‘The Stones are their attitude, and that attitude is Anita’ – the women who transformed The Rolling Stones

Elizabeth Winder’s ‘Parachute Women’ tackles the myth of the partner as ‘muse’. She tells Jim Farber why Marianne Faithfull, Bianca Jagger, Anita Pallenberg and Marsha Hunt were much more than that

‘Over on the wedding day’: Mick and Bianca Jagger minutes before taking their vows in Saint-Tropez, May 1971 (Courtesy of Getty Images)

A few years ago, when author Elizabeth Winder got the idea to write a book about the women in The Rolling Stones’ inner circle in the Sixties, she kept having the same thought: “These women have such incredible and dramatic stories to tell,” she says, “I felt sure that somebody must have written a book about it already.”

In a sense, they have. Of the main women covered in Winder’s book, Marianne Faithfull, the most famous of the Stones’ former lovers, has written two memoirs; Marsha Hunt, who had a child out of wedlock with Mick Jagger, has written one; while Anita Pallenberg, who was Keith Richards’s partner in the Sixties and Seventies, has had a book written about her, as has Bianca Jagger. Winder, who did not speak to any of those women, nor to any of the Stones, for her book, wound up borrowing from all those sources. Yet, none of them came up with the particular, and provocative, premise of Winder’s work, titled Parachute Women.

The book is named for a Stones’ song from their 1968 album Beggar’s Banquet. It’s the central contention of her book that the women she covers – primarily Pallenberg and Faithfull – were crucial in teaching “a band of middle-class boys how to be bad”. It was the women’s influence, intellect and sophistication that transformed the relatively provincial and conventional Stones of the early Sixties into the bohemian revolutionaries who would bewitch the world several years later. “These women were way cooler than the Stones,” Winder says. “Mick and Keith wound up becoming some of the coolest people on earth, but they got that from them.”