Much has been said and written about Anita’s transference from Brian Jones’s to Keith Richards’ corner and yet little has been documented about how she led both relationships. While Keith Richards’ arrest for Anita's heroin possession in Canada during 1977 would cast a dark shadow over their relationship, further torment would come two years later when Anita would find herself embroiled in an almightily seamy situation when a seventeen-year-old boy shot himself in her New York state home. Keith Richards described Pallenberg as a "very strong woman" who was "extremely bright" and "a great beauty". The couple had three children together, one of whom died as an infant, before they finally separated in 1980. Pallenberg sang backing vocals on classic Stones track Sympathy for the Devil and was said to have had a "profound" influence on the band.
“They were like schoolboys,” Anita would recall from her first interactions with The Rolling Stones. “They looked at me like I was some kind of threat. Mick Jagger really tried to put me down, but there was no way some lippy guy was going to do a number on me. I was always able to squelch him. I found out that if you stand up to Mick, he crumbles.” While enchanted by Anita’s blonde hair, leggy stature and elegant gait, it was her fearless presence– incongruously offset by her pixie features–that truly caught their attention. Some reports have claimed that it was Brian Jones who singled Anita out, saying (in German): “I don’t know who you are, but I need you.” “Brian was very unusual,” reported Anita in 2006. “He was moody and he was physically attractive. He looked like a girl in a funny kind of way. Sexually I like girls as well as men and he had a wonderful curiosity. The other Stones were more like, what shall I say, frightened, Brian was much more ready to go to strange places. Except for Brian, all the Stones at that time were suburban squares.”
“I’ve obviously contemplated marriage,” Brian told some waiting journalists. “Anita is the first girl I’ve met I’ve been serious about.” Behind Anita’s cool exterior, Pattie Boyd observed the dynamics of the Jones/Pallenberg alliance. “She was definitely in control of that relationship. You could see that she could do exactly what she wanted. She actually was a bit scary. To me, she seemed that she had secrets that she would never reveal. I’ve never met a young woman with such incredible confidence.” “The first time he took acid,” Anita would later recall of Jones’s trip, “he saw creatures coming out of the ground, the floors. He was looking in all the cupboards for people, ‘Where are they?’” For those already walking a thin line between reality and fantasy, LSD would serve to join up the dots. The drug confirming and furthermore propelling Anita’s already furious sense of being, she took to LSD with considerable gusto. While for Anita its earth-shattering experience was liberating and informative, for Brian’s fragile sense of self and worth, the torturing visions, demonising voices and unfiltered memory recall would serve to increase his already unbridled paranoia.
Keith Richards' cool detachment masked a shy innocence that only a few would detect. Unlike some members of the band, Richards would nonetheless maintain a fairly modest libido, preferring the attention of one woman to the smorgasbord of sensual delights that were available to pop stars of the moment. Jane Fonda’s interest in Richards would extend well beyond the shoot of Barbarella. Anita would later recall Fonda visiting her and Keith at their London residence, only to be ignored by Richards because he said she reminded him of his aunt. “On tour he desperately missed Anita,” confirmed The Stones' road manager Sam Cutler. “He was never unfaithful to her. I was with him every minute of the day of the 1969 tour and he was never with any other women. He was a one-woman man; a great romantic and a gentleman. Whenever we got to a hotel, he was calling her. He pined for her.” With Keith travelling to the States in preparation for the fifteen-date tour on October, Anita would be left home alone with baby Marlon. The tour separating the couple for the best part of two months, the vacuum left by Keith’s absence was considerable, and a heavier reliance on drugs was perhaps somewhat predictable. It was during this period that Keith would begin work on perhaps his most enduring paean of his love for Anita and Marlon, ‘Wild Horses’.
