In common with Scorsese’s classic 1976 rockumentary, Shine a Light featured the director as a character, Sir Mick’s new best friend “Marty,” alternately charming and irascible (as when, with only hours to showtime, he still hadn’t been told which songs the Stones would be playing). The resulting film had characteristic Scorsese energy and drama, yet came nowhere near The Last Waltz. That had been about a still-young band breaking up at the peak of their form; this was about one just a few steps ahead of the taxidermist.
For all its cash and kudos, the Bigger Bang tour proved to be jinxed like none since 1969. In April 2006, during a break in Fiji, Keith decided to climb a coconut tree and fell off it onto the beach, landing on his head and knocking himself unconscious. He was rushed to New Zealand for medical treatment, reported as a brain scan; in fact, he had sustained serious head injuries and a team of top surgeons only just managed to save his life.
A tragic reprise of the incident took place on October 29, during the filming of Shine a Light, when Ahmet Ertegun, the Stones’ old label boss at Atlantic and still Sir Mick’s good friend, fell and knocked himself out in a backstage hospitality area. He never regained consciousness and died a few weeks later, aged eighty-three.
Then, on November 11, Joe Jagger died of pneumonia, aged ninety-three. He had been hospitalized since suffering a fall a few weeks earlier, and his son had only just returned to America after a flying visit back to Surrey to see him. The news of his death came as the Stones were about to play a sold-out show at the MGM Grand hotel in Las Vegas. The performance went ahead as scheduled, and Sir Mick made no reference to his loss from the stage.
The slight, quiet, sinewy man with hardly a hair on his head had shaped the shaggy superstar more lastingly than the world ever knew. If Sir Mick felt respect for precious little else, he always had huge respect for Joe, the richer-than-Croesus rock god admiring as well as wondering at his father’s steadfast altruism. In 1981, when the Stones were on their first mega-money U.S. tour, Joe had been in the country at the same time, giving a series of lectures in his tireless crusade to persuade young people to lead clean lives. “Physical training from the Renaissance to the present day,” his son was fond of quoting with almost paternal pride. There was real affection between them, too, in an understated British way: whatever the pressures of being Mick, the superstar could always make time to tramp the wet Welsh Marches on one of the hiking tours Joe so much enjoyed. His funeral took place at St. Mary’s College Chapel, Twickenham, on November 28, in the presence of three Sir Mick exes who had all adored him: Marsha, Bianca, and Jerry.
The tour ended with a gig perhaps not as lucrative as others but one triumphantly demonstrating the Stones’ continued power over the young of their homeland. On June 10, 2007, they headlined at the Isle of Wight Festival, their first appearance on the island since they’d played at a repertory theater there in 1964 with Brian and Bill, with the scenery from the current production (including French windows) as a backcloth. Forty-three years on, they proved as big a draw as any of the hot young twenty-first-century bands on offer, from Snow Patrol to Muse. Their set included an appearance by Amy Winehouse, the eeriest sixties throwback yet, with her black-caked eyes and outsize beehive hairdo, though her self-destructive drinking and drugging were pure mid-seventies Keith Richards. The honor of singing with Sir Mick seemingly helped her hold it together for once; their duet on the Temptations’ “Ain’t Too Proud to Beg” was the festival’s acknowledged highlight.
In January 2008, Carla Bruni, that explosive figure from Sir Mick’s past, secretly married another diminutive, powerful individual, France’s president Nicolas Sarkozy; so, rather than the man from Elysian Fields, she ended up with the one from the Élysée Palace. One commentator of an anagramatic turn of mind wondered if from now on “Élysée” should be pronounced “Easy lay.”
OVER THE PAST twenty years, Keith Richards’s appearance has become increasingly bizarre. Whereas advancing age has etched Sir Mick’s face into Mount Rushmore stone, it has given Keith’s the horrific fluidity of a gurner, those competitive grimace makers peculiar to England’s north country. When he smiles, and his features seem to dissolve like some old-fashioned movie special effect of Dr. Jekyll turning into Mr. Hyde, one feels a genuine need to cover small children’s eyes. He has also taken to doing strange things with his hair, twisting it into dreadlocks tipped with metal objects resembling clothes pegs or tying it up in none-too-hygienic-looking bandannas.
