Girl Trouble by Dyhouse Carol

Author:Dyhouse, Carol
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Zed Books
Published: 2013-09-27T04:00:00+00:00

6.1 A young Marianne Faithfull looking innocent, 1967 (© Stanley Sherman/Getty Images).

Speculation about the details of Faithfull’s love life was wild. A story about (unspecified) sexual practices involving a Mars bar circulated widely. This was too risky for most journalists to write about. Consistently denied by those implicated, the rumour nonetheless achieved the status of an urban myth and has proved ineradicable. The press developed a complex relationship with Marianne, who tended to give mixed messages in interviews. ‘I really do want to be good,’ she told Don Short of the Daily Mirror early in 1969, lamenting that she felt helpless in the grip of events which had entangled her. In the previous year she had continued to take drugs, conceived a child with Jagger, horrified critics of permissiveness by refusing to consider marriage in spite of this pregnancy, and gone on to miscarry a baby daughter. ‘I am still happily sinning away with Mick,’ she was quoted as having reported.4

Marianne Faithfull’s role as a leather-clad sex symbol in Jack Cardiff’s 1968 film Girl on a Motorcycle (alternatively titled Naked under Leather) didn’t appeal to everyone. When she was not speeding along country lanes (minus a crash helmet) the film featured Marianne and her lover (played by Alain Delon) in a series of psychedelically rendered erotic clinches, or as reviewer Dick Richards in the Daily Mirror put it, writhing around ‘like octopuses in an acute state of coloured DTs’.5

Richards was impressed by Faithfull’s performance as a lusty young girl who ‘clamours for attention as an amoral sexually greedy wanton young hussy’. But it was too easy to assume that the role was in character, and Marianne’s boast that she had slept with three of the members of the Rolling Stones before deciding that the group’s lead singer was her best bet didn’t exactly help her reputation.6 In retrospect, she saw herself as having been a victim of double standards which glamorised sexual adventure and experimentation with drugs in young men, while condemning women who behaved similarly as sluts and bad mothers.7 There was undoubtedly some truth in this. Faithfull’s open interest in sex, and her willingness to condone sexual relationships and pregnancy outside marriage, would attract little attention today, but appeared scandalous in the 1960s. At that time, as the Daily Mirror’s agony aunt Marjorie Proops pointed out, there was widespread belief that a refusal to marry suited men more than women.8 Confident young men might see marriage as a prison, but for young women it often represented a much-needed security. Moreover, given that there was still something of a stigma attached to illegitimacy, was a refusal to marry fair to the children? After her break-up with Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull’s drug addiction got out of hand, she lost custody of her son and was reduced to living on the streets of Soho. For some, she was a walking lesson in the dangers of permissiveness. ‘I’m Miss Anti-Family Values,’ she confessed some years later.9

The tone of press reports on Marianne

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