Mick Jagger: How Bianca Jagger hit the Stone where it hurt most... in his pocket

Mick Jagger: How Bianca Jagger hit the Stone where it hurt most... in his pocket

By Paul Scott

PUBLISHED: 20:52 EST, 7 January 2013 | UPDATED: 06:11 EST, 8 January 2013

Like most of Mick Jagger’s loves, his first wife, Bianca, was cheated on and then discarded. But, as we reveal in the third part of this fascinating series, the Nicaraguan wildcat was the only one who managed to hit back where it hurt him most?.?.?.?in his pocket.

What could be more bitter-sweet than the prospect of celebrating the wedding of a beloved child, only to have to spend what should be a joyous occasion in the presence of a former spouse with whom you share a resolutely sub-zero relationship?

In the case of Mick Jagger, he dealt with the awkwardness of coming face-to-face with his former wife Bianca for the first time in many years last summer by adopting his trademark devil-may-care smirk â€" and donning an appallingly loud pink and purple suit.

For her part, the ex Mrs Jagger barely attempted to disguise her distaste at having to pose alongside him for the wedding snaps, as the ir only daughter, Jade, married festival promoter Adrian Fillary.

The mismatched Bianca Jagger, and the shamelessly unfaithful Mick Jagger

And if the funereal black frock coat she chose for the event in Oxfordshire did not adequately convey her dark mood, then one look at her stony-faced glare for the cameras said she’d rather be anywhere else but within several hundred miles of Mick. 

In truth, you can hardly blame 67-year-old Bianca. After all, during their nine-year marriage in the Seventies, Mick cheated on her shamelessly.

Nor were the couple ever really compatible. Indeed, quite why serious-minded Bianca married Mick in the first place, given her contempt for his rock ’n’ roll lifestyle, is anyone’s guess. 

Of all his lovers, though, Bianca is the one who has perhaps emerged most unscathed from the Stones circus. 

Her life today as a human rights campaigner couldn’t be more different to Mick’s.

But once, they appeared to be the very personification of the shallow showbusiness power couple.

They met amid the old money confines of the elegant George V hotel in Paris in the early autumn of 1970. 

A host of celebrity friends, including George Harrison’s wife, Pattie, had flown in for a party to celebrate the release of the Stones’ live album, Get Yer Ya-Ya’s Out!

Mick Jagger with his wife Bianca Jagger at a Rolling Stones party at Blenheim Palace. They were divorced in 1980

The effect 25-year-old Bianca Perez-Mora Macias had on the assembled males was mesmeric.

Dark, cool and haughty, she arrived on the arm of her on-off boyfriend of five years, French record label boss Eddie Barclay.

If Bianca effortlessly lived up to the role of ‘beauty’, Barclay made a pretty good fist of nailing the part of ‘the beast’.

Twice her age, he came coiffed in a luxuriant greying toupee that appeared to move independently every time he took drags from a vast cigar.

But what Barclay lacked in looks, he made up for in cold, hard cash.

Near his summer home in St Tropez, he cruised around in a white Rolls-Royce and gave sumptuous parties where guests were instructed to wear only white.

The 27-year-old Jagger was instantly captivated by the dusky Bianca. The question was: how to get her ageing sugar daddy out of the way?

His solution was as cruel as it was hilarious. As Barclay chatted to other party guests, Mick crept up behind him and began tugging at his rival’s wig.

With Barclay humiliated, Mick could move in to work his legendary charms on Bianca.

Typically of the predatory Mick, he was not about to let the small fact that his seven-month pregnant girlfriend, Marsha Hunt, was at home in London get in the way.

Even more brazenly, he spent the evening hitting on Bianca in front of his blonde American-born personal assistant, Chris O’Dell, who, as well as attending to her boss’s business affairs, was also on hand to warm his bed on tour when the mood took him.

But even to Miss O’Dell, the primal chemistry between Jagger and Bianca on that first meeting was impossible to deny. 

‘There was no doubt there was electricity in the air,’ Miss O’Dell told me. ‘ Mick was very open about it. He was sitting next to Bianca, who looked absolutely gorgeous, and was very focused on her.

He was playful, and he is playful with people he likes.

‘Before that night, Mick had been very interested in Pattie Harrison. I flew to Paris with Pattie because he wanted her to be at the party. But Pattie had already arranged to meet Eric Clapton, who was on tour in France.

‘Bianca was not obviously Mick’s real type, as he normally went for blondes, like Marianne Faithfull, and he was very attracted to Pattie. But Bianca was just so beautiful.’

By the time the group’s European tour had moved on to Rome, Bianca was there, waiting to meet Jagger.

But from the outset, Mick was well aware he had more than met his match.

Jade Jagger (second left) at her wedding to Adrian Fillary with her parents Bianca Jagger (left) and Mick Jagger (right) at Aynhoe Park, Banbury, Oxfordshire

Nicaraguan-born and the daughter of a rich commodities dealer, Bianca had been sent to Paris by her parents at the age of 17 to study at the Institute of Political Science.

With a fierce intelligence to match her beautiful looks, she quickly found herself the subject of attention from rich and famous men, and before her 20th birthday was dating Michael Caine, who brought her to London.

Within weeks of meeting her, Jagger installed his new lover at his home at 48 Cheyne Walk, Chelsea â€" a move that was complicated by the fact that the role of chatelaine of the house was still nominally filled by Californian model Catherine James, a former lover of Eric Clapton and Wings guitarist Denny Laine.

She had moved in with Damian, her son by Laine, four months previously after being introduced to Mick by Clapton. 

When Jagger went off on the band’s European tour, Catherine jetted back to LA w ith her son.

