Филип Норман – Mick Jagger (страница 3)
There is also the puzzle of how someone who fascinates so many millions, and is so clearly super-intelligent and perceptive, manages to make himself so very unfascinating when he opens those celebrated lips to speak. Even since the media first began pursuing Jagger, his on-the-record utterances have had the kind of non-committal blandness associated with British royalty. Look into any of the numerous ‘Rolling Stones in their own words’ compilations published in the past four decades and you’ll find Mick’s always the fewest and most anodyne. In 1983, he signed a contract with the British publishers Weidenfeld & Nicolson to write his autobiography for the then astounding sum £1 million. It should have been the show-business memoir of the century; instead, the ghostwritten manuscript was pronounced irremediably dull by the publishers and the entire advance had to be returned.
His explanation was that he ‘couldn’t remember anything’, by which of course he didn’t mean his birthplace or his mother’s name but the later personal stuff for which Weidenfeld had stumped up £1 million and any publisher today would happily pay five times as much. That has been his position ever since, when approached to do another book or pressed by interviewers for chapter and verse. Sorry, his phenomenal past is all just ‘a blur’.
This image of a man whose recall disappeared thirty years ago like some early-onset Alzheimer’s victim’s is pure nonsense, as anyone who knows him can attest. It’s a handy way of getting out of things – something he has always had down to a fine art. It gets him out of months boringly closeted with a ghostwriter, or answering awkward questions about his sex life. But the same blackboard-wipe obliterates career highs and lows unmatched by anyone else in his profession. How is it possible to ‘forget’, say, meeting Andrew Loog Oldham or living with Marianne Faithfull or refusing to ride on the London Palladium’s revolving stage or getting banged up in Brixton Prison or featuring in Cecil Beaton’s diaries or being spat at on the New York streets or inspiring a London
Such is the enduring paradox of Mick: a supreme achiever to whom his own colossal achievements seem to mean nothing, a supreme extrovert who prefers discretion, a supreme egotist who dislikes talking about himself. Charlie Watts, the Stones’ drummer, and the one least affected by all the madness, put it best: ‘Mick doesn’t care what happened yesterday. All he ever cares about is tomorrow.’
So let’s flick through those yesterdays in hopes of refreshing his memory.
To become what we call ‘a star’, it is not enough to possess unique talent in one or another of the performing arts; you also seemingly need a void inside you as fathomlessly dark as starlight is brilliant.
Normal, happy, well-rounded people do not as a rule turn into stars. It is something which far more commonly befalls those who have suffered some traumatic misery or deprivation in early life. Hence the ferocity of their drive to achieve wealth and status at any cost, and their insatiable need for the public’s love and attention. While awarding them a status near to gods, we also paradoxically view them as the most fallible of human beings, tortured by past demons and present insecurities, all too often fated to destroy their talent and then themselves with drink or drugs or both. Since the mid-twentieth century, when celebrity became global, the shiniest stars, from Charlie Chaplin, Judy Garland, Marilyn Monroe and Edith Piaf to Elvis Presley, John Lennon, Michael Jackson and Amy Winehouse, have fulfilled some if not all of these criteria. How, then, to account for Mick Jagger, who fulfils none of them?
Jagger bucked the trend with his very first breath. We expect stars to be born in unpromising locales that make their later rise seem all the more spectacular . . . a dirt-poor cabin in Mississippi . . . a raffish seaport . . . the dressing room of a seedy vaudeville theatre . . . a Parisian slum. We do not expect them to be born in thoroughly comfortable but unstimulating circumstances in the English county of Kent.
Southern England has always been the wealthiest, most privileged part of the country, but clustered around London is a special little clique of shires known rather snootily as ‘the Home Counties’. Kent is the most easterly of these, bounded in the north by the Thames Estuary, in the south by Dover’s sacred white cliffs and the English Channel. And, rather like its most famous twentieth-century son, it has multiple personalities. For some, this is ‘the Garden of England’ with its rolling green heart known as the Weald, its apple and cherry orchards and hop fields, and its conical redbrick hop-drying kilns or oast houses. For others, it conjures up the glory of Canterbury Cathedral, where ‘turbulent priest’ Thomas à Becket met his end, or stately homes like Knole and Sissinghurst, or faded Victorian seaside resorts like Margate and Broadstairs. For others, it suggests county cricket, Charles Dickens’s
In the two thousand years since Julius Caesar’s Roman legions waded ashore on Walmer Beach, Kent has mainly been a place that people pass through – Chaucer’s pilgrims ‘from every shire’s ende’ trudging towards Canterbury, armies bound for European wars, present-day traffic to and from the Channel ports of Dover and Folkestone and the Chunnel. As a result, the true heart of the county is difficult to place. There certainly is a distinctive Kentish burr, subtly different from that of neighbouring Sussex, varying from town to town, even village to village, but the predominant accent is dictated by the metropolis that blends seamlessly into its northern margins. The earliest linguistic colonisers were the trainloads of East End Cockneys who arrived each summer to help bring in the hop harvest; since then, proliferating ‘dormitory towns’ for city office workers have made London-speak ubiquitous.
Jagger is neither a Kentish name nor a London one – despite the City lawyer named Jaggers in Dickens’s
No such mercenary aims possessed Mick’s father, Basil Fanshawe Jagger – always known as Joe – who was born in 1913 and raised in an atmosphere of clean-living altruism. Joe’s Yorkshireman father, David, was a village school headmaster in days when all the pupils would share a single room, sitting on long wooden forms and writing on slates with chalk. Despite a small, slender build, Joe proved a natural athlete, equally good at all track-and-field sports, with a special flair for gymnastics. Given his background and idealistic, unselfish temperament, it was natural he should choose a career in what was then known as PT – physical training. He studied at Manchester and London universities and, in 1938, was appointed PT instructor at the state-run East Central School in Dartford, Kent.
Situated in the far north-west of the county, Dartford is practically an east London suburb, barely thirty minutes by train from the great metropolitan termini of Victoria and Charing Cross. It lies in the valley of the River Darent, on the old pilgrims’ way to Canterbury, and is known to history as the place where Wat Tyler started the Peasants’ Revolt against King Richard II’s poll tax in 1381 (so rabble-rousers in the blood, then). In modern times, almost its only invocation – albeit hundreds of times each day – is in radio traffic reports for the Dartford Tunnel, under the Thames, and adjacent Dartford–Thurrock Crossing, the main escape route from London for south-coast-bound traffic. Otherwise it is just a name on a road sign or station platform, its centuries as a market and brewing town all but obliterated by office blocks, multiple stores and even more multiple commuter homes. From the closing years of Queen Victoria’s reign, traffic funnelled to Dartford was not only vehicular; an outlying village with the serendipitous name of Stone contained a forbidding pile known as the East London Lunatic Asylum until a more tactful era renamed it ‘Stone House’.