Mick Jagger (73 page)

For Marsha, Mitchelson and the California courts between them finally obtained a measure of satisfaction. After her previous experience, she wanted no further truck with out-of-court settlements, and the case was heard in January 1979. Mick’s paternity of Karis was confirmed and he was ordered to pay $1,500 per month in maintenance. According to Marsha, no lump sum was involved nor were the payments made retroactive.

But for Bianca, there was to be no California Gold Rush. She had, rather naively, expected that if her divorce action moved to L.A., it would be handled in the same low-key manner it had been in London. However, Mitchelson lost no time in announcing that she was seeking $12.5 million, or half Mick’s estimated earnings during their marriage. As an interim measure, she wanted $13,400 per month in living expenses, which broke down as $4,000 for rent, $2,000 for clothes, $2,000 for transportation, $1,500 for a chauffeur, nanny, and live-in maid, $1,500 for food, $1,000 for entertainment, $500 for travel, $500 for incidentals, $300 for telephone, $200 for laundry and cleaning, and $200 for utilities.

Early in February, Mitchelson went before the California Superior Court to make the case that Mick was so often in Los Angeles he should be considered a de facto resident. A written deposition by Bianca—with potential to cause him problems beyond the court—said that during their entire married life “he and I literally lived out of suitcases in a nomadic journey from one place to another in his quest to avoid income tax.” She alleged that on some visits to his London house, they had crawled around on their hands and knees to avoid anyone seeing that they were back in Britain. Likewise “on numerous occasions [Mick] told me he had to keep secret the fact that he was making recordings in Los Angeles so as not to be forced to pay United States income tax.”

Mitchelson instanced a particular two-week visit Mick had paid to California with Jerry as one such illicit working trip. In fact, as his film agent Maggie Abbott could confirm, it had simply been to discuss yet another movie he never made, The Moderns. Nonetheless, Judge Harry Shafer ruled California had jurisdiction to hear the divorce and ordered Mick to pay Bianca $12,000 in temporary support, $2,500 for medical treatment (she had injured her knee in a roller-skating accident), and $35,000 against her legal expenses.

Mick’s response was to launch a cross-petition in London, complaining of Bianca’s “unreasonable conduct,” which turned into a tug-of-war beween the British and American legal systems as to where the divorce proceedings should take place, or rather, continue. When the hearing opened in July, Marvin Mitchelson flew over to present his arguments on behalf of California with customary force and flamboyance. But he proved no match for Mick, who put on a virtuoso performance before the judge, Sir Michael Eastham. “He charmed the pants off the judge,” recalls one of the lawyers present. “And when he spoke, he put himself into the legal world as if he’d spent his whole life in it.”

Sir Michael having found against Bianca, she took the case to the court of appeal, where it was heard on October 17. Wearing a black trouser suit and a red polo-neck sweater, she sat taking notes as her counsel, Robert Johnson (not the legendary blues singer), pleaded that the highest settlement she could expect in Britain would be $1 million, a grossly inequitable share of Mick’s estimated $21.5 million net worth. But the three appeal judges ruled that her claims for a California divorce “could not be weaker” and the action must continue in London. Afterward, Bianca once again proved herself rather different from the usual frowning Sphinx by asking reporters outside the court if anyone had a cigarette.

The precise amount of her settlement was not fixed until November 1980 and was never made public, though her counsel’s estimated figure of $1 million apparently erred on the side of pessimism; Jerry would later say it took “most of what [Mick] had” at that point. Even so, compared with payouts in future superstar divorces, and the amounts he was destined to earn, it would soon seem like small change.

Nor was that the only way in which he got off lightly. A rock star’s ex-wife in Bianca’s situation might have been expected to remedy the alimony shortfall by signing a lucrative contract to write a tell-all autobiography, then to make a round of chat-show appearances whose damage to her former spouse would more than counterbalance the money he’d saved. But Bianca wrote no book and spilled no beans—then or ever. And, bitter though she felt about the divorce, its final residue was sadness, for she’d genuinely cared for Mick and believed he had for her. A few years later, she would reflect they had never really stood a chance from the moment he decided to get married in Saint-Tropez in the presence of half the world’s media. Or, as Bianca expressed it, “My marriage ended on my wedding day.”

