Summer 1968
“You two look busy,” Derek said one day, sticking his head in the office and making a face at the disorganized mess of newspapers, scissors, glue, and scrapbooks. “Look, Harry Nilsson is flying into town today to meet the Beatles. Would you be able to pick him up at the airport, Chris?”
“Sure!” I said. I was excited—this would be my first real assignment for Apple. I took the bus, hoping to save Apple money (only to realize later that no one else worried much about saving money, at least not at that time), but that was a huge mistake because the bus stopped about a hundred times before finally making it to the airport. Fifteen minutes late, I ran inside the terminal, searching everywhere for Harry and afraid that I had missed him and blown my first big responsibility. I knew who to look for because I’d met Harry once before, in LA at a private screening Derek organized to celebrate the release of Magical Mystery Tour. I scanned the baggage claim area looking for a tall, blond twenty-seven-year-old man with an aw-shucks manner and a killer smile. And there he was, following a limo driver who was carrying his bags and headed out the door.
“Harry!” I yelled out, running to catch up with them. “Derek sent me to pick you up. I’m Chris O’Dell. I met you once back in LA.”
“Hi, Chris, sure, I remember you,” Harry said, although I’m pretty sure he didn’t. As I’d soon discover, Harry was one of the nicest, kindest, gentlest guys you’d ever want to meet, and the last thing he would do was make me uncomfortable.
“Hey, that was really thoughtful of you to pick me up,” Harry said, “but it seems that Ringo has kindly left his limo for us. Apparently, he and his wife just left for Spain. Do you have a car here?”
“No, I took the bus,” I said.
“Well, come with us in the limo.” That was fine by me. By the time we arrived at his hotel on Park Lane, Harry and I were fast friends, and I spent the rest of the day with him, meeting up with Derek for lunch, and then hanging out with Harry at the hotel, having a few drinks, getting to know each other. When he left to spend the evening with John Lennon, I took a taxi home, put some coins in the meters, and cozied up on the couch with a hot cup of dark tea with milk, a proper English way to end the day.
A few days later Peter Brown called me into his office. Always prim and proper, a little standoffish, Peter Brown was even more serious than usual.
“This is a very special, private recording, Chris,” he said, handing me a manila envelope. “It’s incredibly valuable, one of a kind. I want you to take a minicab to the EMI pressing plant. They’re expecting you. They’ll press the tape onto vinyl. I want you to stay with them and with this tape throughout the recording process. Make sure no other copies are made. Then bring the master tape and the record immediately back to me.”
Something big was going on. I felt extremely important and wondered if perhaps I had passed the “trust” test. Richard told me that gaining trust with the Beatles was the number one priority. If you weren’t trusted, you’d be out, but you had to gain that trust and prove that you weren’t going to be one of those people who blabbed to the press. You had to do a good job and get the right results. I took the package and held it tight. Peter Brown had given me strict orders, and I was not about to mess this up.
The EMI pressing plant was in Hayes, about twelve miles outside London. I thought it took an awfully long time to get there, but I managed to enjoy the scenery while holding the envelope on my lap, my hands folded over it as if in prayer. What was this tape I was holding? Why was it so valuable? Who besides Peter Brown thought it was so important? As we pulled up to the big gray building (everything seemed gray in London), the driver told me the structure had been used to develop radar equipment and guided missiles in World War II and later housed the first television transmitter for the BBC. I asked the driver to wait, then walked into the reception area where, just as Peter Brown had promised, someone was expecting me. An old wind-up phonograph was on display in the reception area, and I stopped for a moment to admire it. I’d never seen one before.
We took the elevator to an upper floor and immediately stepped into a brightly lit room filled from one end to the other with a bunch of hissing and sighing machines and employees intently focused on their jobs. We walked to one of the smaller machines, and the man who greeted me reached out for the package, which I had been holding tightly to my chest. My initial instinct was to pull the envelope closer to me, and only reluctantly did I hand it over.
“Peter Brown said only the one pressing,” I reminded him.
“Yes, he made that perfectly clear,” he said, rather grimly but with the hint of a reassuring smile. I loosened up a bit then and watched, fascinated, as a technician put the tape in a machine, pushed some buttons, and the process of transferring the tape to vinyl began. Seven or eight minutes later the technician played it back to check the sound. Frank Sinatra’s voice filled the space around us. We stood there, aghast. I looked at the technician who looked at the manager-type man who looked at me, and we all couldn’t believe what we were hearing. Frank Sinatra was singing to the tune of “The Lady Is a Tramp” except that the words were changed to “the lady is a champ,” and it was all about Maureen Starkey, Ringo’s wife. “There’s no one like her / She married Ringo, but she could have had Paul / That’s why the lady is a champ,” Sinatra crooned.
They put a special printed Apple label on the record, packaged it up all neat and tidy, and sent me back to Wigmore Street. Back in Peter Brown’s office, the 45 rpm record safely in his possession, he told me the story behind the tape. “Maureen is a big Sinatra fan,” Peter Brown explained, “and for her twenty-second birthday, Ringo asked Frank Sinatra if he would record a song for her. Songwriter Sammy Cahn agreed to rewrite the lyrics to ‘The Lady Is a Tramp’ and Sinatra recorded the tape in Los Angeles. We’ll make a few more copies of the record and then destroy the master tape.”
Wow, I thought, as I walked down the hallway to Derek’s office, so this is what power looks like. You pick up the phone, ask Frank Sinatra for a favor, and he’s happy to oblige because you’re a Beatle (or you’re directly connected to a Beatle), word gets around and other people, famous people and factory workers, are thrilled to be involved because the Beatles are, well, the Beatles. My world seemed to stretch out a little bit at that moment. I saw the possibilities that this kind of power could create. No door would be closed to you. No person could—or would—refuse you. With that kind of power, you could do anything you wanted.
