The Sacher-Masochs are an ancient and illustrious Austrian family dating back to the reign of Charlemagne. Europe’s Who’s Who, the Almanach de Gotha, testifies to almost nine centuries of Sacher-Masoch involvement in warfare and the arts, culminating in the nineteenth-century novelist who first described the giving of pain for sexual pleasure, and used his own name to define it: Masochism.
Eva’s childhood was dominated by her father, an Austrian count of the old school, who went off to the Great War much as his forebears had accompanied Charlemagne, with a silver helmet, a cloak and a string of seven Arab chargers. The count survived, with his grandeur almost all intact. Eva spent her girlhood in surroundings of nineteenth-century splendour, albeit tinged with the growing menace of Nazism. A gifted dancer, and very beautiful, she won a place with the famous Max Reinhardt company in Vienna. But for the war in 1939, she would have joined Max Reinhardt in Hollywood and would, undoubtedly, have become a major film star.
It was to be her destiny, instead, to live out the Nazi terror, and so meet and fall in love with an Englishman, Glyn Faithfull, whose peacetime study was research into ancient words and languages. As a philologist, Glyn had been drafted into British wartime intelligence and was in Yugoslavia as a liaison officer with a unit of Tito’s partisans that included Eva’s brother, Alexander. The story in the family goes that Glyn Faithfull saved Alexander’s life. He, in gratitude, recommended the Englishman to the affections of his beautiful sister, herself active in the Viennese Resistance attempting to save Austrian Jews from extermination.
The war over, Glyn Faithfull married his Austrian baroness, brought her home to England and resumed his academic career with a teaching post at Liverpool University. Their only child, Marianne, was born in 1947 and first came to consciousness in the unlikely surroundings of Ormskirk, Lancashire.
Marianne’s first real memories begin after the age of six, when her parents separated and Eva took her to live in Reading, in a tiny house which, even so, contained rich reminders of her highborn Austrian heritage. There were the ceremonial dinner plates, from banquets long unaffordable, and leather books from private libraries long dispersed. There was the discovery that Eva spoke in a voice quite different from other girls’ mothers; that her speech, her gestures, her very posture belonged to somewhere far from Millman Road. ‘Eva had to adapt her whole body to that house,’ Marianne says. ‘She’d grown up in rooms so big you could just sweep across them. At Millman Road there was no room big enough to sweep across. She’d trained herself to be very careful and contained, to suit the size of the rooms we had.’
Marianne remembers with what grande dame style Eva used to invest even the most mundane parts of their life in Reading. ‘She’d go round the shops, talking to everyone as if she was touring her estate. One must always be gracious, she said. She told me I had to smile at everyone. And the poorer they were, the nicer I had to be to them.’
The dour Reading shopkeepers were, if anything, more captivated by the little girl who would, in time, do her mother’s shopping, carefully repeating Eva’s ceremonious: ‘One pound of tomatoes – not too big. One ni-ize lettuce …’ ‘Millman Road wasn’t in the worst part of Reading, but it was near the worst part. There was one very frightening street I had to go down to the shop where I used to buy my mother’s Woodbine cigarettes. “Darleeng …” she’d say, “you go out and get me some Voodbines …”’
The baroness was a cultivated as well as formidable woman. From her mother, at the earliest age, Marianne learned to read voraciously and appreciate paintings and music. Though money was short, Eva took her back to Vienna to show her where she had come from and visit the city’s great museums and galleries. ‘My mother taught me something else as well at an early age. She taught me that to be beautiful – as I knew I was – shouldn’t be a passive thing. It was something to be put to use, the way that, in the past, she’d put her own beauty to use. I was trained by a highly trained professional.’
A local Catholic convent, St Joseph’s, agreed to accept the baroness’s daughter as a weekly boarder on semi-charitable terms. ‘When I first brought a friend home to Millman Road, I got this terrible shock,’ Marianne says. ‘I realized that my home wasn’t the same as other girls’. I realized my mother was quite different from everyone else’s.’
