ROB CHAPMAN: “Chances are, regardless of where or what location you grew up in, there’s a couple of types you’ve known at one time or another. Firstly, there’s our resident Lothario – let’s call him Vinnie – a little mad, bad, and dangerous to know. The local tearaway. Vinnie’s name often crops up in the same hushed breath as ‘back seat of a car,’ ‘knickers around her ankles,’ and ‘had to go away for a while until the heat died down.’ Then there’s this other guy. Let’s call him Cedric. Bespectacled. Quiet. Nervy rather than nerdy. Disconcertingly distant, as if he’s forever entertaining some private joke in your presence. Invited you round to his house one day and you wondered why he was so intent on playing you his dad’s record collection, until it dawned on you that these obscure discs in their thick cardboard sleeves by black artists you’d never heard of weren’t his dad’s at all. They were his and he seemed to know every note, every nuance. Brian Jones was both of these characters. And a few others besides.”
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD: “Brian was that rare mixture, a Botticelli angel with a cruel streak. During the next seven years he’d display a remarkable talent for charming people before savagely mauling them. Jones’ pockets were already always stuffed with unfinished but twisted song lyrics and poems vowing revenge on those who had ignored him, abused him or doubted his genius. Other writings of Brian’s dealt with fauns and hobbits.”
LOU REED: “A softly-spoken, drinking, smoking, womanising Narcissus with psychosomatic asthma. A strutting, intense egotist with a gentle, shy smile that played across his face whenever the TV camera lingered long enough. A musical purist blessed, or cursed, with pop star looks. Eulogised by many. “Brian Jones, with his puffed-up Pisces, all-knowing, suffering fish eyes. Brian always ahead of style. Perfect Brian.”
SPANISH TONY: “Brian was still loving it all then, in 1965. He was the beautiful Stone, the one the fans screamed over while they told jokes about ‘old rubber lips’ Jagger. Brian was living with Linda, the loving mother of one of his many children. He seemed to have become almost settled, almost content. Until the foxiest blonde I had ever seen arrived in London. Her name was Anita Pallenberg, and no one ever seemed to know quite where she came from or who she was. When pressed, she would reveal that she was half Italian and half German and that she had worked as an actress with the Living Theater. She had only to walk along the street to cause a string of traffic accidents. She had tumbling, shining blond hair, a long lithe body and wickedly beautiful cat’s eyes. She was no dumb blonde either, and the combination of witty conversation and devastating looks rapidly turned her into the darling of aristocratic London.”
ROBERT GREENFIELD: “What first attracted Brian and Keith and Mick to Anita was her experience in worlds through which the Stones themselves had not yet traveled - her incredible fashion sense, her authentic movie star glamour, her continuing ability to get as high as anyone on the planet, her insatiable need for sex, her interest in the dark arts, and last but most certainly not least her utter refusal to take shit from anyone as well as the obvious pleasure she derived from shocking the bourgeoisie.”
TOM KEYLOCK: “There was something about that bird. She could say ‘fuck you’ in six languages.”
CHRISTOPHER SANDFORD: “And then, to everyone’s amazement, Jones sauntered in with the most ravishing, drop-dead girl on his arm anyone had ever seen. But gorgeous. Bone-thin yet built, with a shock of cropped blonde hair and clad in a shiny black nano-skirt; her face corpse white but for two droopy, coal-black eyes that gave her an air of boozy languor. Most surprising of all, she didn’t give a toss about the Stones, whom she considered ‘little schoolkids’ and who went mad for her as a result. She was some piece of work. Anita Pallenberg. Keith was staggered. Ho-ly shit. What did a chick like that see in him?”
ANITA PALLENBERG: "I met Brian first in the Oktoberfest circus. I got backstage with a photographer. I told him I just wanna meet them. I had a piece of hash and amyl nitrates.That first night that Brian and I spent together, he cried the entire night. We were in bed and I held him in my arms and he couldn’t stop crying, like he’d been holding back all this pain and now he was able to let it go. It was all about Mick and Keith and the others I didn’t make much sense out of it at the time since I didn’t know about these band things then and what was going on, but I tried to comfort Brian and hold him and that was a crazy way for a long affair to begin.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “I didn’t leave Munich with Brian, because I had a modeling assignment in Paris, but I did go to hear their next concert, which was in Berlin. What madness that was! The music was very rebellious that night, very wild, and the atmosphere was really charged up. I was watching from backstage. Mick was doing his sexy number and the girls were throwing their panties on the stage, then quite suddenly it all began to turn ugly, with the audience pushing and shoving their way onto the stage, and the Stones all dropped their instruments and ran. To get back to the hotel we had to go through the underground concrete bunkers connected by tunnels where Hitler and his staff had operated during the war. That was my introduction to the Stones – escaping that mad mob of wild teenagers by running through Hitler’s bunkers… I stayed with Brian at his hotel that night and he asked me to go back to London with him. He really liked me, I could tell, and I responded to him. Brian was very attractive, very unusual, very intriguing. That’s when Brian and I began to have a serious relationship.”
