August 30–31, 1969
“Did you hear that Bob Dylan is singing at the Isle of Wight in August?” Bill Oakes said. Bill was Peter Brown’s new personal assistant.
“Really?” I’d escaped to Peter Brown’s office for a short break—that office was always good for the latest gossip. As I sat across from Bill at the table he used for a desk, I thought again how cute he was with his rosy cheeks, creamy English complexion, and little-boy look. As soon as he arrived at Apple earlier that summer, we started flirting and within a few weeks we were dating. It was so fun to have someone close to my age—he was twenty, a year younger than me, and he was easygoing and flexible, essential qualities for working in the crazy, chaotic world of Apple. We knew how lucky we were, working for the Beatles, and we’d share these great stories about our day at the office that always began with the words, “You won’t believe what happened today!” Bill’s stories were always fascinating because as Peter Brown’s personal assistant he was privy to personal details about the Beatles and their wives. I loved having that little window, through my friendship with Bill, into the Beatles’ private lives.
“It’s his first live appearance in three years,” Bill said with an eager look on his face.
“Let’s go!” I said.
We had so much fun planning our trip to the Isle of Wight.
“Why don’t we just take a couple of backpacks and jump on the train?” I said.
“That could be good fun,” Bill said. “I’ll organize the tickets.”
“And what about staying in a bed and breakfast?” I said. I liked the sound of that—a bed and breakfast in the country. It seemed so quaint and sweet.
Bill laughed. He knew what I was thinking—we could pretend to be “normal” people for a weekend. I know this sounds sort of silly, not to mention snooty, but I’d been breathing the rarefied air of Apple for fifteen months, and I’d lost a sense of what “normal” meant. Every day when I showed up for work, the Apple Scruffs, the most loyal and loving of all the fans, would call out, “Hi, Chris!” I’d smile and wave, fully aware that the fairy dust of fame had settled all around me. There was something about being at Apple all the time that made me feel I was somehow different from everyone else. Even though I wasn’t famous, I was rubbing up against fame every day. How could I not feel special? How could I not believe that I deserved to be treated well because I worked for the Beatles?
We were making dinner in Bill’s kitchen, having a glass of wine and still working on our “normal people” plan, when the phone rang.
“Hello? Oh, hello, George.” Bill stared out the kitchen window as he focused on the conversation. I could tell that he was being given an assignment of some kind, and I hoped it wouldn’t interfere with our trip to the Isle of Wight. Bill motioned for paper and pencil, and I passed them to him. He scribbled away for a few minutes, then said good-bye.
“You’re never going to believe this,” he said. “Bob Dylan forgot his harmonicas.”
“You’re joking!” This was Dylan’s first big concert in three years and he forgot to pack his harmonicas?
“No, it’s true,” Bill said, laughing. “George asked me to buy some at the music store in Soho tomorrow.”
The idea of traveling as two of the normal folks with Bob Dylan’s harmonicas stuffed into our backpacks appealed to both my love of adventure and sense of privilege. We might look like ordinary backpackers on their way to a rock concert, but inside those backpacks we held the key to the concert’s success. The show wouldn’t go on without us!
The next morning Bill called me at my flat to tell me that plans had changed once again.
“George called and said Dylan needs the harmonicas right away. He wants me to put them on a helicopter this morning.”
“Okay,” I said, thinking that then we could catch our train and everything would work out just as we’d planned.
“I was thinking that maybe we should just jump on the helicopter, too,” Bill said. “It’s going straight to the farmhouse where Dylan and his wife and George and Pattie are staying. George suggested the idea. What do you think?”
“Really?” That was all I could manage.
“Amazing, huh?” Bill laughed. “Okay, I’ll get the harmonicas and meet you at the heliport in Battersea. We’re scheduled to leave at ten-thirty. Can you make it?”
“You bet,” I said, already moving my clothes from my backpack into a small suitcase.
We sat in the front of the helicopter, next to the pilot. A big, rounded glass window bubbled out and over us so that we looked right through the glass down to the ground, and as we flew over the city of London, I felt like I was going to free-fall right through the bubble to the earth hundreds of feet below. After about fifteen or so minutes the pilot turned to the right and we headed out over the English Channel. I didn’t like flying over water.
“Where are we landing?” I yelled over the thunderous sound of the helicopter blades as the island came into view. “Is there an airport?”
