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LongBeachArena72

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MisterDDDD

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LongBeachArena72

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Bliss
I do not believe in speaking ill of the dead - they cannot defend themselves. But this idealisation of Anita Pallenberg is baffling. The damage she did to herself, her children, her partners, people in her orbit, and your beloved band the Rolling Stones has been very well documented for decades. Read Spanish Tony, Robert Greenfield, Barbara Charone, AE Hotchner, Victor Bockris et al and numerous news stories. The accounts of her behaviour, including her own recollections, show her to have been impulsive, capricious, destructive and apparently without a conscience or moral compass.

Agree, Bliss. It's a curious but not uncommon phenomenon. Another recent example was the hagiographic treatment given Muhammad Ali when he died. Ali was one of the most hated public figures in my lifetime. His stance against the Vietnam War in the mid-60's not only nearly ruined his career but brought down a hailstorm of criticism from nearly every side of the political spectrum. But, in death, after years of being the "cuddly" Ali with a terrible disease, he was almost universally hailed as a sweet ambassador to the world. Made him less interesting, imho, took the teeth out of what he stood for, devalued the radical causes that he fought for.

While I don't disagree with the "phenomenon",I have to strongly disagree with the Ali example. Ali's stance against the war was not only not criticised from "every spectrum", it was cheered by many of us at the time. Later in his life, and long before his death, most agreed he was of course right which only added value to the causes he fought for.

Also, a lot of us will grant grace to those afflicted with alcoholism, drug addiction etc., because of what we know of the disease. Brian Jones was perhaps a good example of the same phenom.

Yes, I cheered him, too. And, yes, he was revealed to be on the right side of history. What I meant by "every spectrum" was people of different political stripes. Dems and Reps (with exceptions of course) could nearly all agree that an uppity pacifist black man was a traitor to his country. This was not a minority opinion at the time.

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Cristiano Radtke
Anita Pallenberg: more rock’n’roll than the Stones

The actress, muse and lover of Brian Jones and Keith Richards was a remarkable woman who lived her life furiously

Will Hodgkinson
June 17 2017, 12:01am, The Times


Anita Pallenberg, who died this week aged 73
MANGOLD/CAMERA PRESS

For much of the Nineties, a remarkable-looking woman could be spotted at the more interesting music, art and fashion happenings in London. Deeply lined yet still beautiful, she was clearly free of plastic surgery or Botox, as if she weren’t going to inject anything into herself that didn’t come with a purpose more interesting than vanity.

I remember seeing her, in a leopardskin coat and oversized hat over blond hair, at an outdoor screening of Performance on Portobello Road in 1994. At about the same time she popped up at the Notting Hill Arts Club, looking like a much older version of Kate Moss, who she was with. A year later she held a screening of her home movies at the Horse Hospital in Russell Square, accompanied by a young musician called Joey Ducane, who turned out to be her boyfriend. It was, of course, Anita Pallenberg.

“One night I ended up playing pool with Anita and Joey in Soho and it was weird — she was really quiet,” says Teri Olins, a designer who became part of Pallenberg’s 1990s crowd. “Another time we went back to her flat in Chelsea and she made baked potatoes for everyone. She never said much, but she was always friendly. And she and Joey dressed identically — floppy hats, big coats.”

This is the key to understanding Pallenberg. She wasn’t just a lover to Brian Jones. She was more than just a partner and muse to Keith Richards, with whom she had three children — Marlon, now 47, Angela, 45, and a second son, Tara, who died of sudden infant death syndrome at ten weeks — and split from, after 12 years, in 1979. A part of her was Jones and Richards — or rather, a part of them was her. Sexy but androgynous, with a blend of the feminine and masculine that set the template for the rock chick, she was on an equal footing with any partner she had, Rolling Stone or not.

There is a Vogue shoot of Jones and Pallenberg from 1966 in which it is hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Richards seemed tough, but Pallenberg seemed tougher. She was wilder, just as smart, and frankly more in the spirit of rock’n’roll than any of the people who sat down with a guitar and came out with the stuff.

