Though New York had inspired something called punk rock early in the seventies, this was a very British version in its anger and nihilism as well as its strong satiric streak. UK punk was rebellion in the form of self-torture, its uniform the kind of bondage garments previously worn only in private by sadomasochistic fetishists, its jewelry chains, rings, metal studs, and outsize safety pins piercing the tenderest parts of the body and face. It was in fact the same blast of energy through a somnolent youth culture and pop scene that the Rolling Stones had been a decade and a half earlier. Its defining band, the Sex Pistols, exactly followed the Stones’ footsteps to becoming a national scandal. Their manager, Malcolm McLaren, a worthy heir to Andrew Oldham, took a comprehensively untalented boy named John Lydon, gave him spiky hair and a torn T-shirt, renamed him Johnny Rotten after his decaying teeth, and turned him into a modern Mick Jagger, with an equally talentless boy dubbed Sid Vicious counterpointing him as a contemporary Keith. The Sex Pistols behaved as the “wicked” Stones of yore could never have done, spitting at their audiences, insulting the Queen, and using four-letter words on teatime television. Whereas parents had once considered Mick the Antichrist, Johnny Rotten’s best-known song announced he actually was (a notion every bit as absurd).
With the coming of the Sex Pistols, the Stones found themselves regarded even more as irrelevant old buffers. Johnny Rotten called them “dinosaurs” and opined that Mick “should have retired in 1965.” Mick affected elder-statesmanly amusement, aligning himself with the Pistols’ main target: “I’m along with the Queen, you know, one of the best thing’s England’s got . . .” He accused the Pistols of selling out their fuck-’em-all principles by appearing on BBC TV’s Top of the Pops and the cover of Rolling Stone (just as the Stones had before them, amid the same accusations of selling out). He said he liked the punks’ energy, but not their attitude and certainly not their clothes. Whatever the new street fashion, he vowed that no one would ever catch him in a torn T-shirt.
Despite the punk uprising, the Stones’ fan base seemed to be holding as steady in Britain as in America. Black and Blue and “Fool to Cry” had reached No. 1 and No. 6 respectively, and their forthcoming double live album, Love You Live, was expected to sell two million, well up there with the current adult-oriented rock giants, Fleetwood Mac. In February, they signed a four-album contract with WEA in America and EMI in the rest of the world. Mick was quick to dampen speculation that the deal was worth $14 million. “None of us is really concerned with making money . . . I just try to make the best music I can.” Try as they might, no one could see his nose increasing in length.
And rock’s dinosaurs could still show punk’s squeaking pterodactyl chicks a thing or two. That same month, the Stones convened in Toronto to record further tracks for Love You Live incognito at a small club named El Mocambo. They lacked only Keith, whom British magistrates had recently fined for possessing cocaine in a crashed car on the M1. Belatedly flying out with Anita and Marlon, he took a heavy-duty dose of smack on the aircraft as a means of keeping going after five days without sleep. At the Toronto airport, the spoon he’d used was found on Anita, who was promptly arrested and taken into custody.
Unknown to Keith, a package of “stuff” he’d sent ahead had been intercepted by Canada’s Royal Northwest Mounted Police. Later that day, a squad of Mounties disguised as room-service waiters raided his suite at the Harbour Castle hotel. As an economy measure, there were no bodyguards outside the door, and he himself had gone off into another of his profound sleeps, so it was left to little Marlon to deal with the raiders. An ounce of heroin was found in the suite; enough to warrant a charge of trafficking. By law, Keith had to be awake to be charged. It took the Mounties forty-five minutes to rouse him.
Although Keith clearly had no intention of trafficking heroin to anyone but himself, the police would not reduce the charge, which carried a penalty of up to seven years’ imprisonment. Suddenly, a low-key private jaunt had turned into the Stones’ worst public catastrophe since the Redlands bust. All Mick’s years of careful nurturing and planning were thrown into jeopardy because his Glimmer Twin did not possess a glimmering of common sense.
He might have been expected to react with cold fury as well as distancing himself from the troubled scene as rapidly as possibly. Not so, according to Keith’s memoirs: “Mick looked after me with great sweetness, never complaining. He ran things, he did the work and marshalled the forces that saved me. Mick looked after me like a brother.” And not only Mick: the immediate, urgent problem was Keith’s need of another fix with no stash left. It was Bill Wyman, that least-regarded but most kindhearted Stone, who, at great personal risk, went out and scored for him.
