Mick had always hated any of the other Stones intruding on his social life and now Bill, of all people, was starting to do it. Sometimes they would both separately be invited to concerts in aid of the Prince of Wales’s Prince’s Trust charity, attended by the gorgeous, pop-loving Princess Diana. Mick’s face, one onlooker recalls, would “turn gray” whenever he arrived in the VIP box to find Bill already there, chatting with the royals.
Occasionally it was convenient to pretend they were mates and equals. If Bill was in a restaurant having dinner with friends, Mick would join his table accompanied by a large entourage, order the most expensive champagne, then leave before the whopping check arrived. Then again Bill would request a one-to-one meeting with him to discuss some aspect of Stones business and be told he was too busy. Bill’s ghostwriter, Ray Coleman, witnessed more than one such brush-off. Even for Coleman, with his long experience of rock-star egomania, it was “unimaginable that the bass guitarist in the Stones rings the vocalist and is told he hasn’t got time to see him.”
The iron had finally entered Bill’s soul with the Steel Wheels tour of 1989–1990, which supposedly ended the warfare within the Stones and netted $260 million, almost three times the original estimate. After the tour ended, he told friends that the accountants had earned more than Charlie and himself put together.
His resignation in 1993 astonished the music business. In November 1991, the Stones had signed with a new label, Virgin—the least appropriate trademark they could have found—for their largest advance yet, $25 million; they were now lining up a world tour to promote their first Virgin album, Voodoo Lounge. As with Steel Wheels, the whole operation had been contracted out to the young Canadian Michael Cohl and his company, TNA (short for The Next Adventure). Cohl was already certain of breaking the Steel Wheels tour’s record with new revenue streams from sponsorship, merchandising, TV rights, and luxury “skyboxes” to end the long tradition of purgatorial discomfort at rock gigs, at least for those who could afford them. In short, it looked as if Bill was walking away from a gold mine.
His thirty years’ service with the Stones were not marked by any farewell ceremony or even public tribute. “Bass-playing can’t be all that difficult,” Mick commented. “If necessary, I’ll do it myself.” Keith sent a fax saying, “No one leaves this band except in a wooden box,” implying he had the box at the ready and the wherewithal to put the defector there. But in the media he contented himself with calling Bill “too wrinkly” to stay with the band. That was rich, coming from Keith; in any case, Bill was the only one of them to have remained virtually wrinkle-free.
No attempt was made to find a new Stone to play bass on the Voodoo Lounge tour. Instead, the job went to American Darryl Jones, a fine musician who had once backed Miles Davis, but who, like Mick Taylor and Woody, would merely be a salaried employee.
Leaving the band was not the end of Bill Wyman, as many predicted, but, in many ways, the making of him. Just before his final tour, he had opened a Tex-Mex restaurant named Sticky Fingers after the Stones’ 1971 album and decorated with memorabilia of their career from the archive he’d had the small satisfaction of withholding from Mick. His original plan had been a chain of restaurants named Rolling Stones, but Prince Rupert had warned that his sticky-fingered ex-bandmates would require 90 percent of the take. Just this one establishment, in Kensington, west London, was soon making him more per month than he’d ever earned with them.
A man of many enthusiasms outside music, he never became one of the industry’s numerous professional victims and whingers, or revealed his feelings about his former CO except on the odd private occasion. One such was when he happened to bump into Mick’s long-ago fiancée, the former Chrissie Shrimpton, accompanied by her daughter, Bonnie. “Your mother was lovely,” he told Bonnie, “and [Mick] treated her like shit . . . and all his girlfriends like shit . . . and all of us like shit.”
IN 1997, FORTY-THREE-YEAR-OLD Tony Blair became Britain’s youngest prime minister since 1812, leading a Labour Party rebranded, and supposedly rejuvenated, as New Labour. Blair had sung and played lead guitar with a student rock band in the early seventies, and had been swept to his landslide victory over John Major’s Conservatives on a tide of triumphalist pop music, notably D:Ream’s “Things Can Only Get Better.” His cabinet and closest advisers were mostly around his age, with the same history of shoulder-length locks, crushed-velvet flares, and bopping to “Brown Sugar” and “Honky Tonk Women.” As had already happened in America with President Bill Clinton, political as well as economic power passed to the baby boomers.