“She almost single-handedly engineered a cultural revolution in London by bringing together the Stones and the jeunesse dorée,” says the singer Marianne Faithfull of her fellow member of the band’s inner circle. While Faithfull brought highborn sophistication to the Rolling Stones, Pallenberg bought European decadence. As Richards said of her: “She knew everything — and she could say it in five languages.”


Pallenberg with Mick Jagger in Performance in 1970
ALAMY

“Anita used to say that we (the two of us) are light years ahead of the Rolling Stones,” Faithfull wrote yesterday on her Facebook page. “Witty and probably true!” Pallenberg certainly had Zelig-like abilities to be in the right place at the right time. Born in Rome in 1944 to a German-Italian salesman and a German embassy secretary, she was 16 when, freshly expelled from boarding school, she fell in with the film directors Fellini, Pasolini and Visconti in Rome. Two years later she was hanging out with the Beats in New York before a stopover in Paris to meet Truffaut, Godard and other luminaries of the nouvelle vague, then in 1964 she returned to New York to become a part of Warhol’s Factory scene alongside her fellow European model in exile Nico. And then she met Brian Jones.

“He was OK at first,” said Pallenberg, who met Jones in 1965 while on a modelling assignment in Munich. “Brian would always ask me to do his hair and make-up. He loved dressing up and posing.”


With Jo and Ronnie Wood, Marianne Faithfull and Kate Moss in 1999
GETTY IMAGES

So did she — until Jones, a physically diminished but violent man in the process of losing the band he was formerly the leader of to Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, tried to beat her up. In 1967 the Stones planned a holiday in Morocco, but Jones became ill and was waylaid in Toulouse. By the time he caught up with the rest of the band in Marrakesh, where Jones dealt with his illness by self-prescribing LSD and hashish, Richards and Pallenberg were an item. “Amazing things can happen in the back of a Bentley,” Richards said of the burgeoning romance in the Stones documentary 25 x 5: The Continuing Adventures of the Rolling Stones. “And they did. Two kids later . . .”

As well as being, unlike so many of the wives and girlfriends of Sixties rock stars, too much her own person to put up with being used and abused, Pallenberg was also incredibly stylish. A pioneer of thrift-shop chic, in the late Nineties she served as inspiration and occasional contributor to Cheap Date, a magazine by the stylists Kira Jolliffe and Bay Garnett devoted to the joys of charity shopping.

Since the late Sixties her signature look of designer items combined with vintage and ethnic clothing has been copied endlessly. When the Stones were in Hollywood for the recording of Let It Bleed Pallenberg bought a job-lot of furs owned by Bette Davis. At a time when Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba label was leading a trend in Thirties Hollywood revivalism, Pallenberg actually had the original Thirties Hollywood clothes Biba was reviving.


Pallenberg with her son Marlon
GETTY IMAGES

In the early days at least it seemed that Richards might have bitten off more than he could chew by dating Pallenberg. In 1968, after playing an evil space queen a little too convincingly in Roger Vadim’s camp classic film Barbarella, Pallenberg shot Performance, the ultimate evocation of late hippy bohemianism. In Donald Cammell and Nic Roeg’s film Jagger plays a reclusive rock star living in a ménage à trois in a grimy but glamorous basement flat in Powis Square, Notting Hill, with characters played by Pallenberg and the French actress Michèle Breton. In real life, Pallenberg had been in a ménage à trois with Cammell and his wife, Deborah Dixon.

“Cammell [was] a twister and manipulator whose only real love in life was f***ing other people up,” wrote Richards, who claimed in his memoir, Life, that the director orchestrated an affair between Jagger and Pallenberg. Richards dealt with his misery by writing Gimme Shelter in the art dealer Robert Fraser’s Mayfair flat while Jagger and Pallenberg shared a bathtub in Performance, although ultimately, reasoning he had stolen Pallenberg from Jones, he was sanguine about the short-lived affair. “I thought, ‘If she’s going to be making a move with Mick, good luck to him,’ ” Richards wrote. “He can only take that one once. I’ve got to live with it. She probably nearly broke his back!”


