Anita dit

"Ce que je pense, en revanche, c'est que je faisais peur aux gens. Peut-être parce que je ne venais pas du même milieu social que bien des musiciens, et ne parlons pas de leurs femmes. La culture, l'éducation, le savoir-vivre sont souvent ressentis comme une agression, voire une perversion par ceux qui en manquent." Anita Pallenberg (2002)

La belle-soeur... circa 2000

Brotherly love

When Marsha Hansen decided to incorporate her music skills and theological education into a ministry, her brother-in-law gave support and advice. Encouragement from a family member may not seem like much ... unless you happen to be related to Keith Richards.
A year after Marsha married Rodney Hansen, an ELCA pastor, her sister-in-law married Richards, the guitarist for the Rolling Stones, suddenly making her related to one of rock 'n' roll's most notorious men.
But Hansen has never seen the side of Richards that the public does. "I met Keith in 1982 when he and Patti were dating," Hansen said. "I couldn't have named one member of the band back then. From the beginning I was so impressed with his character. He's been so consistent as a good family member.
"It's funny to see it from the inside because you couldn't ask for a better person to know or to trust."
Hansen said when she told Richards about her desire for a music ministry, he encouraged her to sing in front of more people and to feel secure about her talent.
Since then Hansen has followed his advice, performing in churches throughout the San Diego area. She also assists her husband when he is a guest pastor (Rodney Hansen is currently between calls).
"I think music is not an adjunct to worship but part of it," Hansen said. "Sharing music that is not only Christian but also represents my cultural heritage helps bring more of my experience of the role Christ [has played] in my life."
Hansen, with a little help from Richards, is working toward her first record deal and is recording her second CD. But Richards has been more than just a musical adviser.
"Marrying into this Norwegian family, I felt like an outsider," Hansen recalled. "Keith ... made me feel comfortable. He would be the one to lean over and whisper, 'It's OK,' and squeeze my hand." Hansen's CD, I Know the Lord's Laid His Hands on Me (Orchard), is available through.

Building a Bridge to Babylon

Marsha Hansen Brings a New Dimension to the Extended Rolling Stones Family

by Jill Underwood

Summer may be officially over but, somewhere in Connecticut, a barbecue is still smoking and music is still blasting. Not that unusual, except that the music is old African-American spirituals and the home belongs to Rolling Stone Keith Richards. Both are music to the ears of Marsha Hansen.’Keith would open all the doors up so everybody could hear the singing and playing,’ says the Chula Vista singer and mother of three. Richards’ listening sessions were what gave Hansen the inspiration to give up teaching and pursue her dream of singing spirituals professionally.The leap of faith came with encouragement from Richards, who also happens to be Hansen’s brother-in-law. ‘I love her dearly. We started singing around the family,’ remembers Richards. ‘That’s where music comes from. It comes from the heart. When she started getting into it I said, ‘Good luck and get going and I’ll keep an eye on you.’’Richards’ reputation isn’t exactly that of a choir boy. But as a child he was a member of a prestigious youth choir in England that performed before Queen Elizabeth II. Hansen herself is a product of the Southern-pewed singing set. When they met almost 20 years ago, the two heard beautiful music. ‘She’s got a great feeling as a sister,’ says Richards. ‘When we get together, we start to hang around the piano and the guitar and pick out and choose songs.’Hansen returns Richards’ respect and affection, whatever his reputation. ‘You get to know a person’s character over the years,’ defends Hansen. ‘If he says something, you can count on it. He has a lot of integrity and he’s very kind. All the children love Uncle Keith.’ Hansen says she has no problem allowing her lambs to lay down with the lion.And why should she? This is a woman with degrees in theology, sociology and human relations. When she met Rod Hansen 20 years ago, she was a Naval officer in Japan. She knew him as a Navy chaplain long before realizing he was also the brother of international supermodel, Patti Hansen. The two married in 1981 on the aircraft carrier Midway. Patti and Keith married in 1983. At the time, his sister’s union gave Rod Hansen little satisfaction.’I represent the establishment,’ says the 48-year-old Hansen. ‘Quite a different world from where Keith lives, and my first thought was, ‘Of all the people in the world you had to fall in love with, Patti, look what you did!’But the two families eventually grew close and learned how to have fun together. Now, with five children between them, the families have flourished. The Hansen’s even have a favorite Rolling Stones song: ‘Brown Sugar,’ admits Marsha. ‘When our daughter was born, I said, ‘Oh look, Keith. She’s ‘Brown Sugar,’ isn’t she? She even had that played when she walked out as the Homecoming Princess last year.’But it’s her own music Marsha concentrates on these days. Her first CD of African-American spirituals, I Know the Lord’s Laid His Hands on Me, was released late last year. ‘These are songs that are from the pre-Civil War [era],’ Hansen explains. ‘They’re sacred folk songs which rose up from enslaved African-Americans with a rural bent. It distinguishes them from Gospel. Gospel grew from an urban experience.’The project came about after Richards gave Hansen a DAT recording machine and introduced her to keyboardist, Rob Whitlock. Together, Hansen and Whitlock co-produced the debut. Its completion left Hansen flying high, but there were still clouds of concern: Would Richards like it? After all, his musical opinion means more to her than almost anyone’s. ‘He’s an encyclopedia in his knowledge of music. I really don’t know anybody who has the music knowledge he does,’ says Hansen.She didn’t have to worry. Hansen’s disc was like a revelation to the rocker. ‘It’s quite pure as compared to a lot of Gospel singers I know,’ says Richards. ‘It kind of intrigues me, too.’But would Richards have told her if he didn’t like it? ‘Now and again I’ll say ‘You’ve got to hit there on another key,’’ Richards admits. ‘But that’s just me being an old record producer.’And Marsha Hansen can take it. Neither sticks nor Stones will break the bones of her sound, which she describes as ‘personal.’ ‘I like the ethnic characteristics in my voice,’ says Hansen. ‘It’s passionate and rich. You can tell you’re listening to an African-American woman sing.’And she’ll be singing a lot more. A second CD is in the works. And she’s leaving space on at least one track for a few guitar licks -- licks that Richards has promised to fill. What’s this? Keith Richards jamming for the robed one?’I love music, no matter what it is,’ says Richards. ‘Music is music to me. It’s not necessarily the message to me. Whether it’s church music or comes from the Honky Tonks, I don’t mind as long as it’s good.’ Richards even made his own record of soul music years ago, Wingless Angels.So how do you repay a Rolling Stone? If you’re Marsha Hansen, with a gift from the heavens. ‘I gave him a hymn book for his house,’ Hansen laughs. ‘He did sing sacred songs as a little boy, but there was never a hymn book around when I was looking for one. So I said, ‘You have to have this now!’’ You can buy Marsha Hansen’s CD, ‘I Know the Lord’s Laid His Hands on Me,’ at Sam Goody stores or at www.MarshaHansen.iuma.com

Lucie de la Falaise & Marlon

Elle (1994)

Anita - Marie Claire (1ère page only)

Anita Pallenberg - The Times 2004

From The Times May 08, 2004

Anita Pallenberg - romancing the Stones

Performance closed the 1960s with a Molotov cocktail of drugs, debauchery and death — off screen as well as one, Anita Pallenberg tells Chris Sullivan

“This film is about the perverted love affair between Homo sapiens and Lady Violence.” So read a telegram sent by the director of Performance, Donald Cammell, and his star, Mick Jagger, to the president of Warner Brothers early in 1970, attempting to convince him to release their film. “It is necessarily horrifying, paradoxical, absurd. To make such a film means accepting that the subject is loaded with every taboo in the book.”

Warners had thought that it was buying a crime caper starring the lead singer of the world’s biggest rock combo, that would capture “swinging London” and allow them to break into the coveted teen market. Instead, it received a violent, hard-nosed London gangster flick; a sado-masochistic, homoerotic, free-loving, psychotropic bag of snakes that didn’t introduce its most bankable asset (Jagger) until halfway through, and caused the wife of one of their executives to throw up at a test screening.

Performance, which is re-released this week in selected cinemas by the British Film Institute, is the twisted tale of Chas (James Fox), a smart-suited gangland heavy who falls foul of the Mob boss Harry Flowers (Johnny Shannon). Chas hides out in the spooky Notting Hill townhouse of the reclusive former rock star Turner (Mick Jagger) and his insatiable inamoratas — the gorgeous Pherber (Anita Pallenberg) and the androgynous Lucy (Michèle Breton). As Chas is sucked into Turner’s sybaritic world, he is plied with hallucinogenic mushrooms, becomes the butt of the trio’s twisted revelry and accepts the sexual advances of all three.

“Performance was Donald’s vision,” says Pallenberg now, still living in Chelsea and resplendent in a black Bella Freud pullover that proclaims “Ginsberg Is God”. “He was notoriously into threesomes, rock stars and criminal violence. He injected all of his deviant sexual fantasies into the movie.”

Cammell had been part of the Chelsea Set which was, as Nik Cohn so eloquently describes in his book Today There Are No Gentlemen: “A gaggle of public schoolboys, in search of a riot. Some of them dabbled in chicanery, some made exotic marriages, some turned homosexual.” Rumoured to be the godson of the notorious black magician Aleister Crowley, Cammell had been a painter in London but moved to Paris in the early 1960s to pursue a career in film. “That is where I met him,” says Pallenberg, who became involved in a ménage à trois with Cammell and his model girlfriend, Deborah Dixon. “He was completely star-struck and had all these mad movie scenarios, mostly about rock stars.”

When Pallenberg started her much publicised relationship with the Rolling Stone Brian Jones in 1965, Cammell was enraptured and became a frequent visitor to the court of King Brian. “I guess Turner was based on Brian,” says Pallenberg. “But it was all very superficial; Brian would ask me to do his hair and his make-up. He wanted to look like Françoise Hardy.”

