"Good Lord, why?" rasps Marianne Faithfull, as she sinks into the hotel's rumpled bedding. “It’s so strange, why would you be a fan of somebody who’s never really done anything until now. A fan of what? A fan of Mick Jagger’s girlfriend?” Without much luck at clarity, I try to explain my devotion to the hypnotic ether that emanated from Marianne’s earliest recordings. “It was new,” she decides at last. “That’s what it was.” She can accept the tentativesingles on grounds of originality, if not for the adulation which greeted them a long fifteen years ago.

In those wildly inventive, mid-60’s gogo years, no one, male or female, was embarrassed at being a Marianne Faithfull fan. She was a real live fairy princess, blonde and with of blonde and blue-eyed, with a wisp of a body and a glimmer of a smile so haunting one easily absorbed the legend of her convent school upbringing and subsequent fame. She deserved to be discovered by Rolling Stones svengali Andrew Oldham, and personified her delicate first single, “As Tears Go By,” the loving creation of a still-innocent Mick Jagger, so the fan mags read. Jerkily adolescent boys who dated hometown girls as consolation prizes dreamed of going out with her. And the girls who stood over ironing boards, pressing staight lines into unruly mops of hair, suffered their beauty agonies gladly if the result might make them look like her.

Over a decade later, her Broken English album greeted more with honest critical acclaim than gushing breathlessness, Marianne Faithfull peers at an old fan club badge she’d been given the night before. She perks up a bit, examining every inch of her miniaturized 17-year-old self. “I’d never known there was a fan club. It cheers me up, it’s nice to remember how I used to look. The kind of innocence—I’m gonna put it on again, would you pass it to me.” She wraps herself in an oversized tan jacket and lights another of too many cigarettes, fighting the advanced case of laryngitis that plagued her long awaited American performing debut on Saturday Night Live.

I may not know much, but I know I don't want to be alone.

“When I got here, my voice was fine,” she frets. “I hadn’t toured for 18 months, so I Was out of condition. I should have whispered at rehearsal, but because my band are not session musicians, but a red band, if I sing properly, they play better. And I over-strained my voice. They should have just let me ALONE,” she forces out with disgust. “But they all think, which is not true, that it was cocaine. I’m not a total fool. I know that all drugs are bad for the voice, unfortunately they are. ”

Her resignation at anticipating other people’s put-downs might be dismissed as paranoia, coming from anybody else. But in Marianne Faithfull’s case, too often the slurs were true. She retains the fierce defensiveness of the formerly drug dependent, giving all the cash in her purse to a visiting friend, a beatnik author caught in some private hell of dcohol or addiction. She spares no opinion, controls no outburst, and I think that if innocence nearly killed her, it’s honesty that has pulled her through.

Having lived as a teenage pop star, a gossip column favorite for her rock star attachment, a junkie, a divorcee and a very up and down careerist, Marianne Faithfull is today remarkably beautiful. Her hair, blonde tipped with a splash of strawberry tint, hints at her fondness for punk style. Her figure is more curved than the lace-collared 60’s minidresses hinted, but just as enviable. The tiredness which shadows her face after a sleepless night in the Mudd Club is gone when she reappears the next afternoon. Only her voice has irrevocably changed, shifting from foamy lightness to ripe sultriness, and Marianne is pleased with the evolution. She tells a disc jockey who tactlessly questions the difference, “my voice and songs were perfect for someone 17, 18, 19. Then time goes on, lots of it, and my voice is sounding right for a woman of 33. If I had the same voice as at 17, I’d sound like an idiot. ”

Vm not a total fool. / know that all drugs are bad for the voice...

Of course I doubt that at 17, Marianne could have imagined herself snarling through Heathcote Williams’s lyrics of “Why D’Ya Do It,” a morality play in song that asks the kind of life blood questions one never satisfactorily resolves, like “why’d you let her suck your cock.” Forget it. Straight out of convent school, all wide-eyed and unaware, Faithfull was best imagined as an unopened hothouse flower.

“I wasn’t smoking or drinking, cigarettes or alcohol, taking drugs, I didn’t even sleep « around. All I did, from the minute I got up to JS the minute I fell down into bed was work, ^ from the age of 17 to about 20. And then £ suddenly, when I found myself financially OK, by chance, living with Jagger, I thought, right, I’m now going to start doing a bit of living, and of course I did with a vengeance. Presumably, if I’d not left home and school, I don’t know what I would’ve done. I would’ve been bored to tears. I would’ve been Lucy Jordan,” she thinks, referring.to the subject of Shel Silverstein’s plaintive ballad, which she covers on Broken English.

Janis Ian wrote a choice slice of reality when she said, “I learned the truth at seventeen,” and I ask Marianne if she thinks trading her adolescence for an image was worthwhile. She leans forward and responds with an intensity she’ll equal only one other time during the two days I spend with‘her. “You don’t know how poor my mother and I were and you don’t know how ambitious I was. I did it. I got my mother out of that house. Then it all fell to bits, I lost the child and blah, blah, blah. And my fantasy of this little old lady in a 500-year-old country cottage, with a little rose garden and lots of animals, I don’t think it’s her trip at all, but my mother’ll never admit it.” (Marianne set up her mother, an impoverished baroness, in a country cottage. —Ed.)

