Mick Jagger (50 page)

Ever since his platonic love affair with Cleo Sylvestre, Mick had always had a weakness for beautiful young black women. Not long after the Weekend Telegraph Magazine cover came out, Marsha was rung up by the Stones’ office and asked to appear in a publicity picture for their next single, “Honky Tonk Women,” posing in “tarty clothes” alongside the whole band. She declined, explaining that she preferred not to look as if she’d “just been had by all the Rolling Stones.” Mick then called her up in person and, a few nights later, paid a surprise visit to the Bloomsbury flat where she was staying. As she did an amazed double take, he grinned, pointed his finger like a pistol, and went “Bang!” Marsha was not a Stones fan and, in comparison with the elfin Marc Bolan, thought Mick “not beautiful or even striking.” What won her over, she would recall, was “his shyness and awkwardness.” They spent the rest of that night just sitting and talking about the blues clubs and characters they both knew so well. She noticed how his voice, slurrily Cockney at first, became softer and genteeler the more he relaxed.

They began an affair in deepest secret but, since Marsha was a fellow recording artist, could also be seen together in public without arousing suspicion—in any case, London still had almost no paparazzi. Mick’s name for her, to which surprisingly she did not object, was Miss Fuzzy. He liked it that she didn’t go gooey-eyed and weak-kneed in his presence like most females, but had a crisply forthright manner (“butch,” he called it) as well as an educated and inquiring mind and a natural classiness. Best of all, despite all the dope smoking that had gone on in and around Hair, she was completely straight. Marsha would later recall him often talking about Marianne’s increasing drug use, how much it upset and worried him, and his powerlessness to stop it.

If Marianne’s singing career had stalled, her acting one still seemed to be on the rise. In the spring of 1969, she was invited to play Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet in a new production by the eminent film and theater director Tony Richardson. Although married to Vanessa Redgrave, the most adored young British actress of the day, Richardson was bisexual and had an obvious crush on Mick; nonetheless there was no question of Marianne’s having been chosen on any basis but merit. Hamlet was to be played by thirty-year-old Nicol Williamson, described by the great drama critic Kenneth Tynan as “a young contender for the title of best actor in the world,” and the top-drawer supporting cast included Anthony Hopkins as Claudius. The play was to have a limited run at the Roundhouse, a converted tram shed in Camden Town which had become London’s foremost arena for experimental theater and music; it would also be filmed for cinema release.

The parallels were only too painfully obvious between Marianne and the young woman tormented by the vagaries of the revenge-obsessed Prince of Denmark (who at one point is said to be “lov’d of the distracted multitude” like some prototype rock star) until finally her sanity unravels and she effectively commits suicide by drowning. And, indeed, the British stage had never seen quite such a haunted and heartbreaking Ophelia, with her death-white complexion and dark-ringed eyes; an incarnation of that dubious style known as heroin chic three decades too early.

It was, unfortunately, not just makeup. To get her through the scene where Ophelia’s insanity is revealed, Spanish Tony Sanchez would deliver a nightly heroin jack to Marianne at the theater. In readiness for the almost inevitable reaction, called “pulling a whitey,” a bucket was positioned in the wings so that she could vomit into it directly as she came offstage. In Faithfull, too, she admits to carrying on an affair with Nicol Williamson during the run, and frequently playing Ophelia’s anguished scenes of unrequited love with the Prince of Denmark just after having sex with him in her dressing room.

Performance might be languishing in Warner Bros.’ vaults, but the hearsay accounts of Mick’s brilliance in it led Tony Richardson to offer him a second major screen role. Fresh from both critical and commercial success with The Charge of the Light Brigade, Richardson was to make a film about Ned Kelly, the nineteenth-century Irish-Australian outlaw, or bushranger, who became a folk hero much like the American West’s Jesse James. In preference to the many fine antipodean actors around, he proposed casting Mick as Kelly. Even for so practiced a mimic, portraying an Australian desperado in a big-budget action movie represented a huge leap into the unknown; nonetheless, Mick accepted the challenge with none of the agonizing that had preceded his Turner self-portrait. Though he would later bitterly regret being talked into Ned Kelly by Richardson, at the time it looked like the fast track to film stardom that Performance hadn’t provided.

Shooting was to begin on location in New South Wales in July, when Mick’s schedule was still empty of performing commitments with the Stones. He would also for the first time be acting opposite Marianne, who’d been cast as Kelly’s sister, Maggie, a rather less alluring role than Ophelia. She took it mainly in hopes that going away together—far from the political and sexual intrigues of the Stones’ court—might somehow revive their relationship.

