Chapter Nine
The stories of Stones’ women are relevant because of what they reveal about their men. Hearing that Mick treated Chrissie and Marianne heartlessly, that he was serially unfaithful, had moths in his wallet and failed to support them after things fell apart – which he should have done, given that he was a rich celebrity and that the attention he attracted impinged upon both their privacy and their ability to recover – we recognise a pattern of behaviour from which Mick would never veer. He professed to welcome the baby he conceived with Marsha Hunt, until Karis was actually born. He then denied paternity, and left Marsha with no alternative but to launch a humiliating battle to force him to contribute to the cost of educating and raising her. Only years down the line would he forge a close relationship with his firstborn.
When his first wife Bianca filed for divorce after seven years of marriage, on grounds of his adultery, he lawyered her down to a fraction of her due. As for Jerry Hall: after fifteen years together, she discovered that he cheated on her with a future First Lady of France, actress Carla Bruni, only a day after Jerry had given birth to their third child, Georgia May. When she learned that Mick had conceived a son, Lucas, with yet another woman, Luciana Gimenez Morad, Jerry threw in the towel, before being deprived of the satisfaction of divorcing him, since their ceremony in Bali was not a legal marriage in the first place. As a result of which, Jerry bit the dust with a shameful settlement. If only in recognition of the fact that she had given him four children, he should have left her both dignified and comfortably off. Mick’s victory, though, was hollow. That single act of gross disrespect diminished him. It turned factions of the public against him. Like he cared. All that mattered was the dosh in the bank. What he cared about was that it stayed there.
It must comfort Chrissie and Marianne a little to know they were not the only ones; that Mick behaved just as selfishly with the women who came next. A victim of his own rapaciousness, he was driven to pursue what he couldn’t have – a monarch’s sibling, a Madame Head of State, the spouse of a pal, a fellow musician’s daughter, his best friend’s girl – until he got her. Once his desire was satiated, he craved her no longer and went sniffing for someone else. This was not the kind of man to make a life with. Mick was never marriage material, a safe bet, someone who would keep himself only unto you so long as you both lived. They must have known. Yet still they fell at his feet, as predictably as autumn leaves.
Flattered by his initial rapt attention, they basked in his reflected glory and were bewitched by his wealth and fame. Not just the groupies and the party girls. Not just the models, the actresses, the television personalities and the porn stars he favoured. Not only the Americans and South Americans for whom he must have a soft spot (there having been many). Mick pulled women of every nationality, profession and walk of life. He seduced socialites, aristocrats, political wives. He bedded publishers, editors, photographers and journalists, perhaps to pay the media back. What about the workers, the nannies, cooks and housekeepers? Was that just a droit de seigneur thing? Did any of them truly believe they would be gifted the Jagger heart? Or were they well aware that they were being used and would soon be discarded, but dropped their drawers for the hell of it, perhaps thinking it might be something to tell the grandkids? Were they simply curious to know what it would be like, a rock around the cock of the world’s most exaggerated sex symbol? Have many not wondered?
Even when Mick did commit himself to long-term relationships, it was only half-heartedly. His philandering broke the women who loved him. He seemed fascinated by females who gave the impression of not needing ‘a man’, yet who were in fact utterly dependent on them. He appeared to be enchanted by that beguiling combination of innocence, worldliness and dysfunction such as he found in Marianne – who was a doll, a perfect physical specimen, with a wide-eyed child’s face and the body of a whore, with daddy issues and boarding-school hang-ups, bereft of siblings, the product of a broken home. Marianne, sex on legs, daring, damaged and frail, was the ultimate rock’n’roll woman. Mick would keep searching for and finding her throughout his life, for she came with all kinds of names. The young, silly, pretty, careless, impressionable girls he gobbled for breakfast. They made him look good. They must have made him feel like a stud. Which suggests that he lacked confidence in his masculinity. Because of his bisexuality? There’s a question.
He was clearly attracted to men. His long-rumoured dalliances with Brian Jones’s replacement Mick Taylor, screen actor Helmut Berger, Rolling Stone magazine publisher Jann Wenner and even with his old mucker Keith have never been denied. His decades-long obsession with David Bowie erupted into the public domain in 1985, when the pair recorded a cover of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas’ ‘Dancing in the Street’ for Live Aid. The sexual tension between them in the David Mallet-directed video ignited the screen. The record shot to No. 1 in the UK and No. 7 in the US, and all the old rumours resurfaced.
