Mick Jagger (75 page)

In 1979, after one or two inconclusive affairs (the baddest Stone being not that highly sexed as well as essentially monogamous), he had met a twenty-three-year-old American fashion model named Patti Hansen, recently the face of Calvin Klein on giant billboards in New York’s Times Square. He had pursued her with all the ardor of his romantic nature, bombarding her with love letters, some written in his own blood. Patti, surprisingly, had not turned tail and bolted, and the two were now permanently together. With upbeat natures as well as Vogue covers in common, Patti and Jerry became friends and allies—closer, in fact, than their respective Glimmer Twins would soon be.

Despite having come out so much on top in his divorce, Mick still seemed to harbor great resentment toward Bianca, describing her as difficult and “devious,” and rejecting any idea that they might ever become friends. It particularly irked him that she intended to continue using his surname, even though claiming it had brought her nothing but unhappiness. He had no doubt she intended to exploit it to the full to make up the shortfall in her alimony.

Still, a veneer of civility had to be maintained for the sake of their daughter. Mick received regular access to Jade—an area in which Bianca could really have been difficult or devious if she’d chosen—and remained as loving and attentive a father as ever. Jade joined him for some of the ’81 American tour, watching from the wings with the restive air of any ten-year-old visiting Dad at work.

Jerry handled her unofficial stepmother’s role with the same aplomb as she did everything else. During the stop in Orlando, to play the Tangerine Bowl, she left off her makeup, scraped her hair into a ponytail, and took Jade and a group of other tour children off to spend the day at Disney World. Mick admitted that he’d have liked to go with them, but couldn’t face the kerfuffle that would result. “I do enjoy a good Big Dipper [roller coaster],” he added almost wistfully as he jogged up and down in his football player’s breeches, preparatory to facing the next eighty thousand.

As things turned out, the uses to which Bianca put the Jagger name were not to distress Mick by earning her piles of money, or encroach on his territory in any way. For a time, she pursued her screen-acting career, appearing in one or two minor roles but scarcely justifying Andy Warhol’s view of her as a modern Greta Garbo. Then, in 1979, she returned to her native Nicaragua as part of a Red Cross delegation looking at the country’s reconstruction since the 1972 earthquake. Despite the aid that had been poured into it—not least via Mick and the Stones—it remained one of Latin America’s worst poverty black spots, and the grip of the corrupt Somoza family as secure as ever.

From that moment Bianca’s life—hitherto about little but clothes and finding wealthy men to protect her—changed completely. Studio 54 lost its queen and the people of her own and neighboring countries, similarly oppressed by poverty and vicious despots, found a passionate, selfless advocate.

In 1981, while Mick was gearing up for his American comeback, Bianca went to Honduras with a party of U.S. congressional delegates to observe the plight of refugees streaming over the border from civil war–torn El Salvador. As they watched, a Salvadoran death squad armed with M16 rifles rounded up a group of forty refugees and marched them away. Bianca and the other delegates followed the squad and shouted that only killing them, too, would stop them telling what they’d seen. As a result, the captives were released.

Her international profile was raised still further when Nicaragua’s Somoza clan was finally overthrown by the revolutionary FSLN Party, or Sandinistas, and the U.S. government—fearing the spread of communism in Latin America—began lending covert support to a right-wing counterrevolutionary alliance known as the Contras. Bianca took part in lobbying against this policy and was a leading voice in the subsequent furor, when the Reagan administration was discovered to have secretly sold arms to Iran, its supposed archenemy, to fund the Contras. So the world finally did see a Jagger getting involved in politics and speaking out fearlessly.

JOHN LENNON’S ASSASSINATION did not sour New York for Mick and certainly did not make the city feel too dangerous for him to continue to have a home there. But getting together with Jerry awakened the first serious interest he’d ever shown in accumulating property. By the early eighties, he was spending equal amounts of time in two different overseas locales, each in its own way satisfying his insatiable thirst for social status.

