‘You’ve got to have a line of coke,’ she purred: The night I did cocaine with a megastar in a Chelsea flat… then never touched it again

In 40-plus years of writing about musical megastars, from the godfather of soul James Brown to the grandfather of pop Rod Stewart, I’ve snorted cocaine only once. It was in a Chelsea flat one rainy evening in 1981 at the insistence of Marianne Faithfull.

With her days in the pop charts far behind her, Marianne, who died last week aged 78, was then living with a punk musician some years her junior known as Ben E Ficial.

After a long evening’s talk about a Wonderland called the Swinging Sixties, she gave me one of her misty-eyed smiles and announced: ‘You’ve got to have a line of coke.’

While Ben was out procuring the stuff, Marianne dismissed my obvious unease in a voice suddenly reminiscent of Oscar Wilde’s Lady Bracknell.

‘Remember that when people have gone to the trouble and expense of getting you something,’ she told me, ‘it’s very bad manners to refuse it.’

As I was inhaling my line as shown, through a rolled-up £10 note, her tone changed to that of a gym teacher urging some lazy pupil up the wall bars: ‘Oh, come on! You’ve only had a bit of it. You can do better than that!’

Marianne Faithfull was the face of the Sixties with her trademark blunt fringe, pout and mini-skirts

I hardly liked to tell her that it did nothing for me but cause a slight giddiness and, later on, a little scab inside my nostril.

At the time, I was following up my biography of The Beatles with one about their chart-rivals (and secret buddies) The Rolling Stones.

Marianne topped my interviewees-list as Mick Jagger’s former lover and muse, the woman who’d given a gauche blues singer from suburban Kent his first coating of sophistication.

The pop elite of the Sixties were known collectively as ‘Young Meteors’, but none soared higher nor plunged lower than Marianne Faithfull.

That name, which sounded so much like managerial artifice, was completely genuine. Her father Glyn Faithfull was a professor of philology, the study of ancient words and languages. She was herself a true intellectual, formidably well-read and given to quoting Latin proverbs.

But the dominant presence in her childhood was her mother, born Eva von Sacher-Masoch, an Austrian baroness, one of whose forebears had invented sachertorte chocolate cake and another had lent his name to the pleasurably uncomfortable form of sex called masochism.

Separated from Glyn Faithfull and chronically hard up, Eva took Marianne, their only child, to live in a tiny terrace house in Reading, Berkshire.

Even though reduced to smoking Woodbines, the cheapest cigarettes, Eva always retained something of the grande dame and had clearly passed this on to her daughter.

Author Philip Norman was following up his biography of The Beatles in 1981 when, at the insistence of Ms Faithfull, he did his first line of cocaine 

Marianne was educated at a Catholic boarding school so strict that while bathing the girls had to wear shifts to avoid the ‘sin’ of looking at their own nude bodies.

All this safeguarding was fatally undermined when, aged 16, she met a Cambridge undergraduate named John Dunbar who had many friends in London’s still small and close-knit pop music community.

One night, Dunbar took her to a party whose guests included Mick Jagger and The Rolling Stones’ 19-year-old manager-cum-record producer, Andrew Loog Oldham.

Jagger made a poor first impression by talking to Marianne in a fake Cockney accent (that he still uses to this day) and deliberately slopping wine down the front of her dress.

But Oldham grabbed her attention by saying that somebody with her looks ought to be making records and offering to manage her.

For her recording debut, Oldham turned to Jagger and his fellow Stone Keith Richards, who up to that point had made little impact as a songwriting team.

‘Marianne’s a convent girl,’ he told them. ‘I want a song with brick walls all around it and high windows – and no sex.’

The result was As Tears Go By, a wistful ballad produced by Oldham and giving little scope to Marianne’s rich mezzo-soprano.

In August 1964, it made number nine in the British singles charts. ‘Greensleeves Goes Pop’, one Fleet Street headline said approvingly.

For a time she basked in the nation’s good opinion, marrying John Dunbar, having a son, Nicholas, releasing further demure singles like This Little Bird and Come And Stay With Me (which, of course, meant in separate rooms) and becoming one of the first pop stars to broadcast a charity appeal.

Then in 1966, she left Dunbar for Jagger, the ex-convent girl unbelievably shacking up with a figure by now regarded as a shaggy-haired Antichrist. ‘I knew that everyone who’d bought my records felt I’d let them down,’ she told me.

In fact, Mick hadn’t been her first choice of Stone; she’d had flings with Keith Richards and the band’s unstable instrumental genius, Brian Jones.

The couple set up house in Chelsea’s super-fashionable Cheyne Walk, where Marianne’s grande dame instincts enjoyed free rein. The parsimonious Jagger was induced to spend £6,000 (think £60,000 today) on an outsize chandelier for the front hall.

‘Looka’ that,’ he’d say to visitors, torn between pride and horror. ‘Six grand for a f***ing light!’

The singer shocked fans of her music by dating rock legend Mick Jagger from The Rolling Stones

She bestraddles a Harley Davison in black leather in an Anglo-French ‘erotic thriller’, The Girl On A Motorcycle

Ms Faithfull, here performing in 2010, died last week aged 78

The last convent wall crumbled in 1967 with a police raid on Keith’s cottage in West Wittering, Sussex, where Jagger and Marianne were spending the weekend with a group of cronies, otherwise all male.

