Marianne Faithfull (2012-ish)

On the way to meet Marianne Faithfull in Dublin I thought I was going to die. The plane couldn’t land because of horrific winds. It circled while everyone was tossed from side to side, and then decided to land anyway on top of the wind that threw us all about the place.
            By the time I arrived at the tinkling tea lounge of the Shelbourne Hotel I was in a heightened state. I had an out of body experience. I soon realised this was the perfect mode to meet Marianne Faithfull, who has been in a heightened state and out of her body most of her life.
            I’d read that she can be imperious, defensive. She’s none of that, but she has a curious commanding and demanding presence. We sit down for tea and she orders water for her French paracetamol. On her new album Horses And High Heels she’s written a happy song about eternity.
“Eternity and death. It’s quite a paradox to find joy in that, but I think that’s the right way to do it. I’m not facing death. I reckon that’s a long way off and I think by the time it happens you’re ready for it and you’re tired.”
Of course she did face death when she discovered a lump in her breast five years ago, but more of that later. Horses And High Heels is somewhat of a triumph. Songs that she’s written and songs from the seventies, like Love Song, covered by Elton John, sung in her haunting and pain soaked voice.
“I’m having a good phase really. I’m trying not to make people cry.” Her guitarist on the album, Doug Pettibone, says that her voice could sing a menu and make people cry. She insists though she’s not about the crying but the surviving.
“I’m having a great life and I want to go on having one. I’m not sure yet what my higher mission is but I have a feeling it might be great. Before I thought my mission was death, but now my mission is life. I feel quite different now to that bad, stupid, silly girl. I feel that everything is before me like a wonderful banquet.”
Uplifting thoughts from a 64 year old who has spent a life perfecting the art of self-destruction. She has a smoky cackle. She still smokes, but that’s about all she does. And later on in the interview, when she learns I know Paul McKenna, she asks that we call him now and be hypnotised to give up cigarettes.
“I think it’s really helpful if you don’t drink and do drugs. It’s frustrating sometimes. I can’t say it’s a bed of roses. But it’s better for my wilder emotions and my self-sabotage if I don’t. Drink breaks down your spiritual system, and then you go back on to the drugs and that would be awful.” She pulls almost a cartoon sad face and she reminds me of some of the awful places she’s been to.
“I know for a fact that heaven and hell are here on earth.” She talks with perfect recall about a vision, a dream she had during a ‘suicide attempt’ in 1969.  It was soon after she’d miscarried Mick Jagger’s child at seven and a half months; not long after the death of Brian Jones, luminous original driving force of the Stones. The Rolling Stones had just done a concert in Hyde Park and then Marianne got on a plane with Jagger to Sydney.
“It was a vision I had after I’d taken 150 Tuinols. I didn’t intend to take so many, I just kept taking them on the flight and I remember taking a whole load more after I ordered hot chocolate on room service. I wasn’t dead, I was walking along in no man’s land with Brian Jones and he said ‘this is where I go’ and he fell off the edge of the abyss and I didn’t, I had to walk all the way back again, and I walked a very long way. I was in an airport and there were planes coming in and taking off and I said I’m waiting for Mick to come and get me, which indeed he did, he brought me back. I remember it all. It was after that that we wrote Wild Horses.”
Keith Richards in his book Life is very kind to Marianne crediting her talent as being an über muse, not just inspiring songs but helping Jagger write the lyrics. “It wasn’t that I wrote whole songs, but I’d be ‘what about this line, what about changing that’ and he loved it. He wouldn’t have loved it if I’d tried to claim credit or money, he wouldn’t have liked that, ha, ha. And it would have been unfair because he’s the star, along with Keith.
Richards is kind enough to demystify the Mars bar incident once and for all. It never happened. It’s something that humiliated her at the time and has haunted her. “His book makes wonderful reading and he writes about the big stuff. I love and adore him.”
Reading it I wondered why didn’t she choose him over Mick. “Oh I would have done, but he was having a scene with Linda Keith and he was already in love with Anita, so no chance.”
Really? “You don’t know how silly a girl I was. He loved me all along but I didn’t know that. We’ll never know really. I was definitely mad about him. I spent one lovely night with him and got to know him later. The more I saw him the more I loved him. People have said we would have been so good together. I was too young to hold his attention.”
She was a teenager when she was first introduced to the court of the Rolling Stones, but she wasn’t exactly an ingénue. In 1965 when she was 18 she married artist John Dunbar and had a son, Nicholas. She left Dunbar for Jagger when she was 19. Long golden hair, big eyes, floral tiny mini dress, it’s a classic image of sixties beautiful person who was also known as an ‘angel with tits’. From the outside she had everything, even a sweet little hit record, As Tears Go By. She felt constantly displaced. She’d been intending to go to university or drama school and here she was, part of a circus. She felt undermined and had no confidence.
“I couldn’t even give a blow job. People care about that. Not that Keith cared. He’s a real man. But one of those things about being in that world…” she doesn’t finish the sentence. “I have never been able to give a good blow job, I would have been sick. I’ve always felt rather inferior. Keith didn’t care. We had such a great night. Wow, I’ll never forget that. I certainly did not have to give him a blow job. It was hot and sweaty.
“But I also had a great time with Mick, in bed and out of bed.” In her autobiography Faithfull she recalls that for months she and Jagger slept on opposite sides of a gigantic bed avoiding sex.
“The other bits were fabulous. We used to go out visiting sacred places, chapels on lonely hills. Keith would drive the Bentley with Christopher Gibbs and sometimes Michael Cooper took pictures. He was the court photographer there are pictures of me and Mick in the car having a row. You can see just how cross we were. We weren’t always having fun but we did have good times, it was a very creative relationship. He was very good at playing Three Sisters to help me learn my lines. He was a nice Hamlet too.” It was when she played Ophelia she started to think in a suicidal frame of mind and soon after she took all the pills with the hot chocolate.
