by Lynn Barber
So then she launches into her spiel about Intimacy – how she saw Patrice Chéreau, the director, in a Paris restaurant and rushed over to tell him she loved his film La Reine Margot and to ask, ‘Can I be in your next film?’ He said yes, and started writing a part for her that night. It is quite a small part, as a loopy bag lady, but Chéreau evidently convinced her it’s the pivot of the film. Did she mind having to look so unglamorous? ‘I did and I didn’t. The first time I saw it, it was a shock. But I would jump off a cliff for Patrice. I don’t know why, but I really fell in love with him and I want to work with him again. He’s one of the reasons I’m doing this interview. I want the film to be a success – I want Patrice to go on making films in English so I can work with him again.’
Actually, I would have thought that Patrice Chéreau’s career could survive without the services of a ratty old rock chick. But let that go – she is very good in the film, however briefly. She has always had the potential to be a good actress, but four years ago she told the Radio Times, ‘I was never an actress. That’s a waste of my time.’ So is she an actress or isn’t she? ‘Well, you know I love acting, but I haven’t ever made it my priority. Maybe that was a mistake. But I couldn’t help it. Music really is my life. And nearly every film I’ve been in has been crap, except Hamlet [with Nicol Williamson], which is brilliant. And I’ve ended up very fond of La Motocyclette [The Girl on a Motorcycle] although it was a horrible experience to make. But honestly, the rest of the filmwork I’ve done has been ghastly. So I used to feel, till now, that I hadn’t had the opportunity to be in really good films with really good directors. Because I could have been a really good actress – and I still could.’
Yet, judging from her book, she had endless opportunities to be a good actress, but invariably blew them away by turning up to work drugged to the eyeballs or not turning up at all. It might have been an obscure desire to punish her mother who had huge ambitions for her little princess. But also she was hell-bent on becoming a junkie from the moment she read The Naked Lunch – she wanted to be a junkie more than she wanted to succeed as an actress or to marry Mick Jagger. Jagger was surprisingly patient for a long time – he took the rap for her in the notorious drugs bust at Redlands when he claimed her pills were his. (Incidentally, she says about the drugs bust that, yes, she was naked under a fur rug – but it was a very large fur rug – and no, there was no Mars bar involved. But she hasn’t eaten one since.)
She split with Jagger in 1970 and became a full-time heroin addict, living in squats and on the street. But she was lucky in that friends got her on an NHS drugs programme, which meant she could get her daily fix on prescription from the chemist. She had one of the highest dosages going – 25 jacks of heroin a day. It left her with poor circulation which is still evident in her angry-red, mottled arms.
It is a mystery what she lived on in the 1970s – she says it’s a mystery to her, too. ‘I don’t know how I survived. There was a time after the 1960s, when I was – I call it depressed – where there was absolutely no income. But I managed somehow. My parents didn’t have any money. I didn’t sell my body. I don’t know how I managed. Flying through life on charm, I suppose. But I never took unemployment, welfare, ever. I have a thing about it.’ Scratch an old hippie, find a Thatcherite, as Julie Burchill always says. Faithfull was far too hoity-toity to do anything as common as signing on. She always made sure people knew her schoolteacher mother was a baroness (Austro-Hungarian, natch). There is a theory that Jagger only embarked on his social mountaineering to impress Faithfull, because she sneered at him for being middle class – of course he totally gazumped her within months. Anyway, she ‘lived on her wits’ and according to Chris Blackwell of Island Records was very good at touching people such as doormen for the odd fiver or tenner.
What drove her to drugs? ‘I don’t know that anything drove me. I didn’t even like it that much either; I just think it was like a good anaesthetic.’ But she says in her book that she always had an attraction to the ‘Dionysian’ life. ‘And I still do!’ she grins. ‘I’m always going to be drawn to that sort of fantasy. Though nowadays I don’t do anything about it.’ Does she still take drugs? ‘Occasionally. I’m not going to go into it. Obviously no heroin. And I don’t at all trust all these new drugs; they’re not a good idea. But you know I’m a very decadent person, I really am. Whether I’m on drugs or not, it doesn’t change anything. I can see why I liked them, and I can’t sort of put that down. It’s just if you want to do anything else in your life, it doesn’t really go.’
