Marianne Faithfull

Martyn Palmer interviews

On the night of her recent 60th birthday, Marianne Faithfull, one-time pin-up of the Sixties sex, drugs and rock'n'roll generation, had a quiet dinner with friends at a well-known Parisian restaurant. 

Those present included her best buddy, the Hollywood actress Carrie Fisher, and Francois Ravard, who Faithfull refers to in that bewitching, gravelly-toned voice of hers as "My lover". 

It was, she says, a restrained affair, particularly as she is now a non-drinker and relishes nothing more than an early night. 

"I have retreated socially because it’s so boring going out with friends who are drinking when you are not yourself. My trick is to stay for a bit and then **** off," she says, making that word sound, somehow, seductively urbane. "I always make sure I have my own key. That's the answer, really." 

At one time, of course, both drink and drugs would have been her props. In the early Seventies, after the demise of her legendary relationship with Mick Jagger, she was on a self-destructive spiral of addiction that left her destitute and living on the streets of London. 

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The Berlin Film Festival, where we’re meeting, might be a tempting occasion to fall off the wagon. It can't be easy to deal with the level of curiosity that attends women who have been either very, very beautiful, or very, very wild. Or in Faithfull's case, both. 

"But it's my job to turn up here and promote my film and to be cool and to be myself," she says. "And having a hangover is not good for me and it's not good for you. Besides, I have been there, got the t-shirt and the video. Obviously I have this self-destructive streak. I've always had it. But it's got much, much better and I'm managing pretty well. I think I got over my death wish years ago."

Faithfull is not keen on being described as "a survivor", although she has indeed, lived to tell a tale that has included not just the destructive rock'n'roll rollercoaster but more recently a brush with breast cancer that has made her re-evaluate her life. She prefers instead to think of herself as "a winner", and these days looks and behaves that way.

During the festival, there to promote the film Irina Palm, in which she stars, she has been a model of professionalism. And today she arrives at Berlin's Regent Hotel for our interview smartly dressed in blue crushed-velvet jacket, sharp white blouse and well-cut jeans. Her ash-blonde hair is carefully coiffed. 

True, there are laughter lines now around her periwinkle blue eyes and her bones are more cushioned than in the days when she was Jagger's muse and the subject, too, of Leonard Cohen's haunting song So Long Marianne. She is no longer the catatonically beautiful 17-year-old waif mouthing the words of As Tears Go By on Top of the Pops. 

Read an interview with Leonard Cohen

Faithfull knows this better than anyone, of course. At one point we talk about her first film, Girl on a Motorcycle, the risque – or so it was billed at the time – tale of a woman who leaves her husband to run off with a good-looking fella (Alain Delon) on the back of his Harley. 

"I did not enjoy it," she says now. "It was like a Harley-Davidson commercial. But I'm glad I did it because at least there's a record on film of how gorgeous I was. Otherwise I would definitely not have remembered."

She remains, however, immensely attractive with an expressive, animated face, a droll sense of humour and the urbane manner acquired not least by living mostly in Paris for the past two decades. 

Was she not fazed by the whole subject matter of Irina Palm – the tale of a woman of a certain age who enters the oldest profession, providing "massage" in a seedy London sex club in order to pay for life-saving medical treatment for her grandson? 

"Not at all," she says, clearly finding the question rather narrow-minded and provincial. 

"Despite the plot line, this is not a dirty movie. Actually, it is a rather moving and complex tale of a woman who will do anything for her son and grandson – a theme that I can very much identify with. It's a very good film and my part in it is complex. I'm actually very proud of it."

To research the role, Faithfull spoke to two friends in the sex industry. How does she know such people? "Through drugs," she says simply. "If you're a prostitute you're almost invariably an addict too, because that's how you get through it. You can't do it straight. So I was able to ask them a bit but not much, because work is not something they really like to talk about. 

"It might surprise you but I don't know very much about the sex industry at all and I have never, for example, been inside a sex club. I don't like being around that sort of thing. Sex is all right, I suppose, but I'm much more interested in love, to tell you the truth."

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I tell her that her own life would make a fascinating biopic. "You've got to be kidding! I don't like biopics. No, I'm afraid not. My life is my life and I'm still living it and it's by no means over. I did write an autobiography, yes, and that's grand. And my book is my book. Let it stay there."