Mick, for his part, expressed neither regret or remorse, only the Tyranny of Cool rampant: “I only did it [got married] for something to do … I’ve never been madly, deeply in love with anyone. I’m not an emotional person.”

That came as a surprise to many people, not least his former fiancée, Chrissie Shrimpton. From their years together in the mid-sixties, Chrissie knew how very emotional he could often be, and possessed a thick bundle of love letters from him to prove it. Now married, with two small children, she no longer had any connection with the pop or fashion world, but lived quietly in south London and was studying for a sociology degree. By so doing, she hoped to rationalize that unreal era when not only her boyfriend, her elder sister, Jean, and Jean’s boyfriend, David Bailey, but almost everyone else she knew had suddenly become world famous.

Since being dumped so ruthlessly by Mick in 1966, Chrissie had barely looked at his old love letters. But when his divorce—and declaration that he’d “never been madly, deeply in love”—hit the headlines, she mentioned the cache to a female journalist she happened to meet in a restaurant. The journalist urged her to sell it to a Sunday newspaper without delay, but Chrissie, as she recalls, was “far too proud” to let thousands of strangers pore over her love life. The cat was now out of the lavender bag, however, and soon afterward, while driving to her sociology class, she heard on the radio that Mick intended to start legal action against her. The material in a letter, even a love letter, belongs to the sender, not the recipient, and to publish them without the writer’s permission is breach of copyright.

Chrissie was panic-stricken, but had no way of contacting Mick to ask him to call off his lawyers. All she could do was talk to David Bailey, the one member of that old Swinging London elite who remained close to him. Bailey warned that things were about to get “very nasty” and advised that the only way of placating Mick was to send him back all the letters. She did so, not realizing that although he might own their content, the paper and envelopes were her property.

IN OCTOBER 1978, Keith Richard finally went on trial in Toronto for trafficking heroin into Canada. He’d spent much of the previous summer sharing a house in Woodstock, New York, with Mick and Jerry, and undergoing another bout of black box electric treatment for his addiction before reappearing in court. Helped by Jerry, Mick looked after the couch-bound, sweating, hallucinating sufferer, bringing him meals, reattaching the electrodes when they fell off his head, celebrating his every small step back to sensibility and self-respect like shaving or taking a bath. Jerry realized he was on the road to recovery when he went outside and started throwing knives at trees.

The draconian punishment which had hung over Keith for eighteen months did not materialize after all. The court was swayed to mercy by his apparently conscientious efforts to kick his habit (luckily, no one had found out about the bulk purchase of toy syringes from FAO Schwarz). And for once the Stones’ aura of depravity worked to his advantage. The Canadian government was anxious to play down the embarrassing aftermath to the Harbour Castle hotel bust, when Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau’s wife, Margaret, had been sighted there in a bathrobe for a rumored assignation with Mick. To spare the PM any further embarrassment, it had been decided to deal with the case as quickly and quietly as possible.

Keith was found guilty on the trafficking charge, but sentenced only to probation. There was an additional penalty for the Stones as a whole, innocent NCOs as much as officers. As part of his defense, the judge had heard the touching story of a blind Canadian girl who would turn up unescorted at Stones gigs all over North America, and to whom the wicked smackhead had often been kind. In a final expiation of his offense, the band was ordered to give two concerts from which all receipts would go to the Canadian National Institute for the Blind.

These duly took place at the Oshawa Civic Auditorium, Ontario, on April 22, 1979, emceed by John Belushi. The opening set featured Keith in an ad hoc band called the New Barbarians, put together by Ronnie Wood and featuring another penitent hell-raiser, Bobby Keys, on tenor sax. Then the original barbarian came prancing out to join them, looking more the part than ever.

So much for that elder-statesman-like vow never to join the punk rockers. Mick was wearing a torn T-shirt, loosely held together with duct tape.

THE ROLLING STONES’ 1981–1982 world tour marked their twentieth anniversary as a band. Mick would still be singing “Satisfaction” at pushing forty—although using that phrase to him risked awakening the pedant who always lurked inside the rock god. “I’m not ‘pushing forty,’ ” he corrected one BBC interviewer stiffly. “I was only thirty-eight a few months ago.”

