Jerry Hall vowed to reveal all about life with Mick - but this week her £1m memoirs were scrapped
15th May 2009
Situated one floor above Hollywood's gaudy Sunset Strip, the On The Rox bar was, on first inspection, an unprepossessing little drinking den.
Reached by a narrow, neon-lit staircase at the side of The Roxy Theatre, it was a cramped affair with a series of private booths and a small dance-floor, and had once seen service as a seedy strip club. But despite its down-at-heel appearance and less-than-salubrious history, it was the venue where - during its heyday in the Seventies and early Eighties - Tinseltown came to party.
On any given night, Jack Nicholson and Robert De Niro could be found among its loyal clientele, John Lennon was a virtual fixture during his drink-and-drugs-dominated 'lost weekend', and actor John Belushi spent much of his last night alive there before being found dead from a drugs overdose in his hotel room at the nearby Chateau Marmont. One evening in late 1981, the American supermodel Janice Dickinson was in the bar dancing alone when she became aware that she had gained a partner in the diminutive form of Mick Jagger.
After dancing the night away with Jagger, the next day the statuesque Dickinson - who later went on to be the long-term girlfriend of Sylvester Stallone - returned to her room at the ritzy Beverly Hills Hotel to find it crammed full of pink roses. Delivered with the flowers was a note that read simply: 'Will you be my baby?' The Rolling Stones singer had signed it using his regular pseudonym, Prince Philip.
His concern that his pursuit of the beautiful Dickinson should not leak out was understandable. Just a few months earlier, in a flurry of publicity, Jagger had moved into a bohemian New York apartment with his lover of three years, Jerry Hall, after stealing the beautiful Texan model from her then fiancé, singer Bryan Ferry.
Jagger managed to keep his sexually charged affair with the exotic-looking Dickinson a secret from Jerry for eight months until one evening when a furious Hall rang her fellow model out of the blue.
'I hadn't exactly been keeping quiet about seeing Mick and someone must have told her about our affair,' Miss Dickinson told me this week. 'Jerry was shouting and cursing. Then she said: "Stay the **** away from Mick. I've got a gun in my purse and I know how to use it." ' Despite the threat, the affair carried on for another two months before Dickinson called time. 'Even though Jerry had found out about us, Mick didn't seem in any rush to end it, but I decided I wasn't a homewrecker,' former Vogue model Miss Dickinson added.
Jagger's serial betrayals were something Hall would have to get used to during her 22-year relationship with one of the world's best known rock stars.
Indeed, so brazen did Mick become during his affair with the abrasive Miss Dickinson, who starred two years ago in the ITV reality series I'm A Celebrity... Get Me Out Of Here!, that on one occasion he took both women to a New York nightclub and talked dirty to his secret lover while Miss Hall's back was turned. It was just one of the thousands - yes, thousands - of liaisons the sexually obsessive Jagger conducted while he was with Jerry.
Yet far from divulging such details in her supposedly 'explosive' memoirs about her life with the priapic Jagger, this same Miss Hall, who once threatened to kill her love rival, has decided discretion is the better part of valour. And this week, her publishers HarperCollins - who had been prepared to pay £1million for the book and only weeks ago were confidently predicting sensational revelations - announced that the deal was off.
They have decreed Miss Hall's efforts were 'unfit for publication' because of the dearth of information about 65-year-old Jagger in the manuscript. The planned media blitz for the book's September release has been scrapped and Jerry has agreed to give back a £500,000 advance.
Isn't it staggering, given the many lurid tales that surround their relationship - and rumours that Sir Mick fathered a secret love child he refuses to name - that Jerry's reminiscences have apparently turned out to be, as one publishing source told me this week, so 'spectacularly dull'?
Seasoned observers of Jagger's modus operandi may at this point allow themselves a wry smile, because lurking in the shadows would seem to be the sinewy figure of the control-freak singer. Everyone says he still wields almost total power over his ex - even ten years after their split, when Jerry finally said enough was enough after he fathered a son, Lucas, with Brazilian model Luciana Morad.
Last night, a mutual friend of the couple claimed: 'Mick has got his way as usual, because the last thing he wanted was this book coming out. He's very happy it's been scrapped. He despises these types of confessional books anyway and has always refused to write his own life story. The thought of the public poring over the details of his sex life absolutely appals him.'
So what could be behind Jerry's decision not to dish the dirt? In a word: money.
Another source added: 'Jerry would be absolutely crazy to incur Mick's displeasure. He's never been known as overly generous and she is forever moaning about how stingy he is. Even so, he not only funds their four children, but also to a very large extent Jerry as well. Jerry's no fool and she's hardly likely to want to risk killing her cash cow, is she? As for Mick, he has always used his money to control those around him. It's the way he operates.'
Indeed, two years ago, when Jerry made the mistake of publicly mocking her ex-husband for his meanness, Mick slapped her down by taking the unprecedented step of issuing a statement in which he said he continued to pay the 'lion's share' of costs relating to his ex-wife's lifestyle. The source added: 'It was a humiliating kick in the teeth for Jerry, who always likes to play up the fact she is her own woman. It was a salutary lesson that you don't mess with the bountiful Sir Mick.'
