BOOK
Jerry Hall: My Life in Pictures
Jerry Hall: My Life in Pictures
Jerry Hall is one of the few 1970s icons who can remember much about those hedonistic times. But for all the wild stories she could tell, these days she's more interested in her kids, cricket and keeping chickens
Jerry Hall: "I never saw the point of drugs when a couple of glasses of wine with friends was just as much fun." Photograph: Graeme Robertson for the Guardian
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A couple of years ago Jerry Hall took a £500,000 advance from HarperCollins to write an autobiography. She dutifully wrote it, without the services of a ghost, and turned it in, only for the publisher to reject it as too dull: not enough dirt on Mick Jagger, with whom she somehow managed to spend two decades and produce four children, despite his monumental feats of philandering. She gave the cash back, and has instead produced a coffee-table book with lots of alluring pictures of her – she was one of the first supermodels – and text drawn from her original manuscript. It is lovely as far as it goes, but with Keith Richards having recently produced an intimate self-portrait in his own autobiography, you feel it could have gone a lot further.
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Hall is bright. That is immediately clear when we meet in a dimly lit bar at the Savoy hotel – it is mid-afternoon, but feels like about four in the morning. But for all her natural fluency, the text is pedestrian, sometimes sublimely so. "I was having coffee and got talking to an older couple sitting next to me," she writes of her early days in Paris, where she had arrived as a 17-year-old, fresh from the wilds of Texas. "They turned out to be Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. I knew who they were, because I had watched their programme about existentialism on TV, and I also love his book Being and Nothingness."
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Lunch with Jean-Paul and Simone follows, at which the main subject of conversation is rodeo – and that's it. Sartre is despatched in three sentences. Dali gets one – he wanted her to run through his sculpture garden naked, but she refused. The matter-of-factness is numbing, which is a shame, since Hall, who never did drugs, is one of the few icons of the 70s who really can remember that most hedonistic decade. "Andy Warhol could remember them, too, because he didn't take drugs either," she says. "Keith Richards certainly can't."
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I ask her whether we will ever get a full-blown memoir. "I don't think I'll do it again, lord no, it's too much work," she says in her Texan drawl, full of unpredictable stresses. "It took a year to do it." In any case, she insists, she likes what she's written here, and her children like it, too. She's managed to write a book that's nice about more or less everyone, even Bryan Ferry, who was so annoyed when she left him for Jagger in the mid-70s that he kept her clothes. She says she enjoyed having to reflect on her life. "It's quite cathartic. I was amazed at how much I'd done. But I don't regret anything, and wouldn't change anything. I've had a wonderful adventure and four beautiful children. Mick and I are great friends. It's quite an achievement to have had the life we had together."
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The beginning of the adventure is, in many ways, the strangest part of the story. She is one of five sisters – she and her twin, Terry, were the youngest – born in a small town in Texas to a mother who loved movies and fantasised about being Scarlett O'Hara, and a handsome father who never recovered from serving in the second world war. "He was very volatile and very dangerous," she says. "Now it would be called post-traumatic stress syndrome. He was very damaged." He regularly used to beat his daughters, all of whom left home young to get away from him. With $800 she received as compensation for poor hospital treatment after a car crash, Hall left for France just before her 17th birthday.
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"My first airplane trip was to Paris," she says. "I had this fantasy that I would become a model, and I did! My mother said you have to go to the Riviera. We'd been watching To Catch a Thief, and she said, 'The Riviera's the place to go.' I spent my last bit of money on a pink metallic crochet bikini and some high heels, walked out on the beach in Saint-Tropez, and a man came up and said, 'Would you like to be a model?' How lucky is that?"
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Back in Paris, Helmut Newton photographed her in bondage gear – "This isn't porn," he told her when she burst into tears, "it's art" – and she was launched. But she says she never expected her modelling career to last. "I thought of it as a five-year deal. I'm surprised how long it lasted." At 54, she is strikingly beautiful – much more so in the flesh than on TV. She's also unaffected, punctuating the conversation with a throaty laugh and having a sly fag at the end of the interview, in contravention of all known hotel rules. I ask her what she thought, back in the 70s, was going to happen when her five years of fame were up. "I always wanted to have a family – that was one of my big wishes. And in school I'd taken drama, and I'd always wanted to act. I did go to drama school in New York, Los Angeles and London, and I did small parts here and there, but I never really had the time. Modelling was always paying more." Over the past decade, she has finally got the chance to act – notably in The Graduate, The Vagina Monologues and Calendar Girls.
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She is much more than a rock star's glamorous appendage, and I ask her whether it irritates her that people still see her as Bryan Ferry's lover and Mick Jagger's missus. "People read about you with their breakfast for years, so you're like an ongoing soap opera," she says. "People feel like they know you because they've read about you, and people who don't know me seem to have warm feelings about me. I seem to be popular with women. I go into the loo in restaurants and they all say, 'Oh, I love you.' It's odd, but it's really nice, too."
