They should have put her on a British pound note. That bewitching face stopped Bob Dylan and Mick Jagger in their tracks. To recast Ken Tynan’s description of Garbo, what one saw in other women while stoned, one saw in Marianne Faithfull sober. With her ethereal beauty, her long blond hair and thick bangs, her music, and her work as an actress, she embodied the era of London’s Swinging Sixties. She died last week in that city at the age of 78.
I met Marianne when I was barely out of my teens, the first student of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, founded by Allen Ginsberg and his “crazy wisdom” Buddhist teacher, Chögyam Trungpa. Those were heady and hazy days. I remember seeing Marianne in a vintage-clothing store in Boulder, Colorado, trying on vests and hats. Those signature bangs she wore in the 60s were gone, as she had taken to wearing her hair in a swept-up, rockabilly style.
Marianne was a professor of poetics at the school (an honor Ginsberg bestowed on her—a fitting tribute, as her father had been a professor of Italian literature at the University of London), teaching a lyric-writing workshop beginning in the summer of 1988. While “professor of poetics” was the Beats’ Order of Merit, it certainly wasn’t what she was known for.
A muse figure (a description she was uncomfortable with but would come to accept), Marianne had her first hit with “As Tears Go By,” written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away,” a phrase she supposedly uttered while coming out of a drug-induced coma, became the haunting refrain of the Jagger-Richards song “Wild Horses.” She co-wrote and recorded “Sister Morphine” two years before the Stones’ version. She urged Jagger to read Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, which inspired the lyrics to “Sympathy for the Devil.”
Marianne seemed to have disappeared into the heroin haze that flourished in the 60s and early 70s, living on the street for two years, experiencing miscarriages, an attempted suicide, and a drug arrest in 1967, followed by many attempts to get sober. She came roaring back in 1979 with Broken English, her sweet soprano now ravaged and thrilling. Besides the memorable title song, which she co-wrote, she recorded an unforgettable version of John Lennon’s “Working Class Hero.” The album brought her renewed acclaim and appreciation after years spent in the wilderness, reminding us of what a true artist can make out of their own suffering. Another 20-plus albums would follow.
There’s never been a more moving version of Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now, Baby Blue” than her cover, sung in that magnificent tobacco-stained growl of a voice that will never be duplicated. She’d performed it multiple times and once sang the refrain to me as I came out of the United Bank of Boulder, empty-handed, after handing over all the money my parents had sent me to the grifting Beat poet, Gregory Corso.
Marianne was crazy about Corso. After stealing clothing, a watch, rings, and some money when he was just a teen, Corso was caught and ended up a very young inmate in Elmira Correctional Facility. He devoured the prison library, reading everything from comic books to “Adonais,” by Percy Bysshe Shelley. Corso was one of Marianne’s people—the gifted and the damned, I guess you could call them.
She and Corso shared a heroin history, and whenever they were together, they would trade verses from The Epic of Gilgamesh, the Mesopotamian tale about the King of Uruk whose rule was challenged by the wild man Enkidu. Like Corso, Marianne loved the Romantic poets. Little wonder that the last of her studio recordings was “She Walks in Beauty,” a 2021 collection of poems set to music. Her voice when reciting Lord Byron’s “So, We’ll Go No More a Roving” sounded as if it had been kept in a wood barrel of bourbon for the last 10 years, deepened by cigarettes and “alcool,” as she called it.
She was fond of saying that she’d always wanted to live according to “William Burroughs’s rules”—at least the ones in his books. She was knocked out by the scalding honesty she found in Junkie, but she couldn’t imagine what possessed him to write it all down. The author, for his part, was humorously aghast. “In the first place, my work is fiction,” Burroughs told her. “It was never meant to be taken literally, and it certainly was never meant to be taken literally by you!” The beautiful thing was, she could laugh at herself. The muse had become a sage.
“Wild horses couldn’t drag me away,” a phrase she uttered while coming out of a drug-induced coma, became the haunting refrain of the song “Wild Horses.”
Bertolt Brecht was another of Marianne’s people. She loved his songs, and as an actress, she played Pirate Jenny in The Threepenny Opera at the Gate Theatre in Dublin, and she recorded two albums devoted to the Brecht and Kurt Weill songbook. She became, like Marlene Dietrich and Noël Coward before her, a celebrated concert-and-cabaret artist.
Marianne’s mother, Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch, a Hungarian baroness and ballet dancer, appeared in productions of Brecht and Weill’s. Marianne’s great-great-uncle was Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, who wrote Venus in Furs, the novella that brought the word “masochism” kicking and screaming into the English language. Not for nothing did she title one of her late albums 20th Century Blues.
The few letters I wrote to her after the Kerouac School always found their way, even with addresses such as Mother Courage c/o Marianne Faithfull, named after one of the Brecht plays I wish she had done. (I could easily see her dragging a cart across a war zone.) One address had her living above a movie house, not inappropriate for an enchanting actress. Watch her as Ophelia playing opposite Nicol Williamson’s Hamlet, or alongside Alain Delon in Girl on a Motorcycle, the two of them in bed, and you can see a terrible beauty being born.
In this season of Bob Dylan, it might be worth noting, you can see her in Don’t Look Back, D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary about Dylan’s 1965 tour of England. She sits with her legs tucked underneath her on a chair in Dylan’s hotel suite at the Savoy in London while Joan Baez warbles “As Tears Go By.” Marianne sings along, hesitantly, drowned out by Baez’s confident soprano: not exactly a command performance. In fact, she’s barely keeping up with the words, but you can see what all the fuss and feathers were about. Her fair-haired, pre-Raphaelite beauty embodies a vanished era, not the Romantics but the thrilling, early days of the Rolling Stones and the newly electric Dylan.
In later years Marianne became less restless, surrounded by the books she loved and the younger musicians she worked with. She admired David Bowie and Brian Eno and Iggy Pop, recorded with Metallica, and adored Patti Smith; she thought Horses was as great as Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell.
She will always be “that amazing bird from London,” but in John Lennon’s words, that bird has flown. She’ll go no more a roving.
Sam Kashner is a Writer at Large at AIR MAIL. Previously a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, he is the author or co-author of several books, including Sinatraland: A Novel, When I Was Cool: My Life at the Jack Kerouac School, and Life Isn’t Everything: Mike Nichols, as Remembered by 150 of His Closest Friends
