memories, dreams & reflections

Marianne Faithfull

with David Dalton

Copyright

Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain in 2007 by Fourth Estate

Copyright © Marianne Faithfull 2007

Quotations taken from Henrietta by Henrietta Moraes (Hamish Hamilton, 1994); When I Was Cool by Sam Kashner (HarperCollins, 2004); the works of Gregory Corso (courtesy of New Directions Books); ‘Incarceration of a Flower Child’ (© Roger Waters).

The publishers have tried to contact all copyright-holders but would be pleased to correct any omissions.

The right of Marianne Faithfull to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

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Source ISBN: 9780007245819

Ebook Edition © SEPTMBER 2008 ISBN: 9780007283095

Version: 2017-07-03

For François

contents

Cover |
Title Page |
Copyright |
Dedication |
Since Writing My Last Book |
Summoning Up a Sunny Afternoon in the Sixties (One of Many) |
I Guess She Kept Those Vagabond Ways |
Looking Back at Anger |
Eva |
My Weimar Period |
Me and the Fabulous Beast |
Stealing Coal |
Uncle Bill & Auntie Allen: Down Among the Beats at the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics |
The Curse of Hollow Tinsel Bohemia |
Caroline Blackwood: For All that I Found There |
‘How Goes the Enemy?’ |
Fuck Off, Darling! (My Beloved Henrietta Moraes) |
Donatella Versace |
Sixties Legend in Death Plunge |
Decadence as a Fine Art |
A Giant Musical Mouse |
Gregory Corso |
Sex with Strangers and Other Guilty Pleasures |
My Life as a Magpie (an Annotated Faithfullography) |
Mind Movies |
The Girl Factory |
A Lean and Hungry Hook |
Juliette Gréco |
Incident on Boogie Street |
Bono Busking |
M. St Laurent’s Dog |
My Past Attacks Me (Ned Kelly) |
Looking Roman Polanski in the Eye |
It Was a Good Old Wagon |
Sex, Drugs and Smoking |
I Join the Club |
They’ll Never Make a Saint of Me Either |
Enormous Plans at the Last Minute |
Index |
Acknowledgements |
Also By Marianne Faithfull |
About the Publisher |

since writing my last book

Where to begin? Well, perhaps I should begin where I left off – just about to start recording The Seven Deadly Sins. And around that time I was, of course, also dealing with the ramifications. It’s weird the way people expect you to treat them in a book. I tried to be honest but that didn’t always suit everybody. A few people were upset with what I’d said … usually about them. I guess I was meant to say ‘I owe everything to A——’ or ‘Without B—— I’d never have …’ Well, I’m sorry, but it wasn’t that kind of book. One thing I’ve learned from my last book is, it’s quite dangerous to summon up the past.

The one who really loved the book was Keith. Of course, he and Dylan are the stars of the book, so no wonder. I was puzzled when Bob mumbled that he didn’t like it very much.

‘Are you joking?’ I said. ‘You’re the bloody, fucking star of the book! Nitwit!’

Anyway, the fourteen years since the book have been, in many ways, a very tough time. I’ve seen the death of a lot of good friends. Denny Cordell and Tony Secunda, for instance, who both were responsible for getting me to write my first book, have passed on.

Denny’s way of getting me to write the book was to give me Jenny Fabian’s Groupie, a book I’d read already, actually. I just looked at it and said, ‘Denny, no! No, it’s not going to be like that. No way!’ And it wasn’t.

Denny was a legendary producer and A&R man. He produced Joe Cocker, the Moody Blues, Leon Russell, Tom Petty, Bob Marley, Toots, and many others. Denny’s illness was terrible. He was ill for a long time. Denny got hepatitis C while working as a gofer for Chet Baker. He got into smack for one year but it eventually caught up with him.

I had a bout with hep C, too. I was shattered for a year, but by the time I got it they had somewhat perfected the treatment, using interferon and other drugs that weren’t available when Danny got sick.

Tony Secunda’s death came unexpectedly. Tony was the visionary agent of my autobiography and a wonderful madman manager of the old school. ‘Sailor Sam’, as McCartney calls him in ‘Band on the Run’, managed Procol Harum, the Move, T Rex, and me (briefly) with wicked provocation and panache. And a couple of years later Frankie (that mad girl he married) died, too, poor thing. There but for the grace of God, as they say! How I’ve made it this far myself, I have no idea. More of that later.

The saddest thing about getting old is the passing of your friends and lovers. Gene Pitney died. I liked Gene, he was a great shag and all that, but why did he die so young? He never drank or took a drug in his life. The odds of Gene dying in Cardiff – poor sod – are astronomical. I give him all honour and credit for the work he did, but what a place to shuffle off your mortal coil.

Then we began losing our parents. My father died in 1996 (my mother Eva had died in 1992). Keith’s dad Bert, who I really loved, died recently and Mick’s father just died, too – what a kind and gentle man he was. It was a serious moment for Mick. And I must say that both his mum and dad were really kind to me, and, well, let’s just say I must have been a complete nightmare. I shudder to think. It wasn’t as if Mick was this blameless soul exactly, but he wasn’t like me, ever.

You start wondering about your own mortality when people begin putting you on the list of who’s next in line. I remember going to David Litvinoff’s funeral. Litz was a brilliant nutter, the catalyst for Performance and tutor in infamy to James Fox. Really the whole film is his style – allusive talk and gangster vibe. Lucian Freud painted a famous portrait of him called The Procurer. He was gay and didn’t want to get old, so he killed himself. He committed suicide at Christopher Gibbs’s house on the Aubusson carpet – Chrissy thought that was frightfully poor form.

I went to David Litvinoff’s funeral with Christopher and Robert Fraser – a long time ago but it’s something I’ll never forget. We were in the limo having just come from the Jewish cemetery where we’d watched David’s cremation – it was all very sombre – when Chrissy suddenly had a furious outburst. He looked at me and said: ‘Well, I hope we never have to go through that again!’

People’s idea of my social life is greatly exaggerated. I think they expect scandalous scenes with famous, outrageous people. You know, ‘And then when Gore Vidal sat down with a line in front of him, he said to me …’ and so on and so forth. Well, okay, I admit it’s fun going to Sheryl Crow’s Christmas party and seeing, I kid you not, Salman Rushdie talking to Heidi Fleiss, but for the most part my life isn’t like that at all. Really. (You can believe me or not.)

Where was I? Oh yes, my lack of a social life. Well, it’s true I have settled down just a bit. After I finished my autobiography I met François, while I was recording a song called ‘La Femme Sans Haine’. Philippe Constantine, who invented world music for Richard Branson’s Virgin Records, wanted me to do a duet with Ismaël Lô. Duets are something I never do, actually, but it turned out very well. Never got released, though, but I did meet François and fell in love.

Oscar Wilde’s famous line, ‘I can resist anything but temptation!’, used to be my mantra, but, after a year and a half in which I’ve suffered the seven plagues of Egypt (and made four records and five movies), I’ve decided to modify my wilful approach to life. But first, let me tell you all about my wicked, wicked ways.

summoning up a sunny afternoon in the sixties (one of many)

Listening to Revolver always brings back memories of when we were all much younger and madder. Any excuse to get together, get high, get dressed up, or play each other our latest faves. In and out of each other’s houses and at many different clubs, Pete Townshend and Eric Clapton dropping by Cheyne Walk, Mick and I visiting Brian Epstein; day trips to George Harrison and Pattie Boyd’s multi-coloured hippie cottage, evenings at Paul McCartney and Jane Asher’s.

Sometimes a tiny little moment, a gesture, will catch me unawares and transport me back to the sixties. One day I was waiting for a taxi after the Versace show, and suddenly there was Stella McCartney knocking on the window. As I turned and peered out, Stella gave me a wink and a thumbs up. And I had this sudden flashback to her dad, Paul, because that gesture and the wink is just what he used to do in those days. Kind of a corny music hall cheeky-chappie thing. So there was dear Stella by Starlight, who looks quite like the old man anyway, giving me Macca’s sign! The sixties was a great motley cast of characters in an ongoing operetta with multi-hued costumes to match. What I remember most is how beautiful everybody was, and, of course, the beautiful clothes: we dressed up like medieval damsels and princes, pirates, pre-Raphaelite Madonnas, popes, hussars, mad hatters and creatures visiting from other planets.

And then there were the courtiers and spear-carriers – all those strange characters around the Beatles and the Stones: the roadies, the hustlers, and instigators. George’s personal assistant Terry Doran, the ‘man in the motor trade’, somehow getting hold of Lennon’s psychedelic Rolls-Royce and ending up with a top job at Apple Corps. There was the sublime Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ publicist and agent provocateur; the sinister Tom Keylock, Andrew Oldham’s homicidal chauffeur; Brian’s thuggish builder, Frank Thorogood, and his deathbed confession of how he murdered Brian Jones.

Then there were the Beatles’ old roadies Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans. Big, benign, boyish Mal shot by the LA police during a misunderstanding. And Stu, Ian Stewart, the Stones’ original piano player. I loved Stu! I remember for my twenty-first birthday Mick wanted to buy me a car and Stu was given the mission to find it. He turned up with the most beautiful car imaginable, a 1927 Cadillac, a Bonnie and Clyde car in an incredible beige colour with a red stripe across it where the doors opened. How cool was that? But despite Mick’s efforts I never learned to drive. It was like driving a tank in the First World War, it had a gear stick and all that stuff, I could hardly see, my nose only just reached the windscreen.

