Mick Jagger (62 page)

There was, of course, no Hello! in 1971, but Fleet Street did its best to fill the gap, even The Times publishing a front-page report headed “MICK WEDS IN HIPPIE CHAOS.” Oz magazine’s editor, Richard Neville, who had been at the wedding, penned a long editorial voicing the disgust of Britain’s Underground to see their former Street Fighting Man thus absorbed into the international jet set. “Jagger has firmly repudiated the possibilities of a counterculture of which his music is a part,” thundered his ungrateful guest. “Street-Fighting Man found Satisfaction in every pitiable cliché of la dolce capitalism … The Jagger myth, epitomising multilevel protest for nearly a decade, finally exploded with the champagne corks.” Private Eye’s next cover was a photograph of Mayor Estezan asking Bianca in a speech bubble “ARE YOU TAKING THE MICK?”

There was even a comment from Bianca’s ex-boyfriend Michael Caine to add to the tiny store of public knowledge about her—and hint that domestic life for the Jaggers might not be all perfect harmony: “I was with Bianca for quite a long time. We enjoyed the relationship very much, and I was a bit upset about her marrying Mick … She’ll argue about everything until you feel you’re going mad. I bet they’re fighting like cats and dogs already.” (He wasn’t far wrong.)

No public response, however, came from the long-term partner Mick had finished with less than a year earlier; Marianne had already sunk too far out of sight. She had not heard the wedding was imminent and knew nothing about it until she came up to London from Berkshire for one of the regular Valium injections with which she was now trying to fight her heroin habit. Arriving at Paddington station to catch her train home, she saw “MICK WEDS BIANCA” all over the evening papers. The shock made her forget her train and head for the station bar to add three vodka martinis to the Valium already inside her. Shortly afterward, the police were called to a nearby Indian restaurant, where she had passed out into a plate of curry. She was taken to Paddington Green Police Headquarters and locked up overnight.

Not until her release the next morning did her captors finally realize she was, or had been, somebody. Paddington Green HQ was an ultramodern complex only recently opened, and when Marianne emerged from her cell, she was deferentially asked to sign the visitors’ book. The only other name in it so far was that of the home secretary, Reginald Maudling, who’d performed the opening ceremony. Inscribing a shaky signature after Maudling’s was the nearest she would be to celebrity for a long time to come.

THE PROVENÇAL HOME originally selected for Mick and his bride was a villa called Nellcôte on the craggy heights above Villefranche Harbor. Formerly owned by the shipping magnate Alexandre Bordes, it was more palace than villa, fronted by heavy iron gates and surrounded by a double tier of Romanesque columns. Within was a maze of interconnecting Art Nouveau salons with parquet floors, mirrored doors, marble fireplaces, and chandeliers. Acres of exotic gardens led down to a private beach and jetty. But Mick thought it all too showy, not to mention too public, so poor Nellcôte was assigned to Keith instead.

For tax-exile rock stars, there was an abundant choice of accommodation along the Azure Coast, long colonized by wealthy British and Americans, with its opulent coastal villas and apartment blocks and hinterland of medieval mountain villages. And all the lesser Stones were quickly settled: Bill and Mick Taylor in Grasse, Charlie (whose sensitive soul shrank from Côte d’Azur glitz) at Arles, Vincent Van Gogh’s old home in the Vaucluse, far away to the northwest.

Mick, as usual, took the longest to decide, staying on at the Byblos, then moving to an even more luxurious hotel, Bastide du Roy in Aix as his chief PA, Jo Bergman, continued the hunt. His eventual choice was at Biot, just outside Antibes, a secluded property owned by the Prince de Polignac, uncle of Monaco’s ruler, Prince Rainier. It had a tradition of being let to composers and musicians but always hitherto in the classical sphere, and de Polignac was initially reluctant to entrust it to the most infamous name in pop. He would later say that Mick and Bianca were the best tenants he ever had.

Strangely, after having been so resentful about moving to France, the one who settled into the new life most quickly and contentedly was Keith. In his cliff-top Art Nouveau palace, he became like a gypsy reincarnation of Dick Diver in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender Is the Night, presiding over a huge and constantly changing circle of friends and hangers-on, British, American, and French. The house’s population was seldom fewer than twenty—including sundry small children like the former cocaine mules Jake and Charley Weber—splashing in the pool, sunning themselves on the balustraded terraces, and taking perilous rides with Keith round Villefranche Harbor in the speedboat he named Mandrax 2. So many sat down to the regular gourmet meals that the kitchen had to be enlarged, at a cost that made Prince Rupert Loewenstein mop his noble brow. In time, even people-hungry Anita wearied of the incessant party and banquet, complaining, “Why does no one ever say good-bye?” Finally, one day, the revels became too much for Keith also, and he and Anita fled to Mick Taylor’s house in Grasse for some peace and quiet.