"I have never put the make on a girl in my life. I just don’t know how to do it. My instincts are always to leave it to the woman. Which is kind of weird, but I can’t pull the come-on bit: “Hey, baby, how you doing?” and all of that. I’m tongue-tied. I suppose every woman I’ve been with, they’ve had to put the make on me. Meanwhile I’m putting the make on in another way—by creating an aura of insufferable tension. So Anita made the first move. She was one of the prime women in the world. She certainly made a man out of me. I loved her spirit, even though she would instigate and turn the screw and manipulate. Anita and I got back to my little pad in St. John’s Wood. And Brian made desperate attempts to get Anita back. There was no chance of that happening. Once Anita makes up her mind, she makes up her mind. It’s said that I stole her. But my take on it is that I rescued her."
Although Anita received a fairly healthy wage from her film and modelling assignments, her spending had far exceeded her income, leaving Keith as the major breadwinner. Walking down the aisle of the Chapelle Sainte-Anne, Mick and Bianca were accompanied by the theme song from the film Love Story, a somehow cheesy soundtrack that elicited loud guffaws from both Anita and Keith. On April 28, 1976, before a concert in Frankfurt, Keith announced that after nine eventful years together, he and Anita were to get married. Ever the iconoclast, Keith would tag the announcement with the information that it was to facilitate a passport for Anita, and yet made it clear from the public statement that he wanted some permanence to their relationship. Keith announced that the union might take place live onstage in front of 18,000 fans during one of the Stones’ run of gigs at Earls Court Arena during the May of 1976. Ultimately, the event never happened–nor, as evidenced from official records, did the marriage ever take place. Finding their third child Tara motionless in his crib, Anita called nearby physicians–to be confronted with the reality that her child had died overnight. On inspection, the little baby–just two and a half months old–had developed respiratory issues and had succumbed to sudden infant death syndrome (SIDS).
“Keith was very protective and loving,” recalled Anita later. “He just said, ‘Forget it.’ And everybody else told me the same thing. They all said, ‘Forget it. Look after your other children.’ I am sure that the drugs had something to do with it. And I always felt very, very bad about the whole thing.” Understandably, Keith would be deeply haunted by the tragic episode. In 2011, he would relive the trauma of losing his child. “Leaving a newborn infant son is something I can’t forgive myself for. It’s as though I deserted my post.” Journalist Nick Kent was present for the pitiful reunion in the most upsetting of circumstances. “Anita was crying and seemed to be having difficulty moving,” wrote Kent in The Dark Stuff. “Keith was shepherding her along but he was crying too and looked all of a sudden to be impossibly fragile. They looked like some tragic couple leading each other out of a concentration camp.” The couple settled at Nellcôte in the French Riviera. Celebrated visitors at Nellcôte would include John Lennon and Yoko Ono, William S. Burroughs, aristocratic drug dealer Jean de Breteuil (who romanced Marianne Faithfull and Pamela Courson) plus The Stones’ entourage.
Entitled ‘All About You’, the song (written in late 1979) would be seen by many as a direct response to his break-up with Anita and the emotional detritus that lay around them. While Richards has been nebulous over the years as to what spawned the lyrics, his lamenting words saying he “may miss you” or he’s “still in love” suggest there was an ongoing love for Anita. “That song is about Anita,” recalled Keith to Loaded magazine in 1997. “I was breaking up with her around that time. I’d said, ‘Look, if we clean up together, we’ll stay together.’ Well, I cleaned myself up. But she didn’t. And I realized that I couldn’t sleep with someone who had a needle beside the bed. I was too fragile at that point. I loved her, but I had to leave her.” Keith’s generosity towards Anita never diminished since their gradual split in the late 1970s. Welded together through their children and grandchildren, the couple would often find time to catch up, the spirit of harmony never once challenged by the separate paths they took. “There is an underlying love that goes beyond all of that. She'll be always in my heart,” Keith reported in 2011 to Rolling Stone magazine. —"She’s a Rainbow: The Extraordinary Life of Anita Pallenberg" (2020) by Simon Wells
The Doors were playing at the Hollywood Bowl on July 5, 1968. Jim was staying across the street from The Doors’ office at the Alta Cienega Motel that day because, Pamela explained to Christopher Jones, “He likes to stay there to work himself up before a performance.” Chris was spending the afternoon at Pamela’s apartment in West Hollywood. There were no phones in the rooms at the Alta Cienega, so Jim was at a pay phone when he called Pamela that afternoon and asked her to come pick him up and take him to the concert. Don’t go pick him up!” Chris suggested her as a dare. Jim called several times, “really pissed off,” according to Jones, but Pamela decided not to go to La Cienaga. Jim knew that Pamela had spent the day with Chris, and when she didn’t come pick him up at the motel, he was just as sure that she would be bringing Chris to the concert. But Jim didn't imagine Pam would find Mick Jagger and would seat on his lap instead. As though to curry her favor, onstage Jim wore an intricately embroidered vest from Pam's boutique Themis. Robby Krieger: "I remember Jim's girlfriend Pam took a liking to Mick Jagger and sat with him for the entire show. I don't know how Jim felt about that (laughs)." Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull skipped the backstage afterward.
