MUSE WHO NEVER STOPPED ROLLING
SHE WAS THE IDEAL ROCK CHICK WHO LIVED AN UTTERLY FASCINATING LIFE ON THE EDGE OF STARDOM
Anita Pallenberg, who died at the age of 73, was sexual muse to three of the Rolling Stones; she did drugs, sadomasochistic sex and dabbled in black magic, yet lived to tell the tale.
A ravishing beauty with a shock of blond hair, heavily kohled eyes and a stickthin frame, she epitomized the ’60s “rock chick.” But there was something more dangerous about Pallenberg than there was about, say, Marianne Faithfull, another Stones groupie who recalled Pallenberg’s “terrible smile, which was quite frightening, too, all those teeth.”
She had an autocratic foreignness which people found both scary and seductive. She sometimes claimed to be a witch.
Her effect on some members of the group was calamitous.
When she first met the Stones in 1965, she was just 21. But she had already appeared in films and fashion magazines, knew Andy Warhol and “everyone else” in New York, could say “f--off” in six languages, knew about drugs and was highly qualified in the arts of sex; her model agency billed her as “too beautiful to get out of bed.”
She had gone backstage after a Stones gig in Hamburg to offer them drugs, but they refused. She was unimpressed, regarding them as ignorant “schoolkids” and determined to set about their education.
She was aloof, immoral and utterly fascinating, and it did not take long for band members to fall under her spell.
She began with Brian Jones, who was “kind enough” to agree to smoke some of her hashish and sniff her amyl nitrate.
“We ended up back at his hotel room and I spent all night holding him while he cried.”
Within a week the guitarist had evicted his girlfriend and their baby from his flat and installed Pallenberg. She treated him to an uninhibited crash course in sadomasochistic sex.
It was a whirlwind life: “We’d stay up all night and go to Stonehenge at dawn. You’d be in your satin miniskirt out in the middle of nowhere,” Pallenberg recalled.
As well as experimenting with the occult, the couple took LSD together, an experience that precipitated Jones’s decline into paranoia.
Matters came to a head in 1967. She and Jones decamped with Richards to Marrakesh to chill out. Travelling through Spain, Jones was forced to stop off in hospital.
Pallenberg and Richards continued without him, making love in the back seat as Richards’ chauffeur drove on. Richards and Pallenberg became a devoted couple.
Somehow their relationship survived the making of Donald Cammell’s film Performance (1970), in which Mick Jagger and Pallenberg starred, making love, so it was claimed, as the cameras rolled.
“There was all kinds of sex going on,” she recalled, “but I put it down to method acting.”
Richards was furious but forgave his lover (“I mean, hey, I’d stolen her from Brian,” he recalled).
The birth of a son by Richards (named Marlon, after Brando) a month after Jones’s death did nothing to bring her to her senses. While heavily pregnant with their second child, Dandelion, Pallenberg was taking heroin daily.
The pair became more and more dependent on drugs. In February 1977 she and Richards flew out (five days late) to join the other Stones on tour in Canada. At Toronto, customs officers found hashish in her bag and a spoon that held traces of heroin. They were arrested.
It was clear things could not go on as before and by mid-1979 Richards, in Paris, had begun to wean himself off heroin. Living at his farm in South Salem, north of Manhattan, Pallenberg was watching television one night with a 17-year-old neighbour named Scott Cantrell when, in what may have been a disastrous game of Russian roulette, Cantrell shot himself dead with one of Richards’ guns.
Although the police later cleared Pallenberg of involvement in Cantrell’s death, her relationship with Richards was over.
After several half-hearted attempts to sober up, in 1987 she finally summoned up the willpower and booked into a clinic in Kent, from which she eventually re-emerged, sober if not entirely penitent.
Of mixed Swiss, German and Swedish parentage, Pallenberg was born on January 5, 1944. Her father was a frustrated composer who became the owner of a travel agency in Rome.
A rebellious child, Pallenberg hung out with the street children of Rome, “skipping school, going grave-digging, drinking at the beach, having boyfriends with Vespas. All that Italian dolce vita stuff.”
At 18, she set sail for New York. Later, on a modelling assignment in Hamburg in 1965, she went to see the Stones and began the odyssey that led to a rehab clinic.
WE’D STAY UP ALL NIGHT AND GO TO STONEHENGE AT DAWN. YOU’D BE IN YOUR SATIN MINISKIRT OUT IN THE MIDDLE OF NOWHERE. — ANITA PALLENBERG