Shownotes Transcript
Double Elvis. This episode is brought to you by Principles. Are there limits to the U.S. government's debt growth? What will happen if the debts are not curtailed? What should policymakers or investors do? Those are urgent questions that legendary investor and New York Times bestselling author Ray Dalio addresses in his new book, How Countries Go Broke, The Big Cycle. The book comes out in June and is available for pre-order today wherever books are sold.
Double Elvis. About a Girl is a production of iHeartRadio and Double Elvis. Let me tell you about Keith Richards, the reigning king of the improbable rock and roll survivors. Born not in a crossfire hurricane, but rather beneath the bleak post-industrial World War II skies of Dartford, England, the soul of the Rolling Stones, the human riff,
A glimmer twin who emerged from a drab London suburb crossed with bombed out buildings and crooked streets. But this isn't about Keith Richards. This is about Anita Pallenberg, the "It Girl" of the 60s. A spooky sorceress. A German/Italian model/actress/lady of the band who bore Keith three children amidst endless globetrotting adventures.
with trouble constantly at her heels before it inevitably caught up with her. She shocked the world by getting sober in the 90s and became a muse for a second time for new generations of artists. This story is about a girl. Paula Pallenberg got word of a possible escape route from her home in Rome.
As bombs hurtled through the Italian skies, she packed her infant daughter Anita and her older sister Gabriella into a car and made a mad dash through the crumbling ruins of burning cities and out to safety. At the time, Paula's husband, Arnaldo, was conscripted as a cook in the Italian army. Anita wouldn't meet him until she was three. They returned to Rome in 1945 and settled in a family villa, a relic of money long gone.
Arnaldo played piano. The house was filled with music. Anita was a heat seeker. By her teens, she was partying with Rome's artsy cliques. Her parents shipped her to a fancy boarding school in Bavaria. She studied Kafka and escaped to Munich whenever she could. She partied too hard. She bent too many rules. She was expelled and hid the city to study art.
She hitchhiked, she partied, she modeled, issuing pancake makeup and rollers for a natural look. Allergic to mascara, she wet her eyes with saliva and made photographers furious. But she was too beautiful to be ignored. She found her way back to Rome, just as Federico Fellini was shooting his cinematic classic La Dolce Vita.
Anita found her way to the set and toured friends like Nico, the model who would go on to monotone fame, singing The Velvet Underground. Around this time, Anita was captured in a photoshoot documenting the electric youth of 1962 Rome for Playboy magazine.
More modeling jobs followed in Europe, London, and New York, and more collisions with the luminaries of the time. Robert Fraser, the London gallery owner, Andy Warhol, then just a pop artist on the rise, surrounded by a coterie of hangers-on, doomed heiresses and speed freaks newly liberated from their parents' split-level 1950s ranches on Long Island. She was gliding along the fringes of burgeoning bohemia.
Anita arrived on the London scene in the mid-1960s. A charcoal-eyed, husky-voiced Jezebel who connected with Rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones at a Munich concert in 1965. The band's breakthrough single, Satisfaction, was then at the top of the charts. Brian, whose casual glam eclipsed the scruffy appearance of his bandmates, introduced himself as the group's leader.
Anita took him at his word. She offered him some hash. He was sensitive, highly strong, totally ahead of his time, and also part of another time, she'd say later, long after Brian drowned in his swimming pool in 1969. Brian was much more ready to go to strange places. The other stones were still straight-laced and relatively timid by her standards.
Mick Jagger had only just dropped out of the London School of Economics. His mother still rode the train from Dartford with Doris Richards to do the boys' laundry. Not Brian. Brian was already a father to illegitimate children several times over. He was hostile and rebellious. He was gifted. He was, as Anita shrewdly observed, ready.
Mick and Keith had the effortless cool, the stage presence, and soon the songwriting skills. But Brian had Anita with her miniskirts, scarves, stick-straight dirty blonde hair, and enigmatic pout. She was tall, Germanic, and unafraid, the magnetic center of any scene she was in. She tipped them from British pop stars toward the avant-garde, connecting them to the fashionably wealthy class.
