The Stones: The Acclaimed Biography. Philip Norman

waistcoats or jumping up together in zany Beatle style. Their clothes – Brian Jones’s especially – were discussed at inordinate length. Like every other group, they filled in their ‘Life Lines’ for New Musical Express, tempering sarcasm with what was usual, including the ritual white lie about their ages. Mick Jagger (‘born 1944’) gave his Favourite Colour as ‘red, blue, yellow, green, pink, black, white’, and his Favourite Clothes as ‘my father’s’. Keith Richard gave his Year of Birth as ‘1944’, his Parents’ Names as ‘Boris and Dirt’, his Favourite Actor as ‘Harold Wilson’, his Miscellaneous Dislikes as ‘headaches, corns, pimples, gangrene’. Brian Jones (‘born 1944’) gave his Sister’s Name as ‘Hashish’ and his Biggest Career Break as ‘break from parents’. Though Bill Wyman subtracted the largest amount from his age – five years – he admitted the existence of his wife, Diane, and his four-year-old son, Steven. Only Charlie Watts did not lie about his age or his Hobbies: ‘collecting antique firearms and modelling in plaster’.

      The ‘voice of the teens’ no longer needed their manager to whip up notoriety for them. On March 27, under a headline BEATLE YOUR ROLLING STONE HAIR, the Daily Mirror reported that eleven pupils at a boys’ school in Coventry had been suspended for imitating the Stones’ hairstyle. The headmaster had refused to reinstate them until they returned to school with hair ‘cut neatly, like the Beatles’.’

      By April 1964, they had spent so many consecutive weeks on tour that when Bill Wyman finally went home, his dog mistook him for a burglar and tried to bite him.

      Bill had moved with his wife and son from their flat in Penge to a modest house in Farnborough. He was still conspicuously the older man of the group, weighing the pleasures of stardom against the need to support a family and pay off a mortgage. That was only just possible on the wage each of the Stones drew from Eric Easton, pending Decca’s first payout of royalties – which, their contract now revealed, might not be for up to a year after the actual record sales. When Bill drove home to Farnborough, he did so in the mood of an overworked commercial traveller, minus commission.

      Mick, Keith and Brian had left the Edith Grove flat and gone separate ways which, at the time, seemed dictated by Brian’s eternally complicated love life. He now wanted nothing to do with Pat Andrews and baby Julian, being deeply involved with a pretty young model named Linda Lawrence. Within a matter of only months, the inevitable happened. Linda, too, discovered that she was pregnant.

      Mick and Keith were now sharing a flat with Andrew Loog Oldham in Willesden, North London. ‘We had two rooms between us,’ Oldham says. ‘And we had to share a bathroom. It was rather a quiet place, really. Half a bottle of wine in that flat was a big deal. And anyway, all three of us were going steady.’

      Mick Jagger was ‘going steady’, in almost every sense of that winsome Fifties phrase, with Chrissie Shrimpton, seventeen-year-old younger sister of Jean Shrimpton, the famous new face of Vogue and Sunday colour supplements. A year earlier, watching the Stones play at a basement club in Maidenhead, a friend of Chrissie’s dared her to go up to Jagger and ask him to kiss her. The encounter was symbolic of the new kind of Sixties girl Chrissie Shrimpton was no less than the kind of Sixties man Jagger would shortly become. He did kiss her and afterwards invited her out to a cinema in Windsor.

      Chrissie’s father was a prosperous builder in the Buckinghamshire town of High Wycombe, with a substantial house and farm a few miles into the country. Mr Shrimpton did not at first care at all for the thin, spotty boy his younger daughter had been bringing home after excursions to music clubs in the neighbourhood. The fact that he was an LSE student, a cut above the usual pop-group type, somewhat mollified Chrissie’s parents. And Mr Shrimpton, self-made man that he was, perceived that, under the hair and spots and sullen lips, there was an acute and calculating intelligence.

