From The Sunday Times
August 9, 2009

Rolling Stone ex Jerry Hall wants a new man

The ex-Mrs Mick Jagger, now a naked West End star in Calendar Girls, is looking for company. No rock stars need apply

Jerry Hall
Camilla Long
‘Pootin? Tahpless? In Saaahberia? ” Jerry Hall pauses at the thought of the half-nude Russian prime minister on holiday, her cigarette-toasted drawl, barely changed since she left the Dallas ’burbs, wrapping itself round her words. “That’s so . . . Russian. He’s all muscly, isn’t he? Oooh, I wanna see thaaaat . . .”

Hot dang. If the Texan accent is the sexiest in the world — why invite someone to bed in one syllable when you can use 12? — it’s a wonder La Hall ever gets to the end of a sentence. She may insist her finest feature is her hair — at 53, she still has a waist-length swag the colour of a cottage loaf — and that her “long legs” have got her everywhere, but her voice . . . Well, you can see why she hasn’t quite bothered with a rolling Yorkshire “get tha’ coat, tha’s pulled” for her new play, Calendar Girls. “Neh,” she says drily, sinking into the sofa of her dressing room. “Ah don’t thank ah’d be verr good at it.”

As for nudity, she hasn’t tried awfully hard with that, either: she may have to get her kit off (again), but it’s “tasteful stuff”, she says. “Not burlesque. I did sort of think I ought to watch \ a bit, but I can’t be bothered. And now we’re up and going,” she sighs and stretches and reaches forward to the bowl of chips . . . “Ahhhhm completely back into the ice cream and french fries.”

She insists she’s modest — “It’s not like I wanna strip off in front of people, like I get a kick out of it. I never take my top off on the beach. I’m not the type of person who wants to show her nude body to anyone, ever” — but try telling that to those who witnessed the 11 months of full-frontal she did in 2000 as Mrs Robinson in The Graduate. For her children, especially her elder son James, 16 at the time, it was “quite difficult”, she admits. “They were so relieved the nudity was tastefully done.”

I don’t think she need worry too much. In cashmere, pearls and post-show greasepaint that’s a tiny bit draggy, Hall still looks appropriately hot. Slim but not toned (which is more than I can say for her frightening cast-mate, Anita Dobson, whose biceps would give Madonna a run for her money), when she does disrobe in the performance she’s in pretty good nick. “It’s so liberating being older,” she says, “and not caring any more. Fifty was a great turning point. I thought, this is good, also a bit later I can get cranky and eccentric and that’ll be even better. You’ve done all the hard stuff, found your husband, had children, done the career . . . ”

If anyone has “done the hard stuff”, it’s Jerry. There were 23 particularly hard years when she was “married” to Mick Jagger, which, rather gallingly, turned out to be not a marriage at all: he had their Balinese beach ceremony annulled when the couple split in 1999. This meant paltry alimony for her — about £10m of his estimated £215m fortune — as well as a rather tiresome citizenship situation.

“I was having problems with my visa,” she says. “I didn’t have residency so I needed a work permit. Anyway I got it”, and she started doing radio. Next week she presents The Art of Laughter, a Radio 2 special in which she talks to the likes of Richard Curtis, David Walliams and Stephen Fry ahead of the Edinburgh Festival.

No passport? Nice kiss-off. “He wasn’t a great husband but I’ve kinda moved on,” says Hall. She called time on her relationship with the Jumpin’ Jack Flasher when she learnt that Luciana Morad, the Brazilian model, was having his child. “It was a constant flood of women trying to knock the door down.” She pauses. “I gaht tarrd.”

Jerry and Jagger still live next door to each other in Richmond, southwest London, although “he just doesn’t seem to be there”, she says, apparently mystified. “He’s . . . away a lot. With divorce, there’s always a huge sense of disappointment and failure. But we’re on very good terms. We have four children together, so he’ll always be part of my life. I care very much about him and always will.”

Was there anything good about being married to Mick? She pauses for a long time. “He was . . . a good provahder, as my mother says.” But isn’t he notoriously stingy? Even Hall cannot deny this. “I suppose . . . he’s quite careful,” she says, reaching for the iced coffee that has come with the chips. “Ha ha ha.”

When they met in 1977, Hall was already successful: a hard-working, hard-partying model who had escaped an abusive home life in Mesquite, Texas, after realising at 16 that she wanted to model. “I was with a guy at some party and he gave me LSD,” she says, “although I didn’t know. He told me afterwards. But it changed my life. I went and locked myself in the bathroom and spent the whole time looking in the mirror thinking: oh my God, I’m so beautiful I could be a model . . .”

