Chapter Eleven
I once spent a weekend with director Ken Russell in the Lake District, in Borrowdale.1 It was 1986, the year his ‘tortured bit of cinematic epilepsy’ Gothic was released.2 We were filming a documentary for Channel 4 television, in a rowing boat on Derwentwater. On the edge of that vast and tranquil lake stood his home, which he shared with his second wife Vivian. Ken had raced from the kitchen clutching a bottle of champagne and a head of raw broccoli for us to snack on. The camera crew were in a second boat, bringing up the rear.
The celebrated director’s shock-horror flick starring Gabriel Byrne as Lord Byron and Julian Sands as Percy Bysshe Shelley sparked a conversation about David Bowie and Marc Bolan as the Byron and Shelley of rock. Were those Romantic poets the original rock stars, I wondered? No, Ken begged to differ. That honour went to Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt, he said. The term ‘Lisztomania’ had been coined a hundred and twenty years before ‘Beatlemania’ in reference to the terrifying hysteria that gripped women during Liszt’s recitals. This was no mere social phenomenon, but a recognised medical condition. It was also the title of the film that Ken had made about him. Fifty-nine at the time of our interview and as avid a rock fan as ever, Ken had cast the Who’s frontman Roger Daltrey as Liszt, and had enlisted keyboard wizard Rick Wakeman to compose the soundtrack.
Since he rated Bowie and Bolan so highly, I suggested, he should make a film about them as the reincarnations of Shelley and Byron. ‘I’ll have to wait until David dies,’ mused Ken. ‘I know too much. Besides,’ added the creator of Oscar-winning Women in Love and The Devils, of videos for Elton John, Bryan Adams and Cliff Richard, and of the film adaptation of the Who’s 1969 rock opera Tommy,3 ‘there is only one rock star I long to work with now. I’ve lost interest in all the others. I was denied the opportunity to direct Mick Jagger on A Clockwork Orange, and I’ve never got over it. It would have made superstars of us both.’
Wasn’t Mick already a superstar by then? ‘Well yes he was, of course, and that’s precisely why he would have been brilliant,’ enthused Ken. ‘His detractors love to douse him in excrement and scoff that he can’t act. Poppycock. If a director can’t tease a perfect performance out of someone like Mick, he is in the wrong profession. What do they think he does up there on stage if it isn’t acting? Do they think he’s that extreme all the time? Of course he’s not! The character he portrays is an alter ego, an extension of himself, something he summons from within and puts away again at the end, for next time. The best kind of film actor is one who has never had a minute’s training and who knows absolutely nothing about what the luvvies call technique. There’s no such thing!’ he screamed, gesticulating wildly. Over the side went his champagne flute. He snatched mine from my hand and glugged lavishly.
‘Look at Daltrey, who played Tommy in my film. He hadn’t a clue, bless him, but he trusted me. He said, “Tell me what to do, Ken, and I’ll do it. Anything.” He took direction very well, I have to say, and the result was exactly as I’d envisaged. He was mesmerising. A god. I got him back to do Liszt, and yet again he was sensational. All I wanted, I told him, was for him to play Franz Liszt as a nineteenth century Mick Jagger. He wasn’t offended by that, no. Not at all! He was as great an artist as Jagger, though not quite as busy a shagger, I think I’m right in saying. He had to shag himself stupid with as much posh totty as he could cope with, in that one, without doing himself a mischief. All pretend, of course.’
Couldn’t Ken have hired Mick himself, to do it for real? Carnality being his forte. ‘Mick wasn’t box office,’ sighed Ken. ‘Roger had already proved himself. He was also stunningly beautiful and exceedingly fanciable. Even I fancied him, and you know what I’m like with women. I could have achieved the same result with Mick, of course. I can make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear better than the best of them. I mean, he might be a sex god but he’s no Adonis. Why do you think he tortures and denies himself to maintain the figure of a teenage boy? Because he’s got to look in the mirror every day. It would upset anyone. But the decision was out of my hands. The same thing happened with A Clockwork Orange. In which Mick Jagger directed by the enfant terrible, as they call me, would have acquitted himself brilliantly. I would have made sure that he did. And he wouldn’t have the reputation for being a failed film actor that he has today.’