Since receiving a conditional discharge for his minuscule drug offense two years previously, Mick had had not the smallest brush with the British police. But now suddenly there was evidence of a renewed attempt to break a butterfly on a wheel. One day as he was driving himself down King’s Road, he was pulled over and his Rolls given a thorough search for drugs—which, of course, yielded nothing. Then, on the evening of May 28, the day his role as Ned Kelly was announced, he emerged from 48 Cheyne Walk to go to a recording session and beheld a carload of police led by a contradictorily titled officer named Detective Sergeant Robin Constable.

Marianne was not with Mick (a telling detail about their life by that point) but down in the basement kitchen, talking to Christopher Gibbs. “On looking from the window,” her official statement would say, “I saw Mick being held by a lot of men. There was also a woman there. All the men were in plain clothes. I never heard anyone, but saw someone’s hand over Mick’s mouth … I assumed Mick was being attacked by thugs and ran from the kitchen up the stairs to the front door, which I opened. At this, Mick said ‘Shut the door, you silly twit, it’s the police.’ ”

As with the Redlands bust, the police’s timing seemed suspiciously perfect, though no tip-off from the News of the World or any other scandal sheet was to be alleged this time. Rather, it looked as if a member of the Stones’ entourage had been bribed to set up Mick on his own doorstep. Suspicion later fell on the Stones’ driver, Tom Keylock, who had many contacts at Scotland Yard and was the only one who knew to the minute when the intended target would be leaving for the studio.

The next day, Mick and Marianne appeared at Great Marlborough Street magistrates’ court, jointly charged with possession of a lump of cannabis weighing a quarter of a pound, to which they pleaded not guilty. Mick’s treatment, however, had none of the hysteria and overkill of 1967. The case was adjourned until June 23 and he was released on fifty pounds’ bail. That second hearing ended in a further adjournment and continued bail until September 29, which would allow him to go to Australia and appear in Ned Kelly in the meantime.

Thirty-six years later, in 2005, a cache of hitherto confidential documents released by Britain’s Public Records Office was found to include the court papers from this second, and last, Jagger drug bust. Among them were claims by Mick that the police had planted “white powder” (i.e., heroin) at Cheyne Walk, and Detective Sergeant Constable had solicited a bribe for arranging—in a total turnaround of the Redlands episode—that Marianne should take the blame while he walked free.

According to Mick’s statement, the find had been made in a cardboard box from Cartier, the jewelers. “I saw Constable pick up the box. I walked over to him, by which time he opened the box [and] pulled out a folded piece of white paper … He said ‘Ah, ah, we won’t have to look much further.’ He had a little while earlier been asking me where the LSD was … He showed me the paper and I saw that it contained some white powder … Constable licked one of his fingers and dipped it in the powder and tasted it. I did the same of my own volition. It had a talcum powder flavour … I would not know what heroin tastes like, but the flavour was not bitter.”

DS Constable was then alleged to have said: “Don’t worry, Mick, we can sort it out … You plead not guilty and she [Marianne] pleads guilty.” He had asked Mick several times “How much is it worth to you?” and himself suggested a bribe of “a thousand,” adding, “You can have it back if it doesn’t work.” During the charging process at Chelsea Police Station, the police had applied further pressure, reminding him that another drug conviction would probably get him banned from America. On getting home late that night, he had immediately telephoned Michael Havers, his counsel in the Redlands trial, and asked Havers to defend him once again.

In the end, the white powder did not figure in the case, and Mick was charged only with possession of the cannabis. After the second court hearing, on June 23, he claimed Detective Sergeant Constable privately said to him, “It’s not a quarter-pound piece any more, is it?”—implying that since the raid the police had sold or used some of it. Constable had allegedly hinted that another of his team had planted the cannabis at Cheyne Walk, but told Mick: “To know that will cost you a big drink [bribe].” Mick had suggested, “Drop a note through my door,” but the matter had gone no further. Signing the statement that same evening in his solicitor’s office, the autographing habit proved too strong and he added a cross for a kiss.

