Marsha Hunt: Star of hippie counterculture musical Hair and muse of Mick Jagger

Opening amid 1967’s “Summer of Love”, as sexual freedom and psychedelic drugs encouraged millions to tune in, turn on and drop out, Hair became a cultural touchstone, a Broadway and West End hit.

Nothing embodied the spirit of Hair more than the giant coiffure of its poster girl and star of the West End production, Marsha Hunt, the actress with the spectacular Afro who went on to inspire the Rolling Stones to write Brown Sugar, which reached number two in the UK charts and the top spot in America.

With her black curls radiating out like a giant atom-bomb cloud, Hunt’s sensuous arms wrapped around her lithe legs, naked except for bracelets of tiny bells on her arm and ankle, her photo by Lord Patrick Lichfield became one of the iconic images of the 1960s.

Hunt came to symbolise a time when everything was far-out, cool and feelin’ groovy, while Hair introduced hit songs including Good Morning Starshine and Aquarius.

Half a century later, as a 50th anniversary production of Hair debuted in the West End this week, Hunt endures as the embodiment of that free-wheeling era and its ageing aftermath, from her affair with Marc Bolan to her bitter paternity suit with Mick Jagger, and her battle against cancer.

“You couldn’t be a woman in your twenties in London at that time and not be a part of the sexual revolution,” Hunt once said.

“It was all t*** and bum and that was an expression of liberation.”

Hunt saw herself as a fighter at the vanguard of a new world free of bourgeois inhibitions and social restrictions: “I thought it was my duty to take my clothes off to show that women no longer had to hide.”

Yet she insists that despite epitomising the drug-fuelled era of free love, she was not what James Brown would have called a Sex Machine.

“You say my name and they think hot pants, Sixties, Jagger, all that shit,” Hunt, now 71, told an interviewer in 2008.

“But the reality is I’ve probably had much less sex over my lifetime than most women my age.” She claims to have had stretches where she went without sex for 17 years, and following a relationship endured another nine years of self-enforced celibacy. Drugs? “Ha!” says the Americanborn beauty.

“The truth is, I didn’t take drugs after the age of 19. I came to London, and then I was too worried about being caught and deported.”

How did a symbol of sexual liberation come to this? Born and raised in Philadelphia, Hunt went to that hotbed of student Left-wing radicalism the University of Berkeley, near San Francisco, smoked pot, protested the Vietnam War and in 1966 moved to Swinging London in search of adventure.

With her visa due to run out she married Soft Machine rock star Mike Ratledge so that she could stay in the country, having found that Britain lacked the deeply ingrained racism she experienced in the US.

“American politics and its class system, better known as racism, had shaped and limited my life and future in ways that I couldn’t know or fully comprehend until I was outside it,’ she wrote in her 2005 biography, Undefeated.

“When I arrived in London… my nationality became my identity, and the ‘negro’ label took a back seat.”

She sang back-up vocals for blues great Alexis Korner and her voice, along with her gorgeous looks, won her the role of Dionne in the West End production of Hair.

It was a modest part, in which she sang a Supremes parody, White Boys, backed by two West Indian women but Hunt became the face – and body – of Hair, thanks to her classic Vogue photoshoot with Lord Lichfield.

“The pictures were supposed to be for the cover, which would have made me the first black woman on the front page of Vogue,” she says. “It didn’t happen, but there was a huge spread inside.

“The only reason I did so many promotional shots for Hair was that I was the only one who would get up early for them.”

As the poster girl for the “Black is Beautiful” movement, Hunt became a hot commodity.

Within six months she had signed her own record contract and had a “glorious” fling with Hair co-star Paul Nicholas. She was soon romancing T. Rex singer Marc Bolan, after meeting at a recording studio.

“You could see the shafts of light pouring out of their eyes into each other,” recalled record producer Tony Visconti.

The Rolling Stones asked her to appear wearing slutty clothes in a publicity photo for their song Honky Tonk Woman but she declined. “I didn’t want to look like I’d just been had by all the Rolling Stones,” she says.

Jagger, unaccustomed to being turned down by women, was intrigued. He pursued her, appearing outside her Bloomsbury flat at midnight wearing a dark coat and a grin.

“He drew one hand out of his pocket and pointed it at me like a pistol . . . Bang!” she says. They plunged into a passionate romance, and Jagger showered her with love letters.

“I feel with you something so unsung there is no need to sing it,” the British rock legend wrote in one billet doux in 1969. In another missive, he thanked Hunt for being “so nice to an evil old man like me”.

Jagger, then aged 25 and only two years older than Hunt, used her as his inspiration for one of the Rolling Stones’ greatest hits, Brown Sugar, she claims.

She also secured herself a footnote in rock ’n’ roll history, giving birth to the first of Jagger’s children – he now has eight by five different women – daughter Karis, born in November 1970.

The baby was Jagger’s idea, still saddened by a miscarriage suffered by his previous girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, says Hunt. Yet Hunt was never a Stones fan, and insists: “I never wanted to be known as Mick Jagger’s girlfriend.”

They planned to live apart, “the sophisticated embodiment of an alternative social ideal – parenthood shared between loving friends living separate lives”.

But Hunt’s pregnancy dampened Jagger’s ardour and by the time Karis was born he had already moved on to Nicaraguan beauty Bianca Pérez-Mora Macias, who would become his first wife.

Refus ing to acknowledge paternity, Jagger gave Hunt a meagre £200 and offered no other support for Karis. After two years of financial struggle, taking every singing, acting and modelling job she could grab, Hunt filed a paternity suit against Jagger, admitting: “I had to stop pretending he would assume his duty.” Hunt became a social pariah, going from “the girl from Hair” to “the girl who sued Mick Jagger,” she says.

A seven-year legal battle concluded when Jagger agreed to provide Karis with an annual payment and set up a trust fund for her future – but gave Hunt nothing. Her singing career in tatters, she turned to acting and writing, penning novels and three memoirs. But disappointments haunted her. Record contracts fell through, she blew a film audition for Sidney Poitier, and Richard Branson withdrew funding for a musical she wrote after a poor dress rehearsal.

In 2004 Hunt was diagnosed with breast cancer. She shaved off her magnificent hair before chemotherapy could destroy it, and with characteristic bravado drew a flower on her right breast as surgeons were poised to remove it.

A long-term cancer survivor, Hunt has kept her hair cropped close ever since, saying: “Short hair’s truly liberating.” Despite her troubles, Hunt believes she has had “a charmed life.”

She has lived in Ireland since 1995, and has a country home in France, using both as writing retreats. Jagger is now close to Karis, 46. When she wed in 1990, Jagger gave Karis away, and he posed smiling for photos with Hunt, their vitriolic lawsuit behind them. Quite how pally they are these days is less easy to gauge.

Jagger was said to be furious when in 2012 she sold 10 love letters he wrote to her at the height of their romance for £190,000. In one, he wrote: “If I sailed with you around the world, all my sails would be unfurled.” In an astonishing irony not lost on the woman who on stage in Hair symbolised sexual liberation, she and husband Ratledge never divorced and remained friends.

They celebrated their 50th wedding anniversary, apart, in April. The secret to a successful marriage is simple, says Hunt: “Separate immediately.” 

Hair The Musical is on at The Vaults Theatre in London. For details go to hair50.com