Stu did me another great favour. Mick hated the Stones’ performance in The Rolling Stones’ Rock and Roll Circus. He just wanted the whole thing to go away. It was like the scene from Snow White where the Wicked Queen says to the huntsman: ‘Go! Take her into the forest and destroy her!’ with Mick as the Wicked Queen and Stu as the huntsman. Except that it wasn’t me he was talking about, it was the cans of film of my part in Rock and Roll Circus. He wanted those tapes destroyed. Burned. Thrown into the Thames. For ever eliminated. And Stu said, ‘Yeah, okay, Mick, will do.’ But he couldn’t do it! ‘Where can I put these cans of film,’ Stu thought to himself, ‘where Mick will never think to ever look?’ And so he took them to Eel Pie Island and said, ‘I say, Pete [Townshend, this was], I’ve got these old cans of film. Do you mind if I leave them in your garage?’ And Pete said, ‘No, Stu, go on. That’s fine, you know, I don’t mind, don’t use it, there’s nothing really in there.’ And there they lay, mouldering away, for twenty-five years, until one day, God knows, Pete, clearing out the garage, found the film and it said Rock and Roll Circus on it! And he goes, ‘Oh, hey, what’s this?’ And being incredibly smart, he put it on his home projection and watched it, and every single shot was of me for the Rock and Roll Circus. He called Allen Klein and said, ‘I’ve got something you’ll be very interested in. I’ve found the lost Marianne film from the Circus. What do you want me to do with it, Allen?’ And Allen said, ‘Hallelujah! I’ll send a courier.’ And he did. He sent his daughter, Robin Klein, to pick it up. Townshend knew about this problem because of course The Who were very much involved with the Rock and Roll Circus – and he also knew that one of the reasons the show hadn’t come out was because they appeared to have upstaged the Stones. They really didn’t, but, anyway …

And there it all was, except for one really beautiful crane shot. I don’t know what happened to that. Maybe Mick was so angry that he just had one roll of film out of a can, tore it into a million pieces and burned it in the back garden as he and Bianca danced around it hooting like owls!

I loved Mick, I really did, you know – but if I had stayed in that situation with Mick, all that money, going to the South of France, Keith and Anita Pallenberg, blah-di-blah, Goat’s Head Soup, I’d be dead, and I knew that. And if I was going to go down, I wanted to go down my own way! Not with some adjunct decadent ringleader and his scurvy crew!

When I split with Mick and left with Nicholas, I took a beautiful Persian carpet and some Ossie Clark dresses and all my Deliss silk clothes. So these were the clothes I was wearing when I was living on the street, a wraith-like vision, an anorexic waif, feeling no pain, and not feeling any cold either, of course, you see, because of the smack.

At this point, I’m sort of an honorary Rolling Stone, a situation I’m a little ambivalent about. I love them and we had such great times, but it was a really hard scene to be in. I was never going to be good at functioning in that bitchy world, with all those betrayals. Now, when I go to see them backstage or at the George V Hotel, it’s lovely to see Keith and Ronnie and Mick and Charlie. Charlie’s always been a delight. I love to go and hear him outside of the Stones environment when he plays his jazz shows in London.

I’m still scared of the Stones because I always have this feeling – and it’s not just an illusion – of being sucked in again. Unlike Anita, I don’t have any immediate connection with them. I’m a free agent, and yet, when I see them, I suddenly feel drawn in. I go back to their very beginnings. I am part of them. I know that. And that’s okay.

One of the favourite places Mick and I liked to hang out was George and Pattie Boyd’s house in Weybridge. Mick loved George and I thought Pattie one of the most beautiful people ever. I loved the way she dressed, her fantastic sense of style. Psychedelic dresses in beautiful colours or little skirts that showed off her wonderful legs.

During those magical afternoons George would be the perfect host, serving up exotic teas, fat joints, and his new songs like exquisite delicacies offered for our consumption. A little bungalow (by rock star standards) brightly painted in sparkly psychedelic ice-cream colours, very warm and cosy and friendly, like the people who lived there, with a garden full of sunflowers and cushions outside. Just a very soft, gentle vibe, as if this fairy-tale cottage were conjured out of his sweet melancholy songs.

It was always far easier to go and visit people from other bands. You didn’t have all the stresses and strains you do with your own group. At Redlands, Keith’s house in West Sussex, there was always some tension – undercurrents that I couldn’t even put into words. Subterranean stuff, which I think is always lurking about in any band. What makes an interesting band is that incongruous combination of people at odds. The tension makes for great music, but it doesn’t always make for the easiest social situations.

Clearly there were similar issues with the Beatles, but any raging insecurities or problems within the group were never apparent at Weybridge on a sunny afternoon, with George sitting cross-legged on a kilim playing us his songs.

So being with George and Pattie was very relaxing. Mick and I were able to lie back on Moroccan cushions, get high and float away listening to George’s new songs. When he wasn’t playing his own stuff, he would be playing Ravi Shankar on those beautiful green discs we all used to have. I do think he very much brought all that into our world.

Mick loved George’s songs – those wonderful songs on Revolver – but George never felt that anybody appreciated his songs, really, or thought they were as good as John and Paul’s. George was racked with doubt about his work, but it’s now obvious what a great songwriter he was. ‘Beware of Darkness’ is as good as anything anybody ever wrote.

In a way, Brian Jones was George’s counterpart in the Stones. But there was a big difference in their personalities. The thing about George – and we all feel it strongly now that he’s gone off and left us – is that he plunged into things. Whatever he got into, whether it was the sitar and Ravi Shankar or the Maharishi, he walked right in and never looked back, and that takes a lot of confidence. Brian, on the other hand, was all flash. He loved to astonish – and then on to the next thing. Sometimes I’d get the eerie feeling that – like the positive and negative in a photograph – George was the positive version of Brian. They were quite similar in many ways; both could play a lot of different instruments and were hugely talented. But of course one huge difference was that Brian was unable to write songs. His perpetual upsetness and unhappiness and paranoia and low self-esteem all worked against him. It was tragic because he wanted to be a songwriter more than anything. I’ve watched the painful process, Brian mumbling out a few words to a twelve-bar blues riff and then throwing his guitar down in frustration.

I think in Brian’s state writing a song probably wasn’t possible. He could only do it through another medium, through Keith. I guess the closest he came to it was ‘Ruby Tuesday’, where his melancholy recorder wistfully carries that sense of irretrievable loss. ‘Ruby Tuesday’ was a collaboration between Keith and Brian. It’s one of the few cases where Mick had nothing to do with a Stones song, neither the lyrics nor the melody – but he and Keith got the writing credit. Without Brian, there wouldn’t be a ‘Ruby Tuesday’.

It’s funny how each drummer was so perfect for the band they were in. Mick admired Ringo’s drumming – it was so simple, so spare, so incredibly on the money – but it wouldn’t have fitted into the Stones at all. You couldn’t have taken Ringo and put him in the Stones; you couldn’t have Charlie Watts drumming for the Beatles. As for Keith Moon, his drumming would have got too much in the way of the guitars and the vocals in either the Stones or the Beatles, but could there have been a more perfect drummer and maniac for The Who than Keith Moon?

I’ve heard this funny theory that Mick wanted to be a Beatle and that John wanted to be a Rolling Stone, but I think it misses the point by a mile. Mick loved the Beatles, of course, and obviously there was a bit of natural competition going on there, but I don’t think that was unhealthy at all – they sparked off each other.

You know, people have said, with a little truth to it, that the Beatles were thugs pretending to be gentlemen, whereas the Stones were gentlemen pretending to be thugs, and this is where it all gets so interesting when we talk about the music, because you’ve got those contradictory aspects bleeding through. They’re very subtle, but they’re there, and that’s what makes the music so compelling, the rent in the temple cloth.

The thing about the Stones is that they were very intense about everything: about writing, recording, and performing. The Beatles had a similar intensity in the studio, but they were never able to transmit that on to the stage. They were so unlucky with what they went through in the early days; not being able to hear themselves play. It was a complete fuck-up that we have to lay, I’m afraid, at Brian Epstein’s door.

One of the things a manager must do is make sure that theb technical aspects are taken care of when the musicians go on stage. Kit Lambert and Chris Stamp did it for The Who, Clapton’s crew looked after Eric. The basic responsibility of people who take care of any band, including mine, is to make sure that the sound is right so that the musicians can enjoy the experience. That’s vitally important, and Brian Epstein just didn’t get that together. He never made that leap from playing small venues in the north of England to playing Shea Stadium. It’s tragic to see the Beatles on stage with their tiny amps, unable to hear a thing. And naturally, after that last tour, they came back from all that and said, ‘That’s it! We’re never going out again!’ And then Brian Epstein got really depressed because he realised he was almost out of a job.

The Beatles completely evolved from the pop business. The Stones began as a Brit Chicago R & B group and then lurched into a more raunchy rig than the Beatles ever managed. When the Beatles stopped touring in 1966 they were still the lovable Fab Four – they were rock’n’roll muppets. The Stones were menacing and sexy. A lot of that had to do with the kind of music they played, with Andrew Oldham, their manager, pushing their bad-boy image and Mick and Keith’s natural bolshiness. But much of it, too, had to do with Mick’s savvy on the business side. They never had a manager in the sense of a daddy figure like Brian Epstein telling them what to do – Andrew was younger than they were and more reckless. They weren’t dependent on Allen Klein or Andrew – they were their own gang. Also, you have to take into account that the Beatles were the pioneers and nobody had invented proper speakers yet. It was so early on that nothing had been sorted out yet.

Mick might, very occasionally, put the Beatles down for their provincialism, which, if you’re from London and they’re from Liverpool, is a very natural reaction. But he’d never put their music down. Well, of ‘Yellow Submarine’ or those whimsical Beatle songs he might say, ‘Now that is a bit silly.’ I never thought so; I loved it, still do. Also something like ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, but these are obviously not the sort of things the Stones would be into.

Anyway, when you listen to the Beatles carefully, and the John Lennon stuff in particular, they aren’t all sweetness and light. There’s an edge to their music; there’s a real soggy, dark, dirty bit in it that bleeds through. Their sweetness is very superficial. You hear the undercurrent in Paul’s bass playing, you hear it in John’s harmonies, you hear it in the call-and-response stuff. Maybe not the first couple of records, but when you get to Revolver and Rubber Soul, things begin to darken. And there’s something very weird about Sgt Pepper, too. It’s not at all what it appears to be. I’ve found subsequently that listening to Sgt Pepper can be a bit of an unsettling experience. Pet Sounds still comes across as very beatific, so innocent and yearning, whereas Sgt Pepper really doesn’t.

Brian Epstein didn’t seem to get it that one of his jobs was to make sure that his precious boys were happy onstage and could hear each other and that they weren’t torn to pieces all the time by crazed fans. The most basic of needs, you know, just to make sure they weren’t being hounded day and night by cameras and reporters, with absolutely no time to themselves. These awful things kept happening and he wasn’t able to deal with them. That’s one of the reasons why Derek Taylor, their publicist, was so handy, because he was such a gentleman, and a hipster plus he had that ability to make people snap to attention. Invaluable, since Brian Jones would go missing in the middle of tours, recording sessions, negotiations, and nobody could find him. Epstein was a handy front for the Beatles in the beginning, because he seemed to be a gentleman – in appearance he was upper middle class. At first he was able to keep that together and where he did fall short he wasn’t that different from many of the early managers. It was new territory and they didn’t know what the hell they were doing.

