PAMELA MAYALL: “She was playing two roles, then: the glamorous star and the gorgeous girl on Mick’s arm. And at the same time, I think her inner self was sinking.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I think women slip into that. Living through a man. Letting somebody use them and not thinking that it’s at all strange. But now I think it’s very odd that I put myself at his disposal like that. Because I was more educated than he was. I was very good with words. And I gave him books to read that would give him ideas. I thought then, and I still do, in a way, that if you live with an artist, that’s part of life. All I do now is make sure I get back from people what I put in, which is fair.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Whenever Mick felt he’d been ignoring me, he would turn up with roses or jewelry, but I always lost the jewelry and I’ve never cared much for out-of-season roses.”
SPANISH TONY: “Marianne took Brian’s death badly. In her fragile, confused condition she interpreted it as a portent of her own doom, and she wept for hours, lying alone on the big bed at Cheyne Walk. Mick emotionally destroyed Brian as surely as he was destroying Marianne. He drains people, takes over their soul, their personality, their whole identity. He took away Brian’s self-respect, his confidence in his music. And he was doing the same to Marianne.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “One day, I was sitting in the bedroom and Mick came in very forlorn and put his head on my knees like a child. He was trying to hold on to me. I could see how much he loved me, and it broke my heart. I patted him on the head as if he were a little boy. I felt badly for him and wanted to take away his pain. I felt great empathy for him, but I wasn’t in love anymore. There’s always one person in a relationship that’s a little more in love. I was retreating, and he knew it.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Mick liked that scene, you know, High Society, or he thought it was. I mean, we went once for Christmas to the Earl of Warwick’s house and it was beautiful and there were footmen behind every chair and I took a couple of mandy’s and, er, passed out in the soup, which is not… well, depends on your attitude really, but Mick was so humiliated, but so humiliated by this – he had to carry me upstairs and put me to bed – and this just wasn’t done. I’m not saying I’m terribly proud of myself, and I wasn’t doing it just because it was Warwick Castle – you know, I just happened to feel like it.”
CHRISTOPHER GIBBS: “The Smithwicks family were very kind of
Irish and Catholic and uptightish. And I
have this vivid memory of Marianne taking a picture of his Holiness the Pope
that was propping something up. She put
it on her knee and rolled up an enormous joint in the drawing room. The family did not notice but Mick and I
did.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “Marianne was miserable, using smack, and spoke openly of her desire to really get into it, to experience the doomed floating freedom of the junk world, while he worried that they could get busted for heroin at any moment. She despised her acting career and let it go. She called Mick at the studio, crying and complaining of loneliness, while he was trying to work, which led to big fights and more tears. Marianne’s public behavior began to slip. Mick would take her for a country weekend at a duke’s castle and she’d nod off into the soup. They’d have to carry her upstairs, and Mick would be embarrassed. He was spending more time with Marsha Hunt at her place in St. John’s Wood.”
SPANISH TONY: “Marianne, poor Marianne knew she was losing Mick, knew that, at twenty-one, she was every inch the fallen woman the public made her out to be. Even the Archbishop of Canterbury denounced her from the pulpit for being pregnant by Mick. Though she was brave, beautiful and hip on the outside, somewhere deep inside there lurked the soul of the confused, consumptive little girl who had been packed off to boarding school at the age of eight. Soon she was mainlining four jacks – these are pills – of smack a day.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “In anguished relationships like the one I had with Mick it’s much easier and more satisfactory for all concerned if the one playing my role dies, after which I would turn into a sainted, mystical figure – like Brian – and no longer be a threat to anyone and – more important – no longer a bother to anyone. The martyred Marianne. Perhaps that’s what I had in mind.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “By the time we got to the hotel in Sydney I’d forgotten not only where I was but who I was. I looked in the mirror. What I saw was a very thin, frightened face. I’d cut my hair, I was anorexic, and my skin looked cadaverous. I saw someone literally falling apart. Someone with blond hair and looking very scared. In my drug-induced stupor I dimly recognized the ravaged face of Brian Jones staring back at me. I was Brian, and I was dead.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “When I opened my eyes six days later the first person I saw was Mick. He held my hands in his and said, ‘You’ve come back!’ ‘You can’t get rid of me that easily,’ I replied. ‘Don’t be silly, darling. God, I thought I’d really lost you this time.’ ‘Wild horses,’ I said, ‘couldn’t drag me away.’ Mick was loving and compassionate and wrote me beautiful letters every day from the film set. The letters were full of remorse: ‘Please forgive me for causing you all this pain… I’m utterly devastated to realize that you felt you were in such agony you had to kill yourself.’ I know that when I took my 150 sleeping pills I did it out of revenge. It was the only way I could make my point. It had something to do with Brian. Everyone was taking his death so in stride, for God’s sake! Well, I thought, I’ll show you! You want pain and suffering? I’ll show you pain and suffering!”
