Mick Jagger

by Philip Norman

  Such domestic upheavals faded from importance when, on December 23, a powerful earthquake struck Bianca’s home city of Managua, Nicaragua, killing five thousand people, injuring twenty thousand, and destroying 80 percent of the buildings. Both her long-separated parents had still been living in Managua, but frantic phone calls from Cheyne Walk throughout Christmas Eve and Christmas Day failed to locate either of them. On December 26, Mick called Les Perrin with one of the tasks that always had to be dealt with instantly, national holiday or not. This time, what he wanted now was not a Harley-Davidson but an airlift of emergency supplies to Nicaragua.

  In the end, he took much of the initiative, chartering a private aircraft for Bianca and himself to reach Managua in the shortest possible time, with one brief stop-off at Kingston, Jamaica, to pick up a cargo of medicines including antityphoid serum. Once there, he faced up unflinchingly to the death, devastation, and squalor, multiplying his usual attention span by millions as Bianca followed one unsuccessful lead after another as to her parents’ whereabouts, vanishing from media view so completely, in fact, that some British papers reported him lost. Finally, on New Year’s Eve, both his in-laws were located, safe and well, in Nicaragua’s unscathed second city of León.

  The moment when rock musicians ceased merely to be bywords for selfishness and self-indulgence, and began to use their vast power for humanitarian ends, is generally agreed to have been George Harrison’s Concert for Bangladesh in 1971. But Mick, that seeming paragon of selfishness, was not far behind. Directly after he returned from Nicaragua, he mobilized the Stones to give a benefit concert for Managua’s earthquake victims in a brief window of opportunity before setting off on their Far East tour. The concert took place on January 18, 1973, at the Los Angeles Forum, with Santana and Cheech and Chong as support acts, and raised $350,000 for America’s contribution to the Nicaragua relief effort. In addition, Mick donated a jacket and Keith a guitar to be auctioned by an L.A. radio station and Mick contributed a further sum, reportedly $150,000, out of his own pocket.

  As some cynics remarked, the concert had enormous PR value for the band in the eyes of the American government; it was also a way for him to keep showing Bianca he wasn’t so vain. Still, this was Mick at his best—soon to be followed, as is often the way of stars, by Mick at his worst.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  The Glamour Twins

  FOR TWO YEARS, Marsha Hunt had concealed the fact that she’d borne Mick Jagger a daughter named Karis. Even more amazingly, she had demanded no hefty regular maintenance payments from Mick as the price of her silence. All that mattered to Marsha, she would later explain, was that he acknowledged being Karis’s father and seemed to want to keep seeing her. With idealism perhaps possible only in a sixties person, Marsha trusted him to do right by their child in the end.

  Being married to Bianca and about to become a father for a second time did not initially seem to change Mick’s attitude toward Karis. He had promised she would visit him when he moved to France, and proved as good as his word; in the summer of 1971, not long after his wedding, he invited Marsha to bring her out to the Stones’ Provençal enclave.

  When they arrived, however, Marsha learned they were not to stay with Mick and Bianca at Biot but with Mick Taylor and his wife, Rose, in Grasse; the equivalent of being boarded out with the domestic staff. Marsha was invited to the Biot house only once, for a dinner at which Mick and Bianca spent most of the meal conversing together in French, though well aware that she couldn’t understand a word. After that, Mick saw Karis just once more, for about an hour. As they said good-bye, Marsha, to her embarrassment, had to ask him for £200 to settle bills awaiting her back in London.

  For the most part, she supported Karis and herself with singing and modeling work, although now somewhat less of a celebrity than when she’d starred in Hair. Only in times of dire need would she seek financial help from Mick, through the Stones’ London office. She seldom asked for more than a couple of hundred pounds and always received it immediately. When Bianca gave birth to Jade in 1971, Mick at first seemed keen that his two daughters should get to know each other. He invited Marsha to bring Karis to 48 Cheyne Walk and photographed her in the garden with Jade on her lap while Karis played nearby.

  In the summer of 1972, as the Stones prepared to tour America, Marsha was offered some gigs in West Germany, fronting a band called 22. She wanted to take Karis along and asked Mick for £600 to pay for a nanny to travel with them, which, as usual, was sent without question. One evening in a German café, Karis upset a glass of hot tea over herself, suffering burns to her arm, leg, and chest. Marsha rushed her to a local American military hospital for emergency treatment, then telephoned across the Atlantic to Mick, who, as she later recalled, was greatly concerned and immediately offered help. It was agreed that Marsha should get Karis back to the UK as quickly as possible and Mick would pay for her stay in a private clinic.

