Death of a groupie
She bedded two or even three of the Stones. But as she dies at 73, Anita Pallenberg’s life of debauchery and drugs is a cautionary tale for anyone who wants to glamorise the Sixties
SHE first appeared backstage at a Rolling Stones concert in Munich, seemingly just another of the mini- skirted groupies drawn to the raw, sexuallycharged glamour of the new stars of rock and roll.
With her long legs and ravishing blonde covergirl looks, Anita Pallenberg easily navigated her way past security and into the dressing room.
There she found Brian Jones, founder and original leader of the Stones, distraught and close to tears after coming off stage following an apparent row with fellow bandmates Mick Jagger and Keith Richards.
Pallenberg had brought with her a wrap of cannabis and a phial of amyl nitrate, or ‘poppers’ as they were known.
It was 1965 and Jones, who was already disappearing into a drug-crazed world, wasted no time on small talk.
‘I don’t know who you are,’ he told her, ‘but I need you. Will you spend the night with me?’
Pallenberg was to later recall: ‘It was a strange way to start an affair. That first night we spent together, he cried the entire night. We were in bed and I held him in my arms and he couldn’t stop crying, like he’d been holding back all this pain and now he was able to let it go.’
When the band moved on to Berlin, Pallenberg came, too. She was 21 and it was the start of a volatile and at times deeply destructive relationship with what was to become the world’s greatest rock and roll band.
For her part, the Italian-born and German- educated model seemed utterly unimpressed with the Stones, whom she considered ‘little schoolkids’.
They, however, were bewitched by her — as Keith Richards famously said: ‘She knew everything and she could say it in five languages. She scared the pants off me.’ He was right to be scared: over the following decade-and-ahalf as muse to at least two Rolling Stones, she was to wreak emotional havoc in their lives.
After dumping Jones, who was often brutal and violent towards her, she began a long romance with Richards, with whom she had three children and — though she always denied it — was said to have had a fling with Jagger, too.
No wonder the band’s former assistant Tony Sanchez described her as the woman who ‘almost broke up the Rolling Stones’.
But then, the life and times of Anita Pallenberg provide an insight into the hedonistic Sixties that is as tantalising as it is disturbing.
Pallenberg, whose death at the age of 73 was announced this week, was at the dark heart of not just that decade but also the 1970s. A party girl who came to symbolise the style, the creativity and the decadence of that era, she was, recalls an old friend, ‘a luminous beauty in the Sixties, a strungout junkie in the Seventies.’
And of all the beautiful people those years produced she perhaps seemed the least equipped to survive the excesses of sex, drugs and rock and roll.
Born in Rome in 1944, she was sent to a Munich boarding school because her Lutheran father wanted her to learn to speak proper German. Prone to skipping classes, she was expelled at 16.
After studying graphic design, she moved to New York where she hung out with pop artist Andy Warhol’s notorious crowd and became a photographer’s assistant. By the time she went backstage at that Stones concert, she had worked as an actress and model, too.
This, then, was the hypnotic figure who moved in with Brian Jones. Their relationship was nothing if not volatile. Blows were freely exchanged between the two, sometimes for pleasure, sometimes not.
With an increasingly drunk and stoned Jones spiralling out of control, Keith Richards began providing her with a shoulder to cry on — and soon rather more besides. In 1967, the three drove through Europe to Morocco. En route, Jones was taken ill after a day smoking cannabis and drinking brandy.
Pallenberg and Richards contin- ued without him, making love on the back seat of Keith’s blue Bentley with the chauffeur trying not to watch too closely in the rear view mirror.
When Jones eventually tracked them down and started beating up Anita, Keith put her back in the car and drove back to England. They settled down as a devoted couple — but life was far from tranquil.
Other members of the band saw her as a threat, she said. Jones was ousted from the Stones in June 1969 and was found drowned in his swimming pool the following month.
Meanwhile, armed with that same confidence which had
‘The once luminous beauty became a strung-out junkie’
Love scenes with Mick made Keith jealous Led away by police, her shirt wet with blood
enchanted Jones and the notoriety of having loved not one but two Rolling Stones, she seduced Hollywood.
In her early years with Richards, she starred in the hit sci- fi film Barbarella with Jane Fonda, Candy with Marlon Brando and, of course, performance, opposite Jagger.
But her relationship with the Stones soured once they became a huge money-making machine.
‘No girls were allowed in the studio when they were recording,’ she later recalled. ‘ You weren’t even allowed to ring. I did other things, I didn’t sit at home.’
One of the things she did was drugs. She had started using heroin when filming the violent thriller performance.
A jealous Richards was convinced the film’s love scenes weren’t simulated and that pallenberg and Jagger were having an affair.
Indeed, the most gripping passage in Richards’ acclaimed memoir, Life, concerns his writing of the Stones’ seminal hit Gimme Shelter during filming.
He devotes the best part of six pages to insisting he wasn’t upset by pallenberg’s infidelity, a claim undermined by the bitterness with which he dismisses performance as ‘ third- rate porn’ and, famously and humiliatingly describes Jagger’s ‘tiny todger’.
He recalls: ‘I didn’t find out for ages about Mick and Anita, but I smelled it. Mostly from Mick, who didn’t give any sign of it, which is why I smelled it…
‘I never expected anything from Anita. I mean, hey, I’d stolen her from Brian. So you’ve had Mick now, what do you fancy, that or this? It was like peyton place (an American soap opera) back then, a lot of wife swapping or girlfriend swapping.’
