So Long, Marianne (1946-2025): What Becomes of the Brokenhearted

Marianne Faithfull. (Photo: Peter Seeger.)

“The men and women who produce works of genius are not those who live in the most delicate atmosphere, whose conversation is the most brilliant or culture the most extensive, but rather those who have had the power, ceasing suddenly to live only for themselves, to transform their own personality into a sort of mirror.”

Marcel Proust

If there is a sadder singer-songwriter on earth, I’m not sure who it might be. The late Marianne Faithfull was sadder than Neil Young, sadder than Leonard Cohen, sadder than sad. She even exceeds the sorrow and bleakness quotient of one of the great lamenters of all time, Nico, the chanteuse of pain who originally performed with The Velvet Underground but who left them, probably because they were too happy for her. She might be sadder that Amy Winehouse, although she was fortunate enough to live a full half-century longer than the poor lamentable Amy. Marianne Faithfull was the dark side of Joni Mitchell: while it’s true that Mitchell had her own dark side, Faithfull was the dark side of Joni’s dark side. She was an exile who lived in a dream world for so long that her reports from its frontier took on the status of legend. She was also, apart from being a consummate risk-taker, an empath of the highest order, with a remarkable ability for turning sheer survival practically into an authentic religion.

Falling from grace, falling from grace.

Lord, you have a pretty face.

Take it away and pack it in a suitcase.

Then forget about falling from grace.

Put yourself in my place, please try.

I never told the truth, I never told a lie.

Falling from grace, falling from grace.

Lord, you have a pretty face.

Take it away and pack it in a suitcase.

Then forget about falling from grace.

Marianne Faithfull, 1979 

Now naturally all artists, perhaps especially singer-songwriters, would admit to being slaves to risk. They accept creative and often even personal risk as one of the prices they pay to do the job at hand. But in Faithfull we have the ideal example of something truly scary, a person who will take the ultimate risks for everyone, on our behalf, and go to the very end of where that risk takes her. Well, almost to the end. But then again, once one knows a little of her genealogy, perhaps the embrace of risk in her work and life, both artistic risk and existential risk, becomes a little more clear. 

Her mother Eva was the Baroness Erisso, hailing from a long line of Austro-Hungarian aristocrats, the von Sacher Masochs. If the name rings a little bell in the back of your head it’s probably because of one particularly famous, or infamous, member of the clan. Her great-uncle was Leopold Baron von Sacher Masoch, whose 1870 novel Venus in Furs gave rise to the familiar term masochism. What a lovely and inspiring family legacy! Her immediate roots are no less dramatic: her mother was raped by occupying Russian soldiers, got pregnant and had an abortion, then met Major Glynn Faithfull, a British spy working behind allied lines. In a clear bid to escape her situation, Eva married the major and fled from her distressed background. They split up fairly quickly, but not until establishing an eccentric household which would forever mark their daughter Marianne with the radical urges that eventually guided her own lifestyle choices.

And what choices she made, almost as if driven by a kind of family karma which all but guaranteed her leap into the abyss that followed. It took almost thirty years to get the Glimmer Twins of The Rolling Stones to admit that it was she who wrote their iconic little ode, “Sister Morphine,” which rose to fame on their 1971 album Sticky Fingers. With their names, Jagger and Richards, listed as the composers, not hers. Even though she released her own version in 1968, which went nowhere largely because the public who had swooned to the lithe blonde singing “As Tears Go By” four years earlier refused to sanction that same little angel’s descent into the darkness of drug addiction, something far more acceptable in the macho boy’s club of rock music. Her version is the more harrowing one. After all the “scream of the ambulance” was coming for her, personally.

By the time she penned Broken English seventeen years later, the times were far more favorable for her particular pathology as it played out in gritty, hard-edged songs that could never be confused with the soft pop of her swinging London origins. Even though “As Tears Go By” by a 17-year old girl was a bleak and monotone lament, it didn’t approximate the descent into darkness represented by her comeback record, which placed her in the forefront of serious singer-songwriters, and so far away from her beginnings as a gentle pop tart. For a while though, she was our counterculture Lolita, trying out each of The Stones in turn before eventually settling on Jagger.

