Marianne Faithfull Made an Art of Upending Expectations

In March 1964, at a swinging London party, Marianne Faithfull got a record deal without singing a note.

Andrew Loog Oldham, the brash young manager of the Rolling Stones, had noticed the striking Faithfull — then a 17-year-old blonde with shaggy bangs, full lips and a knowing glint in her big doe eyes — from across the room. When he asked her then-husband, the artist John Dunbar, if his wife could sing, Dunbar said that he supposed she could. Oldham took him at his word, and a week later he sent Faithfull a telegram telling her to come to Olympic Studios for a session. With a face that pretty, he reasoned, would anyone really care what came out of her mouth?

The wonderfully outspoken Faithfull, who died on Thursday at 78, spent most of her life making a mockery of that question. She could never quite play the role that Oldham dreamed up for her that day, the fantasy of the demure, retiring ingénue — and thank goodness. For one thing, Faithfull didn’t truly come into her own unique talent as a vocalist until her early 30s, far past the ingénue’s perceived expiration date. And when she did begin to sing songs that were more aligned with her own sensibilities, starting with her corrosive 1979 masterpiece “Broken English,” years of substance abuse had transformed her voice into a punky survivor’s croak. Eventually, in the last several decades of her improbably long career, she channeled her voice’s rich smokiness into a third act as a kind of gothic cabaret singer, personalizing expert interpretations of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave, among others.

That was far from what those who’d marveled at her mute beauty would have imagined her to sound like back in 1964, but such was Faithfull’s subversive power. She upended the expectations of all sorts of feminine stereotypes — the flash-in-the-pan teenage pop star; the silent, self-abnegating muse — and allowed the world to experience the destabilizing shock that occurs when a pretty face gives voice to ugly truths.

Just three months after attending that party, in June 1964, Faithfull had a hit single, the morose-beyond-its-years “As Tears Go By,” by most accounts the first original song written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Faithfull treated her instant pop success as an amusing lark, and possibly a brief detour before her planned future of studying at Oxford; she lugged around a bag of classic British literature on her first tour. But in 1966, when she and Jagger began dating, she achieved a level of glamorous notoriety from which it would be difficult to return to civilian life. And so she was thrust into yet another stereotypical female role that she could not quite play obediently: the Rock Star’s Muse.

Plenty of people still tend to think of a muse as inspiring with her beauty, her compliance and the selflessness of her love — anything but her mind. But Faithfull made more of a mark on Jagger by exposing him to art, literature and theater, all worlds in which she was then more immersed than he was. She was the one who told him to read Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel “The Master and Margarita,” about a particularly charismatic Satan; the result was “Sympathy for the Devil.” She introduced Jagger to artists and poets (like her friend Allen Ginsberg) and took him to his first ballet, “Paradise Lost,” which culminated with the great dancer Rudolf Nureyev leaping into an oversized crimson mouth. Suffice it to say, it had an impact.

The darker side of Faithfull’s influence on the Stones came from her experimentation with drugs, which manifested itself in some of the band’s most harrowing tunes. In 1969, when Faithfull overdosed on more than 100 barbiturate pills and went into a coma, she claimed that the first words she said to Jagger when she awoke were “wild horses couldn’t drag me away.” (The origin myth of this song has been long debated and will probably never be settled for sure, but still, what a story!) An early experience with heroin prompted Faithfull’s first foray into songwriting, when she penned most of the lyrics to “Sister Morphine,” later to appear on the Stones’ 1971 classic, “Sticky Fingers.”

Faithfull recorded her own version of “Sister Morphine” two years before the band, but her label pulled it, thinking its content was too controversial for a Pretty Face like her. By 1979, when she released “Broken English,” mores had changed, as had Faithfull’s reputation, owing to tabloid scandals, addiction and a period of living on the streets. Still, its rawness possessed the power to shock.

As she wrote in her unfiltered, extraordinarily vivid 1994 memoir, “Faithfull,” when she came to the studio to record the vocal for “Why D’Ya Do It,” an angry, expletive-laden piece by the poet Heathcote Williams that was deemed too obscene to be released in Australia until 1988, her backing band was noticeably taken aback by her way with four-letter words. (They shouldn’t have been so surprised; Faithfull was the first person to say the F-word in a major motion picture.) “You can’t imagine the look of horror that came over these supposedly hip, liberated guys,” she wrote. “They were all absolutely appalled and horrified. It was hilarious.”

“Broken English” sounds like a dispatch from the edge of the underworld, sung by someone who caught a glimpse of what it’s like down there but somehow returned to Earth, albeit forever changed. That was another of those icky, unbecoming topics that a Pretty Face is not supposed to concern herself with: death. But Faithfull allowed her brushes with it to haunt the edges of her music and deepen her gravitas as a performer. As years went by, she continued vanquishing potentially fatal foes: hepatitis, breast cancer, and most recently a bout of Covid-19 that put her, once again, in a coma. The sign on the foot of her bed read “Palliative care only.”

But she upended expectations once more, surviving and soon returning to a passion project she had been working on, a spoken-word album of recitations of classic Romantic poems. For one last time, she allowed a glimpse of the other side to inform her art, and the uncompromising tone of her voice: “I sound more vulnerable,” she told me in an interview at the time, reflecting on her performance of Alfred Tennyson’s “Lady of Shalott,” “which is kind of nice, for the Romantics.”