Mick Jagger (64 page)

For most of the journey, the band and their entourage were to fly in a luxurious private DC-5 decorated with the logo of Rolling Stones Records and consequently nicknamed the Lapping Tongue. A current spate of aircraft hijackings and terrorist incidents at airports heightened the general paranoia. When the tour kicked off in Canada on June 3, the Lapping Tongue was denied permission to land at Vancouver Airport because of an inadequately prepared flight plan. Marshall Chess managed to contact the prime minister, Pierre Trudeau, but even Trudeau could not help—something which may later have given him a twinge of satisfaction. Instead, the band had to land in Washington State and cross the Canadian border by road.

Some press commentators had wondered whether a rock idol soon to reach the remarkable age of twenty-nine could still draw crowds, especially with the charts now full of pubescent acts like the Osmonds and the Jackson 5 (both of which starred actual children). All such doubts were laid to rest that night at Vancouver’s Pacific Coliseum, when two thousand fans who had been unable to get tickets stormed the front entrance, thirty security staff were injured, and a relief column of Royal Canadian Northwest Mounted Police had to be summoned to restore order.

The Stones’ de rigueur black support act likewise seemed almost a child by comparison—especially with thirtyfive-year-old Bill Wyman. Rather than hard-core bluesmen, they had the blind Motown prodigy formerly known as Little Stevie Wonder, whose harmonica playing was as brilliant as his singing and songwriting—never mind his piano, guitar, and drum playing—and whose live show with a red-hot soul band named Wonderlove included a killer cover of “Satisfaction.” It’s to Mick’s credit that he wasn’t uptight about facing such competition, but consciously set out to blow it outta sight. For once in Stevie’s life, he had to bow to a superior showman.

Gone were the butterfly capes and jokey Uncle Sam topper of 1969. This time around, Mick took the stage in a selection of velour Ossie Clark jumpsuits, purple, pink, lavender, or turquoise, fringed or covered with stars, that gaped open almost to his navel. In every arena, on his orders, the first eighteen rows were kept free of VIPs and photographers so his public could see he really was still as wand-slim as Donny Osmond, still as irrepressibly hyperactive as little Michael Jackson. He also liked an unobstructed view of his audiences and their responses, these days so different from the screamy, straightforward little girls of yore. During one show when he accidently cut his lip on the hand microphone, he saw a respectable-looking middle-aged man at stage front deliberately bite down on his own lip until it gushed blood. While lashing the stage with his belt in “Midnight Rambler,” he’d be aware of male figures below him mutely begging for similar flagellation or grinding lighted cigarettes into their open palms.

Near the top of the tour schedule, as if to get it over with, was the return to San Francisco, to face the lingering Altamont fallout and the clearest danger from Hell’s Angel avengers. If that wasn’t enough, the Stones’ two shows at Winterland were promoted by Bill Graham, who had last been heard from publicly calling Mick a “cunt.” Mick, however, forestalled any awkwardness by walking straight up to Graham, extending a hand, and saying, “ ’Ello, Bill, ’ow are you?” Graham graciously took this as an apology, even admitting that three years earlier he hadn’t been “the nicest person.”

A seventy-five-strong police cordon around Winterland and enhanced security at the Miyako Hotel ensured that none of the Oakland Angels’ threatened bloody reprisals ever came to pass. But the Altamont issue was still far from dead. As the band took their seats on their plane prior to takeoff for L.A., a young woman in hot pants talked her way aboard and thrust a sheaf of legal papers relating to the festival under Mick’s nose. Seconds later, she staggered down the aircraft steps, screaming that “that son of a bitch”—Keith—had hit her and thrown her off, hurling her summonses after her. No one on the Lapping Tongue regarded this as other than perfectly right and proper as well as hilarious.

Chris O’Dell, who had joined the tour at Mick’s insistence (after hand-delivering his stage outfits), became aware of two separate groups in the thirty-strong road company. On one hand, clustered around Mick, were the workers—like tour manager Peter Rudge, Marshall Chess, Ian Stewart, Jo Bergman, and Alan Dunn—who dealt with the thousand and one problems arising from every show, every movement to a new city and sojourn in a new, beleaguered, resentful franchise hotel, and who lived in a permanent state of stress, insomnia, and indigestion. On the other hand, clustered around Keith, were the players, like Bobby Keys, who would remember this as “the ultimate, fuck-you, don’t-give-a-shit Stones tour … one hell of a whopper of a good time.”