PAUL TRYNKA: “I find Brian’s teaming up with Anita
fascinating. I believe it was a
conscious move on Brian’s part. It was
the ultimate double-or-quits because he knew that they would make an amazing
team. I think part of him loved the
chaos; the Pan aspect of just disrupting everything, and with Anita, he knew
they’d unleash something very powerful together. They were the ultimate power couple, they
were totally cutting edge, scary, outrageous; Anita was the full 50 per cent of
the relationship.”
MARC SPITZ: “In photos, Jones truly seems to meld with her; you can almost see the possession of his soul go down.”
STASH KLOSSOWSKI: “She grew him, the way women do grow one.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Flash of pulling up to the Albert Hall’s back entrance. We walked in and everybody parted. This is how I remember it. Sitting up in the balcony, first circle. I think this might have been the first time I saw Anita Pallenberg and Brian Jones together. They were wandering about the Albert Hall on acid, and in their sashes and silks and feathers they looked like transformed anima-into-mock-human characters who had stepped out of a Charles Perrault fairy tale.”
LINDA KEITH: “I see Anita as being the forerunner of the Stones’ style as it really evolved through Brian, and Brian led the way in style when Brian was with Anita. She was the most wonderful and powerful person. I have huge respect and admiration and love for her. I was in awe of Anita.”
PATTIE BOYD: “She was very unusual. She had this deep voice with a very sexy kind
of Swiss accent. She looked so cool and
confident and totally unaware of her beauty.
She was wandering around our house talking and just being totally
fabulous – I couldn’t keep my eyes off her.
I just thought she was stunning; she had such charisma and
confidence. She was definitely in
control of that relationship. You could
see that she could do exactly what she wanted.
She actually was a bit scary. To
me, she seemed that she had secrets that she would never reveal. I’ve never met a young girl with such
incredible confidence.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “There’s little doubt that Anita Pallenberg knew that in her, Brian Jones, breaker of women, had finally met his match. By falling in love with Anita, he had finally found a woman so strong he couldn’t destroy her. With this young goddess on his arm, Brian recovered some of his dissipated aura. Dressed as a dandy in sharp pinstripes, outlandish broad-brimmed hats, and flamboyant women’s costume jewelry bought at Saks Fifth Avenue in New York, Brian was the King of Clubs.”
TERRY RAWLINGS: “Anita, it seemed, could always extract the response she required from Brian, easily and without question. Anita started to encourage Brian to wear her clothes, costume jewellery and makeup. Together they would go shopping in women’s boutiques and the ladies’ departments of London’s most fashionable stores, buying chiffon blouses, women’s hats, silk scarves, bracelets and trinkets, setting a style that would pre-empt pop-star glamour. He was a prototype for many to follow.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Brian was very moody, which I like, and he was physically attractive as well – he looked kind of like a girl in a funny kid of way; sexually I like girls as well as men and Brian seemed to combine both sexes for me. Also, Brian was very outspoken, blunt, said everything on his mind, outrageous things, and he had a wonderful curiosity – curious about new things, new places, wanted to know everything that was going on, wanted to meet new people, new ideas, learn the new dances. And he spoke some German, which we could use when we had something private to say and other people were around. The other Stones were more like, what should I say – frightened. Brian was much more ready to go to strange places, to meet people he didn’t know. Except for Brian, all the Stones at that time were really suburban squares. Mick’s girlfriend, Chrissie Shrimpton, was a secretary type, nine to five, Miss Proper, hairdresser’s on Thursday, and so was the girl Keith had, very normal, very plain, no challenge… you know, background women, with personalities like elevator music.”