If basing Turner on Jones was inspired, then recruiting Jagger to play him was a stroke of genius. After the infamous drug bust in February 1967 at Redlands, Keith Richards’s country house, both the police and the press were all over the band like a tattoo. By the time that Cammell and his co-director, Nicolas Roeg, started shooting, the mischievous singer was perceived by half the population as a glamorous, enigmatic desperado, and by the other half as the manifestation of every social evil. Having sold the movie as a Jagger vehicle, Cammell enrolled the services of Pallenberg who, as filming progressed in the late summer and autumn of 1968, found herself in the middle of a nightmare. “Donald was a real prima donna,” she recalls. “He would go into fits of rage and then disappear, while Nic Roeg would spend seven hours lighting one shot as we waited in the basement. I was often so stoned that even though I wrote my own dialogue, I didn’t know whether or not I had done my lines.”

The other problem was Keith Richards, who had saved Pallenberg from the physically abusive Jones in Tangiers in the spring of 1967, and with whom she was now living. He was scornful of the movie and jealous of her intimacy with Jagger. So, after returning home from filming, she would have to listen to Richards’s jibes, before jumping out of his bed the next morning and returning to Jagger’s four-poster.

So, how real were those sex scenes? Pallenberg now admits that they went beyond the call of duty. “But I put it down to method acting.” At one point she spent a whole week in bed with both Jagger and Breton: “There was a camera under the sheets. It was like a porno shoot.” Cammell and Roeg flanked the happy trio with a 16mm wind-up Bolex, and Roeg has said that even today he can see Cammell’s smiling face emerging from beneath the bed linen asking: “How was it for you?” Some of the footage was so explicit, however, that the film processing lab called to say that it flouted the obscenity laws and they were legally obliged to destroy it — which they did, with hammer and chisel.

Cammell, meanwhile, thrived on the friction. “Donald wanted my character to wind everyone one else up, which I was more than happy to do. I used to tease James Fox by saying that I had spiked his coffee with LSD. It was not an harmonious shoot, but that’s what Donald wanted: chaos, paranoia and grief,” recalls Pallenberg. “It was horrendous.”

The on-set shenanigans took their toll. They have been variously blamed for Fox’s rejection of acting for the next decade in favour of Christian vocational work, for Breton never performing again and for Cammell’s suicide in 1997 — he shot himself in the head, re-enacting the movie’s climax. Pallenberg is unconvinced. “James had already considered the road to Jesus when he had a breakdown and Michelle was never an actor anyway. As for Donald, he was always on the edge. But the myth is so much better.”

Rumours also abound that the actors were taking as many drugs as their on-screen counterparts. Spanish Tony, the Rolling Stones’ infamous drug dealer, claimed that both Jagger and Fox were smoking DMT between takes, a strange psychotropic drug that produces a 15-minute trip. “I didn’t see anything like that, but I wouldn’t be surprised. In those days things were a bit hush-hush,” says Pallenberg. “Spanish Tony was bringing me other things. By the completion of filming I was heavily into drugs.”

The other point of debate has been which co-director should take the greatest credit for the movie: the mercurial, doomed Cammell; or Roeg, who went on to have the more glittering career? Sanford Lieberson, the film’s producer, is emphatic that “Donald and Nic worked together in an immensely positive way. They discussed everything, and were inseparable. It was Donald’s concept. He wrote the screenplay, but the interpretation was a collaboration.”

“Nic and I had been friends for years,” said Cammell in a rare interview not long before his death. “We both read the same books, which to my mind is more important than seeing the same films.” Certainly Roeg’s dazzling use of different lenses, stocks and camera angles helped give the film its unique look. Whatever the case, their combined genius managed not only to paint an authentic portrait of London’s Bohemia, but also another 1960s archetype — the London gangster. They based Harry Flowers on Ronnie Kray, who by that time had an apartment in Chelsea and could be seen most nights mixing with the likes of Lord Boothby at the Krays’ gambling club, Esmerelda’s Barn in Wilton Place.

David Litvinoff, who was given the title of Dialogue Consultant and Technical Advisor, acted as their guide to the underworld. Marianne Faithfull described him as “a genuine mob boss”, and he was certainly a good friend of Ronnie’s. According to Christopher Gibbs, the film’s design consultant: “He didn’t have an affair with Ronnie Kray, but he used to pick up boys with him.”

It was Litvinoff’s job to help the decidedly posh Fox prepare for the role of Chas. “There was a sort of decisive moment,” said Fox. “Donald and Nic got terribly fed up with me being me. They sort of kicked me out and said: ‘Don’t come back until you’re Chas.’” Fox hung out at the gangsters’ favourite haunts and was trained in the pugilistic arts at the Thomas a Beckett pub on the Old Kent Road by Henry Cooper’s corner man, Johnny Shannon, a former heavyweight boxer who would eventually play Flowers.

“I made sure he worked the bag,” remembers Shannon. “He also did a bit of skipping and some sparring. When I first met him, he used to dress very flamboyant — floppy hats, long hair, flowery scarves, all that. I suggested to him that the “chaps” really don’t walk round like that. That was it. He wore his nice suits everywhere after that.”