Mick was always desperate to make it in movies. He had grown up on the singer-turned-actor phenomenon: Frank Sinatra in Anchors Aweigh and From Here to Eternity, Bing Crosby in High Society and White Christmas, Frank and Bing together with fellow crooners Dean Martin and Sammy Davis Jr. in Robin and the 7 Hoods; not forgetting Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock, Blue Hawaii, Viva Las Vegas and the rest. Backed by labels only too eager to take advantage of their charges’ cinematic success and convert it into multi-million record sales, they started a trend that would in future embrace artists from across the genres: from Kris Kristofferson, Barbra Streisand and Dolly Parton to Madonna, Beyoncé and Lady Gaga; from Mark Wahlberg, Justin Timberlake and LL Cool J to Tom Waits, Snoop Dogg and Lenny Kravitz; from Bette Midler, Bowie and Cher to Iggy Pop, Jennifer Hudson, Courtney Love and Harry Styles.
Above all, possibly because they were his band’s most obvious rivals, Mick envied the Beatles their motion picture success and crossover appeal.4 The Stones having matched their popularity, he didn’t see why they couldn’t achieve similar. He overlooked the fact that while the Beatles oozed charm in films full of harmless fun, he and his boys would never get away with such schmaltz. Their reputation was menacing. The Stones could never in a million have made a Beatles kind of movie, as Jagger well knew. He also knew what kind of film he did want to make. A fan of Anthony Burgess’s depraved 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange, Mick leapt to challenge obvious choice Oliver Reed for the role of psychopath Alex DeLarge, the main character, in the screen adaptation. The rest of the Stones would have supporting roles, as Alex’s droogs (gang members), even if they didn’t want them. Screenwriter and film-maker du jour Ken Russell would direct. But the screenplay’s horrific content prevented the producers, who had snapped up Burgess’s rights for a song, from getting the project past the British Board of Film Certification. They gave up, and Russell was offloaded. By 1968, the picture still didn’t have a director. Mick remained as keen as ever to play the lead. When it was suggested that David Hemmings would be cast, the Beatles petitioned in writing that their friend Mick should get the role instead.
Another document came to light in 2008, a letter which showed that the film’s executive producer had tried to talk John Schlesinger5 into directing it, and had also suggested that the Beatles should compose the soundtrack. In the end, Stanley Kubrick, director of 1968’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was appointed, and Malcolm McDowell was cast in the leading role. Mick’s disappointment must have made him all the more determined to land a part he could make his own and establish a major screen presence. He jumped at Ned Kelly but needn’t have bothered.
Then along came Performance. It seemed an infinitely better fit, given that the script required him to portray nothing more demanding than a version of himself. Anita Pallenberg and James Fox would co-star. Peyton Place6 ingenue Mia Farrow, who was at the time Frank Sinatra’s third wife, had been engaged to play Lucy, the supporting female character. But she was forced to withdraw after suffering a bad fall in New York, which left her with a fractured ankle. An unknown French waif by the name of Michèle Breton was brought in to replace Mia. She went by the nickname ‘Mouche’, the French for ‘fly’. Because she dwelled among degenerates and fed on shit? Exploited by the producers and director and corrupted by the experience, she was abandoned beyond to a life of destitution and obscurity, discarded like a broken toy. She casts a long shadow over the Rolling Stones legend. She may be their most tragic victim.
Where did Mouche come from? Accounts conflict. Some claim that she was born in Brittany, a picturesque peninsular of north-western France jutting into the English Channel. Her peasant parents are said to have thrown her out when she was sixteen, palming her off with a one-way train ticket to Paris and a hundred francs to be going on with. Their parting shot was a bit harsh: they never wanted to see her again. Why? Does that sound likely? Perhaps her surname is a clue. ‘Breton’ is both French for Brittany and the name of the regional language spoken there. Could she have thrown off her original family name and have adopted that as a pseudonym?
Her official movie bio stated that she came into the world in Déville-lès-Rouen in Normandy, north-western France. It also placed her, at the age of fifteen, in Alpine Grenoble, south-eastern France, her ‘university-teacher’ parents having moved there for work. She is said to have made her way unaccompanied to Saint-Tropez, to live with her grandmother. There, she became a beach bum and fell in with the trendy movie crowd, much as Anita Pallenberg had done in Rome. Another version, the most plausible in my opinion, claims that pretty, scrawny, uneducated Michèle, who was dark-haired and strong-featured with a flat chest and a prominent nose, was from a family of peasants living in the hills above the French Riviera, where her father was a garagiste: a small-scale, what we might call ‘cottage’, wine-maker.