London's gilded youth. Anita and Brian were an electrifyingly mismatched pair. Brian, wheezing asthmatic bags under his eyes, he was soft and sheltered, angry and abusive, an outcast in the comfortable village of Cheltenham where he grew up, obtaining A and O levels and playing clarinet and saxophone before discovering the blues.
American blues would become his overriding obsession until drugs took over and left him weak and withering, pale behind Mick Jagger's swaggering shadow, lost inside his fur coats as he was slowly iced out of his band. They appeared beautiful together, but soon bruises would show up on Anita's arms.
They were two beautiful orphans in a decadent sea, attended to by a stream of hangers-on, beatniks, junkies, groupies, fans, artists, muses, and monsters, lounging about in satin and velvet. It was all an illusion, translucent and delicate.
Their shared flat in trendy South Kensington was grungy inside, empty save for a couple of chairs, a mattress on the floor, and a few moth-eaten stuffed animals left over from a movie Anita had done in Germany. Theirs was a meeting spot for friends, a hangout, a place to get high. One friend was there more often than the others. Keith Richards became an unofficial third tenant.
He was a bachelor at loose ends in St. John's Wood, having broken up with his girlfriend, Linda Keith. Brian was going downhill fast then, losing himself by degrees in a near-constant stream of acid and barbiturates, hallucinations exacerbating his paranoia. Keith was sensing an opening. "It's the snakes again, is it, Brian?" Keith would ask in a stage whisper, taunting him for laughs as Brian lost his shit. He should have been committed.
But instead, he folded more deeply into his own darkness. Marrakesh is as good a place as any for the spectacular end to a relationship. Keith Richards wasn't going to make a move. Not so soon. He lived by his own code of bohemian ethics. Brian Jones' behavior had alienated him from his bandmates, even before he met Anita.
But Keith wasn't going to steal his mate's girlfriend, even if that mate was an asshole, now slowly going crazy. He'd yet to give up on his friendship with Brian. Mick, Keith, Marianne Faithfull, Robert Fraser, and a handful of friends had just been busted after an acid trip at Redlands, Keith's country estate. A police search turned up a handful of speed in Marianne's coat, along with Robert Fraser's stash of heroin.
The Stones were officially outlaws. While awaiting charges to be filed, they decided it would be a good idea to get the fuck out of England and cool out for a bit. Put some space between everybody. Anita and Bryant hadn't been present for the bust, but they were feeling the heat nonetheless. Everyone thought it was a setup, a plot to get the counterculture up against the wall. They were almost certainly right. So Morocco it was.
It was February of 1967. One of those sudden jaunts where everyone piles into a car. Keith, Brian, and Anita packed themselves into Keith's dark blue Bentley. Anita was really battered by now, almost captive to Brian. He'd become furious that she wouldn't give up her modeling and acting career to tend to his every need. As the car cruised through France with loyal stone soldier Tom Kalick at the wheel.
Brian's darkness surfaced. He was paranoid about Anita, or just observant. He started in on her, reopening their long-running argument. At the same time, his asthma flared up, triggered by the hash and cigarette smoke now fishbowling the Bentley. Brian wheezed and gasped for air. He insisted they follow an ambulance they saw to a hospital in Alby. He was diagnosed with pneumonia and admitted.
The rest of the party got back in the car and kept driving. Brian's absence in the car was filled by a sudden sexual tension. They gave into it, Anita making the first move and driver Tom Kalick up front keeping at least one eye on the road. "It's getting very friendly in the backseat," he wrote in his diary. It was springtime in Spain and summer in Tangier. They wondered about Brian. They smoked hash. They wandered into Marrakesh.
It was all under wraps by the time Brian arrived. Anita was still unsure if she could or even wanted to leave him. And she and Keith were both worried about what this would do to the Rolling Stones. But Brian knew something had shifted. Something both subtle and tectonic. If Brian had been paranoid before, he was spinning off the face of the earth now.
