May 22–23, 1968
“Chris, you needn’t be alone this evening,” Derek said later that day. After the boutique opening, we took a taxi back to Apple where Derek returned dozens of phone calls, and I sat in his office reliving the day in my mind.
The more time I spent with Derek, the more he took on that fatherly role, watching out for me, worrying about me, even hovering over me a bit. In those early days at Apple, I’d spend hours sitting on the chair in his office, leafing through magazines, watching and waiting for my lucky break while he’d carry on with business as usual, answering phone calls, writing press releases, entertaining visitors, and checking in with me every now and then to make sure I was okay.
“I’m fine, Derek, don’t worry about me,” I said. Actually I couldn’t wait to be alone. I was tired and slightly hung over from the wine at lunch, and I still needed to unpack my bags and settle into my new hotel room.
“Let me ring up this nice American lad who’s here in London. He would be great company for you.”
I didn’t want to meet a nice American lad. I wanted to go to bed.
“He’s from North Carolina. A songwriter. Wonderful voice. Peter Asher just signed him to Apple Records.” Derek was talking in spurts, conscious of the time and the fact that he had a train to catch.
“An American?” I tried not to sound too disappointed. I really wasn’t interested in hanging out with an American—I wanted to meet people from England. I must have been really tired because I was a little irritated with Derek. He was usually so sensitive to my needs, why didn’t he realize that the last thing I wanted to do on my fifth night in London was spend a boring evening entertaining a nice American?
“His name is James,” Derek said, reaching for the phone and looking again at his watch. “He’s rather shy, but I think you’ll enjoy one another.” I looked at Derek, my expression quizzical, and he gave me a funny little smile. What does that mean? I wondered. Is he playing the matchmaker?
“James! Hullo there, it’s Derek Taylor. Listen, there’s a lovely young lady sitting across from me who I’d like you to entertain this evening. She’s just arrived from America and doesn’t know anyone in London. Would you be free?”
I realized that I had tensed up, hoping the voice on the other end of the line would decline the offer. Maybe he was tired, too. Maybe, like me, he had no desire whatsoever to meet another American.
“That’s great!” Derek said. “Her name is Chris O’Dell. Why don’t you meet at her hotel around, say, eight o’clock?”
So that’s how it happened that exactly at eight o’clock that night there was a knock on my door and I opened it to find a tall, gangly, handsome young man smiling shyly at me. He had long brown hair and carried a guitar case.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Chris O’Dell.”
“Hi, I’m James Taylor,” he said.
“Come in,” I said, stepping aside to make room for him to pass by me. There was barely enough room for him to walk by, even with my back up against the wall. That was the smallest room I’d ever seen.
“I’m really sorry if Derek ruined your evening,” I said. “I guess he was worried I’d get lonely.”
“No problem. I wasn’t doing anything anyway. It’s cool.” Very gently he laid his guitar case on the floor and then sat down next to it, his back against the wall. I perched on the edge of the twin bed and tried to get a conversation going. He sure was slow to warm up, but once I got him talking about himself, he opened up a little. He told me he’d been vacationing in Formentera, a little island off the southern coast of Spain, and he was recovering from a love affair that had gone bad. He didn’t give me many details, but I could tell he was in some kind of pain. What I didn’t know then was that he was addicted to heroin and was trying to get clean, so I might have confused his physical distress with emotional torment, although usually they travel together.
“How did you end up in London?” I asked.
“I met Peter Asher through a mutual friend, he liked my material, and he brought me here,” James said, his arm draped protectively around his guitar case, his eyes staring at the speckled brown carpet. Every once in a while he’d glance up at me and give me a really nice shy smile before returning his gaze to the floor. He told me that he liked Peter, and he thought signing with Apple would be a good thing. I was surprised that he wasn’t more excited about the whole thing, but I soon learned that this was James’s style—he wasn’t exactly the effusive type.
After dinner at a nearby pub, we spent hours talking in the hotel room, sharing stories about our lives, our experiences in London, and the whirlwind of my days at Apple. It was after midnight when James opened his guitar case and began to play while I listened, absorbing the gentle energy of his music and feeling so relaxed I could have drifted right off to sleep.
Somewhere around two in the morning I began to wonder if he was ever going to leave. I decided to give him a big hint.
“Gosh, it’s getting late,” I said with a big yawn. “Aren’t you tired?”
James stopped his humming and strumming for just a moment and shook his head. “No,” he said in his lazy sort of way. “I always stay up late. It’s a great time to write.”
shit, I thought, now what am I supposed to do? I didn’t want to be rude, so I sat on my bed for another half hour or so, listening to him strum his guitar and sing quietly under his breath. How was I going to fall asleep with this guy singing in my room? Oh man, I thought, Derek is going to pay for this.
