From Bad to Worse[I]
On the afternoon of Friday, August 25, 1967, the platforms and waiting rooms of Euston Station were jammed with travelers of all sizes and ages. It was a hot, suffocating day and the pitiful excuse for air-conditioning gave off only sticky whiffs of dampness, raising the temperature in that human pressure cooker to an ungodly swelter. To make matters worse, trains were insufferably late. Every few minutes the same emotionless voice crackled over the public address system, trying to convince the ornery mass that salvation was only minutes away, but nobody, not even a conductor, was willing to believe it.
Then the unexpected proclaimed itself. A fretful clustering had developed near one of the side entrances. A phalanx of bodies sliced smoothly through the crowd, a maneuver sudden and effortless, coinciding with a unanimous murmur—Ooh!—from those nearby. Bursts of recognition, heavy with excitement, echoed through the hall: The Beatles! Impossible. Not in public, certainly not in a common rush-hour train station. Wide-eyed passengers converged from all directions, determined to get a better look at the men traveling by themselves, dragging luggage and elbowing their way toward the distant Platform 8.
The night before, during their introduction to the Maharishi, an invitation was extended to the Beatles to attend a Transcendental Meditation seminar he was giving at University College that weekend. A midnight message was left for Ringo, who hastily arranged to sneak away from Maureen, with her blessing. Brian was also invited, John making the call himself.
As far as Brian was concerned, meditation was the last thing he wanted to participate in that weekend. He was desperate, if anything, to raise a little hell. For the past ten days, his mother had been a houseguest at the Chapel Street flat. She’d moved in with Brian immediately following Harry’s sudden death in July, and together, mother and son endeavored to put their lives back on track. In the opinion of Brian’s chauffeur, Bryan Barrett: “It was the best damn thing that ever happened to him.” Queenie woke him early each morning and they discussed their daily plans over breakfast. Then, Brian dressed in a suit and, for the first time in ages, put in long days at the office. There was no prowling about after sundown, no multidrug highballs. Evenings were spent quietly in each other’s company. They were very attentive, very content. “Each night, I drove them to dinner, and often to the theater,” says Barrett. “He was like the old Eppy again, sharp, focused, and in control.”
It was a good thing, too, because there was a lot on the company drawing board. There was the “Magical Mystery Tour” project that Paul was still hounding about; another Beatles single to schedule with EMI (it would be “Hello Goodbye”); the Stigwood/Shaw deal to untangle; a staging of three short comedies by novelist Saul Bellow in which Brian had invested $14,000; and more—much more. “That very weekend,” says Tony Barrow, “he’d finally gotten confirmation from the BBC that Cilla Black would host her own major TV series, which was quite extraordinary, and he was in the process of trying to get hold of her to relate the news.” Meanwhile, Brian and Nat Weiss were preparing to release an album by lanky folk heartthrob Eric Andersen, as well as signing Harry Nilsson to a recording contract. And there were plans for a trip to Toronto, where Brian was seriously entertaining an offer to host a weekly television show. But right now Brian wanted some action, and to that end he invited Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis to Kingsley Hill, where they planned to meet, according to Brown, “four or five young, amusing guys to distract us for the weekend.”
As expected, it was a mob scene at Euston Station. The Beatles had arrived in their chauffeur-driven cars and those inconspicuous psychedelic clothes they favored. In addition to Cynthia, Jane, Pattie, and her sister, Jenny, they’d cobbled together an entourage that included Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and Donovan. And just in case they felt unnoticed or out of place, thirty or forty reporters had converged on the party as they made their way to the train.
Somehow as they raced along the platform, Cynthia fell behind the others a step or two. “I was struggling… with the hand baggage, trying to keep up,” she remembered in a subsequent interview. “In front of me, the others leapt on the train. I moved forward, arms full, to follow them, when suddenly a policeman was barring my path.” Stammering, she identified herself as Cynthia Lennon, but he’d already turned back a dozen other Cynthia Lennons.
Ahead of her, oblivious, John swung himself jauntily up onto the train. A long blast on the whistle drowned out Cynthia’s cries as the heavily laden train chugged forward, out of the station.
Inside, the Beatles bundled into a parlor car adjacent to a first-class compartment containing the Maharishi, who sat lotuslike, in statuesque repose, on a mat strewn with flowers. George drew the blinds and lit incense, while the others, tense yet exhilarated, filled the overhead rack with baggage and got settled. As everyone found seats, it dawned on John that Cynthia was missing.
Frantic, he wrenched open a window and leaned halfway out of the train, squinting to find her in the dispersing crowd. Cynthia could barely make out the words as her husband’s pleadings were swallowed by the train’s roar. “Tell him to let you on!” John shouted. “Tell him you’re with us!” But it was already too late. They were too far apart, without any chance of the train coming to a stop. Peter Brown put an arm around an inconsolable Cynthia Lennon as the caboose disappeared in the distance. He assured her that she could hitch a ride to Bangor with Neil Aspinall, who was driving north later that evening. But Cynthia knew in her heart that though she’d eventually rejoin the gang, her train had finally pulled out of the station.
An expanse of concrete and sun-bleached brick, surrounded by acres of lawn, the University College—or Normal, as it was known—spread across a leafy fringe of Bangor like an abandoned sanitorium. As the school was currently on holiday, the Beatles and their mates were quartered in one of the empty nondescript dormitories, a far cry from the luxurious suites they’d occupied on tour for the past few years. “It suddenly felt as if we were back in school again,” recalled Marianne Faithfull, who shared the others’ excitement about the unglamorous atmosphere.
The freedom they felt was exquisite. There were no handlers, no press, no fans, no obligations. That night, in a show of solidarity, the entire entourage went to a local Chinese restaurant for dinner, where, unrecognized by the staff, they talked with real gusto about the protocols of meditation and the significance of receiving a mantra. No one really knew what to expect, and perhaps to combat the feeling of the unknown, they grew catty and made snickering references to their eccentric Indian guru. “There were already some misgivings being aired about the Maharishi,” Faithfull recalled. “We’d heard from Barry Miles that the word in India was that [he] was suspected of certain financial improprieties and sexual peccadilloes, and also an obsession with fireworks.”
The following morning everyone was introduced to the seminar’s cross section of participants, of which there were nearly three hundred—most of them strangers—as well as to the resident staff instructors. The initial sessions were devoted to the basics of meditation, which, for inveterate movers and shakers, was a difficult concept to absorb. “You just sit there and let your mind go,” John explained in his characteristic stripped-down style. Of course, for John, who dropped acid, then zoned out for hours in front of the television, that might have been a snap, but Paul found it difficult to concentrate. His head was cluttered with too many ideas and projects that competed with the spiritual process. “You spend all your first few days just trying to stop your mind dealing with your social calendar,” he recalled.
