Stones: Acclaimed Biography, The

by Norman, Philip

  Like all his former colleagues in the Stones, Wyman is an avid cricket fan. Unlike most of them, however, he still has wind and mobility enough to play from time to time. Hence this brief photo opportunity prior to his appearance in a celebrity match organized by the Duke for a charity called the Oxfordshire Young People’s Association. Tabloid memories are mercifully short: of the assembled snappers, none remarked on the novelty of covering Bill in an outdoor sport, nor that until recently his interest in young people could not exactly have been called charitable.

  The scene outside Sticky Fingers might have been deliberately designed to show how pop now crosses all social divides. The Duke of Marlborough, a tall, bendy man with Churchillian goggle eyes, swung a cricket bat over his shoulder. The ex-Stone, soon to be fifty-seven, tossed a ball playfully up and down. His tiny rock star frame was encased in a striped cricket sweater and ritualistically cheap and faded blue jeans. His face has the aged impishness one sees in photographs of Edwardian music-hall stars. His hair is almost eerily abundant, with the auburn and brown tints of a superior feather duster or a cheap brogue shoe.

  ‘Look this way, Bill … Your Grace … can you turn the bat round a bit? Great! Throw the ball up again, Bill … Great!’ Assuredly, a wondrous change from BILL TAKES A TEENAGE LOVER, MANDY’S WAGES OF SIN, WYMAN TO FACE THE MUSIC and LET-OFF FOR SEX-PROBE STONE.

  Sticky Fingers, named after the Stones’ classic 1971 album, is a pseudo Tex-Mex joint where the youth of Kensington and Fulham can pretend they are in Natchez or El Paso. Round the walls are selected items from the vast hoard of memorabilia that Wyman squirrelled away during his thirty-two years with the Stones – clippings of quaint Sixties outrage, a guitar given to him by Brian Jones, framed golden discs for landmark albums like Exile on Main Street, Tattoo You and It’s Only Rock and Roll, each achingly collectable icon clamped to the wall by a security system that the Louvre might envy. Wyman eats there three times a week when he’s in London; his corner booth, indeed, was where he proposed to his new wife, Suzanne, over a chilli dog.

  Sticky Fingers is perhaps his most eloquent two-fingered salute to the band which he formally quit in January 1994. It proves that there can be life after the Rolling Stones – provided you get out alive. It also proves Bill’s own bitter point that he had good ideas all along, if the others had just listened to him. His original plan, an associate recalls, was for a chain of restaurants called Rolling Stones. ‘But when he went to Prince Rupert [their financial adviser, Prince Rupert Loewenstein] he was told “OK, but you’d only get 10 per cent of the take.”’

  Despite a slump in the restaurant business, Sticky Fingers was an instant hit. Wyman recently told a friend the place earns him £60,000–£75,000 per month, more than he ever got for being a Stone. There was soon talk of opening a second one, Beggars Banquet. Pretty good for a man who, according to one of his rancorous late comrades, ‘only thinks with his dick’.

  For his first twenty-two years as a rock star, Bill Wyman was famous only by association. He was just another bit-part player in the super echelon; a mega-extra like George Harrison in the Beatles and John Entwistle in The Who. Hollow-faced, impassive, cradling his bass guitar at a curious upright angle, he communicated nothing from his place in the Rolling Stones, save perhaps resignation to perpetual eclipse. There’s not much else you can do if your front men are Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, combining the properties of Nijinsky and Count Dracula.

  The great turnaround did not come until the mid-Eighties, paradoxically at a time when the Stones at last seemed to be losing their old sulphurous reek of lawlessness and decadence. Nijinksy and Dracula, as they advanced into middle age, both acquired stable relationships, children, households, nannies and late burgeoning moral awareness. Meanwhile, the eye of their forty-eight-year-old bass player lit on a thirteen-year-old London schoolgirl named Mandy Smith.

  The chapters of the subsequent miserable saga filled alternate issues of the Sun and Hello! magazine. How Scotland Yard passed a file on the liaison to the Director of Public Prosecutions before deciding no charges should be made. How Bill and Mandy were eventually married, he aged fifty-three, she aged nineteen, in splendour rivalling the Field of the Cloth of Gold. How, after only a couple of days’ honeymoon, Mandy summoned her mother, Patsy, to join her. How she afterwards fell prey to a mysterious illness which reduced her weight to five and a half stone. How the couple were divorced after having spent less than a week of married life together. How Mandy sought a £5 million settlement from Bill’s reputed £24 million fortune, but was persuaded to accept cash and a house, together worth just £580,000.