“James, I really need to go to bed now,” I said finally.
“Oh, sure, go ahead. I’m just going to work on this song a little longer.”
Surely he wasn’t planning to stay? What did he want from me? Was he expecting to go to bed with me? Nothing even remotely sexual had passed between us the whole night. Why didn’t he leave? Maybe he sensed my confusion, because he seemed to emerge from his songwriting fog for a moment.
“Look, you don’t mind if I stay the night, do you? It’s kinda late and I’d like to finish this song and crash.”
“Oh. Well, the bed’s not very big.” I looked at my twin bed with a “gee, I’m sorry” look and hoped he’d get the message. James was a tall guy—skinny, but really tall—and I was tired. I didn’t want to share my bed with him.
“Well,” he said, following my lead and looking at the bed, “it’s okay for me if you don’t mind. I could always sleep on the floor if it’s a problem.”
What was I going to do, kick him out in the middle of the night? He clearly wasn’t going to leave. But what if he came on to me when the lights were out? I didn’t trust myself—saying no wasn’t exactly in my repertoire of responses at that time of my life. I knew I had to do something to defuse the situation, and I had a secret weapon, the ultimate turn-off—if James had any ideas about having sex with me, I’d instantly eradicate them.
“Okay, you can stay if you like, but I’m getting ready for bed,” I said, sitting down at the dressing table. I opened the drawer containing my hair rollers. Now these weren’t just any hair rollers. I had packed six jumbo frozen orange juice cans, both ends removed—no wonder I needed two big suitcases—and I began to roll my hair around the cans, securing them with jumbo-sized hairpins.
James was so absorbed in his music that he didn’t even notice. I went into the bathroom to change into my nightgown, and when I returned, James was still oblivious to my presence, so I got in bed without a word and turned toward the wall. The rollers were a bit awkward, but I’d gotten used to them and knew how to position my head so they didn’t poke into my scalp. I fell asleep to the soft strumming of James’s guitar.
I woke up the next morning to discover that James had somehow managed to squeeze himself into the bed, between me and the wall. When he heard me get out of bed, he stretched and yawned.
“I hope you weren’t too crowded,” he said.
“No, it was fine,” I said, and it really was, although I have no idea how either of us managed to get any sleep at all. I sat down at the dressing table to take out my rollers.
“James, I have to leave soon,” I said. “Do you want to stay here and sleep in?”
“No,” he said, sitting up on the bed and stretching, “I’ll leave with you.”
I combed my hair and began to tease the top layers to get some height on top, adding lots of hair spray, while James reached for his guitar and started to play the song he’d been working on the night before. Suddenly he stopped.
“Hey, Chris,” he said, “why do you wear those orange juice cans in your hair?”
I laughed, a little embarrassed and wondering, too, if he saw through my ploy of the night before.
“Well, they smooth out the curl and add some lift,” I said.
“Oh.” I think I gave him a little too much information. “Hey, are you done in the bathroom?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said. I watched him shuffle into the bathroom, eyes looking at the floor as usual, guitar in hand. He shut the door and began to sing, much louder than the night before. He really is odd, I thought. I didn’t know then that musicians often like to sing in the bathroom because of the acoustics.
Ten minutes later he opened the door and asked if I would mind coming into the bathroom to listen to the song he was working on. While I put on my makeup in front of the bathroom mirror, he sat on the toilet playing his guitar and singing his new song about missing Carolina, seeing the sunshine, feeling the moonshine.
He was homesick, that much was clear. And I wasn’t. In fact, I was a little impatient because I wanted to get to Apple before everyone else arrived. I didn’t want to miss anything.
But as I listened and began to relax into the music, my impatience eased. The sound in that tiny bathroom was so rich and full that I didn’t want him to stop. I felt as if he were singing straight from the depths of his soul, exposing his loneliness and longing to me and in response, I loosened up, softened, released. Had I made a mistake with the curlers?
“James, that was truly beautiful,” I said when he stopped singing and looked up at me.
He thanked me, and I had the feeling that I could say a thousand words of praise about the song and still it might not be enough to still his troubled mind.
“Would you like to come to my rehearsal?” he said as he put his guitar back into its case. I noticed that he had slender, strong, beautiful hands. “I’m meeting the band in an hour. We could get some breakfast on the way.”
“I’d like that,” I said. And that’s how I spent the morning of my sixth day in London, watching James Taylor and his band rehearse at the Apple Publishing office on the floor just above the Apple Boutique.