She had one failed detox in England in the early 1980s, and then went to Hazelden, the Minnesota clinic, in 1985 and cleaned up. She stayed completely clean, and went to NA meetings for five and a half years. She also moved to Ireland, to the remote and beautiful Shell Cottage on a country estate in County Wicklow, and lived very quietly, alone. She had friends three miles down the road, but she couldn’t walk that far and couldn’t drive. ‘It felt very lonely, and I was there nine years, and it’s a long time to be all on your own. But I’m very glad I did and it was really great for my spiritual life.’
But four years ago she moved in to Dublin. The papers reported that she was chucked out of Shell Cottage after a rowdy birthday party caused £5,000 worth of damage. She says not so. ‘I gave it up because I was lonely. It did have rats. And I’d lived there just long enough. It was self-protection, and there was a moment when it was over. I know the landlord didn’t really like me. But you know, a lot of people don’t really like me. I’m not everybody’s cup of tea!’
I like her for saying that. Unfortunately, liking someone, with me, always provokes a disastrous urge to give good advice, and out it pops. Surely, I tell her, she shouldn’t be drinking, surely Hazelden taught her that sobriety was the only salvation? ‘I’m not going into all that,’ she snaps. And somehow she must have signalled an SOS because suddenly the PR is beside us, telling Marianne, ‘I’m really sorry to interrupt, but I do think we need to lead it slightly more to Intimacy. I know you’ve got lots to say about the film.’ François simultaneously explodes behind me, ‘I knew it! I knew this would happen! It’s always the same – this is going to be the last time, Marianne.’ ‘Why don’t you join us, François?’ I say, thinking I’d rather have him in sight than shouting over my shoulder, but Marianne says quickly, ‘Oh, you don’t want that!’
Heroically, like a good Girl Guide, she pulls herself together and starts yacking about Intimacy until everyone has calmed down. We both rave about the sex scenes between Kerry Fox and Mark Rylance – she says they remind her of Lucian Freud paintings – she says they’re almost like seeing sex for the first time. And, she adds, the orgy scene is brilliant. ‘Though of course I’ve never been to an orgy.’ Oh come, Marianne! ‘In my mind. I’ve never actually physically been to an orgy. But it does fascinate me – how do you show decadence onscreen? And I’m sure that it’s not about chandeliers and opulent surroundings, it’s exactly like in Intimacy. True decadence is an empty room with one bare light bulb.’ In the book, she confesses that sex was always her Primal Anxiety. Every 1960s male fantasised about going to bed with the Girl on a Motorcycle – but she suffered terrible stage fright before the act and would do almost anything to put it off. She once spent days hanging around Bob Dylan, seeing off the other groupies, until he finally made his move and then she told him, ‘No – I’m pregnant.’ Was it performance anxiety? Did she think she was a lousy lay? ‘No. I am sexy, we all are – but people saw me as some kind of illusion and I always had a problem with that. But it doesn’t really come up any more because, you know, I have a lover and I don’t have to worry about it.’
‘Who is it?’
‘I’m not telling you. I just thought I should explain that when I say I’m not worried about it any more, that doesn’t mean I don’t have sex any more. It’s just not an issue in the sense that one isn’t having to take one’s clothes off and go to bed with strangers.’ Is this a long-term relationship? ‘Yes. A deeply c
ommitted and serious relationship. But private.’ Might they marry? ‘I’m not the marrying kind.’
‘It is a man, is it?’ I blurt, suddenly remembering that her book includes several scenes with women. ‘Yes. I’m not gay. I would never rule it out, but it’s obviously not my thing – although very nice and perfectly sexy and so on. And anyway I’ve moved on from that, because I’m in love.’