Brian Epstein was so talented and had so many gifts and yet in many ways it was as if he really wasn’t paying attention. He fucked up. Beautifully. He was eaten up by what he called his ‘problem’. This was all long before it was cool to be gay. He was wrestling with real demons there, boy, as much if not more than our Andrew. But the difference was that Andrew seemed to enjoy his demons, let’s put it that way. Andrew embraced them, whereas poor Brian just beat himself into a bloody pulp over it. Nobody guessed that he was so terribly depressed and desperate. I had no clue anything was awry. The many times that I went down to see him in his lovely country house, they were beautiful idyllic afternoons. He seemed happy, and put up such a front you could never guess what was going on in the dark corners.

We talked and talked, about ballet, opera, the theatre. We talked about Margot Fonteyn and Nureyev, Vanessa Redgrave, Maggie Smith’s production of Miss Julie. At that time Brian was agonising over Up Against It, the Joe Orton script that he wanted the Beatles to do. He was worried it was too far out.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, flipping through the script. ‘Some of it is extremely provocative and nasty.’

‘C’mon, Brian,’ I said. ‘It’s Joe Orton; they’ll eat it up.’

‘Well, the Archbishop of Canterbury turns out to be a woman, the boys get dressed up as women, commit adultery and murder, and are involved in the assassination of the Prime Minister. Do you really think audiences can stomach this stuff?’

‘It’s farce, Brian,’ I told him. ‘And, let’s face it, at this point the Beatles could do with something edgy.’

I hadn’t, of course, actually read it, and when I did, I saw how tricky – unfortunately – it would be for the Beatles (with the exception of John). There were wonderful outrageous lines. The Archbishop of Canterbury was pure hysterical camp: ‘I’m Princess of the Church. Let me pass. I’ve some hard praying to do.’ The Stones maybe could have got away with it, but for the Fab Four it would’ve been a bit of a stretch.

Orton rightly anticipated that it would be turned down. In his diary he wrote scathingly of Epstein: ‘An amateur and a fool. He isn’t equipped to judge the quality of a script. Probably he will never say “yes”, equally hasn’t the courage to say “no”. A thoroughly weak, flaccid type.’

Too bad. I think if the Beatles had done Orton’s script, it would have really helped Brian – moved him up a level. Although Joe Orton made an unfortunate choice in a lover (who killed him), his take on the Beatles was spot on. He had the right cheeky attitude to the whole thing, and he came from the same milieu as the Beatles. It would have been brilliant if they’d filmed Orton’s script. Would have helped Brian exorcise some of his shit, too.

I know Brian Epstein really liked me because towards the end of one of these teas he asked me to marry him; not that he was exactly serious, but for a second I actually considered it. Come to think of it, I know exactly what stopped me. It was our Mick walking in and saying, ‘Come on, darling, we’ve got to go home now.’

Kit Lambert, who along with Chris Stamp managed The Who, was a wonderful maniac. I remember in the early seventies visiting Kit in some really dreadful, scabby flat in Notting Hill, before Notting Hill became fashionable. It was a trip, I can tell you, both of us doing lots of heroin and coke and alcohol – Kit loved alcohol. We had a whale of a time as Kit regaled me with stories about his dad Constant Lambert, the composer, acting out scenes from operas, scenes with divas and soirées with princesses and rent boys. I didn’t know Kit in his heyday; I only got to know him on the way down, which was more interesting I think, because in an odd way that’s when he was truly in his glory – he was a connoisseur of the lower depths, an area in which I am also somewhat of an expert. The only good thing you could say about Kit’s self-demolition was that he had a perverse kind of pleasure in all of it. He was such a fascinating pervert with a classical education. He used to say things like, ‘The destruction of Pompeii … one of the most magnificent events in history. Those two naked boys preserved in flagrante delicto for all eternity!’

Kit liked building things up, like a child with a sand castle, and then, oh, the mad joy of tearing them down. He enjoyed seeing everything in turmoil, going up in flames. Like Nero, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and Pliny the Elder, he loved a great catastrophe – especially if he’d engineered it himself. He loved talking about his disasters – few understood that he relished them as perverse works of art.

I remember once he wanted to take me on a lig to the Cannes Film Festival on a yacht with lots of drugs. In spite of his fallen state he was always very posh. But I wasn’t in any condition to go to some fancy international event and display myself in my wretched condition, so regretfully I declined. Thank God. I would have made the most awful fool of myself, and in public. I had been doing that far too much in front of people as it was – along the lines of the famous Mandrax head-in-the-soup incident. Kit went and made a fool of himself in the grand manner, but then he was a man for whom flamboyant bad behaviour was a fine art. One of the curious things about Kit, of course, was that his father had been a great composer; and that leads us directly to Tommy, The Who’s rock opera. You can see why Pete with his transcendent – and overweening – approach to rock would have been so receptive to Kit’s idea, and I do think it was Kit’s idea – writing a rock opera. After Sgt Pepper everybody wanted a crack at the rock Gesamtkunstwerk, but it was not on. The only person who managed anything like it, and, in fact, preceded it, was Brian Wilson with Pet Sounds. And it was Pet Sounds that helped give Sgt Pepper wings.

Kit came to a sad end, alas. He died of a cerebral haemorrhage after falling down the stairs of his mother’s house in 1981.

Visits to Paul and Jane Asher weren’t quite as relaxed as those Mick and I spent with George and Pattie. With hindsight I can see that they were rather uptight. There were constant little frictions. Mick and I were very close and we would never have done anything like fret about windows being open or closed, or anything as petty as that, but this is what happens when couples start to come apart. In any case I was in a very different position to the one Jane found herself in. I’d done what Paul wanted Jane to do, and given up my career. I wasn’t going on tour with the Old Vic; I wasn’t taking any more movie roles and very few parts in plays. I gave up everything I’d been doing, apart from a little bit of theatre. Jane was a serious actress and wanted to continue her career, but Paul had other ideas. That’s why Linda was so perfect for Paul; she was just what he wanted, an old-fashioned Liverpool wife who was completely devoted to her husband. In a way, that’s what Mick wanted, too, and for a while I acquiesced, but in the end it kicked back very badly. On the other hand, Paul isn’t exactly the regular bloke he appears. For one thing, he was always intellectually curious. Not only was he into electronic music and Stockhausen and all of that, but he was into Magritte, pop art, the Expressionists and even avant-garde theatre. I believe it was Paul who first thought of Joe Orton as the screenwriter for the next Beatles movie. He’d been to see Loot, Orton’s outrageous phallic farce, and liked it. He encouraged Brian Epstein to arrange a meeting with Orton, and in Orton’s diary he describes getting on famously with Paul.

Arrived in Belgravia at ten minutes to eight … I found Chapel Street easily. I didn’t want to get there too early so I walked around for a while and came back through a nearby mews. When I got back to the house it was nearly eight o’clock. I rang the bell and an old man entered. He seemed surprised to see me. ‘Is this Brian Epstein’s house?’ I said. ‘Yes, sir,’ he said, and led the way to the hall. I suddenly realised that the man was the butler. I’ve never seen one before … He took me into a room and said in a loud voice, ‘Mr Orton.’ Everybody looked up and stood to their feet. I was introduced to one or two people. And Paul McCartney. He was just as the photographs. Only he’d grown a moustache. His hair was shorter too. He was playing the latest Beatles record, ‘Penny Lane’. I like it very much. Then he played the other side – Strawberry something. I didn’t like this as much. We talked intermittently. Before we went out to dinner we agreed to throw out the idea of setting the film in the thirties. We went down to dinner. The trusted old retainer – looking too much like a butler to be good casting – busied himself in the corner. ‘The only thing I get from the theatre,’ Paul M. said, ‘is a sore arse.’ He said Loot was the only play he hadn’t wanted to leave before the end. ‘I’d’ve liked a bit more,’ he said. We talked of the theatre. I said that compared with the pop-scene the theatre was square. ‘The theatre started going downhill when Queen Victoria knighted Henry Irving,’ I said. ‘Too fucking respectable.’ We talked of drugs, of mushrooms which give hallucinations – like LSD. ‘The drug, not the money,’ I said. We talked of tattoos. And after one or two veiled references, marijuana. I said I’d smoked it in Morocco. The atmosphere relaxed a little. Dinner ended and we went upstairs again. We watched a programme on TV; it had phrases in it like ‘the in crowd’ and ‘swinging London’. There was a little scratching at the door. I thought it was the old retainer, but someone got up to open the door and about five very young and pretty boys trooped in. I rather hoped this was the evening’s entertainment. It wasn’t, though. It was a pop group called The Easybeats. I’d seen them on TV. I liked them very much … A French photographer arrived … He’d taken a set of new photographs of The Beatles. They wanted one to use on the record sleeve. Excellent photographs. The four Beatles look different in their moustaches. Like anarchists in the early years of the century. After a while … I talked to the leading Easybeat. Feeling slightly like an Edwardian masher with a Gaiety girl. And then I came over tired and decided to go home. I had a last word with Paul M. ‘Well,’ I said, ‘I’d like to do the film. There’s only one thing we’ve got to fix up.’ ‘You mean the bread?’ ‘Yes.’ We smiled and parted. I got a cab home. Told Kenneth about it. Then he got up to make a cup of tea. And we talked a little more. And went to sleep.

JOE ORTON and JOHN LAHR, The Orton Diaries

While Brian Epstein came off as a shadowy, pathetic character.

Somehow I’d expected something like Michael Codron. I’d imagined Epstein to be florid, Jewish, dark-haired and overbearing. Instead I was face to face with a mousey-haired, slight young man. Washed-out in a way. He had a suburban accent.

Mick was initially supportive of my acting, but I sensed it was something he’d rather I not do. I was the consort – my career would distract from the image he wanted to create. I had absolutely no wish to compete with him, but eventually I decided acting would be okay since it was far enough away from what he did. I thought it wouldn’t affect him, but, fuck me, then he wanted to act, too! He can’t help it; he’s just got to compete.

