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| Anita Pallenberg: Not the photograph mentioned below. |
The
film-maker handed me a photograph.
“Do you
know who that is?”
I did, but
I knew the film-maker well enough to say “No”.
“Anita
Pallenberg” he said, before falling silent. “A dangerous woman,” he added
finally.
The pause was
for my benefit. It was an invitation for me to speculate as to why an
unpublished, private snapshot of Anita Pallenberg would be languishing in an
envelope amongst all his other papers.
Considering
the sheer volume of personal files in the archive, the answer was pretty obvious. It
wasn’t just the heavy air that made the room of documents feel like Bluebeard’s
Castle.
The
film-maker got to know the Rolling Stones around the same time that Pallenberg
had entered the band’s bubble via Brian Jones. Later, when the film-maker was
shooting promo-clips featuring Jones out of his mind on drugs, Pallenberg was
at the start of an often-toxic relationship with Keith Richards. The film-maker then
crossed paths with Donald Cammell just as he was about to shoot Performance (1970) featuring Pallenberg
as Pherber. The trail, such as it is, becomes harder to trace at the end of the
decade, but when the Stones decamped to the south of France to make Exile on Main Street (1972) an extended
entourage followed them. Richards and Pallenberg established a headquarters at
the villa Nellcôte, in Villefranche-sur-Mer and in-between attempts to make the
album, the area became a focal point for the wealthy, wandering demi-monde who
had previously bunkered down in late-60s Mayfair. The film-maker had been moving through the area
around the same time working on a series of projects, some connected to the
Rolling Stones, some not.
So then, it’s
likely he knew Pallenberg or at least that’s what he wanted me to think. But
why would he also want me to think she was ‘dangerous’? A lot of people used to
tell me the film-maker was ‘dangerous’. What was it about her or, what was it
she could do that he could find so
threatening?
Pallenberg
has always been cast as the sorceress in the drama-cum-soap opera that is the
history of the Rolling Stones: a kind of sixties Medea who emanates a black
radiance from the centre of the band’s solipsistic world. In the soft edges
between the Stones camp and Performance,
Pallenberg is the one who seems to have acted the least. We're led to believe that what you see on screen - all the mindgames, the dark
psychedelia and the weird rituals - is how she was in real life. Various Stones biographers have
pictured Pallenberg casting magickal spells, discussing witchcraft with
Kenneth Anger and of course, there’s the trail of (usually drug-related) human
wreckage that seemed to follow in her wake. That said, most of the
personalities that made up the Stones’ circle could be described in such terms.
So what if Pallenberg sung back-up vocals on ‘Sympathy for the Devil’? They
were all into the dark stuff.
It’s OK for
the men of the piece to be ‘dangerous’. We expect that. However, it’s different
for the women. Pallenberg was an actress and a successful model before she met
Jones and Richards. Thereafter she morphed into the essential sixties accessory:
the rock star girlfriend. To call her ‘dangerous’ seems to name all the things
that she did which didn’t fit into the boundaries of that role, i.e. independence, opinions, ideas and such like. When not called
a ‘witch’, Pallenberg is also tagged as a ‘muse’, that’s to say she’s someone
that men wrote about or someone who otherwise facilitated men in the production
of their work. In later life she was approached to write an autobiography, but
all the publishers wanted was the inside story of the Rolling Stones: another
book about the men she used to hang out with. The autobiography never appeared,
not because she was unable to do it, but because she didn’t want to do it on
those terms. When asked, inevitably, to explain herself she refused. Maybe this
is why she was 'dangerous'. Pallenberg was more interested in living her life
rather than turning it into work with the unquestioning assumption that everyone
else would want to see it.
I looked at
the photograph for a while. Pallenberg was smiling. She didn’t look dangerous,
she looked friendly, at ease. Then the film-maker took it back. He put the
photograph back in its envelope, put the envelope back in a folder and put the
folder back on the shelf. One alongside all the others. Without comment he left
the room.
