Mick Jagger (21 page)

Her mother, Eva, was an Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, Baroness Erisso, whose family, the Sacher-Masochs, dated back to Emperor Charlemagne. Eva’s great-uncle Leopold von Sacher-Masoch was the author of the nineteenth-century novel Venus im Pelz in which he gave his own name, “masochism,” to pleasure derived from self-inflicted pain. Brought up in Hapsburg grandeur, Eva had become an actress and dancer with the Max Reinhardt company in Vienna during the 1930s and, but for the war, might have followed Reinhardt to America and a career in Hollywood. Instead, she married the British intelligence officer Robert Faithfull and settled with him in Britain, where Marianne, their only child, was born in 1946.

The couple separated in 1952 and the Austrian baroness relocated to—of all places—Reading, the unexciting Berkshire town best known for Huntley and Palmers biscuits and Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol. Here she acquired a small house in the poorest district and worked variously as a shop assistant, coffee-bar server, and bus conductress while still managing to imbue her daughter with a sense of patrician superiority. Marianne was educated on semicharity terms at a Catholic convent school, St. Joseph’s, under a regime so strict that the girls had to bathe in underslips to avoid the sin of looking at their own nude bodies.

She grew up to be a stunning combination of beauty and brains, mistily innocent-looking, yet with a voluptuous figure; shyly and refinedly spoken, yet with an inquiring intellect and a rich mezzo-soprano singing voice. She had no doubt that life would lead her into the theater or music—possibly both—and by the age of sixteen was already working as a folksinger around Reading coffee bars. Early in 1964, she visited Cambridge to attend an undergraduates’ ball and met Andrew Oldham’s friend John Dunbar, then studying fine arts at Churchill College. Oldham was looking to expand his managerial empire beyond the Stones and asked Dunbar if he knew any girl singers. “Well, actually, yes,” Dunbar replied.

At Adrienne Posta’s launch party, the other female guests wore butterfly-bright “dolly” dresses with the new daringly short skirts. Marianne, however, chose blue jeans and a baggy shirt of Dunbar’s that was sexier than the most clinging sheath. Tony Calder, standing near the door with Mick, Oldham, Chrissie Shrimpton, and Sheila Klein, still remembers her entrance: “It was like someone turned the sound down. It was like seeing the Virgin Mary with an amazing pair of tits. Andrew and Mick both said together, ‘I want to fuck her.’ Both their girlfriends went, ‘What did you say?’ Mick and Andrew went, ‘We said want to record her.’ ”

Marianne at this point thought the Rolling Stones were “yobbish schoolboys … with none of the polish of John Lennon or Paul McCartney.” By her own later account, she wouldn’t have noticed Mick if he hadn’t been in the throes of yet another row with Chrissie “who was crying and shouting at him … and in the heat of the moment, one of her false eyelashes was peeling off.” The person who most interested her was Andrew Oldham, especially when he came over (“all beaky and angular, like some bird of prey”), brusquely asked his friend John Dunbar for her name—no female equality for years yet!—and, on learning it genuinely was Marianne Faithfull, announced that he intended to make her a pop star.

Within days, to her amazement, Marianne had a contract with the Stones’ label, Decca, and an appointment to record a single with Oldham as her producer. The A-side was to have been a Lionel Bart song, “I Don’t Know How (To Tell You),” but when she tried it out, it proved totally unsuited to her voice and to the persona her Svengali intended to create. Instead, Oldham turned to his in-house team of Jagger-Richard, giving them precise instructions as to the kind of ballad he required for Marianne: “She’s from a convent. I want a song with brick walls all round it, high windows, and no sex.”

Though the result bore a joint credit, Tony Calder remembers its conception to have been entirely Mick’s, working with session guitarist Big Jim Sullivan. The monologue of a lonely, disillusioned older woman—harking back to Alfred Lord Tennyson’s “The Lady of Shallot” and foreshadowing the Beatles’ “Eleanor Rigby”—it was a glimpse of the sensitivity and almost feminine intuition Mick was known to possess but so rarely showed. The original title, “As Time Goes By,” became “As Tears Go By” to avoid confusion with pianist Dooley Wilson’s famous cabaret spot in the film Casablanca.

