Taken from yesterday's edition of the Daily Mail newspaper: 18/05/10
Pictured: The daughter of Rolling Stones hellraiser Keith Richards whose birth nearly tore band apartShe has a hint of the rock chick about her, with her leopard-print scarf, green suede pixie boots and oversized sunglasses.
But you’d never guess just how rock ’n’ roll this woman is.
That’s because Dandelion Angela Richards was brought up in obscurity, far from the excitement – and excesses – of her parents’ lives.
She is the daughter of Rolling Stones hellraiser Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg, and was born at the height of the band’s success, during their days of wild partying.
Now 38, she was brought up by Richards’s mother in Dartford in Kent because her own mother was too drug-addled to care for her.
She now goes by Angela, her middle name, and is enjoying a rapprochement with both her mother and father.
Around the time she was conceived – in the summer of 1971 – Miss Pallenberg was seriously addicted to heroin, shooting up three times daily while on tour with the band.
When she discovered she was pregnant, Miss Pallenberg asked her rockstar boyfriend’s PA to arrange for an abortion.
She asked several times for flights to be booked so she could have a termination back home – but never took them.
Extraordinarily, Richards – who was a doting father when sober – also apparently believed that the baby was fathered by Mick
Jagger while he was too fuddled under the influence of heroin to notice.
The fall-out from that argument between Jagger and Richards would go on for years.
But in time, everyone accepted that the child was Richards’s and after she was born in Switzerland in April 1972, she was placed in the care of his mother Doris.
And now, all these years later, Angela is having a proper family life with her parents. All three live as neighbours – albeit in separate sprawling estates – near Chichester on the south coast.
When Doris died in 2007, Richards installed his daughter in a large estate with an equestrian school.
Angela moved from a flat in Dartford to live at the estate with her husband of 12 years, Dominic Jennings.
Last week, local riders from nearby East Wittering came and went from the estate to groom and ride her horses around the paddock.
Neighbours in Chichester told the Daily Mail this week that although they were aware of Angela’s heritage, they had little to do with her and she had not been the most sociable of neighbours.
‘We have occasionally felt the need to go over and ask her to turn the music down when she has a party. But she certainly hasn’t made much effort to befriend us,’ said a neighbour who did not wish to be named.
Angela has begun raising her public profile recently, however. Stones websites include pictures of her with fans backstage at concerts in the UK and America.
And Richards, 66, in residence as often as being a tax exile will allow, is making up for lost time with his daughter. The pair meet regularly when he is in Britain.
His own house, Redlands, is two miles up the road from Angela’s.
It was the location of the infamous Sixties drugs raid by police which resulted in Richards and Jagger spending a short time in jail for drugs possession.
Miss Pallenberg, 66, lives in a farmhouse nearby with Marlon, the son she had with Richards in the Seventies. They had a second son, Tara, who died three months after birth.
Angela also has two half sisters – Theodora, 25, and Alexandra, 24 – from Richards’s marriage of 27 years to Patti Hansen.
Richards said recently: ‘I love my families. I have several – extended. And they all love each other. I’m extremely blessed with my ladies who all, thank God, get along.’
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'Dandelion' Richards Article (Read 1,435 times)