What is the truth? Were different versions of her story concocted and disseminated to disguise her origins, throw authorities off the scent and prevent a search for her family and birth certificate? Or did she change her story on a whim whenever she felt like it, rewriting her past to fit in with the scenario of the moment, to render herself more interesting and to maximise her chances at a future? Could she have been coerced into doing this? If so, Performance director Donald Cammell is the most likely culprit. The Scottish society portraitist and bohemian bon viveur with his own Chelsea studio and a fascination for real-life gangsters including the Kray twins had plenty to hide. Having reinvented himself as a screenwriter, the wildly ambitious social climber was keen to establish a reputation as a director. This would be his first official film, which he would co-direct with Nicolas Roeg.7 Thirty-four-year-old Cammell did not want the industry to know that he and Deborah Dixon, a stunning, blonde, internationally successful model who was bankrolling her boyfriend, had scooped the allegedly fourteen-year-old Michèle from the beach at Saint-Tropez and had enticed her to reside with them in a ménage-à-trois in Paris. Pubescent flesh and girl-on-girl action were Cammell’s weaknesses. This set-up lasted for about a year, during which Michèle, encouraged by Deborah, did a little modelling in the French capital.
Although it has been written that Performance was her only film, she can clearly be seen, albeit fleetingly, in the Jean-Luc Godard 1967 black comedy Weekend starring Mireille Darc and Jean Yanne. Michèle was not credited. IMDb also lists her as having played Greek goddess Athena in three episodes of Italian state television’s 1968 mini-series L’Odissea, based on Homer’s Odyssey. Was that really her? She was not known for linguistic prowess. She spoke negligible English when she was brought to London to film Performance.
When journalist Mick Brown found her years later in Berlin, Breton told him about her life after Performance wrapped. She said that Cammell drove her back to the Paris apartment, let her stay for a couple of nights, then kicked her out. Once again homeless, with little money and few possessions to her name, it seems likely that she was remunerated inadequately if at all for her work on the film. She drifted aimlessly around France, turning up in Villefranche in 1971 and finding her way to Nellcôte, the villa that Keith rented during the recording of Exile on Main St. She was probably dealing drugs. She ambled on down to Spain and was arrested for possession on Formentera, a small island off Ibiza. She reportedly gave the policia the slip, legged it back to Paris and then hit the hippie trail, washing up in Kabul, Afghanistan, during the mid-1970s. She lay low for a year, shooting morphine. When she hit rock bottom, she sold everything she had left including her passport. She was destitute, starving, tripping on LSD and in a frail mental state when it occurred to her that she had to stop and change her life or she would die.
She spent the following few months in hospital in India – we have no clue as to who might have supported her financially – before making her way back to Kabul and thence to Europe, sans ID. She quit the road when she reached Berlin. If it sounds like a script, much of it may be. But her recollections about the filming of Performance, during which she was stoned out of her brains most of the time, ring true. ‘I was very young and very disturbed,’ she said. ‘I didn’t know what I was doing, and they used me. Everybody was sleeping with everybody,’ she later shrugged. ‘It was those times.’
Keith did not mince words in the comprehensive damnation of Donald Cammell in his memoir Life. ‘The most destructive little turd I’ve ever met,’ he called him. ‘Also a Svengali, utterly predatory, a very successful manipulator of women … putting people down was almost an addiction for him … when I first heard of him, he was in a ménage-à-trois with Deborah Dixon and Anita, long before Anita and I were together, and they were all jolly jolly. He was a procurer, an arranger of orgies and threesomes – in a pimpish way, though I don’t think Anita saw it like that.’
Performance may well have been warped Cammell’s way of getting back at Keith, because he’d had Anita first, and was jealous of the guitarist’s wealth, success and hold over her. Casting Keith’s girlfriend as Pherber, the fierce lover of faded rocker Turner (Jagger), and throwing in an androgynous, out-of-it French teen for hot threesomes in a shockingly decadent and violent piece was always going to have incendiary consequences. Add monstrous, mind-addling drug consumption to the daily shoot and stand well back. Cammell messed with everyone’s heads in the name of performance art (he called it), especially co-star James Fox, who gave his best murderous gangster. A year after the film, Fox joined a religious sect and turned his back on acting to become an evangelist. Rumours persisted for years that he went off his rocker during the shoot. He later denied this, insisting that he had been heading in a more spiritual and cerebral direction anyway.
