MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I had gone from the obscurity of a convent, right smack into the limelight. It was fabulous when I first started singing in front of an audience. I loved it. I always have and still do. That was amazing. Learning, getting a sense of my power, was very interesting. But I didn’t get any help from the Stones. Nor did I want any. They looked very common to me. I liked more intellectual sorts of people in those days. I liked John, doing his fine arts at Cambridge and all that. The Stones didn’t have that kind of superficial undergraduate education that I liked, to be able to talk about paintings, reading Camus, and going to see foreign movies and all that, that’s what I liked doing. They weren’t into that.”
MARC SPITZ: “From the moment Mick met Faithfull, he began to fantasize about having a girlfriend who didn’t seem to need constant reassuring. She seemed, especially for a teenager, perfectly independent. Surely someone like that would be able to understand and keep pace with his own life and maybe even help him evolve out of a sweaty, down-and-dirty blues scene into a different London: one of wealth and culture. If he wasn’t pursuing thing, he know instinctively that it had become necessary. And so in his fantasy, she’d give him books to read, tell him what paintings to ponder and what films to take in. She’d help him grow up some but wouldn’t require that he dispense with the low culture he so sincerely adored.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “Marianne thought Mick was narcissistic, manipulative and as tight as two coats of paint. She radiated a blue-eyed innocence that belied her fierce intelligence and passionate appetites… Bob Dylan was said to be in love with her, like so many men drawn to her charismatic orbit, but his amorous advances had been rebuffed.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “For months and months and months I ignored Mick, completely. Not realizing, because I didn’t know anything about seduction technique, that this was in fact the dead-sure way to make him continue to hassle me.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I was very critical of people in those days. That was probably one of the things that Mick liked about me, that I wasn’t easily impressed, that I was very snotty. But what was good about the groups of people in the early sixties was that they really liked each other and liked being together. There was a great exchange of ideas and aspirations and feelings. They were all young and friendly and growing up together. And everybody was good-looking. And I think that was a real flaw in the whole thing… I think that one of the things that eventually attracted me to Mick was that he was clever and ugly.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Marianne was very coy and very straight – kind of like a pearl on velvet – Laura Ashley kind of stuff. And then, of course, she ended up with Mick and all of that. I always had great admiration for her. I always found it amazing how on ‘As Tears Go By,’ for instance, her voice kind of tremoloed… it was like vibrato. I was always completely fascinated by her. She always looked like such a fragile little girl, and then at the same time she was also very tough. I mean, she left John – left the whole thing behind and then started to go out with Mick and then started to become quite ruthless, actually, and then she changed all her outfits. I remember her once saying to me when she was going with Mick that she wanted me to take her to buy some clothes. Well, she bought a chandelier and four or six stags – you know, the heads with horns – and God knows what else. So as I say, I was always just sort of fascinated by this kind of over-the-top person.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “We lived on a boat for a week, sleeping on board and during the day putting into Villefranche and Nice and tiny ports along the coast. I remember one day as we were sailing along the Riviera we saw a beautiful house on the cliffs with mimosa hanging off the balcony and we said to each other that one day we would live there. While the weather was fine it was quite lovely, but one day a huge storm blew up and the sea became extremely rough… We all got into the same bunk, Mick and Nicholas and I, and held each other. I think that is where I really fell in love with him.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “The Stone I really liked was Keith Richards, because he was quiet, laid-back, didn’t come on. People like that are always more interesting because you can make them anything you like. You can fantasize them into all sorts of situations and give them feelings that they probably don’t even have. I was too scared to go up and talk to Keith, of course. And he was much too shy to talk to me. But I liked him. Very much… I wished it was Keith who said he was in love with me, but then again, Keith wouldn’t say that. Keith wasn’t the sort of guy who said, ‘I love you.’”
SPANISH TONY: “Mick Jagger loved her very much – he made that obvious every time they met. Quite apart from her beauty Marianne had the class and style that Mick craved. His newfound wealth and influence had made him popular among the young aristocracy, but he knew he lacked their sophistication. Marianne delighted in educating him, teaching him literature and art and manners.”
MICK JAGGER: “Marianne turns me on to lots of good things. She has led me into music, drama and literature that I hadn’t read before… I turn her on to things more basic.”
VALI MYERS: “Marianne Faithfull turned up one day with her boyfriend to see some of my work. I thought, who is this scrawny little guy, so I said to him, what is it you do Micky? How would I know who the bloody hell Mick Jagger was? - I wasn’t interested in Mick Jagger, I was always into Marianne. She was a real fighter.”
VALI MYERS: “Marianne Faithfull turned up one day with her boyfriend to see some of my work. I thought, who is this scrawny little guy, so I said to him, what is it you do Micky? How would I know who the bloody hell Mick Jagger was? - I wasn’t interested in Mick Jagger, I was always into Marianne. She was a real fighter.”
MARC SPITZ: “With Faithfull on his arm, Mick could evolve into a Lord Byron figure; romantic and searching, but also able to talk trash with the boys, shoot pool, and drink in pubs. Now that would be something. It was an ideal. And from the moment he met her, he pursued it aggressively. Mick wanted her not just as a sexual partner but as a key to his new self. The poetic romance of the imagery in ‘As Tears Go By’ was perhaps unconsciously designed to release this figure from the cocoon.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “We were both radiant, the way one is in the first phase of a love affair when you are suddenly immersed in the life of a complete stranger. I remember getting a flash of how Mick and I looked together as we were walking through one of those arcades off Bond Street. Ambling along in the other direction came David Courts and his wife, Lotte. When they caught sight of us they stopped in their tracks as if taking in some astonishing scene. The moment froze and this image of Mick and me reflected back, floating in the air between us for a fraction of a second, and then vanished. It was the first time I had seen that curious and perilous apparition; Mick and me as the Couple.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “There were lots of things I could have done at the age of nineteen that would have been more healthy than becoming Mick Jagger’s inamorata. In the end it doesn’t matter that hearts got broken and that we sweated blood. Maybe the most you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “When I returned to London, I took a realistic look at the life I was leading, married to John, who was taking acid all the time and putting methedrine in his coffee in the morning. And we had a house guest who was the first junkie I ever knew. He used to come and stay for months and months and leave his hypodermics on the draining board in the morning. Our home life wasn’t exactly what people thought at all. But every time I appeared in public I had to be sweet and smile, be a lady, all that shit. And that really began to drive me nuts. I think if I hadn’t fucked off and gone over to Mick, John would have done very well. But I didn’t give him a chance. I fucked off before he could. John’s art gallery was very successful – I think he could have been somebody. But I wrecked him. I just got fed up with it. Mick’s life was too tempting, this very powerful man with lots of money promising me the moon with my name on it. I fell for it.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “Marianne’s wild spirit and noble erudition would soon contribute another strong female persona to the band’s creative identity. Now the Stones and their women moved in a glamorous flash of pop celebrity and artistic validity, the vanguard of the new generation’s cultural heroes. Nobody in those times was more beautiful than they, or more damned.”