Everything changed, however, after they received a mantra, the mystical form of incantation that guides a meditator, “like a prescription,” to a higher level of spiritual consciousness. The password or phrase was conveyed in a private ceremony on Saturday afternoon, during which the Maharishi encouraged all students to “immerse themselves completely in the energy of the soul, to make contact with it and establish a fathomless level of consciousness.” Except for a few handicapped cases, all participants took off their shoes and entered a fragrant, candlelit room, where they deposited a few stems of flowers at the guru’s slippered feet. After a brief Hindu prayer was intoned, the Maharishi whispered a handpicked mantra in the disciple’s ear, along with advice that he or she was never to share it with anyone. “It has been specially chosen to harmonize with your personal vibration,” he said. Weeks later, after the novelty had worn off, Mal Evans divulged that his mantra was I-ing, at which point everyone discovered they’d been given the same word.
After a casual lunch on Sunday, the famous friends bounded in and out of one another’s dorm rooms, expressing their views with cautious fascination and looking for corroboration. No one was sure what to make of it all, but they were surely onto something important. John couldn’t resist comparing the Maharishi’s message to inhaling a potent drug for which “you get a sniff and you’re hooked.” Even Mick Jagger, who was a very bright, sensible, and extremely cautious young man, viewed the seminar with an enthusiastically arched eyebrow. Suggestions were made to invite Keith Richards and Brian Jones.
About three o’clock, in the hallway, the infernal pay phone started to ring. Again. No one paid it any attention, thinking it would eventually stop. After an interminably long and noisy stretch, however, Jane Asher excused herself to answer it.
“Jane,” the voice on the other end said, “it’s Peter Brown. Could you find Paul and put him on the phone?”
Peter Brown: The last thing Paul wanted that day was to speak with anyone from NEMS, but if there was Beatles business that needed immediate attention, then he was the only one suited to take care of it. As it turned out, however, this was business of the kind that even Paul was incapable of processing.
Brian had so looked forward to the weekend “divertissement” that he skipped the Beatles’ send-off to Wales and headed straight for Sussex in his precious Bentley convertible. There were too many last-minute details that required his attention—an alluring dinner menu, drugs, recreation, discreet sleeping arrangements. The invitees were young, rugged East Londoners and naive, which intrigued him. Things could get rough, which intrigued him even more, although it would be difficult explaining that to Geoffrey Ellis, who, by Peter Brown’s definition, was “something of a tight ass.” But when the boys canceled at the last minute, Brian lapsed into one of his depressions. Peter says he could tell instantly upon his arrival that Brian was in a “dark mood.” He was “drinking and stoned, very disappointed that there wasn’t going to be any action.” Even so, they all sat down to a very civilized dinner, a leg of lamb and root vegetables, served by the staff. “Many bottles of wine” were consumed, along with brandy after the meal. It didn’t take long until the three men found themselves “sitting there, looking at each other with boredom.” About ten, after calling around London trying to drum up other action, Brian announced that he was going for a drive. “Don’t worry about me,” Brian assured them. “Go to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”
Brown suspects that Brian drove back to London, stopped off at home, made a few calls, then cruised around the city’s usual gay haunts. He obviously found something to amuse him, because on Saturday he didn’t wake up until after five in the afternoon. “Brian called us just after that,” Brown recalls. “Clearly, he’d just woken up, because the sleeping pills, those infernal Tuinals, were still in his system and he was slurring his words.”
“I’m sorry for fucking up the weekend,” he apologized. “I’ll try and come back later.”
Brown, sensing that Brian wasn’t in any condition to drive, suggested that he take the train—a forty-minute trip to Lewes Station, where someone on the staff would pick him up. But Brian never showed up—and never called.
On Sunday, Brian’s housekeepers—Antonio and Maria Garcia—grew concerned that the Bentley, which had been parked at the curb late Friday evening upon its return from Kingsley Hill, hadn’t been moved. They called Joanne Newfield, who thought nothing of the matter. “It wasn’t unusual for Brian to go in his room and stay there and take some pills and… check out for twenty-four hours,” she thought. Indulgently, she told them not to worry and thanked them for the call. After lunch with her mother, however, Joanne decided to drive over to Chapel Street “just to make sure that everything was okay.”
When she arrived, about twelve-thirty, the house was immaculate and still. There were no telltale signs of an orgy or a rowdy boys’ party. Joanne summoned Antonio from the basement staff quarters; together, they went upstairs and knocked on Brian’s bedroom door: no answer. That wasn’t unusual, either, but when Joanne couldn’t rouse her boss on the intercom, she became alarmed. The intercom was in the phone, but you didn’t have to lift the receiver to speak into it. Even when Brian was completely out of it, he usually managed a few choice words. Apologetic to a fault, Joanne called Kingsley Hill and eventually reached Peter Brown, who had gone to the Merry Harrier pub in Cabbage for a drink before lunch.
“I’m going to have [Antonio] break the doors down,” Joanne sighed.
Brown, however, pleaded with her to wait. They’d broken down doors before, which only made Brian furious. Instead, he suggested that she contact Brian’s doctor, Norman Cowan, whose specialty was keeping these indiscretions quiet. But Cowan was away for the weekend, so she called Peter’s doctor, John Gallway, a young gay man who would know how to deal with Brian once they got him up and around.
Throughout the unendurable wait for Gallway’s arrival, Joanne and Antonio continued to beat on Brian’s door. Joanne also called Alistair Taylor, who only half an hour earlier had gotten off a plane from California, where, at Brian’s instructions, he’d gone to walk Cream through a visa problem at the American embassy. Frantic, she explained how Brian refused to answer his door. Taylor, a veteran of two previous suicide false alarms, felt no misgiving. (Once, in 1966, Brian had called him “to say goodbye.” A heartsick Taylor rushed right over, only to find him sitting up in bed, reading, with an annoyed look on his face: “What do you want?”) “So? What’s new?” he responded now to Joanne. Alistair assured her there was nothing to worry about, but Joanne begged him to hurry over. “Oh, Joanne, I’ve been flying all night!” Besides, he’d “drank the Pan Am 707 dry on the flight back” with Cream, he was out of uniform (in sandals, a denim shirt, and jeans), and he lived in Clapham, a neighborhood quite a ways out of town. Still, there was something in her voice that disturbed him. “All right,” he relented. “As soon as I can get a cab.”
John Gallway arrived at Chapel Street at 2:45, a few minutes before Alistair, and spoke on the phone briefly with Peter Brown, who decided it was time to break down the door. Gallway and Antonio put their shoulders into the task. Alistair Taylor rushed up the stairs just as he “heard the door give.”
“Just wait outside,” Gallway advised Joanne as he entered the darkened chamber, but Joanne didn’t want to wait and stood inside the doorway of the outer dressing room, holding her breath. Directly in front of her, she could see Brian’s tiny pajamaed figure in shadow, lying eerily on his side. Blood streamed from his nose. Nothing stirred; the room was perfectly still. As Joanne remembered it, Gallway examined Brian for a few minutes—although he probably didn’t take more than a few seconds—and when he turned back to her she noticed that all the blood had drained out of his face.
“Is there any brandy in the house?” he asked Antonio. “I think we should all go down to the study and have some brandy.”
Gallway walked past Joanne, who was rigid, “in total shock,” and picked up the phone receiver, which was dangling off a table. “He’s lying on the bed,” the doctor told Peter Brown, “and he’s gone.”
