But Spitz said the old stereotype of Keith Richards as the band’s wildest romantic risk-taker does not hold up under this particular anecdote.
“So, when you look at them as a promiscuous band, you have to put things into perspective,” Spitz said. “Keith, who was the baddest of bad boys, turned out to be the most romantic of the Stones.”
Fox News Digital reported that it reached out to a spokesperson for the Rolling Stones for comment.
Richards has not publicly offered a partner count. In interviews and in his memoir Life, He usually talked about the women who shaped him most, especially Anita Pallenberg and his wife, Patti Hansen. He has also often said drugs and music occupied far more of his attention than chasing women. That is a very Rolling Stones distinction.
Why does Bill Wyman’s history remain controversial?
If Richards complicates the myth, Spitz presents Wyman as someone who fit the familiar version of the myth. In the biography, Wyman is described as the group’s most relentless womanizer.
“Bill Wyman had a saying in the band that he couldn’t go to sleep alone,” Spitz told Fox News Digital. “Every night, he scouted the most beautiful young women standing closest to the stage. He would point out one or two, and one of the roadies would invite them backstage.”
Spitz noted that Wyman was the oldest member of the Rolling Stones and, at the beginning, the only married one. “Yet, when he joined the band, he let loose,” he said. “He was, without a doubt, the most promiscuous of all the Stones.”
Wyman’s personal life later drew criticism far beyond the usual rock-star-excess story. He married his first wife, Diane Cory, in 1959. Their son, Stephen, was born in 1962, and the couple divorced in 1969.
In 1989, Wyman married Mandy Smith. He was 52. She was 18. Multiple reports have said they met when she was 13 and he was 48.
Spitz wrote that the relationship “revolted” Jagger, whose daughters Karis and Jade were older than Smith. He also wrote that the rest of the band confronted Wyman over it. Wyman has since expressed regret over the marriage, according to the San Diego Union-Tribune.
“Rock ’n’ rollers have always gotten a pass,” Spitz said. “As a biographer, I can’t give them a pass. I’m sorry. I have a responsibility when I examine these things.”
How tangled were the Stones’ relationships in the 1960s?
By the late 1960s, the romantic map around the Rolling Stones looked less like a private life and more like a scheduling problem. The Times of London later laid out some of the overlapping relationships: Richards slept with Pallenberg, and Pallenberg slept with Jagger. Marianne Faithfull slept with Brian Jones, Richards and Jagger. Jagger also slept with Pat Andrews, Jones’ girlfriend.
Jagger proposed to Faithfull in 1968. She turned him down.
Spitz wrote that Faithfull and “most of London” knew Jagger was also involved in “a torrid affair” with Marsha Hunt.
The biography also revisits Faithfull’s view of Richards. “Marianne Faithfull said that Keith was the most romantic man,” Spitz said. “The one night she spent with Keith was the most romantic night of her life.”
That detail lands in the book as a corrective to the easy caricature. The Stones’ image was all menace and appetite, but within that orbit were attachments, resentments, betrayals and loyalties that did not fit neatly into anyone’s future memoir.
How did Brian Jones help shape the band’s outlaw image?
Spitz argues that Brian Jones helped define the Stones’ reckless reputation before it hardened into mythology. Jones, who founded the band, was central to its early edge and to some of its earliest scandals.
“Brian, by the time he was 21, had fathered five children,” Spitz said. “He was repopulating post-war Britain by himself.”
Spitz said that Jones’ behavior did not destabilize the band so much as cost it money. “Every time there was a paternity suit, the Stones decided to pay off those harmed by Brian’s behavior,” he said. “But it increased, believe it or not, the band’s reputation a bit.”
That reputation, Spitz said, was no accident. The Stones decided early that they would be the anti-Beatles.
“They weren’t going to bow at the end of every song. They weren’t going to wear suits onstage. Politeness was out the window,” he said. “They were going to behave the way teenagers and young men in their early 20s behaved. That meant going their own way, being a little insolent and being arrogant. They dressed in their street clothes. They smoked onstage. They were the bad boys, and they liked being the bad boys.”
Jones died by drowning in 1969 at age 27. The coroner recorded his death as “death by misadventure.”
What role did Anita Pallenberg play in the band’s tensions?
Spitz also details how sex and jealousy sometimes fed the band’s internal tensions. One of the most cited examples involves Jagger and Pallenberg, who played a couple in the 1970 film Performance.
According to Spitz, the two had sex on film. He quoted a Rolling Stones employee who said there was “a lot of very explicit video taken by Anita on her handheld movie camera showing Mick and Anita really screwing,” material that was allegedly edited into a separate X-rated short feature.
Pallenberg, who died in 2017 at 75, confirmed the story in private journals quoted in the 2024 documentary Catching Fire, according to Page Six.
Spitz wrote that tensions rose between Pallenberg and Richards while they were renting a home together, describing the atmosphere as polluted by “a pressure cooker of tension and frustration.”
“Even the customarily fearless Keith couldn’t handle this one,” Faithfull recalled, as quoted in the book.
It is a bleakly efficient example of how the band’s public mythology, sex, drugs, art, danger, could become much less glamorous when everyone involved had to keep living inside it.
Why did Mick Jagger and Keith Richards last?
For all the affairs, marriages, breakups and betrayals, Spitz argues the Rolling Stones’ longest-running love story was not romantic. It was the creative bond between Jagger and Richards.
“The Stones have some magic that’s held them together through thick and thin, and there’s been a lot of thin,” Spitz said.
He noted that there were periods when Jagger and Richards were not speaking, and periods when the band was not making the music of the moment. Still, audiences kept returning.
“Everything in the band depends on Mick and Keith’s relationship,” Spitz said. “Their rapport is so crucial to the Rolling Stones’ longevity. There was a time when things got pretty tense, especially in the ’90s. But these guys, it’s a love story.”
Spitz pointed to Richards’ wedding to Patti Hansen as proof of that complicated loyalty. Richards chose Jagger as his best man, even though the two were not speaking at the time.
“So that tells you all about them,” Spitz said, “how tight their bond is and how much they really care about and love each other.”
The band’s legend may still run on outrage, myth and numbers nobody can verify. But Spitz’s account suggests the more durable story is the strange machinery that kept the Rolling Stones together long after the scandals stopped being surprising.
