The Black Queen

KANDIA CRAZY HORSE: “Due to misogyny, fear of the occult and some other bullshit, Keith Richards’ former common-law wife and notorious rock ‘jezebel’ will never get her due. Yet my adoration of Richards and indeed of rock’n’roll as a cultural idea is solely the result of Pallenberg’s artistry and courage. Rock in the ‘60s Golden Era desperately needed a feminine face, a salon-keeper, a dose of the Dark Gift, a sexual icon, whether its questing children knew it or not. Accompanied by her best friend Miss Marianne, Pallenberg made rock’n’roll a brief semblance of utopia, a fully realized life expression. And she never sang a note.”

VOLKER SCHLONDORFF: “It took me completely by surprise.  I went up to see Anita, she wasn’t in Brian’s room but she was in Keith’s room having breakfast.  Their relationship was not obvious yet.  Even though the break-up with Brian was a shattering moment, she remained very cheerful and was enjoying the situation.  But she didn’t take things too seriously.  She didn’t see this as a big romance.”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “We kind of became lovers. And then we started living together. But in those days he was, as I say, very shy, and then there was Mick as well. Keith was not like a womaniser. He was not like what you’d imagine pop stars to be like – chasing after women. In the high heydays of the Rolling Stones he used to wear a pair of jeans that were practically glued to him, like he had some girls to help him try to get them off and they just couldn’t. And then he just sprayed himself with patchouli oil so much that they just went, ‘Choo, get away!’ I mean, he just seemed to be a one-woman guy. He was always very loyal to me. He needs the love and security, I guess.”

ANDEE NATHANSON: “When the Stones played Rome at the Palazzo Dello Sport it was right after Brian and Anita broke up.  It was weird because both the guys were there, but there was such a strange vibe before the show.  We couldn’t figure out what it was.  Keith was in his own room practicing his guitar, and immediately after the show he left to be with Anita and Brian came with us.  Poor Brian.  I had never seen anyone so sad in all my life.  He was mightily upset.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “In the summer of 1967 Mick and I went to Rome to see Keith and Anita. The scene in Rome gravitated around them. There were Christian Marquand, Terry Southern and Julian Beck and Judith Malina of the Living Theatre. Terry was very funny about Anita’s immersion in her ‘Barbarella’ role. He teased her a lot: ‘Ah, by my troth, here comes the Black Queen! Rats scurry across polished marble floors and little snakes hiss at her baleful entrance!’ There was a lot of that going on.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “Anita’s Roman world centered around the Living Theatre, the famous anarchist-pacifist troupe run by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, which had been around for years but was coming into its own period of activism and street demos. The Living Theatre was intense, but it had glamor. There were all those beautiful people attached, like Donyale Luna, who was the first famous black model in America, and Nico and all those girls who were hovering around.”

GERARD MALANGA: “The ambience in Rome was wonderful. I referred to it as a renaissance. A whole slew of very interesting people were hanging out with each other. We were hobnobbing with the artist Mario Schifano, and the filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini, and the Living Theater. One day Anita, Keith and myself rendezvoused at Billy Berger’s place. He was an American actor who was very successful in spaghetti westerns. I went into the kitchen and there was Keith at the stove stirring up this syrup in a pot. He was a very jovial person. He threw in some brownie mix and made hash brownies. We hung out for a while, he wrote out the recipe for me, and they left. I proceeded to eat one of the brownies and literally turned green.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “Anita’s friends were, as ever, a hip crowd of the period – people like the actor Christian Marquand, who directed ‘Candy,’ the next film Anita worked on that summer, which starred, among a large cast of stars, Marlon Brando, who kidnapped her one night and read her poetry and, when that failed, tried to seduce Anita and me together, ‘Later, pal.’ There were Paul and Talitha Getty, who had the best and finest opium. I fell in with some other reprobates, like the writer Terry Southern, with whom I got on well, and the picaresque, scarcely believable figure of the period ‘Prince’ Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, known as Stash, son of the painter Balthus. Stash was an Anita connection from Paris who had been sent by Brian Jones to try and get Anita back. Instead he fell in with the poacher – me. Stash had the bullshit credentials of the period – the patter of mysticism, the lofty talk of alchemy and the secret arts, all basically employed in the service of leg-over. How gullible were the ladies. He was a roué and a playboy, liked to look upon himself as Casanova. What an amazing creature to sweep through the twentieth century. Stash was in a band, playing tambourine with one black glove. He loved to dance, in this weird aristocratic way. I was always convinced Stash was going to break out into a minuet.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “We lived with Stash in this magnificent palace, the Villa Medici, with its formal gardens, one of the most elegant buildings in the world.  Down the Spanish steps for lunch. Nightclubs, hanging out at the Villa Medici, going to the gardens of the Villa Borghese. It was my version of the Grand Tour. Blue Lena had loudspeakers in the grille, and Anita used to terrorize the Romans by putting on a woman policeman’s voice, reading out their number plates and ordering them to turn immediately to the right. The car flew a Vatican flag with the keys of Saint Peter.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “We all took acid at the Villa Medici, the home of the French Academy in Rome where Stash was staying with his father, the painter Balthus. It was moonlight, a full moon. There were Baroque staircases and a beautiful, formal, 18th century garden with citrus trees. And with the sort of mood that conjures up, we all became someone else, we all became characters out of the past. Later that night Anita and I saw a ghost. We walked about the gardens all night in the moonlight waxing poetical and metaphysical. In the morning Mick sat in the garden strumming his guitar to a dirge like tune. It was the melody to what would eventually become ‘Sister Morphine.’”

