Mick Jagger (59 page)

Mick’s recreation of Turner’s domestic setup was to prove strangely prophetic. For, having lain on the shelf for more than a year, Performance suddenly became a live project again. The Hollywood studio that had bankrolled it, Warner Bros.–Seven Arts, had meantime been sold to the giant Kinney Corporation and acquired a new chairman, Ted Ashley. Looking over his inventory, Ashley was surprised to find a film starring Mick Jagger on which the previous owners had spent more than a million dollars but which had been junked after just one viewing of its first cut, early in 1969. Mick’s name was far hotter in America now than when that decision had been made, so Ted Ashley decided to send Performance out into the world.

A sneak public preview of the original cut was held at a small cinema in Santa Monica, attended by Warner’s new high command, the film’s producer, Sandy Lieberson, and its writer-codirector Donald Cammell. The scenes of bloody gangland violence and deviant rock-star sex caused palpable shock and disgust and, Lieberson recalls, “people walked out in droves.” Ashley ordered Cammell to do an extensive reedit, paring down the long preamble featuring the young hoodlum, Chas, and his cronies—so reducing the bloodshed—and making Chas’s interplay with Turner the crux of the story. Far from welcoming this expansion of his role, Mick was outraged by the changes and dilutions, and joined Cammell in a letter of protest to Ashley that both knew in advance would be futile: “This film is about the perverted love affair between Homo Sapiens and Lady Violence. It is necessarily horrifying, paradoxical, absurd. To make such a film means accepting that the subject is loaded with every taboo in the book … If [it] does not upset audiences, it is nothing.”

Performance opened in the United States in August 1970, and was both a box-office and critical disaster. Time magazine’s Richard Schickel called it “the most completely worthless film I have seen since I began reviewing.” Decades would need to pass before a poll of directors and critics rated it number twenty-eight in the list of all-time cinema greats, and Film Comment magazine voted Mick’s Turner “best ever performance by a musician in a feature film.” For the cinema historian David Thomson, it is “not anywhere near as good as the stories that surround it,” but essential viewing “if you ever doubt the tempest of repressed sexuality and pretension in the English soul.”

Nor were those stories yet at an end, for in after-years the film seemed to cast a malovelent spell over almost all its leading players. The most visible casualty was James Fox, who had taken the role of Chas as Britain’s leading young screen actor, with a seemingly boundless career in front of him. Chas’s gender-bending sexual games with Turner/Mick helped trigger a profound psychological crisis for Fox, further heightened by the death of his theatrical-agent father, Robin (who had not wanted him to accept the part and had asked Sandy Lieberson to keep a paternal eye on him). After the shoot, Fox disappeared to South America for several months, then abandoned his career at its zenith to join a fundamentalist Christian sect called the Navigators, not returning to the screen for more than a decade.

Anita Pallenberg—whom Turner chides for “shoot[ing] too much of that shit, Pherber”—was soon to live out the line with Keith, falling into heroin addiction that would ravage her perfect face and body as cruelly as quicklime. Michèle Breton, the androgynous nineteen-year-old for whom appearing in a sex threesome with Mick Jagger should have been the autoroute to stardom, instead vanished into total obscurity. Not long after his stint as “dialogue coach,” the hyperactive, hyperviolent David “Litz” Litvinoff mysteriously committed suicide.

The darkest shadow fell over writer-director Donald Cammell, who until then had seemed to lead a charmed life. Despite his extraordinary cinematic vision, Cammell wrote and directed only three more films over the next twenty years, each as visually and sexually daring as Performance, and each even more drastically diluted and recut by nervous producers. After the third, Wild Side, suffered this same fate, the once-charming, easygoing Cammell sank into paranoid depression, carrying a handgun with him everywhere and sleeping with it under his pillow. In April 1996, he used it to kill himself with the same “execution-style” single shot to the head, learned from his East End gangster friends, that Chas uses to dispatch the tormenting Turner at the end of Peformance. It was later reported that he’d positioned a mirror so as to be able to watch his own death throes. Truly, in the words he’d written for Mick, “the only performance that makes it … all the way is the one that achieves madness.”

As usual, Mick seemed to be the only one to have come through the experience unscathed—but even for him, Performance was to turn into a kind of curse. After that extraordinary first screen performance, people would endlessly ask, how come he never managed to do it again?

