Mick Jagger (18 page)

Trilby, as a result, migrated from trendy Chelsea to the more prosaic north London district of Willesden. The new flat was a modest two-bedroom affair on the first floor of 33 Mapesbury Road, a street of identical 1930s houses with even less charm than Edith Grove—though immeasurably cleaner and quieter. Mick and Keith were the official tenants, while Oldham came and went, staying part of the time with his widowed mother in nearby (and more desirable) Hampstead.

Rock musicians’ neighbors are usually condemned to purgatorial nuisance, but with Jagger and Richard, Mapesbury Road got off lightly. For much of the time, the pair were away on tour, and when they returned, they would sleep for twelve or fourteen hours at a stretch. Their fans had no idea where they were living, and none yet possessed the gumption to find out. There were no riotous all-night parties, no revving cars or motorbikes or onslaughts of deafening music, not even the tiniest tinkle of breaking glass. There was no drug taking whatsoever at this stage, or even very much drinking. “A half bottle of wine in that place,” Oldham would remember, “was a big deal.”

Since Mick had been swept up into his new pop-star life, his parents back home in Dartford had hardly seen him and, apart from the increasingly unflattering stories they read in the press, had no idea where he was or what he was doing. When Oldham commandeered the Stones, he did not have to sell himself as a responsible manager to their respective families the way Brian Epstein had, painstakingly, to the Beatles’; Oldham, indeed, had not even met Joe and Eva Jagger, and initially left all dealings with the couple to his associate Tony Calder. “One day,” Calder remembers, “a call came through to the office, and this very polite voice said, ‘My name’s Joe Jagger. I understand that my son is getting rather famous. If you need help of any kind, just let me know.’ I took calls from so many angry, hysterical people every day … I couldn’t believe I’d just been talking to somebody who was polite.”

Liaison with Joe and Eva improved when Oldham employed seventeen-year-old Shirley Arnold, a longtime loyal Stones supporter around the club circuit, to organize their fast-growing national fan club. Shirley joined the small Oldham enclave inside Eric Easton’s office in a Piccadilly office block called Radnor House. Also among the staff was Easton’s elderly father-in-law, a Mr. Boreham, who advised clients on long-term financial planning. Shirley remembers Mr. Boreham’s amazement after a consultation session with Mick. “He said Mick had asked him what he thought the pound would be worth on the currency markets in a few years’ time. That was something no one in the music or entertainment business thought about in those days.”

Henceforward, Shirley kept Joe and Eva fully updated about their son, finding them “lovely people” who never made the slightest demands on their own account or expected to profit from his success. “Eva was the dominant one in the marriage, very conscious of what other people thought, and to begin with she wasn’t sure what to make of all the headlines. But Mick’s dad was always totally laid-back about it all.”

Brian Jones might cut a dash with his pet goat on the streets of Windsor, but elsewhere he was finding it increasingly hard to win the attention he craved. Ironically, the Stones’ takeover by professional managers that he had wanted so desperately had eroded almost all his former power and status as the band’s founder, chief motivator, and creative driving force. While they were still struggling to break through, Brian had a certain value to Oldham and Easton as an ally within their ranks, and so could wangle preferential treatment in pay or hotel accommodation. But now that they had made it, his doom was effectively sealed.

Knowing in his own mind what a star he was, he could not understand why Oldham should be devoting such time and trouble to Mick, or why audiences responded to the results with such fervor. “Brian would come into the office to collect his fan mail,” Tony Calder remembers, “and there it would be in a little pile, with a dirty great pile next to it. ‘Who’s that other lot for?’ he’d say. ‘They’re for Mick,’ I’d say. Brian would storm out in a fury, not even taking his own fan mail.”

One way of fighting back would have been to compete against Mick in onstage showmanship, as lead guitarists often did against vocalists. But with curious perverseness—the same that made him go and live with his girlfriend and goat in Windsor rather than at least try to preserve the old solidarity of Edith Grove—Brian in performance struck none of the melodramatic or flamboyant poses that normally went with his role. Throughout the Stones’ set, he stood rooted to the stage with his lute-shaped Vox Teardrop guitar, as innocent-looking as some Elizabethan boy minstrel, giving out nothing but an occasional enigmatic smile. It was a technique that seldom failed him with individual females in intimate one-to-one situations, but in front of eight or nine thousand going crazy for Mick’s duckwalk, it was an ill-advised tactic.

