Interview

The hidden tapes of Anita Pallenberg: Fear, self-loathing and an affair with Mick Jagger

She was Keith Richards’s most famous muse but a new documentary, based on an unpublished memoir and audio tapes left behind by the Sixties icon when she died in 2017, reveals secrets she took to the grave. Jim Farber talks to the filmmakers and to her son Marlon Richards, and asks what they discovered about the late star’s ‘darkest period’

Sunday 12 May 2024 06:00 BST
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Play with fire: Marlon Richards, son of Anita Pallenberg and Keith Richards, explores his mother’s story with directors Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill in ‘Catching Fire’
Play with fire: Marlon Richards, son of Anita Pallenberg and Keith Richards, explores his mother’s story with directors Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill in ‘Catching Fire’ (Magnolia Pictures)

Marlon Richards doesn’t mince words. When the son of Keith Richards has, on occasion, gone on YouTube and seen nasty comments about his mother, Anita Pallenberg, on Rolling Stones-related clips, he has answered them in no uncertain terms. “I say, ‘This is me and you have no idea what you’re talking about,’” he tells me via Zoom from his home in West Sussex. “To comment on someone’s personal life with all that judgement is hurtful to everyone they know. I would really like them to see that Anita wasn’t who they assumed she was.”

Now, he finally has the chance to make that case via a new documentary titled Catching Fire. At nearly two hours, the film offers a far fuller and more nuanced picture of Keith Richards’s most famous, glamorous and notorious girlfriend of the Sixties and Seventies than has been presented by any previous depiction. At the same time, the film includes scenes that might only reinforce the judgements some have of her. As Pallenberg herself wrote a few years before her death in 2017, at the age of 75, “I’ve been called a witch, a slut and a murderer. I’ve been hounded by the police and slandered in the press. But I don’t need to settle scores. I’m reclaiming my soul.

Those defiant lines appear in a loosely constructed and never-published memoir that lends the documentary its focus and gives it a scoop. Richards discovered the manuscript in Pallenberg’s London apartment after she died. “I had no idea she’d been writing this,” he says. “She was very much like that – quite devious.”

Two years later, when the family were cleaning out Pallenberg’s apartment to sell it, Richards’s son found more – a Manolo Blahnik shoe box containing around a dozen audio tapes of his mother narrating her life, as well as typed transcripts of interviews she had given for a possible book. (Due to the poor quality of the audio tapes, Pallenberg’s quotes are read in the film by the actor Scarlett Johansson.) “The material was very raw and emotional and full of things she never would have discussed with me,” Richards says.

Chief among them are unfiltered expressions of shame and doubt never evident in a woman who preferred to present herself to the world with flagrance and flair. “She had a deep self-loathing that I only realised after reading some of the transcripts,” Richards says. “She really did despise herself.”

At the same time, she had an intelligence, talent and influence seldom appreciated by those outside her inner circle. Richards, who produced the documentary, was so determined to let every side of his mother be seen that he gave the film’s directors, Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill, carte blanche. In return, Zill says, “We tried to tell her story with the least amount of judgement possible. We’re not here to bring some moralistic, 21st-century perspective to her life.”

Instead, they aimed to frame Pallenberg’s story within the go-for-broke hedonism of the Sixties revolution she epitomised. To help, the film features lots of Super 8 footage that captures the louche adventures of the Richards clan, including Anita and Keith skiing in Switzerland in the Seventies while blissfully high on heroin, and lounging between bumps of blow in the south of France while recording Exile on Main Street.

In addition, Richards gave a long interview for the film, as did Marianne Faithfull who was Pallenberg’s close confident, especially during the years when the former was involved with Mick Jagger. Although Richards and Pallenberg split up by the Eighties – and despite the fact that the guitarist has been married to Patti Hanson for nearly four decades – the Sixties “It” couple remained close. She even died at his home from issues related to hepatitis C. In the film, Richards speaks of Pallenberg with wonder. “She was a unique piece of work,” he said. “I never quite figured it all out.”

Although Richards and Pallenberg split up by the Eighties, the Sixties ‘It’ couple remained close
Although Richards and Pallenberg split up by the Eighties, the Sixties ‘It’ couple remained close (Magnolia Pictures)

Still, some of those in the Stones’ camp were wary of Keith’s participation in the film. “Everyone was concerned about what Anita would say [in the unpublished memoir and unreleased transcripts] because she was a wild cannon,” Marlon says.

