Jagger, Jerry and the war over his £10m mansion she calls home
By Alison Boshoff
PUBLISHED:00:31 GMT, 18 March 2013
UPDATED: 00:31 GMT, 18 March 2013
http://www.dailymail.co.uk Jerry Hall wants Mick Jagger to sign over Downe House to her Model thinking of selling 26-room mansion in south west London Sources close to Jagger say she is unlikely to get her wayJerry Hall was once again on top form at a press conference last week, tossing out snappy quotes and posing in a leopard-print skirt and size eight Louboutin heels.
Her wide, red smile, painted on for the cameras, never faltered as she plugged her forthcoming theatrical run in Melbourne as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate.
But, 10,000 miles away from that sunny Australian photocall, storm clouds are gathering as she faces up to what, at 56, might be a rather tricky third act in her life.
Together for 21 years: Rolling Stones front man Mick Jagger and Jerry Hall are at war over the £10m mansion they once shared
All but one of her four children have flown the nest and her two-year romance with billionaire property tycoon Warwick Hemsley has run its course (they split up last September). Meanwhile, her beloved mother, Marjorie, a strong-willed Texan matriarch, died following a stroke and heart failure earlier this year at the age of 88.
Like many divorcees of a certain age and with an uncertain income, Jerry is looking to the future with nervous eyes.
But what, you may ask, has she got to be nervous about? Wasn’t she once married to Mick Jagger, one of the most successful and wealthy men in showbusiness? Surely, a lonely retirement spent in penury is the last thing she needs to fear.
In the midst of these major changes in her life, friends say Jerry is turning her attention to her retirement and the eventual fate of her £10 million home in Richmond, south-west London.
In fact, she is thinking of selling the 26-room property in order to release funds, a course of action which seems to be putting her on a collision course with her fabulously wealthy ex.
For elegant Downe House is the place where she and Jagger raised their family, Lizzie, 28, James, 27, Georgia, 20, and Gabriel, 15. The eldest two Jagger children live in the U.S., model Georgia rents a house with friends in London and Gabriel still lives at home with his mother.
Mick and Jerry bought the house, which dates from 1780, in 1991 for £2.25 million.
When they moved in, Jerry was pregnant with Georgia, and Mick was in the throes of a stormy dalliance with model Carla Bruni, who is now Mrs Nicolas Sarkozy.
Downe House was the Jaggers’ home for seven years until one night, in November 1998, when, during a dinner party, Jerry was handed a copy of a newspaper alleging that the Brazilian model, Luciana Morad, was pregnant by Jagger.
After the baby, Lucas, was born, Mick moved out.
Battle ground: Downe House, the £10m property in Richmond, south west London that Jerry wants Mick to sign over to her
In the legal wrangles which followed, it was widely believed that Mick had signed over the house to Jerry. Everyone assumed that Jagger — who is worth around £200 million and counting — had wanted at least to give her the family home after cheating on her.
But the fate of the property wasn’t quite that straightforward. Jerry had to suffer the humiliation of having her marriage annulled in 1999 after it was revealed that the ceremony she and Jagger underwent in Bali in 1990 had no legal validity.
Sources said Jerry had been hoping for a ‘divorce’ settlement in the order of £30 million, but I can reveal that she walked away with around a third of that . . . and not one of Jagger’s many properties dotted around the globe.
Mick permitted her to stay on in the house in Richmond, but it remained a mutual asset. Now Jerry is asking the man who shared her bed for 21 years to sign it over to her.
She has asked him for ‘clarity’ when it comes to the house and his intentions for it.
Cha cha ching: Jerry's stint on Strictly Come Dancing last year is thought to have earned her £55,000, and she wrote a tell-all autobiography for HarperCollins in 2009, for which she received a £500,000 advance
A friend of Hall’s says: ‘It is a source of increasing concern to her as she gets older.’
Apparently, she would like to be able to sell the house or leave it to her children, but she can’t while Jagger’s name is still on the deeds.
A source told me last week: ‘I know that she has been thinking about it. Her mum has just died and all of that stirs up where you want to be. It could simply be an exercise in finding out what her possibilities are. That said, she will want to sell up when she gets older. At the moment, it’s just her and Gabriel there, and it’s a big house for two people. The upkeep is very expensive, too. When the roof goes, it costs thousands.’
