John was taken aback and almost fled. However, as the idea sunk in, there was something about it that struck some kind of a chord with him. Ever since his childhood he had felt like half a person; he’d been looking for the missing pieces of the jigsaw. In fact, he’d always been in search of his parents. That dreadful moment when as a five-year-old child he had run from one to the other before choosing his mother had left an indelible impression. Then she had fooled him by dumping him at Mimi’s and disappearing. While he pondered all this, Yoko apparently thought he was hesitating, so she turned up the heat. She said that if he didn’t give her the money she must destroy herself. John must have had visions of Yoko committing hari-kari on the spot. Worse, he could probably visualize the headlines.
Abruptly he told her he’d fund her exhibition, on the condition she kept it secret. After she left, clutching a check from accounts, he still simmered with rage at her manipulation.
“Why did you agree?” I asked curiously.
“To get rid of her,” he snapped. “With women like that you have to pay them off, or they never stop pestering you.” Personally, I thought the opposite applied, but didn’t comment. There seemed to be some contradiction between John’s words and his behavior. Even when he was being dismissive of her, he was seeing her secretly. Perhaps his words were just a smoke screen.
Getting John to underwrite her show was a huge coup and there was no way on earth that Yoko was going to keep it to herself. Triumphantly, she instantly sent out a press release announcing that she and John were holding an art exhibition. The white catalogue stated, “Half a Wind: by Yoko Ono and John Lennon.”
John was very annoyed. Had Robert Fraser not been in jail he would have said, “I told you so.” All John could do to retaliate was to solicitously escort Cynthia to Brian’s memorial service on October 17 and then very publicly hold her hand at the Earls’ Court Motor Show a few days later.
Although John was scornful about being a shopkeeper, he had set up his old school chum and fellow Quarryman, Pete Shotton, with his own grocery store in Hampshire and Pete had done well. The store was flourishing. However, the germ of an idea took root. They could open a store that was different. It would be the kind of place where people would flock in and have fun, buying stuff that they loved and wanted to own. Paul liked the idea of an all-white emporium where you could buy white china and so on, the kind of simple and stylish objects you had always wanted but couldn’t find anywhere. He saw it as an inexpensive upmarket Marks and Spencer’s where anyone could walk through the door without feeling threatened by it being too posh.
John extended their simple idea of free choice for everyone. He said “If they want the counter, sell them the fucking counter, if they want the carpet, sell ’em that as well.”
I’m not sure who came up with the idea of giving The Fool £100,000—equivalent to over a million pounds in today’s terms—to design the storefront and outfit the new boutique with anything from clothing to Moorish furniture, but it happened. They were given complete freedom to come up with their own designs and buy whatever they wanted. Magic Alex, who was sitting in on the meeting in his habitual position on the arm of John’s chair, whispered in his ear and John said, “And we’ll invest in a workshop for Alex. He can make us electronic gadgets we can sell to Sony and EMI and go into mass production and make lots of money.”
The Beatles were under a lot of pressure at that time to prove themselves in the aftermath of Brian’s death. Consequently, the people who worked for them, or for Apple, were under a lot of pressure not to take the piss out of even the smallest of the Beatles’ bright ideas, including their involvement with the Maharishi, Alexis Mardas, or the Fool. They’re looking at you saying: “Go on. Say it. Say what you’re thinking! I can take it.” And you’re going, “No fucking way. One: you can’t take it. Secondly: I like it here!”
To disagree would prove you were not tuned in and turned on, and drop out would mean something else completely—the door! Ergo, something’s got to give, and usually it’s common sense.
So, Magic Alex bought substantial premises in Boston Place, adjacent to Marylebone Railway Station. Apple Electronics was set up and he was told he could buy whatever a wizard needed. Ultimately, his brand of magic cost the Beatles some £300,000—over £3 million today. For someone who had said that like Prospero he could dangle the sun in the sky, he could make a spaceship by using the engines from John and George’s brand-new Ferraris, he could construct a twenty-four-track studio, when eight-track was still the norm on both sides of the Atlantic, nothing was too much. But the only thing I can remember seeing that Alex made that actually worked was a miniature pocket radio, constructed from a few scraps of plastic and wire.
As a vehicle for all these ventures, and many more yet to be ill conceived, they would use Apple, the company Brian had set up for them, because whoever had signed all the checks at NEMS, still signed them for Apple. It was all tightly controlled financially, but a whim is a whim is a whim and £100,000 was a huge sum to draw for three young Dutch clowns whose only previous enterprise, a small clothing shop in Holland, had gone bust.