No amount of questioning from me will yield any more, and she segues smoothly into talking about her life in Dublin. ‘I take care of myself. I go swimming. I read a lot. I see my friends. I talk on the phone. I watch telly. I go to bed quite early.’ She is scared to live in London because ‘it’s too on’ and she thinks she would be pestered by paparazzi. But she sometimes dreams of having a second home in London so she could see more of her son and grandchildren. She had her only child, Nicholas, when she was just eighteen, and lost custody of him when she became a junkie. But they are on good terms again now. ‘I’m really glad I had Nicholas – though I never ever meant to have children. But I had this sort of force that guided me and I knew that if I didn’t have Nicholas I’d never have a child – and I never would have, either. But I could see myself going out with my beautiful grown-up son. And I did that last night – we went to see Beck at the Brixton Academy and it was wonderful. I never quite saw the grandchildren!’
Over coffee, I ask her about François. ‘Darling François!’ she exclaims. ‘I’m sorry he’s a bit grumpy – he’s had so much of it. He’s been my manager for seven years.’ Just for acting, or for music as well? ‘The whole thing. The whole treatment.’ She says this almost with a wink and suddenly – how can I have been so slow? – bells ring, scales fall from eyes, and I squeal, aghast, ‘Is he The Man?’ She says she won’t talk about it, but the answer is all too obviously yes. Good God. ‘Well, I find him very difficult,’ I tell her. ‘Yes,’ she says, ‘but that’s partly his job.’
François has obviously been earwigging again, because he suddenly looms over me and shouts, ‘Are you talking of me? I hate this fucking tabloid paper. Sex and drugs and all that. I just allowed this interview for Patrice, because Marianne loves Patrice. If I could put it back, I will.’ Marianne hisses at the PR, ‘You let him get drunk, you fool.’ François, meanwhile, grabs the bill from the waiter and plonks it in front of me. ‘Oh,’ says Marianne sarcastically, ‘is this on the Observer – that dreadful tabloid newspaper? Sorry, Lynn.’ François shouts at her, ‘Don’t be sorry, Marianne. Don’t apologise. You will see the piece, it will just be sex and drugs, always the same shit. Trust me, for seven years I am telling you the truth.’ The PR intervenes brightly, ‘I think everything’s OK,’ only to get a blistering from Marianne: ‘Well, no. Everything is not OK. I mean, I’m cool, but François is not pleased. Don’t let’s go into denial – it’s not a river in Egypt.’
So then François snarls some more insults at me and I pay the bill and flounce out. The poor chauffeur is still waiting outside and for a moment I think: Tee hee, I could take the limo home and leave them to grub around for a taxi. But then I think how furious François would be and how he’d take it out on Marianne, and decide I don’t really want to punish her quite that much. Though remembering her performance with the waiter I’m fairly torn. I don’t for a minute believe in their nice-cop-nasty-cop routine. If François is bad, she’s bad too – in fact, maybe worse: she chose him, after all.
Oh, she is exasperating! She is so likeable in some ways but also such a pain. The question that was spinning round my head the whole time was: Who does she think she is? She is a singer with one good album (Broken English) to her credit, an actress with one or two good films. Really, her main claim to fame is that she was Mick Jagger’s girlfriend in the 1960s, but of course she would never admit that. She thinks she’s a great artist who has yet to unleash her full genius on the world. Maybe one day she will, and then I will beg to interview her again on bended knee. Till then, back to the forest, you tiresome old Fabulous Beast.
*
This interview had a strange afterlife in that almost every time Faithfull was interviewed subsequently, the interviewer would mention Lynn Barber and Faithfull would make various disparaging remarks about how aggressive she found me. But then, in an Irish interview, she expanded this to claim that I’d asked if she’d ever had sex with a dog. I did what? It would never occur to me in a million years to ask if she’d had sex with a dog, because it would never occur to me in a million years that she might have had sex with a dog. Where would I get such an idea? I know I asked about the Mars bar – she said there was no Mars bar and I believed her – but where was this dog supposed to have come from? I was pretty annoyed but I thought: Oh well, she’s batty and left it at that. But then she repeated it in another interview and it was in danger of becoming an accepted fact. So I wrote to the editor and said they must print a correction and also warn Faithfull that, if she ever said it again, I would sue her for libel. That might sound a bit heavy, but it could seriously damage my career if it was thought I went around asking people if they had sex with dogs.
