Mick

The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger

Christopher Andersen

• Publisher: Gallery Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781451661460
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music Biographies

" He's a smart little mother******, I'll give him that. " —KEITH RICHARDS on MICK JAGGER IS he Jumpin' Jack Flash? A Street Fighting Man? A Man of Wealth and Taste? All this, it turns out, and far more. By any definition, Mick Jagger is a force of nature, a complete original—and undeniably one of the dominant cultural figures of our time. Swaggering, strutting, sometimes elusive, always spellbinding, he grabbed us by our collective throat a half-century ago and—unlike so many of his gifted peers—never let go. For decades, Mick has jealously guarded his many shocking secrets—until now. As the Rolling Stones mark their 50th anniversary, journalist and #1 New York Times bestselling author Christopher Andersen tears the mask from rock's most complex and enigmatic icon in a no-holds-barred biography as impossible to ignore as Jagger himself. Based on interviews with friends, family members, fellow music legends, and industry insiders—as well as wives and legions of lovers—MICK sheds new light on a man whose very name defines an era and candidly reveals: —New details about Jagger's jaw-dropping sexual exploits with more than four thousand women (including Madonna, Angelina Jolie, Carly Simon, Linda Ronstadt, Uma Thurman, and France's First Lady Carla Bruni)—as well as his encounters with several of rock's biggest male stars. Also, the day Mick's wife Jerry Hall and Keith Richards pleaded with Jagger to seek treatment for sex addiction. —The backstage drama surrounding Mick's knighthood, and Jagger's little-known ties to Britain's Royal Family, including Prince William and Kate Middleton. —What he really thinks of today's superstars—including Lady Gaga, Britney Spears, Beyoncé, Justin Timberlake, Kanye West, and Justin Bieber. —Never-before-revealed, behind-the-scenes accounts of his often turbulent relationships—from his band-mates, ravenous groupies, and rabid fans to such intimates as Andy Warhol, John Lennon, Jackie Onassis, Bill Clinton, and others. —Cocaine, LSD, hashish, and speed—the flabbergasting truth about the extent of Jagger's substance abuse, and how long it really went on. —A rare glimpse into Mick's business dealings and the killer instinct that has enabled him to amass a personal fortune well in excess of $400 million. —The stormy "marriage" between Mick and Keith that nearly ran aground over Keith's searing comments—and all the scandal, mayhem, excess, madness, and genius that went into making the Rolling Stones "the world's greatest rock-and-roll band." Like its subject, this book is explosive and riveting—the definitive biography of a living legend who has kept us thrilled, confounded, and astounded. THIS IS MICK.

1

♦ ♦ ♦

“Tell Them to Stick It Up Their Arse”

BUCKINGHAM PALACE
FRIDAY, DECEMBER 12, 2003

Prince Charles adjusted the braided cuff of his rear admiral’s dress uniform and cleared his throat as he ran down the list of names. He was searching for one in particular. “Ah,” he said, his finger stopping halfway down the single sheet. “‘Sir Michael Jagger.’ So he’ll be here this time, I see.”

“Yes, sir,” answered the Lord Chamberlain, whose job it was to see that the day’s investiture ceremonies went off without a hitch. “I can’t imagine he’d miss it.”

Mick had shown an attitude toward being knighted that verged on the cavalier. He had postponed the date no fewer than ten times, most recently opting out of an invitation to be knighted just two days earlier, on December 10. On that day, one of the few people who could upstage him—rugby superstar Jonny “Wilko” Wilkinson, who had just led England to victory in the World Cup—was also to be honored, and sixty-year-old Mick had no intention of competing for the spotlight with a twentysomething sports hero.

“It’s really quite difficult to believe,” the Prince of Wales said, shaking his head. “Mick Jagger. A knighthood. Just incredible.” Then, turning to the Queen’s chief usher, he added, “My mother did not have the stomach for it.”

It was not unusual for Charles to stand in for his mother at such ceremonies—particularly if she was ill or otherwise indisposed. In this case, she surprised her son and even her staff when she suddenly decided to have elective surgery on her left knee on December 12—an operation that could have been performed anytime over the previous year and for which there was no pressing need. Indeed, that same week, she appeared hale and hearty when she welcomed Wilkinson and his teammates to Buckingham Palace following the World Cup victory parade through central London.