The two A-listers had always hung together and hero-worshipped each other. They often ravished each other in print. They are known to have indulged in frequent threesomes. Backing vocalist Ava Cherry was once the meat in that sandwich: ‘Even though I was in bed with them many times,’ she revealed, ‘I ended up just watching them have sex.’ Playboy Playmate Bebe Buell had similar experiences with David and Mick. ‘I used to get some pretty strange phone calls from [them] at three in the morning,’ she told American author Christopher Andersen for his biography of Jagger, ‘inviting me to join them in bed with four gorgeous black women … or four gorgeous black men.’ Bowie would tease the press with ambiguity, never confirming or denying anything. Jagger evaded questions with a ‘stick to your knitting’ expression. Besides, rock’n’roll has always flirted with androgyny. It’s about performance, the spectacle, entertainment. What else is sex to an entertainer, if not performance art?
Could it be that he harboured a deeply rooted aversion to that aspect of himself, and pursued endless females in order to suppress the homosexual urge? Just asking. Different times, back then. Upbringing, social prejudice, traditional values and views on decency and acceptability all played their part. Only a theory, of course. He’s not telling us, is he. But it fits. For a man like Jagger, the dissonance between who he really is and the character he projects is something he has always managed brilliantly. Reticence about accepting a bisexual identity may have been the very thing that led him to womanise so relentlessly. It could equally have been the thing that allowed him to continue indulging in homosexual encounters. Because we didn’t expect it of him, we didn’t see it. Picture Jagger the shagger as a bisexual icon: pretty powerful in our enlightened age. Rock’n’roll really would have come full circle.
For all that they had in common, Anita Pallenberg was the antithesis of Marianne. Tigrine and confrontational, with a bite as bad as her bark and a right hook to dodge if you saw it coming, she came with her own baggage and complications. It was she, not Marianne, who embodied the spirit of the Rolling Stones. More than merely a muse, she was intrinsically a part of them. ‘Anita is a Rolling Stone,’ was the view of Jo Bergman, a PA and later manager to the band between 1967 and 1973. ‘She, Mick, Keith and Brian were the Rolling Stones. Her influence has been profound. She keeps things crazy.’ Keith won her, loved her, became addicted and was devoted to her. He procreated with her and could barely tear himself away from her, not even when their newborn died on her watch, though he did draw the line after her teenage lover shot himself in the marital bed. Although he fell in love with and married someone else, he never got over her. It must have been to his great relief that his only wife Patti Hansen – the American model and (briefly) actress whom he married on his fortieth birthday in December 1983 in Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, and who gave him daughters Theodora and Alexandra – was big-hearted enough to respect his previous relationship, and embraced Anita as part of their family. ‘I like a high-spirited woman,’ Keith admitted in his memoir. ‘And with Anita, you knew you were taking on a Valkyrie: she who decides who dies in battle.’ He also once observed that she ‘knew everything and she could say it in five languages. She scared the pants off me.’ Not for Richards the shy, retiring wallflower. Patti has always been a force to be reckoned with too.
Anita lied about everything, starting with her age, which the writers of her obituaries misreported. The error was understandable. Born in Rome during the Second World War, her birth certificate was not accessible. After her death in 2017, her survivors confirmed that she had arrived on 6 April 1942, and had therefore been seventy-five. She has been described as Italian, German, Swiss and Swedish. A cross-breed of all four, and more. She kept her origins ambiguous and was a snarl of self-constructs and contradictions, with the result that her identity was more a matter of who she set out to be than of who she was. Although she projected as being vaguely blue-blooded and a descendant of old European money, her family were not well-off. She seemed to me to personify Peter Sarstedt’s evocative 1969 hit ‘Where Do You Go To (My Lovely)?’ about a Neapolitan street urchin who faked her way into high society, swanning from Juan-les-Pins to St. Moritz, designer-dressed and hanging with Picasso. With looks and charm enough to carry her into the most rarefied circles, Anita conned everybody.
Her German parents Arnoldo and Paula were both working in Rome at the turn of the forties: her amateur-musician father for a travel agency, her mother at the German embassy. Anita’s elder sister Gabriella had been born pre-war. By the time their second daughter was on the way, the country was under Nazi occupation and her father was in the north, cooking for Italian troops. She didn’t meet him until she was three years old. Like her future soulmate Marianne Faithfull, she had daddy issues.
