Even Charlie, not one given to hyperbole, felt this “folded up twenty-five years of the Rolling Stones.” Keith’s fury and contempt waxed even greater when it emerged that Mick was recruiting a stage band—including a lead guitarist who would be expected to do Keith-like moves—and that the solo tour would still feature around twenty Stones songs. To any journalist who’d listen, he excoriated “Disco Boy Jagger’s little jerk-off band,” threatening that if Mick really did take the stage with other musicians, “I’ll slit his fuckin’ throat.” Mick called the Stones “a millstone” around his neck and said that, much as he “loved” Keith, working with him had become impossible. “When are you two going to stop bitching at each other?” one interviewer asked Keith. “Ask the bitch,” he replied.
With that, the other Stones seemed to roll off in different directions as if from a snooker cannon shot. Mick went ahead and recruited a new tour band, dubbing them the Brothers of Sodom, even though they included female backing vocalists. Keith released his own solo album, Talk Is Cheap (including another jab at Mick entitled “You Don’t Move Me”), then formed his own breakaway band, the X-pensive Winos, and made a film with his abiding musical hero, Chuck Berry. Ronnie Wood toured with Bo Diddley and became the front man for a short-lived Miami bar named Woody’s on the Beach. Bill Wyman turned to writing film music and embarked on his autobiography, using the extensive archive he’d withheld from Mick and with a seasoned music journalist, Ray Coleman, as ghostwriter. Charlie found his way back to jazz at last by forming a big band called the Charlie Watts Orchestra.
And after all that, Primitive Cool was a flop, reaching only No. 26 in the UK and No. 41 in America, while its lead single, “Let’s Work,” barely scraped Billboard’s Top 40. It sent Mick into an atypically subdued and reclusive mood where he took to draping himself in concealing scarves, as one friend recalls, “like the Elephant Man.” And as a result, the solo tour had to narrow its scope, leaving out both America and Europe and going only to Japan and Australia.
In Sydney, he was visited backstage by Maggie Abbott, the British film agent who had tried so long and hard to get his movie career going. Subsequently no one else had fared any better: since Fitzcarraldo, his only screen appearances had been on an American TV series called Faerie Tale Theatre, not totally miscast as the Emperor of Cathay in “The Nightingale.”
But Abbott now had a story to tell that would have made any film producer salivate. After Mick ceased to be her client, she had run across an L.A. video maker named David Jove, an egocentric character who at the same time appeared concerned never to become too famous. They had become friends and finally Jove had told her a secret he had harbored for fifteen years. His real name was David Snyderman, aka “Acid King David”; he was the mysterious figure behind Mick and Keith’s drug bust, trial, and imprisonment in 1967.
Over time, Abbott had learned the whole story: how Snyderman had been recruited by the FBI in cahoots with British MI5 to get Mick and Keith busted as a means of keeping the Stones permanently out of America; how he’d infiltrated himself into the weekend party at Redlands in the guise of an acid dealer with an irresistible new variety; how, after tipping off the Sussex police to swoop, he’d been spirited out of Britain by his FBI-MI5 handlers and done his best to disappear completely thereafter, settling on the West Coast and changing his surname to Jove; how he’d kept his head down all these years, resisting all temptation to cash in on rock’s most famous legend; but how, even so, he lived in fear that his former FBI handlers might one day come after him and seal his lips permanently.
From her years in London, Maggie Abbott also knew the third and perhaps most grievously wounded victim of the Redlands affair, Marianne Faithfull. Marianne had by now returned from the nadir of heroin addiction to reestablish a career in music and win respect as one of its most unlikely survivors. The two women had kept in touch, and in 1985, while Marianne was on a trip to L.A., Abbott had introduced her to David Jove. Marianne was clearly uncomfortable during the meeting and afterward confirmed to Abbott that he was “Mr. X . . . the guy at Redlands, the guy who set us up.”
One might have expected the revelation to fascinate Mick, penetrating even the famous Jagger amnesia with memories of the Summer of Love, from his cell in Brixton Prison via the mythical Mars bar to his summit meeting with the establishment. What a chapter for that recently aborted autobiography! One might have expected at least mild curiosity about the person responsible for the worst fright of his life. But he showed no interest in Maggie Abbott’s story and cut her off before she could get started, merely saying he was “cool” about what had happened and it was “all in the past now.”
