CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN is the author of headline-making, best-selling biographies of the likes of Madonna, Michael Jackson, Jacqueline Kennedy and Princess Diana. In “Mick: The Wild Life and Mad Genius of Jagger,” the author reveals the famously amorous singer’s long affair with Carla Bruni. Bruni, the future first lady of France, was once the “mystery woman” in Jagger’s life — and the one woman Jerry Hall feared could end their marriage.
BY CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN
A t the height of the Urban Jungle tour in 1990, Jagger spotted his old pal Eric Clapton with a twenty-three-year-old model named Carla Bruni. An heir to the Pirelli tire fortune, Bruni had all the qualities he looked for in a woman: jaw-dropping beauty, youth, money of her own ($4 million a year in modeling fees, plus her inheritance), and, most important, a rock star boyfriend.
“I knew Carla would appeal to his eye,” said Clapton, who remembered all too well how Jagger had tried unsuccessfully to steal his ex-wife, Pattie Boyd Harrison Clapton, away from him. He begged his friend to stay away from Carla. “Please, Mick,” Clapton pleaded, “not this one. I think I’m in love.”
MICK JAGGER’S PURSUIT OF ANGELINA JOLIE REVEALED IN ‘MICK’
But within days, Jagger and Bruni began what Clapton called their “clandestine affair. After Carla stood me up a couple of times, I got a call from the girl who had introduced us, telling me Carla was seeing Mick, and it was serious.”
Clapton was devastated. “The obsession with Mick and Carla gripped me for the rest of that year,” he said. “It took some grisly turns when I found myself guesting with the Stones on a couple of shows, knowing she was lurking in the background.” Jerry had also been aware of the rumors during the Urban Jungle tour and dismissed Carla as just another camp follower. But when stories surfaced in the press indicating that affair was still going strong after a full year, Hall ordered him to end it. Instead Mick flew out the door in a rage.
Worried that she had pushed Mick too far, Jerry dashed off a letter begging him to forgive her. The ploy worked. Three days later, a tourist spotted Jerry and Mick sharing a quiet drink at the Crane Beach Hotel bar in Barbados. They kissed and then got up to leave. When the tourist noticed that they had left an envelope on the table, he decided to take a peek at the contents.
“Oh, my darling Mick . . . I’m truly sorry I was jealous . . . you’re all that matters to me in the world . . . Please don’t take your love away. I want you to have your freedom and I won’t mind if you f— other girls. I’ll do it with other girls and you too . . . I respect, admire, trust, need, and love you all through my being. I think you’re a genious (sic) . . . I love to f— you . . . I just want to be your #l girl. I LOVE YOU.
Your Baby, Jerry”
Apparently touched by Jerry’s heartfelt apology, Mick plunked down $4 million for Downe House, a twenty-six-room white Georgian mansion overlooking the Thames in the leafy London suburb of Richmond. While Jerry, now expecting their third child, set about redecorating the couple’s latest acquisition, Mick took Hall up on her offer to look the other way.
Still, Bruni, confronted with the distinct possibility that Hall might ultimately prevail, began to hedge her bets. Having just ended an affair with Crown Prince Dimitri of Yugoslavia, she was now also spending time with brash New York real estate tycoon Donald Trump. Although Trump would later concede that Bruni was “desperately stuck” on Jagger, Carla reportedly offered to end her affair with Mick if Trump dumped his fiancée, Marla Maples.
Carla’s “constant calling became a total pain in the ass,” Trump said. “She was trying to get me to leave Marla, something I had in mind anyway, and she was using every psychological trick in the book. In the end, Carla became a woman who is very difficult to even like.”
O n January 12, 1992, Jerry gave birth to seven-pound, thirteen-ounce Georgia May Ayeesha Jagger. The next morning, Mick was on a plane bound for Thailand, where he and Bruni checked into villa 15 at Phuket’s luxurious Amunpuri Hotel using the Thai-sounding name “Someching.”
Jerry managed to get through to Mick. “Who are you with?” she demanded to know. “Are you with Carla?” He denied it, but that hardly explained why Mick was not by Hall’s side. “A man is supposed to be with his woman,” Hall said, “when she has just had a baby!”
Mick thought otherwise. Over the next several days, he and Carla strolled on the beach, swam in their villa’s private pool, and prowled Phuket’s nightclubs. “They danced and kissed,” one club bartender recalled. “There was a lot of touching going on. They weren’t hiding anything.”
