Mick’s ‘Brown Sugar’ auctioning love letters
Handwritten letters from Rolling Stones frontman Mick Jagger to his former lover Marsha Hunt will be auctioned in London next month.
Hunt is an American-born singer who was the inspiration for the Stones’ 1971 hit “Brown Sugar” and bore Jagger’s first child.
Sotheby’s said Saturday that Hunt has tasked the auction house with selling 10 letters written from the set of Jagger’s film “Ned Kelly,” which was shooting in Australia.
Hunt said the letters chronicling their “delicate love affair” and secret history touch on subjects such as the first moon landing and John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
Sotheby’s books specialist Gabriel Heaton said the letters sent in the summer of 1969 show a “poetic and self-aware” 25-year-old Jagger.
“They provide a rare glimpse of Jagger that is very different from his public persona: passionate but self-contained, lyrical but with a strong sense of irony,” Heaton said.
Sotheby’s said the collection, which includes song lyrics and a Rolling Stones playlist, is expected to fetch between $111,300 and $159,000 and will go under the hammer on December 12.
Roth says he’s written his last novel
Exit, Philip Roth? Having conceived everything from turning into a breast to a polio epidemic in his native New Jersey, Roth has apparently given his imagination a rest.
The 79-year-old novelist recently told a French publication, Les inRocks, that his 2010 release “Nemesis” would be his last. Spokeswoman Lori Glazer of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt said Friday that she had spoken with Roth and that he confirmed his remarks. Roth’s literary agent, Andrew Wylie, declined comment.
Roth has certainly produced, completing more than 20 novels over half a century and often turning out one a year. He has won virtually every prize short of the Nobel and wrote such classics as “American Pastoral” and “Portnoy’s Complaint.”
Explaining why he stopped, Roth said that at age 74 he became aware his time was limited and that he started re-reading his books of the past 20 to 30 years, in reverse order. He decided that he agreed with what the boxer Joe Louis had said late in life, that he had done the best he could with what he had.
The birthday bunch
Comedian Jonathan Winters is 87. Guitarist Vince Martell (Vanilla Fudge) is 67. Singer-keyboardist Paul Cowsill (The Cowsills) is 61. Singer Marshall Crenshaw is 59. Singer-guitarist Andy Partridge (XTC) is 59. Singer Dave Alvin is 57. Actor Stanley Tucci is 52. Actress Demi Moore is 50. Actress Calista Flockhart is 48. Actor David DeLuise (“Wizards of Waverly Place”) is 41. Actor Leonardo DiCaprio is 38.