I stopped working, but then other issues began to raise their ugly heads. The Devil, as we know, makes work for idle hands. I got heavily into drugs in spite of all the warnings, which, again, I can only see from a distance. The biggest warning of all should have been Brian’s headlong plunge, but I didn’t realise it, and by the time I did it was too late. I had my overdose in Australia, and that was the beginning of the end for Mick and me. It’s easy enough, after all, to rationalise how other people’s problems are different from our own, and honestly there was no logical reason why I would’ve compared my fate to Brian’s.

Some very odd things happened to me in Australia when I OD’d on all those sleeping pills. It sounds strange, but I have a feeling that those six days out, unconscious, did some very bizarre things to me. I always thought that I came through that with no damage, but I know that when I had my biopsy last year the results showed very old scarring on my liver – apparently the 150 Tuinol and six days’ unconsciousness caused serious liver damage. Other bizarre things happened. Before the OD I could speak French, and afterwards I couldn’t. An entire language had somehow got lost.

I’m always amazed at how scenes from the past get congealed into rabid set pieces. There’s the whole Redlands business. It’s so complicated and has an endless life of its own. Almost immediately it became an emblematic part of Stones history, but my position was much dodgier – my role was ambivalent and eventually had disastrous effects on me and on my relationship with Mick. It was a horrible ordeal, but initially it created a bizarre bond between us. I took the poison-pen letters and all those dreadful things in the papers too hard. I was too young and insecure to have all that hatred directed at me and didn’t know how to deal with it. I turned it all on myself. Mick’s attitude was much, much healthier. Like, ‘Well, they’re just idiots. I’m not gonna let this get in my way!’ Which should have really been mine, too, but I wasn’t grown up or secure enough to do that. Also I was slandered as the wanton woman in the fur rug, while Mick was the noble rock star on trial.

The 1969 festival at Altamont, the Stones’ infamous free concert outside San Francisco, is now seen as a rock’n’roll Black Mass. So many things about Altamont that now seem inevitable just weren’t at the time. Mick may have sung his pantomime songs about the Devil and the Midnight Rambler, but he was in a total hippie mood when he went out there to do that concert. He wanted more than anything to be part of the counterculture utopia. ‘Brothers and sisters, we are creating the blueprint for a new society’ and so on. That’s how it was, actually. People imagine the Stones came to Altamont to incite murder, to summon up Beelzebub and his satanic crew from the bowels of the earth. Not at all! It was meant to be a Hippie Love Fest. It’s one of the saddest things that it turned into its opposite.

Mick must have realised when ‘Sympathy for the Devil’ started that it was a mistake. Every time they’d play it on that tour, he’d say: ‘Something funny happens when we start this.’ He got off on it – as if something might happen if he said it. And then suddenly it wasn’t funny any more. It’s the same old thing: wanting to have power over people. And often they don’t think about whether it’s good power, whether it’s positive or negative – it’s part of being young and stupid. Something happened to him out there on that tour. He’d always been so sweet and gentle – he began to get harder after that. The fact that I’d gone off to Rome with the painter Mario Schifano while he was gone didn’t exactly help his mood when he returned.

All these things eroded our relationship, but there were other more fundamental problems. As much as I loved Mick, the actual life, the big rock star life, wasn’t really for me. Mick, however, couldn’t live any other way, and I wouldn’t expect him to, it’s just part of his nature.

I love Bob Dylan’s attitude to the sixties. ‘I am the sixties. You want ’em? You can have ’em!’ Oh, God, that made me laugh so much! But, you must know by now he’s a sly dog and as slippery as an eel. He’s like some sort of creature that, as soon as you identify what it is, it turns into something else – a chameleon! Bob has a clever, oblique way of talking about himself. And because he’s so mentally agile he can see-saw about the sixties as much as he likes. He knows you can never take him out of the sixties, however much he grumbles, so his ambivalence about his decade is just a prank. If you take him out of the house of cards it would collapse. He just wants to be the Joker in the pack.

Bob’s old records are so embedded in our lives everybody gets nervous when a new Dylan record comes out. There’s so much expectation. When Modern Times was released, I talked to Polly Harvey and I told her how wonderful it was and she said, ‘But, oh, I’m scared! I’m scared!’ And I said, ‘Don’t be! It’s all right! It’s more than all right!’ We always hope it’s going to be this great thing – and there have been some clunkers, haven’t there? Some real downers, too. Time Out of Mind was very negative, but, as always, there were a couple of great tracks I loved, like ‘I’m Sick of Love’. I know that feeling – you want it but you get so sick of that old roller coaster.

Bob’s been competing with himself since 1966, trying to outdistance his own mythology. I was listening the other day to his radio show. He was talking about fathers and there was this bit where Bob says, ‘Well, you know, manic depression and depression and bipolar disorder, these are really all just the blues.’ He sees everything in a mythical context. The contemporary world is ersatz, a fallen model. And then he played Lightning Hopkins. It was a wonderful moment. I thought, ‘Yeah, man, that’s exactly what these people are doing, taking away the lightning, taking away the blues.’ The blues have that wonderful irony. I’ve naturally got them, I’m never going to be able to be rid of them – I couldn’t bear it, I wouldn’t be me.

On his show, Bob does his radio voice, the smooth, soft-talking deejay. Old possum Bob. That’s what I like so much about the Dylan radio show, that he’s playing a character – I love that he’s gone to the trouble to create a new persona. Of course, he’s always been good at manufacturing personae – brilliant. I love to see that he hasn’t lost his touch. I keep thinking that I want to send him an e-mail from Marianne in Paris saying: ‘Love the radio show, love the character. Don’t change a thing!’ But what Bob really likes to hear is young people criticising him. Because he loves saying what he really thinks. They’ll say: ‘Why don’t you play more new music, Bob?’ And he says things like: ‘Well, Scott from Arlington, the thing is, there’s a lot more old music than there is new music.’ That’s an argument I wouldn’t have thought of, and so very typical of him. He basically thinks modern music is crap, but he does play it occasionally. He played a Blur track the other day called ‘Coffee & TV’, but most of what he plays is stuff you’ll only hear on some old hipster like Hal Willner’s answering machine, the wildest, oldest stuff you can imagine.

Bob still thinks of me as the angelic Marianne of the mid-sixties and whenever he sees me drinking and smoking he gets a bit cross. I’d like to say I’ve reformed – I have actually, I hope that doesn’t disappoint – but unlike Bob I haven’t found God in the process. Bob is very religious but when it gets to God and all that, I feel I have to say to him: ‘You know, Bob, I’m really not religious actually.’ I know I shouldn’t say those things, but I feel I have to. I’m not a pagan or a witch or anything dark or satanic, I’m just a humanist like my dad. But it’s all over the place. Religion, God, Christ on the cross. And if they’re not Christians, they’re Scientologists. Look at Bono, too, with his big cross and everything. I understand that people have to do what they have to do to get through, but I don’t think you have to impose your thing on other people. But I do know that when you make that kind of statement to Bono, you’re kind of left out, they cut you out of their plan. ‘Oh, well, if she’s not Christian …’ They look askance. ‘Must be something wrong there.’ That’s such nonsense. Christians have always done that. If you’re not part of them, then you’re against them, and I’m not against them, I just don’t want to be them.

My 2002 tour promoting Kissin’ Time ended in Australia, which is where Bob Dylan was just beginning his tour. We sat together on his balcony with a full moon shining over Sydney Harbour, talking about music – and ourselves – with a smattering of light flirtation. He told me he’d listened to my recent record, 20th Century Blues, and that he loved Kurt Weill’s chords, and he would eventually use them in those thirties-type songs on Modern Times. Kurt Weill took many of his melodies from music he heard in the synagogue and I’m sure Bob knew that.

I love to hear Bob talking about the blues and how we’re all linked to that music. That was very good for me to hear. And folk music. How you take that music and change it by running it through your own temperament.

Bob understands my voice because he’s got a funny voice too. I saw him backstage when I was about to start work on Vagabond Ways with Mark Howard and Daniel Lanois and he’d just worked with them. He said, ‘Don’t worry, it’s going to be fine with them. People like us with funny voices, they’ve only just now figured out how to record us, and the way is not to use digital. You have to use analogue recording equipment.’

I love the way Bob uses his voice to create a persona. On his radio show, Theme Time Radio Hour, you have Ellen Barkin saying, ‘It’s night time, a cat howls, the high heels of a prostitute clicking down the street, the moon shows for a second and disappears behind the clouds. Here’s your host, Bob Dylan.’

What amazes me about the sixties, because, in my mind, of course, it’s only yesterday, is how historic it’s become. We’ll soon be lumped with the Battle of Culloden, the Peasants’ Revolt, the Armada, and the invention of the loo. Over forty years ago! Longer! The strangeness of the whole passing pop parade – from Mod to Hippie to Glitter to Punk – will soon be part of the Ancientness of Olde England. It’s odd, too, that the sixties, with its grand image of itself, ended not with a whimper but a bang – and woe betide any who got in the way of its thrashing apocalyptic tail.

Looking back, it wasn’t such a bad idea to go to the country like Paul and Linda and not see anybody after the sixties. It was rather a wise thing to do because there was this dark cloud looming. It’s like that song of Roger Waters that I sing in my show:

Do you remember me?

How we used to be Helpless and happy and blind?

Sunk without hope In a haze of good dope and cheap wine?

Laying on the living-room floor

On those Indian tapestry cushions you made

Thinking of calling our firstborn Jasmine or Jade.

And then that ominous chorus:

Don’t do it

Don’t do it

Don’t do it to me!

Don’t think about it!

Don’t think about it!

Don’t think about what it might be

Don’t get up to open the door,

Just stay with me here on the floor

It’s gonna get cold in the nineteen seventies.

And that was written in 1968! That was prescient, if not your actual prophetic vision. Whatever we thought of Linda, and she didn’t make that great an impression on me, I think it was a credit to Paul that he didn’t marry a model. A module. Because that’s what all the others have ended up doing, they’ve married these modules. And they have children who also become modules.

