Why it really is hell being an ageing beauty
Marianne faithfull was on stage in London t his week, complaining about her physical decline. ‘i’m j ust an old cripple now,’ she told fans during her concert, as she leant on a walking stick and fumbled for her glasses.
The 69-year- old went on to describe herself as ‘disabled’ and ended the show by saying: ‘i’m getting very tired now. i really am. i’m not so young any more.’
Yes, Marianne, ageing is hell but what is the alternative? With her history of medical issues, including drugs, exhaustion, breast cancer in 2006, hepatitis C, a broken back, a broken hip and emphysema, Miss Faithfull is lucky to be alive at all.
at her lowest ebb in the Seventies, she lived rough on the streets of Soho for a couple of years, lost in a fog of drugs, drink and god-knows what else. a brutish and sad experience hardly likely to add years to her life expectancy.
‘i am a crock!’ she cried. Between songs, she even reminisced about her drug dealer, ‘Spanish Tony’, who in the old days would turn up to bring her heroin during her concerts, which she would snort in the toilets before going back on stage.
Marianne didn’t sound particularly proud of this, but she wasn’t regretful either. if there was a connection to be made between her current ill health and these experiences, including a lifetime’s devotion to cigarettes, it is one that she chose not to make.
‘Do as i do and think about cancer before having a glass of wine,’ said Dame Sally Davies this week, in the kind of hectoring way that’s more likely to make women reach for the bottle than lock it away.
Davies, the Chief Medical Officer for england, is keen for women to see the connection between their social habits and their health, but where would she begin with Marianne, whose entire existence seems to have been barrelling towards this frail j unction; one t hat f i nds her nearly broken, incapable of standing on a stage unaided for more than a few minutes?
i say frail, but when you think about it, Marianne must be as strong as a she-ox to have endured at all. What a survivor. it must be the steel i n her aristocratic austrian blood (even though she grew up in reading).
HOWEVER, what is most amazing about Marianne Faithfull is that she’s still up there, under a spotlight, and that people are still fascinated by her. What usually happens is that the older women get, be they famous or otherwise, the more marginalised by society they become. People j ust aren’t interested in 50, 60 and 70-something women in perhaps the way that they were when they ( we) were younger.
We may fight it with every fibre of our hardening arteries, but unless we happen to be an axe murderer or the preternaturally youthful helen Mirren, we all dissolve on the side-lines in a pastel, ghostly-grey, ignored blob.
Most single women of Marianne’s age struggle to get dates, and if they want to attract the attention of a waiter in a busy restaurant, then they’d better take along a peashooter or perhaps a lasso.
So, despite her complaints, Marianne is at least still bucking the trend. even if this shuffling figure with her e- cigarettes and weak tea is in marked contrast to former boyfriend Mick Jagger, currently cavorting on- stage in South america, looking as fit as a butcher’s dog. The 72-year- old danced through a 19-song rolling Stones set, then perhaps later scampered off with his 28-yearold ballerina girlfriend, Melanie hamrick. Joining him on- stage was his trusty bandmate ronnie Wood, who at the age of 68 is expecting twins with his 38-yearold third wife, Sally.
These men! They’re like vampires. ever-youthful pixies who feed off the blood and energy of muchyounger women. They’re also ageing, but they’ll never grow up.
it is different for girls. it is much, much harder. especially f or women like Marianne Faithfull, whose fame and fortune were predicated on her astonishing youthful beauty.
Perhaps we shouldn’t have too much sympathy for her, because she threw it all away in the most senseless of ways.
But it still must be hard when those celebrated looks begin to fade, when the beautiful and the damned have to face the cold winds of real life and male indifference for the first time.
Marianne’s old-age confessions came in the same week that 49-year- old supermodel Cindy Crawford declared she has hung up her swimsuit for good. This leaves the stage clear for her astonishingly lovely 14-year- old model daughter, Kaia, to launch herself on the catwalk.
Of course, Cindy is still a beautiful woman, but it must be a bittersweet moment to stand by and see her own lustre being eclipsed by that of her daughter.
So here we have three ages of woman: from beautiful teen to middle-aged mother to shocking rock crock. Life is over in a camera flash, and one hopes that Kaia and other youngsters like her learn to make the most of it instead of mucking up or merely surviving against the odds.
The irony is that we all want to live a long life, but we don’t want to get old. Or get ancient before our time, like poor Marianne.