Chapter Eight

Marianne

The Edith Grove hellhole having at last been abandoned during the summer of 1963, Mick and Keith relocated to a Kilburn flatshare with Andrew Oldham. Brian moved in with yet another new girlfriend’s family in Windsor. Charlie was desperate to marry his fiancée Shirley, but Mick and Andrew denied him permission. Who did they think they were?! They must have taken their lead from Brian Epstein, who forced John Lennon to conceal both his marriage to pregnant girlfriend Cynthia Powell and the birth of their baby Julian, because news of both would ‘damage the reputation’ of the Beatles. Likewise, a married Stone was an oxymoron, and something that could only be disastrous for their image. There wasn’t much that they could do about Bill, already a husband when he came on board. But he was only an auxiliary member, so blind eyes were turned.

Keith seemed to be take-it-or-leave-it about women most of the time, except when they were on the road with irresistible females such as Phil Spector’s Ronettes. Mick, on the other hand, was shameless, having his cake and eating it wherever he could. While projecting as footloose and fancy-free to the band’s hoards of hopeful, hysterical fans, and getting his end away with as many of them as possible, he had for some time been embroiled in a semi-covert, tempestuous affair with his first love. She may only have been a trainee secretary, but his pretty wannabe model and actress Chrissie came with an impressive pedigree. Her sister was Jean Shrimpton, ‘the Shrimp’, famous model and partner of celebrity photographer David Bailey. Mick had met his posh-totty builder’s daughter at John Mansfield’s Windsor Ricky Tick club, on 11 January 1963.

‘Chrissie had been a fan of Mick’s for several months, having seen them play at Ealing,’ said John. ‘Not happy to be at the back (the venue being packed by the time she made it there, through arctic conditions), she climbed on to a table and clambered into the fish nets dangling from the ceiling. Over the heads of the fans, she proceeded to crawl towards the band, helped onwards by those underneath paddling her towards the stage with their hands. This was “crowd surfing” before it had been invented. As she reached her goal, the net finally gave way and Brian had to catch her. She had literally fallen for Mick!’

The couple moved in together. But home life was not harmonious, thanks to Mick’s relentless womanising. She’d find out about the latest, he’d weep and wail at her feet, she would take him back and he would do it again. He wrote ‘Under My Thumb’ about her. What drove him to be unfaithful? We know what: biology, novelty, ego, immaturity, commitment phobia, curiosity, opportunity, you name it. Because he was who he was, and therefore could.¹ If girls just wanna have fun, dirty dogs just wanna have sex, willy-nilly, with as many partners as possible. Because fame and fortune are nothing if not aphrodisiacs. Because what kind of man could Mick call himself if he didn’t rise to the occasion and take advantage of all who were dropping in his lap and falling at his feet? Don’t go there. Poor Chrissie, who only wanted happily-ever-after. With a rock star. I mean. But she was young, innocent and starry-eyed. She couldn’t have known better. They got engaged, Mick’s proposal undoubtedly prompted by yet another humiliating infidelity.

Chrissie got a job at the Stones’ label Decca, going on to work for Andrew in the band’s own management office. So that she could keep an eye on her wayward fiancé? As their popularity increased, and as female fans continued to invade their privacy and even their apartment, the relationship started to crumble. It would be destroyed, ultimately, by a girl Mick had first set eyes on at a party, when she was still a Reading convent schoolgirl on the verge of sitting her A levels. Brian, Keith and Andrew Oldham were all at the same party. Andrew waded in, visions of self-reinvention as the new Phil Spector with his own impressive stable of artists dancing in his head, and declared that he was going to make a star of the innocent seventeen-year-old. ‘I saw an angel with big tits,’ he famously said, ‘and signed her.’

