Mick Jagger (85 page)

Movie acting was not the only area where Keith finally trumped his Glimmer Twin. Following his debut as Captain Edward Teague, he trousered a reported $7 million advance for his autobiography. The ghostwriter was James Fox—not the actor who went off the deep end after appearing in Performance but a former London Sunday Times journalist (like Sir Mick’s former ghostwriter, John Ryle) and author of White Mischief, an investigation into the Happy Valley murder in 1940s Kenya. Keith’s infinitesimal attention span, lassitude, and new passion for burying himself in his library promised Fox an even more difficult task than Ryle had faced with the Jagger memoirs in 1983; nevertheless, a manuscript was completed, pronounced fascinating, and published in October 2010 as Life.

In a handwritten message on the back of the book, Keith assured his readers that it was “all true” and that he remembered “everything.” Actually, most of the 547-page narrative passed in a woozy haze, specific only about blues music, guitars, and epic drug abuse. But on one subject he was utterly specific: his seeming total alienation from the onetime teenage soul mate he now called Brenda. “I used to love Mick,” he wrote, “but I haven’t been to his dressing-room in twenty years. Sometimes I think ‘I miss my friend.’ I wonder ‘Where did he go?’ ”

His friend was portrayed as an egomaniacal megalomaniac and impossible diva and snob who treated all women abominably and usually left them to cry on his, Keith’s, shoulder. Goddess in the Doorway, his friend’s most recent (and probably best) solo album was wittily renamed “Dog Shit in the Doorway.” The coup de grâce came in the section about his friend’s relationship with Marianne Faithfull in the late sixties. “Marianne … had no fun with Mick’s tiny todger. I know he’s got an enormous pair of balls, but it doesn’t quite fill the bill.”

Strange vocabulary apart—todger being a children’s word, more commonly used by little girls—this hardly sounded like the worldly-wise old soul of rock ’n’ roll Life sought to portray. It certainly was not a complaint ever heard from a vast numbers of, er, consumers over the years; in any case, it was extraordinarily catty and irrelevant. The book’s editors urged Keith to cut it, but he refused. Sir Mick, he claimed, had read the proofs and asked for only one cut—about his use of a voice coach. Sir Mick himself emulated royalty once again and made no public comment. His one consolation was that when Life became a bestseller, his todger had been of material assistance.

The size of Keith’s advance, if not the desire to answer back, led several publishers to wonder whether Sir Mick might at last be ready to write the autobiography he had aborted in 1983. However, something promising to be almost as hot was already on its way: Jerry Hall had been paid £500,000 of a £1 million advance from a major UK house to continue the life story broken off in her 1985 memoir, Tall Tales. The project was to some extent therapeutic: as her friends knew, Jerry had been much less buoyant than she seemed after the end of her marriage and had since felt depressed, even agoraphoblic. Despite that purportedly “very, very generous” annulment payoff, she told friends she also needed the money.

She started out writing the book herself, but after a time her publishers persuaded her to work with a ghost. The rumor in the book trade was that her narrative about her life with Sir Mick had plenty of human warmth, but the ghost was needed to put in more sex. In fact, there was more than enough sex: the ghost was needed to put in more human warmth. The book was complete and ready to go into production one Friday afternoon, with Jerry still gung ho about getting it all off her chest; the following Monday, she canceled the whole project. There could not but be suspicion that, assiduous as ever in covering his tracks, Sir Mick had bought her off.

The whole £500,000 advance was returned to the publisher. And numerous women all over the world must have breathed a sigh of relief, not least France’s first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozky, who that summer accompanied her titchy spouse to Britain to meet the new prime minister, David Cameron, and was widely admired for her elegance. Jerry subsequently contracted with another publisher, but this time just for a coffee-table book entitled My Life in Pictures. Its minimal text, however, still gave a full summary of Sir Mick’s post-1985 infidelities, at one point describing him as “a ruthless sexual predator.”

NO LONGER PERHAPS. L’Wren Scott started her own couture label in 2006 and has since risen to considerable heights, professionally speaking, with creations like the headmistress dress, what Vogue called “calf-corseting gladiator pumps,” and $12,000 Lula bags, named after her mother, which, she says, “open and close with a kind of ‘woosh,’ like the first time you ride in a nice car and go ‘Wow!’ ” (When the bags were launched, one British columnist noted drily that the Jagger wallet was not famed for opening with a woosh, though it might close with one.) Sir Mick is usually at her shows, video camera poised, not meaning to siphon off all the attention but always doing so as (Vogue again) he “bounces around in a violet blazer and sneakers.”