Litvinoff also recruited the acting talents of John Bindon, who once bit off a man’s ear in a brawl — when he was berated by his friends, he gave it back to his lopsided adversary in a cigarette box. Bindon later killed a gangster named John Darke outside a pub in Putney. With Ronnie Kray as their model, and a gang of non-actors as the villains, Cammell and Litvinoff exhibited the distinctly homoerotic side of the capital’s underworld. “Donald was very interested in all of that,” says Pallenberg. “He was most upset when he had to cut the scene where Jagger and Fox kiss each other.”

In the autumn of 1969 the finished cut was sent to Warner Brothers. Utterly appalled, they destroyed the print and ordered the directors to Los Angeles to re-edit. Roeg, however, had to fly to Australia to make Walkabout, leaving Cammell and the experienced editor Frank Mazzola (a former LA gang member who taught James Dean how to wield a switchblade for Rebel Without a Cause) to rework the film. In trying to fulfil the studio’s brief of losing much of the sex and violence, the pair employed a series of rapid cuts that proffered less of the offending material, but which also effectively upped the tension and revolutionised for ever the art of film-making.

Released in the US in the summer of 1970, Performance was panned by the critics. Richard Schikell of Time magazine called it the “the most disgusting, the most completely worthless film I have seen since I began reviewing”. Britain, though, was more understanding. In January 1971, after a charity premiere for the drug charity Release, it was embraced by the underground press, the youth turned out in droves and it became an instant cult classic.

“The movie seems to me to be about the end of an era of hippy innocence, free love and sexual experimentation,” reflects Pallenberg. “It’s about how all these exterior forces personified by Chas came in and changed everything.” Its uncanny prescience had become only too apparent by the time of its release: Jones had by then been dead for two years; the Kray Brothers were in prison; and the murder at the Rolling Stones concert in Altamont had chilled the international psyche.

Still as powerful and perplexing today as it was on release, Performance is best summed up by its succinct tagline: “This film is about madness. And sanity. Fantasy. And Reality. Death. And life. Vice. And Versa.”

Performance is out on selected release; visit www.bfi.org.uk or phone (020-7255 1444) for further details

Anita Pallenberg 1984

Lu ça une fois et il y a longtemps... c'est pas pour me dédouaner, c'est certainement de la merde. Déjà le titre...

ROCK WIVES by Victoria Balfour 1984 (Part I)

Although Anita Pallenberg has an impressive list of acting credits behind her-including roles in the films Barbarella and Performance-she is far better known for her real-life role as the woman who bewitched first Brian Jones, then Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones.Anita's long and notorious association with the Stones began in 1965, when she managed to finagle her way backstage at one of their concerts in Munich. Right then and there, Brian Jones took a fancy to her, and soon they were rendezvousing for romantic weekends all over Europe. When, some months later, Brian, whose position within the group was crumbling, brought Anita to England to live with him, the arrival of this long-legged, multilingual Italian-born German beauty immediately elevated Brian's status with the others. In any case, Anita and Brian, with their identical bleached-blond Beatle-style bobs, were a mischievous pair: Anita persuaded Brian on one occasion to pose for the cover of a German magazine wearing a Nazi SS uniform while crushing a doll underfoot. But there was a dark side to Brian: He had a tendency to beat up his women. Eventually Anita grew tired of Brian's abusive ways and in 1967 fled into the sympathetic and willing arms of Keith Richards. That union-which lasted a dozen years or so-produced Marlon, now fifteen, and Dandelion Angela, twelve (a third child, son Tara Jo Jo Gunne, died in 1976 at the age of two months).At some point in their relationship, both Anita and Keith became heroin addicts, and it seemed like that whenever they got their names into the papers, it was because of one drug arrest or another. In 1977 Canadian customs officials found a heroin-encrusted spoon in Anita's luggage (and a package of Tic Tacs, which they confiscated for examination); this led to a raid on Keith's hotel room in Toronto, where police found an ounce of heroin. As a result, Keith kicked junk and managed to stay out of trouble. Anita was not so lucky. In 1979, a seventeen-year-old boy shot himself in her bed in the Westchester home that she shared with Keith. Disturbing as that incident was (Anita was eventually cleared of having any part in the boy's death), people seemed to be more shocked by the photographs of Anita taken as she was escorted from court: Vastly overweight and dull-eyed. Anita was virtually unrecognizable from her acting days.Not long after that incident, Keith and Anita began to drift apart. From time to time, Keith was seen in the company of other women. Then he met freckle-faced American model Patti Hansen, and that was that. Keith and Patti married on December 18, 1983.Since there has been no news of Anita for some time, many people have assumed that she has become just another pathetic victim left behind by the Rolling Stones.

