Mick Jagger (69 page)

Also at rehearsals was twenty-five-year-old Annie Leibovitz, a photographer with a remarkable knack for catching rock dignitaries in the most unguarded situations yet not damaging their amour propre. She had covered the ’72 tour for Rolling Stone in a junior capacity, but Mick had spotted her qualities and asked her to join this one in effect as his personal photographer. At first she tried to be as unintrusive as possible, but then realized that “what might have seemed like a nuisance to him became a source of comfort … to know I was somewhere nearby … I remember him saying I should tell him if I wanted him to be at a specific place on the stage at any point in the show, but … I couldn’t think of anything for him to do that he wasn’t doing already.”

One day, while leaving a restaurant in Montauk, he mistook a plate-glass window for a door and shattered the pane with his forearm, making a seven-inch gash that needed twenty-four stitches. As he showed off the gory wound later, Annie Leibovitz unslung her camera and began snapping it in black-and-white. Mick at first demurred but then changed his mind and told her to continue—this time in color.

MICK’S FAILURE TO become the major screen actor Performance had promised was not for want of trying. And most of that trying was done by his longtime English film agent, Maggie Abbott.

Abbott had known him socially in London since the mid-sixties and worked for the Stones’ film agent, Creative Management Associates, with Sandy Lieberson, who went on to produce Performance. Mick’s screen debut as the teasing, reclusive Turner had profoundly impressed her, but she thought Ned Kelly an ill-advised follow-up and had vainly tried to talk him out of it. As a result, he trusted her judgment and showed her a professional loyalty he did to precious few others. During the 1970s, Maggie Abbott would bring him some twenty-five film projects, offering diverse acting challenges and the chance to work with directors of the caliber of John Boorman, Steven Spielberg, and Franco Zeffirelli; several more came from other quarters, including the Andy Warhol circle.

His interest was often aroused, sometimes turning into enthusiasm, occasionally into actual commitment. Yet thanks to indecision, conflicting obligations with the Stones, or—most frequently—last-minute attacks of cold feet, he ended up not doing a single one.

Predictably, a high proportion had a musical theme. In 1973, when plans were first mooted to film the Who’s rock opera Tommy, Mick was considered for the name role, then invited to play the Acid Queen. He decided he didn’t want to be “in the Who’s movie”—hadn’t they upstaged him in his movie, The Rolling Stones’ Rock ’n’ Roll Circus?—so Tina Turner got the part instead. Around the same time he was approached to star in a biopic of his blues hero Robert Johnson, who died aged only twenty-seven having reputedly made a pact with the devil, but that one never got as far as a pact with an agent either. There was more progress with Blame It on the Night, the story of a rock star getting to know his estranged son, which Maggie Abbott was to coproduce. Mick was initially interested, especially when producer Gene Taft offered him a co-credit for “original story” if he would provide material from his own direct experience of rock stardom. He changed his mind, however, on realizing that the estranged parent-child theme had uncomfortable parallels with himself and his daughter Karis. When the film finally came out in 1984, “Michael Philip Jagger” was still co-credited for the story.

Another field to generate numerous offers—one increasingly dominant in seventies cinema—was science fiction and fantasy. Mick could have costarred with Sean Connery and Charlotte Rampling in John Boorman’s Zardoz (1974), about an apocalyptic future world ruled by a cult known as the Exterminators, whose sub-Orwellian god preaches a somewhat anti-Jaggerian doctrine: “The penis is evil. The gun is good.” He could have costarred with Malcolm McDowell in Nicholas Meyer’s Time After Time (1979), in which the Victorian visionary H. G. Wells uses his Time Machine to pursue mass murderer Jack the Ripper into the twentieth century. (David Warner ended up with the role Maggie Abbott had wanted for him.) He could have played the lead in Stranger in a Strange Land, about a young man raised by Martians readjusting to earth, or in Kalki, adapted from Gore Vidal’s 1978 novel about the leader of a drug-selling religious cult bent on world domination. Mick had several meetings with the putative director Hal Ashby in Malibu, and even visited India to scout locations before the project withered. Perhaps the biggest missed plum was The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), directed by Performance’s Nicolas Roeg. When Abbott suggested Mick to play the visiting extraterrestrial, Roeg objected that he was “too strong” and someone more frail and ethereal was needed. So the role went to David Bowie.

