never knew about the I Ching’s chillingly accurate death-by-water prophecy, but in the Rif Mountains, watching Jajouka’s Rites of Pan, he seemed to receive a different sign of having “no expectations.” Suki and he were sitting cross-legged in the village square when a white goat was carried past to be sacrificed. It had a strangely familiar-looking blond fringe, and as Brian looked into its terrified eyes, something prompted him to whisper, “That’s me!”

MARIANNE WAS FIRST to make it to the big screen, starring opposite French heartthrob Alain Delon in The Girl on a Motorcycle. The film’s trailer showed her in one-piece black leather and featured a voice-over whose supercharged sexual imagery clearly had someone other than Delon in mind: “Now you’ll know the thrill of wrapping your legs round a tornado of pounding pistons … like the Girl on a Motorcycle! She goes as far as she wants, as fast as she wants … straddling the potency of a hundred wild horses!” In America, the title was changed to Naked Under Leather.

It was just how the public had imagined Mick and Marianne’s private life ever since Chichester Quarter Sessions and the “girl in the fur rug” headline: a nonstop high-octane sexual burn-up fueled by cartons, if not crates, of Mars bars. In fact, Marianne would admit in Faithfull that she’d always found sex “a problem”—as beautiful people not infrequently do—and that within about six months the initial passion between Mick and her had cooled to friendship, “the kind you get when you’ve been married a long time and know your partner doesn’t expect too much of you.” In bed, more often than not, they would have ramparts of books between them and be reading aloud to each other.

From the earliest stage, her autobiography would say, Marianne knew that Mick was continually unfaithful to her and, like the European aristocrat she was at heart, accepted it as his droit du seigneur over virtually every attractive female who crossed his path. “Getting upset about a little fucking around was unhip and middle class.” Nor did she care if—in her own enigmatic words—he “slept with men.” She herself had a few one-night stands, though more from a sense of fair play than any sense of rejection or frustration. One she would record was with Stash, Brian’s Russian princeling friend and co-bustee, who appealed to her sense of the romantic by climbing up the wisteria outside 48 Cheyne Walk and through her bedroom window while Mick was working in the garden studio with Keith.

The public perception of a drug-saturated couple was even more illusory than their supposedly unbridled sex life. While Mick certainly sampled most of what was available, moderation was his watchword, as in everything else except vanity; despite being around heavy drug users all the time, he himself never took a smidgen too much or lost an iota of precious self-control. Even LSD gave up in despair after finding no inner demons with which to unsettle him. Marianne, by contrast, was both naturally addictive and recklessly adventurous. From hash and acid, she soon progressed to cocaine, which she first encountered at a party with Robert Fraser: six neat white lines for six different guests to snort through a rolled hundred-dollar bill. Unaware of the protocol, Marianne snuffled up all six, one after the other.

Mick thoroughly disapproved of her growing drug intake and did all he could to discourage it—sometimes with anger, occasionally with heartfelt tears. The main sanction he could apply was money, and as a result Marianne also had a brief affair with the drug dealer Spanish Tony, whom she found repulsive but who was generous with freebies.

Drugs for Marianne increasingly became a way of anesthetizing herself against the pressures and ordeals of life with Mick. Not the least of these was his infatuation with aristocrats, “any silly thing with a title and a castle,” most of whom bored her silly. Occasionally she would embarrass him in front of his highborn friends, as at a banquet given by the Earl of Warwick at Warwick Castle when she took five Mandrax tablets by way of hors d’oeuvres and passed out into her soup. The ordeals also included visiting Mick’s parents, even though they were never other than sweet to her. Rather than risk a repeat of the Warwick Castle incident in front of Joe and Eva, Mick took to going to his parents’ home alone, dropping Marianne en route at the home of blues musician John Mayall, whose wife, Pamela, he regarded as a good influence. Chrissie Shrimpton would have recognized the controlling nature that even tried to choose suitable friends for her.

