NICK KENT: “Then there was the lovely Bianca Jagger, or ‘Bianca the Wanker’ as she was known to the road crew whom she treated despicably at all times. This mutual disdain extended to group members also, principally to Richards, who loathed her with a vengeance. It was all about ‘appearances’ with Bianca: looking beautiful, making the right entrance, being seen with the richest and most elegant people and exploiting any and every circumstance for maximum publicity value. She always cultivated this expression somewhere between haughty disdain and utter uninterest, and looked at people as though she was mentally adding up the cost of the clothes they had on their backs to see if they were worthy of communicating with or not. One time she actually smiled at me, and it was almost terrifying to see the blinding whites of her teeth, like Scott Fitzgerald’s description of Daisy in ‘The Great Gatsby’ whose smile was like an old cash register ringing up a particularly costly sale.”
ROBERT PALMER: "Mick left Marianne behind when he left England, and, after enjoying himself for a time as one of European high society's most eligible bachelors, he gave his fans a real shock -- and confirmed his top-of-the-gossip-column status -- by announcing his impending marriage to Bianca Perez Moreno de Macias, actor Michael Caine's ex. The wedding ceremony, held in St. Tropez on May 12, struck a crushing blow to the Stones' rock n' roll credibility. Mick failed to realize that most of his fans had bought the image he'd created for himself over the years, the image of the androgynous anarchist-trickster, implacable of the establishment. And his new image -- the social butterfly and talk-of-the-town celebrity -- appalled them. It appalled Keith Richards, too. He registered his own private protest at the wedding by hurling an ashtray through a thick glass window.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “In St. Tropez in the merry month of May, Michael Philip Jagger is about to wed Bianca, she of the dark sultry eyes and cruel insolent mouth, always a sight to see, whether in a broad Daisy Buchanan hat with the front flap pinned back or a brilliant iridescent green scarf with a peacock feather on it wrapped around her forehead, sitting calmly backstage as utter chaos swirls around her, the elongated ivory holder through which she smokes her cigarettes bobbing like a miniature pointer in her hands.”
SPANISH TONY: “Anita hated Bianca from the start. On the tour, she would borrow clothes from Bianca, and then she would ‘forget’ to return them or she would just leave the things screwed up and filthy in Bianca’s hotel room. Her schemes were truly bizarre. Bianca was a man who had had a sex-change operation, she said. Anita offered to pay me a fortune if I could dig up some proof of the operation from the press or the police. Mick made it clear he didn’t want Bianca to fall out with Anita. ‘You’ll have to sort it out between yourselves’ he said. ‘Anita is one of the Stones now. Put up with her as best you can.’”
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “Once she had abandoned
the absurd notion that Bianca was a man, Pallenberg turned to the black
arts. She placed a number of voodoo
curses on Bianca, stabbing pins into dolls and, in one instance, walking around
a bewildered Bianca three times with a handwritten curse stuffed in her shoe –
one of several voodoo tricks for getting rid of people.”
STASH KLOSSOWSKI: “I had a 1969 Rolls-Royce Phantom that I drove from Rome to Nellcote. Keith took me aside and he said, ‘First thing I want to know is, what is your take on this marriage? How much do you think this will cost us?’ He was furious. He was quite prophetic.”
MAGGIE ABBOTT: “I know when they met because I was there. They met backstage [after the Olympia show]. Ahmet Ertegun introduced them, and when I saw them together I immediately realized what a brilliant idea it was. She was a female Mick. Ahmet knew as a couple they would be irresistible to the media.”
CHARLIE WATTS: “Mick is a very middle-class boy from Dartford. Keith is, and was always, much more outside of everything than Mick. Mick was never what he wrote: he was never a Satanic Majesty and he was never a Street Fighting Man, but he wrote bloody good songs that created this persona. So for him to marry… It’s what people did. I don’t think it’s ever suited him though. He’s never really liked it…”
VICTOR BOCKRIS: “Apart from Keith, none of the Stones were invited, and Keith had to punch his way past photographers and security guards to get in.”
JERRY POMPILI: “Keith came walking up to the door, and the chief of police grabbed him. They were standing there with their hands around each other’s throats screaming in their respective languages, and I had to break it up. The cop had no idea who this guy was. You know Keith. He looked like he was going to play a gig.”
TERRY REID: “By and by we could hear a clanking noise growing even louder, coming down the corridor towards us. Clanking and rattling; very weird. All of a sudden it stopped right outside. The door swung open, and everyone did a double take. A man stood on the threshold. He was in full Nazi uniform. He seemed to be standing to attention, all SS tunic, with an Iron Cross dangling around his neck, and black jackboots. It was Keith.”
PETE ERSKINE: “Is it true, then, that you hurled an ashtray at the altar when Mick and Bianca got married?”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Uh – well at one point I did heave a rather hefty piece of metal at a policeman; they didn’t know me from Adam. I had to get in somehow.”