It happened to be the first time that Jagger, usually chary about drugs, sampled the new ‘mind-expanding’ LSD, but when the raiders burst in, the party had just returned from a post-trip country ramble and were blamelessly watching a film on television.

Marianne was just out of the bath and, rather than put her muddy clothes back on, had wrapped herself in a fur rug doing duty as a bedspread.

When one of the female officers demanded to strip-search her, she let the rug fall to the ground in the grandest of grand-dame gestures to show there was nothing beneath it to search.

The police’s haul from the Stones consisted only of a tiny amount of pot, for which Keith was busted, and four amphetamine-based travel-sickness tablets, illegal in Britain, which Marianne had bought in Italy but accidentally left in the pocket of a velvet jacket belonging to Mick.

Nonetheless, the wicked chief Stone played the old-fashioned English gent and pretended the tablets were his. It was enough for Authority to clobber Jagger and Richards for all their past rebellions and provocations, like shoulder-length hair, wearing their own clothes onstage and polluting innocent young minds with songs like Satisfaction and Let’s Spend The Night Together.

The pair were subjected to a vicious show trial and given prison sentences when the usual penalty for both their offences was probation.

Marianne had not been charged but sat in court throughout the trial, instantly recognisable as ‘the girl in the fur rug’, a detail suggesting the police had interrupted an orgy instead of a TV movie.

Long before there was the internet, a rumour went viral – and still often resurfaces –that she and Jagger had been interrupted during a sex-act involving a Mars bar. ‘I couldn’t understand why Mars never capitalised on the free publicity,’ she told me.

As the hit singles dried up, she turned to stage and screen acting, playing Irina in Chekhov’s play Three Sisters to great acclaim at the Royal Court theatre and bestraddling a Harley Davison in black leather in an Anglo-French ‘erotic thriller’, The Girl On A Motorcycle.

She also appeared in a dreadful horror movie called Madhouse Mansion, scripted by me, set in Sussex but shot in India and never to be seen in cinemas that I was too ashamed to remind her about.

Although she performed with the Stones only once, in their chaotic Rock ‘n’ Roll Circus film, her intellect gave a keener edge to Jagger’s songwriting.

Most notably she made him read The Master And Margarita by the Russian author Mikhail Bulgakov which depicts Satan as a smooth-talking cad in evening dress.

Bulgakov’s novel prompted him to write Sympathy For The Devil, one of the small handful of epic pop songs alongside John Lennon’s A Day In The Life and Bob Dylan’s Tangled Up In Blue.

But Marianne was progressively worn down by his court of sycophants, glacial ‘cool’ and increasingly blatant infidelities.

She hoped for better things when she fell pregnant but the baby, a daughter already named Corrina, was stillborn. Jagger blamed it on her cocaine addiction, and no others followed.

In 1969, the Stones gave a free concert in London’s Hyde Park as a memorial to the problematic Brian Jones, who’d mysteriously drowned in his swimming-pool a few days earlier.

Jagger launched the event by reading from Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Adonais, which he probably wouldn’t have heard of without Marianne.

Meanwhile, she found herself sharing the VIP stand with his latest flame, the actress Marsha Hunt (who was destined to be the mother of his first child).

The next day, Marianne accompanied him to Australia where he was to star, embarrassingly, in a biopic of the outlaw and folk hero Ned Kelly.

In their hotel room, while Jagger was still out cold from jetlag, she took took 150 sleeping pills washed down with hot chocolate.

She told me of the strange dream she’d had, poised between this world and the next, when she’d met Brian Jones ,’very p***ed off to realise he was dead’.

Jagger revived her and later wrote his most impassioned ballad, Wild Horses, to express his relief. But their relationship was effectively over.

She finally nerved herself to leave him in 1970. Palimony settlements for rock-star muses who’d contributed to their fame were still a decade in the future and all she had to show for her four years with Jagger were a few clothes.

Her epic pharmacological history culminated in heroin-addiction which, she told me, had been ‘a conscious experiment I went into with my eyes wide open’.

But it caused her to lose custody of her son, Nicholas, and at one point reduced her to homelessness while suffering from anorexia – ‘living on a wall in Windmill Street [Soho]’ as she put it.

After the shallow rock biz, it proved strangely liberating. ‘I realised that human beings were really good. The Chinese restaurant let me wash my clothes there. The man who had the tea-stall gave me cups of tea and even the meth-drinkers looked out for me.’

In 1979, she made a triumphant comeback with her album Broken English which went platinum and earned a Grammy nomination, the once-feathery voice now in an almost Marlene Dietrich register as it distilled the many lessons she’d learned – or failed to.

No longer was she seen as a victim but as a survivor, admired by younger chanteuses who’d chosen similarly difficult paths like Courtney Love and Sinead O’Connor and with younger songwriters like Jarvis Cocker and Damon Albarn vying to write material for her.

Suddenly she seemed of the moment, while Jagger and the Stones were wrinkled waxworks still cranking out hits from half a century ago.

In recent years, she’d battled cancer and numerous other ailments and spent some time in a care home but was evidently determined to go on communing with the audience she’d amassed in her two different lives.

After we talked for my Rolling Stones biography, we never met again. But I often thought of that rainy night in Chelsea, Ben E Ficial, her Lady Bracknell accent and the cocaine.

• Philip Norman’s George Harrison: The Reluctant Beatle is published by Simon & Schuster, £25.