But the most pressing question is: just what are those juicy stories of infidelity and deceit Jerry won't be sharing with the book-buying public?
In truth, she would have needed ten times the 304 pages she did write in order to list the number of times she was cheated on by Mick since the then 21-year-old Jerry broke her engagement with Roxy Music lead singer Ferry in 1977.
Indeed, the template for Jagger's cruel treatment of Jerry was cast within days of them moving in together. While Jerry was away on a modelling assignment, Jagger sent a telegram to a beautiful up-and-coming American actress who, as well as being feted for her sex appeal, was also married to a well-known Hollywood figure. The missive apparently stated in pretty bald terms his desire to have sex with her. Despite them never having met, she could not resist the invitation to get under the sheets with rock's leading lothario, and they are believed to have enjoyed a debauched three days in the bed he usually shared with Jerry.
She was not alone in her inability to turn Jagger down. 'It was impossible to say no to Mick,' Janice Dickinson recalled this week. 'He would wine and dine you, buy jewellery and send planes to collect you. He usually got what he wanted.' But having sex with other women was only the start of his betrayal of Jerry. 'He was nasty about Jerry behind her back as well, which I didn't like,' Miss Dickinson remembered. 'He used to say mean things about her - that he couldn't stand her. He wasn't complimentary. 'I used to put his meanness down to the fact he was bothered by how short he was.'
His diminutive stature did not, however, hinder Jagger's success with a carousel of the world's most beautiful women, including models Christina Haack, Jana Rajlich and Nicole Kruk. He had already left his first wife Bianca Macias, with whom he had a daughter, Jade, and was the father to another daughter, Karis, born in 1970, following an earlier fling with American actress and singer Marsha Hunt.
Increasingly, Jerry turned a blind eye to Jagger's philandering. She regularly found women's clothing and jewellery in the bedroom of their £10 million house by the Thames in Richmond, Surrey, as well as their four other homes around the world.
There is also a rumour, which persists to this day, that Jagger fathered another child, whose identity remains secret, during their relationship. But it was his seven-year affair with stunning Italian-born Carla Bruni, now the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, that Jerry most feared would take Mick away from her for good.
According to Clapton, he told his friend Jagger he was in love with Carla and begged him not to make a play for her. But within days Mick was having a passionate affair with her and she quickly stopped taking the guitarist's calls (Clapton should have known better - during the Layla singer's marriage to Pattie Boyd, Jagger had made a series of unsuccessful attempts to get her into bed).
Mick's stealing of Carla unsurprisingly led to a bitter falling out between the two rock stars. Meanwhile, Jagger fell as heavily for the mesmerising Bruni as Clapton had before him. However, it did not stop Mick from marrying Jerry the following year in a Hindu ceremony in Bali. By that time the couple already had two of their four children together, Lizzie, now 25, and James, now 23. They went on to have Georgia May, 17, and 11-year-old Gabriel.
When Jerry discovered his affair with Carla she reacted furiously. She confronted her rival in the lobby of a top Paris hotel, where the two women had a screaming match that ended with Jerry kicking Carla's shins and bellowing: 'Keep your hands off my man.'
The well-bred Miss Bruni reacted by sneeringly telling truck driver's daughter Jerry she had 'no class, no elegance'. Mick promised to break up with Carla, but they continued their affair.
After yet another row with Jerry over Bruni, Mick stormed out. Jerry wrote to him, begging him to come back, saying: 'I'm truly sorry I was jealous. I want you to have your freedom and I won't mind if you **** other girls. I don't want to change you at all. I just want to be your number one girl. I love you. Your baby, Jerry.'
Within weeks Jerry was pregnant with Georgia May. But just a day after she was born, Jagger flew to Thailand for a holiday with Carla. Carla refused his entreaties to move in with him and Mick began an affair with another model, 29-year-old Brazilian Luciana Morad, whom he met backstage at a Stones gig in Rio de Janeiro. Miss Morad gave birth to Jagger's seventh child, Lucas, in May 1999. Jerry discovered the boy's existence while hosting a dinner party in Richmond with Mick. She was handed a copy of a newspaper at their front door which revealed details of the child's birth. It was, she thought, the final humiliation. She went back inside and announced their marriage was over.
But there was more embarrassment to come when, during their divorce case, Jagger - who has been dating U.S. fashion stylist L'Wren Scott for the past seven years - argued that the Bali wedding had no legal status under British law. The couple eventually agreed an annulment. Jerry got to keep the house, plus a lump sum of around £5million, plus a monthly maintenance payment.
Even so, friends say the house and £3million of her settlement is actually kept in trust for the children and Jerry, who has not had another long-term relationship since the split, will have to move out when she is 65.
But Jerry's one-time love rival Janice Dickinson, now 54, has little sympathy for her.
'Mick wasn't a good guy to her,' she told me this week. 'She was cheated on constantly and just sat there and took it. For years she took the money, she took the humiliation and the shame. That to me is condoning it.'
Harsh words, perhaps, but now Jerry Hall has scrapped that million-pound book deal, it seems we will never know her own long-suffering side of this story of sex, lies and betrayal.
I like Jerry's taste.
