Jerry Hall At 70: “Life Is Quite Hard… You Should Have As Much Fun As You Can”

Jerry Hall swings open the door of her Georgian manor in Henley, one arm outstretched as she flicks cigarette ash onto her pristine driveway. “Come in! The fire’s on!” She takes a drag, flashes a conspiratorial smile and lets her Texan drawl unfurl luxuriously: “Do you mind if I smoke?”

Hall is an It girl to her bones: irresistibly funny; a generous gossip; the kind of person people switch place cards to sit next to at dinner parties. And her stories! During more than 50 years in the spotlight, she’s been one of the world’s first supermodels; a darling of Studio 54; a rock’n’roll matriarch, wife of The Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger; and a West End star, causing tabloid furore by appearing nude in The Graduate at the grand old age of – sorry, let me check – 44, before sparking an even wilder firestorm when, in 2016, she married media tycoon Rupert Murdoch with a service of celebration at St Bride’s church, Fleet Street.

There was a time when Hall and her bouncy caramel waist-length blow-dry were everywhere: campaigns for Christian Dior and Versace; legendary runway appearances for Oscar de la Renta and Thierry Mugler; and in Vogue after Vogue, shot by greats including Helmut Newton, David Bailey and Norman Parkinson.

I’m here because in July, Hall turns 70. She’s marking the occasion in suitably glamourpuss fashion. Last week, she was back on her first Vogue shoot in perhaps a decade, celebrating her milestone by spinning around a pole in vertiginous stilettos. “I tell you, it was hard work. And the heels! I was crippled for days,” she says. In the summer, there will be lunch and dancing in a marquee in the garden as well as an Elvis impersonator (“He won in Las Vegas”). All the family are invited, including her and Jagger’s grown-up children – models Elizabeth and Georgia, entrepreneur Gabriel and actor James – and her three grandchildren. As are more than 200 friends, from Charlotte Tilbury to Tracey Emin.

Before the festivities, though, she will be filming the next series of the Claudia Winkleman-fronted reality TV phenomenon The Celebrity Traitors. As someone used to adhering to ironclad NDAs, Hall refuses to say anything more than she’s “excited” to be part of it. Several weeks after we meet, photos are released of Hall and her fellow A-list competitors (she is one of three former Vogue cover stars) at the edges of a loch in the Scottish Highlands. It remains to be seen how she fares in the show.

What she adores is entertaining. “I love hostessing and homemaking, very old-fashioned feminine stuff,” she says. She’s fabulous at it. Today, there’s lunch in the oven (chicken thighs and carrots, to be served with a peppery rocket salad), she tells me, as she leads me into a grand sitting room crowded with art: a Hockney swimming pool, an Ai Weiwei and a Richard Prince. Later a glass of Whispering Angel appears in front of me, a Highgrove coffee-table book used as a coaster. “I like to drink wine at lunch and wine at dinner; if I have company I’ll always have wine,” she says. It’s one of her favourite vices. As is smoking: 10 American Spirits per day. “I think I’m quite moderate.” (“I used to be considered the goody-goody when I drank and smoked only,” she says. “Now I’m the naughty one and I’m doing the exact same thing.”)

Hall’s house is messy in a way that feels subversively chic in an era of influencer-prescribed minimalism. An 11-bedroom country pile full of maximalist prints, every surface has something intriguing on it: a well-thumbed John Mortimer; Now That’s What I Call The 70s on CD; a Grayson Perry vase adorned with cartoonish pictures of the super rich. “It’s all the places where people do tax exile,” she tells me with a cackle.

I’m meeting her after a decade that has been, at times, uncomfortable. The power axis of politics, media and celebrity tilted precariously her way during the years she was married to Murdoch, the controversial – will the word do? – emeritus chairman of News Corp and the Fox Corporation. This, in fact, is the house they once lived in together, which came her way in their 2022 divorce, the particulars of which she is not at liberty to discuss as part of a wide-ranging separation agreement, which reportedly included stipulations such as that she was on no account to give information to the makers of Succession.

They moved here together, accompanied by a small phalanx of security. Now, just one guard remains (ruggedly handsome Steven, who shuttles me to and from the nearest train station between jobs in the garden). The marriage brought a different kind of scrutiny – less forgiving and more politicised than Hall had dealt with in her earlier life. How did she find her 60s, I wonder?

“Um, it was interesting,” she says. “You know…” She grits her teeth and chuckles in the manner of a person forever drawn to the limelight, sometimes to her detriment. “Quite tiring. Things are calmer now. It’s lovely. ”

Her life is not, she says, how she once imagined 70 might look. “My grandmother, when she was in her 70s, she had grey hair, she was a bit fat – a lovely old granny.” She smiles. “I love being a granny, I’m always babysitting, but I don’t really feel 70.”