Alistair Taylor walked slowly into Brian’s room and lightly, mournfully, touched Brian on the shoulder while Antonio’s wife, Maria, sobbed in the hall. Afterward, everyone assembled in the study to gather their thoughts. “It was some time before we called the police,” Joanne remembered, “because we wanted to make sure that things were okay in the house—that there were no substances for them to find.” They combed through Brian’s study, tidying up this and that, and waited for David Jacobs, Brian’s lawyer, who was already on his way, via fast train, from Brighton.
Alistair said: “We’ve got to get hold of Clive before Queenie hears about this on the radio.” But no one answered the phone at Clive’s house. In the interim, the doorbell rang. Thinking it was the police, Taylor answered without looking through the peephole and came face-to-face with Mike Housego of the Daily Sketch. “What are you doing here on a Sunday?” the reporter wondered. “Oh, you know what Brian’s like,” Taylor responded too quickly. He looked past Housego and wondered whether the garage door was shut or if he could see the Bentley in its space. “Oh, that’s a bit weird,” said Housego. “We heard he’s ill.” “Nooooo! He’s fine. He’s got a bit of a headache. That’s why he’s gone out.”
A few minutes later another reporter called. The police must have passed the word to them, Taylor figured, making it more urgent than ever to contact Clive Epstein. “This is going to break,” he told Joanne. “The press aren’t stupid. If Queenie hears it over the air, we are in trouble.”
He finally reached Clive at home and broke the news. “There’s been an accident,” Alistair remembers telling him. “Oh—not… not Brian,” his brother stammered. “Is it bad?” Alistair hesitated. “Clive, he’s dead.” Clive Epstein’s reaction was unforgettable. “There was a big scream—a horrendous scream. I’ll never forget it to my dying day.” Joanne Newfield could hear it over the line, from across the room.
Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis left Kingsley Hill immediately for London, with stolid Geoffrey behind the wheel, racing the car like a madman along the Eastbourne Road. First, however, Brown had placed a call to David Jacobs at his country house in Hove—it was presumed that Jacobs would know how best to deal with the police—then followed it with the call to Bangor. “The Beatles had to be told before anyone else, and I didn’t want them to be told by the press,” Brown recalls. “They had to be protected. The press knew where they were; there were photographers in Bangor. I thought they should all come back to their guarded situations in London as soon as possible.”
“I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’ve got bad news,” Brown told Paul when he came on the phone. “Brian has died.” Brown thought Paul’s reaction to the news of Brian’s death was “noncommittal” but says, “Then I suppose he was stunned. Paul never said how terrible a blow it was or how sorry he felt. It must have been confusing, following, as it did, two days of purging the spirit of material energy.” The boys had known little or nothing about the state of Brian’s health or the extent of his emotional unraveling. Later, at a hastily arranged press conference on the Bangor campus, Paul managed to express the group’s reaction: “This is a terrible shock. I am terribly upset.” But in the “confusion and disbelief” that followed the phone call, there was only numbness.
What could they do? Who would they turn to for advice? For the moment, Paul recalled, the Beatles “traipsed off to the Maharishi,” who was holding court in his inner sanctum amid piles of wilting flowers. “Our friend’s dead,” they told him. “How do we handle this?” Because Hindu theology dictates that mortals not focus on death but in the transcendence of the spirit—the soul’s moving on to another plane—the Maharishi disdained any comments about Brian’s physical death. Instead, as Ringo remembered, he advised them not to try holding on to Brian, “to love him and let him go,” so that his soul could continue on its upward journey. “You have to grieve for him and love him, and now you send him on his way.”
John put it into layman’s terms when he faced a crush of agitated reporters sometime later that afternoon. “Well, Brian is just passing into the next phase,” he told the stunned press corps, which had never heard such mumbo jumbo. “His spirit is still around and always will be. It’s a physical memory we have of him, and as men we will build on that memory.” But deep down, John remembered thinking: “We were in trouble then.” True, Brian’s business edge had been dulled badly by his drug addiction and demons. But he still provided some glue and, in a scene increasingly populated with Magic Alex types and vampires, he could provide some ballast. John admitted feeling “scared” about the Beatles’ ability to function, to remain together as a group, without Epstein’s instinct and finesse. Indeed, as soon as the news of his death had struck home, John thought, “We’ve fuckin’ had it.”
Eventually, the press descended on Chapel Street like jackals. Alistair Taylor, dog-tired and “in shock,” remembers staying long enough to “fend off the first wave.” He refused to let anyone in, but finally even Taylor couldn’t handle the relentless crowd on the sidewalk. “There was nothing more I could do,” he recalls. Slipping out the back, he went around the corner to a pub whose name he cannot recall. Mike Housego was at a table by the window, nursing a pint. “And I poured my heart out to Mike. Everything I ever felt about Brian came pouring out. Everything!” The reporter just sat and listened, without taking out his notepad. Finally, Alistair asked: “Are you going to print all that, Mike?” Housego shook his head mournfully. “I never asked you to talk,” he said softly. “That’s not an interview, mate.” And not a word of it has ever appeared.
Nothing about the death had been heard backstage at the Saville Theatre, where at 7:30 that night the latest entry of “Brian Epstein Presents…” was playing before a packed house. Jimi Hendrix was headlining, with the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Keith West’s Tomorrow as the opening acts, and collectively the combos were burning up the place—literally. Arthur Brown had been electrifying crowds by setting his hair on fire during his finale. And as for the headliner, there was no shortage of excitement.
“We did the first show, which was really great,” recalls Tony Bramwell, “but I noticed that Brian hadn’t taken his box yet.” He’d usually sit in the royal box with friends, and between sets he’d make a rather grand entrance to have drinks with the artists at a bar at the side of the stage.
They were just about to start the second performance and were letting the audience in when there was a phone call backstage saying that Brian had been found dead. “We thought it wouldn’t be right to carry on with the show,” Bramwell says with typical understatement, “so Eric Burdon, who had stopped by to watch Jimi, went out into the street and told the crowd that the show was canceled, Brian Epstein was dead.” Brian’s name was up there on the marquee. He’d been a fixture on such shows as Juke Box Jury and Desert Island Discs, a recognizable part of the scene. In no small way, he’d revitalized the British pop music scene, giving rock ’n roll its most identifiable sound since Elvis Presley hit the turntables. All of this registered as the news of his death rippled along the line outside. Tony Bramwell says the crowd’s collective response was palpable. “The kids put their heads down and walked off in absolute silence.”
All evidence indicates an accidental overdose. His bedroom door had been locked from the inside, and pages of correspondence and amateur poetry lay scattered about the floor. The police recovered seventeen bottles of assorted pills in the bedroom, plus a residue of brandy shellacked the bowl of a crystal snifter found on his night table. “I believe it was an accident,” George Harrison concluded. “In those days everybody was topping themselves accidentally by taking uppers and/or amphetamine and alcohol—loads of whiskey or brandy and uppers… and that’s the kind of thing that Brian did.” Paul, who heard the rumors of “very sinister circumstances,” also believed “it was a drink-and-sleeping-pills overdose.”* Suicide—threatened before—seemed out of the question. Says Alistair Taylor vehemently, “His father, Harry, had died only six weeks before, and Brian would never have done that to Queenie—not in a million years, no matter how down he was. It just wasn’t in the man.”
