Happy Birthday Bianca Jagger

Although it was her May 1971 marriage to rock god Mick Jagger that brought her into the Jet Set lifestyle of the Seventies, it was Bianca Jagger's work on behalf of civil rights that made her such a compelling figure at the time.

I always felt that of the whole Studio 54 set - a frisson of boldfaced names like Andy Warhol, Liza Minnelli, Halston, Truman Capote, and Calvin Klein - she was the only one who seemed to have anything to say, her husky contralto and earnest outlook being constantly drowned out by the high-pitched cacophony made by her glittery friends.

Early in 1979, while her friends stayed home and worked on their coke face, Jagger returned to her homeland of Nicaragua with the International Red Cross to observe conditions there under the Somoza Regime; upon her return to Manhattan her outspoken opposition to President Anastasio Somoza Debayle and his policies no doubt hastened his fall from power in July of that year - a figurative assassination by media that came just a year before his very literal assassination by bazooka in Asunción in September 1980.

The moral of the story is: don't fuck with Bianca Jagger.
*