After the show, Pamela brought Chris backstage, while she went to see Jim in the dressing room. As soon as Chris entered the dressing room, Jim reached for Pamela and sat her down on his lap. “He just sat there grinning at me, defiantly, with Pam on his lap,” says Jones. “Pam was looking at me kind of nervous. But Jim knew about us at that point, and he was trying to get it up on me. I just left the backstage.” The Doors embarked on a tour of the States in November, and still Pamela hadn’t come home. She was in London with Chris Jones. Their breakups before had always been minor ones, quickly healed, but this was stretching out for weeks, and Jim felt he had to take action. Without telling anyone where he was going, he left for London to get Pamela back. “Jim left town and didn’t show any of us the respect to tell us that he was leaving, how long he would be gone, when he was coming home—he just disappeared,” says Bill Siddons. The Doors left to tour Europe less than two months later, and Pamela came along, choosing mostly to stay in London while the band toured. Ray and Dorothy Manzarek were impressed by the domestic bliss the couple seemed to have fallen into their furnished flat on Eton Square.
Many of Jim Morrison's statements are clearly not to be taken at face value, he often meant the opposite of it, and they were sarcastic. What else do you say to a shallow audience? It has always bothered me that neither the media nor those who want to make money off of Jim Morrison ever acknowledge that he obviously had mental health problems with severe depression being the most obvious problem. Krieger's father was a psychologist and noticed Jim could not attend the band's first rehearsal because he had gotten drunk and thrown in jail. That was a red flag. Manzarek had his personal assistant/gopher Danny Sugerman be the one to actually put his name on No One Here Gets Out Alive. "With his crooked smile, agile mind, and great gift for gab, Ray surprised me at our first meeting by placing a typed manuscript in front of me: a copy of No One Here Gets Out Alive, the Morrison bio by Jerry Hopkins and Danny Sugerman, still some months away from publication," explained Chris Morris. Manzarek was going to get that Buick money, one way or the other. This kid's short, unhappy life became a morbid cottage industry with every book being nothing more than an uglier rehashing of 'Jimmy Dearest', with Jim simply being a drunk asshole as the only narrative, even though Jim was a choirboy compared to other more respected and "beloved" figures in rock. —by RidderontheStorm1969
Cheri Siddons echoes The Doors's manager Bill Siddons’s sentiments. “It was never The Doors. I mean the crowd was always screaming, ‘Jim! Jim! And he looked at me once and said, ‘Cheri what do they want from me? They don’t know me, they don’t know who I am. What do they want?’ I mean that was the crux of it to me, right there. Jim was the antithesis of Mick Jagger. Everyone was sucking more, everyone wanted more, I don’t really know what it was. Maybe because Jim was deeper—it could’ve been a lot of reasons. But I think somewhere in the middle of it, he didn’t want to play anymore and yet this whole cog wheel was going around him.” “Jim was kind of being worshipped into a box,” confirms Bill Siddons, “and he was really victimized by it. ‘Okay, you’re the crazy Jim Morrison! You’ve got to jump off the stage and reappear in a cloud of smoke!’ And the audience was hungry and wanted their show, goddamn it! But he was taunting the audience, going ‘What are you here for? Is this what you came to see? I mean, what do you want from me?’ It was a bunch of teenagers that wanted to party, and here was this tormented artist who was kind of doing his Van Gogh impression. Jim created a monster that got out of control and started to eat him away.” —"Angels Dance, Angels Die: The Tragic Romance of Pamela and Jim Morrison" (2010) by Patricia Butler
Because Morrison had a tendency not to talk about his relationships, it was difficult to gauge how things were going on with Pamela. “She was a constant force in his life, but they were volatile,” explains Siddons. “They’d taken a house on Verbena Drive and were attempting to live a domesticated life, but that only lasted a few months. That’s why Jim was living at the Alta Cienega Motel.” Morrison had a knack, like Dylan, to pen lyrics which tie to elemental themes. He also tracked down some of the eternal chords and rhythms of how our culture breathes inside the continuum of the West. The Road which chases the setting Sun. The same way someone can find those echoes in Whitman, Crane, Williams, Frost, Dylan etc. Morrison was less consistent then those seers, but when his pick found the proper vein the traces of the ever circling West Hawk can be traced back home. That is a legacy, regardless of its lack of consistency, that won’t be forgotten.
