| October 2nd, 2005 05:56 AM |
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| Ten Thousand Motels |
'I'd rather be with my kids than a man'
After her celebrated nude appearance in The Graduate, the West End again beckons Jerry Hall, this time with a part in High Society that, she says, mirrors her real-life role as a mother
Lynn Barber
Sunday October 2, 2005
The Observer
What did I do to make Jerry Hall dislike me so much? I felt like a very unsightly verruca that had had the temerity to erupt on her toe. It was not that she was rude exactly. On the contrary, she was very gracious in a sort of duchess-addresses-shopgirl manner, but I have not felt so thoroughly condescended to since I was a baby journalist in nappies.
And yet I totally approve of her in principle. I loved her 1985 autobiography, Tall Tales. I like the fact that she is self-educated and has taken every opportunity to learn; she came from some hicksville nowhere in Texas and conquered Paris, New York and London. She is a hard worker, a trouper who doesn't seem to know the meaning of self-pity.
It is only her grandeur I object to. Maybe she just hates the press. Any time I quoted anything from one of her previous interviews, she denied having said it. An Observer colleague once sat next to her at an awards dinner and said she spent about two seconds establishing that he was of no importance and turned her back on him for the rest of the meal.
She is talking to the press (me) now because she has a show to plug, High Society at London's Shaftesbury Theatre. She plays the debutante's mother, and perhaps some of the snobbishness of the role has rubbed off on her. The other actors - we meet at the rehearsal rooms - are all dressed in usual actors' motley, but she is every inch a lady in black cashmere and pearls, with a Vivienne Westwood pencil skirt and her own-design Charnos fishnet tights.
She looks fabulous: trim figure, lovely skin, endless legs, perhaps a bit sturdy round the ankles. She has always said she would never have Botox or plastic surgery and I believe her; the veins on her forehead pulse thrillingly under the transparent skin. She says her only beauty routines are lots of water and lots of sleep - 10 hours if possible - and moderate exercise. She has never dabbled in drugs and rarely drinks because she hates any loss of self-control.
However, I notice that she smokes, because she gets through almost as many cigs as me. She says it's because they don't get many rehearsal breaks, so she has to cram the nicotine in when she can. She loves rehearsals, but finds them tiring. 'You have to do everything again and again, especially dance routines, which are a bit alien to me, so I'm getting quite exhausted after dancing for several hours at a time.'
But acting is the thing she always wanted to do. She was in The Sound of Music at school and loved it and she went to classes at the Actors' Studio with Stella Adler when she first lived in New York. 'I did small bits here and there, but then the modelling took off and then I had my children and I felt I'd missed the thing I really wanted to do. So to be given that second opportunity, that was just the greatest thing.'
Her big opportunity came when she played Mrs Robinson in The Graduate for six months in the West End and for five months on tour. It got stinking reviews, but she thinks it was the best thing she's ever done apart from her charity work. 'The thing I'm most proud of is that I've raised a lot of money for certain charities - breast cancer and the Caldecott Foundation and the NSPCC. But as far as my self-esteem is concerned, doing The Graduate for 11 months was fantastic.'
Obviously she doesn't need to work for the money, but: 'I have a lot of energy and if I don't keep myself busy, I go crazy. I alphabetise the spice rack, separate the Lego from the Playmobile, colour-code the knicker drawers - it's scary! My house loves it when I'm working so the linen cupboard can get a rest. I just don't sit around.' Can't she sit and read? (One hopes she can because she once judged the Whitbread Prize.) 'Yes, I do read a lot. But I read in a very obsessive way [she mimes furiously turning pages] where I can't put it down until I've finished it.'
She has done so much work since leaving Mick Jagger in 1999 - not only acting, but TV presenting (she has a series currently on cable called Kept in which she is supposed to be auditioning toyboys) - that you wonder what she did during all those years she was married. She finds it a bit of a mystery too. 'At the beginning, I went with Mick on his tours, and I had the children, and occasionally they'd ask me to do bits of modelling, but mostly I was, you know, running our houses - we had a lot of them - throwing parties, inviting people. That was quite a big job. I would always be there for his opening nights and invite all our friends and celebrities, so there was a lot of that - that was a kind of social job though. I think that this [acting] is much more rewarding creatively. I'm having a lot more fun now.'
She says again and again that she and Mick are on excellent terms, that he is a wonderful father, that he is 'totally reliable, he has never once let me down on any arrangement to do with the children. He is extremely conscientious, involved in all their schoolwork, everything.' He has finally moved out of the flat next door where he lived for some years after the divorce; he still owns it but nowadays stays at Claridge's when he is in London. They talk almost every other day on the phone, mostly about the children, but also about mutual friends. She says she plans to see the current Stones tour when it reaches England next summer, and that Mick has promised to come and see High Society at Christmas.
She has even met his girlfriend, L'Wren Scott: 'I asked her to tea once and she seemed very nice. I said call me if there's any problems with the children because you're seeing them so much. It's fine. She's nice with my children, so that's all that matters.'
