Such wiles had long since lost their efficacy. Mick and Bianca might share a bed, but outside the boudoir she was now just one of the crowd who daily competed for his attention. She had come to detest the elaborate web of Mick’s advisers and assistants with whom she had to negotiate to reach him: “the Nazi state,” she privately called it, subliminally influenced perhaps by that photo shoot with Leni Riefenstahl. There was also a new stinginess and seeming lack of concern for her that had marred even his impressiveness over the Nicaraguan earthquake. When he left Managua for the Stones’ Far East tour, Bianca stayed on to help the relief effort, living in a rented house for which he promised to pay. The rent did not arrive and she had to waste hours on disrupted phone lines trying to get through to Ahmet Ertegun’s office in New York before the problem was finally sorted out.
Her declaration of complete separateness from the Stones (“I have nothing to do with them!”) came less from hauteur than fear, as she later admitted. She was terrified of being drawn too deeply into a world whose pressures and excesses could, and frequently did, kill people. And terrified not only for herself. As a mother, she might not be perfect, but in comparison with Keith and Anita’s two small children, Marlon and Dandelion, Jade’s life was a model of normality.
Keith now lived part of the time in Jamaica, attracted by the music, the ganja—and, he would later claim, the chance to learn to fight properly with the knife he had always carried. In March, while coming down from the Stones’ Far East tour at his Ocho Rios beach house, he had a major bust-up with Anita over what he thought her unseemly involvement with some local Rastafarians. He stormed out and flew back to London alone, whereupon Anita was busted for cannabis possession and thrown into a horrific Jamaican jail, leaving the two children alone until neighbors realized their plight and took them in.
On June 26, the London Evening Standard splashed “ROLLING STONE RICHARD—GUN, DRUGS CHARGES” after Keith and Anita were raided back at 3 Cheyne Walk and heroin, cannabis, Mandrax, two unlicensed firearms, and a quantity of ammunition came to light, generating twenty-five charges in total. (Interestingly, no attempt was made to widen the search to Mick’s house, just a few doors away. As if some word had been quietly passed from Washington, D.C., he would never again be turned over by the British police.)
Hard and soft drugs and industrial quantities of alcohol and cigarettes were no longer the only hazards with which the Richard children had to live. In July, Keith’s Sussex cottage, Redlands, the scene of his martyrdom with Mick in 1967, was gutted by fire. Four-year-old Marlon having raised the alarm, it was assumed one of his drug-sozzled parents had nodded out with a lighted cigarette, though Keith claimed a mouse had caused the conflagration by nibbling through some electrical wires. In October, he celebrated lenient court treatment for the June bust (a £250 fine for him, a year’s conditional discharge for Anita) with a party in his suite at the Londonderry Hotel. While the grown-ups partied, fire broke out in the bedroom where Marlon lay asleep, the whole floor had to be evacuated, and Keith was banned from the hotel for life. Once again, he denied anyone had fallen asleep while smoking and blamed faulty electrics.
At four, Marlon was already his father’s keeper, ever watchful for the police raid or the cigarette burning into the bedspread. And loving mother though Anita was, her child care left something to be desired. Marlon would sometimes be looked after by Bianca and Mick—who, characteristically, was always kind to him. Once when Bianca tried to take off his socks, she found he’d been wearing them so long that they were welded to his feet.
What her detractors never realized was that Bianca’s Egyptian-cat aloofness masked a conventional, even straitlaced person for whom life with Mick proved an endlessly unfolding catalog of disillusionment. She hated the impermanence of their existence, which, thanks to his tax situation, was a constant shuttle between America, France, Britain, and Ireland, never settling longer than a few weeks anywhere. He was a fugitive from income-tax authorities as much as Keith ever was from the law, haunted by dread of breaching his nonresident status—especially in Britain, where the tax man was believed to be all-knowing and all-seeing. Bianca would later recall an illicit stay at Cheyne Walk when they had to crouch down when passing windows so as not to be seen and generally act “like squatters.”
Then there were the other women. It had been only weeks after her marriage, when still pregnant with Jade, that Bianca had learned about Marsha Hunt and Karis. Her assertion that she didn’t care about Mick’s long-concealed love child, or Marsha’s paternity suit, convinced no one who really knew her. Then there were all the other women she later found out about—and the still-greater number she never did. A faint consolation, as she told the Sunday Times, was that “Mick sleeps with many women, but rarely has affairs with them. They are all trying to use him . . . nobodies trying to become somebodies.”