“We’re going to the south side of the island. We’ll see a large stone farmhouse, and they said they’d lay out a sheet to mark our landing spot,” Bill yelled back.
Several minutes later we spotted the farmhouse. But where was the landing spot? The helicopter flew in a circle around the farm, and on the second pass we saw several people holding a bedsheet and waving us toward the house.
“I think they want us to land over there,” the pilot said, pointing toward the farmhouse.
“Next to the house?” Bill and I both looked at each other in amazement.
“Right behind the house.” The pilot seemed rather amused.
We were hovering twenty or thirty feet above the ground, and dust was flying everywhere when I looked over at the farmhouse. Leaning out the second-floor window, a little grin on his face, was Bob Dylan. I nudged Bill in the ribs, pointed at Dylan, and we both burst out laughing.
“Nice landing,” George said when we walked into the farmhouse a few minutes later. “You know Pattie, don’t you?”
I’d had two face-to-face encounters with Pattie: fifteen months earlier at the Aretusa restaurant when I asked her if she might help me with my makeup someday, and then—this was the scene I’d just as soon forget—there was an embarrassing encounter in the hospital a few days after George had his tonsils removed. He called me from his hospital bed and asked me to bring in some paperwork. “And don’t forget your grandmother’s pajamas,” he added, laughing. A week earlier, George had been in my office when I opened the package from my grandmother and he got a huge kick out of the lime green chiffon harem-style pajamas with the mostly see-through pants and the sequined brassiere. “Okay,” I said, hesitating for just a moment before deciding it might be fun to walk into his room with my black maxi Biba coat covering the pajamas and flash him. Maybe that would cheer him up, and we could laugh about it for weeks. But when I entered the room with my hands tightly holding the coat closed, preparing to open my arms wide and give him a quick peek, I saw Pattie standing by his bed. George, greatly amused by the startled look on my face, introduced me again to Pattie, who said a gracious but somewhat cool hello. I mumbled a few words, pulling my coat even tighter around me, and minutes later, I was out the door of the hospital and safely hunkered down in a taxi headed home.
If Pattie remembered either of those incidents, she didn’t let on when we met for the third time on the Isle of Wight. Instead, she smiled at me with such grace and good humor that I felt as if she were taking me by the arm and saying, “Come in, let’s have some fun.” Once again I felt a deep and intense longing to become her friend.
“Great entrance!” We all turned around at the sound of Bob Dylan’s voice. Walking down the stairway with his wife, Sara, he looked as though he’d just rolled out of bed, with his hair tousled, his shirt untucked, and his face unshaven. Oddly enough, he seemed perfectly matched with Sara, who was elegant and soft featured, dressed in flowing clothes that gave her the look, as she floated down the stairs, of an angel descending from the heavens. He was the hoodlum to her choir girl, the knave to her queen, the beast to her beauty. And yet, when Sara stood close to me, I felt the intensity of her gaze and the keen intelligence that directed it. I learned later that she was of Russian descent, and I could imagine her as a czarina, full of mystery and mystique, wisdom and all-knowingness, earthiness and spirituality. To tell you the truth, she spooked me a little. I almost felt that she could read my mind.
“Thanks for bringing the harmonicas,” Bob said, and with those few words, he turned around and walked back up the stairs, Sara following close behind him. Years later, when I toured with Bob and got to know him better, he’d remind me of a little long-beaked bird who would flit from one place to the next, staying put for only a brief time, all the while looking from side to side, ready to rise and take off if anyone came too close or talked too loud or somehow offended his sensibilities. He was a contradiction, for sure—a man of great presence who would absorb all the energy in the room and then suddenly disappear, leaving no trace behind except, perhaps, for the trailing smoke of his cigarette. I stood there looking at the legendary Bob Dylan and his enigmatic wife ascend the stairs, almost beside myself with excitement. This was one of those moments that I wanted to frame, a picture of me standing in the living room of a farmhouse on the Isle of Wight with George Harrison, Bob Dylan, and their wives. Smiling to myself, I thought how much I loved my life.
“Are you two hungry?” Pattie asked, bringing me out of my reverie. Bill and I looked at each other—we hadn’t had time to eat before we left London—and nodded our heads simultaneously. We were starving.
