Mick Jagger (63 page)

Away from the Côte d’Azur, the old pecking order was restored. When the Stones moved to Los Angeles to finish off the new album, Mick took charge once more, driving the unfinished tracks to a conclusion and adding star session musicians like Billy Preston and Dr. John. Keith, anyway, had other pressing problems to deal with. In his absence, the French police had belatedly raided Nellcôte and come up with incriminating evidence that made the Redlands bust in 1967 seem laughable. His American visa was about to expire and, thanks to the audible media clamor from France, was unlikely to be extended.

Like Marianne Faithfull a couple of years earlier—and just as erroneously—he decided the country where he would be most likely to get clean for good was Switzerland. June Shelley, who went with him, later reported he’d almost died in an ambulance en route to the clinic. In April 1972, while he was still undergoing treatment, Anita gave birth to their second child, a baby daughter, in the maternity clinic down the road. Whatever happened, it seemed, the Glimmer Twins just couldn’t stop competing.

That May, a year of legal action by the Stones against Allen Klein seemed to reach a conclusive settlement. While the band were shaking the dust of Britain from their wedgy boot heels, their American lawyers had filed suit against Klein in the New York State Supreme Court, charging that during his tenure as their manager he had used $29 million of their earnings “for his own profit and benefit.” It was in America, too, that Mick planned to challenge Klein’s ownership of all the band’s record copyrights between 1963 and 1970. The contention was that young, naive musicians had been suckered of what was rightfully theirs by a cunning, amoral entrepreneur.

Neither strand of litigation, however, brought the desired results. On the copyright issue, American courts would take the view that Klein had bought them legitimately from the Stones’ first manager, Andrew Oldham, and that, however young and naive, the Stones had always known those copyrights were vested in Oldham, not them. Under American law, very little overturns the sacred principle that a deal is a deal. And the $29 million lawsuit came to a stop when Klein’s lawyers offered $2 million “in settlement of all outstanding difficulties.” The negotiations were partly conducted by Klein’s nephew, Ron Schneider, who tape-recorded his separate discussions with his uncle and Mick. At one moment Mick could be heard expressing willingness to talk to Klein personally, because “this whole thing has gotten to be a drag.” Klein was heard saying rather wistfully, “I think Mick Jagger still likes me.”

In mid-May, the Nellcôte basement tapes were released as a double album, Exile on Main St. Apart from the word exile, it gave no hint of the circumstances in which it had been recorded and conveyed not the slightest flavor of France. Keith’s guitar dominated the Stones’ now-familiar post-sixties mix of stripped-down rock, hard-core blues, and hillbilly ballads. Only here and there did a track title accidentally refer to the band’s Riviera lifestyle or the ramshackle recording process—“Tumbling Dice” and “Casino Boogie,” for instance, to Monaco’s gambling joints; “Loving Cup” to Keith’s profligate hospitality; “Ventilator Blues” to that stifling cellar studio; “Stop Breaking Down” and “Shine a Light” to the wavery power supply; “All Down the Line” to the unwitting contribution of the French national railways. From bilingual Francophile Mick, however, came not even the most oblique mention of his new surroundings, his new wife, or new baby. Whatever emotions were inside, his voice remained firmly stuck on Planet Jagger, with its make-believe honky-tonks and whorehouses and its implicit capital, Noo Awleans.

Exile did not so much overstep the limits of pop-lyric decency as pole-vault far beyond them, abounding with previously forbidden words like shit, fucking, cunt, even nigger, and naming one track (for no obvious reason) “Turd on the Run.” Also included was Jagger and Richard’s first specific protest song, “Sweet Black Angel,” about the trial of the American Black Power activist Angela Davis. The track also became the B-side to the album’s advance single, “Tumbling Dice,” which reached No. 5 in the UK and No. 7 in America. It says much about how times had changed since “Let’s Spend the Night Together” that scarcely a demurring voice was heard in the press and censorship problems on radio were minimal.

The album received mixed reviews, even the good ones sounding vaguely disapproving. “There are songs that are better and there are songs that are worse,” wrote Lenny Kaye in Rolling Stone, “and others you’ll probably lift the [gramophone] needle for when time is due.” But, he concluded, “the great Stones album of their mature period is yet to come.” For the same magazine’s Robert Christgau, it was “a fagged-out masterpiece which explores new depths of recording-studio murk, burying Jagger’s voice under layers of cynicism, angst and ennui.” Over time, most of the critics would eat their words, and Exile on Main St. would be seen as the Stones’ supreme achievement on record—though Mick himself never seemed that keen on it.

