R.I.P. Anita Pallenberg

Below is just one of the many many sections in Keith Richards’ awesome memoir that describes the captivating power of Anita Pallenberg, actress, artist, muse, wild child, Connector (to use Malcolm Gladwell’s term) … You read about her adventures in the book with Brian Jones and then – more significantly – Keith, and you can’t believe it all went down that way. Racing across Europe, facing jail time, drug possession charges, fleeing to Marrakech, holed up in a castle, hiding out from Brian Jones, Keith says that it was “boinky boinky boink” all the way down to Africa … It’s all just too dramatic to believe.

What a life. She and Richards have three children and at this point, those children have children, making Richards and Pallenberg literally the coolest grandparents on the planet. Pallenberg was also an actress, appearing in a couple of classics in the period (Barbarella, Performance)

Here’s an excerpt from Richards’ memoir. He speaks of Pallenberg at length, and it is clear from all he says that although their relationship was tempestuous (understatement of the century), her role goes far beyond being an inspiring force to one of the most famous bands in the world. He loved her. He respected her. He “got” who she was, and he valued it. He respected it. He also starts off the Anita introduction with the immortal words, “Anita, sexy fucking bitch.” Maybe you have to be a certain kind of person to hear the love and respect in those words.

Here’s Keith:

One of the prime women in the world.

She 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 grandfather and great-grandfather were painters, a family that had gone down, apparently, in a blaze of syphilis and madness. Anita could draw. She grew up in her grandfather’s big house in Rome but spent her teens in Munich at a decadent German aristos school where they threw her out for smoking, drinking and – worst of all – hitchhiking.

When she was sixteen she got a scholarship to a graphics school in Rome near the Piazza del Popolo, which was when she started hanging out at that tender age in the cafes with the Roman intelligentsia, “Fellini and all those people,” as she put it. Anita had a lot of style. She also had an amazing ability to put things together, to connect with people. This was Rome in the Dolce Vita period. She knew all the filmmakers – Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini; in New York she’d connected with Warhol, the pop art world and the beat poets. Mostly through her own skills, Anita was brilliantly connected to many worlds and many different people. She was the catalyst of so many goings-on in those days. The people she mixed with were hard-core avant-garde in the days when hard core hardly existed.

Anita had a huge influence on the style of the times. She could put anything together and look good. I was beginning to wear her clothes most of the time. I would wake up and put on what was lying around. Sometimes it was mine, and sometimes it was the old lady’s, but we were the same size so it didn’t matter. If I sleep with someone, I at least have the right to wear her clothes.

She certainly made a man out of me.”

Think about the final two sentences of that excerpt. Its image of gender fluidity presented in a no-big-deal tone, freedom of identity and expression, a heady kind of freedom, threatening to the status quo, but organic to him, and to her.

There won’t be another Pallenberg. How could there be?

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