November 1969–March 1970
Four weeks after I met Leon, we flew back to Los Angeles to start a new life together. I’ve never regretted that decision, even though life didn’t turn out the way I had imagined. If I had stayed in London that autumn and winter of 1969–1970, I’m almost certain I would have been fired. Allen Klein and his accountants, seeking absolute control and autonomy, were on a rampage during those months, and only a few select people survived. Jobless, penniless, Appleless, I would have had no choice but to leave England and return to America. Who knows what would have happened then. Life follows its own convoluted pathways, and only when we look back from the vantage point of time and distance can we see that the twists and turns along the way make some sense, after all.
As the plane lifted off from Heathrow Airport, I stared out the window and blinked back tears, thinking about all the bizarre coincidences that had brought me to this point in time. I was leaving my job, which I loved, and Derek and Richard, whom I adored, and the Beatles, whom I would have followed to the ends of the earth, to fly back to America with a man I had just met but who, in a few short weeks, had become the love of my life. Leon knew I was struggling with my emotions and in an effort to make the journey easier for me (“I want to take you back to LA in style”), he tried to get us seats in first class. But they were all taken—by the Rolling Stones. Looking out the tiny airplane window, I smiled, comforted by the idea of the Stones sitting up front. At least I wasn’t leaving everything behind all at once; some of the glamour and excitement of London was coming along with me. I felt even better when Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts came back to coach to chat with Leon.
On that long, long trip back to LA, I tried to imagine what Leon’s house might look like. I pictured a little place in the hills with a white picket fence, taffeta curtains, a kitchen with pies in the oven and a dog in the yard, but the house wasn’t quite as I had pictured it. Oh, it was nice enough from the outside, a two-story tract home on the valley side of the Hollywood Hills, but the inside was something else again. I walked in the front door to find a living room stuffed full of studio equipment and musical instruments and only one piece of furniture—a sofa that you could reach by stepping over or crawling across the amps and instrument cases. The kitchen reminded me of a recording studio kitchen with only the bare essentials—coffee cups on the counter and traces of sugar and powdered creamer that would build up until someone got sick of the mess and cleaned it up. I opened the oven door, took one look at the black-crusted surfaces, and never opened it again. A small bedroom on the main floor housed the control board, and Leon had converted the garage into a studio. Basically, the entire main floor of the house was a recording studio.
Upstairs there were three bedrooms. One bedroom was occupied by a couple, both musicians and old friends of Leon’s, who sensed right away that I was a threat to their continued presence in the house. They basically pretended I didn’t exist. Another couple, a bass player and his wife who were also Leon’s good friends, lived in the second bedroom. They were much nicer to me, probably figuring they might be able to hang around for a while if we got along. Jimmy, a drummer friend of Leon’s, lived in the walk-in hall closet and hardly ever came out, or at least I rarely saw him. I’m sure they all took one look at me and thought, Oh, shit, there go our free digs, although Jimmy didn’t seem all that concerned. After all, he was only taking up an empty closet.
That first night, in our bedroom—the only private place we had in a four-bedroom house—Leon and I talked about his love affair with Rita Coolidge and how she broke his heart when she left him for drummer Jim Gordon. He didn’t want to go through that pain again, he said, so he started off our live-in relationship with a little “rule” that would turn out to be the end of us.
“If either one of us should ever sleep with someone else,” Leon said, holding my hand and looking deep into my eyes, “we have to promise to tell each other.”
That shook me. I had this uneasy sense that Leon was predicting the future. Either he thought I was going to cheat on him—like Rita did—or he was warning me that someday he would cheat on me. He framed the whole discussion so that it seemed he was trying to protect himself after getting his heart broken by Rita, but it felt like there was more to it than that. Maybe he knew the relationship was doomed from the start. I don’t know. It hurts now just to think about it because from that moment on, even though we were still so much in love and so hopeful it would work out, I was waiting for something bad to happen. I was afraid—afraid to trust him, afraid of being hurt, afraid that he would cheat on me, afraid of Rita, afraid of all the people in the house, and, soon enough, afraid of everything.
“I feel like we’re living in a fishbowl,” I complained after a few days.
“It’s your house, Chris, do what you need to do,” he said.
That didn’t feel quite right. Why was he leaving the dirty work to me? Well, maybe this is my job now, I thought, the role of the “old lady.” So I went to work. I got rid of everyone except Jimmy the drummer because he was sweet and only took up a closet, and I moved furniture around in an effort to make the house more like a home. In Leon’s bedroom, the largest in the house, I created a living room space where we could relax and watch television. I found out who owned the motorcycle parked in the upstairs hallway and told him to move it out to the yard, and then I enlisted Leon’s help painting the hallway where the motorcycle had scuffed up the walls. I bought several cans of fire engine red paint, we put shower caps on our heads, rented a machine to spray paint the walls, and blasted away. Leon’s face and beard were covered in paint, which dripped like blood from the end of his beard.
