July 1972–February 1973
I’d been flying east for the last two months, so without much thought I just kept going. After the tour ended, all the Stones went east—Mick went to Ireland, Keith went to Switzerland, and Bill and Astrid went to the south of France—and so I sort of followed along and went home. Home to Friar Park. Dead tired and strung out, I knew Pattie and George would take care of me.
From the moment I arrived, though, I pulled them into my druggedout craziness. On my second day, still jet-lagged and exhausted, I knew I needed some cocaine. I didn’t just want the drug—I needed it. My body was screaming for it. “I’d love to get some coke, wouldn’t you?” I asked Pattie, trying to be casual about it. We were having our morning tea in the kitchen.
“Mmmm. That’s sounds good,” she said, looking up at me from the shopping list she was making. I couldn’t quite read her expression.
“Do you know where we can get it?” I asked, holding my breath. This wasn’t a drug that Pattie and I had done a lot of together, and I couldn’t remember many times that we’d actually brought it to Friar Park.
“Well, I could call someone,” she said.
“Do you think George would mind?” I asked.
“Probably not,” she said with a little smile. “He might be up for a bit of fun.”
Pattie knew exactly who to call—someone at Apple, I remember that much—and we drove into London that afternoon. It was after dark when we arrived at the new Apple offices, housed in a modern three- or four-story building on St. James’s Street. We walked into the large office on the second floor and who should be there but Ringo and Harry Nilsson, straight from the set of Son of Dracula, relaxing with a drink and some cocaine of their own.
“Look who’s here!” Harry said when we walked in the door.
“Ah, well, if it isn’t the magnificent duo,” Ringo chimed in. “Come in. Join us.” He motioned to two chairs by the desk.
Music was playing, the lamps were lit, and the coke was laid out in lines on the desk. It felt so warm and cozy there, and it was so good to see them both after what seemed like a long time. They told us how much fun they were having filming Son of Dracula and encouraged us to visit the set later that week. The four of us sat around, snorting coke and chatting happily for an hour or so before Pattie and I headed back to Friar Park with our little packet of cocaine.
That night George, Pattie, and I drank Scotch, snorted coke, and played pool in the game room off the main hall. George and I stayed up long after Pattie had gone to bed, drinking and reminiscing. I told him stories about the Stones’ tour, focusing mostly on Keith Richard’s insane capacity for drugs and his ability to stay up for days without sleep, and George talked about the new songs he was writing. I remember thinking that this was the old George, the fun, light, mischievous George I remembered from my first days at Apple, almost as if the Bangladesh concert had released him from the cares and woes of the past. He seemed—happy.
Just as we’d promised, Pattie and I visited the Son of Dracula set. Ringo was dressed up as Merlin the Magician in a black robe with stars all over it, pointed hat, long gray hair, and a full beard (my heart lurched inside me because with all that gray hair he reminded me of Leon). Harry, handsome as ever, wore a black coat with a high collar, black suit and tie, and white shirt. I laughed as I watched Ringo and Harry joking around on the set, mugging for Pattie as she took photographs. Their play seemed so childlike and innocent, especially in contrast to the Stones, who always seemed to be precariously balanced on the edge of destruction with the drugs, the sex, and their “who gives a fuck” attitude. I felt safe and somehow reconnected with a more innocent world.
During a break in the filming Ringo introduced me to Hilary Gerrard, his financial adviser, a stick-thin man who wore his thinning hair tied back in a little ponytail and was dressed impeccably and expensively in a silk shirt, vest, and pinstripe trousers, a scarf casually tied around his neck, and spats. Though just eleven or perhaps twelve years older than I was, it felt like he belonged to another generation with his slight bows and “with all due respects.”
Hilary carried a strand of amber beads in his right hand, each the size of a large marble, and when he wandered off, a slight frown creasing his forehead, I asked Ringo if the beads had some kind of meaning or significance. I felt close to Ringo that day, almost as if we were old friends, in part because we’d had so much fun sharing cocaine a few days earlier but also, I’m sure, because he reminded me of Leon with his long silver hair. With that gray beard and pointed hat, Ringo looked very handsome, even regal. “Oh, they’re Hilary’s worry beads,” Ringo chuckled, obviously very fond of this rather eccentric man. “He must be very worried today because he’s clutching his largest beads.”
Worry beads! I loved that. And in all sizes! From the moment I met him, I felt a strong connection to Hilary. In many ways, he reminded me of Derek, who was so protective of me and concerned about my well-being, but while Derek was lighthearted and witty, Hilary tended to fret and fuss over little details. At the same time, once he made up his mind, he didn’t hesitate to express his opinion, always in a very civilized way of course. “With all due respect, sir, you are being fucking boring,” I heard him say more than once. I’d soon discover that Hilary would always tell me the truth. Sometimes it hurt, but I knew I could trust it. “No matter what role you have played in the rock-and-roll world, my dear,” he once told me, “at heart you will always be a smalltown girl.”
