Found after 50 years, the blonde who posed nude with the Stones
Now a mum of two aged 66, she admits without a blush that she was a groupie who slept with Jagger AND Hendrix — then got married to Meat Loaf
TH E scorching Sunday afternoon in october 1969 heralded the last gasp of a summer that had seen nearly 500,000 hippies gather for three days of peace, love and drug-addled wallowing in the mud at the Woodstock music festival.
The rolling Stones guitarist Brian Jones had died, Mick Taylor had joined in his place and the rest of the band had regrouped at a mansion in Los Angeles during their first U.S. tour in three years.
The Swinging Sixties were almost over — although Mick Jagger certainly wasn’t finished with hedonism as he enlisted the services of a naked blonde girl.
She would, he decided, make a photoshoot the band were doing with the British celebrity photographer Terry o’Neill just a little more exciting.
Those photos, which Jagger assured her would never be seen publicly, epitomised the raunchy glamour of the Stones.
Today, particularly since the advent of the #MeToo movement, images of a naked young woman sitting on the ground under the gaze of five clothed, older men seem unsettling.
But in the Sixties, it simply made the Stones look even cooler.
As for the 18-year-old girl, peering provocatively at the camera in some shots and with her back turned in others, she was identified only as ‘Angel’.
Many explanations emerged as to who she was and why she was there.
one suggested she’d jumped a wall into the garden and insisted on being in the photos because she was the Stones’ biggest fan.
Another report said the ‘little blonde admirer in a maxi-length knitted dress’ had just been passing when Jagger, ‘with the enthusiasm of a man ordering a British rail cup of tea’, had casually told her to ‘ get your dress off and get in the picture’.
Now, nearly 50 years later, the Mail has tracked her down. She is Leslie Aday (then Edmonds), no mere awestruck fan but the quintessential rock chick.
Her colourful history included flings with both Jagger (whom, in fact, she was dating at the time of the photo) and Jimi Hendrix, before she met and married rock star Meat Loaf.
No LoNgEr with the Bat out of Hell singer, real name Marvin Aday, 66-year-old Leslie is happy to reveal what really hap - pened that day with the Stones.
She had moved to California from New York state earlier in 1969 to work as a nanny.
Finding herself on the street, she was offered a roof over her head at the Stones’ mansion, which was owned by legendary singer Stephen Stills. The Stones management constantly struggled to find staff to administer to the band’s peculiar up-all-night needs, and that is where Leslie came in. She explains: ‘Someone would be hired but then they’d complain, saying, “We won’t make peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at three o’clock in the morning”. But that was oK by me.’
on the morning of the photo - shoot, she recalls getting up early mischievously: ‘If they’d been the Beatles, I might have known who they were.’
However, she got to know Jagger quickly and was soon having an affair with him.
‘How did they used to put it in the olden days? We had a scene,’ she says. ‘We had a lot of fun. We both had a similar sense of humour.’
Around the same time, Jagger was also ‘ having a scene’ with actress and model Marsha Hunt, with whom he subsequently had a daughter, his first of eight children with five different women.
PErHAPS this was why the Stones were keen to claim naked Leslie was just a random passing fan. Certainly a pattern for sexual conquests was already set.
In due course, Leslie noted that Jagger had become fascinated by a woman he had never met and described as ‘a Nicaraguan princess or something’.
The woman was Bianca PérezMora Macias. Leslie says: ‘He kept asking if I had ever heard of a woman named Bianca.’
History records that Jagger soon met the Latin- American beauty (who became his first wife) at a post- concert party in France the following year, in September 1970.
As for Leslie’s own fling with
Jagger, it only lasted a few weeks. She moved back to her Pennsylvania home in December 1969.
For their part, the Stones ended their tour with a big, free concert at Altamont in California. It became a notorious event in which four fans died in the drug and drink-drenched mayhem.
Meanwhile, the Stones’ Hells Angels security guards beat up fans — men and women — and caused one of the deaths by stabbing a young black man.
The band has never really lived this tragedy down. It wasn’t, however, the end of Leslie’s relationship with the Stones.
She reconnected with Keith Richards in 1977, in New York, spending Thanksgiving at his manager’s home, with Leslie cooking the turkey. By then she had a two-year-old daughter, Pearl.
Leslie recalls tackling Richards about the infamous nude photoshoot, saying she had felt ‘a little betrayed’.
She says he replied casually: ‘I think it’s a great ****ing photograph and you should be well proud of it!’
Although she has never made a penny from the picture, Leslie says all the Stones have used it to illustrate their autobiographies. As the epitome of the rock chick, she is happy to talk of her affair with Jimi Hendrix.
He performed at the 1969 rock festival at Woodstock, the town where she was living, and was part of its influential music scene.
She says she began cooking for him and their relationship moved from the kitchen to the bedroom.
‘Saying you dated Jimi Hendrix sounds silly,’ she says of the libidinous guitarist.
It was in Woodstock eight years later, in 1977, that she met Jagger again. She was assistant manager of the Bearsville Recording Studio — set up by Bob Dylan’s manager — where the Stones came to rehearse for a tour.
Leslie believes she may have been responsible for introducing Jagger to his second wife — Jerry Hall — after driving to the studio a group of women, including the Te x an model, as well as former Jagger lover Bebe Buell (mother of the actress Liv Tyler, whose father is Aerosmith singer Steven Tyler).
‘He was very interested in Jerry,’ she says of that day. ‘He just had big eyes for her.’ Leslie found her own rock ’n’ roll Mr Right two years later.
Meat Loaf booked the Bearsville studio to record the follow-up to Bat Out Of Hell, one of the bestselling albums in history. She met him on February 1, 1979 and they married on February 23. Of their lightning courtship, she says: ‘It seems now like one of the silliest things a woman could do.
‘I had a four-year-old child. I had the job I really wanted.’
But the marriage worked for more than 20 years. They had a daughter d Amanda, now an actress, and a Meat Loaf adopted Pearl (her daughter d with Janis Joplin’s drummer d Clark Pierson and who sang s in the Meat Loaf backing band b when they performed at the inauguration i ball for President Bill B Clinton).
Their marriage started to fall apart a in the late-1990s after Meat Loaf L achieved huge success with the t single I’d Do Anything For Love L (But I Won’t Do That).
Leslie blames their wealth and what w she calls ‘fameosity’ for starting s to pull them apart.
She says: ‘When a male mid-life crisis c meets a female menopause, it’s it a train wreck. And it was a big train wreck.’
Leslie now lives in Los Angeles while Meat Loaf has returned to his native Texas. ‘I really don’t know much about him any more, unless I hear little dribs and drabs from the kids,’ she says.
Tod ay, Leslie’s nostalgia for that famous Stones photo-shoot is marred by terrible memories of the group’s disastrous Altamont concert and the thuggery of the Hells Angels just weeks later.
The bloodshed ‘was a nightmare,’ she says. ‘That was the end of the Sixties.’