Brian never knew about the I Ching’s chillingly accurate death-by-water prophecy, but in the Rif Mountains, watching Jajouka’s Rites of Pan, he seemed to receive a different sign of having “no expectations.” Suki and he were sitting cross-legged in the village square when a white goat was carried past to be sacrificed. It had a strangely familiar-looking blond fringe, and as Brian looked into its terrified eyes, something prompted him to whisper, “That’s me!”
MARIANNE WAS FIRST to make it to the big screen, starring opposite French heartthrob Alain Delon in The Girl on a Motorcycle. The film’s trailer showed her in one-piece black leather and featured a voice-over whose supercharged sexual imagery clearly had someone other than Delon in mind: “Now you’ll know the thrill of wrapping your legs round a tornado of pounding pistons . . . like the Girl on a Motorcycle! She goes as far as she wants, as fast as she wants . . . straddling the potency of a hundred wild horses!” In America, the title was changed to Naked Under Leather.
It was just how the public had imagined Mick and Marianne’s private life ever since Chichester Quarter Sessions and the “girl in the fur rug” headline: a nonstop high-octane sexual burn-up fueled by cartons, if not crates, of Mars bars. In fact, Marianne would admit in Faithfull that she’d always found sex “a problem”—as beautiful people not infrequently do—and that within about six months the initial passion between Mick and her had cooled to friendship, “the kind you get when you’ve been married a long time and know your partner doesn’t expect too much of you.” In bed, more often than not, they would have ramparts of books between them and be reading aloud to each other.
From the earliest stage, her autobiography would say, Marianne knew that Mick was continually unfaithful to her and, like the European aristocrat she was at heart, accepted it as his droit du seigneur over virtually every attractive female who crossed his path. “Getting upset about a little fucking around was unhip and middle class.” Nor did she care if—in her own enigmatic words—he “slept with men.” She herself had a few one-night stands, though more from a sense of fair play than any sense of rejection or frustration. One she would record was with Stash, Brian’s Russian princeling friend and co-bustee, who appealed to her sense of the romantic by climbing up the wisteria outside 48 Cheyne Walk and through her bedroom window while Mick was working in the garden studio with Keith.
The public perception of a drug-saturated couple was even more illusory than their supposedly unbridled sex life. While Mick certainly sampled most of what was available, moderation was his watchword, as in everything else except vanity; despite being around heavy drug users all the time, he himself never took a smidgen too much or lost an iota of precious self-control. Even LSD gave up in despair after finding no inner demons with which to unsettle him. Marianne, by contrast, was both naturally addictive and recklessly adventurous. From hash and acid, she soon progressed to cocaine, which she first encountered at a party with Robert Fraser: six neat white lines for six different guests to snort through a rolled hundred-dollar bill. Unaware of the protocol, Marianne snuffled up all six, one after the other.
Mick thoroughly disapproved of her growing drug intake and did all he could to discourage it—sometimes with anger, occasionally with heartfelt tears. The main sanction he could apply was money, and as a result Marianne also had a brief affair with the drug dealer Spanish Tony, whom she found repulsive but who was generous with freebies.
Drugs for Marianne increasingly became a way of anesthetizing herself against the pressures and ordeals of life with Mick. Not the least of these was his infatuation with aristocrats, “any silly thing with a title and a castle,” most of whom bored her silly. Occasionally she would embarrass him in front of his highborn friends, as at a banquet given by the Earl of Warwick at Warwick Castle when she took five Mandrax tablets by way of hors d’oeuvres and passed out into her soup. The ordeals also included visiting Mick’s parents, even though they were never other than sweet to her. Rather than risk a repeat of the Warwick Castle incident in front of Joe and Eva, Mick took to going to his parents’ home alone, dropping Marianne en route at the home of blues musician John Mayall, whose wife, Pamela, he regarded as a good influence. Chrissie Shrimpton would have recognized the controlling nature that even tried to choose suitable friends for her.
