Chapter Seventeen
I can’t remember the first time I heard a Stones song, nor which one it was. I remember with terrifying clarity the first time I met a member of the band.
Some memories torment us in perpetuity, despite our best efforts to forget them. All the if-onlys, the why-didn’t-I?s and the wish-I-never-hads can be ignored, most of the time. We park the poor choices and the lapses of judgement. We might wince occasionally when something uncomfortable returns to haunt us, but most things are easily brushed aside. Others are not. Wounds are silent. Left untreated, they fester. ‘The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing,’ goes the old adage.1
My guilt is hinged to the things I did not say. I knew a grown man who was having sex with a child. He was, in those days, my friend. His girlfriend was under the age of consent. British law on this subject is crystal clear: if an individual over the age of eighteen engages in sexual activity with a person below the age of sixteen, he or she may be charged with a criminal offence which could result in a fourteen-year prison sentence. I knew what was going on. I should have told someone. But the thing is, even if I had done so, not a thing would have been done. Even now that the whole world knows, nothing has changed.
Hollywood feigned surprise when movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was exposed as a sex abuser. As if Hollywood didn’t know. It opened floodgates. Actresses, models, ordinary women, and men, rushed to join the movement that sheds light on the sexual misconduct of powerful males, declaring #METOO and #TIMESUP. When Kevin Spacey was exposed, his fabulous career disintegrated. Bill Cosby, media icon, father figure, philanthropist and world-renowned paragon of virtue, who for decades had used the power of television to influence millions of his fellow Americans on the subjects of class, race, morality and his own importance, was found guilty of sexual assault after a year-long trial during which he challenged the accusations of sixty-odd victims. He was convicted of aggravated indecent assault against his accuser Andrea Constand in 2018, and was imprisoned. In 2021, the Supreme Court of Pennsylvania voided his conviction.2
How many would-be starlets have been conned onto the casting couch down the years? How many millions in myriad other industries have yielded to predators who were in pursuit of only one thing, because they didn’t know that they were allowed to say no? How many Roman Polanskis still roam the earth?3 How many Bill Wymans does it take to change a light bulb? Only thirteen? I know, but the thing is she looks twelve.
I agree, it is no laughing matter. But such gags still do the rounds. When they hear them, the vast majority laugh at them. They would laugh on the other side of their faces if the girl in question had been theirs.
Though we have grown accustomed to the sight of his paunch, sagging chins and thin silver hair, there was a time when the former Stones bassist was physically attractive. This stooping old man was once rock’s most prolific shagger. Three or four a night on the road, he was wont to boast. Three at a time, sometimes. He wasn’t fussed. Bring it on. He couldn’t help it, could he, women threw themselves at him. He’d have been an idiot to say no. He was always boasting about his conquests, which made us feel uncomfortable. Too much information, not to mention inappropriate conversation with young girls. I realise only now how insecure he was. He was selling himself to us. As William Perks from Penge, as we have seen, he’d done National Service in Germany and was married with a son when he found himself caught up in the fledgling biggest band in history. He was unhappy at home. He nipped out for a few halves. It was the sixties. Bill and I had dinner a couple of times at the original Ivy. On 21 February 1984, we attended the British Rock & Pop Awards at the Lyceum Ballroom off the Strand, sharing a table with Midge Ure. Bill accepted an award on behalf of late bluesman Alexis Korner, who had died of lung cancer the previous month. ‘If Alexis hadn’t been there, we wouldn’t have been there,’ he said in his short acceptance speech, referring to the Stones’, should I say Brian’s, first enabler. Bill seemed distracted by a couple of identical young blondes on the dance floor, prompting Midge to lean over and whisper in my ear, ‘I think you’ve just lost him.’ ‘Not mine to lose,’ I retorted, ‘and I’m not his.’
Despite which, a friendship emerged. It was all it was, and I didn’t dwell on it. I hadn’t heard from Bill for a few weeks, and had been too busy to care, when he called to invite me to accompany him to the 30 May opening night of a West End revival of the Broadway musical Little Me, starring comedian Russ Abbot and actress Sheila White, at the Prince of Wales Theatre. He arrived wearing an odd tan leather two-piece suit that reminded me – I had an old sofa like that once.
