“Ignore her,” I advised again. “She’ll get the message.”
“She said she’d tried John, ’cos he’s been to art school and all that. She’d left a message but he hadn’t called her back. Look, the thing is, she says she’s a friend of Miles and John Dunbar, and she also said she met Brian at Edinburgh and he said he’d book her at the Saville.”
It all came back. 1 said. “Ah, yes. Well, what do you want me to do?”
“Oh, I don’t know. She’s quite arty and sort of sings a bit and stuff. She said she wouldn’t mind being put on at the Saville. Remind Brian, will you?” Pleased that he had done what he had obviously promised her he would do, Paul moved on to more interesting topics.
Duly, I met with Yoko to discuss her show. She said she’d done a few gigs at places like Middle Earth and been accepted, had gone down well even. To my mind, Middle Earth was generally filled with like-minded prats looking for “something.” Quite what they were looking for I didn’t know. It was spiritual maybe, but it wasn’t art. However, London was very experimental at the time and we didn’t want to lag behind.
We had to keep the theater open all the time, to keep the central heating going and help defray the staff’s wages. As a result, we would always have something on every day of the week that punters would buy tickets for. Brian would meet people and enthusiastically book them, no matter how nutty they were. I never knew what or who to expect next. Feeling as deranged as the Mad Hatter, I’d sit in the office and wait to see who would come in through the door. There’d be the Tribal Dancers of Kalahari, or the Bearded Ladies Jazz Quartet, or the Circular Knitting Machine Moog-Madness Motherfuckers. A secretary would buzz us: “Mr. Hitler’s in reception”—“Send him up!” We’d have all kinds, all shapes, sizes and persuasions.
We agreed to put Yoko on during an artists’ night, with a troupe called the Flux Partners, printed a few posters advertising her as avant-garde. Who were we, to know what was good and what was pseudo? Were we artistics or Philistines? She asked for the stage to be completely covered in black cloth, both the floor and backdrop and we stationed a few stepladders around, so the tiny audience who had been curious enough to buy tickets could go up and down them, thinking such deep thoughts as, “I’m climbing a stepladder to heaven.”
At the start of her show, a small, round black spider that blended in with the blackout material we had draped everywhere ran almost invisibly across the stage on all fours. It was Yoko. To set an example, Yoko climbed a ladder herself, and then she climbed down. Then she wailed a bit while moving around like one of those stop-motion figures on South Park. I couldn’t believe my ears. I really do believe that she thought rock and roll was simply people screaming their heads off. Finally, she brought out a chair and sat on it impassively, holding out a pair of scissors for her piece de resistance, the much-reprised performance of “Cut Piece.” The scissors were wired for sound, so every cut had a horrific, almost animal sound, like a beast crunching into its human prey. The audience was very uneasy by this brutal aural and visual display of what suddenly seemed like a real assault on a woman. With the final snip, Yoko was left naked on stage, seated pallid in the spotlight, with droopy tits. People stirred uncomfortably in their seats, a few giggled, nobody clapped. The bloody place was obviously filled with Philistines.
I stood watching from the back with Brian, who had popped in briefly, as he always did. Full frontal nudes were illegal in public, and the fact that it was a Sunday compounded the crime. Brian was stunned, much concerned that he would be arrested for pornography. “I don’t think we’d better put her on again,” he said, visibly shaken.