Memories, Dreams and Reflections by Marianne Faithfull is available at the Saga Bookshop for £9.99

She is unexpectedly guarded about her love life, which aside from the Jagger affair has included three marriages. One to John Dunbar, who is the father of her now grown-up son, Nicholas, and two others, to Ben Brierly and Giorgio Della Terza. Both ended in divorce but she has been happily ensconced with Ravard, also her manager, for the past 15 years. "It took me a while to find the right man," she smiles. 

Ravard was by her side while she battled with breast cancer last year, receiving treatment at the Gustav Roussy Institute in Paris from the same celebrated team of surgeons and consultants who recently attended Kylie Minogue.

Despite the rigours of the treatment and what she describes as "a truly horrible year", she declares herself to be absolutely fine. "I'm really well, thank you," she says, "And really, really lucky. They found my breast cancer very early, which makes all the difference."

For all that, she says, being diagnosed with the disease was among the most frightening experiences of her life. "But, then, I grew up in an age where if you got cancer it was very final. You got it and you died. Now, though, it's changed so much and you can be saved. But it's taught me that the most important thing is to keep checking so that whatever is happening, they can catch it as quickly as possible. 

"For men at this age it's prostate cancer, for women it's breast cancer and although the tests aren't pleasant I would urge everyone to have them because it's a matter of life and death and I want to see my grandchildren grow up."

10 early signs of cancer

The two grandsons in question - "Nicholas's boys" – are now aged 13 and 10. Faithfull is close to both and, indeed, to her son, who edits a finance magazine. 

"I didn't have very much in common with my character Maggie, in Irina Palm. She's a suburban woman from the shires. Not like me at all. But, like her, I do love my son very much. And like her, too, I had him when I was just 18. I adore my grandsons too, all the more so since having breast cancer. But then that whole experience has made love and life, friends and family so much more precious."

She was told as much by Marsha Hunt, who, you may recall, also dated Mick Jagger in the Seventies, having a child with him some time after he had broken up with Faithfull. The two had not talked for years but Hunt, who also recently suffered breast cancer, got back in touch, "and we got very close over this experience that we had in common. Marsha, in fact, had a really, really serious experience of breast cancer, much worse than me.

"She wrote to me and then we started talking and she really helped me through it. She said, 'Listen, they caught it early and you'll see that out of something so dark and frightening something good will come.' And, in fact, she was absolutely right. It has just made me so much more appreciative of all the blessings in my life."

During the dark days of her illness Jagger was also in contact. "He called me while I was having treatment in hospital, which was extremely thoughtful of him," she says. 

Over the years they have stayed in touch, watching each other's activities from a healthy distance. While she loved Mick, in hindsight she sees that the relationship and, indeed, the world that went with it, was connected to the self-destructive side of her personality. 

"By the end of the relationship I just wanted out of that world," she says. "It wasn't that I didn't love Mick or the other people in my life. I did. But I wasn't cut out for all that. I certainly wasn't cut out – although it's a great honour – to be a muse. That is a very hard job."

Instead, she has preferred to be a creative person in her own right. She has run parallel careers as an actress, recently appearing in films like Intimacy (based on Hanif Kureishi’s story) and Sophia Coppola's lavish biopic of Marie Antoinette, and as a singer-songwriter. June sees her in Paris, Je T’Aime, a film of vignettes about the city of love, and she is also working on a film called House of Boys with Debbie Harry and Stephen Fry.

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Recently, she has been working on a new batch of songs and has just embarked on the Songs of Innocence and Experience European tour that was postponed last year due to her breast cancer. On May 4 she will be headlining at the Women's Arts International Festival at the Brewery Arts Centre in Kendal, Cumbria.

"And I'm really looking forward to reconnecting with my audience," she says. "I had so many wonderful messages of support during my illness. I can't wait to thank people personally."

The new material is largely acoustic and will showcase a mellowing talent. But, at the same time, Faithfull is thrilled that a generation of younger fans now show up at her gigs. "They are there for the music and not because of anything in my past," she smiles. "And that is very good for me."

It helps in her endeavour to look to the future. And her experiences with breast cancer made her aware, for example, that she had not made provision financially for the old age she is now so determined to experience. 

