Why does the saga of Kate and Pete seem so bloody familiar? Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg have been there, done that

Like fairy tales and hit songs, cultural myths demand repetition. Which, in a roundabout way, helps explain why Kate Moss remains so deeply in thrall to her druggie beau Pete Doherty (described by Blender as "rock's tragic scuzzbucket du jour") and, according to the British tabs, is making every possible effort to get pregnant by him.

Ill-starred they may be, but Kate and Pete might just be the hippest couple in the world. With her sensuous lips parted and a come-hither look in her eyes, Moss, 32, is naked or nearly so in virtually every fashion magazine in the world, while the 27-year-old Doherty, formerly frontman of the well-regarded garage-rock outfit The Libertines and now the lead singer of Babyshambles, is perhaps best known for his amazing ability to get arrested.

But Kate and Pete didn't start the fire. The roles they're playing—roles that have also been played, with some not-so-subtle variations, by Sid and Nancy, Tommy and Pamela, and numerous others—were originated three and a half decades ago by Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg during a fateful summer of drugs, decadence, and intermittent musicianship on the French Riviera. It was 1971, and Keith, then 27, was, as he remains, a guitarist for the Rolling Stones. Anita, who like Moss began her career as a model, was a well-known actress. Blonde and drop-dead beautiful, she appeared naked or nearly so in virtually every scene of Performance, a movie considered so shocking at the time that no one would release it. The proud parents of an 18-month-old son (with a daughter on the way), she and Keith were living in tax exile in a rented villa by the name of Nellcote, along with a coterie of hangers-on, woozy aristos, musicians' wives, groupies, Corsican drug dealers, and, briefly, a 25-year-old Rolling Stone reporter who was completely oblivious to much of what was going on behind very firmly closed doors.

An associate editor in the magazine's London bureau, I'd been sent directly from the Cannes Film Festival to write a cover story, an interview with Keith. Although he was initially accomodating, speaking openly and on the record, it took two weeks for us to complete the interview. Consequently, I spent much of my time hanging out with Nellcote's resident obliterati, who over the next three and a half months would destroy a number of automobiles, sleep with one another, come to the attention of the local police, ingest an ungodly amount of drugs, and occasionally make it down to the house's dank cellar, where the Stones just happened to be recording what many consider to be the greatest album they ever made.

By the time they arrived in Los Angeles—having fled the villa just before it was raided by the French police—Keith and Anita were using a gram of heroin a day. Although Keith had already managed to establish his reputation as the outlaw in the band, due in no small part to his menacing on-stage persona and his dangling earring, a fashion accessory no straight man would have been caught dead wearing back then, he had only been busted twice. First, in 1967, he and Mick Jagger were charged with possession of cannabis and four pep pills (only to have their convictions reversed). The second time Keith was busted—in 1977, when he and Anita were caught with heroin in Toronto—was the last. To this day, he wears a handcuff bracelet to remind himself never to be arrested again.

It would take more than a bracelet to remind Pete Doherty to stay out of trouble. The rocker has racked up enough charges—painstakingly detailed in rollingstone.com's Pete Doherty Watch, which counts the days since his last arrest and rehab—to fill the police blotter of a moderate-sized English constabulary. He spent two months in jail for burgling the flat of Carl Barât, his close friend and former Libertines bandmate. He's also been arrested for assaulting a documentary filmmaker who allegedly sold photos of him smoking heroin to the press and for carrying a knife. Four separate times, (including twice in one day, an astonishing feat in any era) he was arrested for driving under the influence of assorted combinations of heroin, crack cocaine, and cannabis. He was thrown off the Top of the Pops television show for fighting with an audience member and was photographed injecting an unconscious woman with what was thought to be heroin (not to worry; turns out he was just drawing blood to use in his artwork).

No matter what anyone thinks of Doherty's talent (Mick Jones of The Clash, for one, has given him the stamp of approval by functioning as his producer/babysitter), with just three albums to his name, he has clearly spent far less time in the studio than in the headlines. As is the case for so many other high-profile media performance artists these days (Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton, and Jessica Simpson among them), his art seems to have become secondary to his well-publicized antics.

No shrinking violet where self-promotion is concerned, Doherty has posted his most intimate thoughts and feelings on the Internet along with a series of notebooks, The Books of Albion, which contain, according to The Independent, "scrawled song lyrics, chord patterns, sketches, wine stains, notes from girlfriends." Looking like an unholy cross between Paul McCartney and Dylan Thomas, he has also appeared twice to discuss his problems on BBC's Newsnight program and granted unfettered access to his life to writers and reporters from The Sunday Times, The Express, The Independent, and Vanity Fair.

But despite the soap opera that Doherty's life has become, it is Moss who remains the bigger story. This was proven beyond all doubt when, in September 2005, the Daily Mirror ran grainy front page photographs, snapped with a cell phone, of Moss getting up close and personal with several lines of white powder in a recording studio. Wanting no truck with a fashion model who used drugs (heaven forbid), Chanel, H&M, Burberry, and H. Stern promptly dumped her as their public face. With her career about to vanish before her lovely eyes, Moss, who had rarely said much of anything in public before, apologized to her fans and went into rehab only to re-emerge as the star of 11 major fashion campaigns and her own Vanity Fair feature, which noted (without going into further detail): "Her appetites and indulgences are said to be prodigious."

Much the same could once be said of Anita Pallenberg. While filming Performance in the fall of l968, she began an on-set affair with Mick Jagger, then living with the singer Marianne Faithfull. Back then, Mick and Keith were still the best of friends. As were Anita and Marianne. Only now Anita was sleeping with Mick while Keith was in love with Anita and Marianne was in love with Mick. Once filming was done, the four went on holiday together to South America where Mick continued to pursue Anita. Meanwhile he and Keith wrote "Honky Tonk Women."

Sixty-two years old, Anita now lives in London where she works as a fashion consultant and counts Kate Moss among her closest friends. Whether she has ever told Moss of George Santayana's observation that those who fail to learn from the past are condemned to repeat it, no one can say for sure.

Although the drugs of choice have remained mostly the same, the celebrity game has changed considerably in the 35 years since Keith and Anita became the prototypical rock & roll glamour couple—challenging the generations that followed to strive mightily, and dangerously, to live up to their example. Mad as their life together may have been, they somehow managed to play out most of their personal melodramas behind closed doors.

Not so Kate and Pete. But then, for those who crave the glare of the media spotlight, what matters most is the quality of their performance—onstage and off. And, as Mick Jagger noted in the movie of the same name, "The only performance that makes it, that really makes it, that makes it all the way, is the one that achieves madness. Right? Am I right?"

For Pete's sake—and Kate's as well—let's hope not.

Robert Greenfield's Exile on Main St.: A Season in Hell with the Rolling Stones (Da Capo) is in stores now.

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