STILL FAITHFULL AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

STILL FAITHFULL AFTER ALL THESE YEARS

BY

PENNY VALENTINE

(This is Part II of our continuing coverage of the Stones. Last month: Mick Taylor. Next month: Ron Wood. -Ed.)

Real survivors are rare in rock 'n' roll. Those who live in the fast lane tend not to make it to 30, the rest are called survivors simply because they're alive, but few "went deep sea diving, touched the bottom" and came up again.

Marianne Faithfull pulls at the sleeves of her thick sloppy sweater, studies the ladder in her tights and apologizes for being late (she isn't), but she's been cleaning her flat. After ten years of steering clear of the recording studios an album, Faithless, has just been completed and she has finally managed to get a record contract after months of banging on company doors to be told she just wasn't—er—saleable.

She was a 17-year-old convent schoolgirl when Rolling Stones manager, Andrew Oldham, seized on her "potential"—that peculiar mixture of innocence, remoteness and beauty; vulnerability and brittle egotism—and intrigued her enough with the thought of show business and fame to sign her to a recording contract. She was ready and willing: "A really awful pretty little girl's arrogance," she recalls. Three hit singles later she was feted and became a feature of the "Swinging 60's"— photographed by David Bailey and on the cover of every expensive glossy in town.

"I spent at least three years pretending I wasn't a Junkie."

She is now 31. Her life has included a tempestuous five year headlinehitting affair with Mick Jagger; a starring role in the Stones' first major British drug bust; and a failed suicide attempt in Australia where she downed 150 sleeping pills when Jagger was filming Ned Kelly. Her later stint at acting won her critical acclaim and a reputation for unreliability. For over eight years she was a heroin addict.

Today there's a battered beauty about her and a lack of self-pity that's remarkable. The only things that haven't changed are the famous bird and flower tattoo on her hand, and the tremulous singing voice which retains its strangely insidious quality. For the rest, her precise diction now resonates with a deep rich chuckle, and she is no longer concerned in projecting a "cool" self-image, distancing her from those around her.

Flung into a world she had no prior knowledge of: "I was a very sheltered child coming from a convent. I didn't even know what a homosexual was. So I was obviously fantastically curious, and I think that's why I was so ready to get into anything and everything that came along"—Faithfull revelled in the attention rock 'n' roll brought her, the circle of friends and admirers who led an elite existence in the heyday of 60's British rock. It broke up her marriage to John Dunbar and it finally lost her custody of her son Nicholas. It took her, a ready victim, through dope, acid and cocaine to heroin.

When her relationship with Jagger broke up, her career in ruins, she discovered she was broke. She stayed that way until last year. Then old friends started to pull strings for her— she denies they were maybe moral debts owed from long ago—and she finally got some back royalties for "Sister Morphine": "I know one of the reasons they wouldn't give me the money at the time was because I'd go and blow it on smack. And looking back, if I'd got it between '69 and '74, I probably would have. As it was, I had so many debts, I went through it in about six months anyway!" she laughs.

She is now so open to interview that you feel like an intruder. She shrugs, "Once I would say 'no drugs and no Mick Jagger' to interviewers. But this time 'round I knew I'd be forced to face a lot of things, have to talk about it all. It's self-exploitive in a way, I know: But it really depends what the stakes are you see." The stakes are making a "come-back"—a situation this business does not take to. It doesn't like to be reminded of its failures and emotional cripples.

Faithfull finally took a heroin cure in 1974. A combination of two things forced her to reach the decision. One was meeting ex-junkie Alex Trachey, the Scottish poet; the other was watching her mother—to whom she had always been very close—temporarily disintegrate and attempt suicide.

"She just felt she couldn't hang on any longer. She looked after me a long time when I was ill, gave Nicholas and myself somewhere to live after Mick and I split up, watched me... Well," she looks out of the window, "that really shook me. I got registered as an addict, which is really the first step to getting out. Because the first thing you have to do is admit you're on the stuff, which you tend not to do.

I spent at least three years pretending I wasn't a junkie, that I didn't really 'need' heroin. Which is nonsense. And when you have to go to a clinic every day to pick it up, along with all the other junkies, then you know...

"I got registered with a really very good doctor Alex had fixed up for me and he gave me as much stuff as I wanted—too much. That's the problem with junkies, you always crave more, you never get quite enough if you're buying it. On the National Health Service they recognize this...."

TURN TO PACE 66

"I was very screwed up when Mick and I split."

CONTINUED FROM PAGE 45

Despite the hounding of newspaper gossip writers who followed Faithfull's "love life" after the Jagger split, she denies that she ever had a real relationship while she was on drugs.

"Taking smack is always a substitute and I didn't have one sexual experience while I was a junkie—because one' of the side effepts is that the junk becomes a kind of sexual experience itself. When I split with Mick I went off with Paddy Rossmore but that fell through because I was really in bits after Australia and Mick and I was taking stuff." (Rossmore went to Dublin and set up a heroin clinic when their relationship finished.)

