Naked girl at Stones party
Marianne
Faithfull seemingly moved through the fair that was the Swinging Sixties
effortlessly, but the footing was treacherous.
Her father
was an academic; her mother came from Polish nobility. A great-great-uncle was
Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, from whom the word “masochist” is derived and author
of Venus in Furs, the underground novel about sadomasochism that inspired
the Velvet Underground song.
Faithfull was a 17-year-old folksinger adrift in a male-dominated world of rock musicians. She was a musical muse to Bob Dylan – she turned down his advances, leading him to write It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue in response – and a smitten Graham Nash, who wrote Carrie-Ann about her.
(Adding Wild
Horses, Mick Jagger’s ode to their relationship, and she overtakes Patti
Boyd, for whom George Harrison wrote Something and Eric Clapton wrote Layla).
Faithfull wandered
into the tarpit that was the Rolling Stones inner circle, having brief affairs
with Keith Richards and Brian Jones, then getting pregnant by U.S. pop singer
Gene Pitney who had played piano during a Stones recording session, before
connecting with Jagger.
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Faithfull the folk singer |
A couple of
other Top 40 singles, Summer Night and Come and Stay with Me, were
pleasant but did little to bolster Faithfull’s reputation as more than just the
girl on Jagger’s arm.
In early 1967, the couple and others, including George and Patti Harrison, attended a weekend retreat at Keith Richards’ country estate. Following a tip, a squad of 18 police officers raided the house with Jagger and Richards arrested for drug offenses based on the discovery of a few roaches and amphetamine pills (which likely belonged to Faithfull, but that Jagger claimed as his own to save her from arrest).
Two legends
grew out of the party’s aftermath: that the police hid in the bushes until the
Harrisons left, thereby not arresting a Beatle, and that the police interrupted
Jagger while he was eating a Mars Bar out of Faithfull’s vagina – a rumor the
police floated to the British tabloids out to sink those degenerate Stones. (It
was always the specificity of the candy brand that made this sound more like
the fulfillment of someone’s sexual fantasy than reality).
What is true
is that Faithfull had just taken a bath when the cops busted in and covered
herself with a nearby rug, hence the headline in the next day’s Evening
Standard, NAKED GIRL AT STONES PARTY.
Marianne and
Mick went from being photographed in airport terminals and entering clubs, to getting
their pictures taken in front of a courthouse. They broke up shortly
afterwards.
Faithfull
sightings were rare through most of the seventies. She developed a serious drug
habit, and was at times homeless, living in the streets or squatting in
abandoned buildings.
In 1979, her
voice weather-beaten, lived in – you get the idea – Faithfull came out of
nowhere to record a new wave single Broken English, a critical and dance
floor favorite. She’d found her own voice, and a second career as international
chanteuse and actress, touring sporadically, but always intertwined with a long
litany of health issues, suicide attempts, marriages, divorces, miscarriages
and abortions.
She deserved
respect for what she accomplished. All of it can be considered a triumph.