Mick Jagger (61 page)

The tour revisited most of the Stones’ old northern package-tour haunts, like Coventry, Manchester, and Newcastle-on-Tyne. They were almost the last survivors of those innocent days and, despite the gigantic loss of innocence they represented, met with screams as joyously infantile as ever. To conserve resources for the coming months abroad, intershow travel was by ordinary domestic flights or the purgatorial nationalized rail network. Bianca accompanied Mick, who already looked more than a little French in his floppy blue cap and gray suede maxicoat. He had spoken the language reasonably well since his school days, and now practiced constantly with the fluent Bianca. Journeys between gigs were whiled away with games of backgammon, at which Bianca proved remarkably adept, while still unbending little to their fellow players. Marshall Chess, from whom she won a small fortune, grumbled that “she even gambles in a foreign language.”

The final farewell gig was a nostalgic return to Soho’s Marquee Club, which had given the Stones their first break as an interval band, fronted by “R&B singer Mick Jagger,” in the matelot-striped summer of 1962. But the return was not a happy one. At the moment they were due to start, Keith—whom the prospect of emigration seemed to be stressing almost as much as going cold turkey—was still at Redlands, sixty miles away. He did not arrive until two hours later, in a filthy mood, leaving his Bentley parked on a double yellow line and stomping into the Marquee barefoot. Unluckily, the club was still run by Harold Pendleton, whose hostility to the beginner Stones for being “too rock ’n’ roll” Keith, in particular, had never forgotten or forgiven. The performance was to be filmed for American TV—to make up for their nonappearance in the States that year—and to gain maximum publicity. Pendleton wanted them to play in front of a large neon sign saying MARQUEE CLUB. There was a furious row which ended with Keith swinging his guitar at Pendleton’s head.

On March 30, the band bade their friends in British pop a personal farewell with a party at the super-respectable Skindles Hotel on the Thames at Maidenhead, attended by John Lennon and Yoko Ono (soon to go into exile themselves), Eric Clapton, and Roger Daltrey from the Who. At 2 A.M., the party was still in full swing, and after numerous complaints from other guests about its deafening music, the hotel abruptly cut off the power supply. An inebriated Mick picked up a table and hurled it through a plate-glass window.

Just before the start of the new British tax year, he and Bianca left London for Paris. Amazingly, Marsha Hunt still had not revealed the identity of Karis’s father or sought any further financial help from Mick, merely telling him he was free to see the baby whenever he wanted. According to Marsha, he seemed to have an attack of conscience just before he departed, and asked for Karis to be brought to see him. A meeting was duly arranged, but when Karis arrived, she was accompanied only by her nanny. Marsha did not attend, nor did she seize this golden opportunity for putting pressure on Mick afterward. The opportunity was still more golden, had she but known: Bianca was three months pregnant.

On April 7, the Stones reconvened in Cannes on the French Riviera to sign the agreement with Atlantic’s parent company, Kinney Services—who concidentally now owned Warner Studios and, therefore, Performance. In the second week of the month, Atlantic released their debut single on Rolling Stones Records, breaking the immemorial two-title formula with “Brown Sugar,” “Bitch,” and a live track, “Let It Rock.” Hard on its heels came the Sticky Fingers album with a cover conceived by Andy Warhol—a blue-denim-clad male crotch with a real zip fastener up its front. The zip unzipped to reveal white Y-fronts, an exposure somehow far more shocking than naked genitalia would have been.

The new Stone Age kicked off with a landslide victory: Sticky Fingers at No. 1 in the United States and UK and “Brown Sugar” No. 1 and No. 2, respectively. Disgruntled Decca tried to cash in by releasing a compilation of old Stones tracks (that is, with copyrights all owned by Allen Klein). Mick placed full-page advertisements in the music press, warning fans that it was substandard.

On May 10, he telephoned his London office from Saint-Tropez and told Shirley Arnold that he was to marry Bianca there two days later. He gave Shirley a list of seventy people he wanted invited and asked her to charter an airliner to fly them out at his expense. “But don’t tell them I’m getting married,” he added.

MICK’S SECRETIVENESS ABOUT the marriage indicated that it was to be a private affair, solemnized in some tasteful, tranquil place which no intrusive camera lens could penetrate. Up to the last minute, he kept the secret from everyone but the trusted associates whose organizational help he needed, not telling even his fellow Stones until twenty-four hours beforehand. The media had their suspicions, particularly when he was spotted collecting two matching gold rings from a Parisian jeweler, but his spokesman, Les Perrin, firmly denied any wedding was in the wind, as did a frowning Bianca. He seemed determined to stop the event from becoming, as he put it, “a circus.”

