Mick Jagger (71 page)

An intellectual and bibliophile, Cavett discovered literary depths in Mick that he had never revealed in their chat-show encounters. “One evening, my wife and I had Bianca and him over for drinks. As they left, I said what a pleasure it had been to have them in our house. ‘In our house … ,’ Mick repeated, which I realized afterward was a quotation from Macbeth.” Another night, they went to a Japanese restaurant in Manhattan. “When the young boy waiting on us recognized Mick, he just slid down the wall and onto the floor.”

Toward the end of the Jaggers’ stay, Cavett left his property for a while. “I used to lend my house to my secretary, Doris, every summer, and so she got to know Mick and Bianca as well. She later told me that they’d called round one evening, stayed awhile, and been very dignified, but she suspected they’d been drinking. ‘What made you think that?’ I asked her. ‘Because,’ she said, ‘Bianca was reading the New York Times upside down.’ ”

A visit by Mick’s parents unfortunately coincided with the reported approach of a hurricane named Belle. It had mostly blown itself out by the time it reached Long Island, but produced one curious manifestation directly in front of the Warhol and Cavett properties. A giant wave came in but didn’t break, staying there in suspense like a ten-foot-high green wall. For the rock star who wanted out of his marriage but feared the consequences, both in publicity and monetary terms, it was a perfect marine metaphor: the wave had to break but, please God, not just yet.

In August, the Stones returned to Britain to headline a pop festival in the rolling grounds of a stately Hertfordshire home, Knebworth House, their first festival since Altamont. The intended lead act was the hottest new glam-rock band, Queen (a name that would have been unthinkable in the sixties, even when Mick was at his queeniest). Queen was quickly dropped, however, when the Stones offered to appear for relatively modest money. Much more important to Mick was proving he was still on top and able to see off any competition.

But Knebworth did not turn out well. For the first time, the fact that the Stones were advancing into their thirties became an issue in the British media, which still regarded the cutoff point for rock musicians as around twenty-five. Much gleeful play was made with the fact that one of their supporting acts, 10cc, had a song called “Wild Old Men” with lines cruelly apposite to this near-pensioner status: “Old men of rock ’n’ roll come bearing music … where are they now? … they are over the hill … but they’re still gonna play on dead strings and old drums … wild old men, waiting for miracles.”

The age question received further exposure when Keith gave an interview complaining about Mick’s continued flirtation with glam rock. “Mick’s got to stop slapping paint all over his face to that absurd Japanese theatre degree. [He’s] getting older and he’s got to find a way to mature if he’s gonna do what he does. He’s got to get in front of that fuckin’ mike and SING!” Mick might have retorted that taking so many drugs that you crash your car and your six-year-old son goes supperless did not show great maturity either. But he said nothing, a policy to be wisely maintained throughout every Keith diatribe to come.

Unlike Altamont, the Knebworth Festival was primarily a Stones event, with a red stage modeled on Mick’s mouth and extended tongue, and Beggars Banquet–style jugglers and clowns to entertain the two-hundred-thousand-strong crowd between sets. But the tongue-shaped apron had the effect of pushing the spectators back even farther than usual, and few wanted to leave their hard-won places on the grass to watch jugglers or clowns. After memorable sets by Todd Rundgren’s Utopia and Lynyrd Skynyrd, there was a four-hour wait as adjustments were made and remade to the Stones’ lighting effects. Their eventual performance was described by The Times as “a shambling parody.”

Knebworth marked Les Perrin’s final appearance as the Stones’ and Mick’s PR man. Perrin had contracted hepatitis on the ’73 Far East tour, then suffered a stroke from which he’d never fully recovered. The old chain-smoking Fleet Street hand had devoted ten years to his unruly clients, steering them through disasters that could have annihilated them, like the Redlands bust and Brian Jones’s death; sharing their notoriety to the extent of suffering police harassment and bugged telephones; talking straight to Mick as no one else but his own father ever dared to; more than once pulling him back from self-harm with a paternal “Don’t be silly.” Such was the essential decency of the Stones’ organization that no one liked to fire Les Perrin, even though former music journalist Keith Altham had already been lined up to replace him. On the day of the festival, Mick reversed all usual PR-client protocol by ordering a chauffeur-driven car to bring Perrin and his wife to Knebworth, arranging the best seats in the VIP enclosure, and ordering him simply to enjoy the show and not think of doing any work.