With Keith Richards and their son Marlon in 1969
GETTY IMAGES

Pallenberg was in the thick of it during the Stones’ most creative period. She was at Olympic Studios in London providing the woo-woos for Sympathy for the Devil and, during the recording of the 1968 album Beggars Banquet, convincing Jagger and Richards not to use an earlier, inferior version of Stray Cat Blues. Exile on Main Street, one of the most gloriously messy rock’n’roll albums of all, was written and recorded for the most part with a mobile recording studio at Nellcôte, the mansion and former Nazi headquarters on the Côte d’Azur that Pallenberg and Richards rented from April 1971 to March 1972. Pallenberg served as gatekeeper against the myriad hangers-on desperate to enter the Stones’ orbit, although she had a soft spot for Gram Parsons, a country-rock artist who developed a friendship with Richards. She later cited Parsons as her favourite musician.

Meanwhile, Pallenberg drifted into heroin. In Britain at the end of the Sixties it was possible to register as a heroin addict and get the drug on the NHS, alongside the cocaine prescribed to counteract its effects. Richards says: “It was only when [the NHS prescriptions] stopped that you began to have a drug problem in the UK.”


Pallenberg, playing the Great Tyrant, with Jane Fonda in Barbarella
REX FEATURES

With two children, the couple held it together as best they could. Both were arrested in Canada in 1977, with Richards avoiding a jail sentence for heroin possession by agreeing to play a benefit concert for the blind. In 1979 Pallenberg’s 17-year-old lover, Scott Cantrell, shot himself while the two were in bed. “I didn’t feel anything,” she later said. “That’s one of the wonders of drugs and drink.”


At London Fashion Week in 2016
GETTY IMAGES

Pallenberg cleaned up, attended Alcoholics Anonymous and remained close to Richards, joining her children on at least one date of all of the Stones tours. Richards, who is reputed to have given Pallenberg financial support long after they split, posted a tribute on her death: “A most remarkable woman. Always in my heart.” He accompanied it with a photograph of her sitting on one of those Bette Davis furs. There will be commentators on hand to suggest she paid the price for all that sex, drugs and rock’n’roll, but to live a life like hers and keep going until the age of 73 (or possibly 75 — she kept her age vague) doesn’t sound too bad a trade-off.

“Before you know it,” she said, “it’s 3am and you’re 80 years old and you can’t remember what it was like to have 20-year-old thoughts or a 10-year-old heart.” She lived her life fast. And then she was gone.

[www.thetimes.co.uk]

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NICOS
Pallenberg with her son Marlon
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The blond kid isn't Marlon

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chatoyancy
Jake Weber was eight when his parents took him to visit Keith and Anita in France. He remembers that his father smuggled something in his shirt. I think his mother died around that time. Jake is now an actor, was in NBC's Medium with Patricia Arquette, Rosanna's sister. Jake is also in American Gothic.

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Bliss
So let's get this straight, HankM...

>>>"....you are one of the good people here.."

Who are you to judge others here? You demonise people who don't agree with your [one-sided] opinions?

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RoughJusticeOnYa

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Bliss
So let's get this straight, HankM...

>>>"....you are one of the good people here.."

Who are you to judge others here? You demonise people who don't agree with your [one-sided] opinions?

He/she is, like all of us, "His / Her Own (Wo-)Man" -

which makes him / her perfectly entitled to consider just about ànything really either "good" or "bad" Bliss, imo...

Regardless of the beef the two of you might have had (which I'm guessing from the neck hairs in your post standing straight): that really is nothing to get worked up about.

It's just an opinion; and, in fact, ALL opinions are "[one-sided]" (almost per definition)...

And this place is 'just' a forum;
that's where people gather, to ventilate opinions.

No harm in that.
Nothing to get worked up about.

I don't know HankM, and I don't remember any of his previous posts in particular;
but then again, I'm not defending HankM here -
just his right o consider Christiano "a good guy". (And, let's face it: who would want to argue with thàt ?!)


Just don't "judge" and "demonize" yourself here, I'd say.

This Sunday is way to good for that.

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matxil
If a guy lives on the wild side, it's cool. If it's a girl, she´ll get judged for it. Luckily Anita Pallenberg never seemed to care what other people thought of her. She must have been an extremely strong woman, living next to Keith for so many years. And even in her later years, she always had a strong sense of humour and wit. She's one of those rare women (or men) who lived their own life. Inspiring. I earlier said R.I.P, but I am not even sure she'd want to rest in peace, she might get bored. Then again, in her later years she seemed to have calmed down a bit, picked up gardening. But I am sure even that she did with intensity. I don't believe in a life after death, but she sure had a fully lived life before death.

