Mick had first met her on the UK leg of the Steel Wheels tour, which in Europe changed its name to the Urban Jungle tour. At the time, she was dating Eric Clapton, with whom she came backstage after the Stones’ Wembley show. Knowing his friend’s predatory ways—which had once even threatened his relationship with his wife, Pattie Boyd—Clapton took Mick aside and pleaded, “Not this one, please, Mick. I think I’m in love.” But the law of the Urban Jungle was inexorable.
Not that Carla Bruni was anyone’s idea of helpless prey. Born in Italy but raised in France, she was heiress to the Italian SEAT car-tire fortune and, at only twenty-two, had become France’s top supermodel, sought after by every fashion house from Dior and Chanel to Versace and Lacroix. Long, dark hair aside, there was something of Anita Pallenberg in her rangy elegance, her sculpted cheekbones, and the fascination she exerted over powerful men, particularly in the lower height range. Before Eric Clapton, she had had a string of prominent lovers including Crown Prince Dmitri of Yugoslavia. A decade later, when she had risen far above rock stars and minor European royalty, one of many unofficial French biographers would call her “a female Don Juan.”
The thought of being supplanted by a sister supermodel—especially one more than a decade younger—finally drove Jerry to confront Mick. Not least of her concerns was that the HIV epidemic, long thought to be confined to male homosexuals, now struck down promiscuous heteros also. Mick angrily denied the affair, as Carla already had to the French media, and stormed out of their temporary UK home in Barnes, southwest London. But then a few weeks later they were seen having lunch together in Barbados, clearly back on the most affectionate terms. After they left the restaurant, a fellow customer picked up a piece of paper from their table which seemed to be a written apology—from Jerry to Mick. “I want you to have your freedom,” it read in part, “and I won’t mind if you fuck other girls.” Shortly afterward, Jerry became pregnant for a third time.
The conscientious, farsighted father within the errant husband had decided his three latest children should be educated in England. Accordingly, in mid-1991, he paid £2.5 million for Downe House, a twenty-six-room Georgian mansion on Richmond Hill, once owned by the dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan (whose most famous play, aptly enough, is The School for Scandal). The house had magnificent views of the River Thames and adjoined Richmond’s famous royal park with its free-ranging deer. Not far away was the Station Hotel, where Andrew Oldham had happened on the Stones in 1963 and an artless boy Trilby met his Svengali. Pete Townshend lived up the hill in Ronnie Wood’s old house, The Wick, while Woody himself now owned a mock-Tudor hunting lodge (with its own fully equipped pub) on the other side of Richmond Park.
Though Downe House was intended as a permanent base for Jerry, Elizabeth, James, and the new baby who would soon join them, Mick’s endlessly complex tax situation meant he could spend only limited time there each year. On his visits, it always took him a while to come down from his other life of touring, recording, and teenager-ing. Then he was happy enough to be a family man, walking dogs through Richmond Park and taking his turn in supervising his seven- and six-year-old. A visitor remembers him vainly trying to keep order as Elizabeth and James created a post-bedtime ruckus—the voice of “Get Off of My Cloud” and “Midnight Rambler” bawling upstairs “Stop that fuckin’ noise!”
He was a good cook, more patient and painstaking in the kitchen than anywhere else except music, and might spend a whole afternoon cycling from shop to shop to find every last correct ingredient for a Japanese recipe that appealed to him. Jerry had no such aptitude, but approached cookery in the same cheery spirit as everything else, donning a novelty apron her sisters had given her. Inspired by the Stones’ Sticky Fingers album cover, it had a zip-up panel from which a fabric penis popped out. This was symbolic on two levels, the less obvious being Jerry’s ability to cock up even simple child dishes like scrambled eggs and pasta. As a result, her son, James, took to cooking as a small boy and before long was skilled enough to be entrusted with the family’s Christmas lunch.
Mick happened to be home for part of Jerry’s pregnancy, and was loving and attentive throughout. To add to the reassuring atmosphere, Carla Bruni seemed to have transferred her attention to the New York property tycoon Donald Trump. Each night in bed, Jerry later recalled, “I would put my foot next to Mick’s big, warm foot and feel so much love and happiness and peace. And in the morning I would wake up to [him] bringing me a cup of tea.”
