Mick Jagger (60 page)

Not that Bianca—unlike Yoko—sought to exert any influence whatsoever. Whereas all Mick’s previous women, to some or other degree, had belonged to the pop music world, she was a total outsider. Even the Parisienne Holly Golightly in the Peter Sarstedt song kept Rolling Stones records in “a fancy apartment on the Boulevard Saint-Michel.” But, despite years with France’s best-known record boss, Bianca knew nothing about rock—indeed, regarded it and its practitioners as rather childish. For Mick, at the beginning, that was part of her irresistible allure.

With Yoko, of course, the opinions of all three other Beatles had counted, whereas with Bianca, Mick was concerned with only one Stone, his fellow Glimmer Twin. Keith initially considered her just “some bimbo,” and resignedly prepared for Mick to take another furlough into the society columns. Though he found Bianca aloof and humorless, he was constitutionally incapable of being nasty in the way George Harrison, for example, was to Yoko. A far more dangerous foe emerged in Anita, until now the reigning beauty among the Stones’ harem wives. While feigning a sisterly welcome, Anita whispered and intrigued against Bianca behind her back, even getting the drug dealer Spanish Tony Sanchez to pursue a rumor that she’d been born a man and undergone a sex-change operation.

Thanks to a strict Catholic upbringing in Nicaragua, Bianca was a conventional, even rather straitlaced young woman, and the discovery of the sexual free-for-all around the Stones came as a profound shock to her. Before very long, too, she heard about the swathe Anita had cut through the band, and the still-active rumor that being Brian’s old lady first, and now Keith’s, was all part of a long-term plan to end up with Mick. The other persistent whisper to trouble her was that Mick’s sovereignty in the band conferred a kind of droit du seigneur; throughout their time together, Bianca would believe he had “fucked all the other Stones’ wives except Charlie’s.”

As things turned out, Mick and Bianca spent much of their first months together at the country house he had bought to share with Marianne but, until now, had used mainly as a chat-up line (“Do you like waking up in the town or the country?”) to his Californian handmaidens. Just before the decision to become tax-exiled nomads, the Stones had acquired a custom-built mobile sixteen-track recording studio housed inside a large truck painted the anonymous khaki of a bird-watcher’s hide. They were now using this Mighty Mobile to complete Sticky Fingers, the first album for their own Rolling Stones record label. Stargroves was the handiest place to park the vehicle and hook it up to a power supply. The Gothic pile therefore suddenly had to provide accommodation for the Stones, their staff and technicians, plus visiting session musicians like the organist Billy Preston. As most of the house was still unfurnished, Marshall Chess used a company that supplied decor for film sets to assemble a dozen instant bedrooms.

In his capacity as head of Rolling Stones Records, Chess became de facto executive producer on Sticky Fingers, operating the same tough regimen as Chess Studios in the old Chicago days, when the house rule used to be “three tunes in three hours.” But even he could not always keep Mick’s eye on (or rather off) the ball. Bianca had no concept of the iron rule that when the Stones were recording, their old ladies waited patiently for as long as it took. She would come into the studio, give Mick a smoldering glance, and he would break off work and disappear with her, sometimes for days.

After years in musty limbo, Stargroves suddenly boomed with electric noise and echoed with pot-fumed laughter. Its decidedly Edgar Allan Poe atmosphere even brought a brief resurgence of sympathy with the devil. Filmmaker Kenneth Anger had at long last raised sufficient funds to make his black magic epic Lucifer Rising (with music written by onetime Manson disciple Bobby Beausoleil in the California prison where he was now serving a life sentence). Unable to persuade Mick to play Lucifer, Anger had cast Chris Jagger instead, with Donald Cammell as Osiris and Marianne Faithfull as Lilith. Keith still found Anger amusing, if Mick did not: while setting up the production, he was a frequent occupant of Stargroves’ ad hoc bedrooms, and even sketched ideas for visuals on its stone floors. “That was a crazy time,” Marshall Chess recalls. “I’d be woken in the middle of the night by someone banging on a piano, and the next morning there’d be all these weird occult drawings all over the floor.”

