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Anita Pallenberg’s 1962 photograph for Playboy magazine; she was 18 years old.
One of the fun things about blogging is how much I learn from readers. Last week ‘Nathan’ at beatles.ru clued me into some fascinating information about Anita Pallenberg: she was featured in the February 1962 Playboy photo spread “Girls of Rome”.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
As ‘Nathan’ points out, Pallenberg is one of the few women in this feature who are fully clothed, in fact, Pallenberg’s attire is dowdy– she stands out for that reason. The “Girls of Rome” shoot endows her with a certain mystery, especially considering many of the other women look rather tough.
A lot was going on in early 1962: that March, a few weeks after Anita’s Playboy spread was published, her future ‘boyfriend’ Brian Jones hitch-hiked to London to catch the first ever performance of Alexis Korner’s ‘Blues Incorporated’ band, according to Bill Wyman in Rolling with the Stones. Twenty-one days later the Rolling Stones were formed.
Korner’s new band, Blues Incorporated, was extraordinary in a number of ways: he was risking *somebody’s* money by performing ‘Rhythm and Blues’ to a largely uninitiated London audience– and more than just one night’s takings were at stake. Blues Incorporated was designed to be an ambassador band for a series of new R&B clubs– the investor(s) for these clubs remain unknown, but we do know that European Jazz circuits had been colonized by the ‘intelligence community’ since the early 1950s.
The story goes that Brian Jones asked Alexis Korner if he could play with Blues Incorporated after the show on the band’s opening night. Naturally, Korner immediately agreed to let the unknown newbie play with his cutting-edge team as part of their second performance ever, with a franchise of watering-holes at stake. Brian Jones first appeared with Blues Incorporated on March 24th 1962.
On April 7th 1962– that’s two weeks later– Korner introduced Jones to two young men who had very little musical experience: Mick Jagger and Keith Richards. POOF! The Rolling Stones were born. If you’d like to know more, please see my post, Rolling Through the Intelligence Community. (By July of 1962 Alexis Korner had ditched Blues Incorporated for a lifetime broadcasting gig at the BBC. Mission Accomplished!)
I believe Pallenberg’s strange ‘placement’ in Hefner’s magazine and Korner’s creation of The Rolling Stones were pieces of a larger cultural offensive that was being put into place circa 1962. Somebody in Rome was building what spooks call a ‘legend’ around Anita, the rest of us might call it “window dressing” or a “back story”. Pallenberg may not have been earmarked as a ‘handler’ for Brian Jones from day one of her Agency career, but her Playboy shoot suggests that Anita Pallenberg was always slated for counter-culture psy-ops work in Europe.
If you’re new to my blog, please have a look at my posts Anita Pallenberg and the CIA, which explains how Anita’s work for The Living Theatre was funded by the CIA as part of the Agency’s anti-Russian leftist crusade. Also, please read Do You Have a Key to the Playboy Mansion, which details the 1973 IRS investigation that showed Hugh Hefner and Playboy Enterprises to be CIA assets.
Anita Pallenberg was in Rome by February 1962. As far as I can tell, her only known employer, the Living Theatre, wasn’t in Rome until 1963 when they had their building in NYC seized by the IRS for failure to pay taxes. This means that in 1962 either Pallenberg was with a ‘satellite’ of the troupe in Rome; or she was being groomed by the CIA in Rome before the theater arrived.
The Living Theatre received funding from a CIA “philanthropic institution” named the Farfield Foundation. The Farfield Foundation was one of the bogus cultural foundations that backed the Congress for Cultural Freedom which Ernst Henri outed that same February in the World Marxist Review. Frances Stonor Saunders identifies the Farfield Foundation as specifically a CIA front in her book The Cultural Cold War.
Why did the Living Theatre choose Rome? Well, James Jesus Angleton had set up Rome as a post-WWII American propaganda hub. According to Hugh Wilford in his book The Mighty Wurlitzer, by 1948 Angleton was heading up black propaganda in Italy for the CIA. The propaganda was anti-communist: Angleton’s staff would ‘place’ newspaper articles and other literature with the compliant Italian press. Paul Cushing Child, Julia Child’s creepy husband, did similar propaganda work in Germany and France after WWII.
Readers may remember from my last post that between ’59-’76 Playboy featured a number of Italian directors and journalists whose careers flourished in Italy after the war. Federico Fellini [2 Playboy covers] was plugged in Pallenberg’s “Girls of Rome” spread, but his name didn’t make the cover of that particular issue. In fact, Italy’s film industry was plugged on Playboy’s cover more than any other continental country’s.
