Great beauty is often a curse
Marianne Faithfull s confession this week that she had to dose herself up with drink and drugs to have sex will have come as a huge shock to the countless men who adored her.
After all, she was the poster girl for free love, the epitome of cool in her floppy hats and furs. If she wasnt enjoying herself, then who on earth was?
The answer is simple: men.
The blokes, from Mick Jagger to Keith Richards and all the rest in between, who woke up one day in the Sixties to discover that a combination of the Pill and the new permissiveness had done away with the need for boring old-fashioned stuff such as respect, love and responsibility; that now young, naive girls like Faithfull had no excuse whatsoever for not jumping into bed with them.
Not, that is, unless they wanted to be branded as frigid or hopelessly uncool.
As Faithfull put it: I had to pretend that everything was so wonderful, wild and sexual. But it really wasnt.
But she had another disadvantage, too: her beauty.
Great beauty, it is generally assumed, is a great blessing. In reality, it is almost always a terrible burden.
If a woman has beauty, especially at a very young age, it can come to define her.
However clever, kind and talented she may otherwise be, the fact that men desire her and women envy her will always throw a spanner in the works. Faithfull was truly stunning.
And in an era of free love, she would have attracted an almost intolerable level of male attention, some of it welcome, much of it not.
No surprise that the poor girl hated sex: she must have come to associate it with a sort of abuse.
Little wonder then that she threw her beauty away, ruining her looks through drug abuse and only finding peace in her 50s.
That she has come through it all is testament to the one thing that endures long after looks have faded: character.
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