THE DAY Maxine Entwistle decided she had had enough was the day she went shopping in Beverly Hills. She had exhausted the exclusive boutiques in Rodeo Drive and returned, tired but happy, to the Regent Beverly Wilshire hotel to show her husband, The Who guitarist, John Entwistle, her purchases. But when she opened the door to their suite she was topped in her tracks. There, on the hotel balcony, her husband stood naked while a young blonde groupie performed a sex act. Maxine was struck speechless. She wanted to shout and go ballistic but she was so shocked not a sound came out of her mouth. She walked back out of the door without a word, knowing their 15-year relationship was effectively at an end. Uncertain of what to do next she called her mother-in-law, Queenie, expecting sympathy and advice but was told instead, 'John's a star. He's allowed to have a wife and mistress. They all do. All the wives accept it.' But not this one.
        Maxine Entwistle is devastated by John's death last month, of a heart attack in the arms of a woman in a Las Vegas hotel bedroom, but she cannot have been surprised by the circumstances. Last week a coroner ruled that a massive cocaine overdose triggered the heart attack. Although grieving, Maxine is glad she left John and the carnival that went with being on tour with a world famous rock band. She knew that otherwise, one day, she too would end up dead in an anonymous hotel bedroom hundreds of miles from home. It might have been an impure batch of drugs, a drunken fall or even suicide. But she knew that the debauched, debilitating excesses of the music business would get her in the end, just as they got John. Few people have seen the corrupt, morally bankrupt, world of rock up close in the way that she has.
        Today, for the first time, Maxine talks about the hatred and the bitterness that ran like a fault line through The Who, and that turned Entwistle, 57, and one of the world's most successful bass guitarist, into a shambling drunk racked with jealousy and consumed by a destructive self-loathing. She reveals the band's uncontrollable envy of Mick Jagger for the money he has made, which they never could, for his business acumen, which they never had, and for his continued success which they couldn't emulate. And she told me that despite The Who's image - in which Roger Daltrey, Pete Townshend and Entwistle had been the best of friends since adolescence - they couldn't, in fact, bear to be in the same room together and only came together for recording sessions and stage shows. Maxine also disclosed that although John had a 53-room Gothic mansion in Stow-on-the-Wold, Gloucestershire, and insisted on traveling only by private plane, he was in debt and worried that if he didn't earn more - in the form of huge advances - to support his lavish lifestyle he would be declared bankrupt. It was this terror, fuelled by an addiction to gambling, drink and sex, that persuaded him to go back on the road and that ultimately; she believes, led to his death. He needed the money that the tour would provide him with but tragically he had spent the £1million he had already been given, on gambling debts, before a single note had even been played.
        One mystery that still surrounds the death of John Entwistle in the Hard Rock Hotel in Las Vegas is the identity of the woman who was in the room when he died. Lurid reports have focused around private strippers and expensive call girls but Maxine, 46, is convinced they are inaccurate. The petite American who was married to John for eight years until their divorce in 1997 said: 'I am absolutely certain there will have been a woman but John never had to pay for sex.' John couldn't stand to be alone. He needed sex and loved being the big rock star. I haven't asked any of the band members whether there was a woman because, to be frank, I would be shocked if there wasn't. 'One day in LA he sent me and a friend out with some money to go shopping. I got back and the suite had two bimbos in it. I walked on to the balcony and there was John getting oral sex from another girl. I was just expected to tolerate it because he was a rock star.
        'People say it was a sad way to end up - alone with a girl in his room. But it wasn't the girl that was sad. It was the fact that he didn't want to be there at all. He had to do one last tour because he was broke. He knew he had high blood pressure and was at risk of a heart attack, but he ignored all the signs because he needed the cash. 'The tragedy is no one around him did anything. For all his fame and adulation, there was no one in his life who cared enough about him to get him the help he needed. 'The Who never saw each other unless they were working. Their egos were too big to be in the same room together.'

        MAXINE, who has successfully fought her own battle with alcohol, said: 'John was an alcoholic. When I last saw him two years ago backstage after a Who concert in Los Angeles, he gave me a big hug and told me how proud he was of me for getting sober. He told me: "I wish I had the strength to do what you did, but I don't." It was a cry for help. He should have gone to rehab. But he was in denial and those around him were too. 'He and the rest of the band were always going on about being jealous of Mick Jagger because of his money. The Who never made the multi-millions that Mick did. Mick had a great business brain and was notoriously tight with his money. When he was dating Jerry Hall she told me he made her pay for her own plane tickets and hotel rooms. John had money tied up in homes, but he was always broke. 'When I divorced John, everyone thought I'd get a huge pay-off. But he didn't have that sort of money.'