Clik here to view.
Federico Fellini
What was Anita Pallenberg doing in Rome with The Living Theatre? Much like Playboy, the Living Theatre promoted both playwrights who were sponsored by the CIA’s Congress for Cultural Freedom (Jean Cocteau)[1] and those whose work the CCF was openly hostile to, like Bertolt Brecht. Where Playboy was a ‘well-heeled’ anti-Russian leftist rag, The Living Theatre aimed to pull the ‘anarchist’ left out of Rooskie clutches. Also like Playboy, the Living Theatre promoted a type of sexually-charged racial integration, according to Keith Richards’ description of the troupe. The Living Theatre was about exposing taboos and cast members were frequently arrested for indecent exposure. As one would expect, the CIA’s politics were consistent between their Living Theater and Playboy operations.
This bizarre footage comes from a performance of the Living Theatre’s most famous work, ‘Paradise Now’ (not work safe!):
The Living Theatre troupe starred the handsome Black lead Rufus Collins, surrounded by a bevy of beauties like Anita Pallenberg and Nico (from their video above, it seems that these women were mostly White, much like the Playboy Bunnies). The throng also included the first Black super model, Donyale Luna, who Keith Richards particularly admired. Long and short, The Living Theatre’s ‘racial integration’ political agenda was put forward just like Playboy’s and was equally cynical. Spectorsky even featured The Living Theater on the August 1969 Playboy cover.
Clik here to view.
Donyale Luna on the cover of her friend Andy Warhol’s magazine. As long as she was useful Luna was embraced by American media establishment leaders, such as the CIA’s TIME magazine. By 1979 however, her star had faded and she died of a heroin overdose at 33.
I encourage readers to check out my statistical analysis of Playboy’s promotion of racial integration and Black nationalism over the ’62-’76 period; the CIA had a very definite agenda with regard to this Orwellian political pairing. These politics would pop up again later in Pallenberg’s life through her link to Rastafarianism. In 1972 Pallenberg took up with Leonard Percival Howell’s Black supremacist cult in Jamaica, where she had conspicuous liaisons with Howell’s followers which helped promote the Rasta cause. Pallenberg became involved in Winston Churchill’s Jamaican drug trade through the Rastas and ended up being repeatedly raped in jail. See Tony Sanchez’s Up and Down with the Rolling Stones.) [2]
I’d like to come back to Pallenberg’s Playboy spread now, because it’s an artifact documenting CIA operations through pornography in Western Europe. I’ve included images of the entire spread here. The first thing to strike me was that many of the women featured weren’t Italian– seven out of twenty-four were foreign. Two of these young immigrants were from Germany (three if you count half-German, half-Italian Anita); one was from France; one was a Brit; one was Syrian; and finally I suspect “Tanya Berryl” was either American or from the Commonwealth. Two out of the three who fully exposed themselves were foreigners.
All of these European women would have been born around WWII, most would have been children displaced and impoverished by that war. They were also among the first generation of German and Italian children to be exposed to whatever psychological experiments and social conditioning the CIA decided to implement.
I’m going to make a prediction now: in the future, there will be an exposé of MK ULTRA-like CIA abuses against vulnerable people in the defeated Axis countries. These defeated peoples had little protection from their American occupiers and post-war Europe would have been an excellent place for unfettered research into ‘mind control’ and other forms of social conditioning.
I think it’s very probable that the CIA and its asset, Playboy Enterprises, scoured Europe for vulnerable young people who could be used as propaganda tools– maybe they did this scouring through scouts in positions like that of The Living Theatre’s founder Judith Malina. I believe it’s unreasonable to assume that MK ULTRA-type research was limited to US military personnel, American prisoners, American prostitutes or the inmates of American mental institutions. The scary reality is that ‘displaced persons’ in Europe would have been ‘safe’ guinea pigs. Maybe that’s why eighteen year old Anita had a lifeless expression; maybe that’s why we know so little about her background.