Marooned in the Harbour Castle hotel, awaiting legal developments, the band hardly had need of further lurid publicity. It arrived nonetheless in the shape of Margaret Trudeau, twenty-eight-year-old wife of Canada’s fifty-seven-year-old prime minister, Pierre Trudeau. Notoriously fun loving and indiscreet, Madam Trudeau had hotfooted it to the Harbour Castle when the Stones checked in, and was subsequently sighted in their bedroom corridor clad in a bathrobe. Inevitably, her name was linked to Mick’s (a turnaround, indeed, from seven years earlier when John Lennon had met her husband to discuss world peace), though it was actually Ronnie Wood, according to his 2007 memoir, Ronnie, who enjoyed a brief dalliance with her.
Midway through the Keith emergency, Mick had to fly down to New York to see Jade, who was there with her mother and had fallen ill. Margaret Trudeau was reported to have followed him and—to her prime minister husband’s further embarrassment—was sighted among the near-naked throng at Studio 54.
Pending Keith’s trial in Canada, his lawyer managed to get him a visa to enter America with Anita for treatment of their heroin addiction. He underwent the treatment in New Jersey and also carried on his smack habit, buying children’s doctor and nurse kits from FAO Schwarz’s toy shop in New York and using the plastic toy syringes. There seemed little hope of avoiding a hefty prison sentence for trafficking, maybe as much as five years, and even Mick seemed to acknowledge the Stones might soon need a new rhythm guitarist if they didn’t fall apart completely: “We can’t wait five years,” he said. “Five years from now we won’t be touring at all, just a few lounges.”
IN MAY 1977, Bryan Ferry began a world tour with Roxy Music. Disinclined to stay in purdah at Ferry’s London house, Jerry Hall flew to New York and, a few evenings later, found herself at a dinner party seated between Warren Beatty and Mick, whom she hadn’t seen since his tea-making performance a year earlier. Since then, his name had been linked with the singer Linda Ronstadt and the brewing heiress Sabrina Guinness, and he’d been carrying on a secret affair in California with a twenty-five-year-old British model-turned-photographer named Carinthia West.
The dinner party turned into an unashamed contest between Mick and Warren Beatty as to who could get off with Jerry. But for her, despite Beatty’s legendary power as a seducer, there could be only one outcome. She left with Mick to go to Studio 54, where Bianca happened not to be holding court that night, then accompanied him back to his house on West Eighty-Sixth Street, where the coast was also conveniently clear, to share another cup of tea.
Afterward, in Jerry’s words, Mick “laid siege” to her, bombarding her with flowers and arranging to be seated next to her at other dinner parties. When she objected that he was married, he said he hadn’t lived with Bianca for a year. Jerry agreed to an affair but imposed a strict time limit, saying she must go back to Bryan Ferry when he returned from his tour at the end of the summer. Knowing the Stones’ reputation, she also refused to date anyone who used drugs. Mick admitted that in the sixties he’d taken LSD “every day for a year” and that, while nowhere near Keith’s level, he did occasionally smoke heroin. “Go away,” Jerry told him, “and don’t come back until you’re straight.” He obeyed.
They saw each other regularly in New York over the next four months, taking care to go nowhere they might be
spotted by the paparazzi. After her prim, introverted fiancé, Jerry found Mick a refreshing change; unlike Ferry, he made no attempt to curb her yee-haw high spirits and thought her prowess at leg wrestling hilarious. They had not been dating long when Jerry’s truck-driver father, John, died suddenly. Mick, she would recall, was “kind and supportive” as she tried to comfort her mother and four sisters. He also showed his usual generosity in the first flush of romance, giving her a pair of antique diamond hoop earrings for her twenty-first birthday in July.