But by far the greatest pressure was living with someone who never forgot he was a rock star, who even in their most private moments together behaved as if he was “starring in an endless film” and “had to look good all the time for the great director in the sky.” Kind, thoughtful, generous, and chivalrous though he still often was, the compulsion to be cool ruled Mick’s existence and increasingly hid his nicer side. Worst of all were the moments when they put aside the books and Marianne tried to talk to him about the problems she was having with their relationship. What she came up against then was not so much rock-star cool as old-fashioned English reserve—Keith was the same—that shied away from any discussion of emotions or feelings. His refusal, or inability, to let her under his shiny superstar shell hurt far worse in the long run than all his playing around. “I was a victim of cool, of the tyranny of hip,” she would recall. “It almost killed me.”
Nonetheless, they both considered themselves to be together for keeps. No sooner had they settled in at Cheyne Walk than they began looking for a country house, selflessly assisted, as ever, by Christopher Gibbs. The search was complicated by grande dame whims on Marianne’s part that Mick still found amusing. If Gibbs found a property to view in, say, Shropshire, she would suggest “having lunch in Henley on the way.” When he protested that Henley wasn’t on the way to Shropshire, she would smile her misty smile and say, “It could be on the way.” So the lunch reservation in Henley would be made, and a car journey that should have taken only three hours would use up a whole day. In any case, nothing Mick saw, however old and beautiful or stunningly contemporary, was ever quite what he was looking for.
Their shared long-term view was confirmed at the beginning of October, when the Rolling Stones office announced Marianne was expecting a baby. By then she was actually five months pregnant, but thanks to floaty, shapeless hippie couture, no one had known but the Stones’ inner circle and her mother. She and Mick were agreed in wanting a girl and had already chosen the name Corrina, after the blues song by Taj Mahal (“I wouldn’t trade your love for money / Honey, you’re my warm heart’s flame.”)
Mick’s immediate response on learning the news was to say they should get married. Despite the sixties’ vaunted sexual liberation, women who gave birth outside wedlock were still considered social outcasts and their babies stigmatized as illegitimate. In Marianne’s case, it could only be seen as the final step in her chosen career as a fallen woman. However, she declined his proposal, joking that after his vociferous mother, “there couldn’t be another Mrs. Jagger.”
Pop stars had, of course, been in such situations before but never publicly acknowledged it, let alone seemed quite happy about it, as Mick did. And the moral outcry, no less from those who had previously drooled over stories of fur rugs and Mars bars, was deafening. Though Marianne was technically Catholic, the Anglican Church adopted her for the purpose of denouncing her as a sinner, the Archbishop of Canterbury himself asking his congregation to pray for her. Marianne made no public response—lest a hail of stones in the biblical sense might have greeted it—but on October 12, Mick went onto David Frost’s Frost on Saturday TV show to answer their accusers.
Pitted against him was Mary Whitehouse, self-appointed leader of a campaign to clean up “filth” on television, now also the nation’s main lay spokesperson against unmarried cohabitation and parenthood. With her metallic hair, headmistressy northern voice, and glinting spectacles, Whitehouse had a way of crushing opposition rather like Margaret Thatcher a few years later. “The fact of the matter,” she lectured Mick, “is that if you’re a Christian or a person with faith and you make that [marriage] vow, when difficulties come you have this basic thing you’v
e accepted. You find your way through the difficulties.” His response was a credit to London School of Economics debating tradition, even though the Tyranny of Cool prevented him from admitting he’d wanted to take that vow with Marianne. “Your church accepts divorce. It may even accept abortion . . . am I right or wrong? I don’t see how you can talk about this bond which is inseparable when the Christian church itself accepts divorce.”
Marianne’s sixth month of pregnancy coincided with Mick’s shooting of The Performers, now retitled Performance. Determined to take care of herself as she had not with her first child, Nicholas, she got right away from London and its narcotic temptations, retiring with her mother to a house Mick rented for her in Tuam in the wilds of Ireland’s County Galway. He made constant trips out to see her, for her pregnancy was proving a difficult one, and he also needed her input on how to play his first screen role.
