Mick Jagger (46 page)

The other Stones were not to appear in Performance or even feature as a band on the soundtrack, which instead included an impressive array of top American rock names such as Randy Newman, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and guitarist Lowell George. Mick himself was there primarily to be an actor, with the thing for which he was best known coming a long way second. Apart from the theme song, “Memo from Turner,” he had only one musical number on-screen, Robert Johnson’s “Come on in My Kitchen,” performed with no backup but his own guitar.

His nervousness in this alien new medium was mitigated by several familiar faces in addition to codirector Donald Cammell. The first choice to play Pherber, the senior of Turner’s two live-in girlfriends, had been Hollywood actress Tuesday Weld, whose most compelling credential was having starred opposite Elvis Presley in Wild in the Country. Weld flew to London to start work, but then had to drop out when a too-strenuous massage injured her back. Instead, Pherber was played by Anita Pallenberg, who had already made several movies and whose knowledge of rock stars’ ways, as Brian’s lover before she became Keith’s, was second to none. Just before the shoot, Anita, too, became pregnant, but chose to have an abortion rather than lose the role.

To lend authenticity to the homosexually tinged gangland sequences, David Litvinoff, the Stones’ pet enforcer, was hired as technical adviser and dialogue coach. Litvinoff’s special charge was James Fox, the hitherto posh young actor, now cast as the Cockney protection racketeer Chas. Under Litz’s tutelage, Fox learned to speak in the mock-formal banter London thugs use with their victims—which makes them performers in their own right—and toured the East End, meeting several of the Krays’ henchmen and working out at a boxing gym above the Thomas à Becket pub frequented by real-life muscle. For further verisimilitude, the supporting cast included Johnny Shannon, a former fighter, as the pederastic gang boss Harry Flowers, aka Ronnie Kray, and John Bindon, an enforcer for the Krays whose specialty was cutting off people’s hands with a machete.

Almost all of the film involving Mick was shot on location, inside Turner’s cavernous house. Though Cammell’s script placed this in run-down Notting Hill, it actually was in Lowndes Square, Belgravia, conveniently close to Cheyne Walk. The owner was Captain Leonard Plugge, an eccentric Member of Parliament and friend of royalty who had previously used it for private gaming parties. Christopher Gibbs was brought in to create a rock star’s lair with Moroccan cushions, candles, mirrors, and closets bursting with unisex clothes. All the windows were blacked out to deter prying fans and heighten the claustrophobic atmosphere.

Sandy Lieberson, it soon transpired, had not merely been schmoozing: Mick really was a natural—and, more than that, a director’s dream. In his enthusiasm for the project and desire to learn everything possible about the screen actor’s craft, his usual rock-star imperiousness, impatience, and petulance vanished completely. For all eleven weeks of shooting he reported punctually for work every day, obeyed his codirectors Nic Roeg and Cammell’s instructions to the letter, endured the repetitiveness and frequent tedium of filmmaking without complaint, and to the other cast members and crew came across as the friendliest, funniest, least pretentious of people. “It was,” Lieberson recalls wistfully, “a very happy shoot.”

According to folklore, Mick constructed his on-screen persona from the velvet-voiced devilment of Brian in happier times and the saturnine menace of Keith. But apart from dyed-black hair, Turner was pure Jagger, from his rouged and mascara’d face to his huge-buckled hipster trousers, alternately challenging, teasing, haughty, moody, or reading out passages from clever books in a cut-glass accent that would not have disgraced the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. At one point, the rock ’n’ roll hermit was actually referred to as “Old Rubber-Lips.” Even Mars bars made a brief appearance, lined up beside the front doorstep having, somewhat implausibly, arrived with the morning milk.

It was just as well that the house’s windows were blacked out. One scene required Turner to smoke joints in the bath with Pherber and his other live-in girlfriend, Lucy, played by an androgynous French nineteen-year-old named Michèle Breton, whom Cammell had discovered on a Saint-Tropez beach when she was only thirteen. To begin with, Mick was reluctant to use real joints in the bath scene lest it should spoil his focus, but was soon persuaded otherwise. Indeed, the reek of pot throughout the shoot made art director John Clark recall later: “You took one breath and you got stoned.” As one of the crew quipped to his colleagues, the drug supply was more reliable than the location catering. “You want to get a fuckin’ joint, they’re coming out of your ear’oles. You want a cup of tea, you got no fuckin’ chance.”

