Vale Anita Pallenberg, the “sixth Rolling Stone”
German-Italian film actress, model and cultural icon Anita Pallenberg is being hailed as “the sixth Rolling Stone” after her death yesterday (Australian time). She was 73.
Jo Bergman, the band’s personal assistant from 1967-73, said of Pallenberg: “Anita is a Rolling Stone. She, Mick, Keith and Brian were the Rolling Stones. Her influence has been profound. She keeps things crazy.”
Longtime friend Bebe Buell hailed her as the official “sixth Stone” adding, “There was no one more beautiful, more unique and more inspiring!”
Born in Rome on Jan. 25, 1944 to German parents, Pallenberg was expelled from boarding school at 16 and drifted into the art scenes in Rome and then New York. She moved to Paris and became a model.
When she talked herself backstage into a Stones concert in Munich in 1965 offering original guitarist Brian Jones hashish, they became an item.
Pallenberg’s influence on the Stones as well as on the London pop scene at the time was immediate, with her looks, her fashion sense, independence and no-nonsense attitude in a macho world.
Keith Richards wrote in his autobiography, Life, “My first impression was of a woman who was very strong. I was right about that.
“Also an extremely bright woman, that’s one of the reasons she sparked me. Let alone that she was so entertaining and such a great beauty to look at. Very funny. Cosmopolitan beyond anyone I’d come across. She spoke three languages. She’d been here, she’d been there. It was very exotic, to me.”
There s a famous exchange between Pallenberg, who appeared on backing vocals to Sympathy For The Devil, and Mick Jagger over the track Stray Cat Blues. When he played it to he expecting her to praise it, she responded it was “crap, the vocals are mixed up too high, and the bass isn’t loud enough.” Jagger remixed it immediately.
Her interest in black magic was adopted by some of the Stones, and seeped through into the voodoo spirit of tracks like Jumpin’ Jack Flash. One of the songs she inspired was reportedly Wild Horses.
Author A. E. Hotchner observed, “How Anita came to be with Brian is really the story of how the Stones became the Stones.
“She almost single-handedly engineered a cultural revolution in London by bringing together the Stones and the jeunesse dorée…The Stones came away with a patina of aristocratic decadence that served as a perfect counterfoil to the raw roots blues of their music.
“This…transformed the Stones from pop stars into cultural icons.”
Pallenberg’s movie roles included playing The Black Queen in Barbarella, starring Jane Fonda, and as Nurse Bollock with Marlon Brando and Richard Burton in Candy.
She also filmed the violent, hallucinogenic Performance in 1968 with Jagger but the studio did not release it until 1970.
After that came the heroin years and a breakup with Richards, with whom she had three children (one died in infancy).
In 2007 she played the character Sin in Abel Ferrara’s Go Go Tales, a Queen Elizabeth impersonator in Harmony Korine’s Mister Lonely (2007) and an opium-den hostess in Stephen Frears’ Cheri (2009).
On a 2001 episode of Absolutely Fabulous, she played the Devil, with another key figure in Stones mythology, Marianne Faithfull, playing God.
Pallenberg suffered from Hepatitis C, and ended her years with a limp, after two hip surgeries. She gave up alcohol and drugs, but returned to them as her health declined.