Uschi Revisited
January 24, 2007
The face of Germany's rebellion. The Rolling Stones' No. 1 groupie. Bavarian barbarian. The illusion of perfection. Lust machine.
Uschi Obermaier has been called a lot of things ever since she put on fake eyelashes and a miniskirt as a teenager and swapped the dull working class neighborhood of Munich she grew up in for a wild time at the Bavarian capital's night clubs with a certain Jimi Hendrix.
Affairs with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards followed. She became a model and in 1968 moved into Berlin's infamous Commune 1, where a group of young Germans, including Obermaier's then boyfriend, Rainer Langhans, rejected the traditional family system and propagated free love while partaking in a fair amount of drugs.
"She was the most beautiful face of Germany's brainy rebellion," wrote German magazine Stern, which shocked readers with raunchy pictures of Obermaier and Langhans in the 1960s. "She and her boyfriend impersonated the attitude towards life of that time of upheaval."
Obermaier, who quickly became a sex symbol for her generation, played in a few movies, but rejected an offer for a 10-year-contract by the late Italian producer Carlo Ponti. She left Germany in 1973 with a former Hamburg pimp named Dieter Bockhorn to travel around Asia and America in a bus and eventually settled in California after Bockhorn, whom she had married in India, died in a motorcycle crash on New Years' Eve 1983.
Calming down
Blessed with "good genes" and a formidable plastic surgeon ("I've received some help, but the details are private," she told Stern), Obermaier still talks to Keith Richards once in a while -- usually to get free tickets to a Stones concert, she said.
She has stopped using her fridge to store Manolo Blahniks and replaced breakfasts consisting of apple juice, a line of heroin and a joint with home-cooked meals such as deer ragout and blue cabbage prepared according to her cousin's recipe. She finds that she's started to care about the shape of faucets.
"I'm sick of listening to my biography," Obermaier, now 60 and a jewelry designer living in Topanga Canyon just north of Los Angeles, recently told Munich's Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Lovers' quarrel
She's hoping others might feel differently. Her autobiography, entitled "High Times: My Wild Life," was published in January and a movie based on her life called "Das Wilde Leben" (English title: 8 Miles High) will open next week.
In a talk show on German public broadcaster ARD on Monday, Obermaier was reunited with her former Commune 1 boyfriend, who promptly accused her of misrepresenting the facts in the film by claiming that he was uptight when it came to sex.
"It was great in the beginning and then not any more," said Langhans, who now lives in a self-styled "harem" with five women. He added that the film was clearly Obermaier's version of what happened, not his.
His ex-girlfriend responded by giving him a peck on the cheek.