He was an impecunious old Etonian peer who tried and failed to rescue her from drugs.
They fell so madly in love that within three days of meeting at a country house party, Marianne Faithfull had all but abandoned Jagger, then the world’s most famous rock star, and announced that she intended to marry the ‘sensitive’ and ‘gentle’ Lord Rossmore, a bachelor who lived with his widowed mother.
Of all the mixed up couplings between the old upper classes and the new aristocracy of rock and pop music that erupted in the 1960s and 1970s, this extraordinary union between the hauntingly beautiful actress and singer then at the peak of her glamour and fame and the bookish, spiritual Anglo-Irish peer, who died last week aged 90, was one of the most mystifying of all.
In a feature on the then new âCoolmine Drug-Free Therapeutic Communityâ in 1973, this newspaper quoted its founder, Paddy Rossmore, as saying it had been inspired by the problems of an unnamed âfriendâ. Rossmore had known nothing about drugs before meeting this friend, he said. The Dublin treatment centre was the result of a painful learning process that ensued.
As explained in his obituaries this week, the friend was rock-star Marianne Faithfull, whom Rossmore once planned to marry. She had ditched her previous boyfriend Mick Jagger in 1970, in favour of this shy aristocrat from Monaghan, less used to featuring in the gossip columns.