Marianne Faithfull was taken at the time, by Cambridge undergraduate John Dunbar. She had a post-exam plan to follow Dunbar to university, to read English Literature, Philosophy and Comparative Religion, and then to pursue a career in the theatre. Floored by her fragile beauty, her eye-popping architecture, her raspy voice and insouciant elegance, daringly eye-shadowed Oldham proffered his calling card, which bore the words ‘Andrew Loog Oldham, darling’. He enquired, ‘Can she sing?’, didn’t bother to wait for an answer and offered her a recording contract.

Marianne’s debut was one of Mick’s and Keith’s first toddles into songwriting, the Elizabethan-flavoured ballad ‘As Tears Go By’. It was inspired by ‘As Time Goes By’, the famous song from the 1942 Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman picture Casablanca. Andrew changed ‘time’ to ‘tears’, of course he did. The twelve-string acoustic guitar on her rendition was played by future Led Zeppelin star Jimmy Page. Recorded at Olympic Studios under the watchful eyes of Mick and Keith, and released on 24 August 1964, it shot to No. 9 and proved several of Oldham’s points. Marianne would later claim that Mick and Keith wrote the song for her. She would eventually admit that they probably didn’t. The Stones recorded it themselves a year later. Marianne re-recorded it when she was forty, twenty-three years after her first attempt: ‘ … and at that moment I was exactly the right age and in the right frame of mind to sing it,’ she wrote in her memoir Faithfull. ‘It was then that I truly experienced the lyrical melancholy of the song for the first time.’ The newly minted pop singer quit school, deserted her mother, and abandoned herself to relentless, gruelling, sexually abusive pop tours masquerading as stardom.

Two things about Marianne, apart from the obvious, made her irresistible to Mick. One, she had exotic and aristocratic roots, which impressed him, as he was already hobnobbing with gentry and royalty, and hoicking himself up in the world. Two, she was somebody else’s, therefore a prize to be pilfered and won.

She was descended on her mother’s side from Leopold Baron von Sacher-Masoch, author of Venus in Furs who lent his name to the syndrome masochism.² Her mother Eva, whose name matched that of Mick’s mother, was Austro-Hungarian Baroness Erisso. Eva had danced in Berlin during the 1920s Weimar Republic era, returned to Vienna during Adolf Hitler’s climb to power, was active during the resistance, and like her Jewish mother had been raped by occupying Russian Red Army troops. She met and married British army major Glynn Faithfull, a closet eccentric of Welsh descent, and returned with him to live in England, where they welcomed their only child. But Marian Evelyn’s mismatched parents separated when she was six. Her father joined a commune, leaving mother and child to fend for themselves. A bitter divorce and greatly reduced circumstances led to her mother, who maintained delusions of grandeur, becoming a boarding school dance teacher, and subsequently scraping a living as a shoe shop assistant, a bus conductress and a café waitress.

When Marian was seven, she was enrolled as a ‘charity boarder’ at St Joseph’s convent school in Reading. She converted to Catholicism. When she was seventeen, she was taken to a Cambridge university ball, and fell in love at first sight with almost twenty-one-year-old student Dunbar. One of John’s great friends was Peter Asher, the brother of Paul McCartney’s girlfriend, actress Jane Asher.³ Peter had enjoyed pop chart success as half of Peter and Gordon. He invested generously in John’s new business venture, the Indica art gallery and bookshop in London where John Lennon first met Yoko Ono. Along the way, she extended her name by two more letters, and glamourised herself with elongated pronunciation.

Her first face-to-face with Mick occurred at a Ready Steady Go! party, when the inebriated rocker approached her and emptied his champagne flute down her low-cut dress. If that was all he could think of to gain her attention, he failed to impress. Marianne was on the road with Roy Orbison when Dunbar travelled to see her, and proposed to her ‘on Wigan Pier’.⁴ Weighed down with guilt as a result of tour affairs with Gene Pitney, Allan Clarke of the Hollies and others, Marianne seized the opportunity to redeem herself. She was desperate to draw a line under her promiscuous lifestyle. ‘The sixties and the to-hell-with-what-they-think attitude hadn’t happened yet,’ she reflected. ‘Feminism wouldn’t affect me for another fifteen years. There was John who I loved and wanted to marry … He knew me very well, and he knew that if he asked me to marry him I would just say yes … I had a child with the right man, and it was the best thing I ever did.’ Does she still think that now?

