Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue

by Marc Spitz

  But like Ralph in Lord of the Flies, Brian Jones couldn’t hold the conch for long. The pressure to top himself creatively, the aforementioned acid frizzle that had melted away a good portion of his sanity by the end of 1967, and the ceaseless paranoia that replaced it, made self-control, much less control of the Rolling Stones, impossible.

  When Pallenberg began auditioning for film roles, using her new notoriety as a Stones girlfriend to gain the attention of directors like Volker Schlöndorff (who directed her alongside British actor David Warner in Michael Kohlhaas—Der Rebell), Jones’ paranoia increased considerably. Film was an alternate reality, an imaginary world where fidelity, emotionally and sexually, could be suspended.

  Jones knew he could lose Anita to any number of handsome actors. He also knew that Mick and Keith were attracted to her, only fueling the jealous delusions. Already half crazy, he was steaming toward utter devastation. His physical abuse of Pallenberg was becoming increasingly apparent to the other Stones. Keith Richards was aghast and decided Pallenberg needed rescuing.

  When Keith finally made his play for Anita, shortly after the Redland bust, while on a getaway to Morocco, he was not the “Keith” we now know. In footage of him pre-Anita, strumming his guitar with awkward and unbounded glee, he frequently seems almost nerdy, and toothy, a Buddy Holly type, not the fearless rock and roll pirate he’d become after donning her clothes, digging her drugs, and absorbing her “demon.” Mick was still living in Chelsea with Marianne. They were talking about starting a family. He’d achieved the goal he set for himself back when he swapped Chrissie Shrimpton for Faithfull. He was now a powerful, well-connected member of London society, able to fraternize with poets, painters, art and antiques dealers, and hipper Parliament members. But now Keith had the conch.

  “I found there was an enormous talent in Keith, and Keith was really a shy little guy in those days, couldn’t come out of himself. And I had all this kind of Italian energy and outgoing personality, so it was really easy for me,” Anita has said. “And somehow it finally came out. Then he started to write songs and he started to sing them himself. I thought it was wonderful.” Keith’s previous lead vocal contribution to the band had been the wry and winking drug ditty “Something Happened to Me Yesterday,” which closes the American and British versions of Between the Buttons, the band’s follow-up to Aftermath. Now Keith began working on a new blues song, “You Got the Silver,” inspired by Anita, and perfect for him, not Mick, to sing. Was Mick worried that Keith would start vying with him for lead vocals on various Stones tracks? Probably not, but the mere consideration announced a shift in Stones power. Keith had been fully drawn out. He was now bigger than life, just like Jones had been, and just like Mick was. But now it was up to him to reckon with all the jealousy and superstitious paranoia that came with possession of the conch.

  Anita, an underrated actress with perfect comic timing, would not give up her aspiration to movie stardom. She was too independent to merely be a Stones aide-de-camp and rock wife. She accepted the role of the Black Queen in Roger Vadim’s futuristic sex farce, Barbarella, opposite Vadim’s wife, Jane Fonda. “How much are they going to pay you?” a worried Keith asked her when she told him she was off to France to shoot the film. “I’ll just give you the money.” She refused this offer, and after proving the highlight of Barbarella (uttering lines like “To the Matmos with this winged fruitcake” with camp glee), she next shot the adaptation of Candy (penned by Keith’s future drinking buddy Terry Southern and directed by Stones’ Chelsea social scene cohort Christian Marquand) in Rome. Richards again offered her money to not do the film. He was especially jealous of a scene she had to do with Marlon Brando (who, in the days before political correctness, was cast as a randy Indian guru). “Keith heard that Marlon Brando and I had a scene, so he took the first plane and he was out there. It was the same story, so eventually I tried to time it out to work where Keith was working.”

  Ironically it would be a film shot much closer to home that would justify both Brian Jones’ and Keith’s paranoia.

  Mick had been looking for a film to mark his coming out as a movie star ever since Andrew Loog Oldham’s planned adaptation of A Clockwork Orange fell through.