        But why did John Entwistle suffer more than other members of the band? Maxine paints a picture of a rock and roll victim. And certainly what had seemed attractive as an adolescent became desperate as a grown man. When The Who became successful, writing teenage anthems which chimed with their own adolescent feelings, such as Can't Explain and My Generation which includes the ultimate rallying cry, 'Hope I die before I get old', Entwistle was just 19 years old. Maxine realised just how desperate the band had become when, in their vain attempts to appear young, she witnessed them dying their hair in a hotel bathroom sink. She said: 'Both John and Keith (Moon) died their hair black. That was one of the things I stopped when we got together. I made John go to his real grey. It was more dignified.'
        At this stage, Entwistle would do anything to try to compete with the flamboyant members of the group. Moon was famous for driving limousines into swimming pools. Roger Daltrey had perfected the brilliant techniques of swinging his mike on stage like a lasso and Pete Townshend dazzled audiences with his athletic mid-air leaps white playing guitar. All Entwistle was required to do was stand in the background while the others stole the limelight. It was to depress him and inevitably - as with another bass player, Bill Wyman of The Rolling Stones - Entwistle began to resent his role as the band wallflower, forever left in the shadows. It was then that his addictions, the drinking, the gambling and the constant stream of women, took hold, while he stubbornly ignored warnings from his doctors about his dangerously high blood pressure.
        Maxine said: 'John had the reputation of being the quiet one of The Who but I brought him out of himself. We were soulmates. When we first met I wasn't a fan but John kept pestering me for a date but I refused a couple of times because I knew he was married and had a wife and kid back in England. But he was persistent and in the end I went out with him. We had an affair for a year while he was flying back and forth between his wife in England and me in L.A. But their marriage was over. In 1980 he asked me to move to England with him. First of all we lived in Pete Townshend's flat on London's King's Road before moving to the country to a mansion called Quarwood. It was a daze of drink and drugs and parties.
        'We lived sex, drugs and rock and roll. We would hang out with Jagger all the time. Bill Wyman was a very good friend. So were John Hurt and Michael Caine. We partied every night. We would go to clubs like Stringfellows and Tramp and it was champagne and pot the whole way. But I was anorexic and my body was messed up. I longed for a child with John but the doctors told me I would never be a mother.
        'I had started getting unhappy in the relationship. John was going away more without me. We got married on a whim on September 11th, 1991, but I knew as I was walking down the aisle of this tacky wedding chapel in Las Vegas that the marriage wouldn't last. An Elvis impersonator was our witness.
        'I hit rock bottom just a year later - on June 24, 1992. John was away with the band and I was in the wine cellar drinking everything but I wasn't getting drunk. Then I smoked some pot, but didn't get stoned. I was frightened. I thought I was losing my mind. The drugs and the drinking had become too much. I knew I had to sober up to survive. I went into rehab.'
        There would be no going back to their relationship that had begun in 1978 when she was a 22-year-old waitress at LA's infamous celebrity hang-out Rainbow Bar and Grill. In an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting Maxine met French count Thierry Curial de Brevannes with whom she had a brief fling and who is the father of her eight-year-old son, Oliver. She then went on to marry her second husband, marketing manager Richard Bolen, 54, and now lives in a modest wooden chalet home by Lake Tahoe, Nevada. But she still wears an enormous black pearl ring given to her by Entwistle as a reminder of past times, both sad and happy. Maxine said: 'I wanted us to he like Barbara and Ringo and detox together but John didn't want to give up booze. He loved drinking too much.'
        When Maxine became pregnant Entwistle was furious and filed for divorce. 'I think I humiliated him by getting pregnant by another man. But by the time the divorce was finally sorted out in 1997 we were friends again. 'We spoke on the phone every few months and I was due to see John on July 3 when The Who played San Francisco. Then John died. In the end, I went anyway and met Pete and Roger backstage. I think John and I would still be married if he'd sobered up. And I also believe that if we were still married he would be alive today. I loved him and would have taken care of him to the end.'
        Maxine did not attend his funeral last month in the 12th Century church of St. Edward in Stow-on-the-Wold, claiming she had to look after her son back in America. In truth, however, John's first wife, Alison, the mother of his 30-year-old son, and Lisa Pritchard-Johnson, his girlfriend of six years, did not want her there. It is a sad commentary, and yet a cliché of all rock stars, that at the end three women were fighting over his gravestone - and what little money there is left - for the guitarist has bequeathed all his assets to his mother, Queenie, and son, Chris.
        Perhaps tragically for Entwistle, he didn't die before he got old. He died a portly, grey-haired 57-year-old trying to live out the fantasies of a teenager while hating himself for it. It was, in truth, a far more tragic outcome than his cocaine-induced heart attack with a female stranger in an anonymous hotel bedroom, desperate though that is, too.