Having aborted Gene Pitney’s child, at a time when abortion was still illegal, Marianne was desperate for a baby to cleanse herself of both the sin and the crime.⁵ Her wish was granted in April 1965, when she discovered that she was pregnant again. But while Dunbar was back at Cambridge sitting his finals, Bob Dylan landed in London. ‘I wasn’t simply a fan,’ she admitted. ‘I worshipped him … I was quite aware that the tribute traditionally laid at the feet of pop stars by their female fans was sex. I was incredibly ambivalent. I was pregnant, I was about to be married … and what [John] didn’t know might not hurt him …’ The fantasy lingered for a bit. Bob was writing a poem about her, he told her. That old chestnut. She informed him she was with child and immediately regretted it. He threw her out, perhaps fearful that she might be planning to pin the deed on him. She married John in Cambridge the following month. His best man was Peter Asher. They honeymooned, predictably, in Paris. Just before the bride’s nineteenth birthday, she gave birth to their baby Nicholas. How fucked up was all this, how drugged, how detached, how dismally sixties?

And, wait, this is where it gets complicated. Brian Jones is by now with Anita Pallenberg, a consuming, exotic, alien creature who lures Marianne under her wing. Marianne, bored and trapped by young motherhood, who is still recording and performing though her heart is hardly in it, who resents having to be the family breadwinner, who is fed up with tripping over the bodies of John’s junkie pals all over the floors of their flat, spends less and less time at home with her husband and baby, and more and more time with Brian and Anita at their place. Keith Richards comes too. Anita is away one time, they are doing a ton of drugs, and Brian finds his way into Marianne. He is so high on Mandrax that he cannot perform. Marianne crushes on ‘beautiful, gorgeous’ Keith, with whom she is falling in love, if she’s not there already. Poor baby Nicholas is forgotten at home with his nanny, surrounded by drug addicts. Then Mick, who is still co-habiting with Chrissie, starts finding his way round to Brian’s.

‘There were lots of things I could have done at the age of nineteen that would have been more healthy than becoming Mick Jagger’s inamorata,’ wrote Marianne. ‘In the end it doesn’t matter that hearts got broken and that we sweated blood. Maybe the most you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.’

The last two standing in Mick’s hotel room in Bristol one night after a Stones gig and an impromptu after-show, they wondered about getting it together and went for a walk to decide. Inevitably, they made love. She returned to London, then took off with Nicholas and nanny to a rented villa in Positano, Italy. She arrived to find a pile of messages from Jagger. When she decided to wend her way home, motherhood was clearly not her priority. She left the nanny to drive Nicholas back. That’s a long drive for a young girl, from Positano to London. More than a thousand miles. With a baby in the back. In an unreliable car, which broke down, no one could get parts, there were no mobile phones, they didn’t speak English, the child’s wellbeing was endangered and all. But, hey.

On 15 December, when Chrissie and Mick were due to depart on holiday, she discovered that her boyfriend had disappeared. Chrissie phoned the Stones office, only to be told that their flights had been cancelled. Not even then did she twig that he must be with Marianne. But all alone in their palatial Harley House, Regent’s Park apartment with her menagerie of pets – half a dozen cats, a dog and a cageful of birds – the devastated twenty-one year-old knew that he had deserted her. She gulped back a bottle of sleeping pills, not as a cry for help, she would later protest. Without Mick, her life was over, she said. She really wanted to die. This was the first attempt at suicide that would dog Mick’s footsteps. It was by no means the last. When Mick wrote ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’, was he oblivious?

