She was a figure out of fiction, right down to her Jane Austen name. The daughter of a baroness and a British major (a spy during World War II), Marianne Faithfull — who died this week at 78 — was discovered by the Rolling Stones’ manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, at a record release party in the 1960s while still in her teens. “My first move was to get a Rolling Stone as a boyfriend,” she was often quoted as having said. “I slept with three and decided the lead singer was the best bet.”
The bet paid off for both parties. Mick Jagger and Ms. Faithfull dated from 1966-70 and during that time she recorded a series of pop songs, most memorably “As Tears Go By.” Mr. Jagger wrote imperishable Stones hits like “Wild Horses” under the direct inspiration of Ms. Faithfull — lovely, feckless, druggie and unfettered. She was “a wonderful friend,” Mr. Jagger wrote on Instagram this week, “a beautiful singer and a great actress.”
She was also a style paragon from the outset.
“She seemed to touch all the moments, from Mod to rich hippie to bad girl and punk, corsets to leather to the nun outfit she wore when she performed with Bowie,” the designer Anna Sui said this week by phone. “She was there, through all those periods — performing, participating in events, acting and singing and also in the tabloids, very much in the eyes of anybody loving those periods.”
A British journalist once described Ms. Faithfull, in the late 1960s, as “the flowing-haired, miniskirted, convention-knocking epitome” of a “drug generation” that her elders were challenged to understand. What more accurately she epitomized was a spirit of bohemian laissez-faire better located in class than any particular era.
Cultured, if not conventionally educated, Ms. Faithfull was as offhand about her looks as only a natural beauty could afford to be. And she was as indifferent to the straight-jacketing conventions of the bourgeoisie as those of her background (she spent her early years in an upscale commune her father founded in Oxfordshire) often are.
Ms. Faithfull was still a young girl when her parents divorced. Her mother — a descendant of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, the author of “Venus in Furs,” that ur-text of masochism — took her to live 40 miles outside London in Reading. There she opened the Carillon, a tea shop, and sent her daughter to the local Catholic boarding school.
It can seem hard to square the louche image of what the English daily The Independent once referred to as “rock’s primary horizontale” with that of a young Marianne Faithfull traipsing to St. Joseph’s Catholic School in the uniform of a brown cape and a brown-and-yellow felt hat.
She did, in fact, become someone whose sexual antics (along with two-thirds of the Stones, she also had liaisons with Jimi Hendrix, Chris Blackwell and both David and Angela Bowie) and descent into heroin addiction were well chronicled. Yet the hard-living Ms. Faithfull retained throughout a degree of propriety and even hauteur, an aura of willful disregard usually associated with the English upper classes.
Certainly few female performers in music history have cycled through as many personas as Ms. Faithfull did, from the kittenish Mod dolly of her early career to a prim fashion plate and then an avatar of tailored ambisexual chic. She portrayed herself as a corseted diva in kink drag, a punk apparition with a Vaseline quiff, even the nun in robes and wimple, Ms. Sui cited.
“Actually, nothing says Marianne Faithfull to me like ‘The Girl on a Motorcycle,’” the filmmaker Amos Poe wrote in a text message to this reporter. He was specifically referring to a poster image from the director Jack Cardiff’s erotic drama of 1968, in which Ms. Faithfull starred alongside Alain Delon. On the poster, she bestrides a Harley-Davidson clad in full biker leathers, a vision of sulky sexuality.
“For years, it was the poster on my wall,” Mr. Poe wrote, “and the image in my mind of pure pop.”
Transiting a life of astonishing highs and gutter lows, Ms. Faithfull never lost an innate rock-chick brio forged in the Swinging Sixties, shared by few (Keith Richards’s ex-wife, the Italian-German actress Anita Pallenberg, is a notable example) and admired by countless designers, actors, models and directors. Somehow, she managed to make even dishevelment look chic. “I’ll never forget her telling me, after my daughter was born, that I’d have to quit being a perfectionist,” the director Sofia Coppola said.
Glancing at images from the recent men’s wear runway shows in Europe, it is easy to detect how durable Ms. Faithfull’s influence remains. Kate Moss teetering across the cobblestones of Paris en route to the Dior Men show in a scanty slip dress and what looked to be a vintage monkey fur jacket was pure Faithfull. In fact, Ms. Moss so closely modeled her style over the years that Ms. Faithfull was eventually moved to denounce her onetime pal as a style “vampire.”
No matter. In the end, Marianne Faithfull was inimitable in voice, outlook and image.
“I’ve been listening to her remarkable 2018 album, ‘Negative Capability,’ and marveling again at her passage from innocent schoolgirl thrush, via rock stars and heroin, to her reinvention as a radically honest, scar-voiced chanteuse,” the author Lucy Sante wrote to this reporter in a private Instagram message.
Much like a character from one of the Kurt Weill songs Ms. Faithfull covered — in a graveled rasp that attested to every cigarette, injection and drink she had ever consumed — Ms. Faithfull was never less than compelling to observe. She commanded attention through the simplest of means, as Ms. Sante noted, “by laying all her cards on the table.”
