Marianne Faithfull: How Crown Princess of Swinging London’s wild affair with Mick Jagger nearly destroyed her

A unique chanteuse, a chronicler of her era and once proclaimed the most beautiful woman of her generation, Marianne Faithfull – who has died aged 78 – was the Crown Princess of Swinging London.

But she has never able to truly escape her role at the centre of rock’s most lurid story involving Mick Jagger, a sex act and a chocolate bar. From the height of her 1960s infamy, as the girlfriend of Jagger caught up in a notorious drugs bust, to the end of a magnificent career, one salacious detail defined Marianne.

The facts have been debunked numerous times by everyone involved, from the Rolling Stones to the police to the drug dealers and potheads who were witnesses.

To omit it from her obituary would be pointless, though compared to the self-inflicted tragedies of the years that followed, this brush with the law was almost trivial. But the truth is – yes, there was a Mars bar.

A statement released late last night, said: “It is with deep sadness that we announce the death of the singer, songwriter and actress Marianne Faithfull.

“Marianne passed away peacefully in London today, in the company of her loving family. She will be dearly missed.”

Sir Mick paid tribute to Faithfull in a social media post. “I am so saddened to hear of the death of Marianne Faithfull,” he wrote. “She was so much part of my life for so long. She was a wonderful friend, a beautiful singer and a great actress. She will always be remembered.”

Bandmate Keith Richards wrote:”‘My heartfelt condolences to Marianne’s family! I’m so sad and will miss her!”

Marianne was 17 when her wideeyed, waiflike looks attracted the attention of the Stones’ dissolute manager Andrew Loog Oldham, at a London party. There with her boyfriend, artist John Dunbar, she was, “an angel with big breasts”, Loog Oldham said.

After hearing her sing, in a mournful alto with heavy Austrian inflection – her mother was from Vienna – he urged Jagger and guitarist Keith Richards to come up with a hit for her. It had to be ominous and virginal, he announced: “A song with brick walls all around it, high windows and no sex.”

The duo, who had not yet written their breakthrough single Satisfaction, protested they hadn’t the first idea what to do. Loog Oldham pushed them to the kitchen table and ordered them to get on with it. They picked a title, stolen from Casablanca – As Time Goes By – and handed in “a terrible piece of tripe”, Richards remembered.

But in the teenage Marianne’s lovelorn, aching treatment of the song – renamed As Tears Go By – it was far from tripe. It became one of the most poignant and heartbreaking pop songs of the decade, part lament and part grand European melodrama. The press called it “baroque-and-roll”. She simply said, “it fitted me so perfectly”.

A top ten hit in the UK and top 30 in the US, the song created an air of mystery around the girl dubbed “the greatest discovery of 1964”. In a year that included the Beatles’ first American tour and Michael Caine’s arrival in Zulu, that was quite an accolade. The Stones immediately claimed Marianne for their own, even though she soon married Dunbar and had a child with him. The marriage was over within a year.

Rebelling against her strict Catholic convent school upbringing, she had a one-night stand with Richards: “Wonderful,” she remembered, “but it was just one night so it’s completely idealised.”

Richards then urged her to sleep with his bandmate, Jagger: “He thought it would be good for the band. And instead of saying, ‘But I love you,’ I said, ‘OK’. I didn’t really love Mick when I was first with him, I was just obeying Keith.”

It wasn’t love at first sight for Jagger either, she believed. For years Marianne harboured a vaguely jealous suspicion that he took up with her only because actress Julie Christie, who shared her porcelain prettiness, had turned him down. Yet she made him the envy of other stars, including Jimi Hendrix and Bob Dylan, who pursued her without success.

As the band skyrocketed with a series of hits, Marianne’s own career faltered. She soon became a heavy drugs user, addicted to pills and cocaine as well smoking marijuana constantly.

Nearly half a century later, she admitted that she needed the drugs to keep up with the sexual demands of the rock ’n’ roll scene. “I hated men,” she said on BBC1’s genealogy show Who Do You Think You Are? in 2013.

“It took me years, until the time I got to 50 or so, before I could be in a relationship and in love, and not have to take a drink or drugs to have sex. It was a big problem for me in the 1960s, especially as I had to pretend that everything was so wonderful, wild and sexual.”

Her psychological traumas stemmed from the experiences of her mother Eva and grandmother Flora during World War II. Both women were raped by a Red Army soldier when the Soviet Union liberated Vienna from the Nazis in 1945 – and as the man assaulted Flora, Eva took his gun and shot him.

These admissions certainly cast a different perspective on those events of February 1967, when police raided Redlands, Keith Richards’s Sussex house.

The guitarist claimed in his autobiography that he was so stoned, when he opened the door to Chief Inspector Gordon Dineley and 17 officers from the West Sussex Constabulary, that he thought they were dwarfs in identical costumes.

The sight that greeted the police stupified them. DS Stanley Cudmore later told a court, “as we approached, I heard loud strains of pop music. When I entered the room, there was a television on, but the pop music drowned the sound.