Sources close to Jagger, however, think it highly unlikely Jerry will get her way over this piece of prime real estate.
Jagger’s spokesman refused to comment, saying: ‘This is confidential.’
Sources close to the initial separation deal say his lawyers at Smyth Barkham put a complex series of conditions around Jerry continuing to stay there. They say Jagger gave her the house to live in only until she was 65. Conditions also stipulated that, should she remarry or cohabit, she would have to leave Downe House.
Another provision stated that if Mick died before Jerry, his heirs could enforce the conditions.
Jerry, of course, agreed to all this. She will have been advised by her legal team at Mischcon de Reya that, as an unmarried partner, she had no rights in law.
Mick’s view was always that she was the one who wanted a permanent split, and that he was just acting on legal advice to protect what was his. It is fair to say, though, that bricks and mortar exerted some pull over Jagger: within a few months of their split, it emerged that Mick was refusing to leave Downe House. While both of them had moved on emotionally — Jerry dallied with Paul Allen of Microsoft and novelist Edward St Aubyn, Mick with heiress Vanessa Neumann and model Sophie Dahl — they maintained a semblance of family life.
Mick bought a flat next door and an entrance was knocked through between the two properties.
Here's to you: Mick got into the habit of coming and going as he pleased, and looked after the children on the nights in 2000 when Jerry was playing Mrs Robinson opposite Josh Cohen in The Graduate
Mick got into the habit of coming and going as he pleased, and looked after the children on the nights in 2000 when Jerry was playing Mrs Robinson in London’s West End.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, this compromise eventually became intolerable. By 2002, when Jerry was involved with banker Tim Attias and Mick was dating stylist L’Wren Scott, Jerry asked him to move on.
Attias was reportedly unsettled by the idea of Jagger watching him come and go.
Jagger moved into a suite at Claridge’s Hotel in Mayfair which cost him £2,500 a night.
That should have been that. But, rather awkwardly, Mick’s girlfriend L’Wren Scott was pictured sneaking out of the Richmond house on the eve of a Rolling Stones concert at nearby Twickenham in 2003.
Jerry was in San Francisco playing Mrs Robinson at the time, and was reportedly furious.
Fashionable romance: Mick Jagger is now with fashion designer L'Wren Scott
A source close to Mick said: ‘Jerry doesn’t want him parading his new girlfriend in front of their kids and he was happy to respect her wishes.
‘But his hotel bill was mounting up and he took his chance to move back in while Jerry was away in the U.S. He is going to have a lot of explaining to do now they have been caught.’
This was swiftly followed the next year by a row over antiques and paintings at Downe House. Mick let Jerry know that the furnishings, ornaments and paintings in Richmond were his and said that he wanted them back.
Among them were Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein originals and several Old Masters, said to be worth up to £30 million.
The valuables were placed in storage, at a cost of more than £400,000 a year, and were later moved into Mick’s new property, a house in Chelsea, West London, which he bought in 2006.
By then, relations between him and Jerry were at an all-time low, not helped by Jerry’s failed romance with explorer Benedict Waud, and Mick’s continued happiness with L’Wren, who is still his girlfriend.
The following year, it became clear that Downe House needed a great deal of maintenance work. Mick and Jerry agreed to split the £100,000 bill, but were ‘barely on speaking terms’ over it.
Since then, however, relations have improved. Jerry said last year: ‘Mick’s funny, brilliantly talented and quite easy to live with — except for the infidelity.
‘We’re very good friends now. He calls most days. He’s so funny.’
Jerry has continued to work on stage, TV and modelling endorsements. Her stint on Strictly Come Dancing last year is thought to have earned her £55,000, and she wrote a tell-all autobiography for HarperCollins in 2009, for which she received a £500,000 advance.
But the book was never published after Jerry failed to dish enough dirt. Rather than elaborate on Mick’s shortcomings, she chose to return her advance.
She did, though, say the project was not necessarily permanently shelved.
‘I’m not ready to put it out yet . . . maybe in a few years,’ she said.
Was this a coded warning to Jagger? Perhaps if the battle for Downe House hots up, we may finally get to read her unvarnished account of what life with the Rolling Stone was like.
Pages: 1
Jagger, Jerry and the war over his £10m mansion sh (Read 3,852 times)