Worry beads, Merlin, Son of Dracula, Friar Park—part of me wished I could stay with Pattie and George forever, but I knew I didn’t belong there anymore. My life was somewhere to be found in between the fantastical extremes of the Beatles and the Stones, although I had no idea where to start looking for it. But I did know one thing for certain: I couldn’t bring George and Pattie into my cocaine-craving world. It was too dark, too dreary, and besides, I needed to find someone with a steady supply of coke.
I flew back to LA and reality struck. Coming off a tour is miserable business. You’re part of a tight little community that exists only for itself and then BAM! it’s over and everyone goes their separate ways. I didn’t love everything about the Stones tour, that’s for sure, but I hated not having Mick, Keith, Charlie, Bill, and Astrid around anymore. I looked for them in every face that I saw, confused by the sudden change of reality. They had been my family, dysfunctional as it was, and I felt as if a part of me were missing. I needed to rest and recuperate from the tour, but I missed all my friends and the loneliness was, at times, unbearable.
I remember reading something that Keith said about coming off the road and having to adjust to a whole new way of life. “The one thing I can’t handle is that sudden change in pace of living. I can handle it through slowing down or speeding up; that’s easy. But I just haven’t got any brakes.”
I didn’t have any brakes either. The drugs had just shredded the shit out of my brake pads.
I settled back into my apartment and developed a routine of sorts. I’d sleep late in the morning, often until noon, when I’d stumble out of bed and make a pot of strong coffee. An hour or so later I’d have my first snort of coke. That worked to take the pain away from the night before. I’d wait a bit, snort some more coke, and when I started feeling too edgy from the coke, I’d take a Quaalude. Around four or five in the afternoon I’d start drinking. Every once in a while I’d smoke a joint, and once I tried angel dust (PCP). It was horrible. I hated hallucinogens.
Long before I realized it, a vicious cycle had set in. Cocaine made me anxious, Quaaludes took the edge off, alcohol made it possible to do more coke, which required more Quaaludes and more alcohol, and on and on it went. I was always looking for that perfect balance.
For the first few weeks after I returned to LA, I hung out with Eileen, Denny Cordell, and Gary Stromberg, but things got bad in a hurry. The tipping point was the day I met Marshall Chess for lunch in the Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel. I was still getting a weekly paycheck from the Stones, but I didn’t have anything to do. Marshall wasn’t paying much attention to me because he was struggling with his own demons. Heroin was his drug of choice.
We sat at a small table for two out on the patio, surrounded by lush plants and flowering trees. Marshall was really twitchy. He played with his silverware, ran his hand through his hair (which seemed to me too long and a little greasy) while we talked for a while about the tour and what the Stones were doing now that they were back in Europe. Suddenly, he leaned across the table with a serious look in his eyes. I knew what was coming.
“Chris, there really isn’t a job for you now.” Marshall wasn’t the type to beat around the bush, but I remember feeling grateful because he was letting me down softly by taking me to the exclusive Polo Lounge, buying me an expensive lunch, and speaking in a sympathetic tone of voice, even as he went about the business of firing me.
“Yeah, I figured as much,” I said. I noticed that my hands were shaking, probably from cocaine and alcohol withdrawal, but at the time I figured it was nervousness about losing my weekly paycheck. The thought of being unemployed scared me. I ordered a salad and glass of wine, although I wasn’t hungry. After lunch we hugged good-bye and I drove home, locked the door, poured a drink, and chopped up a line of cocaine. I always wondered if Marshall knew I was in trouble with drugs. He was a heroin addict, true, but addicts are pretty good at identifying each other, even if they can’t recognize themselves.
So now I didn’t have the pretense of a job, let alone a job, and my life started spinning out of control. I continued to hang out with Gary, spend time in the evenings with Eileen, and with Denny Cordell at his beach house or the large suite he rented at the Chateau Marmont, a famous old hotel on the Sunset Strip. I was getting messed up more often than not, and the drugs began to affect my emotional and mental state. What was I going to do? Who would I work for next? If I’d descended the ladder, as I’d imagined when I stepped down from the heights of the Beatles to work for the Stones, what rung was I on now? The only way left, it seemed, was down, down, down. Maybe my future in rock and roll was over.
I was going crazy thinking about it. Sometimes I’d drive around town, looking at the houses I had rented for Mick and Keith, remembering all the great times we’d had together. Now the only thrill in my life was getting high. Drugs were my best friends; when I got sad or scared, when I needed something to make me feel better, they never let me down.