AROUND THE FIFTH month of Marsha Hunt’s pregnancy, she began to sense a change in Mick’s attitude to their parenthood pact. Where once he could hardly wait for her to bear his child, so she would later write, he now seemed to take a step back; where once he had been all tenderness and positivity, he now “vacillated between approval and disapproval … It alerted me … that he was already forgetting the baby had been his idea.”

They still remained on close enough terms for Mick to suggest Marsha should join him in Paris during the Stones’ European tour, even though by then she would be seven months pregnant and the secret would be bound to get out. She declined the invitation but—with no diminution of supportiveness on her side at least—told him to phone her whenever he wanted to talk.

As further proof of his rather lonely state, he also asked “Miss Pamela” on the tour (she decided to return to her boyfriend, however) and took along one of Cheyne Walk’s two resident houris, his “cook” Janice Kenner. The other, Catherine James, was dismissed as she lay in bed, with a farewell kiss and instructions to lock up the house before returning home to California.

The Stones’ first appearances in Europe since before Mick and Keith’s trial in 1967 featured their largest-ever retinue, sixty-five people, and a custom-built stage set and lights. As always, the support act was a revered blues figure, in this case guitarist Buddy Guy with a band including harmonica virtuoso Junior Wells to keep the headliners’ own harp player on his mettle. At a press conference before the opening show, in Malmö, Sweden, on August 30, Mick announced that the tour would not make any money, but was a gesture of appreciation to European fans for their loyalty over the past three years. (He would later say the band had earned just $1,000 each.) Asked about Ned Kelly, he snapped, “It isn’t worth seeing.”

Europe repaid the favor with displays of Mick-mania as extreme as any back in dear old revolutionary 1967 (though, after the close-up horror of Altamont, they could not but seem slightly anticlimactic). In West Berlin, street battles between fans and riot police left sixty-three officers injured. In Milan, a crowd of two thousand attempted to storm the already full-to-capacity Palazzo dello Sport; only by a miracle were people not trampled or crushed to death. At Paris’s Palais des Sports, about a dozen young women jumped onstage around Mick and stripped off their tops in unison, like some synchronized Olympic event, to reveal a common absence of bras. “Normally, that wouldn’t have bothered me too much,” sax player Bobby Keys remembers. “But I’d flown in my mom from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to see the show, so she’d know how good her little boy was doin’. So I’m standin’ there, these beautiful young chicks shakin’ their tits in my face, knowin’ Mom’s watchin’—and dyin’ by the minute.”

Meanwhile, the Stones’ final Decca album, the live Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!, had reached No. 1 in Britain and No. 6 in America, belatedly rousing the label into efforts to win them back. Emissaries from Decca hurried to Paris to see whether, even at this late stage, Mick could be persuaded not to defect to Atlantic. A helpful gesture, Mick’s people suggested, would be for them to pay the band’s bill at the George V hotel. Decca’s men eagerly agreed, not realizing that the George V still allowed guests to make purchases at expensive stores on the nearby Champs-Élysées and charge them to their hotel account. The result was a shopping spree at Cartier for Mick and the boys, a hotel bill of tens of thousands of dollars, and an end to any further overtures on Decca’s part.

Despite the availability of cook Janice to, in her words, “calm him down” after each night’s show (implicitly by means of something other than a warm milk pudding), Mick still seemed unhappy without a permanent relationship and was frequently overheard on the telephone to Marsha, albeit talking about himself rather than the progress of her pregnancy. One night, he called her to say he’d been feeling lonely but had met “someone named Bianca who was from Nicaragua” and whom he intended to see again in Italy.

The meeting had been on September 21, at an extravagant after-show party at the George V for which Decca Records would find themselves paying. Ahmet Ertegun, now Mick’s goateed shadow, had brought along an old friend, the French pop mogul Eddie Barclay. With the fifty-year-old Barclay was his twenty-five-year-old former girlfriend, Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias. Also present when Ertegun introduced Bianca to Mick was Donald Cammell, still at this time a creature of geniality and light. “You two are going to have such a great romance,” Cammell told them. “You were made for each other.”