Anita’s earliest ambition was to become a Catholic priest. ‘It had great allure and mystery,’ she said. ‘I like what’s forbidden.’ Verboten could have been her middle name. It was certainly her modus operandi. Her default was to go against the grain. She attended the Swiss School in Rome, and was later despatched to her parents’ homeland to board at Bavaria’s Landheim Schondorf school, where she was expected to acquire the native language and culture. One of only twenty girls at the establishment housing two hundred pupils, in a foreign country a thousand kilometres from home, Anita swallowed her separation anxiety and stood up to the offspring of Nazi officers. She held her own, excelled academically, sailed, skied, smoked, drank, partied herself sick and was expelled, damn it, which precluded her acceptance into university. She decamped to Munich, got into art school, thwarted an attempted rape, developed an abhorrence of men as a result and reinvented herself as a lesbian. She would later declare that she had always been bisexual.
Back in Italy in 1959, she signed up at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma to study restoration and graphic design. She grew bored and dropped out. She fell in with Federico Fellini’s crowd, who were in town to shoot La Dolce Vita.1 She was seventeen, blonde, beautiful and up for anything. She watched the Wall go up in Berlin, and discovered rock’n’roll on Hamburg’s Große Freiheit, witnessing the embryonic Beatles hitting their stride. She hung with Andy Warhol’s Factory studio gang in New York, and absconded to Paris on a modelling assignment. Not because she was enamoured with the fashion industry. The opposite. Like so much in her life, the pursuit was a means to an end. She slid into screen acting during her sojourn in the French capital. She got to know and shacked up with bohemian artist and film-maker Mario Schifano, eight years her senior … the same Schifano with whom Marianne Faithfull would later elope, the one whom Mick sent packing from the cottage he had bought for Marianne’s mother.
She was trolling about in 1965 when she was invited by a friend to a Rolling Stones gig in Munich. They wound up backstage before the show, where the fledgling groupie offered around her hash. The boys declined, explaining that they couldn’t do drugs before going on stage. It wouldn’t be long before they reversed that habit, to the point that pre-gig indulgence virtually became mandatory. It was Brian Jones who nabbed her. She was like gazing into a mirror, his own exquisite hair and visage reflected back at him. She slipped into his hotel bed that night, and that was that. They were joined at the hipness for the next two years, garbed identically. These Beautiful People shared everything, including their clothes. She styled and beguiled the Stones, transforming the raw, raucous tykes into rock stars.
It couldn’t have been all bad, or it would not have lasted that long. But Brian’s grip on reality and on the Stones was sliding. Ostracised by Mick and Keith, egged on by Andrew Oldham, Brian lost control. Drink and drugs made him paranoid. He took his insecurities out on his girlfriend. On a jaunt to Morocco in 1967, Keith witnessed a particularly vicious attack. In love with Brian’s woman for as long as he could remember, he took his chance, hurled her over his shoulder and carted her back to Blighty. They were together for the next twelve years. Once he got with Anita, Keith shaped up. He started wearing make-up and getting his hair cut in designer salons. He began to fashion an idiosyncratic look that would soon become the template of ‘quintessential rock star’, and which would eventually go whole-hog pirate. Brian couldn’t stand it. Wherever Keith went, Anita followed, a reminder of what they’d once had. He couldn’t overcome the ignominy and move on because Anita was always there, right under his nose.
‘Anita seduced everybody,’ said rock journalist Robert Greenfield, who lived with her and Keith while he was writing his book Exile on Main St. A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones. ‘She was so powerful that very few people were immune. There was her extraordinary physical beauty and the sharpness of her mind. She was crazy and beautiful, and crazy beautiful.’
She was also astute. She perceived immediately that there was only one person on earth for Mick, and that no woman could compete. ‘From when I first met them, I saw Mick was in love with Keith,’ she explained. ‘It’s like they’re married, and they’ll probably be that way for the rest of their lives.’
Life as Keith’s lady was lush in those salad days. But then the thrill began to wear thin. The mega-wealth alone would have satisfied most rock wives, but Anita always wanted more. Boredom was the killer.
