Wednesday, December 27, 2006

[mick jagger] driver tells all

If you scan the posts you’ll see that only rarely does this blog post the MSM’s article lock, stock and barrel and only when it’s a goody and would suffer by being abridged. Thus I post this piece by Helena de Bertodano:

Most taxi drivers have at least one story about having a celebrity in the back of their cab. Keith Badgery can trump them all. He had Mick Jagger in the back of his car for 14 years. And Michael Jackson for four-and-a-half months. Not to mention Madonna, Rod Stewart, Barbra Streisand, Naomi Campbell, Julia Roberts, Jack Lemmon, Celine Dion, Mariah Carey, Gloria Estefan and many, many more.

For years, people have told him, "You should write a book." Now he has. In Baby, You Can Drive My Car, he reveals the antics of his clients, in particular Mick Jagger, whose famous womanising Badgery often witnessed. In fact, the book opens with Badgery tactfully getting out of the car while Jagger says his farewells to Sophie Dahl. "This took some time. By the end of it, the car was actually rocking slightly," he writes.

I meet Badgery at his home in Carshalton, Surrey. His wife Jane, also a chauffeur, collects me from the station in the black Mercedes limousine Badgery used for ferrying around his clients. It is very comfortable, with a beige leather and suede interior and tinted windows. As we cruise along the streets of Carshalton, I almost convince myself that I am famous.

Badgery, 53, used to work for a company that supplied cars to celebrities and became so popular that they would vie for his services. For the past five years he has worked independently, and only stopped driving Jagger two months ago. Jagger used him so often that Badgery had to drop his other commitments. "I basically lost all my clients through Mick because he used me every day of the week," he says.

But Jagger has recently hired a new minder, who also acts as a driver, and Badgery had found himself increasingly sidelined.

Therein lies the juiciness of this article, continued here …

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