Mick Jagger (82 page)

Not until June 1999, when Jerry’s divorce action and Luciana Morad’s paternity suit were both well advanced, did tax conditions allow the Bridges to Babylon tour to reach Britain. The hiatus after the main European segment had been filled by a short extra American tour with premium-price tickets and a different name, No Security—which, in those condom-conscious times, Mick had cause to regret about his fling with Morad.

Everyone who remembered the old Mick Jagger was amazed by the charm offensive he launched to dispel the bad vibes of the previous year and win younger Britons over to the Stones. His masterstroke was an extended appearance on Channel 4’s riotous youth show TFI Friday, casting himself as an avuncular guide to his band’s inner workings rather like his father, Joe, had once been to canoeing and rock climbing. TFI Friday’s presenter, Chris Evans, was given unprecedented access to him in the run-up to the two London concerts, at Shepherd’s Bush Empire and Wembley Stadium. The program included a backstage tour personally conducted by Mick in faultless Estuary English (“Yeh, it’s quih a loh of sho-yoos if you think abouh ih.” Translation: Yes, it’s quite a lot of shows if you think about it.) and a short lecture on the importance of projection. Evans was even allowed to tease him a little, laying out Polaroid pictures of various road-crew members and offering a fifty-dollar prize if he could name every one. He could.

The bridge building was completed before two audiences of eighty-eight thousand at Wembley on June 11 and 12. At both shows, the dominant female element were no longer mindless Mick-lovers as of old, but standard-bearers for Girl Power, drinking beer from the bottle, swearing as lustily as any male, and ready to give a deafening collective raspberry to any hint of Neanderthal sexism from the stage.

As a first disarming gesture, the performances started closer to on time than any Stones shows in recorded memory. There was barely half an hour’s wait before the four of them appeared on a giant video screen loping along like the gang from Reservoir Dogs, eerily unchanged save that every line had been removed from their faces, leaving the blank white ovals of Marcel Marceau mimes. And from Mick came no traditional mocking Dixie-Mama greeting of “A-a-awright!” but a formal apology in his best BAFTA accent: “I’m sorry it’s taken so long. We really appreciate your waiting. And we’re going to work our arses off to make up for it.”

After more than two years almost continuously on the road all over the world, a band of such antiquity might have been expected to show exhaustion, carelessness, and terminal boredom. Yet those two Wembley shows were among the best the Stones had ever given. There was a special symbolism in the moment when they crossed the cantilevered bridge to the tiny B-stage to play old favorites like “Route 66” in the round. Millionaire tax exiles turned into bluesmen once again, still as true to the music as ever after all these years, and close to their home crowd in a way they hadn’t been since nights at the Marquee or the Richmond Crawdaddy Club.

As for Mick, from the moment he shed his sparkly jade frock coat to reveal a turquoise crop top—still with a flash of bare midriff—he proved yet again that whatever new rock gods might come along, none could ever be more than his apprentice. And Planet Jagger cast as potent a spell as ever. By the end of the first hour, he was no longer a fifty-six-year-old grandfather being divorced by his more popular wife and embarrassingly sued for paternity of an unborn Brazilian baby. He was the eternal teenager whose sex drive was a modern wonder of the world. Each day, his audience wondered if he’d dare sing the suddenly relevant “Some Girls,” and in one show he did, giving almost defiant emphasis to “Some gurls give me cheeldrun … Ah never aysked them for …”

The laughter that rippled through Wembley Stadium came as readily from females as males and held no whisper of reproach.

IN AUGUST, MATTERS with Jerry were resolved by a brief hearing in London’s High Court. Two experts in Indonesian matrimonial law were summoned to pronounce on Mick’s claim that the Hindu marriage he’d orchestrated in Bali in 1990 had had no legal validity, therefore he could not properly be sued for divorce. Both experts opined that, because the ceremony in the wood-carver’s hut had not been ratified by any civil proceedings, its legality might indeed be open to question.

Unlike the endings of all Mick’s previous relationships, however, he did not use his get-out-of-jail card to the full. There were his four children with Jerry to consider; he also feared that attempting to fob her off with some Bianca-size pittance would bring a tell-all autobiography down on his head. It was therefore announced that their marriage had been annulled “by mutual agreement” and Jerry would receive an undisclosed financial settlement (reportedly a £4.5 million lump sum plus £100,000 per year maintenance and £25,000 for each of the children until the age of twenty-five). In a first for any of his outgoing women, she described his provision as “very, very generous.”

