Mick Jagger (76 page)

Not long afterward, she and Mick were in a restaurant when yet another lovely young thing came up, leaned over him, and offered her telephone number. Jerry gave her an almighty kick on the shin under the table while never slackening by a millimeter that big, sunshiny Texan smile.

BACK IN THE sixties, paranoid Brian Jones was always accusing his fellow Stones of ganging up on him. As the eighties went on, it really would happen to Mick; the difference was that he didn’t care.

His Glimmer Twin made little secret of finding him unbearable these days. The Stones’ Emotional Rescue album in 1980 had contained an acrid ballad called “All About You,” written and sung by Keith as a footnote to life with Anita. But one line seemed to point to an equally wearisome relationship that had no end in sight: “So sick and tired hanging around with jerks like you.”

The sorest point with Keith was Mick’s need always to look youthful and with-it, and the consequent threat to the Stones’ integrity as hard-core country bluesmen. With his fortieth birthday looming, Mick still made a beeline for every trendy new club, from New York’s Limelight to London’s Blitz, to hang out with young hit makers like Paul Young and Duran Duran, in the same jade-green shirts, shoulder-padded jackets, and sheaf-cut hair. At their concerts, too, he would often be in the front row, studying their vocal tics and body language to see what he might appropriate. It mystified Keith that such a mighty original tried to copy kids who’d almost all started out as would-be Mick Jaggers.

In New York, the craze was rap or hip-hop: black music as simple and formulaic as the blues, which replaced melody with a hard, unadorned beat and singing with the recitation of belligerent doggerel verse. Rap’s real artistic creation was break dancing, for single males only, usually performed on the street, which demanded extreme gymnastic agility and drew crowds wherever it was demonstrated. Skilled break-dancers created complex routines that went from splits to Cossack-style crouch kicking and spinning like a top on one shoulder or even their heads.

Mick, of course, took an immediate interest in rap and paid several anonymous visits to the clubs where it could be heard. Here, the live attractions were no longer bands, as in his young days, but “scratch” deejays who manipulated the vinyl discs on their turntables so that the rasp of the needle, once anguish to any music lover, became an exciting augmentation to the beat. He claimed to have tried break dancing, even spinning on his head, for which he paid with symptoms like a severe hangover the next day. To Keith, however, rap still only meant something he’d spent the last few years dodging.

Now clean and in possession of his full senses for the first time in years, he was discovering just how tight Mick’s grip on the Stones had become while he was out of it. Despite those brotherly ministrations in Woodstock, he felt that on one level Mick had been happy for him to be a junkie, as it stopped him interfering too much in band business. Now, at conferences with Prince Rupert, he became increasingly aware of Mick’s voice saying, “Oh, shut up, Keith.”

On the Tattoo You tour, he had received virtually equal recognition with Mick, not only for his peerless riffs but also for what one writer called his wasted elegance—henceforth the aim of any boy who picked up a solid-body guitar. These days, he did almost as many interviews as Mick, revealing a humor and honesty very different from his Glimmer Twin’s bland equivocations. In contrast with Mick’s studied Cockney, the previously taciturn “Human Riff” turned out to speak with the faint staginess of some boozy old repertory actor. His recent decision to drop the stage name Andrew Oldham had wished on him in 1963 and go back to being Keith Richards with an s seemed further proof of how genuine and comfortable with himself he was.

Yet behind the scenes, he’d had constant battles with Mick and ended up losing most of them. He complained that he’d wanted to call their surprise hit album plain Tattoo but Mick had surreptitiously added the You, and that his objections to the tour’s pastel Kabuki stage design had been similarly ignored. He fulminated against “plastic Jagger” after Mick started employing a movement coach to choreograph what used to come naturally. Most of all he hated the finale when Mick had himself swung out above the crowd in the cherry picker to scatter carnations during “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Keith called it “a fucking sideshow” and one night sabotaged it by hijacking the cherry picker to play an extended guitar solo.

Ronnie Wood had become Keith’s soul mate, drinking, drugging, and gun pulling at practically the same level, and the pair began poking fun at Mick behind his back like schoolboys while the teacher is writing on the blackboard. After Keith discovered the existence of a historical novelist called Brenda Jagger, they nicknamed Mick Brenda, which also was Private Eye magazine’s name for the Queen. Keith also began alluding to him as Beef Curtains, male slang for the lips of the vagina. Mick, in turn, mocked Keith for being an unadventurous old stickin-the-mud and characterized the Stones en bloc as “a bunch of pensioners.”

