ANITA PALLENBERG: CREATING KEITH AND OTHER CALAMITIES
To say Anita Pallenberg was a Rolling Stones’ “groupie” or a “muse” is to misread her influence. Pallenberg made the Stones cool, dangerous and worldly. She turned Keith Richards, a shy guitarist who no journalist wanted to interview, into a style icon. She told him how to wear make-up and cut his hair and soon everything about him made sense. She also taught Brian Jones how to dress and Mick Jagger how to be a rock star.
But when Anita first entered the Stones’ orbit, fresh from Andy Warhol’s Factory, she was all about Jones. She dated Jones until he became abusive and unhinged, and Keith had to spirit her away from a horrible domestic violence situation. That’s when Anita and Keith got together and took as many drugs as human bodies could tolerate. They had three children before their relationship ended around the time Anita had an affair with a 17-year old, who went on to shoot himself with one of Keith’s guns.
In January, 2002, I might have had an idea of all of the above, but it wasn’t exactly at top of mind as I was getting ready to go out on my only night off. I was nearly out the door when the editor of the newspaper I worked for called and asked if I’d interview Anita Pallenberg. He said Anita had published a book and was doing just one print interview in Australia and her people had chosen the Sunday Magazine, which appeared in the Sunday Telegraph and Sunday Herald Sun. I told the editor I couldn’t do it because I had plans. Then he pulled out the big guns. He said he would consider it a “personal favour” if I did the interview. I’ve always been putty in the face of “personal favour” requests, so I cancelled everything and did the interview. And it turned out great! How could it not? I mean, it was with Anita Pallenberg.
ANITA Pallenberg -- movie star, model and style mentor for The Rolling Stones -- is on the phone from London, blandly admitting she was once “a pretty nasty piece of work''.
Sure, there was the booze, the heroin and the bed-hopping among The Stones. But it was what friend Marianne Faithfull refers to as Pallenberg's “evil glamour” that has inspired so many wild stories about the egocentric 1960s sex siren.
During her 12-years as Keith Richard's girlfriend and mother to his children, a feather-wrapped Pallenberg would stand on the balcony of the couple's country estate and taunt house guests with the words: “Who invited you?”
She also encouraged her staff to take drugs, and had a steamy 10-day affair with Mick Jagger while Faithfull, his girlfriend and her best friend, was in Ireland preparing to have his child.
Pallenberg, once a practising white witch, shrugs off her behaviour in between dropping the receiver and activating the answer machine: “Sorry, sorry, sorry. Bloody phone!”
It is early in the morning, after all. Much too early for rock royalty. Still, she wanted to use this interview to tell Australia that not every story about her is true.
“I take it with a pinch of salt,” she says. “Especially, certain people who claim their documentation is accurate and I barely remember them. I often wonder who these people were. Were they part of us or onlookers? It's quite intriguing to see how many people have popped out ofthe woodwork. There you go -- everyone wants a piece.”
At 56, more than 20 years after she and Richards split, Pallenberg is entering the maelstrom of fame once again, with a new book called Exile, featuring photographs of her and The Stones during an 18-month sojourn to the south of France.
It was there the band made Exile On Main Street -- sometimes cited as the best record of the rock era. The Stones, plus wives and girlfriends, moved to France in April 1971 to escape the 97 per cent tax they were paying on every pound earned in Britain.
Jagger set up home in Biot and St Tropez, Bill Wyman near Vence, and drummer Charlie Watts in Provence.
The actual recording of the evergreen Exile On Main Street took place in the $3000-a-week Villa Nallcote, a rambling mansion in Cap Ferrat which was home to Richards, Pallenberg, their son Marlon, several chefs and freelance photographer Dominique Tarle, whose pictures are featured in the book.
Pallenberg knows what is expected of her and it is not long before she is reciting Nallcote's guest list – “Eric Clapton, Jim Gordon, Bobby Keys -- I can't remember everyone.”
For the record, Swiss royalty joined them regularly, as did Richards' favourite drug dealer, “Spanish Tony” Sanchez. Guests were advised to bring narcotics rather than flowers, and Beatle John Lennon once threw-up on the stairs after taking pills with Richards.