Given all this peace and reconciliation, it is strange that she keeps performing her revenge song, 'Around This Table'. She did it first at Eddie Izzard's birthday party last spring, then at a Texas indie music festival and again the other day at a poetry fest at the Royal Albert Hall. Although it was written by her friend Rachel Fuller, who is Pete Townshend's girlfriend, she has never disguised the fact that it is based on her experience.
'You know how when you get divorced, you kind of obsess over an object that each of you has to have? It was like that.' The object is a dining table that has seen the happy days of a marriage: 'We make love on it./ Our children scratch their names beneath.' Then comes the decline: 'We scream across the surface./ Our hate is carved in stone./ At opposite ends, we fall apart and I am left alone./ Well, now you want this table for your pretty mistress's home.'
So who's got the table now? 'Mick's got it.' Why did she let him have it? 'I just let him have what he wanted. I don't really care about things that much. I was a little irritated, but I've totally gotten over it and I love my new table; it's so much better.'
Mick, she claimed last summer, 'thought the song was really good, but he thought it was a bit personal. He said he was going to write a reply.' The new Stones album contains a song with the lines: 'Oh no, not you again, fucking up my life./ It was bad the first time around./ Better take my own advice.' So was that his reply? 'No! He said it wasn't about me.' And she believed him? 'He says only the good ones are about me.'
She has been going to a psychotherapist ever since her divorce and once said that if she'd discovered psychotherapy before, she probably would have left her marriage earlier. Now she says she's glad she stayed long enough to have four children, adding: 'Yeah, maybe that is true. Probably wouldn't have stayed that long.' How long was the marriage bad? 'We had our ups and downs. I was very in love with him for a long time. But we'd have periods where I'd think I'd had enough and then we'd get back together. I was extremely forgiving for a long time.'
Was the only problem his infidelity? 'Always, yes. Other than that, we got on very very well.' She has even forgiven him for claiming they were never married, that their wedding in Bali was a sham, though she drawls: 'I thought that was a bit tacky after 23 years and four children. And he organised our wedding.' But she has persuaded herself that his lawyers made him do it. And she repeats like a mantra: 'We're on very good terms now.'
This is the woman who is in the Oxford Book of Quotations for saying that her mother taught her that to keep a man, a woman had to be a maid in the living room, a cook in the kitchen and a whore in the bedroom. She recounts in Tall Tales that her mother told her five daughters that 'the man always comes first' and when her father, a long-distance lorry driver, came home, they had to treat him like the king of the house, even though he beat them.
'Sometimes he used to beat us with his belt so bad that we'd have black and blue welts on our legs and couldn't go to school. But we never felt we were abused. It really wasn't that weird. In our town, a lot of the kids were beat up.' But doesn't she resent her mother for condoning it? 'I've forgiven her. It was a different time. And she didn't know how to escape that situation. I think she did the best she could.'
She has even forgiven her father. 'He did hit us and the neighbours used to call the police. But he was a very angry, unhappy person and I do feel sorry for him. He was taking all these black bombers [uppers] to drive and I don't think they realised then how bad they were, and he had health problems. And he'd come from a very dysfunctional family. He'd been raised by his father who drank a lot, so he had his own problems. But I'm just really proud that I and my sisters have been very good mothers. We haven't been abusive in any way to our children.
'Things happen to people in life and you just have to move on. But I do think all those inner things from a troubled childhood are just fantastic material for acting. They can be drawn on and accessed very easily. And I think that to use that negative stuff in a constructive, positive way is what's really important in life. I find that's what I need to do and that acting really helps me a lot.'
She says she is very happy with the company of her children. 'I'd much rather be with them than anyone else, including a man.'
Consequently, she has no urgent desire to find another husband. 'I don't really want to get married. I've got my career, my friends - my life is very, very full. It's nice to go out to dinner with a man and have fun, but I wouldn't rush into anything because I don't think it's right to bring another man into the house with my four children. It would take years of building a relationship before that would even begin to be a possibility.
'But I do see couples on the beach together who look like they've been married for 50 years or something, and I watch them and think, "That looks very nice - having companionship." I do think when you're old, it's very important to be loved. So maybe later, when I've got plenty of time. But now, at 49, with four kids at home, it's not on the cards.' But doesn't she miss sex? What about being a whore in the bedroom? The question seems to shock her because, having unbent a little, she reverts to her most formidable duchess mode: 'I don't think about sex unless I'm in love with somebody. It doesn't enter my head unless there's a reason for it. If I'm in love, then I feel the inclination; otherwise, no.'
Turning 50 next year holds no terrors for her; even turning 40 didn't bother her. 'The only one that bothered me was 25 because I was in the modelling profession where 25 is seriously old, so I thought, "That's it! Modelling's over", and I didn't know what I would do. But since then, I'm not worried about my age because I'm healthy and I'm a young woman. As far as vanity and wrinkles and things like that, that's a part of life I don't worry about. I put on creams, you know, but don't go mad, and I don't have any kind of treatments. I just live a healthy lifestyle. And staying happy, not getting negative and angry, I think that helps, looking at the positive of everything.'
Great woman. I tug my forelock with genuine respect as I back out of her presence.
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| October 2nd, 2005 10:05 PM |
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| Soldatti |
The TV here is showing her reality show. What a load of sh##t. |
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