STEVEN TYLER:  “I was into – I don’t want to say my feminine side, but the hipper women’s stuff, the way Marianne Faithfull and Anita Pallenberg dressed those guys!  They really had that motley, tatterdemalion medieval troubadour thing down.  As soon as I began to refine my own personal style, I was immediately attracted to the Anita Pallenberg/Keith Richards gypsy look.”

ELIZABETH WILDER: “Anita was thrilled to be back in her old stomping groud, where she’d spent hours at Café Rosati sipping coffee with Fellini.  Keith had never spent any real time in Europe before and for the second time that summer found himself following Anita’s lead.  He held her bags while she fiddled with bottles in jewel-like perfurmeries and patiently waited while she tried on mules in boxlike boutiques, negotiating prices in perfect Italian.  The paparazzi trailed them constantly – snapped them shopping, leaping into taxies, huddled together over an English newspaper.  Anita was nonchalant, while Keith hadn’t acquired his coolness yet and couldn’t resist flipping the paps the bird.”

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD: “Inspired by Anita and the finest Afghan hash, Keith went through a change, almost a reincarnation in Rome. Before long the Living Theater and a whole slew of experimental filmmakers, artists and writers were gravitating around Keith and Anita’s incense-filled hotel suite. When Keith wanted to go shopping for shirts he’d insist that Anita accompany him and stay with him until he chose just the right fabric and cut, at which point he’d buy a dozen along with strings of beads and necklaces. The same thing with boots, coats, sunglasses.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Anita was playing the Black Queen in ‘Barbarella.’ The city that the Black Queen rules over is built on this atmospheric fluid that allows her to suck the life out of everybody in the city. There’s a wonderful scene with Anita lying in her dream chamber at the center of the city tapping into everyone’s dreams.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Anita was in costume all the time. She had the most wonderful clothes. All her own clothes began looking like the Black Queen’s outfit, so even when she wasn’t in her costume she just looked like the day version of the Black Queen. The Black Queen’s casual wear. Wonderful. Even better in a way than the costume in the movie, which was the most boring, obvious bit of stuff. She put herself together in the most exotic way. She was at her most beautiful.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “There’s that line between put-on and reality, which is never quite clear. That one got crossed by our Anita a great deal. Early afternoon there’d be ‘Darling, sometimes vhen I am at Cinecitta I really do believe I am the Black Queen.’ As a joke, naturally. Then eight hours later and a lot more stoned: ‘But you know vhat? I really am the Black Queen;’ and then another eight hours later a scary: ‘I AM THE QUEEN OF ALL I SURVEY!’”

