An Additional Act[I]
Throughout the first ten years of the Beatles saga, women knew their place. A fan screamed, wept, engaged in some heavy personal fantasy, and, on the off chance of a close encounter, flung herself recklessly in the general vicinity of one of the Beatles, hoping at the very least for a re-ciprocal smile. A lucky bird might even get to spend the night. But for a girlfriend or a wife, the role was severe. They were at best a prop in the grand scenario; at worst, a handicap. Aside from creature comforts, which were glorious, the disadvantages of pairing with one of the band outweighed the benefits. For one thing, there was no room for a woman in that crowded spotlight. They gave up whatever individuality they had to support the boys’ careers and, as such, were swallowed whole by the monster Beatlemania.
The Beatles were an unconditionally exclusive fraternity—one for all and all for one. Cynthia Lennon, envious of their rapport, called it “a marriage of four minds… [that] were always in harmony.” Always may be too strong a word, but on those occasions when it became necessary to close ranks, the Beatles formed an airtight bond that knew no equivalent; there was nothing and no one capable of infiltrating the core group. Neil and Mal gained entry—at times—but that only made their slavish devotion and loyalty more painful. Perhaps those two more than anyone recognized the boundaries of real friendship; after twenty-hour days that might begin with driving hours on end, then lifting heavy equipment and running what some might view as demeaning errands, a word, even a look, often reminded them exactly who they were and left them outside looking in, just like everyone else.
The Beatles’ women, on the other hand, never got that close. Decisions were routinely made without their input. Their opinions were seldom, if ever, sought. It was unthinkable that a project dreamed up and green-lighted by one of the Beatles, even something as significant as Apple, would be referred to the women for comment. “When it came down to business,” says Alistair Taylor, “the girls were usually the last to be told.”
The same rules pertained to the music. John and Paul might preview a nascent song they’d just written for Cynthia or Jane, but other than a rare special occasion—like the “All You Need Is Love” broadcast—women were barred. No woman had ever been invited into the studio and, as far as can be determined, none had asked. In Paul’s view, the studio was sacrosanct, the Beatles’ relationship to it like “four miners who go down the pit”—and “[y]ou don’t need women down the pit, do you?”
On those nights when the Beatles finished work at a respectable hour, they’d head home to change, collect the girls, and go back out to one of the clubs, where they’d squeeze into a private banquette that functioned as a sort of clubhouse. Conversation revolved entirely around the musicians and their lives. If the women talked at all, it was among themselves. Occasionally one of the Beatles might spot a friend and disappear for the rest of the night—just wander off without a word—leaving his companion to arrange her own way home, no matter how late the hour. Other times one of the girls might sit in the backseat of a limo for a ridiculous stretch of time, waiting until the last fucked-up straggler had paid his respects.
Yet those kinds of sacrifices were made without complaint. In part, of course, this was because it had never been any other way. The Beatles had chosen women—Cynthia, Jane, Maureen, and Pattie—who accepted their offbeat way of life and were willing to put up with the rigors that the role required, without defiance, resentment, or asking too many questions. Nowhere in the Beatles saga do characters appear more selfless. The women surprised even one another by the extent of their thoughtfulness and TLC. Cynthia, who conducted her mornings in monklike silence so that John could sleep until two in the afternoon, marveled at how Maureen pampered Ringo through those all-night recording marathons. “Instead of going to bed,” Cyn recalled, “she would wait up until he came home and serve him a wonderful roast dinner, even if it happened to be five in the morning.” Jane once remarked to a friend how she admired Pattie for filling the house with incense each day, ready for George’s arrival.
And nowhere in the Beatles saga are characters more forgiving. During the boys’ long tenure in the spotlight, the women dealt capably with every curveball that was thrown at them. They’d been through the craziness and idol worship, the marijuana and the LSD, the meditation and the mystery tour. They’d dealt with the fickle, heartless press that robbed their families of any privacy. They’d stayed home alone, rattling around their empty mansions during those long tours and even longer recording sessions, dealing with the isolation that stardom imposed. They’d heard the rumors of infidelities and waved them away like smoke. They put aside all personal ambition because they were the Beatles’ women, and those were the rules.
But after ten years, the rules were about to change.
Of all the plum roles that had come her way, the Subservient Beatles Woman was the only one Jane Asher refused to play.
She had been only seventeen years old when, five years before, Paul McCartney had literally moved into her life as a housemate and a lover, youthful and innocent, perhaps, but hardly naive. Assuming her rightful place in the Beatles’ entourage was never difficult for Jane. “There was something about the way she behaved that put everyone at ease,” says a friend. “Although she was posh, you never got the sense she was pretentious or insincere.”
And yet, she had too much going for her to take a backseat to anyone, much less her mate. From the beginning, Paul had a hard time keeping up with her. Jane’s diary, which she lived by, was a clutter of fascinating appointments and social commitments. “I was amazed by the diary,” Paul admitted. “I’ve never known people who stuffed so much into a day.” There were auditions, meetings with television and movie producers, vocal lessons, acting classes, fittings, gallery debuts, screenings, recitals, opening nights. Paul was also impressed that “Jane knew people in the country,” which he considered a “rather upper-class thing.”
“Paul was clearly in awe of her,” says Peter Brown. “He liked the whole package; it was his ticket in.” But after a time—and well before 1968—Paul found his own foothold in this once-alien world. He was an internationally known figure, sought after as much by strangely dressed freaks as he was by distinguished diplomats and intellectuals. From the banks of the Mersey to the mansions on the Thames, there wasn’t a social circle in which he couldn’t form a connection. If anything, Jane now had trouble keeping up with him. Jane was unfamiliar with the work of de Chirico, de Kooning, or Magritte, to say nothing of William Burroughs, Luciano Berio, Antonioni, or the Fugs. And what of the characters involved in the underground who shared Paul’s idealistic sympathies? She had no reason to be keenly aware of their issues and schemes, nor did she have a working knowledge of their subversive politics. And Jane hated the drug scene.
“Jane confided in me enough to say that Paul wanted her to become the little woman at home with the kiddies,” Cynthia wrote. Another reliable observer says Jane had “clearly decided that she was setting her own terms on how she conducted her career.” There were to be no cop-outs, no compromises, no backseats taken to pop stars.
At the time of their engagement, things were already “very tense” between Paul and Jane, according to Marianne Faithfull, who thought their relationship was more “like an act” than a romance. Peter Brown’s characterization of it as “a companionship” seems more generous, although not entirely on the mark. Still, they had weathered several ups and downs, including Jane’s “traumatic” confession that she intended to leave Paul for a boyfriend in Bristol. They’d gotten past that—but just barely. As far as marriage went, Paul “could not get her to name the day.” However, there was something about making the relationship official, so to speak, that seemed to take the pressure off and allowed them to get on with other things. For Paul and Jane, engagement postponed engagement.
Although no one else knew it—not even Paul, George, or Ringo—John Lennon found himself wrestling with similar emotional issues.
For the past few months, there had been a sea change in his life. First, his father, Freddie, reappeared after a three-year hiatus, this time in the company of a nineteen-year-old student named Pauline Jones, whom he would eventually marry. They spent several weeks as guests at Kenwood, John and Freddie struggling to come to terms with their lifelong estrangement. Various sources indicate that it was a difficult, if not contentious, reunion, hardly the reconciliation either man might have hoped for. John was always on the go, “never available” for his father, to say nothing of his own wife, who, Jones observed, “had begun to establish a social life of her own.”
Much of John’s erratic behavior can be attributed to a situation that threatened to shatter his household routine. Much to his own surprise, he had become infatuated with another woman. She had edged into the picture in late November, following a private seminar with the Maharishi in a London suburb that the Lennons had attended with Pete Shotton and his wife, Beth. As the two couples were leaving the guru’s guesthouse, a tiny raven-haired woman, clad head to toe in black, appeared out of the shadows and asked John for a lift back to the city. Shotton recalls that he treated “this stranger” with the kind of “tactful attention” a pop star would give a favored fan. John shifted uneasily from foot to foot—Cynthia noticed that a look of “pure shock” crossed her husband’s face—then said, “This is Yoko. Do you mind if she comes back with us?”
Yoko Ono had been “particularly persistent” in her pursuit of John Lennon since their first meeting at her Indica Gallery show in 1966. Over the course of several months thereafter, she had tried unsuccessfully to get his attention, first standing at the gates to Kenwood among the horde of groveling fans and haunting the steps outside the Apple offices, in the hope of a “chance” encounter. She once gained admittance to Kenwood for the purpose of calling a taxi, then planted a ring by the phone, necessitating a return visit. Cynthia recalled that afterward, “there were a lot of phone calls [at home] from Yoko, and John also received a constant flow of letters from her,” none of which aroused Cynthia’s suspicion—or his, so it seems. “John read them and left them lying around,” Cynthia said. She took Yoko for another of the endless would-be artists who approached John for assistance, seeking a personal endorsement or money.
Somewhere along the line, John’s attitude toward Yoko Ono changed. Whether it was caused by the end of touring, the shock of Brian’s death, or the effects of meditation, it is hard to determine. A more likely reason suggests that the excessive boredom of his marriage finally prevailed. But between November 1967 and January 1968, something piqued his interest in Yoko. Cynthia sensed that change and said that she confronted John about Yoko, but he dismissed her curiosity with genuine indifference. “She’s crackers, she’s just a weirdo artist,” he replied. “Don’t worry about it.” Nor was there anything to be gleaned from a volume of her poems, Grapefruit, lying on John’s night table. Even after the number of letters and calls increased, he insisted: “She’s another nutter wanting money for all that avant garde bullshit.”
But by January that avant-garde bullshit had an impressive price. John sent Yoko to see Pete Shotton at Apple about underwriting one of her myriad projects. In an office above the boutique, she told Pete, “I want two thousand pounds.” Pete was staggered by the request. It was “an enormous amount of money,” he says, and the magnitude of it took him completely by surprise. Recovering, he asked her what she wanted it for. Only Yoko Ono could have explained a concept as loopy as the one she called “Half-a-Wind,” a roomful of everyday objects, mostly furniture and appliances—“all beautifully cut in half and all painted white,” as John later described it. Shotton was flabbergasted by the description. “I’ll have to talk to somebody about this, Yoko,” he says he told her. “I can’t give you two thousand pounds to cut furniture up.” Yoko flashed an inscrutable smile and told him “it was metaphysical.”
“In the beginning, all those screwy ideas of hers amused him,” says Peter Brown, “then they intrigued him—and then much more.” “She did a thing called ‘Dance Event,’ where different cards kept coming through the door every day saying, ‘Breathe’ and ‘Dance’ and ‘Watch all the lights until dawn,’ ” John explained to Jann Wenner in a 1970 interview, “and they upset me or made me happy, depending on how I felt.” And much of Grapefruit he found infuriating, scattered with outrageous instructional “pieces,” such as “Use your blood to paint. Keep painting until you faint. Keep painting until you die.” John, who loved nothing more than to whip up controversy, saw a kindred spirit in Yoko. She refused to play by anyone’s rules. Yes, there was the “avant-garde crap” that she perpetrated as art, but she was unlike any other woman he’d ever met, a real challenge to figure out. She excited him.
The whole idea of having a secret friend with limitless potential excited John. He believed he had finally met a woman who was not interested in his fame, a woman who insisted that her art and ideas were as important as his own. It was intense—not at all like a one-night stand with a dolly bird, not even sexual. “After Yoko and I met, I didn’t realize I was in love with her,” John recalled. The attraction was purely intellectual, purely creative, a powerful conflux of like-minded rebels. Their talk, in a series of clandestine nighttime calls, was charged with an electric intimacy that warranted something stronger, deeper, more intense.
The trouble was, he was married. And so, it turned out, was she.
[II]
In fact, Yoko had been married for almost half of her young life. She was born on February 18, 1933, into a spectacularly prosperous Japanese family descended from samurai that was as wealthy and influential as, say, the Rockefellers in the United States. Her father, Eisuke, a Christian financier proficient in English and French who headed an institution that would eventually merge with the Bank of Japan, moved his family to America on two separate occasions—once in 1936 and again in 1940, not all that long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Those short tenures in the States provided Yoko with perhaps her most formative impressions; from a pampered and sheltered Long Island compound, she developed a fluency in English and was profoundly influenced by American culture. But the experience was short-lived. World War II almost finished off the Onos. Eisuke was abruptly posted to the bank’s satellite office in Japanese-occupied Hanoi, while Yoko, with her mother, brother, and baby sister, remained in Tokyo. Yoko attended the prestigious Gakushuin School, where she was tutored in all phases of Western culture until the escalating bombings eventually drove her family into the countryside, to a worn-out little farming village near Karuizawa, in the south.
It was a lonely and disorienting episode for such a proud, imperious family. The sense of isolation—of being cut off from their lifestyle—was overwhelming. From the moment they arrived, late in March 1945, there was open resentment toward their rarefied ways. They were treated like outsiders by their own people, taken advantage of and plundered. Yoko’s mother, Isoko, was forced to sell her possessions for food and shelter. According to one biographer, things got so bad that “they actually went begging from door to door.”
But except for those ten months in exile, where she lived among starving peasants, Yoko never suffered from privation. Throughout her childhood, she was raised in a bubble of sumptuous privilege, groomed by a team of servants for enlightenment and social status. Nothing was ever denied her; and after the war, there was no limit to the special treatment she received—ballet lessons, piano instruction, private tutoring, etiquette. Most overindulged Japanese girls raised in such a royal manner became, in the tightly regulated atmosphere of rebuilding, duty-bound to leisure, but Yoko Ono was not destined for anything so conventional. She had always been a curious young woman; now, as her curiosity became subject to maturity, it took on a more ambitious nature. Yoko returned to Gakushuin, concentrating in writing, poetry, and music, and in 1951 enrolled in Gakushuin University, where she intended to matriculate as the first female philosophy major. Ironically, her own mother planted the seeds of rebellion. “She used to tell me that even a woman could become a diplomat or prime minister if she was as bright as I,” Yoko reflected in an interview with a Japanese journalist. “She also said that I should not be so foolish as to get married or that I should not be foolish enough to have children.”
Rebellious to a fault, Yoko did both.
In 1952 Yoko’s father was repatriated from Indonesia and rewarded with another American posting, this one more important and permanent than the previous sojourns. The Bank of Japan handed him its New York branch office, which was leading the way in underwriting the rebuilding of Tokyo. Soon after Eisuke’s transfer, Yoko joined the family in America, resuming her studies in 1953 at Sarah Lawrence College, whose campus wasn’t far from her home in suburban Scarsdale. There were no majors or grades given at the college, freeing its small body of creative students to express themselves independently. Yoko impressed teachers and classmates as being a “particularly adept” writer of short stories and shone with brilliance, it was said, in music theory. But neither felt right. “See, I was writing poetry and [doing] music and painting, and none of that satisfied me,” she told Rolling Stone in a 1975 interview. “I knew that the medium was wrong. Whenever I wrote a poem, they said it was too long, it was like a short story; and a short story was like a poem. I felt that I was a misfit in every medium.” She was looking for “an additional act,” she said, something that allowed her to adequately express her art in a way that existed outside the box.
The answer lay only twenty-five miles away, in New York City. The postwar blinders had come off Manhattan’s creative community, and the best minds of every discipline were mixing media as though they were martinis. Great concoctions burbled up from the imaginative wilds, and from this crucible lively scenes developed. The most attractive to Yoko Ono was the avant-garde. The avant-garde was like rocket fuel: you could go anywhere with it, even into outer space.
No shrinking violent, she took right off, staging her own events, or pieces, as she preferred to call them, in what would become a characteristically kooky way. Her debut piece, “Painting to Be Stepped On,” instructed participants to lay a sheet of blank canvas on the ground and to walk on it; another—“Pea Piece”—involved dropping frozen peas at random places throughout the course of a day, like Hansel and Gretel. Her pieces became more outrageous—and annoyingly adolescent—as figures on the avant-garde scene began to take notice.
