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Marianne Faithfull: As Years Go By
Ações de livro
Comece a lerDuração: 534 páginas6 horas
- Editora:
- Omnibus Press
- Lançado em:
- Jan 1, 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780857129932
- Formato:
- Livro
Descrição
As Years Go By is a richly detailed portrait of Marianne Faithfull, the woman who has lived an incredible life, one that far transcends her best known role as courtesan to the chief rolling stone.
Ações de livro
Comece a lerDados do livro
Marianne Faithfull: As Years Go By
Duração: 534 páginas6 horas
Descrição
As Years Go By is a richly detailed portrait of Marianne Faithfull, the woman who has lived an incredible life, one that far transcends her best known role as courtesan to the chief rolling stone.
- Editora:
- Omnibus Press
- Lançado em:
- Jan 1, 2011
- ISBN:
- 9780857129932
- Formato:
- Livro
Sobre o autor
Relacionado a Marianne Faithfull
Amostra do livro
Marianne Faithfull - Mark Hodkinson
2013.
1
The 1960s has become the most written about and eulogised decade of modern history. The claim, no less, was that a ‘new kind of people’ were said to walk among us. They weren’t strictly ‘new’ of course – history is replete with similar dandies and hedonists – but the difference was their time coincided with the media age. This meant that unlike previous generations they did not exist in isolation and remain of limited influence. Everyone got to know of these young, savvy, sharp-dressed free spirits. In their bangles and bright colours, they were easy to spot. If they looked different, they also acted and thought different. They made it cool to be cultured and independent, creative and reactionary. Though many at its epicentre were educated, privileged and wealthy, the attitude and mind-set was accessible to all.
Distilled to a single scene the decade is a golden sun blazing down upon a skinny girl as she sashays through London. Long hair frames her face and sways rhythmically with her miniskirt. The passing cars are white, long and sleek. Their owners, street-smart young men, pop their haircuts out of the side window and ask if the skinny girl is all right, darling. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, a flower-powered dream stems from California in glorious Technicolor. ‘It’s not the hair on top but the mind underneath’ and ‘Beethoven in a crew cut?’ are among slogans daubed on placards carried by students in Connecticut where 53 of their contemporaries are suspended for wearing their hair long. The youth of the world were liberating their hair before moving on to their minds and bodies.
Time magazine, with a worldwide readership of 25 million, devoted much of its issue of Friday April 15, 1966, to celebrating ‘Swinging London’. The phrase ‘swinging’ had been coined earlier by the socialite and former Tiller girl Diana Vreeland, editor-in-chief of Vogue who noted: ‘London is the most swinging city in the world at the moment.’ This astute commentator had previously conjured a similarly apposite term when she wrote of a ‘youthquake’ hitting the world. The media appropriated the epithet ‘Swinging Sixties’ to summarise the period. Only one other decade, the ‘Roaring Twenties’, had been defined so concisely.
Obviously the 1960s did not swing in the sense that people succumbed en masse to hedonism. Otherwise, trains and buses would not have run on time (did they ever?); dustmen would not have emptied bins; shops would have run out of stock and no one would have voted at elections. The vast majority lived a life largely unchanged from previous decades. They travelled to work on public transport. Young married couples ate ham sandwiches at their in-laws’ on Sunday evenings. Football fans were soaked watching drab matches in the teeming rain on open terraces. On television Sergeant George Dixon (played by Jack Warner) proffered a stolid and paternal version of police work in Dixon Of Dock Green, closing each episode with a homely, philosophical direct-to-camera speech. If the decade was swinging it was on the periphery of most lives – the music coming out of radios, films shown at the local cinema, programmes broadcast on television, clothes featured in magazines, advertisements on billboards.
The ‘Swinging Sixties’ is not, however, a falsehood A tiny percentage really did live life to the brim, overflowing. By chance or design they found themselves at the core of a seismic cultural and social shift. Youth was celebrated and valued as never before. They formed bands, opened art galleries and shops, wrote novels and plays, directed films. Everything they achieved or attempted was considered inherently hip, vital. The intelligent and shrewd walked with the beautiful and the handsome, everyone a star in their own film. They were free and easy about sex and drugs but hard-line on politics and protest. Paul McCartney, one of the decade’s chosen few, said of the period: Most of the time we were unaware most people were living these really ordinary little lives while we were madmen riding this incredibly psychedelic whirlwind. It seemed very normal to us to be smoking a lot of pot and flying around very late.
