Anita Pallenberg — the Rolling Stones muse who blazed a trail of her own

“Writing this helped me to emerge in my own eyes,” Anita Pallenberg wrote in the secret memoir she worked on before her death in 2017. “I’ve been called a witch, a slut, and a murderer . . . But I don’t need to settle scores . . . I’m reclaiming my soul.”

These words suggest even Pallenberg came to see herself as the public did — as a bit-player in the Rolling Stones’ totemic 1960s and 1970s, first as Brian Jones’, then Keith Richards’ muse and lover. A new documentary, Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg, now sets her firmly centre stage, tracing her remarkable early years as a cosmopolitan German-Italian boldly wandering from Fellini’s crowd in Rome to New York, where, she recalls, “I slid into the downtown scene . . . [and] washed Jasper Johns’ brushes.”

Meeting the Stones while modelling in Munich in 1965 led to acting roles as Mick Jagger’s lover in Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970) and the playfully murderous, lesbian Black Queen in Barbarella (1968), as well as inspiring Stones songs such as “Sister Morphine” and “You Can’t Always Get What You Want”. It also derailed her life. She was dismissed as a heroin-addicted drain on the band — a cast-out, burnt-out case. Catching Fire restores a little-known, cleaned-up third act.

“It was important to go into how tragic the story really gets,” says the film’s co-director Svetlana Zill, “but there’s a version of this film that could be salacious. We wanted to lead with the tender, nuanced acceptance which both [Pallenberg and Richards’ children] Marlon and Angela have, after living through this.”

Catching Fire also legitimises a life devoted to sensation and experience. More concrete possibilities than the now dismissed role of muse were, Marlon Richards says, “truncated” in rock’s male milieu. “She didn’t really have a career, so how laudable is she?” co-director Alexis Bloom considers. “But she changed the way people [she knew] thought about art and living and dressing. She didn’t have a monetary, productive value, but she walked into a room and disrupted it. Anita made herself into a story.”

Pallenberg changed the way people [she knew] thought about art and living and dressing

Narrated by Scarlett Johansson in Pallenberg’s own words, the film includes previously unseen family photos and home movies that also resurrect her ferocious physical presence, with a grin that looks both happy and hungry. “Barracuda-like!” Marlon says with a laugh when we talk over the phone. “She had that smile on the day she died. She was larger than life. She was quite slight, but she threw herself about. She always had an opinion and loudly voiced it, which was half the problem for the band.”

Forty pages of unexpected memoir as well as taped interviews, discovered in her Chelsea home after her death, turned the project’s key for Marlon, who is an executive producer on the film. “I had to drink a whole bottle of wine to read the transcripts,” he says. “There was detail about her partaking in the writing of songs such as ‘Angie’ with my father, and her general regret about everything. The writing is quite confessional. There was such misogyny and vitriol directed against her, and she knew that I would want to set the record straight for her family. And so she left a trail, like Hansel and Gretel breadcrumbs, for us to find. And we found everything, from the films to the book to the tapes.”

Home movies shot on Super 8 film hazily thread through Catching Fire, beginning in 1967 and showing intimate, ordinary moments between Pallenberg and Richards. “There wouldn’t be a film if it wasn’t for that Super 8,” says co-director Alexis Bloom. “Even though when I first watched it, I honestly was seasick. It’s made by degenerate stoners, sometimes on boats.” Zill agrees. “It’s over- or underexposed, they can’t hold a shot. But there’s an experiential quality that we wanted our film to take. Anita was always in the moment, and that footage feels like you’re in the moment with them. We weren’t making a huge retrospective biography, but really: what is the experience of Anita Pallenberg?”

Pallenberg called Brian Jones her “doppelgänger” while in photos she seems to mirror Keith Richards physically, much as identities mystically swap in Performance. Her integral role in the Stones’ majestic work from 1968 to 1972 seems a matter of both direct inspiration and atmosphere she conjured, charged with provocation, sophistication and decadence. “Anita would rather have been known for her fashion sense or her joie de vivre than her association with The Rolling Stones,” Marlon counters. “Saying she inspired songs is their kudos, not hers.”

The language used by and about Pallenberg in Catching Fire starts with a school friend describing her “sparkle”, then her loving “the feeling of culture exploding” in downtown New York in 1963. She sees Jones “flicker out like a light”, and Richards “bursting with love” for her. As he wrote in his 1969 song “You Got the Silver”, “a flash of love has made me blind.” Everyone seems to be running on an energy which, by the 1970s, had proved finite.

The mood conclusively soured in 1971, as the Stones made Exile on Main St. in what Pallenberg dismissed as the “hellhole” of Nellcôte, the French Riviera villa rented by Richards. She and Keith were already junkies. “Working in a misogynistic milieu broke her down,” Marlon says. “And she realised: I may as well just get wasted.”

A nadir was reached on July 20 1979, when teenager Scott Cantrell shot himself dead while playing Russian Roulette in Pallenberg’s company. Nine-year-old Marlon cleaned up the drugs before the police arrived. “A dreadful evening,” he recalls. Pallenberg and Richards’ daughter Angela had already moved in with Keith’s mother, soon after a third child, Tara Jo Jo, had died at 10 weeks old in 1976. However, Marlon maintains that: “They were good parents for the most part, doing the best they could under the circumstances. I felt old and exhausted by the time I was 10. But it was enlightening, to say the least.”

After separating from Richards, Pallenberg recovered from addiction following rehab in the 1980s. “She became this sweet, energised individual,” Marlon says. “She got a degree at St Martins, studied botanical illustration, Mandarin, and made films. She loved punk, and young people. My daughter just found an old letter from her grandmother yesterday, signed ‘G-Ma’ — her hip-hop name for herself.” Pallenberg returned, too, to cult cinema, including a typically iconoclastic role as a punk impersonator of the then Queen in Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (2007).

The woman whom Keith fondly recalls confronting 1960s social constraints and just wanting to “kick it all over” hadn’t wholly changed. “When Anita got sober, she stopped getting arrested and being a complete tornado,” says Bloom. “But she was the queen of minor infractions. If a sign said ‘don’t step on the grass’, she’d step on the grass . . . She’d continuously do things she wasn’t supposed to.”

Marlon considers his own response to Catching Fire’s testament to his blazing mother. “The directors found a poignancy and sadness in my mum’s inability to be in control of her life, for a time. She wasn’t a victim or victimiser. She was just a woman trying to succeed in a very new thing.”

In UK cinemas from May 17

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