The arguing and backbiting continued through the summer of 1983 as the band worked on their next album, Undercover, at the Pathé-Marconi Studios in Paris. Its lead single, “Undercover of the Night,” was written entirely by Mick and evoked his recent time in Peru (and Bianca’s new vocation) with references to “one hundred thousand disparus [disappeared] lost in the jails of South America” and “death camps back in the jungle.” The video for this most overtly political Stones track since “Street Fighting Man” was directed by Julien Temple, who had made his name with the Sex Pistols’ feature film The Great Rock ’n’ Roll Swindle.

Temple’s “Undercover of the Night” video had a convoluted story line featuring Mick in the dual role of a rock star kidnapped by South American terrorists and a mustached Fitzcarraldo-like tycoon in a white suit and Panama hat. All in all, it seemed more a vehicle for his unrealized screen-acting ambitions than a showcase for the Stones, whose ensemble performing moments came and went so quickly as to be almost subliminal. At the end, his rock-star character was shot in the head by a death squad just like the one Bianca had recently helped to thwart in Honduras. Even though only pantomime, the scene proved too strong for the BBC’s Top of the Pops, so Mick celebrated his fortieth year by having another single banned.

For Julien Temple, the filming was an experience that made the Sex Pistols seem almost a rest cure by comparison. One day in the men’s room of the George V hotel in Paris, Keith shoved the young director up against a wall and held a sword stick to his throat. It was Keith’s way of saying he didn’t think he was seen in the video enough.

Mick was making one concession, at least, to advancing years. In late 1982, it had been announced he was working on his autobiography. The lucky publisher was to be the London house of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, whose cofounder and chairman, George Weidenfeld, was famous for the lavish sums he paid his authors, the star-studded parties he threw, and the publicity his titles tended to attract. Weidenfeld lived in Cheyne Walk, Chelsea, a few doors from Mick’s old home, and enjoyed a reputation in the literary world similar to Mick’s in the rock one, under his (self-bestowed) nickname “the Nijinsky of Cunnilingus.”

Weidenfeld inevitably knew his fellow émigré and party giver Prince Rupert Loewenstein (the two portly, white-tonsured figures almost looked like Tweedledum and Tweedledee) and offered a preemptive deal munificent even by his standards. Mick would be paid an advance against royalties of £1 million. The book would be put together from tape-recorded interviews by a ghostwriter whom he himself was allowed to choose.

Ghosting someone else’s book may not be the most prestigious literary work, but is a craft nonetheless. Unfortunately, when Mick’s people began casting around for likely candidates, their first port of call was not the lists of reliable, sometimes brilliant ghostwriters kept by every publisher. Mick declared that he didn’t want “some hack” but a literary name, young and interesting enough not to bore him during their hours closeted together. It happened that Granta magazine had just published its choice of “the Best of Young British Novelists,” a twenty-strong list including Martin Amis, Salman Rushdie, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro—and this author. So the search for his amanuensis began there.

Among the Young British Novelists selected to audition was twenty-nine-year-old Adam Mars-Jones, whose short-story collection Lantern Lectures had won the 1982 Somerset Maugham Award. Mars-Jones was instructed to go to London’s Savoy hotel, where Mick was registered under the name “Mr. Philips.” In one of the hotel’s best suites, a barefoot Mr. Philips was watching cricket on television with only Charlie Watts and a single young female PA for company. He was, as so often, disarmingly informal, squatting down on the floor next to Mars-Jones and asking suggestions for the dream England cricket side he and Charlie were compiling.

For tips on how to handle the situation—not knowing anyone personally acquainted with his prospective collaborator—Mars-Jones had consulted the eminent critic and literary editor John Gross. In Gross’s view, it was vital not to suggest that writing an autobiography meant Mick’s career was over or in decline. Accordingly, Mars-Jones had coined for himself the job description of “word engineer” rather than the mausoleumy “ghost.” Mick turned out to have read Lantern Lectures and also to have been skimming the memoirs of Charles Chaplin (another small man, and notorious sexual athlete, who became globally famous) as a possible model for his own narrative. Mars-Jones asked him how good his memory was, but received a rather noncommital reply.

