Marianne Faithfull: Francis Bacon’s Wild Child – Darren Coffield

Marianne Faithfull

This month sees the opening of an exhibition of portraits by the artist Francis Bacon at the National Portrait Gallery and the launch of my book Queens of Bohemia and Other Miss-Fits at Hatchards of Piccadilly. The book reveals the scandalous lives of the women who influenced and inspired Bacon, an intense man whose eyes could penetrate the soul. When interviewed for my book, the pop icon Marianne Faithfull said she first crossed paths with Bacon after she’d just split up from Mick Jagger:

‘Francis Bacon didn’t try to stop me or tell me I was making a big mistake or anything. My plan was to disappear for a while. Even the people I knew on the street didn’t know my name. They didn’t know who I was, or care … I thought I was invisible. But Francis Bacon, the man with X-ray eyes, could see me.’

Although seen as a 1960s counterculture figure, Marianne Faithfull was fascinated by the generation before her, the Bohemia of 1950s Soho. Looking back on it now, Marianne wondered:

‘What the hell happened to Bohemia? It took a hundred years for poets, painters and talented layabouts to create and just twenty years for slick pseudo-hipsters to fuck it all up. It’s the curse of hollow tinsel bohemia! Everybody’s cool, and nobody knows what the hell it means.’

Central to the scene was Marianne’s best friend, the bohemian bombshell Henrietta ‘Hen’ Moraes, the subject of some of Bacon’s best paintings. Hen was a half-Indian beauty and one of the stars of bohemian London. She became part of an incestuous hedonistic set that bedded one another and included artists such as Lucian Freud who partied with hard-living aristocrats and East-End villains.

Marianne Faithfull
Photos: Courtesy of Darren Coffield Archive © Darren Coffield 2024

She was the prototype Rock ‘N’ Roll wild child a decade before the term once used to describe Marianne Faithfull was invented. Hen possessed a fearless naivety and an uncanny antenna for adventure, and it was this that Marianne hankered after:

‘Back in the old Bohemia… art was more intense, purer. Sex was hotter, too – more repressed! And there was a genuine intellectual bohemia instead of this hipster-lite culture we have today. It was much smaller, much more authentic.’

Marianne and Henrietta’s paths first crossed in the 1960s at Baghdad House, a Persian restaurant on Fulham Road, where they sat on cushions, drank yoghurt and smoked dope. Here, the crème de la crème of hip London hung out, and it became a popular spot with the Rolling Stones and their aristocratic circle of friends. The Royal photographer, Cecil Beaton, was dining with Mick Jagger in a gold brocade coat. Beside him sat his girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, with her beautiful blonde hair and slightly smudged eyes; she noticed a middle-aged woman in bright red and green zip-up boots covered in gold covered stars, which made her look like a comic book superhero:

‘Her reckless intensity of spirit magnetically attracted people to her. Henrietta had friends from the gutter to the aristocracy whom she both terrorised and enchanted.’

According to Marianne, Hen and her aristocratic friends at Baghdad House embraced the hippy way of life and dropped out of society to travel in horse-driven caravans. They also adopted a hippy diet to get rid of all the toxins of the modern world:

‘They all went along with this very strict hippy rule book about only eating macrobiotic food, avoiding anything edible that was white (bread, sugar), not taking baths and not using any medicine — which caused some very funny things to happen, you know. If anyone got the clap or crabs…they never got rid of them.’

Marianne Faithfull
Photos: Courtesy of Darren Coffield Archive © Darren Coffield 2024

Hen’s hippy ‘wagon trail’ took four years to travel to Wales at the heady speed of 4 miles per day. According to her ex-lover, the artist Lucian Freud, at one pub Hen stopped at along the way:

‘She didn’t wear any knickers, sat at a table, put up her legs, and the pub owner came by and didn’t like what he saw and barred her.’

Strangely, Marianne and Henrietta found a common reference point in the artist Francis Bacon. Henrietta began her wagon trail just as the years of drug addiction began to take hold of Marianne, and her four-year long relationship with Mick Jagger ended:

‘I could’ve stayed with Mick, and he did love me, but I couldn’t bear it, that world. I just felt not good enough. Low self-esteem. All the things a drug addict feels.’

At this point, Marianne entirely simply lost her way and slid down the social scale from being a sex symbol to a Soho bum – a homeless junkie hanging around the streets, looking to score. Her favourite spot was the bombsite opposite Soho’s French pub, a former haunt of Henrietta’s, where a dishevelled Marianne first caught Francis Bacon’s eye:

‘Francis would come out and, seeing me sitting there, would take me to Wheeler’s to feed me. In a strange way, he knew what I was doing, Francis knew a lot about pain … whenever I bumped into him, he treated me as a long lost friend.  I don’t know why … maybe he saw a kindred spirit … Francis couldn’t understand why in the world I wouldn’t want to live with Mick Jagger! To him, living with Mick Jagger would have been heaven.’

