Marianne Faithfull - Memories, Dreams and Reflections

Kit came to a sad end, alas. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage after falling down the stairs of his mother’s house in 1981.

Visits to Paul and Jane Asher weren’t quite as relaxed as those Mick and I spent with George and Pattie. With hindsight I can see that they were rather uptight. There were constant little frictions. Mick and I were very close and we would never have done anything like fret about windows being open or closed, or anything as petty as that, but this is what happens when couples start to come apart. In any case I was in a very different position to the one Jane found herself in. I’d done what Paul wanted Jane to do, and given up my career. I wasn’t going on tour with the Old Vic; I wasn’t taking any more movie roles and very few parts in plays. I gave up everything I’d been doing, apart from a little bit of theatre. Jane was a serious actress and wanted to continue her career, but Paul had other ideas. That’s why Linda was so perfect for Paul; she was just what he wanted, an old-fashioned Liverpool wife who was completely devoted to her husband. In a way, that’s what Mick wanted, too, and for a while I acquiesced, but in the end it kicked back very badly. On the other hand, Paul isn’t exactly the regular bloke he appears. For one thing, he was always intellectually curious. Not only was he into electronic music and Stockhausen and all of that, but he was into Magritte, pop art, the Expressionists and even avant-garde theatre. I believe it was Paul who first thought of Joe Orton as the screenwriter for the next Beatles movie. He’d been to see Loot , Orton’s outrageous phallic farce, and liked it. He encouraged Brian Epstein to arrange a meeting with Orton, and in Orton’s diary he describes getting on famously with Paul.

Arrived in Belgravia at ten minutes to eight … I found Chapel Street easily. I didn’t want to get there too early so I walked around for a while and came back through a nearby mews. When I got back to the house it was nearly eight o’clock. I rang the bell and an old man entered. He seemed surprised to see me. ‘Is this Brian Epstein’s house?’ I said. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and led the way to the hall. I suddenly realised that the man was the butler. I’ve never seen one before … He took me into a room and said in a loud voice, ‘Mr Orton.’ Everybody looked up and stood to their feet. I was introduced to one or two people. And Paul McCartney. He was just as the photographs. Only he’d grown a moustache. His hair was shorter too. He was playing the latest Beatles record, ‘Penny Lane’. I like it very much. Then he played the other side – Strawberry something. I didn’t like this as much. We talked intermittently. Before we went out to dinner we agreed to throw out the idea of setting the film in the thirties. We went down to dinner. The trusted old retainer – looking too much like a butler to be good casting – busied himself in the corner. ‘The only thing I get from the theatre,’ Paul M. said, ‘is a sore arse.’ He said Loot was the only play he hadn’t wanted to leave before the end. ‘I’d’ve liked a bit more,’ he said. We talked of the theatre. I said that compared with the pop-scene the theatre was square. ‘The theatre started going downhill when Queen Victoria knighted Henry Irving,’ I said. ‘Too fucking respectable.’ We talked of drugs, of mushrooms which give hallucinations – like LSD. ‘The drug, not the money,’ I said. We talked of tattoos. And after one or two veiled references, marijuana. I said I’d smoked it in Morocco. The atmosphere relaxed a little. Dinner ended and we went upstairs again. We watched a programme on TV; it had phrases in it like ‘the in crowd’ and ‘swinging London’. There was a little scratching at the door. I thought it was the old retainer, but someone got up to open the door and about five very young and pretty boys trooped in. I rather hoped this was the evening’s entertainment. It wasn’t, though. It was a pop group called The Easybeats. I’d seen them on TV. I liked them very much … A French photographer arrived … He’d taken a set of new photographs of The Beatles. They wanted one to use on the record sleeve. Excellent photographs. The four Beatles look different in their moustaches. Like anarchists in the early years of the century. After a while … I talked to the leading Easybeat. Feeling slightly like an Edwardian masher with a Gaiety girl. And then I came over tired and decided to go home. I had a last word with Paul M. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’d like to do the film. There’s only one thing we’ve got to fix up.’ ‘You mean the bread?’ ‘Yes.’ We smiled and parted. I got a cab home. Told Kenneth about it. Then he got up to make a cup of tea. And we talked a little more. And went to sleep.

JOE ORTON and JOHN LAHR, The Orton Diaries

While Brian Epstein came off as a shadowy, pathetic character.

Somehow I’d expected something like Michael Codron. I’d imagined Epstein to be florid, Jewish, dark-haired and overbearing. Instead I was face to face with a mousey-haired, slight young man. Washed-out in a way. He had a suburban accent.

Mick was initially supportive of my acting, but I sensed it was something he’d rather I not do. I was the consort – my career would distract from the image he wanted to create. I had absolutely no wish to compete with him, but eventually I decided acting would be okay since it was far enough away from what he did. I thought it wouldn’t affect him, but, fuck me, then he wanted to act, too! He can’t help it; he’s just got to compete.

I stopped working, but then other issues began to raise their ugly heads. The Devil, as we know, makes work for idle hands. I got heavily into drugs in spite of all the warnings, which, again, I can only see from a distance. The biggest warning of all should have been Brian’s headlong plunge, but I didn’t realise it, and by the time I did it was too late. I had my overdose in Australia, and that was the beginning of the end for Mick and me. It’s easy enough, after all, to rationalise how other people’s problems are different from our own, and honestly there was no logical reason why I would’ve compared my fate to Brian’s.

Some very odd things happened to me in Australia when I OD’d on all those sleeping pills. It sounds strange, but I have a feeling that those six days out, unconscious, did some very bizarre things to me. I always thought that I came through that with no damage, but I know that when I had my biopsy last year the results showed very old scarring on my liver – apparently the 150 Tuinol and six days’ unconsciousness caused serious liver damage. Other bizarre things happened. Before the OD I could speak French, and afterwards I couldn’t. An entire language had somehow got lost.

I’m always amazed at how scenes from the past get congealed into rabid set pieces. There’s the whole Redlands business. It’s so complicated and has an endless life of its own. Almost immediately it became an emblematic part of Stones history, but my position was much dodgier – my role was ambivalent and eventually had disastrous effects on me and on my relationship with Mick. It was a horrible ordeal, but initially it created a bizarre bond between us. I took the poison-pen letters and all those dreadful things in the papers too hard. I was too young and insecure to have all that hatred directed at me and didn’t know how to deal with it. I turned it all on myself. Mick’s attitude was much, much healthier. Like, ‘Well, they’re just idiots. I’m not gonna let this get in my way!’ Which should have really been mine, too, but I wasn’t grown up or secure enough to do that. Also I was slandered as the wanton woman in the fur rug, while Mick was the noble rock star on trial.

The 1969 festival at Altamont, the Stones’ infamous free concert outside San Francisco, is now seen as a rock’n’roll Black Mass. So many things about Altamont that now seem inevitable just weren’t at the time. Mick may have sung his pantomime songs about the Devil and the Midnight Rambler, but he was in a total hippie mood when he went out there to do that concert. He wanted more than anything to be part of the counterculture utopia. ‘Brothers and sisters, we are creating the blueprint for a new society’ and so on. That’s how it was, actually. People imagine the Stones came to Altamont to incite murder, to summon up Beelzebub and his satanic crew from the bowels of the earth. Not at all ! It was meant to be a Hippie Love Fest. It’s one of the saddest things that it turned into its opposite.