Catching Fire: Anita Pallenberg in Her Own Words
Keith Richards: “Anita just wanted to fucking kick it all over.”
To call Anita Pallenberg a muse would not be inaccurate.
During a particularly heady time, she inspired the Rolling Stones — longtime partner Keith Richards above all — but she was more than that.
Unlike some rock star companions, Anita didn’t seek out the spotlight for her own glory, but that doesn’t mean she didn’t have her own unique skills and interests. In their sympathetic and even-handed documentary, Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg, co-directors Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill (director of last year’s Restless Dreams: The Music of Paul Simon) attempt to provide a fuller picture.
As a music and film writer, as well as a fan of the Rolling Stones, I’ve read about Anita over the years, but mostly in bits and pieces. In the infamous tell-all Up and Down with the Rolling Stones, Keith’s former assistant and drug procurer “Spanish” Tony Sanchez describes Anita as “the foxiest blonde I had ever seen,” a blonde so foxy “she had only to walk along the street to cause a string of traffic accidents.”
In Zachary Lazar’s semi-fictional 2009 novel Sway, he imagines what life was like for Anita and her first Rolling Stones boyfriend, Brian Jones, the band’s tragic and tempestuous founder. It isn’t a pretty picture.
The facts as filmmaker Nick Broomfield presents them in his 2023 documentary, The Stones and Brian Jones, aren’t any more flattering to either party, though Broomfield, who has mellowed out over the years, isn’t as much of a muckraker here as he was in 2002’s Biggie & Tupac or 1998’s Kurt & Courtney. Fortunately, Anita and Brian didn’t stay together, but her higher-profile relationship with Keith Richards, who also appears in Sway, would represent a deeper connection–and a bigger set of problems.
Marianne Faithfull’s candid 1995 memoir, Faithfull: An Autobiography, on the other hand, presents Anita in a more empathetic light. “You can’t begin to imagine what she was like in those days!,” she exclaims. “Dazzling, beautiful, hypnotic, and unsettling.” The two women became friends while Marianne was seeing Mick Jagger, and they leaned on each other for support as the press hounded them while their male companions were too self-involved and/or strung out to give them the consideration they deserved.
Like Anita and Keith, Marianne became a heroin addict, and she pulls no punches in describing those wasted years, but she also emphasizes just how bright, funny, and fearless her “witchy” friend could be. Best of all, the friendship would outlive their Rolling Stones-oriented relationships. As Marianne wrote in a 2017 remembrance for The Guardian, “Until she got very ill, we spoke on the phone most days.”
Just as Poly Styrene’s daughter, Celeste Bell, served as the driving force behind the 2022 documentary I Am a Cliché, Marlon Richards, Keith and Anita’s son, serves as the driving force behind Catching Fire. In addition to producing, he provided the raw material to present Anita’s story from her point of view, mainly the unpublished memoir, Black Magic, he discovered after her passing (Scarlett Johansson voices excerpts).
As Marlon sees it, his family isn’t nostalgic, and doesn’t like to look back–”my mother was not someone who dwelled on the past at all”–and yet Keith did exactly that in his 2010 memoir, Life. Though Marianne and Keith don’t appear on camera, their audio contributions are consistent with their written recollections. With a few exceptions, most of the visuals come from archival material, some never seen before.
Instead of a cradle-to-grave portrait, Bloom and Zill focus on key moments in Anita’s life, like when she met German filmmaker Volker Schlöndorff, who provided her first acting job in 1967’s A Degree of Murder and hired Brian to compose the score – for which he roped in notable peers Jimmy Page and Rolling Stones associate Nicky Hopkins. Anita was modeling at the time, and she impressed Volker with her unique combination of strength and vulnerability, but he found it strange that she never discussed her German-Italian family or her Roman childhood (Volker also appears in the Brian Jones documentary).
In her memoir, Anita notes that her father was an artist and aspiring musician, while her mother was a devoted helpmate who would do anything to please him. Their homelife was fairly miserable. Anita, a strikingly beautiful young woman, rebelled by smoking cigarettes (she never stopped), listening to rock and roll, and dropping out of school at 16 – or getting expelled, depending on the source. It might have helped if her parents had supported her dramatic ambitions, but they firmly believed that acting was for “whores.”
Anita began her modeling career in New York, but she was more interested in what was happening in painter Jasper Johns’ studio or Andy Warhol’s Factory. She met the Rolling Stones in Munich in 1965 when she went backstage on a dare to kidnap one of the lads. Instead, Brian, in a manner of speaking, kidnapped Anita and whisked her off to London. She had zeroed in on the shaggy-haired guitarist, who she found the most attractive, and offered him hash. How could he resist? Keith, at the time, was too shy to attract her attention, but he made every excuse to visit the couple, besotted by Anita’s beauty and worldliness.
From a bad relationship with her parents, she segued to a bad relationship with Brian, who became less fun and more aggressive once he started gobbling prescription drugs like candy (as Nick Broomfield’s documentary makes clear, Brian didn’t emerge from a happy home environment either). “Why,” Marianne Faithfull wondered in her memoir, “did he beat Anita, whom he adored?” Keith became a Platonic port in the storm at a time when his bandmate had become rude, unreliable and violent–and Keith became something more during a trip to Morocco that Brian had to temporarily abandon due to a drug-induced respiratory infection. At first it was just a fling, but after Brian’s abuse shifted into overdrive, Anita was out.