It could all have been so different. “Yeaw. What if I’d decided to be a garage mechanic?” So she went to Paris and moved into an apartment with Grace Jones and when she met Mick she had appeared on nearly 40 magazine covers. She was ambitious and enjoyed making money —“I said yes to everything” — and had already landed one rock star, the Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry, but that quickly evaporated when she met Mick.

“I don’t believe in love at first sight,” she says firmly. “But I do believe in hormoaanes at first sight! There was definitely chemistry. It was pretty fabulous.” Still, she didn’t say yes immediately. “Mick was quite a drug addict when I first met him, just for a short time. He quickly gave up: I wouldn’t go out with him until he did and he had a lot of willpower.”

Hall disapproves of drugs. In fact, she says, she’s not terribly into partying at all. You hid that well, I say. “I guess it was fun but I didn’t think it was ever that much fun,” she says. “At Studio 54 I used to stay up on the balcony with Andy Warhol and watch everybody. Mick would be off with everyone and stuff.” There were some pluses: “I met Tennessee Williams. He said he had written a part for me, but he died before he finished it.” She would love to be in a play of his, “he’s so poetic”, and “I would love to be Lady Macbeth. That would be heaven . . . Ha ha ha”.

She and Mick split up and since then there has been Tim Attias, a banker 10 years her junior, but nobody at the moment. “I don’t have a boyfriend. I’d love to have one. I haven’t met anyone for quite a while now.” She would definitely get married again — loneliness isn’t a problem now, “but I think about that in the future”.

“I just haven’t met that person yet. I’m still hopeful.” Her ideal man would be “55, 58”. A silver fox? “That would be nahce . . . I like men who are funny, relaxed.”

She fell in love with Hugh Grant just yesterday, when she interviewed him for the radio show: “Oh mah God. He’s so handsome. I was asking him questions and I noticed how blue his eyes were and I completely lost track of what my question was.” But “actors look in the mirror too much”. Would she ever date a rock star again? “I think I’m done,” she says. “One thing I say to my daughters, is for God’s sake don’t go out with a rock star but,” she rolls her eyes, “they do like them, too.”

Politicians are out as well, although “power is definitely an aphrodisiac. Every time I’ve met someone who’s in power I’ve found them very attractive. I met President Clinton . . .” She pauses for effect, “Ooh, he was faaaaabulous. And Tony Blair. They are quite attractive, but I never would. No. It would be really, really boring to have to behave that much all the time. They’d be watching you and you’d do something wrong and it’d be really . . . boring.”

Quite: who’d trot around after a head of state? Like Nicolas Sarkozy, for example. What must she make of her former rival Carla Bruni? She goes quiet. “Well, I don’t care,” she says coolly. Bruni had a lengthy fling with Jagger while the couple were still married; the day after Hall gave birth to their third child, the Italian model allegedly lured the rock star to Thailand on holiday. Hall reviews the target. “He’s like Napoleon,” she says of Sarkozy. “A very brave man.” What about his punishing exercise regime? “I don’t believe in jogging,” she says. “It’s verr bad for your health. But then he does seem to have had some serious lapses of judgment . . . Ooooh ah shouldn’t carry on. I love France!”

Hall will probably have the last laugh if her memoirs are published. Earlier this year plans to publish her autobiography were shelved and she returned her £500,000 advance. The contents, it was claimed, hadn’t been revealing enough. “It was a mutual decision to wait,” she says. “So I’m not going to do it for a bit. I’ll take it and change it: maybe later. I wrote it all myself and my girlfriends read it and they really liked it. But I didn’t talk about sexual details.” Instead “I told a lot about our adventure trips and people we met, a lot of funny stories. Maybe it wasn’t sensational enough?” she moues. “It was pretty bad actually — terrible — because they didn’t take it and well . . .” she jabs a finger, “it’s mah autobiography. But you know. I will do it.” Why didn’t she just write about the sex? I heard Mick paid her not to. She bats this away. “Dahling! Who cares? I don’t think . . . sex is something you talk about.” Not even with girlfriends? “I don’t and none of my girlfriends do either.”

There’s something prim about Hall, something ladylaahk and Southern belle-ish that makes me feel that whatever she got up to behind closed doors, the Pollyanna in her felt she could get away with a few pony trekking anecdotes and how good Mick was with nappies. Also, she wouldn’t want to upset the apple cart with her children — nasty divorces are the rock star’s stock in trade and Hall has, to date, done a good job of keeping it clean.