Yet, Zill says, in their interview with Keith, “We didn’t even ask a question for the first 30 minutes. He came in ready with lots of stories.”

So did friends from throughout her life, dating back to her days as a youthful hellion in Italy, through her years with the Stones, to her less documented, but still quite dramatic, later years. Born in Hamburg in 1942 during the Second World War, Pallenberg grew up in a family with a long lineage in the arts. Her grandfather was the painter Arnold Böcklin, whose most famous work, Isle of the Dead, hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum; others in the clan were poets, writers and artists. Yet her early life was mainly defined by the war, as Allied forces rained bombs down on Germany. “I didn’t learn to walk,” she wrote in her memoir. “I ran.”

Though highly educated, with a command of four languages, Pallenberg was expelled from her boarding school at 16 for her rebellious behaviour and immediately decamped to Rome where she became part of the La Dolce Vita crowd. A huge fan of rock’n’roll, she met the Stones in Munich in 1965, and quickly seduced Brian Jones. Along with her beauty, she was also far more educated and worldly than anyone in the group. “She definitely ran circles around them intellectually,” says Marlon. “She was well versed in literature and knew her way around the art world.”

Along with her beauty, Pallenberg was also far more educated and worldly than anyone in the group
Along with her beauty, Pallenberg was also far more educated and worldly than anyone in the group (Magnolia Pictures)

Same goes for Faithfull though, at the time, she was just 18 and Pallenberg 23. “Neither Anita nor I wanted to be with them because we wanted some of their power,” Faithfull says of the Stones in the film. “We had our own power.”

Pallenberg had enough of it even to affect the power structure within the band. She famously moved on from the abusive and self-destructive Jones to be with Richards. Her bohemian elan, insurrectionist spirit and fever for drugs rubbed off on Richards, giving him a role model for his persona as rock’s ultimate bad boy. “She used to laugh at Keith for being a lightweight,” Bloom says. “When they used to get really f***ed up together, Keith would pass out and she would poke him and say, ‘Get up!!’”

She also gave Keith a run for his money in the sexual realm. During the filming of the 1969 film Performance, which starred Pallenberg and Jagger, she and the Stones singer had a brief sexual relationship, despite her deep love for Richards. “They were all pretty cavalier about sleeping with people,” says Zell. “Everyone was talking about ‘free love’ but it was mainly the men who did it. Anita did it too.”

Jagger’s fleeting affair with Pallenberg hurt Richards, though, true to the times, he didn’t push the point. He loved her too deeply. He admired her just as much. In particular, her experience as a successful model, with a fine awareness of textiles and fashion, made an impression on him. Soon, he began to wear her size zero clothes. (“They had 23-inch waists!” Marlon said.) Despite the many ways they connected as equals, however, the guitarist wanted her to concentrate on him rather than on her career.

“Keith was quite old-fashioned that way,” Bloom said. “Even if you’re the wildest person playing rock’n’roll and doing drugs and having lots of sex, there are deeply engrained ideas about gender roles that were still there,” adds Zill.

Though it’s not in the film, the directors said that in their interview with Richards, he expressed regret about holding her back. “He told us, ‘I could have done things differently,’” says Bloom. “‘She was always drawing and painting and I really should have encouraged that,’ he said.”

Many observers believe her frustration, and subsequent boredom, led her further into drugs, a habit that had a major impact on her domestic life. When she became pregnant with Marlon, she tried to get off hard drugs but was still on methadone and far from sober at the time. Contemplating that today, the 54-year-old Marlon, a father of three, says, “It’s shocking. In hindsight, everything about that is shocking. I raised my children in a whole different way. I made a point of wanting a stable lifestyle for them.”

Richards, Pallenberg and young son Marlon in 1970
Richards, Pallenberg and young son Marlon in 1970 (Getty)

By contrast, Marlon was often left to his own devices as a child. In the film, we see him running around at the age of three during the recording of Exile while his father nods out. One speaker in the film, the son of the group’s local drug dealer, says that, when he was just eight, he asked Pallenberg if he could do what the adults were doing – ie, snorting coke. After hesitating briefly, she let him have a line. The filmmakers say they considered cutting that story from the film for fear it would alienate many viewers, but Marlon wanted it, he says, because he “wanted it to be a cautionary tale”.

At the same time, he has no judgement towards Pallenberg as a mother. “Even if she might have been off her face, she was very much in control of the situation,” he says. “The woman was quite fierce. The pros outweigh the cons in this scenario. I credit my parents with treating me as an adult from a very early age. They never condescended to me. I see that as a benefit.”

