Читать книгу Memories, Dreams and Reflections - Marianne Faithfull - Страница 9

In early 1970 I was in bad shape. Not long after I’d left Mick I found myself on a slippery slope – I’d become a heroin addict and spent my days seeking oblivion, sitting on the wall of a demolished building in Soho. As if things weren’t dire enough, I agreed to play Lilith, a cemetery-haunting female demon, in Kenneth Anger’s occult allegory Lucifer Rising. Needless to say, the film didn’t improve my situation, either karmically or financially. And that was that – or so I thought, but karma has an awkward habit of bouncing back at you. It reminded me, yet again, that dabbling in the occult – even if you don’t entirely believe in its coiled powers – has a nasty way of casting its baleful influence long after you have left the scene – and accumulating vengeful force along the way.

Through William Burroughs I’d met the writer and painter Brion Gysin – inventor of the cut-up and Burroughs’s sometime collaborator. Brion was a really kind soul. When I was living on the street in London, I would occasionally go and see him. He was one of those rare people who genuinely did care about you; he was different, especially in those dark troubled times in London, Brion stood out like a beacon when everyone else seemed so self-centred and horrible – there was little sympathy for someone in my state in those days.

One day Brion took me round to where the occult filmmaker Kenneth Anger, whom I’d met through Robert Fraser, was staying. Kenneth was notorious for his film Scorpio Rising, a montage of Hell’s Angels, Hitler, fellatio, sodomy, Jesus, and assorted satanic imagery. Anger has made some two dozen movies, almost all dealing with satanic subject matter; aside from Scorpio Rising, the best known are Invocation of My Demon Brother, and Inauguration of the Pleasure Dome. I should have run as fast as I could from a self-styled conjurer of dark powers – however silly his dilettantish Satanism seemed to me – but I was very susceptible to the influence of others just then and easily led. As my father would have reminded me, in the words of Virgil, facilis descensus Averno – easy is the descent to Hell.

But love and light to Kenneth – only thing to do with Kenneth – love and light I send. Really. Can’t do anything else. I’ve gone through so much recently. All the anger, bitterness, upsetness, paranoia, grief has gone away. Hopefully, for good.

At the time I met him, Kenneth was living in Robert Fraser’s flat – Robert was in India. Kenneth saw that I was very vulnerable, obviously anorexic, on drugs, nowhere to live, and wanted to help me by putting me in his film. He didn’t understand my reasons for being on the wall, but saw that I could definitely be used, and that, in a nutshell, was how I came to be in Lucifer Rising. Kenneth really believed that he was setting me on my feet again as an actress. He thought I was on his side, which in a sense I was – as an artist. But basically he didn’t have a clue what I was up to – or how fragile I was. On junk, at the end of my tether and in no shape to do anything – let alone play a graveyard-haunting Mesopotamian night demon with a penchant for destroying children. Actually, since the advent of ‘cosmic feminism’, Lilith has become something of a heroine of women’s rights. In the Talmud she was the first wife of Adam, but refused to accept her subservient role. Adam rejected her, after which God created Eve as a more obedient mate. Because she refused to accept the inferior relationship in the primal marriage, she has been interpreted as a strong-minded woman reacting to male oppression. In Hebrew folklore she is said to have slept with Lucifer, giving birth to hundreds of lilin, female demons who would become the succubi of medieval and Jewish legend.

Whew! Kenneth got me at a very weak moment – I was completely dependent on the kindness of strangers, and, in fact, met a lot of very kind strangers. My friends the meths drinkers, for example, and the people in the Chinese laundry and my drug dealer – well! – and all sorts of funny, generous people I ran into. Even the police looked after me.

Strangely, Kenneth thought he could take me, a heroin addict, off the street, transport me to Egypt, and get me to play Lilith. It was great to go to Egypt – don’t get me wrong – but to have to crawl around an Arab graveyard dressed as a nun covered in Max Factor blood with skulls all around me was insane! It’s amazing they didn’t stone me to death, actually. The scene was shot very early in the morning when nobody was around, thank God. Of course today I’d probably be on some list of infidel dogs for desecrating a Muslim graveyard in a movie. Anyway, lightning didn’t strike – but, of course, it did eventually.

Naturally it was a huge mistake. Karmically a seriously wrong turn for me and something that took me a long time to overcome. I never should have done it, and had I been in my right mind I wouldn’t have considered it for a minute. That was one of the problems of being as high as I was at that moment, that somebody like Kenneth Anger – who is definitely on the dark side – could come along and get me to do mad, satanic things. What did I think I was doing? Well, I thought it was art, I suppose. I never got paid, which I always think is a sure sign it’s art. It was art, wasn’t it? It was the Devil’s art, and it’s very hard to get paid by the Devil, as you may know. There’s a few other people we could put in that category – mainly from the music business.