She says she’s lucky. “I haven’t got anything wrong physically; I suppose that is to come. But who knows? My maternal great-grandmother lived to be 106 and she was still looking after the horses. The only reason she died was she fell down the stairs and broke her hip. So my main thing is just: don’t fall down.”

In recent years, fashion has begun – rather belatedly – to embrace older women. This past fashion month, Carolina Herrera cast 79-year-old photographer Ming Smith on the runway, while Michèle Lamy, in her 80s, walked for Matières Fécales at Paris Fashion Week and 66-year-old DJ Princess Julia walked for London label Lueder. IMG Models has begun actively scouting older faces. Hall has been part of that shift, fronting a 2022 campaign for Saint Laurent in power sunglasses and a skin-tight bodysuit, and appearing alongside her daughters and two of her grandchildren for Burberry last year.

She is delighted by the change. “I mean, years ago, I would never be asked to do a modelling job at 70.” Just as encouraging, she says, is the dismantling of the idea of “age-appropriate” dressing. “I think it’s terrible,” she says. “That thing of an ‘older lady’ line and it’s all beige. It used to be ugly shoes that are comfortable, ugly clothes that are grey and beige and dull.” She pulls a face. “I think it’s fun to be able to dress in a way that looks good on your figure. I’m very lucky I didn’t lose my figure. So I think I should be able to wear anything.”

The same goes for hair. “There’s always this thing – you get old and you have to cut your hair short and have this short blue-grey hair,” she says. “I think it’s a hideous look. I think you shouldn’t do it, no matter what the magazines say.” Hall puts on her best Emmeline Pankhurst: “We should stand up for our rights to be old and look good!”

Hall looks sublime today. Her honey-coloured waves still fall down to her ribs. Her cheekbones pop like they did in the 1970s. Sitting cross-legged by the fire in ballet flats and skinny jeans – flinging cigarette ends into the hearth – she appears 75 per cent leg. I assume there must be a regime, a discreet army of doctors, dermatologists and biohackers behind the scenes. “Nooooo.” She looks despairing. “I don’t go to the doctor. Never! I think medicine’s bad for you. I don’t want to find anything wrong with me.”

No dessert, lots of sleep, water and gardening – that’s her secret, she says. She doesn’t go to the gym and she rarely uses sunscreen. She’d never get Botox or fillers, she says. “I think we should be allowed to look 70. Why not? Why should we try to look 50? I mean,” she raises an eyebrow, “you want to look a good 70.” She laughs. “What’s wrong with wrinkles? I have loads of wrinkles, but I don’t mind. I’m 70, I should have wrinkles. I don’t want to look weird, I don’t want to scare my grandchildren.”

Does she think people try too hard to look perfect these days? “Let’s face it, plastic surgery is not perfected.” She leans forward, speaking louder. “Look at the photos from the Oscars. Look at the women! They look scary. I guess some people have to do it for their career, but I would just rather retire.”

Hall has theatrical charisma. She punctuates sentences with wide eyes and pageant smiles. She grew up in rodeo-obsessed Mesquite, a tomboy with four sisters. Her father, a delivery driver for a chemical company, had fought in the Second World War and struggled with his mental health. “Sometimes he was very scary. He would whip us with his belt. He was terrible. But he had PTSD, he had nightmares, so I kind of understand. My mother did the best she could – she instilled in us a lot of courage and independence.” Hall’s mother also encouraged her to, as a teenager, escape to the French Riviera to chase stardom, using a health insurance payout after a near-deadly allergic reaction to penicillin. She was approached by a model scout on her very first day in France. “He followed me into the bathroom.” Were you not afraid? “No, I wanted to be discovered!”

There’s a motto Hall has always lived by: “Just say ‘yes’. I really believe in that,” she enthuses. “My life was full of so many strange things that I couldn’t have imagined, and had I been busy having ambition or having a goal, I might have missed all those fun things.”

There is, inevitably then, a vast amount of lore surrounding Hall. I put some of it to her. There’s a painting of you in Roman Abramovich’s dining room? “True.” You and Mick got quite into Kabbalah? “No, no, we gave a dinner. It was fashionable. Madonna was doing it!” You turned down modelling for Salvador Dalí? “True. He wanted me to be nude. My mom had made me promise not to do nudes. I was very young.” You realised you had model potential while on LSD? “Someone spiked my drink. I locked myself in a room, stared in the mirror and thought: ‘Oh my God, you’re so beautiful.’ It was like a revelation.”

