Marianne Faithfull on the hard road to becoming a legend
This story was originally broadcast on "CBS Sunday Morning" on May 3, 2009.
Listening to that weathered voice, you know it hasn't been easy being Marianne Faithfull. Her latest album is titled "Easy Come Easy Go," and no one understands better just what that means. She was the archetypal Sixties rock chick; a pop star at 17; Mick Jagger's muse at 19; and by 24, a junkie on the streets.
You hear it all now in that elegantly imperfect voice, because Marianne Faithfull has survived sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll.
She admits there is a mystique about her. Asked if it's a burden, she replied, "No. It's a pleasure now. I love, look, thinking of 'How could I be this person?'"
The British singer who burst on the scene in 1964 was introduced to America on the show "Hullabaloo." Her breakthrough hit, "As Tears Go By," was written for her by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, whose manager discovered her at a party.
"They came up and said to the person I was with, 'Can she sing?'" Faithfull recalled.
Marianne Faithfull performs "As Tears Go By":
The daughter of an eccentric British professor and an Austrian baroness, Faithfull was just out of convent school when her career took off. Was that scary? "Yeah, of course, it was," she said. "And very boring! These were the days when the most interesting thing a journalist would ask you was, like, what your favorite color was."
It all happened so fast. At 18, she married a London art dealer and had a baby. "I was very overenthusiastically eager for life," she said. "I wanted to just bite into it and swallow it whole."
Then, she walked away, from both her marriage and her career, for Mick Jagger.
Why would you give that up? "I think I was sick of it," she said. "And I was a very undisciplined, temperamental little girl."
Mick and Marianne became one of Swinging London's most photographed couples, on top of the world, until February of 1967, when British police barged into a Rolling Stones party at Keith Richards' home. The Stones were found with drugs; Marianne was found naked wrapped in a fur rug. The charges were later dropped, but Marianne's angelic image was disgraced.
She said she "hated" herself. "Because I'd let everybody down. I think that's the worst feeling in the world. I'd let my parents down. They never made me feel they were ashamed of me, really. But it must've been very hard."
She embraced her new bad-girl role in the film "Girl on a Motorcycle." But then, another blow: eight months pregnant with Jagger's daughter, she miscarried. Soon after, on a trip to Australia to make a film with Jagger, she swallowed 150 sleeping pills. She spent six days in a coma.
Marianne recovered, but her relationship with Mick didn't. "I think we were both very hurt," Faithfull said. "I thought I would like it, you know?"
Like what? "Like living with a great man who loved me and looked after me and did everything I wanted, and then it wasn't enough."
She slipped into a prolonged heroin addiction. She said, "It's certainly not what I was dreaming of when I was eight or ten – I'm going to grow up and become a junkie and live on the street! No. And nobody really could understand it, because I was so 'beautiful' and so 'clever' and so 'talented' and I had everything."
She lost it all, even custody of her son, Nicholas. The damage began to show in her singing voice.
I asked, "What did you think as you heard your voice change?"
"Hoped it would end up okay," Faithfull replied. "I mean, yeah, I can't deny that it was a moment of doubt. Of course, there was."
It took her a decade, but in 1979, she pulled herself together to release a raw and daring comeback album, the critically acclaimed "Broken English." She said, "That's the result of an identity that has been flattened, and is suddenly allowed to come up. I became myself, and it was not a person people thought I was. It was more intelligent, stronger, ravaged in its own way, but very quite interesting."
But Faithfull was still an addict. It would be six more years before she finally cleaned herself up. She said, "I know the drugs have changed and damaged everybody's perception of me. I can't do anything about it, except stay clean and do my work and be completely honest about it."
To make "Easy Come, Easy Go," she called on some old friends like Sean Lennon, and she recorded Merle Haggard's "Sing Me Back Home" with Keith Richards.
She said that, in some ways, she fell in love with Keith Richards first. "Yeah, I did. I found him incredibly romantic. But I did love him very much. I can't say I didn't."
And occasionally, she'll still go to a Stones concert. "I have a real feeling of, 'Hey, I was part of that, and I'm very proud of it,'" she said.
She's resumed her acting career, playing the queen mother in "Marie Antoinette." And as part of her recovery, she apologized to her son Nicholas, who is now 43 and, Faithfull said, "the pride of my life."
Now 62, Faithfull lives in Paris and Ireland, but finds it difficult to go back to London. "Because it all happened in London; it was beginning of the whole damn thing," she said. "That's how I see it now."
"So, you wish, in some respect, you wish it wasn't there?" I asked.
"Yeah. It'd be much easier, I think. But maybe I wouldn't be quite so glamorous."
She took the hard road to becoming a legend. But Marianne Faithfull, who once tried to end her life, now can't get enough of it. "Now, I appreciate it," she said. "I think I've been very unconscious for a long time, and only now have I begun to get it. As long as I got it before I croaked, I think that's the main thing."
EDITOR'S NOTE: Marianne Faithfull died on January 30, 2025, at age 78.