If you wish to marry quietly, of course, the place not to do it is the Côte d’Azur’s most glamorous resort at the height of the spring season, surrounded by dozens of your internationally famous chums. Mick’s Saint-Tropez nuptials in fact were the first celebrity wedding as we have since come to know them through magazines like Hello! and OK!, where the whole world effectively gets invited. The only difference in today’s version is the preselling of exclusive photographic access and the sponsorship deals which usually pay for the whole occasion and leave a tidy profit over. Perhaps the ultimate example was to come in 2000, when the wedding of British TV personality Anthea Turner helped promote a new chocolate bar. Now, if the Mars company had been on the ball in 1971 …

This veritable stampede to the altar after just eight months was entirely Mick’s idea. Bianca, as she later said, felt nowhere near ready for such a commitment and did not think her pregnancy ought to be a factor. Indeed, she told him she was quite prepared to flout her Catholic upbringing and have the baby out of wedlock. “As far as marriage was concerned, I was frightened of the whole idea,” she said later. “It’s Mick who is the bourgeois sort … He insisted on having a proper ceremony and becoming man and wife in the conventional sense.”

He certainly was doing it strictly by the book—or, rather, le livre. In traditional French style, there was to be a formal civil marriage in Saint-Tropez’s town hall followed by a service in the pretty hilltop chapel of St. Anne. For the latter to be allowed, protestant Mick had to receive instruction in the Catholic faith from a Jesuit priest, Father Lucien Baud, during which it emerged that the feast day of Saint Anne happened also to be his birthday. Father Baud was pleasantly surprised by his intelligence, knowledge, and receptiveness.

Despite the cloak of secrecy, British photographers began staking out Saint-Tropez several days before the wedding. Among them was a Paris-based freelancer named Reg Lancaster, who happened to have done some early shots of the Stones in their pub R&B days. Though initially hostile to these advance skirmishers, Mick ended up joining them to watch TV coverage of the soccer cup final between Arsenal and Liverpool being played back home in Britain. The game went to extra time, in which Arsenal beat Liverpool 2–1, but the French transmission cut off before this vital last segment. “Mick was an Arsenal fanatic,” Lancaster recalls. “He went bananas when he couldn’t find out the score.”

On May 12, a chartered Viscount airliner arrived in Nice, bringing the seventy wedding guests Shirley Arnold had rounded up on forty-eight hours’ notice. They included two Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr (still barely on speaking terms after the recent High Court action); Eric Clapton and his girlfriend, Alice Ormsby-Gore; the Queen’s photographer-cousin Lord Litchfield; the designer Ossie Clark; and the Faces’ guitarist Ronnie Wood. Pot freely circulated throughout the flight, much to the consternation of Les Perrin’s wife, Janey, who had to bully the worst offenders into hiding their stashes before touchdown.

Nor was this the only contraband undetected by Nice Airport’s douaniers. Also on the guest list was socialite and amateur race-car driver Tommy Weber, whose wife, Susan “Puss” Coriat, heiress to the Maple furniture fortune, was an acquaintance of Anita’s. Being currently back in rehab, Puss could not make the wedding, but Tommy had brought their two sons, eight-year-old Jake and six-year-old Charley, to act as pageboys. Thirty-nine years later, Jake Weber would allege that their true role had been as drug-carrying mules. Taped to his bare body under his shirt, each small boy carried half a kilo of cocaine, a wedding gift from Keith to Mick. The bridegroom was suffering more nerves than he let on, and had earlier told Spanish Tony Sanchez—so Sanchez later claimed—“A guy needs a little C-O-K-E to get him through his wedding day.”

The wedding’s operations center was the famous Hôtel Byblos, just off Saint-Tropez’s main square, Place des Lices. Mick had flown in his parents ahead of the main group but somehow forgotten to book accommodations for their two-night stay. “I had to get on to him to get them rooms at the Byblos,” Shirley recalls. “And for Les Perrin, his wife, Janey, and myself.”

The tiny, whitewashed town was by now a heaving mass of photographers and television crews even more aggressively competitive than in the days when Brigitte Bardot used to pose in striped bikinis on its beach. The wedding would, indeed, be a circus—in its original Roman sense of sacrificial victims and baying, pitiless mob—and several times hover perilously close to being abandoned altogether.

The first such moment came early in the day when Bianca was faced with the marriage contract prescribed by French law, stating whether Mick’s property and hers were to be held in common or separately in case of divorce. “Prenups” had yet to become a standard feature of wealthy celebrity marriage, and to Bianca it seemed a cold-blooded transaction, implying that she was only interested in Mick’s money. She became upset and pleaded with him to call the whole thing off. His response—a thumbscrew turn from the Tyranny of Cool—was “Are you trying to make a fool of me in front of all these people?”