What was in the man, however, was enough of a substance called carbrital to kill a small horse. Norman Cowan had prescribed the drug on two occasions for Brian, along with Librium and Tryptizol, issuing large amounts of pills, he told the coroner, “because he was off on holiday and Epstein needed drugs to tide him over.” It was impossible not to be suspicious, and the authorities were. “Our main concern was to convince the coroner that it was an overdose and not a suicide,” recalls Peter Brown, who starred in the witness box at the inquest on the morning of September 9, 1967. Brown and Norman Cowan also planned “very carefully” to claim Brian’s body immediately upon delivery of the official verdict and have the funeral the same day. To avoid a media circus in Liverpool, they had arranged to transport the enameled black coffin there directly by limousine and to bury Brian before sunset, as Jewish custom dictates, before the press expected the funeral to have taken place. Everyone else would come by train, except for the Beatles, who had been asked not to attend for fear they would attract a large crowd. Brian Epstein was all of thirty-two years old. On a lovely summer night, he finally got the one thing that had always eluded him: eternal peace.
[II]
In the days immediately following Brian’s death, various factions began assembling to wrest control of his music empire. “There was a big power grab,” recalls Alistair Taylor, who watched the action raptly from the sidelines. “The infighting was awful. Vic Lewis, Robert Stigwood, Peter Brown—the knives were out. Everybody wanted control of the Beatles.”
Incongruously, Brian had left no will designating an heir, but his chairman’s share of NEMS legally passed to Clive Epstein, who, according to most observers, wasn’t equipped to run the company. It was clear that Brian had wanted Stigwood and his partner, David Shaw, out of the picture and had begun proceedings to ensure against their proposed takeover of NEMS.
In the ensuing mad scramble for control, no one bothered to consult the Beatles about replacing Brian Epstein. Incredible as it might seem, Stigwood had never even met the band. “In fact, the Beatles were shocked to learn that Brian had planned to sell NEMS,” Brown recalled. This was the first they’d heard that their management situation was in play—and they weren’t happy, to say the least, about the prospect.
On Friday, September 1, 1967, only four days after Brian Epstein died, Paul rounded up the Beatles for a meeting at his house to jump-start his plans for a Magical Mystery Tour. When the others pulled up in front of Cavendish Avenue, late in the afternoon, Paul was waiting for them at the front door with his sheepdog, Martha, panting by his side. “Let’s go upstairs to the music room,” he said. “There is something we should get to without delay.”
He wasn’t kidding when he said “without delay.” Despite lacking a concrete plan, a crew, or even a basic script, he wanted to begin filming Magical Mystery Tour right away, that very week. The Beatles had flirted with leaving for India over the weekend in order to pursue their study of Transcendental Meditation, but Paul convinced them that it was more critical to consolidate their business interests and to keep the band visible. No one had the foggiest idea of what their legal and financial obligations were, he argued. “They didn’t know where any of the money was,” Neil Aspinall recalled, “they didn’t have a single contract for anything with Brian, not with a record company, not with a film company—Brian had them all.” And they had no idea where he kept them. What is more, they only had a beggar’s stake in NEMS, leaving them dependent, for the time being, on the business decisions of others. “It didn’t make them vulnerable,” Neil insisted, “but it did make them realize that they had to get it together…. [T]hey needed an office and an organization of their own.”
Paul’s Mystery Tour scenario was achingly simplistic. It was diagrammed on a single sheet of paper he’d first shown to Brian Epstein back in May. The entire blueprint was contained in a circle divided into eight segments labeled as follows:
1. Commercial introduction. Get on the coach. Courier introduces.
2. Coach people meet each other / (Song, Fool On The Hill?)
3. marathon—laboratory sequence.
4. smiling face. LUNCH. mangoes, tropical (magician)
5. and 6: Dreams.
7. Stripper & band.
8. Song.
END.
There was no more to it than that; everything else—the look and feel of the project—existed entirely in Paul’s head. “John had spent an afternoon in his swimming pool thinking up ideas for the script,” an insider reported; otherwise, it was going to be improvised on the fly.
At least a Magical Mystery Tour dealt with elements they were capable of putting to use. Music, for one. Every film needed a soundtrack, especially one that necessitated the Beatles’ lip-syncing to certain sequences. There was already a title song in the can, as well as “Your Mother Should Know” and “The Fool on the Hill,” which Paul had written while visiting his father in March, during the Sgt. Pepper’s sessions. He had a fat reserve of songs in his arsenal—John has said as many as twenty, but that is most likely an exaggeration. As John recalled, “[Paul] said, ‘Well, here’s a segment, you write a little piece for that.’ ” That put tremendous pressure on John to contribute, a task he wrestled with over that pulpy, hot weekend. However, when the Beatles entered Studio Two on Tuesday evening, ready to roll, it was evident that John had come up with a killer.
“I Am the Walrus” is pure Lennon fantasy, written, he claimed, over the course of two acid trips. The lyric is based on Lewis Carroll’s “The Walrus and the Carpenter” from Through the Looking-Glass, which John considered “a beautiful poem,” although he pleaded ignorance when it came to the political undertones in the narrative. What fascinated John was the mazy wordplay of the original piece, which he used to form his own literary pretzels twisting around a cloud of psychedelic imagery. “Corporation teeshirt, stupid bloody Tuesday man…” “Crablocker fishwife pornographic priestess…” “The words don’t mean a lot,” he admitted; they are mostly nonsense, having no more substance than the mantra “Goo Goo Goo Joob” that rounds out the chorus. Of all the imagery, only “I am the eggman” has a basis in personal experience, a reference to a 1966 orgy he attended with Eric Burdon, who earned the nickname for breaking raw eggs on girls during sex.
The session itself was chaotic—George Martin graded it as “organized chaos… but also disorganized chaos”—because of the haste in which it was arranged and the prevailing influence of drugs. In many ways the basic rhythm track evolved like any other, beginning with electric piano and drums, then adding overdubs of bass and more drums to support the ever-shifting arrangement. John also laid the vocal in with relative ease, so that by the end of Wednesday’s session they had a complete, if unspectacular, version in the can.
There it languished until almost a month later, when the song got a dressing unlike any other in the Beatles’ repertoire. John had been listening to—and studying—an acetate of “Walrus” throughout the interim and under a smorgasbord of substances. At that point it was too basic and straightforward, especially for a lyric he considered “so weird.” They needed to give it a proper arrangement—proper, of course, being a euphemism for weirder than weird.
At first, the Beatles’ experiments with a mellotron had little effect on the track other than to produce some spooky, surrealistic textures. But as time wore on, they began to layer on instruments—eight violins, four cellos, a contrabass clarinet, and three horns—building dense levels of overdubs. Take followed take. By playing notes at the bottom end of the scale, they found they could stretch the tones even further. The bizarre sounds began to overlap and curdle until it was hard to distinguish their identities. They did the same thing with voices. The Mike Sammes Singers, an almost comically white-bread commercial chorale, was hired and put through a series of vocal gymnastics. Eight men and women accustomed to doing light television themes and folk songs chanted, “Ho-ho-ho, he-he-he, ha-ha-ha,” and, “Oompah, oompah, stick it up your jumper,” along with shrill whooping noises. The pièce de résistance, however, came at John’s giddy direction: a ludicrous refrain that droned on behind George Martin’s orchestration: “Everybody’s got one, everybody’s got one…” (later corrupted by so-called Beatles experts to be “Everybody smoke pot, everybody smoke pot…”).