In the end, of course, I created more chaos. I talked Leon into getting a dog and after an impromptu trip to the pet store, we came home with two blond cocker spaniels that we named Sam and Dave. They ran around the house, pooping and peeing wherever they went, and as I walked around cleaning up after them, I realized that I wasn’t very good at this domestic bliss thing. I couldn’t cook and I hated to clean. I wanted to be with Leon and I didn’t have anything else to do, so I spent virtually every hour of every day with him at home or in the studio. I loved Leon—that much I knew for sure—and I was determined to make the relationship work. I could forget about everything else, I kept telling myself.
“Come to the studio with me tonight,” Leon said one evening when I was watching television in the sitting area I’d created just off our bedroom.
“Sure,” I said, lifting up my voice to sound excited about the idea, “that would be fun.” Inside, my heart was pounding. I loved being in the studio, but that night I knew Rita, Leon’s Delta Lady, would be there working on her new album. The words to the song Leon wrote for her, especially the part about him whispering sighs to satisfy her longing, cycled endlessly through my mind at times—I couldn’t stop them—and I’d just get crazy with jealousy.
I wasn’t in the same league as Rita. She was tall, dark, and exotic looking with thick black hair and full-moon eyes. Along with Leon, Bobby Whitlock, and Carl Radle, she was one of Delaney and Bonnie’s “friends,” singing backup vocals with the rock-soul group while Leon played the piano and guitar. She had a career, a following, a life that she could call her own. How could I compare? She was dark while I was fair, she was famous and I was a nobody, she was Leon’s Delta Lady (a big hit) while I was his Pisces Apple Lady (which never became a hit). Who was I, really? I had no role, no job, no identity. I lived in a house with Leon and two puppies that I couldn’t control and that was filled with musicians jamming downstairs at all hours of the day and night, and no friends and no family close by, and London and Derek and Apple and the Beatles eight thousand miles away, on the other side of the earth.
That night in the studio as I watched Leon working with Rita, I felt somewhat reassured that he was no longer in love with her. During the breaks, he would come straight to the control room, smile down at me, touch my arm, kiss me. He was trying to let me know that I had nothing to fear. I wish I could have absorbed his adoration and allowed it to fill me up. Instead, I fretted, doubted, and questioned everything. Sitting on the sofa in front of the console watching Rita sing, her eyes closed, her body movements so graceful and fluid, I felt awkward and childlike, acutely aware that I was allowed into the studio only because I was Leon Russell’s old lady. I remembered, with fondness and longing, the days when I hung out at Trident, Olympic, and Abbey Road studios and the Beatles, George Martin, and Glyn Johns would smile and welcome me into the inner sanctum. Back then I had something to do. I was a member of the team. I had earned my right to be there.
But now that I was with Leon, I reminded myself of poor Alice Ormsby-Gore, the waiflike girl-child sitting in the corner, not saying a word, not having a damn thing to do, just waiting for her man to finish his work so they could go home and be together. No wonder the Beatles’ wives so rarely came to the studio. It wasn’t that they were banned, I suddenly realized—they just didn’t want to sit around watching, waiting, and as Maureen would put it years later, acting like just another “nodding appendage.”
Well, that’s what I was becoming, just another nodding appendage. I was losing myself, bit by bit, piece by piece, and I had no idea how to put myself back together again.
I took up painting by numbers. I wanted to do something creative but didn’t have the talent to paint freehand, so I painted landscapes. By number.
Leon laughed at me. Not in a cruel way, but he thought it was pretty funny that I’d sit around the house with my white numbered canvases, concentrating on staying within the lines and putting the right colors in the right spots. I laughed with him, but I didn’t think it was funny at all. Something was happening to me that I didn’t understand. I was searching for structure and meaning, even if I had to find it in a silly paint-by-number kit. Leon was busy with his first album, Leon Russell, and Shelter Records, the new record company he and Denny Cordell had started, and he spent more and more time away from me during the day. I was lonely. And scared. And so so so so sad. So horribly desperately hopelessly sad. I realize now that I was depressed, but at the time I had no idea that the fear and despair that threatened to engulf me came with a label, a diagnosis. I could not move out of the gloom that settled around me. I couldn’t shake it. I was smoking a lot of marijuana and drinking a lot; cocaine was my new favorite drug. The hopelessness would lift for a bit, then settle in even thicker. I had no idea the drugs were making things worse.
I kept thinking back to a few months earlier when I was working at Apple, nine, ten, twelve hours a day, always at the center of the activity, loving each and every moment of my life. Now I had one role—Leon’s girlfriend—and I was spending all my time at home (which didn’t feel at all like my home) with the bedroom door shut, painting by numbers, ironing Leon’s shirts and my jeans (anything, believe me, that needed ironing), watching mindless television programs, and leafing through movie magazines.
