Looking at photos of Marianne Faithfull from the 1960s, it`s difficult to equate that girl with the woman she is today.
Tho once innocent-looking blond became a decorative appendage of the early Rolling Stones-Mick Jagger in particular-and later allowed a promising singing and acting career to wallow in drug-laced self-doubt. Fortunately for her, she lived to tell about it and to slip quietly into middle age.
The young Faithfull`s model figure and silky locks have given way to settled comfortableness. The bird-song voice that once glided through syrupy hits like ”As Tears Go By” and ”Come and Stay With Me” is now a rough-hewn, throaty roll. The 20-year battle with drugs and alcohol has not been kind to her once-delicate features, but she does look at peace with herself. And there`s an air of optimism about her. The lingering glare of once being Mick Jagger`s consort has been replaced by the solitude of an 18th Century cottage in County Kildare, Ireland. She even looks back on her suicide attempts and her drug abuse with disarming humor.
It has been six years since she quit alcohol and drugs and with a new sense of inner calm, the singer and actress, now 45, has no desire to look back with blame or regret.
”I really don`t blame anything or anyone for what happened. I don`t even blame myself anymore,” she said. ”There`s simply no point in a lot of regrets.”
While Faithfull maintained her singing and songwriting career through the wild excesses of her life-her ”Broken English” and ”Strange Weather”
albums were hits in the 1980s-she`s now eager to return to making films. There is a plan for her to star in an upcoming independent American dark comedy about about ghosts, tentatively titled ”When Pigs Fly.”
Faithfull is pleased she`ll have to dye her hair black to play a ghost who returns to haunt the husband who killed her in ”When Pigs Fly.”
”It`s a great idea,” she said. ”It will free me from this thing of being a busty blond, which has always been a pain in the neck, in a way. I guess I`ll change the color back after the film because I`ve got used to being a blond, but I`m still waiting to have some fun,” she said, laughing.
An acting career that began in the late `60s never quite took off, even though critics approved of her performance as Ophelia in Tony Richardson`s 1969 stage and film production of ”Hamlet.”
After her first acting job in 1967 in a production of Anton Chekhov`s
”Three Sisters” at London`s Royal Court, Faithfull had some film offers, but she was fearful. Finally she accepted a role she thought was right for her in ”Girl on a Motorcycle.” But, she says: ”I was very disappointed in how it came out and that`s one of the reasons I didn`t do much in films afterward. I don`t cope well with disappointment. It was a wonderful experience making
`Hamlet,` (1968) though. I was glad I saw Tony Richardson in Los Angeles
(this year) before he died. He was a great man. That`s been about it with films until now.
”I have this thing about control and one of the problems for me was I never thought I`d have any control,” she said. But now she has decided that the answer to satisfaction is, ”You choose the people you work with very carefully, like I choose the people I make records with very carefully.”
One regret, she said, was not ever doing a good erotic drama.
”I don`t think I`ll be asked to do nudity at my age,” she said, laughing. ”Golly, I don`t think I have anything to fear about that. I`m not afraid of nudity at all. If I wasn`t such an official old lady now I wouldn`t mind.”
Faithfull`s house in Ireland is an important element in her life now.
”It`s an old folly (a peculiar-looking house) by a lake and I live there alone,” she said. ”My big problem is I don`t drive and I have to learn to because it`s quite a way to the nearest village. I love the quiet. Normally I`m on the road with my music so it`s the most perfect antidote to hotel rooms and all that stuff. The house is very austere and quite big. When I`m there, friends come and stay a lot. I love cooking and looking after people.”
The daughter of Austrian-born baroness Eva Erisso and R.G. Faithfull, a university lecturer, Faithfull feels at home in Ireland.
”I don`t know quite what it is about the Irish,” she said, ”but the people simply accept me. I don`t have a feeling that I don`t measure up. They have a way (of making) you feel all right. I don`t have to be social if I don`t want to be. Everyone seems to accept if sometimes you are grumpy and antisocial. I need that.