Anita herself always maintained the love scenes were just ‘acting’.
When the Stones moved to France to escape the taxman in the early 1970s, she went too. It was in France that the band recorded exile On Main Street and their lifestyle plunged to new depths of decadence.
Anita was often to be found lounging on the terrace in a leopard-print bikini, made lazy both by the heat and the heroin. Richards was just as likely to be under the influence.
When the Stones met to record, they were obliged to work on ‘junkie time’ with sessions arranged at midnight and Keith turning up three or four hours later.
The couple had a child, Marlon (named after Anita’s one time costar Brando). The baby’s first words, famously, were ‘ room service’, so used was he to living on the road with the Stones.
Their second baby, a daughter, was christened Dandelion, but now uses her middle name Angela.
After the birth at a private clinic in Montreux, Switzerland, her parents moved into a luxury hotel. The squalor in which Anita lived horrified observers.
Stones’ assistant Tony Sanchez recalled how he and Richards would take the children out while ‘Anita languished in solitary splendour, smoking her joints and jabbing needles into her bottom.
‘After three weeks, there were empty bottles everywhere, fag burns on the mock Louis XIV furniture, and the sheets were an uninviting shade of grey.
‘The maid stuck with the onerous task of cleaning out the suite and insisted on fumigation.’
Disaster was now dogging the couple with a series of police raids and court appearances. Anita was arrested at Richards new villa in Jamaica for possession of cannabis and thrown into jail, where she was attacked and assaulted.
A third child, Tara, was born in 1976 but died in his cot at ten weeks. Richards later wrote that he only got to change his new son’s nappy twice.
After the baby’s death, Keith’s mother Doris said Anita was not a fit parent and took Angela to live with her, while Marlon stayed with his parents.
Anita later said: ‘Keith was very calm and protective and normal and loving. He just said “forget it”. And everybody else told me the same thing. I’m sure the drugs had something to do with it. I always felt very, very bad about the whole thing.’
The house they had bought in Switzerland, where Tara was born, was locked up and they never set foot in it again.
After that, everything seemed to fall apart. Drug dealers arrived regularly at Redlands, Richards’ Sussex estate, and the couple spent hours on end in a stupor.
Arrested in possession of heroin in Toronto, Richards escaped jail and underwent rehab — and Anita went with him. It worked for him, but not for her.
By now it was clear to all their friends that for his own survival Keith needed to split from Anita. She was installed in a house in New York State, with instructions to make sure Marlon went to school — but the set-up unravelled into disaster.
In 1979, a 17-year-old handyman called Scott Cantrell, with whom pallenberg had been having an affair, shot himself in the head in Richards’ bedroom while she had her back turned.
Richards was away recording with the Stones in paris and Cantrell, it was claimed, had been lying in bed playing with one of the guitarist’s handguns.
It was ten-year-old Marlon who phoned the emergency services.
pallenberg was led away by detectives, her shirt wet with the teenager’s blood. There were rumours that he had been playing Russian roulette, inspired by the Robert De Niro film The Deer Hunter, and that she was involved in black magic.
Although Anita was cleared of involvement in the teenager’s death, she and Richards finally parted.
Addiction still had her in its grip. In a rare moment of introspection, she later admitted she never thought she would live to see the year 2000, such was her consumption of drugs. ‘I really thought I was going to die of heroin addiction,’ she said. At one stage she said she wouldn’t make 40.
Deep in the throes of her vices, she blew up to 13 stone and once spent a month in the Grosvenor House Hotel in London without ever leaving her room.
eventually, isolation and loneliness drove her to seek help and in 1987 Anita’s sister got her into rehab.
Finally clean, she went back to school, embarking on a four-year fashion and textile degree at Central St Martins in London where her graduate show was dubbed ‘a triumph of style over substance abuse’. And for a while she also went back to modelling for the designer pam Hogg.
In a remarkable turnaround, the world’s most famous rock chick was in recent years more likely to be found looking after her grandchildren, tending to her allotment in Chiswick, or cycling across London to a botanical drawing class at Chelsea’s historic physic Garden, than indulging in any excesses of old.
She was hard to recognise from the beauty who captivated first Jones and then Richards. She walked with a limp, the result of several hip replacements and that beautiful, beguiling face was lined with the years of hard living.
Yet the smoky German accent remained and she still possessed what her friend and fellow partner in excess Marianne Faithfull, Jagger’s ex love, called her ‘evil glamour’.
By 2014, she was able to boast that she hadn’t touched drugs for 14 years. Her years of addiction,
she said, had not been lost years but years spent in a cocoon. Drugs, she said, had kept her ‘more childl i ke… they stop emotional growth.’
While Richards is still married to Patti Hansen, the model he wed in 1983, Pallenberg never married. Time, however, went a long way to heal any wounds between the former lovers.
She was often to be found at Redlands, her old marital home where Richards allowed her to live while he was touring, or at one of his other homes.
In recent years, Richards said that he would always love Pallenberg and in an interview remarked at what pleasure the two of them had found in becoming ‘ proud grandparents’.
‘A most remarkable woman,’ he said yesterday. ‘Always in my heart.’
For her part, the woman who loved not one but at least two Rolling Stones, said of Richards: ‘ He was always the best.’