He sealed his fate with both his girlfriend and his band at the hotel that night. Perhaps explicitly to rebound his own humiliation onto Anita, he arranged for two local prostitutes to come to his room. When Anita arrived, she was confronted with a scene of pure debauchery in the basement, the kind only a self-loathing misogynist like Brian Jones could choreograph.
When he invited her to join in, she refused, disgusted. Her rejection was all the excuse Brian needed to fly into a violent rage. It began with him hurling the room service tray at her, progressed to a straight-up brawl, and ended with a bruised and bloodied Anita at Keith's door while Brian lay in a bathtub, calling out to no one. "'You've broken my rib! Fucking ribs broken!'
Up in his room, Keith was persuading a still unconvinced Anita that the Rubicon had been crossed. I can't leave him, Keith, she said. He'll die. You want him to kill you then? Keith responded. She saw, then, that this was not hyperbole. She'd been in some shit relationships, but never in actual mortal danger from one. Keith planned a moonlight escape.
Brian was abandoned once and for all. Before Brian arrived back in London, Anita moved out of their shared flat. There wasn't much to move. She took all her clothes and half of the hash. Later that year, Anita was in Rome shooting Barbarella with Jane Fonda. Her career was on the rise.
Dressed in a dark wig and black lace and leather, frighteningly cruel, she played, fittingly, the Great Tyrant, a.k.a. the Black Queen, mocking and seducing Jane Fonda's title character. She called her, tauntingly, pretty pretty. Marianne Faithfull remembers how Anita started dressing in that costume all the time. The Black Queen, mistress of the underworld.
a kind of cult sci-fi Elvira meets Alice in Wonderland as dominatrix, a role written by Terry Southern with Anita in mind. She still had lots of friends from her days modeling in Rome, a minor celebrity. After one night out partying with some of them, they had a run-in with police, who moved to search her. Anita swallowed her brick of hash, but they took her in anyway.
At the jail, she strode down the corridor, handcuffed, as shouts of, Anita! Anita! rose up from behind the bars. Anita, now high as hell, quickly turned to shush them. I'm not Anita, she whispered. I'm the Black Queen and I cannot be arrested. Keith joined her in Italy. They were happily in love, darlings of the counterculture, the fashion and film world, aristocrats and junkies.
At night, they'd cruise in Keith's Bentley, terrorizing other cars through a built-in PA speaker. They were paired to Redlands, his country estate and the site of that seismic police raid. She decorated the interior in decadent style, while he reinforced the exterior with huge walls and an actual moat.
Anita sang back up on sympathy for the devil and made suggestions during recording sessions, something never tolerated with any other woman until now. But Anita was different, cultured, sophisticated, well-traveled, and forceful, not afraid to tell Mick when his work was crap. In fact, she rather enjoyed it. She understood the effect she had on people, particularly men.
Tony Sanchez, aka Spanish Tony, procurer of drugs, one of the Stones' documentarians and hangers-on at the time, remembers Jagger completely remixing Stray Cat blues after Anita pronounced the vocals too high. That graffiti bathroom shot with the open toilet on the cover of Beggar's Banquet? That was Anita's concept, too. She called herself the Sixth Stone.
She was really the fifth stone by then, higher in the pecking order than Brian Jones, who had remarkably hung on past his expiration date in the band. That he hadn't already quit out of self-respect speaks to the fact that he had none. He was a ghost, pale and withering, skittish, haunting the music with his still-impressive multi-instrumental abilities. Anita was too in love to notice.
Anita and Keith were both very busy, her with another few film roles and Keith with touring and recording. He wrote You Got the Silver for her around this time. What downtime they had was spent on the kind of mind expansion that swept the rock star set in the late 60s. LSD, UFOs, Alistair Crowley, Eastern philosophy and British countryside dress up.