True to her mother’s prophecy, L’Wren has apparently seen off all rivals for his attention, even weaning him away from his longtime, superefficient PA, Miranda Guinness. As a result, the Apostrophe has a new nickname—“the Loin-Tamer.” But despite the impressive diamond ring she now sports, there seems no prospect of a First Lady Jagger. After they had been together nine years, he described her to a London Times interviewer as someone he was “sort of seeing,” while L’Wren herself says only that they’re “kind of dating.”

The most compelling proof of the real person behind the Jagger mask comes from his seven children with four different mothers. Rock stars’ offspring frequently end up loathing their fathers, or at best treating them with weary tolerance, but all Sir Mick’s plainly adore him. Despite their widely different ages and ethnic ingredients, they get on well together, indeed regard one another as real sisters and brothers—something that couldn’t happen if he didn’t give each of them the same love, attention, and status. In this regard, at least, the Eternal Teenager has thoroughly grown up.

After presenting him with a second granddaughter, Amba Isis, in 1995, Jade found fame with stones of a rather different kind. She started her own design company, Jade Inc., when she was twenty-four, and in 1996 became creative director of Garrard’s, jewelers to the British Royal Family for 160 years, waking up its staid showcases, rather like Dad once did the Top 10, with her chain-mail underwear, diamond-encrusted revolver and skull pendants, and “devil-themed” trinkets. She has since launched the Jade Jezebel Jagger line of clothes, redesigned the classic Guerlain perfume bottle, and devised a flying lounge for the low-cost Spanish airline Vueling. Now married to deejay Dan Williams, she lives unostentatiously in north London.

Jade’s mother, Bianca, is unrecognizable as the white-clad sacrifice who unhappily married a rock star in Saint-Tropez in 1971. For more than thirty years, she has worked tirelessly for humanitarian causes, through her own Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation and as a goodwill ambassador for the Council of Europe, a trustee of the Amazon Charitable Trust, and a council member of Amnesty International USA. The numerous honors she has received include the Right Livelihood Award presented by the Swedish parliament “for outstanding vision and work on behalf of the planet and its people” and regarded as “the alternative Nobel Prize”; the United Nations Earth Day International Award; the Amnesty International USA Media Spotlight Award for Leadership; the World Citizenship Award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation; the World Achievement Award (presented to her by Mikhail Gorbachev); and two honorary doctorates. In her mid-sixties, it is still Bianca rather than Jade who turns every head as they come into the Ivy restaurant in London. There are many around Sir Mick who believe she remains the one real love of his life. Himself excepted, of course.

Both his daughters with Jerry Hall grew up to be models after their mother. Elizabeth, the elder, looks like Jerry, but the younger, known as Georgia May, looks like Brigitte Bardot, the French sex kitten who was every British schoolboy’s fantasy in the 1950s, from her long blond hair and enormous eyes to the little gap in her front teeth. When she was twelve, and first experinmenting with lipstick, her father looked at her in horror one day and said, “Are you wearing makeup? You’re wearing more makeup than I am!” At sixteen, she was signed up by Tori Edwards, the model agent who represented her mother and sister, and in no time was the face of Versace and Rimmel and on the cover of Vogue. Indeed, Sir Mick became worried that her career was moving too fast, and insisted she call a temporary halt to study for her A-level exams.

In 2010, Georgia May posed topless in an advertisement for Hudson Jeans; the following year, Elizabeth appeared on the cover of Playboy. She had first been approached to do so in 2005 when she was twenty-one, but her father—that onetime reveler at the Playboy Mansion—was so shocked by the idea that she refused. (Jerry, of course, had done Playboy back in the eighties, when Lizzie was a baby). Georgia May is the more rock ’n’ roll of the two sisters, often seen in the Richmond pub the Roebuck throwing back cocktails with noisy groups of friends by whom she likes to be addressed as “Jagger.” But, as she recently told Tatler magazine, she never forgets the first principle inculcated by her mother, that eternal southern belle: “Always smile, be nice and gracious to everyone … and never show your bum.”