Patricia Kennealy: "Oliver Stone, who is, of course, Satan, raped both me and Jim on screen. Oliver had the chance to make the Citizen Kane of Sixties movies, the Lawrence of Arabia of that amazing era—Jim is the only rock star about whom such a movie could have been made—and he blew it. Here was this guy who has absolutely everything going for him: He’s brilliant, gorgeous, he’s a creative genius, he has dramatic love relationships—and he lives his far too brief life in the most unbelievable pain, doing his best to destroy himself, and he dies doomed and alone at 27. Why?? The answer to that could have made a compelling piece of cinema. So does Oliver Stone make a heartbreaking piece of art from all this? No! He makes a lying vicious mean-spirited piece of unmitigated garbage. What I will never forgive him for is that you don’t care that the Jim character is dead at the end of the movie; nowhere in that evil damned piece of slander is the viewer made to care about Jim and what becomes of him. That’s not an artist at work, that’s just Oliver fucking Stone doing business as usual, and that is why I say that had he been present when I first saw the movie at a screening, I would have ripped his throat out. What Oliver did to me was terrible. But what he did to Jim was criminal. I hasten to add: I was never pretty like Pamela, but in my days with Jim I was 117 pounds when I was thin and 125 when I was fat; either way, at almost 5’9″ that’s far from chubby." Source: http://satireknight.wordpress.com
-NME (July 2019): Do you see a connection between The Doors and Natural Born Killers?
-Oliver Stone: "Yeah, I think of it as a line. Filming Natural Born Killers was like being free again. I think The Doors is like Natural Born Killers. It’s in that line of film where with imagery we freed ourselves and allowed free associations. Jim Morrison was much more advanced than I was. I was 21 and still learning about the world. I was in Vietnam and I considered myself an explorer. I looked up to him. When I came back in ’69 and ’70, I was in New York and he was on his trip. But I sent him a script. That was an interesting story. I sent him the script of Break, which was my first script which I wrote when I came back, about Vietnam. It was very psychedelic. I thought Jim could play the soldier. He could play the character of me. It was quite a wild script. I didn’t hear back, of course. I’m used to that, I’ve been rejected before. Jim was all out for nothing, almost suicidal. He was serious. I think you see it in the movie, he takes no prisoners. ‘Do you love me?’ ‘Would you die for me?’ It’s crazy stuff. He was finished with the band. I do think Paris was the beginning of a new stage but it got derailed. I think part of that, this is my opinion only, I can’t prove it, but I do feel that Pamela Courson had a drug problem. My feeling is that he was trying to help her, and kept up with her, and I think he overdid it. We weren’t allowed to depict her addiction, because her parents didn’t want to have any of that, but you can see in the film that she’s high.” Source: www.nme.com
The fact that Max Fink (Jim's lawyer) disliked Pam maybe was due to her refusing his advances which could have created tremendous resentment for a rich Beverly Hills lawyer. Fink probably made a pass at Pam, trying to make her mistress, so she eventually would leave Jim. Others, like Jean de Bretueil had already failed previously at separating her from Jim. Fink tried to persudade Jim to break up with Pam after she had run away to Paris with Bretueil. But Jim thought it was more of a drug-related relationship than a romantic relationship. Fink asked Jim to reconsider his stormy relationship with Pam. Jim bluntly said to Fink that Pam was her woman and he wouldn't tolerate one more cross word from Fink, especially since Jim had heard (through Diane Gardiner) of the seduction game Fink had attempted on Pam behind Jim's back. Fink, as last ditch, pondered if an unstable Pam could charge Jim with abuse during the trial. Jim got red and furious against Fink, assuring him: "I would never strike my woman." Miranda Babitz agreed: "Jim suffered from clinical depression. He was not agressive. She threw plates, crockery, and frying pans at him, but he just laughed. When they went out at night, Pam hit Jim in the face with her tiny fist if he was getting too close to another chick. The only scratches that I saw in Jim's face I think were related to their passion nights."
