Mick Jagger (65 page)

Afterward came a lavish birthday party thrown by Ahmet Ertegun on the roof of the St. Regis Hotel, with live music from the Count Basie Orchestra. At the big circular top table, Mick talked business with Ertegun while an unsuspecting Bianca chatted to Chris O’Dell beside her. Warhol went around taking Polaroids, showing particular interest when one of his Factory protégées, Gerry Miller, popped out of the giant birthday cake wearing nothing but a few tactfully hung tassels. Cocaine and joints openly circulated, among rockers and socialites alike. Later, Mick broke off from discussing grosses and percentages for an impromptu jam with Stevie Wonder and Muddy Waters, the guest who still probably thrilled him most. It was all a little too much for the society columnist Harriet Van Horne. “I thought of all the ancients who would have been perfectly at home at such a Bacchanale as Jagger’s birthday party,” she wrote. “Nero … Caligula … the Marquis de Sade. I also thought of A Clockwork Orange and the Manson Family.”

BY SEPTEMBER, MICK was back in London and living at 48 Cheyne Walk again. With a Stones Far East tour planned for early 1973 and a European one straight afterward, the perennial question—Would he still be singing “Satisfaction” when he was thirty?—no longer needed asking. But soon after returning to “dear old England,” he announced he’d retire from the band when he reached thirty-three. “That’s the time when a man has to do something else. I can’t say what it will definitely be … but it won’t be in show business. I don’t want to be a rock ’n’ roll singer all my life … I couldn’t bear to end up as an Elvis Presley and sing in Las Vegas with all those housewives and old ladies coming in with their handbags.”

To his London staff, too, it seemed that the shine was wearing off Mick’s marriage rather quickly. When Shirley Arnold left the Stones’ employ after nine years’ devoted service, he and Bianca turned up at her farewell party separately, each bearing a different gift for her—respectively a topaz pendant and some perfume—and then began bickering about which was the official leaving present. However, Mick was just as charming and appreciative to Shirley as ever, and Bianca no less so.

By late November, he was off on his own again when the Stones reconvened to start a new album at Dynamic Studios in Jamaica. The choice of venue was dictated by Keith’s ever-widening notoriety as a drug user: apart from Switzerland—which he was already starting to find insufferably bland—no other country but Jamaica would grant him a visa. Mick, besides, was determined the follow-up to Exile on Main St. should not be just “another collection of rock songs,” and hoped the birthplace of reggae would give the band a new direction. A secondary attraction was that, thanks to its colonial past, the island was as cricket-obsessed as Britain, so he’d be able to watch the game in midwinter to his heart’s content.

The album, eventually released as Goats Head Soup, was the Stones’ last involving Jimmy Miller. Despite having overseen every one of the band’s hits since “Jumpin’ Jack Flash” in 1968, Miller had never received official recognition as their producer, or been able to persuade Mick to up his original modest percentage. Being treated like a tradesman, hired and rehired from album to album, was the least of Miller’s problems. Thanks to spending all that time around Keith, he now had a drug problem just as serious but without the same wealth, or prodigious constitution, to deal with it.

Working at Dynamic, with Jamaican and Guyanese musicians and Chinese engineer Mikey Chung, gave the band a shot in the arm in the positive sense. But Jimmy Miller noticed how the normally focused and disciplined Mick could be discombobulated by phone calls from Bianca in London. One evening when she called, he was in the midst of working on a vocal track that had the Jamaican sidemen and Mikey Chung all beaming in admiration. But when he returned to the studio after talking to her, the vocal was ruined.

Recording was interrupted on December 2 when the Nice police issued warrants for the arrest of Keith and Anita on heroin-possession charges and Mick and the other three Stones were called back to the Côte d’Azur to give statements before a magistrate. Mick revisited his former rented home in Biot, where the housekeeper, Madame Villa, pressed a suit for him to wear at the hearing. On December 4, he issued a statement saying that he, Bill, Charlie, and Mick Taylor had not been charged or even arrested in connection with heroin and that “at no time did we hold drug parties in our houses.”

Returning to Bianca and Jade at Cheyne Walk, he found the pre-Christmas atmosphere turned to superfreeze by a new American hit single, Carly Simon’s “You’re So Vain.” It was a song for the feminist ego, a satirical out-of-love letter to a narcissistic paramour who wore his hat “strategically dipped below one eye” and never took his adoring gaze from his reflection in the mirror. The seeming detailed portrait of Mick, than whom no more strategic hat dipper or greater mirror worshipper walked the earth, became still more pointed in its second chorus (“You’re so vain, you probably think this song is about you”) when his muffled but still unmistakable tones chimed in on backing vocals.