‘At that time no girls were allowed in the studio when they were recording,’ she said. ‘You weren’t allowed even to ring. I did other things, I didn’t sit at home.’ She reignited her movie career, to Keith’s dismay. He reportedly offered her £20,000, enough to buy a house back then, to refuse a part in Barbarella with Jane Fonda.2 Yeah, right. She co-starred as Nurse Bullock in the sex romp Candy,3 and she did a lot of drugs. She said that she started using heroin while filming Performance with Jagger, aborting a pregnancy to secure the part of Pherber, the dangerous other half of Mick’s imagination. She probably did screw Jagger during the shoot, but would always deny it. Keith was consumed by jealousy. He and Anita were already parents by then, their son Marlon having been born in the Dulwich maternity unit of Kings College Hospital, London, in August 1969. Anita had convinced herself that Brian Jones’s spirit would be reincarnated in their baby, whose given name was a perverse dig at Anita’s Candy co-star Brando. The star of The Wild One had kidnapped Anita, and had tried to seduce her with poetry. ‘ … when that failed, he tried to seduce Anita and me together,’ Keith scoffed. Nice try, joker. She had already been seduced psychologically by Kenneth Anger, an American occultist and film-maker who had wormed his way into the rock scene during 1968. He befriended Mick, with whom he also worked, as well as Keith and Anita. Anger had the name ‘Lucifer’ tattooed across his chest. He promoted Satanism, witchcraft, sadomasochistic sex and the use of hallucinogens such as LSD. It was from him that Anita learned her spells, with which she loved to terrorise people. Their reaction to them gave her a sense of power.
When the band quit England for the South of France and recorded Exile on Main St. at Keith’s rented villa, the couple were often busted for drugs. Anita lived up to her position as lady of the house, running the staff, the visitors, the suppliers and the dealers and seeing off the local constabulary. Keith could handle his habit, most of the time. Although his girlfriend was joining him for a hit now and then, they said, it was mostly recreational. She could stop any time she wanted, she would say. And then she couldn’t.
‘It wasn’t like that,’ insists former journalist and newspaper editor John Blake, who knew them personally. ‘I got so involved with the Stones over the years, and it was fascinating to watch what happened to them. Anita was indeed in thrall to Kenneth Anger, a very nasty piece of work, and there were all the implications of black magic and sinister goings-on. She was very sophisticated and worldly. She got hooked on heroin first, and she wanted to get everyone else shooting up. She dragged Keith in. He was young and innocent when she got hold of him. He and Mick were just working-class kids who didn’t have a clue. They fell in with women who showed them a different side of life and made them aspirational. Marianne got Mick hooked on fifty-grand chandeliers. Anita got Keith hooked on heroin.’
Her second baby was conceived while Keith was by his own admission ‘hooked big-time’. She couldn’t say for sure who the father was. This desperate period is one that Keith neglects to confront in his memoir, perhaps for fear of hurting his eldest daughter, or quite possibly because he doesn’t remember … even though, as he says, ‘I haven’t forgotten anything.’ Fearing that the child was Mick’s, Anita begged Keith’s PA to help her get an abortion. She made arrangements several times to have the pregnancy terminated, but never made it. In the end, it was accepted that Keith was the dad.
Anita used heroin during her second pregnancy, perhaps as an antidote to her desperation regarding paternity. She was terrified that her baby would be born an addict. She gave birth in a Swiss rehab clinic in April 1972, to a baby with a cleft lip and palate. Keith wasn’t present for the birth, but he wasn’t far away: he was ‘being cleaned up’ by a doctor up the road in Vevey. Which was, he said, ‘fucking awful … you wonder why you’re doing this to yourself when you could be living a perfectly normal fucking rich rock star life. And there you are puking and climbing the walls.’ He was still in the clinic when she delivered. He picked up his guitar and started singing out of nowhere ‘Angie’, not knowing that he had a daughter, nor that the word coming out of his mouth would have anything to do with her name. It was Anita who called her Dandelion Angela Bellstar.
Four years later, beyond the Stones’ legendary Touring Party of America, beyond the searing success of Exile on Main St., across Europe, the Pacific and out the other side, through It’s Only Rock ’n Roll and on to the Tour of the Americas, more suicides, deaths and destruction and with the Richardses back on the smack, Anita managed to give Keith a third child. They named their second son Tara Jo Jo Gunne, after their friend the Irish Guinness heir who had blown his mind out in a car a decade earlier. Soon afterwards, Keith hit the road with seven-year-old Marlon. The feral child who should have been at school became his father’s minder, on the 1976 Stones’ Tour of Europe. Hiding the smack, cleaning up his cack and tucking the gun back under Dad’s pillow, he was growing up way too fast. Anita, hopelessly out of it, should never have been left at home alone with a newborn and a four-year-old. But she was, and the consequences were tragic.
