Get a Line On You [Brian Jones]

Anita Pallenberg (06.04.1944 -13.06.2017)

...is dead.

I'm too tired and stressed to know exactly how to feel about it, but it seems like I should do a post about her and despite everything this books is probably the right place for it.

A while back I found this article on Anita I thought really interesting, but never managed to post it. It's from 24th April 2016, written by Nell Beram, coauthor of Yoko Ono: Collector of Skies (Abrams, 2013) and a former Atlantic Monthly staff editor. She has written for Salon about Nora Ephron and for Bright Lights Film Journal about Doris Day.

*

(Random note, you can ignore: My aunt looks so much like her that it creeps me out sometimes... I don't have the best relationship with my aunt, so this probably doesn't exactly help me appreciate Anita. )

I started writing a tribute to Anita Pallenberg over a year ago, thinking that it couldn't be long. Marianne Faithfull told Vogue in November of 2014 that Anita, her lifelong friend, had recently moved to Jamaica, which reminded me of when my angina-plagued grandfather moved down to Miami on doctor's orders to escape the insalubrious cold. But as far as I knew, Anita hadn't been ill. Still, presuming she was born in 1944 (some accounts say 1942), that puts her in her early seventies-not much in terms of human longevity, but up there in rock years. I'm pleased to report that I was wrong: Anita is still with us. But when she goes, I fear she will be remembered, reductively, as the German-Italian paramour and drug buddy of Keith Richards. She was an in-demand model when, in 1965, she got sucked into the Rolling Stones vortex-or caused it, depending on the telling. As Marianne, who predated Anita in the Stones' inner circle, wrote in her dishy but soulful 1994 autobiography, Faithfull:

"How Anita came to be with Brian is really the story of how the Stones became the Stones. She almost single-handedly engineered a cultural revolution in London by bringing together the Stones and the jeunesse dorée...The Stones came away with a patina of aristocratic decadence that served as a perfect counterfoil to the raw roots blues of their music. This...transformed the Stones from pop stars into cultural icons."

Anita began with fey and frail but violent Brian Jones and left him for Keith in 1967. That was the end of getting beat up, but the beginning of her worst drug excesses. Anita more than kept up with Keith, who said of his first impression, "She knew everything and she could say it in five languages. She scared the pants off me!" Marianne described the experience of entering a room in which Anita held court:

"At the center, like a phoenix on her nest of flames...the wicked Anita....She 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. An outlandish Italo-Germanic-Cockney slang that mangled her syntax into surreal fragments....It was all part of her sinister appeal."