With Blair—or, rather, the boomer advertising men behind him—came the concept of Cool Britannia, where New Labour Britain in the late nineties was portrayed as experiencing the same upsurge of youthful creative energy and national pride it had under Old Labour during the mid-sixties. The sixties were back and destined never really to go away again: in clothes, hair, design, and decor; in iconoclastic young artists (widely seen as “the new rock ’n’ roll”); above all, in a stream of bands wearing high-button suits and mop-top haircuts, singing in their true accents rather than Jaggeresque faux-American ones and generically known as Britpop. There was even an echo of that mythical mid-sixties rivalry between the Beatles and the Stones, albeit in inverted form, with lovable southerners Blur versus uncouth northerners Oasis.
For Old Labour’s Harold Wilson, thirty years earlier, battening on to youth culture, as represented by the Beatles, had been just a cynical ploy to woo the youth vote. But Blair was a besotted rock fan for whom being prime minister offered a heaven-sent chance to hang out with the superhero of his adolescence. So, after warming up at a few Cool Britannia parties at Number 10 with Ultravox’s Midge Ure and Oasis’s Noel Gallagher, he sought a meeting with Mick Jagger. It proved an object lesson in Mick’s power to reduce the most alpha of boomer males to jelly.
The encounter took place at a private dinner, hosted by Blair’s friend the novelist Robert Harris. Also present were Jerry (standing by her man yet again); Blair’s wife, Cherie; Harris’s wife, Gill; and Blair’s Machiavellian chief image maker, Peter Mandelson. Recalling the evening in his autobiography more than a decade later, Mandelson described Mick as “intelligent and politically astute”—precisely the conclusion of Old Labour’s Tom Driberg circa 1968. As Mandelson went on to chronicle mercilessly, Blair remained prime ministerial during the meal, but “afterward . . . summoned his courage and went up to Mick. Looking him straight in the eye, he said, ‘I want to say how much you’ve always meant to me.’ For a moment, I thought he might ask for an autograph.”
Mick was now fifty-four, but his sex drive remained stuck in overdrive and his pursuit of women young enough to be his daughters was as embarrassment-free and reckless of consequences as ever. Lately, his public dalliances had built up into a positive surge. A twenty-six-year-old, six-foot one-inch Czech model named Jana Rajlich was caught on camera wrapped in a towel and peering out of his bungalow at the Beverly Hills Hotel as if checking whether the coast was clear. Pulp Fiction star Uma Thurman was observed being snogged by the famous lips (eternal teenager!) in an L.A. club named the Viper Room. A twenty-two-year-old British model named Nicole Kruk claimed to have slept with him in Japan, leaving his hotel suite in the nick of time as Jerry was on her way up in the elevator. That summer, Jerry again decided she’d had enough and consulted the eminent British divorce lawyer Anthony Julius. However, Mick once again managed to dissuade her, and as if to cement their rapprochement, she became pregnant for the fourth time.
In August, he left Jerry planning nursery decor and rejoined the Stones in New York, where, coincidentally, they had to make a video for a track called “Anybody Seen My Baby?” from their next album, Bridges to Babylon. The decidedly nonnursery story line called for a young stripper to catch Mick’s eye in a sleazy club, then be pursued by him through the New York traffic in her underwear.
To play the stripper, he wanted twenty-two-year-old Angelina Jolie, one day to be
among his enraptured audience at the BAFTA Awards but in 1997 the most beautiful among Hollywood’s rising actresses—and also, by some way, the wildest. The daughter of Jon (Midnight Cowboy) Voight, she was already on her first husband, the young British actor Jonny Lee Miller, and known for a lifestyle with more than a touch of Rolling Stone. At her wedding to Miller, for example, she walked down the aisle wearing black rubber pants and a white shirt on which her bridegroom’s name was written in blood.
Jolie initially turned down the role in the “Anybody Seen My Baby?” video, having more important film work in hand. But she was talked into it by her mother, Marcheline, an avid Jagger worshipper since the early seventies. Her bravura performance in shedding her clothes and blond wig, then weaving through Midtown traffic in a bra and knickers, drove all thoughts of six-foot Czech models, even Uma Thurman, from Mick’s mind. His being five years older than her father, of course, meant nothing.