“It’s very rock ’n’ roll, you know. I didn’t want it to be like that. I’m the more experimental person in the group, you see. I mean, I’m very bored with rock ’n’ roll. Everyone knows what their roots are, but you’ve got to explore everything. You’ve got to explore the sky.”

TO PROMOTE EXILE in its most important market, there was to be an American tour in June and July, the band’s first shows there since Altamont. Since Keith was still trying to get straight in Switzerland, pretour rehearsals had to take place in a small cinema in Montreux on the shores of Lake Geneva. It was when the band returned to Los Angeles to do publicity for the album and continue limbering up that the Pisces Apple lady joined Mick’s entourage.

Chris O’Dell was a lissome Arizonan with tumbling hair and a wide, warm smile who managed to become an insider at the two most exclusive courts in rock. She started out working at the Beatles’ Apple company—hence her nickname—becoming especially close to George and Ringo and their not overhappy wives. She was also a friend of fellow American Janice Kenner, Mick’s “cook” during his final bachelor days, and would occasionally drop by 48 Cheyne Walk to hang out with the two of them. Janice’s ambiguous role in Mick’s household taught Chris that any attractive young woman he employed might be called on for nostrings sex—an arrangement later known as friendship with benefits.

Being trusted by the Beatles was an automatic passport to being trusted by the Stones. As the band prepared for their 1972 American tour, Chris O’Dell became assistant to Marshall Chess, who immediately gave her the job of finding Mick and Keith homes to rent in L.A. For Mick, she came up with 414 St. Pierre Road, Bel Air, an H-shaped pink stucco mansion on a 6.5-acre estate built by press baron William Randolph Hearst for his movie-star mistress Marion Davies and since used as a hideaway by Howard Hughes and a honeymoon retreat by Jack and Jackie Kennedy. The house had twenty-nine bedrooms, a ballroom, an enormous library, and three pools, and looked over pink Italian gardens which had lately featured in the gruesome horse’s head scene in The Godfather. Mick loved the property and lost no time in installing Bianca, six-month-old Jade, and her English nanny. Though still technically working for Marshall Chess, Chris effectively became his personal assistant.

In her time with the Beatles, Chris learned that looking after supercolossal rock stars was a great deal easier if you got along with their wives. “Each morning,” she remembers, “my first call would be to Bianca to see what she needed doing, before I contacted Mick and found out the hundred and one things he needed doing.” Bianca she felt to be “a spoiled girl” who showed little of Mick’s appreciativeness when some near-impossible whim was gratified. And, as in France, she didn’t like Mick to spend too much time at Keith and Anita’s house on Stone Canyon Drive, a few minutes’ drive away. “Bianca wasn’t the type to just go hang out. It always seemed that her relationship with Mick had an element of rivalry. When they came into a room, each looking fabulous, they seemed to be competing to get everyone’s attention.”

The house was also planning headquarters for the forthcoming tour, and dozens of people tracked through it each day, seeking Mick’s permission for something or other. Yet he still found time for fatherhood. “I remember him in the kitchen with Jade, totally wrapped up in her,” Chris O’Dell says. Rock superstars tend not to bother much with baby care, but after Jade’s birth, he had gone to Sally, her English nanny, and requested lessons in bottle-feeding and nappy-changing.

America in 1972 was no more stable a society than in the expiring sixties. The year was to bring a presidential election in which the voting age would be lowered from twenty-one to eighteen. Republican incumbent Richard M. Nixon—the most paranoid character ever to occupy the White House—feared being ousted from office by a massive youth vote, substantially whipped up by British pop stars. John Lennon, now in exile with Yoko in New York, had become deeply involved in extreme-left politics and as a result was under surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation as well as threat of expulsion by the immigration authorities. Nixon’s paranoia was assiduously fed by the FBI’s director, J. Edgar Hoover, a ferocious reactionary whose secret penchant for wearing girls’ dresses even frillier than Mick Jagger’s none yet suspected.

