Her pop career appeared stalled, but Faithfull soon embodied every hip aspect of the 1960s. She dropped acid with the Stones' Brian Jones. She scored a cameo role in Jean-Luc Godard's "Made in USA." Finally, in December '66, she became Jagger's girlfriend. Before that winter, Jagger had hit on her once or twice at parties, but after he had occasion to see the dumpy flat where the Dunbars lived, he looked anew at this lanky girl with the amazing frame and smile. Faithfull brought out the Lancelot in him. She was too fair to be stuck in such dismal surroundings. Soon Jagger began sleeping with his Guinevere.

The King Arthur metaphor is appropriate because during those years Jagger had a thing for the Arthurian myths. He also apparently had a thing for Galahad -- band mate Richards. Once as Jagger and Faithfull were getting it on (as they said back then) in a room next to Richards' bedroom, Jagger, according to Faithfull, shouted out, "You don't know how much I want to suck Keith's cock!" Faithfull herself had performed intimate acts with Richards, only to be told afterward that she was meant for Jagger. And she was. He wrote "Let's Spend the Night Together," she says in her autobiography, after a bout of relentless sex with Faithfull in a Bristol hotel.

She continued recording unmemorable pop in her unremarkable voice. Then came the Mars bar incident. In February '67, Faithfull was partying with Jagger at Richards' place when bobbies raided the house for drugs. Faithfull was found wrapped in a fur rug -- Venus in furs -- which she promptly dropped to the floor. The girl was naked. Surely the police would have been turned to stone at the sight of Faithfull in full glory if Richards had not chosen that moment to flip on the record player -- suddenly Dylan was intoning, "Everybody must get stoned."

The newspapers reported that Jagger had been caught performing candy bar cunnilingus on Faithfull. "I still don't like that story," Faithfull says to me 33 years later. "I never will find it funny. I went into complete insanity trying to figure out who started the rumor." No Mars bar was found at the scene, but drugs were discovered upstairs. Jagger and Richards were arrested and there was a trial. The "Establishment" wanted to make a lesson of the two and dished out stiff sentences. But those were not Victorian days, and the Glimmer Twins did not do prison time like a pair of Oscar Wildes -- the verdict was overturned. By the summer, Faithfull says, she and Jagger were "blissfully happy." They were "young, rich, protected, and the world was at our feet." They even sat with the Beatles at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's feet.

Faithfull later told the Soho News that their "fantasies of taking over the world seemed to be coming true." She strayed from singing and played Irina in Anton Chekhov's "Three Sisters" at the Royal Court Theater. Jagger was feeling so empowered that he toyed with running for Parliament. Their happiness climaxed in 1968 when Faithfull found herself with child -- Jagger's. She was still married to Dunbar, but told newspapers that she was very happy about the baby. She didn't want to marry Jagger, however. "I don't want to be married to him," she told the Daily News. "I don't want to be married at all." Then in November, a day before John Lennon's then girlfriend, Yoko Ono, had a miscarriage, Faithfull miscarried. The baby girl would have been named Corrina. This was the beginning of Faithfull's fall; she turned to barbiturates and alcohol while Jagger buried himself in work.

In the summer of 1969, the pair were in Sydney, Australia, about to film "Ned Kelly" together, when Jagger awoke in their hotel room and found Faithfull lying beside an empty bottle of Tuinals. She was rushed to the hospital in a coma. Jagger sat by her bedside. Picture him there: Surely the lyrics of Faithfull's first major song played through his mind. She had been trying to transcend her lightweight recording career, and had written "Sister Morphine." She used Milton's "Lycidas" as a model for the structure of the verse, which describes the singer lying in a hospital bed much like the one Faithfull lay in that day, awaiting death.

It was darkly ironic that on that same day, on the other side of the world, Jones was being buried in back of the church where he used to sing as a choirboy. Seven days earlier, he had drowned in Winnie the Pooh's pool. (A.A. Milne was the former owner of Jones' house.) Just a week earlier, Jagger and Faithfull had consulted the "I Ching" about Jones -- and "Death by Water" was the hexagram they arrived at when throwing the coins.

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