But before I get any further into the less charming aspects of Kenneth’s character I want to bang on a bit about the good things he did, because so far I’ve only given you his ruthless side.

One memorable evening Kenneth took me to see Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine at the National Theatre. Kenneth was naturally a huge fan of Marlowe, that Elizabethan ‘student of the School of Night’ whose death – a blow to the head by his own knife – is often seen as being foretold in his bloody and demon-haunted plays. ‘Black is the beauty of the brightest day,’ he has the ruthless tyrant Tamburlaine boast. Tamburlaine – parts I and II – is awe-inspiring and grotesque in an epic sort of way that only Elizabethans and Jacobeans could manage. I am grateful to Kenneth for that, even though it was three or four hours of disembowellings and upside-down crucifixions and tits being cut off and children being slashed. ‘Blood is the god of war’s rich livery.’ Endless horrors, but still fantastic. Kenneth was drooling throughout, and so was I, Christopher Marlowe being one of my heroes, too. Marlowe had his profligate vision, his wayward, possessed intent and conception of himself as the doomed, ‘brain-sick’ artist (‘What is beauty, saith my sufferings, then?’). I’m always impressed when I see monstrous happenings turn into art before my eyes. When you see Tamburlaine, orany Christopher Marlowe play, you are confronted with actual genius, with a metamorphosis of horror into art. The great Elizabethan ‘blank-verse beast’ whirls words like a conjurer juggling sapphires, swords, stars, and the axle-tree of heaven as if they were so many balls:

I hold the Fates bound fast in iron chains, And with my hand turn Fortune’s wheel about; And sooner shall the sun fall from his sphere Than Tamburlaine be slain or overcome.

Heavens! You truly believe some word-mad god tunes this music to our souls.

On the other hand, I’m afraid I’ve never really felt that Lucifer Rising was art. To be kind, let’s say the jury is still out on it. The thing is, for me it’s just sort of undigested cult stuff. There’s no question that it fits exquisitely well into this ghastly world we live in, but there’s a difference. I didn’t have a very high opinion of him to begin with and after I’d seen the alchemical films of Harry Smith I realised where Kenneth must’ve got many of his images from. The idea of drawing flying saucers coming into the screen – that was Harry’s idea. You could say Kenneth nicked it or you could say he was influenced by Harry, depending on how generous we want to be. Or we could say they influenced each other – which may well be the case. Harry started out as a fan of Kenneth’s work.

Harry, in any case, was at the other end of the spectrum. He was cool and relaxed – he didn’t have to promote himself. Kenneth tries too hard. Harry wouldn’t have minded whatever I said about him. He could take a joke, but Ken can’t – which is something I learned when I wrote my last book.

I suppose I was a bit unfair to Kenneth in my autobiography. The way I described my experiences was honest – the whole fiasco was so disturbing I still flinch when I think about it – but at the same time, I understand why Kenneth was so upset.

Obviously he was expecting a delightful, charming portrait of himself instead of what he got. I suppose I was pretty harsh, even a wee bit nasty, and now I’m trying to see it from his point of view – which isn’t all that easy. But, whatever I said about him, I certainly didn’t expect the vituperative response I got. Sometime after the book came out, Kenneth sent me a letter containing a curse written in fake blood. I opened it up and basically flipped out. I was so troubled by it I immediately took it down to my friends, Julian and Victoria Lloyd, to figure out what to do. On one level the letter was silly and hysterically funny, too. There was the part where he says, ‘You Jew! You Jew, like Kirk Douglas, like DANNY KAYE!’ What kind of curse is that? A Hollywood witch’s curse, I imagine, right out of Vampira’s grimoire. It was all about Jews and Danny Kaye – because Danny Kaye was Jewish, not a fact you would be likely to focus on, but Kenneth, of course, would (being virulently anti-Semitic). I’ve got a lovely Jewish granny, thank God, from whom I got my blonde hair and the big lips. Kenneth knew about all that. This put a rabid bee in his bonnet.