  If the script up to that point might have been written by Jackie Collins with help from Vladimir Nabokov, its sequel is more like the climax of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera. No sooner had Wyman paid off Mandy than his son Stephen, thirty, became engaged to her mother, Patsy, forty-six. The mother-in-law he has lately discarded with such effort was set to become his daughter-in-law – perhaps even, she threatened, the mother of his first grandchild.

  Many inside the music business, as well as millions outside it, were baffled by Wyman’s decision to leave the Stones only weeks after they had signed the biggest recording deal of their career. Under their new $28 million contract with Virgin (ha-ha) Records, the ‘old men of rock’ joined the same earnings super-league as Michael Jackson and Madonna. Their concert tours, ever a byword for sponge-like greed, were set to continue rolling for as long as Mick Jagger could do Satisfaction without the aid of a Zimmer frame.

  Wyman’s part in all this seemed the ideal synthesis of monster prestige, sumptuous enjoyment and infinitesimal workload. You have not seen a human being cossetted until you’ve seen a Rolling Stone on tour, gently shepherded from Lear jet to stretch limo to emperor-size hotel suite by scores of bodyslaves and security men. Onstage at Wembley Stadium or the Orlando Tangerine Bowl, his presence was the same bare minimum: a middle-aged man in little-boy clothes, hair exotically wound in a bandanna, smouldering fag mundanely pasted to lower lip. While Jagger could work off pounds in one show, Bill often would not pop a single bead of sweat. Those daily two hours in front of 60,000-odd faces and gyrating bodies were, he once told me, ‘like going off with the family to the seaside for the day. You have to be sure to have a wee first.’

  Between shows, too, he seemed to have found his own peculiar equilibrium. A visit to Bill Wyman’s hotel or motel room was an experience very different from the usual plunge into rock star squalor and fug. Always the bags would be unpacked and stowed, the liquor bottles aesthically arranged, the bathroom pristine, the bedcover as straight at midnight as the maids had left it at midday. ‘With Bill, everything has to be obsessively neat,’ an associate says. ‘The pen mustn’t lie on the desk, but must be inside the diary. His handwriting is as precise as a schoolmaster’s. Not only is he the one rock star I know to have a briefcase, but it’s the neatest briefcase I’ve ever seen. Pens, papers, all in their place, three spare packs of his cigarettes … and a banana in case he gets hungry.’

  His mind is similarly well ordered. He is a walking archive of Rolling Stones history, able to remember precise dates a quarter of a century ago when they played the Salisbury Gaumont, the Slough Adelphi or the Floral Hall, Morecambe. The same meticulous chapter and verse is given to an amatory career that would make Frank Harris gasp. A female editor who worked on his memoirs, Stone Alone, was heard to exclaim despairingly ‘Bill’s included every fuck he ever had!’ although a former Stones PR man sounds a sceptical note: ‘Bill’s always talked about the 1,000 women he made love to. But no one seems to have seen any of them.’

  Many believe that his orderliness was as vital to the Stones as the others’ chaotic wildness. ‘Bill was always the rock-steady one,’ said Ray Coleman, former editor of the Melody Maker and collaborator in his autobiography, Stone Alone. ‘He could always be relied on to turn up at recording sessions cold sober and to remember the chords when all the others were out of it. And he did compose th
e bass riff for Jumpin’ Jack Flash, which has to be one of the most powerful rock intros ever. Almost every producer who ever worked with them said that Bill and Charlie Watts were the real heart of the Rolling Stones. Bass players and drummers in rock bands always have this same problem – they know they’re essential to the band, but they can never shine.’

  There were, in effect, two classes within the Stones – Mick and Keith (and, at the beginning, Brian Jones) who hogged the limelight and caused the trouble, and Bill and Charlie, on whose blameless heads the backwash continually broke. Ultimately, however, the Stones’ second division narrowed down to just one. Charlie Watts, gentle and stoical, has always been well liked and decently treated by the band’s twin godheads. The two later recruits, Ronnie Wood and Mick Taylor, found their level in the lead guitarist’s niche. Only Bill stayed on the outside. Far from being resigned to obscurity, he had ambitions both as a songwriter and singer, yet all his attempts to develop them were doomed to squashing by the Glimmer Twins. ‘The trouble was that he never really liked Mick or Keith from the beginning,’ says an associate. ‘The vital chemistry just wasn’t there. They said that after thirty years, Bill still hadn’t really joined the band.

