Melanie Hamrick and Mick Jagger at a state banquet at the Palace of Versailles in 2023. Photo /Ludovic Marin, AFP
The former dancer, 37, has written her second ballet-based romance novel — and her Rolling Stone boyfriend, 81, has been reading. ‘Mick was like, you used “throbbing” a lot,’ she tells Laura Pullman.
Writing sex scenes well is notoriously hard, but they come naturally for Melanie Hamrick. “I find them the easiest,” says the ballerina turned novelist and long-term girlfriend of Mick Jagger. “It’s like choreographing a dance. It’s a movement and I’m writing movements down.” Whereas a setting where two people are having coffee at a café can stump her: “I’m, like, ‘I don’t know what to do with this.’ "
Published last year, her debut novel, First Position, was a ballet bonkbuster set in America, full of orgies and champagne, drugs and fiery dancers. Her second, The Unraveling, brings us to London and involves more of the same: affairs, lesbian flings and “psycho ballet bitches”.
She lists her go-to words for steamy scenes. " Thrusting, throbbing, pulsating. Just go to the thesaurus,” Hamrick says, sipping a double-shot latte. “That’s what Mick said — he’s, like, ‘Throbbing was used a lot in book two.’ "
It’s thanks to the 81-year-old Rolling Stone that the 37-year-old dancer from Virginia decided to become an author. Hamrick kept telling her rock-star boyfriend anecdotes about her 16-year career at the American Ballet Theatre in New York: “I was, like, ‘I want to write a book. I want to write a book.’ And then, finally, he said, ‘Oh my God, write the book!’ "
Hamrick retired from the dance company in 2019, almost three years after giving birth to her son with Jagger, Deveraux, who is now seven. “I’m really thankful I found writing,” she says. “I see some dancers holding on when they leave, and you just want them to find peace because some dancers should be ballet dancers and some should move on.” Having been overlooked for a prima role and with her focus on motherhood, she recognises that she fell into the latter camp.
In her new novel the American heroine, Jocelyn Banks, must find a wealthy patron to help her survive at an elite ballet company and pay the bills. Enter a tall, dark and handsome Mr Moneybags. The sex scenes between Banks and various paramours, both men and women, come thick and fast. A few sample lines: “The fact that he’s endowed like the hero of an old bodice-ripping paperback romance is just the icing on the cake”; “God, he looks so hot when he’s sex-drunk”; “Our tongues touch for the first time and hers tastes like vermouth. Hot and red, as juicy as a ripe peach.”
We meet in London at the Chiltern Firehouse, which is just the sort of high-thread-count hotel where Hamrick’s characters knock back Krug before leaping on each other. She is pretty and engaging. It’s clear why Jagger, who has eight children with five women, fell for her.
The pair first met in February 2014 in Tokyo at a Rolling Stones concert after American Ballet Theatre dancers, who were also performing in the city, were given tickets. It was the first gig Hamrick, then aged 26, had been to. Jagger greeted her backstage with a fist bump. “He’s about to go on stage, he’s in his moment,” she recalls. “Everyone has their different thing.”
The following month Jagger’s then long-term girlfriend, the fashion designer L’Wren Scott, took her own life. Jagger’s tour had moved on to Australia by then, and the day after her death he put out a statement saying he was “struggling to understand how my lover and best friend could end her life in this tragic way”.
By that summer Jagger and Hamrick were an item. She insists that she wasn’t starstruck by the Rolling Stone. “Ballet dancers meet some of the biggest stars and act, like, ‘Who are you?’ Because, to us, ballet dancers are the gods. That’s who you study and look up to. You’re so in your world,” she says, describing her twentysomething self as a “bunhead” — her hair was always tied in a tight, performance-ready bun. Early on in their relationship, however, while visiting Jagger in London, she really was starstruck when the playwright Tom Stoppard popped over for tea. A few years earlier she had written a paper about Stoppard as part of an evening university “critical perspectives” course. “I was, like, ‘Oh my God, can I tell you about my paper?’, and Mick said, ‘What are you doing?’, and I was, like, ‘I love you, Tom!’ " she says, full of girlish giggles.
I tentatively raise the 44-year age gap between her and Jagger. “I don’t think about it. Everyone’s going to have their opinion. If you think about others’ opinions, no matter where you are in life, you’re going to have a problem and you’re going to analyse it,” she says firmly. “I put the blinders on. Am I happy? Yes. Are the people in my life happy? Yes. Am I hurting anyone? No. OK, they can mind their own business.” Fair enough.
The couple bounce between homes and hotels around the world. When the Rolling Stones aren’t touring, time is largely split between a rented townhouse in Chelsea and a 16th-century château on the Loire River. Deveraux goes to school in France and has tutors while on the road. “Mick can’t stay put and I’m similar,” Hamrick says. “I’ll say, ‘I want to stay put.’ Then after two weeks, I’m, like, ‘Where are we going?’ "
Hamrick stepped out of her pointe shoes for good five years ago and while she doesn’t miss the dancing itself, she hankers after the camaraderie, the friends and the way her body felt after a long day. After reading about the gruelling rehearsals for the BBC’s Strictly Come Dancing, she wanted to join the show: “The feeling of being so tired and your body hurting so much you feel sick. In my weird, twisted mind as a ballet dancer, I’m, like, that’s when you know you’ve had a good rehearsal day.”
