Who would have imagined, even in the psychedelic '60s, that a waterlogged dead man could be responsible for Faithfull's coma? On the night she took the Tuinals, Jones had appeared to her, encouraging her to swallow the pills. She later hypothesized in her autobiography, "Obviously he had woken up dead, not known where he was and decided to call for me!" Faithfull remembered that the two "strolled" through a landscape similar to Albrecht Dürer's engravings of hell until they came to a cliff. Jones jumped off; Faithfull didn't. She then found herself lost in an airport. She'd been out for six days when she awoke, and the first thing she saw was Jagger's face.

The two would stay a couple for a little over a year, but Faithfull continued her plummet from grace while Jagger repressed his Lancelot impulses, becoming more of a superficial fop. He brought Faithfull to a dinner at the Earl of Warwick's place, and the woman was so smacked up she fell face down in her soup.

It was only a matter of time before Jagger began dating Bianca Rose Perez Moreno de Macias, who was probably his doppelgänger. After Faithfull read about the May '71 marriage in the papers, she staggered blind drunk into an Indian restaurant in Chelsea, where she was promptly arrested. Later she told a reporter, "Even if I died or [Mick] died, I still won't get away from him. We can't get away from each other by dying."

Faithfull ran into Jagger a week or so later, and had wordless sex with him in a room above a London head shop. A week after that, the Stones' "Sticky Fingers" album was released. It contained the song "Sister Morphine," and Faithfull wasn't listed in the credits. Her name should have appeared beside another song, "Wild Horses," as well, she contends. When she awoke from her coma in Australia, her first words to Jagger had been, "Wild horses couldn't drag me away." She later admitted to a journalist, "All my traumas and all my unhappiness, Jagger changed into brilliant songs."

It wasn't until the end of the 1970s that Faithful would begin to write her own brilliant songs. First she had to discover the Doors' Jim Morrison dead in his bathtub. Or did she? In the summer of 1971, she found herself in Paris consorting with Morrison's drug dealer. After Morrison's overdose, it was whispered that she had found the body. "I tried to figure that one out," she tells me. "One of my theories is that people get blonds mixed up -- if Sylvia Miles is at party in New York, she's assumed to be me. I just read a biography about [singer] Nico. I think maybe it was Nico who was in Paris at the same time. It could be -- but we'll never know."

Shortly after that, satanic filmmaker Kenneth Anger filmed Faithfull crawling around an Egyptian graveyard as the sun rose over the pyramids for a scene in his devilish extravaganza "Lucifer Rising" (which also starred Charles Manson's right hand, Robert Beausoleil). Faithful was no stranger to the Dark One. She had given Jagger a Russian novel about Satan that, she says, inspired him to write "Sympathy for the Devil."

The only mid-'70s Faithfull sighting of note occurred when she showed up wearing a nun's habit to sing "I Got You Babe" in David Bowie's "1984" NBC-TV show. During that time, she pulled together an occasional recording session, but released only a rather lifeless country record. She spent her days living in a Chelsea squat with no electricity or hot water. Her companion was a man whose name was Ben Briefly. Or Ben E. Ficial. Or Ben Dover.

In 1979, Faithfull released her comeback record, "Broken English." The disc was embraced by punks even though it was not a punk album. (Christ! Some of the tracks even had synthesizers!) But punk was the only musical context for Faithfull's new voice. It had transformed into a steely cross between Janis Joplin's and Lotte Lenya's. Plenty of punk girls tried to affect a voice like hers, but Faithfull embodied the voice without affect. She believes the change happened "gradually of course ... I didn't even know it was happening," she told me. "Well, I sort of realized." Pause. "See, I don't hear my voice like other people. I know it's very deep and all that, but I hear it like a beautiful contralto -- a bit rough. I hear it like an instrument."

Then there were the songs Faithfull was singing. The first one was a self-penned ode to German terrorist Ulrike Meinhoff -- a heartfelt choice as it turns out. "Drugs kept me from being a terrorist," she told author Hotchner. "I was going to have to explode out into ... actual acts of violence ... or I was going to have to implode and contain it." The most violent song on "Broken English" was the last, where she snarled lyrics like "Why'd ya let that trash/Getta hold your cock/And smoke all my hash?" It certainly was a far cry from wearing a habit and crooning, "I got you, babe." When Faithfull married Ben "What's His Name" later that year, it's no wonder that Johnny Rotten was a beaming guest at the ceremony.

For the next five years, Faithfull recorded striking but imperfect rock records containing songs about women who have fallen so far from grace that they wander New York's Times Square with pistols in suitcases. In the mid-'80s, she fell so low that she was holed up at the Hazelden Clinic in Minneapolis to get off dope. There she fell in love with a fellow junkie. In "Faithfull," she writes of their nights of wild sex. She also tells how the poor man leapt out of a 36th-story window after she told him they should temporarily separate.

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