The after-show party was at the Ivy. Bill and I shared a table with the actors Jill Gascoine and Alfred Molina. The next time I saw him was at a dinner at Thierry’s, the French restaurant below his Kings Road office/pied-à-terre. Also present were his PA Karen, a couple of her girlfriends and the songwriter Ken Gold.4 The vivacious waitress that night was Lou. She and Ken became an item, and the gang that gelled that night continued to go around together. Our group soon expanded to include Bill’s son, Stephen. And there were two sisters I was sure I’d met before, Nicola and Mandy Smith. Bill had apparently introduced them to a friend of his, who ran the agency Models One. They were accompanied by their middle-aged mother, Patsy. Later, the penny dropped: they were the girls by whom Bill had been mesmerised at the Lyceum pop awards back in February.
Mandy soon emerged as the ringleader. She was fun, and always up for anything. She tended to be the one to choose which restaurant we would eat in, and which club or party we would go on to afterwards. Though we always offered, Bill insisted on picking up the tab every time. Mandy’s favourite club was Tramp, the exclusive haunt on Jermyn Street. Bill was friendly with its founder, Johnny Gold, whose business partner was Oscar Lerman, then married to author Jackie Collins. Lisa Vanderpump and her husband Ken were part of the throng too. We knew Lisa from the ABC videos. They called Tramp ‘the office’. The dance floor was a handkerchief. You sat around chatting most of the time, getting drunk on champagne.
They didn’t call Bill ‘the quiet one’ for nothing. He’d survey the scene as though peering through binoculars. He didn’t draw attention to himself, nor did he schmooze other celebrities. They came to him. None of the other Stones ever came out with us. He rarely socialised with ‘the others’. Bill said: ‘They keep themselves to themselves, and so do I. We’re not family.’
So far, so what, doesn’t it sound? What I have to remind myself is that it was rather magical to sit listening to him talking about being in the Rolling Stones. In us, he had a captive audience for his tales about the songs, the band’s escapades and their exploits on the road. He didn’t know how Keith went out there and did it some nights, he said, because he was more often than not off his head. Charlie and Bill were allies. Mick was the boss, and never let anyone forget it. Ronnie was the bridge, between the two camps. The band had evolved into something different after Mick Taylor left and Ronnie joined, he told us. It had a whole new vibe. His most surprising revelation, if you could call it that, was that he, Charlie and Ronnie were effectively employees of Mick and Keith, at that point. Their pay was salary. Mick and Keith wrote the songs and banked the royalties. It was a situation that would not change during Bill’s tenure.
His punctuality and reliability impressed me. These are not, as a general rule, rock star qualities. He chain-smoked, which was annoying, but at least he was never a diva. I have known a few in my time. If you stopped to think about it, I suppose we thought it was rather odd, being friends with a Rolling Stone. But there was never anything ‘us and them’ about it, because we were a diverse and lively bunch in our own right. I think Bill found us entertaining. He struggled to keep up, half the time. He had seen the world, but through a narrow angle lens. His views on most subjects were limited. But he was always willing to lend his name to one of our projects. When music journalist Robin Eggar, radio producer Phil Swern and I wrote the best-selling The Sony Tape Rock Review (Rambletree, 1984), Bill contributed the foreword and a fetching, recently shot photograph of himself. ‘Tit for tat,’ he said.
‘What does that mean?’
‘You are my friends.’
Were we, though? I didn’t give it much thought at the time, but I get it now. Even celebrities had to find friends from somewhere. Most of us who hung together at that point had relatively normal jobs. We lived regular lives and did everyday things. Perhaps Bill identified with us because he hailed from humble himself. He rarely felt comfortable, he confessed, among toffs and superstars, whereas Mick actively courted the great and the good. Bill didn’t because such people made him feel uncomfortable, he said. He never knew what to say. He liked the fact that Mandy and Nicola lived on a London council estate. They spoke his language. Maybe he saw all of us as a refuge of normality. Who was deluded: him, or us?
Only years down the line could I admit to myself that Bill had gathered our clan to conceal his affair with Mandy. It is glaringly obvious now. When his limo approached our chosen restaurant, he would ask one of the boys, usually the tall, dark, good-looking one who grew up to be a famous broadcaster and writer, ‘Would you mind walking Mandy in?’ He would then take my arm and beam for the photographers, snuggling close as we got out of the car. At the end of the night, when the driver dropped us home one by one, it would always be Bill and Mandy left in the back. Just the two of them.
