Unique, compelling and bonkers: My 24 hours with Marianne Faithfull

Sylvia Patterson recounts the conversation she shared with the iconic singer, who told of her life with a promiscuous Mick Jagger, the coke psychosis that led her to hack at her face with a razor blade, and her unrelenting terror of not being interesting enough

Marianne Faithfull with Anita Pallenberg at Heathrow airport, 1967 (Getty)

Of all the celebrated maverick spirits of the Sixties and Seventies counterculture – from Keith Richards to Bob Dylan to Jim Morrison – surely aristocratic songbird Marianne Faithfull was the most rebellious of them all.

An iconic pop star at 18, and a year later the girlfriend of Mick Jagger, she was only 22 when she rejected the lot – fame, money, status as the Most Beautiful Girl in the World – to become a homeless heroin addict living in the bombed-out rubble left by the Second World War. This she preferred to domestic bliss with Jagger at the height of his peacock fabulousness. “Which is very, very insulting to Mick,” she told me back in 2009.

This was, I suggested, a spectacular act of punk-rock defiance, a cry of “I reject everything.” “Yes, it was,” she agreed. “Because I saw through the whole pop business. At 21, I could see it was bulls***. A formula that keeps making money. There was also that thing of ‘two stars in one house’, my own little ego fighting for a chance.

“I’d been trying to run away from Mick for a long time! I did love him. But the life was difficult, living with such a very famous person. And such an incredibly promiscuous person. I could see it very clearly. ‘I’m not required for this... I’m gonna f*** off.’”

We had this conversation over lunch in a fine-dining bistro in Luxembourg, where Marianne ordered “beef filet, au poivre” in her exquisitely scorched, profoundly theatrical voice. That year there was no accompanying glass of wine: the sometime alcoholic/drug addict had been clean for five years. “Even a little alcohol is too much,” she told me. “It’s just being an addict.”

Her nose told some of the story, a thin scar running from the top and forking down one side, from an incident when she took a blade to her face as she tried to release the imagined insects crawling under her skin. “Coke psychosis,” she said, matter-of-factly. “I was bleeding, and I realised this was going to scar, so I stopped... but hey, it happens to people a lot.”

Faithfull entered into a relationship with Mick Jagger at the age of 19 (PA)

Marianne, then 62, was tremendous company – almost ill-advisedly honest, fantastically indiscreet, her cut-glass intonation at odds with her often chaotic circumstances. That day she was wearing a calf-length black woollen Christian Dior overcoat splattered with streaks of milky white. She’d had “an accident” on opening her “beautiful Balenciaga bag”: a leaking water bottle had melted a bag of peppermints, “so when I picked up the bag, all the water went over my coat, and that’s why it’s covered in sh***”.

That day, she was already 45 years on from her debut hit single, “As Tears Go By” (written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards). Those 45 years had been filled with uniquely artistic endeavour, in song, film and theatre, all heavily eclipsed by what she called “The Legend”: her public profile, premised on her relationship with Mick.

Prior to the two years she spent living on a wall in Soho, there was the infamous Redlands drug bust, when Keith Richards’s home was raided by 20 police officers on a tip-off from the News of the World. Marianne was found naked, covered only by a fur rug.

“That really damaged me,” she noted. “It damaged our relationship, and by 22 I was living on the street as a heroin addict. When the News of the World closed, I danced a jig. They were trying to destroy The Rolling Stones, and they couldn’t – but me? They nearly did.”

Ever since that time, she’d been a seriously tested survivor – not only of cataclysmic drug psychosis, but of three marriages, miscarriage, a suicide bid, Hepatitis C, cancer and breakdown, the last having occurred just the previous year. “Depression,” she confided. “Sometimes my whole life just catches up with me, you know?”

Thanks to a spectrum of treatments – “therapy, acupuncture, exercise, massage, a chiropractor” – her lifelong paranoia was finally subsiding. “I don’t wake up any more with nameless, rambling fear,” she said, explaining how she was now able to cope with permanent sobriety. “It can be boring,” she added, cheerfully. “But you have to get used to it.”