The nation felt the change as it percolated through the media. They watched Ready Steady Go! on Fridays (and later Top Of The Pops), buying into its motif, ‘The weekend starts here’. They bought the records. They had the haircuts, wore the clothes. Most were much the same as Billy Liar, dreaming of a richer, brighter life elsewhere but actually content to sip tea in the station cafe while the train set off to the city without them. If the daily grind remained, the scenery had at least switched almost imperceptibly from monochrome to colour.
The Beatles and The Rolling Stones did not eschew that metaphorical train. It is almost impossible to overstate the popularity of both groups during the 1960s. Between April 1963 and June 1969 The Beatles had 17 number one hits, seven consecutively. In the same period The Rolling Stones had eight number ones, five consecutively. In modern times singles have reached the top spot in Britain selling fewer than 18,000 copies, whether CDs or downloads. The Rolling Stones and The Beatles regularly shifted more than half a million singles and their most popular hits, more than a million. The magnitude of their impact goes far beyond excessive record sales, though. More importantly, they became a cultural phenomenon. They defined the times and anyone connected with them did so, too.
Marianne Faithfull, by virtue of her three-and-a half-year relationship with Mick Jagger, is bound tight in the iconography of the 1960s. She was extraordinarily young during this period of her life. By the end of the decade she had just reached her 24th birthday. At a time when most people begin to feel comfortable in their skins, she had shed many: schoolgirl, housewife, mother, folk singer, lover, actress, adulteress, depressive, film star, and celebrity — much of it played out in front of a camera. Her name will ever be in close proximity to the words ‘Jagger’ and ‘Sixties’ and she will not elude this easy classification. The records, films, plays, concerts and innumerable incidents from her personal life will be largely overlooked or forgotten. Those six years (1964 to 1970) of public scrutiny were lived fast and often dangerously and interest in them is understandable. Besides, they remind people of a certain age of their own youth. They measure the timeline of their own lives against Marianne’s.
Perhaps this fixation with such a narrow time period skews her real worth, reduces her to caricature. Since then she has found a niche, musical and cultural, and remained steadfast. She is sought out by revered modern artists – PJ Harvey, Jarvis Cocker, Nick Cave, Mark Lanegan, Greg Dulli, Damon Albarn, Lou Reed, Morrissey, among many more – who want to write for her, sing with her and produce her music. Esteemed authors such as Will Self proffer album sleeve notes extolling her ’emotional excoriation’ and ‘Sisyphean stylus’. Her contemporaries, the Cillas, the Sandies, the Lulus, faded long ago and became celebrity curios. Marianne has remained focused, consistent and loyal to her muse. The narrative of her life, the ups and downs and the habitual, is traceable through her albums. They relate what happened and when, how she felt, with whom she collaborated, how her ‘look’ and face and body have changed down the years. The lyrics lay down her mood, her feelings and document specific events. And the voice is forever framed too, its shifting tonality picking its own route through the years. In short, her artistic integrity has remained intact.
‘Marianne Faithfull’ is an elegant name, a name awaiting fame. When Marianne entered the music business many assumed it was a fanciful invention by her manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. Her birth name is Marian Evelyn Faithfull but her mother, Eva, referred to her as Marianne, favouring the two n’s. Sometimes she called her by the pet name of Marianderl, which is used in Austria and Germany. To further confuse matters, Marianne’s father, Glynn, who registered her birth, spelt her first name Marian and used this spelling on official forms and in formal communication with his daughter. Throughout her career, however, and to Marianne herself, there has only ever been one spelling of her Christian name – Marianne.
