A Complete Chronicle of Mick Jagger's Voluminous and Varied Sex Life

Once I house sat for a family in the Woodley Park section of Washington, D.C. and while they had a great collection of fine French brandies, their library left a whole lot to be desired.

"Sittin Jack Flash":
Mick Jagger turns 70 this July

So out of sheer boredom, I found myself sipping their fine restorative libations while reading an unexpurgated biography of the closeted homosexual movie star, Rock Hudson.

After a 300 or so page romp thru the smarmy, graphic and seeming non-stop homoerotic exploits of New Trier High School's favorite son, I had an overwhelming urge to wash my hands.

After wading thru 328 pages of Christopher Andersen's new biography, Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger, I felt a need for a more industrial strength washup -- something like 24 hours in a full service Turkish bath.

The book was, quite simply, all sex - all the time.

The exploits of Mick Jagger, who turns 70 this year, really were quite smarmy overall and reading about them, after a short while, simply became boring.

Andersen, a former editor of People magazine, seems to have interviewed every one of Jagger's purported 4,000 female conquests and a good many of the androgynous rocker's male bedfellows too.

He recounts a lot of this in mind numbing detail.

On those rare occasions when Andersen manages to mention the storied musical endeavors and achievements of Jagger and the Rolling Stones, the treatment is cursory -- more to set the chronological backdrop for the latest phase of Mick's bedroom antics.

We are treated to scenes of Jagger in a menage a trois with his one time paramour, glam rocker David Bowie and a voluptuous black girl.

Glam rocker David Bowie
and Mick had a torrid affair

We have Jagger in the kitchen screwing his kids' new nanny on the countertop while his then-wife, Jerry Hall, dozes in another part of the house.

We have Mick, Bowie and Bette Midler cloistered in a closet together, boisterously getting it on with each other for more than an hour during a New York soiree.

We see Mick, Bowie, Bowie's wife and the rock group Queen's principal queen, Freddie Mercury, "whooping it up" with a group of transvestites at a London gay haunt.

Some of Andersen's chronicles border on the truly disturbing, such as Mick's seduction of MacKenzie Phillips on her 18th birthday. "I've been waiting to do this since you were 10," he tells the teenage star of TV's One Day at a Time and daughter of his friends John and Michelle Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas.

Mick, we are told, earlier had an affair with Mackenzie's mother and we are told that the teenager got her sexual start via an incestuous affair with her drug addled father. (p.192)

Had enough yet?

And pop biographer, Andersen devotes a full five pages to a controversy over the size of Mick Jagger's genitalia. The controversy was apparently started by fellow Rolling Stone, Keith Richards, who in an interview referred to Mick's equipment as being his, "tiny todger."

EGADS!

Andersen's output is pretty much what you might expect from someone who once scribbled for People magazine, which is, after all, little more than a glossy  glorified supermarket tabloid.

Keith Richards nicknamed Jagger
"Brenda" and "Her Majesty"

Nevertheless, some interesting little tidbits about Jagger's life manage to squeak thru the lurid scatological chronicle, to wit:

--Mick Jagger's father, Joe, was something like the post-war Jack LaLanne of Britain, a physical fitness devotee and evangelist with his own national TV show,

--On December 12, 2003, when Mick Jagger was to be invested as a Knight of the British Empire, Queen Elizabeth conveniently chose to have elective surgery that day so as to avoid having to oversee the ceremony,

--Jagger told British reporters in 1970 that, "The time is right now, revolution is valid." and "There should be no such thing as private property." He said this with a straight face, even as "street fighting man", Mick, was lavishing millions on his new Queen Anne styled mansion, furnishing it with priceless antiques, Flemish tapestries and Persian rugs. Jagger was chauffeur driven to that very press conference in his brand new Bentley limousine. (p.88)

--Jagger told fellow Stone, Keith Richards that as a young rocker, the idol whom he tried to emulate on stage, was not Elvis or Buddy Holly, but rather Marilyn Monroe. He wept bitterly when she died.

--Mick originally had a polished, upper middle class accent, but he acquired his trademark gruff, Cockneyfied sound as a result of accidentally having bitten off the tip of his tongue and swallowed it during a basketball game.

--Jagger seriously considered running for the British House of Commons on the socialist Labour Party line in the 70s, but thought that Bianca Jagger, his then wife, would be a political liability. (Altho with Bianca being a big fan of the Marxist Sandinistas in her native Nicaragua, you'd think that would be a big plus with the motley, neo-Leninists who constitute Britain's Labour party.)

All in all, this is not a very fun book to read, obsessed as it is with the obsessive sexual pursuits of a rather bizarre guy.

You'll probably not want to go out and slap down $32 for Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger.

Unless of course, you happen to be a giddy middle school boy in need of titillation, a National Enquirer reader or perhaps, an avid devotee of Bob Guccione's raunchy films.

Here is a 1966 performance of Mick Jagger's misogynist anthem, Under My Thumb:



And here from 1986 - introduced by Sir Paul McCartney - good buddies Mick Jagger and David Bowie perform live their reprise of the Martha and the Vandellas hit, Dancin' in the Streets: