At a point in time, years after the height of her celebrity, Marianne Faithfull was talking to an acquaintance about an invitation to a photographic exhibition in Berlin.
“How appropriate,” the friend declared. “You and Berlin have so much in common. Armies have passed through you both.”
It was a brutal assessment that even shocked the normally unshockable Faithfull, who died yesterday, but one that captures the essence of life hard lived. A life with incredible highs and some shocking lows.
The highs are pretty well known. Between 1964 and 1970 Faithfull was a pop star, part of British rock royalty. The lows began with her use of narcotics and ended with time spent as a homeless junkie. A period she describes in remarkably philosophical terms.
“Just losing myself on the streets of London was just great, having no address and no telephone number. It was really good for me. It was what I was meant to do … it pulled me back together as a real person”.
As the statement might suggest, Faithfull is a woman full of surprises and contradictions.
Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger in Italy. (AFP: Leeimage)
Like a Rolling Stone
For most she remains forever joined at the hip with Mick Jagger as the ultimate swinging 60s couple. In fact she was obsessed with Mick’s musical partner Keith Richards but couldn’t see her way clear to break up such a productive relationship.
Through her association with the Stones she’s often remembered only as a music person. Early on though her real aspiration was to be taken seriously as an actress, taking theatrical roles in Chekhov’s Three Sisters and Shakespeare’s Hamlet.
As the 60s gathered speed Faithfull began her pop life being marketed by her manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, as a fey almost virginal presence in a fast decaying world. If that was the public persona, in private the story was very different. Married to John Dunbar who ran the Indigo Gallery, her association with his art circle put her in the world of drugs and drug taking. Marianne made it clear she wanted to try them all.
In time that apprenticeship set her in good stead to become part of the Stones inner circle.
Being part of that inner circle delivered her even greater fame and the ultimate infamy when police came calling at the door of Keith Richards “Redlands” home looking for drugs. As they searched the house they found Faithfull clad in nothing more than an animal skin rug.
As it turned out, the drugs the police found in an item of Mick’s clothing were actually Faithfull’s. Strategically he said nothing believing that while a drug possession charge might not hurt a rock star, it would certainly destroy her stage career.
What Jagger could not protect her from though was the English tabloid press who rapidly spread a story claiming the exotic use of a Mars bar in her love life.
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Her coma in Australia
Ultimately the drug charges against the Rolling Stones would come to little but the impact of drugs on Faithfull were real.
In her autobiography she recalls how she used drugs to prepare for the role of Ophelia.
“I’m afraid I threw myself a bit too much into that part. Just before the mad scene, I took smack. I didn’t need it of course, but I thought it did”.
In time such recklessness would utterly undermine her stage aspirations.
In 1969 Faithfull came to Australia with Jagger who’d been chosen to play the lead role in the film Ned Kelly. A short time into the visit she overdosed, falling into a six-day coma. It was a strange experience she recalled, claiming that while she was unconscious she met former Rolling Stone Brian Jones, who’d died a month earlier.
When it came time to decide whether to stay with Brian or go back to the living, Brian helpfully told her, “I’m going on alone.” Faithfull regained consciousness a short time later.
It was a narrow escape made all the more remarkable because just a year before Faithfull had written the lyrics to an as yet unreleased Stones song called Sister Morphine, that tells the harrowing story of a morphine addict lying in a hospital bed craving the next fix.
Never one to offer credit for a good idea, Jagger left her name off the song writing credits but did privately deliver her a stream of royalties that would help her survive as her world fell in.
For much of the 70s and 80s Marianne Faithfull’s life was full of addiction.
A battleground of addiction
As Faithfull’s relationship with Jagger shredded so did her life. Her artistic aspirations fell away and drugs took centre stage. By 1971 she was, according to her biographer Mark Hodkinson, a full-blown heroin addict. That meant leaving her son in the care of her mother Eva, living rough and relying on help from others. Her situation got so bad shop owners in the area she frequented took her clothes and washed them while she sat rolled in a blanket.
For much of the 70s and 80s Faithfull’s life was a battleground of addiction marked by brief artistic bursts. Perhaps her greatest burst of creativity came with the album Broken English.
Gathering a team of top flight musicians, a sympathetic producer and an array of songs the album combined her best literary instincts with a the bristling energy of punk and new wave music.
Two songs stood out. Neither was written by her, yet as she has so many times since, she made them her own. The first a betrayed lover’s bruising lament called, Why’d Ya Do It, with lyrics by poet Heathcote Williams. The second song was called the Ballad of Lucy Jordan. Originally recorded by Dr Hook it might well have been created for her, telling the story of a woman who’d done none of the things Faithfull had done and yet somehow still found herself torn by her wasted past and her lost dreams.
Buffeted by fate and addiction Faithfull might well have become just another rock casualty. She refused to succumb to that temptation. Instead, relying on her innate toughness and intelligence, along with her ability to tell an unvarnished truth, she moved from potential victim to wise elder… always, it should be said, with a sense of humour.
On a more recent album, Negative Capability, she re-recorded the song As Tears Go By. Written by Jagger and Richards it was the track that originally pushed her into the limelight. Gone is the folksong quality and the girlish voice, here instead is a woman who has seen so much reflecting on the passing years and filling the words of a now old song with fresh meaning.
“It is the evening of the day, I sit and watch the children play,
doing things I used to do, they think are new — I sit and watch as tears go by …”
It was William Blake who said the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom. Clearly Blake and Faithfull never met but Blake’s observation reminds us that, with her passing we have lost someone of great wisdom.