CHRISTOPHER ANDERSEN: “Brian and Anita competed with Mick for the limelight. They were both extraordinarily dressed – all huge hats, feather boas, white pointy boots, tight velvet pants, and flowing scarves. Brian beat Pallenberg savagely, and at various times hurled everything from a pot of hot coffee to an end table at her, leaving Anita covered with massive welts and bruises.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Brian was a leader. With the Stones, he was the first one that had a car. He was the first into flash clothes. And smoke. And acid. It was back when it seemed anything was possible. Everybody was turning on to acid, you and beautiful, and then a friend of Brian’s died and it affected him very much. It made it seem as if the whole thing was a lie. As far as I know, Mick took his first trip the day he got busted, in ’67. Keith had started to suss, he saw us flying around all over the place. He started to live with us. Every time Brian was taking trips, he was working, making tapes. Fantastic.”
CHRISTOPHER GIBBS: “They fought about everything – cars, prices, restaurant meals. Brian could never win an argument with Anita, although he always made the mistake of trying. There would be a terrific scene with both of them screaming at each other. The difference was that Brian didn’t know what he was doing. Anita did know what she was doing.”
STEPHEN DAVIS: “Brian and Anita fought like tigers. She knocked him down with a punch in a crowded Chelsea nightclub. He’d steal her movie scripts and rip them up because he was jealous. Once, after Brian had beaten her up, Spanish Tony asked Anita what had happened and was told it was none of his fucking business. Sanchez arrived at Courtfield Road one day to find Brian freaking because he thought Anita was dead from an overdose of sleeping pills. They got her to the hospital, where her stomach was pumped. When she came to, Anita and Brian clutched each other and wept like babies.”
JOHN DUNBAR: “I remember meeting Brian because it was so dramatic. It was at a party and I was coming up the stairs and he was being hit by this very beautiful woman, quite hard. It was Anita bashing Brian. She knocked him down: it was quite a spectacular kind of thing. I was very impressed.”
DAVE THOMSON: “Jones would use his fists on Anita, whom I actually saw going into their room with a bloody great whip. I could hear her whipping Brian.”
PHIL MAY: “Brian and Anita moved in with us at the Pretty Things house on Chester Street. Once we came back from a tour and found that Brian had gotten hold of all our records and tapes and completely mutilated them – burned and twisted them. Another time he had written scurrilous things with shaving foam all across the bathroom mirrors. On top of all that, Brian had completely got it into his head that we were a sort of threat to him. Or a threat to the band. But, of course, the real threat to Brian was posed by the other Stones… Brian and Anita had a crazy relationship. They fought a hell of a lot. So sometimes she stayed there, sometimes she didn’t, when he’d beat her up. Brian was unpredictably violent. On one occasion, we were sitting downstairs in the basement when Brian came in. We were listening to the Stones’ first album – people sitting around, smoking joints, listening – when suddenly Brian went crazy, picked up a guitar, and crashed it down over the head of our drummer, Viv Prince, smashing the guitar to smithereens. But Viv was so stoned, he kind of said, ’What?’ He didn’t realize what had happened. Brian was so paranoid he thought because we were laughing and smoking joints that we were pissing on the album. That was his paranoid side, but then again he could be very, very gentle. He just had these outward explosions like a little kid.”
MICHAEL GRUBER: “One night at the Bel-Air Hotel in Los Angeles, Brian and Anita had to get off by beating the shit out of each other. He’d take a chair and bash it over her head. Cary Grant is in the next bungalow. He doesn’t want to hear ‘you fucking cunt’ and televisions being smashed over champagne and caviar. About 4 a.m. the manager came to my bungalow. He tells me one of our party is destroying their bungalow. I told him not to worry as we’d pay the damages. When I got to Anita and Brian’s bungalow it looked demolished, like a truck had run through it.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “I learned later just how violent Brian had already become with her, as the downward slide began, throwing knives, glass, punches at her, forcing her to barricade herself behind sofas. It’s probably not well known that Anita had a very sporty childhood – sailing, swimming, skiing, outdoor sports of every kind. Brian was no match for Anita, physically or in terms of wit. She was always on top of it. He always came off second best. And she thought, at the start at least, that Brian’s rampages were quite funny – but they were becoming unfunny and dangerous. Anita told me later that at Torremolinos on their way to Tangier in ’66 they had had massive fights after which Brian ended up in jail – and Anita too, once, for stealing a car coming out of a club. She was often trying to bail Brian out, screaming at the turnkeys.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: "He always hurt himself. He was very fragile, and if he ever tried to hurt me he always wound up hurting himself."
