Installment#2
Casting as Life and Art
Cottingham How I came to be Mick Jagger
 
Playing Mick Jagger is the most embarrassing part of The Anita Pallenberg Story for me, and perhaps the casting decision which requires the most explanation. After all, Mick Jagger can't even play Mick Jagger.

So where did I get the idea to cast myself as him?

Well, I didn't. The casting of Mick Jagger was Leslie Singer's casting decision - not mine. I don't have luscious lips or otherwise resemble Mick and my life wasn't changed by Muddy Waters.In terms of body verisimilitude, I wanted Paris critic Frank Perrin as an 'ass double,' because his is the right size; but somehow we never came up with enough money in the budget for an Ôass double' to be flown in from Paris.

In addition to the lack of physical similarities between myself and Mick, I can't even say I understand or relate to his musical sense or his dance style. Musically, while Leslie Singer (and nearly every other member of the cast of The Anita Pallenberg Story) was discovering the Stones and Rock and Roll and Punk as teenagers, I was playing J.S. Bach and Beethoven on the piano. I didn't begin to seriously listen to Rock and Roll until I was into my late 20s, during the 1980s. For the research on Anita Pallenberg , I had to educate myself as to which popular radio numbers from my adolescence were Stones tunes because I had unconsciously misattributed more than a few of their hits. For instance, I thought "Angie", one of the Stones biggest singles of the 1970s, was by the Marshall Tucker Band; and I thought "Ruby Tuesday" was a Beatles song; and other titles of their I would have sworn were by Roxy Music. I knew "Satisfaction" was theirs and I even knew most of the lyrics to "Sympathy for the Devil" - but that's because of the Godard film, One Plus One. Godard has meant a lot to me since I was a teenager. But the Stones, well, until The Anita Pallenberg Story, they were less than a glimmer on my cultural horizon.

And as for Mick's dance moves - well, my own inclinations couldn't be more different. As a child I studied dance for ten years - and the only thing I could do is ballet. I did appear on television a few times in popular numbers choreographed by the Mary Ann Pearman Dance Company of Ft. Thomas, Kentucky, on a children's special called "The Uncle Al Show", which was broadcast in the Southern and Midwestern region of the United States during the sixties and seventies. But my dance sensibility, like my musical sensibility, is formal, classical and slow - the opposite of Mick's.

So please don't think that it has been my life long dream to be Mick Jagger: not at all. This may be true for some people, but not for me. My childhood idol was Lord Byron. I wanted a club foot, an estate, and to die a heroic death. And as a young girl, when my friends were developing crushes on boy pop stars, and trading copies of Tiger Beat and other fanzines, I thought they were just stupid: I couldn't imagine writing love letters to some idiot whose picture you saw in a magazine.

Perhaps the only thing I have in common with Mick Jagger is Carly Simon. In the early '70s one of my friends, Annette, had Carly Simon's No Secrets album. Carly appears on the cover wearing a big straw hat and a blue T-shirt. She is bra-less and her erect nipples are noticeable. I would go to Annette's house to stare at Carly Simon's nipples. (I think Mick got to see them a bit more up-close, sigh.)

Mick has other attributes though; and it is his personality profile, as well as his role in the development and maintenance of the Stones, that inspired Leslie to link me with him. Mick is the one who kept the whole thing together. Even in the early years, in 1962-63, when the Stones were first getting their act together, Mick was the one who was organized enough to send money orders to Chicago to get the R & B albums they couldn't buy in England. Keith and Brian were, from the start, the juvenile delinquents. Mick was focused, determined, and ambitious. As the years rolled on, Mick was the one who kept things going: Brian died because he couldn't keep it together, Keith spent more than a few years smacked out, and of the other Stones, well none of them could have played Mick's role - and I don't mean the singing and dancing, though that's true too.