Mick maintained his authority with the skill of a regimental colonel who occasionally joins his junior officers for horseplay in the mess. It was on this tour that fitness training became part of his daily routine, usually in a two-or three-mile run which he would do again, treadmill-style, before his audience each night. “The thing for me [was] to stay as straight as possible,” he explained. “Not that I wouldn’t take a beer or get a bit drunk, but I never went onstage loaded … Never once. How could I?” On the short stretches of the journey when Bianca joined him, he was every inch the attentive husband, dutifully staying away from Keith’s room, pointing out quaint Americana to her from the back of their limo, hovering protectively over her in their reserved seats at the front of the Lapping Tongue. But once she had gone, the first rule of rock tours, “it doesn’t count on the road,” came back into play and he reverted to bachelorhood without a beat.

When the tour reached Chicago—right after Minneapolis, where the police attacked fans with tear gas while Mick sang “I’m Jumpin’ Jack Flash, it’s a gas gas gas”—every hotel in the downtown area turned out to be booked solid by business conventions. Fortunately, hospitality was available gratis from Chicago’s famous son Hugh M. Hefner, the founder of Playboy magazine, who still made his home in the city.

Between shows at the International Amphitheater on June 19 and 20, the Stones and their inner circle stayed at Hefner’s fabled Playboy Mansion, whose front doorbell bore the Latin motto Si Non Oscillas, Non Tintinnare (If You Don’t Swing, Don’t Ring). As well as food, liquor, and gambling around the clock, Hefner provided an unlimited supply of Bunnies, the pneumatic pinups who adorned his magazine’s centerfolds. His rockbiz guests proved to swing rather too much, and Hefner retreated to his eight-foot-diameter circular rotating, vibrating bed while—in the words of an American guest—“people screwed everywhere.” In the carnal melee, a Bunny who was scheduled to pose for a centerfold ended up covered with cuts and bruises and couldn’t go before a camera for ten days afterward.

Mick’s glance, however, passed over these buxom Flopsies, Mopsies, and Cottontails to settle on Bobbie Arnstein, a slender thirty-one-year-old, somewhat like the French film star Anouk Aimée, who worked as Hefner’s personal assistant. Bobbie in fact was a tragic character, later convicted for drug possession, given a suspended fifteen-year prison term, and found dead in a seedy hotel from a barbiturates overdose. She also suffered from an eating disorder which, at the height of the revelry with the Stones, caused her to retire to her room and order three three-course meals from the Mansion’s twenty-four-hour kitchen. She was halfway through the feast when she answered a tap on her door and beheld Mick, clad in nothing but a pair of white leather trousers.

Bobbie was not averse to yielding to his advances but, having just consumed a hunk of ripe Brie cheese, was embarrassed about her ammoniac breath. As they grappled, Mick trying to plant a kiss and Bobbie to avert her head, he lost his balance and sat down heavily on a chair where she’d parked her next course, a slice of Black Forest gâteau. Not even Mick Jagger could keep desire aflame with chocolate, cream, and black cherries plastered over his white leather trouser seat.

Truman Capote joined the tour in Kansas City, appropriately enough since his nonfiction masterpiece In Cold Blood, about the random murder of a rancher’s family, was set in Kansas. With him, Capote had brought one of his New York society friends, Princess Lee Radziwill, the interior-designer younger sister of Jacqueline Onassis. She was the most distinguished fan yet seen in the Stones’ dressing room, though Keith practiced determined lèse-majesté by addressing her “Princess Radish,” sometimes adding “you old tart” for good measure.

Capote received VIP treatment given to no other embedded reporter, traveling in the Lapping Tongue and the best limos, watching the show from a privileged place in the wings. But relations between Mick and him grew no warmer. It did not help that the great author was apt to call the Stones “the Beatles” and made no secret of considering their leader “a scared little boy, very much off his turf.” “Truman never seemed to be taking the story seriously,” Chris O’Dell recalls. “He had this mocking attitude toward everyone.” Finally Keith retaliated with one of the heavy-handed practical jokes often born of after-show carousing: in a parody of the Clutter family’s slaughter in In Cold Blood, Capote’s hotel room door was daubed with tomato ketchup.