  ‘Because he’d taken an equal share of bad publicity, he thought he was entitled to an equal share of the credit. He hated the way that a group that had been founded on democratic principles was commandeered by Mick as a vehicle for his own ego. He hated the way Keith almost tore it apart in the Seventies with his drug busts, and he hated the way Mick and Keith were continually sniping at one another through the Eighties. I’m only surprised he didn’t get out years ago.’

  His apartness and self-containment in fact were to be the main reason for his survival in a band that had strewn innumerable casualties, and not a few corpses, in its wake. Level-headed and abstemious, hating drugs and drunkenness, he was never drawn into the competitive orgies and intrigues which left Brian Jones dead in a swimming pool, turned Mick Taylor from a non-smoking vegetarian into a heroin addict, threw the old Etonian art dealer Robert Fraser into Wormwood Scrubs and squandered a succession of breathtaking women: Chrissie Shrimpton, Marianne Faithfull, Suki Poitier, Bianca Pérez Mora Macías, Anita Pallenberg.

  With the arch-elitist Jagger, relations could sometimes resemble that of master and under-footman, as a mutual friend witnessed. ‘A couple of years ago, Mick was in London and there was quite a crucial thing the Stones needed to discuss. But when Bill rang him up to arrange a meeting, Mick said he hadn’t got time. To me it’s unimaginable that the bass guitarist in the Stones rings the vocalist and is told he hasn’t got time to see him.’

  Most bitter of all were his grievances over money. Like all innocent young bands, the Stones were shamelessly ripped off at the start of their career. But for the past twenty-two years they have been the most prodigal earners in international pop, channelling their earnings into a network of investments masterminded by the thrifty Jagger. To all interviewers (this one included) Wyman maintained that the performance money, as distinct from Jagger-Richards songwriting royalties, was split equally between the five Stones. Yet after their 1989–90 Steel Wheels world tour – with its sponsorship by Budweiser beer, reputedly worth $75 million – he complained to a friend that he and Charlie Watts between them ‘hadn’t made as much as the accountants’.

  Within the band he always felt uneasy, mocked by the others for his comparative old age, his suburban tastes, his refusal to take drugs, even his preference for rock ’n’ roll over the blues. His only ‘mate’ within the line-up was Brian Jones, with whom he developed a verbal code both for pulling groupies and then getting rid of them to make way for fresh relays. ‘Bill even went about sex in a methodical fashion,’ a friend remembers. ‘While the Stones were performing, he’d be deciding which girls he fancied in the crowd and letting them know he wanted to see them later. The others used to wait until afterwards, and take pot luck from the ones who came to the dressing room. But Bill used to pull them from the stage.’

  Through all those golden Sixties years, when the Stones seemed to be piling up treasures like insolent young caliphs, Bill existed on a semi-permanent bank overdraft. His first wife, Diane, tired of Rolling Stone lifestyle and took their son Stephen away to live with her in South Africa. In 1966, Bill had met a nineteen-year-old Swedish student named Astrid Lundstrom, with whom he was to maintain a stable relationship until 1983. During one of Stephen’s holiday visits, he decided arbitrarily not to send the boy back to Diane. Astrid subsequently played a major part in bringing Stephen up in comparative normality, and preventing him from turning into a rock ’n’ roll brat.

  The French tax exile, undertaken with grudging resentment, proved to be a renaissance. In France, even a second-division Rolling Stone received the status of cultural hero. Wyman and Astrid settled in a custom-built house in the Provencal mountain-top village of St Paul de Vence. Their next-door neighbour was Marc Chagall (meeting whom, Bill said, was ‘as big a thrill as meeting Chuck Berry’). Their ‘local’ was the bougainvillea-drenched Colombe d’Or with its casually displayed works by Picasso, Leger and Braque, its chic echoes of Yves Montand and Simone Signoret. Visitors from London brought Bill the two things he missed most about Britain: Birds custard and Branston pickle.