However, according to Jolie’s biographer, Andrew Morton, the wooing of this real-life Angie was very different from any that had gone on before. Now Mick was the infatuated follower and Jolie the flighty superstar, as hard to pin down as the butterfly of rock had ever been. Seemingly unimpressed by his vast fame and mystique, as Morton recounts, she was the first of his girlfriends ever to treat him “like shit.”
Their relationship lasted around two years, apparently without ever getting back to Jerry and weirdly abetted by Jolie’s mother, Marcheline, as a way of living out her own long-ago Mick dreams. Marcheline’s ultimate plan, according to Morton, was that Mick should divorce Jerry and marry Angelina, and then she would move in with them.
Though Mick never showed any sign of wanting to go that far, he was clearly smitten far beyond reach of the Tyranny of Cool. When Jolie failed to return his phone calls—as she usually did—he would leave long, pleading messages at the number she’d given him, not realizing it was actually her mother’s. Marcheline would gloat over the messages at length, sometimes inviting friends in to share them. Despite her cavalier treatment of Mick, Morton writes, Jolie became drawn into Marcheline’s matrimonial fantasy, once telling her mother he’d actually proposed to her. She also announced a plan to adopt a special-needs child whom she would name “Mick Jagger.”
Jerry had a different bone to pick with Mick: he had been seen with Carla Bruni again. And this time, the show of public unity she usually kept up began to waver. At a dinner party at Elton John’s, fellow guests noticed how many furious glances she directed across the table at Mick. He responded by getting drunker than people usually saw him, then joining Elton, pop’s other most famous eternal teenager, in an impromptu duet.
On September 23, the Stones set off on their Bridges to Babylon world tour, destined to extend over almost three years rather than the scheduled one, playing to 4.5 million people in North America, Japan, South America, and Europe, and grossing $390 million. As well as Darryl Jones on bass again, they had six auxiliary musicians, including Bobby Keys, and three backup vocalists. The show began with an explosion of fireworks from which Keith emerged, playing the intro to that recently voted greatest rock single of all time, “Satisfaction.” It also had an intimacy and proactiveness never previously associated with Mick. Audiences could take part in an advance Web vote for songs they wanted to hear, and halfway through each set, the band crossed a cantilevered bridge to continue playing on a “B stage” like a tiny boxing ring 150 feet out into the crowd. Back in the UK, where Stones foreign tours had once caused paroxyms of vicarious repulsion and humiliation, New Labour’s Home Secretary Robin Cook expressed hopes of enlisting them among Cool Britannia’s “Ambassadors of British Excellence.”
In London, Jerry was going through her pregnancy alone, feeling “neglected, fat, and unloved,” but with Texan chutzpah undiminished. During her eighth month, she sat for a nude portrait by the great Lucian Freud, seventy-four-year-old grandson of Sigmund and a man whose reputation as a pursuer of much younger women and begetter of children was right up there with Mick’s. During their thrice-weekly sessions, the supposedly misogynistic Freud showed a surprisingly kind and chivalrous side, making her feel like the most beautiful woman in creation, suggesting frequent breaks for delicious meals, and trading literary quotations, Lord Rochester from him, Edgar Allan Poe from her.
Freud later admiringly spoke of Jerry’s “spiritedness” and the “physical intelligence,” or ease within her own body, she still had as an eight-months-pregnant mum no less than did the new mega-supermodel, Kate Moss. As a rule, he depicted his female sitters as repellent blubbery heaps, but his reclining Jerry, with “lump” and flowing gold hair, had an atypical radiance.
The portrait was finished by December 9, when she gave birth to Mick’s second son, Gabriel—an archangel to chase away any lingering shades of Lucifer. Mick was not present, having a pressing previous engagement to sing “Sympathy for the Devil” in Atlanta, and did not see the baby until a week later. Jerry’s first visitor in the hospital was the smitten Lucian Freud, loaded down with boxes of flowering narcissi.