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RoughJusticeOnYa
... wise words...

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Rip This
...kind of odd that Jagger hasn't made any public statement whatsoever....no?

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Bliss
I do not believe in speaking ill of the dead - they cannot defend themselves. But this idealisation of Anita Pallenberg is baffling. The damage she did to herself, her children, her partners, people in her orbit, and your beloved band the Rolling Stones has been very well documented for decades. Read Spanish Tony, Robert Greenfield, Barbara Charone, AE Hotchner, Victor Bockris et al and numerous news stories. The accounts of her behaviour, including her own recollections, show her to have been impulsive, capricious, destructive and apparently without a conscience or moral compass.

If you want to praise Anita, give her credit where it is due. As Keith's muse, the Stones' best output was likely due to her presence and her influence. Her presence in Performance made that film powerful and enduring. And she deserves enormous respect for having so completely turned her life around after what was apparently 30 years of heavy drug addiction and alcoholism. Completing a four year degree at an advanced age at one of Britain's most prestigious and demanding art schools is impressive. And as I said earlier, she conquered her demons and for the last 15 or so years of her life, she enjoyed warm relations with her family and a large circle of friends.

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matxil
If a guy lives on the wild side, it's cool. If it's a girl, she´ll get judged for it. She's one of those rare women (or men) who lived their own life. Inspiring.

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dcba

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matxil
If a guy lives on the wild side, it's cool. If it's a girl, she´ll get judged for it. She's one of those rare women (or men) who lived their own life. Inspiring.

I don't think you can compare her to a truly inspiring woman like Alexandra David-Néel. Anita met the right people (66-67) then she went down the gutter like most junkies do. 20 or 25 years of hard drugs are lost years, no matter what the addict might say.
In a way Anita was a relic of a bygone era, an era that, alas, made so many casualties.

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stone4ever

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dcba

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matxil
If a guy lives on the wild side, it's cool. If it's a girl, she´ll get judged for it. She's one of those rare women (or men) who lived their own life. Inspiring.

I don't think you can compare her to a truly inspiring woman like Alexandra David-Néel. Anita met the right people (66-67) then she went down the gutter like most junkies do. 20 or 25 years of hard drugs are lost years, no matter what the addict might say.
In a way Anita was a relic of a bygone era, an era that, alas, made so many casualties.

Also the poor bitch on heroin on the streets doesn't get to get Keiths riches to help her from homelessness or death. These celebrity junkies have the glamour attached because they have their millions to help. No rehab clinics for millions of poor people. They usually die within a few years.

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dcba

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matxil
If a guy lives on the wild side, it's cool. If it's a girl, she´ll get judged for it. She's one of those rare women (or men) who lived their own life. Inspiring.

I don't think you can compare her to a truly inspiring woman like Alexandra David-Néel. Anita met the right people (66-67) then she went down the gutter like most junkies do. 20 or 25 years of hard drugs are lost years, no matter what the addict might say.
In a way Anita was a relic of a bygone era, an era that, alas, made so many casualties.

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TeddyB1018
The judgmental attitudes about drug and alcohol use on a forum dedicated to the Rolling Stones are off-key to me. Though they became a powerful corporation, the Stones began as bohemian artists. Not only have bohemian artists gotten high for time immemorial, but part of the allure of the artistic life is irresponsibility (which also often includes narcissism and ruthlessness). The Rolling Stones have always been questionable role models, though role models they have been.

Should we bitch about Carrie Fisher now?

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latebloomer

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TeddyB1018
The judgmental attitudes about drug and alcohol use on a forum dedicated to the Rolling Stones are off-key to me. Though they became a powerful corporation, the Stones began as bohemian artists. Not only have bohemian artists gotten high for time immemorial, but part of the allure of the artistic life is irresponsibility (which also often includes narcissism and ruthlessness). The Rolling Stones have always been questionable role models, though role models they have been.

Should we bitch about Carrie Fisher now?

Amen, Teddy.