On November 4, Marsha Hunt gave birth to a daughter she named Karis. She went through the whole process alone, checking herself into the grim Victorian St. Mary’s Hospital, Paddington, and avoiding all questions about Karis’s father, though the baby’s remarkably full lips provided a clue. Toward the end of her pregnancy, Marsha had been seriously short of money, having had to give up performing, and been unable to extract the royalties she was owed from her record label, Track. Finally, she had no alternative but to ask Mick—who, she knew, was now living with Bianca—for financial help. As she would recall, he sent £200 with a note saying “I know I haven’t done right by you,” or words to that effect, and also lent her a ring of his that she liked. What a miserly chill there is in that word lent.

After Karis was born, the signals from Mick initially seemed encouraging. Marsha received a congratulatory telegram and a bouquet of red roses from him, and he dispatched Bruna, the Cheyne Walk housekeeper, to prepare her flat for her return from the hospital. Some time passed, however, before he could slip away from Bianca and pay Marsha and Karis a visit. He was accompanied by his driver, Alan Dunn, and was “cordial and charming,” Marsha would recall, but seemed “in a hurry to be somewhere else.” Soon afterward, Bruna was recalled to Cheyne Walk.

He did not reappear for another ten days. By now, Marsha’s tolerance was exhausted, and she railed at him for his neglect, holding baby Karis in her arms. Mick responded that “he had never loved me, and I was mad to think he had.” He added that, if he chose, he could take the baby away from her. Marsha’s spirited answer was that she’d “blow his brains out” if he tried.

For Marsha, there was thus an unpleasant double meaning in the title of Mick’s third film that year, Gimme Shelter, when it premiered in Britain a month later. And the Maysles brothers’ color documentary of the Stones’ return to America, and its gruesome climax at Altamont, seemed to reflect everything she now felt about Mick’s irresponsibility and uncaringness. The Maysles had continued filming as a twenty-two-year-old Hell’s Angel wannabe named Alan Passaro, identified mainly through their concert footage, had gone on trial in Oakland for the murder of the black teenager, Meredith Hunter. Passaro pleaded self-defense, claiming that Hunter had actually fired the handgun he was seen waving. Gimme Shelter was central to the prosecution’s case, but during the trial its seemingly irrefutable eyewitness evidence began to crumble. Outtakes from the film seemed to show Hunter previously taunting a group of Angels, and an orange flash coming from his weapon just before he was felled. The jury concluded that anyone who pulled a gun around Hell’s Angels, especially if he was black, deserved everything he got, and Passaro was acquitted.

Gimme Shelter showed Mick in the most unflattering possible light, a puny orange-satin harlequin at first oblivious of the nightmare around him, then powerless to affect it. His departure from Altamont Raceway looked most ignominious of all, sweat-soaked and visibly traumatized, crammed with thirteen other people into a helicopter bubble designed for eight. There was no mention of his “balls of a lion” for going onstage at all, let alone staying as long as he had. As usual, he was too cool to tell the real story, or allow it to be told, so once again the world thought the worst of him.

ON JANUARY 4, 1971, Performance opened in London with a charity premiere at the Warner Cinema, Leicester Square. Mick had asked that the proceeds be donated to Release, the hippie charity which—largely inspired by his and Keith’s ordeal in 1967—provided legal representation to young people arrested for drug possession. The Warner organization had at first thrown up their hands in fresh horror, but capitulated when Mick threatened to boycott the event unless his wishes were respected. His support, in fact, came as a godsend to Release’s founder, Caroline Coon, who was struggling against heavy odds to keep the service going. London’s foremost Beautiful People flocked to buy expensive tickets, with the promise of joining Mick at the preshow reception and the party afterward.

However, despite his enthusiasm for Release and his desire to cause Warner maximum discomfiture, his attendance at the premiere was never seriously in the cards. He had long ago lost interest in the film or any pride in his playing of Turner; more to the point, Bianca would hardly relish his steamy on-screen sex scenes with Anita Pallenberg and frolics in the bath with Anita and Michèle Breton.

On the night, an expectant crowd of literary and media celebrities gathered at the Warner West End, among them the famous drama critic and libertarian Kenneth Tynan and the editor of Oz magazine, Richard Neville. Anita turned up, accompanied—surprisingly—by Keith, but as the minutes ticked away to showtime, there was no sign of Mick. Finally, an angry deputation, led by Tynan’s wife, Kathleen, surrounded Caroline Coon, shouting that they’d been conned, if not Cooned. The celebs received assurances that Mick was flying in from Paris to join them and were persuaded to watch the film, then go to Tramp for dinner—on him—and he’d catch up with them later. But he never did. The explanation was that his flight had been delayed by fog.