By the late 70’s, punk music was creating an angry answer to pop and rock’s massive commercialism, and it was this chilly climate that Faithfull was able to capitalize upon for her return to the spotlight after a decade of heroin addiction from which she only barely emerged alive. Faithfull was definitely the original Material Girl; there would likely be no Madonna if not for her, and naturally there is simply no useful comparison between Faithfull’s strong plunge into feminist rock and the 80’s dance queens’ solipsistic provocations.

But back in 1968, when the original version of “Sister Morphine” was written and tumbled onto an unsuspecting audience perhaps used to expecting more blondeness in her music, of the “What the World Needs Now” variety, the radio waves recoiled from her message of self-destruction and oblivion, even though they lapped it up when it was sung by Jagger only three years a few years later. And the lyrics tell us why those reactions were not surprising:

What am I doing in this place?

Why does the doctor have no face? . . .

Well, it just goes to show,

Things are not what they seem.

Please, Sister Morphine, turn my nightmares into dreams . . .

Come on now, Sister Morphine, you better make up my bed

‘Cause you know and I know in the morning I’ll be dead.

She wasn’t, of course, and the real shocker is that she had yet to fully taste the oblivion she craved when she wrote that song. Once or twice was all she tried it, testing it out for size. It was far more a romantic evocation of the condition from the outside, poetically projected through the rock environment which she inhabited with her main consorts, The Rolling Stones.

I was delighted to discover the following quote from her autobiography, Faithfull, written with David Dalton, which seems to secure her position among the boys’ rock club but also to solidify her membership in the wider union of sufferers.

“Sister Morphine” was released in England in February 1969. It was out for a mere two days when Decca freaked out and unceremoniously yanked it off the shelves. There was no explanation, no apology. When it came out on Sticky Fingers later, however, there wasn’t a peep about it, so perhaps it was the timing. I wasn’t being allowed to break out of my ridiculous image.

I was being told that I would not be permitted to leave that wretched, tawdry doll behind. If I went on doing my nice little folksy songs, I could go on making records. “Sister Morphine” was my Frankenstein, my self-portrait in a dark mirror. But unlike Mary’s, my creation wasn’t going to be allowed to see the light of day. Mine was a very pop Frankenstein, just a song, but in my mind I had painted a miniature gothic masterpiece, my celebration of death!

She would exact a profound revenge of course, with the ascent of her later “comeback.”

Perhaps there was something after in her constitutional makeup, something almost genetic and hereditary, stemming from both her strange childhood with extremely strange parents in a dysfunctional home life, and the not-so-distant echo of her mother’s great historic uncle, the man for whom masochism is officially named. For what else was her self-abnegation and near obliteration at the hands of the poppy but an extended and hopeless attempt to engage in a kind of transcendental masochistic philosophy, one from which she is lucky to have emerged at all?

It now seems entirely possible that Faithfull’s background made her emotionally predisposed to submit to perhaps the greatest and most dangerous of sadists, King Heroin.

His Satantic Majesty also had close ties with quite a few of her peers in this edgy entertainment profession as well. But in Broken English, she wasn’t just exploring the scary side of her own pathology, a pre-requisite for all dark mirrors everywhere, but also personifying the dysfunctions of last capitalist and post-industrial society. And in that husky (it’s too scary a voice to call sultry, after all) Marlene Dietrich growl of hers, she enunciates the questions we all want asked, even if answers will never be forthcoming: “Don’t say it in Russian, don’t say it in German / Say it in broken English, say it in broken English.” Only hers was the kind of voice that could adequately deliver such incisive lyrics as those found on her often harrowing songs. Only a voice like hers could match feelings like hers and bring them up into the light of day.