"I realised last year that I have no safety net at all and I'm going to have to get one. I'm not prepared to be 70 and absolutely broke. So I need to change my attitude to life, which means I have to put 10 per cent away every year for my old age. 

"Not that I'm going to stop work at 70. I'll probably carry on. But I want to be in a position where I don't have to work. I should have thought about it a long time ago, but I didn't." 

Is she afraid of growing older? "Are you crazy? Let us never forget the wonderful story about Bette Davis. I think it was Carrie who told it to me. A young reporter goes up to Bette with a microphone and says, 'So, Miss Davis, what's it like getting older?' And there she is with her whisky and water in one hand and a cigarette in the other. She looks at her and takes a sip, takes a long, long drag and gives her that look and says 'Well, it’s not for pussies.' And it's not."

The advancing years, Faithfull says, have made her reflective. She has been considering, for example, what traits she shares with her parents. Her father, Major Glynn Faithfull, was a philologist and Utopian who ran a commune in Oxfordshire. Her mother was a half-Jewish, Austro-Hungarian aristocrat, the Baroness Von Sacher-Masoch.

"It was a colourful upbringing," she smiles, "and I dare say I have traits from both my parents. I'm like my mother in that I like to lie in bed and watch telly. I don't like to see a lot of people. I read a lot and I think a lot. But, unlike her, I'm not drinking water and whisky at 10 in the morning or smoking three packs of old Woodbines a day.

"Dear Ma," she laughs, "she was like that. But then, of course, I didn’t make her life very easy."

Were she still alive, she'd have been amazed by her daughter in her later years. "I remain aware of my self-destructive streak," she says, "and the fact that I have it is something that I need to learn again and again. But the truth is that these days, while I remain non-conformist I am much more conventional than you would think. Last night, for example, I went out to dinner with my lover and then we watched The Devil Wears Prada. Almost my perfect night. And what a wonderful part. I'd love to play a really fantastically well-dressed, incredibly wicked, but secretly rather wonderful person like that. Sadly, Meryl got there first."

In future, of course, all things remain possible for Faithfull. For now, though, she would settle for conquering her one remaining addiction. "I'm still a smoker," she confesses, "but I'm trying very hard to stop."

Smoking, she says, is in itself an exercise in self-destruction. "But," she says drily, "that's the thing, isn't it? As you get older you don't need to be self-destructive any more – it's coming anyway." 

This interview was first published in the May 2007 issue of Saga Magazine.

Informative, in-depth and in the know: get the latest news, interviews and reviews with Saga Magazine.

Saga Magazine caught up with Marianne again in 2014

Maureen Paton interviews

The last time I interviewed Marianne Faithfull was 35 years ago in a West London pub round the corner from her record company. I was a young Melody Maker journalist and she was a hard-smoking, gravel-voiced 33-year old who had come back from the brink of drugs oblivion to reinvent herself as a rock singer/songwriter with the brilliant post-punk album Broken English.

As every music-loving Baby Boomer knows, her promising early career as a Top 10 teenage popstrel had been overshadowed by her rocky four-year relationship with Mick Jagger between 1966 and 1970 and then derailed by what she called ‘the rabbit hole’ of a heroin habit that left her living on the streets of London for two years in the early Seventies. Now fast forward more than three decades and my second interview with this self-styled ‘fabulous beast’ who has long since become part of rock and roll legend.

Rock and roll legend 

Despite enduring health problems that could fell an ox, let alone a slightly built 5ft 4in woman, Faithfull has made 32 studio albums and  as many movies in a parallel acting career on stage and screen. Having survived TB as a child, she suffered a drugs overdose that left her in a coma for six days, a nearly fatal kidney infection, breast cancer, hepatitis C, a broken shoulder in a fall downstairs, a broken sacrum last year and now the latest, a hip replacement after a fall in Rhodes at the end of May this year. ‘I was staying in Lindos in a 17th century house, beautiful but completely fatal for older people. I slipped on the floor coming out of the bathroom and was so scared of hurting my back again that I did the splits and broke my hip,’ she tells me ruefully.

Despite her history of drugs and smoking, however, she has escaped osteoporosis, according to her doctor’s tests. ‘I don’t break my bones easily.” And apart from the occasional grimace of post-op pain, the Chanel-shirted, blue-jeaned Marianne, now a handsome, still lush-lipped grandmother of three, looks a hundred times healthier than on our last encounter; that’s what maturity - in more ways than one - does for you. No wonder she’s one of the new faces of Yves St Laurent, whose head designer is creating all the costumes for her world tour that marks her astonishing 50 years in the music business.