  Her burns were serious enough to keep her in the clinic for ten days. Marsha slept in her room, going away only once to do a singing gig in Wales for some badly needed cash. The bill for Karis’s treatment was seventy-five pounds, but the promised payment from Mick never came. Marsha had to do a midnight flit from the clinic, racked with guilt after the kindness she’d received there. But when she met Mick later in London, he made light of the money’s nonarrival, saying she probably would have used it “to buy shoes.” At this, Marsha’s previous forbearance, tact, and trust in his better nature evaporated and she got herself a lawyer.

  Compared with the $4 million which the Stones’ 1972 American tour had been forecast to earn, her aspirations were modest—a £25,000 trust fund, payable when Karis left school some sixteen years into the future. She hoped Mick would agree without litigation, but the young lawyer she consulted took the precaution of going before a magistrate and obtaining a paternity order, or summons to an alleged father to attend court. The plan was that Marsha should meet Mick on his own and ask for the trust fund; only if he refused would the paternity order be served.

  The rendezvous was the Albert Memorial in Hyde Park, just across the road from the Royal Albert Hall. Mick turned up alone, as Marsha had asked, and they sat on the seat at the base of the monument while her lawyer waited, unseen, at the foot of the steps down to the park. If Mick’s response was negative, Marsha had to signal the lawyer by shaking her head. After a few moments she gave the signal and her lawyer approached. “Are you Mick Jagger?” he asked—an unnecessary question since he was an ardent Stones fan. “Oo wants to know?” was the surly response. He handed the paternity order to Mick, who took one look, snarled “Fuck off!,” and tore it up.

  In subsequent negotiations between lawyers, Mick’s side initially offered a £20,000 trust fund for Karis, then revised it downward to £17,000. Out-of-court paternity settlements at that time were relatively small and the barrister Marsha consulted thought she should accept. Following the Albert Memorial sting, relations with Mick recovered sufficiently for her and Karis to be invited back to Cheyne Walk for Jade’s first birthday party. But almost six months after she’d agreed to the reduced trust fund, there was still no sign of its being set up. This was because, contrary to all Mick’s previous behavior toward Karis—never mind the values with which he’d been brought up and still largely maintained—he now intended to deny that he was her father.

  In June 1973, Marsha launched the paternity suit at Marylebone magistrates’ court, just a short walk from Mick’s old home, Harley House. He himself was not present at the hearing. His lawyer said that the claim was “not admitted” and there was “discussion between the parties as to the merit of these allegations.”

  As a result, the story appeared in the British press, with Marsha’s previous dignity and discretion now weighing against her. Having kept her involvement with Mick secret for so long, she looked like an opportunistic gold digger suddenly coming out of the woodwork to destabilize his brand-new marriage. Mick remained studiedly flippant, implying it was just a p
ublicity stunt to promote Marsha’s latest record. His lawyers, meantime, fought a stonewalling campaign, asking for adjournments and blood tests. The whole affair shocked close associates like Shirley Arnold, who had seen his previous acceptance of Karis. “I told him he should admit she was his and that if anyone asked me, I’d say she was,” Shirley recalls. “But he just didn’t want to hear it.”

  After two further hearings, Marsha received a new out-of-court offer: £500 per year and a £10,000 trust fund, on condition her lawyer signed a document saying that Mick was not Karis’s father and the settlement was being made simply to avoid embarrassing publicity. The lawyer considered it the best deal she was likely to get, so Marsha told him to sign.

  NINETEEN SEVENTY-THREE WAS the year when Mick started to turn respectable—or, rather, when the reluctant rebel invented by Andrew Loog Oldham finally disappeared like the illusion it had always been, and a thoroughly self-controlled, calculating, and conformist rebel materialized instead.

  In May, the former perceived threat to U.S. homeland security—and FBI mark—became the first pop star to receive an official honor in Washington. The Stones’ benefit concert for Nicaragua’s earthquake victims had raised $787,500, and Mick was invited to hand over the check personally to its recipients, the government-endorsed Pan American Development Foundation. “Not only Mick,” gushed the usually measured Washington Post, “but the newest superstar of the family, Bianca Jagger, his wife and twin in sullen-lipped looks.”