The first was France’s Loire Valley, a region famous for its wines and the historic châteaus that give their names to the most exclusive vineyards. In the tiny village of Pocé-sur-Cisse, near Amboise, he bought a château named La Fourchette (the Fork) dating from 1710—the same year as his old house in Chelsea—and once owned by the Duc de Choiseul, finance minister to King Louis XVI. Quite small, as châteaus went, La Fourchette was surrounded by fruit trees somewhat reminiscent of Mick’s native Kent. History buff that he was, he discovered that, unlike many smaller Loire châteaus, it had not been built for a rich nobleman’s mistress; interestingly, too, it lacked a back staircase, suggesting its eighteenth-century occupants had kept no live-in servants. With it came a private chapel that could be converted into a recording studio. The property was utterly secluded and peaceful (save for the grunt of the wild boars bred on a neighboring farm), yet Paris was still within easy reach, and from nearby Tours an air taxi could whisk him across to London in only seventy minutes.

The quiet of Pocé-sur-Cisse was not disturbed by its new rock-star seigneur. While at La Fourchette, Mick kept the lowest of profiles, driving around in an old Opel station wagon or a modest Nissan Micra, training for his tours on the poplar-lined back roads to Tours. Workers in local fields and vineyards grew accustomed to the sight of him shadowboxing, karate-chopping, or—an essential preshow exercise—running backward at high speed. Impressively to the French, his houseguests were not just family and music friends but eminent cultural figures like John Richardson, the art critic and biographer of Picasso. Richardson was full of admiration for the classic walled garden which Mick commissioned the society landscape designer Alvida Lees-Milne to lay out. He later recalled long, leisurely meals at “big trestle tables under the chestnut trees … the children having buns, the adults smoking joints …” There were also spectacular cross-dressing parties, for which Mick particularly enjoyed borrowing the more extravagant items from Jerry’s wardrobe.

Like Keith, his preferred holiday destination had long been the West Indies, though on a more rarified level than Jamaica’s ganja belt. Since 1970, he had been paying regular visits to Mustique, a tiny island in the Grenadines owned by a British aristocrat, the Honorable Colin Tennant (aka the third Baron Glenconnor), and a favorite retreat of the Queen’s divorced sister, Princess Margaret. Other wealthy and titled people had homes on the island, and applicants to join its charmed circle were vetted as strictly as at any old-school Pall Mall Club. Trust Mick to zero in on the one place in Britain’s former empire where its upper classes still ruled triumphant.

He had holidayed on Mustique while still with Bianca (as Jerry had with Bryan Ferry), and in that era—more than welcome, of course, to the ruling elite—had bought a small property which initially was not much more than a shack on the beach. This he now set about developing into a Japanese-themed six-bedroom villa with extensive grounds that included a koi pond and a series of pavilions connected by a walkway. The house was named Stargroves, after the Gothic folly in Berkshire he’d bought for Marianne Faithfull back in the sixties (and which, to Jerry’s relief, he’d finally sold). The Mustique Stargroves was to have a somewhat happier history, though it, too, would end up being for rent.

Despite all the changes that Jerry brought to Mick’s life, one thing remained unalterably the same. It inspired a lugubrious bon mot from one of his on-the-road press officers, a man often required to smuggle some casual companion out of his hotel suite before journalists could be let in. “Does Mick play around?” the PR said with a hollow laugh. “Does Dolly Parton sleep on her back?”

For the rock star pushing forty, teenagers continued to have irresistible appeal. Around the time of the aptly named Some Girls album, he began dating a seventeen-year-old he had met, with Jerry by his side, at one of Ahmet Ertegun’s glittering parties. As well as belonging to a distinguished aristocratic and literary family—an irresistible combination for Mick—she was beautiful and highly intelligent, with a wicked sense of humor and a cynicism about the rock world that came as a refreshing change from goggle-eyed worship. She still lived at the family home in Kensington, where one evening her older sister answered the phone to someone calling himself Mick Jagger. “Yes, and I’m the Queen of Sheba,” her sister replied.

She dated Mick over the next five years on a casual, irregular basis and with the full knowledge of her family, to whom he was known as “Michael J.” (“Isn’t he a bit old?” queried her grandfather, a distinguished and high-profile member of the House of Lords). Because of her famous family, Mick took unusual care to keep the relationship a secret; in London, their dates would usually be to see some highbrow film like Luis Buñuel’s The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie at an art-house cinema where no one gave him a second glance unless he wanted them to. And Jerry never suspected a thing.

