Faithfull: An Autobiography

A fascinating book that describes the life of Marianne Faithfull and her many, many affairs, as well as a bit of her musical journey; there's also a lot about Faithfull's observations of the Rolling Stones, from her vantage point of having been with at least three of them (her buddy Anita Pallenberg has the same point of view, having also been with Brian, Jagger and Richards; unfortunately, she hasn't written her autobiography yet). Faithfull is married, with a child and a hit record when she's barely 20, her husband the beatnik hipster John Dunbar, who was actually much more hip and far deeper into stuff than Mick or Keith were in 1962. Life was a roller coaster of meeting people, getting famous, and then not turning back from that life ever again, from time to time getting frantic, getting crazy, getting up, collecting families to attach herself to since she didn't have a proper one herself, never responsible about money except for the early days with Dunbar when she was the only one bringing any into their young household. Small wonder she got messed up.Faithfull sometimes comes off like a princess, but she more often seems like a wise sage, and perhaps the smartest person to have ever come out of the Stones camp. Her earliest memories are recounted at the beginning, along with some interesting tales of her eccentric parents (amazingly, her goofy British father is even more extreme than her Austrian mother, a haughty but penniless aristocrat).The book is full of great anecdotes, like being on tour in the UK with Roy Orbison (who expected her to jump in with him), and a young Graham Nash when he was in the Hollies ("even I had enough sense to not be with him"). There are long descriptions of various trips and other mental journeys ("Sleep was out of the question. I lay down on the bed, but found that when I shut my eyes I could see right through my eyelids."). There's nearly a whole chapter about meeting the hip young Bob Dylan on his first visit to London, when he held court with the Beatles fawning at his feet, and fools like Donovan were mocked mercilessly. She describes being on tour, with Jimmy Page and Jackie DeShannon romping next door (Page had been a session man on "As Tears Go By" - "He played on almost all my sessions in the sixties. He was very dull in those days"). In 1965 she was on tour with a bunch of bands, including the Mannish Boys, whose lead singer was a young Bowie. Faithfull devotes most of the chapter "What's A Sweetheart Like You..." to a description of her first meeting with Bob Dylan, which happened just after she found out that she was pregnant and had gotten engaged to John Dunbar. Rejecting Dylan's advances, she gets into an intellectual discussion with him that sounds very Dylanesque:"How can you take a guy who wears glasses seriously," she quotes him saying. "Only undertakers and college professors and grandmas and people who can't even see what's in front of their noses wear glasses. He's an intellectual jerk, that's the worst kind of jerk there is."Ha ha ha... They meet again a few more times, later on to discuss her album Broken English song by song. Slowly, she slips into the Stones' orbit, first by being with Brian, then Keith, and eventually Mick, with whom she stays several fateful years (during which she provided the inspiration for several songs, also co-writing at least one song). Faithfull has great descriptive passages in her text about the Stones:Where Brian [Jones] was soft, malleable, vague and unstable, everything about Keith [Richards} was angular, flinty, compact, hard, disctinct. The hatchet face, chiselled, rock-hard features, Indian scout's eyes that bore through everything. The mysterious rider appearing out of nowhere. Hypnotic, sinister, disturbing. A cursed-by-fate intensity, set off against gorgeous clothes, self-mocking humor and a sardonic turn of phrase.Later, in the photo captions, she describes Keith again: "Bourbon to hand, switchblade in his boot, guitar across his back and the law at his heels - Keith Richards is rock 'n' roll." Mick she describes in many different ways:There is quite a perverse side to Mick and it's no accident that his anguished relationships produced some great songs. Mick is so grounded as a person he never loses his footing. He can be right there next to the person falling off the edge but not slip himself. For a songwriter, this is a very useful talent. He is able to observe the car crash at the moment of impact and escape unscathed - a quality that is extremely exasperating for the victims. I always envied Keith and Anita because they looked into the jaws of death together. It was never like that with Mick and me.She has her fun with Mick. "Like Ronald Reagan, he had learned to play a character more copmlex than his own." Ouch!! "The most indelible misconception to come out of Let It Bleed was the silly notion of Mick as the disciple of Satan. A devotee of satin, perhaps," and she describes the origins of "Sympathy for the Devil" in Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, which the well-read Faithfull had given Jagger a copy of. There's a hilarious encounter between Jagger and the Labour MP Tom Driberg:"My dear boy, we wouldn't expect you to attend to the day-to-day ephemera of the House. Not at all. We see you more as, uh, a figure-head, like, you know...""The Queen?" said Mick, completing his sentence."Precisely!"What a scream. the conversation is full of "funny chat and zinging questions", but when it founders, "in an awkward moment of silence Dribert looked at Mick's shorts and suddenly said 'What an enormous basket you have.'" Oh la la!!!This was all happening around the time that Eric Clapton was giving Jagger guitar lessons (?!?!).She recounts the weekend that she and Jean de Bretueil went to Paris and he sold Jim Morrison the dose that killed him (some sources claim that he had done the same thing for Janis Joplin!). They ran for Morocco. "Jean saw himself as a dealer to the stars. Now he was a small-time guy in big trouble. He was very young. Had he lived, he might have turned into a human being."Faithfull describes her life on the street in London, living on top of a bombed-out wall in a squat, and how she found some sort of truth there, eventually pulling herself out to resume her musical career, and possibly going straight eventually. Here the story starts to peter out, as celebrities like the Rolling Stones seldom show up, and Bob Dylan only makes an occasional appearance (Dylan never forgot their first encounter, and their reunion is peculiar. "I idolized Dylan, but to be idolized by Dylan is a very different thing... an unnerving thing. Terrifying, really, as if the Minotaur had taken a liking to you."). But in her new phase, we somewhat un-grounded as we no longer know or understand her co-conspirators. But her description of her remarkable life is always strong and fascinating, if somewhat maddening, tragic and pathetic as she makes herself a burden on friends, family and state. But she still does have several great anecdotes in her, such as the one of getting blotto with the Von Bülow's, and trying on shoes from Sonny's staggering collection. "I passed out and was found lying on the bed wearing pair number 57." She appeared in a documentary with Robert Michum, who gave her a classic movie era screen kiss in the middle of Hollywood Boulevard, and eventually became a grandmother. "Oscar looks just like me and therefore is the best thing ever." And that's that.

