Anita Pallenberg, who has died aged 73, was sexual muse to three of the Rolling Stones; she did drugs, sadomasochistic sex and dabbled in black magic, yet lived to tell the tale.
A ravishing beauty with a shock of blonde hair, heavily kohled eyes and a stick-thin frame, she epitomised the '60s "rock chick".
She had an autocratic foreignness that people found both scary and seductive. She herself sometimes claimed to be a witch. Her effect on some members of the group was calamitous.
When she first met the Stones in 1965, she was just 21. But she had already appeared in films and fashion magazines, knew Andy Warhol and "everyone else" in New York, could say "f--- off" in six languages, knew about drugs and was highly qualified in the arts of sex; her model agency billed her as "too beautiful to get out of bed".
She had gone backstage after a Stones gig in Hamburg to offer them drugs, but they had refused. She was unimpressed, regarding them as ignorant "schoolkids", and determined to set about their education. She was aloof, immoral and utterly fascinating, and it did not take long for band members to fall under her spell.
She began with Brian Jones, who was "kind enough" to agree to smoke some of her hashish and sniff her amyl nitrate. "We ended up back at his hotel room and I spent all night holding him while he cried."
Within a week the guitarist had evicted his girlfriend and their baby from his flat and installed Pallenberg. She treated him to an uninhibited crash course in sadomasochistic sex.
It was a whirlwind life: "We'd stay up all night and go to Stonehenge at dawn. You'd be in your satin miniskirt out in the middle of nowhere," Pallenberg recalled. As well as experimenting with the occult, the couple took LSD together, an experience that precipitated Jones' decline into paranoia.
Matters came to a head in 1967 when, after the infamous Mars Bar drug bust at Redlands, Keith Richards' country home in Sussex, she and Jones decamped with Richards to Marrakesh to chill out. Travelling through Spain, Jones was forced to stop off in hospital. Pallenberg and Richards continued without him, making love in the back seat as Richards' chauffeur drove on.
Richards and Pallenberg became a devoted couple, so devoted that several airlines banned them for hogging the in-flight lavatory. "She certainly made a man out of me," Richards recalled in his memoirs.
Somehow their relationship survived the making of Donald Cammell's film Performance (1970), in which Mick Jagger and Pallenberg starred, making love, so it was claimed, as the cameras rolled. "There was all kinds of sex going on," she recalled, "but I put it down to method acting."
Pallenberg went on to act in Barbarella with Jane Fonda, but Performance had a devastating effect on many of those involved in it. James Fox turned to religion; Pallenberg (and Richards) turned increasingly to drugs and she became almost indifferent to those around her. After Jones' death in 1969 a friend rang her up: "No, it wasn't Mick. It was only Brian, thank Christ," she told him.
The birth of a son by Richards (named Marlon, after Brando) a month after Jones' death did nothing to bring her to her senses. While heavily pregnant with their second child, Dandelion, Pallenberg was taking heroin daily.
But she refused to become another statistic. After several half-hearted attempts to sober up, in 1987 she finally summoned up the willpower and booked into a clinic in Kent, from which she eventually re-emerged sober if not entirely penitent.
Surprisingly, Pallenberg felt that the '60s had rather passed her by: "When everyone talks about all this love and peace, I can't really remember much of that. I never did it."
Of mixed Swiss, German and Swedish parentage, Pallenberg was born on January 5, 1944. Her father was a frustrated composer who became the owner of a travel agency in Rome.
A rebellious child, Pallenberg hung out with the street children of Rome, "skipping school, going grave-digging, drinking at the beach, having boyfriends with Vespas. All that Italian dolce vita stuff."
Hoping to instil some Teutonic discipline, her father sent her to a school in Munich, from which she was soon expelled. She won a scholarship to study graphic design in Rome, but preferred to spend her time in cafes, becoming "a sort of mascot" to the film directors Fellini and Pasolini and launching into an affair with the avant-garde artist Mario Schifano.
It was on a modelling assignment in Hamburg in 1965 that she went to see the Rolling Stones and began the odyssey that led in the end to the rehab clinic.
After sobering up, Pallenberg enrolled at St Martin's School of Art and completed a degree in textiles and fashion. Her graduation show was praised as "a triumph of style over substance abuse".
Telegraph, London