And notice they did, in cosmetic ways as well. During her freshman year at Sarah Lawrence, Yoko’s clothes looked almost deliberately chosen to make her appear more Western, as if they’d been borrowed from an Asian version of Blackboard Jungle. By the time she hit Greenwich Village, however, Yoko had refined her look, giving herself a more severe, almost spooky twist: a baggy black sweater thrown over a black leotard, with her long black hair brushed out and frizzed below the waist. Tall women carried off the pose with sinuous grace. But Yoko, who was tiny and not particularly trim, looked like a character lifted out of one of Charles Addams’s cartoons. Although her features were Oriental and her complexion a burnished gold, she was not an exotic woman, and this only added to the overall ethereal effect. Not that Yoko seemed to care one way or the other. If her appearance happened to put people off, she would fix them with either a blank stare or an enigmatic, Mona Lisa smile.
One admirer who caught the right impression of that smile was Toshi Ichiyanagi, a standout piano student at Juilliard—a true prodigy, in fact, whose entry into the avant-garde scene was primed by his progressive master, Vincent Persichetti, the man credited with grooming Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Toshi shared Yoko’s passion for John Cage’s experimental work, and together they launched themselves into the enthusiastic circle of artists and performers that revolved around the form. In the spring of 1956 she dropped out of Sarah Lawrence and moved into a cold-water flat in SoHo with Toshi, thus rerouting the direction of her life.
New York in the late 1950s and early 1960s was a breeding ground of young militants pursuing revolutionary visions of how modern music and art should be produced. John Cage and Arnold Schönberg had ushered in a fertile avant-garde scene that now included Judith Malina and Julian Beck, Andy Warhol, Robert Morris, Diane Wakoski, Paul Morrissey, and dozens of other artists (many later breaking away to launch the pop art movement), all of whom seemed to reflect one another’s intensity.
In the thick of this creative ferment, Yoko encountered two men who would have a far greater effect on her life than her first two husbands combined: La Monte Young, the enfant terrible extraordinaire of conceptual art, a man of such enormous visionary talent that serious musicians still discuss his legendary performances the way chess masters dissect classic openings; and George Maciunas, an “eccentric’s eccentric,” whose uptown art gallery not only launched Yoko Ono but also Fluxus, the experimental movement of renegade artists devoted to demolishing artistic conventions by “promoting living art, anti-art” and what its manifesto referred to as a “non-art reality.” Together and separately, they staged a series of events (known as “happenings”) in New York lofts and walk-ups that stretched over many years and stood the underground art scene on its head. La Monte Young composed several-hour-long pieces whose entire score consisted of two notes for the cello, two droning notes that were supposed to create their own energy, while collaborators made chalk drawings on the floor around him. As Albert Goldman noted: “Long before Jimi Hendrix set light to his guitar, LaMonte Young ignited a violin on stage.” Another piece called for the release of a handful of butterflies. Maciunas, on the other hand, was a card-carrying provocateur (although some preferred the term con artist). Nothing delighted him more than coaxing a wicked laugh from the viewer of some outrageous project or stunt perpetrated in the name of Fluxus: sacks filled with paper while a band played military marches, poems filled entirely with nonsense syllables, collages assembled from the detritus of local odd-lot shops.
For Yoko Ono, both mentors fulfilled the visions and images that had been caroming around her head. She took both men for lovers, separating from Toshi, who proved to be, in Yoko’s words, “very kind” in regard to a string of affairs she engaged in throughout their marriage. It is difficult to know the extent of their understanding. Friends have referred to it as “an open marriage” or “partnership,” but in any regard the arrangement had clearly run its course. In early 1961, after Toshi returned to Tokyo, Yoko devoted every waking moment to launching her career, pushing full steam ahead under the guidance of her mentors.
On November 24, 1961, Yoko staged her first uptown performance at the Carnegie Recital Hall, an intimate theater above the renowned concert house, which featured works in progress by artists who were either on their way up or on their way down. Yoko’s “opera,” as she billed it, was so strange and unexpected that it had the odd effect of confirming neither direction. One movement in particular caught the slender audience unawares. Entitled “A Grapefruit in the World of Park,” it was performed in darkness as well as near silence so that listeners, as she explained afterward, “would start to feel the environment and tension and people’s vibrations.” At one point, two men tied together, with empty cans and bottles strewn around them, wriggled their way from one end of the stage to the other. “I wanted the sound of people perspiring in it, too, so I had all the dancers wear contact microphones, and the instructions were to bring out very heavy boxes and take them back across the stage, and while they were doing that, they were perspiring a little. There was one guy who was asthmatic, and it was fantastic.” Mostly outraged concertgoers exiting the hall were overheard venting their indignation at the crazy experience.
There were other similar performances in New York, one more infuriating than the next, but audiences showed little interest in Yoko’s work, the critics even less. Hardly any serious writers wasted ink on a review. Frustrated by their reaction (or rather, lack thereof), she returned to Tokyo in 1963, where much of the avant-garde community had rallied around her husband, Toshi Ichiyanagi.
But there was no sign of encouragement and no one in Tokyo to inspire her. For months on end she languished in solitude, in a sterile eleventh-floor high-rise, contemplating suicide. Her intention was to escape, to loose the chains of boredom at any cost. On more than one occasion, Yoko’s reckless gesture toward an open window forced Toshi to restrain her from plunging to her death. For reasons that are unclear, Yoko had unchecked access to a prescription for sleeping pills and the requisite overdose nearly delivered the coup de grâce. Yoko woke up in a sanitorium, where she was confined for several weeks. It was during this time that Yoko met Tony Cox, a small-time hustler with an art background, who rescued her from her depression and set out to make her a star.
In the course of their tempestuous romance, there was one remaining hitch: she still had not resolved the situation with Toshi. Further complications arose when Yoko discovered she was pregnant. This was not the first time; in the past, Yoko’s form of birth control was abortion, of which there were many. “In New York I was always having abortions,” she told Esquire in a 1970 article, “because I was too neurotic to take precautions.” But Cox persuaded her to have the baby and to marry him. “Tony and the doctors frightened me into thinking that I could not safely have another abortion,” she recalled. Some suspected that Yoko’s pregnancy provided a safety net for Tony Cox, a solution to plaguing visa problems, which marriage and a child would resolve. “Tony got her pregnant to stay in Japan,” a close friend insisted.
On August 3, 1963, Yoko gave birth to a girl they named Kyoko Chan. If having Kyoko was intended to bring stability to Yoko and Tony’s relationship, it couldn’t have been a more wrongheaded decision. The newlyweds were living in a minuscule one-room flat in Shibuya, a neighborhood of mostly artists, musicians, and writers, where a baby only intensified the couple’s sense of isolation. How could one create and perform with a newborn infant demanding so much attention? It hadn’t been much of a marriage to begin with, and before long, Yoko, an indifferent mother, could not cope. Instead, she buried herself in writing and performing new pieces, including the self-publication of Grapefruit, the book of whimsical poems she later gave John as a calling card.
Throughout the spring and summer of 1964, Yoko staged a series of events in Tokyo and Kyoto that traded on her cockamamie instructional scenarios. One, appropriately titled “Sweep Piece,” was a four-hour performance during which the audience watched a janitor sweep out the entire theater, stroke by stroke. Another, “Touch Piece,” lasting from dusk to dawn, instructed participants to do nothing more than touch their neighbors. Yoko’s most provocative piece during this period, performed at the Sogetsu Art Center in Tokyo, was “Cut Piece,” in which she appeared on stage in a fetching black dress and invited members of the audience, one by one, to approach and snip away at her clothing with a pair of large scissors. There was always some reluctance from people to participate in a potentially humiliating and grotesque to-do, but eventually one spectator would timidly volunteer—even if it was Tony, appearing as a shill—setting off a group reflex ultimately resulting in near nudity.
Proper recognition as a concept artist was still a long way off, but the Japanese audiences’ volatile reaction convinced Yoko that she could not stay in Japan if she expected to attract serious attention. If there were to be additional acts to the Yoko Ono Show, she had to be ready to take it on the road. Yoko landed in New York alone in November 1964, without Tony and Kyoko, the first move in what was effectively a trial separation. Over the next six months Yoko launched an all-out assault, diving right into this mutant gene pool. She staged event after event through 1965, many under the guidance of Tony Cox, who had returned to her side and resumed his promotional crusade.
