"Are You In That Garden?"

DONALD CAMMELL: “I was interested in the idea of an artist at the end of the road. I wanted to write something about an artist in that predicament. It could have been any kind of artist: a painter, a writer, a concert pianist. But I had access to the biggest rock and roll singer in the world, and I was interested in that world. And there is no art form in which the violent impulse is more implicit than in rock music.”

ELIZABETH WINDER: “Anita soon found herself living in a creative menage a trois with Deborah Dixon and Donald Cammell.  After a night of dancing at Chez Castel, they’d drive down to Saint-Tropez in Donald’s Alfa Romeo, drink pastis at Café Senequier, or spend hours on the beach discussing mirror images in Borges.  With Anita as his muse, Donald began to write the script in earnest.  She taught him about Francis Bacon, Jean Genet, Vladimir Nabokov, and the cutup techniques of William Burroughs.”

GARY LACHMAN: “Cammell’s father, Charles Richard Cammell, an aesthete and decadent in the twenties, befriended Aleister Crowley, and wrote a book about him; Crowley, in return, stood as Donald’s godfather – an odd role for someone who called himself the Beast 666. In later life Donald would talk of being bounced on the aging mage’s knee. Early influences are paramount. From all reports Cammell was as manipulative and domineering as the old wizard.”

DONALD CAMMELL: “I was brought up in a house where Magick was real. My old man, Charles, filled the house with magicians, metaphysicians, spiritualists and demons. I was conditioned by my father, by his books, by Aleister Crowley. I reacted against that at one stage: I became very materialist, obsessed by science and physics. But later I became more and more conscious that the world I was brought up in was an expression of a reality. I dug Magick and wanted to find out more.”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “As the son of Aleister Crowley’s biographer, Cammell was interested in magic, not politics… Cammell’s magnetic personality encompassed interests in literature, cinema, art, metaphysics, philosophy. If he said, ‘Come with me to hell,’ one friend said of Cammell, ‘You’d say ‘Okay, how bad can it be.’’”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Anita was the dark queen under an evil spell, so gorgeous and dangerous. But the sarcastic, sophisticated and decadent Donald Cammell was the major Dracula.”

DONALD CAMMELL: “I was living a very sort of marginal existence to society [in 1964 and 1965]… and I was not involved with the pop society at all… I met the Stones, not in a pop society, I met them by accident. Brian… because he fell in love with a girlfriend of mine called Anita Pallenberg.”

DAVID CAMMELL: “I had arranged to meet Donald in Tangier, at the famous Minza Hotel. I’d been driving through Spain in my little Lotus sports car, left it at Algiciras and took the ferry across to Tangier. In fact he never turned up so I spent a couple of adventurous days there, bought a lot of pottery and returned via Paris to stay with Donald and Deborah. In his studio I met Anita Pallenberg for the first time, who asked me if I could give her a lift to London. I had my priorities in those days, so I dumped all my pots in Donald’s studio – they’re probably still there – and transported Anita to what turned out to be an assignation at a night club with Brian Jones.”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “We wrote ‘Performance’ sitting on the beach in Saint-Tropez. Donald, Deborah [Dixon] and I all worked on it together. I remember one time a gust of wind blew the whole script into the ocean water, and I remember frantically ironing each page trying to dry them out…. I was very angry with Donald after I saw a TV interview with him soon after the release of ‘Performance.’ He referred to ‘an actress’ who’d helped him with the script, but didn’t mention my name. That really irritated me.”

DONALD CAMMELL: “Anita had a lot of influence on the way that I saw ‘Performance.’ And she’s not often credited with it… But in fact I became fascinated by some things that she was already deeply involved in, like Artaud… So I give her full credit.”

MARC SPITZ: “Ironically, this immersion into utter darkness came at a time when life was at its most idyllic.  Mick and Marianne were living in Cheyne Walk, a few houses down from Keith and Anita.  Mick could walk over and work on songs at Keith’s yellow, psychedelic grand piano.  He and Marianne were planning a family; she’d gotten pregnant at the beginning of ’68 and they’d named the child, a girl, Corinna.  Keith and Anita were talking about starting a family as well.  It seemed to be a new era of maturity and functionality for the two main Stones and the women that they loved.  And then filming began.”

ELIZABETH WINDER: “The décor at Courtfield Road was Donald’s other inspiration, and Anita helped furnish the set with artifacts from her own life.  For silks she shopped at Chelsea Antiques.  Maracas from Brazil, a tapestry from their bedroom, a fur-lined cape that once belonged to Brian.  In this way and so many others, Performance was Anita, made piece by piece from her very cells – her hash, her records, even the script itself – blessed by Artaud, dipped in Saint-Tropez, still crusted with salt and her Bain de Soleil.”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “Pherber is very direct, spontaneous, pithy, funny, rather arrogant, ironic more by accident than design, and at the same time elliptical and evasive when it comes to questions about herself – sort of automatically secret.”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “I wasn’t crazy about taking the part of Pherber… It was offered to me after Tuesday Weld broke her shoulder in dance class or something. They had already started shooting by then and Donald came to me and he really wanted me to do it, insisted that I do it. I was very involved in my relationship with Keith by then, and he didn’t want me to do it, he didn’t like Donald. I had been trying to get pregnant so it meant that part of my life would be put on hold. I went into the picture pretty cold right from the start.”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “Spanish Tony found Mick and James Fox smoking dusty DMT in the greenroom, to give some extra flash to the drug scenes they were about to do. Halfway through the shoot, Anita slipped some acid into Fox’s coffee without telling him, which really sent Fox off the deep end.”

