"Only a fool would call Anita Pallenberg a muse," writes Elizabeth Winder in Parachute Women: Marianne Faithfull, Marsha Hunt, Bianca Jagger, Anita Pallenberg, and the Women Behind the Rolling Stones. Winder's feminist corrective to the Rolling Stones legend is both wholly convincing and written with a panache that befits her subjects. Winder (Marilyn in Manhattan) takes as her premise that the Rolling Stones wouldn't have become a bad-boy monster rock act without the women then in their lives--"the real rebels, progressives, and contrarians." Faithfull, a singer and actress with a baroness mother, introduced Mick Jagger to high culture, which informed his music. The German Italian model and actress Pallenberg showed Brian Jones and Keith Richards how to dress, and she had Jagger's ear when she felt that a song's production was lacking. Although the influence of Nicaraguan-born Bianca Jagger (née Pérez-Mora Macías) is harder to quantify, she was the first Jagger woman to call herself a feminist; while involved with him, she recognized that men "don't want you to be independent because then you will escape them."
Winder synthesizes familiar Stones anecdotes in a way that's revelatory, and she's especially clear-eyed about the double standards--regarding male vs. female drug use and male vs. female promiscuity--that hampered her subjects' careers. All four women articulated some variation on the sentiment of Black singer/actress and onetime Jagger girlfriend Marsha Hunt: "I had opinions, beliefs, intellectual strength. But... people thought I was some dunderhead. I was dismissed as a rock chick." Readers of Parachute Women won't make this mistake. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer