In 1986, she asked Billie Holiday for aid in recording a new kind of record with producer Hal Willner. Faithfull and Willner spent weeks just listening to records, everything from spirituals to torch singer laments. The album they created was not a strident rock record. Instead, she sang against subdued instrumentation provided by Bill Frisell's uncanny jazz guitar, accompanied by Lou Reed bass player Fernando Saunders elegantly anchoring the beat. In that classy musical setting, Faithfull sang about life lived in a penthouse as well as on the "Boulevard of Broken Dreams." "I've had my share/of love, life and money," she declared on another song. She also recut "As Tears Go By," revealing it as a brilliant elegy to lost youth.

There was one daring, yet terrible moment on the album. She covered Leadbelly's "I Ain't Goin' Down to the Well No More" a cappella. Her voice proved too European to "chameleonize" African-American spirituality. We can be thankful Faithfull moved on to embrace composer Kurt Weill -- the crown prince of European jadedness -- and by the 1990s, she had become the best living interpreter of his work. (Ute Lemper, so sorry.) On perhaps the most perfect record of her career, "20th Century Blues," she sang backed only by piano and upright bass. She recorded predictable chestnuts like "Mack the Knife," but even dared to tackle "Falling in Love Again" and out-Dietriched Marlene. Faithfull was now an eternal Venus in furs.

But she still appeared to be publicly weighed down by her '60s past. In 1995, she was encouraged by a publisher to write her autobiography. "They told me, 'It's going to be good for my soul' and all that. I thought, 'Yeah, right.' I wrote it because they gave me a lot of money." During that time she was also offered movie roles. Producers wanted her to play doomed chanteuse Nico (the woman who perhaps discovered Morrison in the tub). Faithfull was also considered to play Madonna's maid in "Evita." "The last straw," Faithfull told me, "is I was offered a lot of money to do an ad for Mars bars."

Is it a candy bar that Faithfull will be remembered for in the end? On her most recent album, "Vagabond Ways" (a wonderful state-of-the-art "rock" record aided by the ghosts of Herman Melville and Marcus Garvey), she sings a wry Leonard Cohen song that goes, "I was born like this/I had no choice/I was born with the gift of ... a golden voice."

Long after Faithfull is gone, her exhausted yet "golden" voice should be what we remember her for. It's the voice you hear when all the bars have closed, the whores have gone home and you're out of cigarettes. The voice of lost innocence. Or maybe the voice singing at your enemy's funeral.

Marianne Faithfull believes no one listens to this voice anymore. "People only know my name," she says. "They don't know what I do. I'm just a name." Even if that were true -- and it's not -- at least she has a great one. "Yes, I do," she agrees, giving a dry Cruella De Vil laugh, "although people always thought I made it up."

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