Faithfull, the daughter of a onetime British spy and a fallen Austro-Hungarian baroness, was 17 and a charity boarder at a British convent school when she met the Rolling Stones at a party. From then on, as she makes clear in Faithfull: An Autobiography (310 pages. Little, Brown. $22.95), the singer chose her own fate and embraced hedonism at every turn. Hers was not a downward slide into decadence, but a swan dive. Yet banal as it sounds, all the drugs and debauchery ultimately fed her art. In 1964, when she scored her first hit with the Stones’ “As Tears Go By,” she was a pretty blonde with an iffy voice and a half-baked career. By 1979, when she made a comeback with “Broken English,” she sounded furious and knowing – she’d become a cabaret singer for the end of the world.
Faithfull has her following as a performer – she’s about to release a fine best-of collection, and a new album and a tour are scheduled for spring. But she’s realistic enough to know some readers will be more interested in the likes of Jagger and Keith Richards than in the likes of her. One of the great pleasures of reading “Faithfull,” which was written with David Dalton, is watching a generation of rock legends humiliate themselves as they try to hit on one woman. Roy Orbison is absurdly brusque (" “Ahm in room 602, behbeh’ “). Bob Dylan flies into a petty rage when refused (“Without warning, he turned into Rumpelstiltskin”). And Jagger is simply Jagger (“Mick came up very close to me with his glass as if he were going to propose a toast and then tipped the entire thing down my dress”).
After test-driving Stones guitarists Richards and Brian Jones, Faithfull dated Jagger for the latter half of the ’60s. She was the wife of an art dealer (and the mother of a small boy), and he was forging his legend. Decades from now we’ll still be speculating about the chemistry that drove the Rolling Stones, but Faithfull’s got it figured out: Mick wanted to sleep with Keith. In the book’s most memorable scene, she’s in bed with Jagger when he says, “If Keith were here right now, God, I’d like to lick him all over and then . . . " And then he gets a little too specific for our purposes.
Once the Stones fade out of the picture, “Faithfull” loses its momentum and becomes simply squalid. The singer marries and divorces twice more, and becomes a homeless junkie. Even after her professional comeback, she finds herself in the back of a limo, offering her 17-year-old son a line of coke. Finally, in the mid-’80s, she straightens out for good. One wishes Faithfull had tried harder to locate the moral in her story – she’s too ready to chalk her troubles up to “the centrifugal whirl of the ’60s.” “I was twenty when all this happened. Mick was twenty-four,” she writes. “What did we know?” But unreflective though she may be, she’s given us an eyewitness account of the folks who made the decade go round.
