Mick Jagger (66 page)

After two further hearings, Marsha received a new out-of-court offer: £500 per year and a £10,000 trust fund, on condition her lawyer signed a document saying that Mick was not Karis’s father and the settlement was being made simply to avoid embarrassing publicity. The lawyer considered it the best deal she was likely to get, so Marsha told him to sign.

NINETEEN SEVENTY-THREE WAS the year when Mick started to turn respectable—or, rather, when the reluctant rebel invented by Andrew Loog Oldham finally disappeared like the illusion it had always been, and a thoroughly self-controlled, calculating, and conformist rebel materialized instead.

In May, the former perceived threat to U.S. homeland security—and FBI mark—became the first pop star to receive an official honor in Washington. The Stones’ benefit concert for Nicaragua’s earthquake victims had raised $787,500, and Mick was invited to hand over the check personally to its recipients, the government-endorsed Pan American Development Foundation. “Not only Mick,” gushed the usually measured Washington Post, “but the newest superstar of the family, Bianca Jagger, his wife and twin in sullen-lipped looks.”

Assembled for the presentation ceremony were a bevy of Latin American ambassadors and U.S. senators, including New York’s liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits, whose help Bianca had enlisted to protect the relief funds from Nicaragua’s sticky-fingered president, Anastasio Somoza. But even such an occasion could not get Mick to turn up on time. “All we have to do now,” quipped Javits as the canapés went round yet again and diplomatic small talk faltered, “is wait for Hamlet.”

This Hamlet eschewed his sable suit for a blue-and-white-striped blazer with a yellow rose in its lapel, while his saturnine Ophelia wore a green Ossie Clark coat with matching straw hat and sequined shoes. In recognition of what was, by any measure, a magnificent humanitarian effort, they were jointly presented with a golden key (though the other Stones did not receive so much as a thank you for participating in the benefit concert).

Just four months earlier, before the band’s Far East tour, Mick had been denied a Japanese visa because of his drug record and also faced a short-lived ban from Australia. After the Washington ceremony, he would never again be classed as a subversive in America or be declared persona non grata anywhere, excepting the city’s snobby Sans Souci restaurant where he went later that same day, his gold key to D.C. in his pocket, only to be turned away for not wearing a tie.

At the outset of their marriage, in her unsmiling—and so not very sympathetic—way, Bianca had said she wished to be known as something more than just a rock star’s trophy wife. “I am a person in my own right,” she told one interviewer. “Mick’s accomplishments and achievements are his. Nothing to do with me. I must achieve on my own. He’s a musician and I am not. The people who surround the Stones bathe in the reflected light. I refuse to.”

Nowadays, with such beauty and stylishness added to the Jagger name, she would have gone straight to the top of the celebrity A-list and found more than enough autonomy there. One can easily imagine her filling page after page of Vogue, both English and French, dominating party spreads in the Tatler, showing Hello! or House & Garden around her latest Tuscan villa, joining the judges on American Idol, shaking out her shiny hair in TV shampoo ads, or using that sumptuous scowl to drive home the sales pitch for L’Oréal cosmetics: “Because you’re worth it!”

But in the Britain of 1973, what we now call celebrity culture was in its infancy. There were as yet no gossip columns except faintly parodic specimens in mass-circulation newspapers; no supermodels, no reality-TV stars, no billionaire soccer players’ wives, no fashionistas, no red carpets for anyone but the Queen. Celebrity rested on tangible achievement, like starring in films—or fronting a rock band—and the phenomenon of being famous for being famous was still largely unknown. So Bianca, cast for celebrity culture but detonated too early, was something of a loose cannon.

If anything, she was a prototype supermodel, albeit not tall and unnaturally skinny enough for the professional catwalk and rather too much of an original, for she had her own highly distinctive style combining 1930s Parisian elegance with a dash of the dominatrix. Her severe-sexy gowns, tailored suits, and little pillbox hats with veils were the opposite extreme from faux-naive sixties dollybird-ism, and started a noticeable trend. After she appeared in a fashion show for Oxfam at the Grosvenor House wearing a two-tone curly wig and flourishing a silver-topped cane, London’s only walking-stick dealer, James Smith & Son, recorded their first-ever female clients.

