Jerry Hall profile: The model and the media mogul Rupert Murdoch

What better for a woman allegedly addicted to publicity than to find love with the mightiest of newspaper barons?

What do you do if you have spent most of your life with one of the greatest rock stars ever, if people have written pop songs about you, if you have been an instantly recognisable, globally famous beauty, if you have modelled for Lucian Freud, lunched with Sartre and de Beauvoir, hung out with Dali and Warhol, and then, all of a sudden, you are 59? Well, if you are Jerry Hall, you get engaged to Rupert Murdoch. And for someone who has made a life of being a consort to charismatic, individualistic alpha males, that could reasonably be said to be reaching the pinnacle.

There has been predictable sniping about Hall’s engagement this week to the world’s most powerful media baron, 84 years old and worth an estimated $11.4bn. Some of this is ageist repugnance at the idea that old people have sex. (Yes, he is old enough to be her father, but that seems to be OK when men are a bit younger, especially in Hollywood films.) The pair have looked excited and happy on the couple of occasions that they have appeared together in public; they have looked, in fact, like people who have survived difficult previous relationships, who are conscious that they are no longer young, and who scent the possibility of a bit more happiness and fun to come.

In any decision to marry there is an element of calculation, however, whether we admit it or not. Here the calculations seem to be rather well made. On the catwalk at the Golden Globes last weekend, Hall was shifting her head in that model way, switching on her smile, doing some of the things she is best at. Her former fiancé Bryan Ferry apparently once said she was “addicted to publicity”. Now she is being looked at again. Once she got inside the building, she sat next to Matt Damon.

Since her split from Mick Jagger in 1999, Hall has been less in the limelight. She has acted a bit, to mixed reviews. She appeared in a reality show about toy boys and she was a contestant on Strictly Come Dancing. (She was the second celebrity to be eliminated.) She made appearances as herself in French and Saunders and Hotel Babylon and wrote a memoir that wasn’t published. None of it was quite what she was used to, none of it quite at the centre of wealth, glamour and celebrity.

It’s probably not really about the money. She has had other boyfriends, including wealthy ones, in the past 20 years – and in any case, she isn’t what most people would call poor, and certainly not as she would have understood the term as a child growing up in Mesquite, Texas. Her father, a truck driver, who died of cirrhosis of the liver, was violent to his children: three older daughters, then twins, Jerry and Terry (both girls: he’d wanted boys). She told Hello! that she lived in fear of him throughout her childhood and she left as soon as she was able, with $800 compensation she’d been given following a car accident when she was 16. She flew to France and was staying in a hostel in St Tropez when, in fairy-tale fashion, she was discovered on a beach by a modelling agent and propelled into a world of magazine covers and pop stars.

It’s not, though, that the money won’t make a difference to her. Under the terms of her settlement with Jagger, it is understood that she can stay in Downe House, their 26-room home on Richmond Hill, until she is 65 or until she marries or cohabits. When they separated, Jagger claimed their 1990 marriage ceremony in Bali was invalid, a contention that was upheld by the High Court, meaning she couldn’t divorce him. As a result, she ended up with much less of his estimated $215m fortune (it’s thought to be about $10m) than she might have expected; she observed that after 23 years and four children, an annulment “seemed a bit rude”.

After St Tropez, there was a flatshare in Paris with Grace Jones and a career as a supermodel: by 1977, she had appeared on more than 40 magazine covers. One of her early jobs was to feature as a mermaid on the cover of Roxy Music’s album Sirens and, within months, she was engaged to the band’s lead singer, Bryan Ferry. She claimed for a long time that she met Jagger after this, at a dinner in Manhattan, although in her 1985 autobiography Tall Tales, she acknowledged he had been pursuing her long before. At any rate, they had an affair while she was still engaged. “Amazingly, we never got caught,” she said. “He would cover his mouth – it’s his mouth people see.”

Rupert Murdoch will be able to keep her in the style, not just financially, but also of celebrity and glamour, to which she became accustomed in those years. She won’t have to worry about downshifting when she leaves Downe House. And if recent appearances are anything to go by, Murdoch will be delighted to have her revisit her modelling talents, showing off her glossy good looks, her face lit up by that dazzling smile. Hall said, admittedly a long time ago, that she had “always felt that the man is king of the house and should be amused and treated well”. You can see how that would work here.

For Murdoch, the marriage also makes sense. His children temporarily stopped speaking to him after he left Anna, his wife of 32 years, for Wendi Deng in 1999. Jerry Hall, unlike her predecessor, is not interested in the business and she won’t be having any more children. An associate told the Financial Times that the marriage will have “zero impact” on the family trust. The couple have recently had a holiday on a yacht in the Caribbean with some of the 10 children they have between them.

His, at least, are likely to be relieved: after the split with Wendi Deng, there were Wolf Hall-type concerns about who might be getting close to him and in whose interests. Marriage will put a stop to all that, and, while Hall may inherit some part of his personal fortune (he owns $110m of shares in 21st Century Fox and, among other assets, the top four floors of a building on East 23rd Street, New York), that’s relatively small beer.

Michael Wolff, Murdoch’s biographer, has described him as highly susceptible to women, saying that his life has at times been dominated by a “search for sex, glamour, companionship – he has very much sought all three together”. His daughter, Elisabeth, told Wolff he is easily dominated by women. It is clear he succumbs to being fussed over. (Reports of his appearances in public with Rebekah Wade make much of her attentiveness to his every need.)

Murdoch was diagnosed with prostate cancer in 2000. He is somewhat deaf and he has sometimes looked frail (most notably at the parliamentary committee hearing on phone hacking, when a shaving foam pie was thrown at him). It is easy to see why he pulled Hall back to be photographed with him as they were entering the Golden Globes and looked so thrilled that she was by his side.

In the aftermath of her separation from Jagger, Jerry Hall spoke wearily about the tendency of men to pursue younger women, which she put down to fear of their own mortality. She seems to have made a rational, if not particularly feminist, decision to play the old game of reassuring men that they really are important. In return, she gets to be adored. There may be some tricky years ahead, but it’s a long way from Mesquite, Texas. And even from Richmond, London.

Jerry Hall: A life in brief

Born: 2 July 1956, Gonzales, Texas.

Family: Daughter of Marjorie, a librarian, and John, a truck driver. Has four sisters, including a twin. Four children with Mick Jagger. Engaged to Rupert Murdoch.

Education: Local high school and modelling agency.Career: Spotted on the French Riviera and by 1977 had appeared on 40 magazine covers. Acting career includes London productions of The Graduate and High Society. Published her autobiography in 2010.