In The Heel Of The Hunt

“Are you here to talk about my book?” Marsha Hunt demands, within moments of meeting me in the bar of Dun Laoghaire’s Royal Marine Hotel. “Or are you just here to ask about all the other stuff?”

When I answer that we’re here to “mostly” talk about the book – her latest novel, the harrowing and tautly written fictional memoir Like Venus Fading – she seems somewhat relieved. It’s hardly surprising. As a singer, actress and, more recently, bestselling author, Hunt has been famous for more than half of her 52 years and talking about her various artistic projects, superstar affairs and general life experiences could easily take up most of the day.

Certainly, there’s no shortage of material. Marsha Hunt’s CV is as varied as it is impressive. She’s the black bombshell who caused a sensation when she posed nude for Vogue; the notorious rock chick who had affairs with the likes of Mick Jagger and Marc Bolan; the feminist icon who hosted a hugely successful nightly chat show on Capital Radio, interviewing the likes of Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams; and the acclaimed actress who has been a member of both the Royal National Theatre and the Royal Shakespeare Company, as well as a star of the Hollywood screen. More recently she has been making a name for herself as an extremely accomplished writer, publishing three novels and an autobiography in the last decade.

Born and raised in Philadelphia, the daughter of a psychiatrist, she moved with her family to Northern California in 1960. She studied in Berkeley during the student riots of the 1960s but moved to London in 1966, originally staying on artist David Hockney’s floor in Powis Terrace. It was in England that she first began her musical career, initially performing with the blues bands of Alexis Korner and Long John Baldry. When people reflect on her singing career, however, they usually say it began with her 1968 starring role in the hit musical Hair.

“I think I sort of stumbled into my music career,” she laughs. “I was not a person who ever aspired to be a singer. I kinda got to England and it was ‘well, what are you gonna do?’ and I went ‘okay, I’ll sing this week.’ I was looking for an au-pair job and somebody said to me, ‘I don’t know any au-pair work but they’re auditioning for this show in the West End, you should try for that’. And all of a sudden I was in Hair.”

Although she had only two lines of dialogue and sang lead on just one number – a Supremes-esque send-up called ‘White Boys’ – Hunt’s role in Hair quite literally propelled her to overnight stardom, her anonymity disappearing with the first rave reviews. Despite the fact that the cast featured such notables as Elaine Page, Tim Curry and Oliver Tobias, the stunning black 22-year-old from Philadelphia completely stole the hearts of the audiences and the limelight of her co-stars.

“It was literally overnight!” she recalls. “And that happened in a way that probably success can only happen out of a musical. I don’t think there’s anything else where yesterday you’re nobody and today, for some reason, all the newspapers are talking about you and photographing you and everybody’s murmuring your name.”

Is that something she looks back on now and asks herself, ‘What the hell was all that about’?

“No, I knew at the time,” she says. “I also think that it’s a racial thing. If you’d come up through the America that I’d come up through then you’d understand. I mean, I survived the ’50s when people were calling me ‘nigger’, so I had to know who I was so that other people’s perception of me didn’t deter me. And I think that that held through when the reverse happened, when people wanted to say things more glowing than was possibly deserved.”

Whatever about the overblown reviews she may have received for her performance in Hair, the superb critical notices her writing has attracted have all been well deserved. Hunt’s literary career began in 1985 when she was commissioned by Andrew Motion to write her autobiography, published the following year under the title Real Life. In 1990 she turned her hand to fiction and wrote her internationally acclaimed novel Joy. This was followed in 1993 by a historical gay romance entitled Free and then, in 1994, by the family saga Repossessing Ernestine.

Her latest novel, Like Venus Fading, is the fictional memoir of black singer and actress Irene O’Brien. A remarkable tale set against the background of American 20th-century history, it tells the story of how O’Brien, manipulated by both her family and by various movie moguls, defied Hollywood’s colour bar to become a sex symbol and an Oscar nominated movie star, before faking her death in 1965 and escaping the whole sordid scene. Now living quietly in a northern California suburb, O’Brien reflects upon a life in which she was abused as a child, abused as a wife and abused by the Hollywood star system.

