THE WOMAN WHO would come nearest to pinning the butterfly down was born Jerry Faye Hall, one of female twins, in Gonzales, Texas, and raised in the blue-collar Dallas suburb of Mesquite. Her truck-driver father was an inveterate gambler who once lost the family home in a poker game. He was also an alcoholic and a domestic tyrant whose five daughters all frequently had to stay home from school to conceal the bruises on their legs from lashes with his belt. Eventually, Jerry’s twin sister, Terry, pulled a gun on him and threatened to kill him if the maltreatment continued. Despite these experiences, Jerry always refused to classify herself as an abused child or hold a grudge against her father. “In our town,” she would recall nonchalantly, “a lot of the kids were beat up.”
She was raised in the great outdoors, learning to ride as second nature, watching cowboys round up and castrate steers, and spending summers on her grandmother’s chicken farm, where the old lady would roust her and her sisters out of bed each morning with a stick, shouting “We’re gonna can preserves!” In contrast to her loutish father, her mother instilled ladylike southern-belle ways, insisting that she gulp down a full meal before going out on dates with boys so that, like Scarlett O’Hara in Gone with the Wind, she didn’t “eat in front o’ no gennelman.”
By her early teens, she had risen to full height, with a mass of gleaming, genuine blond hair and a smile that could stop traffic. She had already decided on a modeling career, but the nearest Mesquite could offer was a job at the local Dairy Queen (from which she was soon fired for giving away too many milkshakes and orders of french fries). Her aim was simple: “I want to marry a millionaire so I can have caviar any time of the day or night and take nice long champagne baths.” The only way of achieving it was to become a modern-day Texas Ranger.
At the age of sixteen, she was awarded $800 in compensation for medical negligence during a routine procedure on her sinuses. Showing herself every bit as much a gambler as her father, she spent the whole sum on a trip to France. A fashion agent spotted her sunbathing on the beach in Saint-Tropez, the scene of her future love’s matrimonial “circus” in 1971; as a result, she began to get modeling jobs in Paris, for a time sharing an apartment with a black woman of equally Amazonian proportions, the singer Grace Jones. One day at La Coupole brasserie, she was asked to join the table of France’s two most eminent writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. As she later recalled, they were “fascinated” that she knew their works on existentialism and “wanted to understand nothingness and being”; they also “love[d] also to hear me talk stuff about rodeos.”
In 1975, Bryan Ferry saw her picture in Vogue and asked her to appear on the cover of Roxy Music’s new album, Siren. Ferry at the time was the epitome of glam-rock pastiche chic with his slicked-down hair, tailored suits, white shirts and ties—everything the Rolling Stones were once thought to have stamped out. For Roxy’s Siren album—a UK No. 1—Jerry impersonated the mythical seductresses who lured mariners to their doom, lying naked-seeming on a rock with her gold tresses hidden under seaweed-colored curls. After the shoot, she began an affair with Ferry, moving into his house in Holland Park, west London, and accepting his proposal of marriage.
Although the era of sickly, sticklike supermodels was yet to come, Jerry’s slightly horsey beauty and air of glowing health made her stand out from as well as tower over all her catwalk competitors. She earned an unprecedented $1,000 per day, enough to buy herself a two-hundred-acre ranch back in Lone Oak, Texas. In Britain, her lips became as well known as her face after a Revlon lipstick ad put them on the sides of London buses (something the nation’s most famous mouth hadn’t achieved). In 1976, she appeared with Ferry in the video for his solo single “Let’s Stick Together,” clad in tiger print split to the waist and uttering zestful rebel yells. The single was a hit, but its title proved sadly ironic.
Even before she met Mick, in fact, the engagement to Bryan Ferry had been going downhill. Despite a working-class background in County Durham, Ferry affected the airs of an English squire together with those of a poet; he liked his six-foot blond siren to wear tweeds and sit decorously while everyone fluttered around him. Jerry preferred partying, raucous laughter, and leg wrestling, a Texan barroom sport at which she was remarkably adept.
