S*x, Wyman and Media Evil – How Mandy Smith Was Torn Apart

S*x, Wyman and Media Evil – How Mandy Smith Was Torn Apart

The first night she ever spent at his country house in Suffolk, he sat her down and told her the story of the ghost. A young girl had once married the much older Lord of the manor. The lord had destroyed her body and soul. She had starved herself to death there in those very rooms, and her presence remained in the corridors and the dark beams.

Amanda Louise Smith was thirteen years old, away from her mother’s council flat in Tottenham for the first time, listening to a man more than three times her age narrate a parable he seemed not to recognize as his own. Years later, when she weighed five and a half stone and could not climb out of bed, the story would come back to her like a prophecy that had been waiting all along. And yet the true darkness was nothing to do with the supernatural; it was very, very real. Welcome to Society Mysteries.

Mandy was born on the seventeenth of July 1970 in a Tottenham Council home, the younger daughter of Paty Smith, an Irish Catholic woman raising two girls alone. Her father John walked out when Mandy was three and was never discussed again. Her older sister Nicola was the closest thing she had to a guide, two years ahead, sharper, braver, prepared to lie her way past any bouncer in North London. The two of them dressed up in their mother’s clothes and made themselves look older.

By twelve, Mandy was a fixture at clubs where the door staff knew them, kept their secret, and sometimes slipped them past the velvet rope. She was without doubt a striking child with the bone structure of an older woman, very pale, very thin, hair like corn silk, eyes that took in everything and gave away nothing. Paty was often ill; supervision was a concept that belonged to other families. The day that would set her life moving on its own wild track was in October 1984.

The BPI awards were being handed out in London, and a bouncer the sisters knew had slipped them VIP passes. Mandy was thirteen and dressed like a woman of twenty-five. Bill Wyman, the Rolling Stones bassist, was forty-seven and dared to accept an award on someone else’s behalf. He saw her dancing to the warm-up act before the ceremony began, and he sent for her in the way he had been doing for twenty years.

She was brought to his table like a parcel from a department store. He asked her age, and she told him the truth. By the next afternoon, he had taken both sisters to lunch, leaned across to Nicola, and confessed that he was, in his words, totally in love with her little sister. To his bandmates and friends, he asked Mandy to claim she was seventeen, both for the appearance of legality and to protect his standing as a man who reportedly preferred girls just past the age of consent rather than way under it.

The lie was the first thing he taught her. In his autobiography Stone Alone, published in 1990 when she was twenty, Wyman wrote the sentence that would follow him for the rest of his life: she took my breath away, she was a woman at thirteen. It is a startling line, less for what it admits than for the calm with which it admits it. She was not a woman; she was a child being instructed how to perform womanhood for a married rock star who knew exactly what the law said about him.

By the time she was fourteen, the relationship was sexual. Paty knew and did not stop it; in fact, she encouraged it. Mandy later said her mother was really ill at the time and that Wyman, in some twisted reading of the situation, looked after me. Outside observers were less generous about Paty, but Mandy defended her because there was nobody else to defend. For two and a half years, the affair stayed underground.

Mandy lived a double life that would have flattened most adults. She was a schoolgirl who traveled to a country estate at weekends and a country house consort who traveled back to North London on Sunday nights. She was photographed at premieres; she learned to drink to manage rooms full of men who had been famous before she was born. Her schoolwork went the way of most schoolwork in that situation. She was being trained, without anyone calling it training, for a life as a celebrity wife.

When she turned sixteen in July 1986, the legal age of consent arrived like a starting pistol. The relationship became officially public almost immediately, and the British tabloids went off like ordnance. Prosecutors briefly considered charges, then dropped them. Wyman years later in 2013 would volunteer himself to the police, ask if they wanted to interview him, and receive a polite no. In 1986 though, the noise was deafening.

The papers cast Mandy as a wild child, a Lolita, a corrupting influence on the nation’s daughters. Wyman was largely treated as a man having a colorful midlife; he even called it that himself. In October that year, RTE in Dublin canceled her scheduled appearance on Saturday Live, demoting her to the audience because the broadcaster said she was not important enough and might give a bad example to young teenage girls. She was sixteen, sitting in a television studio in Dublin, being publicly informed that her existence was contagion.

The music industry, sensing opportunity, moved in. In September 1986, she became the first artist signed to Pete Waterman’s new PWL label on the recommendation, the story goes, of Pete Burns from Dead or Alive. Stock, Aitken and Waterman were then the most efficient hit factory in Europe, and they began building a pop career around Mandy. Her debut single, a high-energy cover of I Just Can’t Wait, came out in January 1987. It did nothing in the UK charts, partly because radio programmers had no appetite for the press storm she carried with her.

