Sunday Times 2

In the second extract from his fascinating new biography of Mick Jagger, author Christopher Andersen describes how Jagger’s closeness with Princess Margaret attracted the Queen’s lasting disapproval.Even in private, the Queen seldom questions the Government’s decision to award an honour. But there is one notable exception. Shortly after taking office in 1997, Tony Blair proposed Mick Jagger for a knighthood.
This was hardly a surprise: the first time the two men had met – at a party hosted by Peter Mandelson – Blair had gone straight up to the Rolling Stone and said: ‘I just want to say how much you’ve always meant to me.’

But Blair’s hero meant something else entirely to the Queen. To his dismay, she responded to the request with stern opposition.
The Prime Minister didn’t give up: over the following five years, he repeatedly submitted Jagger’s name to the Palace, only for the Queen to make it known each time that she did not approve.

Was it because Jagger was a rock star? Not at all – she’d been pleased to knight other singers, such as Paul McCartney and Elton John. But Jagger was different. Unlike most who receive such honours, he appeared to have embraced few charitable causes – despite having accumulated a massive personal fortune.

Nor could he be regarded as patriotic. While other rock stars had remained in Britain, paying millions to the Inland Revenue, Jagger had been technically living abroad since the early Seventies in order to escape paying tax.

And that wasn’t all. The Queen disliked what he stood for. Not only had he fathered seven children by four women and faced drug charges, but his early public persona – scruffy, surly, obscene, resolutely anti-establishment – had been calculated to offend.
It didn’t help Jagger’s case, either, that he’d often mocked the Royal Family and repeatedly referred to the Queen as England’s ‘Chief Witch’.
All solid reasons to deny him a knighthood, you might think. But at the core of the Queen’s distaste for Jagger was something far more personal: his relationship with her free-spirited younger sister.

Time and time again, the monarch had intervened to cover up potentially scandalous revelations that would have linked Princess Margaret with the bad boy of rock. One of these concerned an outrageous party at which drugs were served – and which led to Margaret being rushed to hospital.

Why, some asked, was the enfant terrible of rock – the son of a sports teacher from Dartford in Kent – so keen to pursue this unlikely friendship? The truth, according to insiders, is that Mick Jagger never really was anti-establishment; in fact, he’d long harboured blatant social ambitions.
‘Mick always wanted to be one of them – he aspired to be an aristo from the very beginning,’ said his friend and long-time publicist Keith Altham.
Jagger was pushing at an open door. By 1965, his reputation as both anarchist and corruptor of youth had gone global – which gave him a unique social cachet.

‘It was suddenly very chic to be seen chatting with a rock star – especially a Beatle or a Rolling Stone,’ recalled Brian Morris, owner of the trendy Ad Lib nightclub. ‘Mick was probably the most sought-after socially, since he was thought to be the most dangerous.’
He became friends with Robert Fraser, a well-connected London gallery owner with a taste for cocaine.In turn, Fraser took Jagger to meet his old Eton classmate Christopher Gibbs, a Chelsea antique dealer who was responsible for the classic ethnic hippie look – achieved with Moroccan print drapes, carpeting, pillows and brass lamps.

Jagger was invited to dinner parties at Gibbs’ flat on Cheyne Walk, overlooking the Thames, where he met the men’s designer Michael Fish. ‘I’m here,’ whispered the Stone, ‘to learn how to be a gentleman.’Not that he gave up on his rock-star antics: when he wasn’t dining with the ‘right’ people, he played the irredeemable hooligan with his fellow Stones.

Typical of this time was the night he took two dancers back to his hotel. As he told his friend, Rodney Bingenheimer, they had ‘a wild party – mattresses on the floors, bouncing off the walls, an incredible night’. One of the dancers would go on to have a No?1 hit record. The other would become an Oscar-nominated movie star.

Meanwhile, the Stones’ greatest rivals were stealing a march on them that year. All four Beatles wound up on the Queen’s Birthday Honours List in 1965, with each being made an MBE. Did Jagger mind? Probably – but at least he could console himself that he was now moving with ease through the world of titled aristocrats.

It was at the 16th birthday party of Lady Victoria Ormsby-Gore, daughter of former British ambassador to the United States Sir David Ormsby-Gore, that he made his most important royal contact.

As he surveyed the room, Princess Margaret, wearing one of her cleavage-baring gowns, beckoned him over. Immediately, Jagger sprang to his feet – leaving behind his indignant girlfriend, Chrissie Shrimpton. She had reason for concern.
Even though Margaret was then married to Lord Snowdon, she was already famous for her liaisons with younger men.
‘There was a flirtation going on there, definitely,’ said Lady Elsa Bowker, whose husband, Sir James Bowker, was Britain’s former ambassador to Austria and Burma.

‘Princess Margaret was only in her 30s and quite attractive. And as everybody knows, she was attracted to younger men.’ By then, the combination of Jagger’s raw sex appeal, upper-class mumble and mannerisms of an English gentleman was turning him into a magnet for blue-blooded women.Margaret, it seems, was no exception. After that night, according to one courtier, ‘they spoke on the phone constantly and she invited him to social events’. Were they ever lovers? Jagger, for all his faults, has never kissed and told – but at least a few suspected they were.The courtier recalled: ‘She found him sexy and exciting. If you saw them laughing together, dancing, the way she’d put her hand on his knee and giggle at his stories like a schoolgirl, you’d have thought there was something going on.’

How Mick met his match: Jagger was left by Angelina Jolie 

In Christopher Andersen book he describes how Mick Jagger’s affair with Carla Bruni drove his then girlfriend Jerry Hall to despair, before he turned his attention to a beautiful young unknown woman called Angelina Jolie.

His marriage was thriving with Jerry becoming pregnant in 1997 with her fourth child. Then Jagger flew to New York to film the video for the Stones song Anybody Seen My Baby?

His attention was immediately caught by a lushly beautiful unknown who’d been hired to play a stripper in the video. Her name was Angelina Jolie.Beyond her obvious physical attributes, Angelina offered something extra: an element of danger. “She scares me a little – I like that,” Jagger said.

Highly strung, foul-mouthed, and given to dark moods and fits of temper, not only was she married – to the British actor Jonny Lee Miller – but she was already having an affair with the actor Timothy Hutton.Jagger kept phoning until he wore her down and she agreed to meet up with him in Florida. The weekend left Angelina unimpressed and Mick wanting more.

His phone calls – which mostly went straight to answering machine – became increasingly desperate. Her mother’s friend, Lauren Taines, who listened to some, described them as ‘astonishing’ and said Jagger was virtually sobbing.

‘© Daily Mail, London

© Daily Mail, London

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