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MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Some very odd things happened to me in Australia when I OD’d on all those sleeping pills. It sounds strange, but I have a feeling that those six days out, unconscious, did some very bizarre things to me. Before the OD I could speak French, and afterwards I couldn’t. An entire language had somehow got lost.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “The last person the in world I could
discuss anything with was Mick. We never
talked about anything really personal, about anything that really mattered to
us. I tried on some occasions, but it
didn’t work. In a way he resented it, as
if it were an intrusion into a private part of him he didn’t want to share with
me… I often thought that it might have been a help if Mick and I had tied on a
good drunk together, maybe if we had loosened up that way, we might have stood
a chance of talking and of getting ourselves on track. But that was the sixties, and we just didn’t
drink.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “The thing about drugs is that when you are taking drugs, you simply don’t speak. You are. You don’t talk about anything. You just are. You exist individually, you are separate entities with no connection between you. Mick was giving of things, especially in the beginning, like flowers or little gifts, but there was no giving of himself. He was always wanting to be somewhere he wasn’t. And this restless ambivalence made you feel rather strange if you were in a relationship with him.”
MICK JAGGER: “I don’t find it easy dealing with people with drug problems. It helps if you’re all taking drugs, all the same drugs. But anyone taking heroin is thinking about taking heroin more than they’re thinking about anything else. That’s the general rule about most drugs. If you’re really on some heavily addictive drug, you think about the drug, and everything else is secondary. You try and make everything work, but the drug comes first.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “One night in November, Labour Party M.P. Tom Driberg showed up at 48 Cheyne Walk to have supper with Mick and Marianne. As he arrived, Mick called from Olympic to say he’d be at the studio all night. Marianne burst into tears. Sobbing, she asked the startled politician to please go to the pub next door and buy a few bottles of wine, because she had no money.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “For years I had been babbling about death in interviews. That was play-acting. There came a time, however, that it stopped being a performance. The combined effect of playing Ophelia and doing heroin induced a morbid frame of mind – to say the least – and I began contemplating drowning myself in the Thames. I was acting as a child does. I became Ophelia. I had fused with my part the way Anita had done in ‘Barbarella.’ The difference, of course, being that Anita had been playing a dragon lady out of a comic book, too operatic a role to really infest your daily life (even for Anita), whereas I was playing a teenage suicide. I would indulge myself in lurid pre-Raphaelite fantasies of floating down the Thames with a garland of flowers around my head.”
KENNETH ANGER: “Marianne had a hard life when she was with Mick. He is a very sophisticated sadist.”