Writing is now the focus. Her books have been described as a mixture of Fifty Shades of Grey and Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky’s 2010 psychological horror film starring Natalie Portman and Mila Kunis. She loved those EL James bondage bestsellers (“so fresh”) and describes herself as “obsessed” with Black Swan. “A lot of ballet dancers were, like, it made us look crazy,” she says.”I was, like, ‘You guys are crazy. You spend hours a day in this dark theatre with no sunlight, like little vampires.’ "
She recalls auditioning for the film. “I’d just been hit by a delivery bike. I limped in and I was, like” — she puts on an agonised groan — " ‘I’m … going … to … make … it.’ " She got the gig but backed out after realising the long hours required. Her dancer friends in the film reported back that Portman and Kunis were always hungry on set.
“It’s not like [ballerinas] don’t eat,” she says. “It’s just years of toning and honing the body. It’s just the way, over time, muscles are built and you look a certain way, and they were trying to get that look in three months.” (Although I once interviewed Georgina Pazcoguin, a New York City Ballet star, who told me about her diet of 720 calories a day as a 19-year-old.)
Hamrick grew up in Williamsburg, Virginia, a well-heeled colonial town, with her parents, John and Anne, an engineering company director and a healthcare worker, and two siblings, Chris and Rachel. Aged 11 she followed her older sister to the Kirov Academy, a prestigious ballet boarding school in Washington, then moved to New York to turn professional in her late teens. She describes a world of demanding bosses, shattered dancers, cut-throat competition and bed-hopping. “These are your university ages, your party years, and you’re in the studio all day in a swimsuit [essentially]. You have hormones running around. You have good-looking people,” she says, explaining why there’s so much infidelity in her novels. “It’s just the set-up.”
Before Jagger entered stage left, Hamrick was engaged to José Manuel Carreño, a Cuban professional dancer 19 years her senior. Is dating someone outside of ballet easier? “Mick is the perfect balance,” she says. “He’s not a ballet dancer but he is a dancer and a performer, and we understand each other’s worlds, yet we’re not in each other’s worlds.” In the run-up to Jagger’s high-octane performances in front of tens of thousands of fans, for example, she appreciates that he might need space.
Coming from a close-knit family, she finds Jagger’s sprawling bunch of ex-wives and girlfriends, including Bianca Jagger and Jerry Hall, plus seven other children, five grandchildren and three great-grandchildren, no big deal. Deveraux’s oldest half-sister, Karis, daughter of the American actress Marsha Hunt, is 53.
Unsurprisingly, it sounds like a fun life. This summer she, Jagger and “Dev” went to the Paris Olympics — “the crowd was really vibey at the fencing” — and Hamrick lights up when she talks about attending a state banquet at the Palace of Versailles last September held in honour of King Charles III and Queen Camilla. “It was the highlight of my life,” she says giddily. “Mick’s, like, ‘How many times can you mention Versailles at a dinner, Melanie?’ "
At the banquet a Frenchman was sitting between her and Camilla but turned his whole upper body towards the royal, which blocked Hamrick out of any conversation. “He didn’t do the lean back [position],” she recalls, adding that Camilla clocked the situation. “She’s really sweet because she tried leaning forward a couple of times.”
There is a giant diamond “promise ring”, as she calls it, which Jagger gave her last year, glittering on her left hand and four sparkling gems stuck on her top teeth. Dev and Jagger have tooth gems too but only Jagger’s is a diamond. “It’s the same glue that they use for braces,” she says, grinning.
She concedes that it’s “really hard” to keep Dev’s feet on the ground as the son of a Stone. (His full name is Deveraux Octavian Basil Jagger — “Octavian” because Jagger’s eighth child was born on December 8 at 8.08am.) When she thinks he needs a reset, mother and son stay at her apartment on Manhattan’s Upper West Side, where she lived when she was a dancer. “It’s a very nice apartment, but it’s not a hotel. He helps me with the laundry, he helps me cook dinner. We take the subway.”
On one New York trip, they volunteered at an animal shelter and ended up distraught when they couldn’t rehome all the kittens. “Oh my God, that was a parenting fail. We were both on the street crying, and Mick’s [on the phone], like, ‘Just take the cats!’ " Alas, they didn’t have the paperwork to fly.
A dedicated lover of romance, she recommends The Ripped Bodice, a romance-only bookstore in New York and Los Angeles. I ask why there’s so much lesbian sex in The Unraveling. “I find it strange that it’s not more open in the ballet world,” she says. “You find a lot of male [gay] relationships but you don’t find [gay] women, which I’m always puzzled by because it is such a woman-dominant world. You spend so much time together.”
Ideas for novel three are already bubbling but she says she is torn about whether to move from romance into women’s fiction.
“With women’s fiction, I’ve got to really rely on my writing skills versus ‘Mmm, sex scene. Let’s go!’ "
Reluctant to describe herself as an author, it is clear that Hamrick is riddled with self-doubt, a hangover from her dancing days. “I’m my worst critic,” she says. “You’re not ever stopping in ballet. You might have had a good show, but there’s always room for improvement.” Though she notes a key difference between ballet shows and ballet books: “The performance doesn’t live on for ever on shelves!”
The Unraveling by Melanie Hamrick (HarperCollins) is published on sale now.
Written by: Laura Pullman
© The Times of London
"I do feel kind of stuck. And I feel like a lot of people feel that way."