He did not reappear for another ten days. By now, Marsha’s tolerance was exhausted, and she railed at him for his neglect, holding baby Karis in her arms. Mick responded that “he had never loved me, and I was mad to think he had.” He added that, if he chose, he could take the baby away from her. Marsha’s spirited answer was that she’d “blow his brains out” if he tried.
For Marsha, there was thus an unpleasant double meaning in the title of Mick’s third film that year, Gimme Shelter, when it premiered in Britain a month later. And the Maysles brothers’ color documentary of the Stones’ return to America, and its gruesome climax at Altamont, seemed to reflect everything she now felt about Mick’s irresponsibility and uncaringness. The Maysles had continued filming as a twenty-two-year-old Hell’s Angel wannabe named Alan Passaro, identified mainly through their concert footage, had gone on trial in Oakland for the murder of the black teenager, Meredith Hunter. Passaro pleaded self-defense, claiming that Hunter had actually fired the handgun he was seen waving. Gimme Shelter was central to the prosecution’s case, but during the trial its seemingly irrefutable eyewitness evidence began to crumble. Outtakes from the film seemed to show Hunter previously taunting a group of Angels, and an orange flash coming from his weapon just before he was felled. The jury concluded that anyone who pulled a gun around Hell’s Angels, especially if he was black, deserved everything he got, and Passaro was acquitted.
Gimme Shelter showed Mick in the most unflattering possible light, a puny orange-satin harlequin at first oblivious of the nightmare around him, then powerless to affect it. His departure from Altamont Raceway looked most ignominious of all, sweat-soaked and visibly traumatized, crammed with thirteen other people into a helicopter bubble designed for eight. There was no mention of his “balls of a lion” for going onstage at all, let alone staying as long as he had. As usual, he was too cool to tell the real story, or allow it to be told, so once again the world thought the worst of him.
ON JANUARY 4, 1971, Performance opened in London with a charity premiere at the Warner Cinema, Leicester Square. Mick had asked that the proceeds be donated to Release, the hippie charity which—largely inspired by his and Keith’s ordeal in 1967—provided legal representation to young people arrested for drug possession. The Warner organization had at first thrown up their hands in fresh horror, but capitulated when Mick threatened to boycott the event unless his wishes were respected. His support, in fact, came as a godsend to Release’s founder, Caroline Coon, who was struggling against heavy odds to keep the service going. London’s foremost Beautiful People flocked to buy expensive tickets, with the promise of joining Mick at the preshow reception and the party afterward.
However, despite his enthusiasm for Release and his desire to cause Warner maximum discomfiture, his attendance at the premiere was never seriously in the cards. He had long ago lost interest in the film or any pride in his playing of Turner; more to the point, Bianca would hardly relish his steamy on-screen sex scenes with Anita Pallenberg and frolics in the bath with Anita and Michèle Breton.
On the night, an expectant crowd of literary and media celebrities gathered at the Warner West End, among them the famous drama critic and libertarian Kenneth Tynan and the editor of Oz magazine, Richard Neville. Anita turned up, accompanied—surprisingly—by Keith, but as the minutes ticked away to showtime, there was no sign of Mick. Finally, an angry deputation, led by Tynan’s wife, Kathleen, surrounded Caroline Coon, shouting that they’d been conned, if not Cooned. The celebs received assurances that Mick was flying in from Paris to join them and were persuaded to watch the film, then go to Tramp for dinner—on him—and he’d catch up with them later. But he never did. The explanation was that his flight had been delayed by fog.
Under the UK’s lingering film-censorship code, Performance received an adults-only “X” certificate which consigned it to the realm of cheap horror and skin flicks, limited its showings outside London, and ensured that thousands of youthful Mick fans could not legally see it. His one song from the soundtrack, “Memo from Turner,” had been released as a single the previous October, but had reached only No. 32. His best screen performance and best solo track thus came and went together.
