But Cleo did not feel nearly ready for such a commitment. She had only just left school and was about to begin studying at a teacher-training college near Richmond. She also had an inbuilt nervousness about marriage – and men – having witnessed stormy and at times violent rows between her own parents before their separation. ‘I told Mick it had nothing to do with how I felt about him,’ she recalls. ‘It was just that the time wasn’t right. I wanted us still to be friends, but he said he couldn’t bear for it to be just on that level.’
The heartbreak, though real enough, was not to be of long duration. One night in early 1963, the Rollin’ Stones were playing yet another Thames-side blues club, the Ricky-Tick, hard by the battlements of the royal castle at Windsor. When Mick launched into Bo Diddley’s ‘Pretty Thing’ (‘let me buy you a wedding ring / let me hear the choir sing . . .’), his bandmates knew exactly whom it was aimed at.
Her name was Christine – aka Chrissie – Shrimpton; she was seventeen years old, but very different from the usual schoolgirl blues fan. Her older sister, the fashion model Jean Shrimpton, was growing increasingly famous through appearances in once-stuffy Vogue magazine, photographed by the young East Ender David Bailey. While Jean’s looks were coolly patrician – more fifties, in fact, than sixties – Chrissie was a quintessential young woman of now with her Alice-banded hair, ethereally pale face and thick black bush-baby eyes. The impassive pout essential to this look was enhanced by unusually wide and full lips, albeit not quite on the same scale as Mick’s.
Despite a noticeably posh accent and aura, Chrissie Shrimpton was less upper class than she appeared – and also more of a natural rebel than Mick had ever been. Her father was a self-made Buckinghamshire builder who had used his wealth to realise his dream of owning a farm in the high-priced countryside near Burnham. Though brought up with every luxury and given an expensive private education, Chrissie was an unruly spirit, constitutionally unable to submit to rules or authority. When she was fourteen, her convent school gave up the unequal struggle and asked her parents to remove her.
While fashion modelling took her sister Jean steadily up the social ladder, Chrissie consciously went the other way, dressing down like a beatnik and seeking out the raucous, proletarian R&B set. By day, she followed the only course open to young women without educational qualifications, training to be a shorthand typist at a secretarial college – her third – on London’s Oxford Street. At night, she roamed far from the Shrimptons’ Buckinghamshire farmhouse, becoming a regular at Eel Pie Island and the Crawdaddy, where she got to know both Rod Stewart and Eric Clapton well before first setting eyes on Mick and the Stones.
The various printed accounts of their first meeting are always set at the Windsor Ricky-Tick, with seventeen-year-old Chrissie – who sometimes cleared away glasses there in exchange for free admission – brazenly taking the initiative. In one version, she accepts a dare from a girlfriend to go up to Mick on the bandstand and ask him to kiss her; in another, the place is so packed that she can reach him only by crawling across the decorative fishing nets above the dance floor, helped along by people below in an early instance of crowd surfing.
Chrissie herself is unsure now whether the two of them first seriously locked eyes at the Ricky-Tick, at a nearby pub where the Stones sometimes played upstairs on Sunday afternoons, or at a place called the International Club, frequented by foreign au pair girls in nearby Maidenhead. ‘I was attracted to Mick originally because he looked like an actor named Doug Gibbons,’ she remembers. ‘At least, Doug was a prettier version of Mick. And I remember that when we first spoke his Cockney accent was so thick I could hardly understand him.’
After serenading her with Bo Diddley’s ‘Pretty Thing’ a few times, he asked her for a date, naming an afternoon the following week and suggesting Windsor, with its castle and fluttering Royal Standard, as their most convenient common ground. ‘It was the day of my grandmother’s silver wedding party, and I explained I’d have to go to that first. I remember meeting Mick on the street in Windsor because that was when I first saw him in daylight and realised one of his eyes was two colours – the left one was brown and green.’
For their next date, he took her down to Dartford by train, as she thought, to meet his family. After her father’s substantial Buckinghamshire farm, the Jagger family home struck her as ‘very ordinary’. Neither Mick’s parents nor his brother turned out to be there, and Chrissie realised he was hoping – or, rather, expecting – to have sex with her. But the seeming wild child was not the pushover he expected. ‘I was very worried about it and I wouldn’t stay,’ she recalls. ‘So I had to come back again on the train on my own.’
Mick forgave the rebuff, however, and a week or so later, after an early-ending gig, Chrissie took him home to Burnham by train to meet her parents, Ted and Peggy, also inviting Charlie Watts and her friend Liz Gribben, to whom Charlie had taken a shine. ‘My parents were slightly appalled by the way Mick looked, but they were impressed by the fact that he went to LSE, and my dad liked him because he was so bright and into money. I don’t think my mother ever really liked him – even before everything that happened – but Dad could always see how sharp he was and what a success he was going to be, whatever he ended up doing.’
Mick became a regular overnight visitor at the Shrimptons’, always occupying a separate room from Chrissie’s, as any well-brought-up young man in that era would be expected to do. After breakfast he would catch the same 8:42 commuter train from Burnham that Chrissie took to her secretarial school. ‘My sister Jean by that time was going around with a lot of debby Vogue types who’d sometimes be on the same train,’ she remembers. ‘I used to hear them whispering “Poor Chrissie . . . her boyfriend’s so ugly.”’
Chrissie, by contrast, spent little time in the bosom of the Jagger family, though that was a consequence of Mick’s desire to get away from home more than any mutual antipathy. She remembers her surprise on discovering that, unlike their elder son, neither Joe nor Eva had any trace of a Cockney accent and that both were ‘quite intellectual people, which my parents weren’t, though we had more money. Mick’s mother was quite simply a domestic slave, devoted to looking after the males of the household. She was one of those garrulous women, and Mick was often very irritated by her and very dismissive of her. And his father was very formal and – to me – charmless and rather alarming. But I did get on very well with his brother, Chris, who at that time was mostly away at school. We were the two Chrisses, the younger siblings of the more successful older ones.’
Very soon after that initial refusal, Chrissie began sleeping with Mick – something that for a genteelly raised, convent-educated seventeen-year-old in 1963 was still far from routine. The first time was at the Shrimpton family home while her parents were away, since she couldn’t bring herself to enter his bed at the squalid flat he shared with Keith, Brian and the ‘gobbing’ printer Phelge at 102 Edith Grove. ‘I hated it . . . it was so dirty,’ she recalls. ‘The spitting and the Nankering . . . and they’d got notes that girls had sent them pinned up all over the wall. It was an all-blokes place, where I was always made to feel like an intruder.’
Keith she remembers as ‘just a weedy little boy, who was very sweet and shy and upset about his parents having recently got divorced . . . Brian was very bright, and it was obvious that he and Mick didn’t get on at all. He tried to pull me a couple of times, but only to spite Mick. When it happened I can remember thinking “This is ridiculous because you’re half my size.”’
Mick had been seeing Chrissie only about two weeks when – out of nowhere – the Stones’ fortunes suddenly began to improve. A whole-page feature article on the Crawdaddy Club in the local Richmond and Twickenham Times gave them a laudatory plug. Then Giorgio