She still uses ex-husband Mick's name, but Bianca Jagger is back in Nicaragua trying to be her own woman

By John Moody/Managua

Her life was a picture-perfect photo op, sublime as fantasy, and just as fleeting. Married to the monarch of rock, a champagne-sipping intimate of the rich, the recognizable and the royal, her fashions and friendships were grist for the gossip pages. Today she professes no sorrow that the spotlight rarely focuses on her; she is relieved, she says, that she survived its glare. So smirk not, while considering that Bianca Jagger--yes, Mick's ex, Mrs. Rolling Stone--claims she never really enjoyed the trendy, fast-track life-style that she epitomized for more than a decade. Now in her 40s, single, vegetarian, and soon to be a grandmother, Jagger wants to be accepted for herself. And, incidentally, to be President of Nicaragua.

Her aspiration--unlikely as it may seem on first glance--is understandable. The job she covets, however, is about as appealing as milking cobras in a closet. Nicaragua, to put it nicely, is not among the world's trendier stop-offs, no place for a lifetime Best Dressed Hall of Famer to sully her Calvin Kleins. Listening to this and other gibes about not always getting what you want, Jagger smiles politely. Then, in a voice fashioned near the earth's molten core, she imparts a nugget of hard-earned wisdom mined from her improbable life: "How much longer do I have to apologize for going to Studio 54? If during my years of marriage, I was insouciant and led a life of ease and was followed by the media, that does not mean I am not a person of substance who is concerned with serious and deeply felt ideas."

Yesteryear's jet-setter today wants to be seen as a cerebral political and environmental activist. Although like a backsliding glitz addict she sometimes lapses back into the Manhattan social whirl, Jagger spends most of her schizoid existence in her native Nicaragua. (The word bicoastal takes on new meaning when one of the shores fringes the Gulf of Fonseca.) In the early morning she can frequently be seen galloping through the hills outside Managua on her Arabian horse, El Moro. When she sees glitterati friends now, she often tries to wring donations for the documentary film she is making on Nicaragua.

The two-hour production, directed and narrated by Jagger, will be released next year. She hopes it will give her a new kind of celebrity, the sort reserved for intellectual and artistic achievement. The untitled film inspects the differences in Nicaragua since the pro-Soviet Sandinista regime was dethroned in 1990 by a charismatic political neophyte, Violeta Barrios de Chamorro.

Jagger is no armchair filmmaker. She and a small production crew have spent hours covering soporific press conferences, violent strikes, and armed showdowns over property disputes. Nor has she closeted herself in the capital, Managua. The Jagger team tramped through Nicaragua's untamed mountain paths and the malarial North Atlantic coastal regions populated by the Miskito and Sumo indigenous communities. She has talked more to peasants than to Presidents. And after two years of filming, Jagger has concluded that Chamorro's government, like those of the Sandinistas and the earlier dictatorship of Anastasio Somoza Debayle, has betrayed the people it claims to serve.

That makes Jagger persona non grata to Chamorro and her son-in-law Antonio Lacayo, the country's de facto leader. Compounding her sin, Jagger is lending her fame and personal credibility to Nicaragua's burgeoning ecological-awareness movement. When the government tried last year to grant a Taiwanese company logging rights in Nicaragua's endangered rain forest, Jagger blew the whistle by writing an incisive op-ed piece in the New York Times. Stung by public outcry, the Managua government put the logging contract on hold and underlined Jagger's name on its enemies list.

When Blanca Perez Mora Macias was born in 1945, the country was a bastion of machismo and women were little more than chattel. Her father divorced his wife and left her to care for their two children. Blanca's mother, who had never before held a job, opened a roadhouse canteen to survive. As a divorce, even a reluctant one, she was stigmatized. The injustice shaped Jagger's view of life. Says she: "I did not have a happy childhood. I was very affected by the divorce of my parents. At first I felt let down by my father. Later I realized that I should not judge him. I felt the pressure it put on my mother, and that also put pressure on me. My mother was turned into something less than a person by that very repressive, Catholic society. I decided that under no circumstances was I going to be a second-class citizen because I was a woman."

Blanca's scorching eyes, delicate bones and sensuous voice ensured that she would attract notice. But the young woman chose another path, winning a scholarship to the Paris Institute of Political Studies. "I loved Paris, but I was also full of fear. I had never gone out on my own in Nicaragua. I was naive, but even then I knew I didn't want to live in Nicaragua as it was in those days. I saw my struggle as a woman as political, and I wanted to be able to fight in the political arena." She perfected her French to the point where she forgot Spanish. She dressed in men's clothing, "perhaps in order to capture some of the power they possessed."

She also changed her name: Blanca became Bianca, the name with which she introduced herself in 1970 to a bow-lipped British rocker named Mick, of whom she knew very little. "It was a coup de foudre--how do you say in English?--love at first sight," she recalls. "Mick spoke French very well for an Englishman, and at the time I spoke very little English. He was unpretentious, charming and had a great sense of humor." They married the next year, with Bianca three months pregnant.

