Free love. Psychedelic drugs. Embroidered Moroccan cushions. Nietzsche. Zen. Tribal trinkets. Customised existentialism. Ossie Clark dresses with knee-high boots. (Later, it was all ruffled blouses and cloaks from the Antique Market). Chat-up lines such as “Have you read ‘Les Fleurs du Mal’?” Or, when she first slept with Mick Jagger, a deep discussion of the Holy Grail. All these things summed up the 1960s for Marianne Faithfull. But most of all, she would remember with her still-bright smile, “how beautiful everyone was”.
And she most of all, many said. To Andrew Loog Oldham, the Rolling Stones’ manager, who discovered her at a party in 1964, she was an angel (with breasts). To the British public, who fell for her when she first appeared on “Top of the Pops”, at 17 with her straight blonde hair and innocent blue eyes, singing “As Tears Go By” in a plaintive whisper, she was a demure convent schoolgirl suddenly swept into fame. “Virgin on a Pedestal” was the first of many labels, which clung to her like shadows.
That pedestal was not quite so tall. She had several songs in the top ten in the mid 1960s, but none, not even “Tears”, reached number one. She made a better actress than a singer. As for virginal or demure, those were not right either. True, she sang sweet folk songs round Reading’s coffee bars. But at St Joseph’s, behind a brown paper cover purporting to be “The Imitation of Christ”, she was devouring Huysmans and Genet. She also regularly paid visits to a commune where her absconding father taught Dante and Petrarch and, if she crept round the battlements at night, she could hear the communards noisily making love. When she left home for London she meant to experience anything and everything.
First, smoking and drinking. She did lots of both, liking her life’s grit to sound through her songs. Then plentiful sex. She tried three of the Rolling Stones: Brian was feeble, Keith gave her the greatest night of her life, but Mick seemed the best bet. There was no shortage of others. The chaste angel was rapidly eclipsed by her role in “The Girl on a Motorcycle” (1968), straddling her steed in skin-tight black leather, looking really good. She found Mick voracious, and too stern about her bowerbird habit of buying glittering things, but over their four years together he was kind. He wrote “Wild Horses” after she told him she couldn’t be dragged away. To the press she was now “Mick’s Muse”, a label she kept for decades, half-afraid of straying into his prancing orbit again.
The Stones had been tough company. Those years reeled past in a whirl of drugs, parties, pregnancies (one by her first husband John Dunbar, one, miscarried, by Mick), police raids and bad press. She insisted she had come to drugs as a genuine innocent, after, not before, she had inspired Mick to sing of “Sister Morphine”. She had discovered them at a party in 1967 for which the host had prepared six lines on a table. He handed her a rolled dollar bill; she snorted all six. (It was Merck cocaine, she explained, delicate as snowflakes.) She soon moved on to heroin, though she didn’t intend to, and was high for most of the late 1960s. The newspapers were overjoyed when in 1967 the police raided a party at Keith’s country house to find her, they claimed, wearing only a fur rug and intimately involved with a Mars bar. Sheer fantasy, she retorted. But it gave her a new label, “Wanton Woman in a Fur Rug”; or, indelibly it seemed, “Mars bar”.
It was time to disappear. Not to die, really, though she tried that; but the 14th-floor window of an Australian hotel was sealed shut, and 15 Tuinal weren’t enough. She needed to work out who she was. In that heroin high, when she no longer knew, she had gone to check in the mirror. She was not there; she saw Brian, who had drowned some weeks before. If he was dead, maybe she was. William Burroughs’s “The Naked Lunch” had recommended heroin as the best way to escape the world. For two years, on the street in Soho, that was what she tried.
For most of that time, when not in squats, she sat on a wall. Though she was wearing her Deliss silk dresses, almost no one recognised her. Her weight fell to seven stone; two front teeth got knocked out. Facilis descensus Averno, as Virgil wrote. There were human compensations: local shopkeepers helped her wash her things and gave her cups of tea. She reckoned her drugs bill was £20,000, but she had always been, and remained, hopeless with money. Her label now was “Junkie”, though as a junkie she was hopeless too, missing her veins so often that a friend had to shoot up for her. Gradually she was rescued, but it took 15 years.
Then she had to repair the ruins, both of her face and her voice. She marked her first determined steps back with an album called “Broken English” in 1979, snarling her way through her own disillusion, jealousy, fury and bad dreams. It was acclaimed. If her looks and cords had perished she could sing Kurt Weill and the blues, which were both in her already. She could do cabaret with the world-weariness it called for; she could do film. (Especially that, as she loved being someone else.) In 2007 she was nominated as best actress for “Irina Palm”, the story of a middle-aged woman taking up sex work to save her son, at the European Film Awards. After 1985, when she was “clean”, she made 21 studio albums.
She absolutely refused to be a victim. After all, she wasn’t. She had set the course of her life herself. No one had made her take up with the Stones, or get married to three brief husbands, or become an addict. Despite the labels, she had loved being an icon of the 60s, when all those scintillating beautiful young things were frolicking beneath a volcano about to explode. As she might have remarked at the time, peeling off her baby-doll frock before some romp, “What would Rimbaud say?” (He was her idol). He wrote, “The poet makes himself a seer by a long, deliberate and total disordering of the senses. He consumes all the poisons in himself.” So had she. No regrets. Undaunted, godammit! ■