Ferry initially had no suspicions on that June evening in 1976 when he accepted the invitation for them both to have dinner with Mick. Afterward, still believing himself Mick’s main object of interest, he suggested they all return to his house in Holland Park. On the car journey, Jerry later recalled, Mick pressed his knee hard against hers, causing her to feel “an electric sensation.” When they arrived, she went to make tea and he offered to help, “jumping around, joking . . . and spilling things,” much to the distress of the house-proud Ferry. Mick had also somehow or other invited several additional people to join them, so ruining Ferry’s hoped-for quiet chat about the problems of being pop idols together.
In one version of the story Jerry has often told, Mick would follow her every time she went into the kitchen and Ferry would suspiciously follow them both. In another, Mick chased her around a Ping-Pong table until Ferry came and chased him off. Eventually, freaked out by all the hyperactivity and mess, Ferry sullenly retired to bed. By Jerry’s account, Mick tried to kiss her, but she wouldn’t let him. However, as Mick later told a friend, she gave him an unequivocal come-on: “He said Jerry was wearing stockings with suspenders, which she kept flashing at him.”
Afterward, he would often phone Ferry and leave cheery messages like “Hi, Bryan, let’s go out again . . . ,” but his calls were not returned. “I’m never going out with him again,” Ferry told Jerry. “All he did was ogle you.”
The end of the European tour in July made it necessary for Mick to hang around his family again. He and Bianca went to the Olympic Games in Montreal—getting tickets at short notice being, of course, no problem for him—to see the Cuban sprinter Alberto Juantorena win two gold medals. Afterward they took Jade for a second stay at Andy Warhol’s beach house in Montauk, where Mick celebrated his thirty-third birthday.
To mitigate the uneasiness with Bianca, there was a stream of celebrity houseguests, including John Lennon and Yoko Ono (now reconciled), Eric Clapton, David Bowie, and Warren Beatty. As during Mick’s previous tenancy, his visitors sometimes unwittingly wandered onto the adjoining property of talk-show host Dick Cavett. One morning, Cavett bumped into Jackie Onassis, widow of both President John F. Kennedy and the Greek shipping tycoon Aristotle Onassis, walking alone on the shore.
Cavett came to know Mick and Bianca well in this twilight of their marriage—and to be as smitten by Jade as Warhol had been the previous year. “She was the cutest thing, and Bianca used to dress her up so beautifully in little pants suits and bow ties. And, God, was she bright—and funny! I remember I was driving her and Bianca in the car one day, the thing wouldn’t start, and I said, ‘Oh, shit!’ I apologized for the bad language, and in this beautiful British accent, Jade said, ‘You needn’t concern yourself. I’m quite accustomed to hearing it.’ ”
An intellectual and bibliophile, Cavett discovered literary depths in Mick that he had never revealed in their chat-show encounters. “One evening, my wife and I had Bianca and him over for drinks. As they left, I said what a pleasure it had been to have them in our house. ‘In our house . . . ,’ Mick repeated, which I realized afterward was a quotation from Macbeth.” Another night, they went to a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan. “When the young boy waiting on us recognized Mick, he just slid down the wall and onto the floor.”
Toward the end of the Jaggers’ stay, Cavett left his property for a while. “I used to lend my house to my secretary, Doris, every summer, and so she got to know Mick and Bianca as well. She later told me that they’d called round one evening, stayed awhile, and been very dignified, but she suspected they’d been drinking. ‘What made you think that?’ I asked her. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘Bianca was reading the New York Times upside down.’ ”
A v
isit by Mick’s parents unfortunately coincided with the reported approach of a hurricane named Belle. It had mostly blown itself out by the time it reached Long Island, but produced one curious manifestation directly in front of the Warhol and Cavett properties. A giant wave came in but didn’t break, staying there in suspense like a ten-foot-high green wall. For the rock star who wanted out of his marriage but feared the consequences, both in publicity and monetary terms, it was a perfect marine metaphor: the wave had to break but, please God, not just yet.
In August, the Stones returned to Britain to headline a pop festival in the rolling grounds of a stately Hertfordshire home, Knebworth House, their first festival since Altamont. The intended lead act was the hottest new glam-rock band, Queen (a name that would have been unthinkable in the sixties, even when Mick was at his queeniest). Queen was quickly dropped, however, when the Stones offered to appear for relatively modest money. Much more important to Mick was proving he was still on top and able to see off any competition.
