With their matching golden heads and floor-length robes, Brian and Anita seemed to Marianne “like two children who had inherited a decrepit palazzo.” Having both exotic European ancestries and intellectual curiosity in common, Marianne and Anita got on well, though Marianne always professed herself “terrified” by the sardonic beauty who at one moment was Brian’s dominatrix, at the next a seemingly helpless victim of his physical abuse. Like others at their court, she pretended not to notice when Anita’s hippie finery was topped off by brutally bruised arms or a black eye.
Usually Marianne would find Brian absorbed in efforts to catch up with the Jagger-Richard songwriting partnership, scribbling lyrics in notebooks or putting embryo songs on tape, then erasing them because they never seemed good enough. The flat had no front doorbell; instead visitors had to stand in the street and shout until their host or hostess appeared on a first-floor balcony. One day while Marianne was there, the mother of one of Brian’s two illegitimate children named Julian appeared, hoping to shame him into paying maintenance. She stood in the street, holding the baby up entreatingly with both arms, while Brian and Anita looked down from the balcony, laughing like tsarist nobility at comical peasants.
For all Brian’s pot-fumed hilarity, Marianne noticed how “a doomed look had begun to set on his face. Inner demons had started eating that Renaissance angel’s head . . .” On acid, his paranoia increased to the point where he heard voices plotting against him even in gurgling water pipes or the fizz of electrical wiring, and, with yet more horrible foresight, he was painting a mural of a graveyard on the wall above his and Anita’s bed.
Keith would almost always be there, too, “exuding lonely bachelorhood” since his breakup with Linda Keith, having walked the four miles to Chelsea from St. John’s Wood. Mick put in only occasional appearances from far-distant Harley House, somewhat like a boss checking on his workforce, and soon departed, unnerved by all the drug use and appalled by the squalor of the kitchen.
By the winter of 1966, Marianne and Dunbar had separated and Marianne and baby Nicholas were on their own at the Lennox Gardens flat. Disillusioned by the superficiality of her pop career, Marianne wanted to progress to acting but recently had had to turn down a plum offer, playing opposite Nicol Williamson at the Royal Court Theatre in John Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence, because her management said it paid too little. One day, Andrew Oldham dropped by to see her, accompanied by Mick. Despite all Mick’s recent sneering at women, she noticed how he took in the chilly basement with its single small electric fire and sensed his genuine sympathy for her predicament.
Early in October, Keith and Brian invited Marianne to a Stones concert, with Ike and Tina Turner as the support act, at the Colston Hall in Bristol. Backstage, she found Mick in a corridor being taught by Tina Turner, the sexiest dancer in the cosmos, to do the Sideways Pony. As she watched him being bossed around by Tina—told he was useless, in fact, but taking it good-humoredly—she still had not the smallest inkling of what lay ahead.
AFTER THE COLSTON HALL show came the usual hanging out back at the Stones’ hotel, with Keith, Brian, and trusted courtiers like the photographer Michael Cooper. As Marianne recalls in her autobiography, Faithfull, she smoked joint after joint until she was “speechless and unable to move.” Gradually the others drifted away, leaving only her, Mick, and one of the Ikettes, Ike and Tina Turner’s backing dancers, who hoped to be Mick’s companion for the night and took an annoyingly long time to realize that three was a crowd.
By now it was getting on for morning, and despite the October chill, Marianne proposed a walk in the park next to the hotel. To discover if Mick was anything more than the rude little yob of their previous encounters, she gave him a viva voce test in the Arthurian legends, so many of which are rooted in Bristol’s West Country hinterland. He not only answered every question correctly but proved himself a modern Sir Lancelot when they returned to his room by unlacing her dew-soaked boots and placing them on a heater to dry before they got down to making love. Marianne was “completely moved by his kindness.”
For both of them, however, it initially seemed no more than just another casual fling. With a failed marriage behind her, Marianne was in no hurry to commit herself again. And if she did so with anyone, she wanted it to be with Keith Richard. To her bookish mind, especially in the dazzle of LSD, Keith resembled the poet Byron, “the injured, tormented, doomed Romantic hero with wild hair and gaunt visage . . . an eruptive, restless presence . . . a fusion of decadence and surging energy.” Yet in all those acid-dropping nights together at Courtfield Gardens, she had never dropped any hint of how she felt about him. Partly this was because she sensed his own inadmissible fixation on the girlfriend of his new best mate. He clearly worshipped Anita Pallenberg and longed as devoutly as any Camelot knight errant to rescue her from Brian’s ill treatment, but was constrained by loyalty to a brother Stone from making the slightest move.