It was during this go-go period that Yoko performed the pivotal piece that would jump-start her career. In the corner of a gallery located in the Judson Memorial Church in lower Manhattan, where she lived with Kyoko, Yoko performed “Stone Piece,” in which she crawled into a large cloth bag, either alone or with Cox, took off her clothes, and engaged in some form of sex. Other times, she would sit, solitary, for hours, moving occasionally, and then only slightly, to provoke the interest of passersby who gathered to watch. “Inside there might be a lot going on,” she explained coyly. “Or maybe nothing’s going on.” Everything depended on the imagination. A critic from Cue called it “hypnotically dreamlike,” which was only one of many ways the piece affected viewers.
While it didn’t bring fame, as Yoko had hoped, something almost as attractive materialized from the Judson Church show: an invitation to participate in a symposium in London called “Destruction in Art,” organized by movers and shakers in the avant-garde scene there. Thanks to Tony’s resilient advance work, she arrived trailing a paper storm of frothy reviews, many of them written to order by her dutifully calculating husband. Her performance at “Destruction in Art,” on September 28, 1966, already a hotbed of expectation, caused a minor sensation. Appearing before a packed crowd of enthusiasts, Yoko performed both her “Cut” and “bag” pieces, finishing with a number in which she instructed the audience to shout out the first words that came to mind for a period of five minutes.
The London papers were nearly as enthusiastic as the boosters at the symposium, which saluted her pieces with prolonged worshipful applause. The art critic for the Financial Times called Yoko’s performance “uplifting,” and a reviewer for the Daily Telegraph called her performance an “elevated conclusion” to an otherwise “dreadful” symposium. Barry Miles, partner with Peter Asher and John Dunbar in the recently opened Indica Bookshop, had seen the performance that night and invited Yoko to showcase an exhibit entirely of her choosing in the basement gallery. The offer, as Miles presented it, was too good to pass up, and it paid off in spades when John Lennon walked in the door.
[III]
Yoko was drawn both to John and to the girth of his bankbook, which could endow her career. Many newcomers to her London entourage recall Yoko and Tony actively seeking a well-situated backer for their projects. “A Beatle,” several remember, and according to a close friend: “She said, half-laughingly, ‘I’d like to marry John Lennon.’ ”
John was genuinely intrigued by the odd combination of exoticism and absurdity that Yoko projected, but admitted being “intimidated” by her as well. The way she carried herself, as though nothing could derail her from her mission, was for John the most powerful turn-on. One of his strongest impressions from the start was not of Yoko’s work, which he considered “far out,” but of her loose, liberated manner, which made him realize she was “somebody that you could go and get pissed with, and to have exactly the same relationship as any mate in Liverpool.” It “bowled me over,” he acknowledged. He’d never known a woman so much like himself.
Apple was still in its critical infancy and required whatever part of John’s attention he could muster. In January 1968 the Beatles opened offices at 95 Wigmore Street, an eight-story high-rise around the corner from EMI, and began staffing it with friends and cronies. The old Liverpool gang (Derek Taylor referred to them as “the old courtiers”)—Peter Brown, Geoffrey Ellis, Alistair Taylor, Terry Doran, and Tony Bramwell—were brought over from NEMS; Derek Taylor agreed to return as Apple’s press officer; and Peter Asher, Jane’s talented brother, launched an A&R department dedicated to recording new talent. John was also collaborating on a short play based on material from his two books, In His Own Write and A Spaniard in the Works, that no less an august temple than Britain’s National Theatre planned to stage in June. And to top it off, before the Beatles left for India, they intended to squeeze in a session to record a new single.
The session, which began on February 3 and meandered over the next eight days, actually produced four sides, the most memorable being “Lady Madonna,” which was earmarked from the start as the group’s next—and final Parlophone—single. Paul had written it almost entirely himself, as “a tribute to women,” he said, although his images of women collide and contradict one another faster than the chitter-chatter of a Greek chorus. Nevertheless, the song returned the Beatles to a more straightforward rock ’n roll structure than they had practiced in the past few years, “not outright rock,” according to Paul (Ringo referred to it as “rockswing”), “but it’s that kind of thing.” The opening barrelhouse piano riff was lifted, Paul has since admitted, from Humphrey Lyttelton’s “Bad Penny Blues,” a minor hit released in 1956 and produced by none other than George Martin. The vocal, however, took its origins from a different source. “[The song] reminded me of Fats Domino,” Paul explained, “so I started singing a Fats Domino impression. It took my voice to a very odd place.” Odd, yet familiar to early rock ’n roll fans. Gone were the obliqueness and wearisome effects of the previous two albums. Gone, too, were the umpteen overdubs that made the Beatles’ songs impossible to duplicate in concert. “Lady Madonna,” for all its power, was basically recorded in a day—the old-fashioned way—with a chorus of saxophones added as an afterthought later in the week.
The “Lady Madonna” sessions included “Hey Bulldog,” another pared-down rocker, as well as the music for “Across the Universe” and George’s Indian-style spiritual, “The Inner Light.” It was becoming increasingly clear that if the Beatles were to find their focus again, they had to play together, as opposed to piece together takes; they had to let ’er rip. For a while Paul endeavored to provide the necessary spark, but after eight days of cheerleading, the Beatles ran out of steam. “I think… we were all a bit exhausted, spiritually,” he recalled. “We’d been the Beatles, which was marvelous… but I think generally there was a feeling of: ‘Yeah, well, it’s great to be famous, it’s great to be rich—but what’s it all for?’ ” The music was the glue that had held it all together, but the music, like their individual lives, was moving in every direction at once. “So we were inquiring into all sorts of various things… and after we thought about it all, we went out to Rishikesh.”
The plan was to spend three months, from February 15 through April 25, 1968, in Rishikesh, Uttar Pradesh, India, to study Transcendental Meditation and self-realization at Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s ashram. The three wives—Cynthia, Pattie, and Maureen—would accompany the boys, as would Jane Asher, but as early as February, John schemed to have Yoko included in the entourage. “I was gonna take her,” he said later in an interview with Rolling Stone. It seemed like a good idea at the time to have her around, a convenient way to get to know her better. Ultimately, however, he “lost [his] nerve, because I was going to take [Cynthia] and Yoko, and I didn’t know how to work it.”
The Maharishi’s ashram was a new concept in the Hindu spiritual world. Throughout the region of Uttar Pradesh, wizened holy men, called sadhus, sought enlightenment from the Bhagavad Gita in a setting of utter, natural simplicity, strolling barefoot beside the sacred Ganges or meditating in half-lit solitary caves. There were no organized activities other than total commitment to their spiritual pursuit. But the Maharishi’s retreat was unique: part temple, part commercial venture. Set within a fenced-in compound on a hillside overlooking the Ganges, the ashram resembled a Himalayan Club Med, with a central courtyard surrounded by six concrete lean-tos, called puri (Paul optimistically referred to them as “chalets”; Cynthia, “barracks”), where disciples redefined their place in the universe from a warren of tiny, unheated cells. There was a glass-walled dining area and a terraced lecture hall interconnected by gravel paths, a swimming pool, a heliport, even plans for an airfield, all at the nominal rate of $400 for the three-month stay.
It was the answer to the Beatles’ prayers. “We were really getting away from everything,” John recalled—the craziness, the drugs, the fame, the inexorable grind. On February 16, after weeks of shuffling an unusually concentrated workload, he and George, along with their wives and Pattie’s sister Jenny, left the material world, crossed five time zones, and headed toward the plains in the dense valley between the Himalaya and Delhi. The overland journey from the airport—by taxi, Jeep, and donkey—covered 150 miles and took more than four hours. On a particularly forbidding stretch of road, the weary Beatles party looked out both sides of their car and saw only soft, treacherous cliffs, with no guardrail—and no conceivable access. It took them several minutes to realize that they’d have to continue on foot. “There [was] quite a heavy flow of water coming out of the Himalayas,” George remembered, “and we had to cross the river by a big swing suspension bridge” outfitted with a hand-lettered sign warning NO CAMELS OR ELEPHANTS. The Beatles had visited India before—stopping to shop on their way back from the Philippines—but they’d never experienced it from this side of the tracks. A colony of lepers begged on the banks of the Ganges, as dusky-faced monks waded, naked, into the murky current. Sacred cows lazed on the riverbed, monkeys leaped from tree to tree. As one wide-eyed Westerner wrote: “It was a collision of magnificence and wretchedness.”
Paul and Ringo followed three days later, along with Neil Aspinall, arriving at the Academy of Transcendental Meditation, where they joined their friends and sixty other students waiting to channel their full potential.