E-cigarettes 

This time we meet in the plush Whisky Bar of London’s Athenaeum Hotel in Piccadilly, where Marianne, now ‘implacably’ opposed to all drink and drugs, is on cappuccino and mineral water. Although the cover photo on her new album, Give My Love To London, shows her atmospherically wreathed in smoke just like the bad old tobacco days, she has switched to e-cigarettes after finally conquering her last-remaining vice in September last year . ‘Giving up has really helped my voice as well as my skin; I had smoked since I was 19 and I was using it psychologically as a protection, a smokescreen,’ she explains.  ‘But I had to stop: I was killing myself.’

Smoking: good reasons to stay stopped

Even for a sexagenarian as tough as this one, breaking her hip is hardly ideal with a new album to promote, the publication this month of luxury photo book Marianne Faithfull: A Life On Record(which includes her first-ever portrait, taken by David Bailey) plus the 12-month tour. Yet she concedes there’s a core of steel in her, inherited from her English father, an army major and wartime spy for M16, and her Austrian baroness mother, who once shot dead a Russian soldier who had raped her and was about to do the same to Marianne’s grandmother. In a husky growl of a voice even deeper than on Broken English, Marianne insists that she’ll be fine by the time she goes on the road. 

Fresh lemon juice 

‘I was born in 1946 and my generation is incredibly strong; it was a good crop. Maybe it was the socialist health care and free orange juice and school milk and the very simple diet with no sweets.  I have a physiotherapist, a trainer to get me ready for the tour and I do an hour’s work-out a day: 25 minutes of exercise with weights plus walking and swimming. I always wake up very early at 6am and start my day with fresh lemon juice, hot water and honey.’

And there was me thinking that rock artistes weren’t exactly morning people. But then Marianne has always confounded expectations with her work ethic. ‘I have to tour to make money for my pension - and also because I wasted so much time with drugs, so I have a lot of catching up to do. I feel I’ve been given a fifth chance rather than a second chance. But why should you retire if you like what you do? We all get that from the younger generation: ‘Move off the stage!’ Well, f**you!’ she laughs.  

Collaborations with Jarvis Cocker 

Back in the Sixties, Faithfull hung out with Bob Dylan and Beat Poets Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Gregory Corso, yet she’s no dinosaur; what drives her these days are the strong influences of European cabaret and the Brecht/Weill songs her parents loved - and her dancer mother performed to (October 2012-January 2013 saw Marianne appear in a production of the Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht opera The Seven Deadly Sins at the Landestheatre in Linz, Austria) - as well as a constantly evolving collaboration with such innovators as Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd and Brian Eno. ‘I’m not romantic at all and I’m not nostalgic, I don’t want to repeat myself, which is why I keep writing new songs,’ she says. 

Yet this could be the last time of touring for Marianne, who says she loves performing but hates ‘being on the road, which is tough, especially for a woman. I’m rather sick of it. You’d better catch me now in case it’s my last hurrah; I may concentrate on writing at home in future, especially poetry.’

Informative, in-depth and in the know: get the latest news, interviews and reviews with Saga Magazine.

Living in Paris 

After being crucified in the press as the naked woman wrapped in a rabbit-fur rug during the infamous 1967 ‘Redlands’ drugs bust at Keith Richards’ Sussex home, (Marianne swore never to live in England again. These days she is based in a Paris apartment near the Jardin du Luxembourg but has also kept on her old house in Ireland; and Give My Love To London is an ironic love-hate letter to her birthplace.

She still feels bitter about how this country offered her up as a sacrificial lamb in a fit of hysterical moralising over the permissive society, with that angel-faced beauty used against her. ‘I got a lot of hate letters after Redlands; and I was so young that I really believed what they said about me, unfortunately.’ Now, she says, the revelations about the historic paedophile cover-up involving Establishment figures have made her realise that ‘the demonisation of drugs and drug addicts in the Sixties was an incredible red herring, a fantastic distraction from what was really going on among people who were older than we were. The Rolling Stones were wild boys, I guess, but never depraved like that. It puts everything into perspective.’