The surnames of Faith, Faithful and Faithfull were used originally to mark out a person considered to uphold this very quality. The first Faithfull on record was William Faythful (as the name was then spelt), a burgess [municipal official] in the town of Chichester in 1492. Fifty years later, a will was issued in Hampshire by a married couple called Hugo and Margaret Faythfull. Marianne’s authentic patriarchal surname is Davies. The last member of the paternal line to have Davies as part of his name was Marianne’s great-grandfather, the Rev Richard Mervyn Faithfull-Davies, who had been a vicar in Australia and Melanesia (a group of islands off the north-east coast of Australia) before returning to London in the 1900s. Interestingly, church records reveal that at a farewell party held when he left All Saint’s Church in South Wimbledon in April 1914, ‘Musical entertainments, some including the illustrious clergyman himself, took up much of the evening.’ The Davies section of the family name was jettisoned by the Rev Faithfull-Davies’ son, Theodore James. Theodore, Marianne’s paternal grandfather, began his working life as a veterinary surgeon tending mainly farm animals in East Anglia. He was restless and radical and in a bid to distance himself from his family’s ecclesiastical background he abridged the surname to Faithfull. He served in the Veterinary Corps during the First World War and afterwards became founding principal and self-styled ‘resident psychologist’ of Priory Gate School in Sudbury, Suffolk. A colleague of his at this time, the respected psychologist John Bowlby, described him as ‘a rather mercurial character, very intelligent, very unstable really, but with an analytic orientation’. The private school catered for up to 30 children and was based on Boy Scout woodcraft principles, combining love of the outdoors with the involvement of pupils in running the school. Swearing was permitted and Faithfull encouraged nudity, which he termed ‘sun battling’. Between 1921 and 1934 Priory Gate moved to five different locations in East Anglia but ultimately proved unsustainable and closed.
During the 1920s and 1930s and now referring to himself as a ‘sexologist’, Theodore published several books on the psychology of sex and gender, each with a compulsive title: Bisexuality: An Essay On Extraversion And Introversion (1927); Plato And The New Psychology (1928); The Re-Education Of The Invert (1932); Psychological Foundations, A Contribution To Everyman’s Knowledge Of Himself (1933); and The Mystery Of The Androgyne (1938). The preface of Bisexuality contains the passage: ‘Sunlight, both real and artificial, will be used to bathe our bodies, and the light of understanding will profoundly alter our attitude towards sex and the reproduction of the species and of Love.’ He invented a device he called the ‘Frigidity Machine’ to unlock primal libidinal energy and had a policy of not taking baths. Theodore was considered a pioneering influence on an ideology known as ‘New Psychology’, a term used to embrace theories popularised by Sigmund Freud and Wilhelm Reich. He collaborated with the famous educationalist A. S. Neill, the principal at the similarly progressive school, Summerhill, based in nearby Leiston.
In 1910 Theodore married a woman whose father had also been a parson. Frances Newman Channer was born in Shepherd’s Bush, London, in 1885 and worked variously as an artist, calligrapher and embroiderer. In 1912, the year of the Stockholm Olympics and the sinking of the SS Titanic, Frances gave birth to Marianne’s father, Robert Glynn Faithfull. There was a surfeit of Roberts, Bobs and Bobbys in the family so he became known as Glynn. His parents had four more children: Alfred Bernard (1913), Margaret Elaine (1914), Vera (1919) and Stephen (1921). Theodore Faithfull died in 1973. His passion for controversy barely waned. He left his wife, Frances, and, according to family legend, took up with a circus dancer. In later life he submitted florid articles to underground magazines such as International Times.
Glynn Faithfull, together with his brothers and sisters, was educated under his father’s freestyle methods. I do not think he did anything courageous or striking in his life but he was certainly a rebel against his strait-laced family. I think he has left us with a nice, unique name and I believe it is unusual that we followed the family’s female line,
said Glynn Faithfull. This ‘line’ boasted another notable personality in the publisher and women’s rights activist Emily Faithfull, born in 1835. She too was from a church background, the daughter of the Reverend Ferdinand Faithfull of Headley, Surrey. She set up the printing company the Victoria Press and published a monthly magazine for 18 years, The Victoria. She also lectured on women’s rights across the United States and published a novel in 1869. Among Emily’s nephews were the successful music hall comedian Rutland Barrington and John Faithfull Fleet, an expert in epigraphy (the study of inscriptions), especially in India where he lived for many years.
