Mick Jagger (70 page)

In class, Jade was said to be often noisy and disruptive, her father’s daughter in other words, but—also like him—she could be winningly sweet and vulnerable. With Mick not always around to screen them, there were continuing problems with nannies. Classes at Garden House ended at around four, but sometimes Jade would still be waiting to be collected at six or even later.

Mick adored her as much as ever, and was as good a father as any peripatetic, tax-avoiding rock superstar could be. When he was in London, he would pick her up from school each afternoon; still a teacher’s son at heart, he took a close interest in her lessons and quizzed the Garden House staff about her progress. When a nervous music teacher had to confess that Jade showed no sign of singing ability, Mick burst out laughing and said, “She gets that from her mother.”

His parents were the other reason for preserving the facade of his marriage. Joe and Eva Jagger both doted on Jade, especially Joe, that former domestic martinet. “He lets Jade get away with anything,” Mick told friends in amazement. “If it had been me or Chris when we were small, we’d have got a wallop or a task to do as a punishment.”

Most songwriters in a bad marital situation would be unable to prevent it from seeping into their work—but not this one. The Stones’ new album, Black and Blue, released in April 1976, had all the band’s usual macho swagger with an unpleasant added hint of domestic violence. In Los Angeles, a giant billboard on Sunset Boulevard showed the model Anita Miller made up to appear covered with bruises after an encounter with Mick. “I’m Black and Blue from the Rolling Stones,” said the caption, “and I Love It.” A feminist group, Women Against Violence, lodged a protest and the image was scrapped. Mick riposted that “a lot of girls are into that [i.e., enjoy being beaten up by men].” Nowadays, whole careers are scuppered by less.

The album’s lead single, “Fool to Cry,” momentarily raised expectations he was about to get personal at long last. For although the real-life Mick could and frequently did dissolve into tears, the lip-curling Head Stone had never before admitted such weakness. It was a “Wild Horses”–slow ballad with a melancholy, confiding feel, spoken more than sung, its first verse a poignant picture of a weary man with a small daughter on his knee, smoothing his brow and asking “Daddy, what’s wrong?” But by the second verse, he was with a woman who “live [rather than ‘lives’] in the paw part o’ town,” making “lerve serm-tahms … so fahn,” safely back on Planet Jagger.

As the Stones prepared for that year’s UK and European tour to promote Black and Blue, any suggestion of vulnerability on his part produced a strong reaction (luckily without any further feminist backlash): “It’s not like I’m on tour and I’m the Lonely Rock Star. Forget it. It doesn’t apply to me … There’s no reason to have women on tour unless they’ve got a job to do. The only other reason is to fuck. Otherwise they get bored … they just sit around and moan. It would be different if they did everything for you, like answer the phone, make the breakfast, look after your clothes and your packing, see if the car was ready—and fuck. Sort of a combination of what Alan Dunn [his driver] does and a beautiful chick.”

Ronnie Wood had become a full member of the band (though still only on salary) with the breakup of Rod Stewart’s Faces in December 1975. So far as Keith was concerned, Woody had more than qualified for admittance during his loan-out for the previous summer’s American tour. Driving through Arkansas together, the pair had been caught with a car full of coke, grass, mescaline, and peyote as well as a consignment of local liquor in the trunk and Keith’s constant companion, a lethal-looking hunting knife. Thanks to a crafty lawyer, a drunk judge, and a youthful crowd chanting “Free Keith!” outside the courthouse, he had somehow escaped with a $162.50 parking ticket.

Even more than for Mick, the ’76 European tour offered Keith a welcome escape from difficult domestic circumstances. Heroin’s chalk-faced dream by now possessed Anita and him so completely that they said little to each other around the house but “Has it arrived yet?” Not content with wiping out Anita’s beauty, smack had made her prone to fits of violence and delusion when she would take apart entire hotel rooms looking for the stash she imagined to be hidden there. Yet she had become pregnant again and, in March, bore Keith a son whom they named Tara. He went back on the road in late April nonetheless, taking his elder son, Marlon, the six-year-old minder he now could not do without.

With Keith, increasingly, the effect of his prodigious daily drug intake was nodding out at the most inopportune moments. During the tour’s UK leg, he fell asleep at the wheel of his car on the M1 and crashed, fortunately without injury to himself or anyone else. Police who attended the scene searched the vehicle and he was charged with possessing cocaine and LSD. One night in West Germany, he even fell asleep onstage, during the new spot where Mick ceased cavorting to sing “Fool to Cry” at the electric piano.