Then came another big film, Performance, a British crime drama starring Mick as a washed-up rock star and Anita as his roommate. Writer-director Donald Camel was the ringleader, dark and vampiric, manipulative. Keith pleaded with her not to take the part. He despised Camel. It didn't help that the script called for some graphic sex between her character and Mick's.
Camel and Mick both had Brian Jones in mind as a template for his character, a fading rock star. Mick also borrowed a bit of Keep's shadowy wildness, so unlike his own nature. This was no swinging 60s romp as originally conceived. Jagger became the darkest version of all three front-line stones, vain and enigmatic, cold and manipulative.
During the filming, Keith would wait outside the set in Lounge Square in his Rolls Royce, wondering about what was going on inside. What was going on inside was a true blurring of the lines between fantasy and reality, a major theme of the movie. While neither Mick nor Anita have confirmed it, both Keith and Mick's girlfriend, Marianne Faithfull, are certain that a genuine sexual encounter occurred between them.
As Mary Ann realized too late, Mick, by playing Brian and Keith, will be playing two people who were extremely attractive to Anita and who were in turn attracted to her. Keith was on the fringes now. He wrote Gimme Shelter while she was on the set as he paced outside, not daring to go in for fear of what he might see.
What was going through his mind? A storm threatening his very life while Anita and Mick were just a shot away. Bigger storms were on the way. Performance turned out as a dark, violent, heroin-fueled movie. Shots of the drug on screen were rumored to be the real thing. At one point, Anita was called back to the set for another scene, shooting B-12.
It didn't make a critical splash when it was finally released in 1970. It's a cult favorite now, a relic from a moment when the upbeat swing in London took a darker turn. But the fallout from the filming rippled outward. Mick walked away unscathed, just playing another role, the decadent, depraved rock star. That was his style. He was far too stable to be derailed by the film.
But his relationship with Keith was badly damaged. The affair had blown apart their fragile brotherhood. Mick was becoming a man of wealth and taste. Keith drifted deeper into the dark. He and Anita formed their own freaky little unit apart from the band. Haunted and hunted. Beginning to use heroin.
They weren't needle users, not at first. They discovered the wonders of the drug via speedballs, the opiate cut with cocaine. So light was Anita's drug use then that she was able to abstain with little trouble when she became pregnant. Their son, Marlon Richards, was born in 1969, happy and healthy. But then Keith and Anita's heroin use rapidly increased, as heroin use tends to do.
It distanced them from the rest of the Stones. Even Brian, a chronic mess, had never really fucked with heroin. Not that it made a difference. On June 8th, 1969, a month before Marlon was born, Keith drove with Mick to Brian's East Sussex home to deliver the news. Hey Brian, it's all over, pal. Less than a month later, Brian was dead at 27.
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She would cut up photos of Brian and hang them on the walls at Redlands, only to tear them all down the next morning. The cold, unromantic reality of Brian's death punctured her golden bubble. With a new baby to care for now, Anita had very little emotional support.
Mary Ann, already struggling with her own mental health and self-medicating after a miscarriage, was also shaken by Brian's death, and she attempted suicide in Australia, swallowing handfuls of pills. She decided to leave Mick and would spend the next decade battling her demons. Keith was committed to an American tour just three months after Marlon's birth.
He pined for his new family, composing the beginnings of a song, "Wild Horses." Makewood finished the verses as an ode to his fading girlfriend. Over the next few years, heroin took a firm hold over Anita and Keith. The Rolling Stones' machine kept churning, and they made their celebrated double LP exile on Main Street, primarily at Keith's place in the south of France, where Anita oversaw the 19th century estate.
The atmosphere there would ultimately lead to more legal trouble for the couple and members of their party. Feeling pressure from locals unhappy about the drug-fueled chaos and noise, Anita and Keith abandoned the house to some roadies and whomever else was hanging around. When French police raided and found drugs, Keith and Anita, as the official tenants, were left holding the bag. They'd been through the legal ringer before.