The point has been made before, but it bears reiterating: Faithfull may be the single greatest book ever written about the Rolling Stones (and this is coming from a girl who owns at least 50 of `em). Of course, it's not all about the Stones, and thank God; Marianne is just as interesting as Mick or Keith anyway, if not more so, and this book is her masterpiece. But it does delight us with offers of unparalleled insights that could only be observed by someone so close to the boys, the music, and the whole scene of Swinging London. And unlike Spanish Tony, whose book Up And Down With The Rolling Stones was considered an insider's guide to the Stones and their wicked ways, Marianne wasn't just a hanger-on. She was the real deal. So many of the various personas that Jagger adopted (and indeed continues to perpetuate to this day) -- Jumpin' Jack Flash, Lucifer, Turner from Performance - are due largely to Marianne. From Bob Dylan's lost poem he wrote about Marianne when she was hanging out in his hotel room in `65 (enraged, he threw it in the trash after learning she was about to wed student-cum-gallery owner John Dunbar) to seeing Hendrix in a tiny club (he too had his eye on her, naturally) to spending a secret night in ecstasy with Keith Richards, and stories too numerous to even begin to list, Marianne travels back through the highs and lows of her life, literal and metaphorical, in this book that can only be described with oxymorons: funny and heartbreaking, beautiful and tragic, entertaining and disturbing.It seems that many people conjure images of a virgin teenaged beauty queen turned debaucherous rock star girlfriend turned junkie when they hear the name Marianne Faithfull, if they even know that much. What images come to your mind? A Mars Bar and a fur rug? (That bit of slandering - the Mars Bar - may seem humorous in retrospect, but it irrevocably tarnished Marianne's reputation - all due to the complete lie of perverted cops with a vendetta to avenge). Do you picture a detached angel with long, blonde bangs humming "As Tears Go By"? A mini-skirted siren on Jagger's arm? A poor little junkie? That's exactly the kind of thing Marianne would hate to hear (for possibly the millionth and one time). With this book, Marianne deconstructs all of the stereotypes foisted on her, all of the myths and legends and headlines and sensational dramas. So what is left underneath? A portrait of an incredibly honest, funny, intelligent - often brilliant - woman who has tried to make sense of her life - the past 30 years of which (this book was published in 1994) have been lived in the public eye. Incredible to think that now, in 2009, she's been a celebrity for 45 years.Faithfull is distinct from other "rock n' roll memoirs", if we can call that a category. Marianne appears neither to sugarcoat nor gloss over the bad times/unflattering things about herself and her cohorts, nor does she recall them with that embellished, overly dramatic, pompous sort of self-importance. She just states things as she recalls. In fact, her diplomacy is rather incredible, and extremely refreshing. It makes what she is saying much more believable. And Marianne by nature is a performer, an actress and a story-teller, so her prose are witty, warm and delivered with an unmistakable voice. One thing that struck me in this book was just how smart she really is. David Dalton, no stranger to the Stones (his book The Rolling Stones: The First Twenty Years is a great collection), undoubtedly helps, but the ideas, stories and words are all Marianne's. Due to being "out of it" for so many years, I'm sure Marianne needed help piecing things all together (especially times and dates and such, which she admits to having difficulty with due to all the lost years).Marianne was not only in the studio and the bedroom with the Stones during their creative peak (a high of sheer artistic brilliance that they rode in 1968 and 1969), but her influence on Mick and therefore the music he created is considerably