"After about a year of being registered, I'd had enough and felt I could cut down. So I went to the doctor of my own accord and said 'I think I want to go to the hospital and come off,' and he actually told me he didn't think I'd manage it. He said it was very doubtful, that not many people as addicted as I was actually made it... in a way that was the best thing he could have said."

When she finally came out of hospital and announced she was cured of her addiction she was flooded With letters asking her to lectures, or to work with junkies. "But," she shrugs wistfully, "I -couldn't do it because really I had to think of myself and get myself together before I felt strong enough to deal with .that situation. There was no way I could go through that cure and start working with junkies...I was too close."

She had started on drugs her first year in rock 'n' roll, add took heroin while she was with Jagger. She looks back on their affair in an almost analytical way and says that she doesn't think even Jagger could have stopped her from becoming a junkie: "He wasn't really as clever as he makes out—and it wasn't only me, remember. First Brian, then Keith—Anitathen me...three people who he really, loved were hell bent on destroying themselves. You can see where that's ended for poor Keith now and I should think these days Mick's got very cold about it. But there was a time when he was very unhappy."

For the first few years in the Rolling Stones circus, Pallenburg was Faithfull's "idol": "I really used to think she was it. She was very good at making you feel she knew everything and that by comparison you knew nothing. She had this very glamorous mystique about her," she laughs. "And in a way that was very dangerous to someone like me but...that was really my problem. I don't blame anyone. My emotional life was very stunted, and I was a very odd personality in those days. I always thought, for instance, that love was something men gave you —not something you also gave in return. I was always a taker. I took everything like a sponge—drugs, things from people, taking, taking, never giving anything back. That whole cool image 1 put out was really a cover. It enabled me to go through life without giving anything, which is really a terrible thing..."

She thinks Jagger was a bit of a taker too: "Also he was stronger— physically—than me. You know, my mother said that during that time I was always saying 'Oh but I'm so unhappy,' and she couldn't understand it because I couldn't work out what was wrong. There is a cover of Queen magazine of Mick and I around 1971 and looking at that picture! think you can see how we were together—there was a vampire quality about it." She stares out of the window again. Does she ever see Jagger now? "No...I don't really think we'd have much in common anymore. I think maybe one of the reasons he. loved me was because I had all these sort of wild, strange ideas then..."

The day Jagger and Bianca got married in the South of France, Marianne Faithfull was arrested for being drunk and disorderly. She had three cocktails in a London hotel (being an addict meant she would get drunk on very little alcohol) and went into an Indian restaurant on her way to the railway station. "And I just...fell asleep," she chuckles. "It was awful. The guy called the cops and I was booked. I have to admit now that I was very screwed up when Mick and I split. I think for two or three years I was still shell-shocked although, of course, I kept telling everyone I was fine— which is what we English do isn't it? I often think if I'd been more open and been able to scream, there might have been someone around who would have helped..."

It was when she was taken seriously ill with peritonitis and rushed to hospital in Austria, mid-way through rehearsals, that Faithfull decided she didn't want to be an actress anymore. She had been hailed for her performance in Chekhov's Three Sisters and for her work with the Hampstead Theatre Club: "But I was doing a play I didn't like and I suddenly decided I hated the theatre, loathed the actors, and if this was supposed to be Great Art, I'd rather get back to recording and do something I enjoyed."

Although England's NEMS finally picked up her contract two years ago, she is still finding it hard to crack open the doors which were once so readily flung wide for her. She feels that more than anything else, her problem is her lack of "instantly saleable image":

"The other day I bumped into an old friend over lunch and he was talking about how I could be 'sold', and even he had problems, even though he'd done it once with the Girl On A Motorcycle film." (Faithfull was decked out in black leather—innocence and fetishism rubbed shoulders.) "In the end he thought I should write my autobiography through my songs but I don't know...it's a bit early for that. There are still things I can't really talk about."

Faithless only has two of her own numbers on it—the rest Tend to be culled from the new country field. These days faithfull lives with punk musician Ben Briley in Chelsea. She looks back on her life and thinks she has survived only because she was always physically strong and healthy; and she only regrets the loss of her son to her former husband: "Nicholas is 12 now, and he's quite a punk. He can gob with the best of them." She says she never saw herself as the epitome of the 60 s, although she very much, naively, believed in the dream:

"I believed it was good and pure and true you know—and then it wasn't. I think all that ended for me in 1968. That was when it all started to go very wrong. First Brian, then Jimi Hendrix died, and all those people you knew who were dying of drugs...you began to realize it wasn't what you wanted or hoped it would be, or what they said it would be. We really believed, because we were so young, that anything was possible. We had enormous confidence. In a way we were very egotistical and a real 'consumer' society. We consumed everything and we believed we'd come out of it all OK.

"I suppose if I'd stopped at smoking dope and taking acid...I don't know. It's like now people say coke's okay and I really don't agree. I think it's a very heavy narcotic. But you see you always think it won't be you...like I always thought I'd come out of it. I used to think it was like deep sea div.ing, the whole thing. That I'd touch the bottom and when I came up again everything would be exactly the same. And, of course, it isn't..."