We knew about their relationship. It was never discussed. What we didn’t know – genuinely didn’t know, initially, was how young Mandy was. We assumed she must be nineteen or twenty-ish. We had no idea at the time that Bill was paying for her education and had transferred her from her former North London state secondary to an expensive private school within walking distance of his flat. We might never have known that Mandy was a schoolgirl under the age of consent had Bill not thrown a party for her birthday. The whole gang was invited. There was only one candle on her cake. Our tall, dark, handsome broadcaster-and-writer-to-be couldn’t help himself.
‘Go on, then, Mand, how old are you today?’ ‘Fifteen,’ she said. She had been dating Bill by then for more than two years.
‘After that,’ recalls the broadcaster, ‘we all just fucked off as fast as possible, didn’t we. We knew it was wrong. We didn’t do anything about it. We never told anyone. We didn’t dare. We were unwittingly used to disguise what was going on. As far as the press were concerned, we were just the walkers. The moment we learned the truth we scarpered, we were dust. We never challenged Bill about it. We never talked to anyone else about it. The media were never the wiser. But we knew. Knowing that he was abusing Mandy but saying nothing made us as bad as Bill. I feel foolish and guilty now, for having been dragged into it. The guilt doesn’t go away, does it.’
The last time I saw them together was when Bill took Mandy and me to lunch at Langan’s Brasserie. He ordered bread pudding for ‘afters’, and Mandy turned up her nose. ‘What?!’ said Bill. ‘I can’t marry a girl who doesn’t know how to make bread pudding!’ The first inkling of the tinkling of wedding bells. I failed to hear them.
I went to Fleet Street, started travelling, and shoved them to the back of my mind. I remember hearing that they’d split up, then that they were getting married, and eventually that they’d tied the knot. Mandy had turned eighteen by then, while Bill was fifty-two: thirty-four years her senior. I wasn’t invited, nor had I expected to be. Like everyone else, I read about the lavish nuptials in Hello! magazine.
The ritzy Wyman church ‘wedding’ that followed Mandy’s and Bill’s register office nuptials in June 1989 – the summer of Michael Keaton’s Batman and Jack Nicholson’s Joker, of the New Kids on the Block, of Richard Marx’s ‘Right Here Waiting’ and Bette Midler’s ‘Wind Beneath my Wings’ and of the Rolling Stones’ Steel Wheels tour, the third highest-grossing of the decade – was the ‘most memorable event of the year’. Was it? If you didn’t count the end of the Cold War and the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, the slaughter in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square, the Hillsborough football stadium disaster and the sinking of the Thames pleasure cruiser the Marchioness. Still, at least the Stones took it seriously. They turned up and presented Bill with a zimmer frame. The happy couple then headed down to Bill’s villa in St Paul de Vence in the South of France. As did Mandy’s mother Patsy, some cousins and her sister Nicola. Call that a honeymoon? Outnumbered Bill called his secretary Karen and begged her to come over and keep him company. Rock’n’roll.
I was surprised to hear that Mandy’s mother Patsy, forty-six, and Bill’s son Stephen, thirty, had become engaged. That didn’t seem right. But why? Because Patsy was so much older than Stephen? The age gap was only about half that between Mandy and Bill. It was an on-off relationship, however. I later heard that Bill had threatened to cut Stephen out of his will if he refused to dump Patsy. His son was his best friend, he said, and he was heartbroken by the ‘betrayal’. They married, but threw in the towel after two years. Perhaps the surreal nature of their relationship caught up with them. Because that marriage made Stephen the husband not only of his own stepmother’s mother, but of his own father’s mother-in-law. It also made him his own grandfather. As for Mandy, her ex-husband became her step-grandfather. Confused?
I still see, and occasionally work with, the famous broadcaster and a couple of the others. Now and then, we talk about the past. We wonder, what on earth were we thinking? We conclude that we were not. Neither was Bill. Do I believe his defence: that he had no idea Mandy was only thirteen when he met her? He acknowledges her age at the time they met in his autobiography. Despite which, he insists, she was ‘a woman’. To look at, perhaps. But not emotionally. And certainly not in the eyes of the law. Although it is no defence, you could see where he was coming from. He couldn’t help himself. There was nothing ‘thirteen’ about her. There being nothing to reveal that the girl was still a child, it never occurred to any of us to question it. Mandy was mature and soignée, and so beautiful. Total strangers would stop and stare when she walked along the street with us, or made her entrance in a club or at a do. She knew how powerful she was. She was Bill’s personal Brigitte Bardot, and he was helpless. So were we, to an extent. Mandy was stunning. We adored her. We were content to bask in her limelight.
