Anita Pallenberg courtesy of Italian Vogue.
While researching A. C. Spectorsky’s work for the Playboy Empire, I stumbled across this tidbit about The Living Theatre, the only known employer of Anita Pallenberg before she shacked up with Brian Jones, according to author Tony Sanchez in his autobiography Up and Down with the Rolling Stones.
In a nutshell, The Living Theatre received funding from a CIA front, a ‘philanthropic foundation’ called the Farfield Foundation. It seems that the only thing we know about Anita’s working past is that it was paid for by the Central Intelligence Agency. In Frances Stonor Saunders’ words:
It was now reasoned that if the Farfield Foundation were to disburse funds to American– as well as international– projects, then the CIA’s interest, thus sandwiched, would become less conspicuous. ‘The Farfield was engaged in other activities because it needed to cover for the foundation, in case anyone enquired what it was doing,’ explained Diana Josselson. The Farfield report for the period 1 January 1960 to 31 December 1963 lists some of the hundreds of grants made for that period. Recipients included the American Council of Learned Societies, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Modern Language Association, the Dancers’ Workshop, the Festival of Two Worlds at Spoleto, Italy (contributions towards general expenses and the participation of American students, and for the expenses of the poet Ted Hughes), the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Theater Arts, the Living Theater of New York, the New York Pro Musica, the Association of Literary Magazines of America, Partisan Review (‘a grant for expenses’), and the International Institute in Madrid (a grant to preserve the personal libraries of Lorca Ortega and Fernando Almalgro). — from The Cultural Cold War.
As I mentioned in my post Ken Anger’s System of Control, the Living Theatre was founded in NYC like Cinema 16, which launched Ken Anger’s intelligence career. Both the Living Theater and Cinema 16 started in 1947… the same year as the Farfield’s ultimate sponsor, the CIA was founded.
If you’re interested in The Rolling Stones and Kenneth Anger’s connection to the ‘intelligence community’, please see my posts:
Aleister Crowley’s System of Control
Rolling Through the Intelligence Community
The Rolling Stones and Meyer Lansky?
Anita Pallenberg, along with psychological warfare operative Robert Fraser, helped Kenneth Anger start his London-based cult which centered around Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. Both Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull, who comes from an intelligence family, cooperated with Ken Anger’s mission to establish his Thelema-based cult, which was a reincarnation of British intelligence agent Aleister Crowley’s cult at Cefalù, Italy in the early 1920s.
But what was the ‘Living Theatre’? According to ArthurMag.com, which sells a documentary about the Living Theatre, this is how Keith Richards, Anita’s second Rolling Stone boyfriend, describes the organization:
From Keith Richards’ Life, page 221:
“Anita [Pallenberg] and I went to Rome that spring and summer [1967], between the bust and the trials, where Anita played in Barbarella, with Jane Fonda, directed by Jane’s husband Roger Vadim. Anita’s Roman world centered around the Living Theatre, the famous anarchist-pacifist troupe run by Judith Malina and Julian Beck, which had been around for years but was coming into its own in this period of activism and street demos. The Living Theatre was particularly insane, hard-core, its players often getting arrested on indecency charges—they had a play [“Paradise Now”] in which they recited lists of social taboos at the audience, for which they usually got a night in the slammer. Their main actor, a handsome black man named Rufus Collins, was a friend of Robert Fraser, and they were a part of the Andy Warhol and Gerard Malanga connection. And so it all went round in a little avant-garde elite, as often as not drawn together by a taste for drugs, of which the LT was a center. And drugs were not copious in those days. The Living Theatre was intense, but it had glamour. There were all those beautiful people attached, like Donyale Luna, who was the first famous black model in America, and Nico and all those girls who were hovering around. Donyale Luna was with one of the guys from the theater. Talk about a tiger, a leopard, one of the most sinuous chicks I’ve ever seen. Not that I tried or anything. She obviously had her own agenda. And all backlit by the beauty of Rome, which gave it an added intensity…”
In the 1950s Robert Fraser served in the Kings’ African Rifles, part of the British military. Fraser took part in suppressing the Mau Mau Rebellion– a Kenyan rebellion against British colonial rule. In the 1960s, however, Fraser busied himself with artists who ‘challenged the color barrier’– hypocrisy or just a new mission?
It seems that Robert Fraser, the imperialist-propagandist-turned-swinging-rock-groupie, was tight with Warhol too. I find this particularly interesting, because Kenneth Anger was envious of Andy Warhol’s success– so much so that Anger threw paint on what he thought was Warhol’s front door. (Or so Bill Landis says in his biography of Anger.) Nothing like professional jealousy…
It’s going to get even uglier for the hypocritical culture barons of the 1950s, 1960s and 70s, readers… watch this space.
In the meantime, here’s CIA asset Hugh Hefner’s Playboy cover featuring The Living Theatre– August in the Summer of Love. Buhahahhaha.
