Anita Pallenberg, a model and actress who was sometimes called the muse of the Rolling Stones and had affairs with three of the band’s key members, including a decadelong, drug-fueled relationship with Keith Richards, died on June 13 at a hospital in Chichester, England. She was believed to be 75.
Richards confirmed her death to The Associated Press through a spokesperson. The cause was not known, although she reportedly had hepatitis and other ailments.
The alluring Pallenberg, who met the Stones by sneaking backstage at a concert in 1965 and offering the band hashish, may have been the ultimate ’60s rock-and-roll “it girl.” She quickly became the lover of one of the band’s guitarists, Brian Jones, then left him for Richards, with whom she had three children and a shared appetite for heroin.
While making the cult classic film Performance with Mick Jagger in 1968, she reportedly had an affair with the Stones’ lead singer. The strikingly beautiful Pallenberg had such a magnetic presence — an “evil glamour,” in the words of Jagger’s onetime paramour, Marianne Faithfull — that she was credited with helping mold the group’s lasting image.
“She almost single-handedly engineered a cultural revolution in London,” Faithfull wrote, “by bringing together the Stones and the jeunesse dorée” — the young, fashionable and rich. “The Stones came away with a patina of aristocratic decadence that … transformed the Stones from pop stars into cultural icons.”
Throughout the 1960s, Pallenberg seemed to be everywhere. She grew up in Rome and was an international model who spoke several languages; she was part of Andy Warhol’s eclectic group of artists at the Factory in New York, where she became friendly with Beat Generation writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs; she acted in films alongside Jane Fonda and Marlon Brando.
When Pallenberg entered the orbit of the Rolling Stones, they were seen as the raw, street-savvy counterparts to the Beatles. She was originally linked with Jones, but in spite of their identical hairstyles, their relationship took a violent turn.
During a trip to Spain and Morocco in 1967, Richards saw that Jones was beating Pallenberg. Richards took her back to England, leaving Jones stranded in North Africa.
“It’s said that I stole her,” Richards wrote in Life, his 2010 autobiography. “But my take on it is that I rescued her.”
By the time Jones drowned in his swimming pool at age 27 in 1969, Pallenberg was pregnant with her first child with Richards. They named their son Marlon after Brando, with whom Pallenberg appeared in a campy 1968 sex farce, Candy.
She had a role in the 1968 science fiction spoof Barbarbella, opposite Fonda, then co-wrote and acted in the surreal Performance, which was set in the London underworld and starred Jagger in an androgynous role. The sex scenes between Pallenberg and Jagger were so steamy that they won an award at a Dutch film festival — a porn film festival.
Richards later wrote that on the day he realized Jagger and Pallenberg were having an affair, he composed the opening lyrics to one of the Stones’ greatest songs, Gimme Shelter, accompanied by a snarling guitar riff:
Oh, a storm is threat’ning
My very life today
If I don’t get some shelter
Oh yeah, I’m gonna fade away