It was the dawn of the age of meaningless awards, and Bianca was given a shelfload—like Woman of the Year Hat Award 1972—usually in hopes that Mick would accompany her to the ceremony. Her taciturnity with the press led one magazine to dub her “Today’s Garbo,” while another reported (from sources undisclosed) that “she wears no underwear and her nipples are shaped like rosebuds.” Despite Britain’s deep-seated suspicion of foreign names, there was a surge in baby girls called Bianca. With a public profile this high, it would have made sense to create a Bianca Jagger brand of something or other. But in the Jagger household, needless to say, there was room for only one brand.

At the beginning, it amused Mick to be married to a fashion icon (a phrase not yet coined) and, within reason, share his limelight with her. Under Bianca’s influence, he became even fussier about his own wardrobe, adopting several of her ideas, like the silver-topped cane tucked under his arm when he tardily greeted the ambassadors and senators in Washington. The pair began to do fashion shoots together and, in January 1973, were jointly voted onto the world’s Best Dressed list by two thousand international fashion editors and experts. A few weeks later, London’s Sunday Times Magazine had them photographed on the roof of the Biba store in Kensington by the aged Leni Riefenstahl, whose film Triumph of the Will eulogized Hitler’s 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg. The American critic Albert Goldman, who compared Rolling Stones concerts to the Nuremberg rally and Mick to “the Leader,” sure would have loved that one.

The couple posing in Biba’s Roof Garden—she with her frilly Scarlett O’Hara gown and parasol, he in his bright ocher suit—seemed to embody a perfect rock ’n’ roll fairy tale. But the reality was very different. Mick would later say their marriage had been “good only for the first year” and thereafter became a matter of pretending in public with less and less conviction. Bianca’s estimate would be even briefer.

As far as his band and closest associates were concerned, she remained an outsider, alternately mistrusted and mocked. Keith resented her for spiriting his ever-fickle Glimmer Twin away to a glitzy world, populated by couturiers and continental movie stars, where nobody had ever heard of Blind Boy Fuller or open-G tuning. Anita Pallenberg resented her for being so beautiful and stylish and standoffish—all the more now that Anita’s own once-heavenly face was coarsened by heroin, her once-eighteen-karat crop hung lank and colorless, and her once-fascinatingly husky voice had become a croak. Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor and their respective partners were never unpleasant but kept their distance, as befitted Stones second-rankers. Surprisingly, however, Charlie Watts turned out to be a friend. Bianca found Charlie’s genuineness a blessed respite from the sycophancy that surrounded Mick—and also believed his wife to be the only one in the Stones’ inner circle Mick had never screwed.

Even the generally tolerant, good-hearted people who worked for Mick in London found it hard to warm to Bianca, and thus easy to think the worst of her. She was seen as a ruthless gold digger only out for his money (no one knowing about the prenup she had been handed on her wedding morning) and interested only in herself (everyone forgetting her work for the Nicaraguan earthquake victims). Inevitably, too, she was suspected of being behind Mick’s decision to deny paternity of Karis Hunt. It stood to reason: why would a mother want any other child to share in the inheritance that would come to her own?

While Mick was in the studio, or otherwise engaged, the task of keeping Bianca amused would fall to PR Les Perrin’s wife, Janey. Usually this meant putting her in the back of a chauffeur-driven car with a wad of twenty-pound notes and sending her off shopping on Bond Street or Knightsbridge. There were endless problems with the chauffeurs, from whom Bianca seemed to expect almost servile deference. One was sent away simply for failing to tip his cap. A hire-car company which the Stones office had used for years refused to accept any more bookings because of her. Janey Perrin came to dread the phone calls complaining that yet another driver had been lacking in respect and that Bianca—as she pronounced it with her faint Hispanic lilt—was “peesed off.”

Despite her supposed intriguing against Karis on Jade’s behalf, she was seen as an indifferent mother who chafed at being stuck at home while Mick gallivanted around as he pleased. At some moments she would seem devoted to Jade, delighting in buying clothes for her and dressing her up; at others, she’d leave her with the nanny, or Mick’s parents, and disappear to the shops and Ricci Burns’s hair salon in Chelsea. For a time, Jade shared a nanny with Mick and Rose Taylor’s daughter Chloe, who was the same age. Despite working for both famous Micks at once, the young woman earned a minuscule amount and, in revenge, would allow the little girls to play with their daddies’ Gold Discs in the bath.