True of False: In 1985 Anita Pallenberg is:(a) Fat(b) A practicing black witch(c)A hopeless junkie(d) Happy, and in love with someone who is not even remotely connected with theRolling Stones.Answers:(a) False. The Anita Pallenberg who arrives at the Plaza Hotel in New York for the interview is model-slim and looking quite glamorous in a full-length black-and-white fur coat. She has just been for a brisk walk in the cold December air around Central Park, and in fact, she looks downright healthy.(b) False. Although Anita has always been interested in the occult ("I do believe in forces") and was, by her own admission, at one time "messed up about it," these days Anita is just sticking to reading about the stuff.(c) False. Anita, it seems, has finally kicked the debilitating heroin habit she once shared with Keith. For a while, she even stopped drinking, and produces an Alcoholics Anonymous card from her wallet to prove it. "But I was too hyper, too active," she says. "I was annoying everybody. So I just have a drink once in a while."(d) True. One of the first things to come out of Anita's mouth is that she is happy-"Which is something I didn't know, never." That's hard to believe: Anita can't seem to stop smiling, and her gaze is direct. And she is in love. "I met a guy who had nothing to do with the Rolling Stones or music," she says with a big smile on her face. "I have to have somebody to love. It keeps you going."

ROCK WIVES by Victoria Balfour 1984 (Part II)

So much for the rumors. Now for the story:Anita Pallenberg was a war baby. She was born in Rome in the middle of World War II at a time when Italy was being heavily attacked by the Nazis. Because of this, Anita says she remembers being in sort of a permanent state of shock all the time. "My dad had to go to Germany and my mom took us up in the mountains, up close to Austria. We drove through all the burning cities. My mom must have been mad, but she was just trying to get us away from the Nazis. So this is how I learned to walk and talk. I don't think I even spoke Italian or German-I talked in some terrible language."So by the time Anita was eight and back living in Rome after the war, she felt much older than her years. "When I was eight, I felt like an eighty-year-old person. I felt wise, I felt the pain of everything weighing on me. " And to add to her troubles, Anita's older sister was a bully. "I was at her mercy for many years." Anita points to the joints of her fingers and says, rather dramatically, "She cut my fingers when I was about two months old so I couldn't suck them anymore. She broke my arm. She sent me down a hill on a sled. And I was tiny, rickety, a very bony little girl. She just wanted to get rid of me." But one night Anita decided to take action against her sister. "I used to have insomnia at night and used to share a bedroom, so I played the flute under the covers. She was complaining, obviously, so I banged her on the head, and she passed out." Anita smiles like a mischievous little girl. "So I finally found out that she was vulnerable. And from then on I grew up really wild. I skipped school very early on. I used to say good-bye and then not go, so eventually they put me in a live-in school in Germany."At first, Anita liked it there. "My performance was really good. I read Kafka at an early age and all the classics and I wanted to study medicine." At some point, though, Anita lost interest in school. "I was precocious and I wasn't happy, either. I just liked to go sailing and out into the wild. Skipping school, they kind of threw me out of that school as well"-only half a year before she was set to take her university entrance examinations. "I really thought it was terribly unfair," says Anita, suddenly becoming indignant. Then after a pause, she seems to change her mind. "Well, I must have deserved it somehow," she says with a little shrug of her shoulders. Since university was out of the question, Anita decided to go to art school in Munich. "A real fun town. There I had my first sexual encounter. I'm a real late bloomer, I guess." As Anita tells it, it was not a pleasant introduction to sex. What happened was, one day Anita went to get some art books from a friend. The friend, however, had mistakenly handed over her books to a strange man. "I said, 'Well, I'll go pick them.' He tried to rape me. That was a big shock for me." After that, Anita didn't go near men for quire some time. "I went totally antimen," she says. "I found them to be very obnoxious, so I just ignored them." Which is not to say that Anita led a chaste existence. "I went with women," says Anita, with that impish smile of hers. "In Italy it's like a pastime. It's in the summer when the sun shines out. Everybody does it!" By the time Anita was nineteen, she was, as she says mdestly, "quite attractive." Attractive enough, certainly, to arouse the interests of film directors in Rome, who began to offer her parts in their movies. "I thought, 'Well, in the summertime, when I'm not studying, I might get some little role and not tell my parents.' And then my dad found out and he said, 'You're just a slut." So I left home, because I really didn't want to give in to what he was saying." By this time, Anita must have gotten over her fear of men, because she had hooked up with an Italian artist by the name of Mario Schifano (who, coincidentally, would some years later have a fling with Marianne Faithfull, Mick Jagger's girlfriend). "We were good pals and everything and we decided to go to America and see Rauschenberg and all the pop artists."They arrived in New York in 1963, right about the time of John F. Kennedy's assassination. Anita remembers how somber the mood of the city was at that time, but she also recalls how, in spite of that, she managed to have a good time at jazz clubs and hanging out with artists like Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol. Things with Schifano, however, didn't work out, so Anita eventually went to work for an Italian photographer who worked for Vogue and Harper's Bazaar. Sometimes she would stand in for models who were late or ill. Apparently, someone in a high place must have liked Anita's look, because before she knew it, she was a full-time model. Anita says she was never that thrilled with being a model, though. "I've got straight hair, and in those days you had to have curlers and false eyelashes, and I refused all that. And I never had a good relationship with photographers, I must say. I thought they were slightly male chavinist. So, I'd just walk our. My reputation was a bit odd, but I still used to make tons of money. The first money I made I went out to Paris to buy myself a snakeskin jacket." (Which she would later lose on the road with the Stones-"With my lifestyle, I lost everything, especially the things I liked, " she says.)In 1965, Anita went back to Europe and modeled all over the continent. She was in Munich on a fashion job when she read that the Stones were going to do a concert there. A photographer smuggled her backstage, where she met Brian Jones, the sensitive and musically gifted Stone, who, by the age of twenty-three, had fathered three illegitimate children. And that wa the beginning of Anita Pallenberg's long association with the Rolling Stones. For the next few months, Brian and Anita renezvoused all over Europe. "When I think about it, in the early days it was kind of fun," says Anita. "' I will meet you in that town,' and then I would fly by myself and I would see them in the other town. But then when things started to get bigger, I didn't enjoy the lifestyle at all. I didn't like the whole scene. Honestly, I can say now if I knew they'd become that famous, I'd have moved out and disappeared long before."

