‘I’ve been called a witch, slut, murderer’: the ultra-creative women dismissed as rock star girlfriends

In a 2008 interview, Anita Pallenberg swore she would never write her autobiography. The artist, model and actor was weary of publishers who only wanted to read about her intimate dealings with the Rolling Stones - she dated both Brian Jones and Keith Richards, and had an affair with Mick Jagger. "They all wanted salacious," she said then. "And everybody is writing autobiographies and that's one reason why I'm not going to do it."

Yet when Pallenberg died in 2017, she left behind pages of a neatly typed manuscript, titled Black Magic, that contained her life story. True to form, she characterised these memoirs as "memory images, a traveller's tale through a landscape of dreams and shadows" rather than an autobiography. But she held little back while chronicling her spirited and frequently tumultuous life, quipping: "I don't think the lawyers will like it very much."

Read in a narration by Scarlett Johansson, her unpublished words are the backbone of a compelling new documentary, Catching Fire: The Story of Anita Pallenberg. Kate Moss celebrates her as "the original bohemian rock chick that people still aspire to today" but more valuable is Pallenberg reframing her legacy on her own terms from beyond the grave. "I've been called a witch, a slut, a murderer. I've been hounded by the police and slandered in the press," she wrote, before adding, "But I don't need to settle scores. I'm reclaiming my soul."

Given how much ink has been spilt on the Stones over the years, it's refreshing to hear Pallenberg share her own perspective on her experiences. She's not the only high-profile rock girlfriend now getting a chance to tell their own story, asserting their place in, and influence on, male-dominated music culture.

Suzi Ronson, who was married to the guitarist Mick Ronson, just released a candid memoir, Me and Mr Jones: My Life with David Bowie and the Spiders from Mars, that's a clear-eyed look at rock star mythology. Pattie Boyd, married to both George Harrison and Eric Clapton, was interviewed in 2018 by Taylor Swift for Harper's Bazaar ("George and Eric had an inability to communicate their feelings through normal conversation," Boyd said, "I became a reflection for them") and this year she eloquently reminisced as she auctioned her memorabilia, including love letters from Clapton and handwritten Harrison lyrics, for a staggering £2,818,184. "The letters from Eric - they're so desperate and passionate, a passion that blooms once in a lifetime," she said. "They're too painful in their beauty."

Tate Modern, in London, is meanwhile celebrating Yoko Ono with a career-spanning exhibition, Yoko Ono: Music of the Mind - a pointed reminder that Ono's artistic collaboration with John Lennon was only a relatively brief part of her career. It shows how her artistry spans theatre, writing and music, but also how it makes space for her story to change over time - for example, the various performances of Cut Piece across the decades - and for others' perspectives. Take Ono's 1964 artist's book Grapefruit, which uses short, abstract action items ("Imagine the clouds dripping. Dig a hole in your garden to put it in") to generate a huge potential variety of creative responses.

Among those was Lennon's Imagine. In a 1980 BBC interview, Lennon said Grapefruit provided "the lyric and the concept" of the song, but Ono didn't receive a songwriting credit until 2017 even though Lennon was aware of the oversight in his lifetime. "But those days I was a bit more selfish, a bit more macho," he told the BBC, "and I sort of omitted to mention her contribution."