The Bureau had regarded Mick as an anti-American subversive since 1967 when its collusion with British MI5 in the Acid King David affair had led to his trial, imprisonment, and consequent exile from the United States for two years afterward. He still had a fat FBI file, noting such threats to its internal security as his vague murmurs of support for the Black Panthers and the Exile on Main St. track dedicated to Angela Davis. According to a former FBI operative, “J. Edgar Hoover hated Jagger probably more than any other pop-cultural figure of his generation.”

Gunfire still echoed through the land with terrible promiscuity. The shock had barely subsided from the Kent State University massacre, when Ohio National Guardsmen killed four students and wounded nine during a peaceful demonstration against the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. Then on May 16, 1972, George Wallace, the segregationalist governor of Alabama, now running for president, was shot five times at a political rally and paralyzed for life. One balmy evening in Los Angeles, Mick buzzed down his limo window to chat with some girls convulsed with pretour excitement. “Oh, Mick,” breathed one, “aren’t you afraid of getting shot?” He reflected a moment, then gave an unwontedly straight answer: “Yeah … I am.”

Above all there were fears that the Hell’s Angels might be planning revenge against the Stones for leaving them to take the flak, as they saw it, after Altamont. “The band were all very scared,” recalls Marshall Chess, “Mick especially. Every time we came out of somewhere late at night, we’d always be careful to look both ways.” As a result, security was tighter than on any tour before. Key members of the entourage, including Chess, provided themselves with handguns and Mick himself bought two .38 Police Specials. Chip Monck’s stage crew all had to have bona fide union cards, lest some disguised Angel should beg a casual job with the team, then reenact Meredith Hunter’s murder on Mick or Keith mid-set. The pair were assigned two formidable-looking black bodyguards with open white shirt collars as big as snowy shawls. According to an insider who prefers not to identified, these guardians did not just keep watch outside the Glimmer Twins’ hotel suites: “They were with them in their bedrooms. All night.”

No more was the Stones’ progress through America to be reported merely by the drones of the music press. For this tour, the nation’s most prestigious general-interest magazines sought backstage passes, competing with one another in the literary heavyweights they assigned to the story. The Saturday Review nominated William S. Burroughs, the countercultural colossus whose heroin cure Keith had so recently, and futilely, tried. When the Review could not meet Burroughs’s price, his place was taken by Terry Southern, author of screen classics like Dr. Strangelove and Easy Rider, who had previously served a spell as writer-in-residence at the Beatles’ Apple house.

Rolling Stone trumped even Burroughs by commissioning Truman Capote, perhaps America’s greatest prose artist of the postwar era. Though best known for his harrowing nonfiction novel In Cold Blood, Capote had written an earlier, hilarious account of a black operatic company touring Soviet Russia and had always hankered to do something else in the same vein. As a hopeful added attraction for Mick, he had a huge circle of famous friends both in show business and New York’s 400. Equally at home with high and low life, he seemed an inspired choice to chronicle the rise of a once-scruffy rock band to stratospheric chic.

The tiny, falsetto-voiced Capote as a rule had an uncanny ability to charm his subjects and elicit the most revealing confidences. Unfortunately, he considered himself as big a star as Mick, if not more of one, and their first meeting, at a pretour party, was not promising. “He told me he was going to do the tour for the money,” Mick was to recall. “When he told me how much [Rolling Stone] offered, I said, ‘I’m sure that’s not enough and besides … we don’t want you.’ ”

An equally disinguished roster of tour photographers was headed by Robert Frank, whose black-and-white studies of American rural life in the 1960s had earned him comparisons with Walker Evans. Forty-seven-year-old Frank was along in the role of filmmaker, shooting a documentary intended to erase Gimme Shelter’s ugly memories. Highly esteemed by both Glimmer Twins, he was to be allowed total access, working entirely in home-movie-ish Super 8; in addition, the Stones would be given cameras to film their own first-person sequences.

Bianca did not accompany the tour. Mick ruled that she should stay behind in L.A. with baby Jade, joining him on the road for just a couple of brief visits. “I find it very difficult to travel with anyone on tour,” he explained. “Bianca’s easier than some people, but I just have to be on my own.” According to Jade’s English nanny—the second incumbent in the job—Bianca reacted with fury but had to accept the decision. Her one small revenge arose from their habit of wearing the same clothes. Mick had borrowed a scarf of hers, without her knowledge, to take with him. When his bags were all packed, Bianca demanded the return of the scarf and made him rummage through every one until he found it.