At times harrowing and tragic, at times humorous and uplifting, Hunt’s novel is an intricately-constructed insight into what it meant – and means! – to be a black woman in modern America and, particularly, in its showbusiness industry. The novel was inspired by a biography of the ill-fated actress Dorothy Dandridge.

“I think that people in showbusiness can’t tell the truth about their lives,” she says. “What initially inspired this story for me was I was looking at a biography of an actress called Dorothy Dandridge, who lived within the time. She committed suicide in 1965. Her life was completely tragic but it wasn’t particularly reflected in the official story. So then I began looking at all of these biographies of actors and actresses and you realise that icons in particular can’t tell the truth. The people who’ve had a successful career don’t want the bubble to burst on the real facts of their lives.

“So if you take the fact that there’s Irene O’Brien on Palm Sunday sitting on the rooftop, you know, thinking about who she’s been and how she’s become that person – on the one hand, you say why did she wait so long to do it? And then on the other hand, you think many people probably go to their graves without having ever looked back to see what it is that actually caused the big moves and watersheds and so on.”

In the novel, one of Irene’s earliest memories is of being molested by her mother’s landlord. Hunt wrote this to demonstrate that early abuse of any kind can set up a behavioural pattern for life.

“I start the book with this thing of her saying, ‘I was six and he was forty-five and I guess I was his bit on the side’,” she says. “Now, I’m getting the impression that people find that to be a sort of really heavy reference because she’s just floating over it. But I think that, if someone is honest, something like that can actually in a lifetime be the thing which caused the behaviour or sets up the behavioural pattern that continues throughout a life.”

Like Venus Fading also deals with the whole Hollywood star system and the way in which people are put up on pedestals – and occasionally taken down again – by the real starmakers, the faceless behind-the-scenes movie executives. From her own experience, did she find that many of these “icons” started believing their own press?

“Oh, totally!” she exclaims. “I mean, you’ve been working in the music press for a number of years so I probably don’t have anything new to tell you. But for somebody who doesn’t have any insight into how stardom is created or how an icon becomes an icon or an image overtakes a person and they start to live the image, I did want to show how a little girl of six gradually becomes a movie star and how that injection into her life has to do with certain weaknesses that she may have had, as much as certain strengths. You know, she loved being looked at.”

As someone who has been an icon in various fields herself, Hunt doesn’t deny that she has her own image to protect. When it came to writing down the story of her own life and career, she found herself quite constrained. “Well, I know when I wrote my autobiography I couldn’t tell the truth,” she laughs. “I mean, if you’re living, how can you tell the truth about other living people? Anyone hearing that might think, ‘Oh well she’s talking about this celeb or that celeb’ but I’m even careful when writing about basic relationships in one’s family, you know. Your father or your mother might think that you perceive of them as one thing but, if you’re actually gonna sit in a dark corner with a cigarette and think about various things that have happened in your life, you might come up with some very negative and damning facts about people who maybe don’t realise that they’ve had a negative input.”

Although certain aspects of Like Venus Fading have parallels with Hunt’s own life, she denies that the novel is in any way autobiographical. Much of her research into the Hollywood star system came from old biographies of movie stars. The historical aspect – particularly the early section concerning the Great Depression – came from the memories of her mother and grandmother and also from old photographs. “I think picture books tell an amazing truth about a period that sometimes words can’t convey,” she says. “So I looked at a lot of black and white photographs of the time.”

Hunt’s portrayal of America during the Depression is certainly hard-hitting stuff. She stresses that she was quite conscious of telling it like it was.

“I think there’s a danger in America that, in an effort to move forward, in an effort to take away the hard edge of what its history has been, they could whitewash that history and really clean it up,” she says. “In the same way with Irish history, 30 years from now it could be that people will not want to portray the Troubles as they actually happened. But somebody who has lived through that cannot have that erased for political reasons just because it’s easier. They can erase it, they can erase it in terms of talking about it, but your real life still has issues related to that.

Even the sections of the novel that are set in the 1960s (e.g. the Berkeley riots) didn’t necessarily come from her own experience.

