She’s Marianne Faithfull, Damn It. And She’s (Thankfully) Still Here

 

 

 "Several times in her 74 years of life, Marianne Faithfull has boomeranged from the brink of death.

First there was the summer of 1969, when she overdosed on Tuinal sleeping pills in the Sydney hotel room she was sharing with her then-boyfriend, Mick Jagger; as she slipped under, she had a long conversation with his recently deceased bandmate, Brian Jones, who had drowned in a swimming pool about a week prior. At the end of their spirited talk, Jones beckoned her to hop off a cliff and join him in the beyond. Faithfull declined, and woke up from a six-day coma.

That was before she became addicted to heroin in the early 1970s: “At that point I entered one of the outer levels of hell,” she writes in her 1994 autobiography “Faithfull.” It took more than a decade to finally get clean. Since then she’s survived breast cancer, hepatitis C and an infection resulting from a broken hip. But, as Faithfull told me on the phone from her London home one afternoon in February, her recent bout with Covid-19 and its lingering long-term aftereffects has been the hardest battle she’s fought in her entire life.

“You don’t want to get this, darling,” she said. “Really.”

She said it, of course, in That Voice, coated with ash but flickering with lively defiance underneath." 

READ ARTICLE BY LINDSAY ZOLADZ