She and Jagger had scant contact over the years but when she had her lumpectomy in 2006 he called her. “And that meant a lot. I was so lucky that they caught it so quickly. I didn’t have to have chemo. They got rid of it with a lumpectomy. I had a breast lift and a little bit of diminuation at the same time. Might as well make the best of it, that’s what I said to myself.” Who would have thought she was such a positive thinker. Essentially she is. It’s a strength that she sees in herself now perhaps for the first time.
She’s wearing a man’s tuxedo and a white ruffled blouse. Her breasts are still enormous. She says “they have grown back. I have lots of friends who are going through chemo now. I hope that when I die it’s not going to be frightening like that but I’ll just be in my bed and think I’ve had enough, I’ll fuck off now.”
She was afraid, of course, when she had cancer. “Maybe not as afraid as I should have been. All I can say is I’ve been lucky with body. Well done little body. I praise it and say you’re very good.”
She does think that the cancer changed her. That after it her love life could never be the same. “Cancer doesn’t make you feel sexy. It took me a long time to get over it. I went right off sex and that was a difficult moment because when I felt better again Francois had fallen in love with someone else.” Francois Ravard looks like a love child of Serge Gainsbourg and Woody Allen. He is her long time manager and remains so. “Yes, he looks after me,” she purrs. But it took her a while to get over the break-up. She wrote the song Why Did We Have To Part about him.
“In a way it’s about everybody I’ve parted from, but specifically Francois. It was hard to write. During the break-up I had writers block. I couldn’t write anything for two years. In AA I heard about somebody in the film business who retired, then they started drinking again because they let go. I couldn’t let that happen. But I’m well and strong and I’m loving working.”
She still lives in Paris and has a house in County Waterford, Ireland. Her son Nicholas wants her to move back to London. “He’s such a cool son, he’s perfect for me. I don’t know if he’d suit any other mother but he’s very free thinking. He’s a high finance journalist and he’s written a wonderful book, The Devil’s Derivative. How did this happen to me, how did I get a child like this. He’s very much like my father.”
Her father Major Glyn Faithfull was a spy in World War II who never got caught. Her grandfather invented a sexual device called Frigidity Machine which was designed to give women orgasms. He tried it out on her mother Eva, Baroness Erisso, a dancer and actress descended from the Sacher-Masoch long line of Austro-Hungarian aristocrats.
“I always thought he was a fraud. Why would he do that to his son’s new wife? But I don’t think my mother was very into sex and my father was very into it. So that was difficult for both of them.”
She talks more about her adoration of Nicholas. Perhaps the relationship is more intense because he was taken away from her when he was a child and she was a heroin addict living on the streets of Soho. “No, I was always around him, but yes, he was taken away from me, and that was very painful, no question. He was about seven. I’ve actually blocked it out now. Let’s not talk about it, it’s too horrible and I love John again even though he did that to me. It’s been years since I hated John,” she says all drawn out and languid. You get the sense she loves an audience.
What drove her to living on the streets? “I didn’t like living in the goldfish bowl.” Yet she loves applause. Another paradox.
“When I fell in love with Mick because I couldn’t get Keith the band were just like any other band. I hadn’t signed up for this incredible leap in their popularity. They became superstars and I was in the middle of it.  It was me who separated from Mick and not the other way round. It was me that separated from him and maybe from myself. I abandoned Mick and then I abandoned me. I left me lying in the road, anorexic and shooting up heroin. Heroin does make you lose interest in food but it was more than that. I wanted to disappear completely, get smaller and smaller and go down the plughole. But a part of me hung on to the love and the light. My mother’s love was strong and that part helped, the part of me that did want to make it. Why did I take those pills in the first place? I can’t remember exactly.”
Was it the end of your relationship with Mick Jagger? “No, but it hurried up the end. It’s very bad form to try and kill yourself when you’re with Mick Jagger and it’s all about the pretty stuff.”
Enormous orbital eyes look like they suddenly have another vision. “It was because of Brian’s death. That’s why I did it. I was going to punish Mick by killing myself. Mick didn’t kill Brian. I never thought that, but neither Mick nor Keith helped out Brian. They laughed and mocked and pointed. So I thought I’ll punish them all, fuck ‘em. I’ll show them, they’ll learn, they’ll miss me. But it wasn’t to be.”
She’s relaxed now and tells me how she loves to speak French with a strong English accent. She demonstrates and dissolves into giggles. Says she doesn’t speak real French at all and they find it incredibly charming.
She has returned to acting playing with Jonathan Rhys Meyers in the movie Belle de Seigneur. “I love making people laugh. I love performing. The best acting I do is in my life, not just on stage or film.” Is she acting now? “I’m not at the moment or if I am this is a virtuoso performance. A few years ago I might have got acting and being confused.”
She always said her homelessness was of her own doing. She wanted to be anonymous so she acted homelessness and drug addiction. Another bizarre paradox that she was in control of being out of control. “I have come to terms with the past. I took it personally and was too insecure and defensive. If you asked me a difficult question I’d get hurt and punish you all myself. And now it doesn’t matter.”
There’s certainly joy, even in the most bleak song on Horses And High Heels. You can sense her joy in working through the pain. There’s a real lust for life. She thinks for a long time she has been denying herself love. Of all her marriages, three of them, to punk rocker Ben Brierley in 1999 and writer Georgio Della Terza in 1988, she is only in touch with the first husband, Dunbar.
“I want to keep an open mind about love. Do you think there are some people out there that might love me?”