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Ten Thousand Motels
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The Times
July 28, 2009
Jerry Hall on Calendar Girls and Mick Jagger
Beaten child, cheated wife — “Mick was quite unfaithful” — Jerry Hall is still smiling, and is now back on the stage
Andrew Billen
Here’s one for future pub-quiz use: which film and stage role has been played by both Celia Imrie and — boozy murmurs of disbelief — Jerry Hall? The answer is the character Celia in Calendar Girls. Imrie, the doctor’s daughter from Guildford, portrayed Miss September in the loveable 2003 movie and, from tonight, the former Mrs Jagger is stripping for that famous Women’s Institute calendar in the West End version. To be pedantic, the part has changed somewhat. Celia turns from a refined northerner into a Texan who married a Yorkshireman. But then, given Jerry Hall’s rich, wonderful and entirely ineradicable Texan accent, the producers had very little choice.
She is especially qualified for this part having spent 11 months stripping on stage as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate. “Ya know,” she says, when we meet for coffee in a hotel near her former matrimonial home in Richmond, Surrey, “by the end, the nude scene was my favourite bit.” I ask if anything will be covering her modesty. “Two buns,” she says. “I got me two buns.”
My rather lame interpretation of Calendar Girls is that it is grey-pride propaganda and that casting a stunning, 6ft professional model proposed to by both Bryan Ferry and Jagger rather blunts the point, but Hall, at 53, is much harder on her looks than I would be. If they pay enough, she’ll still model — “they” include wrinkle-cream manufacturers, hair-dye companies and erectile-dysfunction clinicians — but she doesn’t like it any more. “Now all I can see is wrinkles and fat and I just think, ‘Ergh! Horrible!’.”
Well, they say beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Last year the Daily Mail became very excited when it fancied it could see, from examination of some paparazzi beach snaps, cellulite on Hall’s thighs. This year it has equally excitedly announced that the cellulite has melted away.
But Hall’s take on Calendar Girls is more interesting than mine. “It really is a story about loss. It’s about older women who have lost something and it’s about women being supportive, grouping together and supporting each other in the WI. Women have these groups. I have loads of women groups, a writing group, a book club group, yoga class. For the camaraderie and the support, they are very, very important — especially since I’m divorced, you know.”
I did.
“Mick,” she adds, “was quite unfaithful.”
Was he? She laughs a little. “Yeah, well everyone knows that. When you love someone it’s hard, but I feel I’ve really gotten rid of all that now.”
The marriage ended ten years ago, when Hall discovered that the Brazilian model Luciana Morad was carrying Jagger’s baby. I am sure infidelity must be a hot topic in her other informal support group, the one whose membership is confined to the partners and ex-partners of rock stars. “Rock’n’roll people are great,” she says. “When Mick and I got divorced so many other women married to musicians reached out. They sort of said: ‘You’re still in the family of rock’n’roll. You are still one of us.’ And that was quite nice.”
Within this group, there is a subset of Jagger’s women. She gets on well, she says, with Bianca, the first Mrs Jagger, even though her own affair with Jagger was, she admits, a “contributing factor after a bit” to the end of that marriage. Marsha Hunt, who bore his daughter Karis, stays with her when she is in London. Karis and Jade Jagger, Bianca’s daughter, are friends with Hall’s four children, the model Lizzie, the actor Jimmy (both in their twenties), Georgia May, 16, and Gabriel, who was a year old when the marriage collapsed.
That day, the day that Jerry Hall finally took the metaphorical rolling pin from the kitchen drawer and clobbered Jagger, was an exciting one for celebrity watchers and Hall fortunately takes our prurience in good part. “It’s to do with people needing a story. There are these iconic stories or myths that people follow because they don’t have enough religion any more.”
So Mick and she are like Greek gods? “Mick’s Dionysus, isn’t he?” she agrees. And better, I suppose, for Hall to think of herself as Aphrodite or Ariadne than as a tabloid, rock-chick victim. “If you are the victim crying all the time it is just such a drag, but if you have a very naughty husband it is difficult not to be put in that position.” How did she avoid it? “Humour. Humour has always been the thing that hides my hurt.”
Obviously the question is why she put up with the hurt for so long. “Well, I just really loved him. He walked in the room and it lit up. And also because of his unique position. People threw themselves at him and I thought, ‘Well, with time this will change. He’ll mature and the girls will stop chasing him.’ But it just never happened. I mean something in him — which is why he’s still such a big rock star — is the eternal adolescent, the dissatisfied eternal adolescent, which is why he can still put out those songs young people still connect to. So, sadly, I don’t think he’ll ever grow up.”
Is it addictive behaviour or just Jagger and his life force? “I think it’s a bit of both and also, now he’s been made this Dionysian icon, how does he escape it? It’s expected.” If he came in now would he still light up the room for her? “He would. Well, there you go.”
We were looking forward to the grubby detail to all this when Hall accepted a £500,000 advance for her memoirs. But, although she wrote them and found the process “very cathartic”, she eventually returned the money to HarperCollins, “a mutual decision”, she says. Two theories persist about this, one that what she wrote was not juicy enough, the other that Jagger paid her off. It’s not, she insists, the second. So the first? “I didn’t write about sex enough,” she says simply. “Mick is my friend. We have four children together. I just don’t think sex is important to talk about, really.”
They wanted gruesome details, then? “Well, I’m just not really supposed to say. What I’m going to do is work on it some and then maybe show it to people [other publishers] when it is finished so that then they know what they’re getting.”
Was she conscious of not wanting to hurt Jagger? “No, that wasn’t it. It just never dawns on me to write about intimate details, things that were emotionally hurtful. I don’t share that with my girlfriends. Ladies don’t talk about what happens.”
Another disappointment for Harper-Collins may have been that, when an icon writes her autobiography, its narrative may not live up to the myth. Take the story that Hall once kicked the shins of Carla Bruni, now the wife of the French President, during her seven-year affair with Jagger, screaming in a Paris hotel lobby: “Keep your hands off my man.” Hall insists that they never met. And what about her telling the model Janice Dickinson that she had a gun in her purse and knew how to use it? “I may have said that,” she concedes, “but I didn’t actually have one.”
Hall’s life, if not mythic, has nevertheless an epic sweep. Her childhood in Gonzales, Texas, sounds miserable. Her father, John, had been a master-sergeant under General George Patton and had helped to bury thousands of bodies in an Austrian concentration camp. He returned to Texas a decorated hero but with undiagnosed post-traumatic stress. The only work he could find was as a driver and on the road he developed an addiction to amphetamines. Back home he beat his five daughters. “With his belt. He used to line us up like a sergeant and beat us. All my sisters left home and I was the last one and knew I had to get out, too. So I went to Paris.”
Her mother, Marjorie, long since happily remarried, was equally frightened of him and did not know how to protect her daughters. “In those days,” she says, reverting to an earlier theme, “women didn’t have support groups for these things.”
John Hall died of cancer five years after Jerry abandoned him for France. In the end, she says, he was proud of her for making money, because he never had. On a beach in St Tropez she was spotted by a fashion agent and was soon gracing the glossiest magazine covers. Not yet 20, she posed as the mermaid on the cover of Roxy Music’s album Siren and was soon the fiancée of the band’s lead singer, Bryan Ferry. She appeared in his video Let’s Stick Together but they didn’t, not once Mick Jagger had talent-spotted her for himself.
In 1990 the Rolling Stone and the supermodel married in an eight-hour ceremony in Bali that turned out, once divorce beckoned, to carry no legal weight in Britain. I ask if she thinks Jagger knew that. “I don’t know. He organised it. I mean we did have to become Hindus.” I say it sounds suspicious to me. “I know, but it was a long time ago.”
Some people may say that, having had an abusive relationship with her father, she replicated it with Jagger. “Yeah, I hope that’s over,” she laughs. “I feel excited and still hopeful about what’s around the corner, about the future. It would be just heaven to remarry and have someone who didn’t behave like that. That to me would be just such a luxury.”
Is there any one special right now? “Umm, well, you know, sort of ... But [we are] not planning any marriage, although you never know.”
She says that she is not interested in young men — “I hate their music” — and even looks are now irrelevant. Yet, I point out, she recently starred in a VH1 reality show, Kept, in which she auditioned for a toyboy lover. What was that about? “Getting paid,” she says, quick as you like.
Has Jagger really been financially mean to her? It is an accusation he resents. “Well, it’s very irritating when they say I got so much money in my divorce. I didn’t and it was ten years ago. He is not mean, but I am not as rich as people think I am.”
I mention that Marsha Hunt once told me that the problem with getting financial support for her daughter wasn’t Mick, but dealing with the multinational that is the Rolling Stones. “It’s true,” Hall says. “That’s what happened with our divorce.”
So money’s the real reason that she is back on the stage, five nights and three matinees a week? “But I enjoy working too. The women on Calendar Girls are fantastic to work with. We laugh so much, we’re like naughty school children.”
So another female support group? “Yeah, it’s nice. I get on great with women. I like women. Modelling was difficult because when you’re young and beautiful and successful the other women are jealous and they’re mean to you. I had difficulty making female relationships that were lasting in my early years.”
And when did it come good? “When I quit modelling,” she laughs. Or almost quit. This bewitching, funny, open woman — far too good for Jagger — will, buns and all, make a helluva calendar girl.
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“Mick was quite unfaithful” — Jerry Hall (Read 1,193 times)