One other Knebworth Festival vignette is, in its way, just as poignant. A television crew packing up to return to London was amazed to be approached by Bianca Jagger and asked for a lift in their van. On the journey she proved herself utterly unlike the disdainful diva of the fashion prints, friendly and unpretentious as well as touchingly grateful for the ride.

How she came to be left out of Mick’s motorcade was never explained. But the fact that his wife had to hitch home, while his PR rode in chauffeured comfort, spoke volumes.

BIANCA, THOUGH, WAS to have a Star Is Born moment when she really did outshine Mick. In April 1977, entrepreneurs Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager opened a discotheque for New York’s demimonde that they intended to be as exclusive as the city’s most historic college alumni club. Their premises being the former CBS TV and radio studios at 254 West Fifty-Fourth Street, Rubell and Schrager named the new venture Studio 54.

Steve Rubell, the front man of the duo, personally selected Studio 54’s clientele as if holding auditions for a Broadway show. Every night, several hundred exotically dressed people would congregate outside, all striving to persuade Rubell they were beautiful, fashionable, or interesting enough to be granted entry. In pursuit of what he called “the right mix,” he would split up married couples, boys and girls on dates, or family members, lifting the red rope barrier for wives, brothers, or mothers while their husbands, sisters, and daughters remained miserably in outer darkness.

Certain people, of course, were not subjected to this sieving process: the artist Andy Warhol; the screen goddess Elizabeth Taylor; the writers Truman Capote and William S. Burroughs; the actors Jack Nicholson, Elliott Gould, Ryan O’Neal, and Helmut Berger; the couturier Halston; the Cabaret star Liza Minnelli; the shoe designer Manolo Blahnik; the Vogue magazine eminence Diana Vreeland; the record mogul Ahmet Ertegun; the ballet dancer Mikhail Baryshnikov; the recently-turned-solo pop star Michael Jackson; the Hollywood ingenue Brooke Shields; the models Verushka and Jerry Hall; and the increasingly free-agent wife of the world’s number one rock god, Bianca Jagger.

Bianca, in fact, had first put Studio 54 on the map. For her thirty-second birthday on May 2, her friend Halston persuaded Steve Rubell to open the club on a Monday night, when it was normally closed, so he could throw her a surprise party. During the evening, a white horse paraded around the dance floor led by a man wearing only white gloves. Bianca, in her off-the-shoulder scarlet dress, leaped onto the horse’s back for a couple of circuits, led by the naked and notably well-hung groom.

Thereafter, she became known as the Queen Bee of Studio 54. She would be there several nights a week, seeing off all pretenders to the title with her endlessly varied outfits and the way she wore them, holding court on the sofas around the dance floor or in the VIPs-only basement—a different person in every way from the frost-bound fashion plate who’d spent the past five and a half years in Mick’s shadow.

Paradoxically, Studio 54 was more decadent than anything which used to offend her around Mick. The dancers—many naked, or almost so—gyrated to Donna Summer’s orgasmic disco anthems beneath a giant effigy of the Man in the Moon being fed cocaine on an animated spoon. The usual cabaret was a drag chorus line, nude but for glittery headdresses and thongs. Drugs of every kind were scored and guzzled more blatantly than the worst scenes in Cocksucker Blues. Waiters and busboys wore only tiny shorts and bow ties and many were available for sex with either persuasion, charging a top rate of $300 for the service known as “going all around the world.” All this in the city which had once thrown up its hands in horror at the Rolling Stones’ long hair.

Most nights, Bianca’s escort would be Andy Warhol, whose usual crippling shyness vanished with the realization that Studio 54 harbored even more human freakery than his own Factory (and also that he could pick up thousands of dollars in portrait commissions during a single evening). Warhol was an ideal date, being sexually unthreatening and happy to endure the longest, latest hours without complaint, though many suspected him of whispering about Mick’s infidelities into Bianca’s ear. She was seen dancing as no one thought she ever could—sometimes with her legs wrapped round her partner’s waist—and on the couches beside the dance floor canoodling variously with Ryan O’Neal, Elliott Gould, and Helmet Berger. The gossip columns insinuated that she’d had affairs with all three. Good for you, the public thought, after what she must have had to put up with.

