Anita Pallenberg: "She was the catalyst"

Actress, artist and muse Anita Pallenberg has died. Pallenberg had a 12-year relationship and two children with Keith Richards, but first she dated Rolling Stone Brian Jones, after famously bringing him hashish backstage after a concert in Munich.

In her memoir Faithfull, Marianne Faithfull wrote,  "How Anita came to be with Brian is really the story of how the Stones became the Stones. She almost single-handedly engineered a cultural revolution in London by bringing together the Stones and the jeunesse dorée (the fashionable youth)."

Jones reportedly mistreated her, and she and Richards were drawn to each other. They hooked up while traveling and checked into a hotel as the Count and Countess of Zigenpuss. "By the time we got to Valencia, it was summer," Richards wrote in his autobiography Life. "I still remember the smell of the orange trees in Valencia. When you get laid by Anita Pallenberg for the first time, you remember things." The next stop was Marrakesh, where band members were hanging out with Very Important Pothead Paul Bowles and Brion Gysin, who contributed the hashish fudge recipe to the Alice B. Toklas cookbook.

Faithfull with Pallenberg in London

Anita ended up in prison overnight a drugs charge in Rome while filming Barbarella. While filming Candy based on the Terry Southern novel, co-star Marlon Brando "kidnapped her one night and read her poetry and, when that failed, tried to seduce Anita and me together," Richards wrote, adding "Later, pal."

As so often happens with power couples, forces conspired to pull them apart. When Anita was cast opposite Mick Jagger in Performance,  tongues wagged about a possible affair with a third Rolling Stone. It was during this time that she says she started using heroin. 

In 1972, Anita was arrested for marijuana in Jamaica, and the Rastas took care of her children while she was in jail. In 1977, she and Richards were arrested and charged with hashish and heroin possession in Toronto. After undergoing a painful withdrawal and facing a long sentence, Richards repented and went into rehab, including electroshock therapy, according to The Sun & The Moon & The Rolling Stones by Rich Cohen.

In his memoir Life, Richards wrote: "Anita came out of an artistic world, and she had quite a bit of talent herself—she was certainly a lover of art and pally with its contemporary practitioners and wrapped up in the pop art world." Her ancestors were painters, and she hung out with "Fellini and all those people" at the age of 16 while on scholarship to a graphic school in Rome. "Anita had a lot of style. She also had an amazing ability to put things together, to connect with people...in New York she'd connected with Warhol, the pop art world and the beat poets....She was the catalyst of so many goings-on in those days."

At one point Anita introduced the band to filmmaker Kennith Anger, who took them down the road to Aleister Crowley and satanic stuff, culminating in "Sympathy for the Devil," and forever attaching the word "witch" to Anita (who did backup vocals on the track). She also inspired the song Angie, among others, and was a fan of Timothy Leary, who visited them in France. 

Apparently Anita left behind no writings of her own. She made a memorable appearance in 2001 on the British series “Absolutely Fabulous,” playing the Devil in a fantasy sequence, alongside Faithfull, who played God. In her later years, she retired to "an allotment in Chiswick where she grew strawberries, artichokes, leeks, broad beans and enrolled in botanical drawing classes" according to The Telegraph. 

ADDENDUM 7/2024: A new documentary, Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg is based on her autobiography Black Magic, discovered by her children after her death. Read in excerpt by Scarlett Johannson in the film, Anita's voice recounts how she gave up modeling when she started doing acid, deciding that she couldn't do both, "And I really loved acid." She also recounts how, when Brian Jones began having bad trips and getting aggressive and abusive with her, he was also taking doctor-prescribed pharmaceuticals like STP, Mandrax, Dexadrine, and barbiturates for his asthma. 

The film recounts how, after having Richards's child, he encouraged her to give up her acting career and left her home alone with the baby to go on tour. Her heroin use continued and she hit rock bottom after their third child died at 10 weeks of crib death. After nearly dying herself from an alcohol overdose, she got clean, went back to school for a college degree, and returned to acting. 

Kate Moss is interviewed in the film, saying, "I didn't know her when she took drugs, but she was so interesting without them." Moss credits her idol Anita with setting an iconic style, "the original bohemian rock chick that people still aspire to today." Eschewing plastic surgery as "naff" (very unchic), Anita's look was extraordinary in her later roles, including playing Queen Elizabeth in Mister Lonely (2007).