I began to hole up in my apartment. When Eileen or Gary called, I made up excuses to stay home. I was thinner than ever, my skin was a pale shade of gray and all broken out with pimples (I hated looking in the mirror), and the perm I got just before the Stones tour was turning to frizz. I’d sit and pull at the split ends for hours. I wasn’t aware of what day it was or even when the day began or ended because I was doing the same thing at almost every hour of every day—going up, coming down, going back up again. It got to the point where my only outside connection was the phone, but the phone hardly ever rang, and the only person I felt safe calling was Eileen. She knew I was taking too many drugs, but she never judged me or lectured me. Maybe she should have, because I was out of my skull.
One morning I tried to get out of bed and fell, hitting my head on the side of the end table and knocking myself out. I woke up lying on the floor with a walloping bump on my forehead. That week—or the next or the previous week, who knows—someone from the bank called and said they were repossessing my car if I didn’t make a payment. “How dare you call me at my house?” I said in the most indignant tone I could muster. They had invaded my private space, I thought, slamming the phone back into the receiver.
I had no trouble getting drugs. One of the backup singers I knew had introduced me to an inner-city dealer who supplied me with anything I wanted. He wasn’t one of those Hollywood types, the sleazy, slick guy who will get anything for you because he wants to be “in” with Mick or Keith or John or George or whoever. This was the real deal, a guy from the “hood” who wasn’t impressed by anyone or anything. He just sold drugs.
One time he stayed the night.
“I’m too stoned to go home, baby, I gotta stay,” he said after we’d snorted a bunch of coke. That was the night he brought out the PCP and encouraged me to try it. We were both in bad shape, and he crashed on the sofa.
In the middle of the night his girlfriend called. He must have given her my phone number.
“Let me talk to my old man,” she said.
“He’s sleeping,” I said, hanging up the phone. I was so out of it. I’d taken a few Quaaludes to calm down from the PCP, and nothing was registering in my brain. The next morning, sometime around noon, the drug dealer stumbled into the kitchen where I was making coffee.
“Hey, your old lady called this morning,” I said.
“What! What the fuck did you tell her?”
“I told her you were asleep.” I yawned, wanting him to leave. Immediately. Now. I felt sick with the guilt and shame of getting so out of it and letting this lowlife stay in my place.
“Why the fuck did you do that? Why didn’t you wake me up?” He was yelling at me. His old lady was going to give him hell.
“Look, I’m not responsible for you. Why don’t you just leave.” I was standing in the kitchen in my bathrobe, eyes bloodshot, head pounding, stomach heaving. All I wanted to do was take a bath and wash away the whole experience.
“You stupid bitch,” he said, slapping me hard across the face.
I was so stunned I didn’t even feel the sting. He left, slamming the door and yelling “bitch” at me one more time.
I sat on the sofa, my head in my hands, in the depths of despair. I was a fucked-up chick getting slapped around by a drug dealer. How could I get any lower than that?
But drug bottoms are bizarre things. You think you’ve hit the bottom, and then there’s a trapdoor that opens and you fall through another floor. Those trapdoors just keep opening. As low as you think you can go, there is always something waiting down below, something much worse, much darker, blacker than night. It’s shame so intense you can taste it, smell it, feel it on your hands, on your body, like grease or paint. And the pain is physical, in the belly and the soul, an aching despair created by the things you’ve done that you never thought you were capable of doing.
I met a guy outside of the cleaner’s on Santa Monica Boulevard one day and invited him to my house. He was young and cute. He started coming over every day, and we’d snort coke and take Quaaludes. I thought we were developing a relationship. One day he came over with a video camera and asked me to pose nude. At first I agreed. I knew it was wrong, but I wanted him to like me. But then he told me he had a different kind of videotape in mind: he wanted me to have sex with his brother so he could film it.
I couldn’t do it. Maybe there was still some innocence left, something good inside me that wouldn’t let me cross that line. I closed the door behind him and never saw him again.
I needed help. But where could I go, who could I trust? I didn’t know where to turn. I couldn’t face my parents or my sister. I knew they loved me and would do anything for me, but they had no idea that I had gotten into drugs. I just couldn’t tell them the truth. I couldn’t turn to my friends, either. What would they think of me if I told them a drug dealer had slapped me around, or that a guy I’d met on the street tried to talk me into doing a nude video?
I was too ashamed to ask anyone I loved for help. I couldn’t even look at myself in the mirror. I’d made such bad choices. That’s what I figured was wrong with me: I’d made these terrible, irresponsible, self-destructive choices. I knew I wasn’t an alcoholic—I’d seen Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick in The Days of Wine and Roses, and I wasn’t anywhere near that bad. Drug addicts live in deserted buildings and sleep on filthy mattresses. I had a nice apartment, a car, rich and famous friends. I’d made bad decisions, I’d lost my self-respect, I was filled with shame and self-loathing, but I believed I still had some control.