In fact, he had got last-minute cold feet over Performance, nervous that he mightn’t be able to carry off the part of Turner, the reclusive rock star, and that he’d embarrass himself with intellectual friends like Gibbs and Robert Fraser. Since losing the Jagger name meant losing the whole film, producer Sandy Lieberson had Nicolas Roeg film him in a scene ahead of the main shoot, so easing him gently into the process—and making him feel too involved to pull out. Though the scene was just him alone in a room, spray-painting the wall, Lieberson said it proved the camera loved him and he was a natural. So when principal photography began in London in late October, Mick was on set, ready to make what would be the only worthwhile movie of his career.
The other Stones were not to appear in Performance or even feature as a band on the soundtrack, which instead included an impressive array of top American rock names such as Randy Newman, Buffy Sainte-Marie, and guitarist Lowell George. Mick himself was there primarily to be an actor, with the thing for which he was best known coming a long way second. Apart from the theme song, “Memo from Turner,” he had only one musical number on-screen, Robert Johnson’s “Come on in My Kitchen,” performed with no backup but his own guitar.
His nervousness in this alien new medium was mitigated by several familiar faces in addition to codirector Donald Cammell. The first choice to play Pherber, the senior of Turner’s two live-in girlfriends, had been Hollywood actress Tuesday Weld, whose most compelling credential was having starred opposite Elvis Presley in Wild in the Country. Weld flew to London to start work, but then had to drop out when a too-strenuous massage injured her back. Instead, Pherber was played by Anita Pallenberg, who had already made several movies and whose knowledge of rock stars’ ways, as Brian’s lover before she became Keith’s, was second to none. Just before the shoot, Anita, too, became pregnant, but chose to have an abortion rather than lose the role.
To lend authenticity to the homosexually tinged gangland sequences, David Litvinoff, the Stones’ pet enforcer, was hired as technical adviser and dialogue coach. Litvinoff’s special charge was James Fox, the hitherto posh young actor, now cast as the Cockney protection racketeer Chas. Under Litz’s tutelage, Fox learned to speak in the mock-formal banter London thugs use with their victims—which makes them performers in their own right—and toured the East End, meeting several of the Krays’ henchmen and working out at a boxing gym above the Thomas à Becket pub frequented by real-life muscle. For further verisimilitude, the supporting cast included Johnny Shannon, a former fighter, as the pederastic gang boss Harry Flowers, aka Ronnie Kray, and John Bindon, an enforcer for the Krays whose specialty was cutting off people’s hands with a machete.
Almost all of the film involving Mick was shot on location, inside Turner’s cavernous house. Though Cammell’s script placed this in run-down Notting Hill, it actually was in Lowndes Square, Belgravia, conveniently close to Cheyne Walk. The owner was Captain Leonard Plugge, an eccentric Member of Parliament and friend of royalty who had previously used it for private gaming parties. Christopher Gibbs was brought in to create a rock star’s lair with Moroccan cushions, candles, mirrors, and closets bursting with unisex clothes. All the windows were blacked out to deter prying fans and heighten the claustrophobic atmosphere.
Sandy Lieberson, it soon transpired, had not merely been schmoozing: Mick really was a natural—and, more than that, a director’s dream. In his enthusiasm for the project and desire to learn everything possible about the screen actor’s craft, his usual rock-star imperiousness, impatience, and petulance vanished completely. For all eleven weeks of shooting he reported punctually for work every day, obeyed his codirectors Nic Roeg and Cammell’s instructions to the letter, endured the repetitiveness and frequent tedium of filmmaking without complaint, and to the other cast members and crew came across as the friendliest, funniest, least pretentious of people. “It was,” Lieberson recalls wistfully, “a very happy shoot.”
According to folklore, Mick constructed his on-screen persona from the velvet-voiced devilment of Brian in happier times and the saturnine menace of Keith. But apart from dyed-black hair, Turner was pure Jagger, from his rouged and mascara’d face to his huge-buckled hipster trousers, alternately challenging, teasing, haughty, moody, or reading out passages from clever books in a cut-glass accent that would not have disgraced the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. At one point, the rock ’n’ roll hermit was actually referred to as “Old Rubber-Lips.” Even Mars bars made a brief appearance, lined up beside the front doorstep having, somewhat implausibly, arrived with the morning milk.