Martin, who bristled at the musical hodgepodge, decided to let the Beatles “have their heads” on the session. “Some of the sounds weren’t very good,” he recalled. “Some were brilliant, but some were bloody awful.” The Beatles, however, were clearly pleased.
Even though Martin and the boys had edited and remixed the twenty-five takes of “I Am the Walrus” into a final sizzling master, John delivered the coup de grâce to the performance. While they were mastering the edit, he turned on a radio in the control booth and tuned in a live BBC production of King Lear, with John Gielgud in the title role. That was all his overactive imagination needed to hear. In the moments that followed, they mixed lines directly from the broadcast—Act IV, Scene VI—into the track, creating the familiar sound of nighttime radio in an already furiously overloaded song.
“The Fool on the Hill,” by contrast, evolved in a stunningly straightforward way. Written back in March, days before finishing “With a Little Help from My Friends,” Paul drew unknowingly on personal feelings about social hermits like the Maharishi, whom he had not met at the time. “It was this idea of a fool on the hill, a guru in a cave, I was attracted to,” he recalled. Years earlier he’d heard the tale about a recluse in an Italian hill town who had missed World War II, and that may have sparked the title. But one night in Liverpool Paul conjured up the lonely image and wrote what is arguably one of his finest and most beautiful compositions.
Unlike “I Am the Walrus,” nothing in the arrangement is cluttered with effects. Paul’s plaintive, handsomely controlled vocal matches his lonely piano accompaniment in sentiments that never strayed far from those on an early demo. Only the organ and a flute meander obliquely around the melody in an irregular groaning pattern, playing off the piano figure and giving the production an unpredictably cautious lift.
Throughout the recording of the soundtrack, production began on the Magical Mystery Tour film, which proceeded in a predictably haphazard manner. Other than Paul, no one had given it much thought, and even he was shooting from the hip. “We literally made it up as we went,” he recalled. There was no real cast to speak of, no featured roles to fill. Faces were the important thing; the Beatles wanted characters, eccentrics who would look and perform in an outrageous way. Only John made a specific casting request: he insisted on hiring Nat Jackley, an old-style music hall comedian whom he had always admired, as well as a couple of midgets. (“John would always want a midget or two around,” Ringo noted.) The rest of the troupe was filled in by rooting through Spotlight, a legitimate casting magazine—fat actors, busty women, grotesque-looking contortionists—and inviting along Victor Spinetti, who had appeared in their other films. Neil and Mal hired the actors, then located a sixty-two-seat bus, an old yellow job on which they painted the Magical Mystery Tour logo, which Paul had designed.
The caravan took off for the West Country just after noon on September 11, 1967, leaving from Allsop Place, a service road behind the Baker Street tube station, which had been the starting point for all the early rock ’n roll coach tours. On board were thirty-three actors, four cameramen, a soundman, a technical adviser, the four Beatles Fan Club secretaries, and an entourage of friends, with Paul McCartney acting as tour guide and emcee.
It would be useless to highlight each stopover on the Magical Mystery Tour. For the most part, it was a mess—five days of chaotic, incoherent shooting on location, in and around Surrey and Devon, with visits to the Cornish beaches on the Atlantic coast and Somerset. “We would get off the bus: ‘Let’s stop here,’ and go and do this and that,” Ringo recalled. “Then we’d put the music to it.” Occasionally it worked, but often they were beset by technical and logistical problems that undermined their efforts. What’s more, the tour was hardly magical or even a mystery, inasmuch as the bus was trailed everywhere by a convoy of twenty or so cars filled with press, fans, and media hangers-on who blockaded roads and snarled traffic. Fed up, an apoplectic John Lennon leaped off the bus and ripped the banners off the sides.
The Beatles had intended to spend another week filming sequences on a set at Shepperton Studios, outside the city, but in their haste to get under way they’d forgotten to book stage time there or anywhere else. Every soundstage within fifty miles was already reserved, many of them by Stanley Kubrick, who was in production making 2001: A Space Odyssey, and it took some clever improvising by a NEMS functionary to hire the empty hangars at West Malling Air Station in Kent, a deserted base used by the U.S. Air Force in World War II, for filming the interior sequences.
Eventually, the Beatles had enough footage to string together an hour’s worth of film, but everyone involved with the project knew this wouldn’t turn out to be one of their masterpieces. Paul had taken over the direction after three separate cameramen botched the job. “It was strictly amateur time,” says Peter Brown, who watched with mounting dread as £40,000 of bills began piling up at NEMS. “If Brian had been alive, he would have pulled it into some kind of professional shape—or talked the Beatles out of it. But without him, Paul was not to be appeased.”
Back at NEMS, it was clear that no one was minding the store. NEMS needed someone savvy, someone who lived and breathed the music business to take over the reins—and fast. But who? The lineup of prospects was a misbegotten bunch.
Peter Brown was basically Brian’s “social secretary” and, along with Alistair Taylor, considered a “Liverpool lad” and therefore not sophisticated enough to stand nose-to-nose with the London jackals. The same with Neil Aspinall, who, as the Beatles’ point man, was perhaps the obvious choice to take over. But even George Martin thought Neil lacked “sufficient clout” and, applying typical British prejudice, “was out of his class” in dealing with the genteel executives who ran major record labels.
During the first week of the Magical Mystery Tour, Stigwood took matters into his own hands. He marched into Peter Brown’s office and ordered him to arrange a meeting with the Beatles so that he could present them with his credentials and discuss the future of the management company. The second week in September, while the Beatles were in Hayward’s Heath, he staged his showdown, over lunch in the hotel that doubled as the film company’s production office.
On one side of a table, the suits—Robert Stigwood, David Shaw, Clive Epstein, and Peter Brown—sat shoulder to shoulder, with grave faces and guilty eyes. Across two plates piled with sandwiches, facing them like a jury, were the Beatles and Neil Aspinall, arms folded across their chests. Stigwood, who was a charming and effusive man, explained how prior to Brian’s death there had been a vacuum at their management company and how he had been running it successfully for the past six months. Clive, shifting culpably in his chair, nodded approval. “Now that Brian isn’t here,” he said, “I’m the natural successor and I want to take over the operation.”
The Beatles sat passively through Stigwood’s presentation, the smoke from their four cigarettes clouding the cramped space. Their eyes gave nothing away. Finally, John allowed his face to convey confusion and distaste, saying: “We don’t know you. Why would we do this?” Paul didn’t give Robert time to respond. “First of all, we don’t have a clue about what’s been going on. But it doesn’t really matter because it’s not our business. We’ve got our own people to look after us, otherwise we don’t need anything else.” They weren’t interested in a manager at the moment, Paul said. Stigwood could go on managing NEMS’ interests if Clive so chose, but that had nothing to do with the Beatles.