I picked up the phone and made an appointment with John Kappas, a hypnotherapist who had helped me through some rough times in the past. John would figure out what was wrong with me. He’d help me understand what I needed to do to get back on my feet again. And sure enough, John offered me hope and direction, explaining that our subconscious mind sometimes gets programmed in ways that lead to harmful, self-destructive behavior. Hypnosis, he reassured me, can change that subconscious programming to create more desirable behavior. I wasn’t sure exactly how it worked, but I trusted John completely and I always felt so much more relaxed and focused after a hypnotherapy session.
One more trapdoor, though, was waiting to open up beneath me. The day of my hypnotherapy appointment, I was feeling shaky and out of control and took two, three, four, I don’t know how many Quaaludes to calm myself down from the coke. I started to walk down the stairs of my apartment to my car, but my legs were rubbery, my eyes wouldn’t focus, and the stairs seemed to change shape before me. I sat down on the top stair, looked down at the floor below me, and knew I wouldn’t be able to walk down those stairs. They were too steep. Somehow I stumbled back to my apartment. I dialed Eileen’s number, but she didn’t answer. I called John’s office.
“This is Chris O’Dell,” I told the receptionist. Her name was Chris, too. “I’m having a hard time getting there.”
“Are you okay?” she asked. I was slurring my words.
“No, I’m not,” I said. “I’ve taken too many drugs and I can’t drive. But I have to see John. Please don’t give my appointment away. I’ll find a way there.”
Making it to that appointment felt to me like a life-or-death situation. Maybe it was. I called Eileen again and then I tried Gary, but neither of them answered. I didn’t have any other friends in LA that I trusted. Who could help me?
“Wait a minute,” I said out loud. I could call the limo company that the Stones used when they were in LA. I’d become friends with Walter, the manager of the company, and I knew most of the drivers. They liked me there.
I looked in my phone book and found the number.
“Hey, Chris, how’s it goin’?” Walter said.
“It’s okay,” I lied. “Listen, remember when you told me that if I ever needed a limo for myself to call and you’d do it for free for me?” I have no idea what those words sounded like to him, but that’s what I intended to say.
“Sure,” he said. “I remember.”
“Well, I need a limo to take me to the Valley.”
“Sure, just say when and I’ll have one there for you.”
“Now,” I said.
“Now? I’m not sure I can get one that quick, Chris.”
“You have to, Walter. Please. I have an appointment. I have to get there. I’m desperate. Please.”
I sat in my apartment, waiting. I was already hours late for my scheduled appointment, but Chris had agreed to hold it for me. I just had to get there. That’s what I kept repeating to myself. I have to get there, I have to get there, I have to get there. That was all I had to hold on to as I slowly made my way down the stairs to the front door of the apartment building.
At last the driver appeared. I sat slumped in the backseat barely able to keep my eyes open.
“Are you okay?” the driver asked, looking at me in the rearview mirror.
“Yeah, I’m okay,” I said, slurring those three simple words together. I was trying so hard to stay focused.
“Listen, I can take you to a hospital,” he said with real concern. I think he was afraid I might die in his backseat.
“No!” I actually shouted the word at him. “Just take me to the address I gave you.”
He shrugged his shoulders and kept driving. Half an hour later I felt the limo come to a stop.
“We’re here,” the driver said, turning around in his seat. “I’ll help you in.” He walked me to the door of John’s office and seemed a little spooked when he read the sign on the door, “Hypnosis Motivation Institute.” I told him I could make it the rest of the way, and he sped off in the limo.
I opened the black door leading into the reception room with its familiar black furniture and red carpet. Chris smiled up at me with no hint of annoyance that I was several hours late. She took my arm, gently, lovingly, and led me straight into John’s office.
I sat down on the recliner and minutes later John came into the room.
“So, what’s going on with you?” he asked, a look of concern on his face.
“I took too many pills, I think,” I said, closing my eyes and drifting off to sleep.
“Okay, well let’s put you into hypnosis,” he said soothingly. That was all I remembered.
“Zero, one, two, three, four, and five, and wide awake.” With those familiar words, slowly, with a little bit of a struggle, I opened my eyes. I was amazed how good I felt—no more nausea, no more drowsiness, no more shaking.
“I feel so much better,” I told John. He was so compassionate, so caring and empathic, that I found myself wanting to be like him.
“John,” I said, braving the question in my mind, “do you think I’d make a good therapist?”
“Why not?” he said with a deep and rare kindness. “You’ve experienced it all.”
Maybe that will be my future, I thought. Maybe someday I will have a stable job with a meaningful purpose, helping other people get over their problems. It was a dream, a glimmer of light in a dark, dark place. Then reality hit. How could I ever hope to dedicate my life to helping others when I couldn’t even help myself?
“I think I have to quit using drugs and alcohol,” I said in that moment of self-revelation. “I think I have a problem.”
There. I finally said the words. If I wanted a future, I had to give up the drugs.
“That sounds like a very good idea,” John said.