For the next ten days everyone wandered the six-acre retreat, spending long hours absorbed in quiet, thoughtful meditation and listening to the Maharishi’s twice-daily instructional lectures, fine-tuning the spiritual fork. A powerful camaraderie developed among the reverent group. After a communal breakfast, they saw one another only occasionally during the day. Meditation, at the Maharishi’s suggestion, should last for twelve-hour stretches, with short breaks, but once the Beatles got settled, the formula was markedly reversed, with twenty-minute segments of meditation aimed at breaking up the interplay. Instead, time was made for talking, reading, and lazing in the sun. The actress Mia Farrow, who had matriculated some weeks earlier, at the beginning of the term, recalled experiencing an initial regret at the boys’ noisy presence, feeling that it disrupted the commune’s focus. “Nevertheless,” she later wrote in her 1997 memoir, “with their cheerful chatter and guitars and singing, the new arrivals brought an element of ‘normalcy’ to the ashram—a sort of contemporary reality, which at first seemed jarringly out of place.”
That is not to say that the Beatles did not take TM seriously. George, of course, had been an instant convert, devoting long, intensely pensive hours to the contemplative process even before leaving England, but John, more than anyone, threw himself wholeheartedly into the practice. “I was meditating about eight hours a day,” he recalled in a 1974 interview. Cynthia, who admitted being surprised by his discipline, said, “To John, nothing else mattered. He spent literally days in deep meditation.” As for the ashram itself, she thought “John and George were [finally] in their element. They threw themselves totally into the Maharishi’s teachings, were happy, relaxed and above all had found a peace of mind that had been denied them for so long.” Even Ringo, whose tolerance for introspection was considerably lower than his mates’, formed an impression that was more agreeable than expected. “It was pretty exciting,” he recalled years later. “We were in a very spiritual place.”
Only Paul viewed this new enthusiasm with characteristic rationality. “It was quite nice,” he thought at the time, like “sitting in front of a nice coal fire that’s just sort of glowing.” Other times he would say, “It was almost magical.” There were instances when Paul allowed the magic to take control of him, like during a midafternoon meditation when he felt “like a feather over a warm hot-air pipe” during which he was “suspended” in midair. But more and more, he had “trouble keeping [his] mind clear,” he said, “because the minute you clear it, a thought comes in and says, ‘What are we gonna do about our next record?’ ”
Paul couldn’t let it rest, not even in India, not even during afternoon sunbathing with the others on the banks of the Ganges. There was always a guitar within reach, always a few sheets of paper nearby on which to scribble the outline of a lyric or a few nascent lines. Paul wrote like mad in Rishikesh—but truth be told, so did John. (“Regardless of what I was supposed to be doing, I did write some of my best songs while I was there,” he recalled.) They threw themselves into their music and began meeting clandestinely in the afternoons in each other’s rooms—occasionally with Donovan, who showed up unexpectedly, in pursuit of Pattie’s sister—playing acoustic guitars and “having an illegal cigarette.” In all, they completed nearly forty compositions; John wrote “Julia,” “The Continuing Story of Bungalow Bill,” “Mean Mr. Mustard,” “Jealous Guy” (originally entitled “I’m Just a Child of Nature”), “Across the Universe,” “Cry Baby Cry,” “Polythene Pam,” “Yer Blues,” and “I’m So Tired,” while Paul tackled “Rocky Raccoon,” “Wild Honey Pie,” “I Will,” “Mother Nature’s Son,” and “Back in the U.S.S.R.,” the latter an homage to his boyhood idolChuck Berry.
Often in the evenings the Maharishi led his young followers on excursions to Dehra Dun, the nearest village. There, in a series of dilapidated tents where local tailors sat cross-legged on mats operating ancient sewing machines, the Beatles had outfits made—the loose-fitting, gauzy shirts and wide pajama bottoms, along with saris, that were traditional Indian garb—or shopped for souvenirs. They explored the open-air markets and came to rely on two or three local cafés, including Nagoli’s, a restaurant that served perspiring beakers of “forbidden” wine. On one occasion, when a traveling cinema arrived in the village square, everyone trooped down from the meditation center along a dusty jungle path, swinging lanterns in the fading twilight. For some reason Paul had brought his guitar, and as they descended through the steep overgrowth, he serenaded the party with bits of a new song he’d been working on. “Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace…,” he sang gaily over the thrash of footsteps. The piece focused on a Yoruba phrase that he’d picked up from Jimmy Scott, a conga player and familiar figure on the London club scene. “Every time we met,” Paul recalled, “he’d say ‘Ob la di ob la da, life goes on, bra,’ ” and the expression stuck in his head.
In India, songs came to the Beatles in the most mundane of ways. “Bungalow Bill” was written after two meditators, a middle-aged American woman and her teenage son, broke camp to go on safari—“to go shoot a few poor tigers,” as John facetiously put it—then returned to their puri,adjacent to the Maharishi’s, in order to commune with God. “Across the Universe” borrowed the expression of greeting that TM disciples exchanged when they encountered one another on one of the paths: Jai Guru Dev, or “long live Guru Dev,” in tribute to the Maharishi’s personal swami.
For most of the prolonged stay, Prudence Farrow, Mia’s emotionally fragile younger sister, remained locked in her tiny room, meditating as if her life depended on it. She failed to appear for meals or even the nightly question-and-answer sessions with the Maharishi. “Prudence meditated and hibernated,” Ringo recalled. “We saw her twice in the two weeks I was there. Everyone would be banging on the door: ‘Are you still alive?’ ”
Eventually, her meditation grew deeper and more extreme. “She went completely mental,” John recalled. “If she’d been in the West, they would have put her away.” Being as it was the East, however, they sent in the Beatles. George and John had been selected as Prudence’s “team buddies,” a designation comparable to court jesters, appointed to rescue her from a near-catatonic state. “One night when I was meditating, George and John came into my room with their guitars, singing ‘Ob la di ob la da,’ ” she told her sister, Mia, although it seems unlikely they’d play one of Paul’s songs. “Another time John, Paul, and George came in singing ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’ the whole song!”
How Prudence responded to the gesture is not recorded, except that the boys “got her out of the house.” And for John, the experience provided inspiration: using a finger-picking technique he learned from Donovan, the structure for “Dear Prudence” was in place before the night was out.
By now, between them, Paul and John had written enough good songs for two or three albums. “I came up with calling the next album Umbrella,” Paul recalled, “an umbrella over the whole thing.” An umbrella! That was all George had to hear. “We’re not fucking here to do the next album,” he snarled at Paul, “we’re here to meditate!” But for Paul, the new repertoire emerging was already part of a masterful aural palette, the songs beginning to overlap and interweave. No doubt the body of an album was taking shape in his mind. He was satisfied with his own substantial output and thought several of John’s—notably “Across the Universe” and “Bungalow Bill”—were among his partner’s “great songs.”
For Ringo, the urge to see his two children became overpowering, and after two weeks he and Maureen decided they’d had enough of the academy. Besides, Maureen had a phobia of the fist-size insects that taxied through their room, and Ringo, still tormented by childhood gastrointestinal problems, couldn’t handle the spicy curries used to season the food. What was an intense emotional experience to most of the Maharishi’s students was, from Ringo’s outlook, “very much like a holiday.” But like any good holiday, the time had come to bid it farewell.
Ringo’s decision posed something of a public relations nightmare for the Maharishi. Since devoting themselves to his teachings, the Beatles had emerged as his unofficial ambassadors to the world; how would it look to the media, assembled outside the academy’s gates, when Ringo walked out early, with his suitcases? Almost immediately after announcing his departure, Ringo came under intense pressure to reconsider. Perceptive to a fault, the Maharishi must have also sensed he was losing his grip on Paul McCartney and Jane Asher. In Peter Brown’s estimation, “Paul and Jane were much too sophisticated for [the Maharishi’s] mystical gibberish.” Paul was obviously never as committed to TM in the way that John and George were, never one to expect “some huge spiritual lift-off.”
After a month in Rishikesh, Paul was eyeing an exit strategy that had been in place before he’d left London, but he was concerned that George and John “might never come back.”