I heard a track from Paul McCartney’s album Ram the other day on the radio. And with an almighty whoosh it just took me right back to those times I spent living on the streets, and then I found myself thinking about dear old Mike Leander who had been my producer on the early albums. Mike talked me into making that record that was released in 2002, called Rich Kid Blues. Hysterical! In fact it was never finished, and I never really liked it because it was made during my heroin addiction. This was 1972, and I was very, very sick indeed. But listening to this album now, all these years later, I think it’s really rather lovely, even though my voice is very weak. What the record represents is a very important moment in my life, when I, as a junkie, was shooting up on the streets, and then suddenly this really nice man, Mike Leander, comes and finds me hanging out on some corner and makes a record with me. He somehow managed to scam some money and took me into a really cheap studio somewhere in Soho with just a guitar player. Mike played me some songs and then asked what I was listening to. I was really into Cat Stevens’s haunting Tea for the Tillerman album, which every woman in the world seemed to love back then.

I remember that Mike played me Paul McCartney’s Ram and I thought it was just brilliant. He said, ‘Let’s try and do something like this record.’ And then he gave me some money to get me off the street. I actually remember leaving the studio that day with a copy of Ram tucked under my arm and all this cash to get some digs. That very day I managed to find a little flat and I set up home listening to Macca’s wonderful record. Even now Ram brings a tear to my eye whenever I put it on. Rich Kid Blues is a sweet, folksy collection that is very redolent of the period – you know, James Taylor, Melanie and Janis Ian, that short-lived era of singer songwriters. I hoped it might fly, but then suddenly Glam Rock came along – which, as irony would have it, Mike was instrumental in because he was Gary Glitter’s producer – and my poor little record was consigned for nearly thirty years to the dustbin of oblivion deep in the vaults at Gem Records. Now it seems that the record is regarded as Marianne Faithfull’s ‘lost album’, and I guess in many ways that’s right, because this album is the missing link between my early work and Broken English.

Sometime late in 2000 I received the proofs of a book through the post called Turn Off Your Mind, Relax, and Float Downstream by a member of Blondie. It’s about the ‘mystic sixties’, and it really does capture the light and the dark side of the decade. And there was a lot of dark, creepy stuff in the sixties, I can tell you: The Process, Kenneth Anger, Mel Lyman, Manson, Anton LaVey, and L. Ron Hubbard. Those people were always trying to get hold of me. Somehow I managed to negotiate my way around them quite successfully. I didn’t get involved in any cults, apart from going up to Bangor for that regrettable weekend with the Maharishi and the Beatles, the weekend that Brian Epstein killed himself.

It’s so odd that few of my friends see anything negative about the sixties. Most of them from back in the day say, ‘Oh but, Marianne, I don’t remember the sixties like that at all … it was wonderful!’ When I hear things like that I question myself, wondering if I got it all wrong and am mad. But I think I have been completely sane all along. Back in the sixties I certainly did seem to attract the most dreadful people: fringe types, cranks, weirdos, people who were after power. It was all so creepy …

This reminds me about the time at the tail-end of the sixties when dear Henrietta Moraes – about whom much more anon – wrote an investigative article for the Daily Telegraph colour supplement about L. Ron Hubbard, the founder of the Scientology religion. She infiltrated meetings in order to write her piece, which went into great detail about what she saw as the dark rotten core of what Hubbard did. She wrote all this stuff about how his partner, Mary Sue Whipp, was a homunculus with three breasts, and how he planned world domination through the power of the spirit. Hen was sure he was all about mind domination, and about muscling in on you immediately and filling your head with all this nonsense, isolating you from family and friends and brainwashing you. So of course he was furious when the Telegraph published Hen’s article. She became convinced that people were following her around and waiting outside her house, and got so terrified that she eventually went to the police.

I wanted to leave the sixties in a blaze of glory – under a volcano. That would be the Vesuvio, Spanish Tony’s Million Dollar Bash, almost emblematic of the blithe, hedonistic sixties overweening-ambitions-and-carpe-diem approach to life. Spanish Tony was the dealer to Swinging London’s stars and the jeunesse dorée.

All of London’s rock aristocracy were in attendance the evening Spanish Tony, nefarious drug dealer to the stars, finally opened his nightclub (which had, actually, only one night). Like all dealers, he didn’t consider himself just a dealer, he wanted to be something else, something a bit more grand, a ma?tre d’ to the hipoisie. Thus, the Vesuvio. It was pretty much of a dive, but the people there were just stupendous: le tout Londres hip. All the Beatles, most of the Stones, a few Whos, spangled guitar slingers, mangled drummers were there – in short, everybody who was anybody, or thought they were. The punch had, of course, been spiked with LSD. And in strolls Paul – very casually, very cool, almost whistling, you know, with one of those little smiles on his lips as if he’s got a really big secret. John was already there and seemed to have had quite a bit of punch by the time we arrived. George, too, of course, and Pattie Boyd, the quintessence of Pop chic. So there’s our Paulie, looking rather pleased with himself. He was in fact very cool, a real man-about-town and interested in different things than George. Curious Paul, fascinated with all sorts of strange things – he really was like that. And what swinging scene would be complete without Robert Fraser, Groovy Bob – the title of Harriet Vyner’s biography, a bricolage portrait of the archetypal boulevardier of swinging London. The Robert Fraser Gallery was the place to be. He showed the classic Pop artists of the sixties – Richard Hamilton, Jim Dine, and Andy Warhol – and made avant-garde art hip to the rock princelings. He was beautiful, took a lot of drugs, and could always be found where the new thing was happening. ‘More than any other figure I can think of, Robert Fraser personifies the Sixties as I remember them,’ so blurbed Lord McCartney on the back of the Vyner bio. Robert even tried to turn Paul on to heroin, but Paul didn’t care for the experience – that was lucky!

So there we were, all having a wonderful time, really high and even a little bit of alcohol, which to us was anathema. It was punch, which is easy to drink and a rather delicious sort of drunk. Little did we know what was in it. Finally we decide to drink, and it was acid! And then in the middle of all this, Paul, sidling about with his hands behind his back.

‘What have you got behind your back, Paul?’ we are crying out.

‘Oh, nothing, really,’ says he. ‘Just something, um, we’ve just done.’ Knowing that everyone would say, ‘Oh! Play it!’

Well, the thing about the Vesuvio that was really great was the speakers. That’s where all of our money had gone, on the very best speakers, huge speakers, the biggest that you could possibly get. Everything else was on the floor, of course; just loads of cushions. Come to think of it, the set-up would never have worked as a club, but Tony wasn’t one to get hung up on the details. For a private party, however, it was perfect. So there was a lot of ‘Oh, go on, Paul, please!’ You know, you always had to do that with him, basically.

‘Oh, yeah, all right, then,’ he says. And then he proceeds to put on ‘Hey, Jude’. It just went – boom! – straight to the chest. It was the first time anyone had ever heard it, and we were all just blown away. And then, of course, we couldn’t stop playing it, we just played away, mixed up with a bit of Little Richard and some blues.

What a night! Right then you just knew how lucky you were to live in these times, with this crowd. That song was so impossible to describe or even take in that I didn’t know what to say to Paul, but of course I did go up to him (we were a polite little lot) and probably burbled, ‘Wow! Far out, man!’ The required string of incoherent sounds, but I felt I had to say something even though, the state I was in, I could hardly speak. Even Mick said it was fantastic, because it was. I guess most people would think the Stones may have had mixed feelings at that moment, and perhaps they did. But (possibly due to the laced punch) the main feeling was one of: aren’t we all the greatest bunch of young geniuses to grace the planet and isn’t this the most amazing time to be alive. It was as if only with this group and at that moment could Paul have done it. We had a sense of everybody being in the right place, at the right time, with the right people. And every time something came out, like ‘I Can See for Miles and Miles’ or ‘Jumpin’ Jack Flash’, ‘Visions of Johanna’, or the sublime ‘God Only Knows’ from Pet Sounds, or anything at all, it seemed like we had just broken another sound barrier. Blind Faith, the Mothers of Invention … one amazing group after another. Tiny Tim, anything, we were instant fans! And I don’t think it was just the drugs.

It was one of the most incestuous music scenes ever. And how did they all find each other? And how did they all seem to be in the perfect group for them? Most knew that they were, but some, like Eric Clapton, kept jumping about trying to find exactly his right space and never quite finding it. But even that made sense for him. If not for the peregrine wanderings of Eric we would never have had ‘Layla’ and all that. Experimental Eric, mixing it up with different bands: Derek and the Dominos, Greg Allman, Delaney & Bonnie, Blind Faith. He was in so many different bands – a restless troubadour. In the end, though, all this wandering about from group to group made him into a separate entity: Eric Clapton. He’s his own brand.

The Vesuvio may have limped along for another couple of weeks before it closed. Of course, the whole venture was a very dangerous idea; it would have been a place where people went to score. Definitely needed, of course, but somewhat unwise. How tempting it must have been to all – a sort of one-stop shop: you go to the club and you get the drugs right there. It would have made life easier for Spanish Tony because instead of having to drive down to John and Yoko and then to me and then drive to Robert, he could just lie on his cushions and make money. Convenient, yes, but also quite convenient for the local constabulary!

I think Spanish Tony’s fear of immediate arrest may have been unfounded. Probably the first thing that would have happened would have been the local fuzz saying, ‘Okay, how much are you going to pay us?’

In my mind’s eye the last image of that night is this: John and Yoko, both completely legless, deciding to drive themselves in the psychedelic Rolls over to Ringo’s old flat on Montagu Square. They would’ve crashed and killed themselves. Driving wasn’t John’s forte, never mind the acid. I see Spanish Tony, keeping himself cool on coke and smack, rushing out and putting them in a taxi. He hands the driver a twenty-quid note and tells him, ‘Don’t let them out till you get to 38 Montagu Square.’ There’s a picture in my mind’s eye of Mick and Keith in front of the Vesuvio with its painting of Mount Vesuvius behind them. So very camp. Mount Vesuvius was an apropos image for swinging London. We were all living underneath a volcano, getting high, getting dressed, getting together, swanning about in clubs with witty names while forces we hadn’t even guessed existed were about to fall down on us. Scintillating, vibrating creatures in fantastically beautiful clothes from Ossie Clark and the Antique Market, all frolicking beneath a volcano on the verge of erupting.

i guess she kept those vagabond ways

Singing Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht for two years was incredibly good for my writing. The bar shot right up. Not that I can now write like Bertolt Brecht or Kurt Weill, but still the experience of singing their songs on my sabbatical, as I call it, changed my way of thinking about songs – and the point of view of the song’s narrator. A kind of charged ambivalence that inflects all the imagery.

