PARACHUTE WOMEN

A vivid portrait of the women behind “the world’s first rock stars.”

The Rolling Stones have made an incredibly long career out of singing about women. Think of all the honky-tonk denizens, ingenues out of the West End, tent-show queens, and consorts of stars who inhabit their lyrics, and it becomes clear that objectifying and mythologizing women have been major parts of their stock in trade. Winder, a biographer of Marilyn Monroe and Sylvia Plath, refreshingly turns the tables by writing about several women who were critical in various ways in shaping the Stones but whose contributions were “devoured, processed, spat out, and commodified by the relentlessly male music industry.” At the center of Winder’s narrative is the German Italian model and actor Anita Pallenberg, who, having formed a sort of androgynous duo with ill-fated band founder Brian Jones, turned him from a country lout into an Edwardian dandy, one of the first great evolutions of the Stones into style mavens. When Jones’ sad time was done, it was Keith Richards’ turn, and if anyone could out-Keith him, it was her—so much so that he had to leave her to break his heroin addiction. “Only a fool would call Anita Pallenberg a muse,” writes Winder. “She was a force of nature, and rapidly becoming the central axis of the Stones.” Meanwhile, Mick Jagger’s former lover Marianne Faithfull, who was quite capable of writing her own songs (“Sister Morphine”), fell under his…well, Winder uses thumb a couple of times too many, but the pun is apposite. Winder’s treatment is both deeply researched and endlessly dishy, especially when it comes to Jagger, who has become “a conservative Englishman,” emotionally unavailable, for whom social climber seems far too mild a term.

Gossipy, entertaining, and quite right in insisting on the central role of women in making an iconic band iconic.