Chrissie would never get to the bottom of what happened next. Maybe it was Mick who found her, and saved her life by getting her to St George’s Hospital. She came to, only to find nursing sisters addressing her by a pseudonym. Whoever got her to hospital had taken the precaution of furnishing her with an alias, to throw the press off the scent. Perhaps the realisation that Mick’s public image was more prized than her life was Chrissie’s first step on the road to recovery.

She had little say in the way things unravelled. Wheelchaired into a truck, she was conveyed to a private clinic in North London, drugged to the false eyelashes and subjected to sleep therapy. She eventually managed to contact her parents, who came to the rescue and carried her home. Only then did she read in the papers about Marianne Faithfull. When she composed herself sufficiently to return to Harley House to collect her things, she found that the locks had been changed.

But what was the old slut Mick on? Nothing more potent or more disastrous than testosterone. It controlled him, that much is obvious. Behind Marianne’s back, he tracked Chrissie down to her new address and started turning up at all hours, demanding sex. Perhaps convincing herself that he loved her after all, and not recognising that she was being used – women crave romance, men just want breasts – she put up no fight. But whenever their paths crossed at parties, he simply ignored her. Drained of pride and confidence, she said nothing. When he stopped coming round after a year or so, the blessing was mixed.

Did Chrissie find her happily-ever-after? Kinda sorta. After falling for another rocker, Steve Marriott of the Small Faces – once bitten, forever smitten, if only by the lifestyle – she withdrew from the swinging London scene that was growing a bit threadbare and boring anyway. She married a normal guy, and had a couple of normal kids. She studied sociology, perhaps in an attempt to make sense of the everywhere and nowhere years. Did she follow Mick’s phenomenal career down the decades, watch the fantasy unravel and lament to herself, ‘All that and more could have been mine’? Or did she thank her lucky stars that she’d had a lucky escape? I want to say the latter.

Marianne, too, would be discarded. Not just yet. When someone told her that Mick had actually wanted to get with the actress Julie Christie, and set his cap at Miss Faithfull only when he found out he couldn’t have Julie, she was neither surprised nor miffed. She put it down to his ‘Dolly Fixation’. It suggests the strong possibility, more or less proven since, that ordinary-mortal females would never satisfy him. Only the most exaggerated specimens of beauty and femininity were good enough for Jagger. It speaks volumes about his personal insecurity. He would thenceforth wear his women the way a woman flaunts a designer handbag: rare, gorgeous, impossibly stylish, outrageously expensive, the best that money can buy. Only a real man loves a woman for qualities other than her reflection. Only a confident, carefree woman settles for (and admits to) the thirty-quid fake.

Life with Mick had its compensations. He was a ‘genuine haven’, Marianne said. He was ‘affectionate, interesting, funny and very attentive. He called me constantly. He wasn’t fucked up like Brian, and he didn’t do drugs (those came later). You could actually lead a life with Mick.’ She acknowledged that his money helped: she no longer had to work, not for the dosh, anyway. She dared to reconsider her theatrical aspirations. In quiet, contemplative moments, she had her misgivings. Certain things she had found disturbing about Andrew, she was beginning to recognise in Mick.

‘[They] were birds of a feather. [Mick] was camp and he wore make-up, at a time when this was still very unusual. I had an inkling that there was a sexual undercurrent between them. I think I knew in some part of my mind that Mick was bisexual … but what I somehow thought that meant was that he would be nicer to me. “Real men” scared me, but Andrew didn’t, and Mick felt safe and easy to be around.’

You see where she was going with this. She actually wanted a ‘real man’. The one that she wanted was Keith. She turned to the Stones’ new business manager Allen Klein for advice, inexplicably, and confessed that her heart lay elsewhere. Rottweiler Klein warned her that Mick would be destroyed by such betrayal. Klein was unlikely to have been prioritising Mick’s personal wellbeing as he articulated those words. If she dumped Mick for his boyhood pal, bandmate and crucially his songwriting partner, she would kill the Rolling Stones. Persuading Marianne to stick with Mick and leave Keith well alone was in Klein’s best interests, not hers.