One such infidelity that Bianca never discovered she certainly would have given a damn about. Just weeks after she met him, he’d had a brief final fling with her predecessor, Marianne Faithfull. It was the time of the Sticky Fingers album, which coincidentally included Mick’s version of “Sister Morphine,” the song marking Marianne’s final surrender to heroin.
By this point, pop’s former Virgin Mary literally had nothing left to lose; her addiction had destroyed her singing and acting career, eaten up her money, deprived her of custody of her son, Nicholas, and driven her mother, the once-indefatigable Baroness Erisso, to attempt suicide. During a detox attempt in a private clinic, she’d had two of her front teeth knocked out by a male nurse after getting a friend to smuggle her in some smack. Her nadir was spending some months as a street addict in St. Anne’s Court, a grubby Soho alley with the same name as the Saint-Tropez chapel where Mick and Bianca had married.
One day, she left her West End junkie friends for a nostalgic stroll down Chelsea’s King’s Road and, outside the Granny Takes a Trip boutique, chanced to bump into Mick. As she would recall, he greeted her as if they’d last seen each other yesterday, kissed her, then began fondling her in a manner clearly indicating that all her attempts to make herself unattractive still had not quite succeeded. The manager of Granny Takes a Trip let them borrow a room above the shop, where they had sex without speaking a word, then kissed and went their separate ways.
The encounter led to yet another attempt to clean up—this time at, of all places, Bexley Hospital, near Dartford, Kent, where the schoolboy Mike Jagger had worked as a porter during his summer holidays.
THE NEWEST FAD in British pop was glam rock; the sound was a pastiche of 1950s rock ’n’ roll and the style was essentially what Mick had been doing for four or five years already. Bands whose heterosexuality could never be doubted put on effete, glittery clothes, teased their hair into streaky pompadours, and slathered their faces in makeup. Glam rock made huge teenybop idols of several artists who had enjoyed only marginal success in the sixties, like Rod Stewart, Elton John, and Marsha Hunt’s other old flame, Marc Bolan. But the one with the most obvious designs on Mick’s throne was David Bowie.
Born David Jones in 1947, Bowie shared Mick’s Kentish roots, having been raised in Bromley first, then in still-less-compelling Beckenham. After a one-off hit single, “Space Oddity,” in 1969, he had developed into a performer whose high-art influences, and sky-high camp, did not prevent him acquiring a female following as frantic as Mick’s had ever been. While Mick’s stage persona had always been a fiction, Bowie went the further step of creating an actual alter ego, a spiky-haired, white-faced, platform-booted space alien named Ziggy Stardust who had fallen to earth and become a rock star.
Though no one looking at Ziggy’s blend of vaudeville and sci-fi would have guessed it, Bowie had to a great extent modeled himself on Mick. He used a stage name half in homage to the American frontier knife and half to Jagger; he recorded at Olympic Studios because of their historic connection with the Stones; he had even been photographed in a Mr. Fish frilly dress reminiscent of Mick’s in Hyde Park. While
most of his songs came from their own weird, genderless world, the odd one—like “The Jean Genie” on his Aladdin Sane album—had blazing guitar riffs and an unequivocal sexual challenge that suggested he would always have preferred to be fronting the Stones. More than one UK music journalist had dubbed him “Mick Jagger’s heir.”
For all Ziggy Stardust’s huge success, Bowie quickly tired of his imposture and in July 1973, after a sold-out concert at London’s Hammersmith Odeon, announced he was killing Ziggy off. Mick was at the show and, at the Café Royal party afterward, transfixed a roomful of celebs, including Barbra Streisand and Ringo Starr, by kissing Bowie full on the lips.
Despite his mega-campness, Bowie was married to a young American woman previously known as Angie Barnett who had played a crucial part in his rise. Both were self-proclaimed bisexuals, their marriage was a famously open one, and before long Mick was rumored to be having an affair with each of them simultaneously. Certainly, Bowie’s admiration seemed to border on infatuation. Melody Maker’s New York correspondent, Michael Watts, recalls him spending an evening rhapsodizing about Mick and showing every sign of being “totally in love with him.”