Pallenberg’s Living Theatre coworkers were as ‘international’ as the women in Playboy’s “Girls of Rome” spread. The founders of the Living Theatre were Judith Malina, who was “German-born” yet okay’d for CIA-funding, and Julian Beck, a New York City based painter. Malina and Beck scouted some of their talent from Europe, though they were based out of NYC until the IRS took their building in 1963. This is how livingtheare.org describes the situation:
The difficulty of operating a unique, experimental enterprise within a cultural establishment ill-equipped to accept it led to the closing by the authorities of all The Living Theatre’s New York venues…
In the mid-1960′s, the company began a new life as a nomadic touring ensemble. In Europe, they evolved into a collective, living and working together toward the creation of a new form of nonfictional acting based on the actor’s political and physical commitment to using the theater as a medium for furthering social change. The landmark achievements of this period include Mysteries and Smaller Pieces, Antigone, Frankenstein and Paradise Now.
In 1999, the Living Theatre began to get funding from the European Union, though my understanding is that the troupe is now defunct, despite Malina’s wealth and its more recent patronage from Yoko Ono and Al Pacino, who have no problem carrying on the CIA’s traditions.
Pallenberg’s “Girls of Rome” ‘photo essay’ is accompanied by three pages of text. The nameless author provides tips for sex tourists and offers an oblique explanation for why so many foreign women are included in the shoot: native Roman women are conservative and difficult to sleep with.
Lamentably, males who may be entertaining the intriguing notion of sowing a few oats are barking up the wrong libido. For despite her temperament, coquettishness, eye-popping fuselage and sensuous propensities, the average Italian girl, even in worldly Rome, is characterized by an equally passionate devotion to the spirit…
In effect, then, the family fortress is virtually impregnable to any but those in search of permanent liaisons.
How “lamentable”.
The author goes on to explain that help is at hand for Playboy readers. The transient population of foreigners, or poor Italians from the south, offer more fertile ground for sex tourism. Playboy gives a comprehensive guide for foreign punters on where to find these women for prostitution, and how much one should pay once one finds them.
Spectorsky didn’t print the name of the author who wrote the accompanying text (they sound like an American who was based out of Rome); I’ll let this bashful Playboy contributor tell you about Roman “streetwalkers” in their own words:
Some [sex tourists] surrender to the city’s well-quipped infantry of approachable streetwalkers. But many more prefer to fraternize with golden hordes of foreign girls– once a commodity borne to Rome by its plundering legions– who now pour into the Eternal City of their own eager accord from Scandinavia, France, Germany, England, America even from the Near and Far East…
Perched on the lower rung of Rome’s economic ladder are a group of girls who have known few of the social or scholastic advantages enjoyed (and in some cases ignored) by the daughters of well- or even modestly heeled families…
Imported and indigenous, several thousands of these girls also drift across the social barrier into an age-old vocation pioneered under the arches of ancient Rome. Evicted in 1958 from the pillowed and mirrored comfort of numerous bordellos, the city’s flourishing strumpet population– even larger, some estimate, than that of pleasure-orientated Paris or London– energetically espouses the tenets of individual enterprise in the maze of side streets surrounding the tourist-thronged Via Veneto. Most, in the time-honored tradition of the trade, offer their familiar wares for prices ranging from $5 to $30, according to the nature and duration of the services required…
So the CIA skips hand in hand with the pimps of Spectorsky’s ‘Eternal City’. I can only speculate on why the CIA thought ‘placing’ Anita in this way was useful to them: perhaps a girlfriend who was featured in an eleven-page ad for sex tourism was an enticing prospect for a young, narcissistic philanderer from the Cotswolds. Perhaps the typical CIA agent thinks Hugh Hefner’s approval makes a woman more desirable; perhaps they need to see that other men want a woman to know that she is attractive… attractive like a pole dancer in Hawaii?! I’ll leave that profiling to John Gittinger.
[1] Readers will remember Jean Cocteau as Kenneth Anger’s Congress for Cultural Freedom connection. Anita Pallenberg and Marianne Faithfull were instrumental in helping Ken Anger establish his reincarnation of Aleister Crowley’s Cefalù cult around the Rolling Stones.
[2] For a piecemeal account of this incident, see Tony Sanchez’s book Up and Down with the Rolling Stones, p. 305. Anita was released from jail corruptly: Richards bribed the Jamaican police through ‘Count X’ and another unnamed business man, who it turns out had alerted the police as to when they could find Anita with a lot of drugs. This shadowy Count and the ‘businessman’ were on civil terms and had engagements in London which probably had something to do with the ganja trade, please see Who was Winston Churchill? Before this ‘businessman’ helped rid Jamaica of Anita and her bad-for-business publicity stunts, the Rollings Stones had “business dealings” with him, says Sanchez.
Image may be NSFW.
Clik here to view.
Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