Mick, too, seemed to have his sights set elsewhere. After ending things with Chrissie Shrimpton—a moment that everyone around him, bar Chrissie, now knew to be imminent—he had ambitions to date British cinema’s sexiest new face, Julie Christie. But that night at the Ship Hotel, Bristol, with its quiz about Guinevere, Mordred, and Excalibur, proved impossible to forget. When the tour ended, he telephoned Marianne and, from that moment, began secretly visiting her at her Lennox Gardens flat.
For Marianne, he was a welcome change in every way from John Dunbar, the only other man with whom she’d ever been in a serious relationship. Whereas Dunbar had been too cool and hip to show her the affection she demanded, Mick continued to be as loving, kind, and considerate as when he’d saved her boots from the foggy, foggy dew. Whereas Dunbar had been deeply into drugs, Mick was only marginally and manageably so; where Dunbar was ascetic, Mick’s love of luxury, refinement, and shopping almost matched Marianne’s own; whereas Dunbar had been vague and disorganized, Mick was decisive and effective; whereas Dunbar had an artist’s indifference to money, Mick was rich and—especially in the first flush of romance—munificently generous. Marianne’s son, Nicholas, now aged one, acquired a variety of expensive new toys, and electric heaters glowed throughout the once-chilly little Knightsbridge flat. “I needed a friend,” Marianne recalls. “Mick was a friend who happened to be a millionaire.”
In Faithfull, she would write that, from the very beginning, she “realized in some part of my mind that Mick was bisexual” and sensed the “sexual undercurrent” between him and Andrew Oldham. Indeed, his more feminine qualities of sensitivity and intuition were part of his appeal after the one-dimensionally macho males to whom she was accustomed. She would later claim that one night when they were in bed together, he even confessed to a fantasy of performing oral sex on Keith (who happened to be asleep in the next room). Here, Marianne could wholeheartedly concur: in Faithfull, she would confess that throughout her whole time with Mick, she remained secretly lusting after Keith.
In the run-up to Christmas 1966, she departed with Nicholas and his nanny for a holiday in Positano on Italy’s Amalfi coast. With her she took a copy of the Stones’ just-released compilation album, Big Hits: High Tide and Green Grass, whose tracks included Mick’s version of “As Tears Go By”—his feminine side at its most delicate and sensitive. Whenever she played the album, it seemed, the phone would ring and it would be Mick surreptitiously calling her from London. Torn between his seductive wooing and Keith’s Byronic decadence, she even sought advice from the Stones’ business manager, Allen Klein: the only known occasion when that hawk-eyed moneyman was asked to play agony aunt. Klein told her that if she did manage to pair off with Keith, it would “destroy” Mick.
On returning to London, she headed straight for Brian’s flat, where she found Keith and the doomed young Guinness heir, Tara Browne, the latter now just days away from “blowing his mind out in a car.” There was no sign of Anita or any other female, and as Marianne dropped acid with Brian, Keith, and Tara, it was plain that the trio thoug
ht sex with her would be part of the trip. Two of them, however, quickly became too stoned to do any such thing, while even the priapic Brian managed only a brief grope while the others slumped, insensible, nearby. The party then dispersed, but a few hours later Marianne and Keith met up again and spent the night together at the Mayfair Hotel—“the best night I’ve ever had in my life,” she would later say, implicitly including the thousand and one with Mick that were to follow. However, the next morning all Keith wanted to talk about was how smitten Mick was with her.
A couple of days later, she and Mick went out shopping together; he bought a tricycle as a Christmas gift for Nicholas at Harrods and they had a late, long lunch at the San Lorenzo restaurant on Beauchamp Place. If they’d wanted to be seen by friends of Chrissie Shrimpton, they couldn’t have planned it better.