ROCK WIVES by Victoria Balfour 1984 (Part III)

Within a short time, however, Anita was installed in Brian's house in London. The domestic situation there would not prove to be exactly harmonious. "I think Brian was a terrible person really," she says. "And I put up with a lot. I was really fascinated with his talent. Why I stuck first to Brian and then to Keith was because of the music. But all the side effects...he was a tortured personality, insecure as hell. He was ill very early on from when I met him. He was totally paranoiac." They argued, especially over things like Anita's career. "He didn't like the fact that I was working. So when I came home with this big fat script, he tore it in half. Jealousy. English people are odd in the head, you know? Eccentric. But I went on." Anita landed a role in German director Volker Schlondorff's first fiction movie, A Degree of Murder (he went on to direct The Tin Drum) and talked Brian into doing the music for the movie. "That movie had success," says Anita. It went on to Cannes Film Festival."In spite of their collaboration, things between them were rapidly falling apart. Brian was drinking heavily and, as the story goes, could be terribly abusive. Finally, when Anita couldn't take his behavior anymore, she left him for Keith. "I found there was an enormous talent in Keith, and Keith was really a shy little guy in those days, couldn't come out of himself. And I had all this kind of Italian energy and outgoing personality, so it was really easy for me. And somehow it finally came out. Then he started to write songs and he started to sing them himself. I though it was wonderful."Would Anita say that she was the inspiration for some of Keith's songs? "I couldn't say that, " she answers. "I was writing songs with them. We wrote together 'Honky Tonk Women' and 'You Can't Always Get What You Want.'" Anita also played critic: If she did not like their music, she was not afraid to say so to the Stones. "I'd always tell them, and to my amazement they would listen. Nobody else would. They were all yes-men. I call them 'shampoo people'-guys with three-piece suits and curlies." In general, she thinks that most of the Sones' hangers-on were afraid of her-"I've always done what I wanted, and that scared them. And I do have my temper."Compared with Brian, Keith was a far easier person to live with, but still "Keith had the same problem as Brian with doing the movies," says Anita. "I got to do Candy in Rome, so I got to meet Marlon Brando. So Keith heard that Marlon Brando and I had a scene, so he took the first plane and he was out there. It was the same story, so eventually I tried to time it out to work where Keiht was working. But he'd always stand me up. So eventually I gave up and I didn't show up on a couple of sets. And then I had kids, so I slowly moved out."Anita's increasing dependence on durgs didn't exactly help her career, either. "We started on acid and all that stuff. Wherever I was, I was getting busted. For nothing! I got busted for Tic Tacs. Ridiculous. Very embarrassing, really," she says.What got Anita into drugs in the first place, was, she says, a combination of "loneliness and boredom." But she syas it was her sense of discipline that kept her from self-destructing entirely. "I'm really amazingly German in that way," she says. "I think I had a notion of what excess it, so I never really took blindly. It's not like Marilyn Monroe, who forgets how many barbs she's taken. I couldn't do anything like that. I remember. But," she adds, her green eyes twinkling, "I thik I know the art of falling over. And everybody seems to love it. Marianne Faithfull know it some more. She knows it to perfection. I always was jealous how she used to get carried around. So why didn't they carry me around?"Anita maintains that, throughout the roller-coaster years with the Stones, she and Keith were "always basically down-to-earth, keeping things very simple. All the other people can say wheat they want," she says, a little huffily. "The example I can say is my son [fifteen-year-old Marlon, who lives with her on Long Island]. He could be a snotty little kid and he's really down to earth. We lived together because Keith was always on the road, so we've been stuck together for years, and to see how he comes out, it's great. He's got no airs. He wants to be an archaeologist. For me, children are the best thing I ever had. Everybody was slashing me when I had Marlon, saying, 'You must be crazy to have children. How can you have a child on the road?' I thought it was better to be with the parents than by himself. Marlon learned to walk on stage, practically."If Marlon thrived on the road, Keith and Anita's twelve-year-old daughter, Angela, did not. When the subject turns to her daughter, Anita sighs. "With her, I don't know. On the road, she used to go off by herself, pick up guys, bring them back-'Mommy, here.' Big guys. And I'd get really scared. And she'd go out of the hotel rooms, and I'd find her sitting on the lap of somebody. That's why I decided not to have her on the road anymore." For now, Angela is being brought up by Keith's mom, Doris Richards, in England. Explains Anita, "I lost one