Sixties icon Marsha Hunt tells Kate Holmquist how she came to terms with having breast cancer
Love heals, but where do you find it when you're a bald, 59-year-old woman who has just lost a breast to cancer and is living in isolation in a village of 100 people in the French countryside? Even taking account for the fact that the ridiculously youthful Marsha manages to make bald and single-breasted a good look, true spiritual love doesn't happen every day.
Hunt has famously been made love to by Robert de Niro, Marc Bolan and Mick Jagger and has had other relationships since, including one with Alan Gilsenan, an Irish film and documentary-maker who Marsha nursed through colon cancer before the couple parted.
Yet when Marsha herself embarked on her "rock and roll cancer adventure" a year ago this November, she had no one great passion to help keep her alive, although she was sustained by loyal friends in Dublin.
A year ago next month, she chose to seek medical treatment here for a suspicious tenderness in her breast because she had seen how well Alan had been treated. A self-professed "exile" born in Seattle, Washington, she regularly hops between Dublin, France, the US and England but wanted to be in her Dublin home to be treated for cancer.
"A middle-aged black woman who nobody knows going to a doctor with a lump in her breast in New York? Come on, nothing's going to happen. I'd be waiting 18 weeks for an ultrasound, a few weeks more for surgery. Here it was all sorted out in a couple of days," she says.
Following the surgery, she had 30 "hits" of radiation and chemotherapy. When she returned to France in mid-February, it was dark, lonely and cold. Until, that is, she happened upon the e-mail address of a man with whom she had a "tingle" at Berkeley 40 years before, when she was 18 years old.
He had been a nice Jewish boy and she was a black girl so beautiful that the picture of her nude taken by Patrick Lichfield for the musical Hair would, one day soon, become iconic and Jagger would write his song, Brown Sugar, about her.
In 1965, though, she was no more than a student and a union between a white man and a black woman was regarded by most people as taboo.
When Marsha found her old beau's e-mail address on a friend's Blackberry, she instantly felt a "hit" of recognition and longing. She e-mailed him a short note and, to her surprise, he e-mailed back.
She was shocked to learn that he had lost his wife to cancer eight weeks previously, at about the same time as Marsha was being "slashed," "burned" and "poisoned" - her words for surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy.
Her Berkeley "tingle" was grieving the love of his life, while Marsha was struggling to embrace life at the cliff-face of mortality.
"I was blown away. He loved his wife, you don't meet men who truly love their women too often. So I fell crazy in love with him."
She is convinced that her powerful feelings of love for him kept her from getting sick during the chemotherapy. "He was such a good man. I've always hungered to be with a man who was nice. Not famous, or rich or complicated - just nice."
She's written a chapter about him in her book about surviving a year with cancer, Undefeated: Am I the same girl (Mainstream), just published.
"He was healed too, by our e-mail relationship. I have sometimes wondered if his dead wife was behind it, guiding us together because she knew he desperately needed someone to confide in and grieve with," Marsha says. "It was far deeper than the physical [ nonsense] that we put on top of love."
Three out of four women with breast cancer never get the cancer again and Marsha counts herself as one of this majority, even though by the time she sought help, her cancer was a 4cm lump that had metastasized to three lymph nodes. Her delay appalled her friends and family, including her daughter with Jagger, Karis, who had just given birth to her second child. They couldn't understand why Marsha waited for five months from the moment she felt the pain in her breast to the day she saw a "hot" breast cancer surgeon at St Vincent's Hospital, Dublin.
"I told myself that if I was going to die, or be so sick that I couldn't write, I had to finish the book I've been working on for the past five years.
"It's about Jimi Hendricks, but also about how and why society changed in the 1960s. I have a unique perspective on the Jimi Hendricks experience that no one else alive has because he and I shared something - black Americans who came to London were transformed and re-packaged for the US, although I never became successful there and he did.
"Stars like Jimi are not born; they're created by Machiavellians. I think I'm rewriting modern history. I decided that I would die for this book. It is the most important thing that I have to leave behind."
It was difficult for her to be surrounded by family and friends who were crying and upset when she was diagnosed. She said to them: "Can we chill a bit here? I'm going to either get well or die. I'm not afraid to die. So let's relax."
Her adventurous attitude had her turning her cancer adventure into a book project and a concurrent ITV documentary from day one.
The Marsha Hunt experience of cancer has been overwhelming for her friends and family at times. "Sometimes they look at me like I'm some sort of freak. They can't understand why my approach is so rational. From my point of view, I've had a fabulous life. I'm ready, whatever happens."