My favorite breakfast at the time was grilled tomatoes with eggs and bacon, which is exactly what the cook fixed for us that morning. Pattie and George sat down with us and drank tea, and after breakfast Pattie, Bill, and I walked over to the barn where Bob and the Band were rehearsing. We stood around talking to Mal for a while. Mal was there as George’s bodyguard, but this wasn’t George’s show, so he didn’t have a whole lot to do.
“Let’s play tennis!” Pattie said suddenly. “Boys against girls!”
None of us had much skill, but I’d played some tennis in high school, and Pattie could get the ball across the net, so we beat the socks off Bill and Mal. Every time we scored a point Pattie would get this mischievous little grin on her face. She was so natural and good-natured, laughing and talking as if we’d known each other for years. I never once felt that day, or any day since, that I was with someone who considered herself “above” me in any way. In fact, in all the years I’ve known her, Pattie has never acted like a celebrity, even when she’s directly in the spotlight with people fawning all over her. She is as unaffected and unassuming as anyone I have ever met.
George and Pattie asked us to go to the concert with them that night. We sat with John, Yoko, Maureen, and Ringo on folding chairs in a front stage area separated from the other concertgoers by a makeshift white picket fence. The concert, which lasted less than two hours, passed in a blur, but I remember standing up at one point and looking back at the vast sea of people in that huge circular concert area built to hold 150,000 people, seeing the tents up on the hill and the people sprawled out on the grass and thinking, That’s where Bill and I were supposed to be. I looked up at Dylan on the stage, just twenty feet away from me, dressed all in white, and thought about the day—the helicopter ride, Dylan leaning out the second-floor window, Sara floating down the stairs holding Bob’s hand, having breakfast in the farmhouse kitchen while George and Pattie drank tea, the barn, the tennis match, the limo ride, sitting next to Pattie in the front row with George, John, Yoko, Ringo, and Maureen—realizing how lucky I was. What an amazing day this had been.
It got better.
“How are you getting back to London?” John asked Bill after the concert.
“We’re taking the train tomorrow,” Bill said.
“Well, now,” John said with a smile, “we’ve got a plane with extra seats, why don’t you fly back with us tonight?”
John lit up a joint before the tiny prop plane even left the ground. After the second pass, I started to feel really, really paranoid. It was such a little plane, and there was a flimsy little curtain separating the four of us from the pilot. I imagined the smoke permeating that curtain, drifting around the top and the bottom and the sides. Was the pilot getting high, too?
I couldn’t stop my thoughts from spiraling into panic. How could the pilot not be high? He was sitting in the same tiny plane with us, we were all breathing the same air that was saturated with hashish. High-quality hashish. If my eyes were burning, surely his were, too. If I couldn’t think straight, how could he? If I could barely wrap my mouth around a few simple words, how was he flying the fucking plane?
I imagined the pilot, stoned out on hash, deciding to have a little fun with us. In my altered state, I visualized a scene in which he turned the nose of the plane to fly straight up into the sky. I swear I felt the plane tilting, rising, lifting. Just as I was fantasizing about how that scene might end, the plane hit some turbulence and started rocking up and down and from side to side. The four of us got big eyed. My hands were sweating, and I was taking shallow little breaths. The plane was bucking by that time and there were all these weird noises, like metal parts tearing and engines coming loose. John and Yoko started chanting “Hare Krishna,” and then I knew we were in big trouble because I could tell by looking at their faces that they also thought we were going to crash and burn. I started chanting with them, Bill chimed in, and we were all chanting “Hare Krishna” for what seemed like hours but must have been only five or maybe ten minutes.
When we started chanting, I felt better. I reached a moment of acceptance. If we die, I thought, at least it will be on the front pages of all the newspapers in the world. I imagined the headlines, “John and Yoko Dead in Fiery Crash” and in smaller letters “Apple Employees Chris O’Dell and Bill Oakes Among the Dead” and in even smaller letters “Pilot Thought to Be Under the Influence of Hashish.” Somehow imagining that newspaper headline (Derek would do a fabulous job with the press release) made me feel better, because if I died that day at least I wouldn’t leave this world as an unknown.
We kept chanting after the plane landed, and we didn’t stop until we took a few deep breaths of the sweet night air and knew for sure that our feet were firmly planted on good old solid ground.