Marianne Faithfull by Mark Hodkinson

Author:Mark Hodkinson [Hodkinson, Mark]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-85712-993-2
Publisher: Music Sales Limited
Published: 2013-02-15T00:00:00+00:00

The headline wrote itself: ‘Marianne Wasn’t Faithful’. On October 30, 1970, Marianne attended a civil court in London for the divorce proceedings to annul her marriage to John Dunbar. During the l3-minute hearing she did not deny allegations of adultery with Jagger. Dunbar also admitted adultery without naming anyone specifically. The divorce was granted to him, a largely cosmetic ruling but one that apportioned principal responsibility to Marianne. She sat, as the newspapers noted, in a ‘wet-look maxi coat’ while lawyers appealed for a waiving of the usual year’s waiting period for the divorce to become final. The Judge, Sir Roger Ormrod, was told Marianne was ‘quite anxious’ to remarry. He refused and snapped: “I don’t think this case is substantially different from any other.” Newspapers speculated about the man Marianne was quite anxious to marry. They were aware that her relationships with Lord Rossmore and Mario Schifano had come to an end. Sir Ormrod granted custody of Nicholas to both parents with Eva Faithfull having responsibility for his care and control.

Kenneth Anger re-emerged into Marianne’s life and asked her to play Lilith in his film Lucifer Rising. Although Anger was to take liberties with various sacred texts, Lilith, in Jewish mythology, was thought to derive from a class of female demons. She declined to eat from the Tree of Knowledge and so did not learn to differentiate right from wrong. Anger had started work on the film six years earlier, hiring Bobby Beausoleil, a 20-year-old musician from Santa Barbara, to act and compose the soundtrack. Filming was suspended in 1967 because Anger claimed footage had been stolen by Beausoleil – others said Anger had simply spent all the money earmarked for the film. Beausoleil was unavailable when filming recommenced. A member of the Charles Manson ‘family’, he stabbed to death one of their associates, Gary Hinman. He contributed the soundtrack from his prison cell. Lucifer Rising was completed with funds from the National Film Finance Corporation of Great Britain, prompting controversy about state funding of a ‘devil film’. Anger also received financial assistance from Germany’s Hamburg 1 Television Company and the United States’ National Endowment for the Arts.

Mick Jagger was asked to play Lucifer but declined. His younger brother of four years, Chris, took on the role instead. The cast was flown to Egypt and within a day Jagger was on the plane back to London after he had ridiculed Anger on the set. Marianne was pleased because she found Chris Jagger to be ‘an incredible loudmouth and smart-arse bully’. With a certain degree of inevitability, Anger became Lucifer. Donald Cammell played Osiris and Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin was featured for a few seconds, playing a bearded man holding an Egyptian stele [slab of stone or wood used to mark burial sites] while staring at a picture of Aleister Crowley. Anger filmed Marianne daubed in fake blood crawling around Arab graveyards at sunrise. He felt her sickly state brought on by heroin added to her performance. Billed cryptically

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.