The turn of the decade had already brought what would be his last serious shot at the movies, in Werner Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo. The eminent German director had first met him years before through Anita Pallenberg and considered him “a great actor … something I feel the world has not yet seen.” In 1980, Herzog began production of a screen epic based on the nineteenth-century Peruvian rubber tycoon Carlos Fitzcarrald, whose exploits included building a La Scala–scale opera house in the remote mountain city of Iquitos. The American actor Jason Robards was cast in the name role with Mick as his simpleton sidekick, Wilbur. And this time, despite ample excuse, there was no eleventh-hour case of Jagger cold feet.

The film reconstructed Fitzcarraldo’s battle with the Peruvian wild, culminating in the haulage of a full-size oceangoing ship through the rain forests by manpower alone. Since Herzog disdained the use of special effects or models, this meant months away on location in and around Iquitos. Conditions were harsh, with only the most basic accommodations and sanitation and unreliable telephone links with the outside world. There was unremitting sticky heat and the threat of wild animals and poisonous insects; if all that wasn’t enough, a local nomadic tribe declared war on the unit, killing one of its Peruvian employees with bows and arrows and wounding several others.

As both times previously when he’d committed to a film, Mick turned without a beat from rock god to team player, getting on well with everyone from costars to clapper boys, never complaining of the hardships. A car had been provided for him, but, as Herzog would recall, he used it mostly to chauffeur other unit members around. He stuck it out for months, getting away only for occasional weekends with Jerry back in New York. Then, with 40 percent of the picture shot, Jason Robards fell ill with dysentery, returned to America for treatment, and was ordered not to continue filming by his doctors. As Herzog pondered how to overcome this catastrophe, Mick also had to leave to begin rehearsing for the Stones’ tour. Rather than replace him, the director dropped his Wilbur character and reshot the entire film from the beginning with Klaus Kinski in the title role. “Losing Mick,” Herzog later recalled, “was the biggest loss I have ever experienced as a film director.”

Ahead of the tour came a new album punkishly entitled Tattoo You, its cover a shot of Mick’s face embroidered like Queequeg the cannibal harpooneer in Moby-Dick. His yearlong involvement with Fitzcarraldo having left no time for songwriting: Tattoo You was just a set of outtakes, some recorded as long ago as 1972, spruced up with new vocals and overdubs. It spent nine weeks at No. 1 on the American charts, reached No. 2 in Britain, and ultimately achieved enough worldwide sales to go platinum three times over. Its lead single, “Start Me Up” (dating from 1977), turned into the Stones’ biggest since “Tumbling Dice.” After the disco flourishes and introspective, even melancholy note of their late-seventies output (“Miss You,” “Emotional Rescue,” “Waiting on a Friend”), this went right back to basics with a growly guitar riff and unregenerate three-chord beat. Despite pushing forty, Mick could still sing like an adolescent with only one thing on his mind.

Earlier in 1981, the American journalist Landon Y. Jones had identified a new demographic, the baby boomers, destined to wield even more economic power in the eighties, and beyond, than teenagers in the sixties. Baby boomers were those same teenagers, the fruit of the postwar copulation surge, now grown to maturity, affluence, even authority, but still unwilling to relinquish the youth that had been so golden and the music that had largely made it so. A Rolling Stones single admitting a need for jump leads (“Start me up … I’ll never stop …”) and a tour admitting to a twentieth anniversary saw the baby boomers first come into their own.

When tickets went on sale for the tour’s opening American leg, the lines that instantly formed included professional men and women in their mid-thirties, wearing the preppy business clothes that had replaced caftans and headbands. In the New York area, there were 3.5 million applications for one hundred thousand seats. A powerful indicator of the new market was the introduction of commercial sponsorship, hugely multiplying the traditional ancillary income from “Lapping Tongue” posters and Tshirts. A bidding war among half a dozen brands identified with this or that aspect of baby-boomer lifestyle had been won by the Jôvan perfumery corporation, which as a result would have its name on the face of every ticket sold. In all, the tour was said to be worth an unprecedented $40 million.