Vagabond Ways is quite a dark record – which is my speciality as I do dark quite well! I had to go into that gothic space and I didn’t have to take heroin to do it. It’s the most unrepentant of my recent albums, but then, I hadn’t done anything so bad recently that I had to repent for except … well, let’s not go into that right now.

By the time I came to record Vagabond Ways in 1999 I had been well marinated in the Brecht/Weill canon. It was like going back to school. You really learn how to use a song to tell a story. The song, ‘Vagabond Ways’, was written with Dave Courts, my dear old friend and hip jeweller – Keith’s skull rings. I came across a little piece in the New York Herald Tribune, where I do get a lot of material. The article talked about how in Sweden they hadn’t stopped their sterilisation initiative until 1974. These were programmes used to sterilise drug addicts, homeless people, nymphomaniacs and alcoholics. I was surprised.

And when I read about this hideous practice I thought, ‘Oh, here’s a song!’ So I put myself into the character of the girl about to be sterilised. She’s talking to the doctor. And then at the very end it just says, ‘It was a long time ago.’ They took her child away. And she was sterilised. She died of the drink and the drugs, but yes I guess she kept those vagabond ways …

It’s quite subtle, you know. Nobody ever believed me when I told them there is an actual story there. And a subject – other than myself. It’s quite hopeless. Everybody always thinks everything I write is about me.

Of course there are some parallels or I wouldn’t be interested in the story in the first place. I’ve got to feel some empathy with this girl. But at the same time when I write a song or perform any of the songs, they’re stories. ‘Broken English’ was about Ulrika Meinhof. It wasn’t till years later that I understood that it could be about me, too.

‘Incarceration of a Flower Child’ is a Roger Waters song. But how perfect a lyric is that! It had so many reverberations about the sixties, the end of the sixties and the consequences. It’s possibly about Syd Barrett, the founder and original lead singer of Pink Floyd, who became deranged as a result of obsessive drug-taking in 1967 and spent most of his life in institutions – a legendary loon. He died in July 2006. But songs are composites, they’re about many different things, not just the ostensible subject. Roger wrote ‘Incarceration of a Flower Child’ in 1968 but he never gave it to Pink Floyd.

Speaking of the past, ‘File it Under Fun’ is my way of dealing with my history. It’s about anybody I’d ever really loved. The title may sound a bit flip, but it’s not intended to be that ironic; it’s more true to my life, true to my feelings than sardonic. It’s got a kind of it’s-all-right-now feel, we’ll file it under fun, don’t worry about it. It’s true there’s a certain world weariness to it, but that’s probably because I’m always being asked about my past and it does get wearying. That was my reply at the time I wrote it anyway. I may have changed; Vagabond Ways is a long time ago.

The title, ‘Wilder Shores of Love’, is taken from Lesley Blanch’s book of the same name, about the exotic and possessed lives of four wild women who lived as they wished: Isabelle Eberhardt, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, Jane Digby and Isabel Burton. But wilder shores of love has a bit more personal reference than just the book. It came from a line of Anita’s. She said she’d been to the wilder shores of love. Not sure I have! Love to me is much more practical. Maybe she had just had some great sex. I have, too, but I wouldn’t exactly describe it as the wilder shores of love. ‘For Wanting You’ comes from my asking Elton and Bernie Taupin to write a song for me – and that’s what they came up with. It was a wonderful moment when I received that in the post. Of course, as per usual, I did not do it in the most commercial way you can imagine. I’m sure it could’ve been a hit, a big hit, but I underplayed it.

‘Great Expectations’, written with Daniel Lanois, is the story of my life. It’s the story in my mind as it goes through my life in pictures. It’s as if you’re sitting outside a tent around a fire and I’m telling the story. As I recount it I can’t remember everything that’s happened and, truth being so subjective, it’sa fable rather than an autobiography. The exclusiveness of memory as it fuses with the mythical life story and with Dickens’s wistful novel. It’s a slightly bitter little song.

To do a song like ‘Tower of Song’ with a light touch is quite hard. The tendency is to be earnest and intense, so it isn’t easy to pull off. But I think I’m getting over that. Still, you have to approach ‘Tower of Song’ like the great monument it is, a Tower of Babel of all songs and all the great singers who’ve gone before you, including the haunting voice of Leonard Cohen himself. The way Leonard does it is dark and broody. I lightened it up a bit. Some people didn’t like that, but there’s no way you can out-gothicise Leonard Cohen.

‘After the Ceasefire’ is a Frank McGuinness bit of magic. It’sa very Irish song, and quite literal in that sense. It’s not about Ireland, it’s about a relationship, but also Frank’s relationship with Ireland. Just a lovely lovely lovely little poem.

It was all the others’ fault, they thought at any rate

After the ceasefire to put an end to hate

She was reaching for her knife, he a fork and spoon

They sat about devouring the poison of the moon

Shared a fatal cigarette neither one would light

Their breath was flame enough, nobody said goodnight

After the ceasefire, after the ceasefire.

FRANK McGUINNESS and DANIEL LANOIS,

‘After the Ceasefire’

Vagabond Ways I recorded with Dan, and Mark Howard, in the Teatro, the recording studio that belongs to Daniel Lanois. Mark produced it. Dan and I wrote some songs together – beautiful stuff. I’m not particularly fond of what he does with U2, but his own records I love. And the ones he does with Emmylou Harris and Bob Dylan, of course – Oh Mercy and Time Out of Mind. That wonderful song ‘She’s gone with the man with the long black coat …’

What was going on in my life when I was making this record? I was emerging from my cocoon. I’m very one-pointed. I’d done 20th Century Blues and then The Seven Deadly Sins. So Vagabond Ways was my first record back in my own genre. I felt I had to make a bit of a statement. A Mariannifesto. To say, ‘Here I am! I’m back!’

looking back at anger

In early 1970 I was in bad shape. Not long after I’d left Mick I found myself on a slippery slope – I’d become a heroin addict and spent my days seeking oblivion, sitting on the wall of a demolished building in Soho. As if things weren’t dire enough, I agreed to play Lilith, a cemetery-haunting female demon, in Kenneth Anger’s occult allegory Lucifer Rising. Needless to say, the film didn’t improve my situation, either karmically or financially. And that was that – or so I thought, but karma has an awkward habit of bouncing back at you. It reminded me, yet again, that dabbling in the occult – even if you don’t entirely believe in its coiled powers – has a nasty way of casting its baleful influence long after you have left the scene – and accumulating vengeful force along the way.

Through William Burroughs I’d met the writer and painter Brion Gysin – inventor of the cut-up and Burroughs’s sometime collaborator. Brion was a really kind soul. When I was living on the street in London, I would occasionally go and see him. He was one of those rare people who genuinely did care about you; he was different, especially in those dark troubled times in London, Brion stood out like a beacon when everyone else seemed so self-centred and horrible – there was little sympathy for someone in my state in those days.

One day Brion took me round to where the occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger, whom I’d met through Robert Fraser, was staying. Kenneth was notorious for his film Scorpio Rising, a montage of Hell’s Angels, Hitler, fellatio, sodomy, Jesus, and assorted satanic imagery. Anger has made some two dozen movies, almost all dealing with satanic subject matter; aside from Scorpio Rising, the best known are Invocation of My Demon Brother, and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. I should have run as fast as I could from a self-styled conjurer of dark powers – however silly his dilettantish Satanism seemed to me – but I was very susceptible to the influence of others just then and easily led. As my father would have reminded me, in the words of Virgil, facilis descensus Averno – easy is the descent to Hell.

But love and light to Kenneth – only thing to do with Kenneth – love and light I send. Really. Can’t do anything else. I’ve gone through so much recently. All the anger, bitterness, upsetness, paranoia, grief has gone away. Hopefully, for good.

At the time I met him, Kenneth was living in Robert Fraser’s flat – Robert was in India. Kenneth saw that I was very vulnerable, obviously anorexic, on drugs, nowhere to live, and wanted to help me by putting me in his film. He didn’t understand my reasons for being on the wall, but saw that I could definitely be used, and that, in a nutshell, was how I came to be in Lucifer Rising. Kenneth really believed that he was setting me on my feet again as an actress. He thought I was on his side, which in a sense I was – as an artist. But basically he didn’t have a clue what I was up to – or how fragile I was. On junk, at the end of my tether and in no shape to do anything – let alone play a graveyard-haunting Mesopotamian night demon with a penchant for destroying children. Actually, since the advent of ‘cosmic feminism’, Lilith has become something of a heroine of women’s rights. In the Talmud she was the first wife of Adam, but refused to accept her subservient role. Adam rejected her, after which God created Eve as a more obedient mate. Because she refused to accept the inferior relationship in the primal marriage, she has been interpreted as a strong-minded woman reacting to male oppression. In Hebrew folklore she is said to have slept with Lucifer, giving birth to hundreds of lilin, female demons who would become the succubi of medieval and Jewish legend.

Whew! Kenneth got me at a very weak moment – I was completely dependent on the kindness of strangers, and, in fact, met a lot of very kind strangers. My friends the meths drinkers, for example, and the people in the Chinese laundry and my drug dealer – well! – and all sorts of funny, generous people I ran into. Even the police looked after me.

Strangely, Kenneth thought he could take me, a heroin addict, off the street, transport me to Egypt, and get me to play Lilith. It was great to go to Egypt – don’t get me wrong – but to have to crawl around an Arab graveyard dressed as a nun covered in Max Factor blood with skulls all around me was insane! It’s amazing they didn’t stone me to death, actually. The scene was shot very early in the morning when nobody was around, thank God. Of course today I’d probably be on some list of infidel dogs for desecrating a Muslim graveyard in a movie. Anyway, lightning didn’t strike – but, of course, it did eventually.