I was waiting for something to happen. I knew it would be bad. I knew that from my first night in Leon’s house when he made me promise that if I ever cheated on him I would have to tell him. I wasn’t going to cheat on Leon, but I knew, deep down, that eventually he would cheat on me. He was out in the world, in the studio, downstairs jamming and recording with his musician friends, in meetings with record producers and studio executives, surrounded by famous people, almost-famous people, or people who wanted to be with famous people. Especially girls. Girls could smell the early stages of fame. They were hanging around Leon, enchanted by his moody, intense masculinity. And his sexuality. Leon was a very sexy man.
One night I got really drunk, sitting around the kitchen with guitarist Jesse Ed Davis and horn player Jim Price. They had stopped by to see Leon and maybe sit in on a session. I pulled out the Scotch and Coke and we sat around the kitchen table drinking and talking. I have no memory of going to bed. The next morning when Leon and I woke up, he leaned up on one elbow and looked at me with loving concern.
“Are you okay?”
“Ooooh, I don’t think so,” I moaned, feeling sick and shaky. I had only brief flashing memories of the night before. “Oh God, what did I do last night? Did I do something stupid?”
“No,” he said, putting his arms around me and holding me close. “You just kept coming into the studio while we were trying to record and telling me that you had to go back to London.”
“I’m sorry,” I said softly. I was so ashamed.
“I want you to hear something.” Leon got out of bed, walked over to the bookcase, and returned with a tape recorder. “I wrote a song for you last night.”
He hit the play button and his voice filled the room as he sang about the woman he loved who was more than he deserved, repeating the words “Hummingbird, don’t fly away” over and over again.
“It’s beautiful,” I whispered, struck by the haunting melody and the lyrics that seemed so full of love and longing. Leon smiled, and I wondered what it would be like to create something so beautiful, almost out of thin air, with no lines or boundaries to keep you fettered and chained. “Last night I watched you sleeping so sweetly and thought how much I love you,” he said. “The song just came to me.”
“What’s the title?” I asked, my heart full of love for this strange, beautiful man who had become my whole life.
“ ‘Hummingbird,’ ” he whispered, leaning down to kiss me.
He flew first. It happened one night when I was feeling even sadder than usual and took some amphetamines to make myself feel better. I was sitting in front of the television, my arms folded tight across my chest (holding myself together), staring straight ahead. I was way too high, so high that my jaw was locked tight and I literally couldn’t speak. Leon sat with me for a while.
“Remember, No matter what happens, I love you,” he said as he stood up. He stopped at the door and watched me for a moment, then softly closed the door behind him. I don’t know how long I sat there, but after a while I started to think about his words. What did they mean? no matter what happens. No matter what happens? What was what? My heart was pounding out a drumbeat that made my head pound and sent the room spinning. I stood up, my legs wobbly underneath me, and went looking for Leon. He wasn’t in the upstairs bedrooms or bathroom. I walked downstairs. He wasn’t in the studio or the kitchen. I patted the puppies on the head, and they squirmed and wiggled with the attention. Every time I looked at those beautiful puppies, I felt guilty.
I found Leon in the living room, up against the wall, kissing one of the Oklahoma girls who was always hanging around. Her knees were bent, her back against the wall, and he was leaning into her, his arms wrapped tightly around her, his mouth pressed hard against hers. I don’t know how long I stood there before they sensed my presence. They both turned and looked at me. No one said a word. I went back upstairs and shut the door. Minutes later Leon came in and stood by the bed, looking down at me.
“It was nothing,” he said.
Nothing? I thought. It was over. I knew that. I’d figured it out, at long last. While I’d been losing myself, Leon was finding himself. His confidence was rising fast while mine was falling even faster. We couldn’t survive that. We didn’t have enough of a foundation to endure the disconnect between my self-pity and Leon’s soaring ego. And he had predicted it, after all.
I moved in with my new friend Eileen Basich, Denny Cordell’s secretary at Shelter Records, and stayed with her for a week. I knew it was over between me and Leon, but I was desperate to see him again. Every day I’d wait for Eileen to come home from the office so we could talk about Leon. He didn’t call me. I wouldn’t call him. I couldn’t sleep. I remember being in an elevator one day and not being able to figure out the buttons. I kept going up and down, stopping at floors to pick people up or let them off, and just continuing on, pushing buttons that were taking me nowhere.
I waited. Something would happen. I trusted that. Something always happened.
A week passed. I was asleep when the phone rang.
“Hello,” I whispered.
“Chris? Is that you?”
“Oh, Derek,” I said. I started to cry.
“How are you, luv? I’ve been thinking about you a lot this week and wondering if you were okay. I called you at the other number, but a man there gave me this number. Is everything all right?”
“No,” I said, trying to hold back my tears. “Leon and I have broken up. Everything is falling apart here.”
“Why don’t you come back?” Derek said. “Allen Klein is still in charge of things here, but I feel sure he’d give you your job back. I’ll help you in any way I can, you know that.”
I hadn’t even considered returning to England. But now it seemed like the only thing to do. If I was ever going to get back together with Leon, I’d have to find myself again. I’d have to go back and become that Pisces Apple Lady who had it all together.
“Okay,” I said.
A week later I was back in London. So much for white picket fences.