Yet all those decades of suicidal drug abuse have left him essentially unscathed, a tribute to a constitution rivaled only by Winston Churchill. (Sad that so many who tried to emulate him, from Gram Parsons to Amy Winehouse, were not similarly armored.) He claims to be still off heroin and not to have used cocaine since nose-diving from that coconut tree in Fiji, though his voice, and in particular his thoroughly scary laugh, still sounds like a thousand unemptied ashtrays made audible. “Nice to be here,” he tells the audience in his solo spot in every Stones show. “Hey, it’s nice to be anywhere, y’know.” Or sometimes: “Nice to see you. Hey, it’s nice to see anyone, y’know.”
That special timbre—less rock guitar hero than boozy, sentimental old repertory actor—has now also endeared him at second hand to a worldwide cinema audience. In the first Pirates of the Caribbean film in 2003, Johnny Depp borrowed it—adding a touch of cartoon skunk Pepé Le Pew—for his character, Captain Jack Sparrow. Knowing Keith’s reputation, Depp wondered if he might find himself slammed up against a wall with a sword stick at his throat. But Keith was hugely amused, and in the third film of the series played a cameo role as Sparrow’s father, Captain Edward Teague (his beaten-up pirate hat, thick black beard, and dangling crucifix earrings striking a relatively normal note for him).
As Captain Teague prepared to go before the camera for the first time, a journalist asked if any advice had come from that seasoned film actor Sir Mick. “He’s the last person I’d ask in the world,” Keith replied. Since the Pirates franchise shows no sign of ending, Sir Mick will have to keep watching his Glimmer Twin make the splash on-screen that has eluded him for more than forty years.
May 2010 brought a reissue of the Stones’ 1972 album, Exile on Main St., with ten previously unreleased tracks. Critically panned on its original appearance, it was now hailed as one of the all-time great rock albums and in its new form became the band’s first UK/U.S. No. 1 since Voodoo Lounge. With it came a documentary, Stones in Exile, recounting the escape from the British tax man to France and the album’s evolution in Keith’s basement at Villa Nellcôte. When it was premiered at the Cannes Film Festival, a line began to form two hours before the screening. Sir Mick was there to introduce it, supported by L’Wren (once again tactfully sans heels). His self-deprecating humor about old times with the Stones, in both English and fluent French, delighted his audience. “[In] the early seventies,” he said, “we were young, good-looking, and stupid. Now we’re just stupid.”
The problem with recapturing the revelry at Nellcôte was that almost none of it had been filmed. Stones in Exile therefore consisted mainly of black-and-white still photographs, almost all by the young Frenchman Dominique Tarle. As a further oddity, several of those interviewed about their part in making Exile on Main St. appeared only as voice-overs, as if they were ashamed to show the physical ravages of their decadent youth. Its British transmission on BBC2 included a brief sofa chat between Sir Mick and the BBC’s arts supremo Alan Yentob. Sir Mick yielded to a little sentiment, saying it was “kinda nice” when people came up and told him which Stones concerts had been milestones in their lives. Unfortunately, after half a century molded by the Tyranny of Cool, his face just didn’t have an expression to go with “kinda nice.”
Movie acting was not the only area where Keith finally trumped his Glimmer Twin. Following his debut as Captain Edward Teague, he trousered a reported $7 million advance for his autobiography. The ghostwriter was James Fox—not the actor who went off the deep end after appearing in Performan
ce but a former London Sunday Times journalist (like Sir Mick’s former ghostwriter, John Ryle) and author of White Mischief, an investigation into the Happy Valley murder in 1940s Kenya. Keith’s infinitesimal attention span, lassitude, and new passion for burying himself in his library promised Fox an even more difficult task than Ryle had faced with the Jagger memoirs in 1983; nevertheless, a manuscript was completed, pronounced fascinating, and published in October 2010 as Life.