“The Queen looked at Mick Jagger’s name on that list,” a senior courtier observed later, “and there was absolutely no way in the world that she was going to take part in that. So she simply arranged to be elsewhere.”

The Queen had, in fact, privately opposed Prime Minister Tony Blair’s efforts to include Jagger among the parade of humanitarians, scientists, diplomats, artists, academics, civil servants, sports figures, and business and labor leaders who made up her twice-annual honors list. The vast majority received an MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), OBE (Officer of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire), or perhaps a CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire). As many as 2,500 such royal honors were announced each year, and while the monarch’s approval is technically required, she seldom gave an individual recipient her personal attention.

Knighthoods were another matter. Next to a peerage, this was the highest honor the Queen could bestow, and she paid special attention to those few men and women she was being asked to make Sirs and Dames. Still, it was rare for the monarch to ever voice an objection—not even in private—once the government had drawn up its list of honorees.

Jagger was such an exception. Shortly after taking office as prime minister in 1997, Tony Blair had proposed Jagger for a knighthood. An unabashed rock fan and self-proclaimed master of the air guitar, Blair was still a young member of parliament when he first met Jagger at a dinner party hosted by Lord Mandelson. “Tony summoned up his courage,” Lord Mandelson recalled, “and went up to Mick. Looking him straight in the eye, he said, ‘I just want to say how much you’ve always meant to me.’ He looked wistful,” Lord Mandelson added. “For a moment, I thought Tony might ask for an autograph.”

Unfortunately, Blair’s request that Mick be knighted was immediately met by stern opposition from the Queen. Over the next five years, Blair repeatedly submitted Jagger’s name for a knighthood, only to have the Queen make it known each time that she believed he was “not suitable.”

Jagger’s profession had nothing to do with it. The Queen had taken great satisfaction in knighting other pop stars, most notably Paul McCartney and Elton John. But Jagger was different. Unlike most of those to receive such honors, he appeared to have embraced few charitable causes despite having accumulated a massive personal fortune. Nor could he remotely be regarded as patriotic. While other British rock stars had remained in England and paid dearly for the privilege in the form of exorbitant income tax rates, Jagger had been technically living abroad to legally escape paying those taxes since the early 1970s.

To be sure, opposition was grounded in a deep-seated personal dislike of Jagger and all that he stood for since the 1960s. More than any other figure, Mick embodied the hedonistic sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll ethos of the era. His early public persona—scruffy, surly, obscene, resolutely antiestablishment—was calculated to offend, and who more than the woman who sat at the very pinnacle of the social heap?

As for his private life, Mick had fathered seven children by four different women, but everyone knew that this was barely the tip of what amounted to an Everest-sized sexual iceberg. As for the drugs, there were arrests, two convictions—even a brief stint in jail. For a time, Jagger appeared to embrace the dark side, singing Satan’s praises in “Sympathy for the Devil” and hiring the appropriately named Hell’s Angels motorcycle gang to provide security at the notorious Altamont Rock Festival in California—a decision that would result in mayhem, and in bloody murder.

It certainly did not help that over the years Jagger had routinely mocked the royal family and that he repeatedly referred to the Queen specifically as England’s “Chief Witch.” He also made a habit of calling for a full-scale revolution. With no hint of irony or self-consciousness, he once actually proclaimed that “anarchy is the only slight glimmer of hope. There should be no such thing as private property.”

For all Jagger’s posturing and hyperbole, something more personal was at the core of the Queen’s anger toward him: she had always been concerned about the curiously intimate and potentially explosive relationship between Jagger and her late sister, the famously free-spirited Princess Margaret. Time and again, the Queen had intervened to cover up one scandalous revelation after another regarding Jagger and Princess Margaret—including one sex-and-drugs party that might have taken the government, if not the monarchy, down with it.

Equally galling for Her Majesty was the fact that Mick, despite his rebel pose, had blatant social ambitions of his own. “Mick always wanted to be one of them,” his friend and longtime publicist Keith Altham said. “He aspired to be an aristo from the very beginning. A knight? He wants to be a prince of the realm!”

Far worse, in the eyes of the Queen, was that he sought to use her emotionally fragile sister to climb the social ladder. “The Queen loved her sister and worried about her. Jagger was a friend of Princess Margaret’s for over forty years, and all that time the Queen thought he was a corrupting influence.”