Brian was upset at the time because the Beatles had told him they had played their last public fandango, they would never appear on stage as a group again. But, most of all, he was upset over Alma Cogan, who had just died of leukemia. It didn’t seem real that someone we knew so well, someone in our own age group, could become terminally ill. From the time she was diagnosed, she went downhill very fast. A friend, Terry Ryan, a film student, who lived in South Kensington just around the corner from Alma’s flat, described how sometimes late at night in the weeks leading up to her death, like a frail shadow, Alma would slip into a nearby wine cellar where he would be with friends from the film school. Wrapped in a fur coat, even in late summer, she sat huddled at the back on her own, slowly sipping a glass of wine. “She looked so sad, so utterly alone,” he said. “I often thought I should go over and speak to her, but as with many people who are dying, what do you say? ‘How’s it going?’ ”
Even though Brian told me that we weren’t to book Yoko again, she was there among us and wasn’t going to go away. John might not have returned her telephone calls, but she was fighting a determined campaign and was gradually closing in on him. In October, the radical new underground newspaper the International Times (“IT”) was launched with a huge Middle Earth concert at the Roundhouse with Pink Floyd and the Soft Machine. Miles was involved with that as well and Paul put money into it. The Roundhouse was a former train engine workshop with a central turntable where engines would shunt in and be turned around to shunt out again. It was cold, poorly lit and filthy, but so packed, no one noticed. That night, in the middle of a set by Soft Machine, Yoko grabbed attention through another Fluxus-style happening. She got someone to turn out the lights, and through the total blackout darkness her amplified voice instructed everyone to touch the person next to them. You could hear giggles and squeals from the audience as a few people complied. The lights came back on, Yoko was thrown off the stage and Soft Machine continued. Paul was there, dressed as an Arab. I went, dressed as myself. I often went to such events, dressed as myself, on the lookout for talent for the Saville. Paul and I drifted around a bit but it was so noisy, you could never hold a conversation. Afterward, Paul mentioned the event to John, who looked wistful, as if he was missing all the fun, in exile out at Weybridge.
Soon Yoko would meet John in person. Dr. Asher and Paul had financed John Dunbar and Peter Asher, enabling them to set up Indica, their little art gallery-cum-bookshop, in commercial premises at Mason’s Yard in St. James. They decided that they would paint the basement white and hold art exhibitions in it. Through her sponsor, Barry Miles, Yoko finally got her foot through the door into the world of the Beatles by getting Dunbar and Peter to stage her show, “Unfinished Paintings and Objects” as their opening exhibition. Yoko hadn’t made any of these herself. Instead, she got some art students from the Royal Academy to do so. After she had finished arranging the sparse objects—an apple on a stand with a hefty price ticket, a couple of her empty sacks lying on the floor, a plank with nails half hammered in—Yoko turned to Dunbar and, apparently thinking on her feet, invented, “John Lennon said he might come to the exhibition. Why not ask him to a private preview? He’s a millionaire, he might buy something.”
Dunbar did telephone, and John agreed that he might drop in on the way to the studio next day. Everyone imagined that John was living in a whirlwind of fun, but he felt isolated and was often quite bored and lonely. Quite simply, he didn’t get many invitations from close friends or people he knew and could trust. When Dunbar called, it could well have been the only invitation John got all week.
The following day, the man himself drifted down the stairs to the basement. He later told me about what he saw, which bemused but did not amuse him. As an art student, he had seen tons of this kind of what I call intellectual fakery and, in John’s words, “didn’t dig it.” The story is now legend of how he stood hesitantly and glanced across at where Yoko and a couple of others sat cross-legged on the floor, stitching the sacks like jailbirds. John himself said he was on the point of leaving when Yoko jumped up and placed herself between him and the stairs. She asked who he was.
John stared. Amazed, Dunbar said, “It’s John Lennon, of course.”
Yoko shrugged. She said, “Oh,” as if she had never heard the name before. I think, when the story went the rounds that John must have been the
only person in London who didn’t hear it.
She handed him a small card. It said, “Breathe.” John peered at it short-sightedly, then took a couple of breaths and handed the card back. Once again he turned to leave, but he wasn’t quick enough. Yoko got inside his guard. She took his arm and guided him to one of her stepladders, which had been painted white and positioned in the center of the room. “This is Ceiling Painting,” she said.
“Yeah?” John peered upward. He couldn’t see a painting. All he could see was a framed pane fastened horizontally against the ceiling; it appeared to be blank. Dangling from the frame was a small magnifying glass on a chain. Suddenly curious, John climbed up, picked up the magnifying glass and looked through it. On a postage stamp—sized card in the center of the frame he saw three miniature block letters: YES. Swaying giddily on the ladder with his head bent backward, he felt spacey. He gazed at the word for several seconds.
