TMS Muse of the Week: Marianne Faithfull

(Gered Mankowitz)

Sometimes labels that are supposed to be flattering can actually be a double-edged sword, depending on who you ask. A lot of people in modern times find the identity of a muse pretty useless since at the end of the day, it’s the artist getting the credit for the work more than the person who inspired it. One woman who has always deserved credit for inspiring other artists as well as forming her own successful career is Marianne Faithfull. One of the biggest popstars to come out of the 1960s British Invasion, is now remembered by a lot of people as the most serious girlfriend in Mick Jagger’s life before Bianca Macías and Jerry Hall. Even worse, some have gone as far as to just lump Marianne in with famous groupies like Pamela des Barres and Connie Hamzy; which definitely isn’t fair, no matter how crazy Marianne’s personal life was in her 20s and 30s. Like fellow Stones girlfriend Anita Pallenberg, or Beatles girls Pattie Boyd and Jane Asher, Marianne always had a fulltime gig of her own. Though she’s actually a direct descendent of Austrian nobility and a great, great niece of Venus in Furs (1870) author Leopold von Sacher-Masoch; Marianne actually grew up rather modestly in Reading, England. Amusingly, Marianne originally considered joining a convent after attending Catholic school as a teenager, and later discovered she actually has Jewish ancestry on her mother’s side of the family.

Not long after turning 17 in 1963, Marianne was noticed by hit record producer and band manager Andrew Loog Oldham while she was performing in local theatre productions and singing at coffeeshops. This chance encounter became the big game changer for Marianne. Within months she had a record deal with Decca and a hit 1964 single, ‘As Tears Go By,’ composed by Oldham’s steady clients Mick Jagger & Keith Richards. The songwriters’ band the Rolling Stones would record the song on their 1965 LP ‘December’s Children,’ yet it’s Marianne’s original track on her self-titled debut album six months earlier that’s the version music fans remember. The new musical ingenue was in the right place at the right time when everyone wanted to be in Swingin’ London in the mid-1960s. Simultaneously while Marianne was the toast of the town with more singles like ‘Come Stay with Me,’ ‘Summer Nights’ and ‘Go Away from My World’ in 1965-66, she and Mick naturally hit it off as well. For the next four years, the couple lived the high life of rock tours, parties, clubs, music festivals, and friendships with the likes of the Beatles, the Who, the Faces and the Yardbirds. Marianne’s best friend during this period was model-actress Anita Pallenberg, who had her own history with both Brian Jones and Keith Richards of the Stones. But with all the fun soon came trouble. Marianne began her stardom as an English rose/girl-next-door, but her public image would involuntarily take a harsh turn.

(News Ltd. / Newspix)

Now, I could go into all the infamous, horrid details of Marianne’s low point, like her destructive heroin addiction or how she was out of work and nearly homeless by the mid-1970s. The chorus of the Rolling Stones’ 1971 classic ‘Wild Horses,’ [“Wild horses couldn’t drag me away”] is supposedly what Marianne said when she woke up in the hospital after an OD. Or how she suffered sexism in 1968 when Keith’s house was raided by cops looking for drugs while she and Mick were visiting; and the press ran a fake report suggesting Marianne was found naked with a Mars Bar in an unusual area of her body. But instead, I’m going to focus on Marianne being one of the biggest success stories in rock history. Rather than becoming a has-been, the vocalist managed to get her act together enough to record and release ‘Broken English’ in 1979. Featuring fan favorite songs like the title track and ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan,’ the LP certified Marianne still had it musically, and this time with some punk and new wave influences. She also got her first and only Grammy nomination—for Best Female Rock Vocal Performance—with ‘Broken English.’

Things started looking even brighter into the next decade with the blonde singer completely clean of drugs and on good terms again with her son, Nicholas Dunbar, after briefly losing custody of him during her addiction. Throughout her record success, the popstar also tried a hand at acting, including playing Ophelia in William Shakespeare’s Hamlet both on West End in 1969 and in Tony Richardson’s 1969 film adaptation; roles in artsy cult films like Jack Cardiff’s Girl on a Motorcycle (1968) and Kenneth Anger’s Lucifer Rising (1972); and even a brief appearance in Denis Villeneuve’s screen adaptation of Dune (2021). Many might not know Marianne was actually the very first person to say the word ‘f*ck’ in a major motion picture during Michael Winner’s I’ll Never Forget What’s’isname (1967).

Mick and Marianne parted ways in 1970 for reasons typical and atypical to how rockstar couples break up. The relationship wasn’t perfect and neither Marianne nor Mick have pretended otherwise over the years, with plenty dished by Marianne in her self-titled 1994 memoir. She was a girlfriend, a muse for a handful of Stones hits, and the band helped inspire her. But she’s an icon all her own too. Whether it’s her early pop LPs from the 1960s, or ‘Broken English,’ you can’t discredit Marianne or claim she didn’t hold her own. She beat addiction, bad publicity, self-destruction, and even illnesses from tuberculosis and Hepatitis C, to breast cancer and Coronavirus. Wild horses really can’t drag her away.