Some brides cling to memories of their wedding day. Jagger has spent years trying to forget hers. The spring ceremony at St. Tropez became a frenzied media circus. "We just wanted to be alone," she sighs. "I suppose I didn't understand what Mick was until then. He brought out an unhealthy curiosity among people. It was a bad way to start a marriage."

Being noticed only because she was Mrs. Mick Jagger was painful. The birth of daughter Jade in 1971 added the responsibilities of motherhood. Their life was an unending concert and party circuit, a life-style she seemed to relish but now scorns: "We became a kind of F. Scott Fitzgerald couple of the '70s, a symbol of the times. I don't want to make it sound like he forced me to do things I didn't want to do. I came from a broken home; I was longing for stability. But when a woman marries a famous man, she takes on his reputation. It wasn't me who wanted to hobnob with royalty."

The marriage ended in 1979. The girl whose most piercing memory was her parents' separation found herself a divorced woman with a daughter of her own. She kept the name Jagger, not, she insists, because of its cachet but rather out of respect for the institution of marriage.

Her attention soon turned to her homeland. In July 1979 the Sandinistas ousted Somoza and installed a leftist government. Like millions of others, Jagger was captivated by the rugged rebels and believed their promises of justice for the poor and equality for women. "I took my daughter to rallies to try to make her understand what was going on. What I encountered, though, was less than an open-armed welcome. One of the things about the Sandinistas from the beginning was their egoism. They felt it was a privilege to let you come close to them."

Though she never joined the Sandinista party, she became friendly with its leaders. At their behest, she lobbied against U.S. aid to the anti-Sandinista contra army. But as the Sandinistas grew more repressive, Jagger shrank from their embrace. "I feel they betrayed their own ideals. Their revolution changed things that would never have changed in this country if it hadn't taken place. I will always oppose the contras, but now I can see them from a different perspective. How can I say those men who joined the counterrevolution were wrong if they felt their rights were being violated? And then you begin questioning everything."

Jagger made a string of B movies and television appearances until, in 1985, she was struck by a car on Long Island, N.Y., and left unable to walk for a year. It was during her convalescence that she decided to become a filmmaker. She studied drama at New York University, then began knocking on the doors of foundations and friends to raise the $790,000 she needed for the documentary on her homeland. "Most of them politely said no," she reflects. "Some came right out and said, `Who gives a damn about Nicaragua?' They forgot who I am and where I come from. They just remembered Bianca Jagger, the party bird."

Chamorro's upset win over the Sandinistas gave Jagger an opportunity to document an unfolding chapter in her country's history. She was soon disenchanted with the ruling clan's authoritarian manner and nepotism. "Dona Violeta was the promise of all good things," Jagger says. "Nicaraguans felt as if the Virgin Mary had descended and would bring peace and prosperity. Now we see that it is all a mockery." The feminist in Jagger is especially distressed by Chamorro's ceding of authority to Lacayo. "I wanted Mrs. Chamorro to be a real President, using the power that Nicaraguans have bestowed upon her. But she has let this man take it away."

Jagger learned about the plans to log the rain forest while researching her film, and found herself at a moral crossroads: Should she simply record the destruction of the environment or publicize the danger in order to stop it? "I wrote the New York Times article because I knew if I held off until the film was done, the rain forest would be gone. It was a choice between being a filmmaker and being a participant in the life of my country. I decided to be an activist."

The op-ed piece was devastating in its simple presentation of facts and statistics, and it made Jagger an instant hero among environmental activists. Says Mark Plotkin, vice president for plant conservation of Washington-based Conservation International: "Bianca is the one person who brought this to worldwide attention in a way no one else could. Without her, it would have slipped right through."

She has interviewed former President Daniel Ortega Saavedra repeatedly, and believes he has not yet accepted the fact that he and his party were turned out of power in a legitimate election. Chamorro and Lacayo have refused to see her. They know the film's story line is already etched in celluloid: Nicaragua has been betrayed once again. "Power really does corrupt," says Jagger. "Whether it's the Sandinistas impersonating revolutionaries, or other people [read: Chamorro and Lacayo] impersonating democrats, those in power forget the reasons for which they struggled."

Jagger is counting on the publicity generated by her film to underwrite her next struggle: a run for the presidency in 1996. "I believe in rights, and I believe in duty," she says. "If I didn't, I'd stay in New York and be totally removed from anything to do with Nicaragua." Her famous last name is one asset. So too, she believes, is her commitment to progressive government. "The collapse of the left worldwide has created a vacuum in politics. There's a total disenchantment now, not just with government but with power. There's room for a new political philosophy that will respond to contemporary concerns. I would like to create a party that doesn't just mouth words but really cares about the poor, about women, about children."

That last concern is much on her mind. Jade, now 20 and single, is expecting a baby, and Jagger has a typical reaction to the notion of impending grandmotherhood. She grimaces, buries her face in her hands, then laughs richly. "It sounds terrible, but I'll survive. I was the Nicaraguan girl who married a rock star. Now I'm someone else. My philosophy is that with perseverance and patience, people will realize who I really am." It is a declaration that she can finally make, and believe, as a woman on her own. She has even started wearing dresses again.