ANITA PALLENBERG: “I think Mick and Keith thought it out and decided to do Brian in because they resented him. He had a suit when they were all still in school. He was a real fashionable punk rocker, Quadraphenia type. Black and white suit, thin tie and he had a car on top of it. He had chicks. All the chicks. And he used to fuck everybody else’s chick. I mean he knew it, he really had it down and they didn’t .Can you imagine having a car in England, at the time? He was so talented and he had that kind of pretty face, that jive talk. Brian was really dedicated.”
TERRY SOUTHERN: “The sensational thing about Brian and Anita – the thing that cause the sophistos at Annabel’s and Scott’s Piccadilly to gawk like bumpkins – was not just the bewitching beauty of the couple, but their startling resemblance to each other. They were like something out of an Arthurian legend – enchanted siblings who had been doomed into a profane and idyllic love. Many found it a bit eerie…”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Once with the Stones – it was the Ad Lib, one of those clubs – everybody was just on these benches, eyeing each other. Keith was going, ‘What the fucking hell do these guys want?’ and they were all going ‘Chat, chat, chat, chat, chat, chat,’ all frivolous and everything, and Keith was saying, ‘Fucking tarts, assholes, cunts!’ But Brian… if someone liked Brian, then he liked them as well. If somebody’d say, ‘Oh, Brian, you’re great,’ he’d just go ‘Ohhh’ and completely melt. So for a while, this whole scene became on outlet for him, to kind of find his own territory aside from the Stones.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “We were getting stoned and no one else knew what it was about. Instead of just sitting on each other’s shoulders in hotel rooms, we were talking to a lot of other people.”
TONY BRAMWELL: “It was around this time that people started
bullying you, saying that you’ve got to turn on and that you’ve seen nothing
until you have taken a trip. There was
always this fear that someone might spike you.
Brian was such a nice guy before all that. He had a place in Beaufort Mews in Chelsea
and you could always pop in, have a drink and a chat – listen to some
music. Then he just became like a thug;
totally out of control. Brian and Anita
used to tumble around The Speakeasy Club, almost getting thrown out because
they were so objectionable. But you
couldn’t throw a Rolling Stone out, so people had to keep saying to them ‘calm
down.’”
CHRISTOPHER GIBBS: “Anita in those days was absolutely
electrifying. Whenever she came into a
room, every head would turn to look at her.
There was something kittenish about her, a sense of mischief – of
naughtiness. When I talked to her, I
discovered she was highly intelligent and extremely well read. She’d read obscure German romantic novelists
like Hoffmann as well as the usual Hermann Hesse.”
GERED MANKOWITZ: “Spiking drinks with acid began to be prevalent. People would put acid in people’s drinks to ‘see what would happen.’ There was a club in London called the Scotch of St. James – it was right next door to my studio. Very cliquey, trendy music club and several people had their drinks spiked there with dicey results. All of that was beginning to creep into the rock and roll sixties society. And I felt that Pallenberg and Brian were not beyond doing that sort of thing. I did not trust them. I wouldn’t go and spend an evening with them because I feared I would have my drink spiked. I became paranoid. I my view, Pallenberg and Brian were very manipulative, dangerous people, but I never was involved enough with them to be exposed to the danger.”
RONNI MONEY: “One night, I was in Scotch of St. James, which was on two levels. I hadn’t seen Brian for ages with his touring, etc., and anyway I arrived and was on the second floor. Down below Brian suddenly looked up and spotted me. He leapt to his feet, ran like a maniac through the crowd right up to me, hugging and kissing me, making a rare fuss of me. I was laughing and hugging him back. I could hardly breathe for him. Then suddenly I felt a hand dig into my shoulder hard, wrenching me away from him. This was Anita. She ordered Brian at the top of her voice, ‘I don’t want you talking to this slag!’ Well! I’ve never seen anything like it. Brian’s hand snaked up so fast you hardly saw it. Really! She got it right on the nose – what a wallop! God, I’d never seen him hit a woman ever! But he was furious! Anita got the biggest shock of her life, no kidding! She’d misjudged that one badly and you could see in her eyes that she knew it. Brian growled at her in front of everybody, ‘Don’t you ever talk to Ronni like that ever again! Do you hear me?’ Anita didn’t know where to look! Brian calmed down and I assured him I wasn’t hurt. But he was. As time went on, I got used to these violent incidents involving Brian and Anita. She usually got the upper hand because she simply overpowered Brian with her force and energy which derived from a steady diet of amphetamines.”