The caller reaches him in Paris, just as the band are about to stroll out on stage. Anita has found Tara lifeless in his cot. He was a little over two months old. Does Keith abandon the gig, burn rubber through the night back to Geneva to support his distraught partner, pick up pieces and hold his loved ones tight – which is what anyone else would have done? Does he fuck. The show must go on and it does, his glassy-eyed, sleep-deprived son gazing at him from the wings through infant eyes that have seen too much. Keith hasn’t had the heart to tell that him his baby brother has died. Denial most desperate. Keith knows.
‘Only Anita knows,’ he wrote. ‘As for me, I should never have left him. I don’t think it’s her fault; it was just a crib death. But leaving a newborn is something I can’t forgive myself for. It’s as if I deserted my post.’ They never talked about it, and never got over it. Keith didn’t even know, when he came to confront it during the writing of his memoir almost thirty-five years later, where his son was buried … ‘if he’s buried at all.’
He was right when he said that a dead child never leaves you. He lives inside you forever, a nagging reminder of where you went wrong. But was it ‘just a crib death’ or ‘cot death’ (as we used to call SIDS – Sudden Infant Death Syndrome4)? Anita was a smack addict. Heroin use by a mother during pregnancy often results in neonatal abstinence syndrome (NAS). An unborn baby who becomes dependent when heroin passes through the placenta into their system, suffers withdrawal when the drug is no longer forthcoming. Symptoms include excessive crying, fever, irritability, seizures, inability to feed, slow weight gain, tremors, diarrhoea and vomiting. It is not uncommon for such babies to die. ‘I am sure that the drugs had something to do with it,’ Anita admitted. ‘And I always felt very, very bad about the whole thing.’
As for Keith, he had never discussed the tragedy. Not publicly, at least. He cut himself slack thirty-nine years after it happened when he revisited, during his appearance on BBC Radio 4’s Desert Island Discs, his decision to go out and play instead of rushing home to confront the unthinkable. ‘Maybe it was a sense of self-preservation … it was a rough, rough thing,’ he told presenter Kirsty Young in October 2015. ‘And I had a feeling … I must go on stage now and I’ll worry and grieve and think about all this after the show. Because if I didn’t go on the stage, I’d probably have shot myself.’
He had given up heroin for good in 1978. He continued to use cocaine until 2006, when he jacked it in after he fell from that branch while on that holiday, and was rushed into theatre for emergency brain surgery. Until then, he had continued to take risks because he had always got away with it. ‘The man who death forgot’ had made a habit of dodging the reaper. He was almost electrocuted during a soundcheck in 1965; nearly burned to death six years later when his bed caught fire; survived a blaze at his country home Redlands in 1973, and another there in 1982; walked unscathed from a Laurel Canyon, Los Angeles house that burned down around him in 1978, escaping naked with a blonde who wasn’t Anita. One of his favourite guitars was destroyed in that fire, his five-string Zemaitis Macabre with custom pirate artwork;5 and he suffered severe concussion in 1998 when he fell in his library as he reached for a book. Few cats have had more lives than Keith. How many to go?
After Tara died, Keith continued to take care of Marlon. Where he went, so did his boy. Anita being in no fit state to look after Angela, their little girl was lodged with Keith’s mother Doris in Dartford while they tried to sort themselves out. Which never happened. The child lived with her grandmother for the next twenty years. Keith stood by Anita, but things were never the same. When he was arrested in Toronto in February 1977 with so much heroin on him that he was accused of importing in order to deal it, he found himself facing a possible life sentence. At which point he blinked, stepped backwards and saw the light. The Stones, their music, had to come first. Had Keith gone down, the band would have been over. Oh yes, better stay alive and out of prison for the sake of the kids. He had no choice but to get clean. So did Anita. He succeeded.