By the time Hen’s wagon trail had come to an end, Marianne had stopped living on the streets and was slowly getting her life back together. She lived in a mews flat right by London’s Regent’s Park. Hen was jobless and homeless, so Marianne somewhat naively took her on, and she parachuted into Marianne’s life with such a tremendous thud that it shook the very foundations of her existence:

‘I thought she was so beautiful – to the point where the Faerie Gypsy Queen in my song is Henrietta, stomping about with a stick.’

Hen enchanted and wove her spell around Marianne whilst exhibiting her charming I’m-taking-care-of-you side.  Marianne considered Hen’s arrival a great, wonderful gift … until she met her horrific boyfriend. Hen had a penchant for some truly dodgy characters, and things soon began ‘disappearing’. One day, Marianne returned to find that her beautiful Persian rug (one of her most precious possessions from when she lived with Mick Jagger) was missing and that Henrietta had hocked the museum-quality carpet for a couple of hours of hedonism. But being pragmatic, Marianne soon realised that Hen was far more valuable to her than any old rug:

‘She was blessed with a thirst for ecstasy and oblivion, a bold eye for a promising sexual encounter and uncanny antennae for alcohol and drugs. She inhabited an enchanted space where the oddest, most unlikely things happened.’

Hen had got some doctor under her thumb, writing prescriptions for amphetamines: black bombers, mandrax, etc. – Hen and Marianne mostly lived on Green Groovers – a mixture of speed and barbiturates. Marianne found Hen’s high-octane amphetamine-fuelled antics fun for a while. Life had become an Alice in Wonderland-like non-stop Mad Hatter’s tea party held in a minuscule little mews house, which Marianne felt she might suddenly outgrow and stick her head through the roof of at any moment:

‘She travelled on her own loopy groove, avoiding the straight world entirely. Henrietta was very kind to me when I needed someone to be kind to me. When I was really in a bad way and deep shit on heroin, Hen would come over and look after me. She loved me.’

But few could keep up with Hen’s heroic ability to indulge in every intoxicating substance known to medical science. Like Alice in Wonderland herself, everything that Hen came across seemed to be compelling her to’ Drink me’ or ‘Eat Me’ and at some point, Marianne started to wonder if it wasn’t all too much, even for her:

‘I was terrible at being a junkie – it was a degrading experience – but not degrading enough! The Star Wars actress Carrie Fisher explained to me that the problem with my life story becoming the basis for a feature film was that it wasn’t bad enough. I thought I’d degraded myself plenty, but I did not. I guess I wasn’t thinking of the movie rights.’

Over time, Henrietta became Marianne’s de facto minder, a vital part of her entourage. Marianne wanted to avoid going on and facing the audience at one gig. As if to confirm her inability to perform that night, her nerves got the better of her. She was violently sick all over Hen, who wasn’t having any of it and spun Marianne around to face the stage and shoved her out there so hard she stumbled on stage with her right hand raised, trying to break her fall, but for all the world looking like she was giving a Nazi salute:

‘When she wanted to be, Hen could be absolutely charming, but she did have a very grumpy side to her, which manifested itself in a character she called Scotch Jimmy – her inner demon!’

Francis Bacon painted Hen dozens of times, and even though she inspired him, he never gave her any of the pictures he painted—despite promising he would. In later life, when she was living in a cramped room on Skid Row and Bacon’s portraits of her began to fetch millions at auction, Henrietta realised the profit being made off her back and continued to complain about it until the end of her days…

Marianne has happily been living in a retirement home for entertainers since contracting Covid in 2022. Last month, her pictures and mementoes were sold at Sotheby’s auction house, and one particular painting had great sentimental value, as she wrote in the sale catalogue:

Photos: Courtesy of Darren Coffield Archive © Darren Coffield 2024

Marianne Faithfull
Photos: Courtesy of Darren Coffield Archive © Darren Coffield 2024

‘I love it because it carries a sense of loss and remembrance … Looking at it makes me think of her, dear brave, wild, chaotic, funny, heroically self-indulgent Hen. She was one of my best friends, wonderfully warm and lovable, and had a good heart. She epitomised that bohemian life that’s all gone now.’

As every true bohemian knows, disposing of one’s possessions is liberating. They’re no good for you. When you die, you leave all your possessions behind, and someone else has to go through them all.

You want to avoid stuff.  What you want are memories – and Marianne has some wonderful ones:

‘Take me back to the old bohemia!’

To read more about the extraordinary women in Francis Bacon’s life, Queens of Bohemia and Other Miss–-Fits which will be launched at Hatchard’s bookshop, Piccadilly, on 15 October 2024.

Francis Bacon Portraits runs from 10 October to 19 January at the National Portrait Gallery, London.

Photos: Courtesy of Darren Coffield Archive © Darren Coffield 2024.

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