The most impressive woman ever to enter Mick’s life—if not quite for the reasons he first thought—had grown up in Managua, capital city of Central America’s largest, richest, and least stable nation. Bianca’s father was a wealthy commodities dealer, and her family on both sides had provided diplomats for various key posts in the Nicaraguan foreign service. When her father’s business failed, her parents separated and her powerhouse mother, Dora, supported her and her brother, Carlos, by running a small restaurant in Managua. Though nominally a republic, Nicaragua was ruled by the Somoza family, a thuggish dynasty that held on to power for forty years by systematically murdering or intimidating all opposition. Dora was a fierce and fearless activist against the regime, and from the earliest age her daughter and son accompanied her on marches and demonstrations and were likewise marked down as enemies of the state. Bianca showed strong academic gifts and at the age of seventeen was offered a scholarship by the French government to study at the Institute of Political Science in Paris. Dora made her go, thinking she’d be safer out of the country.

Bianca and Paris were made for each other. With her remarkable beauty went an elegance that had little to do with sixties dolly fashion and a faint air of mystery somewhat recalling the girl in the Peter Sarstedt song who “talk[s] like Marlene Dietrich and dance[s] like Zizi Jeanmaire,” whose “clothes are all made by Balmain” and has “diamonds and pearls in [her] hair.” While still in her teens, she became the girlfriend of Michael Caine, then as glamorous as any rock star for films such as The Ipcress File. Caine brought her to London and showed her off in many places where she might have crossed paths with Mick, but somehow never did. She later complained that “unkind, superficial” Caine “kept me like I was his geisha.” She hadn’t seen nuthin’ yet.

After Michael Caine came an almost five-year relationship with Eddie Barclay, a former bandleader who had built up his eponymous record label with a mixture of French artists like Charles Aznavour and Jacques Brel and imported American jazz and blues. Though twice her age, and gnomically unattractive, Barclay provided the security Bianca needed. His extravagance and openhandedness were legendary, especially in Saint-Tropez, the high-fashion Riviera resort in which he spent most of every summer. There he wafted around the narrow streets in a white Rolls-Royce, gave “white parties” frequented by the cream of the international jet set, and block-booked a huge table every day at the exclusive 55 beach club, paying for dozens of meals and bottles of wine whether he used the table or not.

Legend has it that Mick fell for Bianca because she looked exactly like him. It has become a modern myth of Narcissus: the world’s most lusted-after creature, entranced by the thought of making love to himself. In fact, the two did not really resemble each other, apart from both being slight and fine-boned, with the same air of not belonging to the noisy, taller crowd around them. What Mick saw was a young woman as intriguing as she was beautiful—so different from all those bland Californians—virtually offered to him on a canapé tray just when he was seeking a new relationship. For Bianca, after years with a middle-aged father figure, Mick’s primary attraction was not being a world superstar, or being incredibly wealthy, or even being incredibly sexy, but simply being young. As to so many females on first meeting, he seemed “shy, vulnerable, and human”—though he rather spoiled this impression by mischievously pulling off Eddie Barclay’s toupee.

So smitten was he that all his usual secretiveness went out of the window. When the tour moved on to Italy, Bianca flew to join him in Rome and was met at the airport by his personal limo. In this birthplace of paparazzi, the story soon got out, unleashing harassment so extreme that Mick punched a photographer, was hauled before a judge, and fined the equivalent of $1,200. After the tour’s final concert in Amsterdam on October 9, he returned to Britain with Bianca openly at his side, joking to reporters at Heathrow Airport that they were “just good friends” while Bianca took refuge in a ferocious, but still beautiful, frown. “I have no name” was her answer to all questions. “I do not speak English.”

From that night on, 48 Cheyne Walk had a new chatelaine. When recent tenants like Miss Pamela or Catherine James telephoned and asked to speak to Mick, a stern Latin-inflected voice would reply that he was unavailable. “Cook” Janice Kenner remained on the staff, but with duties now strictly confined to the kitchen.

Bianca’s impact on the Rolling Stones was not far short of Yoko Ono’s when John Lennon first unloosed her on the Beatles. Whatever Mick’s previous sexual or social digressions, his primary concern had always been keeping the Stones on track and pushing them ever forward. Now, suddenly, here was something that interested him more. The repercussions were felt, not only within the band itself but all down the pyramid of individuals whose livelihoods depended on proving their indispensability to him on a daily, sometimes hourly, basis.