Leading a dual life in which her own brilliance was overshadowed by Mick Jagger almost destroyed her.
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A few years later, she was a homeless drug addict.
The album was unsparing a bleak tour through a nightmarish pop-culture fun house.
The music was shimmery, sometimes abrasive, sometimes almost Eurodisco.
The title song captured the singers own continental background with overtones to the Baader-Meinhof terrorist group.
Are we out of love now?
Is this just a bad patch?
(His name was Glynn Faithfull; she did not invent faithfull for her pop career.)
Her mother did not enjoy sex, and her father was obsessed with it.
He wanted a co-conspirator with whom he could share his vision.
The family ended up living in an almost communal social-research institution.
Faithfull, who was not Catholic, ended up going to a convent school.
He came from an eccentric background, too, and soon Faithfull was living with him and his family.
One of Dunbars friends was Peter Asher, the son of a wealthy lawyer.
Asher, too, still lived at home with his parents and his sister, the model Jane Asher.
They soon all became part of a perfervid scene.
(In 1966, the Indica Gallery would host Yoko Onos first exhibition in London.
From that point, two tales would diverge.
In Rolling Stones lore, Faithfull overnight became the Stones muse.
The reality was different.
She sang it in mono in front of an orchestra.
(A young session guitarist named Jimmy Page played the guitar part.)
And I just went back to school in the fall.
The song ultimately became a top-ten hit in England, then went to No.
22 on the American charts.
As Faithfull later noted, Its an absolutely astonishing thing for a boy of 20 to have written.
A song about a woman looking back nostalgically on her life …
The latter is uneven but also contains a lovely take on Ian & Sylvias Four Strong Winds.
(Dunbar said her first addiction was shopping.)
(She spoke four languages.)
Anita and Brian were like two beautiful children who had inherited a decrepit palazzo, Faithfull wrote.
Still she remained more connected to other members of the band.
She spent her money with profligacy, schemed with the beautiful Pallenberg, and gazed longingly at Keith Richards.
One memorable evening eventually included a fumbling but ultimately failed make-out session with Jones, then (finally!)
a rousing early-hours lovemaking session with Richards.
Lennon, Ringo, George, and Paul, and one or two roadies.
They were waiting for the oracle to speak.
It wasnt so much a matter of being cool; they were too young to be genuinely cool.
Backstage in Bristol while Tina Turner teaches Mick to dance the Sideways Pony …
The media sensation that followed had everything, including sex, courtesy of Faithfull.
NAKED GIRL AT STONES PARTY, ran a front-page headline.
I came out of it diminished.
Ironically, the pills Jagger was arrested for were Faithfulls shed left them in the jacket months before.
Jagger gallantly took the blame, and in a few months both he and Richards were convicted.
Only an unexpected withering editorial from theTimesof London with the headline Who Breaks a Butterfly on a Wheel?
helped turn public opinion around, and the convictions were later overturned.
Her breakdown took several years, particularly after heroin slowly drew her in.
The Stones put it onSticky Fingerswithout incident.
She couldnt, she wrote so she took an overdose of pills.
She ended up in a coma for six days.
A stint at a psychiatric rehab unit in Switzerland didnt help.
She was all of 25.
In time, disgusted with herself, she drove Jagger away.
She had to agree: I wanted to be a junkie more than I wanted to be with him.
That was my idea of glamour!
She herself takes the blame as well: I was all the trouble.
Her descent was Dantean, but set in a candy-colored milieu.
The relationship lasted nine months.
From there she spent all her money, vaporized her career, and burned every bridge she could.
Yet absurdist echoes from her onetime status still chased her.
(Hed been supplying Jim Morrison, and the Doors singer had just ODd and died.)
Then she appeared in Kenneth Angers famous, but ridiculous, underground filmLucifer Rising.
Even as inept as Kenneth was, she wrote, I knew he was dangerous in a way.
From there, she took up residency against a wall in an abandoned lot in Soho.
Along the way she lost custody of Nicholas to her ex-husband.
Once in a while a friend would attempt to help her and get her into a rehab clinic.
Her addiction lasted more than 15 years.
Given her celebrity status, her life was weirder than that of most homeless junkies.
It was released in the 1980s asRich Kid Blues.)
An eight-month cure again courtesy of the NHS brought her back to life for a time.
Incredibly, Faithfull was only 33, but she sounded old the living embodiment of a decayed Brechtian anti-heroine.
In a classicBehind the Musicepisode, this would have been the end of her dependence.
Instead, it went on for another devastating seven years.
(Pallenberg was the Devil.)
It even included a song with Richards, on the Merle Haggard classic Sing Me Back Home.
