Anita Pallenberg was one of the mid-20th century’s most influential It girls. The Italian-born beauty’s looks took her all over the world as a model in the 1960s, and led to her meeting—and besotting—several Rolling Stones, inspiring such songs as “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” and “Gimme Shelter.” At the same time, the magnetic muse was also making her mark in movies like Barbarella and Performance. But life for a woman who was variously described as a “rock-and-roll goddess,” an “evil seductress,” and a “wild child”—that last one, Pallenberg called herself—was more complicated than any of those labels would imply.
The intimate, insidery new documentary Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg, directed by Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill, offers a fuller appraisal. Pallenberg was a Catholic high school dropout, who moved to New York City at age 21, speaking little English. She nevertheless charmed her way into the downtown pop art scene—washing brushes for Jasper Johns, meeting Andy Warhol, and attending a party where Allen Ginsberg collected famous people’s pubic hair. Eventually, she’d couple up with Stones guitarist Brian Jones before settling down with his bandmate, Keith Richards, and having three children with him.
“She had a funny, weird, crazy, wonderful chemistry inside of her that took her to adventure and misadventure in equal quantity,” says Bloom, the Emmy-nominated filmmaker behind Bright Lights: Starring Carrie Fisher and Debbie Reynolds and Divide and Conquer. “She was fiercely intelligent—she certainly didn’t coast by on her beauty. I think she found beauty kind of boring.”
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The directors discovered their mutual interest in Pallenberg at a prepandemic holiday party at Alex Gibney’s company Jigsaw Productions, where they both worked. Bloom had just met with Pallenberg and Richards’s son Marlon about a possible film focused on his mother; Zill, a veteran documentary producer, was reading Richards’s 2010 autobiography, Life. “It felt like this very strange kismet, and so I basically just chased Alexis until she brought me on to the project officially,” Zill says.
Their film’s deep confessional detail comes courtesy of a work-in-progress memoir that Marlon and his children found while going through their mother’s papers after she died in 2017. Excerpts from her notes and drafts are read by Scarlett Johansson (sans Pallenberg’s pan-European accent), accompanied by commentary from Richards, the couple’s daughter, Angela (née “Dandelion”) Richards, plus never-before-seen Super-8 home movies, and personal photographs that were matched to actual events when possible. The family affair also features insights from Pallenberg pals like singer Marianne Faithfull, director Volker Schlöndorff, and model Kate Moss. (Mick Jagger wasn’t asked to participate, although the film suggests that he, too, fell for the free-spirited Pallenberg at one point—and Faithful, Jagger’s then girlfriend, agrees.)
Life for Pallenberg amped up considerably after she met the Stones at a 1965 Munich concert. There, she instantly connected with Jones (we see photos of that backstage moment). Not long after, they set up house in London. But Pallenberg says in the film that when his violent abuse and increasing drug use became too much, she fell into Richards’s welcoming arms.
“For some reason, she found me as mysterious and as attractive as I found her,” the now 80-year-old musician remembers in the film. Though he was “bursting in love” with the woman he would write “You’ve Got the Silver” for, Richards says he never quite understood what she saw in him. “Basically, I was trying to keep up with her,” he laughs. For her part, Pallenberg says in the doc that the shy Richards offered “a different kind of love than I was used to, and it was a good time in my life.”
Their 13-year relationship started off white-hot—“I was considered for a while to be, like, the best-dressed man in the world,” Richards chuckles about Pallenberg’s wardrobe styling. But quickly, it turned chaotic. “There was this sort of Bonnie and Clyde thing about it,” he says—mostly because they were both using heroin and struggling with addiction at the time. In the film, Faithfull says she wrote the song “Sister Morphine” for Pallenberg after Pallenberg discovered that she was pregnant with Marlon—and, incredibly, got a shot of the narcotic to deal with withdrawal. Her friend was further stymied by Richards’s edict that Pallenberg not work. “He resented anything that would take her away from him,” her friend Stanislas “Stash” Klossowski de Rola says in the film.
The couple ultimately had three kids (though their youngest, Tara, died of sudden infant death syndrome), survived at least three houses burning down (according to Bloom), and went into exile twice: first to the French Riviera—in the film, actor Jake Weber recalls how his drug-smuggler dad brought cocaine to Mick and Bianca Jagger’s wedding, and Pallenberg later let the eight-year-old sample it!—and later, to Switzerland. According to the film, the latter country was the only one that would take the family after a warrant was issued for Richards’s and Pallenberg’s arrests due to heroin possession. “We were fucking junkies, for christ sake,” Richards says in the doc.
Bloom says that when Marlon describes his childhood, he recalls “[heroin] needles in the flowerpots.” He notes in the film that it was his mother’s desire not to be a victim that ultimately saved her. Still, according to the directors, there were many more incendiary incidents before she started to seriously commit to sobriety in the late 1980s, including a mental breakdown after Tara died, when four-year-old Angela was sent to live with Richards’s mother. (“That was incredibly sad for us. But given the circumstances, it was the only decision,” Richards allows). After separating from Richards, the film explains, Pallenberg’s young lover accidentally shot and killed himself in Richards’s South Salem, New York, home, where she and Marlon had been living.
“She spiraled for several years of drugs and drinking. She had several instances where she nearly died,” Zill says. “It’s hard to know what her bottom was,” adds Bloom. “Having grandchildren gave her a new joy in life, and as cliché as it sounds, made her want to be more cogent. I think that that shifted her landscape.”
During a period of sobriety at age 48, the filmmakers say, the recovering grandma earned a degree in fashion at London’s Central Saint Martins art school, and even started acting again. “I didn’t know her when she took drugs, but she was so interesting without them,” Kate Moss says in the film, saying Pallenberg epitomizes the “original bohemian rock chic that people still aspire to today.”
Pallenberg and Richards eventually refashioned their relationship, with Richards’s wife, Patti Hansen, including his ex in family events. “We have these amazing photos of them in their 70s,” Bloom reveals. “They both look like bonsai trees. They’re both wrinkled and grinning their faces off. Not pulled and tucked, looking like really old rock and rollers.”
The filmmakers say Richards even visited his ex days before her death at age 75. (According to the doc, she died of natural causes, “surrounded by a large and loving family.”) “They weren’t in and out of each other’s pockets. Keith doesn’t have a cell phone, so it’s not like she was calling him every day to chat,” Bloom says. “But they had a respectful relationship.” A flame that burned bright ’til the end.
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