Marianne Faithfull Made an Art of Upending Expectations

The singer, who died on Thursday at 78, spent decades in the spotlight exercising a very specific and subversive power.

In March 1964, at a swinging London party, Marianne Faithfull got a record deal without singing a note.

Andrew Loog Oldham, the brash young manager of the Rolling Stones, had noticed the striking Faithfull — then a 17-year-old blonde with shaggy bangs, full lips and a knowing glint in her big doe eyes — from across the room. When he asked her then-husband, the artist John Dunbar, if his wife could sing, Dunbar said that he supposed she could. Oldham took him at his word, and a week later he sent Faithfull a telegram telling her to come to Olympic Studios for a session. With a face that pretty, he reasoned, would anyone really care what came out of her mouth?

The wonderfully outspoken Faithfull, who died on Thursday at 78, spent most of her life making a mockery of that question. She could never quite play the role that Oldham dreamed up for her that day, the fantasy of the demure, retiring ingénue — and thank goodness. For one thing, Faithfull didn’t truly come into her own unique talent as a vocalist until her early 30s, far past the ingénue’s perceived expiration date. And when she did begin to sing songs that were more aligned with her own sensibilities, starting with her corrosive 1979 masterpiece “Broken English,” years of substance abuse had transformed her voice into a punky survivor’s croak. Eventually, in the last several decades of her improbably long career, she channeled her voice’s rich smokiness into a third act as a kind of gothic cabaret singer, personalizing expert interpretations of Bob Dylan, Leonard Cohen and Nick Cave, among others.

That was far from what those who’d marveled at her mute beauty would have imagined her to sound like back in 1964, but such was Faithfull’s subversive power. She upended the expectations of all sorts of feminine stereotypes — the flash-in-the-pan teenage pop star; the silent, self-abnegating muse — and allowed the world to experience the destabilizing shock that occurs when a pretty face gives voice to ugly truths.

Just three months after attending that party, in June 1964, Faithfull had a hit single, the morose-beyond-its-years “As Tears Go By,” by most accounts the first original song written by Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Faithfull treated her instant pop success as an amusing lark, and possibly a brief detour before her planned future of studying at Oxford; she lugged around a bag of classic British literature on her first tour. But in 1966, when she and Jagger began dating, she achieved a level of glamorous notoriety from which it would be difficult to return to civilian life. And so she was thrust into yet another stereotypical female role that she could not quite play obediently: the Rock Star’s Muse.