  John Lennon had recently broke from the Beatles to play “Gripweed” a wisecracking musketeer for Richard Lester, director of the band’s A Hard Days Night and Help!. How I Won the War was a darker film, along the lines of Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or the future war-set dark comedies like Catch-22 or Robert Altman’s M.A.S.H.Lennon, covered in blood, has a battlefield monologue about why he enlisted that, in a few frames, sets him apart from every other pop star turned actor with the possible exception of Elvis in King Creole and Frank Sinatra in The Man with the Golden Arm. Faithfull and others around Mick who also sensed the way cinema was bending into dark realism encouraged him to choose something dark and daring. When his friend Donald Cammell, a painter and yet another habitué of the Chelsea art and society scene, told him about a script he’d cowritten entitled The Performers, Mick promised to read it. Cammell, also looking to get into film, shared an agent with Mick. Brando, a close friend of the artist as well, had shown interest in playing the lead role of Chas, an East End syndicate’s hard man (or leg-breaking “performer”) on the run after a job goes haywire. The gangster finally hides out in the bohemian den of Turner, an emotionally disturbed rock star, struggling to recapture his mojo, and Pherber, his decadent, darkly brilliant girlfriend (as well as various hangers-on). It was a perfect part for Mick; close enough to home, but daring and attention-grabbing in its subject matter.

  Financing the film debut of Mick Jagger would be an easy sell, and nobody, at the time, anyway, seemed to trouble themselves with the actual details of Cammell’s script: gender identity confusion, orgies, intravenous drug consumption, and bloody violence.

  Cammell cannily approached Pallenberg with the role of Pherber, knowing very well the fragile dynamic in the Stones camp following her break with Brian and current cohabitation with Keith. Cammell knew Pallenberg from the European art and social scene and he correctly assumed that the extreme nature of the script would appeal to her. Pherber would be the showiest role of her career, her first real lead. She is in nearly every scene of acts two and three, the sort of narrator, ribbing Chas and speaking for the increasingly inarticulate, vain, and numb Turner, whose most consequential utterances amount to “Do you think I should wash my hair?”

  Although Brando dropped out, to be replaced by another close friend of Mick and Cammell’s, matinee idol James Fox, his method approach seemed to infect the production from the start. Fox quickly subsumed himself into the city’s gangster culture, studying with associates of the notorious Kray brothers, hanging around the nightclubs and boxing matches where the hard men gathered, and slowly turning himself into a hair-trigger thug.

  The film, now titled Performance, like Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up before it, would expose the dark side of swinging London, with “acid, booze, and ass” being replaced by “needles, guns, and grass,” as Joni Mitchell would observe on the title track of her 1971 classic Blue. Pherber was a junkie, and by ’68, heroin was epidemic among the hip London art scene. Eric Clapton was strung out. So were John and Yoko. The drug carries a decadent air perfectly suited to both Pallenberg’s rapidly expanding cult of personality and her personal proclivity, having bonded with Keith inside the opium dens of Morocco.

  Mick, observing that Fox was becoming Chas, and Pallenberg was already Pherber, deduced that he too had to become Turner, but in many ways, he was still the son of a suburban P.E. instructor. A toot of cocaine at a party was fine. Some pills, or perhaps a joint, but hard drugs were anathema. At heart, Jagger was much more together than Turner, and a movie, after all, was just a movie, wasn’t it? “Whatever you do, don’t try to play yourself,” Faithfull recalled telling him as he prepped for his debut. “You’re much too together, too straight, too strong. You’ve got to imagine you’re Brian: poor, freaked-out, delu
ded, androgynous, druggie Brian. But you also need a bit of Keith in it: his tough, self-destructive, beautiful lawlessness. You must become a mixture of the way Keith and Brian will be when the Stones are over and they are alone in their fabulous houses with all the money in the world and nothing to spend it on.” And so it was decided that he would channel those who did, first Brian, then Keith, and, in the same way Fox embedded with the gangsters, he would embed with Anita—well, really just bed her, his one concession to the method. Mick even dyed his hair an inky “Chinese black,” according to Faithfull. Ironically, this immersion into utter darkness came at a time when the couple’s life together was at its most idyllic. They were living in Cheyne Walk, a few houses down from Keith and Anita. Mick could walk over and work on songs at Keith’s yellow, psychedelic grand piano. He and Marianne were planning a family ; she’d gotten pregnant at the beginning of ’68 and they’d named the child, a girl, Corinna. Keith and Anita were talking about starting a family as well. It seemed to be a new era of maturity and functionality for the two main Stones and the women that they loved. And then filming began.

