Marsha Hunt: 'I'm glad Mick didn't help raise our girl'
By Jenny Johnston
Last updated at 12:19 AM on 27th September 2008
Swinging Sixties: Marsha Hunt in her Hair heyday
A paternity battle with Mick Jagger and a fight against cancer. Life has thrown a lot at Sixties icon Marsha Hunt. But, as she tells Jenny Johnston, she wouldn't have it any other way.
Marsha Hunt apologises for the fact that her hair is a little wayward today, which is odd. How wayward can a half-inch crop be? And surely Marsha, of all people, should know about truly wild hair. Hers, after all, provided one of the most iconic images of the 1960s, pictured in all its untameable Afro glory as she posed naked to promote the ground-breaking musical Hair.
Still, 40 years on, she is in a London photographic studio, tutting at herself in the mirror and smoothing down the tiniest of strands.
'Normally, I wet it down and blast it with the hairdryer, so it lies flat against my head,' she says. 'But I didn't do that this morning, so these little bits stick straight up. Do you see?' Er, no. But let's give the lady some slack here.
Four years ago, Marsha had no hair at all. It went, courtesy of her own scissors, before the chemotherapy drugs kicked in. She threw a hair-cutting party and let her granddaughter, Mazie, take the first lock. Mick Jagger - father of her daughter, Karis - cut another for her.
With similar chutzpah, she drew a flower on her breast for the doctors who were to operate on her.
Marsha, actress, singer, model, campaigner, is that kind of woman. Now, with her breast cancer in remission, the hair has started to grow back and she could have it wild and carefree again, but chooses not to. 'Short hair is truly liberating,' she says with the widest of smiles. 'I don't think I will ever grow it again.'
Of course, surviving cancer changes a person. So does reaching the age of 62, when so many of your contemporaries haven't, through drugs, disease or hard living. But the chasm between what she represented then, and who she is now, still seems, on the surface at least, vast.
She's in London promoting a forthcoming exhibition of portraits by the late Patrick Lichfield, the man who 'made' her. As well as taking those promotional photographs for Hair, Lichfield shot Marsha for Vogue, which was just as ground-breaking.
'The pictures were supposed to be for the cover, which would have made me the first black woman on the front page of Vogue,' she recalls. 'It didn't happen, but there was a huge spread inside. In those days, it was quite something.'
Defiant: Now aged 62, Marsha Hunt is in remission from breast cancer and says she prefers her short hairstyle
I ask why she holds Lichfield in such high esteem, and the answer is a surprising one. 'I think it was because he was such a gentleman. He never made a pass at me. We had a strange relationship. We weren't friends or anything, but he genuinely took an interest in my life. I think I expected him to be aloof, superior. But he was nothing of the sort. He treated this little negro girl from the US with the utmost respect.'
How touching that it was the apparent lack of sexual interest in her that Marsha remembers.She admits that sex defined her back then.
'You couldn't be a woman in your 20s in London at that time and not be part of the sexual revolution. I was all t**s and bum, and that was an expression of liberation. I thought it was my duty to take my clothes off, to show that women no longer had to hide.'
The notoriety was good for her. The musical Hair brought her a record contract and a raft of acting roles on film and stage. She was feted, adored, wooed - most famously by Jagger. The fact that she bore his child gave her a place inthe history books and added frisson. Mick we will come to later.
'I ain’t gonna talk about him,' she warns, so I steer her to the other juicy stuff: the drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll. She giggles at my assumption of such hedonism.
'Do you know the only reason I did so many of the promotional shots for Hair was that I was the only one who would get up early for them? I had the knack of looking as though I was doing all that, but I never was - at least not as much as you'd assume. Drugs? Ha! They were shooting us up with vitamin pills because we were so tired. The truth is, I didn't take drugs after the age of 19.'
What happened at 19? 'I came to London, and then I was too worried about being caught and deported,' she grins.
Gosh. Well, what about the sex then? There must have been a lot of that - much of it with Jagger, some, by all accounts, with Marc Bolan. She also had a 'glorious' fling with Paul Nicholas, her Hair costar, who is still a good friend. Was it simply the case that everyone was sleeping with everyone?
She isn't exactly offended to be asked, but there is a note of irritation in her voice when she says, 'It was 40 years ago.' I ask if she minds being defined by that sex and drug-fuelled era, and, perhaps surprisingly, she does. It peeves a little that people still expect her to be all about that decade's sexual attitude.
'Because I don't think that assumption was ever right in the first place. I'd been to university. I had opinions, beliefs, intellectual strength. But, because of what happened, people thought I was some dunderhead. I was dismissed as a rock chick. You know the thing. You say my name and they think 'hot pants, Sixties, Jagger' all that s**t. But the reality is that I've probably had much less sex over my lifetime than most women my age. I've been celibate for the past nine years, for starters. I was in a relationship before that, but I was celibate for 17 years before him.'
These days, Marsha is a talented writer. Her latest book, Sex With Jimi Hendrix, might sound like a kiss-and-tell, but it is anything but.
Marsha never actually met Hendrix, but they shared a record label, and - it turned out - a social history.
'Like Jimi, I was 'negro' when I came over in 1966, and in 1968, I became 'black'. But I lived past him to become 'African-American'. I was fascinated by the man, but also the age in which he and I lived. I wanted to chart the changes we’d witnessed. I was constantly discovering things about my own racial history - and it blew me away.'
She is at her most effervescent when she is talking about being part of that revolution.