People did look after me, even the cops. I never got raped or assaulted. But I was such a hopeless junkie, I couldn't even shoot myself up

Marianne Faithfull

For years, she’d been a kind of bohemian, talismanic godmother to similarly lawless characters, from Nick Cave to Kate Moss to (at the time) fellow Paris dweller Jarvis Cocker – “One of my favourite people! He’s so incredibly sly and deadpan.”

Simultaneously, she was wary of strangers. “I’ve been frightened of meeting people who just wanted to meet ‘The Legend’,” she confessed. “Terrified of not being interesting enough.” The Legend, then, was a burden? “No, it’s also very useful,” she decided. “It’s helped me position myself very well, actually. I can kind of do what I like. And now I must have a fag.”

We strolled through Luxembourg’s cobbled city centre looking for a chemist: Marianne urgently needed “bronchial tea”, medicinal teabags infused with expectorant, which she said eased the lot of the smoker. “I can’t give everything up,” she declared, “even if I do have a permanent bronchial situation.” She then coughed emphatically, spat onto the pavement – “Excuse me, very ladylike, I know” – and presently purchased her bronchial tea, alongside two packs of Marlboro Lights.

Closer inspection of her coat, meanwhile, revealed not only the milky streaks, but a broken front button and fraying cuffs. “It’s supposed to be frayed!” she insisted. “Oh God, I’m meant to look like ‘Marianne Faithfull’. This isn’t what Marianne Fai... Actually, it’s exactly what Marianne Faithfull looks like.”

That night, Marianne was once more doing exactly as she liked, giving a spoken-word performance of her favourite Shakespearean sonnets at the Theatre du Luxembourg. Inside this small, hushed, sold-out theatre space, she read Shakespeare’s “Sonnet 116” (her all-time favourite) from a black folder. To the mournful thrum of a solo cello, she began to recite. “Love is not love/ Which alters when it alteration finds,” she intoned, dramatically. “Or bends with the remover to remove/ Oh no! It is an ever-fixèd mark...”

Godmother to celeb rebels: Marianne with Lily Allen in 2009 (PA)

As theatrical concepts go, it was unique, compelling and bonkers, with the audience – including many 16-year-old girls – responding first with bewildered silence and then with rapturous applause. “Sixteen!” marvelled Marianne. “The perfect age for the sonnets!” We were now having dinner, Marianne insisting I have a large glass of wine, which she then gazed at, forlornly.

“That wine looks very good,” she sighed. “When I feel I’ve done a good job, I want to give myself a reward. I have to be happy with a nice dinner. And a fag. And my bronchial tea.”

Talk turned to the legend of the wall in Soho, where she lived as a heroin addict for two years: I confess that I’d always wondered what the wall looked like; how she had lived there day to day.

“It was a bombed building on St Anne's Court, so the wall was the length of a building, with a back to it, which I could lean against,” she remembered. “Inside the crater there were the meth[anol] drinkers around a fire, and they were always very sweet to me. On heroin you don’t feel the cold, so I sat on the wall – literally, day and night – for a year, maybe more. I even slept sitting up. Somehow I was OK.

“People did look after me, even the cops. I never got raped or assaulted. But I was such a hopeless junkie, I couldn't even shoot myself up, and had to go to my drug guru [novelist and anarchist] Alex Trocchi in the daytime.”

She contemplated her unfeasible survival one last time – still a creative, maverick force of nature at 62.

“I never thought I would live this long,” she smiled, gathering up her medicinal tea, fags, and ruined coat. “So now I think, ‘My God, I’m not gonna get out of this, I’ve got to go on!’ So I just hope I can turn people on. To poetry. To the Beats. To Shakespeare. I believe in art, if nothing else. Man, it’s the stuff of life itself! That you don’t reject.”

Sylvia Patterson is the author of ‘I’m Not with the Band: A Writer’s Life Lost in Music’. Her follow-up ‘I’m Not with the Man’ will be published next year