London Calling (49 page)

To make life on the set even more complicated, both Cammell and the producer Sandy Lieberson hinted in interviews that James
Fox and Jagger were having some sort of affair. Lieberson would only say they had ‘an intense personal relationship. Everyone
on the set knew each other. They were all, er, intimate friends.’
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Cammell told Carey Schofield: ‘It was a joy to watch.’ Then, during one ten-minute break three days into filming Jagger’s
scenes, everyone returned to their dressing rooms and James Fox was shocked to find Mick and Anita having sex in Mick’s room.
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Fox knew that Anita was Marianne’s best friend and that Marianne was pregnant with Mick’s child, and that Keith Richards,
who was supposed to co-write the film’s theme song with Jagger, was obsessively in love with Anita.

Marianne had been considered for a role in the film, but as she was pregnant it was felt that to be involved with the problems
and excitement of film-making would have been too much stress for her, so she was packed off to a 100-guineas-a-week mansion
in Tuam, outside Galway in the Republic of Ireland, rented from Molly Cusack-Smith, the Master of the Galway Blazers. Anita
Pallenberg was also pregnant, but she had an abortion and showed up on set the very next day according to Christopher Andersen.
To heighten the tension between Jagger and Fox, Roeg had initially wanted them to move into the house on Lowndes Square where
the film was shot, but as they already had a complicated relationship it wasn’t necessary.

Jagger was concerned about becoming an actor; he had no training and knew that a great deal was expected of him. His task
was not made easier by the fact that Roeg and Cammell were working from an outline, not an actual script. Roeg: ‘It was very
organic, growing out of the relationships between the characters as we went along. You couldn’t do that today.’
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Roeg and Cammell encouraged Jagger to take the androgynous, bisexual character as far as he could. They persuaded him to
wear a body stocking, frilly blouses and make-up: lipstick and blue eyeshadow. Roeg: ‘Mick would resist at first but eventually
he’d come around.’
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The directors told him not to try to act at all but just be himself, but Marianne Faithful knew better:

I suggested Mick start forming his character based on Brian [Jones], but to dye his hair. His hair should be a very strong,
definite colour. To do Turner as a blond would have been too much. In the end he died it black, very black, a Chinese black,
like Elvis’s hair. Brilliant, straight away it gave him a strong
graphic outline. His tights and costumes gave him a tinge of menace, a slight hint of Richard III.
¹⁰

As soon as rehearsals began it became obvious that this characterization was too simplistic so Marianne proposed adding some
of Keith’s strength and cool to the mix: ‘You’ve got to imagine you’re poor, freaked-out, deluded, androgynous, druggie Brian,
but you also need a bit of Keith’s tough, self-destructive, beautiful lawlessness.’
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She said: ‘You simply can’t play yourself because that would be a disaster.’
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It was a character that Jagger adopted so completely that it stayed with him for years to come. In her autobiography Marianne
wrote: ‘He did his job well, so well in fact he became this hybrid character, and never left it. What I hadn’t anticipated
was that Mick, by playing Brian and Keith, would be playing two people who were extremely attractive to Anita and who were
in turn obsessed with her.’
¹³

Jagger expected some antagonism from the film crew, who he rightly assumed were expecting a rock ’n’ roll prima donna. He
listened carefully to Cammell and worked hard at his rehearsals with Jimmy Fox, never objecting to the endless retakes and
repeats which were usually caused by technical problems: someone was out of frame, the set looked wrong, the lighting cast
the wrong shadows and so on. Jagger always knew his lines – singers have to memorize hundreds of lines of song lyrics – and
knew where he was supposed to be on the set – again he was used to this onstage, where his movements would be co-ordinated
with the lighting cues. One day the head cameraman, Mike Molloy, asked one of the grips to hammer small ‘termites’ into the
floor, small wooden pegs to indicate where he should be in a complicated shot. This meant that he could feel his position
with his toes rather than have to look for chalk marks on the floor. ‘I don’t need those fucking things,’ Jagger told him,
and he didn’t. He went through the scene without a hitch. The film was, unusually, shot in the sequence it would be shown,
which enabled the directors to exploit the growing relationship between the two principals. His first shot therefore was of
him hidden behind a screen, telling Jimmy that there was no room for him in the house. Cammell cleverly reversed the class
backgrounds of the two male actors: making Jagger the aristocratic, cultured one and James Fox the working-class hoodlum.
Cammell wanted a real tension between them and encouraged Fox to delve deep into the character.

