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Chris Hutchins, journalist who introduced Elvis to The Beatles and did Tom Jones’s PR

He wrote books packed with ‘unnamed sources’ about the Duchess of York, Diana and Prince Harry

Chris Hutchins, who has died aged 83, began as a reporter for the New Musical Express before founding his own PR company – occupations which allowed him, as he put it, to “get up close and personal” with pop stars and celebrities; this furnished him, when he became a gossip columnist for the Mirror titles and later for the Express, with a fund of stories – some of which may even have been true.
It was Hutchins who broke the story of the Duchess of York’s affair with the Texan playboy Steve Wyatt, and his subsequent book Fergie Confidential: The Real Story (with Peter Thompson, 1992) was full of tittle-tattle from unnamed “sources close to…” chronicling the Duchess’s love of partying, high jinks and crude jokes.
For his book Diana on the Edge (1996), Hutchins and his co-writer Dominic Midgley, in the words of the Sunday Telegraph reviewer, “pored over every newspaper clipping, TV grab and unsubstantiated rumour about Diana and her behaviour, and sent it off to a battery of shrinks for analysis…”
But Hutchins’s greatest claim to fame, by his own account, was as the man who brokered the one and only meeting between Elvis Presley and the Beatles, chronicled in his book Elvis Meets the Beatles (1994).
John Lennon, according to Hutchins, had been asking him to set up a meeting for some time, and the encounter eventually took place on August 27 1965 at Elvis’s house in Bel Air.
“Elvis had prepared a little party for when we got there, but it was rather stilted and felt too obviously set up by me and Elvis’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker,” Hutchins recalled. “Elvis hadn’t been keen when I first got in contact, saying to me: ‘You are just trying to get these boys some publicity off my back’.”
The atmosphere was awkward, “with John trying to lighten the mood by putting on an Inspector Clouseau voice, which just baffled Elvis”. It rapidly turned poisonous when Lennon spotted some table lamps in the form of model wagons engraved with the legend: “All the way with LBJ” – a reference to President Lyndon B Johnson, whom Lennon hated for his role in ramping up the war in Vietnam.
Knowing that any mention of Vietnam would lead to a row with the patriotic Presley and his entourage, a dozen of his “Memphis mafia” pals, Lennon instead gave him a dose of his “Liverpool lip”. When Elvis boasted that it had taken him just 15 days to complete a recent film, Lennon replied: “We’ve got an hour to spare. Let’s make an epic together.”
“Presley allied himself with the FBI director Edgar Hoover,” Hutchins wrote, “and [later] encouraged him to have Lennon thrown out of the US.” In 1970 the star even wrote to US President Richard Nixon, condemning the Beatle as “a real force for anti-American spirit”.
Presley’s dislike of Lennon, however, helped to cement a lasting friendship with Tom Jones, for whom Hutchins later worked as a PR agent. When Presley remarked that Lennon “should’ve been kicked out long ago,” the Welsh singer recalled that he too had had a run-in with the Beatle: “He made some smart remark at a TV studio in England, where we were appearing on the show Thank Your Lucky Stars. I wanted to take him outside and see what sort of hiding his intellect would stand.”
“For the first time that night, Elvis smiled,” Hutchins recalled.
Christopher Neville Hutchins was born on June 23 1941 and educated at Torquay Boys’ Grammar School. He began as a £2-a-week reporter on the Mid Devon Times before joining the NME in 1961.
He left the magazine the following year to travel to Hamburg as roadie to Little Richard, who was sharing the bill at the Star-Club in Hamburg with an up-and-coming band called The Beatles.
He befriended the Liverpool group, who called him “Crispy”: “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.”
When Hutchins rejoined the NME at the end of the year he was assigned to travel with The Beatles on their tours and given a column with the tag-line “Living with The Beatles”.
He joined them on their tours of the US in 1964 and 1965, and recalled how, on the first tour, the actress Jayne Mansfield turned up uninvited at the band’s rented mansion in Los Angeles and began pawing Lennon, apparently intent on seducing him. Lennon, he claimed, took revenge by secretly urinating into the cocktail which she had asked him to make her. The actress “drank it without any obvious displeasure”.
In 1966, Hutchins left the NME to found his own PR company. His first client was Tom Jones, and he would claim credit for persuading the singer’s manager, Gordon Mills, to play up his sexuality. Since Mills also managed Engelbert Humperdinck and Gilbert O’Sullivan, they became Hutchins’s clients, too. Others included the Bee Gees, Status Quo, the Moody Blues, Procol Harum and Eric Clapton.
For a time Hutchins employed the publicist (and later convicted sex offender) Max Clifford who, according to one unnamed source, Hutchins sacked after he came in one morning to find Clifford showing some hardcore pornographic photographs to a secretary.
Hutchins’s clients provided him with a fund of stories which he used after he closed his agency in 1976 and returned to journalism, causing a certain amount of resentment among those whose confidences he betrayed. The cover of Hutchins’s characteristically boastful autobiography, Mr Confidential (2005) featured a quote from Frank Sinatra: “Let me put it this way: your secrets are safe with this guy Hutchins, it’s the people he tells who tend to be indiscreet.”
In 1981 Hutchins began the gossip column “Chris Hutchins Confidential” in the Sunday Mirror. The column later moved to the Daily Express and subsequently Today, before returning to the Sunday Mirror – and finally Punch.
Hutchins’s other books include Athina: The Last Onassis (1996), Goldsmith: Money, Women & Power (with Dominic Midgley, 1998), Abramovich: The Billionaire from Nowhere (with Midgley, 2004), and Putin: A Biography (2012).
The publisher’s blurb for Harry: The People’s Prince (2013), claimed it had been written “with the help of a wide range of people from senior aides to humble members of staff, from aristocrats to bodyguards and protection officers, from friends of Harry’s to the not-so-friendly, from those who shared classrooms with him in boyhood to those he drank with. From girls he has loved and lost to soldiers who have served alongside him on the front line in Afghanistan”.
It was serialised in the Daily Mail, but somehow failed to merit a review in the broadsheets. His last book, however, Love and Death, about a French con man and suspected murderer, was reviewed in the Telegraph last month and described as “horribly fascinating”.
Hutchins is survived by his wife Gerri and by a daughter and son.
Chris Hutchins, born June 23 1941, died June 27 2024

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