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Sunday, Nov 22, 2009
The eternal Venus in furs owns the golden voice you hear when all the bars are closed and the whores have gone home.
Jan 9, 2001 | No woman from the 1960s lost her youth as thoroughly as Marianne Faithfull. And by youth, I mean her innocence, not her looks. Long after that decade ended, she wrote in a song, "Where did it go to ... my youth?" She answered herself only last year with lyrics that begin, "I drink and I take drugs/I love sex and move around a lot." And no citizen of the '60s drank, took drugs and had sex with Faithfull's public abandon.
She began her career in 1964 singing insipid pop songs, but soon became known to the British public as Mick Jagger's girlfriend. They were inseparable -- she was his Yoko Ono. News photographs showed the pair arriving late at the Royal Opera House to see Rudolf Nureyev or, on another occasion, slinking out of a police station after a drug bust. But the most notorious Marianne Faithfull story -- an apocryphal one, she says -- concerns newspaper reports of Jagger being arrested in a drug raid, caught with his head between Faithfull's legs enjoying a Mars bar.
Yet the woman's '60s past is only colorful clutter. During the 1970s, she evolved a voice that is one of the most remarkable ever recorded: a husky, world-weary moan; a voice that Faithfull admits is the result of every whiskey she has ever drunk, every cigarette she has ever puffed. "My voice is loaded with time, mature like brie cheese," she told me recently.
Faithfull is entitled to such a vox, one of pure European decadence. Her mother was a Viennese baroness, a descendant of Leopold Baron von Sacher-Masoch, author of the masochistic classic "Venus in Furs." On the Faithfull side, her father was a British spy whose own father had invented a sexual device called the Frigidity Machine. In her readable, hard-boiled autobiography, "Faithfull," she reports that her mother didn't enjoy sex -- the baroness married the major only to escape postwar Vienna, Austria. The woman did succumb to wifely obligations, however, which led (as such things will) to the birth of a daughter on Dec. 29, 1946, in Hempstead, England.
Faithfull's father ditched the family when she was just 6. Her mother then raised the girl like "one of her cats." Young Marianne was packed off to a convent, where she converted to Roman Catholicism, an act she later reported "was promoted more by a Walter Pater aestheticism than a veneration for the pope." By age 13, she was acting Shakespeare in local repertory theaters. If her future had turned out differently, she might have become a Shakespearean actor of note. As it happened, however, Faithfull, the 1960s pop singer, would play Ophelia in Tony Richardson's filmed version of "Hamlet." In a different film, "I'll Never Forget What's 'is Name," she would take a bath while Oliver Reed watched. In the end, the bathing scene eclipsed the drowning scene.
But we're jumping ahead. In 1963, the bookish, 17-year-old Faithfull fell in love with an artistic lad named John Dunbar. He owned a swinging London gallery where pop stars like Paul McCartney and the Rolling Stones hung out. It was at one of the gallery's parties where the Stones' Rasputin-like manager, Andrew Oldham, first noticed Faithfull. In "Blown Away: The Rolling Stones and the Death of the Sixties," he tells author A.E. Hotchner, "At a time when most chicks were shaking ass and coming on strong, here was this pale, blonde, retiring, chaste teenager looking like the Mona Lisa, except with a great body." Oldham later described her somewhat less elegantly as an "angel with big tits."
Ah, her breasts. How different Faithfull's life would have been if she had been flat-chested. Jagger would never have poured champagne between them to get her attention. The New York Times would never have praised her screen portrayal of Ophelia by observing that her cleavage was "charming." And Oldham wouldn't have turned her into a pop singer.
Who cared whether the girl could actually sing? Oldham arranged for her to record a moody Mick Jagger/Keith Richards composition called "As Tears Go By." In a nondescript voice, Faithfull sang about sitting in a desolate playground at sundown watching children play. She might as well have warbled, "Where did it go to, my youth?" The tune was inappropriately dreary for a teenager, especially one like Faithfull who possessed a goofy, gawky enthusiasm once she got going.
She turned to America's bard for a follow-up single, covering Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." Although it bombed, Faithfull had the opportunity to hang out with Dylan at the Savoy Hotel. She reports that he slouched at a typewriter and began pecking a massive poem about her. When he learned she was about to marry, he tried to talk her out of it. His words fell on deaf ears, however. When he couldn't talk her into bed, he reportedly "turned into Rumpelstiltskin" and ripped up the poem.
Faithfull survived Dylan's scorn. In the spring of 1965, just before she married Dunbar, she recorded a third single, "Come Stay With Me." This jaunty bit of harpsichord pap became a bigger hit than "As Tears Go By." Six months later, she gave birth to a son. She promptly foisted off the kid on her mother and returned to being a full-fledged participant in Swinging London.