Donald Cammell’s childhood friend David Litvinoff was hired to educate James Fox into the character of the gangster. Litvinoff
was a wild character
who had been on the scene since the forties. George Melly met him then at Cy Laurie’s jazz club in Soho:

the fastest talker I ever met, full of outrageous stories, at least half of which turn out to be true, a dandy of squalor,
a face either beautiful or ugly, I could never decide which, but certainly one hundred percent Jewish, a self-propelled catalyst
who didn’t mind getting hurt as long as he made something happen, a sacred monster, first class.
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In
Owning Up
he told the story of one of his encounters with Litvinoff. The night before Melly got married, he gave a lecture at the I
C A on Dover Street on the subject of ‘Erotic Imagery in the Blues,’ after which he was to catch the midnight express to Edinburgh
from King’s Cross. Melly had prepared a serious talk, intending to play records under various headings, including ‘The Machine
as a Sexual Image’, ‘Animal Symbolism in Erotic Blues,’ ‘Sexual Metaphors in Rural and Urban Blues’ and so on. The meeting
was chaired by Charles Fox and Vic Bellerby, both respected jazz critics, and Melly was a little nervous. Mick Mulligan handed
him a glass of water, which he swallowed straight down. It contained four neat gins. When the introductions were over, David
Litvinoff stood up in the audience to question the chair: ‘Is it permitted for the audience to wank during the recital?’
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Half the audience froze in silent disapproval, the other half shrieked with laughter. Mulligan continued to feed Melly gins
and though he stuck resolutely to his text, at least in the early part, he very soon began to enthusiastically sing along
with the records. When Ian Christie criticized a Bessie Smith record, Melly objected and threatened to throw him down the
stairs. After the interval things degenerated completely, Melly delivered an attack on the ICA, calling it the ‘Institute
of Contemporary Arseholes’, Litvinoff sang a song of his own composition and a Dubuffet sculpture was destroyed in the struggle
between ICA staff and Melly’s wedding party. Somehow he was put on the train and the porter bribed to look after him.
¹⁶

Mim Scala remembered: ‘What Litvinoff liked best was little boys, particularly naughty, run-away borstal boys.’
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He was physically ugly, with a prematurely bald head that he attempted to disguise by greasing a few hairs from the back
of his head up over the top. He had a huge nose and thin lips, but his most distinguishing feature was a pair of razor scars
which extended his mouth out into his cheeks; ugly cuts given to him by the Kray twins for being a big mouth. They sent a
couple of their enforcers over to his flat in Kensington High Street and they stripped him naked, tied him to a kitchen chair
and razored the corners of his mouth to let everyone know he was a
snitch. Then they hung him, still naked and tied to the chair, out of his third-floor window, where he dangled all night,
terrified, dripping blood on to the pavement.
¹⁸

James Fox prepared himself for the role by cutting his fashionably long sixties hair, buying his suits from a Jewish tailor
much favoured by gangsters, near Waterloo Station, and immersing himself for three months in the world of London gangsters.
Litvinoff introduced him to boxing promoter Johnny Shannon and asked him to show him the ropes. Fox moved into a small flat
over a pub owned by Shannon in the Commercial Road in the East End. In a brilliant piece of casting, Johnny Shannon was then
recruited to be Harry Flowers. Three times a week Fox trained with the locals in the gym above the Thomas À Beckett pub over
the river on the Old Kent Road. He seemed to become the sadistic gangster so completely that when he made an unscheduled visit
to the office of Sandy Lieberson, the film’s co-producer, Lieberson’s secretary was terrified of him. Even Shannon became
concerned at Fox’s obsessive quest for the authentic character and telephoned to tell Cammell he thought James was over-identifying
with the locals: the previous day Fox had gone along on a heist, climbing over rooftops with a gang, to more fully understand
his character’s feelings. To have the film put at risk by Fox being arrested was not what Cammell needed, and he tried to
stem Fox’s enthusiasm, but not until after he had introduced him to Johnny Bindon, a huge man, frightening because of his
size, whom Cammell described as ‘very highly strung, a real psychopath of the greatest kind… very excitable’. Just the person
to play Moody.