From the very beginning, Faithfull’s roots in the cultural avant-garde of her time were well established. Her first lover was John Dunbar, a near-mythical figure in London who ran the Indica Gallery, where John Lennon first met Yoko Ono at one of her conceptual art shows. Along with Barry Miles, with money from Peter Asher of Peter and Gordon fame and also crucial support from a young Paul McCartney, they began to form the locus of a scene, very early on. This was 1963, after all, and London had not yet actually begun to swing. She and they were among the new tribal forces of feral youth that started the pendulum moving.

As she herself once put it, “The threads of a dozen little scenes were invisibly twining together . . . ” Who knew then that the big stew of a scene would eventually turn global in its scope, liberating whoever wanted to be liberated, whether they were young or old?

“We said, right, this is our mission. Free love, psychedelic drugs, fashion, Zen, Nietzsche, tribal trinkets, customized existentialism, hedonism and rock ‘n’ roll. And lo and behold, before long there was a definite buzz going on.” Faithfull’s own words are always the best way to the centre of what that buzz was all about; hers is the best commentary on the sultry blonde myth that surrounded her, especially because she herself knows precisely how much of it all was myth.

According to Pop Mythology my life proper began at Adrienne Posta’s launching party in March 1964, for it was there that I first met Mick Jagger. Mick fell in love with me on the spot (or so the story goes), decided I was fit to be his consort, and wrote “As Tears Go By.” I, on the other hand, immediately began shooting heroin and having a lot of sex.”

In reality, of course, even though there was precious little of it to speak of, Faithfull’s persona was the construction of The Stones’ hyper-kinetic manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, who saw in her the ideal female reflection of the times.

I was never that crazy about “As Tears Go By.” God knows how Mick and Keith wrote it or where it came from. The image that comes to mind for me is the Lady of Shalott, looking into the mirror and watching life go by. It’s an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of twenty to have written, a song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life . . .

Indeed, it was even more astonishing for a girl of seventeen to be chosen to sing the dark little ode. By the time she was fully in the grip of her heroin addiction, which was almost immediately thereafter, the resonance of the song would be far more ironic.

‘As Tears Go By’ was a marketable portrait of me, and as such is an ingenious creation, a commercial fantasy that pushes all the right buttons. It did such a good job of imprinting that it was to become, alas, an indelible part of my media-conjured self for the next fifteen years. I re-recorded it at the age of forty, and at that moment I was exactly the right age and in the right frame of mind to sing it. It was then that I truly experienced the lyrical melancholy of the song for the first time. The dolly girls all jiggled and jumped up and down and shook their moneymakers, doing little go-go steps in their thigh length white boots. I didn’t want to compete with that, so I decided to go as far as I could in the other direction. I simply stood in front of the microphone, very still, my hands dangling by my side and sang from some place deep inside me, and out came this clear, ethereal voice. It wasn’t the least sexy or hip. It was about as far as you could get from sexy.

Oh, but it was sexy, precisely because she wasn’t trying. It was unbearable, in fact, and she soon developed a style that the dolly girls could never hope to compete with. She was trying hard not to sink into the abyss that was spread before her like a banquet, a beggar’s banquet, it should be specified, but her own appetite for oblivion, shared by so many other dark mirrors, doomed her from the start. Once you start at the top, where else is there to go but down, in her case, down into the arms of the ultimate lover, albeit a pharmaceutical one, into the quivering arms of both cocaine and heroin, both cruel and unforgiving lovers who would erase the next decade of her life, and almost erase her life itself. Naturally, her youth slipped away into the same place all of our youths did, down the drain of time, but she, unlike most of the rest of us, speeded up the process through her own lifestyle choices. One of those choices included her telling all of us her own bitter truth. Still her best recordings pursued a personal demon which still somehow manages to indict all of our shared cultural compulsions from the magic time she still represents for all of us. She readily admitted to being the icon for our urges, though she simultaneously laments ever having been caught up in the glare of those cultural headlights.

(Photo: Hoare/Dailey Express.)

