Jerry Hall: The Interview
With collections from Louis Vuitton to Gucci channeling Jerry Hall's signature '70s glamour, the legendary model will always be in style.
Jerry Hall--first-generation supermodel, the former Mrs. Mick Jagger, dictionary definition of "cool blonde"--is shaping the fashion moment. Her signature style was all over the Spring 2011 collections: Gucci, with Marrakesh-inspired luxe in jewel tones; Fendi, with whites and turquoise, all very Jerry in Saint-Tropez in the mid-'70s; Marc Jacobs, in a more Studio 54 sort of a way. We are all about to be impacted by Jerry Hall's aesthetic.
"Oh, that's so nice," says Hall when we meet at her London home to talk about the fact that she's holding the world's runways in thrall. "I've been hearing it. All the photographers and hair and makeup artists have been telling me, 'We keep saying, 'That's so Jerry Hall!'" And she laughs, which is her way of softening anything that might otherwise seem self-congratulatory.
It's predictable, but in the flesh, Hall is preposterously good-looking. She is 54 years old, all legs, blonde hair, and mannered charm. She is part man-whispering coquette, part solicitous girl's girl, part alpha mama. (I overheard her badgering 13-year-old son Gabriel Jagger to put on a coat before he went outside.) And she is good company.
She's leafing through her new book, Jerry Hall: My Life in Pictures, out now in the U.K. It's both an autobiography and a testament to a spectacular career. "Yves Saint Laurent was my first fashion show," she says. "I wore his tuxedo. And Helmut Newton was my first photographer, in 1973. I was really very lucky. I had an amazing career."
Hall didn't always dream of modeling. Growing up in Mesquite, Texas, she just wanted to be glamorous. "My mother and my sisters--five girls--were crazy about glamour and Hollywood movies. I styled myself on Veronica Lake and Marlene Dietrich." Yet, she says, she was a tomboy.
It wasn't until she took LSD at a high school party that she began to understand her potential. "A boy gave me a quarter of a tab. I didn't know what it was!" she says. "I actually had never taken drugs and was very nervous. And I never did take drugs [afterward] ever, ever. But I locked myself in the bathroom and spent the whole night staring in the mirror, going, 'Oh, my God.'" She runs her fingers over the contours of her face. "All of a sudden, I thought, Wow!"
And so, a few weeks before her 17th birthday, she flew to Paris. "I sort of had a turning thing. One of those moments where you decide you're going to do something really wild. And I did it."
Her twin sister, Terry, soon joined her, and the two of them shacked up in the Hotel Crystal with Grace Jones. "We shared a room; it had twin beds on one side and a single bed on the other and was divided by a curtain," writes Hall in her new book. "Grace was trying to be a model," she tells me. "She and I put on cabaret shows for our friends. We told her she had to be a singer. We'd go to the Club Sept, which was the happening club. That's where I met Antonio Lopez, the fashion illustrator I started working with. And Helmut Newton and Salvador Dalí. I was attracted to artistic and creative types."
Her charm impressed the Parisian intellectual and artistic set. She met Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir at La Coupole. Dalí asked her to come to Spain to make a film of her wearing only a white veil. She turned him down. "I had promised my mama I wouldn't pose nude," she writes.
It sounds like an intense and decadent crowd. "Actually, they were all very sensible," she says. "Andy Warhol [one of Hall's good friends] was the most sensible person I've ever met. He never took drugs, didn't drink. He liked sort of watching. Dalí too. Watchers. And I don't like to be in the middle of a crowd, so I like to watch too."
Hall's modeling career took off instantly. But it was the cover for Roxy Music's 1975 album, Siren, that propelled her to international celebrity. Lead singer Bryan Ferry picked her up at Heathrow Airport, and by the time the shoot was over, they had fallen for each other. Within months, Ferry proposed. Hall was 19; he was 30.
London embraced the glamour and cool of the couple. They were invited everywhere, including to dinner by Mick Jagger. "Bryan was flattered by Mick's attention, but he could also see that Mick was smitten with me. It couldn't have been nice for him. At the end of the evening, Mick brushed his leg next to mine," Hall writes. "I felt an electric jolt!"
Can she remember what she was wearing when she and Jagger met? "Yeah, I can. I was wearing linen trousers, kind of full, '30s, and they buttoned at the side. I had this crocheted sweater; it was '30s too, with short sleeves and a knitted collar. And a matching straw beret. All '30s. I always liked to do a look from a period, you know. Ha, ha! And I loved the '50s. The Hollywood sort of slightly sl*tty glamour. I still love that."
Jagger began turning up regularly at the London house Hall shared with Ferry. "He'd be jumping around and joking, and Bryan would get very edgy. ... One time Mick started chasing me around the Ping-Pong table, trying to kiss me, and Bryan came in and chased him out."
One night while Ferry was on tour, Hall was seated between Jagger and Warren Beatty at a dinner party in New York City. They ended up party-hopping all over town. "[It was] May 21, 1977. ... We would celebrate that day for the next 23 years," she writes. Jagger started wooing Hall with bouquets of flowers and constant attention. She finally gave in, and they began an affair. There was only one problem: Jagger admitted that he smoked heroin. "I told him I couldn't see him if he took drugs," she writes. Jagger managed to break his habit.
When Ferry's tour ended later that summer, he took Hall with him to Los Angeles, but Jagger was relentless. "He begged to see me again, telling me how much he missed me," she writes. They met in Paris. "As soon as I saw him again, I knew I wanted to be with him." They flew to Morocco, and Hall told Ferry she was working. "Finally, he said, 'Stop lying. I read about you and Mick in Morocco in the papers.'"
They ended things, leaving Hall and Jagger free to move in together. Hall tried not to worry about the small detail that Jagger was technically married to Bianca. "I thought ... I could get him to give up womanizing," she writes. For a while, she was right. After all, as she famously told David Letterman on his show, her mother had taught her "the way to keep a man was to be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen, and a wh*re in the bedroom."
The couple became regulars at their favorite nightspot, Studio 54. "That was wonderful. Because you'd see all these amazing people, famous people from all over the world, in one place on one night. It was quite something!"
And she was one of those famous people. "But I was still a fan. Ha, ha! It was wonderful. You'd see Martha Graham, Rudolf Nureyev, Truman Capote, Tennessee Williams. Elizabeth Taylor."
Her Studio 54 outfits were conceived to maximize the club's lighting. "Lots of bling! And lots of Halston. Jersey and draped and quite chic, you know."
Over the years, Hall inevitably became friends with many of the designers she worked with. "Yves Saint Laurent, Thierry Mugler, Madame Grès." Did they give her clothes? "Oh, yes. An awful lot," she drawls. "I know. So lucky!" A year and a half ago, Hall sold a significant portion of her collection at Sotheby's auction house and donated the proceeds to a homeless charity. Was it a wrench to let so much go? "No. Because I was having a feng shui attack," she explains. "And I'm not finished yet. So much junk everywhere."
It's the first big cleanout she's done since splitting with Jagger in 1999. She had been plagued with doubts about their relationship for years. "Mick was a dangerous sexual predator," she writes, "and although I loved him and he swore undying love for me, I felt very unsure of him. I had weaned him off drugs, but they had been replaced by sex. ... By the time we had children, I would read about Mick's dalliances in the newspapers." One report finally did them in: the news about Jagger's son with Brazilian model Luciana Morad.