With hindsight, Marianne would consider “As Tears Go By” “a Françoise Hardy song … Europop you might hear on a French jukebox … ‘The Lady of Shalott’ to the tune of ‘These Foolish Things.’ “ She still concedes that for a songwriter so inexperienced, it showed remarkable maturity—clairvoyance even. “It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of twenty to have written a song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life. The uncanny thing is that Mick should have written those words so long before everything happened … it’s almost as if our whole relationship was prefigured in that song.”

For this second recording session, Marianne traveled up from Reading to London chaperoned by her friend Sally Oldfield (sister of the future Tubular Bells wizard, Mike). Oldham’s production stuck to the “high brick walls and no sex” formula, toning down her usually robust mezzo-soprano to a wispy demureness, counterpointed by the mournful murmur of a cor anglais, or English horn. Mick and Keith watched the proceedings and afterward gave the two girls a lift back to Paddington station by taxi. On the way, Mick tried to get Marianne to sit on his lap, but she made Sally do so instead. “I mean, it was on that level,” she recalls. “ ‘What a cheeky little yob,’ I thought to myself. ‘So immature.’ ”

Within a month, “As Tears Go By” was in the UK Top 20, finally peaking at No. 9. British pop finally had a thoroughly English female singer, or so it appeared, rather than just would-be American ones. And the media were confronted with a head-scratching paradox: two members of a band notorious for dirtiness, rawness, and uncouthness had brought gentility—not to say virginity—onto the charts for the very first time.

The success of “As Tears Go By” might have been expected to start a wholesale winning streak for the Jagger-Richard songwriting partnership that would finally benefit their own band rather than ill-assorted outsiders. But, strangely, having their names on a No. 9 hit acted more like a brake. Mick had no idea where the song had come from and, after weeks of racking his brains with Keith, began to despair of writing anything else a fraction as good.

Certainly, when the Stones’ first album appeared, on April 17, it was still far from clear that they had a would-be Lennon and McCartney in their ranks. Recorded at Regent Sound in just five days snatched from the Ronettes tour, this was almost completely made up of the cover versions from which Oldham had struggled to wean them—Chuck Berry’s “Carol,” Bo Diddley’s “Mona (I Need You Baby),” Willie Dixon’s “I Just Want to Make Love to You,” James Moore’s “I’m a King Bee,” Jimmy Reed’s “Honest I Do,” Marvin Gaye’s “Can I Get a Witness?,” Rufus Thomas’s “Walking the Dog,” Bobby Troup’s “Route 66.” The only Jagger-Richard track thought worthy of inclusion was “Tell Me (You’re Coming Back),” an echoey ballad in faintly Merseybeat style. The album, in fact, was like a Stones live show (much as the Beatles’ first one had been), its immediacy heightened by Regent Sound’s primitive equipment and Andrew Oldham’s anguished eye on the clock. At the session for “Can I Get a Witness?,” Mick realized he couldn’t remember all Marvin Gaye’s words, and neither could anyone else present. A hurried phone call had to be made to the song’s publishers on Savile Row for a copy of the lyrics to be hunted out and left in reception. The usefully athletic vocalist ran a half mile from Denmark Street to collect them, then back again. On the track, he is still audibly breathless.

The album was entitled, simply, The Rolling Stones—in itself an act of extreme Oldham hubris. The Beatles’ first album had followed custom in bearing the name of a hit single, “Please Please Me,” and even their groundbreaking second, With the Beatles, still had a whiff of conventionality. But Oldham did not stop there. In defiance of Decca Records’ entire marketing department, he insisted that The Rolling Stones’ front cover showed neither name nor title—just a glossy picture of the five standing sideways with heavily shadowed, unsmiling faces turned to the camera. Mick was first, then dapper Charlie, a squeezed-in Bill and barely recognizable Keith, with Brian—the only one in their old stage uniform of leather waistcoat and shirtsleeves rather than varicolored suits—symbolically at the back and out of line.

On its reverse, the cover returned to wordy normality, with track listings, studio credits, and a pronouncement that seemed like yet more Oldham hubris: “The Rolling Stones are more than a group—they are a way of life.” Little did even he imagine that, almost half a century later, at the BAFTA film awards, an audience of the world’s most glamorous people would still be hungering to lead it.

Advance orders for The Rolling Stones exceeded one hundred thousand, as against only six thousand for the Beatles’ album debut, Please Please Me. Better still, as it climbed the UK album chart to No. 1, it passed With the Beatles, finally on the decline after six months in the Top 20. The Stones, Oldham crowed delightedly, had “knocked the Beatles off ” in their home market. Now for America.