“John took meditation very seriously,” Cynthia recalled. His approach to it brought with it a remarkable transformation; he seemed happier, certainly healthier, now that drugs and hard liquor were out of the picture. But Cynthia was beginning to suspect the Maharishi’s sweeping power over John: suspicion that there was some sort of mind control involved to wrest her husband away from his career. “He seemed very isolated and would spend days on end with the Maharishi, emerging bleary-eyed and not wanting to communicate with me or anyone…. He went so deeply within himself through meditation that he separated himself from everything.”
It didn’t occur to Cynthia at the time that John was struggling to separate himself from her. He’d moved into a separate bedroom, hardly exchanging a word with her, even in private moments. Knowing that John despised confrontations with her, Cynthia chose to ignore the bad vibes. “Something had gone very wrong between John and me,” Cynthia concluded. “It was as if a brick wall had gone up between us.”
It wasn’t brick, but paper: a flurry of postcards sent by Yoko Ono were arriving in India almost every day. John rose early and stole away to collect them at the postal drop near the dining hall—another glaring sign because, as Cynthia well knew, John hardly ever got up early. But the postcards were like catnip; he couldn’t resist getting the next one to see what kind of cosmic mischief Yoko had cooked up. “I’m a cloud,” she scrawled on one, “watch for me in the sky.” Others echoed her loopy instructional poems from Grapefruit. “I got so excited about her letters,” John recalled, “… and from India, I’d started thinking of her as a woman, not just an intellectual woman.” Yoko Ono, not the Maharishi, had taken control of John’s mind.
Paul and Jane decamped on March 24, 1968, a month and a half ahead of schedule. John and George, convinced that enlightenment still lay within reach, pressed ahead in the next stages of their spiritual development on the path to perfection. Although deeply impressed with the strength and insight of the Maharishi’s wisdom, John continued to struggle with his own demons. He had certainly tried—tried hard—but the thicket in his skull was too thick to clear. Feeling miserable, John longed for a playmate (George had grown annoyingly introspective), someone to help him blow off a little steam. There are various accounts of the way Magic Alex Mardas appeared in India. Some say John “missed his company” and sent for him. Others maintain Alex came on his own “because he didn’t approve of the Beatles’ meditating, and he wanted John back.” No matter how he materialized or the real reason that he went, all agree that everything unraveled soon after Alex arrived.
Alex didn’t share his benefactor’s passion for the idyllic ashram. He was “appalled” by the accommodations and quickly pegged the Maharishi as a controlling, holy hoax. It didn’t suit Alex’s scheme that someone could have more influence over John than he did, and from the outset he looked for a way to regain the upper hand. Somehow, during the course of long walks through the woods, John revealed to Alex that the Beatles intended to tithe a huge chunk of their income to the guru’s Swiss bank account. Shortly afterward Alex told the others that the Maharishi was, among other transgressions, supposedly having sex with one of his disciples, a young American nurse. The veracity of his claim has never been proved. In her memoir Mia Farrow intimates that the Maharishi might have come on to her, but then acknowledges she may have been disoriented and misinterpreted the “advance”: it may have been nothing more than the traditional embrace given by a holy man after meditation. The Maharishi, she said, had never shown anything but consideration and respect toward his guests. Paul, upon hearing the charges, also said: “I think it was completely untrue.” But George and John were crushed by the accusation. They’d put great faith in the Maharishi, given themselves over completely to his ministry. Faced with these circumstances, they were shaken—and angry. George was indignant. The Maharishi had become his spiritual mentor; thanks in no small part to his holiness, George had managed “to plug into the divine energy and raise [his] state of consciousness,” evolving in ways even he’d never imagined were possible. Now this threw everything into a spin. George and John went back and forth all night, arguing heatedly: was it true, or not? Throughout their soul-searching, Alex continued to pour it on, tossing in excoriating details to inflame their doubt. There was really no way the beleaguered guru could defend himself in this situation. The more Alex talked, the more guilty—and despicable—the Maharishi seemed. Eventually George’s faith buckled ever so slightly. “When George started thinking it might be true,” John said, “I thought, ‘Well, it must be true, because if George is doubting him, there must be something in it.’ ”
Finally, John and George made the decision to leave the ashram. It had to be immediately, Alex insisted; otherwise, the Maharishi might send down some “black magic” upon them. When they awoke early the next morning, cars were already waiting outside the compound gates. Alex had gone into Dehra Dun at the crack of dawn to hire several drivers to take the Beatles to Delhi. The last thing he wanted was for the Maharishi to have an opportunity to talk John and George into staying.
Jenny Boyd, who reluctantly left with her sister and brother-in-law, remembered seeing the Maharishi standing helplessly, looking small and quite forlorn, at the gates to the ashram, as they all filed past with their luggage. “Wait,” she recalled him pleading. “Talk to me.”
It seemed pointless for them to hash out the accusations with the Maharishi. He would only deny them. And George was already feeling ashamed about the way they were leaving things. He already suspected they’d been set up by Alexis Mardas. (Though Peter Brown insists that some months later “John told me he knew for a fact that Maharishi had fucked that young girl.”) Why? the Maharishi repeatedly implored. A wave of belligerence swept over John, who responded: “If you’re so cosmically conscious, as you claim, then you should know why we’re leaving.”
With those words, the two remaining Beatles walked out of the ashram at Rishikesh—and out of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s life forever.
But John Lennon was not finished with the Maharishi. On the way back to Delhi, in a bruised little car that kept breaking down every few miles, he began work on a vengeful song titled “Maharishi.” He sang it for George after a long stretch of downtime in which the car developed a flat tire and the driver disappeared, ostensibly to seek out a spare. It had a pungent, assertive melody that gave form to inexplicable feelings. “Maharishi, what have you done…” George understood where it came from but was appalled by the undisguised lyric. “You can’t say that, it’s ridiculous,” he warned John. There was no reason why the Beatles should give the Maharishi a public flogging. It would ruin the man, George argued. It was completely inappropriate, nothing he wanted to be associated with. Instead, George proposed that John replace the Maharishi’s name with Sexy Sadie. Disappointed at first, John tried rearranging the names and laughed at the absurdity. Sexy Sadie—it was pretty funny, he admitted; it would be their private joke. “Sexy Sadie, what have you done… ”
Although John clearly intended the song to distract him from the sorry events of the past twenty-four hours, as well as the obvious marriage difficulties, his attention began to drift as they arrived at the Delhi airport. He was already brooding over issues that would have to be addressed once they got home. George had said his good-byes in the car; he and Pattie were headed south, to Madras, for two weeks, where he planned to make an appearance in a documentary film about Ravi Shankar. And now, without George’s mediating influence, the tension between John and Cynthia filled the interminable silences.
By the time the plane took off for London, John could endure it no more. He began drinking scotch and Coke—his first hard liquor in several months. And the liquor loosened his tongue in ways not even he had foreseen. Confessions poured forth: John decided to reveal ten years’ worth of infidelities, every squalid fuck he’d experienced on the road, including but not limited to intimate friends of theirs. Cynthia didn’t want to hear about it; however, John insisted. “But you’ve got to bloody hear it, Cyn,” he was reported to have said. Protests were useless. Nothing Cynthia said, no amount of tears, could staunch the flow of indiscretions. Joan Baez, Ida Holly, Maureen Cleave—John ticked off the names as if they were Beatles songs. No opportunity to inflict pain, no matter how insignificant, went unseized. Liverpool, Hamburg, London, America, Australia, Japan, France—he claimed to have screwed his way around the globe. Hundreds, thousands, of girls; he’d lost count a long time ago. It was a cruel, horrible way to put his wife on notice, but John, in his rage, saw no other way of doing it. Later Cynthia wrote: “I never dreamed that he had been unfaithful to me during our married life,” but that denial is so much blather. Whatever the case, she undoubtedly understood the indiscreet confession: her marriage, as everyone else knew, was teetering on the edge of collapse. Still, she swallowed her outrage and continued to play the dutiful wife. As if to underscore his disaffection, two weeks after they returned home, John sent Cynthia on a fateful vacation to Greece.