In 1979 – the Toronto court having stunned the world by letting him off drug charges with no more than a year’s probation, and having submitted to electro-therapy treatment in the US – Keith was recording with the band and with his new best friend Jack Daniel’s in Paris when Anita really did hit rock bottom. Still paralysed with guilt over the death of her child, she was confused and disoriented. The family were by then based at Frog Hollow, a glorious nineteenth-century clapboard manse with all the trimmings – wooden shutters, dormer windows, acres of land – in South Salem, New York State, a quick commute north-east of the Big Apple.6 The house had all the familiarity and charm of the kind featured in American Christmas movies,7 give or take the beefy bodyguards.
Set in a desirable hamlet with rich, respectable neighbours and access to excellent schools, it was not Anita’s speed. She was a city chick. A life of isolation in the bucolic reaches did not suit her. All too aware that Keith was out there cavorting with other women – specifically one other, Swedish model Lil Wergilis – while she was stuck at home orchestrating Marlon’s school runs and homework, depression got the better of her. Because she was drinking and taking methadone, a medicine used to treat heroin dependence, and after having fallen and broken her hip, she gained so much weight that her beauty deserted her, never to return. Her once glowing skin was saggy and bruised. She nursed an almost permanent cold. She was only thirty-seven but looked hunched and spent, on the brink of old-womanhood. Her little boy bore the brunt of her mood swings and angry outbursts. She would later express deep sorrow at the way she treated him. ‘Marlon was fine until he had to go to school,’ she told me years later in London. ‘He was better off on the road with Keith. That might sound crazy, given how Keith was, all those years. But I’m telling you, he was a much better parent than me.’ She was seeing ghosts, of her younger, more hopeful, spirited self, and of indigenous Americans. They were sometimes the same thing. She drowned her sorrows and took a teenager to bed. The seventeen-year-old, Scott Cantrell, was one of four kids from a broken home. He was also a high school dropout on a road to nowhere. Like Anita, he was needy and dysfunctional.
Cantrell was on the Richards household payroll, employed as a groundsman. He commuted to work from his father’s home in Norwalk, Connecticut, on the north shore of Long Island Sound, half an hour each way. Knowing that his boss’s common-law wife was attracted to him, the chancer took advantage of his position. In a blink, they were sleeping together. From that point on, the kid was unpleasant to the child, taunting Marlon that he was closer to his mother than he was, and promising to shoot his now estranged father if he dared come around.
Things came to a head during the evening of Friday 20 July, when Anita and Scott were up in the marital bedroom and Marlon was in the living room, watching the tenth-anniversary retrospective of the Apollo 11 moon landings on television. His tormentor was lying in his mother’s bed above his head, toying with one of Keith’s guns, a .38-calibre Smith & Wesson revolver. Then he shot himself, at point-blank range. Anita tore screaming down the stairs to her child, drenched in Scott’s blood. Marlon rushed up to his mother’s bedroom, and saw a sight he would never unsee. How did Scott find the gun? Did Anita give it to him? Did she shoot him? Were the wild ones playing some sick, sordid game, or was it, as later reported, Russian roulette?8
Somebody came for Marlon, the Lewisboro PD came for Anita, and the story (naturally) leaked to the press. It hit London via the wire and reached John Blake, who was at the time a rising star music writer on the Evening News.
‘We heard this guy with Anita Pallenberg had shot himself dead,’ recalls John, and we knew that the Stones were recording in France at the time. The news editor said to me, “Get yourself out to Paris, see what you can get.” I had no idea where they even were, and no clue as to where to start looking.
‘I got lucky. I found myself sitting next to this guy on the plane who was a music business executive. We got chatting, and I told him what I was up to. “That’s no problem,” he said, “the Stones always work at Pathé Marconi Studios [in Boulogne-Billancourt, about five miles to the west of central Paris; the studios are no longer there]. They start recording at about eleven o’clock at night and they work through to the next morning. If you want to see them, go down there really early and you should catch them.”
‘Off I trot at about five o’clock the next morning. I find the studio and walk straight in, no trouble. And there’s Mick, standing in the middle of the room with a great long beard. He looked round at me and stared. I could tell he recognised me from somewhere, but he couldn’t quite place me. He paused, as if trying to remember, and then he said, “Ah, have you got the stuff, man?” He thought I was the bloody dealer! There was this hideous, pregnant pause, and then I said, “No, Mick. I think you’ve mixed me up with someone else. I’m here to see Keith, to find out what he has to say about this awful tragedy with Anita.”