He sees sexism in the far harsher judgements that befall mothers like Pallenberg, rather than fathers like Keith, when it comes to child-rearing. “That’s why I wanted female directors for the film,” he says. “I just don’t think a male director would have the empathy.”

Still, it’s hardly just men, or outsiders, who have judged Pallenberg harshly. Keith Richards’s mother had serious misgivings about her son’s partner as a mother, exacerbated by a freak tragedy that befell the couple. In 1976, the two had a child, their third, named Tara, who died of pneumonia several weeks after he was born. Keith’s mother, who always considered Pallenberg “weird” according to Bloom, stepped in to raise the youngest of their surviving children, Angela, who was then four. “The death of my brother sent Anita into her darkest period,” Marlon says. “After that, she and my father never really reconnected.”

Toward the end of her life, she was being celebrated for something she was, rather than something she was associated with

At that point, Pallenberg was largely left on her own to deal with her demons and to raise Marlon in upstate New York. During that period, another horror befell her that contributed greatly to her image as a person who attracted darkness. In her late thirties, she began an affair with a 17-year-old boy, Scott Cantrell, whom she employed as a groundskeeper. One day, while watching Michael Cimino’s Vietnam war epic The Deer Hunter at Pallenberg’s home, Cantrell imitated a famous scene in which a character is forced to play Russian roulette. Tragically, he pulled the trigger on a loaded chamber, instantly ending his life.

“The house was full of unmarked firearms, which is definitely not safe,” Marlon says. “People have said that Anita was older and should have ensured that didn’t happen,” Bloom says. “But it was such a freak thing.”

Marlon Richards on his mother: ‘Even if she might have been off her face, she was very much in control of the situation’
Marlon Richards on his mother: ‘Even if she might have been off her face, she was very much in control of the situation’ (Magnolia Pictures)

Initially, Pallenberg was arrested but, eventually, the death was ruled a suicide. While her substance issues continued through much of the Eighties, by the end of the decade she cleaned up, to the shock of many. Despite some relapses, Pallenberg remained committed to a clearer way of living. “She realised she couldn’t go back to the way she was,” Marlon says.

She also went back to work, taking on acting roles after decades out of the business. In a delicious twist of irony, in 2007 she had a role in Harmony Korine’s film Mister Lonely playing the queen of England. She also got back into fashion, working with Marc Jacobs and Anna Sui, while being championed by Kate Moss as a role model and style icon. “People began to laud her,” Marlon says. “I love the fact that, toward the end of her life, she was being celebrated for something she was, rather than something she was associated with.”

Pallenberg even recorded an album of songs associated with Marlene Dietrich, produced by Hal Willner, which Marlon hopes will someday be released. Such achievements make him dream of a different life for his mother in which she pursued her many passions, including archaeology. “In an alternative life, my mother would be a chain-smoking, very chic archaeologist,” he said with a laugh.

To understand the life his mother led, Marlon says, viewers should see the film in the context of the world Pallenberg came from, shaped by the horrors of war, which inspired a great sense of adventure in artists like her and Keith.

“They were coming out of a world of austerity after the Second World War into a time that was exploding with music and fashion and drugs and the sexual revolution,” he says. “They were cosmonauts in that sense, doing things that no one had done before. Who knew what would happen afterwards? I just wish people would understand there’s humanity behind this. Ultimately, it’s just humans, being human.”

Tales of Anita Pallenberg from Marlon Richards

Pallenberg and punk

“Anita was a big lover of punk music in the Seventies. She fully supported the Sex Pistols, to the detriment of my father. [Punks hated “old fart bands” like the Stones.] She used to give his guitars away to them, telling Keith, ‘They need them more than you do. And they’re making better music than you are!’”

Pallenberg wrote in her memoir that she penned the lyrics to the Stones’ hit ‘Angie’ with Richards

“I had no idea that she had such a contribution to that song. She wrote it with Keith not based on Angie Bowie or Angela Davis, as most people thought, but about a transgender woman in London in the Sixties who had gone through the procedure. I’m not sure what Mick Jagger added to it, but that’s what she said the song was about from their point of view.”

Pallenberg continued to give Richard clothes that he wore onstage long after their relationship ended

When the Stones did the free concert in Hyde Park in 2013, she gave him this long, flowing scarf that actually f***ed up his opening riff to “Start Me Up”. It was blocking his hands. “F***,” he said. “Your mother’s always doing things like this!”

‘Catching Fire’ opens in the UK on 17 May

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