He would ultimately be found guilty and fined £200, with 50 guineas’ costs—a very different outcome from his trial in the Summer of Love. The case also illustrated how much his social status had changed since then. Bowing to pressure from several of his friends in high places—including Michael Havers and Tom Driberg, MP—the police conducted an internal inquiry into his bribery allegations, headed by a senior Scotland Yard officer, Commander Robin Huntley. In Huntley’s adjudication, Mick was described as “a very intelligent, shrewd and well-known public figure with many influential friends”: different indeed from the “dirty,” “ugly” Rolling Stone of yore. By contrast, Marianne was clearly considered little more respectable than in the era of fur rugs and Mars bars, and her testimony was dismissed as irrelevant. Thus in the end it came down to Mick’s word against the “astute and experienced” Detective Sergeant Constable, and no further action was taken.

AS THE LAST summer of the sixties got under way, it was common knowledge among London’s rock elite that the Rolling Stones were now actively seeking a replacement for Brian Jones. Hard though they had tried to hide their “wooden leg,” the still-unfinished Let It Bleed sessions made further pretense impossible—as well as reminding them afresh just what they had lost. In something like two months, Brian had managed to stagger into the studio only twice, to play percussion on “Midnight Rambler” and autoharp on “You Got the Silver.” The country-rock groove was continuing, helped by a clutch of top American session musicians like saxophonist Bobby Keys, pianist-organists Leon Russell and Al Kooper, and guitarist-mandolinist Ry Cooder. Time was, of course, when Brian could have played all those parts on his head.

There were hopes that his exit could be stage-managed without undue personal trauma or giving offense to the Stones’ female fan following, the majority of whom still adored him. At the time, many star players were walking away from established bands to make more experimental music or join with stars from other bands in so-called supergroups. Brian himself seemed reconciled to leaving, and had several ideas for new projects both as a producer and performer. But in acknowledgment of his huge past contribution to the Stones—not least founding and naming them—he expected a substantial financial settlement.

A far trickier issue was who should take over Brian’s official role of lead guitarist. It would be hard enough finding a player half as brilliant, let alone one who gave off the thrill of danger and mischief he had in his prime. And the Stones’ peculiar power structure made the job qualifications far from that simple. In most rock bands, especially since the male-skewed acid and heavy-metal era, the lead guitarist ranked second to the vocalist, if not equal first. But here, with rhythm-guitarist Keith unchallengeable in that place, he would have to accept subordinate status along with Bill and Charlie.

The problem was finally solved by Marsha Hunt—or, rather, by John Mayall, the hard-core blues-band leader with whom Marsha had lived briefly before finding fame in Hair. She had kept up friendly relations with Mayall, and so knew that his Bluesbreakers currently featured a twenty-year-old guitar virtuoso named Mick Taylor, who was looking to move on. Marsha passed the news to Mick at one of their secret trysts, and Mick immediately summoned Taylor to an audition. With his unsmiling baby face and girlishly thick hair, the twenty-year-old looked nothing like anyone’s idea of a Rolling Stone—still less, anyone’s idea of a Mick. But his talent was undeniable, and more important, he struck up an instant playing rapport with Keith. After contributing riffs to two Let It Bleed tracks, “Live with Me” and “Country Honk,” he was asked to join by Mick for a wage of £150 per week.

So, late in May, the moment arrived for officially giving Brian the boot. Since he rarely visited London anymore, the deed would have to be done at his new country house, Cotchford Farm, near Harefield in East Sussex. For a character so addicted to faux innocence, it was richly appropriate to be now living in the former home of A. A. Milne, surrounded by mementos of Milne’s famously befuddled bear, Winnie-the-Pooh, and his companions Christopher Robin, Piglet, Eeyore and Tigger. Cotchford was originally to be a love nest shared with the Anita Pallenberg look-alike Suki Poitier, but the previous Christmas Suki had finally tired of Brian’s violence and left him. In her place he had installed a twenty-three-year-old blond Swede named Anna Wohlin.

He had stayed connected to the Stones’ office, still treating Shirley Arnold as his own PA without any objection from managing director Mick. Indeed, Mick remained full of concern for him, though characteristically preferring to conceal it. “Whenever Brian phoned,” Shirley remembers, “Mick was always the first one to ask, ‘How is he?’ ” The drug bust at Cheyne Walk had deepened this fellow feeling, for Detective Sergeant Robin Constable had also busted Brian a year earlier and then, too, drugs had come to light that the bustee swore he had never seen before. When news came through that Brian was back in the Priory for another drying-out session, Mick immediately arranged for flowers to be sent to him. Even the well-known Jagger parsimony was suspended in the matter of Brian’s golden handshake. “Mick recognized what a huge contribution Brian had made to the band,” Shirley says. “He wanted the payoff to be as generous as possible.”