Jagger: Rebel, Rock Star, Rambler, Rogue by Marc Spitz

Author:Marc Spitz [Spitz, Marc]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Non-Fiction, Music, Biography
ISBN: 1592406556
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2011-09-07T14:00:00+00:00

10

“The New Judy Garland”

“Some would say that Bianca Jagger is nothing but a creation of the media,” Bob Colacello writes in his November 1986 cover profile in Vanity Fair. The Bianca Jagger that still lives in the public consciousness despite decades of activism and philanthropy on behalf of oppressed people from the Amazon to Afghanistan, her association with the International Red Cross, various green ventures, and her own Human Rights Foundation is often that media creation: decadent, gold-digging, shallow, a hag for the swish designers of the disco era. That Bianca Jagger is frozen in time atop a white horse, bareback in couture as she is led into Studio 54 by a naked man with a porn-star mustache. That Bianca sits astride a white horse. It’s her birthday party. Despite centuries of “women on horseback” imagery and mythology, Jagger looks impassive, even bored by the spectacle. Her smile is faint, not broad. It’s the lack of reaction that makes the image enduring, a great symbol of the disco daze. “If Bianca was mediagenic and muse appropriate in the time of disco,” says author Anthony Haden-Guest, who chronicled the rise and fall of Studio 54 in his book The Last Party, “it was a combination of her own nature, at once opaque and hungry for attention.”

Getting older is a bitch it’s true, and you can’t really begrudge someone for wanting to blur their vision with spectacle to avoid looking at the hard truths of growing up, but this was 1977. Down at CBGB, the grubby young punks were reinventing the music that Bianca’s husband had made so exciting a decade and a half earlier, and here she was, the finale of a grand production number arranged by 54’s owners, Steve Rubell and Ian Schrager, doing absolutely nothing. What did that Bianca do exactly, besides party and allow fashion designers to drape her skinny frame with new frocks?

Today of course, in an age of Hiltons and Kardashians, we can consider her fabulous idleness pioneering. Bianca was the first apparently tradeless celebrity. She was simply . . . Bianca, with a smear of red rouge on her full lips, draped in a Grecian dress, a regal shoulder bared and Halston or Andy Warhol whispering a bon mot into her bejeweled ear. She was, by now, one-name famous. But when combined with her husband, like Jack and Anjelica or Woody and Mia, she entered the zeitgeist with blunt force, leaving many confused and a few hostile. Jack Nicholson and Anjelica Huston were actors; they made films. Bianca flirted with the idea of becoming an actor but never did. Mick Jagger was an actor and a rock performer; he also was virtually managing the Rolling Stones operation the year that they met. Bianca was . . . what exactly? A very pretty vacuum with caramel skin, dark hair, dark eyes, a glamorously flat chest, a vaguely contemptuous bedroom gaze? The media that created her adored her, but everyone else injected resentment, jealousy, envy, and cattiness into that void.

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