At its core, Performance was a study of Mick’s unsettling effect on other males, especially those who considered themselves most unassailably macho. Like so many unsuspecting guests at rock-star parties, Chas was to be fed hallucinogenic drugs, then undergo a trip orchestrated by Turner to shred away all his prized masculinity and expose the lurking demon that he might be just as gay as his avenging gang boss. At the climax, cross-dressed in a frilled shirt and curly wig, he became a grotesque parody of Turner, while Mick’s Turner metamorphosed into Harry Flowers. The filmmakers were banking on the shock value of seeing Mick in an ordinary suit, with his hair scraped back, taking care of business in a manner unthinkable for sixties rock icons (but exactly as he would be doing a short time hence). Here, too, he Cockney-sneered the line that justified the film’s title, and would be endlessly replayed on YouTube into the next century: “The only performance that makes it, that re-ally makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.”

Though Anita was shown teasing and toying with Chas, so much like real-life Anita, the principal seducer clearly was Turner/Mick. A scene in Turner’s private recording studio briefly recreated the Stones’ front man performing an erotically charged dance with a fluorescent light tube for his mesmerized audience of one. In the film’s most memorable coup de cinéma, Chas was shown waking up in bed beside Turner. The long-haired figure instantly mounted him and kissed him devouringly. Only when it brushed its hair aside was it revealed to be not Mick but the androgynous Michèle Breton.

There were also troilistic sex scenes between Turner, Pherber, and Lucy which would allow millions who had fantasized about Mick in bed to watch him there in hugely magnified form—his little rib cage and hairless flesh; the prodigious lips in profile, gaping open like some scarlet-daubed volcano as Anita’s tongue flicked down like forked lightning from above. At these moments the set was closed and Nicolas Roeg filmed in 16mm to give more of a homemade porn-flick feeling. The gusto with which both played their parts gave rise to rumors that, with Marianne safely in County Galway, Mick and Anita actually did have sex on camera. Anita would always deny it, saying that at the time she was “a one-guy girl” (i.e., faithful to Keith) and that, anyway, Mick “was the last guy I would do that with.” Even if merely simulation, it was so convincing that, without Mick’s knowledge, the outtakes were turned into a half-hour short entitled Rehearsal for Performance. And on the Internet today, one can see still photographs of him during the sequence, lying beside Breton, some with a hand shielding his genitals, some not.

With Brian still at Redlands, Anita and Keith had borrowed Robert Fraser’s flat on Mount Street, Mayfair, also a conveniently short distance from the Plugge house. But, like Arthur Miller while his wife, Marilyn Monroe, was shooting The Seven Year Itch, Keith firmly refused ever to come and watch Anita in front of the camera. He was deeply uneasy about her sex scenes with Mick, even on the assumption these went no further than acting, and almost as put out that Mick should be doing something without him and the rest of the band. He could not stay away completely, however, and would sit outside in his car, sending in anguished notes to Anita—about which, Sandy Lieberson recalls, “she didn’t give a shit.” To Donald Cammell, she seemed to be “teasing Keith about wanting Mick, the way she used to tease Brian about wanting Keith.”

Forty-two years later, Keith would claim in his autobiography to have hit back at Mick’s supposed affair with Anita by rogering Marianne at 48 Cheyne Walk and escaping through the window—leaving his socks behind—when they heard the sound of Mick’s car. But since at the time Marianne was heavily pregnant and away in Ireland, one can only assume he was thinking of their brief fling before she and Mick got together (or alternatively, as with other things in his book, just making it up).

Anyway, a far readier weapon of retaliation was the song he and Mick were committed to write for Performance’s soundtrack. He refused to buckle down and work on it, and Mick had to—tearfully—admit defeat to Donald Cammell and suggest hammering out something with Cammell instead. Together they wrote a track entitled “Memo from Turner,” but still did not solve the problem, since Keith was also supposed to play on it, and in the studio resolutely ensured—as only he knew how—that it sounded terrible. Finally he had to be replaced by the young slide-guitar wizard Ry Cooder and the song credited to Mick alone. Apart from its title, “Memo from Turner” had nothing to do with the story or even London, but was an invocation of “Noo Awleans on a hot and dusty night” in the spirit of the soundtrack’s other American country rockers. Despite lacking Keith, or possibly for that very reason, it would stand as Mick’s best-ever solo track.

In the end, Performance was less a Mick Jagger vehicle than a Nicolas Roeg one. For it had all the trademarks that would make Roeg one of the most influential directors of the 1970s: the scenes out of sequence, the switches from color to black-and-white or movie to stills, the distorting close-ups and enigmatic long shots not only recalling European cinematic surrealists like Luis Buñuel but the nightmarish and conspicuously gay paintings of Francis Bacon. It was ahead of Easy Rider in using a multi-artist rock-music soundtrack, including an early example of rap, and in celebrating the drug culture; it was ahead of a whole voyeuristic decade in on-screen eroticism; it was ahead of Michael Caine’s Get Carter and Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry—and remains way, way ahead of twenty-first-century upstarts like Guy Ritchie—in making violence seem cool. Its future admirers would include directors of the standing of Stanley Kubrick, Bernardo Bertolucci, and Martin Scorsese.

And the studio hated it. Warner Bros.–Seven Arts’ UK head of production, Ken Hyman, had not exactly been expecting a pop-star romp in the style of the Beatles’ Help! but was horrifed by the first rushes, particularly the joint-smoking bath scene with Mick, Anita, and Michèle Breton in which, he complained, “even the bathwater is dirty.” Work was shut down for three days while Sandy Lieberson persuaded Hyman to let the shoot run its course. Then, when the footage went to be processed, the Humphries Film Laboratories told Lieberson it contravened British pornography laws and, fearing prosecution as an accessory, destroyed the print in front of him. The Technicolor labs proving less sensitive; a second print was made and shown to Ken Hyman. He pronounced it unreleasable as a Hollywood product—a judgment endorsed by his studio-boss father, Eliot—and the film was shelved indefinitely.

One part, however, did receive speedy exposure. The on-set photographs of a naked, tumescent Mick were published in Oz magazine, en route to the future Internet. And Rehearsal for Performance, the off-cuts from his sex scene with Anita, fell into the hands of Jim Haynes, American cofounder of the Underground porno newspaper Suck. Haynes included it in Suck’s Wet Dream Film Festival in Amsterdam, where it was voted winner in the One-Night Stand category.

ON NOVEMBER 19, Marianne returned to London from County Galway and checked into a private maternity clinic in St. John’s Wood. Her condition had been giving increasing cause for concern, so much so that at one point Mick had to take a Harley Street gynecologist, Dr. Victor Bloom, out to Ireland to examine her. Fears that she might be too anemic to bring the baby to term proved sadly correct: the day after entering the clinic, she suffered a miscarriage.

Marianne, as she would later write, felt “devastated and guilty … and it took me ages before I could even begin to grapple with my feelings about it.” For Mick, the loss of the baby he so much hoped would be a little girl named Corrina can have been no less devastating. Yet he did not allow it to derail him any more than had his trial, national humiliation, and imprisonment a year earlier. Under the Tyranny of Cool, he showed no emotion to the outside world—and almost none to the distraught Marianne—simply picking himself up and carrying on with his superstar life as if nothing could ever be more important. His only vague hint at heartbreak was a seemingly incongruous line in “Memo from Turner” (actually recorded some time earlier): “the baby’s dead, my lady said.”

The end of 1968 allowed little time for sad reflection. Early in December, the Stones’ Beggars Banquet album was finally released in Britain and America, having been delayed for four months by the impasse over its toilet-wall cover artwork. In the end, they had settled for a plain white front cover with the title in italic script and “RSVP” in the bottom left-hand corner, just like all Mick’s real-life invitations to the homes of toffs. Inside was a picture of the band at a banquet table in medieval motley, with Mick biting an apple brandished on the end of Keith’s knife. Unluckily, the Beatles double-disc White Album had just appeared, and Beggars Banquet attracted criticism for seeming to copy its minimalist cover design and for the brevity of some tracks. But every critic hailed it as a magnificent return to form after that previous duff invite, Their Satanic Majesties Request.

The album’s UK launch was a banquet-style lunch for the press in a wood-paneled room at London’s super-respectable Kensington Gore Hotel. All five Stones were present and correct in stripy Dickensian tailcoats and top hats, and Tudor-style serving wenches with frilled caps, aprons, and low-cut bodices brought round the food. In a further time shift, to silent-movie slapstick, there followed a custard-pie fight in which VIP guests like Britain’s future ambassador to Washington, Lord Harlech—and even the usually circumspect PR Les Perrin—joined with enthusiasm. Face dripping with white foam, Mick somewhat rashly announced that everyone’s dry-cleaning bills should be sent to him. He later wrote a charming letter to the hotel, apologizing for the mess.