THE HOT NEWS AND BIZ ARRE STORIES FROM PL ANET MOJO
A new Anita Pallenberg documentary presents her liber tine life and centrality to the Rolling Stones. Plus! Prince Stash.
“I ’VE BEEN CALLED a witch, a slut and a murderer,” wrote Anita Pallenberg in the memoir composed during the sober years before her death at 75 in 2017. Now, that unpublished script – titled, with typical defiance, Black Magic – forms the basis of a two-hour documentar y, Catching Fire: The Stor y Of Anita Pallenberg. It hits British cinemas this month.
Inevitably, as First Lady of The Rolling Stones, the doc weaves the personal with the musical. There’s her testy 18-month relationship with her doppelganger Stone, Brian Jones. Then the union with Keith Richards from 1967 to 1980. Raw testimony from the pair’s children, Marlon and Angela, off-screen contributions from Richards, plus Pallenberg’s own obser vations shed new light on these years.
Given the Richards’ family ’s blessing, the documentar y is rich in home movie footage including a cape-wearing Pallenberg dancing freely in a garden and film of the Mick’n’Marianne/ Keith’n’Anita getaway to South America at Christmas 1968. But it’s Pallenberg’s candid recollections, voiced by Scarlett Johansson, that form the spine of the film.
Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola – popularly known as Prince Stash – first met her in Paris in 1964 and appears in the film. “Anita could be r uthless and relentless when she wanted something or someone,” he tells MOJO. Once ‘rescued’ from Jones by Richards in spring 1967, Keith recounts that he was initially “bewildered [by] her absolute deter mination to be… free. Anita just wanted to kick it all over.”
During their earliest days together, Pallenberg says, “Keith was so shy.” It was her “Italian energy ” and eye for Bohemian style that transfor med him into “a lion”.
“I loved the feeling of culture exploding,” Pallenberg says as the film traces her pre-Stones years. She discovers that her great-grandfather was Symbolist painter A
