Why has Bill Wyman whitewashed his life story?
The Stone’s relationship with a 13-year-old Mandy Smith shocked everyone. But in a new biopic, he blithely glosses over it. No wonder the UK premiere has been scrapped
THERE’S an extraordinary moment in Bill Wyman’s glossy new film about his life where he acknowledges that he made a mistake.
No, not that mistake. In the hour-and-a-half documentary, Wyman doesn’t express a single regret about allegedly having an intimate relationship with 13-year-old Mandy Smith.
In his head, his mistake seems to have been marrying her.
‘I was stupid to ever think it could possibly work,’ he says, in a moment that could almost be described as self-reflection. ‘Two sad marriages really, and I decided it was time I got my f****** life in order.’ Of course, Bill Wyman — now happily married to his third wife and worth an estimated £60 million — did get his life in order.
In the audience for the New York premiere of the film — called The Quiet One and billed as a ‘first-hand journey through Wyman’s extraordinary experiences’ — was his third wife, Suzanne Accosta.
There, too, was Jerry Hall, a former Rolling Stones wife. Also in the audience were at least two of Wyman’s three grown-up daughters.
Awkward? If it was, no one said so.
Those who know Bill Wyman say that if he hadn’t been a Rolling Stone, he would have made a great librarian.
His obsession with meticulous documentation is a surprising trait to find in a rock legend, but it is one that has served him well.
In his days as the bass guitarist with the Stones, Wyman, regarded as the ‘boring’ one of the band, was the official archivist, painstakingly indexing and cross-referencing pictures, tickets, posters, letters. He has since written books drawing on his personal diaries in which he recorded every detail of his life.
Indeed, the film promises cinema-goers an encounter with an ‘ amusing, engaging and down-to-earth man’.
premiere, Or it was until due to the be European held in Sheffield next month and include a Q&A session with Wyman, was pulled amid accusations that the organisers were giving a platform to a ‘sexual predator’.
Perhaps it was inevitable. Of all his 1,000 women, one stands out, because she wasn’t a woman at all, but a young teenage girl.
Wyman’s relationship, and subsequent marriage to Mandy Smith, who was just 13 when they met and, according to her, 14 when they started having sex, has long been controversial. NOW, in the age of # MeToo, the discomfort surrounding this dark chapter of rock history has taken on a whole new slant.
In one segment of the film, Wyman documents the women who used to pursue him. ‘Me and Brian [ Jones, fellow Rolling Stone] used to go out to the clubs and pick up girls,’ he says. ‘ They used to camp outside the hotel.
‘Of course, I jumped at it. It just became part of my life . . . There was probably an addiction to sex, because I wasn’t addicted to drugs, and I wasn’t addicted to wine.’
Every pop legend of that generation could probably tell a similar story. But how does he explain the chapter of his life which involved seducing a 13-year-old? Answer: he doesn’t. He fails to mention Mandy’s age, or the huge controversy that surrounded that relationship. To viewers of this film, she is just another girl in a very long line of them.
‘I got this invite to go to an event and there were all these people dancing,’ he says of their first meeting. ‘I saw this beautiful girl with her hair up, spoke to her and found her name was Mandy Smith.
‘It was from the heart. It wasn’t from lust or anything like that, which people were seeing it as.’
The film cuts to a press conference some years later when the pair announced their eventual marriage.
Wyman is asked whether he is hesitant about marrying again, having been a ‘bachelor boy for so long’.
‘I always thought she was the right girl from the moment I met her, but it was the wrong time. She was too young.’
And that’s it. The Mandy Smith chapter finished.
Then again, Wyman has long since adopted a weary tone when Mandy’s name is mentioned.
In one interview he pointed out that he had approached the police and prosecutors himself to see if they wanted to interview him, only to be told they were not interested.
That the matter wouldn’t go away clearly pained him.
‘We all have a skeleton in the cupboard,’ he admitted in 2013. ‘It’s just if you are a taxi driver in Halifax no one ever hears about it. But if you are a celebrity, everyone does. In my case, it was publicised to the world and that wasn’t really fair.’
The truth, says his one-time friend, author and journalist Lesley-Ann Jones, is very different. She says he should have ‘ retired gracefully from music and gone to live in France with his new wife and children, and kept his head down, thinking: “I’ve been a lucky b*****d.”