St Joseph’s was run by an order of nuns, on principles of medieval strictness. When bathing, the girls had to wear shifts, to avoid the sin of looking at their own nude bodies. It was a system which Marianne, a non-Catholic, found especially repressive and fought against with the enquiring mind her mother had fostered in her. At home, none of the bookcases was ever locked. Marianne and a schoolfriend set about methodically reading through the entire index of books forbidden to Catholics.
At sixteen, both beautiful and intelligent, her future seemed overburdened with promise. Her academic prowess – especially in languages – would have gained her admittance to any of Britain’s top universities. Her talent for drama, allied to her looks and pure mezzo-soprano singing voice, would likewise have taken her to the best academies of either drama or music. ‘There was no doubt, in my mind or my mother’s, that I’d go on the stage. The only question was, how?’
Meanwhile, to use her own wistful phrase, Marianne Faithfull ‘lived in a Renoir painting – long blonde hair, sunny days, straw hat with ribbons …’ She had begun to sing semi-professionally – folk songs, with guitar accompaniment, in a Reading coffee bar to an adoring circle of local college boys. ‘I’d learned my lesson from Eva – that beauty was something I had to put to use. I knew things must happen to me – that my looks and my voice together were a devastating combination.’
As sixteen, she began going steady with John Dunbar, a Cambridge undergraduate studying fine art at Churchill College. She remembers standing for hours outside the telephone box near her house, waiting to talk to John until her money ran out. He was the first boy to make love to her – in her innocence, she thought he would be the only one. The centre of her world moved from Reading to Cambridge, where she would visit Dunbar at his college, and in London, where his family lived and where he had many friends among the new pop in-crowd.
In the early summer of 1964, Marianne went with John Dunbar to a party in London, given to launch a new girl singer named Adrienne Posta. Many of the in-crowd were there – among them an old friend of John Dunbar’s, whose sunglasses and puff-sleeved silk shirt made it hard for Marianne to believe John had first met him through a shared interest in left-wing politics. So she was first introduced to Andrew Loog Oldham while at the same time, across the noisy room, receiving her first sight of her future lover, supporter and nemesis Mick Jagger.
Just then, Jagger’s glance was only one in the swarm that settled on honey-blonde hair and the face it framed, in which virginal innocence co-existed with a kind of helpless sensuality, brimming of its own accord in her wide blue eyes and a mouth as tender, as bruisable, as soft, red fruit. Marianne was well aware she had captured the attention of every man in the room. ‘I knew I was at that party just as a beautiful woman, to go to the highest bidder,’ she says. ‘I knew I had to use my looks, the way Eva had said, to create a situation; to make things happen that I wanted to happen.’
What happened was that Andrew Loog Oldham came swaggering up and, on being introduced to Marianne Faithfull, said: ‘With a name like that, you ought to be making records.’ The name added to the lovely, misty face had set wheels awhirl in Oldham’s mind, even before Marianne told him she was already singing semi-professionally. Within literally minutes, Oldham informed her she could become a big star, provided she placed herself under his exclusive management.
She met Mick Jagger, with Keith, a few minutes afterwards, but was not impressed. She disliked Mick’s pallor, his spotty face and the studied crudeness of his voice and manner. Jagger’s invariable approach to girls he considered ‘high class’ was ‘’Ello, darlin’. ’Ow yer doing?’ Their first brief conversation ended with Jagger deliberately slo
pping wine down the front of Marianne’s dress.
Oldham, it transpired, had been absolutely serious. Within a few days of the party, Marianne found herself offered a formal management contract and a recording test with the Stones’ label, Decca. Since she herself was only seventeen, all contracts had to be endorsed by her mother, the baroness. ‘Eva signed everything, even though she didn’t really know what it was about,’ Marianne says. ‘Her one stipulation was that when I went out on tour, I must always have a chaperon.’
Oldham’s real plan, as always, was for the greater expansion of Andrew Loog Oldham. The manager of the pop group which had outraged Britain now saw his chance to perpetrate an even greater surprise. What more surprising contrast could there be to the shaggy, surly Rolling Stones than a sweet-faced ex-convent girl whose voice was softly elegant and whose mother was an Austrian noblewoman? With a chaperon thrown in as well, Oldham’s promotional script was practically writing itself.
