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“I wish people didn’t just think of me in the ’60s,” Marianne Faithfull told an interviewer almost exactly a decade ago. “I’m not any era. I just go on and on.”
With Faithfull’s death yesterday, in London at the age of 78, the world lost not only the stylish and decadent muse of the Rolling Stones—in the swinging London of the ’60s, she had intense relationships with Brian Jones, Keith Richards, and, infamously, Mick Jagger—but an actor of stage and screen, writer, singer, artist, and groundbreaking and shape-shifting musician who recorded 22 studio albums spanning seven decades.
Woven into the relationships, the work, and the life, though, was perhaps Faithfull’s most lasting quality: She persisted. Faithfull inhabited the sort of outsized spirit that seemed predestined for both greatness and heartbreak, and decade after decade, tumult after tumult, she wielded and reinvented her creativity to steer herself forward through the fire.
Born in 1946 to a father who worked in British intelligence and a dancer mother who traced her lineage to the Habsburg dynasty, Faithfull was also, on her mother’s side, the great-great niece of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch (whose 1870 novel Venus in Furs gave us the terms masochism and S&M). Faithfull was discovered in 1964, at a Rolling Stones record-release party, by the band’s manager Andrew Loog Oldham, and in short order, she recorded the Stones’ song “As Tears Go By”—the first song ever written by Jagger and Richards—and promptly became a pop sensation.
From this moment on, her life seemed to gather speed and notoriety—and to court danger and, soon, tragedy—at almost every turn. If Faithfull’s life and career traversed well beyond the ’60s, it reached a kind of apogee then: She was married (to John Dunbar, the London gallerist who owned the space where John Lennon met Yoko Ono) and gave birth to a son, though she was both bisexual and far from faithful. She began spending time with the Rolling Stones’ doomed cofounder Brian Jones and Jones’s girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, who became her best friend; she began a relationship with Jones; she sang in the background on the Beatles’ “Yellow Submarine”; and then she left her husband and Jones to begin a four-year relationship with Jagger, with the image of the beautiful and glamorous couple quickly cementing in a generation’s mind as the embodiment of a freewheeling place and time. As the legendary music writer and novelist Nik Cohn put it: “She looked incredibly virginal, incredibly sexual, and she had the strangest smile you ever saw. When she sang, she sighed and she drooped her eyelids in poses of infinite lustful purity.”
In 1967, Faithfull was infamously arrested during a drug bust at Redlands, Keith Richards’s 16th-century country home in Sussex, along with Richards and Jagger, and anybody in the United Kingdom who hadn’t yet heard of Faithfull until then sure knew her now: The bust had the kind of pop-culture infamy later reserved for, say, OJ Simpson’s Bronco chase or Michael Jackson dangling his baby over a balcony. (Apart from the many scandalous details invented out of whole cloth by the tabloids, one fact rang true: Faithfull was naked when arrested, save for a fur rug that she draped over herself.)
Faithfull also made a scandalous impact with her film roles, starting with I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname (1967), in which she starred alongside Orson Welles and Oliver Reed in a work summarized by one critic as “splashes of sex and violence in trendy settings.” (While it’s long been reported that the work features the first use of the word fuck—uttered by Faithfull—in a mainstream film, this isn’t exactly true: The word Faithfull says is “fucking,” and after outrage from the British Board of Film Classification, I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname was altered to obscure the word with the sound of a car horn. The film did help bring about the movie ratings we’ve since come to know in the United States, though, after the Motion Picture Association of America objected to a scene that they said depicted cunnilingus but that the Catholic League called fellatio and the film’s director later said was masturbation. In any case, a hectic film adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses actually used the offending word three months earlier.)
Faithfull’s next project, Naked Under Leather (1968), was the first film to receive an X rating in the US—though it was recut and rereleased with an R rating as Girl on a Motorcycle. If one combines the two titles, you essentially have the entirety of the film: Faithfull’s character, Rebecca, spends most of it riding a motorcycle between two lovers in two countries, wearing nothing but a fur-lined leather catsuit made by the fetish designer and publisher John Sutcliffe (whose work would inspire not only Emma Peel’s Avengers catsuits but also Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s work at their Sex boutique on King’s Road, which gave birth to the punk movement—but we digress).
