Jerry Hall is 70, single for one of the first times in her life, and is loving this incarnation. “It sounds selfish, but I really enjoy just doing what I want to do,” she tells me in her Scarlett O’Hara drawl. “You worry about getting old and being alone, then you get there and think, ‘Hey, this is really great!’ What a surprise.”
“I was a bit nervous about living alone at first,” she continues. “I thought, ‘Oh God, I’ve never done this ever’, but it’s so easy! The house stays so clean. You can watch anything you want on TV.” She loves hosting friends for lunches and dinners. “But now I only invite the people I love. It’s the most peaceful, stress-free time of my life.”
She bursts out laughing, before adding with considerable satisfaction: “And I can sleep diagonally across the bed.”
Hall is the OG supermodel, a six-foot (183-centimetre) platinum-blonde glamazon personified, whose extraordinary life reads like a Zelig-ish parade of greatest cultural hits. Everyone knows about the men: her teenage engagement to Roxy Music’s Bryan Ferry, whom she dumped for Mick Jagger, the notoriously philandering father of her four children. They divorced in 1999, and in 2016 she startled many by marrying media mogul Rupert Murdoch, a marriage that ended six years later.
But to define Hall by her relationships is to diminish her brilliance. This is the woman who escaped small-town Texas aged 16 for Paris, where she hung out with Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, and flat-shared with Jessica Lange and Grace Jones. She refused to pose naked for Salvador Dalí (her mother wouldn’t have liked it) and gossiped at Studio 54 with Andy Warhol, Tennessee Williams, Diana Vreeland and Truman Capote.
She was the face of Dior and Versace, appeared in films such as Batman and Urban Cowboy, and caused a furore when – at 44 – she stripped naked in the West End playing Mrs Robinson in The Graduate.
Now, in a less highbrow but still fabulous twist, she’s beloved by a whole new generation as one of the 21 contestants in the UK’s reality TV series Celebrity Traitors.
“I lerved it!” she enthuses. She must have made loads of new friends among her fellow traitors/faithfuls. “I did! I lerved [comedians] Rob Beckett and Romesh [Ranganathan]. They made me laugh so much. Rob and his family came over to have lunch with me the other day. So. Much. Fuhn.”
Fuhn – or “fun”, to stop with the phonetic transcription – is what Hall’s dedicated to chasing. Hugely charismatic, dramatic in her gestures and timing, she uses the word at least two dozen times during our conversation. She certainly deserves it.
Today, she and Jagger are on great terms: she spent Christmas with him and his vast family at his Mustique estate in the Caribbean, and he and his 39-year-old girlfriend Melanie Hamrick attended her 70th birthday party in July.
Her divorce from Murdoch is shrouded in non-disclosure agreements, but allegedly ended with him blindsiding her with an email. Yet now, those dark times have been firmly put aside. “They used to say we had three score [years] and 10,” she says. “But nowadays, people live into their 80s, sometimes more. And I’ve done my job. I’ve had a great career, raised my children. Now it’s fun time for me.” Is this her favourite decade yet? “Definitely! No pressure.”
It’s still a man’s world, let’s face it. But older women are being respected more.
JERRY HALL
Much of the fun derives from her girlfriends, many of whom she’s known for 50 years (“They come and stay and we have a great laugh”), some acquired in her most recent home in Oxfordshire, UK. It’s a far cry from the days when she was constantly – and not always successfully – heading off Jagger’s groupies (during their marriage he was serially unfaithful and had a son with Brazilian model Luciana Morad). “Now I’m not worried about some woman stealing my man. I’m liberated from being paranoid. I have this great group: we play bridge once a week, we’re really into gardening. It’s just so lovely.”
Generally, Hall has seen a welcome shift in the way her generation is treated. “It’s still a man’s world, let’s face it. But older women are being respected more. Even in movies now, you see them playing romantic parts. It used to be that you were the crone. We’re finally coming into our time.”
Having brought up her four children with Jagger – Elizabeth, 42, James, 41, Georgia May, 34, and Gabriel, 28 – in Surrey, UK, Hall now lives in an 11-bedroom Georgian manor, one of her former homes with Murdoch and part of their divorce settlement. There are three dogs, two cats, 10 chickens and a beloved vegetable plot, which she’s tenaciously kept alive throughout the drought aided by her borehole.
