by Ray Connolly
‘But seriously, our standard of living has gone up hardly at all — perhaps we spend a bit more on nice restaurants and wine, and I’ve bought a house, but I still drive my Triumph and Andrew still has his Mini.’
Andrew, who is twenty-three, has also acquired a wife, Sarah, who was at school until last June. ‘She took her A-levels in June and we were married in July. We have a flat in town and an old farmhouse in Shaftesbury. Marriage has actually lowered my expenditure, if anything.’
Being the composers of something so big has, of course, some drawbacks. They have lots of ideas for getting on with other projects, but everything is now being held up while they work on the film. They weren’t involved too much in the stage shows, but in order that they don’t cringe when the film is run on television in 1984, they’re taking particular care to get it as near to their ideal as possible.
On the side, however, they have been able to do some record producing, and are planning to record The Scaffold in a way that they think might launch them in America. Andrew has also written the music for the new Albert Finney film, Gumshoe.
‘The temptation would be to follow up with something immediately,’ says Rice, ‘but that would be fatal. So we’re going to wait until people start wondering when we’re going to do something else. So there won’t be an Adolf Hitler Superstar.’
POSTSCRIPT Twelve years later the names of Rice and Lloyd Webber have become legendary in the theatre with Joseph And The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat being constantly revived (as well as having become a schools classic) and Evita being one of the most successful musicals of all time. Unfortunately, I suspect they did cringe when Superstar was shown on television, although they didn’t have to wait until 1984. After their collaboration on Evita in 1977 Rice and Lloyd Webber split up. Lloyd Webber then wrote Song and Dance and Cats while Rice, after a period of uncertainty in which he became an accomplished television presenter, teamed up with Stephen Oliver for the musical Blondel. Eventually they both succumbed to life in the grand style, particularly Andrew who has become an extravagant party thrower. Tim is also the coauthor of four best-selling books listing hit records, and co-owner with Michael Parkinson of Pavilion Books.
December 1973
Bianca Jagger
It seems to me that you can always tell a woman of true elegance by her reactions in moments of adversity. The nouvelle elegante will probably panic, blush or make an untidy scramble of trying to hide her misfortune: the woman confident in herself, and sure of her style, will turn any unfortunate situation to her advantage.
Such a woman is Bianca Jagger: this week, while walking through the lobby of the Ritz, her pretty black and red garters suddenly fell down simultaneously around her ankles. But with no more ado than a slight giggle, she stooped down, and with hardly a moment’s hesitation, stepped out of them, slung them over her shoulder and made a regal exit into her waiting limousine.
Stockings, she explained, as her driver took us away for further dallyings at the opening of a new art gallery in Bond Street, were more sexy than tights. And she’d gone to some little trouble to find garters to go with them. I think it would have seemed almost indecent had I suggested that in future she take precautions by wearing suspenders.
At a moment in time when the rich revel in looking wretched, Bianca Jagger pursues an almost independent line in looking deliberately, extravagantly gorgeous. She is indeed so elegant that it is slightly unnerving, particularly as she basks, possibly unknowingly, in an element of mystery.
Anyone who comes to Europe from Nicaragua must inevitably be something of an enigma: but when that person marries one of the most famous men in the world, then that mystery is compounded a thousandfold.
‘I find myself in a very curious position,’ she explained over a lunch of lobster and champagne, ‘because although I have never done anything in show business, I am regarded as some kind of a star for just being myself. And it makes me feel as though I don’t really understand where I am.’
Cynics might suggest that her fame lies totally in her marital status, but that’s only half the truth. Since their marriage nearly three years ago, Bianca has been an element in a subtle re-shaping of the public image of her husband, while at the same time offering enough personal presence to have established herself as a totally separate and self-sustaining personality. There’s no such question as ‘Bianca Who?’
And yet she finds herself in something of a crisis of identity: ‘I’m very anxious to do something — probably as an actress — but I would have liked to have been unknown when I did it. Now that will be impossible for me, whatever I do, and everyone will be looking to judge me. I think I will only get one chance, so I must be sure to do the right thing.’
At the time of her marriage to Mick there was some considerable confusion about her background, made worse because she was too scared of the press to come down and talk to us. She recognises that now as a major mistake, but she’s still angry about some of the stories which appeared in the papers the following day, and virtually the first thing she talked about was the piece I’d written. I thought it was funny, I said… but I suppose that depends on one’s personal perspective.
‘Some of the press cast doubts on my background when I got married. But, as my mother says, you always betray your origins eventually. If I had been from a poor family I would never have been able to go to Paris to be educated.’
She dislikes talking about her childhood, she says, since it was not an altogether happy one, due to her parents’ divorce when she was eleven. For us to understand what that meant to her we must first try to understand the feudal style of society which is still maintained in Nicaragua.
‘A divorced woman has no status in my country, and neither has her daughter. She is pointed at and she is considered not to deserve any respect from the community. That was the biggest reason for my leaving Nicaragua when I was nearly sixteen.
‘I didn’t want to be predestined because my mother and father were divorced. I didn’t want to be in an underprivileged position. It wasn’t my fault and it wasn’t my mother’s fault. So when I had completed my Baccalaureat I decided to come to Europe so that I might be able to start with a clear future. I got a scholarship from the French government to study political science in Paris.