So now, the very morning that Mick was scheduled to receive his knighthood, the Queen slipped quietly into King Edward VII Hospital. Once there, doctors would also remove cancerous lesions from her face. The operation to remove cartilage from the monarch’s knee went smoothly, but the procedure on her face left the Queen with deep scars above and below her left eye and along her nose. When she hobbled out of the hospital two days later with the help of a cane, onlookers were shocked by her appearance. “All at once, it seems,” wrote a reporter for the Daily Mail, “the Queen has become a frail, vulnerable old lady.”

No matter. “I would much rather be here,” she’d told one of the attending physicians, “than at Buckingham Palace knighting a certain party.”

In the meantime, it fell to Prince Charles to perform the deed. Years earlier, during a gala to benefit his own charity, the Prince’s Trust, the prince had told Jagger that he “couldn’t believe” Mick had never been on the Queen’s biannual Honors List. But he later told an aide that he was not remotely suggesting a knighthood—“a CBE, perhaps.”

Prince Charles had his own axe to grind with Jagger. Princess Diana was an ardent fan of the Stones and Mick in particular. Shortly after her marriage to Charles in 1981, Diana, then just twenty years old, planned to invite Jagger to tea at Kensington Palace. Charles, despite being distracted by his own affair with Camilla Parker Bowles, had ample time to be jealous. He was well aware of Jagger’s reputation as a womanizer with a particularly keen interest in long-stemmed blondes in Diana’s age bracket and insisted she cancel the meeting with Mick. An angry row ensued, but in the end, Diana grudgingly accepted a compromise offered by her husband: by way of consolation, the princess was allowed to invite a pop star Charles found less threatening than Mick Jagger to tea at Kensington Palace—the then happily married, slightly paunchy, prematurely balding Phil Collins.

Charles may have been even more offended by what he saw as Jagger’s overt lack of manners. At another Prince’s Trust dinner, this time at Windsor Castle in June 1991, Mick was photographed keeping one hand in his pocket as he shook Prince Charles’s hand with the other—a flagrant breach of royal etiquette that the next day’s papers blasted as “especially insulting to the royal family.” Painfully aware of every slight both real and imagined, the Queen and Charles both recalled the incident and the photo that was picked up by papers around the world. “Charles was really appalled by that,” Diana once said of the Jagger hand-in-pocket faux pas. “It’s the kind of silly thing they never forget.”

The one person whose opinion mattered most to Mick made no secret of how he felt about the knighthood controversy. Two years earlier, Jagger had called Keith Richards to break the news.

“Keef,” Mick began, “I’ve got to tell you this now: Tony Blair is insisting that I accept a knighthood.”

“Oh, come on man,” Richards groaned. “Just fucking ridiculous. A knighthood? What the fuck would you want with that? That’s not you, is it? That’s not what we’re about.”

“I mean, Paul has one, and Elton,” Mick replied meekly. “It’s not really the kind of thing you turn down, is it?”

There was a pause. Not long before, Mick had opened the Mick Jagger Centre at Dartford Grammar, the suburban prep school where in the late 1950s he got into serious trouble for wearing his hair too long and his jeans too tight. Had Keith’s old friend changed? After forty years as a convention-smashing iconoclast, was Mick now craving bourgeois respectability?

“You can turn down anything you like, pal,” replied Keith, incredulous. “Tell them to stick it up their arse.”

♦

The black Bentley made its way along Birdcage Walk, turned onto Buckingham Gate, and then, once waved past the gate, pulled up to the porticoed ambassadors’ entrance. A palace aide dashed to open the near passenger door, but the familiar lithe figure emerged from the far side, and without saying a word, bounded up the red-carpeted steps and into the palace.

Once inside, he walked up the horseshoe-shaped Grand Staircase and was led into an anteroom to wait for his group of honorees to be called. As he passed the time, Mick surveyed the works of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Van Dyck, and Rubens that lined the walls. He also noticed that several of his fellow honorees chose to wear their national garb: Scots in plaid kilts, saffron-robed Buddhists, and several women in brightly colored silk saris. There was the occasional military uniform and more than a smattering of men in morning coats, but the vast majority wore formal dark suits. Most of the ladies present were attired in chic suits or cocktail dresses—nearly all worn with that staple of old-school British fashion, the hat.