In an effort to present the best possible optics in case there was a trial, they decided to go through a voluntary drug detox. As if they needed further motivation, Anita was again pregnant. When it all shook out, the couple, along with sax player Bobby Keys and another friend, were handed fines and a suspended jail sentence, and Anita gave birth to a daughter, Dandelion Angela.
But they were using again by the time the band went to record Goat's Head Soup in Jamaica in 1972. They relocated there with the kids, where Anita befriended a number of local Rastafarians. She'd become aware that Keith was sleeping around, and she used one of the locals to try to make him jealous. Keith had finished recording with the Stones. Deciding this game was not for him, he went back to England.
Just after he left, the local police, after an escalating series of run-ins with the couple and their chronically peace-disturbing villa, raided the place. Anita, in no mood to comply, found herself in a Jamaican jail cell. Marlon and Dandelion were left to be cared for by some of Anita's new friends. Three days in jail and a 200-pound fine later, Anita and the kids were back on a plane to the U.K.,
Mere days later, she and Keith were asleep in their London home when police kicked in the door. Another raid, turning up drugs and guns. More fines. The next month, they were at Redlands when some electrical wiring caused a major fire. Marlon woke his parents to beat and escape. Electrical work was again to blame for another fire in the couple's room in a London hotel just a few months after that.
All of this upheaval added to the paranoia and tension that always accompany heavy drug use. Their relationship was spiraling, and they were increasingly living separate lives, often in different countries, with Anita based for a while in Switzerland. It was there, in 1976, that she gave birth to their third child, another son, Tara, having once again detoxed for the pregnancy.
It was a renewed chance for the family, and Keith publicly announced that they'd finally be married. A month after the birth, Keith hit the road with the Stones. He took Marlon with him, his road companion. The boy was seven, but he knew what was up. Maybe the most responsible member of the family, he was a child bodyguard, waking his dad up because he was supposed to be on stage already.
They were in Paris on June 6th, 1976, when Keith got a phone call. A terrible phone call. I'm sorry to have to inform you, came the voice. Tara was gone. The cause was determined to be Sudden Infant Death Syndrome, what they called Crib Death back then. Keith immediately turned his focus to Marlon, grateful at least that they were away from it for his sake.
He even went on stage that very night and the tour continued. The stones must go on, but he would never fully recover. "Leaving a newborn is something I can't forgive myself for," he later wrote. "It's as if I deserted my post." Anita was wrecked. She flew to Paris, barely able to move, and they shut themselves away for a few days. They did not return to Geneva.
Dandelion, who would later go by her middle name, Angela, went to live with Keith's mum, Doris, in Dartford, which seemed like the sensible thing to do, though Anita would come to regret this secondary loss. Another serious addict, John Phillips of the Mamas and the Papas, and his troubled third wife, actress Genevieve Waite, arrived in Chelsea with their two young kids.
The families moved in together, like a drugged-out version of the Brady Bunch. It didn't last long. Of Anita, Phillips later recalled, she lit candles, sobbed, snorted coke, cooked shots of heroin, and was in agony.
Keith wrote, In 1967, Keith and Anita were heading to Toronto to meet up with the Stones. Keith took a hit on the plane. The spoon ended up in Anita's pocket.
Searched. Busted. Released on bail. At the Harbor Castle Hotel, Keith passed out. Marlon stood guard. Who was that? Marlon knew better than to let in any cops, but these cops were dressed as hotel staff. Busted. Again. Both of these latter two busts were down to Keith, the true target of the authorities, and the high-profile man actually holding the drugs.
But in the inconvenienced Rolling Stones circle, Anita was the problem. The bad luck girl, they started calling her. Even Keith managed to resent her. It was her behavior, went the conventional wisdom. They called attention to them. Another detox. But after a stretch of clean living, they found that black tar smack had been the glue binding them together. Without it, they drifted further.
They bought a house near Manhattan in South Salem, New York, Westchester County. Frog Hollow, a benign name for a sinister-feeling place, rumored to be haunted. They stayed away from opiates, but indulged in other vices. Alcohol, lighter drugs, girlfriends for Keith, and more alcohol for Anita. Keith was gone a lot.