But Knebworth did not turn out well. For the first time, the fact that the Stones were advancing into their thirties became an issue in the British media, which still regarded the cutoff point for rock musicians as around twenty-five. Much gleeful play was made with the fact that one of their supporting acts, 10cc, had a song called “Wild Old Men” with lines cruelly apposite to this near-pensioner status: “Old men of rock ’n’ roll come bearing music . . . where are they now? . . . they are over the hill . . . but they’re still gonna play on dead strings and old drums . . . wild old men, waiting for miracles.”
The age question received further exposure when Keith gave an interview complaining about Mick’s continued flirtation with glam rock. “Mick’s got to stop slapping paint all over his face to that absurd Japanese theatre degree. [He’s] getting older and he’s got to find a way to mature if he’s gonna do what he does. He’s got to get in front of that fuckin’ mike and SING!” Mick might have retorted that taking so many drugs that you crash your car and your six-year-old son goes supperless did not show great maturity either. But he said nothing, a policy to be wisely maintained throughout every Keith diatribe to come.
Unlike Altamont, the Knebworth Festival was primarily a Stones event, with a red stage modeled on Mick’s mouth and extended tongue, and Beggars Banquet–style jugglers and clowns to entertain the two-hundred-thousand-strong crowd between sets. But the tongue-shaped apron had the effect of pushing the spectators back even farther than usual, and few wanted to leave their hard-won places on the grass to watch jugglers or clowns. After memorable sets by Todd Rundgren’s Utopia and Lynyrd Skynyrd, there was a four-hour wait as adjustments were made and remade to the Stones’ lighting effects. Their eventual performance was described by The Times as “a shambling parody.”
Knebworth marked Les Perrin’s final appearance as the Stones’ and Mick’s PR man. Perrin had contracted hepatitis on the ’73 Far East tour, then suffered a stroke from which he’d never fully recovered. The old chain-smoking Fleet Street hand had devoted ten years to his unruly clients, steering them through disasters that could have annihilated them, like the Redlands bust and Brian Jones’s death; sharing their notoriety to the extent of suffering police harassment and bugged telephones; talking straight to Mick as no one else but his own father ever dared to; more than once pulling him back from self-harm with a paternal “Don’t be silly.” Such was the essential decency of the Stones’ organization that no one liked to fire Les Perrin, even though former music journalist Keith Altham had already been lined up to replace him. On the day of the festival, Mick reversed all usual PR-client protocol by ordering a chauffeur-driven car to bring Perrin and his wife to Knebworth, arranging the best seats in the VIP enclosure, and ordering him simply to enjoy the show and not think of doing any work.
One other Knebworth Festival vignette is, in its way, just as poignant. A television crew packing up to return to London was amazed to be approached by Bianca Jagger and asked for a lift in their van. On the journey she proved herself utterly unlike the disdainful diva of the fashion prints, friendly and unpretentious as well as touchingly grateful for the ride.
How she came to be left out of Mick’s motorcade was never explained. But the fact that his wife had to hitch home, while his PR rode in chauffeured comfort, spoke volumes.
BIANCA, THOUGH, WAS to have a Star Is Born moment when she really did outshine Mick. In April 1977, entrepreneurs Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager opened a discotheque for New York’s demimonde that they intended to be as exclusive as the city’s most historic college alumni club. Their premises being the former CBS TV and radio studios at 254 West Fifty-Fourth Street, Rubell and Schrager named the new venture Studio 54.
Steve Rubell, the front man of the duo, personally selected Studio 54’s clientele as if holding auditions for a Broadway show. Every night, several hundred exotically dressed people would congregate outside, all striving to persuade Rubell they were beautiful, fashionable, or interesting enough to be granted entry. In pursuit of what he called “the right mix,” he would split up married couples, boys and girls on dates, or family members, lifting the red rope barrier for wives, brothers, or mothers while their husbands, sisters, and daughters remained miserably in outer darkness.
Certain people, of course, were not subjected to this sieving process: the artist Andy Warhol; the screen goddess Elizabeth Taylor; the writers Truman Capote and William S. Burroughs; the actors Jack Nicholson, Elliott Gould, Ryan O’Neal, and Helmut Berger; the couturier Halston; the Cabaret star Liza Minnelli; the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik; the Vogue magazine eminence Diana Vreeland; the record mogul Ahmet Ertegun; the ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov; the recently-turned-solo pop star Michael Jackson; the Hollywood ingenue Brooke Shields; the models Verushka and Jerry Hall; and the increasingly free-agent wife of the world’s number one rock god, Bianca Jagger.