Anita, always up for anything, admitted that initially the sex scenes had happened for real but that she put it down to ‘method acting’. Which suggests penetrative sex, doesn’t it? She later denied it, but was not believed. She had, after all, aborted Keith’s child in order to keep the role. The price she paid for her callousness was full-blown heroin addiction: her own and possibly even Keith’s. Who sat tormenting himself in his car outside the location house while his ‘old lady’ was inside, getting it on with Mick. Keith denounced the finished film as ‘third-rate porn’. He also recalled Anita having told him that Michèle needed shots of Valium before every take, so distressed was she by the acts she was made to perform.
How was this allowed? Why didn’t anybody question it? Assurances were made that qualified doctors were on set every day, administering the anxiolytic. Had they been General Medical Council-registered physicians, they would have required proof of Michèle’s age before they could sedate her. Given her extremely youthful appearance and vulnerable demeanour, why was her wellbeing not safeguarded? How had she obtained a work permit in the first place? Did somebody falsify her application? Insiders intimated that Cammell did. It has long been rumoured that Jagger engaged in sexual activity with Michèle. There was certainly nudity. Photographs from the shoot depict them lying naked on a bed together, side by side. An equivalent film production company today might find itself staring down the barrel of a statutory rape investigation because she may have been underage during the shoot. Nobody knew, and no one was bothered. The film’s American producer Sanford ‘Sandy’ Lieberson described her as ‘someone who didn’t care who she slept with. A strange little creature, totally androgynous-looking – the way Donald liked them.’
The operative word is ‘little’. It implies a childlike state. Who was looking out for this drugged and misguided kid? Clearly, no one. ‘I was taking everything that was going,’ she said in 1995. ‘I was in a very bad shape, all fucked up.’ What might Mick have to say about that now? What he did say, when interviewed for film writer Jay Glennie’s study of Performance, was this: ‘All the stories around the filming of those scenes were so good, I’m not going to deny any of them.’
Nor did Mick deny actress Rae Dawn Chong’s February 2020 allegations that she had slept with him when she was only fifteen. While talking to the Hollywood Reporter about her starring role in Jagger’s promo film for his 1985 solo single ‘Just Another Night’, an aggressively sexual piece in which he appears heavily made-up and bouffant-coiffed in a hot and sweaty club, Chong let slip that they’d had sex together twice in 1977: once after a Rolling Stones recording session and a second time after Mick took her to a Fleetwood Mac concert. Immediately regretting the revelation, she gave further interviews to insist that she had not been a ‘victim of unwanted advances’ and that Jagger had not known her age. ‘He never asked how old I was, and I never told him,’ stated the self-confessed ‘Lolita’. ‘It never came up. He did nothing wrong. He didn’t make me do anything I didn’t want to do.’
The actress, who starred in 1981’s Quest for Fire, The Color Purple and Commando in 1985, and in the 1990s American soap opera Melrose Place, explained that ‘it was the 1970s, a different era. I wasn’t a victim. I don’t want him to get into trouble about this. It wasn’t traumatising. I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t an innocent schoolgirl. I always acted a lot older than I was. I was a grown-up at fifteen … he wasn’t that much older than me in my brain. He was thirty-three and young and gorgeous, with a nice body. It wasn’t a bad thing, it was fabulous. Totally rock’n’roll.’
But whether she wanted it or not, Rae Dawn could not have consented. She was under the age of unrestricted consent.8
Co-director Nicolas Roeg admitted that some scenes in Performance were so explicit, they caused problems when he went to collect the rushes. He turned up at the lab to find technicians destroying the film with hammers and chisels, so fearful were they that they’d be charged by police with holding pornographic material.
Disgusted by its depravity, Warner Bros shelved the film indefinitely. A radically re-edited version was eventually released in August 1970, only to be butchered by the critics who damned it for its graphic sex scenes and denounced it as the most loathsome and pretentious picture of all time. ‘The film that horrified Hollywood,’ screamed the headlines. ‘You do not have to be a drug addict, pederast, sadomasochist or nitwit to enjoy Performance,’ said the New York Times, ‘but being one or more of these things would help.’ It has since become a cult classic via video and DVD sales. I suspect that more Stones and Jagger fans may have read or heard about it than have seen it. In any case, is this not yet another example of ‘the Emperor’s New Clothes’? People claiming to like something because they have been led to believe that it will make them look hip and cool to say that they like it? Doesn’t anyone worry that a minor may have been manipulated and abused in the making of it? It is called, today, ‘one of the most influential and innovating films of the 1970s’, and ‘one of the greatest films in the history of British cinema’. It was even voted, in 1999, the forty-eighth greatest British film of all time by the British Film Institute. How bad were the others?