The civil ceremony at the town hall was scheduled for 4 P.M. and was to be conducted by the mayor, Marius Estezan. The film director Roger Vadim and Bianca’s actress friend Nathalie Delon acted as witnesses. The only other Stone to have been invited here and to the religious service was Keith, although Ahmet Ertegun, Marshall Chess, and even sax player Bobby Keys were present. Keith, wearing the field-gray tunic of a Second World War Nazi officer, was not recognized by the gendarme at the door and barred from entry. There was a furious altercation which ended with him throwing “a large piece of metal” at the officer. Only strenuous PR from Les Perrin allowed him to take his seat with Anita and Marlon rather than getting beaten and thrown into the Saint-Tropez lockup.

To give the proceedings some semblance of dignity, Perrin had decreed that only four photographers should be allowed into the hall. But as French civil marriages are open to the public, it had proved impossible to stop something like one hundred other cameras from pushing in. After a twenty-minute delay, word was brought to Mayor Estezan, wearing his official tricolor cummerbund, that Mick and Bianca would not appear unless he cleared the room of photographers. The mayor refused, backed up by the senior police officer present, and told Les Perrin he’d give them just ten more minutes. Perrin relayed the message to Mick, who retorted that, in that case, the ceremony was off. Perrin’s reply, overheard by his wife, Janey, was the terse, paternal one that generally defused such petulance: “Don’t be silly … Don’t be silly.”

At 4:50, almost an hour late, the couple finally made their entrance. Bianca was a figure both virginally pure and stunningly chic in a low-cut, tailored white jacket that gave no hint of her condition, set off by a matching floppy-brimmed hat with a veil and gloves. Mick looked somewhat less classy in an eau de nil Tommy Nutter three-piece suit and open-necked floral shirt. With a hundred photographers pushing, scuffling, and sometimes coming to blows around them, they finally reached the two chairs arranged in front of the mayor. With unwavering poise, but clearly upset, Bianca sat down, raised her veil, and pulled off her gloves while Mick hovered solicitously over her, remonstrating with the nearest snappers in both English and French. “I don’t think we can do it in front of all these people …” he was heard to say again. However, enough calm was regained for Mayor Estezan to solemnize the marriage, albeit without much geniality. When the newlyweds signed the register afterward, they found themselves on the same page as Bianca’s ex-lover, Eddie Barclay, who had married the fifth of his eventual nine wives at the town hall not long previously.

The onward journey to St. Anne’s chapel for the religious ceremony involved a steep uphill climb on foot, hemmed in by photographers, gaping onlookers, and a posse of jeering local students. Mick held Bianca’s hand and—just like during the Redlands trial in 1967—Les Perrin held his. Arriving at the chapel, they found its front door had been locked to keep out gate-crashers, and Mick had to hammer loudly for admittance. British royalty in the person of Lord Litchfield gave the bride away, and the service, again entirely in French, was conducted by Mick’s late theological tutor, Father Lucien Baud, whose address made approving reference to their talks together: “You have told me that youth seeks happiness and a certain ideal and faith … I think you are seeking it, too, and I hope it arrives today with your marriage.” This part of the day, at least, had some beauty and spirituality, even if Mick and Bianca exchanged vows and rings with the proprietorial Ahmet Ertegun almost breathing down their necks. The organist played Bach’s “Wedding March” and, at Bianca’s request, the theme from 1970s weepie blockbuster Love Story. Not in the least cool, of course, but it still pleased Mick to let her have her way.

The reception, in a private room at the Café des Arts, was attended by two hundred guests, with Bill Wyman, Charlie Watts, and Mick Taylor and their consorts, Astrid, Shirley, and Rose, finally included, and the Queen’s cousin taking photographs. Bianca exchanged her virginal white for a slinky couture gown and jeweled turban—once again eclipsing every other female around—and she and Mick made a point of thanking Shirley Arnold for delivering their British guests there. The party went on until 4:30 A.M. Bianca retired early, apparently not in the best spirits, but Joe and Eva Jagger hung in, not yet having had a chance to give their son his wedding present. The room had a small stage, on which Mick needed little persuasion to get up and perform, backed by Bobby Keys, Stephen Stills, and soul diva Doris Troy, though not the Stones’ other ranks or Keith, who had passed out on the floor. Next day, the new Mr. and Mrs. Jagger boarded a seventy-five-foot luxury yacht, the Romeang, for a ten-day honeymoon cruise off the French and Italian Riviera: coincidentally the scene of Mick’s first idyll with Marianne Faithfull.