A grand old lady

For years the log on password for my laptop was Faithfull, as in Marianne.

(My copy of FAITHFULL)

In my late teens and early 20s I was obsessed with The Rolling Stones, in particular their albums Beggars Banquet and Let it Bleed. It was the sort of obsession that went beyond music, I was captivated by Stones lore, and even though I fancied that era of Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, I was especially captivated by the women who they loved: Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg. I looked nothing like either of them. But with blonde hair, a fringe, black eyeliner, big tits (Andrew Loog Oldham famously said of her ‘I saw an angel with big tits and signed her’) and cigarettes...I could imagine myself into looking like them and that was enough.

(Me in 1997 with my friend Julie, trying my hardest to give Marianne and Anita energy)

I bought Marianne’s 1994 memoir FAITHFULL sometime in the late 90s. I realise now that other than books I’ve had to read for work reasons it’s my most re-read book and may even be my favourite memoir. It’s gossipy and thrilling on sex, love, drugs and making music but it’s also elegant and full of intelligence. It’s full of ‘exquisite little things’, her descriptions of art, clothes, furnishings have stuck with me and informed my own aesthetic sensibilities. There’s an anecdote I love about what she packed for a trip to Morocco in the late 60s ‘some shells, an Indian sari and an Edmund Dulac picture book…more a collage than a suitcase.’ I think of it every time I travel. The book is dreamy (she goes on flights of fancy about Pan, god of the wild and acid trips and the I Ching), but this mysticism is tempered by sharpness and desolation. She was a woman who spent most of the 70s out of her mind, sat on a wall in Soho. Her insight into her own behaviour was hard-won.

Late in the memoir she writes about these ‘wonderfully allegorical’ dreams she had early in her recovery from addiction:

In the dream I was a very grand old lady…well-loved, respected and greatly honoured

It’s nice to know that is how her life ended.