In a handwritten message on the back of the book, Keith assured his readers that it was “all true” and that he remembered “everything.” Actually, most of the 547-page narrative passed in a woozy haze, specific only about blues music, guitars, and epic drug abuse. But on one subject he was utterly specific: his seeming total alienation from the onetime teenage soul mate he now called Brenda. “I used to love Mick,” he wrote, “but I haven’t been to his dressing-room in twenty years. Sometimes I think ‘I miss my friend.’ I wonder ‘Where did he go?’ ”
His friend was portrayed as an egomaniacal megalomaniac and impossible diva and snob who treated all women abominably and usually left them to cry on his, Keith’s, shoulder. Goddess in the Doorway, his friend’s most recent (and probably best) solo album was wittily renamed “Dog Shit in the Doorway.” The coup de grâce came in the section about his friend’s relationship with Marianne Faithfull in the late sixties. “Marianne . . . had no fun with Mick’s tiny todger. I know he’s got an enormous pair of balls, but it doesn’t quite fill the bill.”
Strange vocabulary apart—todger being a children’s word, more commonly used by little girls—this hardly sounded like the worldly-wise old soul of rock ’n’ roll Life sought to portray. It certainly was not a complaint ever heard from a vast numbers of, er, consumers over the years; in any case, it was extraordinarily catty and irrelevant. The book’s editors urged Keith to cut it, but he refused. Sir Mick, he claimed, had read the proofs and asked for only one cut—about his use of a voice coach. Sir Mick himself emulated royalty once again and made no public comment. His one consolation was that when Life became a bestseller, his todger had been of material assistance.
The size of Keith’s advance, if not the desire to answer back, led several publishers to wonder whether Sir Mick might at last be ready to write the autobiography he had aborted in 1983. However, something promising to be almost as hot was already on its way: Jerry Hall had been paid £500,000 of a £1 million advance from a major UK house to continue the life story broken off in her 1985 memoir, Tall Tales. The project was to some extent therapeutic: as her friends knew, Jerry had been much less buoyant than she seemed after the end of her marriage and had since felt depressed, even agoraphoblic. Despite that purportedly “very, very generous” annulment payoff, she told friends she also needed the money.
She started out writing the book herself, but after a time her publishers persuaded her to work with a ghost. The rumor in the book trade was that her narrative about her life with Sir Mick had plenty of human warmth, but the ghost was needed to put in more sex. In fact, there was more than enough sex: the ghost was needed to put in more human warmth. The book was complete and ready to go into production one Friday afternoon, with Jerry still gung ho about getting it all off her chest; the following Monday, she canceled the whole project. There could not but be suspicion that, assiduous as ever in covering his tracks, Sir Mick had bought her off.
The whole £500,000 advance was returned to the publisher. And numerous women all over the world must have breathed a sigh of relief, not least France’s first lady, Carla Bruni-Sarkozky, who that summer accompanied her titchy spouse to Britain to meet the new prime minister, David Cameron, and was widely admired for her elegance. Jerry subsequently contracted with another publisher, but this time just for a coffee-table book entitled My Life in Pictures. Its minimal text, however, still gave a full summary of Sir Mick’s post-1985 infidelities, at one point describing him as “a ruthless sexual predator.”
NO LONGER PERHAPS. L’Wren Scott started her own couture label in 2006 and has since risen to considerable heights, professionally speaking, with creations like the headmistress dress, what Vogue called “calf-corseting gladiator pumps,” and $12,000 Lula bags, named after her mother, which, she says, “open and close with a kind of ‘woosh,’ like the first time you ride in a nice car and go ‘Wow!’ ” (When the bags were launched, one British columnist noted drily that the Jagger wallet was not famed for opening with a woosh, though it might close with one.) Sir Mick is usually at her shows, video camera poised, not meaning to siphon off all the attention but always doing so as (Vogue again) he “bounces around in a violet blazer and sneakers.”
True to her mother’s prophecy, L’Wren has apparently seen off all rivals for his attention, even weaning him away from his longtime, superefficient PA, Miranda Guinness. As a result, the Apostrophe has a new nickname—“the Loin-Tamer.” But despite the impressive diamond ring she now sports, there seems no prospect of a First Lady Jagger. After they had been together nine years, he described her to a London Times interviewer as someone he was “sort of seeing,” while L’Wren herself says only that they’re “kind of dating.”