Their discussion was interrupted by the arrival of Ian Botham, the most famous English cricketer of the 1980s, otherwise known as Beefy for his almost Rolling Stone unruliness on and off the field. Beef Curtains treated Beefy with huge respect, and literature gave way to cricket talk, in particular the question of whether England players were banned from having sex before important matches. At one point, Mick referred to Charlie as “my drummer,” but Charlie seemed not to care, merely protesting jocularly, “Hey, you’re my singer.”

Adam Mars-Jones did not get the job of Mick’s word engineer. He believes he disqualified himself when Mick handed him a joint after taking a puff and he didn’t savor the smoke for long enough, so showing himself uncool beyond redemption. Nor did anyone else from the Best of Young British Novelists land the gig. Instead, Mick chose a journalist, John Ryle, deputy literary editor of the London Sunday Times. Ryle had no track record in writing about rock, but was young, cultivated, and—a crucial consideration—extremely pretty.

The book’s editor was to be Weidenfeld & Nicolson’s recently appointed deputy chairman, Michael O’Mara. Giving the task to such a senior figure was proof of the loving care and attention George Weidenfeld had promised Prince Rupert. Weidenfeld himself, as was his habit, remained apart from the editorial nitty-gritty, often absentmindedly referring to Mick as “Michael” and calling O’Mara “Mick.”

Mick having shifted his base back to New York, the book had to be put together there. John Ryle was installed at the Barclay Intercontinental Hotel in Midtown Manhattan, and his subject would come to his room for tape-recorded interviews which were then sent back to Weidenfeld in London to be transcribed. Meantime, the prospect of Mick Jagger’s story in his own words continued to generate worldwide expectation. O’Mara sold the North American rights for £1.5 million—instantly earning back Weidenfeld’s whopping advance plus 50 percent—and made a string of lucrative deals with publishers in other territories.

His euphoria waned on reading the first transcripts of Ryle’s interviews with Mick. Rather than the expected white-hot revelations, they were full of stuff about Dartford in the 1950s, the cinemas he used to patronize, and film stars he used to like. And to O’Mara, the conversation seemed altogether too unfocused and laid-back for an urgent million-dollar project; as he recalls, “I got a feeling that the ashtrays were full.”

There was no lack of effort on the ghostwriter and the publisher’s part and even, up to a point, the subject’s. Ryle diligently interviewed Mick’s parents, his brother, Chris, and other figures from his inner coterie. Mick sent out personal letters to a number of people from his past (some of whom believed they’d been totally forgotten by him), asking them to talk to Ryle. They included his old girlfriend, the former Chrissie Shrimpton, who’d last heard from him via lawyers a few years earlier after it had been (falsely) reported that she intended to publish his old love letters.

The main problem was that after the Stones’ career got going, Mick was unable to recall almost any dates and possessed no diaries or letters from which a narrative could be constructed. To jog his memory, the New York Times’s rock critic and Rolling Stone specialist Robert Palmer was hired as a supplementary interviewer. A personal letter also went to Bill Wyman, who had kept a detailed diary and preserved almost every piece of paper relating to the band’s career since its earliest days. In a respectful tone Bill was hardly used to, Mick asked him to talk to John Ryle, adding, “You can say what you like.” A handwritten footnote asked for access to his archive to fill in the book’s many yawning chronological gaps. But Bill had no particular reason to want to help Mick, and in any case was planning to write his own autobiography, so sent back a brusque refusal.

Whatever was tried, nothing seemed able to flesh out the taped interviews flowing from the Barclay Intercontinental across the Atlantic to Weidenfeld & Nicolson. The only fleshing out was in the ghostwriter, who, after months of living on room service at Mick’s expense, had lost his formerly lissome, boyish appearance. Michael O’Mara had a few meetings with the interviewee but was never able to communicate his growing anxiety.

Despite being a year Mick’s junior, he felt he was dealing with “an eighteen-year-old.” Sometimes he would land in New York, phone Mick at home, and be told to come right over. When he arrived, Jerry, by now heavily pregnant, would open the door and tell him Mick was out. “I’d sit around and wait for him, trying to make conversation with Jerry, but he never came. I had the strong feeling he was hiding upstairs all the time. When I did manage to talk to him, he’d just tell me not to worry, the book would be fine. He just seemed to think the right words would arrange themselves on the page like magic. But Jerry seemed to realize already something was going badly wrong.”