They had remained good friends before the High Court action, and afterward their relationship seemed unharmed. Jerry took the children off to her new house in the South of France, where, it happened, Mick’s collaborator and her friend Dave Stewart was to marry the photographer Anoushka Fisz. Mick came to the wedding, then spent the night in Jerry’s guest room.

Luciana Morad had by now given birth to a son whom she named Lucas Maurice Morad Jagger. Blood tests, taken on Mick’s insistence, established that he was the child’s father, bringing the grand total of his offspring to seven, and Luciana was awarded $6,000 per month in maintenance. She expressed the hope that Lucas would share the educational opportunities of Mick’s other children and have his name put down for Eton College.

The news about the incriminating blood tests reached Mick while he was staying with Jerry in France. Next morning, he went on his way, accompanied by a British film crew who were making a documentary about him. “I waved good-bye and thought how lucky I was that I didn’t care what he got up to anymore,” Jerry would recall. “It was no longer my problem.”

They no longer shared a bed but otherwise, the Marriage That Never Was appeared to turn seamlessly into the Breakup That Never Was. Having initially moved out of Downe House, Mick took a flat next door and, during his tax-exempt trips back to Britain, was constantly around, seeing the children and presiding over meals. Being relieved of his marital obligations to Jerry seemed to have an almost magical effect: he treated her almost like a suitor again, phoning her several times a day, sending her surprise bouquets of flowers. One evening, Ronnie Wood came across Richmond Park for dinner at Downe House with his second wife, Jo, a refreshing new voice of sanity in the Stones’ seraglio (and a good influence on Woody he would later foolishly let go). Seeing how comfortable Mick and Jerry were together sent Jo Wood into peals of laughter. “Mick said, ‘Wossamatter with you?’ ” she recalled. “I said, ‘You two get on far better now than when you were married.’ ”

Jerry, for her part, became something of a national heroine as proof that a wife annulled by a rock megastar in her mid-thirties could still have a life, and then some. Over the next few months, she appeared on the cover of Hello!, became the face of Thierry Mugler perfume, was appointed a contributing editor of Tatler magazine, joined the judging panel of the Whitbread literary awards, began studying for an Open University degree, and announced plans to sell replicas of her engagement ring from Mick on the TV shopping channel QVC.

In the summer of 2000, she made her West End acting debut when she replaced Kathleen Turner as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate, which, unlike the famous screen version with Anne Bancroft, involved a nude scene to follow those in Lucian Freud’s studio. Mick was there on her opening night (just as he’d been on Marianne Faithfull’s at the Royal Court back in the sixties) and even offered to babysit Gabriel during the play’s run. “He’s wonderfully kind and supportive,” Jerry told an interviewer on Radio 4’s Woman’s Hour—adding, in the most loving way, “He just isn’t very much of a husband.”

IN MARCH 2000, Joe and Eva Jagger attended the opening of the Mick Jagger Arts Centre at Dartford Grammar School—an alma mater now proud to acknowledge an even more distinguished ex-pupil than the nineteenth-century colonial hero Sir Henry Havelock. The £2.25 million complex had received a £1.7 million grant from the National Lottery and Mick had made up the balance, despite having little cause to thank Dartford Grammar for the artistic, still less musical, grounding he’d received there. The inauguration ceremony was perfomed by him jointly with the Duke of Kent, and Jerry was again loyally on hand to help steer her former parents-in-law around the center’s two luxuriously appointed performance spaces, recording studio, rehearsal rooms, bar, and art gallery. At the suggestion of one of the students, Mick wrote “I WAS HERE” on a wall (something which would have been rewarded with a beating when he was fourteen) so that it could be preserved for posterity.

Two months later, at Parkside Hospital, Wimbledon, Eva died of heart failure after a short illness, aged eighty-seven. The following December, she and Joe would have celebrated their diamond wedding anniversary after sixty years of marriage. Mick was at the Cannes Film Festival, but flew home immediately to be with his father. The funeral, at St. Andrew’s Church, Ham (Surrey), was attended by Jerry and her four children, Bianca and Jade, and the three other Stones. The service included a performance by Mick and his brother, Chris, of the Carter Family spiritual “Will the Circle Be Unbroken?”