Marianne, oblivious of financial implications, heeded Klein’s words. Still, one for the road, baby, shall we? Why not? She wound up at Brian and Anita’s. The cat was away. She dropped acid with Brian, Keith and Tara Browne, their friend the Guinness heir, fully aware that they all wanted to have sex with her. She fumbled with Brian, but something made her get the hell out. She found her way back to the marital abode. And then the phone rang. It was Keith. He picked her up in a cab, and they went back to the May Fair Hotel, where Marianne had been staying prior to the acid trip.

And that, she said, ‘was the night I ended up with Keith. It was a wonderful night of sex. As a matter of fact, that night with Keith was the best night I’ve ever had in my life … It was sublime. I was in heaven. I had always been in love with Keith, but very shyly. Now I was totally bowled over.’

But the over-endowed cherub’s ecstasy was short-lived. As he was dressing to leave the next morning, the guitarist uttered unforgettably crushing words: ‘You know who really has it bad for you, don’t you? … Go on, love, give him a jingle, he’ll fall off his chair. He’s not that bad when you get to know him, you know.’

And she simply accepted it. Passed like a box of Turkish Delight from Brian to Mick to Keith, then back to Mick, Marianne became the first unofficial Stones broad. Had she been a little older, a lot wiser, she would have told Keith in no uncertain terms that she loved him. Perhaps she was wiser than she knew. Something stopped her. She must have known already that Keith was in love with Brian’s girlfriend Anita. He would screw whoever he liked, but he had eyes only for her.

Marianne and Mick moved from Harley House into a place on Chester Square, and eventually into an impressive mansion on Cheyne Walk, beside the River Thames. She furnished it lavishly, on money her parsimonious partner was loath to spend. They did a lot of drugs – she worked her way from cannabis to cocaine before she got to heroin – had a lot of sex, and did a lot of talking – though not so much about meaningful, personal things; and only when Mick was not otherwise engaged with his endless stream of sycophantic visitors. She told him almost everything. Her lesbian affairs she mostly kept to herself. Mick’s homoerotic fantasies about Keith, he shared with her openly, to her astonishment. It disturbed her because she was still in love with the guitarist. In 1968, when Mick decided to become a movie star and got involved with directors Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg on the notorious film Performance, Marianne’s gut told her that she needed to distance herself from the ‘seething cauldron’ that the production rapidly became. She relocated to Ireland with her mother and three-year-old Nicholas. Now pregnant with Mick’s baby, a daughter they named Corrina, she was determined that the child would have the best start possible, away from the madness that was consuming her partner in London. But she failed to carry the baby to term, and miscarried at seven months. Both she and Mick were devastated.

Any miscarriage is a terrible experience. But to lose a baby at such a late stage is a trauma from which it can be impossible to recover. Marianne would have been approximately twenty-eight weeks along, if she had calculated her dates correctly. Given that a full-term pregnancy lasts around forty weeks, and that a loss can only be termed a miscarriage up to twenty-four completed weeks of pregnancy, she technically suffered a stillbirth. When a baby dies before she is born, it is usual today for an obstetrician or midwife to induce labour. Marianne did not say whether she gave birth to Corrina naturally. Nor did she describe what happened afterwards. Was Mick with her? Did they get to see, even hold, their dead baby? Did they take photographs, keep the blanket that she was wrapped in, register her birth and give her a funeral (all of which are recognised aids to recovery)? Did her parents receive bereavement support? It seems unlikely. Marianne has indicated that she and Mick never discussed it. His way of dealing with it was to immerse himself in work, and in his affair with American actress Marsha Hunt. To add insult to injury, it was Marsha who would bear Mick his first child, in November 1970, their daughter Karis.