The deal with Atlantic had by now been hammered out between Prince Rupert and Ahmet Ertegun. Marshall Chess remembers Ertegun repeatedly mopping his perspiring bald pate with a handkerchief during the final negotiations, as well he might. The Stones were to deliver four albums over six years and receive a royalty of one dollar on every copy sold—the highest rate ever paid to a recording act. The albums would be released under the imprimatur of Rolling Stones Records, with cover artwork as well as content dictated solely by the band. Rather than a lump sum shared out among them, Atlantic’s advance was to be a budget to cover the making of each album. Mick and Keith had originally wanted other artists on the label—distributing Jimi Hendrix’s label was one possibility—but Atlantic’s funding proved only enough to maintain the Stones.
It was Chess who suggested the label should have a logo that instantly identified it without need of any printed name. The idea occurred to him while he was driving through Holland to meet the Stones in Amsterdam and passed the wordless but universally recognized scallop-shaped symbol of the Shell Oil company. That inspired the notion of branding Rolling Stones Records, and all ancillary merchandise, with Mick’s lips and tongue—the most blatant declaration yet of who was both the star and the boss. Various designs were submitted by leading graphic artists, including one of a tongue with a pill on it, but none seemed quite right. Finally, a Royal College of Art student named John Pasche came up with the garish red, slurping, slavering winner. For creating what would become rock’s most famous piece of corporate identity (ultimately representing wealth almost comparable with Shell Oil’s), Pasche was paid £50, with a later top-up of £200.
Early March brought the Stones’ first British tour in four and a half years. At its opening press conference, Mick revealed that the band would be emigrating to France a month from now, and this was a formal farewell to their UK fans. Because no Briton must ever be seen to avoid tax, even by perfectly legal means, their PR man, Les Perrin, tried to dress up the decision as a purely aesthetic and cultural one, in line with Mick’s well-known dedication to self-improvement. “It’s not a case of running away from the tax man,” Perrin said with reeking disingenuousness. “The Stones like France tremendously.”
No other British band had ever gone abroad en bloc like this in the footsteps of literary celebrities like W. Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. Some commentators initially suspected it might also be a device for quietly breaking up the Stones rather than letting them take their chances against younger competition in the already teeming new pop decade. Just a month earlier, the Beatles’ long disintegration had finally come into the open with Paul McCartney’s application to the British High Court to wind up their business partnership. One interviewer reminded Mick how often John Lennon had accused the Stones of copying the Beatles, and asked whether that applied even now. “Nah, we’re not breaking up,” he answered. “And if we did we wouldn’t be as bitchy as them . . . We’ll remain a functioning group, a touring group, a happy group.” The Daily Telegraph suggested that over the years they could have earned as much as £83 million. Mick took a whole-page advertisement to dismiss the figure as “ludicrous.”
Prior to this UK farewell tour, Keith had made the first of what would be numerous attempts to overcome his heroin addiction. For all his gypsy-rebel air, he remained a shy, rather insecure character for whom drugs were a hiding place from the pressures of fame, and heroin the best one of all. (In later life, he would observe that Mick had an equally powerful addiction to flattery, “which is very like junk,” but never made the slightest attempt to clean up from that.) Over the previous year, his dependence had grown steadily more serious, encouraged not only by Anita but by his angelic-looking country-rock crony Gram Parsons, to the point where Mick’s PA Jo Bergman had seriously wondered whether
he’d survive the 1970 European tour.
Widely read Mick knew that when heroin threatened to destroy the great American writer William S. Burroughs, author of Naked Lunch, he had sought help from a British doctor named John Dent, who reduced the usual horrific withdrawal symptoms by means of an electronic box attached to the patient’s head. Dr. Dent had since died, but the treatment, known as apomorphine aversion therapy, was still practiced by his former nurse, a brisk matron known as Smitty. Keith submitted to Smitty’s ministrations at 3 Cheyne Walk in company with Gram Parsons, both sharing one bed like small boys in a boarding school sick bay. After putting them through five days of almost continual vomiting and incontinence, their nurse pronounced them cured.