“Some people fight so much and they hate each other and it’s poisonous for the children,” she says. She still talks to other rock star wives — Suzanne Wyman and Jeanne Marine, Geldof’s other half, in particular. What Ronnie Wood has subjected his wife to is “pathetic” she says of the 62-year-old Stone who, last summer, ran off with a Russian waitress, then 18. “He’s obviously gone mad . . . I don’t get it. She’s younger than his children. I would never want to go out with someone that young. What do you talk about?”

Harriet Harman, she reckons, is on to something about men and politics. “There’s too much testosterone! Men are not into preserving like women are. Women are more long-term thinking, about preserving things, about future generations. Men, it’s all short-term power control.” Does she prefer the company of men or women? “Well . . . spending time with men can be an awful lot of fun,” she drawls. “But I do have a great group of friends.” Recently she has become close to June Brown, aka Dot Cotton, also in Calendar Girls, and I can’t help smiling at the thought of the two of them sparking up in cafes near the theatre. “I love her. What really cheered me up was working with June and thinking wow, I could do theatre for another 30 years.”

Aw, she’s a broad. She knows how to play the game. Certainly when it comes to sexual relations. What was that about being a cook and a whore? “Yeah,” she smiles. “A maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom.” She smiles. “I’d hire the first two and do the last bit mahself.”

The Art of Laughter is broadcast on BBC Radio 2 on Tuesday at 10.30pm

is this what journalism has come to? a dating service??

pass . i dont want jaggers sloppies

Quote
@#$%&
is this what journalism has come to? a dating service??

It's called PR.

Prefer this one

Here is the link to her publicity shot in Calendar Girls -

[www.seecalendargirls.com]#

....and with the rest of the cast -

...definetly not my type!

i'd hit that.

Not even with a trawling net.

Quote
skipstone
Not even with a trawling net.

thats funny,good line

Good article, thanks for posting. And yeah, I'd do her.

When Hall freezes over.
She's had her time.

Nobody will know, when you're old, when you're old, that you was a beauty,
a sweet sweet beauty....mj

It's strange to say but, for a woman who made a career out of her figure and looks, she appears more attractive in the flesh than in photographs.

Has anyone else who has seen Jerry in "real life" thought the same, or is it just me?

yes, think so too, she´s had her time.

A poster on a now-defunct Stones board who claimed to know Mick and Jerry intimately claims that Jerry got her start as one of the notorious Madame Claude's high-priced callgirls in Paris.

Quote
Bliss
A poster on a now-defunct Stones board who claimed to know Mick and Jerry intimately claims that Jerry got her start as one of the notorious Madame Claude's high-priced callgirls in Paris.

A girl's got to bring home the rent money, you know.

Quote
Manofwealthandtaste
Here is the link to her publicity shot in Calendar Girls -

[www.seecalendargirls.com]#

....and with the rest of the cast -

I think Jill Halfpenny's a peach...she can tinkle my ivories!

Quote
ROLLINGSTONE

Quote
Manofwealthandtaste
Here is the link to her publicity shot in Calendar Girls -

[www.seecalendargirls.com]#

....and with the rest of the cast -

I think Jill Halfpenny's a peach...she can tinkle my ivories!

I agree. Although unfortunately the potential thrill is somewhat outweighed by the alarming thought of Dot Cotton starkers.

Quote
Harlem Shuffler
It's strange to say but, for a woman who made a career out of her figure and looks, she appears more attractive in the flesh than in photographs.

Has anyone else who has seen Jerry in "real life" thought the same, or is it just me?

Yep. Met her for a few minutes before a Stones show in Paris in 1995 and thought she was looking great.

Quote
The Greek
pass . i dont want jaggers sloppies

There's half the models on the planet written off at a stroke.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 2009-08-13 01:06 by Gazza.

Quote
skipstone
Not even with a trawling net.

wuss.

Even at her advanced age, she's still somewhat attractive. I wonder if she & Mick ever do it for old times sake? Cheap London flings & all...

Natlanta, you have a funny way of spelling 'smart'.

nope but i would hope ron's girl would introduce me to one of her friends from Moscow. whoo hoo

only if you mean Jerry Lee Lewis

I, personally, believe these over-50 babes got it going a bit better than Jerry:







Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 2009-08-14 03:01 by Edith Grove.

I don´t like her small tits and her Texan accent.

Quote
Beelyboy
nope but i would hope ron's girl would introduce me to one of her friends from Moscow. whoo hoo

Beely, you are a rip! An absolute blade, my dear fellow!

Quote
Edith Grove
I, personally, believe these over-50 babes got it going a bit better than Jerry:

now these are some babes .very good Edith Grove!!!!!!!!!!

the one in the red hat is a dude.

Wilford Brimley actually