Jerry Hall says the bare-all memoirs are on hold. For now, a new role that indulges her passion for serious literature comes first
27 Oct 2009
There’s something indecent about Jerry Hall – and it’s not the legs, platinum mane or sexually charged Tennessee Williams drawl. It’s the fact that at 53, the Texas-born model oozes contentment. Sacrilege, really, when you consider the current diktat that any woman nearing middle age should be preparing to live out her years mired in self-loathing. “A lot happens at 50,” Hall explains, “the best thing being that you just don’t care any more.” She tilts her head to one side and lowers heavily made-up lashes. “At 40, you still care. At 30, you care way too much – and your twenties are quite frankly a nightmare. Bring on 60, I say: just imagine the joy of having grandchildren.”
Released from her troubled nine-year marriage to serial philanderer Mick Jagger a decade ago, Hall, a mother of four – Elizabeth, 25, James, 24, Georgia May, 17, and Gabriel, 12 – has been busy living out plans that have been a lifetime in the making. She has completed an Open University course in Humanities and the Enlightenment and built up a theatre repertoire on Broadway and in London’s West End, where she has, for the past four months, been playing Miss September in Calendar Girls, a stage version of the hit 2003 film about the British Women’s Institute calendar.
Bearing all this in mind, it’s just possible that the shelving of a £1 million “explosive” autobiography earlier this year might be down to time constraints, and not, as has been suggested, because Hall refused to dish the dirt on her ex-husband.
We meet between performances, in an alleyway behind the Noël Coward Theatre, in London’s West End, where Hall – a great, long caricature of a woman in a fuchsia cable-knit cardigan – has wedged 56 inches of denim-clad leg beneath an outdoor café table. “I’ll tell you another thing that happens when you get older,” she volunteers, lighting the first of many Marlboros before a gaggle of awestruck WI women fresh from the matinee. “Your ears get big and flappy. No one ever tells you that. Everything just keeps growing. Oh, and you get hair in weird places. But for all that, I still like myself. That’s why it’s important to have interests – then you don’t get sucked into this culture of obsessing about yourself.” Registering her admirers for the first time, she treats them to a casual, megawatt smile.
Having started modelling aged 16, when she was discovered on a Saint Tropez beach by a fashion scout, Hall is familiar with the superficial culture she now spurns. By the age of 21, she had graced 40 magazine covers, becoming one of the most photographed models of her time. Now, however, she claims to have a laissez-faire attitude to all things physical, despite the constant needlings of the media, inclined to picture her in bikinis on holiday and mourn/champion her physical inadequacies. “I don’t actually think that British people are mean,” she insists, when I ask how hurtful she finds those pictures. “I think it’s a bit of entertainment, and if it makes people feel better that I’ve got cellulite and so do they, why should I take it personally?”
Surgery, she maintains, has never been an option. “I’m not going to be pushed into messing about with myself. But the sad thing is that Hollywood and TV are very ageist. Once you get older, they can’t wait to get rid of you, so a lot of women feel they have to have things done to keep working, and I think that’s a big mistake. It looks awful, besides which an actress has to show emotion; how can she do that with a face full of Botox? Obviously, there’s a lot of pressure in the fashion industry, too,” she says. “They’ll suggest that you have to go and see such and such a doctor for this and that, but why should you?”
Currently, Hall is in her literary phase, she explains, having been made an ambassador for the Sony Reader – a digital book reader. “My love of literature goes back to my childhood,” she says. The family home in Dallas, Texas, where her father worked as a truck driver, may not have been filled with books, but from an early age Hall became obsessed with the poetry of Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson and Edna Saint Vincent Millay. “I was quite nerdy at school,” she smiles. “I skipped a year and won a scholarship in chemistry.” When a school trip to France was cancelled, Hall was so devastated that she went anyway, aged just 16 and penniless. “It could have been a disaster, but I was incredibly lucky. Before long, I’d met Helmut Newton, done the cover of French Vogue, and my career was made.”
Squaring the bookishness with that new career wasn’t easy, she sighs, exhaling a plume of smoke. “It doesn’t pay for women to show up that side. People don’t like it.” Now, she claims to have found “strength through poetry” and assures me that she is an avid Marcel Proust fan. Has she made it to the end of Time Regained, I ask? “Oh yes,” she throws her head back. “I’ve read the whole thing twice. I love it because I think those long sentences that ramble on and on are just like poetry. There’s nothing like taking Proust to the beach and daydreaming along to it.”
Although her 1985 book Tall Tales, charting the excesses of the 1970s showbusiness scene, was a great success and is being made into a film, the autobiography looks likely to remain elusive. “I’m still working on it,” she says, becoming defensive. “But it takes a lot of time and it is difficult to get the balance right when there are so many sides to every story.”
Sides of her marriage that Jagger might rather were left untold, perhaps. After relationships with Hollywood film producer George Waud, banker Tim Attias, explorer Benedict Allen and the Aussie cricketer Shane Warne, will she marry again? “I am still a romantic,” she laughs coquettishly. “And I think marriage is a wonderful thing, but I haven’t met anyone quite right. That said, I’ve been having fun flirting with the young actors in The Shawshank Redemption over the road. I read somewhere that British men were the worst lovers,” she winks, “well below Spanish and Italian, so maybe going British is a bad idea.”
For the moment, at least, Hall is content to fall asleep alone, after a phone chat with one of her two closest friends, Bill Wyman’s wife, Suzanne, and Bob Geldof’s girlfriend, Jeanne Marine. “My pleasures are different now,” she shrugs. “I like to garden and collect warm eggs from my chicken hutch in the morning.” She giggles, aware that she sounds like a parody of a genteel British housewife. “I originally came here because I was married to Mick,” she points out, “but England has become my home. I’ve stayed very close to Mick’s family and I think getting through things the way we did was an achievement. It’s very easy to move over to the dark side, when what’s important is keeping the family together.”
In retrospect, does she think fame corrupts men more than women? I cite the example of Jagger’s band mate, Ronnie Wood, who left his wife, Jo, last year for 21-year-old Ekaterina Ivanova. “There is no way a woman would ever leave her family for a teenager like that. No,” she says, passionately. “It’s about a fear of dying for men: they want to stay immortal. But you know what, honey? We’re all dying every day – it’s just that women are more deeply rooted in reality.”
She and Jagger still talk “a couple of times a week”, she says. “And he is a very hands-on dad.” Does she still love him? “Yes.” Will he turn out to be the love of her life? “God,” she purrs lazily, exhaling a plume of smoke. “I hope not.”
Wow.