EARLY IN 1988, Ronnie Wood took on the role of peacemaker and persuaded Mick and Keith to talk on the telephone. Then on May 18, a business meeting at the Savoy hotel in London put all five Stones in the same room for the first time in almost two years.
With Woody as intermediary, the Glimmer Twins agreed to meet up on their own in the West Indies and try to thrash out their differences. Mick didn’t want to do it in Jamaica and Keith refused to go to Mustique, so they chose the neutral ground of Eddie Grant’s recording studios in Barbados. It was a meeting every bit as crucial as that first encounter between an economics student and a scruffy beatnik at Dartford railway station in 1961. Keith had no great hopes, warning his family he might be back home in hours rather than days. But as soon as the two got together, the baggage of the past twenty-seven years seemed to fall away; they began quoting each other from their recent public war of words and were soon both roaring with laughter.
In January 1989, the Rolling Stones were inducted into America’s Rock and Roll Hall of Fame along with Mick Taylor, Woody’s predecessor on lead guitar. Although neither Bill nor Charlie attended the ceremony, it was clear the Stones were a band once again, with that errant soloist firmly back in the fold. Mick had never sounded more sincere as when he said what a privilege it had been to work with them and how proud he was of the songs he’d written with Keith. In a rare revisitation of the past, he paid tribute to Ian Stewart and, going even further back, acknowledged Brian Jones’s “marvelous” musicianship. Keith’s speech likewise proclaimed reconciliation, albeit less coherently and naming Mick only second in the order of his thanks, after the guitar maker Leo Fender. In the first, and probably last, mention of Jean Cocteau ever made at a music awards ceremony, Mick quoted the artist’s comment that “Americans are funny people. First you shock them, then they put you in a museum.”
So it was that in August the Stones picked up where they’d left off seven years earlier with a new album, Steel Wheels, and a yearlong world tour already guaranteed to smash the earnings record they’d set in 1982. A young and largely untried Canadian named Michael Cohl had won out over their longtime promoter Bill Graham with a strategy for reaching still deeper into baby boomer pockets. The main corporate sponsor would be brewing conglomerate Anheuser-Busch, makers of Budweiser beer, for around $10 million. “Lapping Tongue” merchandise like T-shirts and bomber jackets would not only be sold at concert venues but through a string of major department stores. The whole operation was projected to cost between $70 and $90 million. In place of the customary Rolling Stone spread, Mick and Keith appeared on the cover of Forbes magazine, the American business tycoons’ bible. Bill Graham—who had once publicly called Mick “that cunt”—lamented that losing them to Cohl, and Budweiser, was “like seeing my favorite lover become a whore.”
THE FIRST PART of Mick’s promise to Jerry when she came back to him in 1982 had been amply fulfilled. In March 1984, she’d given birth to a daughter, his third. Eschewing wacky rock ’n’ roll names, they had chosen the classically simple Elizabeth, followed—at the suggestion of Mick’s first daughter, Jade—by the more colorful Scarlett. The baby was baptized into the Church of England in an ultratraditional ceremony at St. Mary Abbots, Kensington, wearing a robe and cap by David and Elizabeth Emanuel, who had designed Princess Diana’s wedding dress. Jerry’s m
other came from Texas to be present, and Karis, Mick’s daughter by Marsha Hunt, was also invited.
Nine months later, Jerry was found to be pregnant with twins. At five months, one of the twins died and she suffered a blood clot where the other’s placenta connected to her uterus. Lying in bed, weak and grief-stricken, she watched Mick on TV at the Live Aid concert, tearing off Tina Turner’s dress. The rest of her pregnancy she spent at a rented house in upstate New York, mainly kept company by her stepdaughter Karis while Mick was recording in the city. On August 28, 1985, the surviving twin, a boy, was born at Lenox Hill Hospital, New York, and christened James Leroy Augustin. Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston were his godparents and the christening photographs (St. Mary Abbots, Kensington, again) were taken by David Bailey.