Hall is a brilliant storyteller, most animated when unspooling a glamorous anecdote, such as how in her Riviera days she’d parade up and down the promenade in a wardrobe her mother had made her out of snakeskin, red satin and marabou feathers. “I borrowed a friend’s giant great dane. It had a rhinestone collar. I had very long hair. I was ridiculous. Everyone would look at me and invite me to lunch. I was so happy because I had no money.” For a time, she shared a hotel suite with Grace Jones. “We got kicked out of several. We played loud music and we had lots of friends over.”

What’s the latest she stayed up and still made it to work?

“Gosh,” she says. “That would have been when Mick and I were in New York and Studio 54 was on. It didn’t even start until midnight.”

They went most nights for three years. She had fallen for Jagger while engaged to Roxy Music frontman Bryan Ferry, who she’d moved to England to be with at age 19. “I hadn’t seen him for months. He was touring the world. Mick was very funny and persuasive, and there you go.”

Jagger, she recalls, gravitated towards the basement, where the rock stars and actors congregated. “I think bad things happened down there,” she says. She preferred the balcony and white wine spritzes with dear pal Andy Warhol, watching the room from above. (One of six portraits he made of her hangs above a long feasting table in her dining room.) “Up there it was all the older crowd – Martha Stewart, Tennessee Williams, Truman Capote, Diana Vreeland,” she says. “Andy liked it because he could see everyone.” What did they talk about? “He’d say to Tennessee Williams, ‘Oh, you should write a part for Jerry. She’d be so great in one of your plays.’” She laughs loudly.

The idea that younger generations are less interested in partying strikes her as faintly absurd. “Why?!” she says, genuinely alarmed. “That’s weird. Parties are a natural human instinct. That’s terrible.”

And yet there is a melancholy threaded through those years today. “So many of them are dead now,” she says. “Aids, that killed a lot of people. And some of the rock’n’roll people, you know, they died too, drug overdoses. It’s so horrible.”

Hall has known her share of grief. Her mother died in 2013 and she has lost two of her older sisters since. “There are very hard moments,” she says. “I luckily have the kind of mind that can’t remember anything bad. I just remember the good things. It’s like selective memory.” She tries to deal with sadness and anxiety head on. “I say to myself: ‘I’m going to be happy today, I’m going to fill my life with joy,’ and it comes true.”

I tell Hall I want to talk about her two marriages. She reaches for another cigarette from a silver tin by the fireplace and for the first time she seems guarded.

Her relationship with Jagger was loving but turbulent. It ended in 1999 after an affair he had with Brazilian model Luciana Gimenez resulted in a pregnancy. In 2000 Hall described him as a womaniser. Now she’s kinder.

He’s a brilliant granddad, she says. All the kids love his fiancée, choreographer Melanie Hamrick, 38. “He comes out here quite a bit, Sunday lunch, him and Mel and their son, Dev. They’re so sweet.” He is also to thank for the success of their blended family: something like 23 of them spent Christmas in Mustique as an extended family. “Mick’s a great diplomat. All the kids love each other. All the mothers of the kids love each other. It’s just odd, isn’t it? Just worked out that way.”

Does she think people have misconceptions about their relationship? “Well, I think they do because newspapers make up stories all the time. He and I get on really well. I can only think nice things about him. You know, when you’re young, people get crushes on people and do stupid things all the time, don’t they? God, I’m so lucky that it doesn’t happen to me anymore – hardly.”

Friendship with an ex, she thinks, depends largely on circumstance. “Not all exes you want to be friends with, do you? Some people aren’t friendly. But I think when you have children with someone it’s important to be friendly.” She pauses. “Rupert, we were married six and half years and no children, and so, you know.” She flashes me a look.

Do you two still hang out? She shakes her head. “I haven’t seen him in a couple of years. Since the divorce.”

She won’t say anything more about Murdoch. But going through a divorce is “always traumatic”, she says. (When she moved back into the house we are now in, it was reported that Jagger’s security detail had to come over to disconnect the surveillance cameras that were still sending images back to Murdoch’s Fox HQ.) How does she deal with heartbreak now versus when she was young? “‘What will be, will be,’ that’s my saying. And it really works. If it’s meant for me, it’s gonna happen. If it’s not?” She shrugs. She’s not dating now. “I sometimes see people and think,‘He’s cute’, but I kind of can’t be bothered.” Would she ever go on the apps? She looks appalled. “Noooo, never! I’m very, very happy. I don’t feel I’m missing anything. I like men’s company but I don’t actually think I’ll ever want to live with one of them again.”

She pauses. “Let me go make sure I’m not burning my chicken.”