Brian never completely recovered. In his short life, though, he fathered as many as six children with six women, so he certainly never lacked for female companionship. Mick, meanwhile, co-starred with Anita in Nicolas Roeg and Donald Cammell’s Performance in which they play characters not far removed from their real-life rock and roll personas (though shot in 1968, the film would not see release until 1970).
By then, Anita was an experienced film performer, but Mick was not. They became close, which led to a brief affair. She claims Keith knew, but he never said anything. Instead, he wrote “Gimme Shelter,” a song inspired by the Vietnam War–but about jealousy, too. He also had a fling of his own with Marianne.
VIDEO: Anita Pallenberg in Barbarella
Other notable 1960s films included Roger Vadim’s camp classic Barbarella, in which Anita plays the Black Queen–a part the occult-obsessed actress was born to play–and Richard Marquand’s scattershot adaptation of Terry Southern’s novel Candy, in which she plays a homicidal nurse. (In a sign of a very different time, Ringo Starr plays a Mexican gardener in Candy with a Jamaican-Liverpudlian accent.)
Anita began using heroin during the Performance shoot, but when she became pregnant with Marlon, their first child, she switched to morphine, inspiring Marianne to write, with Mick and Keith, the 1969 B-side “Sister Morphine,” which the Stones recorded for 1971’s Sticky Fingers. The end of the affair with Anita, followed by the end of his relationship with Marianne, led Mick to write another signature number, “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” which, like “Gimme Shelter,” would appear on 1969’s Let It Bleed (regardless as to who wrote what, Mick and Keith have shared songwriting credit since 1964).
Life with Anita and Marlon inspired another Let It Bleed number, “You Got the Silver,” on which Keith sings, “You got my heart, you got my soul, you got the silver, you got the gold.” While the Rolling Stones were on tour, though, he encouraged Anita to quit acting. Lonely and unfulfilled, she drifted back to the comforting haze of heroin. After the tour ended, and the ‘Stones became tax exiles, the band and their retinue relocated to the South of France where they recorded Exile on Main Street in Keith’s 16-room chateau, Nellcôte.
Against all odds, a brilliant album arose out of the chaos, but by then, Keith was also addicted. Anita, who served as house mother, was stern with the men, but kind to the kids, like Medium actor Jake Weber, who appears in the documentary, since his father, Tommy, served as the band’s coke supplier. For Marlon, the crazy fun came to an end when his parents split the scene after an arrest on drug charges, the beginning of a nomadic lifestyle that included 20 moves in three years. He doesn’t remember it with fondness.
The couple finally found a refuge in a remote region of Switzerland, where Keith and Anita welcomed a daughter, Angela. A third child, Tara, however, experienced complications, and died suddenly at 10 weeks of age. Anita was devastated, not least because Keith was on the road. Though his band mates tried to talk him out of it, he insisted on performing in Paris mere hours after he found out about his son’s death.
The family splintered at that point as Keith, Anita and Marlon moved to upstate New York, while Angela went to live with his mother in Dartford in Kent. After another tragic death in the Pallenberg-Richards home, the family splintered yet again as Keith moved to Paris, taking Marlon with him. The images of Anita from this period in her life are fairly alarming as she appears to have aged several decades in only a few years. The situation grew even worse when she moved to New York, where her life revolved around smack.
Anita would eventually get clean, earn a design degree, and make up for lost time with her children. She even returned to modeling and acting, appearing in art house films by Abel Ferrara, Stephen Frears and Harmony Korine. In Korine’s Mister Lonely, a film he made shortly after getting clean himself, she plays one of over a dozen celebrity impersonators who live together in a commune in the Scottish Highlands. Anita plays Queen Elizabeth II opposite her other Performance co-star, James Fox, who plays the Pope. It’s a touching film about identity and self-acceptance from a filmmaker not exactly known for his sensitivity.
But for all she contributed to the worlds of fashion and cinema, Anita Pallenberg will always be best known as a muse. Catching Fire, which includes comments from friends like model Kate Moss, goes some way towards expanding the image of her cemented in the public consciousness–a continental goddess with blonde bangs, ever-present cigarette, and unbridled rock and roll swagger–but it could have gone even further as it speeds through the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, while lingering over the white-hot 1960s and 1970s.
VIDEO: Film clip from Performance
Along the way, though, the documentary reveals something that goes unstated: Anita could write. Since she gave explicit instructions not to publish her memoir, however, the full text may never see the light of day.
Furthermore, she states at the outset, “I don’t think the lawyers will like it very much,” indicating that she did not hold anything back. The potent excerpts Scarlett Johansson reads reveal a facility with words, as well as a knack for unsparingly clear-sighted recollection–qualities she shared with her more famous ex-partner.
For a woman who didn’t like to look back, the memoir became a way for Anita to develop another one of her many, largely unsung talents. As Marlon Richards puts it, “It’s important that eventually she said something, and that’s what it is.”
As Anita herself wrote: “I don’t need to settle the score–I’m reclaiming my soul.”
VIDEO: Catching Fire official trailer
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