‘Coming to Europe had been my dream since I was a little girl, and to me it represented the cutting of the umbilical cord. It was my first step towards becoming a woman.
‘Of course, what I was taught by the Church still governs my thinking — that I will be married to one man and will always be faithful to that one man. I’m not puritanical at all, and I can understand if someone else was raised in a different way from me, but I was brought up to be a “good Catholic girl”. Even if my intelligence might tell me one thing, my subconscious tells me the contrary because of my upbringing. I did think I would like my daughter (Jade, now aged two) to be brought up Catholic, but Mick was very reticent about it. So I think we’ll leave it for her to decide.’
Once talking, Bianca is a gossipy, flirtatious woman, who enjoys the idea that men find her attractive, but feels somewhat piqued that every time she is seen with a man a public conversation ensues as to the sanctity of her marriage.
‘When Mick is working I go out to dinner with other men. I don’t like to have dinner alone. Normally I don’t bother any more when I read about who I’ve been seen with. But I’m always surprised to read about men who are supposed to have been my lovers. Never in my life did I have an affair with Marlon Brando’ — which neatly scotches the much publicised derogatory comments that Mrs Jagger was supposed to have made about Brando as a lover.
‘I think I’m really quite old-fashioned. I was eighteen when I lost my virginity which is, I think, quite late. I’m not the sort of person who can go and sleep around without my feelings being involved. Sometimes I wish I could — but it isn’t possible. I can understand people who do, but I wouldn’t want to wake up next to somebody I didn’t hold in some esteem.<
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‘I suppose in a way our marriage is quite modern, but I don’t think that means freedom to sleep around. The problem with a lot of women is that in proving their freedom they have to sleep with every man. I think freedom is a state of mind. If you really feel free you don’t need to keep proving it to your next-door neighbour. You aren’t free if you sleep with every man in your life that you meet: you’re free if you only have the man in your life that you love.’
Her transition from being a student in Paris to the wife of Mick Jagger was, she says, complete coincidence, although she candidly concedes that being a beautiful woman means that eventually you will get to meet everyone. ‘All kinds of people want to meet you just because you are beautiful. That’s an advantage. But on the other hand there is a disadvantage in that there is a strong prejudice about beautiful women. They are also expected to be not very intelligent. I can’t forgive anyone who thinks I am stupid.’
She’s anything but stupid. Her obvious attractions and articulateness (in six languages) gained her a welcome entrée to the top strata of Paris party-going while still a student.
Did she not feel then, that being involved with rock and roll music was sometimes sordid, I asked.
‘Oh yes. One reason I have great respect for Mick is because he isn’t submerged beneath that terrible entourage that goes with rock. I never understood the public image that Mick used to have because he really is a very disciplined person, and he works all the time. You can only keep innovating new ideas like he does if you are disciplined. You don’t get good ideas when you’re drunk or taking drugs all the time. He isn’t a raver, or into drugs or any of that. He’s no midnight rambler.
‘Personally, I feel that I am outside the music business. I don’t feel like the wife of Mick Jagger the performer: he’s a different person. Michael Phillip Jagger is the person I live with.’
At twenty-three (she gets mad when Private Eye suggests that she is older) and the eldest of three children, Bianca Jagger has, in the words of a Nicaraguan delegation to the United Nations, put Nicaragua on the map. ‘He probably thought he was being very sweet when he said that,’ she concedes, ‘but it really was a silly thing to say.
‘D’you know, when Mick and I went there afer the earthquake, everything that I ever saw as a child was gone. It was totally flat. All the buildings which hadn’t fallen down during the tremors had burned down. It was very sad. Mick did a concert to help make money for the relief operation, but I am afraid that some of the $350,000 he made won’t go to the most deserving people.
‘When people judge me they have to remember where I came from and how feudal my country still is.’
POSTSCRIPT The discerning reader will notice a difference of attitude between the above article and the one which immediately follows. It is quite possible that had the first article never been written then the second wouldn’t either, but they both were, for better or worse. Reading the two pieces together now, what strikes me most forcefully is that a day isn’t long enough to get to know anyone, and six months is too long. Now read on.
September 1976
Trick Or Treat?
One lunchtime last summer, Michael Apted and I walked into a crowded restaurant together, sat down, and without looking at each other considered the menu. After a few moments he put his menu down, screwed up his face, and dropped his head in his hands. ‘Stephan’s gone,’ he said. ‘He left this morning. He told me.’
I didn’t look up: ‘About us?’ I asked finally.
‘Yes.’ He paused. I waited, forcing him to carry on. ‘It doesn’t make any difference… not to you and me. You know that, don’t you?’ I didn’t say anything. ‘I mean… I love you,’ he said finally. A couple at the next table looked round at us.
‘No you don’t.’ I was being petulant.
‘You know I do.’
