Marianne Faithfull: Rock Musician and Muse

Marianne Faithfull, the honorary Rolling Stone who was central to the drug-fueled rock music scene in 1960s England, has died at age 78. Faithfull had a hit singing the Mick Jagger/Keith Richards composition "As Tears Go By" at age 17, and a multi-year relationship with Jagger that inspired several Stones songs. In 1967 Faithfull famously covered herself with only a fur rug when police raided Richards's home and arrested Keith and Mick on drug charges. 

She struggled with heroin addiction and co-wrote the song "Sister Morphine" with Mick after a drug overdose put her into a coma. She made a stunning comeback in 1978 with the album "Broken English," on which her voice gained a gravely sound and a world of hurt and experience. 

Faithfull with her mother Eva

In her autobiography, published in 2000, Faithfull paints a colorful picture of her life, starting with her childhood. It begins:

My earliest memory is a dream of my mother covered in armor, a coronet of snakes entwined around her head. I am three years old. I'm in my bed, in the little room with the blue curtains....Everything is blue, the blue of Ahmed's hashish-and-jewelry shop in Tangier....

"Marianne! Marrianne!" a voice calls out. I float to the windowsill the way Alice does, with her feet just off the ground.....I see a fantastic figure looming over me. It is my mother-as-goddess, wearing armlets, breastplates and greaves like the ancient warrior queen Boadicea....A very Middle European apparition—a proper, collective-consciousness dream about the mother, the goddess. 

Her mother Eva was the self-styled Baroness Erisso and "came from a long line of Austro-Hungarian aristocrats, the von Scaher-Masochs. Her great-uncle was Leopold Baron von Sacher-Masoch, whose novel, Venus in Furs, had given rise to the term masochism."

During WWII, her Jewish family lived in Vienna, "more or less free from harassment by the Nazis." After the Russians invaded Austria in 1945, Eva was raped by occupying Russian soldiers, got pregnant and had an abortion. Eva was very beautiful, had been a dancer and actress before the war and had just done a screen test for Hollywood as the war started. She met Marianne's father, Major Glynn Faithfull, who was working as a spy behind the lines with British Intelligence. They fell for each other, but, Marianne writes, "My poor mother in fact married a truly obsessed eccentric, with utopian schemes for humanity and avant-garde theories of reform." 

Her parents broke up and Marianne began spending time in London as a teenager. She writes: "I liked jazz, and I was dazzled by this scene, rudimentary as it was. Just a girl from the provinces, going up to the big city to see what gives....I wanted to smoke Gauloises and drink black coffee and talk about absurdity and maquillage with wicked women and doomed  young men. I tried to understand Sartre and Camus and Kafka, but I like Céline and Simone de Beauvoir. (I had actually read The Second Sex.)"

She began singing folk music in clubs, when her fresh-faced good looks and talent earned her an entree into the fledging rock scene with its idealistic aims. 

We decided, "Right, this is our mission," and at once began to build the walls of our New Jerusalem—something along the lines of the defenses of Paris in Gargantua and Pantagruel. Free love, psychedelic drugs, fashion, Zen, Nietzsche, tribal trinkets, customized Existentialism, hedonism and rock 'n' roll. And lo and behold, before too long where was a definite buzz going on.... 

It was around this time that I had my first lesbian affair with a beautiful Indian girl named Saida. It was all part of my great experiment. When I was 17 she gave me a Tuinal and seduced me in my flat in Lennox Gardens. She was sixteen and absolutely gorgeous. Small, stark, short hair. Exquisite....

Her 2008 book Memories, Dreams and Reflections begins with a chapter titled, "summoning up a sunny afternoon in the sixties (one of many)." She writes:

Listening to [the Beatles album] "Revolver" always brings back memories of when we were all much younger and madder. Any excuse to get together, get high, get dressed up. or play each other our latest faves. In and out of each other's houses and at many different clubs....The sixties was a great motley cast of characters in an ongoing operetta with multi-hued costumes to match. What I remember most is how beautiful everybody was, and, of course, the beautiful clothes: we dressed up like medieval damsels and princes, pirates, pre-Raphaelite Madonnas, popes, hussars, mad hatters and creatures visiting from other planets. 

During those magical afternoons George [Harrison] would be the perfect host, serving up exotic teas, fat joints, and his new songs like exquisite delicacies offered for our consumption. A little bungalow (by rock star standards) brightly painted in sparkly psychedelic ice-cream colours, very warm and cosy and friendly, like the people who lived there, with a garden full of sunflowers and cushions outside. Just a very soft, gentle vibe, as if this fairy-tale cottage were conjured out of his sweet melancholy songs. 

Faithfull between co-star Alain Delon and Jagger

Like Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd, Faithfull writes about the famous time when The Beatles, the Stones, "a few Whos. spangled guitar slingers, mangled drummers -- in short, everybody who was anybody, or thought they were" indulged in a punch that had been spiked with LSD at the Vesuvio club in London. She wrote,

The main feeling was one of: aren't we all the greatest bunch of young geniuses to grace the planet and isn't this the most amazing time to be alive....We had a sense of everybody being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people. And every time something came out, like "I Can See for Miles and Miles" or "Jumpin' Jack Flash," "Visions of Johanna," or the sublime "God Only Knows" from Pet Sounds, or anything at all, it seemed like we had just broken another sound barriers. Blind Faith, the Mothers of Invention...one amazing group after another. Tiny Tim, anything, we were instant fans! And I don't think it was just the drugs. 

Faithfull was too soon thrust into the grueling and perplexing world of touring with her hit song, where she read Jane Austen books on the tour bus. Of her drug use and overdose, she writes:

I got heavily into drugs in spite of all the warnings, which, again, I can only see from a distance. The biggest warning of all should have been Brian [Jones]'s headlong plunge, but I didn't realise it, and by the time I did it was too late. I had my overdose in Australia, and that was the beginning of the end for Mick and me....It sounds strange, but I have a feeling that those six days out, unconscious, did some very bizarre things to me.....apparently the 150 Tuinol and six days' unconsciousness caused serious liver damage. Other bizarre things happened. Before the OD I could speak French, and afterwards I couldn't. A entire language had somehow got lost. 

Elsewhere she writes of a "Mandrax head-in-the-soup incident." She miscarried a child at seven months after taking Mandrax while pregnant. 

Faithfull had an acting career, and recorded 21 albums. She re-recorded "As Tears Go By" at age 40, when she said she was old enough to fully appreciate it. On "Why'd Ya Do It" from the Broken English album, she sings: 

"Why'd ya do it," she said, why'd you let that trash
Get a hold of your cock, get stoned on my hash?"