Dame Joan Collins remembers The Beatles’ famous rooftop gig like it was yesterday, but she has revealed she decided to Let It Be and leave before it ended – to escape overpowering drug fumes.
The Dynasty actress, 90, had a perfect view when the Fab Four put on the impromptu concert above their Apple Corporation HQ in London, on January 30, 1969.
As crowds gathered in the streets below, John, Paul, George and Ringo played for 42 minutes before the Metropolitan Police arrived and told them to turn down the volume.
But Dame Joan – who at the time was dating Apple Corps president Ron Kass and regularly hung out with the legendary band – had not stuck around.
She recalled: “I remember going up to the roof…for their last concert, when they played Get Back, but leaving before I succumbed to a contact high from all the marijuana being smoked.”
Instead, Joan left and picked up her children from school.
The Beatles also played a part when she met the Queen 13 years later – a moment captured by photographer Richard Young.
In her new book, Behind The Shoulder Pads, Joan writes: “I was presented to Queen Elizabeth and the Duke of Edinburgh…at the Royal Albert Hall in 1982 at a concert to celebrate The Beatles’ 20th anniversary. I was quite nervous.”
“A series of events had conspired to make me tense, but it didn’t show in the now-iconic picture. In the photo, my nine-year-old daughter Katy had just presented a bouquet to the Queen and was looking at her lovingly as I curtsied demurely.”
“I had just spoken the lyrics to John Lennon’s Imagine accompanied by the entire Royal Philharmonic Orchestra (as one does!).
“That in and of itself was numbingly scary, in front of not only the royals but 5,000 other elite members of the audience.”
Five-times married Joan wed Ron Kass, her third husband, in 1972.
They divorced in 1983, but by then Joan was playing Alexis Carrington Colby in Dynasty and was well on her way to becoming a global superstar.