The erosion of Brian’s leadership did not end there. Until now, he had always been the spokesman for the band in the quiet, cultured voice which, unlike Mick, he never slurred into faux Cockney. But Oldham considered him long-winded and—as an inveterate hypochondriac—too prone to ramble on about his latest head cold. So, with great reluctance at first, Mick began to do the talking as well as the singing (Keith being regarded, in both areas, as totally mute). “If Andrew told Mick, ‘You’ve got two interviews today,’ his response would always be ‘Are you sure they want me?’ ” Tony Calder remembers. “Andrew rehearsed him in talking to journalists just like he rehearsed him in how to perform.” Under the rules of early-sixties pop journalism, this generally meant no more than reciting a press release about the Stones’ recording and touring plans. It also meant showing a deference scarcely in his nature to interviewers whom Oldham particularly needed to cultivate. When the New Musical Express’s editor Derek Johnson turned up in person, a well-briefed Mick shook his hand and said, “Nice to meet you, sir.”

The music press, of course, voiced no criticisms of the Stones’ hair and personal hygiene, though their lack of stage uniforms still excited spasmodic wonder. Nor did the canny Oldham yet try to sell them as direct challengers to the Beatles. Rather, he peddled the line that they were standard-bearers for London and the south against the previously unchecked chart invasion from Liverpool. Mick delivered the perfect quote: proudly territorial without slighting the Liverpudlian songwriters who had recently done his band such a good turn, competitive but not unfriendly, ambitious but not arrogant. “This Mersey Sound is no different from our River Thames sound. As for these Liverpool blokes proclaiming themselves better than anyone else, that’s a load of rubbish. I’ve nothing against the Mersey Sound. It’s great. But it’s not as new and exclusive as the groups make out. I can’t say I blame them for jumping at this sort of publicity, though. If we came from Liverpool, we’d do the same. But we don’t, and we’re out to show the world.”

At first, Oldham sat in on every interview, poised to jump in with corrections or contradictions where necessary. But Mick proved so reliable at giving journalists what they wanted without giving anything away that he was soon allowed to go solo. “Andrew would prime him to do ten minutes,” Tony Calder says. “But he’d expand it into twenty-five … then forty-five, then an hour.” While other pop musicians fraternized with their interviewers, chatting over a pint at the pub or a Chinese meal, he always preferred the neutral ground of an office; while unfailingly polite, he had an air of detachment and faint amusement, as if he couldn’t understand all this fuss over the Stones—and him. “I still haven’t grasped what all this talk of images is about,” he told Melody Maker. “I don’t particularly care whether parents hate us or not. They may grow to like us one day …” It was a trick that never failed (in the perceptive Bill Wyman’s words) “to portray himself as indifferent whereas in fact he cared very much.”

But the most revealing encounter with Mick in this era was not recorded by any professional journalist. It appears in the diary kept by Jacqui Graham, the fifteen-year-old from Wimbledon County Grammar School for Girls who had switched allegiance from the Beatles to the Rolling Stones in late 1963 and now devoted her leisure hours to getting close to them. In the innocent time before security checks, backstage passes, Neanderthal bodyguards, and dressing rooms turned into royal courts, that could often be extraordinarily close.

Jacqui’s diary greets January 5 as a “brilliant Stoning start to 1964” after a show at the Olympia Ballroom, Reading, which (in a portent of things to come) begins one and a half hours late. This time, it is Keith, with his “lovely hair,” and Charlie Watts who captivate her, while Mick “seem[s] not to be his usual bright self” and is rather less “gorgeous” than at Epsom three weeks before: “I noticed his gold cufflinks & his identity bracelet,” the diarist says with her usual unsparing eye for detail. “He has rather repulsive fat lips and a wet, big tongue!”

On January 11, when the Stones return to Epsom Baths, Jacqui and some other girls are waiting by the stage door and manage to follow them all the way into their dressing room. “Fabulous Keith,” with his “lovely, lean, intelligent face,” does not mind being watched while he dabs on acne cream, even allowing Jacqui to hold his Coke bottle and Mod peaked cap during the operation. Brian is observed, presciently, to be “not looking madly happy” and to have “a very clipped and well-spoken voice … and a lovely slow, tired smile.” Charlie is “dreamsville but much smaller than I had imagined” and Bill is “sweet, small, dark, very very helpful.” But Mick proves “a big disappointment & a big head … [he] thought he was it in his usual blue suit, brown gingham shirt and tartan waistcoat & he looked at us as tho’ we were something that the cat had brought in, although I did look up once to find him eyeing me up and down in a rather sly way. Still—although the worst—he is still fab! … then (damn & sod) home at 11.25.”