‘ Instead, he’s almost thumbed his nose at society. The message coming from him is: “I’m a Rolling Stone. I can do what I like.” ’ It’s a view shared by others. ‘Why did he have sufficient power to mean that his behaviour wasn’t censured?’ asks Professor David Wilson, a criminologist at Birmingham University.
He believes it is in part due to the fact it happened when public figures didn’t have the same scrutiny as they do now. Professor Wilson agrees that if Wyman hadn’t been a Stone, history would have recorded things very differently.
‘They represented rebellion. Wyman was sufficiently powerful to avoid the censure that should have come his way, and by basically airbrushing Mandy Smith out, he is continuing to do so.’
Unluckily for Wyman, Mandy Smith learned about the importance of record-keeping from him.
She kept her own diary during their relationship and in 1994 she went public with a book telling her version of their relationship.
Called It’s All Over Now, it offers a textbook example of how a young girl can be exploited because, sadly, she believed she was complicit in his behaviour. HER book is a graphic account of how Wyman seduced the teenager and then made her feel that she had been the one who led him astray.
However, others who witnessed the pair’s relationship paint a very different picture. They speak of Mandy as having the body of a woman but a naïve and innocent nature. Lesley-Ann Jones says she was ‘beyond beautiful, she looked like an angel’. She was definitely not the Lolita she came to be portrayed as.
‘She wasn’t overtly sexual,’ recalls Lesley-Ann. ‘I remember having my picture taken with her and she was wearing a shirt buttoned to the neck.’
Mandy might have looked older but was in fact still at school. Wyman paid for her education, having transferred her from her state school to a fee-paying one close to his flat on London’s King’s Road.
He had befriended her mum Patsy, who gave a bizarre blessing, of sorts, to the relationship, although Mandy
‘Wyman made her feel she had led HIM astray’
always insisted that her mother thought of Wyman as more of an uncle figure — until it became very clear that he wasn’t.
Even more bizarrely, Patsy went on to marry Wyman’s son Stephen, by his first wife Diane.
Wyman’s clique of friends that included Lesley-Ann Jones only discovered Mandy’s true age when he held a birthday party and someone dared to ask. Fifteen came the answer. Even then the revelation was chilling for her, given the couple had already been together for two years.
What did Jones and her friends do? ‘We scarpered,’ she told me. ‘We never told anyone, didn’t dare. We thought we might get in trouble. We were young and naïve. We never challenged Bill, and we were as bad as Bill for that, for saying nothing.’ Only in more recent times has Jones questioned whether she and her friends were used as cover to collude in his relationship with Mandy. She recalls one event where Wyman asked her to arrive on his arm — yet he linked up with Mandy inside. In fact, Wyman went to extraordinary lengths to hide Mandy’s age. When she was 14, she claims, he asked her to travel on the Orient Express with him — but not on her own passport, on her older sister’s.
Yet while he encouraged her to look and act older when they were in public, at home, she claims, he liked her to look as young as possible.
Yet this dysfunctional relationship ploughed on.
In June 1989, the pair married when Mandy was 18.
But the marriage was over almost before it had begun. Within weeks, Mandy — pale, thin, by then seriously ill — had moved out and the couple divorced in 1993.
‘If there had been any dalliance with me, all record of it was now scrubbed,’ Mandy subsequently wrote. ‘The Stones machine was omnipotent. So long as I continued to say “no comment”, he was home and dry.’
After Mandy, Wyman married Suzanne Accosta and went on to have three daughters.
For her part, Mandy struggled to establish relationships with men. She married footballer Pat Van Den Hauwe (the union lasted only two years) before going on to have a son, Max, now 18, with male model Ian Mosby.
I interviewed her in 2010 and remember emerging from our meeting thinking, ‘poor kid’, even though she was 40.
Single and celibate, she was also thin and fragile. She had returned to the Church — she was raised a Catholic — and was working with vulnerable teenagers. She wanted them to make different choices.
‘Being with a man isn’t all it’s cracked up to be,’ she said. ‘I say to the girls: “Get a career. Then you’ll have self-respect.” ’