One might imagine that no man of forty-eight in his right mind would risk jeopardizing such a setup. But nothing could restrain the Eternal Teenager, or stop the willy jumping out of the apron. Mick had continued seeing Carla and was somehow getting away with it, even when he invited her to his French château after Jerry and the children had returned to London.
In January 1992, Jerry gave birth to a second daughter, Georgia May Ayeesha. The next day, Mick flew to Thailand for an apparent tryst with Carla in the luxury resort of Phuket (not, alas, pronounced “Fuck it,” but “Foo-ket”). Press reports said they were sharing a villa at the Amanpuri Hotel, where Mick was registered under the Thai-sounding name of “Someching.”
Jerry launched a vigorous counteroffensive, telephoning Carla to deliver several colorful Texan variations on the theme “Leave mah man alone,” then using the glossy magazines to send out a message of unbroken conjugal bliss. Hello! photographed her with Elizabeth, James, and the new baby on Mustique, while to France’s Voici magazine, she expressed the hope she’d still be making love to Mick when she was ninety. “[It’s] the best way for me to keep my figure. That is why I hate those times when Mick is far from me. But when we are back together, we make up for lost time, believe me.” On one modeling assignment, she actually came face-to-face with the alleged man rustler. “Why cain’t you leave mah husband alone?” she hollered across a roomful of top designers and fashion journalists, among whom the strongest permissible passion as a rule was the air kiss. “Tell him to leave me alone,” Carla shouted back.
Jerry kept up her brave face for several months more, shining and smiling at Mick’s side even on occasions when her nonparticipation could most have embarrassed him. She was with him, for instance, in May 1992 when Karis, his daughter by Marsha Hunt, graduated from Yale University. Once he had tried to dodge paternity of Karis; now he was as proud a dad as any other present, videoing every possible angle of the brilliant as well as beautiful young woman in her scholar’s gown and mortarboard.
Jerry was there for him, too, in July, when—far sooner than he had expected or wished—the Eternal Teenager found himself a grandfather. Jade, his daughter by Bianca, had turned into a bit of a hippie, leaving her conventional English boarding school to study art history in Florence, then deciding to be a painter. At age nineteen, she had became pregnant by twenty-two-year-old Piers Jackson, also an aspiring painter, who showed little sign of being able to keep a Jagger daughter in the style to which she was accustomed. The baby girl, just six months younger than her grandpa’s latest daughter, was named Assisi Lola. Jerry got along as well with Jade as with Karis and, in addition, had built bridges between Bianca and Mick and Marsha and Mick. Without her, the whole event could have been fraught with embarrassment; as it was, only she had to be embarrassed.
In her struggle to hold on to Mick, she even persuaded him to make the “Sex Drive” video come true, at least a little bit, by accompanying her to a marriage guidance counselor. But without cameras to play to, the Tyranny of Cool quickly proved impermeable. “These things don’t really work unless both of you are absolutely committed,” Jerry was forced to concede. “Mick’s never going to change.”
Finally, she came clean to the Daily Mail’s showbiz columnist, Baz Bamigboye: “We are separated and I suppose we’ll get a divorce. I’m in too much pain to go on any longer . . . It’s unforgivable what happened and I don’t think there’s any hope for us any more.” To McCall’s magazine she added: “There’s nothing more humiliating than loving him
so much that you forgive the infidelities. But I’ve always hoped that he’d outgrow these things and it won’t happen again.”
For the first time ever, the threatened end of one of Mick’s relationships caused dismay throughout his circle. Even Keith was moved to say something not about Keith or the finer points of blues playing: “If [he and Jerry] split up, it will be a real shame. I hope the man comes to his senses . . . you know, the old black book bit. Kicking fifty, it’s a bit much . . . a bit manic.”
Shortly afterward, the man seemed to do just that. He telephoned Jerry and asked her to meet him in Dallas. Three days later, they had lunch together very publicly in a Dallas hotel to let everyone know they were all right again. Only this time, no letter of apology from Jerry came to light afterward.
BEFORE THE WATERSHED of Mick’s fiftieth birthday, there were spasmodic attempts to revive the film career that had stalled with Performance and Ned Kelly more than twenty years earlier. He himself had never really stopped trying, though latterly his thoughts had run more on a screen partnership with David Bowie, who’d taken the role he refused in The Man Who Fell to Earth (and was now his neighbor on Mustique).