”It`s probably true that I sometimes wasn`t accepted in England. The feeling came from me, but often it feels it`s coming from other people.” She has been pleasantly surprised several times at the positive reaction from her fans.
”I remember the first time I went to Australia after my big suicide number there (in 1969) and I thought they would hate me,” she said. ”Of course, it wasn`t like that at all. When I did my performance at the Dominion Theatre in London in 1990 I was amazed at the reception I got. I had gone in there all defensive and they really opened up to me. I realize I just have to forget these fears and do what I want.”
Faithfull`s deep self-doubt can be traced to the uphill battle she faced being accepted on her own. Her life was swamped by the long relationship with Mick Jagger in the `60s and `70s.
”If I`d thought about stardom carefully when I started, which of course I didn`t, and how I would lose my anonymity, I don`t know whether I would have embarked on what I did.” What happened to Faithfull reads like a guided tour of the self-destruction of the `60s vision. It`s difficult not to look at her and reflect on why it all went wrong for so many of the `60s rock `n` roll icons.
The Rolling Stones back then were the symbol of non-conformity and rampant sexuality. Unlimited money, drugs and sex were already the order of the day for the band in 1964 when Mick Jagger became intrigued with Faithfull, who was married that same year to John Dunbar, an art student. Jagger got her a record deal and invited her into the band`s inner circle.
Faithfull became Jagger`s girlfriend through the turbulent days of founder-member Brian Jones` self-destruction and death and Jagger`s rise to individual stardom. The high-profile Faithfull-Jagger relationship
deteriorated with his obsessive career and her drug use, which included heroin. She attempted suicide in `69 while they were in Australia, where Jagger was acting in ”Ned Kelley.” Soon after that their relationship ended. Faithfull is on record as saying that if she and Jagger hadn`t split up, their being together would probably have killed her. And then, she said: ”I had to learn to survive in the normal world without lots of money and attention and get through it. I don`t think Mick could have managed that if he had had to.”
Jagger and Faithfull have never kept in touch. ”That`s all well over,”
she said. ”I still love him in a way, sure, but to me he is just like he is to you-he`s a very successful superstar.”
Faithfull is eager to tell her side of the story of those years and has plans for an autobiography to be published by Little, Brown and Co. in 1994.
”I`ve always thought autobiographies should be written only by people too old to do anything else, but I`ve come to realize that if I don`t tell my stories, others will and they`ll get it wrong. I`m in control of my life now and I want to get down what it was like to choose the path of Dionysus, the exhilaration of those days. No one else could do that.”
If she doesn`t want to look back with regrets at what happened, there is one area of her life at which she wishes she`d been better. She feels she neglected her son Nicholas, who was born in 1964 during her five-year marriage to Dunbar, who later owned an art gallery in London. Dunbar charged her with adultery when they were divorced.
”I turned (Nicholas) over to the nannies too much,” she said. ”Now I realize how I missed out on those years when he was a little boy.”
The major turning point in Faithfull`s life was the decision to beat her alcohol and drug addiction at the Hazelden Clinic in Minnesota in 1985.
The decision to move to Ireland was also an important stage and was prompted by having a big hit there in the late `70s with the single ”Dreaming My Dreams.”
”That was incredibly important to me because it was the thing that gave me the courage to start working again,” she said.
In 1990 she released ”Blazing Away,” an album recorded at St. Ann`s Cathedral in Brooklyn, featuring both her classic hits and more recent compositions. She followed that with concert tours in Europe, Japan and North America.
With her film career being revived, Faithfull doesn`t rule out the possibility of a return to the stage as well.
”I`ve always loved working in the theater and there are so many ways you can use your repertory experience in films and music. I like working with the same people again and again. Doing something night after night you get to know people and you get to feel you can all sorts of things with them without worrying.”
So a lot has changed for Marianne Faithfull, who candidly admitted that her son had never seen her as a normal person until she came out of the rehabilitation clinic seven years ago.
”He is so loving and forgiving of it all, it`s lovely,” she added. ”In the end I made the decision to live-so here I am. The days of temptation are long gone.”