In Europe, where such relationships really had to work to raise a scandal, it did better. Her 1988 album Mandy produced minor dance hits like Positive Reaction and Boys and Girls. She never cracked the UK top forty. A PWL sessions singer named Suzanne Ratigan reportedly recorded much of the lead vocal on the album. The engineer Karen Hewitt later said Mandy got really sick and couldn’t continue. The teen idol they had manufactured was not able to sing the records being put out under her name.

As a model, she worked with Katharine Hamnett and walked print and runway shows. The fashion world, like the music industry, found her useful before it found her real. On the second of June 1989, in a fifteen-minute civil ceremony at his Suffolk estate, Mandy Smith became Mandy Wyman. She was eighteen; he was fifty-two. Three days later, a larger blessing and reception was held in London, photographed by Terry O’Neill and splashed across fourteen pages of Hello Magazine.

She wore something very pale, very thin; he wore the smile of a man who had finally been allowed to make official what he had been doing for five years. The pictures conveyed a fairy tale. The unofficial reality was a malnourished young woman who weighed roughly five and a half stone, or eighty pounds, the wasted body of someone running on adrenaline and willpower and not much else. She would later attribute the illness to a cocktail of stress, contraceptive pills she had been on since she was fourteen, and the corrosive years of secrecy.

Doctors never produced a fully clarifying diagnosis. The wedding photographs are difficult to look at once you know what they are really showing. The marriage collapsed almost on contact. Within weeks of the summary ceremony, Wyman admitted to at least one affair, and Mandy walked out of the country house where she had once been told the story of the starved girl. The man who had pursued her since she was thirteen could not, it transpired, stand to be married to her for an entire summer.

She moved out, and the lawyers moved in. The divorce was finalized twenty-three months later in 1991 with a reported settlement of around eighty-eight thousand dollars. By then she had become, in tabloid shorthand, the girl who married a rolling stone, which was also the only frame in which most people would ever see her. What she said about her body in those years is among the most piercing material in the entire story.

In a 1994 interview with Susan DeMouth for the Independent, conducted from the bed she now shared with her second husband, she described the texture of her recovery. She was about ninety percent recovered from the allergies and depression that sent her weight plummeting to five and a half stone at the end of her marriage to Bill. She still dreamed about him, she said. She sometimes dreamed about Bill that they were together or at a party with Mick Jagger and Ronnie Wood, and she was back in that time.

She woke up with a rush of panic and nausea before she realized, praise the Lord, that she was out of it. Then she started to feel angry because of him; he was forty-seven when they met, surely old enough to know right from wrong and not to take advantage of a teenager’s naive love. She described wearing a bra and knickers to bed as a kind of security thing. She described being too thin and too sick to want anyone to touch her.

She described going so deep into illness in the months she could not get out of bed that she felt she might die down there. She prayed for the answers about which foods would not make her allergic, and they came to her in dreams. The early nineteen-nineties were, even by the standards of her life, very surreal. Arranged in 1993, Bill Wyman’s son Steven, then thirty, married Mandy’s mother Paty, then forty-six. UPI called it probably the most bizarre family tree.

So Mandy was now her ex-husband’s former daughter-in-law’s daughter by way of her own mother. A simpler way to phrase it: her former stepson, several years older than her, was now her stepfather. That marriage too lasted two years. The same year, on the nineteenth of June 1993, Mandy married the Belgian-born footballer Pat Van Den Hauwe, then with Tottenham Hotspur, a hard man on the pitch and reportedly harder off it.

In 1993 at twenty-three, she also published her memoir, It’s All Over Now: My Life with Bill Wyman. The book was a bestseller. It laid out in unsparing detail what she had told no one for a decade. The title was lifted from a Rolling Stones cover of a Bobby Womack song, a small private joke that was also a public verdict. She named the rooms, the timings, the way the lie had been organized. She revised the figure of when sex began, having said thirteen in some early tellings and then fourteen in others, with the exact year mattering more to the law than to the girl who had lived it.

The book is unusual in the genre because it does not aestheticize its own scandal. The voice on the page is younger than its author, full of small precise details, the kind of details you remember when there were too few witnesses to corroborate them. It sold, and then it sold another run. It also fixed her in the public imagination as the girl who had told, which is sometimes the only role a survivor is given after the role she did not choose.

The Pat Van Den Hauwe marriage, the second one, was the period everyone remembered her writing the book through. He was rough, drank heavily, and the relationship was the kind that puts furniture through walls. If Wyman was creepily predatory and yet uninterested, Van Den Hauwe was scary. She kept Yorkshire terriers and fluffy toys and curtains thin enough to let the streetlight through, and she made a small private rite of going to bed in the afternoon, which she described as a luxury earned.