CHARLEY WEBER: “The wedding was very funny. We were all there with big flowers. Jake gave Bianca a flower and kissed her. I gave her a flower and kissed her. Marlon was like, ‘I’m not going to kiss her!’ So I grabbed his flower, gave it to her, and kissed her again. Because she was pretty hot.”
BOBBY KEYS: “We all got very fucked-up before the
ceremony. Everybody was at the Hotel
Byblos in Saint-Tropez, and Marshall Chess and Ronnie Wood and Keith and I were
in the bathroom of Marshall’s suite. That’s
the first time I met Ronnie face to face.
Or, rather, to nose to nose. I
remember one of the perks of staying at the Byblos was that, from the window of
my room, I could watch the French movie actress Brigitte Bardot sunbathing au
naturel outside of the hotel on the beach.”
SPANISH TONY: “It was not the usual crowd you would find in church – girls in see-through tops, micro-skirts and hot pants – and Father Baud was obviously unhappy about this flagrant indecency in his house of worship. As he spoke, the organist played a schmaltzy medley from the film ‘Love Story.’ The tunes had been selected by Bianca.”
BIANCA JAGGER: “I want to be frank. Mick wanted to achieve the ultimate in sexual experience – by making love to himself.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “For Tommy Weber and his young sons, Jake and Charley, the party at Villa Nellcote had started as soon as they walked through the front door, only to be greeted like conquering heroes by Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg. The warmth of their welcome was directly related to the wedding gift that Pallenberg had asked Tommy to bring with him to the south of France. While a kilo of cocaine was a staggering amount of dope for anyone to smuggle personally across foreign borders even then, the way in which Tommy had done so won him immediate respect in that great white mansion by the sea.”
JAKE WEBER: “It was more than a pound. Probably a kilo. He divided it into four packets and taped it front and back so our entire chest and back was covered with masking tape over plastic wrapped in a t-shirt so we wouldn’t sweat from carrying it, which might have made the tape come off.”
ELIZABETH WINDER: “For weeks Anita languished in the cushy
Bowden rehab, detoxing from heroin.
Sleeping pills and methadone eased her through the initial
withdrawal. She missed Keith and Marlon
but fell in fast with Puss Coriat – a gorgeous heiress and fellow patient who
became Anita’s friend and lover. The two
amused themselves with romps around Bowden’s luxurious grounds, all-night Ouija
board sessions, and singing along to the Shangri-Las’ ‘Leader of the Pack.’
Sadly, the cure never took, thanks to Spanish Tony’s weekly gifts of flowers
stuffed with packets of heroin and cocaine.
Anita was discharged from Bowden with more drugs in her blood than she had
on admittance. Nevertheless, she flew to
Marseille to meet Keith and Marlon, just in time for Mick’s wedding.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “I don’t remember much about that wedding – it just went on and on and on and I passed out at some point. I remember going dressed in white – a big mistake. When I got out of the car people thought I was the bride until Bianca eventually showed up… Keith didn’t like Bianca.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “I think Bianca has had a bigger negative influence on Mick than anyone would have thought possible. Mick, Anita, and I used to go around an awful lot before he met Bianca. Mick marrying Bianca stopped certain possibilities of us writing together because it happens in bursts; it’s not a steady thing. It certainly made it a lot more difficult to write together and a lot more difficult to just hang out.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Mick and I have different attitudes, and throughout most of the seventies I was living in another world from him. I don’t blame him – he’d earned the right to do what he wanted. It was just that I couldn’t relate to that. And even if I could have related to it, I was too busy being busted – which is equally dumb. It kind of got up my nose a bit, that jet-set shit and like, the flaunting of it. But he’s a lonely guy, too. He’s got his own problems.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Bianca brought with her a whole load of baggage and society that Mick got into that nobody else was at all interested in and I’ve no doubt Bianca by now is no longer interested in either. Even then I had nothing against her personally, it was just the effect of her and her milieu on Mick that I didn’t like. It distanced him from the rest of the band, and Mick’s always looking to separate himself from the band.”
PETER RUDGE: “Say what you will, but Mick did very well putting the Rolling Stones into this world of celebrity. It benefitted Keith, too. Now Keith could be the dark guy sitting in this world of celebrity-studded rooms, and that was fascinating to people. Mick knew it was. He know the value of Keith being Keith.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “Not at all pleased by the way her brand new husband has ignored her, Bianca returns by herself to the Hotel Bibylos. At some point during the night, Keith Moon climbs in through the window of her bridal suite. Later, Bianca will say, ‘My marriage ended on my wedding night.’”
STASH KLOSSOWSKI: “I knew Bianca because she was Donald Cammell and Myriam Gibril’s menage partner.”
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “Others went even
further in trying to account for the gaps in Bianca’s history – not to mention
the fact that through it all, she’d somehow managed to afford a wardrobe by
Yves Saint Laurent and Givenchy. They
floated the wholly unsubstantiated rumor that Bianca was a Madame Claude girl,
one of the refined, well-educated, gorgeous young companions who moved in the
highest circles during the 1960s.
