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Keith Richards will forever be the king of rock-star debauchery, and at 81, the Rolling Stones guitarist is a living legend. While Richards was notorious for his drug use in the ’60s and ’70s and embodied the bohemian bad boy, his love life wasn’t quite as wild as Mick Jagger’s.
Richards’ primary vice may have been drugs when Jagger’s was sex, but his two primary relationships with Anita Pallenberg and Patti Hansen are no less fascinating than the Stones frontman’s many flings—and we love that he has one of the longest marriages in music. Read on for a deep dive into his love life.
Keith Richards began dating model and actress Anita Pallenberg in 1967. Pallenberg was originally in a relationship with his bandmate Brian Jones, and Richards recalled that, “The first time I saw Anita my obvious reaction was ‘What the f–k is a chick like that doing with Brian?’ Anita’s incredibly strong, a much stronger personality than Brian, more confident, with no reservations, whereas Brian was full of doubts.”
Jones was deeply troubled, dying at just 27 in 1969 following years of drug use. He became increasingly abusive toward Pallenberg, and she left him for Richards. Richards and Pallenberg’s relationship was no fling, though she did have an affair with Jagger during the filming of the experimental 1970 movie Performance, causing some inter-band tension. As Richards wrote in his memoir, it was “not the first time that we’d been in competition for a bird. It was like two alphas fighting,” and he had his own dalliance with Jagger’s muse, Marianne Faithfull.
Richards and Pallenberg never married, but they had three children and stayed together until 1980. Richards’ first son, Marlon Leon Sundeep, who now works in the arts and executive produced a 2023 documentary about his mom, was born in 1969. Pallenberg gave birth to their daughter, Dandelion Angela, who goes by her middle name and stays out of the spotlight, in 1972. Tragedy struck in 1976, when their son Tara Jo Jo Gunne was born, as he died at two months old due to sudden infant death syndrome.
Enduring this trauma strained Richards and Pallenberg’s relationship, and tensions had already been on the rise due to their prodigious drug use and Pallenberg’s affairs. Things got even more dramatic when Scott Cantrell, a 17-year-old who was having an affair with Pallenberg and working on the grounds of the couple’s home, shot himself in the head with Richards’ gun while he was recording in Paris in 1979. Pallenberg was arrested, but the death was ultimately ruled a suicide, and unsurprisingly, the couple broke up shortly thereafter in 1980.