‘The plan was that Mick was just going on tour and we’d get back together when he returned,’ she told me.

But it was while Miss James was away that he met Bianca. 

‘He didn’t tell me anything about it,’ says Catherine.

‘I read about him seeing Bianca when I was back in America. It was in the papers that they were together. Mick used to call me all the time and then, all of a sudden, he didn’t call any more. I was disappointed because I guess I was under the illusion he wanted to settle down.

‘Then I called the house one day. Bianca answered and I knew that was pretty much the end of that.’

Soon Jagger and Bianca would be leaving London as well. In the summer of 1971, The Stones moved en masse to France to escape the 93 per cent UK tax rate.

It followed the discovery by their new manager, Pr ince Rupert Loewenstein, of a huge black hole in their finances.

The parsimonious Mick, to his dismay, found out he owed millions to the taxman.

It was decided the band would make their next album in the basement of Villa Nellcote, the gothic palace Keith Richards had moved into on the Cote d’Azur.

First, though, Mick made Bianca his first wife when they married at a hilltop church just outside St Tropez. 

The pre-wedding preparations hadn’t been exactly smooth-running. The happy couple had a blazing row that morning over the pre-nup he was adamant she sign.

With a fierce intelligence to match her beautiful looks, Mick Jagger had more than met his match with his Nicaraguan born wife

Such was the tension that Mick â€" whose bust-ups with Bianca were as full-blooded as their three-day lovemaking sessions â€" insisted his long-time drug dealer procure him several lines of cocaine just to get him through the day.

Back home in London, Mick’s former girlfriend Marianne Faithfull â€" then hopelessly addicted to heroin â€" saw an evening newspaper announcing the nuptials and went to a bar near Paddington station to drown her sorrows in vodka. 

That same night, she was carted off by police after collapsing face-first into her curry at an Indian restaurant.

Meanwhile, Bianca’s former lover, Michael Caine, said of the new bride: ‘She’ll argue about everything until you feel you’re going mad. I bet they’re fighting like cats and dogs already.’

His prescience was uncanny.

The steady stream of musicians who sat in on the recording sessions †" including legendary U.S. singer Gram Parsons â€" became used to watching open-mouthed as Bianca boxed her new husband’s ears.

From the outset, the aloof and snooty Bianca made perfectly plain her disdain for the bacchanalian goings-on as the band recorded Exile On Main Street.

As well as drink, large quantities of weapons-grade drugs were delivered to Nellcote on a daily basis.

Increasingly, the clean-living Bianca refused even to set foot inside the house, in large part because of a feud with Keith’s girlfriend, Anita Pallenberg.

The blonde Anita, whose once traffic-stopping looks were being steadily eaten away by her growing addiction to heroin, was jealous that her position as the reigning beauty of the Stones’ wives and girlfriends had been usurped.

For her part, Bianca was incandescent that it was an open secret her new husband was still occasionally sharing Anita†™s bed.

Before long, Bianca, pregnant with Mick’s daughter, Jade, insisted they get as far away as possible from the rest of the band, particularly Keith â€" who mercilessly ribbed her behind her back.

They moved to Paris, forcing an exasperated Mick to commute to recording sessions.

Marriage, however, did nothing to curtail Jagger’s bed-hopping ways.

Later, when the Stones relocated to Los Angeles as the base for a huge American tour, he resumed his affair with his PA, Chris O’Dell.

Mick’s adultery did not weigh on Miss O’Dell’s conscience. ‘There was no bond between me and Bianca,’ she told me. 

‘I felt like an employee to her. Most of the time, she was offhand, aloof and officious. She had this regal attitude and appeared to float above it all.

‘She always did her own thing. We had the idea that she was going to b e subservient and wrapped up in Mick, but she was not like that at all.

‘There was a power struggle between them. They would play manipulative games to see if they could make each other jealous.

‘I didn’t feel bad about sleeping with Mick because, to put it bluntly, I wasn’t the only hen in the henhouse.’

Finally, while Bianca settled in London, Mick moved into his own New York apartment. There, he would soon install the woman who would become his second wife, Jerry Hall.

With the marriage over in all but name, Bianca hired LA lawyer Marvin Mitchelson early in 1979 in a bid to get the pre-nup she had signed overturned. 

It was a long, messy battle, in which details of Mick’s affairs and the alleged extremes he went to in order to avoid paying tax were aired. 

When the divorce came through in November 1980, the details of the pay-off were kept secret . 

However, Jerry Hall says the deal almost completely cleared Mick out. 

And during the divorce case, Bianca’s lawyer announced she was seeking $ 12.5 million â€" half of Mick’s earnings since the marriage. 

Mitchelson also demanded she receive expenses from Jagger that would today amount to £23,000 a month, including £3,400 for clothes and extra for a chauffeur, nanny and live-in maid. 

Mick also had to pay her £4,200 medical bill after she injured her knee roller-skating.

With the marriage over, Bianca, who has never remarried, threw herself into her new role as a human rights campaigner and eco-warrior. 

She became a vehement and outspoken opponent of the feared Somoza dictatorship in her native Nicaragua.

She lives alone in a rented apartment on New York’s exclusive Park Avenue and has a home in London.

And as if to underline the chasm between their lives today, while Mick strutted the stages of London and New York like an overgrown teenager at the end of last year to celebrate the Stones’ 50th anniversary, she was in climate change talks in Doha.

Now, the only thing they have in common, other than the Jagger surname, is 41-year-old Jade and their grandchildren â€" Jade’s daughters Assisi, 20, and 16- year-old Amba, by her artist ex, Piers Jackson.

Apart, of course, from some very bitter memories.