ANITA PALLENBERG REDUX

A DOC ON A FEMALE FURY REWARDS A SECOND VIEWING

Last night I stayed in and watched TV.

Specifically, I re-watched Catching Fire: The Story Of Anita Pallenberg on Sky Arts. I wrote about this feature length doc’ on the Yak when it was released a year ago.

Considering how poor most music docs are Catching Fire must have made an impression on me so to watch it again (and Sky Arts comes loaded with ad’s - every 15 minutes there’s the opportunity to make a cuppa/go for a pee).

Then again, my obsessive nature means I punish myself by watching too many music docs: I recently attempted to re-watch Getting It Back: The Story of Cymande as its now streaming on BBC iPlayer. I saw Getting It Back when premiered at Brixton’s Ritzy cinema with the band members in attendance in 2022 and then found it overlong. 3 years on I thought ‘OK. let’s try again’. Mistake: after 45 minutes I switched off, the director relying more on fanboy testimony to how great the veteran Brit funk band were than building a narrative arc.

Watching Catching Fire: The Story Of Anita Pallenberg for the second time I did not for a second consider switching it off. Oddly, I think I found it more compelling this time around. I’m uncertain why - perhaps because I already thought it worthy so relaxed and just paid attention to myriad little details.

What is certain is Catching Fire succeeds as a meditation on fame and beauty and addiction and madness. Many books and films attempt to cover such but few succeed. Especially considering the doc’s subject matter (superstar rock musicians, drug addiction, sex, death…) it could have been very sleazy.

Instead, Catching Fire is subtle, a moving meditation on a headstrong, beautiful young woman whose energies ensured she played a part in making the ‘60s swing as she blazed through the patriarchy, winning fame and famous lovers, before losing almost everything due to addiction and her truly atrocious behaviour.

Its to Catching Fire’s credit that it does not try and make you like or feel sorry for Pallenberg. She’s an amoral narcissist - as were/are the Rolling Stones - interested only in having a very high time and ensuring the music rocked hard. That her children Marlon and Angela can speak of her with directness and without reverting to therapy cliches is impressive (I imagine both have spent considerable time in therapy - with parents like Keith & Anita there will be “issues”).

Being beautiful, wealthy and famous surely made Anita think, as its often done by those in the elite, that the rules no longer apply to them. She certainly escaped the law, but addiction destroyed her beauty and left her a shell of herself.

As it did to Marianne Faithful, who has passed away since I last watched Catching Fire. Hearing her voice made me reflect on these glamorous youths who wrecked themselves - I’m sure there is a doc in preparation about Marianne, who reestablished herself artistically in a way Anita never could, but it won’t be as compulsive as Catching Fire: Anita was bewitching and terrifying, Marianne pretty and intelligent.

In a world where there is so much carnage and suffering it must seem trivial for me to be wittering on about dead jet trash (I agree, it is) but Anita Pallenberg and all she represented shaped my adolescent consciousness to some degree. Because the Rolling Stones played a part in developing my musical tastes - they led me to blues and country music - and even if I rarely listen to them today, when I do they spark something in me: a louche swagger that sounds and tastes and looks so good, a dream of musical freedom, rock’n’roll at its most uninhibited and greasy. And Anita was very much a Rolling Stone - even if she never sang or played a note.

Rewatching Catching Fire reminded me of all the aforementioned. And of friends I’ve known who struggled with addiction. And enchanting European girls. Of an era long gone but how exciting it once appeared. Of adult responsibility and how some - like Keith and Anita - try and shirk such. Of youth and its possibilities and age and its realities. For this, I commend Catching Fire.

Happy days on the set of Performance. The smiles would soon vanish.

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OK, here’s my longass original piece on Catching Fire from a year ago.

I can still recall the Rolling Stones coming to my home town of Auckland in 1972 even though I was a munchkin who had never heard a note of their music and had no real idea what a rock band was. I think the Stones caught my childish imagination because they featured in both the morning and evening newspapers – their one concert was obviously big news and I was already obsessively studying headlines – while the photos made them look strange, exotic creatures, more akin to the characters from a TV show on pirates or highwaymen. My parents, teachers and other sundry adults in no way resembled the Stones.

