Despite their artistic skill, Anita Pallenberg, Suzi Ronson and Yoko Ono were cast as mere lovers or muses. They’re now being allowed to tell their own stories – even if it’s after death
In a 2008 interview, Anita Pallenberg swore she would never write her autobiography. The artist, model and actor was weary of publishers who only wanted to read about her intimate dealings with the Rolling Stones – she dated both Brian Jones and Keith Richards, and had an affair with Mick Jagger. “They all wanted salacious,” she said then. “And everybody is writing autobiographies and that’s one reason why I’m not going to do it.”
Yet when Pallenberg died in 2017, she left behind pages of a neatly typed manuscript, titled Black Magic, that contained her life story. True to form, she characterised these memoirs as “memory images, a traveller’s tale through a landscape of dreams and shadows” rather than an autobiography. But she held little back while chronicling her spirited and frequently tumultuous life, quipping: “I don’t think the lawyers will like it very much.”