Mick and Marianne stayed together for four years. She knew that it was only a matter of time before her life, emotions and habits would become fodder for Stones’ songs, just as Chrissie’s had. Not only for songs, but for newspaper column inches and full-scale media speculation. Where Chrissie had seemed to lap up the attention, Marianne hated it. But she acknowledged that Mick’s affairs inspired some classic hits.

They were the most beautiful couple of the 1960s. Marianne was Mick’s muse. She beefed up his basic knowledge of dance, classical music and literature. She sophisticated him, and raised his game. It was she who gifted him a copy of Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita: a controversial work of philosophy that dissects the concepts of good and evil and their impact on human life, concluding that the two are inter-dependent. It inspired the song that many regard as the Stones’ finest and most defining hour, ‘Sympathy for the Devil’. She stood by Mick throughout his 1967 drugs trial and brief imprisonment. But she was deeply disturbed by a double betrayal, by both her partner and her best friend Anita Pallenberg … who had left Brian and was by then Keith’s girlfriend. What happened? Anita, Mick’s co-star in Performance, had slept with Mick for real (as opposed to ‘just acting’). With three Stones notched on her bedpost, she had by default superseded Marianne as the band’s unofficial broad. More of which, coming.

Marianne’s depression was compounded by the mental frailty of Brian Jones, who never got over the betrayal by his bandmate. Brian’s death by drowning in July 1969 seemed to tip Marianne over the edge. Like Anita and Keith, she and Mick stayed away from his funeral. Guilt? Fear? Couldn’t be bothered? All three? The Jaggers set off for Sydney, Australia, where Mick was about to begin filming the doomed biopic Ned Kelly.⁶ A hallucination of Brian drove Marianne to attempt suicide. She would have hurled herself from the window of their fourteenth-floor suite, but couldn’t get it open because the wooden frame was sealed with paint. So she swallowed 150 Tuinal barbiturates, a highly addictive depressant, washed down with hot chocolate. Mick found her just in time, and rushed her to hospital. He had been here before, hadn’t he. Marianne’s mother flew down to assist. The last rites were administered at Marianne’s bedside by a Roman Catholic priest. Mick wasn’t there for that bit. He was back on set, going on with the show. He was also writing passionate letters to Marsha Hunt, while his suicidal girlfriend was recuperating.

Back in London, against steep odds, Marianne won the role of Ophelia in a Roundhouse production of Hamlet, opposite Anthony Hopkins as Claudius. Her understudy was Anjelica Huston. The leading lady took smack before she went on. She couldn’t stand that Mick was still seeing Marsha, and was tormented by the gossip about him and Anita. So she started an affair of her own, with Italian artist Mario Schifano. Jagger was incensed. He turned up at the Berkshire cottage he had purchased for Marianne’s mother Eva to find the lovers ensconced. A scrap ensued, which Jagger won. It was Mick who slept in the bed with Maid Marianne that night. Mario left at dawn. Era finito.

She left Mick in 1970. Helplessly addicted to heroin, she lost custody of Nicholas. She slept rough for two years in St Anne’s Court, Soho, in those days the location of one of the world’s most famous recording studios.⁷ The Chinese restaurant in that cut-through, which we journalists used to frequent, served lethal cocktails in plastic washing-up bowls with a straw for each person. They kindly allowed her to wash her clothes on their premises. A stallholder nearby used to bring her cups of tea. She was on an NHS drugs programme at the time, and had to present in person daily at a local chemist’s to get her twenty-five jacks of heroin. According to Catherine James, the American model whom Mick moved into Cheyne Walk soon after Marianne moved out, she tried desperately to get Mick to take her back. What baffles me is his callousness and meanness. How was he able to wash his hands of her and walk away?

Whatever. Their love affair was over. The woman who had inspired ‘Wild Horses’, ‘Dear Doctor’ and ‘You Can’t Always Get What You Want’ was left penniless.