The pair put themselves up for two expensive Hollywood buddy movies, Dirty Rotten Scoundrels and Ishtar, but in the first lost out to Michael Caine and Steve Martin and in the second to Dustin Hoffman and Warren Beatty—luckily, since Ishtar proved a spectacular turkey. When plans were announced to film Tom Wolfe’s sprawling New York novel The Bonfire of the Vanities, Mick fancied the role of the sleazy British journalist, a breed he knew only too well, but in the end the part was rewritten for an American and given to Bruce Willis.
In 1992, the name “Mick Jagger” was finally seen on a film poster again, though he was soon to wish it hadn’t. Freejack was set in a future America where ailing rich people could have their brains transplanted into healthy bodies and young victims were hunted down for the purpose by so-called bonejackers. Mick was approached to play the ruthless “Bonejacker” Vacendak at short notice, happened to have a few spare weeks before starting a new solo album, so gave the firm yes that so many producers had sought, and then didn’t have time to chicken out. It was ironic that, having turned down dozens of prestigious and challenging roles, he should end up in exactly the kind of science-fiction dross he’d repeatedly sidestepped throughout the seventies—“not Philip K. Dick,” as one critic wrote, “more Philip K. Dildo.” Especially short shrift was given to “Jagger in sci-fi leather riot gear, looking extremely silly” as a character patently too young for him.
In a TV interview to promote the film, he let slip that, while on location in Atlanta, he’d made the rounds of the city’s strip clubs with his twenty-nine-year-old costar, Emilio Estevez. How did that square with his image as a family man? he was asked. The phrase seemed positively distasteful: “You can have five kids without being ‘a family man.’ ” But he had the grace to apologize, in case any of them were watching.
Nineteen ninety-three brought his third solo album, the making of which involved further prolonged absences of his big, warm foot from the marital bed. Learning the lessons of his eighties solo efforts, he stuck to a mainly soul/country/gospel formula and brought no celebrity helpers into the studio other than Billy Preston, jazz saxophonist Courtney Pine, Lenny Kravitz for one vocal, and Flea from the Red Hot Chili Peppers playing bass. The album sold two million copies and earned a gold disc in America, though its title, Wandering Spirit, was something of a misnomer. Jerry, for one, might have argued that his spirit was not the bit of him that tended to wander. And that year’s real wandering spirit turned out to be Bill Wyman, who resigned from the Stones aged fifty-six.
At the beginning, back in 1962, it wasn’t Bill the others wanted so much as his impressive spare amp. The chemistry between them hadn’t been right then and had never come right since. In the Stones’ class-bound hierarchy, “Mister Formica” (as Andrew Oldham nicknamed him) had always been a figure of faint fun, snobbishly derided for his neatness and punctuality, for being so much older than the rest of them, for having a wife and child when they were still single, and for coming from the joke south London suburb of Penge. Even now, thirty-one years on, it was said of him (and by him) that he’d never really joined the band.
Electric-bass playing is not high art, but good rock bassists are rare and worth their weight in gold to any band. Paul McCartney was one such, Bill Wyman another. The Stones’ killer sound derived just as much, if less obviously, from the bass guitar Bill held at that odd, near-vertical angle as from Keith’s riffs. Yet Bill had never been made to feel indispensable. Other Stones frequently doubled on bass—Mick Taylor on “Tumbling Dice,” Woody on “Emotional Rescue” and “Fight,” Keith on tracks as far back as “Let’s Spend the Night Together” in 1966.
While Bill’s exterior life as a Stone mainly consisted of sharing blame for what Mick or Keith got up to, his interior one bristled with reminders of how much less important he was than either of them. If Mick wanted to go to the Olympic Games on impossibly short notice (no problem), there would be half a dozen acolytes eager to make the call; if Bill wanted to (problem), the assignment would bounce around the office like a game of pass-the-parcel. When Bill wanted studio time booked to work on a solo track, everyone would be far too busy trying to find Keith a new cook.
But by far his greatest grievance was over money. Publicly he maintained that the Stones’ collective income was distributed in scrupulously equal portions, with Charlie and himself receiving no less as NCOs than the officer class of Mick and Keith. He certainly looked the perfect pop plutocrat with his Suffolk stately home, Gedding Hall, and his villa on the Côte d’Azur, next door to the great artist Marc Chagall (each location the farthest conceivable from Penge). In reality, his income as a founder-member of the world’s highest-earning band was but a fraction of what was generally supposed—so much so that for long stretches he’d been forced to live on bank overdrafts.