To launch Marianne Faithfull on record, Oldham planned to use a song by Lionel Bart, a composer of stage musicals then at his apotheosis. The B-side was to be Greensleeves, with slight modifications that would allow Oldham, not King Henry VIII, to claim the composer’s credit.
The Lionel Bart song, unfortunately, did not suit Marianne’s voice. Oldham therefore had no alternative but to order a song from a composing team whose efforts thus far had been confined to sentimental ballads – Mick Jagger and Keith Richard. ‘I told them, Marianne’s a convent girl. I want a song with brick walls all around it, and high windows and no sex.’
These tight restrictions, paradoxically, set free the creative chemistry between Mick and Keith that they had almost despaired of discovering. As Time Goes By – subsequently retitled As Tears Go By – was their first real song in the sense that it sprang wholly from within themselves, stamped unmistakably with a shared character. Simple, even elegant, imbued with overtones of Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott, its qualities startled no one more than its two composers. For weeks afterwards, Mick remembers, they would rack their brains in fruitless attempts to write something else as good.
Marianne went into the Decca studios under much the same strictures, performing the song in the most muted possible version of her rich mezzo voice. The result was what Oldham had wanted: a convent girl singing sweetly and shyly, with high walls and no sex. In August 1964, As Tears Go By was number nine in the charts. Marianne Faithfull was Britain’s latest female singing star. ‘Greensleeves goes Pop,’ the Daily Mirror said.
To this day, Oldham carries around with him a letter he received from Marianne just prior to her debut television appearance on Ready, Steady, Go. With almost painful shyness and politeness, she asks directions to the studios in Kingsway and hopes the show will be over in time for her to catch her last train back to Reading.
Caliban’s island was not more full than Great Britain, in August 1964, of the sound of voices and ‘twangling instruments’, beamed from insecure moorings three miles distant, their harbinger a watery ship’s bell.
Giorgio Gomelsky’s fellow Method actor Ronan O’Rahilly was the first – by a cat’s whisker – to get the big idea. For years, British entrepreneurs had dreamed of starting pop radio stations in the American style, but had always been thwarted by the BBC’s legally enforced monopoly. O’Rahilly’s wheeze was to fit out a ship as a radio station and begin transmitting off the Essex coast, outside Britain’s three-mile territorial limit. Radio Caroline announced itself over the 1964 Easter bank holiday, with a record clearly chosen to echo its own piratical effrontery: Not Fade Away by the Rolling Stones. Almost simultaneously, a rival ship, Radio Atlanta – fitted out in the same Irish port, despite heavy sabotage from O’Rahilly’s supporters – began pouring the same heady mixture of continuous pop, American-style commercials and station identification jingles into Britain’s radio sets.
Within a few weeks, the two pirate stations, as they were instantly dubbed, together had an audience numbering hundreds of thousands. Official attempts to ban them under the Wireless Telegraphy Acts revealed that they were indeed beyond parliamentary jurisdiction. It became evident also that Radio Caroline and Radio Atlanta were providing something the public wanted, despite years of BBC insistence to the contrary. The pirates therefore could continue, and multiply. Soon there was Radio London; Radio Scotland; Radio Clyde; Radio Sutch; Radio Invicta; Radio City. Transmitter ships littered the North Sea, locked in a wavelength war that occasionally spilled into actual violence. A man was even killed in a night attack on the disused Thames Estuary fort which housed Radio City.
The muffled creaks of pirate ship timbers, and groans of their intermittently seasick young disc jockeys, are an essential element in recalling the 1964 ‘Beat Boom’. The sounds were the more exciting for rising and falling somewhat, as the vessel did; being smuggled into the radio dial, like so much contraband.