At the summer’s end, they said good-bye, as per arrangement, and the next day Jerry rejoined Bryan Ferry, who still knew nothing of what had gone on while he was away. He seemed overjoyed to see her, giving her an emerald bracelet for the twenty-first birthday he’d missed, so Jerry decided to try to forget Mick and make a fresh start with him. In pursuit of this, she and Ferry moved to Los Angeles, where, a few weeks later, they happened to have dinner with the Stones’ business adviser, Prince Rupert Loewenstein. While Ferry was out of the room, Prince Rupert slipped her Mick’s telephone number. She rang Mick the next day, and he told her he missed her and begged to see her again. They arranged to meet in Paris, where Jerry was appearing in some fashion shows. After the shows, they decided to go to Morocco, that old Rolling Stones bolt-hole. Jerry called Ferry and told him she had further modeling work there.
When they arrived, the airline had lost their baggage, so they had to buy Moroccan djellabas, voluminous gowns with hoods that provided perfect disguises. They hired a car and spent several days just driving around in their obscuring monkish robes and matching kohl eyeliner, with the radio on full blast. At night they stayed in small hotels where the rooms were lit only by candles and perfumed by bowls of roses. Sometimes there was an open fire and Mick would sit beside it, singing and playing guitar.
At a restaurant in Agadir, Jerry ran into a fashion-editor friend who was on a shoot with a team of models and lent her and Mick some clothes to replace those lost by the airline. When she next telephoned Ferry, he accused her of lying, saying he’d read about Mick and her in the papers. The fashion team must have talked. Ferry offered to take her back, but she knew he “wasn’t the forgiving type”—and, anyway, she believed, he had been having an affair of his own on tour in Japan. In fact, he was furious at having been treated like such a fool and even talked about beating Mick up until friends pointed out Mick’s considerably higher level of physical fitness. He contented himself with not letting Jerry have the clothes and possessions she kept at his house, including a book called The Mists of Avalon she’d left on the bedside table. He was later to make an album called Avalon, but didn’t speak to her again for years.
Mick rented an apartment in Paris beside Notre Dame Cathedral and moved in there with Jerry. “We made love four times a day, ripping each other’s clothes off [and] never got bored or disagreed,” she would recall. Yet as late as September 1977, he was still firmly denying his marriage to Bianca was all over now. “We are still living together and in love with each other. I haven’t got the seven-year itch. In fact I didn’t know we’d been married for seven years [actually six and a half] until I read it in the newspapers . . . We spend six months of the year together. We take it just as it comes.”
In May 1978, when they’d been married seven years to the month, Bianca filed for divorce on the grounds of irreconcilable differences, subsequently amended to adultery. Though Mick had hardly wanted the marriage to continue, he hated being thus preempted and took instant retaliatory measures, shutting down her charge accounts with couturiers, hairdressers, and department stores. He also made 48 Cheyne Walk uninhabitable for her by having all the furniture removed, telling Jade it had gone away to be repaired. All the clothes from the closets were packed into wardrobe-size cardboard cartons—Bianca’s Ossie Clark and Halston dresses and Jade’s little velvet-collared coats jumbled up with Mick’s old satin shirts and buckskin jackets—and stored in a south London warehouse where they would still be moldering together a decade later.
THE STONES’ 1978 album, Some Girls, could hardly have been better named considering the girls of different generations who were currently complicating Mick’s life. And try as he always did to keep his songs autobiography-free, the odd bit of relevance would keep creeping in. The disco-influenced “Miss You” was plainly inspired by the recent Jerry situation, even if his falsetto vocal sounded closer than ever to Mammy in Gone with the Wind (“Dying to meet you,” for instance, became “Da-a-A-A’n-a-meechu!”) and the protestation “Ah’ve bin sleepin’ awl alone” rang as true as a rubber spittoon. “Beast of Burden,” with its rhetorical “Am I rich enough?” seemed to look forward gloomily to paying alimony to Bianca. Most topically, the title track might have been his belated answer to a five-year-old paternity allegation: “Some girls give me cheeldrun . . . Ah never asked them faw.” For the Marsha Hunt problem had resurfaced again.
Not that Marsha was any more covetous of Mick’s fortune or anxious to portray herself as a victim now than in 1973, when she’d launched paternity proceedings against in him in London. After drawn-out delaying tactics by his lawyers, she had accepted the extremely modest out-of-court settlement of £41.67 per month to support their daughter, Karis. By her account, she then had to wait until January 1975 for the first payment. To supplement it she had had to work literally around the clock, presenting programs on London’s Capital Radio, doing cabaret gigs, and making an album for a German record company at Munich’s Musicland Studios—where she might easily have bumped into Mick but, luckily for him, never did.