CHRISSIE SHRIMPTON: “The fact
is that Mick doesn’t like women. He
never has… Mick can be sweet and caring,
but he is also manipulative and possessive… he is a master of verbal
abuse. He has a vicious, vicious mouth.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “It’s like having a butterfly or an insect on a pin. It’s beautiful and fascinating. I was, and I am, so complex and get so disturbed and Mick couldn’t let me go. He had me on a pin and he was watching me flail and writhe, but it was something that fascinated him as an artist.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “The fact of the matter was that I loved Mick very much then and I think we both realized that we had to split up as a matter of self-preservation. I was destroying myself, but he was giving me an excuse to destroy myself. And I came to realize that I had to get out if I was going to grow up because he wanted to keep me frozen as a girl of eighteen.”
MICK JAGGER: “Marianne, you know – she almost killed me. Forget it! I wasn’t going to get out of there alive! Marianne and Anita, I mean – HELP!”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “… she packed up her little boy, slung a favourite Persian carpet under her arm, and walked out of Mick’s house, never to return.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Mick is always starring in an endless movie. He feels that he has to look great all the time for the great director in the sky. If they wheeled in the cameras and lit the scene at any minute, we would all look wonderful. I was becoming someone you couldn’t take anywhere. I was a wreck, physically. I was talking to myself, an unmoored boat slipping away down the Thames. My form of retaliation was especially vicious. Mick idealized me. Every time he saw another flaw in me, he couldn’t bear it. I knew that to destroy myself in his eyes would be the worst torment I could inflict on him. I wanted to destroy my face. A systematic, cold blooded self-desecration. Since he saw me as an extension of himself, it would be much the same as desecrating Mick. After everything we’d been through together, to leave him for drugs!”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I just left that house with all the furniture that I had not only picked, but some of it I had paid for with money I had earned from my performing. But I left with Nicholas under one arm and a Persian rug under the other. And that was it. I didn’t take my jewelry. I didn’t take anything. Out of pride. But in a way it’s a good thing, because it gives me an edge on Mick, now, because he really feels that women are a terrible sort of grasping, feral creatures. But he can never accuse me of that because of the way I left. Mick, you see, likes to sneer at women. He even did it with Jerry Hall, despite the sweet, pliant nature that Jerry has.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “When I split with Mick and left with Nicholas, I took a beautiful Persian carpet and some Ossie Clark dresses and all my Deliss silk clothes. So these were the clothes I was wearing when I was living on the street, a wraith-like vision, an anorexic waif, feeling no pain, and not feeling any cold either, because of the smack.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “It was the biggest, steepest plunge of my life. A free fall. It was around this time that everybody I knew began to turn to hard narcotics to kill the pain, or alcohol or sleeping pills to obliterate themselves. The days of the mind-opening drugs were over. The world had tilted. A major change in key had taken place. It was a Mahler symphony whirling madly out of control.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “The people in Britain imagine that they
have some form of right to me. They must
realize I am not their property and what I say, do, or think is absolutely no
business of theirs. A girl’s private
affairs have to be seen with some compassion.
There is a curiosity about me.
People’s real interest in me is morbid, the girl who tried to commit
suicide. They never see a woman with
body and soul with private difficulties.
They will never let such a person be. I am happy. I am absolutely penniless. I am going to start from scratch. People can help me by just forgetting me.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “My plan was to disappear Marianne Faithfull for a while. Very few people knew who I was. I thought I was invisible. People would say, well, it doesn’t say too much about your other friends that none of them sought you out, but the truth is you couldn’t have found me if you’d wanted to. Even the people I knew on the street didn’t know my name. I was twenty-three with a needle in my arm. It was as if the lights went out. I was scary-looking, anorexic and incredibly thin, like a skeleton, so if you had come across me you wouldn’t have wanted anything to do with me. It was a degrading experience – but apparently not degrading enough!”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Terrible bits of news kept coming through the haze. ‘Didja ‘ear Jimi ‘Endrix died last night?’ It was like hearing reports from a distant battlefield. Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Sharon Tate, Charles Manson, Kent State. I seemed twitchily in sync with a disintegrating world. We were entering an era of disillusionment, self-destruction and tragedy. Even as a hopeless junkie on the street I can’t describe how devastating it was to hear of Hendrix’s death, of Janis’ death, one right after the other. The awful feeling that we must really have fucked up.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “From reading De Quincey, Baudelaire, Oscar Wilde and others, I had this very romantic idea of taking drugs. And the sort of journey and experience that you could get from it, if you didn’t die. I’m very lucky that I didn’t die, which I certainly could have. And then it would have all been absolutely pointless, because there sure was nothing romantic about it, and the journey finally led you into hell. It wasn’t at all like Baudelaire or De Quincey or Oscar Wilde. It wasn’t even like being Dorian Gray. I thought it would be, but it wasn’t.”