Marianne married punk rocker Ben Brierly in 1979, but they divorced seven years later. She submitted to treatment for her drug addiction in 1985, at Minnesota’s Hazelden Clinic, where Eric Clapton had been a patient, and fell into a relationship with fellow inmate Howard Tose. When she told him it was over, he jumped to his death from the window of their Boston apartment. Her three-year third marriage, to American writer Giorgio Della Terza, also ended in divorce. In 2009, she separated from her lover of fifteen years, French record and film producer François Ravard, who had helped nurse her through her 2005 bout of breast cancer. He continued to act as her manager. She would recall a night when she lay recovering from cancer surgery in a Paris hospital room, when the phone rang at around two in the morning. ‘This voice came on,’ she said. ‘ “Hello, Marian, how are you?” I’d know that voice anywhere, he’s the only one who ever called me “Marian”. We had a chat. It was lovely.’ It was the first time in thirty-five years that Jagger had called her.

Cut to a plummy, rounded matron poking around Putney, nipping in for a loaf and out for a latte, and lurking in florists’, choosing blooms. Nothing about her appearance at seventy-five spoke of the hell she had lived through. She had beaten heroin addiction, homelessness, bulimia, cancer, suicide attempts, a broken hip, post-operative sepsis, hepatitis C and emphysema, the result of her lifelong nicotine addiction. She had done endless therapy and had become a huge gay icon. Really? Maybe the bee-stung lips, cascading blonde locks and foppish fringe gave a clue. But noo, that can’t be Marianne Faithfull, can it? Well, I’ll be. Will you look at the thickened waist, her drooping jowls! She was a goddess! Why did she let herself go like that? Get over yourselves, carpers. The antediluvian rock star with the plugged-in barnet can still go leaping around a stage like a good’un to cries of ‘He’s incredible! Look at him go!’ But his former lover, who is in fact three and a half years younger than him, is expected to recede modestly into the shadows, to conceal her ageing and to live out her twilight years under the counter. Her collapsing appearance is considered shameful, while his is endlessly celebrated. What? Human race, help me out here.

Covid-19 has taken its toll. Marianne fell victim to the virus in April 2020 and was hospitalised, during the recording of her twenty-first solo album, She Walks in Beauty. She emerged with memory loss, extreme exhaustion and lung damage, which meant that she could no longer sing. She was talking about the biopic, announced in February 2020, based on her memoir, Faithfull, that she wrote nearly thirty years ago. Lucy Boynton, she who played Freddie Mercury’s girlfriend Mary Austin opposite Rami Malek in Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, was set to play her in Ian Bonhôte’s picture, as well as to exec-produce.

It is extraordinary to think that Marianne’s pop career collapsed in 1967. Pouf, just like that. Her final pop recording, released in February that year, was ‘Is This What I Get for Loving You?’ Where were those who had benefited from her ticket sales and her recording royalties? Weren’t we asking the same questions after the demise of Phil Lynott, Amy Winehouse, Prince, George Michael, Tom Petty and the rest? Why weren’t they supported in their hours of need? But Marianne was world-famous for having been Mick’s girlfriend, and for an allegedly misplaced Mars bar. Not for her music. Even now, they still refer to her as a Rolling Stones muse.

‘That’s a shit thing to be,’ she told the Guardian in 2021. It’s a terrible job. You don’t get any male muses, do you? Can you think of one? No.’ But it wasn’t the worst thing that ever happened to her. That was when she lost Nicholas. In many ways, she had only herself (and Jagger) to blame. She was only properly reunited with her son when he had children of his own. She returned from Paris to London to be close to him and her grandchildren. That blameless little boy whom she neglected so much, who was once abandoned by a thieving nanny in a strange house in Ireland and was found two days later, eating wallpaper off the walls, had made a success of his life. After having trained as a physicist at Manchester, Cambridge and Harvard universities during the late 1980s, he became a financial journalist, analyst and consultant, and has authored several books.⁸

There was always more to her. What became of her was too high a price to pay for her fleeting moment in pop’s spotlight and a few so-what years on the arm of a rock star. Knowing full well that she had much more to offer, and envious of what Mick and Keith had made of themselves – as she explained, ‘what pop music could become’ – she went deeply into herself and emerged with ‘Sister Morphine’: ‘an attempt to make art out of a pop song’. It was, she insisted, not about herself, nor based on her own experiences. She conceived it well before she became a junkie.