MAGGIE ABBOTT: “I didn’t know that they knew each
other. I remember going into Alvaro’s
restaurant in the King’s Road and there were Brian and Anita – and it was the
first time that I’d seen them together.
And it was like, ‘Wow! How did
that happen?’ It was a wonderful
moment. As I walked in they both looked
up at me and went, ‘Hey!’ and I thought, ‘Oh my god, they’re twins.’ They looked completely identical with their
blond fringes and the look in their eyes.
They were so happy, and they wanted the whole world to see it, and it
was a lovely moment. Their cheeky grins
and their total delight – just for the moment the sun shone. I’ll never forget that.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “At first I’m sure Anita wanted to protect Brian from what she thought was our cruelty and callousness. Coming in like that she couldn’t realize how the scene developed. Or how impossible it was to deal with a dead weight like Brian. They had incredible fights. And she used to beat the shit out of him every time. He would start a fight. Obviously she was tougher than him. He always was walking around with his ribs bandaged or his eye blackened. Anita felt Brian was somebody who could be sensitive and obviously she felt he needed support. When he started paying her back by trying to beat her up, she began to realize.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “I think Brian was a terrible person, really. And I put up with a lot. He was a tortured personality, insecure as hell. He was ill very early on – totally paranoid.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Courtfield Road, Brian and Anita’s apartment during the heady Paint-It-Black summer of 1966. A veritable witches’ coven of decadent illuminati, rock princelings and hip aristos. Peeling paint, clothes, newspapers and magazines strewn everywhere. A grotesque little stuffed goat standing on a lamp, two huge tulle sunflowers, a Moroccan tambourine, lamps draped with scarves, a pictographic painting of demons (Brian’s?) and decorously draped over a tatty armchair, a legendary leg – Robert Fraser’s. There’s Brian in his finest Plantagenet satins, fixing us with vacant fishy eyes. On the battered couch an artfully reclining Keith is perfecting his gorgeous slouch. The hand gesturing in the manner of Veronese could only belong to the exquisite Christopher Gibbs, and hovering over the entire scene with single-lens-reflex eye, the invisibly ever-present photographer, Michael Cooper. At the center, like a phoenix on her nest of flames… the wicked Anita. I’m here somewhere, too, looking up with hashish-glazed eyes from the Moroccan rug.”
KEITH ALTHAM: “Brian’s new home incorporates his liking for the dramatic with his taste for the antique. Outside it appears to be just another apartment flat but inside the vast, dimly lit rooms with their oak paneling and wooden ceilings give the place a cathedral-like quality. ‘As soon as I saw it I knew I could relax here,’ said Brian. The lounge is a cavernous room, which boasts a minstrel gallery in beautiful heavy oak, and mantlepiece to match, and with antique chairs scattered about. Mr. Jones strode to the large windows and indicated the Underground station. If it were not for several paradoxical additions - a 23-inch TV set in ultra modern style, a cinema projector and a monster tape recorder, with assorted amplifiers littering the floor - the room might have been transported straight from Windsor Castle!”
KEITH ALTHAM: “Over the minstrel gallery a number of beautiful Moroccan tapestries are draped, divided, somewhat ingloriously, by a colored advert for the Seven Up drink. A huge stageprop sunflower is wound around the bannisters and the toilet has been supplied with a copy of ‘Psychology Of Insanity.’ Keith entered the proceedings at this juncture, coming into the room in an immaculately-styled blue overcoat. Conversation turned to the film shows that he and Brian had been giving in the apartment recently. ‘We had ‘All Quiet On The Western Front’; it was great,’ said Keith. ‘There’s one sequence which lasts for about 15 minutes, when the machine guns are just mowing down French troops one after another. Now we are trying to get ‘I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang,’ which starred Paul Muni. That’s another good oldie.’ An extremely pleasant evening was wound up by playing Bob Dylan LPs and drinking a few glasses of wine. There was a brief excursion to a car showroom to view the ancient Austin which Brian was considering buying. We stood and admired it in the drizzling rain for some minutes before Brian concluded: ‘I probably won’t buy it.’”