Once there had been no doubting Bianca’s power to bring Mick to heel. During the Exile on Main St. sessions, when he used to travel up from the Côte d’Azur to join her in Paris, he’d sometimes find she wasn’t awaiting him at L’Hôtel and had gone missing just like Chrissie Shrimpton used to ten years earlier. As once with Chrissie, he’d have the embarrassment of ringing round her friends to ask help in finding her. While he was away recording in Jamaica, Bianca expressed her boredom and annoyance by getting her luxuriant black hair cut as short as a boy’s. Marianne Faithfull had done the same in ’69, but whereas Marianne’s mutinous crop produced an eerie resemblance to Brian Jones, Bianca’s turned her temporarily into a true mirror image of Mick—which, a former employee recalls, “he loved.”

Such wiles had long since lost their efficacy. Mick and Bianca might share a bed, but outside the boudoir she was now just one of the crowd who daily competed for his attention. She had come to detest the elaborate web of Mick’s advisers and assistants with whom she had to negotiate to reach him: “the Nazi state,” she privately called it, subliminally influenced perhaps by that photo shoot with Leni Riefenstahl. There was also a new stinginess and seeming lack of concern for her that had marred even his impressiveness over the Nicaraguan earthquake. When he left Managua for the Stones’ Far East tour, Bianca stayed on to help the relief effort, living in a rented house for which he promised to pay. The rent did not arrive and she had to waste hours on disrupted phone lines trying to get through to Ahmet Ertegun’s office in New York before the problem was finally sorted out.

Her declaration of complete separateness from the Stones (“I have nothing to do with them!”) came less from hauteur than fear, as she later admitted. She was terrified of being drawn too deeply into a world whose pressures and excesses could, and frequently did, kill people. And terrified not only for herself. As a mother, she might not be perfect, but in comparison with Keith and Anita’s two small children, Marlon and Dandelion, Jade’s life was a model of normality.

Keith now lived part of the time in Jamaica, attracted by the music, the ganja—and, he would later claim, the chance to learn to fight properly with the knife he had always carried. In March, while coming down from the Stones’ Far East tour at his Ocho Rios beach house, he had a major bust-up with Anita over what he thought her unseemly involvement with some local Rastafarians. He stormed out and flew back to London alone, whereupon Anita was busted for cannabis possession and thrown into a horrific Jamaican jail, leaving the two children alone until neighbors realized their plight and took them in.

On June 26, the London Evening Standard splashed “ROLLING STONE RICHARD—GUN, DRUGS CHARGES” after Keith and Anita were raided back at 3 Cheyne Walk and heroin, cannabis, Mandrax, two unlicensed firearms, and a quantity of ammunition came to light, generating twenty-five charges in total. (Interestingly, no attempt was made to widen the search to Mick’s house, just a few doors away. As if some word had been quietly passed from Washington, D.C., he would never again be turned over by the British police.)

Hard and soft drugs and industrial quantities of alcohol and cigarettes were no longer the only hazards with which the Richard children had to live. In July, Keith’s Sussex cottage, Redlands, the scene of his martyrdom with Mick in 1967, was gutted by fire. Four-year-old Marlon having raised the alarm, it was assumed one of his drug-sozzled parents had nodded out with a lighted cigarette, though Keith claimed a mouse had caused the conflagration by nibbling through some electrical wires. In October, he celebrated lenient court treatment for the June bust (a £250 fine for him, a year’s conditional discharge for Anita) with a party in his suite at the Londonderry Hotel. While the grown-ups partied, fire broke out in the bedroom where Marlon lay asleep, the whole floor had to be evacuated, and Keith was banned from the hotel for life. Once again, he denied anyone had fallen asleep while smoking and blamed faulty electrics.

At four, Marlon was already his father’s keeper, ever watchful for the police raid or the cigarette burning into the bedspread. And loving mother though Anita was, her child care left something to be desired. Marlon would sometimes be looked after by Bianca and Mick—who, characteristically, was always kind to him. Once when Bianca tried to take off his socks, she found he’d been wearing them so long that they were welded to his feet.

What her detractors never realized was that Bianca’s Egyptian-cat aloofness masked a conventional, even straitlaced person for whom life with Mick proved an endlessly unfolding catalog of disillusionment. She hated the impermanence of their existence, which, thanks to his tax situation, was a constant shuttle between America, France, Britain, and Ireland, never settling longer than a few weeks anywhere. He was a fugitive from income-tax authorities as much as Keith ever was from the law, haunted by dread of breaching his nonresident status—especially in Britain, where the tax man was believed to be all-knowing and all-seeing. Bianca would later recall an illicit stay at Cheyne Walk when they had to crouch down when passing windows so as not to be seen and generally act “like squatters.”