Singer/actress Marianne Faithfull has given another confessional interview in which she talks about how much she and Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards loved each other. She tells the Daily Telegraph that she and Richards could have had a true romance in the mid-to-late 1960s if they hadn’t already been romantically involved with other people at the time: Faithfull was with Rolling Stones lead singer Mick Jagger, and Richards was with model Linda Keith and, later, model/actress Anita Pallenberg.
Faithfull, who has been promoting her latest album, "Horses and High Heels" (released in February 2011), explains to the Daily Telegraph why she didn’t pursue a relationship with Richards: "Oh I would have done, but he was having a scene with Linda Keith and he was already in love with Anita, so no chance. You don’t know how silly a girl I was. He loved me all along, but I didn’t know that. We’ll never know, really. I was definitely mad about him. I spent one lovely night with him and got to know him later. The more I saw him the more I loved him. People have said we would have been so good together. I was too young to hold his attention."
Faithfull first publicly admitted her true feelings about Richards in her 1994 memoir, "Faithfull," in which she said that at the time she was dating Jagger, she was more in love with Richards, and she wished that she and Richards were a couple. In the autobiography, Faithfull also made a controversial claim that Jagger was also in love with Richards.
In his 2010 memoir "Life," Richards fondly remembers his one-night tryst with Faithfull, which they both say happened because Richards wanted to get revenge on Jagger for having an affair with Pallenberg. In the Daily Telegraph interview, Faithfull speaks highly of Richards and his memoir: "We had such a great night. Wow, I’ll never forget that … His book makes wonderful reading and he writes about the big stuff. I love and adore him."
According to Faithfull, her tumultuous relationship with Jagger reached the breaking point due to their infidelities, her increasing drug addiction, her 1969 suicide attempt and the miscarriage of their unborn child. She says that she left Jagger because the relationship became too stressful for her, and she felt that she needed to reclaim her own identity.
Although she is rarely in contact with Jagger, Faithfull tells the Daily Telegraph that he did reach out to her in 2006, when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. "And that meant a lot. I was so lucky that they caught it so quickly. I didn’t have to have chemo. They got rid of it with a lumpectomy. I had a breast lift and a little bit of diminution at the same time. Might as well make the best of it, that’s what I said to myself."
In the Daily Telegraph interview, Faithfull also repeats the often-told story of what inspired the Rolling Stones hit "Wild Horses," whose title came from something she said to Jagger after she woke up from her suicide attempt/drug-overdose coma: "Wild horses couldn’t drag me away."
Faithfull’s suicide attempt happened just days after Rolling Stones guitarist/co-founder Brian Jones had been found dead in his swimming pool. Jones had been fired from the Rolling Stones less than a month before his death.
"Mick didn’t kill Brian," Faithfull tells the Daily Telegraph. "I never thought that, but neither Mick nor Keith helped out Brian. They laughed and mocked and pointed. So I thought I’ll punish them all, f--- ’em. I’ll show them, they’ll learn, they’ll miss me. But it wasn’t to be."
In the Daily Telegraph interview, Faithfull describes a dream that she had while she was in the coma:"I know for a fact that heaven and hell are here on earth … It was a vision I had after I’d taken 150 Tuinals. I didn’t intend to take so many, I just kept taking them on the flight and I remember taking a whole load more after I ordered hot chocolate on room service.
"I wasn’t dead, I was walking along in no-man’s land with Brian Jones and he said, ‘This is where I go’ and he fell off the edge of the abyss and I didn’t, I had to walk all the way back again, and I walked a very long way. I was in an airport and there were planes coming in and taking off and I said I’m waiting for Mick to come and get me, which indeed he did, he brought me back. I remember it all."
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