Yet the second part of the promise continued to be delayed. “I’m not gonna get married,” Mick had told the media while Jerry was pregnant with Elizabeth. “Not right now. I may get married. But not right now.” Perhaps understandably, after his experience with Bianca, he saw matrimony as no more than “legalistic contractual claptrap.”
For a time, Jerry tried not to exert undue pressure. Her first autobiography, Tall Tales, published—without any objection from him—in 1985, ended with the cliffhanger still unresolved. “I still want to marry Mick. But I’m not nagging him about it. All I really care about is our happiness and our bab[ies].” For her birthday, right after Elizabeth’s christening, she’d asked for an antique silver teakettle with a view to accumulating heirlooms for the baby, but instead Mick had given her an antique Cartier diamond-and-lapis-lazuli ring—“not a wedding ring,” she conceded, “but the next best thing.”
Since then, they had become the world’s most famous nearly married couple. “We’ve definitely set a date,” Jerry announced in 1987. But by the time of her Barbados airport ordeal the following year, that date had receded again. Now, whenever journalists brought up “the M word,” she responded as if to some rodeo audience impatient for her to rope that steer: “Golly, I’m tryin’. Would y’all quit rubbin’ it in?”
In what looked very much like a Plan B, she had refocused on her career, launching her own swimwear line and capitalizing on her continuing popularity in Britain. Beef Curtains begat beef extract when she appeared in a series of TV commercials for Bovril, a drink not previously identified with glamour or couture. Now it had Jerry in a slinky black-and-white frock and broad-brimmed hat, sashaying through a gym full of sweaty hunks to deliver the line “Are you a Bovril Body? Ah know Ah am.” Still, whenever they went to Mustique, she packed a wedding dress, hoping some warm Caribbean night would inspire Mick to pop the question and they’d have a romantic ceremony on their own stretch of Macaroni Beach.
Once the Steel Wheels tour was rolling, however, Jerry began to give up hope. Reports kept coming back that Mick was playing around again and, specifically, that he’d stolen Eric Clapton’s girlfriend, the Italian-born supermodel Carla Bruni. His mother had been kind and supportive throughout both Jerry’s pregnancies and made no secret of her longing for Mick to legalize things and “give Elizabeth and James a name,” as it was still called. As a result, Jerry hoped Eva might back her up in telling Mick his behavior was unacceptable—but any attempt to raise the subject with either of his parents met with a blank wall.
Jerry went off to Italy to make a film (for which she learned to speak Italian), then took the children to stay with friends in Tuscany, more or less resigned to being a single mother. But Mick kept phoning her, telling that he loved her and that he’d changed, and finally asking her to marry him in Bali. She believed him and accepted.
When the tour ended, they went on an extended trip to Nepal, Bhutan, and Thailand, accompanied by the two children, a nanny, a tutor, Mick’s assistant, Alan Dunn, and twenty-six pieces of baggage. The last stop was Bali, where they were married on November 21, 1990. All the arrangements had been made by Mick, without any reference to his bride-to-be. The ceremony was performed by a Hindu holy man in the beachside hut of a wood-carver named Amir Rabik. Mick and Jerry both wore traditional Balinese dress, Elizabeth and James acted as bridesmaid and pageboy respectively, and Alan Dunn was best man. Unbeknownst to Jerry, the proceedings also signified their conversion to Hinduism. The next day, Mick flew on to Japan to receive an award, while Jerry, the children, and most of the twenty-six bags returned to London.
One of the few people Mick let in on the secret was the Englishwoman he’d dated when she was only seventeen. They had remained friendly, and she’d even been to stay at his French château, La Fourchette. One night when she retired to her room, Mick popped out of the wardrobe, evidently “on for it,” but she managed to get rid of the seigneur without damaging his amour propre.
Now he phoned and told her about the ceremony in Bali, somehow not sounding as if it had been the most magical experience of his life. And when she offered congratulations and said how happy Jerry must be, his response was even more puzzling. “I’m not really married,” he said. Remembering how Jerry had hopefully toted her wedding dress around all these years—and forgetting being vengefully barged into the bushes by her—the forthright young woman gave him a brisk telling off.