A huge slice of the earnings, of course, went to Mick and Keith as songwriters, but even that did not seem enough for them—or, at any rate, for Mick. When Bill had written “In Another Land” for the Satanic Majesties album, he’d been pressured to hand over a share of the publishing to Jagger-Richard and, as a result, had never had a song on a Stones album since. Likewise, his contributions to major Jagger-Richard tracks had received no gratitude, let alone recompense. Coming up with the classic riff for “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” for example, might have brought a cowriting credit from more generous, democratic colleagues. With Mick and Keith, especially Mick, it wasn’t even worth asking.
Bill had thought of quitting the band at the same time as Mick Taylor, but had hung on, a disgusted but impotent spectator as Keith almost wrecked it in the seventies and Mick almost did in the eighties. To Bill, the distinction was that, however suicidal Keith’s behavior, he was always wholeheartedly for the Stones, whereas Mick was only ever for Mick. Ronnie Wood’s arrival made life in the ranks a little pleasanter for Bill but did nothing to correct the vast internal imbalance. Woody was a practiced and prolific songwriter but (in a reprise of the “In Another Land” situation) was expected to split the publishing on his compositions for the Stones with Jagger-Richard. Why should you put up with it? Bill often asked him. Happy-go-lucky Woody didn’t want a fight and, anyway, regarded the honor of having a song on a Stones album as worth more than any royalties.
The joke on his denigrators in the band was that quiet, unflamboyant Bill Wyman had turned into the best known of them all—Mick apart—both as a solo musician and personality. More than that, he had succeeded in the very areas where Mick had most conspicuously failed. He was not just the first Stone to release a solo album, but the only one ever to have a UK Top 20 single, “Si Si Je Suis un Rock Star.” He’d written the music for the 1981 film Green Ice, winning considerably more acclaim than Mick’s only movie-scoring effort, for Invocation of My Demon Brother. He had published a successfully ghostwritten autobiography, Stone Alone, a b
estseller in 1990. Even in the area of priapism, he now ranked alongside Mick, claiming to have the names and addresses of one thousand different women he’d slept with stored on his computer.
Here, indeed, he had generated a scandal surpassing any of Mick’s, even the Mars bar. In 1984, at the age of forty-eight, he’d begun dating a thirteen-year-old London schoolgirl named Mandy Smith—purely platonically, so he later maintained, and with the full consent of her mother. The relationship had been exposed by the News of the World and consequently investigated by the Director of Public Prosecutions, giving Britain’s tabloids their yummiest feast since the Year of the Mars Bar: “BILL TAKES A TEENAGE LOVER”; “MANDY’S WAGES OF SIN”; “WYMAN TO FACE THE MUSIC”; and when the DPP decided to take no action, “LET OFF FOR SEX-PROBE STONE.”
The Mick-eclipsing headlines had continued until the decade’s end: first with fifty-two-year-old Bill’s lavish wedding to eighteen-year-old Mandy in June 1989; then with the eating disorder that struck the bride, reducing her weight to five and a half stone, or seventy-seven pounds; then with the couple’s speedy divorce, having spent barely a week of married life together; finally with the Gilbert and Sullivan plot twist when Bill’s twenty-seven-year-old son, Stephen, became engaged to Mandy’s mother, Patsy, transforming Bill’s recent mother-in-law into his prospective daughter-in-law.
The Mandy episode was a grievous misjudgment on Bill’s part—Eternal Teenager Syndrome at its most distasteful—and he lost no time in admitting as much. It still would always rankle with him that none of his bandmates ever offered a word in his support, publicly or privately. Keith might have felt especially motivated to stick his head above the parapet, as Bill had done for him in 1977 by scoring desperately needed smack for him in Toronto. But Keith’s sole comment, inaccurate as well as unhelpful, was that “[Bill] only thinks with his dick.” Mick was appalled by the whole affair, as behooved the father of two then eighteen-year-old daughters, although not much delving into history was needed to find him dating a seventeen-year-old, never mind singing “Stray Cat Blues” (“Ah can see that yaw fifteen years old / No, Ah don’ want yaw ID”).