Jimi & me: why Hendrix's ex-lover is taking on Hollywood

Kathy Etchingham first met Jimi Hendrix on the day he arrived in London in September 1966. She was 20, he was 23, and being managed by her friend Chas Chandler, a former bassist with The Animals, who’d invited her to meet Hendrix at the Scotch of St James nightclub where she was a DJ. Within minutes he was telling her, ‘I think you’re beautiful,’ and so began a three-year love affair.

They lived together in the Hyde Park Towers hotel in Bayswater and Ringo Starr’s flat in Montagu Square, Marylebone, before moving into a tiny flat on Brook Street, Mayfair. They socialised with Eric Clapton and the Rolling Stones, and she says she inspired several of his greatest songs including ‘The Wind Cries Mary’ (her middle name) and ‘Foxy Lady’. They remained on good terms after the breakup and she last saw him the day he died. She wrote fondly about their time together in Through Gypsy Eyes, published by Orion in 1998.

But Etchingham needs to get something off her chest. She is one of the principal characters portrayed in a new Hollywood biopic Jimi: All Is By My Side by the director and 12 Years a Slave screenwriter John Ridley, starring Outkast’s André ‘3000’ Benjamin as Hendrix and Captain America’s Hayley Atwell playing Etchingham. She saw the film at June’s Sydney Film Festival and is not best pleased. She believes both she and Hendrix are misrepresented in the film: him as a dark, twisted genius grappling with his inner demons, and she as a volatile, chain-smoking harpy. She’s particularly displeased about the amount that her character swears. ‘That’s one of the things about being educated in a convent: you learn to speak without swearing,’ she laughs. ‘And in the film I’m effing and blinding all the time.’ She believes the story the film tells is not in line with her account and ‘implies that I lied in my book. So I’m defending myself as much as I am Jimi’. Brook Street Films, the London-based production company behind it, has already responded to Etchingham’s complaint that she was not consulted by anyone involved in the production, stating via LA-based lawyers: ‘The Producers thoroughly researched all aspects of the Picture prior to commencing production, including elements concerning living people. Based on this extensive research, the Producers stand firmly by their portrayal of Ms Etchingham in the Picture.’

On first appearances Etchingham doesn’t come across as a bitter person. She’s friendly and welcoming, chatting about how the nearby train station redevelopment in her Melbourne suburb will revitalise the area. She lives in a spacious home with her doctor husband of four decades. There’s still a hint of the gamine waif who caught Hendrix’s eye, but otherwise she looks much like any other middle-class woman in her sixties.

When asked by ES why Etchingham was not approached by the makers of the film, Brook Street Films declined to give further comment. Etchingham’s face darkens when she talks about what she sees as Ridley’s attempts to rewrite the past. ‘Personal things [in the film] are just made up,’ she insists. ‘Yet you look at these reviewers, and of course they all think it’s true — this “complicated relationship”.’ In one scene a furious Hendrix beats Kathy’s face to a pulp with a telephone. It’s a pivotal moment in the film but, according to Etchingham, it never happened: ‘I seem to have a broken nose, smashed-in face, blood everywhere, and somehow apparently nobody noticed [at the time],’ she laughs. ‘I don’t know how Chas Chandler [who died in 1996] wouldn’t have noticed, since we all lived in the same place. And he would have had a fit.

‘And with injuries such as that, you’d have to go to the hospital. First thing the doctors would have done is call the bloody police. Jimi would have been arrested, and he would have been deported — he only had a work permit, he wasn’t a permanent resident. So the whole thing is ridiculous.’ Brook Street Films also declined to comment on whether any events in the film were fictional when approached.

The other scene that drew particular ire comes straight afterwards. ‘There’s this fictitious character Ida, and I say to her, “They’ve given me painkillers and sleeping tablets,” and she says, “Oh, don’t get them mixed up.” The next scene is me sitting up in a hospital bed, with Jimi sitting on the side of the bed and then he just sort of fades away. I think the suggestion is that I took an overdose,’ she smirks.

According to Kathy, any notion that Hendrix had a violent temper comes from one ‘discredited’ biography, Jimi: An Intimate Biography of Jimi Hendrix, by a former band mate Curtis Knight, now deceased: ‘In the early 1970s Curtis wrote a book in which he claimed he interviewed me and that I told him about Jimi beating me and all kinds of ridiculous things,’ she sighs. ‘He wanted to write a really sensational book so he threw a lot of crap around.’

So what was Hendrix actually like? ‘He was a really nice guy,’ she says. ‘He was really funny. He could mimic anyone. We had a lot of fun.’

Etchingham explains that she wasn’t even aware of the book until 1974, when she returned to the UK after living abroad. ‘My friend said “He says you’ve been interviewed; when did you do that?” and I said, “I didn’t.”’ She tells me the out-of-print book was pulped after she took legal action, and she thought that would be it. ‘And then along comes the internet and it’s like a worldwide publication again. How many times do I have to say, “I didn’t give him an interview, I didn’t say it.”? So now I’ve gone down in history as being volatile and tempestuous!’