Satisfied that Hall was no longer a problem, Bruni bragged to her friends that forty-eight-year-old Mick (“my boyfriend”) was “incredible in bed. He is a wonderful lover — for an old man.” To the press, she lied with alacrity, protesting, “I hardly know the man. It’s completely impossible. I can’t understand it. Perhaps someone’s pretending to be me.”
Hall, left alone in England to care for little Georgia May, regret- ted that she had ever given Mick carte blanche to cheat. At one point, Hall intercepted a written message from Bruni and showed it to Keith. It was written in code, albeit not a very sophisticated one; all Jerry had to do was hold it up to a mirror. The note from Bruni read, “I’ll be your mistress forever.”
“I almost had a nervous breakdown . . . I cried myself inside out when Mick went off with Carla Bruni,” Jerry later said. “I felt sick. It was unforgivable.” When Hall demanded an explanation from Mick, he stormed out again. Hall then phoned Bruni. “Leave my man alone!” Jerry told Carla, who promptly slammed down the phone.
Bruni apparently did not get the message. Jerry was breast- feeding Georgia May one afternoon when the phone rang again.
This time, Hall tried to reason with her husband’s paramour of the moment. “There’s a family,” Jerry explained, “and there are three children involved.”
Jerry was “absolutely heartbroken,” she said later, but she was determined not to let on that her marriage was falling apart. “Making love is by far the best way for me to keep my figure,” she told one French reporter even as she and Mick began seeing a marriage counselor. “That is why I hate those times when Mick is far from me. But when we are back together, we make up for lost time, believe me.”
The only party who seemed unaffected by all the drama was Mick. Finally reunited with Hall in France, Jagger spent the next several months hosting weekend house parties at La Fourchette for his aristocratic pals. There were also parlor games like backgammon and charades, although none of these matched the popularity of simple dress-up.
“Everyone comes down to dinner in drag,” one guest said, “and it’s just huge fun.” No one enjoyed cross-dressing more than Mick, who dressed up one evening as Madonna in black mesh stockings, a blonde wig, and a cone-shaped bullet bra.
Jerry overlooked Mick’s casual indulgences with other women, but not the dark-haired “mystery woman” — widely believed to be Carla Bruni — who was once again keeping company with Mick in California. Things between Hall and Bruni came to a head that fall, when the two models — both on assignment in Paris — crossed paths in the lobby of the Ritz Hotel. Hall reportedly called Bruni a tramp, then shouted, “Why can’t you leave my husband alone?”
“Tell your husband,” Bruni replied haughtily, “to leave me alone!” As for her opinion of Jerry, Carla sniped, “I think people should learn not to wash their dirty linen in public. Maybe in Texas they think this shows class, but I think her behavior shows a big lack of discretion and elegance.”
By the time a reporter for London’s Daily Mail cornered her at the Thierry Mugler fashion show where she was modeling, Hall was ready to throw in the towel. “Yes, it’s true,” she admitted. “We are separated, and I suppose we’ll get a divorce. I’m in too much pain for this to go on any longer. I’m hoping for a quiet life.” Later she would confess that looking the other way in hopes Mick would change had taken an emotional toll. “There’s nothing more humiliating,” she said, “than loving him so much you can forgive his infidelities.”
At one point, Mick reportedly told Carla Bruni that he had slept with four thousand women.
Mick chafed at the prospect of a costly divorce. Four days after news of their split hit the papers, Mick was on the phone to Jerry, pleading with her to take him back. She did — although it was a decision that she would soon regret.
Back in Paris, the normally resilient Bruni was inconsolable. “I thought I would never get over it,” she recalled. “I used to wake up every morning in despair. I thought I would never fall in love with someone else. When your heart is broken, you think the pain is never going to stop.” Carrying on with a married man, she concluded, was “terrible, awful. It’s a ticket to pain, and it leaves you very bitter.”
Meanwhile, Jagger agreed to get back to work with the Stones. Much to Hall’s horror, on October 10, 1994, while the Stones were finishing their gig at New Orleans’s Louisiana Superdome and getting ready to move on to Las Vegas, a fax meant for Mick wound up in Jerry’s hands. It was from Carla Bruni and read simply, “See you at the MGM Grand.”
Hall was on the next plane to Nevada.
Although Hall had believed that she was rid of Bruni, the persistent Italian would continue her on-again, off-again affair with Mick for several more years. “It was a fling,” Bruni eventually admitted. “I was in my twenties, so I wasn’t thinking about a relationship.”
From Hall’s perspective, this was a minor distinction. Yet Bruni believed that she was not the sole cause of the Jaggers’ eventual breakup. “There were so many other women with Mick,” Carla said. “I don’t think I was responsible . . . There were maybe ten other women.”