She was twenty-five when it ended and twice divorced, which is the kind of statistic that only sounds glib until you put it next to her age the first time she met Bill Wyman. In the late nineteen-nineties, she dropped out of show business almost entirely. The pop career had never recovered, and she had stopped trying to revive it. She moved to Manchester in 2001, she became briefly engaged to the model Ian Mosby, and in 2002 they had a son, Max Harrison Mosby, who would be her only child.

The engagement ended not long after his birth. By then she had returned, with the gravity of a long-deferred current, to the Catholicism of her childhood. A nun had reminded her, she told the Irish Times in 2011, that Jesus does not look at the mistakes I have made. She started counseling at-risk teenagers. She and Nicola set up a small public relations firm called Kiss PR, working out of Manchester. She raised her son.

The wild child of the British tabloids had become, by a route nobody could have plotted, a single mother in the north of England who got the boy to school and prayed. In April 2010, at forty, she did something nobody quite expected. She called for the United Kingdom’s age of consent to be raised from sixteen to eighteen. She gave the interview to the Scotsman, and the quotes ran everywhere. It is not about being physically mature; it is emotional maturity that matters.

I don’t think most sixteen-year-olds are ready, she said. The law should rise to eighteen at a minimum, and some girls were not even ready then. People will find that odd coming from me, but I think I do know what I am talking about here. You are still a child even at sixteen; you can never get that part of your life, your childhood, back. I never could. About the man she had once married, she was now unmistakable.

If it happened today, he would be absolutely vilified by the press, he’d be in jail for a long time. It was a gray area, I was underage, but I was complicit. Now I see it in black and white. I work with teenagers, I see how vulnerable they are under all that bravado. It was a rereading of her own life in real time, performed in public. She also said in the same period that she was celibate, that she had been for some time, and that she intended to remain so.

To the Irish Times, she said she was trying to be a role model for young girls, which might seem strange, but she knew the temptations and pressures they were under. She was dating Bill when she should have been being confirmed. It is a line that does what the best lines in confession do; it pulls a sacrament across the page like a held breath. Wyman for his part shifted his own framing over the decades, never entirely settling.

In 2006, asked by Simon Hattenstone in the Guardian about the marriage, he said it was 1984 when he met her, they got married in 1989, and that was a disaster. Pressed on whether he regretted the marriage, he said nope, never, it was an error he made, it was a mistake, I think everybody makes a mistake. The word kept arriving at the door of the matter and refusing to step inside. In The Quiet One, the 2019 documentary about him, he went further than he ever had before.

He was really stupid to ever think it could possibly work, she was too young. That same year, the Sheffield Doc/Fest pulled a planned screening of the film and a Q&A with Wyman after public protest, briefly reopening the whole case in the national conversation. Mandy did not appear; she did not need to. The campaign was being conducted in her absence by the words she had said nine years earlier in a Scottish newspaper.

In recent years she has remained, by deliberate choice, mostly invisible. She gives a then-and-now piece occasionally to a sympathetic outlet. She raised money for a children’s hospital MRI scanner. The Kiss PR firm rolls on. She is fifty-five years old, living in Manchester. She has outlived the gossip pages that built her, the producers who manufactured her, and the era that mistook her for an emblem of its own disorder.

Paty is older and quieter, Nicola is still her closest collaborator, Max is a young adult. Some women carried a place, their life was performed inside themselves like a wound that does not heal so much as relocate. Mandy Smith’s wound relocated. It went from the Suffolk country house to the Hello Magazine pages to the kitchen counters of every British home in 1986, and then slowly it became a private thing again, something she could choose to take out and look at when a teenage girl across a table needed to hear what could happen.

Her cultural afterlife is contested in the way most metoo-era reconsiderations are. She is invoked in arguments about consent, about media exploitation, about the rock and roll exemption that protected men of a certain age and a certain status for a certain length of British history. Remarkably few rock stars have been singled out in the way other famous men in other domains often rightly have for their predatory behavior. Some have suggested rather darkly that if you are attractive and predatory rather than just merely predatory, then a different set of rules applies, a far more lenient set it seems.

Mandy is remembered in pieces about the Rolling Stones, where she usually appears in the small print after Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull, a footnote that is also a question. Her 1993 memoir is one of the rare first-person documents of an era’s appetites written from inside the appetite. Her 2010 intervention rewrote her own legend by the simple expedient of saying out loud what had always been true. The Lord of the Manor told her a ghost story when she was thirteen; decades later, she became the one telling it.