'And it was a revolution, make no mistake. Sexual. Racial. None of us had a clue about how much it was changing the world. We did make a difference, in a way that you just don't see these days. Guantanemo Bay simply could not have happened then. We would not have allowed it.'
Suddenly, she throws Jagger's name into the conversation, explaining why she fell for him, and it doesn't seem to have had much to do with the sex.
'He was educated. He was a radical. He was not the man people think they know now. Somehow, that all gets lost over time.'
Had Marsha been a different type of woman, she would be consumed with bitterness about the way Jagger treated her. When they met, he was obsessed with her, and it is widely thought that he wrote one of the Rolling Stones' most famous songs, Brown Sugar, about her. But when Karis was born, in 1970, Jagger refused even to acknowledge paternity, much less play any part in his daughter's life. He only recognised Karis as his daughter more than a decade later, and then only after a bitter court battle by Marsha.
Today, Karis and her father are close, but the rejection was all too public. At the time, Marsha was determined that her daughter should know her father. Heartbreakingly, she even told Karis 'that's your daddy' when Rolling Stones songs came on the radio.
I ask if she felt any guilt for bringing Karis into the world in what now seems like such uncertain circumstances.
Marsha shakes her head. 'No. What happened was not my fault. Besides, whatever happened with Mick, she went on to have such a fabulous life.
There were uncles and friends of mine who adored her. I never thought she was deprived.
'In fact, now I think she is incredibly lucky. She could have had all kinds of fathers and she had Mick. Now he can really appreciates who she is and what she has become. I know that shewould be a different person had he been around all the time, and, in a way, with hindsight, I can say, "Wasn't it lucky that he wasn't there."'
I ask if she means it was lucky that Jagger wasn't there to screw up Karis's life.
She nods, and says, "She was 12 - formed - when they got to know each other. What are you going to do to a child of 12? You are going to have some influence, but there is already some core stuff pulled together by then.'
Proud: Marsha pictured on her daughter Karis's wedding day with father of the bride Mick Jagger
That's quite a damning opinion of Jagger, then? She shakes her head.
'It's not about him. It's about his position, his lifestyle, his career, his choice of friends. I mean, my daughter had an incredibly stable upbringing. I read to her every night, sang to her. I have no idea how different things would have been if Mick had been part of her life, but I know that the influence of celebrity and all that goes with it is difficult for children.'
She tells me that she went out of her way to turn Jagger into a hero figure for her daughter - 'as all dads should be' - even when she felt like screaming about what a rubbish father he was.
'When you have a child, you put them first, whatever. All your own feelings have to take second place. How I raised Karis is now what I'm proudest of.
Today, she is part of the infamously convoluted Jagger clan, and seemingly happy to be so. She waves away any notion that there is anything unhealthy about the way the Jaggers live.
'No, these are siblings who share a notorious father, but they deal with each other in beautiful ways. All the kids were at Karis's wedding, you know. Jade (Jagger's daughter with his first wife, Bianca) was the maid of honour. I remember standing up and saying something important - that modern life has created new kinds of families, and the crucial thing is to do the best you can with that. And things have worked out pretty well. Mick is a grandfather, and he's a good one. Do I have regrets about getting involved with him? Are you kidding?'
This is a woman who has learned to accentuate the positive. Four years ago she was diagnosed with breast cancer, but dealt with losing a breast in her own inimitable way.
'I said, "So what? I still have my life, which is what matters."'
She has refused all offers of a surgical reconstruction and refuses to wear a false breast. She concedes, though, that being single at the point of diagnosis helped her cope.
'I kind of think that it is easier to cope with the physical aspects if you are on your own. Also, I could be stronger if I didn't have anyone else's fears and worries to deal with. And I'd long since discovered that I don’t need a man to be happy. I'm pretty good at being on my own.'
Well, to a point. A man did come into her life at this time, but in the most unconventional way. She started corresponding with an old boyfriend, whose email address she had come across accidentally.
'My friend had sent me a message, and I was scrolling through the other people she had sent it to when this name popped up. I thought, "Is that the same guy?" So I sent him a message. And that was the start of it.'
By 'it' she means a passionate love affair with a man she still hasn't met since college. I ask how you can have a grand passion online, but she insists it can be done. 'I truly loved him. I found myself longing for the next time we could communicate. I asked my doctor, "Could being in love affect my recovery. Is it good for me?" And he looked at me as if I was mad. But I do believe it helped.'
And it was something that could have become real. It almost did. Once, they came close to meeting up, arranging to meet in a New York restaurant.
'It was the oddest thing. He didn't turn up. Afterwards, I discovered an email from him saying, "I haven't brought your number with me. Call me now. I will be at such-and-such a restaurant at such-and-such a time." Now, I think it was fate that we didn't meet.'
Now, it might be too late. She says she has fallen out of passion with her cyber lover. The final straw was his breathless email informing her that he was planning to move to Buenos Aires, Argentina, and take up tango dancing, of all things. The Marsha Hunt of old might have leapt at the chance, but that Marsha is well and truly gone.
'Please!' she laughs. 'I told him I tangoed at 20; I don't need to tango at 62. At 62, I want to potter in the garden, grow vegetables. I
just want to grow old. Dancing? Done it. Let's move on.'
A restrospective of Lord Lichfield's work is at Nunnington Hall, Yorkshire until 2 November,
www.nationaltrust.org.uk
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M.Hunt: 'I'm glad Mick didn't help raise our girl' (Read 1,429 times)
