Who The Hell Does JERRY HALL Think She Is?
Tom Hibbert, Q, May 1990
WANTED: drawling Southern belle with modelling experience, fun-loving socialite/raunchsome rock star's moll with sidelines in amateur dramatics, swimwear design and promoting beefy hot drinks. Position suits professional person, practised at playing the dumb blonde. Applications in writing to Tom Hibbert. P.S...
WE TAP SOFTLY and politely upon the dressing room door – nameplate: "Miss Jerry Hall" – in the Lyric Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, and it's tugged, fairly
wrenched, open by this peroxide Amazon, beaming beneath acres of lipstick, drawling Southern-wise, like Scarlett O'Hara on the sauce, "Wayull, and how ahre youwew!!?" You'd think she had never been quite so delighted to see anyone in her life. "Cayum
eehyounn!" she goes, battily fluttering the eyebrows set within the overlong face and baring a set of monstrously gleaming, somewhat equine nashers. In her left hand she brandishes a vase of flowers, and there are similar bloom-filled vessels lined all along the mirror counter.
"Just leeyook at all these flowyers!" she says, gesturing dangerously with the vase at her florist shop-styled display. "I just leeyurve flowyers. They're from all my friends. Aren't they nahce? Aren't
people nahce?"
Flowers, one must admit, are sometimes very nice, but these ones have been there in water since the play she's performing in,
Bus Stop, opened a week ago. The dressing room now has a certain less-than-pleasant fragrance. Observing that we have noticed this fact, Ms Hall turns up her ample nose and all but bellows, "Eeyuh, this duressing room smeeyewulls! Mah curleaning lady, she's so nahce and surweet, she just cayun't bayear to throw my flowyers away!" At this she laughs a laugh that's almost a whinny, a thing born in the throat that comes out the nose and is almost impossible to express on the printed page...something like "Shnawwwlsnffffhuhhuhhyawl."
I will refrain, from here on, from attempting to translate Ms Hall's utterances phonetically. You would get a dreadful headache. Suffice it to say, she is clearly very proud of her Southern accent. She exaggerates, uses it, in combination with fluttering eyelashes, as a flirting device – "What, li'l meeyuh?" – just like Scarlett/Vivien Leigh did in
Gone With The Wind. But if riled or angered, the accent slips; she loses it and she sounds, of a sudden, not some Southern belle but more like...well,
Mick.
"Hi, Chris! How are
you?" We have been interrupted (again...someone came scuttling in with Ms Hall's tea and then a make-up lady came to pop her head round the door and say "Hi!" and then there was a bearded bloke relaying some message about Saturday's matinee and now there's assistant director Chris Pickles, dropping by for pre-performance salutations.) "Hi, Chris! How are you? Wasn't Ben
sweet? Did you meet him? He's so sweet. He
loves the play!"
Chris looks rather blank.
"Ben Kingsley." Jerry darts a look at me to see if
I have registered the name of the famed British Thespian.
"Ben Kingsley. He just
loves the play."
Chris perks into action. "Oh, yeah,
Ben. Ben was saying in the interval how he
adored it. It was really nice to have such an open, honest reaction."
Jerry: "Sure
was! Byeeee!"
Chris: "Byeeee!"
Jerry (to me
"Isn't Chris
sweet?" (How on earth should
I know? I only saw the geezer for a few seconds, but Jerry Hall seems to imagine – or wants you to imagine she imagines – that
everybody is sweet and
nahce.) "Oh, he's so sweet. Everyone in the play is so sweet and nahce, all the people in the theatre are so nahce, it's just like having a family. They're so sweet and so supportive and so positive, full of energy, and so sweet that it's really..."
Sweet?
"...nahce."
JERRY HALL, dressed in simple sweater and jeans, though made up to the gills, stalks her dressing room, fussing with her hair and dabbing at her flowers, saying just how very delighted she is to be here, starring in the West End.
"I think the West End is wonderful. And you know, this is a really sweet play. It has lovely messages..."
Bus Stop, written in 1955 by William Inge, is pretty trifling, sub-Tennessee Williams stuff, concerning the fractured relationship between a would-be rodeo cowboy Bo Decker (played by David Cassidy's younger brother Shaun) and a would-be showgirl singer Cherie (Hall), who are stuck in a Kansas diner during a snowstorm. Maybe you have seen the 1956 film starring Marilyn Monroe. Jerry Hall is not Marilyn Monroe (her feet are too big), and reviews have been "mixed", as they say, some unkind gentlemen suggesting that Ms Hall is to the art of Thespis what Yves St Laurent is to speedway. To be polite, Ms Hall is adequate in the part (called upon to lounge upon the diner's counter and sing 'That Old Black Magic' out of tune, she proves that when it comes to singing off key, she's the tops). Ms Hall does not take kindly to criticism of her craft. She sits, slowly crosses her legs, slowly ignites a Marlboro Light and blows the smoke out with something approaching a snarl.