The tour revisited most of the Stones’ old northern package-tour haunts, like Coventry, Manchester, and Newcastle-on-Tyne. They were almost the last survivors of those innocent days and, despite the gigantic loss of innocence they represented, met with screams as joyously infantile as ever. To conserve resources for the coming months abroad, intershow travel was by ordinary domestic flights or the purgatorial nationalized rail network. Bianca accompanied Mick, who already looked more than a little French in his floppy blue cap and gray suede maxicoat. He had spoken the language reasonably well since his school days, and now practiced constantly with the fluent Bianca. Journeys between gigs were whiled away with games of backgammon, at which Bianca proved remarkably adept, while still unbending little to their fellow players. Marshall Chess, from whom she won a small fortune, grumbled that “she even gambles in a foreign language.”
The final farewell gig was a nostalgic return to Soho’s Marquee Club, which had given the Stones their first break as an interval band, fronted by “R&B singer Mick Jagger,” in the matelot-striped summer of 1962. But the return was not a happy one. At the moment they were due to start, Keith—whom the prospect of emigration seemed to be stressing almost as much as going cold turkey—was still at Redlands, sixty miles away. He did not arrive until two hours later, in a filthy mood, leaving his Bentley parked on a double yellow line and stomping into the Marquee barefoot. Unluckily, the club was still run by Harold Pendleton, whose hostility to the beginner Stones for being “too rock ’n’ roll” Keith, in particular, had never forgotten or forgiven. The performance was to be filmed for American TV—to make up for their nonappearance in the States that year—and to gain maximum publicity. Pendleton wanted them to play in front of a large neon sign saying MARQUEE CLUB. There was a furious row which ended with Keith swinging his guitar at Pendleton’s head.
On March 30, the band bade their friends in British pop a personal farewell with a party at the super-respectable Skindles Hotel on the Thames at Maidenhead, attended by John Lennon and Yoko Ono (soon to go into exile themselves), Eric Clapton, and Roger Daltrey from the Who. At 2 A.M., the party was still in full swing, and after numerous complaints from other guests about its deafening music, the hotel abruptly cut off the power supply. An inebriated Mick picked up a table and hurled it through a plate-glass window.
Just before the start of the new British tax year, he and Bianca left London for Paris. Amazingly, Marsha Hunt still had not revealed the identity of Karis’s father or sought any further financial help from Mick, merely telling him he was free to see the baby whenever he wanted. According to Marsha, he seemed to have an attack of conscience just before he departed, and asked for Karis to be brought to see him. A meeting was duly arranged, but when Karis arrived, she was accompanied only by her nanny. Marsha did not attend, nor did she seize this golden opportunity for putting pressure on Mick afterward. The opportunity was still more golden, had she but known: Bianca was three months pregnant.
On April 7, the Stones reconvened in Cannes on the French Riviera to sign the agreement with Atlantic’s parent company, Kinney Services—who concidentally now owned Warner Studios and, therefore, Performance. In the second week of the month, Atlantic released their debut single on Rolling Stones Records, breaking the immemorial two-title formula with “Brown Sugar,” “Bitch,” and a live track, “Let It Rock.” Hard on its heels came the Sticky Fingers album with a cover conceived by Andy Warhol—a blue-denim-clad male crotch with a real zip fastener up its front. The zip unzipped to reveal white Y-fronts, an exposure somehow far more shocking than naked genitalia would have been.
The new Stone Age kicked off with a landslide victory: Sticky Fingers at No. 1 in the United States and UK and “Brown Sugar” No. 1 and No. 2, respectively. Disgruntled Decca tried to cash in by releasing a compilation of old Stones tracks (that is, with copyrights all owned by Allen Klein). Mick placed full-page advertisements in the music press, warning fans that it was substandard.
On May 10, he telephoned his London office from Saint-Tropez and told Shirley Arnold that he was to marry Bianca there two days later. He gave Shirley a list of seventy people he wanted invited and asked her to charter an airliner to fly them out at his expense. “But don’t tell them I’m getting married,” he added.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Friendship with Benefits
MICK’S SECRETIVENESS ABOUT the marriage indicated that it was to be a private affair, solemnized in some tasteful, tranquil place which no intrusive camera lens could penetrate. Up to the last minute, he kept the secret from everyone but the trusted associates whose organizational help he needed, not telling even his fellow Stones until twenty-four hours beforehand. The media had their suspicions, particularly when he was spotted collecting two matching gold rings from a Parisian jeweler, but his spokesman, Les Perrin, firmly denied any wedding was in the wind, as did a frowning Bianca. He seemed determined to stop the event from becoming, as he put it, “a circus.”
