Mick Jagger (79 page)

One of the few people Mick let in on the secret was the Englishwoman he’d dated when she was only seventeen. They had remained friendly, and she’d even been to stay at his French château, La Fourchette. One night when she retired to her room, Mick popped out of the wardrobe, evidently “on for it,” but she managed to get rid of the seigneur without damaging his amour propre.

Now he phoned and told her about the ceremony in Bali, somehow not sounding as if it had been the most magical experience of his life. And when she offered congratulations and said how happy Jerry must be, his response was even more puzzling. “I’m not really married,” he said. Remembering how Jerry had hopefully toted her wedding dress around all these years—and forgetting being vengefully barged into the bushes by her—the forthright young woman gave him a brisk telling off.

“God, you’re so nice about Jerry,” Mick replied. “And she’s so awful about you.”

SO THE EPHEMERAL music played by those naughty boys in the early 1960s proved to be among the more durable things in life. And the naughtiest boy, for whom a maximum career of six months had been predicted, was to find himself still churning it out to undiminished acclaim in middle age and beyond. As Mick approached fifty, the burning question of his twenties no longer even arose: he would never be too old to go on singing “Satisfaction.”

It is the nature of veteran rock stars—and what their public expects, even demands of them—to remain stuck in perpetual adolescence. They are everlasting teenagers, not only in their clothes, hair, and speech but also their ruthless pursuit of self-gratification and inability to deal with uncomfortable or boring realities. Whenever something disagreeable needs doing, they always have someone to do it for them. As the ultimate veteran rock star, Mick became the ultimate case of such arrested development. For all his great intelligence and sophistication, he continued living essentially the same life and inhabiting the same mind space that he had aged nineteen.

When Harold Nicolson wrote the official biography of King George V, a major narrative problem was that after passing sixty, the king did almost nothing but shoot pheasants and stick postage stamps into albums. Similarly, from his fifth to his sixth decade Mick was basically to have only two occupations. The first was tending the international corporation known as the Rolling Stones. And, like George V, the second involved sticking something in—although not stamps into an album.

THE STONES ENTERED their fourth decade riding as high as ever. A joint readers’ and critics’ poll in Rolling Stone at the end of 1990 saw them beat off all competition, past as well as present; they won Band of the Year, Album of the Year for Steel Wheels, and Tour of the Year, while a vote on the greatest rock singles of all time put “Satisfaction” at number one.

In 1991 came the (mostly) live album Flashpoint, featuring a track more overtly political than anything ever sung by the so-called street-fighting man back in the radical sixties. America and Britain had recently sent forces into Kuwait to crush an invasion by Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein—a despot whom the British government had supported for years as a bulwark against Iran. “Highwire” was an unambigous rant by Mick against the international arms dealers who stood to win however this First Gulf War turned out (“we got no pride, don’t care whose boots we lick …”). It did better in the UK than anything from Steel Wheels, also giving him the satisfaction of yet another BBC ban.

More interestingly, Flashpoint also contained his one and only acknowledgment of a condition that showed no sign of abating. “Sex Drive” was modeled on James Brown’s “Get Up (I Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” but with an added tinge of the confessional (“Ah got this secks dra-aive … drivin’ me ma-ayd …”). The video showed Mick actually lying on a therapist’s couch while visions of scantily clad females whirled around him, finally turning into an engulfment of the real thing. But the listening therapist was played by Charlie Watts, and Charlie’s enigmatic smile held no condemnation.

The question was to be raised many times over the next few years: how could someone otherwise so intelligent, fastidious, and careful of his public image continually cheat on his wife so recklessly and publicly? How, indeed, could he have gone back to cheating on her with hardly a beat after solemnizing their relationship in that wood-carver’s hut in Bali?

The answer was Eternal Teenager Syndrome. After three decades as a rock god, Mick inhabited a separate universe in which the normal rules of morality did not apply and inconvenient facts never needed to be faced, least of all about his own advancing years. Almost every female he met, of whatever age, still flung herself at him, not minding—not even noticing—the deep-grooved face that now went with the schoolgirlish torso and the mythic lips. It all could have been managed without giving pain to Jerry, as he was constantly away from home, either working with the Stones or avoiding tax, and surrounded by people as practiced at hiding his dalliances as the courtiers of Louis XIV. Yet he could be almost crazily incautious, less like a teenager than some defiant small boy who, while smashing a window or pulling the cat’s tail, believes that grown-ups simply can’t see him.