The education proffered at Priory Gate gave Glynn Faithfull a thirst and an impressive ability to absorb knowledge. After finishing his formal schooling at Beckenham Grammar School in Kent he entered London University to study modern languages, specialising in Italian. He attained an honours degree in 1934 and for the next three years taught Italian on a part-time basis at the university where he had himself studied. He completed a PhD in the same subject and when he left London in 1937, he was also fluent in French and German and spoke Russian to a good standard. Although his family had moved from East Anglia to Bristol to Essex, and back to East Anglia, his first move north was to take up a full-time lecturing post at Liverpool University, which he held until the outbreak of World War Two in September 1939. Glynn Faithfull joined the intelligence unit of the British Army where his main duty was to interrogate prisoners of war. It seemed to me we had no choice. We were going to either help or hinder Hitler,
he said. When one got to know what was happening in Nazi Germany, and his plans to attack England, there was only one option and that was to defend one’s country.
He spent the first year of the war in the Middle East but was later transferred to Europe. The army reflected the class structure of civilian Britain and he enjoyed privileges generally afforded to a member of the educated middle-class. He rose quickly to the rank of Major and there was consternation at the War Office when, at the end of the war, he left the Army.
In the autumn of 1945 Faithfull found himself on the outskirts of Vienna, which had been liberated by the Russian army and was to be occupied briefly by the British. In the back pocket of his trousers he carried a letter written several months earlier by an Austrian refugee and Count’s son, Alexander Sacher-Masoch. Originally a chemist, Alexander was a left-wing activist who later worked for the Communist Party. When the war ended he became a writer and his books, The Parade and The Oil Burning Gardens, were popular in Austria. He had been interned on the island of Korcula in the Adriatic Sea, which was occupied by the German army until 1944. The two men had met earlier at Bari in the heel of Italy. Alexander had spent most of the war hiding in Yugoslavia, passing on information to the Allies about the movements of enemy forces. At their meeting they reminisced about their families and home countries and Alexander wrote a letter of introduction for Faithfull. He told him to produce it if he should ever pass through Vienna and wish to visit the other aristocratic Sacher-Masochs, whom he assured were excellent company. In some versions of this story it has been said Faithfull saved Alexander’s life and in return was advised to head to Vienna forthwith and claim his prize, Alexander’s beautiful sister, Eva. It’s a good story but I’m afraid it’s not true,
said Faithfull. I certainly didn’t save his life and, to be frank, I was not particularly close to Alexander. I thought he was a friendly chap and it was jolly decent of him to write a letter introducing me to his family.
The address on the letter led Faithfull to an institute in Vienna put aside for displaced Hungarians. Graf Artur Ritter Wolfgang von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian Count, had been allowed to take refuge in a self-contained flat within the institute because his wife, Elisabeth Flora Ziprisz (known as Flora), who he had married when she was 18, was of Hungarian-Jewish parents. She had converted to Christianity when she married the Count, 14 years her senior. They lived among the remnants of the Count’s salvaged riches with their only daughter, Eva, who was granted the title of Baroness because of her father’s status. His full title was Count von Sacher-Masoch of Apollonia and Erisso. To some extent they had a kind of diplomatic privilege. It must have been a frightening war for the family because Eva’s mother was 100 per cent Jewish. When Hitler invaded Austria, life would have been terribly dangerous. I’m sure if they had been anywhere else they would have been taken to Auschwitz. It was a convenient hide-out in a threatening world,
said Faithfull.
Glynn Faithfull recognised many similarities between the cordial Austro-Hungarian family and his own, whom he had seen for just a two-week period in the five years up until 1945. Their flat was a very pleasant set-up. It had three rooms and seemed to take up the whole of the top floor. They were bilingual, speaking Hungarian and German, and they were obviously a very cultured family,
he said. Artur von Sacher-Masoch had served as a regular soldier in the First World War and, similar to Faithfull, had made a speedy rise, reaching the rank of colonel. He was interested in philosophy and wrote novels and nonfiction studies. These were published under the pseudonym of Michael Zorn and included The Avalanche Stone, Between The River And The Steppes and Flight Into Spring. Artur had embraced the family business, for his uncle, Leopold Sacher-Masoch, had also been a writer. He wrote controversial novels in the previous century. Born in Lemberg (now known as Lviv, in Ukraine) in 1836, Sacher-Masoch’s most famous book was Venus In Furs in which he expressed his fetishes, most of which centred on being humiliated by dominant women wearing fur. He lived out his fantasies with his wives and mistresses. In December 1869, for example, he and his mistress, Baroness Fanny Pistor, signed a contract making him her slave for six months with the stipulation that the Baroness wore furs as often as possible. In this role-play Sacher-Masoch took the alias ‘Gregor’, a stereotypical male servant’s name of the time. When the book was published Sacher-Masoch was suffering mental health problems, which plagued him throughout his later years. Leopold’s widow, Wanda von Sacher-Masoch, was also a writer and revealed much about her husband in My Confessions Of Life. The Austrian psychiatrist, Richard Freiherr von Kraft-Ebing, used the term ‘masochism’ in his book Psychopathia Sexualis in 1886 to describe the receiving of pleasure, often sexual, from acts involving the infliction or receiving of pain or humiliation. The phrase soon fell into common usage.