Bianca, in fact, had first put Studio 54 on the map. For her thirty-second birthday on May 2, her friend Halston persuaded Steve Rubell to open the club on a Monday night, when it was normally closed, so he could throw her a surprise party. During the evening, a white horse paraded around the dance floor led by a man wearing only white gloves. Bianca, in her off-the-shoulder scarlet dress, leaped onto the horse’s back for a couple of circuits, led by the naked and notably well-hung groom.
Thereafter, she became known as the Queen Bee of Studio 54. She would be there several nights a week, seeing off all pretenders to the title with her endlessly varied outfits and the way she wore them, holding court on the sofas around the dance floor or in the VIPs-only basement—a different person in every way from the frost-bound fashion plate who’d spent the past five and a half years in Mick’s shadow.
Paradoxically, Studio 54 was more decadent than anything which used to offend her around Mick. The dancers—many naked, or almost so—gyrated to Donna Summer’s orgasmic disco anthems beneath a giant effigy of the Man in the Moon being fed cocaine on an animated spoon. The usual cabaret was a drag chorus line, nude but for glittery headdresses and thongs. Drugs of every kind were scored and guzzled more blatantly than the worst scenes in Cocksucker Blues. Waiters and busboys wore only tiny shorts and bow ties and many were available for sex with either persuasion, charging a top rate of $300 for the service known as “going all around the world.” All this in the city which had once thrown up its hands in horror at the Rolling Stones’ long hair.
Most nights, Bianca’s escort would be Andy Warhol, whose usual crippling shyness vanished with the realization that Studio 54 harbored even more human freakery than his own Factory (and also that he could pick up thousands of dollars in portrait commissions during a single evening). Warhol was an ideal date, being sexually unthreatening and happy to endure the longest, latest hours without complaint, though many suspected him of whispering about Mick’s infidelities into Bianca’s ear. She was seen dancing as no one thought she ever could—sometimes with her legs wrapped round her partner’s waist—and on the couches beside the d
ance floor canoodling variously with Ryan O’Neal, Elliott Gould, and Helmet Berger. The gossip columns insinuated that she’d had affairs with all three. Good for you, the public thought, after what she must have had to put up with.
The most bizarre of these supposed liaisons came about through Bianca’s involvement with Warhol’s Interview magazine, which allowed art and show-business celebrities to ramble on about themselves, unedited, for thousands of words at a stretch. One night, ringing the changes at the El Morocco club, she shared a table with the octogenarian Duchess of Windsor (who for some reason believed herself aboard the liner QE2) and President Gerald Ford’s twenty-five-year-old son, Jack. As a result, it was arranged Bianca should interview Ford Jr. at the White House, with Warhol along to take photographs. These included a shot of her and the president’s son together in Abraham Lincoln’s old bedroom, as the papers reported breathlessly, “with his hands resting on her waist.”
However much Mick might be lionized at Studio 54, it was always Bianca’s territory and he just a visitor (once even forced to pay a six-dollar entrance fee by the genial but implacable door manager, Haoui Montaug). Occasionally the two would be seen there together; at her thirty-second birthday party, for instance, where they sat and held hands. At other times, they arrived separately without greeting or even appearing to notice each other. One night, at a star-studded gala for Elizabeth Taylor, their respective entourages came in through different doors and passed on the dance floor as gloweringly wordless as Sharks and Jets.
London in this same era was gripped by a very different kind of music from silkily orchestrated disco, a look very different from Studio 54’s naked carnival. The sunshiny optimism it had enshrined in the 1960s was now but an unreal memory. Whereas British youth back then had been a privileged, cosseted elite, their 1977 counterparts could look forward only to unemployment, urban decay, and hyperinflation, which successive Labour governments seemed powerless to check. Whereas pop acts then had been groundbreaking rebels, most nowadays produced either long, pretentious quasiclassical symphonies (Yes; Rick Wakeman; Emerson, Lake & Palmer) or facetious subvaudeville (Showaddywaddy, the Brotherhood of Man, the Wurzels). And punk, the music and the fashion, was the result.
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