When he later told her what was really in the drink Mansfield tried to hit him

John hated to be touched uninvited and took revenge by violating her drink

She yanked at his distinctive 'Beatle mop' haircut and asked: 'Is this real?'

When I first became friendly with The Beatles, we had three things in common: we were crazy about rock 'n' roll, short of cash and permanently hungry.

It was this latter state of affairs that led Ringo Starr and me into a highly embarrassing encounter with legendary American rocker Little Richard.

It was November 1962 and I had taken a temporary job as Richard's roadie. At the time he was sharing the bill at the Star-Club in Hamburg with this up-and-coming band known as The Beatles.

Then 22, I was around the same age as John, Paul, Ringo and George, and we hung out together in Little Richard's dressing room, washing amphetamines down with strong beer and cadging steaks paid for out of his fat salary.

That was how we usually got by, but one night Richard and his keyboard player Billy Preston invited Ringo and me to his hotel suite for 'supper'.

Chris Hutchins recalls how Hollywood starlet Jayne Mansfield (pictured) once turned up at John Lennon's house 'intent on seducing him'

She yanked at his hair, which John Lennon 'could not bear', so he 'took revenge' by peeing in the cocktail he made her

Alas, this turned out to be some dried-up sandwiches and it soon became clear that our hosts had other ideas about how to entertain us.

In a bid to emphasise our heterosexuality, Ringo told the story of the worst date he'd ever had back in Liverpool, a trip to the cinema where the only seats he could afford were right in the front row, looking straight up at the screen.

'We sat there for three hours with our necks aching. Funny, I never saw her again…' he recalled.

WHY ELVIS HATED THE BEATLES Early in my career as a music journalist, I struck up a telephone acquaintance with Elvis Presley's manager Colonel Tom Parker. The Beatles began asking if I could arrange for them to meet 'The King'. I engineered a meeting in August 1965, which was to be marred by John Lennon's inability to curb his cutting 'Liverpool lip'. This summit took place at Elvis's house in the exclusive LA neighbourhood of Bel Air. All went well until John spotted a table lamp with a slogan in support of America's then President, Lyndon B. Johnson. A fierce opponent of the war in Vietnam, John regarded 'LBJ' as a warmonger responsible for the slaughter of innocent civilians, and this endorsement was unforgivable. Knowing any mention of Vietnam would lead to a political argument in which he'd be outnumbered by the patriotic Presley and his entourage, he chose instead to belittle his host. When Elvis boasted it had taken him just 15 days to complete a recent film, John sneered: 'We've got an hour to spare. Let's make an epic together.' Stunned, Elvis held his tongue but started a highly personal vendetta against the Beatles. This would be fuelled by his suspicions about their increasingly shaggy appearance, and the inclusion of Karl Marx's face on the cover of the Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band album in 1967. To Presley, this offered proof they were druggies and 'a real force for anti-American spirit', as he wrote to President Richard Nixon in 1970. Although Nixon and the FBI were apparently sympathetic to his demands that the Beatles be barred from the U.S., the Beatles had powerful friends of their own. John eventually made his home in New York, only to be shot dead there by a crazed fan in December 1980. It's strange to think if Elvis had succeeded in banning him from the U.S. he might still be alive today. Advertisement

I chipped in with talk of the girl I was going to marry and, in a lull between all this macho banter, we made our escape.

Keeping out of trouble was never easy with The Beatles, who called me not Chris but 'Crispy', and allowed me to get up close and personal with them during the heady days of Beatlemania.

Eventually reporting for the magazine New Musical Express with the tag-line Living With The Beatles, I was assigned to follow them wherever they went — and none of their tours was more memorable than their first coast-to-coast trip to the States in the summer of 1964.

As in Britain, they were pursued by hordes of adoring females, and not just screaming young girls. Even the biggest names in Hollywood appeared desperate to see what a Beatle looked like in the flesh — literally so in the case of famously bosomy actress Jayne Mansfield.

Late one night, she turned up uninvited at The Beatles' rented mansion in Los Angeles.

I was there alone with John, the others having disappeared to actor Burt Lancaster's house to watch a movie, and the woman who had briefly been America's best-known sex symbol was clearly intent on seducing him.

'Is this real?' she asked at one point, tugging John's hair, styled in the distinctive Beatle mop.

'Are those real?' he replied, dropping his eyes to her enormous breasts.

John was a dedicated womaniser. The sexual traffic flowing in and out of his hotel bedrooms exceeded that of any of the others in the group.

But as much as he loved women, he hated the way The Beatles were treated as novelties, rather than real people, and he couldn't bear to be touched uninvited by strangers.

This prompted him to take a horrible revenge upon Mansfield, secretly peeing into the cocktail which she had asked me to mix her and watching with delight as she drank it and pronounced it 'a real humdinger'.

Eventually tiring of her attentions, John hustled her out of the house, but later she turned up at the nightclub where we had joined George and Ringo for a drink.

There John whispered to Jayne what had really been in the Beatle Special, as he called it, and we were forced to make a hasty and undignified exit as she went to hit him.

As always, getting away wasn't easy. Outside, the police were manhandling huge crowds who seemed to have an unerring sense of where their idols would be.

The strain such attention placed on John had been apparent even before our plane landed in San Francisco, the first of the 25 cities in which they were to perform.