Much to the relief of palace aides, Jagger shed his leather trench coat and six-foot-long red cashmere scarf to reveal a striped suit—albeit one with leather lapels—and tie. They were less than delighted with his choice of footwear: $55 Adidas sneakers.

The investiture itself would take place inside the cavernous white and gold ballroom, built by Queen Victoria in 1854 and easily the largest space in the palace. Several hundred guests—each of the one hundred honorees was permitted to invite three—sat with their programs in their laps, waiting anxiously for the name of their friend or family member to be called. Mick had invited his father, Joe, then ninety-two, and two of his children: thirty-three-year-old Karis and Elizabeth, nineteen. “They would all have loved to come,” Mick said, “but we were limited to three. I chose them in order of seniority and availability.”

At precisely eleven o’clock, musicians seated in the balcony began playing, and five members of the Queen’s Body Guard of the Yeomen of the Guard—the elite detail created by Henry VII in 1485 and better known as Beefeaters—marched up the center aisle to the front of the room.

Prince Charles then made his entrance accompanied by two Gurkha orderly officers, a tradition started in 1876 by Queen Victoria. As the band played “God Save the Queen,” Charles stood at attention before twin thrones on the dais beneath the Durbar Shamiana, a towering, domed velvet canopy that was used when George V was crowned emperor of India in 1911.

“Please be seated,” Charles told the crowd and then, with his equerry at his side to whisper in his ear details about each recipient, waited for the Lord Chamberlain to announce the first honoree.

Mick stood impatiently in the anteroom, chewing gum and jangling the change in his pants pocket. Once one of the Queen’s “Gentlemen Ushers”—in this case, a rear admiral in the Royal Navy—informed Mick that he was to join the next group of ten to file into the ballroom, Mick hastily disposed of the gum and fell into line behind a priest and an elderly man being honored for his services to the sheep industry. Of the scores of men and women being honored that day, Jagger was the only person being knighted.

“Sir Michael Philip Jagger,” intoned Master of the Royal Household Vice Admiral Tom Blackburn, “for services to popular music.”

Jagger stepped forward, smiling, as Charles’s equerry handed him the sword that belonged to the Queen’s father, King George VI, when, as Duke of York, he was colonel of the Scots Guards. Another aide rushed to place the traditional red-and-gold velvet-upholstered investiture stool in position. Pausing to bow before Charles, Mick then stepped forward and, grasping the wooden railing attached to the stool with his right hand, knelt before the prince and bowed his head.

“I dub thee,” Charles said as he tapped Mick gently on his left shoulder and then on his right, “Sir Michael Jagger.” With that, Mick popped up and Charles handed off the sword to one aide even as a red velvet cushion was being placed before him by another. On the cushion was a medal signifying Mick’s new rank that Charles then pinned on Jagger’s lapel. After a brief handshake and a few pleasantries, Mick bowed his head slightly and took five large steps backward before turning to leave.

♦

“I went fucking berserk when I heard,” said Richards, still fuming. “I thought it was ludicrous to take one of those gongs from the establishment when they did their very best to throw us in jail and kill us at one time. It’s not what the Stones is about, is it? I don’t want to step onstage with someone wearing a fucking coronet and sporting the old ermine. I told Mick, ‘It’s a fucking paltry honor.’”

Keith also pointed out that his friend was prob...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Description
• About Christopher Andersen
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Preface
• Chapter 1. “Tell Them to Stick It Up Their Arse”
• Chapter 2. The Glimmer Twins Grow Up, Next Door and Worlds Apart
• Chapter 3. Dirty, Rude, Sullen, Chain-Smoking, Generally Obnoxious—and Brilliant
• Chapter 4. Angels and Demons
• Chapter 5. Under His Thumb
• Chapter 6. “Oh, Shut Up, Keith. Don’t Be Stupid”
• Chapter 7. Steel Wheels, Voodoo, and Four Thousand Women
• Chapter 8. The Final Straw: “Angelina, It’s Mick. Call Me!”
• Chapter 9. When the Moneymaker’s Shaking
• Chapter 10. Hanging with William and Kate/The President of France Is Jealous/Revenge of the Tiny Todger
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• Sources and Chapter Notes
• Bibliography
• Index