The age of consent exists to protect children from themselves, as well as from predators. The minute that Bill discovered Mandy’s age, he should have manned up, controlled himself, taken legal advice, assessed the consequences, and have run several miles if not left the country. He did none of these things. He would later shrug off the whole tragic episode as a ‘mid-life crisis’. He got away with it. How?
I asked a High Court judge, whom I know personally, and whom we shall call The Hon. Mr Justice X Kt. Who shrugged and shook his head. ‘I cannot answer you,’ he said.
‘Can’t, or won’t?’
‘What I mean is that I simply do not have the answer. This lady says she was fourteen when the relationship was consummated. If that is true, a crime was committed. The matter ought to have been brought to trial. Had guilt been established beyond reasonable doubt, it is possible that it would have concluded in a prison sentence.’
‘Even though they were married?’
‘No defence. Makes not a scrap of difference. A crime is a crime. It is a criminal offence in the UK for any kind of sexual activity to take place between two people where one or both participants is or are under the age of sixteen. This, like it or not, is paedophilic behaviour.’
Furthermore, stated His Lordship, ‘Anyone over the age of eighteen in such a relationship is dealt with more severely in law. This is because age gaps in relationships can cause power imbalances, which may lead to abusive behaviour. In fact, the older the abuser, the more serious the punishment is likely to be.’
‘People have defended Bill,’ I remind him, ‘on the grounds that Mandy’s mother gave her permission to have sex with Bill.’
‘Irrelevant,’ said the judge. ‘It is not up to your parents to decide if you can break the law. Regardless of whether they are happy for their child to become sexually active, it is still illegal for anyone to have any kind of sexual contact with a person under the age of sixteen. Wyman should have been arrested. The law applies to everyone.’
Mandy’s sister Nicola did call for Bill to be prosecuted. Nothing happened. Years later, amid the furore over celebrity paedophile allegations sparked by the Jimmy Savile, Rolf Harris, Stuart Hall, Gary Glitter and Max Clifford scandals, Bill revealed to the media that he had taken matters into his own hands:
‘I went to the police and I went to the public prosecutor, and said, “Do you want to talk to me? Do you want to meet up with me, or anything like that?” and I got a message back: “No”.’
The Metropolitan Police refused to comment on Wyman’s claims. Allegations of bribery and corruption came to nothing.5 There was no case for Bill to answer … because no one had lodged a formal complaint. When the police went gunning for former pop star and producer Jonathan King, comedians Chris Langham and Jim Davidson, DJs Paul Gambaccini and Dave Lee Travis, Nigel Evans MP, Sir Cliff Richard and the rest, turning their lives upside down, it was because formal allegations had been made. Which throws into sharp focus a sizeable elephant in the room: the time limit.
The matter is complex: there is no limitation period for criminal offences. For civil claims relating to historic child abuse, a claimant has had to issue court proceedings within six years of the date of the incident (for trespass) or three years (for personal injury – for psychological injury, three years from when the claimant knew the injury was related to the event) – and if the claimant was a child at the time of the abuse, these time limits generally apply from the date when the claimant reaches the age of eighteen. Of course, survivors of childhood abuse often suppress traumatic memories, and are unable to discuss what happened to them for years afterwards. They may not realise until later adulthood that they had been subjected to grooming, emotional or sexual manipulation. Only one thing is completely clear in all this: things are never simple for any alleged victims of historic abuse.
The marriage collapsed in 1991. They were divorced two years later. ‘Mandy went off the rails for a while. She had lots of affairs,’ Bill said. ‘And she got really ill. Really thin. She almost died.’
They did not keep in touch. She went on to marry footballer Pat Van Den Hauwe in June 1993, but that fell apart too. As did her sister Nicola’s engagement to another soccer star, Teddy Sheringham. Shortly after his divorce from his second wife, Bill took a third, Suzanne Accosta, the former girlfriend for whom it is said that he wrote his hit single ‘(Si Si) Je Suis un Rock Star’, and with whom he would have three daughters. He also quit the Stones. Jumped or pushed?