  Assembled for the presentation ceremony were a bevy of Latin American ambassadors and U.S. senators, including New York’s liberal Republican senator Jacob Javits, whose help Bianca had enlisted to protect the relief funds from Nicaragua’s sticky-fingered president, Anastasio Somoza. But even such an occasion could not get Mick to turn up on time. “All we have to do now,” quipped Javits as the canapés went round yet again and diplomatic small talk faltered, “is wait for Hamlet.”

  This Hamlet eschewed his sable suit for a blue-and-white-striped blazer with a yellow rose in its lapel, while his saturnine Ophelia wore a green Ossie Clark coat with matching straw hat and sequined shoes. In recognition of what was, by any measure, a magnificent humanitarian effort, they were jointly presented with a golden key (though the other Stones did not receive so much as a thank you for participating in the benefit concert).

  Just four months earlier, before the band’s Far East tour, Mick had been denied a Japanese visa because of his drug record and also faced a short-lived ban from Australia. After the Washington ceremony, he would never again be classed as a subversive in America or be declared persona non grata anywhere, excepting the city’s snobby Sans Souci restaurant where he went later that same day, his gold key to D.C. in his pocket, only to be turned away for not wearing a tie.

  At the outset of their marriage, in her unsmiling—and so not very sympathetic—way, Bianca had said she wished to be known as something more than just a rock star’s trophy wife. “I am a person in my own right,” she told one interviewer. “Mick’s accomplishments and achievements are his. Nothing to do with me. I must achieve on my own. He’s a musician and I am not. The people who surround the Stones bathe in the reflected light. I refuse to.”

  Nowadays, with such beauty and stylishness added to the Jagger name, she would have gone straight to the top of the celebrity A-list and found more than enough autonomy there. One can easily imagine her filling page after page of Vogue, both English and French, dominating party spreads in the Tatler, showing Hello! or House & Garden around her latest Tuscan villa, joining the judges on American Idol, shaking out her shiny hair in TV shampoo ads, or using that sumptuous scowl to drive home the sales pitch for L’Oréal cosmetics: “Because you’re worth it!”

  But in the Britain of 1973, what we now call celebrity culture was in its infancy. There were as yet no gossip columns except faintly parodic specimens in mass-circulation newspapers; no supermodels, no reality-TV stars, no billionaire soccer players’ wives, no fashionistas, no red carpets for anyone but the Queen. Celebrity rested on tangible achievement, like starring in films—or fronting a rock band—and the phenomenon of being famous for being famous was still largely unknown. So Bianca, cast for celebrity culture but detonated too early, was something of a loose cannon.

  If anything, she was a prototype supermodel, albeit not tall and unnaturally skinny enough for the professional catwalk and rather too much of an original, for she had her own highly distinctive style combining 1930s Parisian elegance with a dash of the dominatrix. Her severe-sexy gowns, tailored suits, and little pillbox hats with veils were the opposite extreme from faux-naive sixties dollybird-ism, and started a noticeable trend. After she appeared in a fashion show for Oxfam at the Grosvenor House wearing a two-tone curly wig and flourishing a silver-topped cane, London’s only walking-stick dealer, James Smith & Son, recorded their first-ever female clients.

  It was the dawn of the age of meaningless awards, and Bianca was given a shelfload—like Woman of the Year Hat Award 1972—usually in hopes that Mick would accompany her to the ceremony. Her taciturnity with the press led one magazine to dub her “Today’s Garbo,” while another reported (from sources undisclosed) that “she wears no underwear and her nipples are shaped like rosebuds.” Despite Britain’s deep-seated suspicion of foreign names, there was a surge in baby girls called Bianca. With a public profile this high, it would have made sense to create a Bianca Jagger brand of something or other. But in the Jagger household, needless to say, there was room for only one brand.