I lived in a music free household – my father liked Gilbert & Sullivan, my mother hymns and choir songs – but for some indescribable reason I had a great hunger to hear popular music. I must have begged my parents to buy records. Instead, they did a wise thing and gave me a very cheap plastic transistor. I immediately lost myself in listening to Radio Hauraki and 1ZM, and thus I got I hear the Stones. Admittedly, it was their early 70s hits – Angie, Tumbling Dice, Fool To Cry – but, aged 10, I purchased a double LP set compiling most of their Decca-era singles (including odd B-sides like Child Of The Moon). Once I put the needle down on Paint It Black I never wanted to lift it off. Or – perhaps - I had lift off?

Which is to say I became a Stones obsessive at an early age and began seeking out their albums (yes, I was a crate digger through necessity, even as a pre-teen) whilst reading everything I could find on them. That the band’s best days were behind them quickly became evident but, no matter, their 1964-72 recordings were very fine indeed. Even today, while I rarely feel the need to listen to rock music, I can put on the Stones – Ventilator Blues or Little Red Rooster or Gimme Shelter or King Bee or I Don’t Know Why or… there are multitudes! - and I’m enthralled. Actually, thinking on it, the Stones were – after Oliver! - my first indication that London was an dark if enchanting metropolis, a place of urchins and adventures, possibly somewhere I might one day reside.

To be young, famous and in love: Anita & Brian circa 1966.

Being a teenage Stones nut meant I learnt of their glamorous partners – Mick squired beautiful Bianca and waif-like Marianne, while devil-may-care Anita Pallenberg, had captivated both the band’s original guitarists. And Pallenberg, who first took up with Brian Jones then dumped him in Morocco to go with Keith Richards, appeared as aloof and dangerous as the band – she leapt out of b&w photos, eyes ablaze, pirate smile askew, a wild beauty. And when, aged 17, I got to see Performance, the renegade 1968 film she stars in alongside Mick Jagger and Edward Fox, Anita set the screen on fire: a fierce, fearless quality emanated from her, she was a siren of sorts, extremely seductive (yet, surely, also destructive).

I was enchanted, possibly enamoured, even though by this time (1981 or 82) I was well aware that Pallenberg had made a huge mess of her life, the lithe beauty replaced by a burnt-out junkie, someone who wrought havoc, even death, in her wake. Its undeniable the Stones caused carnage, their sullen amorality and appetite for hard drugs giving them a sheen of “outlaw cool” - from Brian Jones (dead aged 27 in 1969) on they left a trail of men and women either prematurely deceased or derailed by addiction. Unbelievably, Pallenberg lived until 2017 when she passed aged 75 from Hepatitis C, a disease many who once shared needles suffer from.

Did I mourn her passing? No. I think I was surprised she lived so long. I never met her – a musician friend was once introduced to a weathered woman called “Anita” and, as he shook her hand, he suddenly recognised in the glint in those ocelot eyes that this was she: yes, the ultimate rock chick. He merely stammered, “I’m pleased to meet you” and, if I’d had the opportunity, I imagine I would have said something similar. Or maybe I would have gulped and trembled – I doubt she ever lost that aura of aloofness and danger.

Here’s Anita & Keith with Dandelion + Marlon, playing at happy families.

Catching Fire: The Story Of Anita Pallenberg has just been released on Apple TV and, I believe, in select cinemas. All these years on the fan boy in me was still interested, even though I now considered the lifestyle she and the Stones embodied to be a stupid, wasteful one + most music doc’s suck so this could be yet more dire talking heads and recycled footage.

Well, I watched it and Catching Fire is not a waste of time. Its actually pretty good. Not perfect (a subject as glamorous yet unsavoury as Pallenberg is always going to be challenging) but, for anyone interested in the following - Anita/the Stones/rock culture in the 60s-70s/how a fearless, independent young woman made her own way in an extremely patriarchal era/addiction’s toll - then Catching Fire is worth 90 minutes of your time.

Pallenberg was raised in a well off, conservative Italian-German household and, by her early teens, was rebelling against the nuns at the convent she was placed in. Anita’s beauty won her modelling work, while her hunger to be part of the zeitgeist soon found Pallenberg hanging out with Fellini’s chic set in Rome, then heading to New York, where she inserted herself into the pop art scene, befriending Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg – was she frustrated that these artists were gay? As she quickly returned to Germany I imagine so. For Anita obviously wanted a famous partner.

In Germany in 1966 she attended a Stones concert, ensuring she got backstage with a lump of hashish as a gift/bribe. Here she immediately latched on to Brian Jones (“the most beautiful member” – notes she made towards a memoir are read here by Scarlett Johansson). His and her life would never be the same again and, I think its fair to say, her energies and hunger, her linguist skills and knowledge of the art and film worlds, would influence the Stones, lending them a sophistication and European chic these gauche, suburban English youths lacked.

