Marianne Faithfull's life was one of massively conflicting fortunes
Dylan Jones writes about Marianne Faithfull’s life and considers her candid nature which always had people flocking to her at parties
You could always tell when Marianne Faithfull was at a party because it was almost as though no one else of any interest was in the room. She would occasionally be seen at West London parties, or in Dublin, often hovering in the kitchen and invariably with a smile on her face.
People flocked to her because she was famous, obviously, but also because she was approachable, smart, and had had such a life of fluctuating fortunes that she seemed much like anyone else.
Apart from the fact obviously that she was massively famous, had personified the Swinging Sixties and had slept with three members of The Rolling Stones (two alive, one dead, although the third one wasn’t dead when she slept with him).
Her death, while not unexpected, is still shocking, and in some respects unbearably sad. Because her life was one of massively conflicting fortunes.
For several years she had been infirm, living in care, and was sustained by the attentions of similarly infamous bold-face names in West London.
A couple of friends of mine would regularly take care packages, usually consisting of food, magazines, music, and ridiculous expensive health remedies. She was caustic, often difficult, and obviously debilitated; but she was still Marianne, and her smile could make the whole visit worthwhile.
The ubiquity of the newly famous in the late Fifties and early Sixties means that we are now witnessing the deaths of the celebrated and the revered on a regular basis.
Anyone over the age of 50 is travelling down snipers’ alley, and it doesn’t matter how fast you walk, or how bright you burn.
Marianne wasn’t as famous as she had been 60 years ago, when her four-year relationship with Mick Jagger made her one of the most famous women in the world, and yet by dint of her work, her fall from grace - during her appalling and protracted heroin addiction she slept for 18 months on a brick wall in Soho - her public rehabilitation and her sense of perseverance, she was something of a national treasure.
Already there have been hundreds of thousands of words devoted to her legacy - even though the news was tragic, it was somehow comforting to see the outpouring of love for her on social media last night - although aspect of her career has yet to be explored in death.
Marianne was a) one of the first of the post-war generation to dramatically lose her looks and b) talk about it.
Marianne Faithfull in 1974
Getty Images
As you can see from the tsunami of photographs on Instagram today, back in the sixties she was a phenomenal beauty (when he came across her 60 years ago, one of the managers of the Rolling Stones, Andrew Loog Oldham, described her as “an angel with big tits”), an iconic figure as photographed as Twiggy, Jean Shrimpton or Sandie Shaw.
But the ravages of drug abuse systematically ruined her looks, and by the early eighties she looked as though he had been through hell. She had.
I remember seeing her in a cafe in the West End around this time and when she was pointed out to me, she was unrecognisable. She was tiny, sipping at a cup of tea almost as though it was the only sustenance she had received that day. Maybe it was. I remember being shocked that someone who had been so visible, and so adored, and so notable, could be hunched-up in a crappy Soho caff looking for all the world as though it had passed her by. The thing that shocked me most was my own realisation that the good life doesn’t always last forever.
“Bad behaviour makes men more glamourous,” she once said. “Women get destroyed, thrown out of society and locked up in institutions.”
But she also talked about the way in which her looks had started to make her feel invisible. For many she had been defined by her beauty, and when that went, so did her definition.
She had to come to terms with it. “We are all flawed, imperfect beings, but it is in our imperfections that we find our true beauty.”
She did, however, have a mordant sense of humour and a rather upliftingly cynical view of the world.
The last time I saw her was over a decade ago at a mutual friend’s party in an especially ungentrified part of the East End. We were acquaintances, not friends, but she had long since stopped worrying about the borders between the public and the private, and was sharing anecdotes as though they were free to air.
We were talking in the kitchen, not about anything significant, when suddenly a swirl of gossip suggested someone genuinely famous had arrived.
“Shit,” she smiled. “I’ve been usurped! Guess I’ll have to stay in the kitchen.”
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