It was just as well that the house’s windows were blacked out. One scene required Turner to smoke joints in the bath with Pherber and his other live-in girlfriend, Lucy, played by an androgynous French nineteen-year-old named Michèle Breton, whom Cammell had discovered on a Saint-Tropez beach when she was only thirteen. To begin with, Mick was reluctant to use real joints in the bath scene lest it should spoil his focus, but was soon persuaded otherwise. Indeed, the reek of pot throughout the shoot made art director John Clark recall later: “You took one breath and you got stoned.” As one of the crew quipped to his colleagues, the drug supply was more reliable than the location catering. “You want to get a fuckin’ joint, they’re coming out of your ear’oles. You want a cup of tea, you got no fuckin’ chance.”
At its core, Performance was a study of Mick’s unsettling effect on other males, especially those who considered themselves most unassailably macho. Like so many unsuspecting guests at rock-star parties, Chas was to be fed hallucinogenic drugs, then undergo a trip orchestrated by Turner to shred away all his prized masculinity and expose the lurking demon that he might be just as gay as his avenging gang boss. At the climax, cross-dressed in a frilled shirt and curly wig, he became a grotesque parody of Turner, while Mick’s Turner metamorphosed into Harry Flowers. The filmmakers were banking on the shock value of seeing Mick in an ordinary suit, with his hair scraped back, taking care of business in a manner unthinkable for sixties rock icons (but exactly as he would be doing a short time hence). Here, too, he Cockney-sneered the line that justified the film’s title, and would be endlessly replayed on YouTube into the next century: “The only performance that makes it, that re-ally makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness.”
Though Anita was shown teasing and toying with Chas, so much like real-life Anita, the principal seducer clearly was Turner/Mick. A scene in Turner’s private recording studio briefly re-created the Stones’ front man performing an erotically charged dance with a fluorescent light tube for his mesmerized audience of one. In the film’s most memorable coup de cinéma, Chas was shown waking up in bed beside Turner. The long-haired figure instantly mounted him and kissed him devouringly. Only when it brushed its hair aside was it revealed to be not Mick but the androgynous Michèle Breton.
There were also troilistic sex scenes between Turner, Pherber, and Lucy which would allow millions who had fantasized about Mick in bed to watch him there in hugely magnified form—his little rib cage and hairless flesh; the prodigious lips in profile, gaping open like some scarlet-da
ubed volcano as Anita’s tongue flicked down like forked lightning from above. At these moments the set was closed and Nicolas Roeg filmed in 16mm to give more of a homemade porn-flick feeling. The gusto with which both played their parts gave rise to rumors that, with Marianne safely in County Galway, Mick and Anita actually did have sex on camera. Anita would always deny it, saying that at the time she was “a one-guy girl” (i.e., faithful to Keith) and that, anyway, Mick “was the last guy I would do that with.” Even if merely simulation, it was so convincing that, without Mick’s knowledge, the outtakes were turned into a half-hour short entitled Rehearsal for Performance. And on the Internet today, one can see still photographs of him during the sequence, lying beside Breton, some with a hand shielding his genitals, some not.
With Brian still at Redlands, Anita and Keith had borrowed Robert Fraser’s flat on Mount Street, Mayfair, also a conveniently short distance from the Plugge house. But, like Arthur Miller while his wife, Marilyn Monroe, was shooting The Seven Year Itch, Keith firmly refused ever to come and watch Anita in front of the camera. He was deeply uneasy about her sex scenes with Mick, even on the assumption these went no further than acting, and almost as put out that Mick should be doing something without him and the rest of the band. He could not stay away completely, however, and would sit outside in his car, sending in anguished notes to Anita—about which, Sandy Lieberson recalls, “she didn’t give a shit.” To Donald Cammell, she seemed to be “teasing Keith about wanting Mick, the way she used to tease Brian about wanting Keith.”