ANITA PALLENBERG: “I grew up rather poor in a fabulous Roman villa with illusions of being rich, because my grandfather gave most of his estate to the Nazis. We had concerts of chamber music on Fridays, but no money at all, really.”
KIM GORDON: “What does Mick Jagger mean to you? He makes me think of Anita Pallenberg.”
TONY FOUTZ: “She really was a stand-alone siren. She danced to her own tune and did it her way
all the way. She got all the jokes, had
great irony and wit and was infused with a spontaneous intensity, and a sense
of wonder that made her a trailblazer. She took a lot of people’s breath away.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “Anita grew up speaking four languages in an artistic and literary milieu. She was sent to a Swiss school in Rome, which she mostly skipped to wander about the ruins of the classical city. She was then sent to her father’s ‘decadent’ boarding school in Bavaria, 180 boys and 20 girls, mostly the children of ex-Nazis… Anita hated the school and was finally expelled for hitch-hiking to Munich for fun.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Anita came out of an artistic world, and she had quite a bit of talent herself – she was certainly a lover of art and pally with its contemporary practitioners and wrapped up in the pop art world. Her grandfather and great-grandfather were painters, a family that had gone down, apparently, in a blaze of syphilis and madness. Anita could draw. She was thrown out of school for smoking, drinking and – worst of all – hitchhiking. When she was sixteen she started hanging out in the cafes with the Roman intelligentsia, ‘Fellini and all those people,’ as she put it. Anita had a lot of style. She also had an amazing ability to put things together, to connect with people. This was Rome in the ‘Dolce Vita’ period. She knew all the filmmakers – Fellini, Visconti, Pasolini; in New York she’d connected with Warhol, the pop art world and the beat poets. Mostly through her own skills, Anita was brilliantly connected to many worlds and many different people. She was the catalyst of so many goings-on in those days.”
SIMON WELLS: “Rome’s airborne joie de vivre was crystallized
by the shooting of Federico Fellini’s classic paean to the sweet life of Italy,
‘La Dolce Vita.’ With filming taking
place in more than eighty locations across the city, Anita was able to meet and
speak with its director, as well as other figures in the Rome film community
such as Pier Paolo Pasolini and Luchino Visconti. Such was her continued presence on the set
that Anita was adopted by the crew as a mascot during the filming. Having a taste for the rare and exotic, she
soon became what she would later describe as a pariolina, an aloof yet
fashionable female resident of Rome.”
LAURA JACKSON: “After travelling to Rome, she began standing in for models and soon her photographs began to appear in top fashion magazines. An unusual girl with cropped hair, lean and lissome as a thoroughbred, she had an unsettling air about her.”
FABRICE GAIGNAULT: “Catherine Harle became like a
rock’n’roll agency. They were a bunch of
very strong women in Paris, like outlaws.
They behaved like men, they were so important for the culture of the
time. They were a little frightening for
the Parisian male, because Parisian men were bourgeoisie, and they were nothing
like that. They were free, stronger than
men; they brought culture and an artist’s lifestyle. Anita was beautiful, but she was very
dangerous company; when you were close to her, you didn’t know what was going
to happen. She was beautiful and she
loved to hang out with men; she loved male company. All the men were crazy about her, but they
were afraid of what she could do.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “I studied graphic design and art conservation in Munich for six months, lived in the Schwabing cafes, meeting people… I’ve always been a hanger-on. Whenever I liked something, I really got into it. How better to get into it than to be with them, you know. I liked to travel, so I got a lot of swinging jobs all over Europe. I was always on the run and my poor father thought I was a prostitute. He would stay up all night waiting for me to come home, but my mother was envious of what I was doing, my way of life.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “I met Andy Warhol in a funny way, in a
phone booth. I had gone in while he
waited outside, and he wanted me to leave the phone. I had a good look at him. He looked purple. He was grey and purple. All dressed in black and he didn’t say a
word. When we started to have a chat he
only said, ‘Fantastic, fabulous.’”
KEITH RICHARDS: “If there was a genealogical tree, a tree of genesis of London’s hip scene, the one that it was known for in those days, Anita and Robert Fraser, the gallery owner and art dealer, would be at the top, beside Christopher Gibbs, antiques dealer and bibliophile, and a few other major courtiers. And that was mainly because of the connections they made. Anita had met Robert Fraser a long way back, in 1961, when she was tied up with the early pop art world through her boyfriend Mario Schifano, a leading pop painter in Rome. Through Fraser she’d met Sir Mark Palmer, the original Gypsy baron, and Julian and Jane Ormsby-Gore and Tara Browne, so already a basis was laid for the meeting of music – which played a big part in the art underground from early on – and aristos, though these were not your usual aristos. Anita had a Paris life, dancing around nightly and diaphanously in Regine’s, where they let her in for free; she had an equally glamorous Roman life. She worked as a model and she got parts in movies. The people she mixed with were hard-core avant-garde in the days when hard-core hardly existed.”