. Trying to rediscover the person trapped in the image took up a decade of Marianne Faithfull’s life. She cut an album called Faithless about four years ago,which went no place fast, and largely abandoned singing for the stage, working in small theatre clubs, occasionally appearing in BBC teleplays, and starred as Ophelia opposite Nicol Williamson in a film of Hamlet. For the most part, she stayed away from easily-ridiculed exploitaitive enterprises, having been marked for her sexual athletics in the 1967-vintage Girl On A Motorcycle. However, she did take on the role of Lilith in Kenneth Anger’s still-unreleased Lucifer Rising. Except for “Comeback” and “What happened to” stories which sporadically appeared in British women’s magazines, Marianne Faithfull’s true identity was an unhappy mystery.

Perhaps her renewal had to do with Marianne’s meeting Ben Brierly, a musician formerly in the Vibrators and now starting up a group called the Blood Poets. Around two years ago, she organized a band and toured Britain, breaking in several compositions she and her musicians had written. They received encouragement from the public and Island Records, and after solidifying the tunes on the. road, recorded then with a producer named Mark Miller Mundy.

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Mundy has come to America with Faithfull and the band in the role of musical director, and his grey-suited standoffishness contrasts sharply with Marianne’s open warmth. He barely nods when I comment about some of Marianne’s early recordings, reacting only to compliments about Broken English. Marianne has spent a large part of the day heaping venom on him for pushing her to sing on television with half her , voice gone, and compound the injury the next day with a full show at the Mudd Club. Still, she realizes that she’s quick to throw blame, admitting “you never know when you’ve got a reasonable grudge, or when you’re looking for an excuse. But I must give him his due, the fucking cunt. A) He gave me the one chance when no one would touch me with a ten-foot pole and B) he made a very good record. I couldn’t get anyone to4 do it. I had all these songs and they were scared of my past,” she says flatly. “They were scared of scenes like this and what’ll happen if you blow it on Saturday Night Live.”

The safety-net workers would really be ’scared if they heard Marianne lambast reporters who asked her the wrong questions. When I first saw her, she was talking on the phone to the Wall Street Journal, shaking her fist and insisting, “I am not political!” She preferred to treat John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero” as a “three year old song of social envy. It’s very good, it’s the best I know, but there aren’t many political people Who are good. ”

Heathcote Williams is one of the exceptions, probably because his politics are anarchist. She describes a typical Williams escapade with glee. “He recorded a half-hour speech on the Queen’s cunt with a 10 pound ($20) transmitter and put it on the Home Secretary’s roof in Belgrave Square and split. This thing was being transmitted all over London! If you’re going to be political, that’s political isn’t it, but it’s also very funny.” Her appreciation of I humor does a lot to explain her own artistic preferences, which run from Madness, Tammy Wynette, the Ramones and Lene Lovich to beatnik poetry and a love for “trash” reading.

What Marianne can live without are stereotyped artifacts of men .and women, exploiting each other or themselves. She’s got no use for deception, calculation or pre-set roles, and despises “a certain kind of ‘chick singer,’ as they’re known, that make me want to throw up. And certain kinds of trendy Ms’s that also make me want to throw up. See, I don’t really think sex comes into it that much—men’s songs, women’s songs—well, not to me. If I’m singing a man’s song that’s talking from a man’s point of view to a woman, I’d still say it that way, and it wouldn’t mean I was a dyke. ‘Why D’Ya Do It’ is in fact a dialogue,, though I do not wish to define it that much.”

The radio disc jockey interviewing Marianne expresses his regret that the song in question can’t be aired on his extremely commercial station, arid is openly amazed that his former teenage crush couki actually say such things. “Sexual jealousy is a really touchy subject, ” she patiently says, pointing out, “what people find difficult to take is that those kind of rows go on behind closed doors, but you never see it in public. If I didn’t have any authority about the subject,

I wouldn’t have done it. One of the best things about ‘Why D’Ya Do It’ is it got that monkey off my back.”

She’s tin varnished truth, totally out in the open, and everyone in the studio is taken off guard. The jock quickly changes to an easier theme,-and Marianne deftly fences with him, refusing to elaborate on future plans. She’d like to tour, she’d like to cut another record. But what she’d like to do most, since it really is the evening of the day, is board her plane back to London, where she lives with Ben Brierly, whom,she married a year ago. For the second time, I see Marianne Faithfull’s face show total determination. “I may not know much, but I know I don’t want to be alone,” she whispers.. “Whatever happens with the record is tine, but I won’t let it spoil what I have with Ben. And I have to make sure it doesn’t.” I feel like trading my soul to ensure her future happiness.

We pile into a limo that’s been hauling her around New York on the endless string of interviews and appointments, and I give Marianne a book of 1930’s short Stories which she delightedly adds to other literary gifts, two paperbacks about women’s erotic dreams, and a collection. of Italian renaissance poetry, inscribed “To the traveller” from Anita Pallenberg. In return, she unpins a badge from her black beaded sweater and hands it to me. “1 am an Enemy of the State,” it reads, and I know that the state in question is no government bastion, but the land of false promises, and it’s already been overthrown . , W