Twisted Tales: Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull and the X-Rated Candy Bar

In their few million years on Earth, the archaeological marvels known as the Rolling Stones have inspired a bottomless pit of myths and legends. There's the public urination incident; the mysterious blood transfusion; the purported sex change; the fall from a coconut tree. Then there's the infamous case of the pornographic Mars Bar.

Marianne Faithfull was a folk singer with aristocratic roots in the Habsburg family dynasty when she met the members of England's newest hitmakers through their manager, Andrew Loog Oldham. Her first pop hit was a version of the Stones' 'As Tears Go By,' and she was soon a key figure on the Swinging London scene. Though she married in 1965, she was determined to call one of the Stones her own. "I slept with three and decided the lead singer was the best bet," she told the New Musical Express.

On a getaway weekend with friends at Keith Richards' Redlands estate in Sussex, England, Richards and Mick Jagger, the Stones' Glitter Twins, were arrested in a police raid. During the bust, Faithfull, who had just emerged from a bath, was wrapped in an orange fur bedspread; she later acknowledged briefly flashing the police for her own amusement.

Sometime before the trial a month later, a rumor began to spread that the police had barged in and caught Jagger with his head between Faithfull's legs, munching on a curiously placed Mars Bar. Its genesis most likely stemmed from the police report, which apparently featured details of Richards' secret stash of sweets; by some accounts, a liquid lunch between officers and reporters around the time of the trial may have led to the beginnings of the rumor.

Faithfull, whose eventual breakup with Jagger was followed by a period of heroin addiction and homelessness, dismissed the story of the abused chocolate bar in her 1994 autobiography. "The Mars Bar was a very effective piece of demonizing," she wrote. "It was far too jaded for any of us even to have conceived of. It's a dirty old man's fantasy -- some old fart who goes to a dominatrix every Thursday afternoon to get spanked. A cop's idea of what people do on acid!"

Still, the rumor persists. Adding to the intrigue is the fact that Faithfull's great-great-uncle was the Austrian nobleman Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, whose erotic novella 'Venus in Furs' was the source for the term "masochist." Meanwhile, Mars Bars are now marketed in Europe -- seriously -- with the slogan "Pleasure you can't measure."