The most compelling proof of the real person behind the Jagger mask comes from his seven children with four different mothers. Rock stars’ offspring frequently end up loathing their fathers, or at best treating them with weary tolerance, but all Sir Mick’s plainly adore him. Despite their widely different ages and ethnic ingredients, they get on well together, indeed regard one another as real sisters and brothers—something that couldn’t happen if he didn’t give each of them the same love, attention, and status. In this regard, at least, the Eternal Teenager has thoroughly grown up.
After presenting him with a second granddaughter, Amba Isis, in 1995, Jade found fame with stones of a rather different kind. She started her own design company, Jade Inc., when she was twenty-four, and in 1996 became creative director of Garrard’s, jewelers to the British Royal Family for 160 years, waking up its staid showcases, rather like Dad once did the Top 10, with her chain-mail underwear, diamond-encrusted revolver and skull pendants, and “devil-themed” trinkets. She has since launched the Jade Jezebel Jagger line of clothes, redesigned the classic Guerlain perfume bottle, and devised a flying lounge for the low-cost Spanish airline Vueling. Now married to deejay Dan Williams, she lives unostentatiously in north London.
Jade’s mother, Bianca, is unrecognizable as the white-clad sacrifice who unhappily married a rock star in Saint-Tropez in 1971. For more than thirty years, she has worked tirelessly for humanitarian causes, through her own Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation and as a goodwill ambassador for the Council of Europe, a trustee of the Amazon Charitable Trust, and a council member of Amnesty International USA. The numerous honors she has received include the Right Livelihood Award presented by the Swedish parliament “for outstanding vision and work on behalf of the planet and its people” and regarded as “the alternative Nobel Prize”; the United Nations Earth Day International Award; the Amnesty International USA Media Spotlight Award for Leadership; the World Citizenship Award from the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation; the World Achievement Award (presented to her by Mikhail Gorbachev); and two honorary doctorates. In her mid-sixties, it is still Bianca rather than Jade who turns every head as they come into the Ivy restaurant in London. There are many around Sir Mick who believe she remains the one real love of his life. Himself excepted, of course.
Both his daughters with Jerry Hall grew up to be models after their mother. Elizabeth, the elder, looks like Jerry, but the younger, known as Georgia May, looks like Brigitte Bardot, the French sex kitten who was every British schoolboy’s fantasy in the 1950s, from her long blond hair and enormous eyes to the little gap in her front teeth. When she was twelve, and first experinmenting with lipstick, her father looked at her in horror one day and said, “Are you wearing makeup? You’re wearing more makeup than I am!” At sixteen, she was signed up by Tori Edwards, the model agent who represented her mother
and sister, and in no time was the face of Versace and Rimmel and on the cover of Vogue. Indeed, Sir Mick became worried that her career was moving too fast, and insisted she call a temporary halt to study for her A-level exams.
In 2010, Georgia May posed topless in an advertisement for Hudson Jeans; the following year, Elizabeth appeared on the cover of Playboy. She had first been approached to do so in 2005 when she was twenty-one, but her father—that onetime reveler at the Playboy Mansion—was so shocked by the idea that she refused. (Jerry, of course, had done Playboy back in the eighties, when Lizzie was a baby). Georgia May is the more rock ’n’ roll of the two sisters, often seen in the Richmond pub the Roebuck throwing back cocktails with noisy groups of friends by whom she likes to be addressed as “Jagger.” But, as she recently told Tatler magazine, she never forgets the first principle inculcated by her mother, that eternal southern belle: “Always smile, be nice and gracious to everyone . . . and never show your bum.”
His oldest son, James, is the only one of his children to become a musician, following the rocky path already trodden by Julian and Sean Lennon and Jakob Dylan. James maintains he was never under any paternal pressure to start singing or playing guitar, though being dubbed “Jimi” as a baby by Tina Turner was probably pressure enough. After leaving school, he turned down a college place at Loughborough to turn professional with a band named Turbogeist, but, as of 2011, they still did not have a record deal and James was living in a “dodgy” part of north London where the cookery skills he picked up as a child were much appreciated by his girlfriend and mates. He recently admitted that his father hadn’t yet been to a Turbogeist gig. “Dad once joked about coming along, but I joked that he couldn’t because there’d be too many teenage girls there.”