child, right? So at the time when I lost him, I went through a heavy nervous breakdown. For about three months I was very upset. So Doris offered herself to look after her. Now the problem is eh's keeping her in a shell. She seems to be more conscious of who she is, who Keith is. Like Marlon is Keith's mate, and they've always been mates, but it seems to be more difficult with her. I meet Keith now and tlake about it and see what we can do. We're trying to redeem her. Surprisingly, up until this point in the interview Anita has not made a single reference to Mick Jager, with whom she reportedly had an affair on the set of Peformance. When this is brought to her attention, Anita smiles naughtily and rubs her hands together, as if getting ready to tear him apart. "From when I first met him, I was Mick was in love with Keith. It still is that way." In Anita's opinion, Mick would like to be the way Kieith is, "tough and macho." And she says she helped him out with his acting when they worked together on Performance. "He'd never done a movie and he didn't know how to react to a camera at all. He had a problem with it. I'd say, 'Relax!'" But she adds kindly, "He's really quite sweet. He tries very hard. He's learned a lot. He's become very cultured and very kind of gentleman-ish and well educated."How did her lengthy relationship with Keith Richards finally come to an end? Answers Anita, "They lawyers told us we were no good for each other because of the drugs and all that" (reportedly some people in the Stones' camp blamed Anita for Keith's 1977 drug bust in Canada). "They say we're a bad influence on each other." What Anita says next is unexpected: "I always had my boyfriends on the side! It was loneliness. I didn't think anything bad. I used to introduce them to him. He met them all. But I think the relationship was good, you know? It's not like Bianca and Mick or Angie and David. It was nothing like that with Keith. He's very understanding, a very human person and he appreciates home and he's really a rewarding person."Anita took the breakup hard. "For a while it was a nightmare," she says. "All my life was practically in the same bag. So I couldn't really make out what was what. I didn't know where my sanity was and where my identitywas at that point. I think it was the pain of love. That's what really hurts. Then I was still being harassed by the police and I really didn't find any reason. In London they tried to do that. I had to go to court again, and that really hurt me. "I thought I could never have another love in my life," she continues. "I really thought, 'That's it.' I'm jaded. Where can you go after you've been in love with Keith Richards? What else is there? But it heals, it really does. You can actually get over a person. And then I met a guy who had nothing to do with the Rolling Stones or music," Anita purrs. "English people are wonderful. My cup of tea. It sounds like roses, doesn't it?"It certainly does. And in other ways Anita's life has changed. For one thing, she is no longer a "preacher for the Rolling Stones sound and the Rolling Stones everything." (In fact, she thinks they should retire, "gracefully.") "Now I just started to discover other bands."Lately she has been traveling all over the world because she feels that in spite of all he rtime on the road with the Stones, she never got to see it properly. "I went to all these airports and all these hotels, but I actually nevery really saw what I want to see. I tried to go by myself, but I always got right in trouble because of security." And she wants to see the world soon "before it shuts down. You do understand that there's going to be a Third World War, don't you?"Anita has no plans to return to acting, althought she would like to try her hand at moviemaking again (she produced a movie in Italy in the sixties that starred Mick and Keith called Human, Not Human and won a couple of awards), this time a documentary on the life of Leni Reifenstahl, the official government photographer during the Third Reich. Her relationship with Keith these days is quite amicable. "He doesn't ignore me. He doesn't put me through any bullshit [that is, alimony haggles] like Bianca. We already had so many legal hassles as it was. Who wants to go through more? He comes and visits and says, 'Hello,' brings goodies for Marlon, brings me tapes to play. He's mellowed out a lot. He's had lots of girlfriends from when we kind of split up, and I met them all. There was now way out of it. And I've been around him so long anyway. But Patti's the only one I think is okay. She takes care of him. I'm really happy, because you do feel you have to look after them. At least, that's the way I felt. I felt I had to protect him. He was flying so high in the music world. Anything material, anything that was going on, he couldn't recognize a face or anything."That said, Anita begins to gather up her things, saying that the car is waiting out in front of the Plaza. Then, rummaging in her purse, she produces a package of Tic Tacs. "You see, I'm still on them," she jokes, and pops one into her mouth.

Patti Hansen

Ca date d'il y a déjà quelques années. Patti donc. Passionnant ? On a jamais dit ça.