ANDREW LOOG OLDHAM: “All of my comments about Marianne are made with affection. I really think that the least Keith and Mick, or the Dimmer Twins, could do is give the dear lady an appropriate Ronnie Wood allowance so that she does not have to appear so grateful on that awful Jools Holland show.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Trouble is the Stones don’t give points. Mick won’t do it. They don’t ‘write’ with other people – in theory. But they were grateful to use my mind and my talents – without credit. I kinda knew that was the deal, but when I was with Mick in the mid-sixties I was really young and naïve, so I sacrificed my name. Obviously I also contributed to ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ and ‘Dear Doctor’ – junk songs. I don’t listen to the Stones anymore, but I know they used me as a muse for those tough drug songs. I knew I was being used but it was for a worthy cause. I don’t feel that any more. I’d love to get: a) some credit, and b) some bloody money for the songs I helped on. Mere inspiration? I did bloody more than that.”
OSSIE CLARK: “Marianne said of Bianca, ‘She’s a great beauty, but I’m a great actress,’ as we went in the back of the Roller for a snort.”
ANGELA BOWIE: “Marianne’s act was all the more startling because she was so stoned… That was one slow lady – until, that is, she had to hit her mark and perform, at which point she emerged from her cloud and flat-out nailed it, whatever it was. She got me stoned as a silly schoolgirl on pills and great big hash joints one night, then slipped up on me when I wasn’t looking. She’s wild, that woman.”
ANDY WARHOL: “Marianne Faithfull came along and read a poem she wrote and somebody put down drugs and she said, ‘Oh, don’t put down drugs, because I’m on cocaine right now!’ I like her so much.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “One does get affected by the
media. People think everything I do is
evil and wicked. Well I know I’m not what
people think of me… I got so hung up by what people have said, and worrying
whether I am beautiful or not.”
GERED MANKOWITZ: “I saw Marianne in London sometime after she had broken up with Mick. She was living in the flat of one of her friends, recovering from one of her terrible blows. I went to see her to try and cheer her up. She was lying on a couch, looking very romantic and sort of Byronish. She grabbed my hand and put it on her crotch. And I said, ‘Marianne, this is me. What the hell are you doing?!’”
PATTI SMITH: “Marianne Faithfull:
there is a sweetness
in your little girl mouth
and the pearls you hold
in the palm of your hand
everytime you extend that hand
you break down you fantasize
you are circumsized
agonized
scourged
crowned
crucified
pierced four times
your sacred heart bleeds
drips and drips down
women weep at your feet
twelve men turn you
twelve men desire you
(ammonia clouds your armpits)
a starfish quivers in your belly
and the arrows shake out
shake out shake out
and the muscles in your heart ache
a fish slaps back your face
you roll you roll over
in the sanctuary yards
in a coarse black dress...
...bless your hot virgin mouth
you would be Judas
and Christ himself
you would be Mary Magdalene
the only woman
who made our savior weep
yet you would pull mandrax in
like the sacred wafer
leave me for eternal sleep
But no. I wont let you go.
I won’t let you go. no.
won’t let the honey drain
from your sweet sweet box
wont let the crowds blush and gasp
while you carry your cross
wont let the flower girls fan you
hind a big black hearse
wont let the pearls
crumble crumble
from your little girl mouth.”