He’s been going on about my being part Jewish for years. He’s given lectures about it, about ‘my flaw’. I’ve heard from other people about this terrible flaw in my character: the fact that I am Jewish! That was funny and silly; I just laughed at that. But then the really vile stuff started to spew out: ‘DIE OF LUNG CANCER!’ and all that generic malice right out of the Common Book of Beastly Spells. For someone who considers himself a magus scrying out his victim’s secrets, he somehow missed a few critical things that might have hit home to me rather more effectively. Like sleeping pills! You’ll die from an overdose of sleeping pills! Or painkillers. He missed all that. Kenneth was quite capable of picking out the one thing that would truly sting you. The curse he sent to poor Robert Fraser had nothing in it except a razor blade and a piece of type saying: ‘Something to cure your stutter.’ I joke about it, but at the time I was absolutely panicked, holding the vile curse in my hands – not a fun thing to have in one’s possession. I went down to Jules and Vic’s – they were still living on the corner by Leixlip Castle then and showed it to them. Victoria was appalled but Julian was giddily impressed. ‘It’s a masterpiece!’ he declared. ‘You’ve got to send it to the V&A!’ I don’t know exactly what the Victoria & Albert Museum would’ve made of it, but visually it was an astonishing item. Very graphic and ghastly at the same time, and as maliciously conceived as only a true Satanist and twisted individual could conjure up. It was this huge piece of paper with threats inscribed in blood – Max Factor blood, I’m sure, completely fake – but as an artefact it looked incredible. It was a big, malign, poisonous curse – maybe a bit too wordy, maybe he raged on a bit too much. I mean, does the Devil rant you to death?

‘What the hell!’ I screamed at Julian. ‘I know it’s sort of wonderful in a ghastly cult artefact sort of way. It would be fine if it went to someone else, but it came to me, and, um, I can’t exactly look at it as an aesthetic object just now.’

In the end, Victoria told me to take it to the crossroads where there was a Lady Chapel and burn it with salt, rosemary and rue. Where would I find rue in this day and age? In Vic’s garden. Victoria is not a witch and does not grow this stuff for magical purposes. It’s just a herb, a lovely, old-fashioned herb. It’s in the wonderful mad scene in Hamlet: ‘rue for remembrance’. Or was it rosemary?

OPHELIA: There’s rosemary, that’s for remembrance. Pray you, love, remember. And there is pansies, that’s for thoughts.

LAERTES: A document in madness!

But, why burn Kenneth’s hideous screed with rosemary when it was something I clearly didn’t want to remember? I did it in order to remember my true self. And mark that this nonsense from Kenneth had got nothing to do with me. To fight back. For him to remember who he’s dealing with and for me to know who I am.

Kenneth must have been terribly roiled by what I said about him in my book, but I didn’t mean to hurt him. I just said what I really thought, like I do, but one has to have compassion. I realise now, in hindsight, that Kenneth was half using me, and half trying to help me, and in a funny way, I accept that and I can say ‘thank you’, but at the same time, it caused me a hell of a lot of trouble. I should have just said ‘no’. I don’t mean I was ready to reform completely, but I should have said no. ‘No thank you, darling, perhaps we’ll practise one of your satanic rituals some other time!’ If you let somebody do things to you, such as using you as an actress in a demonic ritual, you will pay a price. Let’s face it, it’s dabbling in darkness and it’s no joke. It’s down to a question of darkness and light, and I’m not even talking about it in religious terms because I’m not a religious person. I have my own spiritual track, but I’m certainly not religious. In fact, I’m against religion, and that helped me, of course, to avoid being drawn into Kenneth’s sway, because black magic is a religion. I, of course, did not tell Kenneth what I’d done – burning his letter at a wayside shrine – because in some Harry Potterish way he could have made a counter curse to that, too. It’s quite complicated, this whole business. And you have to be very careful. What I didn’t want to do – which in fact you can do – was to send the curse back to Kenneth so that it would land on him. Within the occult scheme of things if you send out that much hatred against someone and the recipient has enough power to hurl it back at you psychically, it can rebound – like the piece of paper with the spell on it that Dana Andrews slips back into the magician’s pocket at the end of Curse of the Demon. I’m not an expert, needless to say, but it’s a wearying and aggravating business.

I do think my counter-attack worked. I somehow knew intuitively what to do. In that way I’m quite like my mother – I’ve got that side to me, I just choose not to go to the dark side. White magic is another story entirely – that I am quite capable of using – and this is what you must do if you’re ever unfortunate enough to get a poison-pen letter from Kenneth.

Perhaps by playing a demoness I had summoned up long-dormant demons, some ghoulish skull-fondling jinni out of the desert wastes – but what is quite certain is that demons will fasten on you when you are at your weakest point and by toying with them, even in a film, you give them power. As Christopher Marlowe says at the conclusion of Doctor Faustus, his hero’s fate for meddling in dark matters should make wise men pause before dabbling in ‘unlawful things’

Whose deepness doth entice such forward wits To practice more than heavenly power permits.

And I didn’t entirely rely on my magical practices. In a very English way I wrote him a stiff letter in which I said, ‘Now, look, Kenneth, I’ve supported you, I’ve always said how great you are, and you know what a big fan of your films I am …’ blah-di-blah-blah – I mentioned everything I’d ever done or said about him – ‘so do not go into a queenie fit about the book. Please let’s have no more of this nonsense!’

He wrote back – a much calmer Kenneth. But then at the end of his letter he added: ‘Unfortunately, I can’t take the curse back.’