Patti Hansen in "Health for Women" magazine

Patti Hansen was the subject of a cover story in the April issue of American Health for Women magazine.
Thanks to Alyson Sadofsky from Undercover for this article!
Curled up on the couch in a friend's home wearing a floppy gray sweater and slacks sprinkled with dog hair, Patti Hansen - supernova of models in the '80s and wife of Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards - wears almost no makeup. Her only adornment is a delicate gold cross lined with tiny garnets. Her beauty is classic and profound. It's hard to connect this shy woman with the model who photographer Francesco Scavullo describes in his recent book: "She was completely uninhibited, always running around naked on location shots...nothing fazed her."
But something does faze Hansen the mother, something that never concerned Hansen the model. For years she has been a stay-at-home mom in Connecticut with her two daughters, Alexandra, 11, and Theodora, 13. Now modeling again at 42, Hansen is disturbed by what she sees as the industry norm of uber-thinness. "Recently, I went to a fashion show where it was awful to see the shape of some girls," Hansen says. "One girl looked frighteningly thin."
[snip]Certainly Hansen was not as voluptuous as Monroe, but everything about her photos in the 70's and 80's radiated sexuality. As Polly Mellen, creative director of Allure, puts it, "Patti just has that animal thing." Hansen clearly has always had something. She was discovered at 16, selling hot dogs at a stand on Staten Island. A Wilhemina scout brought her to a party at the famed modeling agency; three months later she was on the cover of Seventeen.
When Hansen met Keith Richards in 1979 at Studio 54, she swears she didn't exactly know who he was. She was 23 and he was 36. "I knew who the Rolling Stones were," she says, "but I didn't listen to that music. I loved the Supremes, Smokey Robinson - soul." Hansen was smitten. "I just loved this man," she says. "I loved the way he looked, his eyes, his strength - everything about him."
Four years later, Hansen and Richards wed. He has two children from a previous marriage; their daughters were born in 1985 and 1986. By all accounts theirs is one of the most solid marriages in the entertainment industry. But now that the Stones are back on tour, and she's over 40, doesn't she worry a bit about the temptations of the road? After all, she's married to the guy who co-wrote "Let's Spend the Night Together."
"Last time he was on tour, I took the kids out of school for a year and we traveled with a tutor," she says. "This time they don't want to do that. So I'm trying to fly wherever he is and see him at least every two weeks. But he's good. At least," she laughs, "I don't read about anything."
Considering her wild past, Hansen is surprisingly conservative now, both politically (she voted for Bob Dole) and temperamentally. A born-again Christian who attends a Bible study group (religion is one area where she and Richards agree to disagree), Hansen doesn't let her daughters see most movies purported to be for kids their age; she forbids cursing and she preaches abstinence before marriage.
As for drugs, Hansen says, "I tell them about the things I've done, because I don't want them to read about me later and be shocked. So I say, 'When I was drinking a lot, I was dancing on top of bars, acting like a fool. I drank so I could be the life of the party.' I tell them, 'You don't need the crutches.' People said I was a free spirit. Well, I was out of my mind. In control [professionally], but out of my mind."
Hansen is very much in control of her life now. At 5'9 1/2", her weight fluctuates between 135 and 145, up from her modeling weight of 121 to 130. Now that her daughters are older, Hansen is returning to the modeling scene, and she knows that while a wild child in her 20s is still an employable model, a 42-year old party girl is not: "I'm not eating pizza in the middle of the night anymore. You can only do that for so long." Aside from the occasional evening when she shares a steak at midnight with her nocturnal, meat-and-potatoes husband, most days she eats a lot of fruit and salad and drinks plenty of water.
[snip]Hansen worked out with a trainer until last March, when much of her energy was turned to focus on the eldest of her seven siblings, who was diagnosed with esophageal and lung cancer. Hansen was devastated when her sister died in September. She is just now gearing up to go back to her workout routine.
If Hansen is a role model for staying sensible about food and exercise in an industry that's overly focused on the superficial, she's also a poster woman for aging gracefully. "I'm fighting surgery big time," she says. "I'd like to be natural." Not that she ruled out the possibility of the surgeon's arts. "I tell people that when Keith goes for a face lift, I'll go for a face lift," she says.
[snip]While Hansen is grateful for her looks, she also genuinely believes that her perfect face and slender body - those sublime accidents of birth - have played no real part in her happiness. She says her greatest joys come from the parts of her life that are available to most women. "My marriage, my children - they've changed my life for the better," she says. "I mean, I had fun times; it's been an awesome life. And I'm thankful I survived it."
Sidebar "Patti's Vitals"
· Age: 42
· Occupation: Supermodel
· Family life: Married for 15 years to Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards; mother of Alexandra, 11, and Theodora, 13
· Biggest sins in the 70's: Sex, drugs and rock'n roll
· Biggest sin in the 90's: Pizza
· What she worries about: Teens' adulation and emulation of models
· How she de-stresses: Takes a "hard, hot shower"
· Biggest beauty secret: Drink lots of water
· Her heaven on earth: Noelle Spa for Beauty and Wellness, Stamford, CT
· Advice to her children: "Do as I say, not as I did."