Marianne Faithfull, whose passing this week was almost lost in the furious news cycle, was an artist whose multihyphenate status was always ahead of her time: She was a musician/actor/model/muse, later a cabaret performer and, most importantly, a survivor. She was to Swinging London what Edie Sedgwick was to 1960s New York City. She was It.
The list of her glamorous and often tragic anecdotes would take up entire books—or perhaps a biopic?—but among them: Faithfull’s mother was a Viennese baroness descended from Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the author of “Venus in Furs” and the originator of the term “masochism.” At just 18 years old, she released a pop single “As Tears Go By” that is said to be the first original composition by Mick Jagger (who, two years later, was to become her boyfriend) and Keith Richards, both just 21 years old. Before they became an iconic lyric, the words “Wild horses couldn’t drag me away” are what she supposedly first uttered after waking up from a six-day coma induced by a suicide attempt via barbituates while on a flight to Australia with Jagger. “It’s a great honor to be a muse,” she said after their relationship ended, but “that’s a very hard job.”
Faithfull’s first real Vogue moment was a 1965 photo shoot with David Bailey (for British Vogue, naturally), but a year prior she was mentioned in American Vogue’s People Are Talking About section alongside Zizi Jeanmarie, Goldfinger, and the Johnson v. Goldwater presidential election. “Marianne Faithfull, who looks like a small lost angel,” Vogue wrote, “has a sharp edge to her tongue, sings in a wispy way…and doesn’t want adulation, just money in the bank.” |
