Bill Wyman: It wasn’t lust with Mandy – it was love
He still defends marriage to teenager in new film
BILL Wyman has defended his controversial relationship with Mandy Smith, claiming it came ‘from the heart’ and was not founded on ‘lust’.
The former Rolling Stones guitarist met his second wife when she was 13 and he was 47.
They married five years later in 1989, when she was 18, but she later alleged that they had sex when she was 14.
A 90-minute film about Wyman’s life, The Quiet One, was withdrawn from a British documentary festival following complaints it provided a platform to a man accused of grooming a minor.
The film was shown at the Tribeca film festival in New York on Thursday night and included an interview with Wyman about his young ex-wife.
Wyman described Miss Smith as a ‘beautiful girl’, recalling the moment when they met.
‘I got this invite to go to an event and there were all these people dancing’, he said. ‘I saw this beautiful girl with her hair up, spoke to her and found her name was Mandy Smith.
‘It was from the heart. It wasn’t from lust or anything like that, which people were seeing it as.’
The film, by documentary maker Oliver Murray – which had been due to have its European premiere at Sheffield Doc/Fest in June – does not address Miss Smith’s age or the controversy surrounding the marriage, which ended after two years.
A clip from an interview with Wyman and Miss Smith following their wedding is also used in the documentary, during which he describes her as ‘the right girl from the moment I met her’.
He said: ‘She was too young. I thought she had to go out and see life for a bit’.
Reflecting on the relationship Wyman, now 82, said he was ‘really stupid to ever think it could possibly work’.
Wyman – who claims to have slept with 1,000 women – also said he was ‘addicted to sex’ and would ‘pick up’ girls who camped outside his hotel when he was married to his first wife.
‘Me and Brian [Jones] used to go out to the clubs and pick up girls,’ he said.
‘They used to camp outside the hotel, on the grass. Of course, I jumped at it. It just became part of my life after that. It became a habit, just through loneliness and just wanting affection.’
He added: ‘These girls were affectionate. There was probably an addiction to sex – because I wasn’t addicted to drugs and I wasn’t addicted to wine.’ Wyman, who did not attend the premiere, also claimed his first marriage to wife Diane Cory in 1959 ‘never worked’ because he married her for the wrong reasons.
‘It was down to the same old thing of marrying the girl next door – that was the phrase’, he said. ‘Getting married, it got me out of the family. Out of the home. It was hard coming home to my wife, who obviously knew what was going on. But then I found out one time, she had a relationship going – I mean, obviously I don’t blame her.’
On the birth of his son Stephen, whom he had with his first wife, he added: ‘And then you end up with a child out of the blue. And you just stay together for the sake of the child which is always the worst thing you can do. Until I finally got divorced.’
There is no mention in the film of how his 30-year-old son briefly married Miss Smith’s mother, Patsy Smith, who was 46 at the time.
His third wife Suzanne Accosta, who attended the premiere with two of their daughters, also appears in the documentary.
The mother-of-three, who met Wyman in 1979 and married him in 1993, said: ‘We were a cliche. I was a model and he was a rock star.’ She added: ‘When we got married and we had the kids, it gave him his foundation.’
‘Stupid to think it could work’