With her mother, Eva von Sacher-Masoch, Baroness Erisso, at their cottage, November 22, 1970
At home with friends from St Joseph’s Convent, October 15, 1964
CA/REDFERNS;DAILY RECORD/MIRRORPIX/MIRRORPIX VIA GETTY IMAGES; JOHNPRATT/KEYSTONE FEATURES/GETTY IMAGES; LEONARD BURT/CENTRAL PRESS/GETTY IMAGES
At Television House on London’s Kingsway, 1965
this stuff about the Romantics. She taught me for that first year, and then of course I was torn away, and I was discovered…” The story of how Marianne Faithfull was discovered – a teenage ingénue fêted by the in-crowd and caught up with the Stones, then duly lost to scandal and addiction, has coloured much of her career. For a long time, the popular imagination carried her as a kind of tragic muse, a victim of her own beauty and the era’s excesses. Later it recast her as a fighter, a treasure, an artist of indefatigable spirit. Today, she sounds determined and faintly amused. She has a deeply fragrant voice, grown a little hoarse following a serious altercation with Covid that kept her in hospital for several weeks last spring. “I got terribly ill. I don’t really remember it, but apparently I almost died,” she says. “I managed not to die.” Still, the effects of the illness have lingered – she warns we might have to conduct our interview in segments, to allow her breaks to recalibrate. “It’s been very hard to cope with,” she explains. “Particularly my lungs, because I used to smoke, and I have of course got emphysema or whatever they call it now.” She pauses. “It’s got another name, and that’s the big problem – my memory, and the fatigue. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t be talking about this! Not the point!” The point is that before she contracted Covid, Faithfull had begun work on She Walks In Beauty. “When I came out of hospital I finished it,” she says. “I was worried: would I be able to do it? But I was, amazingly enough. It’s a miracle, really. It’s beautiful, because the ones
I did post-Covid are very, very vulnerable and that’s kind of lovely.” Faithfull’s literary devotion has been evident across her career. Visitors to her old Paris apartment would often note that half the singer’s bed had been given over to books. Allen Ginsberg once referred to her as “Professor of Poetics, at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poets”. She played Ophelia in Tony Richardson’s 1965 production of Hamlet and the Devil in William Burroughs and Tom Waits’ musical The Black Rider, while over the years she has recorded work by Shakespeare, Frank McGuinness and a version of Heathcote Williams’ expletive-laden poem “Why D’Ya Do It”. Some days she thinks back to the lessons with Mrs Simpson, to the time when she thought she might like to go to Oxford to read English literature. But there has been little regret at the path chosen, no yearning for a return to academia. “I couldn’t have gone back to the convent after that experience,” she says. “It took me a while to accept my life had changed, forever. And then to give myself happily to it.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL
50 • UNCUT • JUNE 2021
Bard dreams: with Hamlet co-stars Judy Parfitt and Nicol Williamson and director Tony Richardson, 1969
I
N many ways, Faithfull is an exquisite representation of an old world that the cultural revolution of the ’60s sought to subvert: the noble lineage, the convent-school education, the demure, doe-eyed beauty. It transpires that her upbringing was somewhat messier than the romanticised version might allow. Her maternal grandparents, members of the Austro-Hungarian aristocracy, had weathered the horror of wartime Europe. Her mother, a former ballet dancer, had relocated to the UK, to live somewhat incongruously on a terraced street in Reading, where the neighbours remember her wearing sheepskin coats and high heels, walking her pedigree dogs. Faithfull’s parents divorced when she was young and weekends away from school were sometimes spent with her father, an intelligence officer turned academic, on a commune in Oxfordshire. “I first met Marianne when John Dunbar brought her to London,” recalls the musician, manager and producer Peter Asher. Dunbar was an art student who in late 1965 founded the Indica Gallery with Asher and Barry Miles. “Everything John had said [about her] was true,” Asher says. “She was unspeakably gorgeous, smart, clever, well read, charming. We were incredibly impressed.” The pair married in 1965 and had a son that same year. Asher introduced Faithfull to Rolling Stones manager Andrew Loog Oldham, who persuaded her to make a record, Jagger/ Richards’ “As Tears Go By” – a melancholy ballad that reached No 9 in the charts. “I think it’s the first good song they wrote and it’s a really good song,” says Asher. Later, Faithfull would be damning about “As Tears Go By”, describing it as “a marketable portrait of me… a commercial fantasy that pushes all the right buttons.”
