Anita Pallenberg Doc: Scarlett Johansson Narrates Vacation With the Rolling Stones
A new documentary will look at the legacy of model and actress Anita Pallenberg. In a clip from Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg, Pallenberg — voiced by Scarlett Johansson reading from Pallenberg’s unpublished memoirs — recalls a 1968 boating vacation she took with her then boyfriend, Keith Richards, as well as Mick Jagger and his girlfriend at the time, Marianne Faithfull. Footage from the trip, a voyage from Lisbon to Rio, has never previously been released. The film arrives in theaters on May 3 and will be available digitally the same day.
“We were never peace and love kind of people,” Johansson as Pallenberg says in the clip. “But we wanted to reassure each other that everything was OK, so we decided to take a trip together: Mick, Marianne, Keith, and I. Crossing the Atlantic on a freighter, we must seem pretty eccentric to the people on the ship. We had great outfits for strolling down the decks. Beautiful Marianne was always dressed top to toe with long gloves, a hat — she was like a Tennessee Williams character. And I was pregnant.”
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In addition to Pallenberg keeping it secret that she was pregnant with Keith’s and her first child, Marlon Richards — born in August 1969 — the trip is notable in Rolling Stones lore as the origin of Richards and Jagger’s nickname “The Glimmer Twins.” When some of the other vacationers — who were dressed to the nines in leftover fashion from the 1930s — grew curious about them, they eventually asked the quartet who they were.
One sojourner, whom Richards calls the “Spiderwoman” in his autobiography, Life, eventually said, “Oh, do give us a hint, just give us a glimmer.” Richards recalls in Life, “Mick turned to me and said, ‘We’re the Glimmer Twins.'” The guitarist writes that once they got to Rio, Pallenberg started requesting a doctor, only then telling him she was pregnant.
“We were almost thrown together because she was with Keith [Richards] and I was with Mick,” Faithfull recalled in a 2018 Rolling Stone interview. “When they were working, we were together. We hung out together, and that’s how we became friends. I don’t know if we just met normally if we would have become friends. Maybe not. She was very different than me. She was much more sophisticated, elegant and beautifully dressed. She was all the things people think I am and Anita really was.”
Catching Fire, which filmmakers Alexis Bloom and Svetlana Zill directed, uses Pallenberg’s own words, read by Johansson, throughout its 110-minute runtime. Marlon and Angela Richards gave interviews to the film, as did Keith. The picture premiered at Cannes last year.
“I’ve been called a witch, a slut, and a murderer,” Johansson as Pallenberg says in the trailer for the doc. “Maybe people confuse me with the characters I’ve played.” The clip shows her relationship with filmmakers, as well as when she met the Stones in 1965. “I was bursting with love,” Richards, in voiceover, says. “Anita is in a lot of those songs. She’s a muse, I’m sure, and not just for me.” He adds that he felt like he had to keep up with her. (Richards and Pallenberg ended their relationship in 1980. Pallenberg died in 2017 of complications from hepatitis.)
Bloom and Zill worked with Marlon Richards to tell his mother’s story in all its nuances, using 8mm home movie footage. “The directors hope that Anita’s humor – and theirs – shine through a story that’s unsparing at times,” a directors’ statement about the film says. “Anita took risks, and so did the directors: This is an immersive documentary with a style and rhythm all of its own.”
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