Like the true dark mirror she was, Faithfull was almost wistful about what we all watched her go through. “There are a lot of things I could have done at the age of nineteen that would have been more healthy than becoming Mick Jagger’s inamorata. In the end, it doesn’t matter that hearts got broken and we sweated blood. Maybe the most you can expect from a relationship that goes bad is to come out of it with a few good songs.” A few good songs, stretched out over some 60-odd albums and hundreds of searing melodies, from the pen of a songwriter who will remain important before, during and long after Madonna’s shiny but illusory reign. “I was now the tarnished Pop Star Angel . . . By the mid-seventies I had reluctantly come to the conclusion that if I were ever to obliterate my past, I’d have to create my own Frankenstein, and then become the creature as well.” And that’s exactly what she did, she consciously descended down deeper into the darkest part of her own darkness on a sad search for the tiny light hidden there. The light that only certain singer songwriters even know about, much less care to search for. For the details on her journey to and from the Inferno, I highly recommend reading her autobiography.

In it she reports how it feels to no longer be what the late great Warren Zevon once called a “travel agent for death.”

I was as zealous as an convert to a new religion, poring over the old Alcoholics Anonymous Big Book as lovingly as any monk. One of my favourite passages is Step Two, which is about the savages. That’s very much what being an addict and an alcoholic is all about. You go back to a completely savage state. But once out of that feral stage one is not, alas, automatically cast into a state of grace: just being clean does not transform everything. Indeed, it is precisely the “everything” of life that is pretty much the same.

She also described telling old friends about how ecstatic it felt to be clean, characterizing what had happened to her as “incredible.” But many seemed to miss the old Marianne, a reaction she says was fairly typical of the rock contingent:

They liked me better on heroin. I was much more subdued and manageable. It’s very common with rock stars. They surround themselves with beautiful and often brilliant women whom they also find extremely threatening. One way out is for the women to get into drugs. That makes them compliant and easier to deal with.

When she called Keith Richards, the imperial leader of a rock clan who probably introduced her to the poppy in the first place and with whom she remained close friends to the end, and told him her good news—how she’d stopped drinking and doing drugs—he was, she reported, sympathetic but a little worried: “He paused for a beat and then said: ‘Ahh Marianne! But what about the Holy Grail?’”

Her answer remains unrecorded. Having lived the life she had, it must sometimes have been difficult remembering whether something actually happened, or whether it was a role she played in a film or one of her many remarkable stage appearances.

But the most powerful role she has ever undertaken was the one as the smoldering train wreck who become a global pop star before even growing up, and then descending into the depths of a near hereditary self-punishment. She’s the role model for every on-the-edge female singer songwriter since her arrival on the scene over 50 years ago. “In my music performance, I’m always trying to get closer to what I’m really like. Whereas with acting, I’m really interested in roles that are completely different to what I’m like . . .”

The more she concealed, the more she revealed, until there was nothing but a glimmering golden glow that somehow suffused everything else and relieved some of the accumulated pain. Not all of it, of course, but enough to make it all worthwhile, almost. So, so long, Marianne, you were exactly the kind of mirror that Proust was talking about.

– Donald Brackett is a Vancouver-based popular culture journalist and curator who writes about music, art and films. He has been the Executive Director of both the Professional Art Dealers Association of Canada and The Ontario Association of Art Galleries. He is the author of the recent book Back to Black: Amy Winehouse’s Only Masterpiece (Backbeat Books, 2016). In addition to numerous essays, articles and radio broadcasts, he is also the author of two books on creative collaboration in pop music: Fleetwood Mac: 40 Years of Creative Chaos, 2007, and Dark Mirror: The Pathology of the Singer-Songwriter, 2008, as well as the biographies Long Slow Train: The Soul Music of Sharon Jones and The Dap-Kings, 2018, and Tumult!: The Incredible Life and Music of Tina Turner, 2020, and a book on the life and art of the enigmatic Yoko Ono, Yoko Ono: An Artful Life, released in April 2022. His latest work is a book on family relative Charles Brackett's films made with his partner Billy Wilder, Double Solitaire: The Films of Charles Brackett and Billy Wilder, published in January 2024.