She was certainly as wild and outrageous as Jones – wilder, really, and frail Brian began physically and mentally declining as their extremely tempestuous relationship consumed the tiny narcissist who had, previously, treated all his women extremely callously – while Richards, shy and enamoured with Anita, would, once he was her paramour, descend into extreme opiate addiction. It was an addiction he shared with Pallenberg, one so all consuming that, of their three children, the third, Tara, would die in his cot aged only a few months while the second, Dandelion, would be adopted by Keith’s mother who could see the four year old girl suffering from parental neglect – junkies tend to nod out rather than engage in child care.

Pallenberg & Jagger in Performance - a film set in a then decrepit Notting Hill that would both undermine the Jagger-Richard partnership and make Anita a screen icon.

That first born Marlon, who stayed with his wayward parents, appears in Catching Fire as a grounded, thoughtful individual who reflects drolly on the madness that surrounded his childhood, is the doc’s biggest surprise. Angela (she dropped Dandelion once living with Granny in Dartford) is also articulate, reflecting on a mother she didn’t know well.

Its Marlon who becomes Catching Fire’s guide to his mother and the madness that consumed her. Madness that reached its nadir in 1979 when a 17-year old boy Pallenberg had hired to help out around their rural New York property (and then seduced) put a bullet in his brain whilst in bed with Anita.

The gun was Keith’s and legal but the idea of millionaire junkies running a house where hard drugs and guns were left lying around reflects on the moral swamp Keith and Anita inhabited – Marlon relates how he, then aged ten, ran around putting guns and drugs into bin bags and dumping them outside the house before the police arrived….

Pallenberg had a vampiric quality and when Marlon describes her descending from her bedroom covered in the youth’s blood he provides an apt metaphor for her dark energies: the dead teen being another Stones casualty that, again, went unpunished. Beyond it being the final straw in Pallenberg and Richards’ relationship.

Pallenberg would descend further into addiction before finally rehab’ing and living out her life as part of Chelsea’s ageing bohemian jet trash - she even appeared once (typecast as the devil) in Absolutely Fabulous, the unfunny British sitcom that lightly satirised wealthy West London women.

She studied fashion – I recall gossip rag the Evening Standard once featuring a few of her designs (dreadful rock star stage outfits), occasionally appearing in small roles in small films, the talent she demonstrated in Performance – where she blasted both Jagger and Edward Fox off the screen – had withered due to neglect and addiction.

Unlike her old pal Marianne Faithful, Anita never determined to reinvent herself post-addiction. If Pallenberg hadn’t chosen to be a rock star’s partner and let opiates overwhelm her, who knows, she might have developed into a fine actor. But she always wanted to be with the in-crowd, squiring a celebrity who paid her way.

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The last section of Catching Fire has Kate Moss and other pals saying how groovy old Anita was. Its something of a cop out considering all that had come before and I do wonder if Pallenberg ever dwelled on the carnage she had wreaked – Marlon and Angela don’t sound like they were very fond of her. Which is understandable.

Catching Fire is imaginatively made, superbly edited, uses talking heads sparingly (both Keith and Marianne offer observations that suggest they remain in awe of her fierce spirit), employs rarely seen footage from across her life and a febrile intelligence – its not just another doc’ about a Stones casualty/ fallen famous beauty.

Instead, it reflects on the “swinging” scene she was part of and how addiction can consume everything. It never reverts to the sex ‘n’ drugs cliches so many music doc’s trade it. Instead, Catching Fire treats Pallenberg with respect – she always demanded such in life and its fitting she receives it in death – while never covering up for her often awful behaviour.

If Anita is to be remembered it will be as one of the 60s great beauties, a powerful, uncompromising, talented woman who refused to obey the rules yet saw her own selfishness destroy her beauty, talent, family and health. There’s likely a moral in this but damned if I know what it is.

Those like me who were once Stones fanatics will surely note a few glaring absences in Catching Fire – too much reality is surely what held the film makers (or exec’ producer Marlon) from including such – so feel free to discuss such here. For now, Catching Fire is the most sobering music doc’ I’ve seen in a good while.

If you haven’t seen Performance then here’s the original trailer. A unique film, it being original, compelling, disturbing and featuring Anita Pallenberg at her most potent - she is the star here, not Jagger or Fox.