In 1977, she moved from London to Los Angeles with Karis, now aged seven, in hopes of promoting her album. It happened that during her brief screen-acting career in Britain she’d become friendly with Mick’s film agent, Maggie Abbott. As well as trying to shoehorn him into movies and discovering who had betrayed him in the Redlands bust, Abbott now became a bridge between him and his unacknowledged firstborn.
Karis had grown into a sparklingly intelligent as well as beautiful child and had been recommended to a special school in L.A. by the Gifted Children’s Association, where she was receiving adulatory reports from all her teachers. Maggie Abbott felt certain she would captivate Mick—all the more so now that Bianca was no longer around—and resolved to arrange a meeting between them. When he passed next through L.A., this time accompanied by Jerry, Abbott sent him photographs of Karis and a full account of her progress at school, adding, “If she’s not your daughter, I’m the Queen of Sheba.”
Mick suggested that Karis should spend an afternoon with him at his hotel, L’Ermitage, in Beverly Hills. The meeting was a great success, in no small measure thanks to Jerry, who showed no insecurity at meeting a love child from his past but was “sweetness itself,” according to Maggie Abbott. Marsha spoke to Mick afterward and mentioned how keeping Karis at the gifted children’s school was taking almost everything she earned. He gave her the telephone number and false name he was currently using but, as she would recall, “It was back to the old routine, spending money I didn’t have trying to contact him.”
Marsha’s efforts to make a career in L.A. were not successful, and in a few months she was reduced to applying for welfare as a single mother unsupported by her child’s father. However, the application form required her to give the name of the absent father, who then in theory would be pursued for maintenance by the government. Writing “Mick Jagger” in the space provided was clearly unfeasible, so Marsha decided her only option was to turn to lawyers again. She agonized about putting Karis through such an ordeal, and did so only after explaining the situation to the wise little seven-year-old and receiving her blessing. How quickly these rock ’n’ roll children had to grow up.
To represent her, Marsha chose a flamboyant L.A. lawyer named Marvin Mitchelson, who specialized in winning substantial “palimony” settlements for the discarded long-term girlfriends of American showbiz stars. Mitchelson’s first act was to fly to London to examine—and dismiss as irrelevant—
the paper she had signed three years earlier, absolving Mick of being Karis’s father in return for that modest out-of-court settlement. Within a few days, Mitchelson had served Mick with legal papers and was in a California court, successfully applying for Mick’s share of the box office from two recent Rolling Stones concerts in Anaheim to be frozen pending a final judgment.
Coincidentally, at this same time Mitchelson acquired a second client who’d borne Mick a daughter. Bianca had initiated her divorce action in London but then realized that if it were held in California, the state’s community-property law would give her a right to half of everything Mick owned. She, too, therefore consulted Mitchelson, showing him the French prenuptial agreement which she’d reluctantly signed on her wedding morning in Saint-Tropez. Mitchelson had no doubt it could be overturned, and opined that Mick’s presence in L.A. was frequent enough for him to be legitimately sued for divorce there.
For Marsha, Mitchelson and the California courts between them finally obtained a measure of satisfaction. After her previous experience, she wanted no further truck with out-of-court settlements, and the case was heard in January 1979. Mick’s paternity of Karis was confirmed and he was ordered to pay $1,500 per month in maintenance. According to Marsha, no lump sum was involved nor were the payments made retroactive.
But for Bianca, there was to be no California Gold Rush. She had, rather naively, expected that if her divorce action moved to L.A., it would be handled in the same low-key manner it had been in London. However, Mitchelson lost no time in announcing that she was seeking $12.5 million, or half Mick’s estimated earnings during their marriage. As an interim measure, she wanted $13,400 per month in living expenses, which broke down as $4,000 for rent, $2,000 for clothes, $2,000 for transportation, $1,500 for a chauffeur, nanny, and live-in maid, $1,500 for food, $1,000 for entertainment, $500 for travel, $500 for incidentals, $300 for telephone, $200 for laundry and cleaning, and $200 for utilities.