Urged to stay clean for his career and thus urged to keep his distance from Anita, the bad luck girl. She gained a lot of weight, did not look healthy, didn't care anymore. Depression, guilt, guilt over Tara, over Brian, more drugs, heroin again, and another self-imposed detox. She took advantage of her proximity to the city, mingling with the wide-ranging punk scene there.
An elder stateswoman, respected for her anti-establishment reputation and for her style, which fit in perfectly to that particular freak scene. She befriended television's Richard Lloyd, whose resemblance to Brian Jones was notable. He often made appearances at Frog Hollow, along with lots of Westchester locals, particularly any friends that Marlon made on his excursions.
One of these was a 17-year-old boy named Scott Cantrell who took Marlon under his wing as a kind of brother figure, alternately remembered as bright and innocent or troubled and obsessive. The truth is probably in between. In any case, he became fixated on Anita, perhaps as a symbol of escape from his troubled life, perhaps as a psychosexual mother figure. The boy's own mother had recently taken her own life.
But he was around a lot. Anita was desperately lonely. Maybe she just needed a modicum of positive attention. Whatever the nature of their relationship, it's not hard to imagine Anita using him to make Keith jealous. Keith refers to him in his memoir as her boyfriend and remembers him as, quote, an absolute prick. Marlon's recollection concurs.
Keith claims he warned both Scott and Anita to knock off whatever it was. Listen, baby, I'm leaving. We're over. We're finished. But this is not the guy for you. This could only have made her more determined to keep him around. Fuck. You. Keith. July 20th, 1979.
the 10th anniversary of the moon landing. 10 years plus a couple of weeks since the death of Brian Jones and the circumstances just as unclear. What's certain is that Marlon was downstairs in the house with Jeff Sesler, one of the Stone Circle, while Anita and Scott were in the bedroom, both pairs watching the coverage of the NASA event on TV. A pop sound emanated from the second floor. Anita came screaming down,
Scott shot himself. Marlon and Jeff ran upstairs. Anita's sign took in the scene. Blood and brains on the wall. Scott lying on the bed. On top of the covers. Fully dressed but unconscious. He would die two hours later at the hospital. What happened?
Marlon thought it was just a flute. A troubled teenager, buzzed, stoned, playing with a gun, probably playing Russian roulette. Bad luck, Marlon said. It was just bad luck. The Stone's legal machine got to work. Anita was charged with possessing a handgun without a permit and being in possession of a stolen weapon.
$500 bail. Passport surrendered. Visibly in crisis, she was taken to Silver Hill, the fashionable rehab in suburban Connecticut. Within a day, the South Salem house was cleared out. But the story swirled around Anita. Dark arts. Witchcraft. Black magic. Orgies. Satanism. The mysterious witchy aura that had made her so enchanting years earlier
was now used to cast her as a villain. The tabloids went crazy, and so did Scott's family, blaming her for the death, even though she was never formally charged. Ultimately, the death was ruled a clear suicide. A grand jury determined Anita was not even in the room when the shot was fired. But she was ruined, cast out of the stone's orbit, broken.
"No. I didn't even read the papers," she told The Guardian in 2008. "Nothing. Didn't feel anything. That's one of the wonders of drugs and drink." Spanish Tony Sanchez, one of the shadowy drug-dealing characters in the Stones' 60s entourage, wrote a gossipy book, Up and Down with the Rolling Stones. They cast Anita as an evil manipulator.
He chronicled her decline in the book, calling her fat, grotesque, inflated, washed up, and rolling stone. Grail Marcus wrote, "She seems likely to be remembered as just one more cast off, one more woman who even after nearly 15 years could not penetrate to the secret place where Mick and Keith kept the most closely held drug of all, the drug of invulnerability."
Chief among the other women Marcus must have been referring to was Marianne Faithfull, who was just emerging from her lost decade, similarly embraced by the punk rock community. She made a masterpiece of an album called Broken English. On it was a song called Guilt that could have been from Anita's own soul, a defensive confession.
