マリアンヌ・フェイスフル ー ザ・団長 Marianne Faithfull - the ringmaster

Sitting on a blue sofa in a restaurant in Montparnasse in 1967, Alain Delon is photographed alongside singer and actress Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger, a couple at the time. But as soon as it was published, the photo caused a lot of talk. We see the companion of the member of the Rolling Stones all smiles chatting with the French actor, seated to his left.

The star of “La Piscine” and the singer experience a moment of complicity while Mick Jagger, present on the right, appears behind the duo, his legs crossed with his head lowered and his eyes closed. The interpreter of “Angie” also stands out from the group by her pink look, her pair of mismatched socks and her worn shoes while Alain Delon is dressed in a gray suit and Marianne Faithfull in a blue feathered dress. 
This photograph actually captures the meeting between Alain Delon and Marianne Faithfull, who are preparing to shoot together for “The Girl on a Motorcycle” by Jack Cardiff. This romantic-erotic film, released in 1968, tells the story of Rebecca (Marianne Faithfull), who misses her husband Raymond. One night, she escapes and leaves on her Harley-Davidson FL, to join her lover (Alain Delon) in Germany.
If the two actors appear all smiles in the photograph, their relationship was in reality more complex. In any case, this is what the singer suggests.
In “Song for Nico”, a song released in 2002, Marianne Faithfull violently pins down her partner from “The Girl on a Motorcycle”. “And will Delon still be a cunt?”, we can hear.
Marianne, may you rest in peace. 💕
God bless you.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marianne_Faithfull
From Wikipedia:
Faithfull lived on London’s Soho streets for two years, suffering from heroin addiction and anorexia nervosa. Friends intervened and enrolled her in an NHS heroin-assisted treatment programme. She failed at controlling or stabilising her addiction at this time. In 1971, producer Mike Leander found her on the streets and made an attempt to revive her career, producing part of her album Rich Kid Blues.

Dunbar attended the University of Cambridge, where he met the singer Marianne Faithfull. They were married on 6 May 1965, with Peter Asher as the best man, and spent their honeymoon in Paris, with the Beat poets Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso. The couple lived in a flat at 29 Lennox Gardens, Knightsbridge, London. On 10 November 1965, she gave birth to their son, Nicholas. She then “…left her husband to live with Mick Jagger…” telling the New Musical Express that “my first move was to get a Rolling Stone as a boyfriend. I slept with three and decided the lead singer was the best bet.“Dunbar and Faithfull divorced in 1970.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Dunbar_(artist)

John Dunbar, co-owner of Indica Gallery, London
From Wikipedia:
McCartney encouraged fellow Beatles member John Lennon to visit the gallery. On 7 November 1966, Lennon attended a preview evening of “Unfinished Paintings”, a conceptual art exhibition by Yoko Ono that ran from 8–18 November. Co-owner John Dunbar had seen Ono’s performances of “Cut Piece” at the ‘Destruction in Art Symposium’ in September and invited her to make an exhibition for the Indica Gallery. Ono was assisted in setting up the show by artist Adrian Hall, who was also present during Lennon’s visit. On seeing it, Lennon initially liked the artwork “Apple” and was impressed by the interactive “Ceiling Painting/Yes Painting”, which he found very positive. While Lennon and Ono claimed that this was the first time they met, this is disputed by Miles and others.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Indica_Gallery

2025/2/2 up-date:

REMEMBRANCE JAN. 30, 2025
Nothing Could Drag Marianne Faithfull Away Leading a dual life — in which her own brilliance was overshadowed by Mick Jagger — almost destroyed her.

