“I’ve been called a witch, slut, and a murderer,” Anita Pallenberg writes. “Maybe people confuse me with the characters I play in films ... But I don’t need to settle scores ... I’m reclaiming my soul.”
After Pallenberg’s death, in 2017, Marlon Richards, the eldest of her three children with Keith Richards, of The Rolling Stones, found a neatly typed manuscript. His late mother’s autobiography, here voiced by Scarlett Johansson, forms the spine of this tragic, surprisingly tender documentary portrait. Her words are clear, unsentimental and so evocative that you can almost smell the weed.
Born into what she calls Bohemian aristocracy in Germany’s stark postwar period, the self-styled wild child landed in New York in 1963. She washed brushes for Jasper Johns, hung out with Andy Warhol and attended parties with Allen Ginsberg. “I loved the feeling of culture exploding,” she recalls.
Her modelling took her “everywhere”, including Munich, where, in 1965, she first encountered the Stones and fell for Brian Jones, “the most beautiful one in the group”. Over two years the relationship descended into drug-addled abuse. Her white knight was Richards, whose fond, gravelled recollections sound an undying love. “She made a man out of me,” he says wistfully.
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Her relationship with and status as muse for the band was complicated. When she began a casual affair with Mick Jagger during the making of Performance, a wounded Richards wrote Gimme Shelter. When she returned home to Richards, Jagger wrote You Can’t Always Get What You Want.
[ Anita Pallenberg, actor, model and Rolling Stones muse, diesOpens in new window ]
How did Richards and Pallenberg survive the 1960s? It’s hard to say. Richards compares their tumultuous life to Bonnie and Clyde’s. They take refuge in Switzerland after a drug raid in the Riviera. Marlon notes the superficial resemblance between the family’s getaway idyll and The Sound of Music.
There remained darkness, drug use and the death of a son in infancy. A treasury of Pallenberg’s Super 8 home movies repeatedly depicts young Marlon parenting his parents. Somehow both survive and Pallenberg, having long negotiated a vital space in a man’s world, gets sober, goes to college and enjoys a return to film and fashion in a characteristically defiant second act.
Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg is on limited release from Friday, May 17th