Mick’s oft-expressed desire to portray a character totally unlike himself and outside his world brought further juicy possibilities. He could have been in yet another remake of Hollywood’s favorite parable, A Star Is Born, playing the screen idol who (in a nice twist on his real-life situation) becomes eclipsed by a more talented wife. He could have played opposite Charlotte Rampling in I Never Promised You a Rose Garden (1977), adapted from Joanne Greenberg’s novel about a schizophrenic girl and the “angel-devil character” she creates inside her head. One of the nearest misses was Nothing Like the Sun, adapted from the novel by Anthony (A Clockwork Orange) Burgess, which would have cast Mick as the young William Shakespeare. Negotiations got as far as a deal letter from Warner Bros. (despite their unhappy history with Performance) when he decided to pull out. He was also briefly tempted by The Moderns, a story of writers in 1920s Paris, and Inside Moves, charting the friendship between a disabled young man and a baseball-playing bartender, which was eventually released, starring John Savage and David Morse, in 1980. He turned down the role of Rooster in Annie, and was turned down for those of Mozart in Amadeus and Dr. Frank N. Furter in The Rocky Horror Picture Show.

Maggie Abbott had moved from London to Los Angeles in 1975, first working at the Paul Kohner Agency, then for independent producer Dan Melnick, later with Melnick as an executive at Columbia Pictures, and finally as a producer in her own right, with Mick remaining her client throughout. She soon realized that most senior Hollywood figures still had no understanding of rock music and thus no idea of the potential cinema audience he could command. So when the Stones played the L.A. Forum on their ’75 tour—the one where Mick bestrode a forty-foot rubber phallus, so cock as much as rock—she had two hundred free tickets distributed to studio executives and major movers and shakers. They also received backstage passes to the VIP Forum Club to enjoy lavish hospitality and Mick at his most charming. “It was fun to watch them being seduced,” Abbott recalls, though actually the process was merely cock-teasing.

Her main problem was always Mick’s incessant, all-consuming life with the Stones; first, getting him to make time to read a script, then—even trickier—persuading him to meet its putative producers and/or backers. Often on these occasions, Abbott recalls, the latter could barely hide their disappointment. “They’re expecting to meet some kind of god, and here’s this person who’s tiny, skinny, knock-kneed, and pigeon-toed. But whoever I introduced him to instantly fell in love with him—producers, directors, film crews, children, old people … everyone.”

Like many before her, she noticed how Mick would adopt an accent to suit the company, one minute broad Cockney, the next an almost parodied poshness she called his “brine trisers” (posh pronunciation of “brown trousers”) accent. And also how, when they were out together in public, he could make himself unnoticeable to the point of invisibility. “Then when we got somewhere he didn’t mind being recognized, he’d completely change … the walk, the gestures, you could spot him a mile off.”

After a time, it occurred to Abbott that he’d feel more committed to a film project, and so less likely to bale out at the eleventh hour, if he also had a hand in producing it. In 1977, she persuaded her boss at Columbia, Dan Melnick, to okay an “ultimate rock-concert movie,” of which Mick would be both star and executive producer, rounding up other rock legends including the reunited Beatles to appear alongside him. Mick flew in from New York to discuss the project and Melnick and Abbott gave him a tour of the studios followed by lunch in the boardroom. As talks continued later at Melnick’s home, the name of Steven Spielberg—just then finishing up Close Encounters of the Third Kind for Columbia—was mentioned as a possible director. “Dan telephoned Spielberg and asked him to come over, without mentioning who he had with him,” Maggie Abbott recalls. “When Spielberg walked in and saw Mick Jagger, he fell on his knees and started salaaming.”

Much as Spielberg worshipped Mick, he had conflicting commitments (mainly to become the richest movie mogul in Hollywood history), so, instead, approaches were made to, among others, the great Italian director Franco Zeffirelli. There was one meeting with Zeffirelli which convinced Maggie Abbott of Mick’s potential as a producer: “All the time Franco was talking, Mick was working out the box-office revenues and percentages like lightning in his head.” But nothing came of that one either.