John Bindon earned himself quite a reputation as a television and film actor, nearly always playing the hard man, and he simultaneously
had his own patch around Fulham and Chelsea, where he ran a protection racket covering about 200 pubs. He was his own enforcer
and anyone who didn’t pay up could expect a dislocated jaw. He performed the same function, on request, for the Kray brothers,
who sometimes helped him out. There was a fascination with London gangsters among the new media and pop stars – he was very
close friends with Bob Hoskins as well as Angela Bowie, who described him as ‘the instigator of a fair amount of spontaneous
sex. I’d use the more familiar “casual sex” in this context, but to me the term has always seemed inappropriate for any activity
as wild, strenuous and mind-blowing as the kind of sex I’m familiar with.’
¹⁹
Even royalty was not immune. In 1975, Princess Margaret invited Bindon to Mustique, where, by royal command, he demonstrated
his ability to hang five empty half-pint beer mugs from his erect penis (Angie Bowie says three pint mugs). Margaret’s lady-in-waiting
summoned him to one side and murmured: ‘My lady knows of your advantage in life and would like to see it.’ Followed by Lady
Tennant, they walked about twenty yards down the beach where, in full view of the lunch party, Bindon unzipped and, according
to his biographer, Wensley Clarkson, ‘she examined it rather like a fossil.’
²⁰

‘I’ve seen bigger,’ said Lady Tennant.
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This display, which shocked the luncheon party, was designed to cover up the fact that Bindon and Margaret had been having
sex for months. They had met on a previous visit to Mustique and in between times the princess had sent a limousine to transport
him to Kensington Palace. When it looked like she was seeing rather too much of him, Special Branch sent four of their heavies
over to put the frighteners on him and this normally very hard man admitted that he was ‘well worried’.
²²
He only ever mentioned the affair with the princess to a few close friends, certainly not the press. At one point the Palace
issued a statement saying that Margaret had never met him, which resulted in red faces when a photograph of the two of them
sitting next to each other in Mustique – Bindon wearing a T-shirt with ‘Cocaine’ written on it in Coca-Cola lettering – appeared
in the tabloids.

Aside from his being a violent psychopath who enjoyed nothing better than putting complete strangers in hospital, his exhibitionism
was another reason to avoid his company. He liked to flash his cock, widely reported as being a foot long, flopping it into
people’s pockets, into their beer, and on at least one occasion, among the uncooked frankfurters at a picnic. It was his performance
in Ken Loach’s
Poor Cow
that launched his career and
Performance
that consolidated it. He was twenty-four years old when he did
Poor Cow
and had spent seven of them in jail, usually for acts of violence. On the set of
Performance
he even managed to shake up the normally implacable Mick Jagger. Jagger went for a night on the town with Bindon, who, as
per normal, got into a drunken fight. The next morning Jagger looked ashen and Bindon, always good for a laugh, shook a matchbox
in his face and chuckled. It contained the last knuckle of someone’s finger. ‘They wanted me to give it back so they could
have it sewn back on,’ he said, ‘but I ain’t gonna.’
²³
Jagger should have known what to expect. When Keith Richards was busted at Redlands and Jagger was arrested for possession
of four amphetamine tablets, it was his friend David Litvinoff who decided to track down the man paid by the
News of the World
to set them up for a bust. When they decided Nicky Cramer was the guilty party it is said that Litvinoff and Bindon paid
him a visit and administered a beating. According to one of Bindon’s friends interviewed by his biographer, Wensley Clarkson:
‘John [ Bindon ] said Jagger
was a little freaked out when he heard what had happened’, particularly as Cramer was entirely innocent.
²⁴
A few years later Bindon got himself into serious trouble over a knife fight in a night club in which he stabbed Johnny Darke
to death, almost decapitating him in what was reportedly a commissioned hit.
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