The kitchen is vast and rustic: bookshelves are lined with The River Cafe cookbooks, a long wooden table is laid for lunch. She tops up my rosé. When she started at French Vogue, Hall says, shoot teams used to sit down for long boozy lunches with wine, discussing art and politics. “I really miss that,” she says.

She did so many wonderful shoots for Vogue in that era. She remembers working on her first cover for British Vogue, styled by Grace Coddington – a portrait with a blue landline phone receiver tucked into a swimming cap. “Oh, that was fun. It went on for weeks and we were in Jamaica and it was beautiful.” Norman Parkinson snapped her walking poodles with Iman. Another time, she travelled to Soviet Russia with Parkinson. “They had all these tourist guides with us, spying on us like they thought we had some kind of telescopic cameras.” Parkinson got her to smuggle film out in her underwear. “Can you imagine? I was so scared.”

She’s shocked by how many people are on set for shoots these days. “Now there’s like 100 people. Who are all these people? What are they doing?” She’s noticed changes with runway shows too. When she was doing catwalks there were no choreographers. Models had creative freedom to add personality to their walks. Now it’s different. “You get this choreographed thing where the girls never smile, they’re very sad. They just walk very straight and very solemn. I find that restricting to these talented women’s ability.” Does she think her generation works harder? “We’d wear eight outfits [for runways], nowadays they just wear one or two, but then we didn’t have social media, so we’d just be hanging out in the back, drinking Champagne and smoking. Now they don’t ever rest.”

She pauses, then brightens. “Come look outside. I come every morning out here and listen to the birds.” We trot off to see her wisteria-draped veranda, then begin to wander through her 12 acres of land to see her neat veg patch, bluebell meadow and apple orchard, rolling out towards the Chiltern Hills. She spends most of her time gardening now, she says, if she’s not painting or writing poetry. In the summer her girlfriends stay for weeks at a time, spending warm days under the umbrellas by her pool. “I get an Italian cook all summer,” she says, “otherwise it’s too much work, I can’t hang out with the girls drinking rosé.”

We reach her chicken coop. “Rhode Island reds,” she exclaims. “They’re so pretty. Hello, girls!” She gathers up eggs in a fold of her jumper. “Look at these eggs, aren’t they gorgeous?” Normally a Shetland pony is here too, she says, but he’s away being trained so that the grandchildren can ride him.

She adores being a grandparent. “I want to teach stuff that my grandmother taught me – games, gardening, looking after the chickens.” She was a pretty relaxed parent. “With my children, I had a very low bar. I just said to them: ‘I don’t care if you go to college. I don’t care if you have a successful career. I don’t care if you have no money. The one thing you cannot do is heroin.’” She’s even looser as a grandmother. “I’ve done my bit. Now, it’s just fun.” She keeps a nursery full of toys for them to play with. I spot a Barbie Dreamhouse. “Lizzie was so annoyed about that. I never got her one.”

Does she feel more British or American now? “I feel more English. I don’t really go to America much anymore. I feel safer here than I do in America. People are reasonable, sensible. I think it’s more of a democracy.” In 2018, she was at Murdoch’s side at Donald Trump’s first White House state dinner. She grinned for the cameras, but, it was said, took a dim view of the president in private – a point of difference from her then husband, whose anti-abortion views she disagreed with. (Her preferred newspaper, she tells me today, is The Guardian.)

How does she feel about what’s happening in US politics now? “Well, it’s scary, really scary,” she says. “It’s so sad, this war that’s going on. I hope it calms down. It’s terrible. I think it’s just a phase – a bad phase.” This rise of Trumpian politics, you mean? “I’m very positive,” she insists. “I think good times are coming.”

Her wish for 70 is to have a peaceful year. “One of the great things about getting older is that you wish for things like peace, whereas when you’re younger, you wish for success, romance or whatever.”

Still, there’s work on the agenda: a turn at the Celebrity Traitors round table this autumn and she’d “like to be in an Agatha Christie or murder mystery kind of thing”, she says. Would she ever return to the runway? “I did get asked to do it a couple of times. It depends on the shoes. I tortured my feet long enough.”

Before I leave I wonder what she’d tell her younger self, all those years ago when she was first scouted? “I must say I wouldn’t want to change a thing. I’ve been very lucky. Hmm…” She pauses for a long time to think. “Maybe floss more?” She laughs. “Life is quite hard and short,” she says. “You should have as much fun as you can.”

Main look: Knotted cape and viscose-jersey jumpsuit, Celine. Vintage clip earrings, 4element. Hair: Alex Brownsell. Make-up: Mel Arter. Nails: Chisato Yamamoto. Set Design: Alice Kirkpatrick. Production: Mini Title. Digital Artwork: David Turner. Photograph: Charlotte Wales. Styling: Robbie Spencer.