His oldest son, James, is the only one of his children to become a musician, following the rocky path already trodden by Julian and Sean Lennon and Jakob Dylan. James maintains he was never under any paternal pressure to start singing or playing guitar, though being dubbed “Jimi” as a baby by Tina Turner was probably pressure enough. After leaving school, he turned down a college place at Loughborough to turn professional with a band named Turbogeist, but, as of 2011, they still did not have a record deal and James was living in a “dodgy” part of north London where the cookery skills he picked up as a child were much appreciated by his girlfriend and mates. He recently admitted that his father hadn’t yet been to a Turbogeist gig. “Dad once joked about coming along, but I joked that he couldn’t because there’d be too many teenage girls there.”

Karis went into film and television production, and recently directed her mother, Marsha Hunt, in a one-woman show based on Marsha’s novel Joy. Lucas, Sir Mick’s twelve-year-old son with Luciana Morad, lives in Brazil with his mother—now a leading TV presenter—but sees his father on a regular one-to-one basis, for instance joining him in South Africa to watch the 2010 soccer World Cup. All in all, it is a brood of which Captain von Trapp himself could be proud. To be sure, as Jade says, “My dad likes to get us all together from time to time, line us up, and make sure we’re all in check.”

HE STILL TURNS up continually in the papers or on YouTube, that new spy hole for voyeurs, slipping out of the rear entrances of clubs as discreetly as three or four security point men can make him; arriving at the Oscars ceremony, where he will probably now never pick up a statuette; making a surprise appearance in brother Chris’s church-hall blues band as a quid pro quo for Chris’s occasional help with song lyrics; or hanging out with the cofounder of Microsoft and one of the world’s richest men, Paul Allen.

All sorts of figures in public life, unconnected with rock ’n’ roll, have a personal, invariably fond anecdote about him: Sir Mick the cricket fanatic, charming a private box full of gruff old Panama hats at a Lord’s Test match; Sir Mick the wine connoisseur, ordering a pipe, or sixty cases, of 1977 vintage port (the year of Elvis Presley’s death) directly from the makers in Portugal; Sir Mick the history buff, authoritatively pronouncing TV historian Simon Schama “a bit spotty on the High Middle Ages”; Sir Mick the supposed mega-amnesiac, meeting would-be Tory MP Annunziata Rees-Mogg, daughter of former Times editor William, and gratefully recalling how her father saved his career back in 1967; Sir Mick the stickler for etiquette, who insists that all his homes contain a copy of Mrs. Beeton’s Household Management, the Victorian domestic manual, with its definitive rules on table placements, flower arrangement, and the correct way to clean silverware.

His legacy is all around us … in the endless debate about the sexualization of pop music that started with Elvis but went into overdrive with “Satisfaction” and has latterly focused on female performers from Madonna to Lady Gaga and Rihanna … in the faux-Cockney accent now used by young people from every background in every region of Britain … in the very latest hot new boy band, slouched on a sofa and taking the piss out of the media, thinking they’re the first ones ever to do it.

American rappers the Black Eyed Peas commemorate him in “The Time (Dirty Bit),” which, since its release in 2010, has scored 10 million hits on YouTube: “All these girls, they like my swagger
They callin’ me Mick Jagger …” In June 2011, Maroon 5’s tribute song, “Moves Like Jagger,” featuring Christina Aguilera (“Take me by the tongue
And I’ll let you know … I’ve got the moves like Jagger”) became an international smash, giving the band their first Billboard Top 10 hit since 2007 and Aguilera her first since 2008. At the same time there’s still nothing cooler than vintage Stones. When supermodel “Cocaine Kate” Moss—who has almost single-handedly made modeling “the new rock ’n’ roll”—married guitarist Jamie Hince, the couple drove away from the ceremony in a vintage Rolls-Royce with “Gimme Shelter” blasting from the stereo.

Moves like Jagger these days percolate into the most unlikely places. For example, the Welsh old-age home where—in a wonderful example of modern institutional care and sensitivity—residents were given a tambourine to shake if they needed to call for assistance. “These people are pensioners,” commented one justifiably outraged relative, “not Mick Jagger.” Nor can we forget the modern craze among otherwise rational women for having their lips artificially pumped up to the bolstery proportions God gave him naturally. That mouth, which was once unique to Mick and certain species of tropical fish, is now smeared across female countenances in every capitalist society on earth. (Hardly “Moves Like Jagger,” though, for being fitted with one of these perma-pouts leaves a face virtually incapable of movement.)