KEITH RICHARDS: “One night when she was doing ‘Barbarella,’ Anita ended up in prison. She was with some guys from the Living Theatre when she was pulled over for drugs, and the police thought she was a transvestite. They put her into the tank, and as soon as they opened the door everybody went, ‘Anita! Anita!’ Everyone knew her – talk about connections. And she’s hissing, ‘Shut up!’ because her story was she was the Black Queen and she couldn’t be arrested – a bit of a theatrical number that she thought would appeal to the enlightened Romans, or somehow divert them. She’d had to swallow a whole lump of hash when they caught her, so by then she was pretty high. They put her in a room with all the other queens.”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “After ‘Barbarella’ I got to do ‘Candy’ in Rome, so I got to meet Marlon Brando.  So Keith heard that Marlon Brando and I  had a scene, so he took the first plane and he was out there.  Brando was on the set, but I didn’t actually work with him, I worked with James Coburn.  But Brando whisked me off back to his country house, and he started to do his Brandoish seduction and I got completely intimidated. I remember he was lying in bed reading his poetry and I ran away.  So I went and hid and they were playing music and I went and put on ‘(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction’ and it was kind of blasting and he comes in and said, ‘It’s really a load of shit, it’s the drums that count,’ and all that Brandoish kind of stuff.  And eventually I didn’t end up in bed with him but I ran away.  He fell asleep and I sneaked out.  And then in the morning he was eyeing me and all that.  And somehow it got to Keith really quickly, and in the afternoon he came.  And while Keith was there Brando was, like, really wicked.  He was sitting there putting his arm around me and smiling at Keith and playing all these silly little games.  And eventually I thought, ‘Well, he fancies Keith.’ That’s how I solved the whole kind of thing, by thinking Brando was gay and that he actually fancied Keith.  But it was the same story as with Brian, so eventually I tried to time it to work out where Keith was working.  But Keith’d always stand me up.  So eventually I gave up.  Being the lady of those kind of guys was always like being set on the side.  The girls were always looked down on.”

MAGGIE ABBOTT: “I remember she was walking around a room.  The camera was literally stalking her.  She was magnetic.  So eventually she came into our office and she was her charismatic self.  I started taking her out on interviews.  Someone in the office said to me, ‘why do you keep going on these interviews with Anita?  Are you trying to protect her from all those producers?’ I remember I said, ‘No, I have to protect those producers from Anita!’  We’d go to these meetings and she’d tuck herself into a corner of the sofa with her legs up and she’d look at them with this wicked cat look she had.  You could see they were straining to take in this energy; this wonderful evocative-provocative aura that she had.  It was so funny; I really felt I couldn’t send her out alone, because I thought, ‘Those poor men in the death rays of the magnetism of Anita.’  She just had that look.”

VICTOR BOCKRIS: “’A Degree of Murder’ was scheduled to be the German entry at the Cannes Film Festival, and Brian and Anita had both been invited to attend.  The ad for the film featured an image of a beautiful young woman on her knees firing a pistol, above the caption ‘Men couldn’t own her!’ Brian flew to Cannes with Anita while Keith drove across Europe for a week, hanging out in his hotel room waiting to see what would happen.  Once again Brian flew into a rage and sent a bruised and hysterical Anita running back to Keith’s suite.  Jones had just blown his last chance with Anita and doomed himself to a precipitous fall.  Keith, who had waited for three months to see if Brian and Anita would get back together, now closed the door in his ex-friend’s face forever.  It was a thrilling but edgy transition.”

MARC SPITZ: “Pallenberg spoke in the broken English of a Federico Fellini starlet or a fey male duke turned vampire.  She was fearless in her exploration of drugs, bondage, and the occult.  Built like skinny girls, the Stones borrowed her garments and made every other male rock band and rock fan want to dress that way as well; that highly creative, elegant, trashy aesthetic that has also been copied by every female rock and roller for the past forty years.”

TONY FOUTZ: “She was really great.  She could have stood on her own as an actress because she had the charisma, she had the bit of wildness in her; she had a real presence on camera and a real nonchalance, too.  She had this natural joie de vivre intensity – real intensity not manic, but an intensity of spirit.  A recklessness of abandonment.  She had a very unique quality and a smile that would have stopped a Trojan horse.  She barely scraped the surface.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Anita’s smile I remember. I mean, her wonderful smile in those days, which promised everything. When she was having a good time, she was so full of promise. She gave this incredible smile, which was quite frightening too, all those teeth. Like a wolf, like a cat that got the cream. If you were a man, it must have been very powerful. She was gorgeous because she was so beautifully dressed, always in the perfect costume.”

CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD: “Pallenberg continued to bewitch the Stones. She was amazingly hip and freewheeling: no rock chick ever seized her moment or embodied her times with more cool assurance. Even before Anita herself was a public figure, she was legendary in the pop business. Fame requires not just looks but presence, and Anita was extravagantly endowed with both. She had the swagger of a star, too.”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “Keith can be in a room with fifty other people and he won’t notice anything but the guitar. To live with a rock star, a woman must find her ways of independence.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “If you want to talk real cool and clothes, talk to Anita. She had a great look that was all about one colour, a sort of beige cream, leather, suede, silk shirts, lots of jewellery and a red fox coat.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “Anita had a huge influence on the style of the times. She could put anything together and look good. I was beginning to wear her clothes most of the time. I would wake up and put on what was lying around. Sometimes it was mine, and sometimes it was the old lady’s, but we were the same size so it didn’t matter. If I sleep with someone, I at least have the right to wear her clothes. But it really pissed off Charlie Watts, with his walk-in cupboards of impeccable Savile Row suits, that I started to become a fashion icon for wearing my old lady’s clothes. Otherwise it was plunder, loot that I wore – whatever was thrown at me on stage or what I picked up off stage and happened to fit. I would say to somebody, I like that shirt, and for some reason they felt obliged to give it to me. I used to dress myself by taking clothes off other people.”

JOHN DUNBAR: “I was walking down Saint-Germain outside Deux Magots and there was ‘John! John!’ and it was Keith and Anita in this cab and I got swept up into their lives for a couple of days. They were staying in this great old brothel called Hortense and I used to go up there and take drugs. I remember walking down the street with Keith in Paris and he stopped at one of those magazine stands and looked at this magazine. He was reading it and this magaziner goes, in French, ‘Are you gonna buy it?’ and Keith goes, ‘Grrr,’ and rips it in half! There was this terrible scene. No sooner had we escaped from that then it’s like one of those cowboy films, somebody bumps into Keith and there’s another fight. So I’m kind of going, like, ‘Not me, gov, not me, gov.’ Those were his aggressive days.”

ANON: “Anita was no fool. She first thought the real power of the Rolling Stones lay with Brian, but after a while she found him to be weak… She found him pathetic in many ways. Her timing was perfect: she intuitively knew that the real power base in the Stones – the one strong man – was Keith and she latched on to him. Keith couldn’t believe his luck.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “We had a great time in Rome when Anita was arranging ‘Barbarella,’ but then we had to go to the south of France for the film festival and Brian again tried to engineer some scheme. Previously he had tried to engineer a reunion in Paris but Anita wouldn’t have it. Anita was really upset. A couple of times she was in tears, which is very unusual for Anita. Maybe if Brian had handled it the right way, maybe he might have pulled it off. Whatever he did was wrong. During the premiere in Cannes I just stayed away and hung out in the hotel. Anita came back in tears ‘cause Brian had tried to beat her up.”

VOLKER SCHLONDORFF: “I know Brian loved her, and I think she loved him. She was certainly in love with his lifestyle. But Brian was very passionate and their affair had problems. Brian was also doing a lot of drugs at this time which messed everything up. What I mean is, Brian was extremely likeable. Yet he wouldn’t often allow you to like him. Strangely at times he’d rather challenge you, provoke you. There was also something definitely devilish about Brian. He’d sense your weakness with incredible intuition and, if the mood took him, he’d exploit it. On the other hand, he could turn around and be incredibly nice to you. I liked Brian, but he was a complicated guy. It must’ve been hard.”

RONNI MONEY: “Anita didn’t look after him, she didn’t care about him – she couldn’t even look after herself.  Look what she did to him and how she did it – running off with a member of Brian’s band, a guy Brian had to work with.  Is there a worse humiliation than that?  I didn’t tell him this, of course, but Anita did him a favor running off like that because she liked drugs, she was his downfall.  You see, there are people who actually enjoy doing drugs.  I’m not talking about addiction – it’s something else.  My husband was forced to tell me, after numerous cures, ‘Well, I like it.’ He liked the whole culture of it.  Because he didn’t want to be touched by anything.  It doesn’t let you get touched by anything.  It cuts out a lot of things that you normally would wake up worrying about.  You really just have to care about your drugs.  That is your whole day… The tragedy is when a man gets involved with a woman who likes doing drugs and gives him companionship.  Anita was one of those women and it was her drug support that wrecked Brian.  That is the killer, when you get a partner that likes drugs as much as you do – then you’re never going to get away from it.  I tried to turn Brian off by telling him in detail what happened to my husband.  But by the time Anita got through with him, he was too far gone.”