To facilitate the supposed ménage à trois, the Bowies had a flat on Oakley Street, Chelsea, just a short distance from Cheyne Walk. Though no hard evidence of Mick’s involvement with either Mr. or Mrs. Bowie ever emerged, Angie claimed to have once returned home from America early one morning to find him sharing a bed with David. Bowie, through his lawyer, said all suggestions of a sexual relationship were “absolute fantasy,” while Mick dismissed them as “total rubbish.” However, the pair did not exactly discourage such speculation; a snapshot survives of them cuddled up together suggestively on a couch.
Mick may have been rather more concerned with monitoring his biggest rival since Jimi Hendrix. Bowie, indeed, had formally thrown down the gauntlet, declaring that Rudi Valentino, his post–Ziggy Stardust alter ego, was “the next Mick Jagger.” Mick’s keenness to hang out with him had a slight whiff of the old Mafia proverb “keep your friends close and your enemies closer.” This could sometimes backfire: when Bowie came to a Stones concert in Newcastle, Mick suffered the novel experience of losing his audience’s attention midsong. Glancing round, he realized the front rows had sighted Bowie’s carrot-haired figure in the wings.
The next Stones album, Goats Head Soup (released August 31 in the UK, September 12 in the United States), showed glam rock firmly taking hold. Goat’s-head soup, or Manish water, is a Jamaican delicacy, and an inner sleeve to the album showed an eyeless ram’s head immersed in broth, looking more like the ingredients for a satanic rite than supper. The front cover was a David Bailey shot of Mick’s face through a gauzy veil, his scarlet lips parted in coquettish surprise somewhat recalling Marilyn Monroe in The Seven Year Itch when the subway breeze blows up her dress.
The single from the album was a ballad called “Angie,” sung with a whispery pathos that did not distort the name so much as stretch it on a rack: “Ayn-jeh . . . Ay-y-y-n-n-jeh . . .” Mick was generally thought to be serenading Mrs. David Bowie, but actually the song was by Keith, written for his daughter, Dandelion, to whom the Swiss maternity clinic had given the local saint’s name Angela. Ahmet Ertegun had qualms about releasing such an untypical Stones product, but was overruled, and the single immediately went to No. 1 in America, though only No. 5 in Britain.
A battle Ertegun did win was over Mick’s song “Starfucker,” aimed at a type of female he knew so well and including a line about “giving head to Steve McQueen.” The title had to be changed to “Star Star” and the “giving head” reference cleared in advance with McQueen (who, of course, was hugely flattered). During the composition process, Chris O’Dell had been surprised to get a phone call from Mick, whom she had not seen since they’d enjoyed friendship with benefits a year previously. With the enthusiasm he never showed in public, he sang “Starfucker” to her over the phone and also gave her to understand he was still hanging out with Carly Simon.
Goats Head Soup likewise topped the album charts—ultimately going triple platinum (three-million-plus copies) in America—but pleased the critics hardly more than Exile on Main St. had done. In Creem magazine, Lester Bangs wrote there was “a sadness about the Stones now because they amount to such an enormous ‘so what?’ ” For Thomas Erlewine, it marked the end of “the greatest winning streak in rock history . . . where the Stones’ image began to eclipse their accomplishments as Mick ascended to jet-setting celebrity and Keith sank into addiction . . . It’s possible to hear them moving in both directions on Goats Head Soup, at times in the same song.”
September brought a tour to promote the album in Britain and Europe, with Mick noticeably cracking down on on-road bad behavior. The main casualty was saxophonist Bobby Keys, hitherto Keith’s most faithful partner in crime. Bobby had already blotted his copybook during the Far East tour when a syringe slid out of one of his saxes as the band went through airport security in Hawaii. On October 17, he failed to show up for the penultimate European gig, at Brussels’ Forêt Nationale, being otherwise engaged with a Belgian girl in a bathtub full of champagne. Mick summarily fired him and, despite all Keith’s pleas, remained implacable.
