Anita Pallenberg is usually referred to as the Rolling Stones’ muse, or as Keith Richards’ longtime partner. That’s how she’s long been remembered. But Anita was so much more than that. She’d been a model and scenester in her own right before she met the Stones. Anita played the Great Tyrant to Jane Fonda’s Barbarella and the trippy seductress to co-star Mick Jagger in Performance. However, her creative work and influence has long been overshadowed by her liaisons with the Stones.
Buy Barbarella Blu-rayCatching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg changes the perception of Anita as simply the Stones’ muse. She finally gets much-deserved recognition as a fashion icon, trendsetter, actress, model, and force of nature in this documentary. Scarlett Johannsen narrates passages from Anita’s unpublished memoir – a quick glimpse of the front page shows the title Black Magic. Her narration adds immediacy and warmth to the revelations.
The doc’s executive producer, Marlon Richards (Anita and Keith’s son) provides some of the commentary, along with his sister Angela (aka Dandelion). There are audio snippets from Keith, Brian, and Marianne, and interviews with one of Anita’s high school classmates, and Marlon’s nanny. The descriptions of Anita are fairly consistent – she had a “sparkle,” says a schoolmate; was a “unique piece of work,” says Keith; and “She had bigger balls than any of them did, probably, in a lot of ways,” Marlon says, probably referring to the Stones. (And Keith found out the hard way that Anita hated the word “nice.”)
Anita, the outlier in a conservative German/Italian family that believed acting was a form of prostitution, recalls “I didn’t walk, I ran” from her staid upbringing. Her first acts of rebellion at a Catholic girls’ school were smoking cigarettes and dancing to rock ‘n’ roll.
After “expelling herself” from school, Anita escaped to New York. Her stunning looks got her a stint as a model in Manhattan. She hung out with Andy Warhol and his avant-garde followers, attended one of Allen Ginsberg’s parties, and cleaned Jasper John’s paintbrushes. Modeling bored her but on one of her modeling trips to Munich, she attended a Rolling Stones show. Her friends dared her to kidnap one of them. Anita didn’t need to lure a Stone into her orbit, however – she and Brian Jones hit it off immediately and they became a couple. Brian was her “doppelganger,” both in looks, intellect, and spirit. The crème de la crème of London’s musical and creative society gathered at Brian and Anita’s flat in London to party and socialize.
When Brian started taking acid, he became violent and would hit Anita. Brian was jealous of her career and talked his way into writing the music for the film A Degree of Murder, her first starring role. Brian fell ill on a vacation the trio took, and Keith and Anita left him at the hospital. When Brian rejoined them, he got violent with Anita again, and she left him -permanently- for Keith.
Anita influenced the way Keith dressed, as he went from suit jackets and trousers to silk shirts, colorful scarves, and animal-print blazers. Their shared exploration of LSD and marijuana graduated to cocaine and heroin. Keith followed Anita into heroin addiction. “I’ve been called a witch, a slut, and a murderer,” Anita wrote. While she was no shrinking violet, she had a more nuanced persona than the haters envisioned.
Marianne Faithfull, Anita’s demure counterpart, whose career was similarly overshadowed by her relationship with Mick Jagger in the 1960s, remarks at one point in the documentary, “We didn’t want some of their power. We had our own power.“ (Ever the completist, Anita had a fling with Mick on the set of Performance. “The funny thing is,” she wrote, “I never really fancied him at all.)
The birth of Keith and Anita’s children, Marlon and Angela, didn’t slow them down. They left London because of “cops in the trees” (and presumably tax issues) and took up residence in the Villa Nellcôte in France with the rest of the band to record Exile on Main Street. Actor Jake Weber, who was the son of a drug dealer at the mansion, describes Anita’s role in Nellcôte as “the queen in a castle of dissolute men.” She entertained Marlon, Jake, and the other young kids at the mansion, dancing with them and giving them some normalcy in the middle of chaos.
Despite their drug use, Anita and Keith were still great parents to Angela and Marlon during this time. While living in Switzerland, they took the kids skiing and tobogganing. Marlon remembers it as one of the happiest times in his childhood.
The two most bizarre events in Anita’s life occurred in the late 1970s, long after she’d faded from the limelight as a muse and “it” girl. With Keith now on tour, she was left alone to care for newborn baby boy Tara. The infant had been born prematurely and been in and out of the hospital, and one night, Anita found the baby lifeless in his crib. The death was attributed to SIDS, but Anita, wracked with guilt, wondered if she could have saved him if she’d been in a better way.
A few years later, left alone in a house in upstate New York with the record company in charge of her finances, she sought solace in the property’s teenage caretaker, who died while playing Russian roulette in her bedroom. Her life now in shambles, she drifted off to the Lower East Side and further into drugs and alcohol. Luckily, this descent was short-lived and she turned her life around. She completed rehab, got her high school diploma, and renewed her relationships with her children.
Catching Fire includes a treasure trove of personal photos and film clips of Keith, Anita, their children, and various friends. A glimpse of what are essentially family films after the decades have passed humanizes Anita and puts the past into perspective.
The film debuted at Cannes in May 2023 under the title Anita. Produced by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Gill, this 110-minute documentary features many never-before-seen personal photos and film clips. The documentary has been screened in select theaters in the U.S and throughout Europe and the U.K. The film opens nationwide on May 3rd.
A joyously witchy Anita swirls around in a black and orange cape in the film’s first shot. She still had that exuberant aura toward the end of her life, even with her renowned looks long gone. Shortly before her death in 2017, Anita strutted down the catwalk in a gold lamé pantsuit. Even though she walked with a cane, she still had the same sparkle.