Naturally it was a huge mistake. Karmically a seriously wrong turn for me and something that took me a long time to overcome. I never should have done it, and had I been in my right mind I wouldn’t have considered it for a minute. That was one of the problems of being as high as I was at that moment, that somebody like Kenneth Anger – who is definitely on the dark side – could come along and get me to do mad, satanic things. What did I think I was doing? Well, I thought it was art, I suppose. I never got paid, which I always think is a sure sign it’s art. It was art, wasn’t it? It was the Devil’s art, and it’s very hard to get paid by the Devil, as you may know. There’s a few other people we could put in that category – mainly from the music business.

But before I get any further into the less charming aspects of Kenneth’s character I want to bang on a bit about the good things he did, because so far I’ve only given you his ruthless side.

One memorable evening Kenneth took me to see Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine at the National Theatre. Kenneth was naturally a huge fan of Marlowe, that Elizabethan ‘student of the School of Night’ whose death – a blow to the head by his own knife – is often seen as being foretold in his bloody and demon-haunted plays. ‘Black is the beauty of the brightest day,’ he has the ruthless tyrant Tamburlaine boast. Tamburlaine – parts I and II – is awe-inspiring and grotesque in an epic sort of way that only Elizabethans and Jacobeans could manage. I am grateful to Kenneth for that, even though it was three or four hours of disembowellings and upside-down crucifixions and tits being cut off and children being slashed. ‘Blood is the god of war’s rich livery.’ Endless horrors, but still fantastic. Kenneth was drooling throughout, and so was I, Christopher Marlowe being one of my heroes, too. Marlowe had his profligate vision, his wayward, possessed intent and conception of himself as the doomed, ‘brain-sick’ artist (‘What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?’). I’m always impressed when I see monstrous happenings turn into art before my eyes. When you see Tamburlaine, orany Christopher Marlowe play, you are confronted with actual genius, with a metamorphosis of horror into art. The great Elizabethan ‘blank-verse beast’ whirls words like a conjurer juggling sapphires, swords, stars, and the axle-tree of heaven as if they were so many balls:

I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains, And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about; And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.

Heavens! You truly believe some word-mad god tunes this music to our souls.

On the other hand, I’m afraid I’ve never really felt that Lucifer Rising was art. To be kind, let’s say the jury is still out on it. The thing is, for me it’s just sort of undigested cult stuff. There’s no question that it fits exquisitely well into this ghastly world we live in, but there’s a difference. I didn’t have a very high opinion of him to begin with and after I’d seen the alchemical films of Harry Smith I realised where Kenneth must’ve got many of his images from. The idea of drawing flying saucers coming into the screen – that was Harry’s idea. You could say Kenneth nicked it or you could say he was influenced by Harry, depending on how generous we want to be. Or we could say they influenced each other – which may well be the case. Harry started out as a fan of Kenneth’s work.

Harry, in any case, was at the other end of the spectrum. He was cool and relaxed – he didn’t have to promote himself. Kenneth tries too hard. Harry wouldn’t have minded whatever I said about him. He could take a joke, but Ken can’t – which is something I learned when I wrote my last book.

I suppose I was a bit unfair to Kenneth in my autobiography. The way I described my experiences was honest – the whole fiasco was so disturbing I still flinch when I think about it – but at the same time, I understand why Kenneth was so upset.

Obviously he was expecting a delightful, charming portrait of himself instead of what he got. I suppose I was pretty harsh, even a wee bit nasty, and now I’m trying to see it from his point of view – which isn’t all that easy. But, whatever I said about him, I certainly didn’t expect the vituperative response I got. Sometime after the book came out, Kenneth sent me a letter containing a curse written in fake blood. I opened it up and basically flipped out. I was so troubled by it I immediately took it down to my friends, Julian and Victoria Lloyd, to figure out what to do. On one level the letter was silly and hysterically funny, too. There was the part where he says, ‘You Jew! You Jew, like Kirk Douglas, like DANNY KAYE!’ What kind of curse is that? A Hollywood witch’s curse, I imagine, right out of Vampira’s grimoire. It was all about Jews and Danny Kaye – because Danny Kaye was Jewish, not a fact you would be likely to focus on, but Kenneth, of course, would (being virulently anti-Semitic). I’ve got a lovely Jewish granny, thank God, from whom I got my blonde hair and the big lips. Kenneth knew about all that. This put a rabid bee in his bonnet.

He’s been going on about my being part Jewish for years. He’s given lectures about it, about ‘my flaw’. I’ve heard from other people about this terrible flaw in my character: the fact that I am Jewish! That was funny and silly; I just laughed at that. But then the really vile stuff started to spew out: ‘DIE OF LUNG CANCER!’ and all that generic malice right out of the Common Book of Beastly Spells. For someone who considers himself a magus scrying out his victim’s secrets, he somehow missed a few critical things that might have hit home to me rather more effectively. Like sleeping pills! You’ll die from an overdose of sleeping pills! Or painkillers. He missed all that. Kenneth was quite capable of picking out the one thing that would truly sting you. The curse he sent to poor Robert Fraser had nothing in it except a razor blade and a piece of type saying: ‘Something to cure your stutter.’ I joke about it, but at the time I was absolutely panicked, holding the vile curse in my hands – not a fun thing to have in one’s possession. I went down to Jules and Vic’s – they were still living on the corner by Leixlip Castle then and showed it to them. Victoria was appalled but Julian was giddily impressed. ‘It’s a masterpiece!’ he declared. ‘You’ve got to send it to the V&A!’ I don’t know exactly what the Victoria & Albert Museum would’ve made of it, but visually it was an astonishing item. Very graphic and ghastly at the same time, and as maliciously conceived as only a true Satanist and twisted individual could conjure up. It was this huge piece of paper with threats inscribed in blood – Max Factor blood, I’m sure, completely fake – but as an artefact it looked incredible. It was a big, malign, poisonous curse – maybe a bit too wordy, maybe he raged on a bit too much. I mean, does the Devil rant you to death?

‘What the hell!’ I screamed at Julian. ‘I know it’s sort of wonderful in a ghastly cult artefact sort of way. It would be fine if it went to someone else, but it came to me, and, um, I can’t exactly look at it as an aesthetic object just now.’

In the end, Victoria told me to take it to the crossroads where there was a Lady Chapel and burn it with salt, rosemary and rue. Where would I find rue in this day and age? In Vic’s garden. Victoria is not a witch and does not grow this stuff for magical purposes. It’s just a herb, a lovely, old-fashioned herb. It’s in the wonderful mad scene in Hamlet: ‘rue for remembrance’. Or was it rosemary?

OPHELIA: There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.

LAERTES: A document in madness!

But, why burn Kenneth’s hideous screed with rosemary when it was something I clearly didn’t want to remember? I did it in order to remember my true self. And mark that this nonsense from Kenneth had got nothing to do with me. To fight back. For him to remember who he’s dealing with and for me to know who I am.

Kenneth must have been terribly roiled by what I said about him in my book, but I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just said what I really thought, like I do, but one has to have compassion. I realise now, in hindsight, that Kenneth was half using me, and half trying to help me, and in a funny way, I accept that and I can say ‘thank you’, but at the same time, it caused me a hell of a lot of trouble. I should have just said ‘no’. I don’t mean I was ready to reform completely, but I should have said no. ‘No thank you, darling, perhaps we’ll practise one of your satanic rituals some other time!’ If you let somebody do things to you, such as using you as an actress in a demonic ritual, you will pay a price. Let’s face it, it’s dabbling in darkness and it’s no joke. It’s down to a question of darkness and light, and I’m not even talking about it in religious terms because I’m not a religious person. I have my own spiritual track, but I’m certainly not religious. In fact, I’m against religion, and that helped me, of course, to avoid being drawn into Kenneth’s sway, because black magic is a religion. I, of course, did not tell Kenneth what I’d done – burning his letter at a wayside shrine – because in some Harry Potterish way he could have made a counter curse to that, too. It’s quite complicated, this whole business. And you have to be very careful. What I didn’t want to do – which in fact you can do – was to send the curse back to Kenneth so that it would land on him. Within the occult scheme of things if you send out that much hatred against someone and the recipient has enough power to hurl it back at you psychically, it can rebound – like the piece of paper with the spell on it that Dana Andrews slips back into the magician’s pocket at the end of Curse of the Demon. I’m not an expert, needless to say, but it’s a wearying and aggravating business.

I do think my counter-attack worked. I somehow knew intuitively what to do. In that way I’m quite like my mother – I’ve got that side to me, I just choose not to go to the dark side. White magic is another story entirely – that I am quite capable of using – and this is what you must do if you’re ever unfortunate enough to get a poison-pen letter from Kenneth.

Perhaps by playing a demoness I had summoned up long-dormant demons, some ghoulish skull-fondling jinni out of the desert wastes – but what is quite certain is that demons will fasten on you when you are at your weakest point and by toying with them, even in a film, you give them power. As Christopher Marlowe says at the conclusion of Doctor Faustus, his hero’s fate for meddling in dark matters should make wise men pause before dabbling in ‘unlawful things’

Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits To practice more than heavenly power permits.

And I didn’t entirely rely on my magical practices. In a very English way I wrote him a stiff letter in which I said, ‘Now, look, Kenneth, I’ve supported you, I’ve always said how great you are, and you know what a big fan of your films I am …’ blah-di-blah-blah – I mentioned everything I’d ever done or said about him – ‘so do not go into a queenie fit about the book. Please let’s have no more of this nonsense!’

He wrote back – a much calmer Kenneth. But then at the end of his letter he added: ‘Unfortunately, I can’t take the curse back.’

eva

My mother had been another person entirely before the war. I always had a hard time imagining what she was like as a cool, urbane, young Weimar girl. It certainly didn’t carry over into her life with us. The war must have changed her drastically. She was only twenty-four when the Anschluss happened and overnight a precious part of her life was simply ripped away.

As my mother got older, she talked more and more about her parents. It was always a very idealistic portrait, with no unpleasant scenes whatever. Her childhood had been perfect.

Even though I never saw much of this Weimar side to Eva, I must have imbibed it somehow in my mother’s milk – it’s the only explanation I have for how I was able to do the Kurt Weill material so believably. Doing these songs takes an aptitude for seeing the grotesque as an aspect of love. Kurt Weill/Bertolt Brecht songs are the counterpoint to the unsettling paintings of Otto Dix and George Grosz. The style was called the Neue Sachlichkeit, New Realism, but actually it’s a celebration of the edge between beauty and the bizarre. That’s really what the Brecht/Weill canon is all about. You’ve got to be able to go there. That wonderfully masochistic chorus in ‘Surabaya Johnny’, for example. The sheer erotic perversity of it.