The daughter of Richard Simon, cofounder of New York publisher Simon & Schuster, Carly was the first noticeably high-class girl to make a career in American pop. Mick had met her early in 1972 through the Beatles’ former Apple protégé James Taylor, whom she was soon to marry. Some months afterward, while she was in London recording “You’re So Vain” backed by Harry Nilsson, Mick had happened to drop by the studio and had joined in, apparently seeing nothing objectionable about the lyric. Recognizing a vocal chemistry between the other two, Nilsson had good-naturedly bowed out.

The line in the song with least appeal to Bianca—dwelled on, as it seemed, by Carly’s chewy voice—was “You had me several years ago.” Various other promient lotharios, notably Warren Beatty, would be cited as its inspiration, and the songwriter herself always coquettishly refused to name names. But Bianca, at least, never had any doubts. She would later admit that, of all the women in Mick’s past, that perpetually self-renewing realm, Carly Simon caused her the worst insecurity.

Such domestic upheavals faded from importance when, on December 23, a powerful earthquake struck Bianca’s home city of Managua, Nicaragua, killing five thousand people, injuring twenty thousand, and destroying 80 percent of the buildings. Both her long-separated parents had still been living in Managua, but frantic phone calls from Cheyne Walk throughout Christmas Eve and Christmas Day failed to locate either of them. On December 26, Mick called Les Perrin with one of the tasks that always had to be dealt with instantly, national holiday or not. This time, what he wanted now was not a Harley-Davidson but an airlift of emergency supplies to Nicaragua.

In the end, he took much of the initiative, chartering a private aircraft for Bianca and himself to reach Managua in the shortest possible time, with one brief stop-off at Kingston, Jamaica, to pick up a cargo of medicines including antityphoid serum. Once there, he faced up unflinchingly to the death, devastation, and squalor, multiplying his usual attention span by millions as Bianca followed one unsuccessful lead after another as to her parents’ whereabouts, vanishing from media view so completely, in fact, that some British papers reported him lost. Finally, on New Year’s Eve, both his in-laws were located, safe and well, in Nicaragua’s unscathed second city of León.

The moment when rock musicians ceased merely to be bywords for selfishness and self-indulgence, and began to use their vast power for humanitarian ends, is generally agreed to have been George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh in 1971. But Mick, that seeming paragon of selfishness, was not far behind. Directly after he returned from Nicaragua, he mobilized the Stones to give a benefit concert for Managua’s earthquake victims in a brief window of opportunity before setting off on their Far East tour. The concert took place on January 18, 1973, at the Los Angeles Forum, with Santana and Cheech and Chong as support acts, and raised $350,000 for America’s contribution to the Nicaragua relief effort. In addition, Mick donated a jacket and Keith a guitar to be auctioned by an L.A. radio station and Mick contributed a further sum, reportedly $150,000, out of his own pocket.

As some cynics remarked, the concert had enormous PR value for the band in the eyes of the American government; it was also a way for him to keep showing Bianca he wasn’t so vain. Still, this was Mick at his best—soon to be followed, as is often the way of stars, by Mick at his worst.

FOR TWO YEARS, Marsha Hunt had concealed the fact that she’d borne Mick Jagger a daughter named Karis. Even more amazingly, she had demanded no hefty regular maintenance payments from Mick as the price of her silence. All that mattered to Marsha, she would later explain, was that he acknowledged being Karis’s father and seemed to want to keep seeing her. With idealism perhaps possible only in a sixties person, Marsha trusted him to do right by their child in the end.

Being married to Bianca and about to become a father for a second time did not initially seem to change Mick’s attitude toward Karis. He had promised she would visit him when he moved to France, and proved as good as his word; in the summer of 1971, not long after his wedding, he invited Marsha to bring her out to the Stones’ Provençal enclave.

When they arrived, however, Marsha learned they were not to stay with Mick and Bianca at Biot but with Mick Taylor and his wife, Rose, in Grasse; the equivalent of being boarded out with the domestic staff. Marsha was invited to the Biot house only once, for a dinner at which Mick and Bianca spent most of the meal conversing together in French, though well aware that she couldn’t understand a word. After that, Mick saw Karis just once more, for about an hour. As they said good-bye, Marsha, to her embarrassment, had to ask him for £200 to settle bills awaiting her back in London.