Faithfull followed up all of this by playing Ophelia in an highly sexualized Hamlet (1969)—though the notoriety of the Redlands arrest, along with her growing drug addiction, had sent her into a long decline.
“It destroyed me,” Faithfull said, reflecting on it all decades later. “To be a male drug addict and to act like that is always enhancing and glamorizing. A woman in that situation becomes a slut and a bad mother.” Film roles evaporated, and the Rolling Stones songs she inspired or had a part in helping to create limned her own melancholy and tragedy with an odd admixture of devotion and affection: “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” “Wild Horses,” and “I’ve Got the Blues,” with the latter two (along with “Sister Morphine,” which she cowrote) appearing on the Stones’ drug-steeped Sticky Fingers, from 1971. (“Wild horses couldn’t drag me away” were apparently the first words Faithfull spoke upon waking from a six-day coma after taking more than a hundred barbiturates while flying to Australia with Jagger.)
Faithfull had a stillborn child, lost custody of her son, attempted suicide, became homeless and anorexic. Over the next 15 years, she battled addiction, to varying degrees of success, while continuing to record and perform whenever possible; she lived with Henrietta Moraes, a muse to Lucien Freud and Francis Bacon; she dedicated songs to Ulrike Meinhof, best known as a founder of the Red Army Faction or Baader-Meinhof Gang, a West German protest group advocating armed struggle. (“Protest is when I say this does not please me,” Meinhof wrote. “Resistance is when I ensure what does not please me occurs no more.”) She sang the Sonny Cher hit “I Got You Babe” onstage with Ziggy Stardust–era Bowie while—seemingly for no particular reason—dressed in a nun’s habit. She married again, divorced again, and started a relationship with a mentally ill, drug-dependent man who later jumped to his death from their apartment.
Is her miracle, then, that she merely lived through it all? Yes and no: Throughout her tumultuous life, Faithfull took sustenance—both literally and spiritually—from her art; when her voice changed after years of hard living, it seemed to become imbued with her sultry, hard-won wisdom and decadent allure. Her 1979 album, Broken English, was both a return to form and a career highlight, and she would go on to find a particular affinity with the work of Kurt Weill. Strange Weather, her acclaimed album of covers, released in 1987, featured her interpreting the work of everyone from Bob Dylan and Jerome Kern to Billie Holiday and Tom Waits.
Faithfull married a couple more times and divorced a couple more times, and in 1985, she finally got clean. In the 2000s she collaborated with a series of younger artists who held her in the highest esteem, including Jarvis Cocker, PJ Harvey, and Nick Cave; her acclaimed 2021 album, She Walks in Beauty, which Faithfull described as a dream project that she’d been wanting to record for 50 years, featured her interpreting the work of legendary 19th-century Romantic poets. (Her 1997 reading of Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee,” from an audio anthology of various artists recording Poe’s work, will send an ecstatic shiver up your spine.) The first of her three memoirs, Faithfull, belongs on any short shelf of unmissable rock-and-roll remembrances and pulls no punches—in either the high or low registers.
In 2011, the French government presented Faithfull with the honor of Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. More recently, she was beset by an array of serious health problems, ranging from pneumonia to breast cancer.
Tom Waits described her as “the aunt offering you a cigarette at a wedding when you’re 11” and called her voice “spooky oil on a squeaky gate, baby powder meets gunpowder.”
Mick Jagger paid tribute to her by noting that “She was so much part of my life for so long. She was a wonderful friend, a beautiful singer, and a great actress. She will always be remembered.”
“I’ve done everything I want to do and gone everywhere I want to go,” Faithfull said in 2013, looking back on her monumental, roller-coaster ride of a life. Far more than mere muse or cautionary tale, she was both larger than life and always uniquely herself.