  The tempests which he was forced to weather with the Stones through the Seventies still brought no feeling of integration or empathy. Friendship with Jagger obviously was a long-lost cause. What he could never understand was his failure to chum up with Keith, a working-class boy like himself, with none of Mick’s obvious social ambition. He has recounted how, on the near-terminal Canadian tour of 1977, he and Ronnie Wood found Keith in convulsions on a hotel bedroom floor and decided that the only way to save his life was to score him some heroin. When the Human Riff subsequently entered detox, Bill sent him supportive letters and received one in return – he surprisingly claims – ‘decorated with pressed flowers’. It stung all the worse therefore to read Keith’s subsequent quoted opinion that he is ‘too wrinkly’ to go on tour and that he ‘only thinks with his dick’.

  Despite the creative tyranny of Jagger and Richards, he developed an annoying habit of outdoing his fellow Stones in solo enterprises. He was the first to make his own album, Monkey Grip in 1974, and remains the only one to have had a number one single, Si Si Je Suis Un Rock Star, in 1981. He also has composed the theme music for a movie, Green Ice, and published a book of photographs of Marc Chagall. While Jagger dickered inconclusively with an autobiography, Bill went steadily ahead with his own massive tome, giving his collaborator Ray Coleman access to some twenty trunks full of accumulated papers, including dry-cleaning tickets, even bank documents relating to the other Stones.

  His unequal stipend did not stop his acquiring spectacular properties – his house in Venice, a penthouse flat in Chelsea and a medieval mansion, Gedding Hall, near Bury St Edmunds, entailing lordship of the manor of Gedding and Thormwood. He indulged a wealth of expensive hobbies including archaeology, astronomy, Australian Aborigonals and metal detecting, and became a member of the Royal Horticultural Society.

  His break-up with Astrid surprised many people, since she had not only helped raised his son but had also acted as his energetic personal agent. He blamed the split on her drug-addiction and alcoholism, which she in turn blamed on his chronic infidelity. They remain on good enough terms for Astrid to have co-operated with his autobiography; he pays her a regular allowance and is grateful for her continuing refusal to cash in her story.

  With his usual computer-aided precision, he remembers it was on February 21, 1984 that he first saw Mandy Smith. He was at a VIP table at the Lyceum ballroom; she was on the floor, dancing with her elder sister Nicola. Blonde and long-legged, she made the forty-eight-year-old feel as if he’d been ‘whacked over the head with a hammer’. He had her brought to his table, there learning with amazement that she was only thirteen. She told him she wanted to make a career as a fashion model. The kindly Rolling Stone of
fered to help.

  His decision to begin dating her is so calmly rationalized in his book, Stone Alone, that one can almost accept it as sensible. Mandy was ‘a woman at thirteen’ and in any case looked at least seven years older. She was used to staying out late in clubs and pubs. And her mother did not object. They saw one another secretly for two and a half years, despite well-founded warnings to Wyman from his fellow Stones that the whole thing would blow up in his face. During that time, he maintains, he treated Mandy ‘honourably’, urged her to continue her schooling and did not introduce her to alcohol or drugs.

  The affair was pretty much over by 1984 when it was exposed in the good old News of the World, creating a rock ’n’ roll scandal unprecedented since Jerry Lee Lewis was hounded out of Britain for marrying his thirteen-year-old cousin. In the ensuing flurry of interest by Scotland Yard and the DPP, the other Stones remained noticeably non-supportive. Jagger in particular – shortly to see the birth of his first grandchild – was said to have viewed the affair with horror. According to Wyman’s account, matters were finally resolved by Mandy’s proposing to him on the eve of the Stones’ 1989 tour. To relays of interviewers he said he was ‘absolutely elated … like a kid with a new toy’ (not a toy with a new kid?). Discounting the thirty-three-year gap between them, Mandy maybe spoke truer than she knew. ‘I don’t think about it. I love him and that’s all that matters. Bill has never acted his age anyway.’

  Wanting ‘a quiet wedding away from the glare of publicity’, they were married by civil ceremony in Bury St Edmunds, then drove to London to appear on the Wogan television show. Bill was at pains to point out that Picasso had been seventy-five when he took a wife forty years younger. ‘That marriage lasted, and there’s no reason why ours shouldn’t be the same.’