Capote never turned in his Rolling Stone article, complaining the tour hadn’t been as interesting as he expected. (Instead, Andy Warhol interviewed him about why it hadn’t “excited his imagination.”) Capote’s subsequent comments about Mick around the TV chat shows were waspish but not wholly unobservant: “[There’s] no correlation at all between a Jagger and a Sinatra … [Mick] has no talent save for a kind of fly-eyed wonder … That unisex thing is a no-sex thing. Believe me, he’s about as sexy as a pissing toad … He could, I suppose, be a businessman. He has that facility of being able to focus in on the receipts in the midst of ‘Midnight Rambler’ while he’s beating away with that whip.”

SOME WAY INTO the tour, much to her surprise, Chris O’Dell found herself sleeping with Mick. Like his arrangement with her friend Janice Kenner at Cheyne Walk, it was an occasional, spur-of-the-moment thing that had no effect on their daytime employer-employee relationship—“friendship with benefits” in other words. “I never took it seriously or thought, ‘I’m the one he’s chosen,’ ” Chris recalls. “We’d come back to the hotel some nights and Mick would say, ‘Why don’t we go to the room?’ He was fun, charming, and had a lovely twinkle, and there was never any awkwardness afterward. It was like when you were a kid and you and some little boy would play together in a sandbox. Every so often, Mick and I would go play in the sandbox.

“It also had partly to do with trust. People on that level of fame can’t trust many people, so, rather than sleep with a stranger and risk being betrayed, they often end up in bed with people who are really their friends. I’d seen that before, with George Harrison and Maureen Starkey. I was sitting at the kitchen table when George said, ‘Ringo … I’m in love with your wife.’ ”

She felt no pangs of guilt either when Bianca rejoined the tour for another spell, wearing a jaunty little Panama hat. There had been no love lost between them since Bianca had unjustly accused Chris of stealing some jewelry that vanished from the Hearst mansion in Bel Air. “I didn’t feel any guilt because I knew what was going on with Mick didn’t mean anything,” Chris says. “He was sleeping with other women at the same time, and I think Bianca realized it. I got the feeling they’d decided on an open marriage.”

The Stones’ Washington, D.C., concert happened to be on the Fourth of July. Mick considered taking the stage in a George Washington–style wig, breeches, and buckled shoes but was persuaded that, with the present jumpy state of American law enforcement, it might not be the best idea. Jumpy law enforcement instead struck in the quiet little Anglophile state of Rhode Island. As the band passed through Warwick Airport, en route to play the Boston Garden, Keith swung his shoulder bag at an intrusive photographer and was promptly arrested. In the shouting match that followed, Mick, Marshall Chess, Keith’s bodyguard, and the filmmaker Robert Frank were also collared, thrown into a police van, taken downtown, and locked up. The mayor of Boston, Kevin White, personally had to arrange bail so that the evening’s performance could go ahead. Even the brusque police camera that took Mick’s post-arrest mug shot could not help flattering him.

The tour ended in New York with four sold-out shows over three nights at Madison Square Garden. Still nervous of Hell’s Angel action, the Stones checked into the Sherry-Netherland hotel under aliases different from those they’d been using at Holiday Inns and such out in the sticks. Mick and Bianca (who occupied President Nixon’s usual suite) were “Mr. and Mrs. Shelley,” Bill Wyman and Astrid were “Lord and Lady Gedding,” and Keith was “Count Ziggenpuss.” They were also advised not to use room service in case someone tried to poison the food.

Feeling the real danger was past, Marshall Chess went to the East River and thankfully threw in his handgun. Unknown to Chess, the Angels’ New York chapter had been phoning tour manager Peter Rudge for weeks past and now demanded a sit-down meeting, which, with Madison Square Garden imminent, Rudge felt it wisest to grant. Claiming that Altamont had left their California brothers $60,000 out of pocket, the New York Angels proposed the Stones should make amends with a concert promoted by them. Rudge was playing them along until the band could get safely out of the country.

The final concert at the Garden was on July 26, Mick’s twenty-ninth birthday. Among the audience was the cream of Manhattan society: Princess Lee Radziwill, Lady “Slim” Keith, Oscar and Françoise de la Renta, Winston and C. Z. Guest, as well as Andy Warhol, Truman Capote, the great playwright Tennessee Williams, and the film star Zsa Zsa Gabor. To mark the occasion, Chip Monck had wanted to put a live elephant onstage and release five hundred live chickens into the auditorium, much as white butterflies had been unloosed in Hyde Park, but the Garden’s spoilsport management vetoed both schemes. Instead, recalling Beggars Banquet days, Mick and the band pelted each other with custard pies and the seventeen thousand present sang “Happy Birthday to You,” conducted by Stevie Wonder.