Leslie's original linking of Mick and me actually predates The Anita Pallenberg Story by nearly five years. It involved another art work, by another New York artist. It occurred in 1994, not long after Leslie moved from San Francisco to New York. At the time, the painter Deborah Kass was working on her series of Andy Warhol portraits, which involved Ôcasting' people to pose as some of Warhol's original sitters. For instance, she redid Ethyl Scull by posing one of her collectors in the same mannerisms, and redid the same grid and color pattern Warhol had done. Deb wanted me to pose for Liza Minelli, for a similar kind of appropriation. I didn't want to do it. I didn't like the idea of sitting in for a fag hag. Liza is great in Cabaret and all, but, well, I don't feel like Liza. But Deb kept pestering me to say yes. One evening I pulled down the Warhol Retrospective catalogue to look at the Liza portrait and I asked Leslie what she thought about it. Leslie was adamant that I shouldn't be Liza and said that the only Warhol portrait right for me to do would be Mick Jagger. At the time, I thought Leslie was crazy. Now, five years later, she has gotten me to pose as Mick Jagger. (I said no to Deb and she got Cindy Sherman to be Liza instead.)

Actually, in the year and a half that I have been studying the Stones I have become more sympathetic to Mick. It's sad that he still can't get no satisfaction; and that, unlike John Lennon, he doesn't appear to want redemption either. In the fall of 1998, after spending months listening to Stones recordings everyday and collecting different books and memorabilia on them, and taking notes for the script, I was thinking about Mick Jagger every day. Then sometime in late October I had a dream in which Mick Jagger asked me if he could be my girlfriend and I turned him down. When I woke up the memory of the dream truly startled me. Of course, the first thing I thought of was how funny and absurd it was - and an especially a good joke that I refused him. But it also made me think of how susceptible our unconscious really is: all you have to do is think and read and watch and listen to someone for a few months and the next thing you know they fall in love with you in your dreams. Intellectually it has long been a belief of mine that if we could produce new culture, we could produce a new reality with it - or, at the very least, new dreams.

My role as Mick in Anita Pallenberg is based on my professional experience working as a critic and curator with visual artists. So many visual artists act like bad children: they assume no responsibility and act out to get attention. Anyone who has ever had the experience of curating an international museum show with living artists knows that the installation process is like watching a kindergarten class in revolt. Mick managing the druggy antics of Brian and Keith and all their girlfriends and groupies while trying to carve out some artistic control and financial justice from commercial record companies like Deca reminds me of trying to organize a group of artists to make a show while at the same time struggling to negotiate the necessary resources out of the museum venue. In order for culture or anything else to happen, somebody has to sometime act like a grown-up. For the Stones, it was always Mick. For my projects - publications, exhibitions, and videos - it has always been me.

I think Leslie also cast me as Mick because there are always girls chasing after me, which is funny and something I take for granted but it impresses some people, including Leslie. And in order to have anything close to the essence of Mick Jagger, one must have had the experience of fucking women, since that has been one of his primary cultural activities for the past thirty years. And the main point of our version of Mick is that I am a woman playing a man, a lesbian playing a man who often played himself like a woman or a drag queen or a fag. We are mocking the idea of male and female, which we don't believe in. And I decided to play Mick as a kind of drag queen, because I agree with Tim Curry that the drag queen personae is the cliché of contemporary life that comes closest to the essence of Mick (although I don't even try to compete with Tim Curry or any real drag queens, because I am not really woman enough to pull it off.) 

von Bonin Cosima von Bonin as Anita Pallenberg
Eisenman Nicole Eisenman as Keith Richards
Brown Gavin Brown as Andrew Loog Oldham
Nanney Chuck Nanney as Kenneth Anger
Parrino Steven Parrino as Hell's Angel
Ganahl Rainer Ganahl as the Vogue Photographer
Amer Ghada Amer as a Rolling Stone Reporter
Theobald Stephanie Theobald as Julie Burchill
Cobett Aaron Cobett as Aaron, the Band's Make-Up Artist
Michael Lucas Michael as François de Menil
de Land Colin de Land as Robert Fraser
Dalrymple Clarissa Dalrymple as Tony Sanchez, the Band's Drugdealer
Beckwith Patterson Beckwith as David Bowie
Norton Peter Norton as the Pizza Delivery Boy
Yau John Yau as John Yau
Force Yvonne Force as a groupie
Jones? Where's Brian Jones ?
New York New York is the star of the film