But by far the greatest pressure was living with someone who never forgot he was a rock star, who even in their most private moments together behaved as if he was “starring in an endless film” and “had to look good all the time for the great director in the sky.” Kind, thoughtful, generous, and chivalrous though he still often was, the compulsion to be cool ruled Mick’s existence and increasingly hid his nicer side. Worst of all were the moments when they put aside the books and Marianne tried to talk to him about the problems she was having with their relationship. What she came up against then was not so much rock-star cool as old-fashioned English reserve—Keith was the same—that shied away from any discussion of emotions or feelings. His refusal, or inability, to let her under his shiny superstar shell hurt far worse in the long run than all his playing around. “I was a victim of cool, of the tyranny of hip,” she would recall. “It almost killed me.”

Nonetheless, they both considered themselves to be together for keeps. No sooner had they settled in at Cheyne Walk than they began looking for a country house, selflessly assisted, as ever, by Christopher Gibbs. The search was complicated by grande dame whims on Marianne’s part that Mick still found amusing. If Gibbs found a property to view in, say, Shropshire, she would suggest “having lunch in Henley on the way.” When he protested that Henley wasn’t on the way to Shropshire, she would smile her misty smile and say, “It could be on the way.” So the lunch reservation in Henley would be made, and a car journey that should have taken only three hours would use up a whole day. In any case, nothing Mick saw, however old and beautiful or stunningly contemporary, was ever quite what he was looking for.

Their shared long-term view was confirmed at the beginning of October, when the Rolling Stones office announced Marianne was expecting a baby. By then she was actually five months pregnant, but thanks to floaty, shapeless hippie couture, no one had known but the Stones’ inner circle and her mother. She and Mick were agreed in wanting a girl and had already chosen the name Corrina, after the blues song by Taj Mahal (“I wouldn’t trade your love for money / Honey, you’re my warm heart’s flame.”)

Mick’s immediate response on learning the news was to say they should get married. Despite the sixties’ vaunted sexual liberation, women who gave birth outside wedlock were still considered social outcasts and their babies stigmatized as illegitimate. In Marianne’s case, it could only be seen as the final step in her chosen career as a fallen woman. However, she declined his proposal, joking that after his vociferous mother, “there couldn’t be another Mrs. Jagger.”

Pop stars had, of course, been in such situations before but never publicly acknowledged it, let alone seemed quite happy about it, as Mick did. And the moral outcry, no less from those who had previously drooled over stories of fur rugs and Mars bars, was deafening. Though Marianne was technically Catholic, the Anglican Church adopted her for the purpose of denouncing her as a sinner, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself asking his congregation to pray for her. Marianne made no public response—lest a hail of stones in the biblical sense might have greeted it—but on October 12, Mick went onto David Frost’s Frost on Saturday TV show to answer their accusers.

Pitted against him was Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed leader of a campaign to clean up “filth” on television, now also the nation’s main lay spokesperson against unmarried cohabitation and parenthood. With her metallic hair, headmistressy northern voice, and glinting spectacles, Whitehouse had a way of crushing opposition rather like Margaret Thatcher a few years later. “The fact of the matter,” she lectured Mick, “is that if you’re a Christian or a person with faith and you make that [marriage] vow, when difficulties come you have this basic thing you’ve accepted. You find your way through the difficulties.” His response was a credit to London School of Economics debating tradition, even though the Tyranny of Cool prevented him from admitting he’d wanted to take that vow with Marianne. “Your church accepts divorce. It may even accept abortion … am I right or wrong? I don’t see how you can talk about this bond which is inseparable when the Christian church itself accepts divorce.”

Marianne’s sixth month of pregnancy coincided with Mick’s shooting of The Performers, now retitled Performance. Determined to take care of herself as she had not with her first child, Nicholas, she got right away from London and its narcotic temptations, retiring with her mother to a house Mick rented for her in Tuam in the wilds of Ireland’s County Galway. He made constant trips out to see her, for her pregnancy was proving a difficult one, and he also needed her input on how to play his first screen role.

In fact, he had got last-minute cold feet over Performance, nervous that he mightn’t be able to carry off the part of Turner, the reclusive rock star, and that he’d embarrass himself with intellectual friends like Gibbs and Robert Fraser. Since losing the Jagger name meant losing the whole film, producer Sandy Lieberson had Nicolas Roeg film him in a scene ahead of the main shoot, so easing him gently into the process—and making him feel too involved to pull out. Though the scene was just him alone in a room, spray-painting the wall, Lieberson said it proved the camera loved him and he was a natural. So when principal photography began in London in late October, Mick was on set, ready to make what would be the only worthwhile movie of his career.