FOR ANY BRITISH band, the supreme challenge, and greatest thrill, is to “crack” America. And few have failed quite so comprehensively as the Rolling Stones on their first U.S. tour, in June 1964. The country would notice Mick soon enough, for better or worse, but during most of this initial three-week visit he was a barely distinguishable face among five, taking his equal share of disappointment and humiliation.

The Stones were not only following the triumphal footsteps of the Beatles four months earlier; they were also well to the rear in the so-called British Invasion of other UK bands who had stampeded after John, Paul, George, and Ringo across the Atlantic and onto the U.S. charts. On the American edition of their first album, they were billed as “England’s Newest Hitmakers,” bracketing them with “soft” pop acts they despised, such as Gerry and the Pacemakers, Billy J. Kramer and the Dakotas, and the Dave Clark Five.

When the Beatles had arrived in New York in February, it was with an American No. 1 single, “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” But the Stones could offer no such impressive calling card. Their Beatle-bestowed UK hit, “I Wanna Be Your Man,” had been released on the London label, Decca’s U.S. affiliate, but then abruptly withdrawn because its B-side was called “Stoned,” which in America meant drunk. It had then been rereleased, coupled with “Not Fade Away,” but even in a market supposedly ravenous for all British bands had barely scraped onto Billboard magazine’s Top 50.

Thanks to Andrew Oldham, their transatlantic hosts had been primed to welcome them like a new strain of herpes. “Americans, brace yourselves!” warned the flash circulated to newspapers and broadcast media by the Associated Press. “In the tracks of the Beatles, a second wave of sheepdog-looking, angry-acting Britons is on the way … dirtier, streakier and more disheveled than the Beatles …” The Fab Four had flown off, carrying the whole nation’s hopes and even prayers like Neville Chamberlain bound for Munich or a Test cricket team for Australasia. Before the Stones left Heathrow Airport on June 1, an MP in the House of Commons expressed fears that they might do real harm to Anglo-American relations.

Even with this advance word-of-bad-mouth, it proved impossible for Oldham to whip up any major media coverage on the American side. Turndowns came from the NBC and CBS TV networks and, most slightingly, from The Ed Sullivan Show, which had clinched the Beatles’ conquest by beaming them to a national audience of more than 70 million. Paradoxically, the splashiest print coverage came from a quarter not normally interested in dirtiness and scruffiness—Vogue magazine. Diana Vreeland, the legendary editor of Vogue’s American edition, agreed to publish a David Bailey photograph of Mick that every British magazine had rejected, despite never having heard of him or his band. “I don’t care who he is,” she told Bailey. “He looks great, so I’ll run it.”

While calling the Stones “scruffier and seedier than the Beatles,” Vogue summed them up more pithily than any UK publication thus far, and with a hint of ladylike moist gussets that probably did Mick’s image more good in the long run than NBC, CBS, and Ed Sullivan put together: “To the inner group in London, the new spectacular is a solemn young man, Mick Jagger, one of the five Rolling Stones, those singers [sic] who will set out to cross America by bandwagon in June. For the British, the Stones have a perverse, unsettling sex appeal, with Jagger out in front of his teammates. To women he’s fascinating, to men a scare …”

Since the Beatles’ reception by three thousand banner-waving fans, spilling over observation terraces and buckling plate-glass windows, the arrival of British pop bands at New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport had become a routine story for the city’s media. For the Stones, London Records laid out a markedly cut-price version of the now-familiar procedure, enlisting a few dozen teenage girls to scream dutifully as the band descended the aircraft steps after their economy-class flight, hiring a couple of Old English sheepdogs to represent kindred spirits, and providing a cake for Charlie Watts’s twenty-third birthday. At the press conference which followed, there was surprise, even some disappointment, when they proved to be politer and better spoken than most of the invaders who had come before. Who was the leader? one reporter asked. “We are … all of us,” Mick lisped in his best LSE accent, without a frisson of Cockney.

The Beatles had spent their first New York landfall with their manager and considerable retinue in interconnecting luxury suites at the top of Manhattan’s grandest hotel, the Plaza, at Fifth Avenue and Central Park. The Stones spent theirs at the far-from-grand Hotel Astor in Times Square, bunking two to a poky room with their retinue (i.e., roadie Ian Stewart). To save money—an urgent consideration throughout the tour—Oldham slept on the office sofa of his friend and role model, Phil Spector.