TERRY SOUTHERN: “Don’t forget you took half Brian’s records and half the dope.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “Well, they were mine!”

TERRY SOUTHERN: “No, I thought it was very considerate to leave half – I mean, you could have taken everything.”

KEITH RICHARDS: “Yeah, well I had a one-track mind at the time. Thought, ‘Here, I’ll leave you something.’”

ANITA PALLENBERG: “I found there was an enormous talent in Keith, and Keith was really a shy little guy in those days, couldn’t come out of himself. And I had all this kind of Italian energy and outgoing personality, so it was really easy for me. And somehow it finally came out. Then he started to write songs and he started to sing them himself. I thought it was wonderful.”

STEPHEN DAVIS: “Keith started wearing Anita’s jewels, then her clothes, and her makeup, and got his unruly hair together in an unkempt shag that became his trademark. Keith had always been somewhat shy, but under Anita’s thumb he became flamboyant and cocksure, the very picture of the English rock star, the pretender to the throne being abdicated by Brian Jones in free fall.”

ANTHONY MAY: “To me, she was just the most beautiful person in the world.  I was just blown over by here.  It was mainly because of her attitude to life.  She was just totally outrageous.  She didn’t care.  She was like a real free spirit, it was probably because she and Keith had money they could do what they like, but I do remember her arriving at a hotel and she was smoking a joint through a pipe.  This sort of thing hadn’t really hit Czechoslovakia, so nobody really knew that it was… It was like she’d turned her room into a Marrakech tavern.  Her bed was just flowing in Morrocan rugs and silks, there were joss sticks everywhere.  I’ll always remember by her bed was telegram and it read, ‘I love you – Keith.’  I thought it was just so romantic.”

ANTHONY MAY: “She came up to me and said, ‘Keith’s arriving in a minute.’  As The Rolling Stones were my favorite band, I was very excited.  We were quite high up in this castle and we saw this black car arriving and she said, ‘Ah, I think this must be him,’ and she ran down to greet him.  As the chauffeur got out of the car, he walked around, opened the passenger door and Keith fell out into the mud.  He eventually came into the castle and he said, ‘Leave us alone,’ and this was about nine in the morning.  He passed out and they couldn’t even wake him up at 5 pm.  We didn’t see him or Anita for three days!”

NICK KENT: “Anita was a big force in the Stones.  She didn’t have any skill to bring to the Stones, but what she had was image and attitude.  She couldn’t play guitar or drums or bass.  It’s questionable whether the Rolling Stones would have had a woman playing in their group, but if they had, then Anita would have been that woman.”

VICTOR BOCKRIS: “Clearly, Anita was a much more dangerous character than Marianne, who used to call her Glenda Hindenburg.  Anita was stronger than Keith or Mick, where Marianne was a lot less sure of herself.  Marianne gave herself totally to Mick; Anita shared herself with Keith.  And Mick would take everything from Marianne and move on by 1970, while Keith would be reliant on Anita for another ten years.”

MARC SPITZ: “This seemed to be the rule in the Stones during the mid- and late ‘60s, the period when the band was at its surging best: Whoever had Anita Pallenberg’s affections somehow had most of the power.  Whoever didn’t have her wanted her with a highly distracting fascination at best, a corrosive jealousy at worst.  Those who had her and lost her, lost their ‘demon.’ Anita knew all about demons.”

MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Although I was sad when Anita ran off from Brian and set up her liaison with Keith, I knew it would be better for her because there was something very sick about Brian and Anita when they lived together.  Whereas Anita with Keith presented a much more acceptable relationship.  I think if they hadn’t got so heavily into drugs they would have been very happy.  And I think part of the reason that they submerged themselves into drugs was because they were trying to punish themselves, more than anyone else could have, for what they had done to Brian.”

MARSHALL CHESS: “Anita was a very powerful human being. She was crazy and out of control but she was very brilliant and really had some kind of power over both Mick and Keith and she was very much an architect of their image.”