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That must, I suggest, be because she came through a traumatic separation – she and Jagger finally split up in 1999 after he was photographed with one twentysomething model too many – and has bounced back. "Getting a divorce is always horrible, because you feel you've failed," she admits. "Everyone hates to give up on a marriage. You think your family's broken up. But we managed to keep the family quite strong, and to still be friendly. Divorce is not the end of the world. It's worse to stay in an unhealthy marriage. That's a worse example for the children."
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She has talked in the past about being in a "dark hole" after the annulment of the marriage – it was annulled because their Hindu wedding ceremony, performed on a beach in Bali in 1990, was deemed to be invalid in the UK – but these days she's either over it, or is a very fine actor indeed. She denies they fell out over the size of the divorce settlement, but is clearly irked that the relationship ended in annulment. "I didn't like the idea of annulling after 23 years and four children," she says. "It seemed a bit rude." The annulment created problems concerning her residency in the UK, but they have now been sorted out, and she is considering becoming a British citizen.
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Hall has talked in the past about married men pursuing younger women out of fear of their own mortality. Does she really believe that? "I shouldn't make generalisations, because they're not all like that," she says. "There are a lot of guys who get a lot of pleasure out of their grandchildren, but Mick is a restless one, a bit of an alley cat." I ask her when, having put up with Jagger's many infidelities in the past, she knew it was time to split. "After the fourth child," she says. "I thought, 'Right, done that, he's served his purpose.'" And she laughs her machine-gun laugh. Her second son, Gabriel, was just two when the annulment came through.
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Hall says Jagger was a problematic husband, but a good father. "He loves his children. He was very good at helping them with their homework; he loves history; he was good at taking them for walks with the dogs; he loves outdoor activities, bike rides, playing cricket." Jagger is a cricket nut, frequently to be seen at Lord's, and Hall got the bug too. "I used to play. I was captain of the girls' cricket team and he was captain of the boys'. We were very competitive." Their two daughters, Elizabeth and Georgia, are models; their eldest son, James, an actor and musician; and young Gabriel a studious 13-year-old who plans to follow in the footsteps of Jagger's father and teach history. Hall has tried to give them as normal an upbringing as possible. "I brought them up in the suburbs [in a large house on Richmond Hill in south-west London], never let them go into London, and made them do chores. I hid things from them in the papers, and we never discussed fame."
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She is very sensible. When she met Jagger, back in the mid-70s, she made it a condition of their relationship that he gave up heroin. "I was always scared of drugs," she says. "Not only was it illegal, it was really dangerous – you could die. Also, they really are bad for your looks. I never saw the point of drugs when a couple of glasses of red wine with friends was just as much fun." It may just be that Hall is a rock chick with the heart of a suburban housewife. "I've always been a stay-at-home kind of person. I love cooking and gardening. I keep chickens. It's pretty normal in Richmond." She says she gets up early and makes Gabriel a gourmet breakfast. These days it's just the two of them in the family house, and one of these days she says she'll downsize. She has just sold a large chunk of her art collection for £2.4m because she was worried about burglars, and hankers after a flat where she doesn't have to fix the gutters, though it's not clear what will happen to the chickens.
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She talks fondly of her new boyfriend – an Australian businessman in his mid-50s called Warwick Hemsley, whom she met while appearing in The Graduate in Perth. The relationship seems to be surviving the fact that they're 12,000 miles apart most of the time. "We've been travelling a lot," she explains. She has a house in the south of France, and they're both part of the yacht set there. Marriage? "We're just having a lovely time together at the moment." She says the children like him. What about Mick? "He hasn't met him yet." Will Mick come to the wedding if they get hitched? "We haven't even gotten there yet," she parries. Maybe he could do the music, I suggest. She laughs, a little nervously.
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Unlike men who attempt to cling to some distant memory of youth, she accepts the inevitability of ageing. "The idea of getting old is horrific," she says, "but I don't want to make it worse by becoming a grotesque caricature. A lot of people have made that mistake of trying so hard to hang on to their looks that they make themselves look really scary." She rules out cosmetic surgery, saying it's impossible for an actor to express emotion with a face full of Botox. She hasn't even had her teeth fixed – one is a little crooked. To stay youthful, she recommends eating healthily, drinking lots of water, getting plenty of sleep, taking exercise and trying to be happy. "And have a good sex life," she adds as an afterthought. We may never get the tell-all memoir, but the Jerry Hall Guide to Health and Happiness will surely be coming soon.
Jerry Hall: My Life in Pictures is published by Quadrille (£25).
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