Jerry was fully aware of how quick he’d been to return to his old ways, but, with two children now to consider, did her best to put a brave face on it. When tabloids tattled about Mick and the New York socialite Gwen Rivers or Mick and the singer Nadine Expert or Mick and the model Lisa Barbuscia, who’d appeared in the “Sex Drive” video, Jerry laughed it off as meaningless or quoted homespun cattle-ranch wisdom: “Let ’em stray and they’ll always come back again.” However, Carla Bruni was something much more serious.

Mick had first met her on the UK leg of the Steel Wheels tour, which in Europe changed its name to the Urban Jungle tour. At the time, she was dating Eric Clapton, with whom she came backstage after the Stones’ Wembley show. Knowing his friend’s predatory ways—which had once even threatened his relationship with his wife, Pattie Boyd—Clapton took Mick aside and pleaded, “Not this one, please, Mick. I think I’m in love.” But the law of the Urban Jungle was inexorable.

Not that Carla Bruni was anyone’s idea of helpless prey. Born in Italy but raised in France, she was heiress to the Italian SEAT car-tire fortune and, at only twenty-two, had become France’s top supermodel, sought after by every fashion house from Dior and Chanel to Versace and Lacroix. Long, dark hair aside, there was something of Anita Pallenberg in her rangy elegance, her sculpted cheekbones, and the fascination she exerted over powerful men, particularly in the lower height range. Before Eric Clapton, she had had a string of prominent lovers including Crown Prince Dmitri of Yugoslavia. A decade later, when she had risen far above rock stars and minor European royalty, one of many unofficial French biographers would call her “a female Don Juan.”

The thought of being supplanted by a sister supermodel—especially one more than a decade younger—finally drove Jerry to confront Mick. Not least of her concerns was that the HIV epidemic, long thought to be confined to male homosexuals, now struck down promiscuous heteros also. Mick angrily denied the affair, as Carla already had to the French media, and stormed out of their temporary UK home in Barnes, southwest London. But then a few weeks later they were seen having lunch together in Barbados, clearly back on the most affectionate terms. After they left the restaurant, a fellow customer picked up a piece of paper from their table which seemed to be a written apology—from Jerry to Mick. “I want you to have your freedom,” it read in part, “and I won’t mind if you fuck other girls.” Shortly afterward, Jerry became pregnant for a third time.

The conscientious, farsighted father within the errant husband had decided his three latest children should be educated in England. Accordingly, in mid-1991, he paid £2.5 million for Downe House, a twenty-six-room Georgian mansion on Richmond Hill, once owned by the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan (whose most famous play, aptly enough, is The School for Scandal). The house had magnificent views of the River Thames and adjoined Richmond’s famous royal park with its free-ranging deer. Not far away was the Station Hotel, where Andrew Oldham had happened on the Stones in 1963 and an artless boy Trilby met his Svengali. Pete Townshend lived up the hill in Ronnie Wood’s old house, The Wick, while Woody himself now owned a mock-Tudor hunting lodge (with its own fully equipped pub) on the other side of Richmond Park.

Though Downe House was intended as a permanent base for Jerry, Elizabeth, James, and the new baby who would soon join them, Mick’s endlessly complex tax situation meant he could spend only limited time there each year. On his visits, it always took him a while to come down from his other life of touring, recording, and teenager-ing. Then he was happy enough to be a family man, walking dogs through Richmond Park and taking his turn in supervising his seven-and six-year-old. A visitor remembers him vainly trying to keep order as Elizabeth and James created a post-bedtime ruckus—the voice of “Get Off of My Cloud” and “Midnight Rambler” bawling upstairs “Stop that fuckin’ noise!”

He was a good cook, more patient and painstaking in the kitchen than anywhere else except music, and might spend a whole afternoon cycling from shop to shop to find every last correct ingredient for a Japanese recipe that appealed to him. Jerry had no such aptitude, but approached cookery in the same cheery spirit as everything else, donning a novelty apron her sisters had given her. Inspired by the Stones’ Sticky Fingers album cover, it had a zip-up panel from which a fabric penis popped out. This was symbolic on two levels, the less obvious being Jerry’s ability to cock up even simple child dishes like scrambled eggs and pasta. As a result, her son, James, took to cooking as a small boy and before long was skilled enough to be entrusted with the family’s Christmas lunch.