All Eva’s dreams of social advancement and more had been fulfilled by her elder son—though, sadly, she did not live to experience the ultimate one. Yet she had never allowed Mick to overshadow the younger sibling who, in their childhood, had often seemed her favorite. Chris Jagger had tried his hand as a recording artist in the seventies and again in the nineties, both times without much success; he had also variously been an actor, a waiter, a decorator, a journalist, a broadcaster, and a vendor of Christmas trees. In latter years, he’d fronted various amateur blues and Cajun bands, playing venues like pubs and village halls, seldom to audiences of more than a few dozen. Eva was loyally attending such a gig when a woman recognized her as Mick’s mother and gushed, “I love your son.” “Which one?” Eva asked firmly.

Joe Jagger, that onetime wiry gymnast, was now a frail eighty-eight-year-old, lost without his partner of almost sixty years. The same attentive son as ever, Mick ensured that Joe was comforted by seeing plenty of his grandchildren; he joined the family holidays to France and Mustique that continued as usual after Mick and Jerry’s annulment, and also went with them to see Mick’s oldest daughter, Karis, marry Jonathan Weston at the Treasure Island resort in San Francisco Bay.

Now that Mick had no more reason to hide his affairs from Jerry, he paradoxically began showing more discretion than he ever had while they were together. During his quite lengthy relationship with twenty-three-year-old Sophie Dahl, six-foot supermodel granddaughter of author Roald—and a former school friend of Charlie Watts’s daughter—the two managed never to be photographed together (proving that any celeb can be invisible who genuinely wants to). When they went to a restaurant, the limo would drop Sophie first, then circle the block before depositing Mick. There was equally little trace of his reported fascination with the television presenter Amanda de Cadenet, who, at twenty-nine, seemed on the old side for him.

The paparazzi had better luck when he met up with Luciana Morad in London for a first look at the baby boy whose paternity he’d finally been forced to acknowledge. He was photographed wheeling Lucas Maurice Morad Jagger through Hyde Park in a stroller and, despite all the humiliating legal and medical proceedings that had gone before, seeming not at all unhappy about this seventh addition to his brood. Journalists who managed a close look at the infant reported lips of a volume as conclusive as any DNA test.

It was the height of the so-called dot-com boom, when instant fortunes were to be made by companies providing services and commodities through the Internet. Mick’s friend and Mustique neighbor David Bowie had been in the vanguard with BowieNet, a vanity Internet service provider dealing mainly in Bowie’s numerous (terrible) paintings, drawings, and prints. Mick similarly channeled a private passion into Jagged Internetworks, which beamed major international cricket matches over the net and soon acquired an impressive catalog of exclusive rights, notably to the Champions Trophy in the United Arab Emirates.

The other concurrent boom was in the work of Cool Britannia’s young British artists, as epitomized by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, who had become the latest claimants to be “the new rock ’n’ roll.” (And certainly, both Hirst’s sculpture of a dead shark immersed in formaldehyde and Emin’s installation of an unmade, garbage-strewn double bed might easily have been found in some hotel room lately occupied by Keith Richards.) The market was virtually owned by the former advertising man Charles Saatchi. Mick became a close friend of Saatchi’s, invested in one of his companies, and, since Saatchi controlled demand as well as supply, had access to tips on which pieces to buy before their values skyrocketed.

This diversification into fields away from music also brought fulfillment of Maggie Abbott’s idea back in the seventies that Mick would make as good a film producer as star. He set up his own production company, Jagged Films, and immediately announced two major projects, a biopic of the poet Dylan Thomas and an adaptation of Robert Harris’s bestselling World War II novel, Enigma (which really should have been the title of that stillborn Jagger autobiography). One early choice as Enigma’s male lead was Jonny Lee Miller, at the time still married to Angelina Jolie. According to Jolie’s biographer, Andrew Morton, it was largely a ruse to keep Mick in contact with this most enigmatic of his ladyloves.

Jagged Films’ other debut production was a television documentary about Mick to promote a new solo album, his fourth, in 2001. His choice as director was thirty-three-year-old Kevin Macdonald, who’d made a film about Performance’s scriptwriter Donald Cammell and gone on to win an Oscar for One Day in September, about the massacre of Israeli athletes by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Olympics. Knowing Mick’s troubled history with documentaries like The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus and Cocksucker Blues, Macdonald was initially dubious; however, a TV tie-in with Britain’s Channel 4 and an album release made it unlikely this one would join those vetoed classics on the shelf. Some parts were to be filmed by Macdonald, others by Mick himself with a tiny digital camera and a recorder in his pocket. Needless to say, the boss of Jagged Films would enjoy total editorial control.