"Sometimes, after a real passionate night, Pam would get up a bit soured, but showing a big smile. They dropped acid together and then got B shots at UCLA Medical Center to help them come down." Quoting Margaret Fink: "Jim seemed to despise his mother. She used to call me up and she just wanted to know if her son was still alive. When I asked Jim about his mother, his face became contorted in anger. 'If that bitch calls again, tell her I am dead. She just wants my money." Max Fink also quotes Jim saying him during the trial he had done the Miami incident on purpose: "Jim thought it was a good way to pay homage to his parents in Florida." Jim confessed Max his doubts about his bandmates, quoting Fink: "Jim told me he felt that they were secretly enjoying his predicament, that there was a smugness now in their attitude towards him." Fink controversially exposed his suspicious in a conversation with his wife Margaret: "I think Pamela was in part responsible for Jim's death. I can’t even state for a fact whether it was deliberate or accidental." According to Eva Gardonyi, after Jim's death: "Pamela was obviously using heroin and she was sort of showing it to me for effect. She was doing this Bonnie and Clyde sort of thing. She was desperately missing Jim and there was something majorly off with her head. I feel she was mentally unbalanced." —"Jim Morrison: Friends Gathered Together" (2014) by Frank Lisciandro
The Fear (poem by Jim Morrison): Eternal consciousness/in the Void/makes trial jail seem almost friendly/Further and further, I shall push the masses/Where is the solution?/The Trip, The Escape/Can I do it?/Can I manage?/Why do I drink?/So that I can write poetry./Sometimes when it’s all spun out/and all that is ugly recedes into a deep sleep/There is an awakening/and all that remains is true.
The key to heroism is a concern for other people in need—a concern to defend a moral cause, knowing there is a personal risk, done without expectation of reward. By that definition, then, altruism is heroism light—it doesn’t always involve a serious risk. Compassion is a virtue that may lead to heroism, but we don’t know that it does. We’re just now starting to scientifically distinguish heroism from these other concepts and zero in on what makes a hero. What M.C. Escher’s illustrations tell us is that the world is filled with angels and devils, goodness and badness, and these dark and light aspects of human nature are our basic yin and yang. George Bernard Shaw captured this point in the preface to his great play “Major Barbara”: “Every reasonable man and woman is a potential scoundrel and a potential good citizen. What a man is depends upon his character. What he does, it depends on upon his circumstances.” Another conclusion from my research is that few people do evil and fewer act heroically. Between these extremes in the bell curve of humanity are the masses—the general population who do nothing—those who refuse the call to action and, by doing nothing, often implicitly support the perpetrators of evil. So on this bell curve of humanity, villains and heroes are the outliers. Heroic acts are prosocial actions that involve extreme sacrifice and risk. Our research suggests that one group refrains from praising heroic acts—heroes themselves. Source: journals.sagepub.com
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