Bit Of Help Getting Down The Stairs, Sir? Mick Jagger Hits His Ninth Decade In High, Blended-Family Style In London

Aptly, Mick Jagger held a blow-out at a Chelsea nightclub on July 26 to mark the broad swath he has cut into his ninth decade among us. Mingling with a certain cuvee of well-heeled Londoners — those few who are, for the moment anyway, not in France — alongside a sprinkling of how-did-they-get-here fellow rockers, were many of Sir Mick’s spiffy and endlessly rambunctious eight offspring, his Virginia-born current partner, former ballet dancer Melanie Hamrick and the mother of the last of the eight Jagger children, Devereaux, age 6, as well as a healthy dose of blended-family in the form of swashbuckling, regal ex Texan Jerry Hall, pictured exiting her car, below.

Ms. Hall reigns wherever she goes and at held to that form at this party in the (what else) London rain. Despite her recent six-year detour to the throne of the Fox Empire, which is rumored not to have sat well with many of the Jaggers, Ms. Hall remains the all-time leading mom of Big Daddy Mick’s five baby-mamas — supplying half the Jagger litter of eight, or four children, with Sir Mick, several of whom, including the daughter-with-the-mostest-attitude Georgia May, attended the July 26 bash with their mom. In fact, so many Jaggers were present that one could reasonably argue, as Second Daughter Jade Jagger (Mom: Bianca/Birth Date: 1978) has maintained, that there needs to be no “other” celebrities or attendees to up the glamour quotient at a Jagger-family party — the Jaggers do that whole offhand glitz thing quite naturally and in abundance for themselves, thank you. Pictured below: Georgia May Jagger doing an insouciant Eighties take on a l’il fire-engine-red cocktail number with a leather jacket against the London midsummer chill.

For his part, Master Devereaux Jagger, age 6, seemed to have retired for the evening, but his balletic choreographer mom looked bright and summery in a featherweight lace dress, with the real-world addition of a therapeutic boot. Those sixteen years as a principal with the Amercain Ballet Theater clearly bear a price.

In real-life non-celebrity mogul-dom — which is to say, in the business of the music business — there is arguably no more serious hitmaker-producer-headphone magnate more serious than Jimmy Iovine, and wherever he goes he brings a certain gravitas to the proceedings, as well as his wife of seven years, Liberty Ross. Man is having a good time, plain and simple, and he has more than earned that.

The lone other Rolling Stone on the evening was the ever-true Ronnie Wood and his wife Sally, above, who made a beeline exit in the care of some of the same stair-minders who had attended bandmate Sir Mick. Such are the vagaries of age and stairs in the London rain at night.

It’s axiomatic that, when the Stones toss a party in London, a certain unshy-if-not-outright-raffish section of the British aristocracy can be counted on to fly a festive flag, and on this evening that role was played to the hilt by none other than the 8th Marquess of Bath, Ceawlin Thynn and the ever-fashionable Marchioness, Emma (nee McQuiston) Thynn, pictured below in the pink as they leave the party, and with that, leaving the impression that their Elizabethan estate, Longleat, built in 1580, readily awaits them, no matter the hour or the day they wend their way home from the afterparty.

The mechanism of age among legendary rock front-men and -women is as inexorable for them as it is for the rest of us, and often it seems the Fates will decide to snip the thread prematurely, as happened with the long-gone fellow travelers Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Elvis Pressley and not least, the first and one of the very earliest of the 1960s British Invasion stars, the Rolling Stones’ very own Brian Jones. It’s not as if the Fates lagged in their cutwork or the trend stopped anywhere along the way, as, living up to the cliche of rock stardom as a mortal enterprise, the more recent deaths of Kurt Cobain, Amy Winehouse, Prince and the ferociously indie Sinead O’Connor attest.

By contrast, to mangle Dylan Thomas, there’s quite a lot to be said for raging against the dying of the light among those who are able to muster out for eternal battle, as the Stones do. Both individually and collectively, the surviving Stones — minus Jones and most recently, their jazzy, rock-jawed timekeeper Charlie Watts — are talented at that, cranking out tours, dropping albums and books, and, as ever, writing new songs. Beginning with Keith’s hilariously unshorn and quite literary autobiography, the Stones’ collective ramble over the last two decades has been a roller-coaster delight, if not without a couple of bumps in the road.

What’s kept them together, doing all this is something very simple and very hard. Longevity in any business is about the creation and maintenance of the notion of family, in the sense of long-trusted associates. Warren Buffet at Berkshire Hathaway springs to mind. Strange as it might seem to some, Mick Jagger is a family man in that way, and, gauging from the attendees at the Embargo nightclub in Chelsea on July 26, in several other ways.

Jade Jagger described it this way in 2021, in the pages of British Vogue: “My father now has eight children with five partners — a globetrotting support network that seems to be ever expanding. In any given year, the whole lot of us might decamp to the Caribbean for a holiday or hit the road in Europe for a Rolling Stones tour — family gatherings where traditional roles lose all meaning amid the chaos and laughter. As a general rule, we’re too busy trying to find a restaurant that will accommodate several dozen screaming Jaggers for the evening to worry about someone’s place in the family tree.”

Well put, Ms. Jagger. That seems like a family, and kudos to the patriarch. Delighted to add this milestone to the birthdays we never dreamt we’d see.