Mick happened to be home for part of Jerry’s pregnancy, and was loving and attentive throughout. To add to the reassuring atmosphere, Carla Bruni seemed to have transferred her attention to the New York property tycoon Donald Trump. Each night in bed, Jerry later recalled, “I would put my foot next to Mick’s big, warm foot and feel so much love and happiness and peace. And in the morning I would wake up to [him] bringing me a cup of tea.”

One might imagine that no man of forty-eight in his right mind would risk jeopardizing such a setup. But nothing could restrain the Eternal Teenager, or stop the willy jumping out of the apron. Mick had continued seeing Carla and was somehow getting away with it, even when he invited her to his French château after Jerry and the children had returned to London.

In January 1992, Jerry gave birth to a second daughter, Georgia May Ayeesha. The next day, Mick flew to Thailand for an apparent tryst with Carla in the luxury resort of Phuket (not, alas, pronounced “Fuck it,” but “Foo-ket”). Press reports said they were sharing a villa at the Amanpuri Hotel, where Mick was registered under the Thai-sounding name of “Someching.”

Jerry launched a vigorous counteroffensive, telephoning Carla to deliver several colorful Texan variations on the theme “Leave mah man alone,” then using the glossy magazines to send out a message of unbroken conjugal bliss. Hello! photographed her with Elizabeth, James, and the new baby on Mustique, while to France’s Voici magazine, she expressed the hope she’d still be making love to Mick when she was ninety. “[It’s] the best way for me to keep my figure. That is why I hate those times when Mick is far from me. But when we are back together, we make up for lost time, believe me.” On one modeling assignment, she actually came face-to-face with the alleged man rustler. “Why cain’t you leave mah husband alone?” she hollered across a roomful of top designers and fashion journalists, among whom the strongest permissible passion as a rule was the air kiss. “Tell him to leave me alone,” Carla shouted back.

Jerry kept up her brave face for several months more, shining and smiling at Mick’s side even on occasions when her nonparticipation could most have embarrassed him. She was with him, for instance, in May 1992 when Karis, his daughter by Marsha Hunt, graduated from Yale University. Once he had tried to dodge paternity of Karis; now he was as proud a dad as any other present, videoing every possible angle of the brilliant as well as beautiful young woman in her scholar’s gown and mortarboard.

Jerry was there for him, too, in July, when—far sooner than he had expected or wished—the Eternal Teenager found himself a grandfather. Jade, his daughter by Bianca, had turned into a bit of a hippie, leaving her conventional English boarding school to study art history in Florence, then deciding to be a painter. At age nineteen, she had became pregnant by twenty-two-year-old Piers Jackson, also an aspiring painter, who showed little sign of being able to keep a Jagger daughter in the style to which she was accustomed. The baby girl, just six months younger than her grandpa’s latest daughter, was named Assisi Lola. Jerry got along as well with Jade as with Karis and, in addition, had built bridges between Bianca and Mick and Marsha and Mick. Without her, the whole event could have been fraught with embarrassment; as it was, only she had to be embarrassed.

In her struggle to hold on to Mick, she even persuaded him to make the “Sex Drive” video come true, at least a little bit, by accompanying her to a marriage guidance counselor. But without cameras to play to, the Tyranny of Cool quickly proved impermeable. “These things don’t really work unless both of you are absolutely committed,” Jerry was forced to concede. “Mick’s never going to change.”

Finally, she came clean to the Daily Mail’s showbiz columnist, Baz Bamigboye: “We are separated and I suppose we’ll get a divorce. I’m in too much pain to go on any longer … It’s unforgivable what happened and I don’t think there’s any hope for us any more.” To McCall’s magazine she added: “There’s nothing more humiliating than loving him so much that you forgive the infidelities. But I’ve always hoped that he’d outgrow these things and it won’t happen again.”

For the first time ever, the threatened end of one of Mick’s relationships caused dismay throughout his circle. Even Keith was moved to say something not about Keith or the finer points of blues playing: “If [he and Jerry] split up, it will be a real shame. I hope the man comes to his senses … you know, the old black book bit. Kicking fifty, it’s a bit much … a bit manic.”