The most bizarre of these supposed liaisons came about through Bianca’s involvement with Warhol’s Interview magazine, which allowed art and show-business celebrities to ramble on about themselves, unedited, for thousands of words at a stretch. One night, ringing the changes at the El Morocco club, she shared a table with the octogenarian Duchess of Windsor (who for some reason believed herself aboard the liner QE2) and President Gerald Ford’s twenty-five-year-old son, Jack. As a result, it was arranged Bianca should interview Ford Jr. at the White House, with Warhol along to take photographs. These included a shot of her and the president’s son together in Abraham Lincoln’s old bedroom, as the papers reported breathlessly, “with his hands resting on her waist.”

However much Mick might be lionized at Studio 54, it was always Bianca’s territory and he just a visitor (once even forced to pay a six-dollar entrance fee by the genial but implacable door manager, Haoui Montaug). Occasionally the two would be seen there together; at her thirty-second birthday party, for instance, where they sat and held hands. At other times, they arrived separately without greeting or even appearing to notice each other. One night, at a star-studded gala for Elizabeth Taylor, their respective entourages came in through different doors and passed on the dance floor as gloweringly wordless as Sharks and Jets.

London in this same era was gripped by a very different kind of music from silkily orchestrated disco, a look very different from Studio 54’s naked carnival. The sunshiny optimism it had enshrined in the 1960s was now but an unreal memory. Whereas British youth back then had been a privileged, cosseted elite, their 1977 counterparts could look forward only to unemployment, urban decay, and hyperinflation, which successive Labour governments seemed powerless to check. Whereas pop acts then had been groundbreaking rebels, most nowadays produced either long, pretentious quasiclassical symphonies (Yes; Rick Wakeman; Emerson, Lake & Palmer) or facetious subvaudeville (Showaddywaddy, the Brotherhood of Man, the Wurzels). And punk, the music and the fashion, was the result.

Though New York had inspired something called punk rock early in the seventies, this was a very British version in its anger and nihilism as well as its strong satiric streak. UK punk was rebellion in the form of self-torture, its uniform the kind of bondage garments previously worn only in private by sadomasochistic fetishists, its jewelry chains, rings, metal studs, and outsize safety pins piercing the tenderest parts of the body and face. It was in fact the same blast of energy through a somnolent youth culture and pop scene that the Rolling Stones had been a decade and a half earlier. Its defining band, the Sex Pistols, exactly followed the Stones’ footsteps to becoming a national scandal. Their manager, Malcolm McLaren, a worthy heir to Andrew Oldham, took a comprehensively untalented boy named John Lydon, gave him spiky hair and a torn T-shirt, renamed him Johnny Rotten after his decaying teeth, and turned him into a modern Mick Jagger, with an equally talentless boy dubbed Sid Vicious counterpointing him as a contemporary Keith. The Sex Pistols behaved as the “wicked” Stones of yore could never have done, spitting at their audiences, insulting the Queen, and using four-letter words on teatime television. Whereas parents had once considered Mick the Antichrist, Johnny Rotten’s best-known song announced he actually was (a notion every bit as absurd).

With the coming of the Sex Pistols, the Stones found themselves regarded even more as irrelevant old buffers. Johnny Rotten called them “dinosaurs” and opined that Mick “should have retired in 1965.” Mick affected elder-statesmanly amusement, aligning himself with the Pistols’ main target: “I’m along with the Queen, you know, one of the best thing’s England’s got …” He accused the Pistols of selling out their fuck-’em-all principles by appearing on BBC TV’s Top of the Pops and the cover of Rolling Stone (just as the Stones had before them, amid the same accusations of selling out). He said he liked the punks’ energy, but not their attitude and certainly not their clothes. Whatever the new street fashion, he vowed that no one would ever catch him in a torn T-shirt.

Despite the punk uprising, the Stones’ fan base seemed to be holding as steady in Britain as in America. Black and Blue and “Fool to Cry” had reached No. 1 and No. 6 respectively, and their forthcoming double live album, Love You Live, was expected to sell two million, well up there with the current adult-oriented rock giants, Fleetwood Mac. In February, they signed a four-album contract with WEA in America and EMI in the rest of the world. Mick was quick to dampen speculation that the deal was worth $14 million. “None of us is really concerned with making money … I just try to make the best music I can.” Try as they might, no one could see his nose increasing in length.