“There were nine people, two of whom I thought were women. Jagger and a woman were sitting on the couch. The woman had wrapped around her a light coloured fur rug which from time to time she let fall, showing her nude body.”

Almost as outrageous, Jagger appeared to be wearing make-up, and the second woman turned out to be a man, “dressed in what would best be described as a pair of red and green silk pyjamas”.

Police noted a “strong, sweet, unusual smell” and, on searching the house, found “pink ostrich feathers” and “a white bra”.

Today, the scene sounds almost comical, more Carry On Carnaby Street than depraved. Certainly Marianne didn’t seem to find it embarrassing or alarming. Asked to accompany the officers on an inspection of the upstairs rooms, she turned on the stairs, let her fur wrap fall, and called out, “Look, they want to search me, Mick!”

Unsurprisingly, Marianne was even more stoned than Richards. The sexually indeterminate hanger-on in the silk pyjamas was the Stones’ drug supplier David Schneiderman, aka the Acid King. He carried an aluminium attache case crammed with pills, coke and tabs of LSD, known as White Lightning.

Marianne was tripping on acid when the police arrived. Schneiderman had slipped a tab into her morning mug of tea. Like marijuana, the drug often makes users hungry... and to combat that, the drug pusher was in the habit of leaving Mars bars lying around, for anyone who got “the munchies”.

As the legend of the Redlands bust spread, a pornographic twist was added. It was said that, when police burst into the sitting room, Jagger was on his knees, performing a sex act on his girlfriend that involved a Mars bar.

The fact that during the subsequent court case, Marianne was referred to solely as “Miss X” only made the lie more credible.

Jagger and Richards were briefly jailed. They treated the drugs bust as a triumph, proof of their bad boy status. But Marianne became increasingly confused and lost, her insecurities made worse by Jagger’s constant affairs. She retaliated by sleeping with another of the Stones, lead guitarist Brian Jones, but he was equally unstable and addicted to drugs.

The irony was that, unlike the middle-class Stones, she was from a truly bohemian background. Her English grandfather, Theodore Faithfull, invented a sex machine in the 1920s that was touted as a “cure for frigidity”.

Her mother was actually an Austrian baroness who became a dancer and, fleeing to Britain after the war, became a bus conductor in Reading.

Eva would tell her stories, as she was growing up, of Berlin nightlife in the 1930s. Marianne realised very young, she said, “what a realm of sexual possibilities there was”, and for a time she was bisexual.

But she also longed for a conventional family life, and in 1968 became pregnant by Jagger – only to tragically miscarry at seven months. After Brian Jones died, drowned in his swimming pool in 1969, she suffered a suicidal breakdown. Staring at herself in the mirror, she hallucinated his reflection, and decided that this was a message to kill herself.

She took 15 sleeping tablets and fell into a six-day coma before recovering. Later, she tried to throw herself out of an upstairs window but gave up when she realised it had been painted shut.

This nightmarish period, coupled with the fact Jagger was embroiled in a serious affair with American model Marsha Hunt, led to the end of their relationship in 1970.

Jagger married shortly afterwards, to the Nicaraguan Bianca Perez-Mora Macias. Marianne descended into heroin addiction.

“When I split with Mick and left with my son Nicholas,” she wrote in her autobiography, “I took a beautiful Persian carpet and some Ozzie Clark dresses, and all my Deliss silk clothes. So these were the clothes I was wearing when I was living on the street, a wraithlike vision, an anorexic waif, feeling no pain and not feeling any cold either, you see, because of the smack.”

She wound up in Soho, living at St Anne’s Court, next door to the Trident studios where David Bowie and Elton John recorded in the early 1970s. Painter Francis Bacon would drop by to take her to lunch if she wasn’t comatose on heroin.

“People looked after me, the meths drinkers, junkies,” she said. “I learned that human beings are really all right. I didn’t know that from my posh life in the Sixties. It was very bitchy and people were cruel to each other. I was on the street for two years, but it was better than staying at my mother’s and being under her thumb.”

In 1973, she joined Bowie on US TV for a duet, singing I Got You Babe – him in a feather boa, her in a white headdress that was part nun, part Egyptian queen.

She emerged from the depths slowly, with a collection of country songs in 1976 and then a superb post-punk album called Broken English in 1979. It included the searing Ballad Of Lucy Jordan, establishing her as a genuine artist, feted during the second half of her life by admirers from PJ Harvey and Nick Cave to Blur and Pulp.

But the long years of addiction had wrecked her health and she suffered repeated illnesses and collapses, including breast cancer 10 years ago.

She lived in fear, she said, of being dragged back into the destructive lifestyle that killed so many people around the Rolling Stones. She could still talk to Richards, she said, but it was too difficult to find anything to say to Jagger – they were together too long, and had both changed too much.

“I could have made better choices,” she said. “But when I first came to London, walking down the street, I just got this feeling that I was in the right place at the right moment.”