It was ‘Donald’s vision,’ Pallenberg said. ‘He was notoriously into threesomes, rock stars and criminal violence. He injected all of his deviant sexual fantasies into the movie … [which] seems to me to be about the end of an era of hippie innocence, free love and sexual experimentation.’ His ‘vision’ just happened to capture a turning point in the sixties, when exuberance was giving way to degradation.
As for Cammell, who made only three films over a quarter of a century, perhaps his guilty conscience caught up with him. Having stated unambiguously that the sex in the film was real, he committed suicide in 1996, when he was sixty-two. Keith had advised him to take the gentleman’s way out three years earlier. The rocker later dismissed Performance as ‘the best work Cammell ever did, except for shooting himself.’
No one knows what happened to Michèle Breton. Various authors and commentators have written her off, perhaps prematurely. She accidentally overdosed; she killed herself; she died a natural death. All assumption. The used and abused little French girl evaporated into the fog and has never re-emerged. If she is still alive, she would be in her late sixties. She didn’t simply lose her way. She never found it.
Nor did Mick ever triumph in Hollywood. ‘I would like to have done a lot more,’ he told USA Today, ‘but it’s a funny world, film. You don’t get that many interesting things. You get a lot of rubbish offered to you that you might do if that was the only job. But I have other things to do.’
Having expressed a fervent wish to play androgynous, stockinged and suspendered Dr. Frank N. Furter in the screen adaptation of Richard O’Brien’s 1975 global hit theatrical extravaganza The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Mick was disappointed to lose out to the role’s originator, Tim Curry. Beyond which, no major roles came his way for years. He was about to celebrate his fiftieth birthday when he appeared in 1992’s Freejack, playing bodysnatcher Victor Vacendak to tepid acclaim in the dystopian cyberpunk sci-fi flick. Despite the film’s hefty names – Anthony Hopkins, Rene Russo, Emilio Estevez – it bombed. Mick slunk away yet again with his tail between his legs. He launched his own production company Jagged Films in 1995, and gave the world his autobiographical television documentary Being Mick six years later. For this, he had followed himself around for a year, shooting much of his own footage on a small handheld camera. In 1997, ridding himself of his Rocky Horror demons, he played transvestite singer Greta in a piece called Bent about the persecution of homosexuals in Nazi Germany. It wasn’t bad. In 2001, he portrayed craggy Luther Fox, a high-class pimp of male hookers in The Man From Elysian Fields. His co-star was Andy Garcia. And eighteen years later, in the 2019 thriller The Burnt Orange Heresy, here’s seventy-six-year-old Mick the wily art dealer trying to nab a painting by reclusive artist Jerome Debney, played by Donald Sutherland.
‘Jagger, though never quite an actor as such, puts in a very good-humoured and game performance that takes this beyond stunt casting, playing the manipulative art dealer, spring-heeled with athletic malice, grinning like a relief map of the Lake District and with a distinct whiff of sulphur about him,’ wrote film critic Peter Bradshaw in the Guardian. ‘It would be great to have Keith Richards play the aged, cantankerous, whiskery painter Debney,’ he added. ‘But you can’t have everything.’
Some people can. How Mick must have fumed when screen fame and acclaim fell into Keith Richards’s leathery lap without him having to twitch a muscle, after Johnny Depp confessed that he had based the look, speech, expressions and mannerisms of his Pirates of the Caribbean character on his guitar hero. It was only a matter of time before the rock god himself would be invited to step inside the fantasy. In 2007, Keith surpassed himself as Captain Teague, father of Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow in At World’s End. He also played guitar and sang the self-penned song ‘Only Found Out Yesterday’. He got the best line in the picture, too: when Sparrow asks him, ‘That’s the trick, isn’t it? To survive?’ Keith as Teague responds, a basso profundo, ‘It’s not just about living forever, Jackie. The trick is living with yourself forever.’ Could that perchance have been a pop at Mick? Keith bagged the Best Celebrity Cameo gong at that year’s Spike Horror Awards, and returned to the franchise four years later in On Stranger Tides. He is as compelling in his role as Depp is in his. And that’s saying something.
As for Jagger. Charisma on stage. Charisn’tma on screen. You get what you need.