"Some of the reviews were nahce but, you know, they picked on me a lot about being too tall, which is so stupid because everybody
knows I'm tall. But they just wanted to pick on me and be bitchy and stuff."
Paranoid tendencies dissipate and Hall composes herself once more into a life-loving Southern belle.
"But I've gotten
wonderful letters. All my friends liked it and I've been offered four other plays and two movies," – she is positively beaming – "so it's very good for my career."
Ah, career. Thus far, the career has consisted of highly-paid modelling and, more important, being the much publicised paramour of Mick Jagger. She doesn't
need the money that the West End offers but, well...
"I have a whole lot of creative energy and I have all these big ideas and I want to entertain people. It's something that's in you from childhood, this desperately wanting to please and entertain people. It's like a gift, or something. Maybe it's that. It's different with Mick."
Ask Jerry Hall about herself and her response often, somehow, turns to things Mick.
"Mick dreams music. He hears music, you know. He's always hearing songs in his head. It's some sort of special talent. With me, I like to do different projects because if you have too much energy, it can go bad on you if you don't do something about it. I just
have to work because if I don't work I tend to re-arrange the furniture all the time."
JERRY HALL WAS born in Mesquite, Texas about 35 years ago ("about" = age in some dispute). Her father was a truck driver, transporting explosive chemicals across America. Her mother was a medical records librarian. The girl had to share a bed with three sisters, which sounds frightfully Southern-impoverished-romantic and Dolly Partonesque but "we weren't like dirt poor, you know, we weren't really white trash, we were just sort of on the verge of being regular suburban lower-middle-class American. I have
never had to starve."
It was mother who taught Jerry that a woman should be a cook in the kitchen, a maid in the living room, a wh*re in the bedroom.
"Oh,
that old quote. I try not to say those things any more. When I was modelling, I was hanging out with wild people and the reporters would want me to say some wild quote. I used to be quite good at that stuff."
Yes, it was Ms Hall who offered this valuable snippet of advice on how to keep a man to gals everywhere: "Even if you only have two seconds, drop everything and give him a blow job." She laughs her whinnying laugh, a disconcerting sound.
"Oh, that's dumb. I don't say those things any more...Actually my mother was a bit old-fashioned, really. She did believe that the man was the king of the castle and that you should try and please them and she thought if you were nahce and sexy you got a lot more out of life."
Does Hall believe that "man is the king of the castle"?
"I don't know because I feel very liberated. I've always made more money than the men in my job, I've always worked and I've had my own money and done what I like with it. And actually Mick is actually much better at organising, you know, things to do with the house than I am. I like to do the decorating and invite people and entertain them but he's much more practical."
What? You mean Mick Jagger, latter-day rock Lothario, can change a fuse?
"A feeyews? What's that? I dunno. He's good with his
hands, haha."
Oo-er, sounds a bit rude.
"I wouldn't say I was the sort of typical unliberated, you know, house-wifey thing. But I suppose man is still king of the castle...if he's got some
muhney, hahaha..."
Hall has always been drawn to men with
muhney, it seems. Flings with David Ogilvy and former racing mogul Robert Sangster, relationships with Bryan Ferry and Mick. But she does not wish to dwell upon the men in her past.
"No, no nah, I don't want to talk about all that. I'm sick of talking about that. I'm sick of talking about Bryan. I'm sick of talking about Mick." (Really?) "I don't want to talk about all that. The English press can be pretty ghastly, can't they? They sure can." All she will say about Bryan is "He was great fun around the house." The rest is silence.
Jerry Hall, girl from Mesquite, worked at Dairy Queen, dishing up ice cream, before her mother encouraged her to take up modelling.
"Everybody said I was nahce and pretty and photogenic but I was tall and thin and I used to be very upset about it. I'd cry and
crah and stuff but my mother said, Well, you know, look at this girl Twiggy, she's really well known and she's skinnier than you are and she's made it, so maybe you can do that. And my school picture came out
real good. It gave me a happy feeling."[/FONT]/FONT]