Despite the cool reception, Stigwood continued to press his point. Why not let things run their course? he wondered. Because, John reminded him, NEMS was built on the Beatles’ success, not on Cream or the Bee Gees. If Stigwood wanted to discuss their continued involvement, they might consider remaining with the company—they might—but not, in any case, by holding a minority participation. The percentages would have to be reversed, giving the Beatles a controlling 51 percent interest. Stigwood, however, wouldn’t hear of it. He remembered mentally tabulating the bags of money flowing out of NEMS, much of it wasted on Magic Alex, and thought: “A joint company doesn’t work unless I can control it and say, ‘There’s not a hundred thousand pounds to spend this week.’ ”
Stigwood needed control, the Beatles craved complete freedom—neither was willing to give an inch. Of course, Brian’s unsecured 70 percent stake in NEMS raised the possibility of a hostile takeover. Such action was never threatened per se, although elements in the heated exchange gave the impression that it might be considered, prompting the Beatles to issue a public statement. “They would be willing to put money into NEMS if there was any question of a takeover from an outsider,” a spokesman told NME. “The Beatles will not withdraw their shares from NEMS. Things will go on just as before.”
After a bit of back-and-forth, Stigwood agreed to disassociate himself from NEMS, taking Cream, the Bee Gees, and a few other assets with him as the foundation of a new company, the Robert Stigwood Organization, that would grow into a multimedia empire; the rest of the roster, such as it was, for the moment remained under Clive Epstein’s languid control, with Vic Lewis at the helm. (Later, Stigwood would claim, “We shook hands, and I don’t think we’ve ever had a cross word about it.” At the time, however, he demanded a £25,000 buyout to leave quietly, which, according to Ringo, “was a very reasonable price” to pay for their freedom.)
After all this time, the Beatles were finally on their own, finally free to make every decision as they alone saw fit.
[III]
Throughout the fall of 1967, while Britain waged an all-out assault on conformity, the Beatles hastened to consolidate their interests. The longtime holding company, Beatles Ltd., was officially renamed Apple Music Ltd., after which seven subsidiaries were formed: Apricot Investments Ltd., Blackberry Investments Ltd., Cornflower Investments Ltd., Daffodil Investments Ltd., Edelweiss Investments Ltd., Foxglove Investments Ltd., and Greengage Investments Ltd., each capitalized with a substantial financial endowment. Money was no problem. “There was an enormous sum of money—well over a million pounds—that had been accumulated by EMI while the new contract was being negotiated,” recalls Peter Brown. “The Beatles received twenty-five percent of that—and that was the money that set up Apple.”
Paul always maintained that Apple was so named for the first schoolbook phrase that children learn: A is for Apple. An apple conveyed an undeceptively simple and pure image. Its nature was uncompromising, essential, vital. But like the apple in the Bible, it proved a sinfully irresistible temptation, and once the Beatles had bitten into it, there was nothing they could do to stop their expulsion from Eden.
Originally the company—a glorified tax shelter—was intended as a real estate operation. Clive Epstein and Harry Pinsker, NEMS’ principal financial adviser, devised an ambitious land and retail trading venture, which, of course, held no appeal for the Beatles. Without the benefit of a similar tax scheme, however, they were into Inland Revenue for 86 percent of the pie. “So we’d sit around the boardroom, kicking ideas around,” recalls Alistair Taylor, who had been appointed to the newly reshuffled NEMS executive board after Brian’s death. “But every time we came up with something and presented it to the boys, it was: ‘You’re joking! Bollocks to that!’ ” The board initially proposed opening a chain of record shops called Apple, but “selling records was dismissed as too commercial for the Beatles.” Another idea came from Clive Epstein. “He wanted to set up a chain of card shops—picture cards, Christmas cards, and invitations whose inscriptions would be written by the Beatles themselves,” Taylor explains. It seemed to the other board members like a “revolutionary” concept, a sure franchise, and the Beatles were called in for approval. Clive even commissioned a few pasteup cards for their inspection. The Beatles passed them around, turned them over, inside out, upside down. There was an embarrassing silence, followed by John’s blunt verdict: “How fucking boring!”
All this showed the Beatles how seriously out of touch the NEMS board was when it came to representing their interests. “You can just imagine the Beatles with a string of retail fucking shoe shops,” John fumed. “[T]hat was the way they thought.”
No, if there was going to be an Apple, it wasn’t going to be run by the suits but by the Beatles. After all, they’d just made a movie on their own. They knew a good deal about the recording process. Paul fancied himself a pretty good businessman. They had a secret resource—Magic Alex—and a cache of fabulous songs. Why shouldn’t they pool their creative resources and run their own company? “We’re just going to do—everything!” John told Pete Shotton during a visit soon after the card shop fiasco. “We’ll have electronics, we’ll have clothes, we’ll have publishing, we’ll have music. We’re going to be talent spotters and have new talent.” Shotton says there was none of the wholesale cynicism that routinely crabbed John’s opinions. “He was very excited about the Apple idea.”
And the excitement was infectious. Terry Doran, Brian’s old Liverpool friend, was enlisted to run Apple Music Publishing and manage new bands, a business he knew virtually nothing about. George got involved with launching a string of discotheques, beginning with the flagship establishment in New York. Paul opened discussions with Mick Jagger about the Beatles and Stones forming a partnership to open their own recording studio, with the possibility of starting up a joint label. Magic Alex was commissioned, at a salary of £40 a week and 10 percent of the profits, to patent and begin producing his wacky inventions under an Apple Electronics subsidiary.
First, however, Apple opened a clothing company. The Beatles were delighted by the idea of having their own boutique full of “groovy clothes.” At least, as John pointed out, the merchandise would be “something that we’d want, that we’d like to buy.” If the Beatles had learned anything from success, from superstardom, it was the extent of their tremendous influence. Fans watched them like hawks: how they talked and looked, what they said and wore, became as important as what they sang. The popularity of long hair alone testified to the impact of the Beatles’ style. By Paul’s own admission, they were already “dressing in such interesting clothes,” most of which had been created by the Fool. If they set the Fool up in business, they were liable to make a fortune.
Of course, the Beatles already had a fortune, which meant they could concentrate less on profits and more on sharing the wealth. Money wasn’t everything, they insisted; money was a trap. Money had a way of compromising true creativity. Nor did they want to come off as a bunch of hip tycoons. “The aim of the company isn’t a stack of gold teeth in the bank,” John said. “We’ve done that bit. It’s more of a trick to see… if we can create things and sell them without charging three times our cost.” A variety of concepts for the new company were kicked around. John liked Paul’s initial idea to “sell everything white.” But in the end, the style of clothes would be left entirely up to the Fool. The Beatles’ only concern was that the store be “a beautiful place where beautiful people can buy beautiful things.”