Bobby therefore sadly missed the first viewing of Robert Frank’s documentary on the ’72 American tour, whose title employed one of his favorite expressions: it was called Cocksucker Blues. The name came from Mick’s pornographic blues song about rent boys and sex with pigs which the Stones had recorded as an up-yours gesture to Decca Records when they defected to Atlantic. Though he had written and sung “Cocksucker Blues” purely as a joke, it had since found its way into circulation and, performed by a different vocalist, even featured in an off-Broadway show, The Trials of Oz, about Oz magazine’s prosecution under British obscenity laws. Rolling Stones Records’ boss, Marshall Chess, also planned to put Mick’s original version on an album of X-rated music, featuring various other prominent artists. The Stones’ sometime session pianist, Dr. John, had already turned in a contribution entitled “How Much Pussy Can You Eat?”
Cocksucker Blues, the documentary, followed on from Dr. John. If there wasn’t much rock ’n’ roll (Robert Frank being too much of an artist merely to film a band onstage), there were drugs and sex in superabundance. Shooting some color but largely black-and-white—what the American novelist Don DeLillo would later call “a washed blue light, corruptive and ruinous”—Frank had used his access-all-areas and his force of camera-operating insiders to the full. There were scenes of people unself-consciously snorting cocaine, smoking and passing joints, and a heart-chilling one of a young girl in a hotel room mainlining heroin. A naked groupie lay on a bed with wide-open legs, fondling herself appreciatively while a male voice-over enthused about her “snatch.” Other unclad females lounged around, exchanging banal small talk, like goods on a supermarket shelf.
Most of the action involved minor figures in the road company, although an early vignette showed Mick slipping a hand inside his sateen trousers and appearing to masturbate (surely an unnecessary act for him if anyone). Caught up in the most depraved scene, an in-flight orgy aboard the Lapping Tongue, he made obvious efforts to distance himself. The culmination was the stripping naked of a nineteen-year-old groupie by a burly middle-aged roadie, who then twirled her aloft and buried his face in her crotch. As it was happening, Mick boogied down the aisle with Mick Taylor, shaking a rattle in Latin rhythm and chortling that the “show” deserved an Oscar.
Just as unsparing was Frank’s record of life on the road in America: the raw concrete backstage areas and monotonous hotel suites, the endless packing and unpacking, the card games on unmade beds, the massed liquor bottles, the overloaded ashtrays, the despoiled room-service trolleys, the endless, bored wandering back and forth between interconnected rooms, the monolithic black bodyguards stationed in corridors day and night for fear of avenging Hell’s Angels. One backstage sequence showed a stoned-to-the-gills Keith squatting on a metal bench
and mumbling incoherently while Ahmet Ertegun, immaculately blazered as always, did his best to murmur agreement in suitable places. There was also the beyond–Spinal Tap moment in Denver when Keith and Bobby Keys staged an example of rock-star naughtiness for the camera, heaving a TV set from their hotel room window onto some garbage cans seven or eight floors below, then doubling up in rather contrived hysterics.
Frank had even been given access to Mick and Bianca’s suite at the New York Sherry-Netherland before the wrap-up shows at Madison Square Garden. Although it was Mick’s birthday, the immense brocaded space was wrapped in silence, its only other occupant Mick’s superdiscreet driver-assistant, Alan Dunn, folding and packing jumpsuits. Bianca, appropriately all in white, flitted to and fro, scarcely uttering a word. At one point she volunteered that she’d like to go to Elaine’s restaurant, whose owner kept a communal table for favorite star clients like Woody Allen. But Mick—still oh-so-quietly—thought not: “terrible food, terrible people, terrible woman.”
Marshall Chess, the film’s producer, showed it to the Stones while they were working at Musicland studios in Munich on a new album that would become It’s Only Rock & Roll. Seeing what was only their kind of rock ’n’ roll in such minute detail, as Chess recalls, “left them all in shock.” However, there was clearly no question of the worldwide cinema release that had been intended. Warner Bros., the financiers of Performance, had first refusal on distribution. But even in the new Hollywood of the 1970s, where nudity and four-letter words had become the norm, no mainstream company would tolerate a production called Cocksucker Blues, or dare to market this one, whatever its title. Not the least problem was the filmmaker’s failure to obtain signed releases from most of the people shown in compromising situations. “When you’re having sex or shooting up,” Marshall Chess says, “you’re not going to want to sign a release.”