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

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.”

It’s just one of many memories that O’Dell has lately been sharing with the wider world. In 2009, her memoir, Miss O’Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with The Beatles, The Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved, detailed her adventures and misadventures as PA, tour manager, and all-round ego-massager to rock’s golden gods, from the late 60s through to the early 80s. The New York Times described her as “Nick Carraway to rock’s egotistical Gatsby”, while she earned comparisons to Forrest Gump and Leonard Zelig for her propensity to pop up in the frame as history was being wrought.

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.”

Taylor neglected to furnish her with any meaningful job description, “so I did some switchboard shifts, typed some letters” – and thought she’d received a veiled termination notice when she was asked to transcribe the Get Back lyrics, with their references to Tucson alongside “get back to where you once belonged”. She also pinched herself constantly. “For American girls especially, The Beatles were fantasy people,” she says. Particularly when McCartney was around, on whom she had a “terrible crush”.

Eventually O’Dell became PA to Peter Asher, Apple’s head of A&R, but the cracks in the Beatle edifice had already widened into chasms, with Paul trying to keep everything together, John mostly sullen and silent, and George and Ringo goofing off elsewhere.

“They were growing up, becoming men,” says O’Dell, “and wanting to find their own purpose.” If O’Dell eventually went with Team George, it was mainly because of the friendship she’d struck up with Pattie Boyd. “There were trust issues with the women around The Beatles, for sure,” she says. “I quickly got that if you were friends with the women, and not rivals, then it was a much more comfortable environment. I loved Pattie, and I knew the line to cross there would have been George. And I had no desire to do that.”

Such were the trust levels, in fact, that George invited O’Dell to come live with him and Boyd in Friar Park, his 120-room neo-Gothic pile just outside Henley, which initially had no furniture or central heating but where the couple threw parties like “Austin Powers fever dreams” she says. “I finally felt like I’d got through to the inner sanctum.”

The shine wore off with the coming of the 70s – and cocaine, which initiated a sexual roundelay that, at times, resembled a creaky bedroom farce. Maureen Starkey, Ringo’s wife, began an affair with Harrison (O’Dell was sitting at Starr’s kitchen table when Harrison confessed to him, and heard his deadpan response that “well, at least it’s someone we know”). O’Dell had a three-month affair with the disconsolate Ringo: “It was a kind of rebound thing for him, and Maureen soon found out.” But the pair remained friends until Maureen’s death from leukaemia in 1994, while Harrison wrote a song called Miss O’Dell, in which he appeals to her to come save him from what sounds like a particularly debilitating bout of ennui. Eric Clapton, at whose place O’Dell was a frequent house guest (if a nonplussed one: “he always seemed very lonely and very empty”), would call round ostensibly to see her at Friar Park, while in reality burnishing his infatuation with Boyd, who would eventually leave Harrison for him.

Her book also details dalliances with Mick Jagger and Bob Dylan while she worked as their tour manager, though she has previously said, dryly, that any job description provided by the Stones in those days should have included a proviso to the order of “sleep with Mick whenever he asks”.

O’Dell has been disappointed in publications – including, alas, this one – from describing her as a “groupie”. It feels a fundamental misnomer; far from being a careerist, O’Dell seems to have gone into everything with a kind of guilelessness. “I was taken aback when I read that description of me, not because I was shocked that they’d call me that, but because I was shocked they were still calling anyone that. In a post-MeToo world, it’s not a great look to still be bandying that word about. I wasn’t a groupie, or even a muse, but more of an emotional support. I eventually became a therapist, an addiction counsellor…  just without a licence.”

Particularly, one surmises, on the Rolling Stones’ infamous 1972 tour, where she went on drug runs for Keith Richards. “I would know what bands needed before they knew they needed it,” she says. “Pattie would describe musicians as like the Pied Piper, walking through the village and everybody following. I thought that was a beautiful image.”

O’Dell came to a further realisation recently. “I think I accomplished a lot for females in the music business. It was so male-oriented, you’d often be the only woman in the room. I began to appreciate the doors I broke open, more than I did at the time.”

O’Dell was as lucky with her timing in getting out of the game as she had been with getting in. She recalls being on tour with Echo and the Bunnymen in Germany in the 1980s: “The day came that one of them asked me to do something for them and I just went, no, you do it yourself. Those weren’t quite the words, but close,” she laughs. “And I was like, oh, I’m done.”

She took herself back to Tucson with her son William (Ringo and Boyd are his godparents), gave up drugs and alcohol, and embarked on her counselling career, marrying a fellow substance-abuse counsellor. She has maintained an enduring friendship with Boyd, who once said that she had some regrets, but, in the end, “you have to cut yourself some slack”, and O’Dell would agree. “The reality is, we were all so young, and given that, I think I did pretty well.”

'Miss O’Dell: Sex, Love, Drugs & Rock ’n’ Roll' is out later this year