Until this moment, all Chrissie knew was that Mick had become increasingly remote and strange in his manner toward her. “With hindsight, I don’t blame him,” she says. “You can’t help going off people, and we were both very, very young. I knew the reason why he was getting fed up with me; it was because I wasn’t cool. He was taking acid by that time, and I was always scared to try it. It was also when Anita Pallenberg had just come on the scene, and these orgies started happening over at Brian’s. When I was first with Mick, I wasn’t allowed to look at anyone else or even be friends with girls he considered tarts. Now he wanted everyone to sleep with everyone else, and I refused to be a part of that. I remember him calling me ‘uncool’ and it being the most terrible insult.”
Pent up with her dog and six cats on the fifth floor at Harley House, still tortured by thoughts of the wedding and babies that might have been, and guilt-ridden over her estrangement from her father, Chrissie felt herself perilously near the state Mick had had such fun with in “19th Nervous Breakdown.” Mick suggested she should see a psychiatrist, of whom an abundance were to be found just across the road on Harley Street. She paid a couple of visits to an unsympathetic middle-aged shrink, who seemed mainly concerned to know whether her sex life with Mick was still healthy. A deeply embarrassed Chrissie said that it was. The shrink requested to see Mick also, then reported back to her that Mick was definitely still in love with her.
On December 15, the day of Mick’s shopping trip with Marianne, he and Chrissie had been due to go to Jamaica on holiday. When Chrissie telephoned the office, she discovered that their flights had been canceled.
But she still had no idea that he was seeing Marianne. “I remember thinking, ‘He doesn’t want me and I can’t live without him.’ ” Alone at the Harley House flat with her dog, six cats, and three songbirds chirruping in their Victorian cage, Chrissie took an overdose of sleeping pills. “It wasn’t just attention seeking or a cry for help,” she says. “I really wanted to die. I thought my life was over.”
She believes it was Mick who found her, though she has never been completely sure. When she regained consciousness, she was in St. George’s Hospital, Hyde Park Corner. The nurses tending her called her by a name she didn’t recognize. To prevent the story leaking out to the newspapers, she had been checked in under an alias.
From there on, Chrissie says, less attention seemed to be given to her physical and mental state than to hushing up the fact that Mick Jagger’s girlfriend had attempted suicide. From St. George’s, she was taken “in a wheelchair, in the back of a lorry” to a private clinic in Hampstead, where, without any choice in the matter or even explanation, she was given some kind of sleep therapy. “The basement where they put me was so damp that I remember, as I lay in bed, my feet were wet. Every time I came round, I was put back to sleep. I asked to see my psychiatrist, but when I tried to ask him what was happening, he stuck a needle into my arm while I was speaking and knocked me out again.”
Finally, she managed to struggle to a pay phone and contact her mother in Buckinghamshire. The long estrangement with Ted Shrimpton over her cohabitation with Mick was instantly forgotten. “I’ll always remember that when my father arrived at this clinic, he was in tears—something I’d never seen before.” She also sent a plea to Mick to bring her her Yorkshire terrier, Dora. “He did bring the dog . . . and when he arrived, he was wearing a black fur coat and full makeup. Again, I don’t blame Mick for any of this. The way I was treated was probably thought to be the best, and no doubt cost a lot of money—and it was all semi out of his hands. But it was very frightening and very scarring.” Mick subsequently did speak to her mother, admitting that he’d been responsible for a radical change in her personality, and he didn’t like what she’d become. “From being strong and feisty and good fun, I’d turned into a neurotic mess.”
Only after Chrissie was released from the hospital, and recuperating at home in Buckinghamshire, did she learn from the newspapers about Mick and Marianne. When at last she nerved herself to return to Harley House to collect her possessions and six cats, she found the flat’s front-door lock had been changed and she had to telephone the Stones’ office and make an appointment. There was no further discussion or contact with Mick; instead, she had to deal with his brother, Chris, the near namesake to whom she’d always felt close, but who now treated her with icy indifference. “That was horrible, because I’d been so fond of him. He let me know I certainly didn’t have any right to be back there.”