Against all advice, Keith insisted on driving himself across Europe, with Marlon as his navigator, prodding him whenever his ragged head drooped, warning him if a frontier was approaching so that he could take a quick hit, then throw away his stash. On many nights as showtime loomed, he would be deep in catatonic slumber from which his burliest assistants were afraid to rouse him, knowing his uncertain temper at such moments and that he kept a handgun under his pillow. Only Marlon could perform the task without risk to life and limb.

The boy forced to play father figure to his zonked-out dad would never forget how fatherly—in his own word, “nurturing”—Mick often was to him on the tour. Back at their hotel after the Hamburg show, with Keith unconscious again and no prospect of supper, he wandered into Mick’s room. Asked whether he’d like a hamburger, he replied that he’d never had one. “You’ve got to have a hamburger in Hamburg,” Mick told him, and immediately rang down to room service.

In Paris, the Stones were booked for four straight nights, June 4–7, at Les Abattoirs. On June 6, as Keith prepared to go onstage, he learned that his son Tara had died of respiratory failure—cot death, as it would come to be called—aged just two and a half months. He insisted on doing that evening’s show and finishing the tour without making his loss public. If a Rolling Stone’s life has ever seemed enviable, think of being onstage with that kind of pain and remorse inside and Mick singing, “Daddy, you’re a fool to cry …”

The tour’s British leg culminated with six sold-out nights at London’s Earls Court arena (extended from three after one million ticket applications). Among the fellow artists who came to pay court in Mick’s dressing room was Bryan Ferry, singer with the glam-rock band Roxy Music, accompanied by his nineteen-year-old fiancée, the American fashion model Jerry Hall. Jerry’s first impression of Mick was most people’s, that he was much smaller than she’d expected, all the more noticeably so from her own commanding height of six feet. The audience lasted somewhat longer than most, then Mick suggested to Bryan Ferry that the three of them go out to dinner.

THE WOMAN WHO would come nearest to pinning the butterfly down was born Jerry Faye Hall, one of female twins, in Gonzales, Texas, and raised in the blue-collar Dallas suburb of Mesquite. Her truck-driver father was an inveterate gambler who once lost the family home in a poker game. He was also an alcoholic and a domestic tyrant whose five daughters all frequently had to stay home from school to conceal the bruises on their legs from lashes with his belt. Eventually, Jerry’s twin sister, Terry, pulled a gun on him and threatened to kill him if the maltreatment continued. Despite these experiences, Jerry always refused to classify herself as an abused child or hold a grudge against her father. “In our town,” she would recall nonchalantly, “a lot of the kids were beat up.”

She was raised in the great outdoors, learning to ride as second nature, watching cowboys round up and castrate steers, and spending summers on her grandmother’s chicken farm, where the old lady would roust her and her sisters out of bed each morning with a stick, shouting “We’re gonna can preserves!” In contrast to her loutish father, her mother instilled ladylike southern-belle ways, insisting that she gulp down a full meal before going out on dates with boys so that, like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, she didn’t “eat in front o’ no gennelman.”

By her early teens, she had risen to full height, with a mass of gleaming, genuine blond hair and a smile that could stop traffic. She had already decided on a modeling career, but the nearest Mesquite could offer was a job at the local Dairy Queen (from which she was soon fired for giving away too many milkshakes and orders of french fries). Her aim was simple: “I want to marry a millionaire so I can have caviar any time of the day or night and take nice long champagne baths.” The only way of achieving it was to become a modern-day Texas Ranger.

At the age of sixteen, she was awarded $800 in compensation for medical negligence during a routine procedure on her sinuses. Showing herself every bit as much a gambler as her father, she spent the whole sum on a trip to France. A fashion agent spotted her sunbathing on the beach in Saint-Tropez, the scene of her future love’s matrimonial “circus” in 1971; as a result, she began to get modeling jobs in Paris, for a time sharing an apartment with a black woman of equally Amazonian proportions, the singer Grace Jones. One day at La Coupole brasserie, she was asked to join the table of France’s two most eminent writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. As she later recalled, they were “fascinated” that she knew their works on existentialism and “wanted to understand nothingness and being”; they also “love[d] also to hear me talk stuff about rodeos.”