Under the UK’s lingering film-censorship code, Performance received an adults-only “X” certificate which consigned it to the realm of cheap horror and skin flicks, limited its showings outside London, and ensured that thousands of youthful Mick fans could not legally see it. His one song from the soundtrack, “Memo from Turner,” had been released as a single the previous October, but had reached only No. 32. His best screen performance and best solo track thus came and went together.

The deal with Atlantic had by now been hammered out between Prince Rupert and Ahmet Ertegun. Marshall Chess remembers Ertegun repeatedly mopping his perspiring bald pate with a handkerchief during the final negotiations, as well he might. The Stones were to deliver four albums over six years and receive a royalty of one dollar on every copy sold—the highest rate ever paid to a recording act. The albums would be released under the imprimatur of Rolling Stones Records, with cover artwork as well as content dictated solely by the band. Rather than a lump sum shared out among them, Atlantic’s advance was to be a budget to cover the making of each album. Mick and Keith had originally wanted other artists on the label—distributing Jimi Hendrix’s label was one possibility—but Atlantic’s funding proved only enough to maintain the Stones.

It was Chess who suggested the label should have a logo that instantly identified it without need of any printed name. The idea occurred to him while he was driving through Holland to meet the Stones in Amsterdam and passed the wordless but universally recognized scallop-shaped symbol of the Shell Oil company. That inspired the notion of branding Rolling Stones Records, and all ancillary merchandise, with Mick’s lips and tongue—the most blatant declaration yet of who was both the star and the boss. Various designs were submitted by leading graphic artists, including one of a tongue with a pill on it, but none seemed quite right. Finally, a Royal College of Art student named John Pasche came up with the garish red, slurping, slavering winner. For creating what would become rock’s most famous piece of corporate identity (ultimately representing wealth almost comparable with Shell Oil’s), Pasche was paid £50, with a later top-up of £200.

Early March brought the Stones’ first British tour in four and a half years. At its opening press conference, Mick revealed that the band would be emigrating to France a month from now, and this was a formal farewell to their UK fans. Because no Briton must ever be seen to avoid tax, even by perfectly legal means, their PR man, Les Perrin, tried to dress up the decision as a purely aesthetic and cultural one, in line with Mick’s well-known dedication to self-improvement. “It’s not a case of running away from the tax man,” Perrin said with reeking disingenuousness. “The Stones like France tremendously.”

No other British band had ever gone abroad en bloc like this in the footsteps of literary celebrities like W. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. Some commentators initially suspected it might also be a device for quietly breaking up the Stones rather than letting them take their chances against younger competition in the already teeming new pop decade. Just a month earlier, the Beatles’ long disintegration had finally come into the open with Paul McCartney’s application to the British High Court to wind up their business partnership. One interviewer reminded Mick how often John Lennon had accused the Stones of copying the Beatles, and asked whether that applied even now. “Nah, we’re not breaking up,” he answered. “And if we did we wouldn’t be as bitchy as them … We’ll remain a functioning group, a touring group, a happy group.” The Daily Telegraph suggested that over the years they could have earned as much as £83 million. Mick took a whole-page advertisement to dismiss the figure as “ludicrous.”

Prior to this UK farewell tour, Keith had made the first of what would be numerous attempts to overcome his heroin addiction. For all his gypsy-rebel air, he remained a shy, rather insecure character for whom drugs were a hiding place from the pressures of fame, and heroin the best one of all. (In later life, he would observe that Mick had an equally powerful addiction to flattery, “which is very like junk,” but never made the slightest attempt to clean up from that.) Over the previous year, his dependence had grown steadily more serious, encouraged not only by Anita but by his angelic-looking country-rock crony Gram Parsons, to the point where Mick’s PA Jo Bergman had seriously wondered whether he’d survive the 1970 European tour.

Widely read Mick knew that when heroin threatened to destroy the great American writer William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, he had sought help from a British doctor named John Dent, who reduced the usual horrific withdrawal symptoms by means of an electronic box attached to the patient’s head. Dr. Dent had since died, but the treatment, known as apomorphine aversion therapy, was still practiced by his former nurse, a brisk matron known as Smitty. Keith submitted to Smitty’s ministrations at 3 Cheyne Walk in company with Gram Parsons, both sharing one bed like small boys in a boarding school sick bay. After putting them through five days of almost continual vomiting and incontinence, their nurse pronounced them cured.