Early in 1967, as part of a long-term investment, the Beatles had purchased a cute little three-story building zoned for commercial use, at 94 Baker Street, on the corner of Paddington. It was the perfect location for a hip new venture—a few steps off Oxford Street, where it might be considered too mainstream and slick, but close enough to attract steady pedestrian traffic; in other words: shabby chic. The top floor provided suitable space for Apple’s corporate offices, such as they were, with accommodating proximity so that the Beatles could keep their fingers in what was going on downstairs.
While the matter of place was settled, however, people close to the Beatles were becoming increasingly unsettled by the Fool. Right off the bat, the designers raised concerns with Harry Pinsker by demanding an employment contract with a signing bonus of £40,000. Pinsker, a relatively conservative accountant who held the Beatles’ purse strings, recounted being “horrified” by the payment and advised his clients to reconsider what he felt to be a superfluous expense. The Beatles, however, couldn’t be bothered. “Give it to them,” Pinsker was told, effectively opening the floodgates.
The Fool passed themselves off as the picture of countercultural perfection, a trio of pale-faced, exquisite sylphs, with more self-possession than Sybil. Their everyday wardrobe could have been lifted out of an Edwardian costume spectacle. According to a description in the New York Times, “they wear gypsy headdresses, at least ten necklaces between them, bells, tight pants, boots, 16th-century-looking jerkins, long, full-sleeved blouses and low belts of satin around the hips.” The image they cultivated, from their public face to all the workmanship that went into their designs, right down to the embroidery accenting their clothing, “splashed with stars and moons,” gave the appearance that they were touched by poetry.
But their true gift was cunning. Like Magic Alex, they dazzled the Beatles with hippie double-talk about spiritual bliss, how the boutique would “have an image of naturel”; it would approximate “a paradise” whose guiding principle wasn’t based on “bread” but rather “love” and “turning people on.” Stoned and starry-eyed, that was all the Beatles needed to hear. John, besotted by the peace-and-love vibe, urged Pete Shotton to get involved with the project. “You should move to London and run it,” Shotton remembers John telling him. “Run it—run Apple.” To Shotton, whose experience was managing a supermarket John had bought him, it seemed like a demotion. But Shotton says he misunderstood; John was offering him “the whole thing”—the whole Apple pie. “I couldn’t do that,” he protested, shaken by the offer, but John remained adamant. “Come on,” he insisted, “it’s just a joke. We’re only spending money, having a laugh. Nobody knows what to do, so just have a go at it.”
Ultimately, Shotton turned the day-to-day operation of the supermarket over to his mother and joined the Apple alliance. His first assignment—getting the Apple Boutique off the ground—gave him an eye-opening view of the cock-up he was inheriting. When he arrived at Baker Street, the scene reminded him of an asylum. “Everybody was smoking dope and taking acid,” Shotton recalls. “So, to them, anything could be done, anything was possible.” Magic Alex was even commissioned, at considerable expense, to provide an artificial sun that would light up the sky over the boutique. There was a lot of loose talk about being ready for the holidays. The Beatles squinted dizzily at the calendar and picked a date out of the air—November 2. “We’ll open then,” they decided. Just five weeks off! Shotton says he tried to convince them that more time was needed; there were so many details that had to be worked out and arranged for, to say nothing of stocking the shelves with clothing and trinkets. None of this, however, deterred the Beatles from announcing the grand opening to the press. It would be ready, they assured Pete. Somehow these things always took care of themselves.
But as late as October 5, the entire shop still had to be renovated. “It was a shithole,” Shotton remembers, “an absolute mess.”
Meanwhile, the Fool requisitioned expense money for a ten-day trip to Morocco, ostensibly to buy fabric and jewelry, but in reality as an excuse for “eating majoun and smoking hashish.” When the Fool got to work, they were carried away with extravagance; their clothing line cost more to produce than Coco Chanel’s latest collection. Silks, velvets, tapestries, and brocades from every international fashion capital were incorporated into their not-so-ready-to-wear line. “The clothes looked more like fancy-dress costumes than anything one could wear day to day,” wrote an observer. “[C]ourt jester crossed with harlequin crossed with Peter Pan, rainbow colors, zig-zag hems… ballet tights and operatic coats for flower children.” It was a dollhouse array of ill-conceived outfits—pretty to look at but completely impractical. “We had to find people to make these clothes,” recalls Pete Shotton, “and when we finally did, the clothes were shit.” Seams burst open, sleeves didn’t quite match, sizes never reconciled. Simon Posthuma, the chief Fool, further demanded that the labels for his creations be woven from pure silk. “I did some calculations and figured out that the labels would actually cost more to produce than the items of clothing, so I put my foot down.” But John overruled him. “It’s a different form of art,” he lectured Pete. “Besides, it doesn’t matter whether we make money or not. If the labels make that much of a statement, we should have them. Let it go.”
Pressure started to mount as the opening neared, and the date had to be pushed back—to early December, at least. But there had to be some kind of trade-off, something tangible, something that the press and public could see that more or less justified the delay.
No problem. Over the weekend of November 10–12, while the Beatles were preoccupied with filming a video of their new single, “Hello Goodbye,” the Fool set about painting the shop’s ancient white brick facade, erecting a scaffolding and draping it with oilcloth so that the work could be done in secrecy. “They refused to tell any of us what it was going to look like,” recalls Alistair Taylor. No one, other than the art students hired to execute the design, was permitted to peek at the work in progress. Even the Beatles were warded off like overeager children. “When the time finally came to unveil it, we all gathered in the street. The tarpaulin dropped dramatically, and underneath was the most incredible psychedelic mural covering this beautiful little building, with a two-story genie and stars and moons and fairies and what have you. Oh my! We were absolutely gobsmacked. It was fabulous! People leaned out of buildings and buses to get a good look. And any car that turned into the street nearly smacked into the one in front of it that had also stopped to stare.”
“The painting was gorgeous,” Paul said, echoing an opinion shared by the rest of the Beatles and most of the public. Citywide, the Apple Boutique mural was a huge conversation piece. London had never seen anything like it. People came from every district to get a closer look, clogging the sidewalk outside the shop, tying up traffic. It became as popular a tourist attraction as any of the traditional sights. But the City of Westminster’s planning commission, whose official permission to paint the facade had been required but seemingly ignored, was less than enthused. “It wasn’t long before we heard from their solicitors, saying we had to restore the building to its original appearance,” Taylor recalls. Three weeks of overheated legal wrangling ensued until, ultimately, the mural was painted out by the Fool.
Inside, the shop was in no less of a muddle. A layout, with sections and aisles, was needed to give the interior some symmetry, but its style was the subject of constant contention. “There was no direction, no focal point,” Pete Shotton remembers. “Paul wanted dividers up. Then John would come in and say, ‘Why in the hell are we cutting people off from each other?’ and he’d have the dividers ripped out.” It went back and forth like that for days, building up and ripping out, until the dispute had less to do with style than with ego. It mirrored their bickering over the music: each of the two Beatles wanted to put his own stamp on the boutique, each suspicious and jealous of the other’s contribution. Unable to take sides in the matter, Shotton struggled, ineffectually, to please both John and Paul. “They needed someone strong, someone like Brian, to say no, and I wasn’t the one who could do it…. I only ever wanted to be friends with them.”