Later when John Lennon (second from right) and Chris Hutchins went to meet Ringo Starr (left) and George Harrison (right) at a nightclub, he told Mansfield what was really in the drink

Over many a Scotch and Coke on that flight, he told me he'd had premonitions about dying in tragic circumstances. I knew he was serious, having seen him soaked in sweat even before a concert, terrified of facing an audience.

These fears perhaps explained his cruel reaction when one determined female fan managed to charm her way past a cordon of guards at the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas and made it to the door of The Beatles' suite.

'Hi, guys, I'm Donald O'Connor's daughter,' I heard her say as I was enjoying a drink with the band.

It took me a moment to work it out, then I realised that her father was the actor most famous for playing Gene Kelly's sidekick in Singin' In The Rain. The guards had been sufficiently awed to let her in but John was unimpressed.

'Oh, I'm sorry love, I really am,' he said. 'Just heard on the radio about your dad. You must be grief-stricken.'

Mr O'Connor's daughter was taken away in hysterics and it was left to someone else to give her the good news that her father was alive and well. Not all the attention The Beatles received was unwelcome.

To Elvis Presley the Beatles' increasingly shaggy appearance 'offered proof they were druggies and a real force for anti-American spirit'

When we reached New York, they were confined to their hotel suite for much of the time, including the evening I went out to see the film Spartacus with their road manager Neil Aspinall. When we returned that night, I was just about to unlock my door when Neil whispered: 'Come and look at this.'

JOHN MADE JANE ASHER CRY - THEN PAUL SEDUCED HER The Beatles quickly got used to fans screaming hysterically during their early performances, but nobody had ever seen a mob like the one which greeted their exit from London's Royal Albert Hall following a concert there on April 18, 1963. According to the next day's newspapers, that was the night Beatlemania was born. While a crowd of fans blocked the path of their limousine, several climbed on to the roof of the car. The noise was frightening and I should know because I'd squeezed in alongside them — and regretted it almost immediately. Eventually the police managed to clear a path for their getaway but not before several helmets had been sent flying. The problem was, where to go next? The Ad Lib club off Leicester Square was their usual nightly haunt but, as a very nervous George Harrison pointed out, hundreds of fans would already be making their way there. 'You can come back to my flat,' I volunteered — rashly, given I was renting a bedsit on the King's Road. I hadn't planned on entertaining four guests and the number swelled to seven with the arrival of singer Shane Fenton (later known as Alvin Stardust, now sadly deceased), his girlfriend Susan and 17-year-old actress Jane Asher, who had been at the Albert Hall to interview the Beatles for the Radio Times. You had to climb three flights of stone stairs to get to the flat. There were not enough chairs, so we all sat on the carpet and swigged from bottles of Mateus rosé, then the sophisticated drink for the young in this posh part of London. Soon John grabbed the small bottle of amphetamines sent to me by my mother from our home in Torquay, to help me keep awake when I drove from London to see her. They were prescribed for slimming but we took them as 'uppers' and tongues quickly loosened as they took effect. That was bad news for Miss Asher, who was bombarded with some offensively intimate questions by John and soon began quietly weeping. After that party-killing interrogation, it was left to Paul to escort the flame-haired beauty back down the stone steps and into the night, beginning a relationship which saw them together for the next five years. Advertisement

Through the doors of The Beatles' grand rooms we beheld a strange sight. Seated on five chairs arranged in a line were the Fab Four and their manager Brian Epstein, all stoned.

Every now and again a man standing at one end of the line would push the closest Beatle off his chair and, in domino effect, each would knock the

next one off, ending with Brian who would collapse to the floor laughing helplessly, setting the others off. It was a surreal scene, made more bizarre by the fact that the man doing the pushing was Bob Dylan.

This was the kind of celebrity encounter The Beatles might have dreamed about when I'd met them two years previously, but Dylan had to visit them because it was too risky for them to leave the hotel to see him.

'It's all right for you Crispy,' John once said. 'You can go out walking with your wife and live a regular life. I bloody can't and it looks as though it's going to be that way for ever.'

His frustrations were apparent in his description of audiences as 'mobs' and his scorn for people who imitated Beatle fashions.

On one occasion, he could not conceal his contempt when a TV news bulletin reported that showbiz stars including Steve McQueen were flocking to a Hollywood barber specialising in Beatle haircuts. 'And McQueen was one of my heroes. How soft can you get?' John snorted.

He was equally disdainful when it was reported that those without sufficient hair of their own — among them J. Paul Getty, then the world's richest man — were wearing Beatle wigs. The only rich person John was impressed by was billionaire Howard Hughes and, as I had discovered on that trip, his fascination with Hughes had nothing to do with his vast fortune.

Back in Vegas, he was intrigued to learn Hughes had been living at the resort's Desert Inn hotel for the past year. Occupying all the luxurious suites on the ninth floor he had remained holed up there, seeing no one except for his staff.

John was determined to see Hughes' hiding place. And when the band's security team refused to take responsibility for any Beatle venturing beyond their guarded suite, he enlisted me in a plan to disguise him in a hotel doorman's coat, with his hair tucked up beneath a braid cap.

In the early hours of one morning, we smuggled him out through the hotel kitchen and drove to the Desert Inn where John stood by the roadside, gazing in awe at the heavily curtained ninth floor.

'That would suit me,' he said. 'In one place for ever, instead of all this travelling. Total privacy, nobody to bother you, scream at you, poke your hair or ask what your favourite colour is. I'd just love to meet him and tell him I understand.'