As mentioned, Hall celebrated her 70th with a lunch party in her garden for 177 “close friends” (she says this with a self-deprecating chuckle). “It was all over by 6pm and it was such fun. I had an Elvis impersonator. I was dancing with my grandkids. Oh, and quite a few exes were there.”
Oh yes? She smiles mischievously and refuses to expand on who – Jagger apart – these might have been. Other guests included Bob Geldof, who made a speech, Charlotte Tilbury and Tom Stoppard’s widow Sabrina Guinness. Hall wore a fetching silk black polka-dot tie-belted dress. “It was good for dancing. But afterwards, I thought, ’What was I thinking? I should have worn something more glamorous, more sparkly. But we started at 12.30pm and it was over at 6pm.”
Jerry Faye Hall grew up in Mesquite, Texas, with three older sisters and a fraternal twin, Terry Jaye, who today is a real-estate broker. Her father was a delivery driver, who’d fought for five years under General George Patton in World War II, and struggled with his mental health, sometimes whipping his daughters with his belt. “He was difficult, but amazing. The war was horrible for him.” Their mother instilled her brood with a spirit of optimism. “She loved watching all these old Hollywood movies and she’d make all these beautiful clothes for us, so we were trained in the appreciation of glamour.”
Inspired by watching To Catch A Thief, her mother despatched her 16-year-old daughter to the French Riviera. In Saint-Tropez, a model agent instantly spotted her in a string bikini. She was photographed by Helmut Newton, David Bailey and Norman Parkinson for Vogue, and aged 19 appeared on the cover of Roxy Music’s 1975 album Siren. Lead singer Ferry, then 30, fell hard for her, but after three years as London’s It couple, she left him for Jagger, a decision – she’s said – that left her “horribly torn”, although she claims she and Ferry are still friends.
With Jagger, she partied relentlessly, spending – she’s said – virtually every night for three years at Manhattan’s Studio 54 nightclub, which never kicked off before midnight. Didn’t she yearn for a night in front of the telly? “I was exhausted. But it was so much fun and I was young,” she explains. Today her bedtime is 9.30pm, although occasionally she busts loose, for example when she stayed at Tilbury’s house in Lamu in February. “I stayed up quite late dancing with Richard E. Grant; we went completely mad.”
Hall is one of the few with memories of the hedonistic 1970s, because she never touched drugs. “I was the goody-goody,” she says. “I would occasionally have a glass of white wine and smoke a few fags and I was considered a prude. I’m still doing the same thing, but now it’s shocking.” Her children castigate her for smoking. “But young people don’t have enough fun. They’re very serious.”
Reports say today’s Gen Z – the under 30s – are having less and less sex. “I heard!” Hall rolls her eyes. “Shocking! I had lots of sex. So lucky.” Another throaty laugh.
When she met Jagger, her one stipulation was that he kick his heroin habit. “With my children I said, ‘I don’t care if you make good grades in school, or go to university, or get a job that pays well. You can always live with me. But the one thing you can’t do is become a heroin addict.’ So it was a pretty low bar. But they’re wonderful people.”
Today both her daughters model successfully, James is an actor and Gabriel an entrepreneur. All are partnered up, apart from Elizabeth who recently split from her husband, American producer Christopher Behlau. Elizabeth and Georgia May each have a son and James a daughter. “I love being a grandma,” Hall cries, eyes wide. “What excites me more than anything is having the grandchildren come to stay. Thrilling!”
After her children left school, she took a four-year humanities degree at the Open University. “Then I did some poetry courses with the Arvon Foundation [in Devon], and then I went to UC Davis [in California] and did chemistry and algebra and got my winemaking certificate.” She adds in a rare reference to the Murdoch era on his Bel Air estate, “I was living on a vineyard, so it made sense. Then someone gave me a boat, so I got my captain’s licence. I just think it’s fun.”
With so much happening, Hall is ambivalent whether she’ll date again. “Who knows? Anything could happen, but I’m certainly not looking for it or planning. I have lunch with people, a lot of men friends. But I’m enjoying just being … relaxed. Having fuhn.”
The Telegraph, UK
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