The Apple Boutique finally opened—without dividers—on December 7, 1967. A by-invitation-only gala was slated for 8:16 P.M. (one of John’s affectations), with a fashion show scheduled at “8:46 sharp.” Neither Paul nor Ringo attended—Paul being on vacation with Jane Asher at High Park, an isolated farm he’d purchased in the Scottish moors, and Ringo, off in Rome, putting in a cameo appearance as Emmanuel the gardener in the screen adaptation of Candy. Nor was there an artificial sun, its inventor, Magic Alex, pleading a lack of adequate “energy.”
What they lacked in solar power, however, was made up by gate-crashers lighting in the doorway and storming the gates. “It was a mess,” Taylor says, “a glorious mess. The worse things got, the more pleased everyone seemed. No one minded the crushing crowds or the confusion. Shoplifting was completely overlooked; it was regarded as a kind of benevolence, hippie philanthropy.”
John and George may have been satisfied with the economics—but they weren’t amused by the opening-night festivities. Unexpectedly there had been an outbreak of screaming, pushing, and shoving when they arrived. It reminded them of Beatlemania, smaller in scale and more concentrated perhaps, yet another mutant form of it. Their uneasiness continued to deepen afterward, over a “tense dinner” with their wives and Derek Taylor, who had arrived from the States especially to attend the gala. Questions kept surfacing about what they’d gotten themselves into.
If they couldn’t free themselves from the grip of crazy celebrity, they wondered, was there ever any hope of restoring some normalcy to their lives? That had been the intention when they stopped touring, the underlying purpose of Transcendental Meditation, the restructuring of Apple. Now John and George began to wonder if any escape was possible.
If there was one constant the Beatles could rely on, it was record sales. The day after the boutique opened, when everything seemed so topsy-turvy again, EMI released a six-song EP (tucked inside a small book) that served as the soundtrack for Magical Mystery Tour. Overall, the music was anything but spectacular; only “I Am the Walrus” and “The Fool on the Hill” measured up to the Beatles’ unique standards. Whispers of dissatisfaction murmured through the underground ranks. Knocks like “trivial” and “soft” accompanied reviews. There was even a plot, some claimed, to derail its airplay. In response to a petition by two housewives accusing the BBC of disseminating a “propaganda of disbelief, doubt, and dirt,” the radio station’s Tory watchdog, Lord Hill, banned “I Am the Walrus,” objecting to the line “Boy, you’ve been a dirty girl, you’ve let your knickers down.” It was a feeble excuse to make headlines off the Beatles’ backs; there was nothing indecent about Magical Mystery Tour, other than perhaps its uninspired musical quality. However, while critics expressed reservations about the unusual package, the fans were hardly underwhelmed, with 450,000 advance orders and another 300,000 copies in the pipeline by the launch.
Coincidentally, Capitol Records announced that American sales of “Hello Goodbye” had reached the million mark on the same day, giving the Beatles a boost against drastic losses at the Apple Boutique. “There was plenty of stock,” recalls Peter Brown, “but no stock control. No one knew where anything was; people were stealing things left and right, much of it by the interminably stoned young staff.” Dressing rooms accommodated any shopper who set out to stash something under his clothes or in a bag. No questions asked. Invariably, more things were stolen from the Apple Boutique than were purchased. “It was disastrous from start to finish,” says Alistair Taylor, who roamed the aisles each day on his way upstairs to the office. Concludes Peter Brown, “Anyone who touched anything fucked it up with great skill. It was a mess, it was—disastrous.”
In the midst of this retail train wreck, another disaster loomed. On December 16 Paul gathered the Beatles and their friends to screen the final cut of Magical Mystery Tour. It was a fifty-odd-minute crazy quilt of scenes—“formless, disconnected, disjointed and amateurish,” according to its critics—cut and pasted together without the slightest regard for narrative. “There was no plot,” Paul admitted, “… [d]eliberately so.” But his bluff that its essence was “magical” carried no weight. “Nobody had the vaguest idea what it was about,” according to Neil Aspinall. There was a lot of chair-shuffling and nervous coughing throughout the seemingly endless screening, during which several people excused themselves, ostensibly to use the loo, and never came back. “It looked awful and it was a disaster,” recalled George Martin, who watched it stupefied, in openmouthed horror, as others seated around him decried it as “pretentious and overblown.” Afterward, John told Ray Coleman it was “the most expensive home movie ever,” which, intended as a boast or not, wasn’t too far off the mark.
The Beatles had dropped roughly £40,000 on Magical Mystery Tour—up to that point. Most of the negative expense, if not more, they hoped to recoup from an exhibitor. But who in their right mind would pick up the tab for such a sorry spectacle? Not a cinema chain; it was too short a mess to qualify as a feature. Peter Brown, who “thought it was dreadful,” had been enlisted by Paul to help sell it. Initially, in November, they pitched it to the BBC and ITV as a Christmas holiday special, and he says the BBC “were drooling at the mouths at the very idea of it until they got a look at the finished product.” ITV passed, on the premise of a scheduling problem. Paul Fox, the head of BBC1, recalled: “I saw it four times before I began to understand it.” He admitted that “there were large parts that were unprofessional” but felt “there were also moments of drama and poignancy, which [he] found quite fascinating.” Ultimately, it came down to the Beatles, as sure a draw as anything on TV. Even considering the extravagant mess on the screen, Fox “thought it was worth showing.”
Brown, however, didn’t share his opinion. He worried about the blow it would certainly deal the Beatles’ unblemished reputation and urged Paul to reconsider. “After the lackluster response from the BBC,” he says, “I tried to suggest writing off the £40,000 and moving on. But Paul didn’t know it was a mess and insisted on making the deal.” The BBC agreed to show it twice—in black and white on Boxing Day and again in color on January 5—for the paltry fee of £9,000. Rather than appear insulted, Paul insisted that money was never the issue. “Sod it,” he thought, “that’s not really the important thing.” It was a well-known fact that Boxing Day TV audiences were the largest of the year. The coverage they’d get would be unprecedented. As Paul envisioned it, close to 20 million viewers who had eaten “too much turkey and sherry” would sit around living rooms throughout Britain waiting for the “plum pudding special”: the Beatles in Magical Mystery Tour.
Unfortunately, in this case, all they’d get was more turkey, and it was no surprise that the critics knocked the stuffing out of it. “Appalling!” the Daily Mail harrumphed. “It was worse than terrible.” James Green, who covered TV for the Evening News, stammered over suitably damning adjectives, advising readers to “take your pick from the words: rubbish, piffle, chaotic, flop, tasteless, nonsense, emptiness, and appalling.” Accordingly, the Daily Mirror chose “rubbish… piffle… nonsense!” The Daily Express limited its slurs to “blatant rubbish” and said, “The whole boring saga confirmed a long held suspicion… that the Beatles… have made so much money that they can apparently afford to be contemptuous of the public.” Punishment was demanded of the culprits. “Whoever authorized the showing of the film on BBC1,” wrote the Daily Sketch, “should be condemned to a year squatting at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.”
But Paul had other things on his mind. During the holiday, “perhaps slightly to [his] own surprise,” he gathered the family together and announced his engagement to Jane.