After her second marriage folded, Mandy moved to Manchester to escape the pressurised London lifestyle. In 2001, she embarked on a relationship with male fashion model Ian Mosby. When she gave birth to their son Max, the couple were engaged, but it did not last. In 2005 she turned to the church, and began counselling abuse victims. Mandy is now fifty-two: the age, give or take, that Bill was when she married him. In 2010, she had this to say: ‘You are still a child, even at sixteen. You can never get that part of your life, your childhood, back. I never could.’ She revealed that she was questioned by police after the story broke but refused to press charges.
She knows that what Bill did was wrong; that his behaviour was criminal; that putting a ring on her finger did not absolve him of guilt. She fell prey to illnesses both physical and mental after marrying him that have blighted her life ever since. Didn’t she want to see him punished?
‘What good would it do? He has a family now. What happened, happened.’
To those who accused her of only marrying Bill for his wealth, Mandy points out that her settlement was only £580,000. ‘Take off the house and the lawyers’ bills and I was left with £50,000, which went on a tax bill. If I had wanted money, I’d have stayed with him.’
We are still asking, all these years later: did Bill groom Mandy? Was all that getting to know the mother and the sister and winning a precocious child’s confidence part of his plan? Why did Patsy Smith ‘sell’ her daughter to a rock star? Despite having clearly been neglected, loyal Mandy would never have a word said against her mum.
‘She was really ill at the time and thought she was going to die – we didn’t know what of – and he looked after me,’ she told journalist Caroline Phillips. Wasn’t it because he was a rich celebrity? ‘No, no. We weren’t impressed by people.’ Why didn’t Mandy help the police press child abuse charges? Because, she said, she felt partly to blame.
‘It was like it was my fault as well,’ she insisted – with the ‘classic guilt of an abuse victim’, as Caroline observed. ‘I fell in love with Bill. I wasn’t a little sex temptress. But I’d feel too guilty getting someone charged for sex abuse.’ Yet in the opening pages of her autobiography, It’s All Over Now, written with journalists Andy Coulson and Ingrid Millar and published in 1993, the year of her divorce from Bill, she dedicates it:
· … to every woman and girl who has suffered abuse – sexual, emotional and psychological – at the hands of a man.
It was an illegal and immoral relationship. It was accepted, and blind eyes were turned. The perpetrator was an A-list rock star. It was not until I became a mother myself that things became more sharply focused. It was then that I knew what I had known all along: that I had turned a blind eye too. I am so sorry, Mandy.
In 2012, Bill turned up at the opening of Exhibitionism: The Rolling Stones, at London’s Saatchi Gallery, to join his former bandmates for their fiftieth anniversary. In 2015, he released Back to Basics, his first album in decades, and was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He celebrated his eightieth birthday in 2016 with his own photographic exhibition at Chelsea’s Proud Gallery. He also signed up to co-produce an autobiographical documentary, The Quiet One. There was much to depict. Not only the endless years rolling with the Stones and his own Rhythm Kings, but Sticky Fingers, his rock’n’roll restaurant in Kensington; his many books, including an arty tome on the work of Marc Chagall, once his neighbour in St Paul de Vence; his obsessive metal detecting; the diaries he has written daily since childhood; and his Rolling Stones archive, said to be worth millions. The ninety-minute film, released in 2019, proved controversial. A number of planned screenings were cancelled after protesters complained.
Does Bill ever pause to reflect how lucky he was? Or does he fear that his luck could yet run out? Because that was never a ‘love’ affair. Whatever he says, it was anything but. In April 2010, journalist Victoria Coren (now Coren Mitchell) wrote about it in the Guardian, denouncing Mandy’s status as poster girl of the wild-child generation: ‘It was never right,’ she declared. ‘How was I allowed to believe that this relationship – Mandy’s life – was glamorous, cool and aspirational? It was child abuse.’
Even if the law never catches up with him, perhaps the greatest punishment imaginable has already been handed down. It cannot comfort Bill to know, as he shuffles towards the abyss, that he will not go down in history for talent and achievement, nor for having been a member of the greatest rock’n’roll band of all time … but because he had sex with a child.
While preparing to film a documentary for an American production company, I read the late Gregg Allman’s New York Times best-selling autobiography My Cross to Bear. The Southern rocker jokes therein about an old road manager whom he cheerfully describes as ‘the original dirty old man’. The manager kept a chart in his case, giving the legal age of consent in every US state. He had copies made for every member of the band and the road crew. He would hand them round at the start of each tour, and kept further copies in case of emergencies. It begs all the questions I would like to ask Bill Wyman. It also answers them.