Glynn Faithfull became fond of Eva Sacher-Masoch, who, at 33, was the same age as him. Her full name was Eva Hermine von Sacher-Masoch. She was born in December 1912 in Budapest, which was then part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Her early childhood was spent in Caransebes, a small town in the Banat region of southwest Romania. The family moved to Vienna in 1918 and, after leaving school, Eva relocated to Berlin to dance classical ballet with the Max Reinhardt Company. She returned to Vienna at the outbreak of the war to live with her parents. She was a very attractive girl,
said Glynn Faithfull. There was no doubt about her not being a Nazi, she was very much against them.
When they first met, Eva was editing a popular magazine called Wife And Mother. During the war it had been taken over by the Nazis and she worked diligently to counter the doctrine it had imposed upon Austria’s women. I saw her as quite a heroic woman, as a loyal daughter who had worked hard in the war to protect her family,
said Faithfull.
Eva, unknown to many, had suffered a traumatic war. In Marianne’s memoir of 2007, Memories, Dreams And Reflections, she revealed that when a soldier discovered Eva and her mother hiding in a room at the institute, he raped her. Eva then picked up a gun and shot him before he could do the same to her mother. As a result of the rape, Eva had to have an abortion. Glynn Faithfull continued visiting the Sacher-Masochs and fell in love with Eva. In the autumn of 1945, after a short courtship, they married and relocated to England. Glynn returned to Liverpool University to complete his doctorate. His accommodation was spartan so Eva lived with his mother in Hampstead, north London. Within a few months of marrying, Eva fell pregnant and drew close to Frances Faithfull who helped her through a difficult pregnancy.
Marian Evelyn Faithfull was born in a Hampstead clinic four days after Christmas Day, 1946. Glynn Faithfull continued his work at Liverpool University but a post-war housing shortage meant he was unable to unite the family in the city. Eva and Marianne spent about a year with Frances Faithfull before moving into rented accommodation in Chertsey, near Staines. The family was finally brought together in 1949 when Glynn bought a neat semi-detached house in Ormskirk, a small market town, 13 miles north of Liverpool in West Lancashire. Their home was in Greetby Hill, a long road in an upmarket suburb. Marianne said her first memory was of the family home in Ormskirk, being bathed and sitting out in her pram. Occasionally Eva took her to the waterfront at Liverpool. Obviously I was really small,
said Marianne. But what I do remember, and I’m sure it had a huge effect on me, was visiting the docks to see the great liners and my mother saying they were going to America.
Marianne’s first school was Ormskirk Church of England Infant School, a few hundred yards from their home. She was one of the first pupils to enter the single-storey building, which had been built to meet the demands of the postwar baby boom. The Faithfulls were eager to expand their family and Eva became pregnant three times but miscarried on each occasion. Although she remained at the school for less than a year, Marianne developed a peculiar accent, a mixture of patrician English picked up from her father, a Teutonic edge from her mother and a Lancashire burr from her classmates. The Faithfulls were obviously vastly different from other families in the neighbourhood and it was inevitable they would soon move on.
2
The Faithfulls duly returned to the south of England in 1952 although Glynn remained in Liverpool, working at the university. Eva, Marianne and Eva’s mother, known as ‘Nona’, moved into Milman Road, Reading. The road is about a mile from the centre of Reading in a traditional working-class area. A cul-de-sac, it has several large detached houses at its entrance and then two rows of parallel Victorian terraces. A line of elegantly curved lamp posts stops at a high wooden fence across the bottom where there is a patch of grassy wasteland. The Faithfulls lived approximately halfway along the row of terraces, opposite Christ Church School where Marianne became a pupil.