MICK WALL: “Brian was into Paganism, Zen, Moroccan tapestries… and drugs. Anita was an aspiring film star and model, into magick, sex, hanging out with rock stars… and drugs. A small-time crook as a teenager, not only was Brian a gifted and successful musician, he was up for anything. He and Anita would hold séances at their flat using an Ouija board; or they would pile in the car and drive off to look for UFOs in the dead of the night. Swinging by the Indica gallery and bookstore, buying the latest occult tomes, searching for ‘Satanic spells to dispel thunder and lightning.’”
GARY LACHMAN: “The atmosphere at 1 Courtfield Road was one of splendor, sorcery and decay, a dizzying blend of drugs, magic and sexual excess. It was a time when, according to Faithfull, if you asked someone if they had read Huysman’s ‘A Rebour,’ and they said yes, you’d immediately hop in the sack…Among Pallenberg’s bric-a-brac was a collection of human relics, handy juju she used against those who incurred her displeasure (part of it included a voodoo doll of Jones).”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Anita was the most incredible woman I’d met in my life. Dazzling, beautiful, hypnotic and unsettling. Her smile – those carnivorous teeth! – obliterated everything. Other women evaporated next to her. She spoke in a baffling dada hipsterese. After a couple of sentences you became hopelessly lost. God, did she just say that? She was either putting you on or this was the Delphic oracle. You were on your own. It was all part of her sinister appeal.”
VOLKER SCHLONDORFF: “She knew how to apprehend a book
without even reading it. She met the
right people who were talking about the book, and she got the gist of it from
that.”
PETE TOWNSHEND: “We hung out a lot from about 1964 to 1966. Part of the time he was seeing Anita Pallenberg. She was a stunning creature. I mean literally stunning. It was quite hard to maintain one’s gaze. One time in Paris I remember they took some drug and were so sexually stimulated they could hardly wait for me to leave the room before starting to shag. I felt Brian was living on a higher planet of decadence than anyone I would ever meet.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Brian had lovely manners and a little whispery voice. He was so intelligent and would become very animated when the subject interested him. Trains, Ingmar Bergman movies, anything magical. Like a lot of people at the time, myself included, he was convinced there was a mystic link between Druidic monuments and flying saucers.”
KENNETH ANGER: “You see, Brian Jones was a witch. I’m convinced. He showed me his witch’s tit. He had a supernumerary tit in a very sexy place on his inner thigh. He stated, ‘In another time they would have burned me.’ He was very happy about that.”
NICO: “Do you know Brian was a witch? We were interested in these things and he was very deep about it. Mick knew and was his enemy. It was dangerous sometimes. Brian was like a little boy with a magic set. It was really an excuse for him to be nasty and sexy. He read books by an old English man who was the devil. I told Brian that I knew the devil and the devil was German.”
MARIANNE FAITHFULL: “Anita and Brian were like two beautiful children who had inherited a decrepit palazzo. Every day they would dress up in their furs and satins and velvets and parade about and invite people over, and we would all sit on the floor and talk about the fantastic things we would do with the kingdom if only we could… Hours and hours were spent putting on clothes and taking them off again. Heaps of scarves, hats, shirts and boots flew out of drawers and trunks. Unending trying on of outfits, primping and sashaying. All roles and gender would evaporate in these narcissistic performances where Anita would turn Brian into the Sun King, Francoise Hardy or the mirror image of herself.”
TIMOTHY ALLEN: “They were a magical couple. They looked like one another. I remember once I was in Granny Takes A Trip
and I saw the pair of them trying on clothes.
