Nettie (left) with Ginger and his late ex-wife Liz on holiday in Acapulco in 1967. Photo / Supplied
Nettie (left) with Ginger and his late ex-wife Liz on holiday in Acapulco in 1967. Photo / Supplied
Even by the hedonistic rock and roll standards of the 1970s, it was an outrageous proposition.
As an intimate group attending a party at Eric Clapton's Surrey mansion prepared to play a game of pool, George Harrison made his wishes clear – the prize should be the 15-year-old daughter of legendary Cream drummer Ginger Baker.
In a revealing new memoir, Nettie Baker says she "nearly choked" at the suggestion, but was further shocked when Harrison then tried to "buy" her for £2,000 (NZ$3,900) later the same evening, reports Daily Mail.
The episode took place in 1976 at Clapton's Hurtwood Edge home and more than 40 years later, Nettie recalls it vividly.
"People were laughing and taking it in good part when George said it and I was thrilled to be the centre of attention – but that was because I was young."
I am not going to condone the behaviour of men in their 30s to teenage girls – because it's wrong. George's remarks definitely crossed the line in a way that people would be more careful about now.
"Nothing terrible happened, but I realise now that was exactly how guys got away with it: because a lot of girls were too young to deal with it."
Nettie, now 57, recalls: "After asking my age, George Harrison decided I should be the first prize in a game of pool. Later that evening, he offered to pay my dad £2,000 for me – and I nearly choked."
The deal was never struck, of course. The party, which had a Twelfth Night theme, was attended by Clapton's then-girlfriend, Pattie Boyd, her ex-husband Beatle Harrison and his new girlfriend, and Nettie's parents Ginger and his first wife Liz, who brought her along.
Could Harrison have been joking?
Nettie recalls: "After asking my age, George Harrison decided I should be the first prize in a game of pool. Later that evening, he offered to pay my dad $3,900 for me." Photo / Getty Images
Nettie will never know. But her life had certainly become far from predictable. She had to grow up quickly around the heroin-addicted Ginger and a volatile mother with an undiagnosed personality disorder, who fought like cat and dog.
"It was never consistent parenting – you never knew whether they were going to be OK or go mental," says Nettie, whose upbringing included fending off the bailiffs and phoning 999 during her parents' fights.
When Nettie was asked to leave the private school Heathfield at 15 because of newspaper headlines about Ginger's drug taking, her polo-mad father asked her to groom his horses full-time.
The polo field was where rock's top echelon mingled with real royalty.
As she recalls in her book, Nettie would find herself dancing at the same ball as Prince Charles and his then girlfriend Lady Sarah Spencer – Diana's sister – and making friends with Sarah Ferguson, the future Duchess of York, through her father 'Ronnie' Ferguson.
"Sarah and I got on well – she always wanted to know what was happening at my house, while I dreamed of meeting a rich and handsome polo player to look after me. I was always looking for an escape."
Yet alongside the showbusiness glamour was the crazy stuff, such as fair-skinned Nettie getting badly sunburnt with big blisters at six years old while her oblivious parents were high on Acapulco Gold cannabis bought on the beach.
And then there was the most ominous member of Ginger's in-crowd: the late John Bindon, the charismatic gangster and occasional actor in such films as Get Carter who provided security for Led Zeppelin, was the lover of Jemma and Jodie Kidd's aristocratic aunt Vicki Hodge, Prince Andrew's one-time squeeze, and even boasted of having slept with Princess Margaret (who denied it) in Mustique.
After a fall-out with Ginger, Bindon threatened to kill his horses – and even his family, as Nettie belatedly found out when Ginger asked her to ghost his book Hellraiser.
"Bindon and his friends really scared me," shudders Nettie, who was introduced to him at 16 in a Worlds End pub in London's Chelsea.
"My parents were obsessed by gangsters – I don't know why."
Ginger with his wife Liz Baker. Photo / Supplied
The first time I met Nettie was through a mutual friend in 2013 at the small terraced house in downtown Harrow, North London, where she was living with, and caring for, her mother until Liz's death from recurring cancer of the colon in March 2014.
It was a far cry from Camelot, the name of the detached mansion with a swimming pool in upmarket Harrow-on-the-Hill, that Ginger had bought for the family when he first became famous.
With Liz battling in vain to get maintenance for the two younger children, the family ended up with none of the multi-million pound fortune that Ginger lost through hard drugs, naivety and disastrous business ventures, including an ill-fated music studio in Nigeria and polo farms in America and South Africa.
The flashy cars such as the two Jensen FFs and other rock-star trappings had long gone.
Even Eric Clapton, who had conquered his own heroin and alcohol habit that he describes in his 2007 autobiography, had to bail Ginger's family out at one stage, only for Ginger – according to Nettie - to spend it on the horses.
"It was no fun being married to a womanising junkie," Liz once memorably told me.
"I always liked Eric, who was more sensible than Ginger, and I got on with Jack [Bruce] too. But Ginger was so wilful that he used to say to me, 'If you don't do what I want, I'm going to overdose'."
Nettie herself never took heroin, having been warned off it by Ginger himself in one of his more responsible moments and also seeing for herself a "horrifying" junkies' den to which a tearaway friend once took her.