“God, you’re so nice about Jerry,” Mick replied. “And she’s so awful about you.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Wandering Spirit
SO THE EPHEMERAL music played by those naughty boys in the early 1960s proved to be among the more durable things in life. And the naughtiest boy, for whom a maximum career of six months had been predicted, was to find himself still churning it out to undiminished acclaim in middle age and beyond. As Mick approached fifty, the burning question of his twenties no longer even arose: he would never be too old to go on singing “Satisfaction.”
It is the nature of veteran rock stars—and what their public expects, even demands of them—to remain stuck in perpetual adolescence. They are everlasting teenagers, not only in their clothes, hair, and speech but also their ruthless pursuit of self-gratification and inability to deal with uncomfortable or boring realities. Whenever something disagreeable needs doing, they always have someone to do it for them. As the ultimate veteran rock star, Mick became the ultimate case of such arrested development. For all his great intelligence and sophistication, he continued living essentially the same life and inhabiting the same mind space that he had aged nineteen.
When Harold Nicolson wrote the official biography of King George V, a major narrative problem was that after passing sixty, the king did almost nothing but shoot pheasants and stick postage stamps into albums. Similarly, from his fifth to his sixth decade Mick was basically to have only two occupations. The first was tending the international corporation known as the Rolling Stones. And, like George V, the second involved sticking something in—although not stamps into an album.
THE STONES ENTERED their fourth decade riding as high as ever. A joint readers’ and critics’ poll in Rolling Stone at the end of 1990 saw them beat off all competition, past as well as present; they won Band of the Year, Album of the Year for Steel Wheels, and Tour of the Year, while a vote on the greatest rock singles of all time put “Satisfaction” at number one.
In 1991 came the (mostly) live album Flashpoint, featuring a track more overtly political than anything ever sung by the so-called street-fighting man back in the radical sixties. America and Britain had recently sent forces into Kuwait to crush an invasion by Iraq’s president, Saddam Hussein—a despot whom the British government had supported for years as a bulwark against Iran. “Highwire” was an unambigous rant by Mick against the international arms dealers who stood to win however this First Gulf War turned out (“we got no pride, don’t care whose boots we lick . . .”). It did better in the UK than anything from Steel Wheels, also giving him the satisfaction of yet another BBC ban.
More interestingly, Flashpoint also contained his one and only acknowledgment of a condition that showed no sign of abating. “Sex Drive” was modeled on James Brown’s “Get Up (I
Feel Like Being a) Sex Machine,” but with an added tinge of the confessional (“Ah got this secks dra-aive . . . drivin’ me ma-ayd . . .”). The video showed Mick actually lying on a therapist’s couch while visions of scantily clad females whirled around him, finally turning into an engulfment of the real thing. But the listening therapist was played by Charlie Watts, and Charlie’s enigmatic smile held no condemnation.
The question was to be raised many times over the next few years: how could someone otherwise so intelligent, fastidious, and careful of his public image continually cheat on his wife so recklessly and publicly? How, indeed, could he have gone back to cheating on her with hardly a beat after solemnizing their relationship in that wood-carver’s hut in Bali?
The answer was Eternal Teenager Syndrome. After three decades as a rock god, Mick inhabited a separate universe in which the normal rules of morality did not apply and inconvenient facts never needed to be faced, least of all about his own advancing years. Almost every female he met, of whatever age, still flung herself at him, not minding—not even noticing—the deep-grooved face that now went with the schoolgirlish torso and the mythic lips. It all could have been managed without giving pain to Jerry, as he was constantly away from home, either working with the Stones or avoiding tax, and surrounded by people as practiced at hiding his dalliances as the courtiers of Louis XIV. Yet he could be almost crazily incautious, less like a teenager than some defiant small boy who, while smashing a window or pulling the cat’s tail, believes that grown-ups simply can’t see him.
Jerry was fully aware of how quick he’d been to return to his old ways, but, with two children now to consider, did her best to put a brave face on it. When tabloids tattled about Mick and the New York socialite Gwen Rivers or Mick and the singer Nadine Expert or Mick and the model Lisa Barbuscia, who’d appeared in the “Sex Drive” video, Jerry laughed it off as meaningless or quoted homespun cattle-ranch wisdom: “Let ’em stray and they’ll always come back again.” However, Carla Bruni was something much more serious.
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