Groupie lifts the lid on the excesses of the Beatles and Rolling Stones
By Anita Singh, Showbusiness Editor
Published: 6:00AM GMT 30 Oct 2009
A groupie who was granted access to the inner sanctums of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones has lifted the lid on their hedonistic lifestyles in a new memoir.
Chris O'Dell and Keith Richards backstage in Nashville Photo: BARCROFT
Chris O'Dell had affairs with Sir Mick Jagger, Ringo Starr and Bob Dylan during the 1960s and 1970s while working as a personal assistant in the music business.
Now 62, she has written an autobiography in which she charts her years as a rock and roll hanger-on, which she describes as "like being given the keys to Disneyland".
She gained her first entry into the music world aged 20, after arriving in London from her home in Tuscon, Arizona with $100 in her pocket. She landed a job as an office assistant at Apple Records, at the height of Beatlemania.
Within months, O'Dell had hit it off so well with George Harrison that she moved in with him and his wife, Pattie Boyd, at their home in Henley-on-Thames.
In her book, she recalls the day that Harrison admitted he had been sleeping with Starr's wife, Maureen. "You know, Ringo, I'm in love with your wife," Harrison said as they sat at Starr's kitchen table. "Better you than someone we don't know," Starr shrugged.
O'Dell had her own three-month affair with Starr and claims that the band lived a drug-fuelled lifestyle. "We all drank and took coke, pot, amphetamines all the time," she said.
On one occasion, she shared a plane journey with John Lennon and Yoko Ono.
"The plane started hitting some turbulence and then John and Yoko started singing the Hari Krishna chant. So we just chanted our way to the earth, basically, until we landed. And I thought, well, if I die here at least I'll be on the front page."
After the Beatles broke up, O'Dell became a personal assistant to the Rolling Stones and joined them on their infamous 1972 tour. Of her fling with Jagger, she said: "If there had been a job description being employed by the Stones back then, I'm pretty sure it would have included a proviso that went something like this: sleep with Mick whenever he asks."
Two years later she was hired as a tour manager for Dylan and began an affair with him. She went on to marry the Hon Anthony Russell, son of the fourth Baron Ampthill. Starr is godfather to their son. Now married for a second time, O'Dell has retrained as a drugs counsellor.
The book is entitled Miss O'Dell: My Hard Days and Long Nights with the Beatles, the Stones, Bob Dylan, Eric Clapton, and the Women They Loved. O'Dell kept diaries of her rock star days but waited until Harrison's death in 2001 before beginning work on it.
She claims that Starr has given the book his blessing.
"We're in our sixties now, some of us are even creeping towards our seventies," she said. "Everybody is grown up enough to realise this is what happened. We're well past it. Ringo's attitude today is, fine, as long as you tell the truth."
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