For the most part, she supported Karis and herself with singing and modeling work, although now somewhat less of a celebrity than when she’d starred in Hair. Only in times of dire need would she seek financial help from Mick, through the Stones’ London office. She seldom asked for more than a couple of hundred pounds and always received it immediately. When Bianca gave birth to Jade in 1971, Mick at first seemed keen that his two daughters should get to know each other. He invited Marsha to bring Karis to 48 Cheyne Walk and photographed her in the garden with Jade on her lap while Karis played nearby.

In the summer of 1972, as the Stones prepared to tour America, Marsha was offered some gigs in West Germany, fronting a band called 22. She wanted to take Karis along and asked Mick for £600 to pay for a nanny to travel with them, which, as usual, was sent without question. One evening in a German café, Karis upset a glass of hot tea over herself, suffering burns to her arm, leg, and chest. Marsha rushed her to a local American military hospital for emergency treatment, then telephoned across the Atlantic to Mick, who, as she later recalled, was greatly concerned and immediately offered help. It was agreed that Marsha should get Karis back to the UK as quickly as possible and Mick would pay for her stay in a private clinic.

Her burns were serious enough to keep her in the clinic for ten days. Marsha slept in her room, going away only once to do a singing gig in Wales for some badly needed cash. The bill for Karis’s treatment was seventy-five pounds, but the promised payment from Mick never came. Marsha had to do a midnight flit from the clinic, racked with guilt after the kindness she’d received there. But when she met Mick later in London, he made light of the money’s nonarrival, saying she probably would have used it “to buy shoes.” At this, Marsha’s previous forbearance, tact, and trust in his better nature evaporated and she got herself a lawyer.

Compared with the $4 million which the Stones’ 1972 American tour had been forecast to earn, her aspirations were modest—a £25,000 trust fund, payable when Karis left school some sixteen years into the future. She hoped Mick would agree without litigation, but the young lawyer she consulted took the precaution of going before a magistrate and obtaining a paternity order, or summons to an alleged father to attend court. The plan was that Marsha should meet Mick on his own and ask for the trust fund; only if he refused would the paternity order be served.

The rendezvous was the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, just across the road from the Royal Albert Hall. Mick turned up alone, as Marsha had asked, and they sat on the seat at the base of the monument while her lawyer waited, unseen, at the foot of the steps down to the park. If Mick’s response was negative, Marsha had to signal the lawyer by shaking her head. After a few moments she gave the signal and her lawyer approached. “Are you Mick Jagger?” he asked—an unnecessary question since he was an ardent Stones fan. “Oo wants to know?” was the surly response. He handed the paternity order to Mick, who took one look, snarled “Fuck off!,” and tore it up.

In subsequent negotiations between lawyers, Mick’s side initially offered a £20,000 trust fund for Karis, then revised it downward to £17,000. Out-of-court paternity settlements at that time were relatively small and the barrister Marsha consulted thought she should accept. Following the Albert Memorial sting, relations with Mick recovered sufficiently for her and Karis to be invited back to Cheyne Walk for Jade’s first birthday party. But almost six months after she’d agreed to the reduced trust fund, there was still no sign of its being set up. This was because, contrary to all Mick’s previous behavior toward Karis—never mind the values with which he’d been brought up and still largely maintained—he now intended to deny that he was her father.

In June 1973, Marsha launched the paternity suit at Marylebone magistrates’ court, just a short walk from Mick’s old home, Harley House. He himself was not present at the hearing. His lawyer said that the claim was “not admitted” and there was “discussion between the parties as to the merit of these allegations.”

As a result, the story appeared in the British press, with Marsha’s previous dignity and discretion now weighing against her. Having kept her involvement with Mick secret for so long, she looked like an opportunistic gold digger suddenly coming out of the woodwork to destabilize his brand-new marriage. Mick remained studiedly flippant, implying it was just a publicity stunt to promote Marsha’s latest record. His lawyers, meantime, fought a stonewalling campaign, asking for adjournments and blood tests. The whole affair shocked close associates like Shirley Arnold, who had seen his previous acceptance of Karis. “I told him he should admit she was his and that if anyone asked me, I’d say she was,” Shirley recalls. “But he just didn’t want to hear it.”