I shook my head. ‘I don’t know that. I don’t know anything any more. I can’t trust you. I can’t believe anything you tell me Everything’s just one big game to you… dressing up in those ridiculous clothes all the time… out of your mind on opium… everything’s just one big game for you. I’m tired of all the bullshit.… I’m tired of you. D’you understand? It’s just not the same any more. It’s never the same… last night, it wasn’t the same…’ Gradually I had worked myself up to a point verging on hysteria.
Apted put an arm out towards me: ‘For Christ’s sake, Kathy…’ The restaurant was now an audience of ears, alert to the conversation and to my name.
‘Don’t touch me,’ I virtually yelled. ‘I don’t want your hands … your fingers near me.’
‘I don’t understand,’ he said. ‘What’s wrong?’ I shook my head. He persisted. ‘Tell me, darling…’
A waiter hovered over us waiting to take our order. He was looking at us very strangely.
‘I’m pregnant,’ I said. And I began to cry.
For six months, while director Michael Apted and I were preparing our film-that-never-was Trick or Treat?, we improvised scenes like this at every opportunity we got — on aeroplanes, in bars, cafes, taxis and finally in between shots on location. He almost always played Ille, the stronger and more determined of the two girls that the film was about, and I was Kathy — the vulnerable one. He didn’t always call me ‘darling’ and I didn’t always cry. Sometimes he would be cold and aloof, and I would be plaintive, simpering and even fawning; and sometimes he would be clever and witty, and I’d be giggly and silly.
Trick or Treat? may not at the end of the day have entertained millions of people at the box office, but in one way and another, the sight of Michael Apted and me acting out the parts of a couple of lesbians must have provided a diverting cabaret to an awful lot of lunches.
For better or worse Trick or Treat? was my idea. I first thought of it in 1969; I wrote it as a novel in 1974; I spent all of 1975 trying to help turn that novel into a film; and so far I’ve spent the first eight months of 1976 trying to recover from that experience. As a film it was, in every sense, a complete disaster; and when it was finally abandoned in January it was estimated that about £400,000 (two thirds of the total budget) had been spent shooting under forty minutes of usable footage. That footage isn’t now worth the cans in which it is being stored.
Nobody sets out to make a disaster, or, in our case, half a disaster: given the right set of circumstances it could happen to anybody. I just wish it hadn’t happened to me. At the start everyone agreed that it was a good and commercial idea; the story of two girls who have a love affair with each other, who decide to have a baby together, and who, in doing so, become tragically involved with a married couple.
It was, in my mind, a love affair between four people, a sort of erotic Chabrol piece about sexual relationships and emotional ambivalences. It was to be set in Europe and to star three Europeans and one American. At a time when English films were unattractive outside Britain, here seemed an opportunity to make a film with international appeal. In fact I’d even gone to Paris to write the novel in the first place.
From my point of view, things began to go wrong right from the start. The first company to show interest in the project was Warner Brothers, but I turned down their very good offer and stayed with Goodtimes Enterprises, the company which had made That’ll Be The Day, Stardust and my documentary on James Dean. There are many advantages in working with an independent production company, but there is one major disadvantage — money. While the major film combines can afford to spend thousands of pounds developing a film in pre-production costs, the resources of a small company cannot realistically be expected to stand an investment of £30,000 in a film which may not get made. I say this now because I think it may help explain some of the pressures upon Goodtimes’ two producers, Sandy Lieberson and David Puttnam, and also upon the film’s director Michael Apted and myself.
I began writing the first draft in March, and by July, had a second draft completed which had attracted the National Film Finance Corporation, EMI Films, and eventually an Ita
lian company called Rizzoli. By then the location had been moved from Paris to Rome and Michael Apted and I found ourselves on a European tour in search of a cast.
At first we hit lucky: Michael Apted’s reputation in Europe is considerable because of his success there with Triple Echo, and Stephane Audrun quickly expressed a willingness to play the part of the older married woman. Much more difficult to cast was the part: Isabelle Adjani, Maria Schneider, Bulle Ogier (my favour-sophisticated and intelligent and slightly decadent multi-lingual young woman. All kinds of names were bandied about for this part: Isabelle Adjani, Maria Schneider, Bulle Ogier (my favourite), Charlotte Rampling, Laura Antonelli, Dominique Sanda and Aurore Clement. And then someone suggested Bianca Jagger …
‘Well, why not Bianca Jagger?’
‘She’d be worth talking to at any rate,’ said Apted. (But was she worth listening to, I now ask myself). Through a mutual friend in California I tracked her down to Paul Morrisey’s house in Long Island and arranged to meet her in Rome at the end of the week. Ominously enough, she arrived a day late, full of stories about Fellini wanting to see her for a part in Casanova. Unluckily for us the part had, I understand, already been cast. Still, Michael Apted and David Puttnam wanted to meet her, so when she had read the script I took her to meet them: they were cautiously interested, and it was decided that I should hang around Rome for a few more days finding out how interested she really was.
Whatever qualities Bianca may lack, it cannot be said that she lacks style, and it was that style which interested us. Bitchy people might say that her whole life is a preparation for an entrance, but, we argued to ourselves, that was because no one was ever prepared to risk giving her more than an opportunity for entering. If she performed well in a screen test, and if the financiers were in agreement, it might be that behind that carefully constructed exterior was a natural actress.