But I was still a long way from wielding any kind of power at Apple that summer of 1968. Even with my patchwork of part-time jobs—running errands, helping Richard with the press clippings, relieving Laurie at the switchboard, and filling in for secretaries when they went on breaks—I had a lot of free time on my hands. Every day I’d spend an hour or two roaming the hallways trying to make myself useful. I needed a purpose, a role in which I could prove that I was vital to the Apple enterprise. I wanted to be irreplaceable.
One day that summer, about a month after I’d arrived at Apple, I was leafing through a magazine in the reception area, waiting to relieve Laurie at the switchboard, when Neil Aspinall walked in.
“Anyone wanna get lunches?” Neil was a man of few words, and the secretaries were accustomed to being asked to run across the street to get sandwiches for the daily lunch meeting of the Apple brass in Neil’s office.
That day I was in the right place at the right time.
“I’ll go!” I said, jumping up out of my chair. I noticed a look of relief on the receptionist’s face.
“Great!” Neil said, smiling broadly at my “I’ll do anything” attitude. He gave me some money and instructions to buy a selection of sandwiches at the shop across the street.
The next day I volunteered to get the lunches again, but I had a bright idea. What if I brought them something a little fancier than plain old sandwiches? After all, these guys were running an important new company, and they deserved something better than egg salad or ham and cheese. I walked down the street to a cute little Italian place and ordered spaghetti, veal scaloppini, lasagna, and a few additional pasta dishes. As I waited for the order, I realized that the Apple execs couldn’t eat Italian food with their fingers, so I asked the restaurant owner if we could borrow some dishes and utensils.
“I work at Apple Records for the Beatles,” I said, “and I wondered if you might be willing to lend us plates and silverware for these fabulous lunches,” I said, pouring on all my charm and promising to bring everything back later that day.
“Si, si, grazie,” he said with a big smile and a little bow. He was thanking me! But then again, why not? He could tell his friends and customers that he was making lunches for the Beatles—that had to be good for business!
When I walked into Neil’s office with a large box that I could barely manage, Neil, Ron Kass, Peter Brown, Peter Asher, Derek, and Dennis O’Dell, the head of Apple Films, looked at me curiously. “What’s all this?” Neil said as I pulled out the plates one by one, followed by the silverware, the napkins, and the steaming hot dishes, and placed them on the coffee table in front of the sofa.
“Well,” I said, standing back, hands on my hips, a proud smile on my face, “I decided you should have something better than sandwiches.” Of course, I didn’t mention the fact that I knew I had to do something out of the ordinary in order for them to recognize that I was somewhat extraordinary.
“Thank you, luv!” Derek said, hungrily eyeing the food.
“Chris, you’ve outdone yourself!” Neil chimed in, eagerly uncovering each dish and releasing the delicious aromas into the room. They started heaping the food onto their plates.
Well, that was fun! I walked back into the reception area, picked up the same magazine I was reading an hour earlier, and thought about what I might do next. Then the idea hit me—if Apple had a Tea Lady, why not a Lunch Lady? And why not me, who had nothing else of importance to do?
The next morning I made a preemptive move.
“Do you want me to get the lunches today?” I asked Neil as I passed him in the hallway.
“Yeah, if you can match yesterday’s lunch,” Neil said, his eyebrow raised in a mock challenge.
“Of course I can. Any requests?”
“Let’s have some more of that Italian,” he said.
That day I ordered several different dishes at the Italian restaurant, and on my way back to the office I noticed a cute little Greek eatery. Hmmm. The wheels started spinning. This was Apple after all, and wouldn’t it be nice if the lunches were varied every day? Why should the Apple execs lunch on just sandwiches and Italian food? So the next day I surprised them with a nice selection of Greek food, then Chinese, and spent many pleasant hours scouting the neighborhood for good food at fair prices. Every one of those restaurant owners was happy to lend us his best plates, silverware, and napkins.
And that’s how I found myself steady part-time work at Apple, which soon enough, to my absolute delight, turned into a full-time job.
“Chris, can you come into my office?” Peter Asher asked one morning as he walked through the reception area.
“Sure!” I said. I have to admit that Peter intimidated me because he was always so serious and uptight, so matter-of-fact and businesslike. Unlike the other Apple executives who reported directly to the Beatles, Peter just seemed to go about his job, staying fairly isolated from the mainstream. I followed him into his office, just one door down from Derek’s.
“Do you want to work for me?” Peter said, sitting down behind his desk and motioning for me to take a seat. “I’m looking for a personal assistant.”
“Yes, I’d love to,” I said, barely able to contain my excitement. Working for Peter Asher, head of A&R at Apple—what could be better than that?
“Good,” he said in his quiet, understated way. He seemed a little embarrassed, as if he was wondering what to do next.
“What will I be doing?” I thought I’d better ask.
“Well, I’ve never had an assistant before, so I’m not certain how to get you started,” he said. “But you’ll help me look after the artists we sign, book studios, make sure everything is set up for the recording sessions, and, of course, do some typing, filing, answering telephone calls, that sort of thing. I’ve been using a studio called Trident. You might want to call them and introduce yourself. They’re very good at giving us whatever we want.”
“Great,” I said. “I’ll call right now.”
Peter cleared his throat and looked at me directly for the first time during our conversation. Shyly, hesitantly, as if he feared I might say no, he said, “And would you still get me those lunches?”