Back down, Yoko took his arm again and guided him to the plank, labeled HAMMER A NAIL IN. He picked up the hammer that was provided. Yoko quickly said, “You can’t do that until the exhibition opens.”
Dunbar said, “Oh, go on, let him. He might not come back tomorrow.”
“Very well. You may hammer one nail in, for five shillings,” Yoko agreed.
John, who never carried a scrap of change, reached into his pocket. “Imaginary money for an imaginary nail,” he said. Yoko smiled faintly.
John said to me later, “That was when we clicked. I saw what she was about, and she saw what I was about. And the ‘yes’ on the ceiling. It was like, affirmative, none of these negative vibes I keep getting off people.”
It was hardly surprising that John felt some kind of electricity; but it was probably the air crackling with Yoko’s desperation. She needed to hook a big fish. Since arriving in England, she had thrown herself into a fervor of Fluxus-style self-promotion and networking, but none of it earned any money. After outstaying their welcome in the homes of a series of acquaintances who had put them up, before losing patience and evicting them, she and her husband were broke, now living hand to mouth in a large empty flat they couldn’t afford. A similar history of evictions and moonlight flits had ensured that she had nowhere to return to in New York—apart from her parents’ home where her husband wasn’t welcome. To me, that says it all, because parents always go that extra mile. She urgently needed a wealthy patron. She had already tried other wealthy men like Paul and Brian, who derided her work. I don’t know who else she had hit on, but miraculously, karma put John in her sights at exactly the right moment, when her female intuition told her he was looking for something, even if he didn’t know it. It would become clear that she didn’t intend to let him escape.
When John said he was late for the studio, Yoko clutched him tighter by the arm and coyly lisped, “Take me with you!”
However, John was used to women hitting on him and Yoko was skinny, plain and older than he was. She didn’t look anything like his dream babe, Brigitte Bardot. There was no earthly reason why he should be attracted to Yoko and told me—and also Cynthia—that he wasn’t. He pulled free and ran up the stairs, pursued by Yoko. His black Mini Cooper with tinted windows was waiting. John jumped in, slammed the door and the car took off. If his driver, Les Anthony, hadn’t been so quick on the getaway, John said she would have jumped in with him. As the Mini shot out of Mason’s Yard, Yoko stood on the cobbles staring after it.
Yoko had been building up a network of mutual contacts, most of them owners of art galleries, like one of Brian’s intimates, Robert Fraser. Another was a slightly built Greek, Alexis Mardas, who had been working as a television repairman until he drifted into John Dunbar’s circle. In much the same way as someone might say, “I don’t have to do this, I’m a brain surgeon you know,” Alex really wasn’t a career television repairman. He was the highly educated son of a major in the Greek secret police. The young physics student was making his way around the world when, unfortunately, he was stranded in London because, so he said, his passport had been stolen and his visa had expired.
Alex and Dunbar decided to go into business making kinetic light sculptures, something the physics student found very easy to do. Some of his more way-out ideas, like hanging a sun from the sky, never worked and never would, but the concept alone earned him the name, “Magic Alex.” To John, he was like a magician of olden times, someone who could make new suns shine and new moons revolve. In a remarkably short time, he became one of John’s best friends, constantly down in Kenwood with his glowing boxes of tricks. To me, Alex was a fake, someone who could convince the bare-assed emperor that he was wearing clothes. I will always remember the twelve empty boxes he made for George. They contained nothing and didn’t actually do anything, but George told John that they contained some kind of light ray that could recognize bad vibes. “Really? I’ll have some of those,” said John. “Yeah, me too. In fact, I’ll have two dozen. Put ’em on my bill,” said Ringo who was the most cynical of all the Beatles. Alex produced dozens and in all seriousness, they were lined up in key points around the Beatles’ homes, where, as far as I could tell, they continued to do nothing at all.