  At the beginning, it amused Mick to be married to a fashion icon (a phrase not yet coined) and, within reason, share his limelight with her. Under Bianca’s influence, he became even fussier about his own wardrobe, adopting several of her ideas, like the silver-topped cane tucked under his arm when he tardily greeted the ambassadors and senators in Washington. The pair began to do fashion shoots together and, in January 1973, were jointly voted onto the world’s Best Dressed list by two thousand international fashion editors and experts. A few weeks later, London’s Sunday Times Magazine had them photographed on the roof of the Biba store in Kensington by the aged Leni Riefenstahl, whose film Triumph of the Will eulogized Hitler’s 1934 Nazi Party rally at Nuremberg. The American critic Albert Goldman, who compared Rolling Stones concerts to the Nuremberg rally and Mick to “the Leader,” sure would have loved that one.

  The couple posing in Biba’s Roof Garden—she with her frilly Scarlett O’Hara gown and parasol, he in his bright ocher suit—seemed to embody a perfect rock ’n’ roll fairy tale. But the reality was very different. Mick would later say their marriage had been “good only for the first year” and thereafter became a matter of pretending in public with less and less conviction. Bianca’s estimate would be even briefer.

  As far as his band and closest associates were concerned, she remained an outsider, alternately mistrusted and mocked. Keith resented her for spiriting his ever-fickle Glimmer Twin away to a glitzy world, populated by couturiers and continental movie stars, where nobody had ever heard of Blind Boy Fuller or open-G tuning. Anita Pallenberg resented her for being so beautiful and stylish and standoffish—all the more now that Anita’s own once-heavenly face was coarsened by heroin, her once-eighteen-karat crop hung lank and colorless, and her once-fascinatingly husky voice had become a croak. Bill Wyman and Mick Taylor and their respective partners were never unpleasant but kept their distance, as befitted Stones second-rankers. Surprisingly, however, Charlie Watts turned out to be a friend. Bianca found Charlie’s genuineness a blessed respite from the sycophancy that surrounded Mick—and also believed his wife to be the only one in the Stones’ inner circle Mick had never screwed.

  Even the generally tolerant, good-hearted people who worked for Mick in London found it hard to warm to Bianca, and thus easy to think the worst of her. She was seen as a ruthless gold digger only out for his money (no one knowing about the prenup she had been handed on her wedding morning) and interested only in herself (everyone forg
etting her work for the Nicaraguan earthquake victims). Inevitably, too, she was suspected of being behind Mick’s decision to deny paternity of Karis Hunt. It stood to reason: why would a mother want any other child to share in the inheritance that would come to her own?

  While Mick was in the studio, or otherwise engaged, the task of keeping Bianca amused would fall to PR Les Perrin’s wife, Janey. Usually this meant putting her in the back of a chauffeur-driven car with a wad of twenty-pound notes and sending her off shopping on Bond Street or Knightsbridge. There were endless problems with the chauffeurs, from whom Bianca seemed to expect almost servile deference. One was sent away simply for failing to tip his cap. A hire-car company which the Stones office had used for years refused to accept any more bookings because of her. Janey Perrin came to dread the phone calls complaining that yet another driver had been lacking in respect and that Bianca—as she pronounced it with her faint Hispanic lilt—was “peesed off.”

  Despite her supposed intriguing against Karis on Jade’s behalf, she was seen as an indifferent mother who chafed at being stuck at home while Mick gallivanted around as he pleased. At some moments she would seem devoted to Jade, delighting in buying clothes for her and dressing her up; at others, she’d leave her with the nanny, or Mick’s parents, and disappear to the shops and Ricci Burns’s hair salon in Chelsea. For a time, Jade shared a nanny with Mick and Rose Taylor’s daughter Chloe, who was the same age. Despite working for both famous Micks at once, the young woman earned a minuscule amount and, in revenge, would allow the little girls to play with their daddies’ Gold Discs in the bath.

  Once there had been no doubting Bianca’s power to bring Mick to heel. During the Exile on Main St. sessions, when he used to travel up from the Côte d’Azur to join her in Paris, he’d sometimes find she wasn’t awaiting him at L’Hôtel and had gone missing just like Chrissie Shrimpton used to ten years earlier. As once with Chrissie, he’d have the embarrassment of ringing round her friends to ask help in finding her. While he was away recording in Jamaica, Bianca expressed her boredom and annoyance by getting her luxuriant black hair cut as short as a boy’s. Marianne Faithfull had done the same in ’69, but whereas Marianne’s mutinous crop produced an eerie resemblance to Brian Jones, Bianca’s turned her temporarily into a true mirror image of Mick—which, a former employee recalls, “he loved.”