In 1975, Bryan Ferry saw her picture in Vogue and asked her to appear on the cover of Roxy Music’s new album, Siren. Ferry at the time was the epitome of glam-rock pastiche chic with his slicked-down hair, tailored suits, white shirts and ties—everything the Rolling Stones were once thought to have stamped out. For Roxy’s Siren album—a UK No. 1—Jerry impersonated the mythical seductresses who lured mariners to their doom, lying naked-seeming on a rock with her gold tresses hidden under seaweed-colored curls. After the shoot, she began an affair with Ferry, moving into his house in Holland Park, west London, and accepting his proposal of marriage.

Although the era of sickly, sticklike supermodels was yet to come, Jerry’s slightly horsey beauty and air of glowing health made her stand out from as well as tower over all her catwalk competitors. She earned an unprecedented $1,000 per day, enough to buy herself a two-hundred-acre ranch back in Lone Oak, Texas. In Britain, her lips became as well known as her face after a Revlon lipstick ad put them on the sides of London buses (something the nation’s most famous mouth hadn’t achieved). In 1976, she appeared with Ferry in the video for his solo single “Let’s Stick Together,” clad in tiger print split to the waist and uttering zestful rebel yells. The single was a hit, but its title proved sadly ironic.

Even before she met Mick, in fact, the engagement to Bryan Ferry had been going downhill. Despite a working-class background in County Durham, Ferry affected the airs of an English squire together with those of a poet; he liked his six-foot blond siren to wear tweeds and sit decorously while everyone fluttered around him. Jerry preferred partying, raucous laughter, and leg wrestling, a Texan barroom sport at which she was remarkably adept.

Ferry initially had no suspicions on that June evening in 1976 when he accepted the invitation for them both to have dinner with Mick. Afterward, still believing himself Mick’s main object of interest, he suggested they all return to his house in Holland Park. On the car journey, Jerry later recalled, Mick pressed his knee hard against hers, causing her to feel “an electric sensation.” When they arrived, she went to make tea and he offered to help, “jumping around, joking … and spilling things,” much to the distress of the house-proud Ferry. Mick had also somehow or other invited several additional people to join them, so ruining Ferry’s hoped-for quiet chat about the problems of being pop idols together.

In one version of the story Jerry has often told, Mick would follow her every time she went into the kitchen and Ferry would suspiciously follow them both. In another, Mick chased her around a Ping-Pong table until Ferry came and chased him off. Eventually, freaked out by all the hyperactivity and mess, Ferry sullenly retired to bed. By Jerry’s account, Mick tried to kiss her, but she wouldn’t let him. However, as Mick later told a friend, she gave him an unequivocal come-on: “He said Jerry was wearing stockings with suspenders, which she kept flashing at him.”

Afterward, he would often phone Ferry and leave cheery messages like “Hi, Bryan, let’s go out again … ,” but his calls were not returned. “I’m never going out with him again,” Ferry told Jerry. “All he did was ogle you.”

The end of the European tour in July made it necessary for Mick to hang around his family again. He and Bianca went to the Olympic Games in Montreal—getting tickets at short notice being, of course, no problem for him—to see the Cuban sprinter Alberto Juantorena win two gold medals. Afterward they took Jade for a second stay at Andy Warhol’s beach house in Montauk, where Mick celebrated his thirty-third birthday.

To mitigate the uneasiness with Bianca, there was a stream of celebrity houseguests, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono (now reconciled), Eric Clapton, David Bowie, and Warren Beatty. As during Mick’s previous tenancy, his visitors sometimes unwittingly wandered onto the adjoining property of talk-show host Dick Cavett. One morning, Cavett bumped into Jackie Onassis, widow of both President John F. Kennedy and the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, walking alone on the shore.

Cavett came to know Mick and Bianca well in this twilight of their marriage—and to be as smitten by Jade as Warhol had been the previous year. “She was the cutest thing, and Bianca used to dress her up so beautifully in little pants suits and bow ties. And, God, was she bright—and funny! I remember I was driving her and Bianca in the car one day, the thing wouldn’t start, and I said, ‘Oh, shit!’ I apologized for the bad language, and in this beautiful British accent, Jade said, ‘You needn’t concern yourself. I’m quite accustomed to hearing it.’ ”