Marianne Faithfull - Memories, Dreams and Reflections

Mick might, very occasionally, put the Beatles down for their provincialism, which, if you’re from London and they’re from Liverpool, is a very natural reaction. But he’d never put their music down. Well, of ‘Yellow Submarine’ or those whimsical Beatle songs he might say, ‘Now that is a bit silly.’ I never thought so; I loved it, still do. Also something like ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, but these are obviously not the sort of things the Stones would be into.

Anyway, when you listen to the Beatles carefully, and the John Lennon stuff in particular, they aren’t all sweetness and light. There’s an edge to their music; there’s a real soggy, dark, dirty bit in it that bleeds through. Their sweetness is very superficial. You hear the undercurrent in Paul’s bass playing, you hear it in John’s harmonies, you hear it in the call-and-response stuff. Maybe not the first couple of records, but when you get to Revolver and Rubber Soul , things begin to darken. And there’s something very weird about Sgt Pepper , too. It’s not at all what it appears to be. I’ve found subsequently that listening to Sgt Pepper can be a bit of an unsettling experience. Pet Sounds still comes across as very beatific, so innocent and yearning, whereas Sgt Pepper really doesn’t.

Brian Epstein didn’t seem to get it that one of his jobs was to make sure that his precious boys were happy onstage and could hear each other and that they weren’t torn to pieces all the time by crazed fans. The most basic of needs, you know, just to make sure they weren’t being hounded day and night by cameras and reporters, with absolutely no time to themselves. These awful things kept happening and he wasn’t able to deal with them. That’s one of the reasons why Derek Taylor, their publicist, was so handy, because he was such a gentleman, and a hipster plus he had that ability to make people snap to attention. Invaluable, since Brian Jones would go missing in the middle of tours, recording sessions, negotiations, and nobody could find him. Epstein was a handy front for the Beatles in the beginning, because he seemed to be a gentleman – in appearance he was upper middle class. At first he was able to keep that together and where he did fall short he wasn’t that different from many of the early managers. It was new territory and they didn’t know what the hell they were doing.

Brian Epstein was so talented and had so many gifts and yet in many ways it was as if he really wasn’t paying attention. He fucked up. Beautifully. He was eaten up by what he called his ‘problem’. This was all long before it was cool to be gay. He was wrestling with real demons there, boy, as much if not more than our Andrew. But the difference was that Andrew seemed to enjoy his demons, let’s put it that way. Andrew embraced them, whereas poor Brian just beat himself into a bloody pulp over it. Nobody guessed that he was so terribly depressed and desperate. I had no clue anything was awry. The many times that I went down to see him in his lovely country house, they were beautiful idyllic afternoons. He seemed happy, and put up such a front you could never guess what was going on in the dark corners.

We talked and talked, about ballet, opera, the theatre. We talked about Margot Fonteyn and Nureyev, Vanessa Redgrave, Maggie Smith’s production of Miss Juli e. At that time Brian was agonising over Up Against I t, the Joe Orton script that he wanted the Beatles to do. He was worried it was too far out.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, flipping through the script. ‘Some of it is extremely provocative and nasty. ’

‘C’mon, Brian,’ I said. ‘It’s Joe Orton; they’ll eat it up.’

‘Well, the Archbishop of Canterbury turns out to be a woman, the boys get dressed up as women, commit adultery and murder, and are involved in the assassination of the Prime Minister. Do you really think audiences can stomach this stuff?’

‘It’s farce, Brian,’ I told him. ‘And, let’s face it, at this point the Beatles could do with something edgy.’

I hadn’t, of course, actually read it, and when I did, I saw how tricky – unfortunately – it would be for the Beatles (with the exception of John). There were wonderful outrageous lines. The Archbishop of Canterbury was pure hysterical camp: ‘I’m Princess of the Church. Let me pass. I’ve some hard praying to do.’ The Stones maybe could have got away with it, but for the Fab Four it would’ve been a bit of a stretch.

Orton rightly anticipated that it would be turned down. In his diary he wrote scathingly of Epstein: ‘An amateur and a fool. He isn’t equipped to judge the quality of a script. Probably he will never say “yes”, equally hasn’t the courage to say “no”. A thoroughly weak, flaccid type.’

Too bad. I think if the Beatles had done Orton’s script, it would have really helped Brian – moved him up a level. Although Joe Orton made an unfortunate choice in a lover (who killed him), his take on the Beatles was spot on. He had the right cheeky attitude to the whole thing, and he came from the same milieu as the Beatles. It would have been brilliant if they’d filmed Orton’s script. Would have helped Brian exorcise some of his shit, too.

I know Brian Epstein really liked me because towards the end of one of these teas he asked me to marry him; not that he was exactly serious, but for a second I actually considered it. Come to think of it, I know exactly what stopped me. It was our Mick walking in and saying, ‘Come on, darling, we’ve got to go home now.’

Kit Lambert, who along with Chris Stamp managed The Who, was a wonderful maniac. I remember in the early seventies visiting Kit in some really dreadful, scabby flat in Notting Hill, before Notting Hill became fashionable. It was a trip, I can tell you, both of us doing lots of heroin and coke and alcohol – Kit loved alcohol. We had a whale of a time as Kit regaled me with stories about his dad Constant Lambert, the composer, acting out scenes from operas, scenes with divas and soirées with princesses and rent boys. I didn’t know Kit in his heyday; I only got to know him on the way down, which was more interesting I think, because in an odd way that’s when he was truly in his glory – he was a connoisseur of the lower depths, an area in which I am also somewhat of an expert. The only good thing you could say about Kit’s self-demolition was that he had a perverse kind of pleasure in all of it. He was such a fascinating pervert with a classical education. He used to say things like, ‘The destruction of Pompeii … one of the most magnificent events in history. Those two naked boys preserved in flagrante delicto for all eternity!’

Kit liked building things up, like a child with a sand castle, and then, oh, the mad joy of tearing them down. He enjoyed seeing everything in turmoil, going up in flames. Like Nero, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Pliny the Elder, he loved a great catastrophe – especially if he’d engineered it himself. He loved talking about his disasters – few understood that he relished them as perverse works of art.

I remember once he wanted to take me on a lig to the Cannes Film Festival on a yacht with lots of drugs. In spite of his fallen state he was always very posh. But I wasn’t in any condition to go to some fancy international event and display myself in my wretched condition, so regretfully I declined. Thank God. I would have made the most awful fool of myself, and in public. I had been doing that far too much in front of people as it was – along the lines of the famous Mandrax head-in-the-soup incident. Kit went and made a fool of himself in the grand manner, but then he was a man for whom flamboyant bad behaviour was a fine art. One of the curious things about Kit, of course, was that his father had been a great composer; and that leads us directly to Tommy , The Who’s rock opera. You can see why Pete with his transcendent – and overweening – approach to rock would have been so receptive to Kit’s idea, and I do think it was Kit’s idea – writing a rock opera. After Sgt Pepper everybody wanted a crack at the rock Gesamtkunstwerk , but it was not on. The only person who managed anything like it, and, in fact, preceded it, was Brian Wilson with Pet Sounds . And it was Pet Sounds that helped give Sgt Pepper wings.