‘It was at that point that I noticed Keith standing there, staring at me from across the room. And he started wailing. “Oh, man,” he went, “oh no, this is terrible, it’s horrible!” And then he ran off and hid behind Charlie’s drum kit. I’m in the middle of the room surrounded by Rolling Stones, feeling rather threatened and thinking, “What do I do now?” And all the while, Keith is going, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh no, I don’t wanna talk about it!” It was really awkward. “Fuck,” I thought. I had no idea what to do. Then Ian Stewart, their lovely keyboard player who was always such a gentleman, wandered over and said to me, “Can you go away now? Would you mind?” “I’m so sorry,” I said to him, “I have to ask. I’m only doing my job.” And I left the studio with a single quote to my name. We got the splash.’
Former Stones’ publicist Keith Altham remembers it well. “John Blake did indeed get himself into the recording studio in Paris,” he affirms. ‘Bloody good journalist. Everyone was out of it. John must have looked the part, and he walked right in. Imagine that, now. He had also tipped me off that he was going, because he didn’t want to do the story. A kid had died, and it seemed inappropriate. I tried to get hold of Mick in the studio, but he wouldn’t take my calls for some reason. I had to laugh when I heard that Mick thought John was the drug dealer. Then John turning to speak to Keith, and him keeling over on the studio floor like a dead dog, behind Charlie’s kit. At which point, as Stu reported back later, Mick had the last laugh.
‘ “As you can see, John,’ he drawled, “Keith wants to talk to you real bad.”’
But neither Stones nor their women wind up in jail. Money talks. So do lawyers. It was rumoured that Keith’s millions marched Anita out of trouble. Not that this deprived the media of their exposé-fest. Tales of satanic rituals and drug-fuelled orgies in ‘that evil house’ ran for weeks. Anita was part of a witches’ coven, and the sisters at a local convent were helping hacks with their enquiries, the whole nine. But Homicide got nowhere. A verdict of suicide was ruled. Anita paid no higher price than a thousand of Keith’s dollars, a fine for unlawful possession of firearms. What has never been explained is how the gun got from the bed to the top of a chest of drawers across the bedroom. Who moved it? Why? How come it bore no identifiable fingerprints?
Scott Cantrell’s family attempted to sue Anita and Keith, for corruption of a minor and all that ensued. The case went nowhere, but maybe should have done. ‘People fail to understand that this was a thirty-seven-year-old woman and a seventeen-year-old child,’ said Cantrell’s sibling Jim in a statement. ‘Even if Scottie pulled the trigger, I hold her responsible for my brother’s death.’
The lawmen may have saved Anita, but it was nail-in-the-coffin time for their relationship. She and Keith partook of a farewell fling in a New York hotel. She was so ashamed of her bloated body that she couldn’t fathom what he still saw in her. ‘I was really overweight,’ she said, ‘and I really didn’t think he liked me, but I guess he loved me because he wanted to make love to me. But I didn’t feel worth it for him. I said, “You brought out the worst in me.”
‘Anita Pallenberg was the image of every man and every woman’s worst fear of what they would become,’ snarled American journalist Greil Marcus in Rolling Stone magazine. ‘Fat, bloated and ruined – not simply to excess but beyond recognition, not simply beyond sex but beyond gender. She seems likely to be remembered, if she’s remembered at all, as just one more cast-off.’
Anita is certainly remembered. She is even, in certain circles, almost revered. The shocking fall-out of her extreme drug abuse – the death of her baby; the blown-out brains of a teenager spattered across her walls; the trauma suffered by her ten-year-old son – are referenced openly, and even glamorised. It has been said for years that there should be a film about her. There likely will be, if the Faithfull flick works out.
Her detractors hasten to damn. Not so fast, suckers. Because Anita turned herself around; she went back to college in 1994, investing four years in a degree in fashion and textiles at Central Saint Martins in London. Having despised the fashion industry for most of her life, it was a curious career choice. She appeared in a few more flicks before whisking herself off to work in ‘the Pink City of India’, Jaipur.9 One could see why: the place is a wonderland of culture, heritage and architecture, and famous for its traditional fabrics, jewellery and handicrafts. Anita found her way back to beauty. ‘I would have stayed in Jaipur forever,’ she said. ‘We were doing organic textiles and spending most of the time out in the desert.’ But a mercy dash to tend to her dying mother detained her in Europe for the next five years. By the time she was free to return to India, she felt too old and creaky, and had lost her nerve. In 2001, she popped up in Jennifer Saunders’ and Joanna Lumley’s Absolutely Fabulous on television, playing the Devil opposite Marianne Faithfull’s God.