quotes:
As the album and her 1994 autobiography, Faithfull, however, she was at pains to make clear she was a woman who acted and was not acted upon; together they are a tough portrait of the dead-end freak-show carnival where, Faithfull freely admitted, she was the ringmaster.
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They soon all became part of a perfervid scene. Dunbar and Asher — with money the latter had made from having a pop hit called “A World Without Love,” written by McCartney — opened a bookshop with an art gallery in the basement. (In 1966, the Indica Gallery would host Yoko Ono’s first exhibition in London. As every Beatles fan knows, Dunbar would invite his friend John Lennon to come see it for the VIP preview before opening night.) With Dunbar one night in 1964, Faithfull attended a party where she met the people who would change her life.
From that point, two tales would diverge. One would be her own story, which would take her through a world few get to experience but in the end would leave her living on the streets scrounging for drugs. The other story, which is the one that made up her media image, was a highly sexualized and male-centric one. That story is generally told this way, in a typically overwrought passage from Old Gods Almost Dead, Stephen Davis’s biography of the Rolling Stones:
Conversation died when Marianne walked into the room. Girls like her, Scott Fitzgerald wrote, “do all the breathing for everyone, and finally even the men have to go outside for air.” She was a dreamy vision of Anglo-European drop-dead beauty: long blonde hair, eyes like blue ice, a “large balcony” (as the French call big breasts), and full, inviting lips plumped like downy pillows. Marianne was also educated, well read, and highly intelligent, and her innocent gaze fell on a man like a heat wave.
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At 18, she was living in a house filled with junkies living off the largesse of her and her husband. She was still a pop star — a typical week might include singing “Yesterday” with Paul McCartney on a TV special — and spent money like a pop star, too. (Dunbar said her first addiction was shopping.) But she was soon pulled away by a gateway to a darker world: the grass-infused, highly untidy abode that Rolling Stone Brian Jones and Anita Pallenberg used as their base of operations.
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… And then, finally and most fatefully, driving off the morning after that event for a weekend test-drive of a new strain of acid at Richards’s country home, which would result in a famous drug raid that nearly put both Richards and Jagger into prison, and forever change her image in Britain.
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The media sensation that followed had everything, including sex, courtesy of Faithfull. “NAKED GIRL AT STONES PARTY,” ran a front-page headline.
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She also seemed to have a sense of disquiet about who and what she was, perhaps exacerbated by the loss of the child she and Jagger had been looking forward to. Her breakdown took several years, particularly after heroin slowly drew her in. She acted a few times, including credible roles onstage in Chekhov plays and in a well-reviewed production of Hamlet. During the latter, she says, she began snorting the drug during every show, giving a realistic cast to Ophelia’s decline. She claims that she was, in I’ll Never Forget What’s ’is Name, the first actor to say “fuck” in a mainstream movie. She also starred in the existential psychedelic film The Girl on a Motorcycle (retitled, not very subtly, Naked Under Leather in America), which features a few polarized sex scenes — and ends badly for the title figure. She released a single of “Sister Morphine,” her song with Jagger; reaction to the scandalous subject got the record removed from stores by her label, and created another furor. The Stones put it on Sticky Fingers without incident. Then came the disintegration of Brian Jones, once one of her best friends, now debilitated with drugs and insecurities. Pallenberg (whom Jones often physically beat) abandoned him; he was forced out of the Stones, and died soon after. Living this dual life — her own and as a rock god’s muse — was, it appeared, beginning to destroy her. In a high-rise hotel room looking out over Sydney Harbour, she had her own Ophelia moment, and tried to get a window open to jump. She couldn’t, she wrote — so she took an overdose of pills. She ended up in a coma for six days. A stint at a psychiatric rehab unit in Switzerland didn’t help.
She was all of 25.
She would find herself at the dinner parties that were the focal point of her and Jagger’s social life — and nod off during dinner. Most notoriously in Stones lore, she carried on an affair with Keith Richards’s drug supplier in exchange for heroin. In time, disgusted with herself, she drove Jagger away. In one scene, she described overhearing the head of Atlantic Records, Ahmet Ertegun, insistently tell Jagger that his junkie girlfriend was a liability to the Stones’ future. She had to agree: “I wanted to be a junkie more than I wanted to be with him. That was my idea of glamour!” Jagger has an outlandish reputation when it comes to women, of course, but accounts from that era all credit his devotion to Faithfull. She herself takes the blame as well: “I was all the trouble.” Impervious even to the strains of Jagger’s most aching love song, “Wild Horses,” written for her, she left.
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From there she spent all her money, vaporized her career, and burned every bridge she could. Allowed to stay at one last friend’s home even through months of unspeakable behavior in front of virtually everyone else she knew, she fell asleep in the bathtub with the water running and nearly destroyed the house.
Yet absurdist echoes from her onetime status still chased her. In 1971, she was in Paris in a tryst with her dealer — and then had to pack up and leave with him abruptly. (He’d been supplying Jim Morrison, and the Doors singer had just OD’d and died.) Then she appeared in Kenneth Anger’s famous, but ridiculous, underground film Lucifer Rising.
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From there, she took up residency against a wall in an abandoned lot in Soho. She shrank down to 90 pounds and eventually only survived by getting on a National Health Service plan that supplied her with heroin.
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Her addiction lasted more than 15 years. Given her celebrity status, her life was weirder than that of most homeless junkies.
full text @
https://www.vulture.com/article/marianne-faithfull-remembrance-mick-jagger.html

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