  When Keith first read Cammell’s script and realized that his best friend and his girlfriend would share a bath and a bed, he was, like Brian Jones before him, furious and threatened. No social climber or sucker for Chelsea culture, Keith didn’t like or trust Cammell. Worse, not content with merely pairing Pallenberg with Mick, Cammell threw “Lucy” into the mix. A near mute, played by the boyish Michèle Breton (another Cammell conquest), Lucy’s raison d’être seems to be to shock and confound. Keith faced a dilemma. To ask her not to start up with Mick would be tantamount to inviting her to do so. Monogamy, after all, was provincial. The Stones, as Keith famously scolded Judge Block when bravely facing his Redlands bust sentence, were not old men. “Petty morals” didn’t make it. And yet, to play it cool could mean losing her forever. It was one of only a handful of moments in his young life when he was completely powerless and he reacted by simply shutting down and waiting it out. This proved an excruciating tactic. Before filming wrapped, he, too, was a junkie.

  “I never imaged Mick would be fucking Anita,” Faithfull writes in her memoir. At the time, she was living in Ireland with her mother and her young son Nicholas, expecting the birth of her daughter. Why would Mick do such a hurtful thing to his best friend and creative partner? you might ask. There were elements of philosophical hedonism at work: an existential “if it feels good, do it,” as Faithfull recalled. Most likely, however, Cammell is the villain here, and if Mick is guilty of anything, it’s of valuing his potential as a movie star over loyalty to his mate.

  Under the circumstances, with Cammell egging them on, it was tempting to rationalize, this was Turner and Pherber, not Mick and Anita. But then, Mick’s spirit was stronger than Cammell’s. He could never fully submerge in any method or bow to any direction. “The only person who might have showed some restraint was Mick,” Faithfull writes. She adds, “It was only natural that [Anita] would find Mick’s incarnation of Turner irresistible. Their characters were propelled toward each other and she already had a hard time distinguishing what was real and what was imaginary.”

  Filming began in a funky two-story house in Lowndes Square near Knightsbridge (substituting for the Powis Square exterior) and from the start, all involved surrendered to the inspired material. Performance truly is powerful, from the curated bits of art, iconography (Martin Luther King Jr.’s photo tacked to a wall here, a strummed bit of Robert Johnson there), to the downright strangeness (and Englishness) of the accouterments (the tank of squirming, phallic eels, a box garden of mushrooms). It’s also a great British gangster caper like Brighton Rock before it or Get Carter, The Long Good Friday, Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, or Sexy Beast after it—full of ultraviolence, pinstripes, and dark humor. “I had a dog as a kid,” one of the gangsters who would later come to snuff the gonerogue Chas mutters. “It was a wire-haired terrier.”

  On a steady diet of good wine and sweet-smelling hash, rehearsals began in the spring of 1968. Richards was not invited to the set and too proud to protest; instead, he sat in the Blue Lena outside the Lowndes Square house, seething, as his best friend and girlfriend discussed their roles in the upstairs bedroom. In his memoir, Keith talks about composing the singularly dread-filled guitar parts for “Gimme Shelter” during this exact period.

  The very first actual scene shot for Performance was a love scene between Mick, Pallenberg, and the tomboyish Michèle Breton. For the next seven days, Cammell and his associate director Nicolas Roeg treated the three-way scene like a separate film, shooting Mick, Pallenberg, and Breton in various states of actual intercourse with handheld sixteen-millimeter Bolex cameras. As with the love scene in Roeg’s subsequent Don’t Look Now with Julie Christie and Donald Sutherland, it has since passed into urban legend that Mick and Anita are really doing it. One thinks he can see the very moment of penetration; a certain giggle on Pallenberg’s part; an exhale from Mick. More likely, however, the true carrying on went down in “rehearsal.” Cammell directs like the painter he was: The light had to be perfect, a warm, lemony, sunlight, filtered through the wool blankets.