Locals were intrigued by the new arrivals. They just didn’t belong there and a lot of people thought that. Marianne’s mum wore sheepskin coats and high heels. I remember she used to walk along with two pedigree dogs. They were quite big and used to pull her along. It was quite comical really,
says Paul Privitera, a resident of one of the larger houses at the top of the street. As an adult Marianne told writers she used to long for the prosperity to complement her family’s noble past. She dreamed of leaving the house, which she referred to as ‘Reading Gaol’ after the prison made famous by Oscar Wilde. Other times, when distance lent enchantment, she recalled Milman Road as the ‘most perfect, most beautiful place in the world to grow up’.
Glynn Faithfull joined the family on occasional weekends and at the end of university terms. The marriage was beginning to fail and they separated a year or so after the move to Reading. There was a certain amount of excitement, I suppose, about marrying foreign girls,
said Glynn Faithfull. It was only after a few years that we found we were not getting on very well. I think it was a hell of a lot of upheaval when Eva left her home country. It might have worked if we had stayed in Vienna. The break-up was an unhappy event and one on which I do not wish to dwell.
Marianne, in her book Memories, Dreams And Reflections, recalled their differing personalities: ‘Eva was much warmer than my father and I’m more like her in that respect. But of course the emotional side of her had a downside. She could erupt in 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,’ she wrote.
Soon after they parted Glynn asked Eva to grant him a divorce so he could marry his new partner, Margaret Elizabeth Kipps. Eva held out but finally agreed to an uncontested divorce in the early 1960s, seven years after they had separated. I think to Eva marriage was sacred and she didn’t think it should end,
said a close friend. For her it was a lifelong pact. I think that is why she never married anyone else.
Glynn married Margaret in 1963 and they had twin sons, Simon and Timothy, and a daughter, Hazel. Glynn died in March 1998 and on Margaret’s death her ashes were scattered on his coffin when he was buried in Ipsden, Oxfordshire.
Despite straitened circumstances Eva Faithfull did not compromise her lifestyle. She rearranged the terraced house to create an illusion of the splendour of her earlier gentrified life. The stairway was pulled out and relocated to make more space. Ornate furnishings salvaged from Vienna gave the home an idiosyncratic touch. The family’s history was recorded on pewter plates scattered throughout the house. Marianne would find coats-of-arms obliterated by tobacco ash flicked into the dishes by her mother. The children from our terrace wouldn’t come into our house because they were frightened of the tapestries in the hall, while the girls from school would come for the weekend, then go back and say I lived in a slum. It wasn’t a slum but we had no middle-class symbols. We had no television, telephone, and, above all, no money,
Marianne told The Tatler magazine in 1972. Eva was aware that neighbours considered her an oddity but cared little for their views. She walked briskly through the streets of Reading in long flowery dresses, usually with a beloved Woodbine hanging from her fingers. A lot of people used to think she was a bit cranky. I was only young at the time but I remember being dumbfounded at the way she looked, which was always regal, as if she was in her own little world,
said Paul Privitera.
Before winning a place at the Max Reinhardt Company, Eva had trained at the famous Palucca dance school in Dresden. The Second World War thwarted her dreams of a career in Hollywood and just a few years later she was teaching dance to students at Chiltern Nursery Training College in Reading. She set up free-expression classes in a rented room at the college. Eileen O’Malley, a short woman with red hair who had moved in with the family at Milman Road, accompanied Eva. She composed her own piano pieces to complement Eva’s extravagant choreography. On Saturday mornings up to 15 students took part in Eva’s improvised classes. She would decide on a story and we had to act it out through dance. It was very enjoyable and she was encouraging us to think for ourselves,
said Maryan Robson, a friend of Marianne’s who became known as ‘Big Maryan’ because she was four years the elder. When Eva found out Maryan was living with her grandmother and had little money, she allowed her to attend classes without paying. That was really good of her. She was a very, very nice lady,
she said. Eva was herself short of money. She received regular sums from Glynn Faithfull but had to take on part-time jobs including one as a teacher at Bylands, a school for children of special needs [then referred to as ‘maladjusted’] run by a wealthy philanthropist in Stratfield Turgis, near Basingstoke. Eva taught dance, painting and current affairs. Occasionally Marianne accompanied her and remembered the children dancing in bare feet acting out expressive scenes. 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 a psychopath,
she said. If I saw them being rude to my mother, I would freak out and yell at them. Eva, in a very matter-of-fact way, would give them a smack – not hard, but a quick clip, like a mother lion.