“I remember John and Yoko sitting on the staircase huddled together,'' Pallenberg says. “The next thing I know John was really, really sick. That was actually the last time I saw John. I had become good friends with him when I was with (the the late Stones guitarist) Brian Jones.
“He and Cynthia (Lennon) would come around and we'd spend the night together drinking and playing and being silly.”
For Exile, the book, Pallenberg was asked to respond to photographs taken by the loyal and always-broke Tarle between 1971 and '72. Peering at a shot of herself and Marlon in a car driven by Richards, she says: “We don't look very happy. Keith's driving is not very good. We were all very traumatised when Keith was driving.”
She then discusses a photo where she is about to embrace Richards: “(That must have been) the early days of Nallcote because later Keith had longer hair. And I'm sure that in the end I wouldn't have been smiling like that.”
Hardly earth-shattering stuff, but the photographs are exquisite.
Picture books, Pallenberg says, are her preferred method of documentation.
She was once asked to write her autobiography on the back of Faithfull's notorious 1994 kiss-and-tell effort, but had the contract torn up after she failed to deliver “more names and more drugs”.
“I'm not willing to give,” she says. “I'm just not that type of person. I don't want my book to sit in a shop at Heathrow Airport. Marianne can do it because she likes to gossip. Whereas I find it something quite hard to deal with.”
Tarle's portraits of Pallenberg at Nallcote reveal a complicated beauty -- a Nordic princess one moment and a furious person striding towards the camera the next.
“I have fond memories of Nallcote,” she says. “But then I also have darker thoughts about the whole experience. It was very tiring. There was Mick's wedding (to Bianca in St Tropez). Loads of drugs.
“Also, I suffered total exhaustion from the music. I remember locking myself into the room to get away from the music. All night it would go. They would play in the basement. Any kind of corner where the acoustics were good. Down there it was hot and sweaty. I rarely went down there. Girls were not welcome, anyway.”
RELEASED in May 1972, Exile On Main Street contained some of The
Stones' finest moments, including Tumbling Dice, Sweet Virginia and I Just Want To See His Face. The album was a tribute to Richards, who briefly wrested control of the band from Jagger while he was preoccupied with Bianca and babies.
“I guess he was ready,” Pallenberg says of Richards. “He always had it in him. Mick had just gotten married and I guess Keith took advantage of the situation. It was really good that he did. It helped him a lot. As a musician, it pushed him at least five pegs up and it gave him a lot of self-assurance.”
Pallenberg, the daughter of Lutheran parents, was brought up in Rome and schooled in Munich. Before she made her name as an international model, she studied graphic design and was a photographer's assistant in New York.
It was after a Stones' concert in Germany, during the autumn of 1965, that she met the band. Jones, who was to die four years later, told her he was the leader, so she attached herself to him. When Pallenberg and The Stones returned to London, she introduced them to her young, aristocratic friends.
They would teach the band about style and decadence which, Faithfull says, became the perfect “counterfoil” to the raw blues of their music.
After two years with Jones, Pallenberg moved on to Richards and a relationship that would last 12 years, produce three children (their third dying after 10 weeks) and scale the heights and depths of hedonism and wealth.
During this period she also gained recognition as an actor, performing in Barbarella, Candy and Performance -- the scene of her 10-day fling with Jagger that so upset Faithfull and Richards.
“(Jagger) was sexy and I was probably sexy as well,” was her only response to the affair.
Now living alone in London, Pallenberg says there have been lovers since Richards, but none compare.
“You can't really top Keith,” she says. “He was somebody who was very hard to top, but reality is different. Our life together wasn't exactly idyllic. I'm not willing to give all my life to that kind of lifestyle.”
These days Pallenberg spends her time helping fashion designer pals and writing for Cheap Date -- a New York magazine that also employs son, Marlon. She admits she is surprised to still be alive. For that, she thanksvanity. Drugs, she says, are bad for the complexion.
“I guess I have a strong constitution,” she says. “We always put our constitutions down to being war children – me and Keith. Keith was sent away and I grew up poor in Italy. That built our constitutions. Poverty makes people very strong.''
Anita died in June, 2017, ageed 75 due to hepatitis C complications