The Beatles’ secret Swedish holiday companion
Alexis Mardas invited a friend on the Beatles’ Greek island cruise – and her presence remained virtually unknown for six decades.
While researching the Beatles’ attempt to buy a Greek island in 1967 I’ve encountered a number of puzzling aspects – with one of the strangest being the evidence of an additional guest on the group’s visit to Greece.
Most accounts of the trip – including Paul McCartney’s authorised biography – name the same members of the Beatles’ entourage, numbering thirteen in total.
So when in 2023 I came across Greek newspaper reports of the visit, I was perplexed by a reference to another person: “a Swedish actress who kept her name secret”.
It was hard to know what to make of this mention. But it became even more intriguing in 2024, when footage shown during Paul McCartney’s live performances showed a blonde-haired woman walking behind George Harrison – seemingly on the Greek island of Monolia. Was this the same person?
Despite my attempts to solve this puzzle, her identity remained a mystery. Then this year, I received an email from someone who’d read my post, saying “the Swedish girl seen in the footage was my mother”.
Alexis Mardas’ Swedish friend
“She was not an actress,” wrote Peter Andreadis. “She was a Swedish art student at Konstfack, the University of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm.”
Peter proceeded to tell me the story of how his mother joined the Beatles in Greece, as he’d heard it from his family. As with most things involving Magic Alex, the events he related – both in the email and a later phone conversation – were both fascinating and surprising.
“In the 1960s, my mother and a friend answered an advertisement in a Swedish newspaper,” said Peter. “A Greek man had bought a car in Sweden and needed someone to drive it down to Greece. My mother and her friend agreed to do this and drove the car from Sweden to Athens.”
Peter didn’t know for certain if it was Magic Alex who placed the advertisement. “What I do know is that my mother met Alexis Mardas during the period when they delivered the car in Greece, and they stayed in contact after that.”
From Sweden to Rhodes
The location of Konstfack would prove to be significant for Peter’s mother, then called Ulla Elander. When walking to classes each day, she passed a travel agency, Caravan Touring.
She got to know the owner, Andreas Andreadis, who was selling charter trips to Rhodes – playing his part in the rapid growth of Greek tourism. Though Ulla didn’t know at that time that she would later marry Andreas, she bought a holiday ticket to Rhodes for herself and her parents – “partly to support my father’s travel business”, said Peter.
When Ulla was in Rhodes, Magic Alex contacted her at the hotel, saying “I have a ticket for you to Athens to join the sailing with the Beatles.” Her parents said, “Of course you should go” – so Mardas arranged for her to fly to Athens to join the group.
“The family always knew this story,” Peter told me. “It was never presented to us as a mystery.”
‘Captivating’
According to Peter, his mother was also “invited to come to India” with the Beatles in early 1968 – “but she didn’t want to – and maybe that is good, because if she did, I might not have been born.”
Ulla and Andreas began a relationship soon after the Greece trip. They based themselves on Rhodes, where Peter was born in December 1968, and married the next year. (He, his mother and his sister relocated to Sweden when war with Turkey in Cyprus broke out in 1974.)
Sorting his mother’s belongings after she passed away in 2024, Peter found newspaper clippings and photographs about the trip with the Beatles. Searching online for more information, he found my article on Follow the Sun and “immediately recognised the story and the woman in the footage”.
One of the articles that Ulla had kept - which I hadn’t seen before - spends several paragraphs discussing the “captivating Swedish woman” who accompanied the Beatles in Greece, making an impression with her “provocative mini-dress” and “daring bikini”. Unlike the other report, this newspaper didn’t say she was an actress - instead providing another inaccurate description of her as “the daughter of a major businessman”.
An official tourism source told the reporter that the woman “wishes to remain anonymous”. But in any case, the publication seems to have had difficulty distinguishing between Ulla and Paula Boyd – George Harrison’s sister-in-law, who was also on the trip. The article describes the Swedish woman as having “short hair” (true of Paula but not Ulla). And two photographs captioned as depicting this Swedish woman actually show Paula.
Hot feet, daily drawing and fish and chips
So was Ulla actually on the trip after all? Peter showed me photographs of her at around the same time which do indeed resemble the woman walking behind Harrison in the footage (who is definitely not Paula). In my view, these provide convincing evidence to back up the account he heard from his mother.
He also told me about some recollections that his family had heard from Ulla. On the yacht there was “a drawing hour every day”, for instance – and “Paul McCartney was a very kind person because he took care of Julian [John’s four-year-old son] on board” – including playing “Indian and cowboys”.
Ulla recalled that one person in the group – it sounds like Ringo – “didn’t like Greek food so much – so it was often fish and chips on the menu”.
“And an odd thing she said that was that George Harrison, while travelling in the limousine, had his feet outside the window all the time.”
With the newspaper cuttings Ulla had kept, there were also some photographs of the Beatles’ party at Arachova – where they took part in traditional Greek dancing – and Athens airport. Peter didn’t know who took these, but they are different to any in public circulation.
Distorted accounts
Memory is notoriously unreliable, and tales – particularly when they involve the Beatles – can get distorted over time. Often, people want to claim a bigger connection to the group than there actually was. But I’m not sure that’s what’s happened here.
In this case, the distortion seems to have come early – namely, in a detailed report of the Greece trip by Beatles insiders Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans for the fan magazine Beatles Book Monthly in September 1967. The article says “our holiday party numbered twelve people” as well as a “13th man”, Alexis Mardas. There’s no mention of a fourteenth member. This information seems to have influenced later accounts of the trip – such as Barry Miles’ The Beatles: A Diary (1998) and his authorised Paul McCartney biography in 1997.
There could be many reasons for the absence of Ulla Elander from Neil and Mal’s article. But despite what the magazine says, there’s convincing evidence that she was there. Her participation in the Beatles’ Greek holiday highlights the unpredictable influence of Magic Alex on the group at this time. And the fact that until now, very few knew about it underlines how the picture of the Beatles we get from band-adjacent sources is not necessarily complete – or completely trustworthy.