As they left, they skipped down the stairs at Granny’s towards the
exit. Outside there was this big Rolls
Royce limo parked in the middle of the street, and they literally fell into
it. There were people crowded around the
car watching them as thought it was some kind of a fairy tale. It was an extraordinary moment.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Brian and I always kept our clothes all together. He was always keen on going out to the shops, trying everything on, putting it all together. He loved it – and he definitely had it – the knack for doing it – and by then he’d given up on his white trousers, become much more sophisticated, really! He always had this things about cutting his hair – it was always such a big scene to cut his hair. He had to have three mirrors, and he’d sit there and I’d be so terrified, because I usually cut his hair, and it was like ‘Oh God!;’ it was a nightmare for me – tiny little bits at a time… incredible – and he’d got so pissed off and angry; I mean, it was terrible because he was also very vain, you know – very, very vain.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “We had a lot of fun, becoming friends again, getting stoned together. It was wonderful at first. So I started to move in with them. I just hung out as a guest and got a ringside seat on the world that Anita attracted around her – which was an exceptional gang of people. I used to walk back through Hyde Park to St. John’s Wood at six in the morning, at first, to pick up a clean shirt, and then I just stopped going home. In those days on Courtfield Road I had nothing to do with Anita, strictly speaking. I was fascinated by her from what I thought was a safe distance. I thought certainly that Brian had got very lucky… Brian would crash out sometimes, and Anita and I would look at each other. But that’s Brian and his old lady and that’s it. Hands off. And so the days went by. The truth was I’m looking at Anita and I’m looking at Brian and I’m looking at her, and I’m thinking, there’s nothing I can do about this. I’m going to have to be with her. I’m going to have her or she’s going to have me. One way or another.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “Over that year [1966] I’d developed a very strong friendship with Brian. I’d managed to break down a lot of barriers, but you see Brian always had to have an enemy, he always had an imaginary foe. He was a bit of a Don Quixote, I suppose. Brian would always manipulate people into these situations of proving your friendship to him by doing something dastardly to the other person. All I tried to do with Brian was bring him more into the groove because he really wasn’t doing anything anymore – he wasn’t contributing anything to the group. All I wanted to do was bring him back into the mainstream again, but Brian used that fact to create a vendetta against Mick, because Brian always wanted to be… like this whole thing of ‘Who do the chicks like the most’ that started with him back in ’63. I’m sure that goes on with Slade and The Sweet now.”
SIMON WELLS: “Distraught at the death of Tara Browne, Brian
headed off on an extended holiday with Anita and Keith. On Christmas Eve, the trio convened at the
grand George Cinque Hotel in Paris where, to enliven the festive season, they
dosed themselves up with amphetamines, cocaine, and other substances during the
day, and took powerful downers at night to bring them down.”
KEITH RICHARDS: “We spent the whole of Christmas on our
knees. We’d conned the hotel nurse into
thinking we couldn’t sleep so she’d given us all these downers that were very,
very strong… We used to take two pills at a time and everybody would crash out,
sleep and order another Christmas dinner.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “It was just excitement for me really. Even though it was my flat in Courtfield Road, I’d go off and leave ‘em there. Actually I’d be quite envious of them really, because there I was making films, which is great, but I always had this problem with authority and there were all of these producers, all of these people, and I had to deal with it all, whereas from what I’d seen of how the Stones operate, their attitude was ‘Oh, fuck ‘em all!’ and they totally got away with it. They were very close, very young and they didn’t give a damn. They were just doing what they did.”
CHRISTOPHER GIBBS: “Mick was a delicate and beautiful creature. Brian was sturdier and into straight fancy dress and flouting all perceived wisdom about what to wear. He was into ethnic clothes much earlier than most people.”
SPANISH TONY: “Sometimes the arrogance of Brian and Anita was frightening. Those who displeased them would be banished from the apartment and shunned immediately by any friends who wished to avoid offense to their highnesses. Brian and Anita were similar in more than just hairstyles: they each carried a cruel streak in their nature, the seed of self destruction.”
ANITA PALLENBERG: “Loads of people were scared of me. I guess it was all that savoir-vivre that I had, and I was from Rome and I had travelled and been in New York and I knew all these people, and I was pretty reckless as well. You could see Keith and Mick exchanging looks like, ‘Who is this weird bird?’ Mick, especially, was very hostile. But he could never make me feel uncomfortable. Even today, I can squash him with just one word. But he was the one most against me seeing Brian and being around the Stones. He told Chrissie Shrimpton she wasn’t to have anything to do with me. Mick and I never hit it off. He always put me down, made snide remarks about me, criticized the way I dressed.”
NICKY BROWNE: “[At Tara Browne’s birthday party], Anita and
I got it into our heads that Mick Jagger was the devil. We locked him into the courtyard and then we
ran into the woods at the back of the house.
We had these walkie-talkies, which I think had been a birthday present
from someone to Tara. We were in the
woods and we were talking on these things… paranoid, of course, watching Mick
trying to get out of the courtyard.”
GERED MANKOWITZ: “One was always uncertain of Brian, of what he was going to do. He would engineer a situation and stand back and watch the results. When Anita came along? Well, she was exactly the same. They took great pleasure together in manufacturing those sorts of situations. The two were undoubtedly very much in a world of their own. Disconnected, you might say.”
SPANISH TONY: “Anita was like a life-force, a woman so powerful, so full of strength and determination that men came to lean on her, to become as dangerously dependent on her as a heroin addict is on his drug supplier.”
