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.