SANDY LIEBERSON: “The filming was high drama.  Everyone was extremely volatile.  They made sure there were lots of eruptions, arguments, tantrums.  Mick in particular is very high strung, very mercurial.  I got the impression that everything had to be very large, or he just didn’t feel alive.”

DONALD CAMMELL: “They were a little unruly. And the most unruly one, I’m sure he doesn’t mind me mentioning this now, was Keith. He was extremely annoyed by what he thought was going on in the house.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “I wrote ‘Gimme Shelter’ on a stormy day, sitting in Robert Fraser’s apartment in Mouth Street. Anita was shooting ‘Performance’ at the time, not far away, but I ain’t going down to the set. God knows what’s happening. As a minor part of the plot, Spanish Tony was trying to steal the Beretta they were using as a prop on the set. But I didn’t go down there, because I really didn’t like Donald Cammell, the director, a twister and a manipulator whose only real love in life was fucking other people up. Donald was a decadent dependent of the Cammell shipyard family, very good-looking, a razor-sharp mind poisoned with vitriol. He’d been a painter in New York, but something drove him mad about other clever and talented people – he wanted to destroy them. He was the most destructive little turd I’ve ever met.”

SPANISH TONY: “Keith refused to go there. He seemed afraid that he would be forced into a confrontation, realized that once he caught Mick and Anita making love, he would lose both of them, and his world would crumble as surely as Brian’s had. He would wait in a nearby bar, morosely sipping Bacardis, or he would just hang around for Anita in the back of his Bentley, which I parked nearby.”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “Later, unknown to his stars, Donald Cammell edited his footage of Mick and Anita into a thirty-minute blue movie and submitted it to a porno festival in Amsterdam, where it won the Golden Schwantz.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “One of the first things that happened between Anita and me was the shit of ‘Performance.’ Cammell wanted to fuck me up, because he had been with Anita before Deborah Dixon. Clearly he took a delight in the idea that he was screwing things up between us. It was a setup, Mick and Anita playing a couple. I felt things through the wind. I knew Mouche – Michele Breton – who used to be paid to ‘perform’ as a couple with her boyfriend. Anita told me Michele had to have Valium shots before every take. So he was basically setting up third-rate porn.”

CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “At her mansion on the Irish coast, Marianne was blissfully oblivious to the potboiler that unfolded during the filming of ‘Performance.’ She had been warned by doctors to stay away from drugs, so Faithfull dutifully restricted herself to wine, grass and lots of cocaine.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “I didn’t say anything about Mick fucking Anita at the time of the film because I knew the only way for it to work was for him to really appeal to her. He was Brian and Keith in one, and that’s the only time he hit with her. Because he was a combination of the two men she cared about.”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “Keith was not exactly keen on my role with Mick in that movie – then Donald asked Keith to write the music for the film and he refused point-blank.  And then Robert Fraser didn’t help the situation by renting out his flat in Mount Street to me for some exorbitant sum, on the production tab, and then forgetting to move out!  So walking back into the atmosphere of that flat could be somewhat delicate at times, to put it mildly!  Donald would reduce Mick to tears over not coming up with the right piece of music or the feeling that he wanted for a scene, and then to tears of joy when he finally hit it!  Mick and I would both be terrified by one of his ‘Von Sternberg’ type tirades and rages – but when we got it right it was great.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “I never expected anything from Anita. I mean, hey, I’d stolen her from Brian. So you’ve had Mick now; what do you fancy, that or this? You’ve got an old lady like Anita Pallenberg and expect other guys not to hit on her? I heard rumors, and I thought, if she’s going to be making a move with Mick, good luck to him; he can only take that one once. I’ve got to live with it. Anita’s a piece of work. She probably nearly broke his back! I’m not that jealous kind of guy. I didn’t expect to put any reins on her. It probably put a bigger gap between me and Mick than anything else, but mainly on Mick’s part, not mine. And probably forever.”

IAN STEWART: “I don’t think Mick really would have made a film if it hadn’t been for the fact that Marianne was scoring big on the stage.  Mick had a broad streak of envy in him, jealousy, and I think it got to him that Marianne had received such terrific notices for her performance in the Chekhov play ‘Three Sisters.’ Mick didn’t like to be overshadowed by anyone, especially the women in his life.”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “’Performance’ was an occult stew of hallucinogenic sexual confusion. The collateral damage from the filming had final consequences for the Stones, their women, and almost everyone connected to them after.”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “The script, an explicit homage to Borges, calls for hundreds of jump cuts and flashbacks derived from the cutup method invented by Burroughs and Brion Gysin. Burroughs’ obsession with the legendary dope-crazed assassins of Hassan Sabbah is a leitmotif of the film. Satanism is openly evoked as Jagger/Turner sings Robert Johnson’s ‘Come On In My Kitchen.’”