He was equally chary of letting her into the Stones’ social circle, mainly because Keith’s girlfriend, Patti Hansen, and Charlie’s wife, Shirley, were both so staunchly fond of Jerry. The only exception was one night in 1980 when the band and their womenfolk—all but Jerry—went to a cinema on Tottenham Court Road to watch the heavyweight title fight between Muhammad Ali and Larry Holmes projected on a big screen. Mick prepared the seventeen-year-old for her first meeting with the other Glimmer Twin by explaining in a rather protective tone that Keith was “lovely but very shy.” During the evening, Shirley Watts acted as a kind of den mother, taking her aside and impressing on her that she must never, ever talk about her current adventure to the newspapers. But Patti—dressed all in red leather—was tight-lipped and pointedly inquired, “Where’s Jerry?” Silly girl to try to outbitch Mick. “She’s doing fashion shows,” he replied, “the same as you should be.”

The day inevitably came when Jerry got wise and Michael’s erstwhile cinema date found herself listening to an outraged Texan voice down the telephone line repeating “Ah thought you were mah fraynd …” “But Jerry,” she replied with impressive quick-wittedness, “I’m not nearly as beautiful as you are. Why would Mick ever want to have an affair with me?” There was a short silence, then Jerry said, “Maybe you got a point,” and put the phone down.

Even after that, the relationship continued its casual course, with Jerry seemingly fully aware but unable to do anything—at least to Mick. Sometime afterward, the seventeen-year-old kept a tryst with him at the Savoy hotel, where she arrived to find him reading a book of poetry. A few days later, at a society wedding, she—literally—ran into Jerry. “We were coming down a narrow garden path from opposite directions, Jerry in a sleek black velvet dress, I in a fuchsia satin Scarlett O’Hara numero. She narrowed her huge almond eyes, swept me off the path into the bushes, and said, ‘Sooo sorry!’ ”

Such tactics grew increasingly necessary as Mick’s dalliances became more and more blatant. In 1982, he and Jerry were staying at the Carlyle Hotel in New York while their new town house on West Eighty-First Street was being refurbished. As they ate in the restaurant, lovely young women kept coming up to Mick, offering telephone numbers which he would often accept. Or Jerry would answer the phone in their suite and hear the person at the other end hastily hang up. When strange rings and earrings began turning up in their bed, she decided enough was enough and moved out. She and Mick went on seeing each other, but he seemed to enjoy flaunting his infidelities and their cradle-snatching element, once explaining he was late because he’d been “out with some eighteen-year-old debutante.”

While still with Bryan Ferry, Jerry had met the international horse-racing tycoon Robert Sangster. At forty-six, Sangster was almost twice her age, but a dynamic, charming character as well as an authority on her greatest passion after couture. Hearing that she’d split from Mick, he got back in touch and invited her to go with him to the Kentucky horse sales. They later met up again in Los Angeles, but stayed in different hotels. By this point, according to Jerry, she’d decided there could be no future in their relationship, and strange earrings in the bed or not, the only man she wanted was Mick.

But events were moving far ahead of her. In Paris, where he’d gone to record with the Stones, Mick saw newspaper pictures of her with Sangster at the Kentucky horse sales. Almost neck and neck came a People magazine cover story of exotically mixed metaphor: “MICK AND JERRY SPLIT! A Scandal Brews as Jerry Gallops off with a Millionaire Horseman.” Jerry was quoted as saying that Sangster “could buy Mick ten times over.”

Mick had been publicly cuckolded like this only once before, when Marianne Faithfull had bolted with Mario Schifano thirteen years earlier. In the celebrity-conscious eighties—and to a man pushing forty—the humiliation was infinitely worse. He instantly got on the phone to Jerry in L.A., saying he’d been stupid and selfish and begging for another chance. (Sangster later described overhearing him on an extension, crying “like a big baby.”) He persuaded her to come to Paris, where he was actually waiting to meet her at the airport. A few days later, they returned together to New York, where, after more mutually tearful scenes, Mick finally came up with the lyric she wanted to hear: “We’re going to get married, we’re going to have babies, and we’re going to be so happy.”

As the first woman to bring a major rock star to heel, never mind this particular one, Jerry became something of a heroine. She received many letters from other women, applauding her determination, and saw her stock with the British press rise even higher. A Daily Mail cartoon showed Mick departing on tour carrying a long, padlocked wooden crate that evidently contained his beloved. “I’ve promised Jerry I won’t mess around any more,” he was telling reporters, “and she’s not going to either.”