The Rolling Stones have settled into life as elder statesmen of rock ‘n’ roll, but they once led very wild lives.
In his exhaustive new biography of the band, journalist Bob Spitz goes deep on the group’s biggest misadventures, including a time when frontman Mick Jagger went a little too far with Keith Richards’ girlfriend. The Rolling Stones: The Biography, out Tuesday, April 21, recounts an incident where Jagger, now 82, was filming a movie with Anita Pallenberg, who dated Richards, also 82, from 1967 to 1980.
In 1968, Jagger was cast in the film Performance opposite Pallenberg. Jagger’s character, Turner, was in a three-way relationship with Pallenberg’s Pherber and Michèle Breton’s Lucy.
“There were lots of drugs on the set fueling the debauchery, including a frisky, communal bathtub scene with Mick, Anita and Michèle,” writes Spitz, who goes on to quote Rolling Stones cofounder Ian Stewart.
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According to Stewart, Jagger and Pallenberg engaged in actual intercourse while filming their love scene.
“When the big sex scene of the movie was filmed, instead of simulating sex [Mick and Anita] really got into each other,” Stewart alleged, per Spitz. “And although what wound up in the picture was a lot of vague, tumbling bodies in the sheets, nothing explicit, there was a lot of very explicit footage [taken by Anita on her handheld movie camera] of Mick and Anita really screwing — steamy, lusty stuff that was edited into a separate X-rated short feature.”
While the alleged real sex never made it into the film’s final cut, Warner Bros. executives were still shocked by what they saw in the daily footage.
“After viewing the bathtub scene, they shut down production for a week to decide whether or not to scrap the entire picture,” Spitz writes, noting that Performance was shelved until 1970.
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Richards, meanwhile, wasn’t happy about whatever transpired between Pallenberg and Jagger.
“Things grew itchy between Anita and Keith,” Spitz notes, adding that Pallenberg herself said, “Keith wasn’t pleased.”
In his own 2010 autobiography, Life, Richards said he’s “not that jealous kind of guy,” but Spitz believes that the rocker “poured his heart” into the song “You Got the Silver,” which appeared on the band’s 1969 album, Let It Bleed.
Pallenberg, for her part, echoed Stewart’s story in her journals, which were explored in the 2024 documentary Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg. (The doc was released seven years after she died in 2017 at age 75.)
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“Mick had never done a movie before, and he liked my confidence, and we were spending more time together. I never really fancied him at all, but you spend eight days in bed together, giggling and taking dope just to produce two minutes of film, what do you expect?” she wrote of Jagger. “Keith never spoke about it, he stayed silent, the worst reaction of all.”
Before Richards and Pallenberg’s tumultuous relationship ended for good in 1980, the duo welcomed three children: son Marlon Sundeep (born in 1969), daughter Dandelion Angela (born in 1972) and son Tara Jo Jo (born in 1976). Tara Jo Jo died of SIDS at 10 weeks.
Richards went on to welcome daughters Theodora and Alexandra with Patti Hansen.
The Rolling Stones: The Biography is out now.