Into her sixties and with less than a decade to live (had she known that, what might she have done differently?), Anita was living alone in London. Did or didn’t she marry one Gabriel Roux in 1982? No one seems sure. She spent her time whizzing around SW3 on her bike, growing her own food on her Chiswick allotment, and drawing and painting at art class. Old lady pursuits. She developed diabetes but resisted insulin treatment, probably horrified by the thought of having to self-inject again after the line-drawn-under low years of shooting up. A host of ailments and illnesses afflicted her. She had both hips replaced, became sick with hepatitis C, took to the bottle again after surgery in 2004, and signed up for AA meetings.
When I met her at a supper party at the Chelsea home of mutual friends, she looked riven and almost mummified, but was still full of herself. She was bitching about model Kate Moss, whom Anita’s old friend Marianne had recently called a ‘style-stealing vampire’ in The Times. ‘She is, too,’ snapped Anita. ‘We invented our style from scratch, and these gyps of girls just copied us, passing our look off as their own. Makes me want to shoot them!’ She was brilliantly self-deprecating, recounting the time when singer Courtney Love had asked her if she’d consider plastic surgery. ‘As I said, I told her straight. “Darling,” I said, “I was the most beautiful woman in seventeen or eighteen countries. I love being ugly!”’
Keith supported her financially from the moment he split until the day she died. He even paid for her new teeth, she said. What a gent. It was complications from hepatitis C that finished her.
‘I don’t want who she really was to be forgotten,’ commented Marianne in the Guardian in 2017, shortly after Anita’s death. ‘People think of her in one way – a ’60s muse, all that shit – but she was so much more than that. A really talented artist, a great actor, intelligent, funny, thoughtful, fearless. She truly didn’t give a fuck what anybody thought of her. I was desolate when she died. Until she got very ill, we spoke on the phone most days. I don’t want to sound sentimental or sappy, she’s worth more than that. She was so important to me.’
A Rolling Stone Anita Pallenberg surely was. Not only did she appear in Jean-Luc Godard’s film about them, Sympathy for the Devil, she also sang backing vocals on the track itself; summoning her obsession with the occult and giving rise to hysterical rumours that the Stones were agents of Satan. Right. If anyone was, it was her! What a laugh she and Keith must have had about that. She was the one casting spells, holding séances, flaunting a ouija board and dragging the others out at night on the hunt for UFOs. It’s said she ‘believed in all that’, ho hum, but she certainly used it to control others, by making them fearful and insecure. Keith wrote ‘Gimme Shelter’ about her alleged affair with Jagger while they were filming Performance, tormenting himself that their love scenes were not pretend.
‘Beast of Burden’ and ‘All About You’ are blatantly about her, even though Keith would sometimes argue otherwise. But it is the song ‘You Got the Silver’ from the December 1969 album Let It Bleed that really showcases his love for this strange, erotic, erratic woman from the Eternal City who in so many ways was more than him. Who made him what he became. It was the first Stones song on which Keith sang solo lead vocal. It was that special to him.10
‘Can I touch a feeling here?’ he mused on the Ask Keith YouTube channel, when somebody enquired about it. ‘ … I always try and capture feelings rather than explain things or make a point about anything … cos you’re usually wrong if you try and do that, at least I am.’ Which actually reveals the very thing we need to know, if you read between lines: that Keith is because Anita was. He couldn’t articulate it in so many words, but it’s there.
Keith came from New York to spend time at her bedside in St Richard’s Hospital, Chichester. She let go only after he left. ‘A most remarkable woman,’ he wrote on Twitter. ‘Always in my heart.’ He, Patti and their daughters Theodora and Alexandra returned for her humanist funeral. Ronnie Wood’s daughter Leah and her husband Jack, and friends including ‘gyp’ Kate Moss and designer Bella Freud attended too.
‘I saw her four days before she died,’ said her friend Jo Wood, ex-wife of guitarist Ronnie. ‘It was natural. She was not very well. She had a fall last year.’ As my mother says, it’s always a fall. ‘Keith is devastated,’ Jo added. ‘Everyone is.’
Anita had found her way home. On her deathbed, she was only a wander from Redlands.