“In the life that I was painting for Irene I did research for the period outside of my own realm,” she explains. “In terms of my own life in that area – Berkeley for instance – it was actually a short period of time. I went off on what I thought was a holiday to England in 1966 and wound up staying there. I actually moved to Hollywood in 1977 and stayed there for three years and then came back again. But what always gave me a sense that I had never left was that I kept an apartment in St. John’s Wood. And somehow, when you have a home to go to, even though you’re somewhere else, you have this sense that your gravity is somewhere else.”

So how much of her own life is actually in the book?

“You know, I think none,” she laughs. “I think what’s in the book is . . . I’ve had experience as a singer, I’ve had experience as an actress – I lived in Hollywood so I know the Hollywood deal. I know a lot of people who became stars overnight. I saw a lot of people’s stardom manufactured by somebody else. My own didn’t happen in the way that Irene’s happened and, in actual fact, one of the things that I hear myself say when talking about the book is that, you know, I think we’re very much products of our time.

“You’re my daughter’s age and what I know is that in addition to who she is as a person and what the family and the input of the family has made her, a lot of what her life reflects is also about the times. She moved to San Francisco a few years ago to experience an America that is very different to the America that I knew. So when you ask how much of me is in the book, in a way, none of me is in the book. Because I’m reflecting upon a life that, in the large, was shaped before I was born.

“At the same time, I really was a singer, I really do know what it feels like to stand up on a stage and look out at an audience and hold the microphone and have it feedback on you. Now, I wasn’t the same kind of singer as Irene’s character. But holding a microphone is still holding a microphone. I know that the technology’s changed, but back when I was singing we used to have to walk around with leads!”

Does she still have anything to do with the music business?

“No, I don’t,” she says, shaking her head. “I find that it’s one of those disciplines where you either do it or you don’t. The music business is really a kind of subculture that operates at a different time of day and in a different mode of thought. I’m now very much a day person, I get up really early to write. But for 15 years I led a music business life and it was all about bands and guys in bands and people not getting up, people getting high and stoned and crazy, and definitely not functioning until 4 o’clock in the afternoon. So it was a very different sort of time for me.”

Was it a fairly destructive period in her life?

“Oh yeah. It was a very different sort of time for me though. I started in it when I was 19 – and in a way I guess it’s how I started writing because I was writing lyrics – and I really only stopped in the business because I felt that I wasn’t earning enough money as a single parent to keep my daughter in private schools and so on.”

The daughter in question is Karis Jagger, Hunt’s only child and Mick Jagger’s first. In the late ’60s, Marsha began an affair with the Rolling Stones singer while his then current girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, was busily enslaved to smack. During that period, he wrote a song about her – ‘Brown Sugar’. Although the relationship didn’t last long, Karis (who recently directed the stage adaptation of Marsha’s debut novel Joy) still links the pair.

“We were together for a year,” Hunt shrugs. “To be honest I wasn’t really into the band. I had a relationship with Mick and it was a private relationship, it wasn’t public. And the whole thing about us now, which is unusual, is that we have a 27-year-old daughter in common and so we saw each other at school fêtes and so on.”

So they’re still in touch?

“Oh yeah. Well, it becomes family, it’s a weird thing. His other children are her half brothers and sisters, you know. But we don’t see each other that often.”

Hunt now lives in Roundwood, Co Wicklow, with the Irish film-maker Alan Gilsenan, whom she met when Granada TV commissioned her to make a documentary about her hometown of Philadelphia (Gilsenan was the director). She wrote Like Venus Fading over two years in Ireland, finding the serenity of the country extremely conducive to the writing discipline. She’s vague about her future plans, mentioning more novels and various pieces of theatrical work without being too specific about either. She’s equally noncommittal about her past career(s) as well, refusing to identify a high point from the last three decades.

“I hope there hasn’t been a highlight,” she laughs. “I hope they’ve all been very high lit! In a way this probably seems irrelevant to this conversation, but being a single parent was probably the most focused of the various careers that I had, because I was constantly in the line of fire of temptation, as a singer with bands, out on the road and then acting in films, there was everything to encourage me not to do that job properly. But I think I did it pretty well in the end.”

• Like Venus Fading by Marsha Hunt is published by Flamingo (£15.99 Stg)