‘By 1972 [she means 1971] when it came out on [the album] Sticky Fingers [as a new version recorded by the Stones], I was the character in the song,’ she said. ‘You have to be very careful what you write because a song is a gateway, and whatever it is you’ve summoned up may come through. It happened to Mick and Keith with that whole satanic business.’

Mick and Keith set Marianne’s song to music, and her original recording of it became the B-side of her 1969 single ‘Something Better’. You see, she was still trying. But she was not credited as co-writer of the song on the Stones’ album. She had to resort to the law to achieve recognition. Where were Mick’n’Keef’s manners? Why did they force the poor girl, who had been important to both of them, to suffer this indignity? It would not be until the 1994 Virgin Records re-issue of the Stones album back catalogue from Sticky Fingers to Steel Wheels that the record, as it were, would be set straight.

Feast your ears on Marianne’s 1979 comeback, Broken English, featuring her eerie cover of Dr. Hook and the Medicine Show’s ‘The Ballad of Lucy Jordan’. It depicts a housewife’s middle-aged disappointment and descent into mental breakdown. When she recorded it, Marianne was only thirty-three. Although she didn’t write the song, it could have been autobiographical. The wistful desperation in that once sweet voice, shattered by heartbreak and substance abuse, is rendered terrifying by the undercurrent of Steve Winwood’s insistent synth. It reached only No. 48 in the UK, but was a Top 20 hit across Europe. The album remains a masterpiece. A Secret Life, released in 1995, is also notable. I met her during her promotion of that one. We lunched. I liked her. I admired the small tattoo of a swallow on her left hand, between her thumb and her index finger, which she said she got in Italy in 1967. She was still with Jagger at that point. Bird tattoos are said to represent freedom and spirituality. They are also symbolic of peace, happiness and optimism.

‘Perhaps I chose it because I wanted to fly away,’ she laughed throatily. ‘We all fantasise about having wings, and about taking to the skies to escape. I got right out of my comfort zone to have it, I can tell you. I was terrified of the tattooist. I think it was supposed to go higher up my arm, but I kept snatching it away. He only got as far as my hand, which had to do.

‘But birds, yes. They are incredibly spiritual creatures. It’s about going higher, about becoming more than you are. Sailors used to have swallow tattoos, didn’t they. That must have been about hoping for a safe journey home. Perhaps that was what I was hoping for too.’

The album received ‘mixed reviews’. Mine was favourable. My editor briefed me to pan it. I praised it anyway, and my interview with her was spiked. She was forty-nine. She needed us to like her poetic offering. No one but her got to read my feature. She was glad that I ‘got it’, she said. It was a commercial failure for Island Records. But honestly, it was and is good.

Her most recent work might be at best an acquired taste. 2021’s ‘poem album’, She Walks in Beauty, features Marianne reciting eleven Romantic poems, including Thomas Hood’s ‘The Bridge of Sighs’, John Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’, ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode to Autumn’, Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘Ozymandias’, a few by William Wordsworth including ‘To the Moon’, and Lord Byron’s ‘So We’ll Go No More A Roving’. Perhaps she could have stopped short of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s ‘The Lady of Shalott’, which does go on a bit, mirrors cracking from side to side – hands up if you did it at school. What it is, this album, is the soundtrack of survival. Because, as Marianne has always known, there is a pared-down purity in poetry. There is a return to lost innocence. There is renewal.

All of her husk is still there. All of her fight remains. It’s worth a listen between the lines, to savour her spirit. Three Rolling Stones fucked her, figuratively and actually. There’s another side to that story. She is still living it.