Favored by presidents, prime ministers, dictators, diplomats, captains
of industry, movie stars, and even a few rock stars, Madame Claude girls often
wound up marrying into the upper echelons of society. ‘You can leaf through the society pages,’
said social chronicler Cleveland Amory, ‘and have no trouble at all finding
Madame Claude girls who are now respected Park Avenue matrons.’”
DONALD CAMMELL: “Bianca was an old-style courtesan, the sort who was always basically saying to herself, ‘Well, who’s going to be paying the rent five years from now?’”
SPANISH TONY: “The wedding party was decadent in its extravagance – all the caviar and lobster and champagne you could consume. A local band played, dismally, but then there was a reggae set from the Rudies and a few songs from Terry Reid. At last Mick went up onstage, to sing with Doris Troy, P.P. Arnold, Steve Stills and a stageful of stars. They were magnificent.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “When I slid off at the wedding, it was towards a cubicle in the john of the Byblos, and I’m taking a leak and in the next cubicle I hear sniffing. ‘Keep it down,’ I say, ‘or break it out.’ And a voice comes back, ‘Want some?’ And that’s how I met Brad Klein, who became a great friend of mine. His forte was transshipment, rerouting dope from here to there. Brad’s dead now.”
TERRY REID: “Ian Stewart was always the go-between, and he told me Mick wanted me to play at his wedding in St. Tropez – the following night. Stew took care of everything, I just had to turn up at the airport early the next morning to board a chartered Comet. There’s 70 people, everyone in sunglasses, everyone trying not to look famous. They were loading crates of champagne onto the plane so I asked Eric Clapton if that was for the wedding. He told me it was for the plane journey and the bus ride at the other end. I don’t remember anything after that, aside from the biggest hangover of all time.”
NIK COHN: “Mick’d settled himself down nicely as an international gossip column face. To be photographed each time he got on a plane. He was seen at the theatre and opera, made friends in the very highest circles, and was responsible for establishing an entirely new vision of male beauty, based no longer on muscle or tan but on skinniness, outrageousness, belle-laide oddity. With the breakup of the Beatles, he became the most superstar superstar of all, after Elvis Presley, and the media accepted him unquestionably as the oracle of all Western youth, to be consulted on whatever new issue might arise. Twelve months in a year, he traveled in search of amusement and got his face on front pages, haunted the smartest restaurants, guest starred at the choicest parties. Finally, he got married in St. Tropez and held a party for hundreds of beautiful-person guests, the assembled press of the world and the cream of the Rock establishment – a true Hollywood fantasia, at which he threw so many tantrums that his guests, half-admiringly, declared him ‘the new Judy Garland.’”
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “All hopes for a
spontaneous Stones performance were dashed by Keith, who passed out well before
midnight. That left it to Mick to
provide the entertainment high point of the night. Although thoroughly wasted, Mick joined
American R&B singers Doris Troy and former Ikette P.P. Arnold for an
electrifying twenty-five minute soul medley.
Sitting with Roger Vadim and Paul McCartney, the new Mrs. Jagger watched
with interest as Mick and Arnold bumped, ground, and sweated their way through
one R&B staple after another – all the while blissfully ignorant of the
fact that Mick and P.P. had once been lovers.
As the night wore on, however, she began to feel ignored – and she let
him know it in no uncertain terms. ‘Mick
isn’t interested in anyone telling him what to do,’ Bill Wyman said. ‘He went right back to his friends and
enjoying the party.’ Bianca, fuming,
returned to their suite at the Hotel Byblos.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “Leaving Keith to his own private little space in the balcony, Jerry Pompili goes off to assemble the musicians. Naturally, everyone he asks says they will be only too happy to join Keith on stage. When he comes back to tell Keith the good news, Pompili discovers that the best man is fast asleep. Keith has passed out. For the first time in the history of the Rolling Stones, the show goes on without him.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “I just remember there were loads of people there and afterwards they all came to my house to slam shut the door and have a fix.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I was living at Yew Tree, the thatched cottage near Reading that Mick had given my mother. Once a week or so I would go up to London on the train to see Doctor Dally, who would shoot me full of Valium. Then I would get the five o’clock train back to Goring. That particular day I was on my way back to Paddington when through the window of a taxi I saw a huge headline banner: MICK AND BIANCA WED IN FRENCH FRACAS. I immediately went into the station bar and had three double vodka martinis. Got blind drunk. Problem was, I didn’t know that you simply don’t drink when you are shot full of Valium. I went lurching and staggering to an Italian restaurant (for some reason I thought I’d be safe if I was near the train). There, I did my famous falling-into-the-curry trick. The owner of the Indian restaurant called the cops and they came and locked me up. Just for the night, they said. To sleep it off.”