[IV]
Readers who leafed through the London dailies on the morning of April 20, 1968, stopped paging as they came upon a peculiar-looking advertisement. It was so outlandish, so un-British, that it was impossible to ignore. Most people who saw it and read through the copy couldn’t help but grin abstractedly as they realized who was behind the shenanigan. THIS MAN HAS TALENT, the banner read. Underneath it sat a bespectacled little busker in a pegged suit and bowler hat (Alistair Taylor, pressed into the role over strong objections) with a bass drum strapped to his back, a harmonica poised at his mouth, a litter of instruments, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a washboard, and other musical paraphernalia scattered around his feet, bent over a guitar and singing into a microphone: a one-man band. “One day he sang his songs to a tape recorder (borrowed from a man next door),” the ad continued. “In his neatest handwriting he wrote an explanatory note (giving his name and address) and, remembering to enclose a picture of himself, sent the tape, letter, and photograph to apple music, 94 Baker Street, London, W.1. If you were thinking of doing the same thing yourself—do it now! This man now owns a Bentley!”
It had the Beatles’ fingerprints all over it. Only two weeks after arriving back from India, they launched Apple with their customary fireworks, in a way that would demand instant worldwide attention. They had kicked around ideas for over a week, trying to decide how to best express the company’s philosophy and make the proper splash at the same time. “We want to help people, but without doing it like a charity,” explained Paul, whose brainstorm produced the ad. “We’re in the happy position of not needing any more money, so for the first time the bosses aren’t in it for a profit. If you come to me and say, ‘I’ve had such-and-such a dream,’ I’ll say to you: ‘Go away and do it.’ ” Apple would cut a check to underwrite the project, just like that.
This announcement touched off a gold rush. The promise of a blank check and the Beatles was too much for anyone to resist, whether they had talent or not. “Overnight, we were swamped with calls and kids who wandered in, demanding an audition,” says Alistair Taylor. “Everyone tried to get through the door in the next couple of weeks.” Worthy artists made their pitch—but so did schemers and crackpots. George, the resident skeptic, called it “madness” and was not too far off the mark. “By the time I came back [from India],” he recalled, “they’d opened the offices in Wigmore Street. I went in… and there were rooms full of lunatics, people throwing I Ching [John had hired a fortune-teller named Caleb who advised him on business matters based on the readings] and all kinds of hangers-on trying to get a gig.” Through it all, the spirit of peace and love abounded—a spirit dedicated to the notion that what goes around comes around. Kids wearing loose-fitting flowered shirts and wide bell-bottoms, with strings of beads around their neck, were camped out, smoking dope and grooving on the vibes. It all seemed positively blissful, but their ultimate objective only betrayed the greed and sloth emblematic of the hippie movement. Everyone’s heart was in the right place, George supposed, but “basically, it was chaos.”
In fact, among the Beatles, Apple was anything but a collective affair. George, by choice, “had very little to do” with the company. “I hate it,” he confided to Derek Taylor on his first day back from India. He’d considered it a “ridiculous” idea from the start and kept himself otherwise preoccupied, scoring a small independent film called Wonderwall and communing with the spiritual world. As for Ringo, business wasn’t his forte. He was happy to be included in the creative sessions, but as for decision making, whatever the others wanted was fine by Rings. “Paul, for the longest time, was Apple,” says Peter Brown. “It was his baby. He was coming in every day, and decisions were made by either Neil or me going to him and saying, ‘Do you approve?’ ‘Yes.’ Okay, it was done. Paul oversaw everything, from building the offices to designing the layouts.” Technically, George and John were also directors of the company and, therefore, necessary to any major decisions, but Brown, as much as possible, avoided getting either one of them involved. “John wouldn’t give me an answer,” he says, “and George would give me a runaround.”
For several months the structure established at Apple was the structure Paul devised. And for the most part, it was a pretty efficient and effective one. The company was run like Decca and EMI, but more relaxed and communal, which is how all record companies were run thereafter. Paul had the young staff hopping—one employee said that “he’d stay there all day and he’d go around checking on things, little weird things, like was there toilet paper in the bathrooms”—but feeling that they were an essential part of the show. Without John hanging over his shoulder, Paul had complete control.
Which only made things worse for John. By all accounts, John had hit an all-time low. “John was in a rage because God had forsaken him,” George recalled. “Then he went and completely reversed himself. He turned from being positive to being totally negative.” According to Pete Shotton, who was spending time with John at Weybridge, there was an overriding feeling of humiliation—from the Maharishi, from the Apple Boutique shambles, from his deteriorating marriage, from what he felt was his shrinking position in the Beatles. “He was more fucked up than I’d even seen him,” Shotton remembers. “It seemed like everything was going to the dogs. He’d been desperately grasping [at] straws, as far as I was concerned, and there wasn’t even a straw there.” The nonstop drug-taking had left John hollowed-out. Stoned and cranky during his brief outings to the Apple office, he growled at the inexperienced young staff, firing off obscenities at the most insignificant provocation. Otherwise, he just checked out. At a London party on April 18 for the launch of Bell Records, an independent pop label, John arrived already higher than a kite and drank so much champagne that he passed out at the table and had to be carried to his car.
Something had to give. It came as a welcome relief that John and Paul, along with Neil Aspinall, planned a quick trip to New York on May 11, where several press events had been scheduled to announce Apple Records in the States. Friends agreed that getting John away might do him a world of good; being alone, with just Paul to steady him, might have a calming influence. But Paul was grappling with his own set of anxieties. “We wanted a grand launch,” Paul said, “but I had a strange feeling and was very nervous.” Drugs, he later admitted, may have been at the root of his problem; there was a lot of dope-smoking before takeoff and even during the transatlantic flight. But Jane Asher also helped spike Paul’s mood. The grudging engagement between Beatle and actress had been ticklish at best. But since traveling together in India and a subsequent ten-day trip to Scotland, Jane’s eccentricities rankled. Paul was having serious second thoughts about the relationship, which had reached a kind of critical, now-or-never stage.
Between John’s attitude and Paul’s paranoia, the Beatles were a PR nightmare. “It was a mad, bad week in New York,” recalled Derek Taylor, who met the two Beatles there to chaperone a round of press conferences, followed by interviews. Taylor had fashioned himself into a debonair drug aficionado since the Beatles first dosed him at Brian Epstein’s housewarming party, and now he and John gorged themselves on speed and a “mild and extremely benign hallucinogen” called Purple Holiday, courtesy of their New York chauffeur. The effect of it came through in the interviews. John was gallingly withdrawn and dismissive, Paul unusually distracted—which made them come off as two rich, snooty rock stars peddling another product.
Once two major press conferences and a television appearance were stumblingly completed, John and Paul headed to yet another press party. There the Beatles worked the room, performing their duties with élan. At one point Paul noticed a woman taking photographs of the crowd. In fact, he’d seen her earlier that afternoon, at the Americana function, where she’d also caught his eye. He remembered her from Brian’s house, when she’d squatted at his feet and shot two rolls of close-ups, and the allure he experienced then hadn’t abated.
“He said, ‘We’re leaving, give me your number,’ ” Linda Eastman recalled, “and I remember writing it on a check.” By the time she got home that night, he’d already called. There was no time for a drink or an informal walk. He and John were leaving the next afternoon, which made the rest of their schedule airtight. Instead, he invited her to join them in a limo for the ride out to the airport. “There was something awfully steamy going on in that car,” recalls Nat Weiss, another passenger to Kennedy, “a lot of heavy checking out, a lot of body heat. It was palpable; you could feel it.” There had always been hordes of available women about, but this was the first time, according to Weiss, that he sensed something more than a quick hustle. “Paul’s whole demeanor—that cocky defensive shield he wore like armor—melted away and, for a moment, he seemed fairly human.”
Despite later claims that he “didn’t think she was particularly attractive” and “[a] bit too tweedy,” John couldn’t have been surprised by Paul’s interest in Linda Eastman. She was certainly his type—blond, “high-breasted and extremely attractive,” a bit aloof—and she had a pedigree that impressed. He also knew Paul’s relationship with Jane Asher was flagging. The irony of it couldn’t have been lost on John that he and Paul—increasingly different in so many ways—were on the same timetable with regard to their changing relationships.