Friday, January 24, which for the diarist “started off being puke,” turns into “the most fabulous day ever … Mick, Keith and Charlie relaxed, friendly & TALKING—yes REALLY TALKING TO US!” With the Stones on again at Wimbledon Palais, she and her friend Susan Andrews manage to sneak into their empty dressing room and hide out there until they arrive. Once again, the intruders are allowed to hang around while the band prepares to go onstage. There is no sexual ulterior motive; they are simply resigned to goggling school-age girls being part of the furniture. This time, Jacqui finds Mick “very friendly … he smiled at me and seemed interested in what I had to say.” Only Brian seems reticent, possibly because his “secret wife,” Linda Lawrence, is also there. The two girls squeeze themselves into corners, watching the ebb and flow of official visitors, including an adman who wants to put the Stones in a TV commercial for Rice Krispies. Mick relaxes so far as to strip off his shirt and put on another. “He made crude remarks like ‘must cover me tits up’ etc.,” the diarist records, “but I liked him.” She is equally unfazed, later in the evening, to see both Mick and Keith wish Charlie good night by kissing him full on the mouth.

By mid-February, Jacqui and Susan have learned via the fans’ grapevine (or gape-vine) where Mick and Keith live and found out their home phone number. When the girls pluck up courage to ring it, Keith answers. Not in the least annoyed at being thus run to earth, he apologizes that Mick isn’t in and stays on the line chatting for some time. This spurs the pair to an adventure which will later fill several pages of Jacqui’s diary, laid out with dialogue and stage directions like a film script:

MONDAY 17TH FEBRUARY. Fate held in store a 15 min conversation in Mick’s hall.

We set off with the spirit of adventure strong within us & at great length found 33 Mapesbury Road NW2. Not knowing which bell to ring we knocked and asked for Mick Jagger. Several minutes passed & then this old woman appeared & behind her I could see Micky standing on the stairs, arms folded with a queer sort of smile on his face. He looked like a sort of pale blue pole in the dim light because he was in his pyjamas—pale blue, dark blue trimmings & white cord. The jacket was open & the pyjama trousers falling down but he seemed quite oblivious & stood there in his bare feet just looking. I felt incapable of walking in but we did & once more our conversation was friendly but I got the feeling he was faintly amused at us for his expression, a vague sort of genial smile, remained unchanged throughout.

This is a rough idea of the conversation:

SILENCE

J: “Good morning.”

S: ‘ ‘ ‘

M: ‘ ‘ ‘

S: “We phoned you up.”

J: “Yes, I hope you don’t mind us coming round here like this, you remember we phoned you up about that party.”

M: “Yes, I remember.”

J: “Well, we went to it & then went to another one over at Blackheath—the second one was at Blackheath, wasn’t it?”

S: “Yes.”

J: “Anyway, we landed up at Hampstead station this morning & we knew you lived round this way so we thought we’d pop in. I hope you don’t mind. I s’pose it’s a bit of a cheek really but it’s typical of us, we’re always doing mad things.”

M: “How did you know my address?”

J: “Oh we’ve known it for ages. I’ve forgotten who gave it to us.”

S: “Which is your bell, you haven’t got your name on it.”

M: (evading question) “Oh, we always put different funny names on it.”

J: “I think you thought we were Bridget before, you know, about the long skirts.”

M: “Oh, I knew you weren’t Bridget—I thought you might be some of her friends. Someone sent me 2 dolls the other day, with long skirts on—very nice. I appreciated it.”

Crosses over to mirror having got up from sitting on stairs.

“I must look awful, haven’t shaved or anything. A bloke came to see me once & took a picture of me like this.”

Arranges hair.

“Sent them to me afterwards. I looked terrible—it was the flash.”

J: “I’d kill anyone if they did that to me.”

M: “Oh, we’ve got to go away again soon.”

S: “Where to?”

M: “Oh, Sunbury or some stupid place like that. We’re playing at Greenford tonight.”