In a few days, Mick was off again to rejoin the Stones—but this time there would be no chivalrous Lucian Freud to fall back on. Freud was now at work on a second nude portrait of Jerry, now breast-feeding Gabriel. When a bout of flu made her cancel three sittings in a row, he was furious, painting over Jerry’s half-finished figure and substituting one of his male assistants breast-feeding the baby in her place. He then wrote her a note telling her what he’d done and enclosing a nude sketch of her with fluids spouting from every orifice. Lucian Freud could make even rock ’n’ roll paranoia look tame. Jerry was initally devastated but soon forgave him, deciding that “all the best people are a bit mad.”
On the Bridges to Babylon tour, according to Andrew Morton, Mick was still in hot pursuit of Angelina Jolie. Early in 1998, as the tour headed for South America, he asked her to join him in Brazil, but she declined—had she not, much future trouble, possibly even his marriage, might have been saved. Before the Stones’ show at Rio de Janeiro’s Praça da Apoteose stadium on April 11, an overwhelming Web vote demanded “Like a Rolling Stone,” Bob Dylan’s unwitting tribute (though Mick now claimed it had been written for them). And who should come out to join Mick for the vocal, looking almost amiable, but Dylan himself.
In May, while the Stones rested up for the tour’s final European and UK leg, it was announced that Keith Richards had fallen off a ladder at his home in rural Connecticut and broken three ribs. Preconceptions of a characteristic drug- or booze-fueled prank were exploded when the ladder turned out to have been in Keith’s private library and the fall caused by overbalancing as he reached for a volume on Leonardo da Vinci, with collateral damage from a shower of heavy Encyclopedia Britannica. As a result, the opening concert in Berlin had to be put back by a month, four more in France and Spain were canceled, and one in Italy was postponed.
British fans, meanwhile, had learned that the Stones would not be coming in August as planned and that they had Tony Blair’s supposedly rock ’n’ roll–loving New Labour regime to thank. Blair’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, had recently abolished an income-tax loophole for UK citizens based abroad which allowed them a certain number of working days in the country each year without affecting their nondomiciled status. The measure had been backdated to March, wiping out the arrangements Mick, Woody, and Charlie had made in advance with the Inland Revenue (Keith had dual U.S. citizenship through his marriage and so was not affected). Rather than face an extra collective tax bill of around £10 million, the band called off their scheduled performances in Edinburgh, Sheffield, and London.
There was an outcry in the British media against this seeming cavalier treatment of the audience who should have meant most to them. In fact, the new rule did not only affect the three Stones but other noncoms among their 270-strong road crew—although a third assistant roadie clearly stood to lose somewhat less. Mick had no wish to disappoint the British fans and went to unusual diplomatic lengt
hs to reach a compromise with the government, offering a charity concert in exchange for a temporary waiver of the tax penalty, even taking over the Independent’s “Right of Reply” column to put out his side of the story. But all that he’d always meant to Tony Blair proved to signify nothing. A treasury spokesman whose surly tone contrasted sharply with Mick’s conciliatory one (even Whitehall pen pushers now considering themselves “the new rock ’n’ roll”) replied that no exceptions could be made and declined to be “lectured by millionaire tax-exiles.”
BY THIS POINT in 1998, the tour had landed Mick with a somewhat larger problem. The previous March, after Angelina Jolie refused to join him in Rio de Janeiro, he had consoled himself with a twenty-nine-year-old Brazilian model named Luciana Morad. She now alleged they had gone on to have an affair stretching over eight months, and as a result, she was pregnant with his child. A New York–based lawyer had filed a paternity suit on her behalf and was reportedly claiming £5 million for the future child’s maintenance.
Luciana Morad was the breaking point for Jerry. Until then, she had resigned herself to a one-sided open marriage, but the deal had always been no children. In January 1999, tired of “other women tryin’ to knock the door down,” she filed for divorce in Britain on grounds of Mick’s “repeated adultery.” To represent her, she hired barrister Sandra Davis, who had helped secure Princess Diana’s £17 million divorce settlement from the Prince of Wales. Mick’s response was to claim the wedding ceremony he and Jerry had gone through in Bali had no legal validity (which he’d told at least one friend at the time); therefore a divorce action was inappropriate and a spousal financial settlement even more so.