"I had only seen rich people taking drugs, I hadn't seen the dark side of it, the other world - and the squat was a shock, full of pathetic monsters," she tells me.
She has had her own share of wild times, as her book acknowledges, but these days she says she hardly drinks and never takes drugs.
After Liz died, Nettie and her sister and brother – Amsterdam-based IT specialist Leda, now 50, and US-based drummer Kofi, 49 – sold the house and contents, including the table at which the "very quiet and respectful" rock guitarist Jimi Hendrix once joined the family for dinner.
For a while Nettie owned a houseboat on the Thames but now lives in a small flat five minutes away from her beloved aunt, Ginger's sister Pat, as she works on writing projects, including a second volume of her memoir out next spring, while running Ginger's website – www.gingerbaker.com - as the keeper of his flame.
"It's really important to me to preserve the cultural legacy of Cream and his other bands," she explains.
The party was attended by Clapton's (right) then-girlfriend, Pattie Boyd (left), her ex-husband Beatle Harrison and his new girlfriend. Photo / Supplied
Though Nettie never managed to land the wealthy polo player of her youthful dreams, she was married for a while to the late musician Michael Lewis and is still close to her in-laws.
Their daughter, Zara, was born in 1992 and now also lives in Normal Land as the campaigns manager for the Leonard Cheshire disability charity, recently singing in their choir in front of Chancellor Philip Hammond at the Royal Academy as her mother tells me with delighted pride.
"I don't have to worry about her," she says of Zara, who is Ginger's only grandchild; he has had no children by his three other wives.
"I have loved Dad at times in my life but I feel incredibly angry with him in a lot of ways," admits Nettie.
"He's a parent who always chooses his partner over his children, whereas although she was difficult to live with, my mother never did that. He's done kind things for us at times and hasn't been completely bad, but all three of us would have liked a closer, better relationship with him.
"I think Dad should have been more supportive to my brother Kofi when he followed him into drumming, but he's like that Fast Show sketch character, Competitive Dad.
"Yet I suppose that's what made him famous, that competitive edge", she shrugs philosophically.
In her book, she writes about how she was 'lured by the false promise of fun, fame and glory, discarding my education and career, only to end up in mouldy bedsit land.
"Dad told us twice that there would be loads of money waiting for us – and of course it wasn't true."
The expectation of an inheritance can act as a serious brake on ambition, of course, and Nettie is the first to admit that for years she just lived for the day, never thinking about providing for her future – unlike her best friend Janet "from Normal Land", as Nettie puts it, in whose beautiful South-East London house Nettie prefers to meet me for this interview rather than her own much more modest home.
"If you decide you're just going to have a laugh and no one tells you how to make money, you can end up like me. You don't live in fairyland, although I've tried! And I was lazy, really, I can't blame other people for me not having been particularly ambitious," she says.
"But I think you get traumatised without realising it, what with the chaotic family life with Ginger so often away touring and then the split between my parents. So I can see why I went in the wrong direction."
George Harrison (left) and Eric Clapton (back) perform at the Prince's Trust Rock Concert with Elton John. Photo / Supplied
To her credit, she went back to full-time education in her 30s, gaining a first-class English degree from Queen Mary College, London, followed by an MA, and now hopes to develop a writing career that will end the cycle of dead-end jobs and the dole – which Ginger first urged her to go on in order, so he cynically explained, to get back some of the supertax he'd paid during the good times.
"I'm very bad at earning money," confesses Nettie, who wishes now that she had gone to university much earlier and embarked on a proper career.
Yet although Nettie's story is in many ways a cautionary tale of how rock and roll excesses can impact on the family, it's also a story of survival.
(Quite literally in her case, since she has not only overcome cervical cancer in her 20s but also survived her mother's attempt to abort her with pills back in pre-fame 1960 when Liz and Ginger were desperately short of money).
Not that Nettie does self-pity. 'I don't see the point of it – a lot of people have had to learn that hard lesson. And I have been very lucky,' she says.
"As a young person, I wanted to enjoy myself – and I have."
"We were poor/rich/poor/rich/poor – it was like a light switch flicking every day, so you had to be adaptable," she recalls.
"It's taught me to get on with everyone from a council estate to a private estate, so being poor has been good for me in a way. Being too sheltered from reality with too much money and fame is bad for you."
These days Nettie says drinking doesn't agree with her any more and she never takes drugs.
"My parents' generation was very naïve about drugs," she says.
"Mum told me that when I was very small, Dad would say to me, 'Take a puff of this – it's much better than cigarettes'.
"And he made the mistake of thinking heroin would be the same as cannabis. I've had a lot of experience with drug addicts and they're not my favourite people; let's say I'm not very sympathetic," she adds.
"You have to have had a really hard time – like having to fly Spitfires in the war at 19 years old or seeing your child die – for me to feel sorry for you."
Meanwhile the resourceful Nettie is planning to turn the short life of the 18th-century poet Thomas Chatterton, subject of her MA dissertation, into another book that has already attracted a publisher's interest.
Chatterton, immortalised in death by Henry Wallis's famous pre-Raphaelite painting, died at 17 from a drug addiction - a subject on which this rock-star's daughter can claim to be something of an expert.