Forgive and forget?

So, like her exact contemporary and fellow ex-pat Jane Birkin, Faithfull has made France her adopted country. Two years ago she became a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, one of its highest cultural honours; and when the Queen attended the D-Day anniversary commemorations in France back in early June, Marianne and Francois Ravard, her manager and former boyfriend, were invited to meet her. ‘Unfortunately I couldn’t because I was in hospital in Rhodes with my broken hip, but I really would have loved to, because they wouldn’t let me meet the Queen back in the ‘60s in England because I was considered to be this “evil” person.  The Establishment was so awful to me, and I didn’t forgive and forget; I never do,’ she adds broodingly. 

And boy, does Marianne know how to brood - especially for her art. Her powerful new album, she reveals, is also a kind of lovelorn letter to Francois with such tracks as Falling Back.  ‘We don’t have sex any more,’ she says in her upfront way, ‘but I still love him and he loves me.’ 

Thrice married and divorced - to art dealer John Dunbar, by whom she had her only child Nicholas, to Ben Brierly of punk band The Vibrators and to writer/actor Giorgio Della Terza - she claims she has no new partner now. ‘I only learned to enjoy sex quite late in my '50s with Francois, apart from my one night with Keith Richards; but if Keith and I had continued, I think we would both have been dead - addiction and all that,’ she explains.

Keith Richards 

She still meets up with Keith – ‘a very nice man’ - and is grateful that his autobiography acknowledged how much she contributed to the Jagger/Richards songwriting; Marianne continues to get royalties for Sister Morphine. His book also exposed the malicious, made-up myth about the misuse of a Redlands Mars Bar once and for all: the confectionery had simply been left on a table for the hit of sugar that LSD users find themselves suddenly craving during an acid trip. “I do see Charlie (Watts) occasionally in Paris and Ronnie Wood too, but not Mick,” she adds. “I’ve really forgotten Mick and I’m very grateful; he doesn’t inhabit my life any more.”

Yet she had been genuinely touched by a phone call out of the blue from Mick back in 2005 after she had contracted early breast cancer, so I ask if they’ve been in contact since - especially after the tragic suicide of his designer girlfriend L’Wren Scott in March this year. ‘I sent an email to Mick, saying “Love, compassion, so sorry about beautiful L’Wren, if there’s anything I can do, of course I’m here…” But of course I didn’t expect an answer from him - and I didn’t get one,’ she says. ‘It’s nothing to do with me; of course I feel for him, and I hope he’ll be all right, but I’m sure he will.’

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A doting grandmother

In fact Faithfull reveals that her first reaction to the shocking news of L’Wren was one of  ‘there but for the grace of God’ (in whom Marianne believes, though she’s fiercely anti-religion).  ‘I thought, “Thank God it’s not me” when I first found out, because it could have been.  And I’m very sorry about her, but it’s not my world, I haven’t been in it for so long and I’m really grateful for that.’

 These days her priorities are her music and her grandma (‘nana’) duties to Oscar, 21, Noel, 16, by her son Nicholas’s first wife Carol and now Eliza, two, by his second wife Teresa; Marianne only comes to London these days to visit them.  Grandparents, of course, are given a precious second chance at family life, and she recalls how she loved to take the boys to the movies ‘if Carol let us. I do like being a grandmother, I’m very proud of them. And I’m very glad I had Nicholas when I did because I could easily not have; life could have just taken over. Getting pregnant at 17 was the only way I would have had a child.’

Yet because of her subsequent heroin addiction, Marianne lost custody of Nicholas in 1970 when he was four; the experience, she now admits, has scarred her for life.  ‘I have no idea who mothered him; not me, anyway, because he was taken away from me. I haven’t really got over that; I never will. Maybe it was for the best for Nicholas to have a real family, which is what he got with the Dunbars; it just means I’m never going to like them,’ she adds wryly.  ‘But I really like Teresa and I’m grateful he’s so happy with her.’

We’ve talked for an hour, but she’s hungry now - another healthy sign - and needs some lunch and a rest. As she gets up with the help of an elegant cane, I say thanks for her patience. This great rock and roll survivor shrugs, and smiles ‘Patience is my middle name.’

Informative, in-depth and in the know: get the latest news, interviews and reviews with Saga Magazine.