There is a black and white photo, taken in 1969, in which Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull leave a British court between journalists and cameramen, after having faced positions of drug possession and consumption. The Rolling Stones singer, with a diplomatic stripe suit and psychedelic tie, grabs the girl with the arm, but seems more concerned with gathering his legendary lips for the camera. Marianne, wrapped in a three quarters of light cloth and high neck, has a serious face and lost look, as if he got carried away by the bustle without understanding what was happening.
At 78 the icon of the swinging London from the sixties, Jagger’s lover and guitarist Keith Richards, the muse of one of the bands of rock & roll More legendary, the theater actress who performed in the tables, loaded with heroin, the crazy of madness of the ophelia of Hamlet. “With deep sadness we announced the death of the singer, composer and actress Marianne Faithfull. He has died today in peace in London, in the company of his beloved family. We will miss her, ”said a singer and actress spokesman.
Faithfull had a remote past of Austrian nobility, but his childhood was the English middle class itself, in the London suburb of Reading. Like many other teenagers, London attracted him as the magnet of dreams of a generation that began to shake British postwar austerity. In that city he met Andrew Loog Oldham, the representative of the Rolling, who convinced Jagger and Richards to write a song for a girl who had a voice angelic enough to awaken the desire in the crazy decade of the sixties. As Tears Go By reached the list of Top Ten British. Faithfull would have several more successes that would reach that list, and the Top 40 of the United States.
His intense relationship with drugs, at a time when no one was completely aware of the mortal jump he was giving, led him to intuit that, in the same way that his image was the poster of those years, his end would come with that of An extreme decade. It was between 1966 and 1970 when Faithfull and Jagger lived their toxic romance, marked by crazy and excessive parties. “Not even wild horses would be dragged,” he told the singer his muse and lover after waking up from a coma. “Wild horses couldn´t drag me away”It is part of the letter of Wild Horses, of his album Sticky Fingers. “I know they used me as a muse to write all those hard songs around the drug. I knew they were using me, but it was for a good cause, ” FaithFull told the magazine Classic Rock. His hand is behind other songs as streets of the band as Dear Doctor o You Can´t Always Get What You Want.
The descent to hell
Before everything burst, Faithfull grabbed headlines when in 1967 the police launched a raid in the house that Richards, the Rolling guitarist, had in Sussex. The drug ran like gunpowder, and the singer was arrested completely naked, covered with a leather blanket. They ran all kinds of rumors about what had happened in that house. That was the size of the legend.
His life with Jagger as soon as he covers four years, but he could never detach himself from the brand of that relationship. When worsening his heroin addiction and cocaine, he undertook a path to the abyss that ended the streets of London, in search of the charity of others. In 1970 he lost his son’s custody, separated from the singer and wandered through the Canalla neighborhood of the Soho. “It made me realize that human beings are really kind. The owner of the Chinese restaurant let me wash my clothes there, and the tea post gave me free tea cups, ”he recalled in his memoirs.
He signed up for a program against drugs of the National Health Service, which allowed him to obtain heroin doses. He lost tens of kilos, burst the shovels of his teeth in a street fight and tried to destroy his beautiful face with a razor. But like the Rolling, she was also a survivor. With the help of Chris Blackwell, the owner of the legendary record record Island Records, Faithfull resurrected with the album Broken Englishin which the voice was no longer angelic, but rough and painful, suitable to tell what hell consists of.
Adored by other Faithfulull emerged in later years, such as Courtney Love, Sinead O’Connor or Kate Moss, the singer and actress became an icon of feminism, a great lady of the recent history of England that had gone and returned to many of The places that these women visited for the first time.
She alone was writing her own story, the same one that sheared without caution in her two autobiographies, first in Marianne Faithfullin 1995, and then in Memories, dreams and reflectionsIn 2007. “I am sorry I had not given more love to my parents, but otherwise, I do not regret anything I did in the past. The regrets are always there, but I think that repentance is a rather stupid feeling, ”he acknowledged in his first book.