Mick and Bianca’s house at Biot, by contrast, was pristinely neat and wrapped in deep quiet, broken only when Mick played a blues record from the large collection he’d had shipped over or practiced on the drum kit he kept in the living room. With the property came a resident housekeeper, a wizened little Italian woman named Madame Villa, whose initial froideur was quickly melted by the Jagger charm. It all seemed a long way from Nellcôte, the more so as few of Keith’s multitudinous houseguests ever found their way there. One exception was a young British falconer who had turned up at Nellcôte carrying a baby eagle in his pocket (which Nice Airport security no more detected than little Jake and Charley Weber’s cargo of cocaine). Mick invited him to train falcons in the garden at Biot, and liked to sit and watch—rather different exercises with birds than the Prince de Polignac had feared. “It was very restful,” he would recall. “[Life] wasn’t mad, really, for me, to be honest.” The staff who ministered to both Glimmer Twins all felt that while Keith had made himself completely at home on the Côte d’Azur, Mick always remained a transient.

The plan was not for the Stones to sit around in sun-soaked idleness but to get straight on with recording their second Atlantic album, using the cache of Jagger-Richard songs written over the previous two years, which the pair had carefully kept out of Allen Klein’s clutches. Their producer, Jimmy Miller, and engineer, Andy Johns, were poised to commute from London, while the horn section of Bobby Keys and Jim Price had loyally followed them to France and were living in rented houses in Villefranche. Recording studios around Nice and Cannes were scouted, but none proved suitable. It was then that Keith came up with the idea which would give him his one and only era as Chief Stone. Nellcôte had a labyrinthine cellar, reputedly used to interrogate prisoners during the villa’s occupation by senior Nazi officers in the Second World War. Why not make the album down there?

Led by the Stones’ resourceful roadie Ian Stewart, their backup team made the transformation speedily enough for recording to start less than a month after Mick’s wedding. Electric cables were run into the cellar and rough wooden partitions erected to screen the musicians from each other, though little could be done to moderate its dank smell and torture-chamber heat. The control room was the Mighty Mobile studio-in-a-truck, parked outside. The electricity supply proved erratic and there were frequent power cuts until Stu found an answer that would have brought mass deportation quicker than any drug, had it ever come to light: one side of Nellcôte’s garden overlooked the electrified railway line to Monaco in one direction and Nice in the other. Stu managed to tap into the power lines, so obtaining an unlimited free supply courtesy of France’s national rail network, SNCF.

This being Keith’s house, recording sessions took place in what became known as Keith Time. He would rise around 4 P.M., then spend several hours hanging out with his innumerable houseguests, or alone in his room with just a needle for company. Not until well past 10 P.M., as a rule, would he pick up his guitars from the parquet floor and lurch downstairs, and the backup musicians assemble in their sweltering wooden stalls, and the juice from French railways start flowing. It being Keith’s house, too, the tracks tended to start out as instrumentals which could ramble on for hours as he sought the right killer riff for each. Mick, an onlooker recalls, “would play a little harp, then start yelling a few things.”

Such lethargy and lack of structure was repugnant to the orderly, focused Mick. “I didn’t have a very good time,” he remembered. “It was this communal thing, where you don’t know if you’re recording or living or having dinner … and too many hangers-on.” As Keith later summed up their essential difference: “Mick likes knowing what he’s going to do tomorrow. Me, I’m just happy to wake up and see who’s hanging around. Mick’s rock, I’m roll.”

For all Mick’s distaste for the Nellcôte bacchanal, he remained strangely possessive where Keith was concerned, and was hostile, as only Mick knew how, to anyone who occupied too much of his Glimmer Twin’s attention. This chiefly meant the beautiful young country rocker Gram Parsons, who paid an extended visit with his soon-to-be wife, Gretchen. Keith and Gram would spend hours together, strumming old Everly Brothers songs and making vague plans for Gram to sign with Rolling Stones Records. While Mick was equally drawn to Gram’s musical talent, his silent, sinuous ill will toward his unknowing rival was likened by another houseguest to “a tarantula.” Keith would later talk of his “weird possessiveness … I [had] the feeling Mick thought I belonged to him.”