Anita pulled herself together enough to show up at Saturday Night Live when Marianne appeared as the musical guest in 1981. Marianne asked for coke. A jealous backup singer gave her procaine instead. It froze her vocal cords. She screeched her way through her set, then voice breaking the whole time, while Anita watched from backstage. Afterwards, Marianne was supposed to perform a set at the Mud Club, but she wanted to bail.
Anita egged her on. She always drank free at the mud club. "What you must now do is go all the way," Anita proclaimed. "Forget about these fucking record company idiots with their fucking golf carts in their hot tubs. You are a punk diva and you must now go like Muhammad to the Mecca of punk." They went and Mary Ann did her sight.
After the show, I went upstairs with Anita. Marianne said, we sat on a beat-up Victorian couch and watched videos of old Stones concerts on a big Sony monitor, posing as schoolgirls watching their favorite band. Two soul survivors shedding their skins, falling together into the 1980s. Marianne was two years clean by then, in the mid-1980s. Marlon asked her to simply call Anita and tell her that
It was brilliant, she said, because he knew her so well and knew we were always in slight love and competition. And it just worked. As she cleaned up, the health problems settled in from years of hard living. Diabetes, hepatitis C,
But she was determined. She returned to her roots in fashion, modeling for Vivienne Westwood and earning a degree in fashion and textile design at St. Martin School of Art, where Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney trained. She worked in New York, India, and St. Petersburg. But she stayed low-key. She didn't flaunt her proximity to stardom, even as some of her creations ended up on the Stones' next tour.
Designer Bella Freud launched a successful line of Anita Pallenberg-inspired clothing. She was an icon and a benign mentor to a new generation. The timing was right. Heroine chic was starting to take hold in the fashion world, too. Courtney Love was a vocal acolyte. Kate Moss became a close friend. Anita was someone who had done it all, seen it all, and lived to tell.
And in 2001, Anita and Marianne reunited on the British TV sitcom Absolutely Fabulous. In a dream sequence, Marianne played God, dressed in white. Anita, in a very black queen costume, was the devil. "'I'm bored anyway. What's the point of me if I'm acceptable?' she asked in her throaty slur. Little devil horns askew."
By 2004, Anita had been drug-free for almost 15 years, more or less. She and Keith settled into an amiable truce, bonded by their rich history. They were grandparents. She loved Keith's wife, Patty. In 2016, she walked her final catwalk for Pam Hogg. Anita wanted to be in the show, and Hogg had a suit with no model. The suit was gold.
Anita brought her own gold Elvis sunglasses, gold slippers, a gold cane. She got a standing ovation. Marlon later thanked Hogg for making his mother so happy. I am ready to die, she said in her final interview in 2016. I have done so much here. My mom died at 94. I don't want to lose my independence. Now I'm over 70, and to be honest, I did not think I would live over 40.
She died on June 13th, 2017, just a few miles from Redlands. With no possibility of summing up all that she'd meant to him, her effect on his life, and on the music, fashion, and evolution of the Rolling Stones, Keith kept his statement simple: "A most remarkable woman, always in my heart." Later he'd add, "Long may she not rest in peace, because she hates peace.
But this isn't about him. This is about Anita Pallenberg, fashion icon, model, actress, muse, mother, road warrior, creature of the 1960s who nudged the stones from suburban schoolboys to bohemian sophisticates. This is about a girl.
About a Girl is executive produced by Jake Brennan and Brady Sattler for Double Elvis. Scott Janovitz is the show's producer. It was created by Eleanor Wells and hosted by me, Nikki Lynette. This episode was written by Kara Baskin. For sources used and more information, go to aboutagirlpod.com. The music is composed by Scott Janovitz, Matt Tahaney, and Ryan Spraker.
The show is on Instagram at aboutagirlpod. And you can follow me on Instagram and Twitter at Nikki Lynette.