With those thousand twangling instruments – bought usually on the instalment plan – came voices, multifariously accented. Following Liverpool’s glorification, other far-flung provincial capitals could also now pride themselves on emitting a competitively fashionable sound. As well as Mersey groups (Pacemakers, Searchers, Mojos, All Stars, Chants, Undertakers, Flamingoes) and Manchester groups (Hollies, Dakotas, Mindbenders, Hermits, Dreamers), there were Birmingham groups (Applejacks, Fortunes, Ivy League); there were Tyneside groups (Animals, Bluechips); Scotttish groups (Luvvers, Poets) and Irish groups (Bachelors, Them). London restored its dented cultural superiority with groups mingling club r & b with aggressive Mod culture (The Who, Small Faces, Kinks). There were all-instrument groups (Jaywalkers, Blues Inc) and all-vocal groups (Four Pennies, Walker Brothers). There were earnest groups (Manfred Mann, Yardbirds) and comical groups (Fourmost, Rockin’ Berries, Barron Knights). There were, in short, dozens, if not hundreds of groups. And, presumably, that Decca executive who had pronounced guitar groups to be on the way out was still in his Albert Embankment office, trying to kick himself to death.
Whatever the passing allegiance for this or that newly fashionable group, being a pop fan in 1964 Britain depended on one fundamental question: ‘Are you Beatles or are you Stones?’ asked with the searching ferocity of rival factions in a football crowd. Even football factions, though, had scarcely been as rife with implications of reflected character.
To answer ‘Beatles’ implied that one was oneself similarly amiable, good-natured, a believer in the power of success to effect conformity. To answer ‘Stones’ meant, more succinctly, that one wished to smash up the entire British Isles. On June 24, a Stones concert in the Winter Gardens, Blackpool, provoked a riot that seventy policemen could not contain. The Stones themselves came under heavy attack, from hails of spittle and grabbing hands that eventually succeeded in pulling a Steinway grand piano off the stage. The journalist Roy Carr – then a musician in a back-up band – remembers with what deep gratification he saw Keith Richard persuade an over-eager fan to retreat from the stage rim by sinking one pointed boot toe in his face. Afterwards, Ian Stewart, the imperturbable, came round to their dressing room to distribute various chips of splintered wood, saying, ‘Here’s your guitar … and here’s your amp …’
On July 3, a Stones concert in Belfast was cancelled for fear of some similar outbreak. What Belfast avoided, Holland received in double measure eight days later, when the Stones caused the virtual destruction of a cinema in The Hague. Next day, when they arrived back in Manchester for a Ready, Steady, Go appearance, a door was wrenched bodily from their hired limousine. So it continued, in Liverpool, Manchester, Carlisle and Edinburgh, the splinter of chairs and woodwork threatening to drown even the chart success of their new EP, Five by Five. Their progress, viewed on old newsreels and TV film, shows what a change was coming over pop concerts. More police, more ‘stewards’ of more and more doubtful provenance, massed along the stage front. More foolhardy lunges at Mick Jagger by desperate girls. More nonchalant violence in the seizing of such girls by their arms, legs, even their hair, t
o toss them back into the crowd.
The virus was spreading into parts of Europe where even Beatlemania had not taken root. On October 18 – despite an attempt to ban them by Belgium’s Minister of the Interior – the Stones played to a howling sea of heads at the Brussels World’s Fair ground. Two nights later, in Paris, the pop concert in its old, innocent, sedentary form was finally laid to rest. The Stones’ show at the Olympia Theatre ended in running fights between gendarmes and youths who ran amok through the boulevards, breaking shop windows, slashing at newspaper kiosks, overturning café tables and hurling customers on to the pavement. The Daily Mirror reported that 150 arrests had been made.
On October 23, the bacillus was once more reported en route to the American continent. America’s worst fears were confirmed by a publicity photograph, showing the Stones apparently in an advanced state of destitution, Mick Jagger engaged in scratching himself like a baboon while Keith peered with absorption inside the waistband of his jeans. ‘The Rolling Stones, who haven’t washed for a week …’ the caption began.
At Kennedy airport, girls who broke from the crowd barriers were felled by policemen with flying football tackles. One of them, pulled forth for a random TV interview, proved surprisingly lucid in answer to the stock question, ‘Why do you like the Stones?’
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