TERRY SOUTHERN: “Robert Fraser’s flat in Mount Street was a veritable mecca for the movers and groovers of the 60’s scene. Michael Cooper, the photographer, produced his own latch-key and let us in. ‘It seems we’re not alone,’ he noted as we got into the lift and heard the muted but wafting blast of Little Richard’s ‘Good Golly Miss Molly’ from three floors above. ‘It’s probably Brian Jones’ new bird,’ he said. ‘She seems to be staying here now.’ Michael had this extraordinary habit of assuming you knew people you’d never met, and then somehow making you believe you did know them quite well. ‘Anita, she’s called,’ he went on. ‘She’s really quite an ultra.’ The most voguish superlative in London at the moment was the word fab. In some circles ultra was used to augment it; so that a girl of supreme beauty might be referred to as an ultra fab. To use the word ultra by itself, however, in the nominative case – as Michael had done, saying, ‘She’s quite an ultra’ – was an example of the creative speech heard in the streets of London at the time. It was also, as I saw when she opened the door, most appropriate in the case of Anita Pallenberg – a German model/actress with an electrifying Kurt Weill/von Stroheim aura. Although she was only nineteen or twenty at the time, she bore a mesmerizing resemblance to the celebrated international beauty Valli, of ‘The Third Man’ fame.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “I like the travelling but hated the
modelling. I was always sweltering in
the heat, plastered in make-up and wearing ridiculously oversized false
eyelashes. The other models used to go
to bed at nine, wearing eye masks. I’d
go out and party all night.”
HARVEY KUBERNIK:
“Their skin was an unblemished, creamy white; their legs, long and lean; with
manes of hair pressed iron-straight and lips glossed by Yardley. They strutted
the high street in the ‘fab’ designs of Mary Quant and Ossie Clark. They
answered to the names Chrissie, Pattie, Anita, and Twiggy. These were the
‘Birds of Swinging London,’ and no self-respecting Pop Star could leave his
Belgravia flat without one. They draped themselves in an elegant ennui that
suited them like an ermine stole worn to a West End premiere.”
GERED MANKOWITZ:
“Anita was the epitome of the incredibly beautiful, incredibly stylish Sixties
woman. But I thought she was evil and manipulative and wicked. I saw her as
being rather frightening. There was definitely a clique around those days, of
manipulating people into situations. Anita was part of that clique.”
CHRISSIE
SHRIMPTON: “Anita could have been evil, perhaps, because she was so very
powerful, but what I liked about her was that she didn’t use her power in an
evil way. She was very weird and freaky and strong, but her feelings were
genuine.”
STASH DE ROLA: “I first met Anita in the early summer of
1964. It was in the apartment of this
philosopher’s house called Alain Jouffroy.
Vince Taylor and I were both in bed with this very gorgeous American
model called Johanna Lawrenson, who was a friend of Anita’s. We woke up in the morning to see this amazing
girl on the terrace standing in the sun and looking at us in bed; smiling with
this amazing, irresistible barracuda smile.
Anita was digging the whole thing of seeing her girlfriend in bed with
two guys.”
GERED MANKOWITZ:
“Anita was an exotic, ambitious, sexy, decadent, dangerous woman. In a word,
she was trouble.”
ANTHONY SCADUTO:
“Anita was a very wicked lady, not human, extra-human.”
KEITH RICHARDS:
“Anita, sexy fucking bitch. One of the prime women in the world. My first
impression was of a woman who was very strong. I was right about that. Also an
extremely bright woman, that’s one of the reasons she sparked me. Let alone she
was so entertaining and such a great beauty to look at. Very funny.
Cosmopolitan beyond anyone I’d come across. She spoke many languages. She’d
been here, she’d been there. It was very exotic, to me. I loved her spirit,
even though she would instigate and turn the screw and manipulate. She wouldn’t
let you off the hook for a minute. If I said, ‘That’s nice…,’ she would say,
‘Nice? I hate that word. Oh, stop being so fucking bourgeois.’ We’re going to
fight about the word ‘nice?’ How would you know? Her English was still a bit
patchy, so she would break out in German occasionally when she really meant
something. ‘Excuse me, I’ll have that translated.’”
MARIANNE
FAITHFULL: “’Beautiful’ and ‘wicked’ are certainly two adjectives that could be
linked together in describing Anita. She gave off a superior aura, a very
seductive quality, and when you couple that with the fact that she was
incredibly beautiful with an incredible figure, great style, very bright, very
tough – her toughness was a predominant trait of her personality, the way she
just didn’t give a damn about anything, but I really can’t say how much of that
could be related to her heavy involvement with drugs and how much of it may
have derived from other sources, sources within her.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: ““I have a quality that I can look very deep into things, I mean I can see through things and see what is beyond them. I have a very old soul from another time that entered my body and lives in me. I feel younger now than when I was 8 years old. When the soul entered my body I felt very oppressed, very heavy, that something was bearing down on me. But now I am young and released with this new soul in my body.”
DONALD CAMMELL: “At the time she first started to hang out
with those guys. She opened up a whole
world to them. She was the most
attractive girl any of them had ever been around, and she had a genuine feeling
for books and poetry, and the guts to get involved with things.”
MARC SPITZ: “When did Us vs. Them become Us vs. Us? When did the impenetrable foundation of the Rolling Stones first begin to show signs of fissuring, and who do we blame for the divide that has never been fully repaired (or credit, as it sure made for a more interesting and combustible band)? Anita Pallenberg. This isn’t to say when in doubt, blame (or credit) the woman. Cherchez la femme as Mick himself might say. It’s merely a testament to the power of this particular femme fatale. Pallenberg has never been acceptable and likely never will. And yet there remains a dignity to Pallenberg that can’t be taken away; certainly because, like Keith, given her drug nightmares she should not be alive. But she not only lives on, she’s now a dark rock legend.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “Anita was beautiful and she was crazy and she was crazy beautiful… Look no further. In all her ruinous glory, here she is.”