The small Everyman Theatre in London Street, Reading, was hired to stage pieces on which Eva had worked with the students from the training college. The theatre, now converted into offices, had, a century earlier, hosted Charles Dickens when he gave a solo reading of A Christmas Carol. Maryan Robson remembers Eva’s version of The Princess And The Pea, when only one person was considered for the lead role. Marianne was such a very pretty child. She had a nice nature and it was always assumed she would be the princess and no one really expected anyone but her to do it.
Families and friends looked on in admiration of the auburn-haired woman with swarthy skin and large gold earrings who had devoted so much time to the production. Eva looked a bit like a gypsy and had a kind of flamboyance. In a way she was like a flower-power person before it came into fashion. I remember she had a bit of a fiery temper though!
says Maryan. It was almost as if Eva was purposely instructing her daughter for an unspecified artistic life. As well as dancing, she was taught piano and singing and the long-term plan was to attend drama school or the Royal Academy of Music. If, however, she performed well academically, Eva had spoken of Marianne attending Cambridge University – Oxford had already been ruled out because she had not been taught sufficient Latin or Greek. Eva exposed Marianne to numerous cultural influences. There were trips to London for plays and concerts, including one to see Maria Callas in Tosca at the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, in February 1964, directed by Franco Zeffirelli. They also travelled to Vienna and as Eva escorted Marianne around its numerous galleries she instilled in her a great sense of tradition and culture that she felt was absent from provincial Reading.
Monica Main (now Monica House) lived in Milman Road and was close to Marianne until the Mains moved 40 miles away to Stamford in the Vale when Monica was aged 14 and Marianne 11. She used to sleep at our house every weekend,
she said. Her mum was always busy and I think Marianne hardly ever saw her. She used to sit and talk to my mother for ages. They cooked together. She was a perfectly normal little girl. She always seemed happy and I remember her singing all the time. She seemed to wear funny clothes quite a lot. They would be weird colours, like she had a dress that was half red and half blue.
Marianne’s grandmother, Nona, died two years after they moved to Reading, aged 65. She had rarely been seen out of doors. She was a really typical grandma figure. She had rosy cheeks and was a lovely old lady,
said Maryan Robson. She remembers the two girls would ask her for a ‘Valentine’. She used to give us a gift of a piece of chocolate or a bar of soap. It must have been an Austrian tradition,
she said.
Eva remained on speaking terms with Glynn Faithfull and tried to shield Marianne from the distress of their failed marriage. Neighbours say Marianne seldom saw her father and the infrequency of his letters meant Eva often had to write hasty notes reminding him to drop a line to his daughter. He would then call to collect Marianne and take her out for the day. Glynn sometimes required a partner to accompany him to official engagements at the university. Eva’s former next-door neighbours, Cyril and Ida Rapley, recall an occasion when he turned up unannounced. He called round to see Eva one afternoon and said he wanted her to go with him to a ball. She didn’t have a dress to wear so she took down the curtains and made one by the time he arrived in the evening. She was incredibly resourceful,
said Ida Rapley. Glynn Faithful said he could not recall the episode and thought it unlikely because he did not involve himself with the university’s social scene.
Acquaintances sometimes set up home with the Faithfulls. They were often teachers or artists, whimsical friends of Eva who was prepared to open up her miniature palace and accommodate poor souls finding themselves temporarily homeless. Chris O’Dell, then 17, moved in with them in 1960 when his parents fell gravely ill. His father had become paraplegic after a viral infection and was attended for many years by his mother. Chris left the family home when his mother became afflicted with motor neurone disease. Both his parents died soon afterwards. Eva, a friend of his family, invited O’Dell to share their home. I was absolutely delighted. I was very fond of them. I went through a difficult period of my personal life, losing my family and everything that went with it. I was in a terrible state. The family home and the furniture was sold. Every last thing went and I didn’t even salvage a book. It was a fantastic act of generosity by Eva, as they never really had any money. They saved my life actually.