Côte d’Azur sun shone uninterruptedly all summer, and there were ample ways for the sports-mad Mick to work off his abundant excess energy. He began playing tennis obsessively—though, to his annoyance, chain-smoking, booze-swilling junkie Keith could still best him on the court. When an expatriate Englishwoman named June Shelley joined the Jagger support squad, she received a typically demanding assignment: Mick wanted a Harley-Davidson motorcycle and had to have it that same afternoon. Locating a Harley proved impossible, but she found Hondas of almost equal power to be available in Nice. Mick and Bobby Keys bought one each and rode them home to Mick’s house in Biot (Keys wrecking his a couple of days later). Many times afterward June would learn that “the words no or it can’t be done weren’t in Mick’s vocabulary. ‘What do you mean we can’t get a piano tuner at three in the morning? We need the piano tuned.’ ”

As the ogling court around him could not fail to observe, strains were already evident in Mick’s brand-new marriage. Bianca disliked the sprawling, smoky, drugged-out scene at Nellcôte even more than he did, went there only for short periods under sufferance, and always returned seething about something Anita had done or said. As the first glow began to fade, they had frequent rows—the public kind Mick most hated—in which Bianca revealed a volatile temper and pugilistic ways that he hadn’t experienced since Chrissie Shrimpton. “I’ve seen her whop him round the ear a few times,” Bobby Keys remembers. “Let me rephrase that ’fore I get my ass chewed off. I’ve seen her give him a few slaps.”

Bianca’s pregnancy was proving difficult, and she’d made clear she wanted the baby to be born in Paris when the time came, in late October. She began to spend time there, establishing a base at the chic L’Hôtel, on the Rue des Beaux Arts, where Oscar Wilde had died (uttering the immortal last words “Either that wallpaper goes or I do”). Mick would join her whenever he could get away from recording sessions at Nellcôte. Still optimistic about his screen career, he was currently in talks with Performance’s producer, Sandy Lieberson, about a film version of Michael McClure’s play The Sermons of Jean Harlow and the Curses of Billy the Kid. Lieberson paid several visits to the Biot house, but never saw Bianca there. Increasingly on Friday nights, Keith would tell the Nellcôte cellar crew with a scowl that Mick wouldn’t be joining them because he’d “pissed off to Paris again.”

On October 21, at the city’s Belvedere Nursing Home, Bianca was safely delivered of a six-pound baby girl. Mick announced to waiting reporters that his daughter was “very precious and quite, quite perfect” and would be named Jade Sheena Jezebel. “Why Jade?” a girlfriend was to ask him some years later. “Her eyes were so green,” he replied.

For almost six months, Keith nurtured the comfortable belief that the Côte d’Azur’s laid-back attitudes extended to hard drugs. Thanks to Nurse Smitty, he was clean when he first arrived in France but, after a go-karting accident, had been prescribed a course of painkilling morphine injections which put him straight back on smack again. And, as always, there were plenty of people around to keep him there. His cook at Nellcôte, an unsavory-looking character known as Fat Jacques, kept a constant supply of a superior grade coming via contacts in Marseille. When small boys were no longer available as mules, Spanish Tony Sanchez brought cocaine for Keith from London hidden inside a toy piano that was a gift for his son, Marlon. One day while Keith was out in the Mandrax 2, sailors on an American aircraft carrier threw him down a big bag of weed. When John Lennon paid him a visit, after coming to Nice for an art exhibition, Mick and the other Stones saw nothing of their old friend and fan. Lennon spent forty-five minutes closeted with Keith upstairs and then left, vomiting on the hall carpet by way of farewell.

In fact, the Nice gendarmerie had Nellcôte under close surveillance and were simply waiting for their moment to pounce. This came when daylight robbers strolled into the house and made off with most of Keith’s guitar collection and two of Bobby Keys’s saxophones. The police apparently believed the robbers to be Marseille drug dealers whose bills hadn’t been paid. Keith was forbidden to leave France pending an appearance before an examining magistrate to answer charges as yet unspecified but, so he was warned, likely to include heroin dealing and running organized prostitution. Thanks to Prince Rupert’s contacts, the more extreme counts were not pursued, and Keith received permission to travel abroad on the condition that he continued paying the whopping rent for Nellcôte.