One would have expected that it would have been John at galleries and events, but it was Paul who was immersing himself in all things weird, wonderful and new. Paul was also experimenting with electronic music. The London Times had said the Beatles were bigger than Beethoven, so immediately, the Beatles delighted in putting themselves in a pun: “Beat-hoven”; but it was Paul who sat in the music room at the top of his house and used some of the electronic gadgetry he’d bought in a trawl around London, creating a Stockhausen sound of layers of Beatles overlaid on Beethoven.
When John came up to town and saw what Paul was up to, the old sense of competition kicked in and he started dropping by galleries as well. In this way, he came to bump into Yoko again, and made a point of ignoring her. I got the impression that John actively disliked her. He told me he thought she was incredibly pushy; perhaps he was afraid that she might grab his arm again and squeak, “Take me with you!” If I were standing about with him, Yoko would come up to me and say something in her high little girl’s voice, perhaps hoping to get John to notice her, perhaps hoping that I would suggest putting her on at the Saville again, but I didn’t like her either and made it plain. John would walk off to talk to someone else, while she stared after him. In those days, Yoko was always staring after John.
14
There was no doubt that many people, particularly John, were suspicious when, early in January 1967, NEMS and Robert Stigwood’s management amalgamated. Stigwood was made a joint managing director of NEMS with Brian; however, without actually lying, Brian managed to somehow convince the Beatles that this was a boardroom arrangement and Stigwood had no power. Stigwood was someone else who had a nickname. It was Robert to his face and “Stiggie” behind his back. Rumors spread that Brian was about to sell the Beatles. He was often seen in a huddle with Stiggie in clubs such as the Bag O’Nails, the new place to be. He always denied these rumors; he even pointed out that the previous year a story had been published about Paul and John meeting secretly with the Stone’s voracious manager, New Yorker Allen Klein, which patently had never happened and was a Klein publicity leak—probably planted by Andrew Loog Oldham in the growing sense of competitiveness between the Stones and the Beatles as they jockeyed for place at the top of the charts.
But with the public announcement of an amalgamation between NEMS and Stigwood, it seemed the rumors could be true. At the very least, something was afoot. Mostly what was afoot was that Brian was seriously ill and desperately sought to escape from the circus of his own creation. He couldn’t sleep, he was taking too many drugs, a soldier he had picked up had broken the banisters in his house and stolen his gold watch, and he felt as if he were slowly going mad. In a desperate attempt to regain control, or to run away—and perhaps the two were mutually compatible in his case—he made up his mind to change his life. It seemed a huge and daun
ting step, given the network of companies, clients, and complicated international activities he masterminded with a small staff of ten. In that year alone, just the Beatles’ record sales had turned over two hundred million pounds. The royalties—the income generated from any number of deals—were funneled through our cramped offices in Argyll Street. Brian wasn’t too troubled about abandoning most of his pop star clients or numerous business interests, but he was tormented by the idea of letting down his beloved Cilla and the Beatles, particularly John. He underwent deep sleep therapies at the Priory, being put under for days at a time with heavy drugs.
It was during this confused and disjointed period, when his tormented mind would give him no rest, that Brian suddenly made up his mind to secretly sell a controlling interest in NEMS to Stiggie and his partner, David Shaw, for half a million pounds. They had until September 1967 to find the money. Considering that the previous year he had been offered $3 million for the Beatles to appear in two just concerts and $20 million to “buy” them out by a consortium of American businessmen, it was an incredibly small sum. It was also badly thought out because Stiggie was an undischarged bankrupt in his homeland of Australia. The previous summer, Shaw had also been publicly named in a big bond-washing scandal. However, desperate to escape, Brian just wanted enough money to live in reasonable comfort in Spain and manage a few bullfighters.
Not only did he already manage one bullfighter, an Englishman named Henry Higgins, but he had spent several weeks in Spain, making a film about him. He had even asked me to make a film there, Feria de Seville. It had originally been Brian’s intention to make this himself, but he was too ill. Instead, I went and had a wonderful time, shooting one of the big religious festivals, complete with blood and gore, horns and tambourines, candles, Madonnas and pretty girls.
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