Marsha Hunt: the muse of Mick Jagger and Marc Bolan
Although both Marc Bolan and Mick Jagger were philanderers in their own respect, there was one person, in particular, that seemed to captivate them: Marsha Hunt. Hunt is a 1960s icon, a model, singer, actress and novelist, and she had relationships with both the singers of the Rolling Stones and T-Rex.
Hunt had been born in Philadelphia and was raised by her mother, her aunt and her grandmother, who she described as “three strong but very different women”. Eventually, Hunt went to the University of California, Berkeley, where she came face to face with the growing counter-culture movement and joined Jerry Rubin in protests against the Vietnam War in 1964.
In 1966, Hunt moved to London and began a career in music, first as a backing singer in Alexis Korner’s trio. She also had a brief relationship with John Mayall and was, in fact, the inspiration for his songs Marsha’s Mood’ and ‘Brown Sugar’. Shortly after, Hunt married a member of the Canterbury Scene band Soft Machine by the name of Mike Ratledge. However, their relationship soon fell apart.
Throughout the next few years, Hunt defined herself as a London artist. Her old wish to return to the United States quickly diminished, and after briefly playing with Reg Dwight (later to be known as Elton John), she achieved notoriety by starring in the musical Hair as the character Dionne. While Hunt only actually had two lines in the show, her beauty captivated audiences, and she was featured on the poster for the London production and later the recorded LP. Hunt was also the first black model to appear on the front cover of Queen magazine, and a nude photograph of her was also used on the cover of British Vogue.
In 1969, Hunt met Marc Bolan during a T-Rex recording session. Tony Visconti noted that when the pair met: “You could see the shafts of light pouring out of their eyes into each other.” Detailing further, he added: “We finished the session unusually early, and Marc and Marsha walked out into the night hand in hand.” While Hunt claimed that her and Bolan’s relationship was based on more than just sexual attraction, her commercial success was at odds with Bolan’s ideals of art being tainted by commercial viability, and it did not last long.
In the same year, she met Mick Jagger when the Rolling Stones asked her to pose for a ‘Honky Tonk Woman’ advertisement. However, Hunt refused as she “didn’t want to look like [she’d] been had by all the Rolling Stones”. When Jagger called her later, the pair began a relationship that would last less than a year. Jagger had considered proposing, but their love was not quite strong enough for them to see it through. Hunt did become pregnant with Jagger’s child, although their relationship ended during Hunt’s pregnancy.
Karis Jagger was born in November 1970, and although the pair had planned to have Karis, they had agreed that Jagger would be an “absent father”. Jagger would eventually grow close to Karis and pay for her to attend a private school and Yale University. As for Hunt, she has since written a number of books, including a 1986 autobiography entitled Real Life: The Story of a Survivor, a 2005 memoir about her battle with breast cancer and a series of novels. She remains a true icon of days gone by.