greater than most people know. She inspired songs from "Let's Spend The Night Together" to "She's Like A Rainbow" to "Sympathy For The Devil" to "You Can't Always Get What You Want" (and there are quite a few more). Although Marianne and Mick parted ways for good in August of 1970, her memory is all over 1971's Sticky Fingers (besides "Sister Morphine", for which Marianne penned the lyrics herself, I feel sure that "Sway" and "I Got The Blues" are about her too - and of course the epic love song "Wild Horses").Another thing I love about this book is that its stars, besides the usual suspects - Mick, Keith, Brian, etc - are some of the lesser-known-about characters in Rolling Stones folklore (Chrissie Gibbs, Robert Fraser, Michael Cooper, etc). Anita Pallenberg is all over the book, which is a real treat for fans of hers (like myself) that don't have many sources to go on.Marianne pretty much dropped off the radar in peoples' minds post-Jagger (until returning in 1979 with a hit album), but what is revealed is just as incredible (albeit considerably more depressing). In 1970, addicted to heroin, she was recruited to play Lilith in Kenneth Anger's mind-screw of a film, Lucifer Rising. This is around the time that Marianne's permanent residence was not the Persian rugs and hardwood floors of 48 Cheyene Walk, but rather The Wall in Soho, where she lived as a homeless registered heroin addict for two years. She recorded some new songs that appeared on the 1971 compilation Rich Kid Blues (which Marianne mocks for her dreadful, heroin-sick voice and the ridiculous title - another falsity of her image was that she came from a wealthy upbringing; her mother was a penniless baroness). And of course she found love post-Jagger: Oliver Musker, who got her off the streets; Ben Brierly, the punk prince and eventual husband, who wrote some of Broken English; and Howard Tose, the mixed-up outsider she met at rehab who tragically committed suicide at the end of their relationship (he suffered from paranoia, schizophrenia, depression and other awful things).Throughout Faithfull, Marianne takes us everywhere with her - from St. Joseph's convent school to Courtfield Road, on wonderful holidays to Tangier and Brazil, through seedy apartments and rehab clinics, to the remote quietness of the Irish countryside, and pretty much everywhere in between. She even takes us inside her dreams, which are always fascinating and often prophetic. There's no wonder that a movie about Marianne's life, based on this book, is in production (last I read). Although doubtless, whoever is cast as our heroine could never possibly capture the charm, beauty, strength and story of this inimitable queen.Read this book. I've just begun it again, for the fourth time.

Very good book full of personality and humour , loved all the parts about the 60s the rolling stones and the lifestyle they all led , some times bit muddled and contradictory so your left slightly confused about what went wrong with the relationship and was sad that she seemed almost determined to be as into drugs as possible at any cost. Very honest even if it showed her in a bad light and have to remember how young they all actually were. Came across as very likable person in spite of everything.

I really enjoyed this book, she’s honest and doesn’t hold back about her relationship’s with men even when she was married and all the other escapade’s and the ups and downs she had in her rock years, a really “must” read

Wow - what a life this lady has had. Knew her for the Rolling Stones connection but had no idea about all her hardships and struggles. She is one tough cookie that's all I can say! Worth reading.

I loved this book, even though I questioned many things about it. A lot of it doesn't make any sense, a lot of it sounds mental, but the story draws you in and keeps you riveted until the end. A very unusual strange life story of a very unusual woman.

Excellent tale of 60s and 70s excess from someone who was at the very centre of it all.