On the plane ride home, they talked about Ron Kass, a man they’d met in New York. Kass had been the top executive for Liberty Records in Europe, serving at the company’s outpost in Switzerland, and he’d come highly recommended by people at Capitol. “He was a fairly hip person, and very sophisticated,” recalls Peter Brown, “he’d been around. The key for us, however, was that he was an American who lived in Europe and understood the international complications of the music business.” After Paul and John had given Kass the once-over, the decision was made to provide him with the tools necessary to launch Apple Records. Anyone who thought the Beatles would relinquish creative control to an outsider was, however, seriously mistaken. This very point was demonstrated immediately upon their return, when Paul dined with Twiggy Lawson, who urged him to check out the recent winner of the talent-discovery TV show, Opportunity Knocks, a seventeen-year-old chanteuse named Mary Hopkin. Paul tuned in the next week to watch the girl defend the title and was enchanted by her voice. Besides, he recalled, “she looked very pretty, young girl, blonde, long hair, so I thought, Okay. Quite right. We should sign her for Apple, maybe make an interesting record with her.”
That was the way the process would work at Apple: see it, hear it, sign it. There would be none of the drawn-out, arduous auditions that had disappointed the Beatles in the early sixties, none of the nitsy policy battles with label functionaries and bean counters. Auditions were “a drag,” as the boys saw them. Record executives—“a drag.” Mazy contracts—“a serious drag.” Expedience became the highest priority. In fact, no sooner had Peter Asher come on board at the end of May than he officially signed Apple’s first outside artist, a lanky, twenty-year-old folkie named James Taylor. “He is an American song writer and singer who is extremely good,” Asher explained with typical understatement, in a June 1 memo to Ron Kass. “We intend to start recording him 20th June…. He is ready to discuss contracts and things as soon as you are.” An introduction, a recording date, contract discussions—that was Apple expedience in all its glory.
George, too, was busy with his own Apple project: recording an album with northern guitar swordsman Jackie Lomax, with whom he had developed an enthusiastic relationship. A lot of theorizing about music, about playing, went into their daily rehearsals, long unconscious jams exploring new interpretations and techniques. Paul, a prodigious innovator in his own right, might have satisfied George’s hunger when it came to musicianship, but Paul had never given him the time of day; like an unfulfilling marriage, George had to get it from someone else. “It all came as a shock, with the freedom Apple brought, when the Beatles started playing with other musicians and finding out what other people did,” recalls Tony Bramwell. “They had never played with anyone [outside of the other Beatles], they’d never jammed. When George prepared his Jackie Lomax record, he suddenly found himself playing with other musicians—and loved it. He discovered there was another world outside of the Beatles, and it eventually drove a wedge between the boys.”
Not that by now animus or infighting would require a great deal of effort. Record production, movies, music publishing, clothing boutiques, electronics… “They could never agree on anything,” Bramwell says. “Ego started becoming more important than success. John automatically blackballed any of Paul’s suggestions, Paul killed George’s, George rejected John’s. I can’t remember one decision that was unanimous or even near-unanimous.” Even their forthcoming recording sessions for a new album, drawn from the “tons of songs” written in Rishikesh, produced fresh tensions, riven with indecision. Each of the Beatles’ chief writers—John, Paul, and more recently George—lobbied fiercely for his personal efforts, extra-sensitive that one of the others’ might upstage his individual contributions. “The Beatles were getting real tense with each other,” said John, who pegged Paul and George as being “resentful” with regard to his songs.
The resentment might have been coming from a different place. With his marital problems still unsettled and Cynthia gallivanting around Greece, drugs continued to govern John’s fitful moods. He dosed himself continuously with LSD, tweaking its random effect with any spare pills he happened to find lying around the house. In the right company, it plunged John into a deep, unfathomable trance that altered between indecipherable rambling and deadpan silences. At Weybridge, into which Pete Shotton had moved in order to keep his friend company, he stayed up nights, tripping and battling wave after wave of incendiary rage. One night, after the usual snack of hallucinogens, Shotton says he noticed John moving his arms around very slowly in a circle. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ ” recalls Pete, “but John couldn’t explain it. He said, ‘I can’t stop. There’s something making me do this. I can’t help myself.’ ” Tears followed, uncontrollable rivers of tears, intermingled with hideous laughter. When Shotton tried to comfort him, John resisted. “I’m not crying,” he insisted peevishly, wiping his eyes with the back of a hand. Suddenly John declared that he was Jesus Christ, back from the grave. “He was convinced of it,” Pete recalls, “saying… ‘This is it, at last—I know who I am.’ ” The next day the Messiah convened an emergency meeting at Apple to announce his identity to the other Beatles. Unimpressed, they said: “Yeah, all right then. What shall we do now?” After someone suggested lunch, the matter was dropped.
That night at Weybridge, in the middle of another drug-induced reverie, the TV flickered off, whereupon John, already chastened and in a self-abasing mood, asked Pete if it was okay if he invited a woman to the house. Shotton, who had no intention of staying up another night with his friend, was relieved. “Well, I think I’ll call up Yoko,” John said.
“Yoko Ono?” Shotton was dumbfounded. He’d seen her around, as something of a mysterious figure on the periphery of the Beatles’ entourage, but never saw John raise so much as an eyebrow in her direction. “I didn’t know that you fancied her. You never said anything about her.”
“I don’t know if I fancy her,” John replied, “but there is something about her that I like.”
Yoko arrived at Weybridge in a taxi sometime before midnight. Things got off to an embarrassingly slow start for two untimid, headstrong souls. “She and John were like two nervous birds,” Shotton recalls. They sat in the dimly lit parlor, on the opposite end of a couch, hands folded awkwardly in their laps in the manner of suitors in an arranged marriage. Shotton, unable to make “heads or tails” of their clumsy conversation, excused himself and went to bed. Eventually, John led Yoko upstairs to his studio, where, amid stacks of record albums and toys, sat two reel-to-reel tape recorders on which he’d first sketched out many of the Beatles’ hits. “I played her all the tapes that I’d made, all this far-out stuff, some comedy stuff, and some electronic music,” John told Rolling Stone in 1970. It was such a crazy-quilt collection of material, much like a recorded journal of random thoughts strung together like mismatched beads. Some were leftover tape loops from Sgt. Pepper’s, some based on Spike Milligan antics; a few dated back to the early Beatles era—those that had survived the aftermath of drug-induced tantrums. The flaky irregularity of it fascinated a conceptualist like Yoko, who slipped right into the spirit of the tapes. “She was suitably impressed,” he recalled, “and then she said, ‘Well, let’s make one ourselves.’ ”
“We improvised for many hours,” Yoko remembered. “He used the two tape recorders and put through them any sounds that came into his hands…. I sat down and did the voice.” In high-pitched, almost painful wailing, Yoko contributed the kind of jarring vocals that reminded listeners of “the babel inside an insane asylum.” They worked steadily through the night, improvising and overdubbing, but especially “enjoying the uncertainty of how it would all turn out.” The free-form, impressionistic structure was exhilarating, the momentum a turn-on building all night to a certain feverish conclusion. “It was dawn when we finished,” John recalled, “and then we made love at dawn. It was very beautiful.”
During the early-morning reverie, John was overcome by the intensity of the whirlwind encounter. “I had no doubt I’d met The One,” he recalled. “Yoko and I were on the same wavelength right from the start, right from that first night. That first night convinced me I’d have to end my marriage to Cyn.”
John encountered Shotton in the kitchen early the next morning. Shotton says that John acted edgy and distant during a breakfast of hard-boiled eggs. It was clear that he was “shellshocked” by the inevitability of the night’s events and the ultimate conclusion he’d reached. Shotton asked how things had gone with Yoko, and John “just looked at me with a dead, blank stare.” Finally, John told him: “We’ve been up all night. Will you do us a favor, Pete? Will you find me a house?”
“You’ve already got a house,” he told John. “You’re sitting in it.”
“No, I want another house. I want to go and live with Yoko.”
“John, you’ve spent one night with her,” he argued, “one fucking night!”
But John was not to be deterred. “Pete, this is what I’ve been waiting for. All. My. Life. I don’t give a fuck about the Beatles. I don’t give a fuck about the money. I don’t give a fuck about the fame. I don’t give a fuck about anything. I’m going to go and live with Yoko, even if it means living in a tent with her. I’m going—and I don’t give a fuck.
“I have just fallen in love—probably for the first time in my life. I can’t bear to be apart from her. In fact, I want to go back up [stairs] in case she has an accident—or escapes through the window.” And with that, he turned and dashed from the room.
“John had been feeling dead inside for so long,” recalls Shotton. “Now, at last, he saw the chance to be reborn.”
And Yoko had acquired an additional act.