      Though Chrissie did not share her sister Jean’s cool, unfussed beauty, she was in every way an improvement on Mick’s Dartford girlfriends. She was also, despite her elfin appearance, strong-minded and forthright, with a temper that Mick soon provoked by his cool and careless attitude to the obligations of a steady boyfriend. Their romance from the beginning was punctuated by fights like the one Oldham had witnessed in the Crawdaddy Club passage.

      They were, even so, genuinely and often happily in love, and had made plans to marry as soon as Mick earned enough money to support a wife. This was in the days when he still planned to finish his economics degree course and choose some respectable career in business, or – he once told Chrissie’s father – perhaps even politics.

      The Shrimptons, with their substantial country house, gave Mick Jagger his first social step up from suburban Dartford. Still more attractive was the connection through Chrissie’s famous sister with the world of fashionable young London – David Bailey, Mary Quant, the Sunday Times, Whipp’s and the Ad Lib. Though Chrissie herself was at secretarial college, her name sometimes appeared in magazine stories about Jean. Mick, though hardly even semi-famous, liked to imagine their romance to be the stuff of newspaper gossip columns. So he would refer to it, in tour interviews with provincial journalists, sitting on the cold back stairs of some northern Gaumont of ABC, sniffing with the faint flu that plagued all the Stones and tilting a Pepsi bottle against his lips. ‘… there’s all those lies being written about me and Chrissie Shrimpton …’

      He was now palpably a being apart from the other Stones, in his cable-stitched fisherman’s sweater, his languid eyes appraising his interviewer’s cheap suit as he dismissed this or that question as ‘too much of a drag to talk about’. Offstage, he seemed the most antisocial and isolated: a rebel against his home and background, more vehement even than was Brian Jones. For weeks on end, Joe and Eva Jagger down in Dartford would hear nothing from him. Keith, by contrast, kept in touch with Doris Richards and showered her with gifts to delight her eccentric heart. Charlie Watts was a model of filial affection who presented his mother with a coffee gateau religiously every Friday night. When buying a gateau for his girlfriend also, Charlie would take the walnut from the centre of the girlfriend’s cake and put it on his mother’s, so that she’d have two walnuts.

      In those days, there were people who could talk to Mick about his apparent rejection of two very pleasant, if deeply ordinary, parents. Paul McCartney had a long talk with him about it one night when the Beatles and Stones were out together. McCartney got on well with his widower father, and all old people, and was depressed by Mick’s dogged insistence, against much evidence to the contrary, that parents were ‘a drag’. Everything was ‘a drag’, it seemed, which did not supply lustre to his still undecided image.

      To so natural a mimic, those early road shows as supporting attraction to big American stars were like a series of lessons in pop idol behaviour and deportment. He had watched the Everly Brothers, singing to one another like blow-waved, cooing narcissists. He had seen Little Richard, a rock ’n’ roll master whose music had always been strangely ambiguous of gender, and who now took to the stage in full make-up, complete with nail varnish. It was on the Little Richard tour that Jagger asked a Liverpool musician, Lee Curtis, how he could find out about theatrical make-up. Curtis’s brother, Joe Flannery, sat him down backstage and showed him how to apply actors’ pancake and rouge.

      Chrissie Shrimpton had watched Jagger’s growing awareness of himself as something more than merely a constituent of the Stones’ democracy. To Chrissie, he still pretended it was all for a laugh; that the normal, sensible part of him stood back and laughed when little girls screamed for him. But then, if they were out together and girls waylaid them, to Chrissie’s great irritation, Mick would pretend not to be with her – even ask her to make herself scarce. The Beatles might have lost followers after the revelation that John Lennon had a wife. It was better for Mick’s image – so Andrew Loog Oldham said – if he seemed to have no steady girlfriend.

      Chrissie felt slighted by Mick’s apparent willingness to let Andrew Oldham rule and dominate him – accepting, for instance, Oldham’s firm rule that girlfriends were barred when the Stones travelled on tour. Mick’s closeness with Oldham was starting to cause comment among Chrissie’s friends who saw them together in pubs, deep in purported musical strategy. Chrissie Shrimpton, in no doubt about Mick’s virility, was nettled when a female acquaintance asked, ‘At that flat,