Faithfull went silent for a few years – she split from the horrible François, and also suffered breast cancer – but I notice she told the Irish Times in February 2011 that she was ‘very wild and emotional’ when she did that interview and ‘I think I might write Lynn a letter to apologise, a letter of amends, for being so rude.’ Her letter has yet to turn up, but anyway, no hard feelings, Marianne. The one thing you can say for sure about Marianne Faithfull is that she is not boring.
CHAPTER THREE
On Interviewing
There’s a wonderful scene in Jennifer Egan’s A Visit from the Goon Squad in which an experienced hack called Jules Jones is sent to interview a nineteen-year-old film star called Kitty Jackson over lunch. He has been allotted forty minutes with her of which she spends the first six on her mobile. ‘Then she starts to apologise . . . Kitty is sorry for the twelve flaming hoops I’ve had to jump through and the several miles of piping hot coals I’ve sprinted across for the privilege of spending forty minutes in her company. She’s sorry for having just spent the first six of those minutes talking to somebody else. Her welter of apologies reminds me of why I prefer difficult stars, the ones who barricade themselves inside their stardom and spit through the cracks. There is something out of control about a star who cannot be nice, and the erosion of a subject’s self-control is the sine qua non of celebrity reporting.’
That phrase – ‘the erosion of a subject’s self-control’ – pretty much sums up the whole celebrity-interviewing game. But what makes the Jennifer Egan scene so delicious is that it’s the reporter who loses his self-control. He gets so irritated by the film star’s bland boring niceness that he suggests they go for a walk in Central Park, in the course of which he jumps her, and tries to rape her. He ends up in prison (of course Kitty writes him a sweet letter) charged with attempted rape, kidnapping and aggravated assault. A bit extreme, you might say, but the feelings he goes through while ‘trying to wrest readable material from a nineteen-year-old girl who is very, very nice’ are ones that I entirely recognise. I have never wanted to rape an interviewee but I have occasionally fantasised that someone else comes in and shoots them. At least then I’d have something to write about.
People often say, ‘Oh it must be great for you meeting all these famous people,’ and I have to resist the temptation to bang my head on the wall and howl. I dare say it’s nice meeting famous people but the trouble is I have to interview them which is a completely different kettle of fish. In fact the interview is the part of my job I enjoy least, so fraught is it with anxiety, impatience, frustration, and often disappointment. It’s like sitting an exam with not enough time – the clock in my head is ticking so loudly I’m surprised the interviewee can’t hear it. I love preparing for an interview, and then writing it up afterwards, but the hour or two I spend with my subject is pretty much pure hell.
The best bit is definitely the research beforehand, especi
ally reading cuttings. It’s the perfect combination of limitless displacement activity with what one can tell oneself is work – ‘I’m sorry I have to lie on the sofa all day but I have to read all these cuttings.’ Nowadays I have to read them on my laptop which is not nearly so much fun, but I used to love getting real yellowing cuttings in real dusty brown files from the Tasiemka Archive in Golders Green. Edda Tasiemka, a German émigré, used to help her journalist husband by cutting out articles she thought might be useful for him. When he died she went on cutting out articles till her entire house was crammed floor to ceiling – not just the sitting room and bedrooms but hall, bathroom, kitchen, landing, garage – with bulging brown files. She’s still doing it, aged ninety, but alas now editors balk at paying her fees and say you can find it all on the internet. You can’t, actually. You can’t hold in your hands the actual Sun front page that screamed ‘Freddie Starr ate my hamster’ whereas you can at Mrs Tasiemka’s. I still sometimes go round to her house just for the joy of riffling through old cuttings.
The point of background research is that you don’t waste precious interview minutes asking for information you could have found out beforehand, such as where they grew up or went to school. But it’s also useful to read previous interviews because they give you a clue as to what you’re in for – if your subject has never produced a good quote, you know you’ll be ploughing stony ground. And if you find the same anecdotes recurring in interview after interview you know these are the ones to avoid.