Nowadays, no major rock star dumps a long-term girlfriend with impunity. As his partner or common-law wife, she can claim to have contributed to his success and, as such, to be entitled to a substantial part of his fortune. Should this tactic fail, she can make a lucrative book deal for her memoirs, sell interviews at high prices to tabloid newspapers and magazines, haunt the TV talk-show circuit, and in general be a rankling embarrassment forever afterward. But for twenty-three-year-old Mick, all such things were still mercifully far in the future; he could cast off Chrissie with as little difficulty as a once-worn satin shirt.
Marianne had returned to Italy with Nicholas and her backing guitarist, Jon Mark, to appear at the San Remo Song Festival. On an impulse, she telephoned Mick and asked him to join her. They met at Cannes Airport, and to escape the press, Mick chartered a boat with a skipper and crew, and they spent an idyllic week with Nicholas cruising along the Riviera coast. Though the Mediterranean mostly stayed millpond smooth, there was one day when a heavy swell blew up and the boat began to pitch and roll alarmingly. When Nicholas started to cry, Mick climbed into the bunk with Marianne and him, cradled them both in his arms, and was comforting and reassuring.
In San Remo, the two gave an interview to the Daily Mirror journalist Don Short, tacitly admitting they were now together. There, too, in a local discotheque, Marianne bought some mild uppers from the deejay so that she and Mick could keep dancing until dawn.
The news that the wicked, unkempt chief Rolling Stone and the young woman who’d brought virginity and refinement to the pop charts were now an item caused less of a media furor than might have been expected. Marianne was separated from her husband, so there was no question of enticement by a sex-mad fiend, and she had a one-year-old child, which dealt with the virginity issue. Moreover, the news blackout around Chrissie’s attempted suicide had been 100 percent effective. There was little for journalists to write other than that Beauty and the Beast had been reincarnated in Swinging London.
When they returned from San Remo, Mick wanted Marianne to move into Harley House with Nicholas without delay. Marianne agreed, despite some squeamishness about occupying rooms he had so recently shared with someone else—which, indeed, still contained some of Chrissie’s possessions, including Petunia, the rocking horse he’d given her for her twenty-first birthday. Christopher Gibbs, the Stones’ antique-dealer friend, was brought in to remove all traces of uncool 1965 and give the place a mystic Moroccan makeover like Brian and Anita’s. Anything Marianne wanted, for herself or her son, she could have. Even so, she felt it a wise precaution to keep her old flat in Knightsbridge.
Few types of romance are more exhilarating than those betwe
en total opposites—at least in the rosy beginning, as the lovers introduce each other to their alien worlds and take on the added mystique of all-knowing teachers and guides. And from its genesis in a spot test about Camelot, this affair between an Austrian baroness’s intellectual daughter and a Dartford gym teacher’s son had a certain schoolroom flavor. Marianne, whose musical tastes had hitherto tended toward the twee and folksy, now received a crash course in Mick’s blues and soul idols, from Robert Johnson and Slim Harpo to Smokey Robinson and the Miracles. Mick, whose literary adventures thus far had not gone much beyond James Bond, was inducted into Marianne’s numerous favorite books, both ancient and modern, and also her passion for mythology, magic, and the occult.
Literature was not the only area in which Beauty far outdistanced the Beast. Despite unrelenting peer pressure on every side, Mick still did almost no drugs beyond the occasional “little smoke” that seldom seemed to affect him much—though he remained as bad as ever at handling alcohol. When he did take acid, Marianne noticed, he remained impressively in control; unlike Brian, he seemed to have no deep-seated fears or insecurities for the drug to ferret out and blow up to big-screen size. For their first trip together at Harley House, five floors above the hurtling Marylebone Road traffic, they both donned their finest hippie clothes and Mick put on a record of an Indian raga. As the acid took hold, he began to dance—not the sexual strutting and posturing of his stage shows but with “pure beauty and exaltation . . . He had become Shiva. I hadn’t realized until then that I was living with somebody who at odd moments could turn into a god.”
The mystical mood evaporated when Andrew Oldham’s new recording protégés, the Small Faces, unexpectedly showed up with their guitars and asked Mick to join them in a jam session. But as interruptions went, it could have been worse.
NINETEEN SIXTY-SEVEN, THAT most horrifically memorable year of Mick’s life (whatever he may say), kicked off with a flurry of small scandals that in the coming months—along with every previous scandal—would pale into insignificance.