As well as the projects listed, Abbott recalls, “there was a steady flow of interest, be it scripts, treatments, ideas, or adaptations, but they were often flights of fancy and a lot of people were simply turned on by the idea and image of Mick Jagger.” From time to time, too, there would be an approach from Donald Cammell to renew the partnership that had worked so spectacularly in Performance. But Cammell’s later film projects became increasingly bizarre and difficult to finance, and he never again managed to land the Turner prize. “Donald was very persistent,” Maggie Abbott says, “and got cross with me sometimes when I couldn’t deliver Mick.” Outside Hollywood, there were various attempts to team Mick with Bianca for something more than just fashion shoots. One short-lived idea was for him to write a stage musical in which she would star, despite having no noticeable vocal ability, with backing from Andy Warhol. Another was for Warhol’s protégé Paul Morrissey to film André Gide’s Caves of the Vatican with Mick and Bianca playing brother and sister. As things turned out, their only joint appearance on-screen would be in All You Need Is Cash (1978), a made-for-TV satire on the Beatles written and codirected by Eric Idle from Monty Python’s Flying Circus. The cast was recruited jointly from the Python team and America’s Saturday Night Live show, and featured two genuine Beatles, George Harrison and Paul McCartney. Bianca played Martini, the wife of McCartney’s character, Dirk McQuickly, while Mick appeared as himself.

For a time, Bianca looked like film-star material in her own right and seemed eager to be viewed as such. In 1975, she accepted the co-lead in Ray Connolly’s screen adaptation of his novel Trick or Treat, to be coproduced by Performance’s Sandy Lieberson with David Puttnam and directed by the eminent Michael Apted. Connolly was a well-known pop music columnist whose first essay into scriptwriting, That’ll Be the Day, an exercise in rock ’n’ roll nostalgia featuring Ringo Starr, had been turned into a box-office hit by Lieberson and Puttnam. Trick or Treat was in a rather different genre, the story of two lesbian lovers who decide they want a baby. Bianca’s role as one of the women involved a nude scene, to which she did not initially object.

Shooting began in Rome, but was quickly thrown off course by her unreliability, erratic moods, and Mick-size tantrums over things like the size of the toilet in her trailer. Mainly at her instigation, Ray Connolly’s script went through repeated rewrites and rethinks to the point that his usually abundant curly hair began to fall out. And when the time came for her nude scene, she hid under a bedsheet. The Rome shoot was abandoned and, shortly afterward, so was the whole production, with losses of £500,000. For Connolly, no longer having to work with Bianca was literally a tonic: his hair started growing again.

During their Roman holiday, however, he caught a fleeting glimpse of the earthier character beneath the couture grande dame and scriptwriter’s nightmare. Late one night on the Via Veneto, Bianca suddenly needed to pee, but no toilet was at hand. So, squatting behind a parked car, she hitched up her designer frock and did it in the gutter. Unlike the similar incident involving Mick at a London petrol station exactly ten years earlier, nobody came along and hauled her into court.

EARLY IN 1976, Mick acquired a permanent New York base, purchasing a two-story brownstone house on West Eighty-Sixth Street, the heart of the city’s wealthy Upper West Side. The property was given an expensive total refurbishment by Andy Warhol’s pet designer, Jed Johnson, but still had somewhat the same anonymous feel as the hotel suites it was meant to replace. The emptiness of Mick’s refrigerator became a standing joke among his visitors, who would go in search of a late-night snack and find only, as Keith later recalled, “a bottle of beer and half a tomato.” He finally got the point when his friend the Saturday Night Live comedian John Belushi turned up dressed in a doorman’s peaked cap and frock coat with a delivery of twelve cartons of gefilte fish.

This New York pied-à-terre served to increase the distance between him and Bianca, who remained based in London when she wasn’t off with her couture friends in Paris or defoliating hapless screenwriters in Rome. The couple were by now seen together only seldom, and generally in an obvious state of massive mutual disenchantment. One paparazzo picture of them in a nightclub showed Mick all over Charlotte Rampling, his almost-costar in Zardoz, while on his other side Bianca had fallen asleep.

The only reason they stayed together—showing what old-fashioned scruples ruled each shallow-seeming egomaniac—was their child. Jade was now aged four and attending an expensive private school, Garden House, in Sloane Square. Bianca attracted further criticism from the Mick camp (ludicrous though it may seem now) by trying to keep Jade on a healthy diet and limit her sugar intake. She was served a special stodge-free school lunch, and her teachers were under strict orders not to give her puddings or sweets, though the rule proved unenforceable: bloodhounds hunting escaped convicts through mangrove swamps are not more relentless than five-year-olds in pursuit of sugar.