Surabaya Johnny. Will the hurt ever mend?

Surabaya Johnny. Oh, I burn at your touch.

You got no heart, Johnny, but oh, I love you,

I love you, I love you so much.

They’re all like that. You can hear it in Pirate Jenny’s song, her all-consuming quest for vengeance in The Threepenny Opera – something my mother understood all too well: the ship, the ominous black ship, sailing into the harbour.

As a person Eva was much warmer than my father and I’m more like her in that respect. But of course that emotional side of her had a downside. She could erupt in an irrational fury. My father’s detachment was oddly soothing compared to my mother’s rages. He didn’t get so emotionally involved, and his remoteness, which I often lamented, was reassuring amidst the family turmoil.

My mother was extreme in her passions: her likes, her dislikes, her resentments. She was an almost savage person. Sophisticated and refined on a certain level, but utterly dominated by hatred and love and regret and bitterness. She first became embittered about my father, later on it was me. But long before either of us had failed her, she was a tinderbox. Drinking made it worse. Unlike my father, my mother wasn’t intellectual. And as she got older and her past began to weigh on her, she became very religious. She suffered from melancholia – that was her word for it. Something like depression, but a much more romantic concept: a gloomy state of mind saturated in Middle-European Weltschmerz, the sense that one’s own sorrow is intrinsically linked to the sadness of the world.

I remember going to church with my mother when I was young and watching her getting incredibly emotional – praying loudly with tears streaming down her face, racked with sobs actually. I was terribly embarrassed. Of course she had just been through the war, but children don’t really understand that. When it finally dawned on me that her involvement with the church brought her peace, I felt glad for her – and then very magnanimously forgave her for embarrassing me.

At the end of her life, God and Christ, Heaven and Hell, all those emblematic ideas became terrifyingly real to her. I suppose she was concerned about going to Hell. She had shot a man, after all. When the Russians entered Vienna at the end of the war, they were hellbent on rape, destruction, and pillage. They opened all the wine cellars in Vienna. Wine running down the streets; all the Russian soldiers had to do was open their mouths and the wine ran in. They got blind drunk, and then raped every woman in sight. A Russian soldier from the steppes burst into the room where my mother and grandmother were hiding. He raped my mother and was about to rape my grandmother, at which point Eva picked up a gun and shot him. It was justifiable homicide, of course – but murder in the eyes of the church.

As a result of the rape my mother had to have an abortion. After the Russians came to Vienna, there were long lines of women queuing up to have abortions. I’ve heard that when a woman has had an abortion, she always wants to have a child. Certainly, this explains why Eva wanted to marry my father and have me.

After my parents divorced, my mother and I moved into 41 Milman Road in Reading. I was about seven at the time and, looking back, I can see that Eva was relatively happy when in Reading. She was teaching and I was going to school and things were okay, but I don’t think she realised it until long after it was over. I’ve found that the ability to realise you’re happy while it’s happening is actually quite elusive.

Eva got a job teaching maladjusted children, as they were then called: children from broken homes who’d gone through hellish lives. And of course she was very good at it. Filled with empathy, she taught them dance, current affairs and art. Eva taught a type of free dance, very much like Isadora Duncan. The children danced in bare feet, made symbolic gestures, and acted out expressive scenes. Sometimes I would go to her classes, which was quite a strange experience. These kids were very disturbed; they had gone through truly terrible experiences and some had done horrible things. I remember one boy had killed some kittens, and he was obviously going to grow up to be a psychopath. That was my unforgiving, childlike take on it. If I saw them being rude to my mother, I would freak out and yell at them, which did no good whatsoever. Eva, in a very matter-of-fact way, would just give them a smack – not hard, but just a quick clip, like a mother lion.

Eva also taught dance at my school for a while and I found myself put into one of her productions. At fourteen, I was playing the lead in The Snow Queen and, right in the middle of the performance, I got my first period. There was blood on my white costume, and even worse I had absolutely no idea what it was. My mother took no notice.

‘The show must go on,’ she said. ‘Just ignore it.’

When he was a young man my mother’s father fell in love and married an eighteen-year-old Jewish girl from Hungary. Coming from his aristocratic family this was a highly unusual thing to do – and of course his family opposed the marriage, but her family even more violently. One time Eva’s grandmother asked her to go to the synagogue with her, and Eva refused. She had been brought up a Catholic and Catholics aren’t supposed to attend other people’s churches. Many years later Eva still regretted it, which was probably why she became so ecumenical when she got older.

When the Nazis came to power in Vienna they insisted Jews wear the Star of David on their arms. My grandfather was outraged that his wife should be subjected to this indignity and said to my mother: ‘Come on, Eva, we’re going to visit the head of the Gestapo, and we’ll see about this!’ He put on his Tyrolean hat and his cloak – he was very tall and imposing – and as he strode along the street in a fury, my mother, quite frightened by the whole business, was trying to keep up with him. Eventually they got to the Gestapo headquarters and my grandfather announced himself.

‘Baron Sacher-Masoch,’ he said. ‘I demand to see the officer in charge!’ They were shown in to the office of the head of the Gestapo in Vienna, who turned out to be an ensign in my grandfather’s regiment in the First World War.

‘What’s this nonsense about my wife having to wear a Star of David?’ my grandfather asked him. ‘I want you to cancel that order immediately.’ And this officer – my mother always used to call him by some daft German name like Bumpfelkaeger – who clearly hero-worshipped my grandfather, answered immediately: ‘Oh, mein Kolonel, mein Kolonel, itis fine, it is fine, sir. I’ll give you the papers right now. Of course, Frau Baroness Sacher-Masoch doesn’t have to wear the Star of David.’

And with that he gave my grandfather the documents exempting her. My grandfather snatched up the papers and swept out of the room. As he got to the doorway, he stopped and turned back and fixed Herr Bumpfelkaeger in his sights, head of Gestapo in Austria, a very powerful man, and said: ‘If I had known in the First World War what you were going to become, I would have shot you in the trenches!’ Despite the fact that my grandmother had converted to Christianity, she still attended synagogue on high holy days. Conversion was not uncommon among Jews in Austria at that time. For instance, Karl Kraus, the famous aphorist, gadfly, and playwright, was an assimilated Jew. That’s why the Second World War and the Nazi racial laws came as such a shock. Many people felt that first and foremost they were Germans or Austrians or Hungarians. My grandmother thought of herself as a Hungarian patriot. She’d grown up in Hungary and had strong feelings about Hungarian independence even though she was married to an Austrian army officer.

As I grew older I got a far more edgy picture of my mother’s past than the one I had previously heard from her. One curious story about my mother’s past life in the Weimar Republic takes place on the Kurfü rstendamm, the equivalent of Fifth Avenue in Berlin, where all the fancy shops – and prostitutes – were.

One night my mother was coming back from dancing and befriended a streetwalker. In the Weimar period, streetwalkers used to put little red reflector lights in their high heels; that’s how you could tell they were whores. When Eva crossed the Kurfü rstendamm to go to her apartment, which was in a rough area, this girl would walk with her and protect her. They would talk along the way about this and that and how much they had in common despite the differences in their lives. That, at least, was my mother’s story. In her telling, this pretty prostitute drops my mother off at her house and there the story ends. I’ve always wondered what happened next, but I was too young and afraid to ask. My mother was somewhat bisexual, but this didn’t help her understand my own proclivity in this area. Eva had been quite wild and bohemian when she was young, but by the time I knew her, she had changed into another person entirely. Motherhood does that. But she still had the odd girlfriend – and certainly boyfriends. I can see that one of the reasons I was sent to the convent was so that my mother could have a sex life.

In my mother’s past I sensed strange currents beneath the surface. There are pictures, for instance, of my mother dressed up in boys’ clothes, snapshots of her in tights and doublets as if she were doing a Shakespeare play – it was an interesting, free time and I’m pretty sure Eva was in the thick of it. She had friends who were costume designers and set designers and painters and dancers and prostitutes and writers, and one or two very rich boyfriends, as well. She was living the high life until the Anschluss happened.

After the Nazis came in of course everything changed. She could easily have left. She had done her first Hollywood film test in the early thirties and they wanted her out there. I could never understand why she didn’t just go. She said it was because she couldn’t leave her people, and there always was something really rather noble about my mother in a crisis. She came of age in a time of perpetual crisis – afterwards, normal life was a little more difficult for her. My father admired my mother’s courage. Theirs was a classic wartime romance. Afterwards, they must have found out just how incredibly different they were. The romance of the war, the danger they found themselves in – Glynn was a spy and Eva his connection – was very romantic. And Eva was so beautiful – but of course very, very spoilt, and Glynn was not the sort of person who was going to indulge her whims.

When I was young my mother still had extravagant habits. Even in little things there was a huge difference between Eva’s and Glynn’s attitudes. As a child I used to spread oodles of butter on my toast – heart-attack amounts. I’d lather it on so thickly that you could barely see the toast. My father would go absolutely nuts.

‘What on earth do you think you’re doing?’ he would growl, eyeing the ton of butter on my toast. And this would cause rows between my parents, with my mother saying, ‘She can put on any amount she wants to.’ And this would go on and on. I guess it was just before the end of post-war rationing that in Britain went on right into the mid-fifties.

The war had taught my father to be frugal, but it had taught my mother something altogether different. The war years in Vienna had been very hard for her – there was no margarine, let alone butter – so she decided that now was the time to have as much butter as possible, not to mention anything else that had been rationed. As a child I would have mounds of cherries and apples and bananas. I loved Eva’s domestic recklessness, but as she got older my mother became more like my father, a change in attitude that I could hardly believe. In her mind she went back to the austerity of the war years; I think a lot of this had to do with her friends, who were far more effective at curbing her extravagances than my father ever was. My mother ended up very like Henrietta’s – the ‘mustn’t grumble’ approach to life that came out of the war years. I remember as she got older, when she would run a bath, she would only fill it up four inches, and I would say: ‘Why are you doing that? Why don’t you pour yourself a really good bath, because your back’s bad and it would be so good for you.’

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