JOHN PHILLIPS: “With the really intelligent people, it’s almost a matter of inbreeding at this point.  You estrange yourself from the world, you create your own society, and that’s what ‘Performance’ is about.”

NICK KENT: “Essentially, it’s a cautionary tale about corrupted souls toying with forbidden forces and then having to face the consequences, but that didn’t prevent its mastermind, writer/director Donald Cammell, from also depicting the lives of his dissolute protagonists in a hypnotically alluring fashion… The film still conveys an almost supernatural power whenever it’s shown, but its lasting brilliance was clearly obtained at a steep cost to its key players.”

MARC SPITZ: “’Performance,’ like Michelangelo Antonioni’s ‘Blow-Up’ before it, would expose the dark side of swinging London, with ‘acid, booze, and ass’ being replaced by ‘needles, guns, and grass,’ as Joni Mitchell would observe on the title track of her 1971 classic ‘Blue.’ Pherber was a junkie, and by ’68, heroin was epidemic among the hip London art scene.  Eric Clapton was strung out.  So were John and Yoko.  The drug carries a decadent air perfectly suited to both Pallenberg’s rapidly expanding cult of personality and her personal proclivity, having bonded with Keith inside the opium dens of Morocco.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “’Performance’ was truly our ‘Picture of Dorian Gray.’ An allegory of libertine Chelsea life in the late sixties, with its baronial rock stars, wayward jeunesse doree, drugs, sex and decadence – it preserves a whole era under glass. By some sinister exchange of energies, the film took on a florid and hallucinated life of its own while those involved (and on whom it was based) began to fall apart almost as soon as the film was finished. The fusion of life and drama in ‘Performance’ had some deadly after-effects. People who fall through sugar glass skylights often end up falling through real ones. If ever a film set off a chain reaction, ‘Performance’ was it.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Our world like a magician’s box collapsed inward on itself. It was as if we willed it to happen, peevishly wanted to wreck it. Let the walls come tumbling down, not like the Battle of Jericho, but the house of Usher. We all forgot Dylan’s Dictum. We should have left it all behind and never looked back… For one instant we looked back and, although we didn’t become pillars of salt, I found that when I turned round again there was no ground beneath my feet.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “It was soon after ‘Performance’ finished shooting in the fall of 1968 that drug use among our inner circle took a quantum leap. It’s when things become completely unacceptable to the human spirit that you turn to alcohol, to drugs, to help you get through. It was right after ‘Performance’ that Anita went off her rocker for years. Into an abyss.”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “Fox freaked out, underwent a religious awakening, disappeared for years. Michele Breton became a heroin dealer, disappeared, was soon presumed dead… Only Mick was okay, perhaps even stronger than before. He emerged from the film with a new persona he would never let drop, the untouchable rock shaman, the magus of the airwaves, the midnight rambler in love with his own beauty and power.”

MICK JAGGER: “That was the thing.  The game, the occult.  Some people are still doing it.  You know, I am interested in the occult, but all that was a bit silly.  Nevertheless, it’s incredible the effect I had on some people just by that film, and I’m not talking about audiences.  People in the film industry really thought I was like that and they’d seen hundreds of films featuring hundreds of actors that weren’t anything like the parts they portrayed.  People acting as soldiers or officers but who’d never been in the army.  People acting as though they were upper-class when in fact they were from the gutter.  When I came along and did that film they thought, ‘Jesus, we can never have a guy like that in a film, he’s – he’s a Satanist!’ They believed every fucking piece of it, which makes me laugh!  Bloody incredible!  I’ll tell you, it’s very difficult to do that sort of role at fucking 6am.”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “I think ‘Performance’ was the end of the beautiful Sixties – love and all that. That film marked the end for me. I can’t even remember the film coming out. I’d forgotten about it completely.”

GARY LACHMAN: “When ‘Performance’ finally premiered in 1971, John Simon, critic for ‘New York’ magazine, called it ‘The most loathsome film of all.’ At one screening in Santa Monica the film had to be stopped because an industry exec’s wife got sick and threw up; viewers asked for their money back. Filmed in 1968 with a real rock star, real sex, real drugs, real gangsters and, so legend has it, real black magic, the film presages the violence to come: Brian Jones’ dismal end, the Manson murders and Altamont. Cammell himself saw the film as prophetic. Speaking of the Stones’ disastrous concert, he said, ‘This movie was finished before Altamont and Altamont actualized it,’ a credit a less demonic artist might avoid.”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “It takes at least one generation to determine whether a work will last. A new generation has discovered ‘Performance.’ I’m very proud of that, in spite of it all.”