New Mills & Boon book a glimpse into Mick Jagger’s sex life

Melanie Hamrick, the mother of Mick Jagger’s eighth child, shows her talent as a writer. But it’s not hard to see the protagonist’s love interest as the author’s real-life partner.

Mick Jagger and partner, former ballerina and author Melanie Hamrick. Picture: AFP

Initially, the marriage of former American ballerina Melanie Hamrick, 36, to Mills & Boon appears incongruous. The average Mills & Boon author is faceless, a species of literary graffiti artist responsible for books with titles such as Tangle of Torment. Yet, despite being appropriately wan, modest, and generally unprepossessing, Hamrick is no stranger to opulence or paparazzi. In addition to her dancing skills, she’s the mother of Mick Jagger’s eighth child (80 this year, Jagger has seven children to four other women).

The greatest surprise, however, is her talent as a writer.

First Position, Hamrick’s literary debut, doesn’t break with convention in terms of plot, which creaks as comfortingly as a suburban ballet teacher’s floorboards.

“Behind the curtain of the American Ballet Company,” the blurb promises, “in the dark world of ambition and revenge, Sylvie Carter has broken every rule on her way to the top. But the ballet world is as unforgiving as it is ruthless and when a devastating scandal erupts, Sylvie alone is blamed.”

The “shocks” promised by the HarperCollins marketing team amount to no more than a spruiker’s guff; the traditionally slight, romantic, and masturbatory narrative concerns the “awakening” of American ballerina Sylvie – “who will do whatever it takes to get to the top” – by soloist Alessandro.

Ballerina Sylvie – “will do whatever it takes to get to the top” in Melanie Hamrick’s book First Position.

“Awakenings” in such books are “shocking” only if executed by, say, a psoriasis-riddled janitor named Bob; characters named Alessandro, Étienne, or Sergei can have no other purpose (“Those thighs could crush you. Really pin you down. Totally control you”).

Hamrick’s voice, however, rapidly overwhelms even Alessandro’s rippling quads. Quiet and precise, it is at once eerily shallow and steered by violent urges for recognition. Through it, a very different story, one revealed in gripping increments, begins to surface. This story tells of a conventionally plain woman taught to value status above love, a woman who yearns for approval, and who uses prescription drugs as a shield against terror.

“I won’t remember a lot of tonight,” Hamrick writes. “ … I look at the bottle of anti-anxiety medication on my bathroom counter and want to throw them off the hotel balcony. I am better than this. Or at least I was.”

The protagonist’s life is contextualised by substances, both legal and illegal – in particular, tranquillisers. Returning to her room, Sylvie, who is “as loose as an untied satin ribbon” – not the only exquisite description – and “warm from my core to my skin”, takes “a little nibble of Xanax just so I can really feel calm”. Fearing the indifference of others, she wants to be “subtly stunning”; the effort takes her hours and “half a Xanax”. “Fragile”, she mixes alcohol with benzodiazepines; champagne, she knows, goes well with Xanax (“just a little”). Panic attacks are a problem, hence the “emergency Xanax”. Alessandro wonders if she has “daddy issues” or “a drug problem”, and another character describes her as having a “bit of a drug problem.”

“I use the shot to wash down a quarter of a pill I brought with me,” Hamrick writes. “Just a little molly … I just want to feel good.”

Sylvie’s lust for luxury is equally pronounced. She loves hotels, “the plush, ornate carpets and running my hands over the wallpaper. I even love the room service trays outside the rooms: they make me think about other people leading other lives.”

First Position by Melanie Hamrick

When Alessandro pulls back the heavy curtains on a set of French doors, a “gasp leaves” her body, as if she’d been “punched in the gut”. Before her, “a star-studded cloth of glimmering stars. Orange and white and gold and red. And standing amid them all is the shimmering Eiffel Tower.” At another juncture, she recognises that she is “completely in the right place. Like sliding a box into a square hole just its size. That’s where I am.” This is the “exact” moment she “stopped being the hood-rat in a tutu and became the New York ballerina drinking fine champagne on a rooftop in Manhattan.”

It’s the craving, Hamrick writes, “not just to be lauded but to be elevated above the others.”

To the same chilling effect, a sex club is described as a place in which “young girls find sugar daddies … types come in all business, let all the fat and wrinkles hang out and give absolutely no f--ks about any of the Caligulan goings‐on to their left or right.”

Despite his own wrinkles, it’s difficult not to see Jagger in the detached, dominant Alessandro, “a notorious bad boy” with a “million‐dollar grin”. On feeling his “dick”, Sylvie feels “flattered” that she’s “the one he wants that badly.” Entering his dressing room, she finds him “shirtless and sweaty, pacing back and forth in the tiny room like an angered lion in a cage”. He turns: “Get out of here.” Tellingly, she wants “to f--k him as badly as I want to be onstage with him. Maybe even more. I want him for myself. Briefly, I don’t even care about what everyone out there wants with him.”

Hamrick expressed a similar reluctance to address reality when asked how she felt about the fact that while she was pregnant with his son, Jagger was linked to Masha Rudenko, a model, and, later, to Noor Alfallah, then 22, who was photographed in the process of being crushed by him in an adoring embrace (Alfallah has since spoken openly of their relationship).

Of Alessandro, Hamrick writes, “How starved am I, if this feels like a meal?”

A jeté that ends ineptly, First Position is nonetheless peculiarly beguiling, and not simply on the basis of its author’s celebrity connections. Hamrick, with her highly strung romanticism, calculated discipline, and cold, cold core, has the potential to be a genuinely compelling writer, if one with “calloused, tough skin that looks as smooth yet still as hard as a porcelain doll.”

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First Position

By Melanie Hamrick
Mills & Boon, Fiction
320pp, $22.99