  Up the street in a pub, Richards downed ale and smoked cigarettes and tried to forget what was going on, cursing Cammell’s perverse manipulation. “He got a hard-on about intimate betrayal,” he would later write in his memoir. Faithfull bravely visited the set and tried to take it in stride. She too was sexually drawn to Anita and had attempted to make love to her one night, after all. “I didn’t say anything about Mick fucking Anita at the time of the film because I knew the only way for it to work was for him to really appeal to her,” she has said. To combat his pain, Richards increased his heroin consumption at pal Robert Fraser’s nearby flat, strumming his acoustic guitar, and singing his new tune “You Got the Silver” with melancholy and longing (it would ironically be one of the last Stones tunes that Brian Jones would add his fading magic to). Keith was furious with Mick, who never acknowledged that anything untoward had happened. He was deeply wounded by Pallenberg, who would also return from the set strangely quiet. When she discovered that she was pregnant, Keith had to entertain, even fleetingly, the devastating possibility that the father might be Mick. This was, of course, not the case, but even a few seconds of such pondering would easily devastate even a hard man like Keith. “Even the customarily fearless Keith couldn’t handle this one,” Faithfull writes.

  There have been told accounts of Mick falling in love with Anita, which certainly explains his silence. More likely, he was in love with the idea of making a smashing debut as a film star and committed to follow Cammell deep into whatever gorge he was headed down. He had left himself a rope to climb back out of the imaginary reality. Falling in love with her would trap him in Powis Square forever. “So remember who you say you are, and keep your noses clean,” Mick sings on “Memo from Turner,” his contribution to Jack Nitzsche’s unnerving soundtrack to the film. Nitzsche was a cohort of Phil Spector and part of the T.A.M.I. Show orchestra. He’d become a key contributor to some of the Stones great singles, most famously the man arranging the famous children’s choir on “You Can’t Always Get What You Want.” “Memo from Turner,” finished after filming wrapped, is collected on the Rolling Stones’ epic box set The London Years, along with other hard-to-find singles and B-sides, but it’s the first real Stones song that’s not a Stones song. Ry Cooder, not Keith, who refused to contribute, plays the malevolent slide guitar, and Mick, as Turner, sings disjointed lyrics courtesy of the cut-and-paste technique of William S. Burroughs (an influence of all three key Stones at the time).

  James Fox, who could not shake Chas long after the principle filming ended, forgot who he said he was. He joined a religious cult called the Navigators and gave up acting for more than a decade. “He had a very hard time,” Mick said later. “It sometimes happens and he decided the stage was a sort of place for sinners and left it.” As with watching the love scene today with some hindsight
and knowledge about what happens next, it’s unsettling to see Fox’s Chas shout, “I’m normal! There’s nothing wrong with me!”

  Breton lost herself in the drug culture for a time and never made another film. Pallenberg and Richards, as well as Marianne Faithfull, were sucked into a whirlpool of drugs, illness, and decay for the better part of a decade. Cammell directed three more films and killed himself in 1996. Keith never forgave him. Asked about Performance decades on, Richards said, “The best work Cammell ever did, except for shooting himself.” He was still harboring resentment more than four decades later, taking pains to point out in Life that his partner has a “tiny todger.” This is yet another inaccuracy, stoked by Keith and embraced by those with a stake in furthering the idea of “Brenda.” While it’s Warhol star Joe Dallesandro, and not Mick, whose enviable endowment graces the cover of 1971’s Sticky Fingers, there are photos, taken by Anita, that show a fully naked Mick Jagger, prostrated in bed, his hand occasionally covering his modesty and occasionally not. Let’s call it average, as far as rock-legend penises go, no larger or smaller than Lennon’s flaccid member on the cover of Two Virgins. Jerry Hall, who after twenty-three years by his side, should probably get the last word, argued: “Mick is very well-endowed. Keith is just jealous.”

  Turner is the only character who dies onscreen in Performance , murdered by Chas before he’s whisked off by the thugs who’ve tracked him down. (His last words: “I don’t know . . .”) And yet it would seem “Old Rubber Lips” (as Chas calls Mick on film) was the cast’s only nontragedy in real life.

  It’s not as clean a getaway as he might have liked, however. The essential Jagger-Richards songwriting partnership would continue to thrive. It had yet to even peak, but the friendship that drove it was never the same. “It probably put a bigger gap between me and Mick than anything else,” Keith would write in Life. “Probably forever.”