Marianne referred to O’Dell as her older brother and they developed a strong platonic friendship. He was often mistaken for a brother and became a surrogate son to Eva. He redecorated the house and put up shelves. She became just like my mother and she did extremely well because she was quite a wise person,
he said. She took me in because of a combination of being sorry for what had happened to my parents and because there might have been a tiny element that a male figure added something to the home.
During most of his stay O’Dell was at college and could only contribute to the stretched household finances when he took on temporary jobs outside term times. Eva never asked for a penny. I became part of the family, like a son. I worked at a brewery in Reading delivering beer at Christmas but otherwise I wasn’t really working.
Apart from her mother, O’Dell was the closest person to Marianne during her early teenage years. She had a terrific personality – very bright and clever, which you would expect coming from a family like that. There was a long ancestry of intellectuals on both sides, academics on the side of her father and intellectual aristocrats on the side of her mother. There were hundreds of years of writers and artists on her mother’s side. Marianne was very happy and extremely well balanced. She had taken the divorce of her parents well and always seemed motivated. This is really why it got so tragic later on when we all watched this remarkable child turn into a vegetable, as the drugs thing took over. She became in a terrible state. We had a terrible, dreadful time with her.
Chris O’Dell saw at close quarters how Eva was schooling Marianne. There was little infringement on her freedom and in later years Marianne remarked that she lived as if in a Renoir painting. I think it was a sort of bohemian household in a way. It was quite artistic,
said Chris O’Dell. There were paintings all over the place. People listened to music and there were frequent gatherings of Eva’s friends who were mostly in arts or teaching. It was a very pleasant, slightly bohemian atmosphere: nothing crazy. It was a lively place, everything was discussed: political issues of the day, population, religion. It was very stimulating to be there.
While Marianne was encouraged to seek out literature and art, other matters such as etiquette or housework were considered banal. Eva was a real aristocrat but she had no time or inclination to do basic jobs around the house,
said Ida Rapley. I don’t think she had any experience of things like that. Eva would host parties in her back garden and ask to borrow butter or sugar. That was really typical. She’d have bottles of wine but forget to get the butter for the bread. She was always on the tap but she was a good sort and I liked her very much.
Ida was known to Marianne as ‘Aunty Ida’. Marianne was a very, very naughty child. I remember one time she had magazines all over the floor and her father had arrived to take her out. I told her to tidy up before she saw him. She hated being told what to do and kept saying, ‘… but Daddy’s here’. I told her I didn’t care if the Queen of England was here: she had to tidy up the magazines. She got very angry and said: ‘I hate you Aunty Ida’.
As a teenager Marianne developed a high-minded manner that was an almost inevitable outcome of her upbringing. To be so insecure and at the same time so sort of grand and arrogant is an odd mixture. I was trying to hide my fear. When I was 17 and really snotty it drove people wild with fury,
she told The Guardian in 1990. Ida Rapley remembered Marianne’s precociousness. One afternoon, Marianne, aged nine, was playing in the garden with lda Rapley’s daughter, Linda, three years her junior. Ida was shocked to hear Marianne informing her daughter of the facts of life. She was a little madam. She would not take anything seriously. Everything seemed to be boring to her. I know a lot of the neighbours used to think: ‘Who does she think she is?’
Glynn Faithfull left Liverpool University to join a group of progressive thinkers who had settled into communal living among the cornfields and solitude of Ipsden, near Wallingford in Oxfordshire. The group had bought the handsome country residence of Braziers Park in 1950 for £8,000 as a base to study ‘ideological theory and live out an integrated life’. Glynn was the creative force behind the ‘school of integrative social research’ but did not devote himself to it on a full-time basis until he left Liverpool. Braziers Park was built in 1688 and remodelled 100 years later in Strawberry Hill Gothic, complete with a turret and castellated roofline. Although it is situated only half a mile from the busy A4074 Oxford to Reading road, it forms a peaceful hush among swathes of mature beech trees and has been designated an ‘area of outstanding natural beauty’, one of only 33 in England. The commune was inspired by the ex-cancer surgeon-turned-sociologist, Wilfred Trotter, known for identifying two distinct types of people in an article published in the Sociological
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