The obituaries will have been written long ago and filed away with others of whom a long life seemed unlikely. Marianne herself probably didn’t expect to reach 78 either but there was a stubbornness to her character, a resilience that kept her going no matter the bullets that life shot through her, even during that dark period in the early 1970s when she lived on Soho streets and begged for change to feed her heroin habit. At the time I was the News Editor of Melody Maker and not once in the three year I held that position was her name mentioned during the editorial meetings we held each Wednesday to decide on the contents of the following week’s paper. No one ever suggested we do an interview with her, even when Decca Records released a compilation called The World Of Marianne Faithfull that landed on my desk for review. Marianne Faithfull? Who wants yesterday’s girl?
I was in love with her in 1964, as was every teenage boy I knew and probably a few girls too. Our first sighting of her was on TV, in black and white, singing her two early hits ‘As Tears Go By’ and ‘Come And Stay With Me’. With her long blonde hair, perfectly sculpted nose and shy, angelic smile, she was the girlfriend we all of us wanted but couldn’t hope to have. Descended on her mother’s side from European nobility, she was virginal, prim, untouchable. We learned she was educated in a convent where nuns no doubt impressed upon her the merits of chastity, and she took these lessons to heart, modestly buttoning up her knee-length black dress to its lacy neck so there showed not a trace of cleavage. I would have gathered flowers for her, bought her trinkets and taken off my jacket to place on the ground so that her tiny feet might avoid a puddle beneath them and if, by chance, this gesture was insufficient to save them from the dirt I would willingly have knelt before her to wash those ivory feet and afterwards lovingly dried them with a soft towel. And were she to have rewarded me with a kiss on the back of my hand it would have remained unwashed to this day. Come and stay with me? Just say the word, my dearest.
Mick liked trophy girlfriends and when the sister of Britain’s top model proved unable to give him the satisfaction he craved his eyes landed on Marianne who, by all accounts, had rejected him out of hand when they first met at a party hosted by Stones manager Andrew Oldham. She found him crude, unmannered, insolent, as did most the UK population over 30. Marianne eventually surrendered and as a couple they became an enduring image of the swinging sixties, rivalling John and Yoko, and like Yoko she brought culture he couldn’t find elsewhere into her lover’s life, alternative ideas, art, poetry and theatre, a different way of thinking. Determined not to be merely a sparkling jewel on his arm, she became a promising actress on both stage and film. Blithely, Mick refused for years to give her the credit she deserved. Her life reached some kind of terrible apogee when she was discovered wrapped only in a fur rug at Keith’s infamous house party at Redlands, raided by police tipped off by the News Of The World, the cruel injustice of the jail terms imposed on Mick and Keith matched only by the injustice suffered to Marianne’s reputation.
When the affair with Mick was over there was a suicide attempt followed by drug dependency. She hurtled downwards. She was now a harlot and it would take over a decade to redeem herself. It came with the extraordinary 1979 album Broken English, a record bursting with obscenities. “Why’d you let her suck your cock?” she sang on ‘Why D’Ya Do It’, the song that followed ‘Working Class Hero’, John’s own two-fingered, expletive-littered rebuke. If that’s what you want from me, here it is, in spades, she seemed to be saying. I would still have washed her feet.
Thereafter Marianne became a sort of grand dame of British pop. She released many albums and became a cult figure. Her experiences placed her above the rank and file. She was dignified, cool and rather aloof. Other musicians sought her out for advice and to kneel at those feet. Punks liked her and she chose her collaborators carefully from among her peers: Nick Cave, Damon Albarn, Metallica. I’d loved to have heard her sing with Dylan or Lou Reed or Tom Waits or anyone else whose voice prized character over mellifluence. But she’d done it all, seen it all and survived.
In the 1980s, when I became the editor at Omnibus Press, one of the projects I inherited was a biography of Marianne that had been commissioned by my predecessor but remained undelivered by a negligent author. It never was delivered but a year or two later I commissioned another author to write a book about her and when it was published Marianne, who had somehow become aware of its long gestation period, evidently read it and told an interviewer the publishers had been waiting for her to die before publishing it. “But I haven’t died so they published it anyway,” she cackled. I thought it was a hilarious reaction. I’ll laugh and cry and laugh about it all again. So long Marianne.
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