The Beatles’ and the Stones’ dirty secrets – by the woman who kept them all

By editorial board on December 5, 2023

Chris O’Dell, the Arizona innocent who found herself at the centre of the 70s rock scene, on her wild times with Ringo, Keith and Mick

"I was the ultimate rock chick!" She had affairs with Jagger, Dylan and Ringo and faced death with John and Yoko. 

She has never been in the limelight herself, though she knows more about the attractions and pitfalls of fame than almost anyone alive.

Chris O'Dell has been a groupie, friend and - in a surprising number of cases - lover to some of the best known rock stars on the planet.

And she is the girlfriend to whom Bob Dylan turned when he forgot his harmonica just before he was due on stage  -  he sent her out to buy a new one.

But, until now, this blonde American who bewitched so many with her beauty in the heady drug-addled days of the Sixties and early Seventies, has remained in the shadows, keeping the secrets she learned as the ultimate rock 'n' roll insider.

Look closely at the footage of The Beatles’ swansong performance on the roof of Apple HQ on January 30, 1969, and you’ll notice a shock of blonde hair nodding with alacrity as they launch into Get Back. Chris O’Dell, to whom the hair belonged (and belongs) to, says it wasn’t just the thrill of this epoch-ending moment she was responding to: “It was freezing cold up there. There was a keen wind blowing and you had to keep moving or numbness would have started to set in. That,” she concludes with a chortle, “is my abiding memory of that day.”...

 

 

 

 

She’s one of the voices in Hey Jude’s interminable chorus; she’s the “mystery woman” embracing Keith Richards on the cover of the Rolling Stones’ Exile on Main Street; she was sitting in a private jet with John and Yoko when it went into a nosedive and they started chanting Hare Krishnas with more than their usual fervour (not even smoking “some very good hashish” beforehand zonked them out sufficiently to mellow out the peril).

She’s now revisiting some of those places – Savile Row, Abbey Road – in a just-announced new documentary, Miss O’Dell: Sex, Love, Drugs & Rock ’n’ Roll, out later this year. We’ll get to the sex, love and drugs shortly – “Oh good,” says O’Dell drolly, her force undiminished at 75 as she calls in from her native Tucson – but the abiding mystery is surely how this self-confessed Arizona innocent found herself at the rock’s nerve centre in the first place.

An early convert to the cause – her father introduced her to Jerry Lee Lewis and Elvis Presley – O’Dell got herself a job at the Dot Records label in Los Angeles, where she met Beatles PR man Derek Taylor. “He couldn’t drive, so I ferried him around for a month or so, and at the end of it, he said, you should come to London and work for this new Apple set-up,” she says. Her dad cashed in a life insurance policy to provide her air fare. “Maybe because it was the nice clean-cut Beatles and not the devil incarnate Rolling Stones,” she laughs. “Oh, little did they know.”

O'Dell appears on Exile on Main Street cover, in the bottom row, second image from the left

Than aged 62, she has decided to tell all in an extraordinary biography packed with rivetting detail about the affairs, the drugs, the backstage tensions and the extraordinary people she came to know so well.

She has called the book Miss O'Dell: My Hard Days And Long Nights With The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton And The Women They Loved.

Chris O'Dell's introduction to rock royalty came through a chance meeting with Derek Taylor, press officer to The Beatles, in Los Angeles.

He invited her to London to work for the band's Apple label. She was 20 years old when she arrived in the swinging capital and had just £60 in her purse.

Whether it was her infectious personality, her enthusiasm or her sheer good looks is unclear, but she suddenly found herself in the group's inner circle at the height of Beatlemania.

'It was like being let go at Disneyland,' she said.

What an extraordinary transformation in lifestyle it was for the homespun girl brought up in a conservative family in Oklahoma.

O'Dell suddenly found herself backstage with the biggest icons in music history.

'The Beatles were my idols, their sound was like nothing else,' she remembers. 'I fell in love with it and the whole idea of being in London.

She was the office girl who looked after them. 'I used to get their lunch, answer phones, cut out press clippings and drive people to the airport.'

But she was soon seduced by the darker side of the music business.

'Where there is rock music and drugs the sex just follows automatically,' she says, by way of explanation.

Initially, the Beatle wives were frosty towards the pretty American interloper. 'When I first started out I had a terrible crush on Paul, but I kinda got debunked by Linda,' she recalls.

But she soon became friends with both Harrison's wife Pattie Boyd and Ringo Starr's wife Maureen Starkey.

Indeed, so friendly did she become with the Harrisons that she eventually moved in with George and Pattie - who remains a close friend to this day - at Friar Park, their 120-room mansion in Henley-on-Thames.

'We used to laugh and goof around together a lot. He was a big flirt and we were very similar,' she said, although she says she never had an affair with George.

She remembers that Eric Clapton would visit Friar Park. He used to say that he was there to see O'Dell when, in reality, he was infatuated with Pattie, Harrison's wife, who was the inspiration for his heartfelt love song 'Layla'.

You can read the full story on Dailymail.com And Telegraph

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