If you wish to marry quietly, of course, the place not to do it is the Côte d’Azur’s most glamorous resort at the height of the spring season, surrounded by dozens of your internationally famous chums. Mick’s Saint-Tropez nuptials in fact were the first celebrity wedding as we have since come to know them through magazines like Hello! and OK!, where the whole world effectively gets invited. The only difference in today’s version is the preselling of exclusive photographic access and the sponsorship deals which usually pay for the whole occasion and leave a tidy profit over. Perhaps the ultimate example was to come in 2000, when the wedding of British TV personality Anthea Turner helped promote a new chocolate bar. Now, if the Mars company had been on the ball in 1971 . . .
This veritable stampede to the altar after just eight months was entirely Mick’s idea. Bianca, as she later said, felt nowhere near ready for such a commitment and did not think her pregnancy ought to be a factor. Indeed, she told him she was quite prepared to flout her Catholic upbringing and have the baby out of wedlock. “As far as marriage was concerned, I was frightened of the whole idea,” she said later. “It’s Mick who is the bourgeois sort . . . He insisted on having a proper ceremony and becoming man and wife in the conventional sense.”
He certainly was doing it strictly by the book—or, rather, le livre. In traditional French style, there was to be a formal civil marriage in Saint-Tropez’s town hall followed by a service in the pretty hilltop chapel of St. Anne. For the latter to be allowed, protestant Mick had to receive instruction in the Catholic faith from a Jesuit priest, Father Lucien Baud, during which it emerged that the feast day of Saint Anne happened also to be his birthday. Father Baud was pleasantly surprised by his intelligence, knowledge, and receptiveness.
Despite the cloak of secrecy, British photographers began staking out Saint-Tropez several days before the wedding. Among them was a Paris-based freelancer named Reg Lancaster, who happened to have done some early shots of the Stones in their pub R&B days. Though initially hostile to these advance skirmishers, Mick ended up joining them to watch TV coverage of the soccer cup final between Arsenal and Liverpool being played back home in Britain. The game went to extra time, in which Arsenal beat Liverpool 2–1, but the French transmission cut off before this vital last segment. “Mick was an Arsenal fanatic,” Lancaster
recalls. “He went bananas when he couldn’t find out the score.”
On May 12, a chartered Viscount airliner arrived in Nice, bringing the seventy wedding guests Shirley Arnold had rounded up on forty-eight hours’ notice. They included two Beatles, Paul McCartney and Ringo Starr (still barely on speaking terms after the recent High Court action); Eric Clapton and his girlfriend, Alice Ormsby-Gore; the Queen’s photographer-cousin Lord Litchfield; the designer Ossie Clark; and the Faces’ guitarist Ronnie Wood. Pot freely circulated throughout the flight, much to the consternation of Les Perrin’s wife, Janey, who had to bully the worst offenders into hiding their stashes before touchdown.
Nor was this the only contraband undetected by Nice Airport’s douaniers. Also on the guest list was socialite and amateur race-car driver Tommy Weber, whose wife, Susan “Puss” Coriat, heiress to the Maple furniture fortune, was an acquaintance of Anita’s. Being currently back in rehab, Puss could not make the wedding, but Tommy had brought their two sons, eight-year-old Jake and six-year-old Charley, to act as pageboys. Thirty-nine years later, Jake Weber would allege that their true role had been as drug-carrying mules. Taped to his bare body under his shirt, each small boy carried half a kilo of cocaine, a wedding gift from Keith to Mick. The bridegroom was suffering more nerves than he let on, and had earlier told Spanish Tony Sanchez—so Sanchez later claimed—“A guy needs a little C-O-K-E to get him through his wedding day.”
The wedding’s operations center was the famous Hôtel Byblos, just off Saint-Tropez’s main square, Place des Lices. Mick had flown in his parents ahead of the main group but somehow forgotten to book accommodations for their two-night stay. “I had to get on to him to get them rooms at the Byblos,” Shirley recalls. “And for Les Perrin, his wife, Janey, and myself.”