But, summing it up, George, who had embraced the karmic philosophies of the East, said, “There’s more than enough laughter and fun to go round.” Perhaps, but having too much money, or even a larger slice of the money they had actually generated, couldn’t hurt. It had deeply shocked them when they had discovered that Brian had given away an estimated £100 million on the very foolish merchandising deal alone. After his death more of his foolish decisions would emerge. While none of the Beatles were greedy or cared that much for personal wealth, this windfall, although just a drop in the ocean, was a degree of compensation they could have had fun with.
They discovered that the accountants had bought a substantial corner building at 74 Baker Street some time ago as an investment, large enough for retail premises with offices above. John persuaded Pete Shotton to get his wife to manage his grocery store while he came to London as manager of the Apple Boutique. Pete wasn’t keen, but John sweet-talked him into it. Peter said he wished he had not agreed because he found he was working for four bosses. In the morning Paul would have a partition erected. In the afternoon John would have it torn out. Pattie’s sister, Jenny Boyd, agreed to be a salesgirl. It was very rushed, because we planned on opening fast, to show the world that Brian’s death hadn’t stopped the ideas or dissolved the Beatles partnership, as was being suggested by the press.
To demonstrate that their business was going to be very different, they even hired a full-time mystic. His name was Caleb and his chief role for over a year was to influence all company decisions by reading the Tarot and throwing I-Ching coins, an early version of Luke Reinhardt’s Diceman ethos. Things got so nutty that Derek Taylor asked Paul if he—Derek—could be designated the office eccentric with a proper nameplate on his door. Paul thought it was a great idea, but having got a yes, Derek was too stoned to order the nameplate and it came to nothing. Derek’s favorite position was seated in a majestic rattan chair in the long press room like some Eastern potentate, surrounded by tables on which stood telephones, bottles of booze and bowls of hash for people to help themselves. While the world flooded in and out, he drifted in a sea of happy oblivion.
The Fool would come into Apple and announce they were off on a buying spree. “Where are you going?” someone would ask. “We don’t know—maybe India, or Morocco. . . . Wherever we can find what we want, man.”
“How much do you need?”
“About ten grand because we’ve just had a couple of spliffs, listened to the new Santana album and we’re going off with a camel train down the Old Silk Road.” And without batting an eyelid, someone would sign the check, hand it over and say, “There you are. Send us a postcard, and try and bring back some receipts. We’ve got to have some receipts.”
Sometime later, they’d come rolling back down Baker Street, smelling of exotic spices like Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, singing, “Lov
ely Rita meter maid, where do we park our camel?”
Even the labels for Apple clothes were embroidered silk in five fantastic colors, but they cost a fortune. They cost as much as an entire piece of similar clothing in a department store or down the market. Miles of these special labels came tumbling off the assembly lines. It was like: “I’m a nouveau millionaire.” “Oh really? What do you do?” “I make labels for Apple.” Until then, it had been the pirate T-shirt makers who made themselves a fortune doing souvenir business outside Beatles gigs; but now it was, “By appointment, label makers to Apple.”
The buttons were specially imported too; it was all Milo Minderbinder stuff, straight out of Catch-22. They’d buy buttons and hash in the cloth market in Madagascar or Marrakech, get stoned, swap the buttons for figs in Tripoli. Wake up, eat the figs, then remember they needed buttons. Go back, buy opium by the pound and buttons at a penny a hundred, keep the opium, sell the buttons to Apple for five shillings each, like Milo: everyone gets a share but no one was any the wiser. It was as if they had worked out that there was an easy way to steal a big pile of bhat with no effort.
They produced mountains of exotic, radiant pantaloons and caftans and bolts of useless rainbow silks, velvets and batiks, but as we very quickly realized, no matter what weekend hippie fantasies people entertained about getting it together in the country with a stoned earth mama from San Berdoo with flower decals all over her beautiful body, most of them couldn’t wear caftans or a djellaba to work on Monday morning.
Even at the Apple office we were still quite conservative, with reasonably conservative clothes. I always wore a tailored suit and tie because it would get me into most places without any hassle. John turned up at Abbey Road once in a silk turban and curl-toed slippers, full of Eastern promise, and the others laughed so much they fell over. There were endless discussions about the prices. The Beatles didn’t want to look as if they ripped people off and insisted that it didn’t much matter what they charged anyway; it was all free money that would otherwise go to taxes. It made perfect logic, put like that. To make it even more logical, we should have put up a big placard that read: HELP YOURSELF, because people did. Tons of items were stolen from the racks. The Beatles were the best customers. They’d choose tons of things I never saw them wear and ask the sales staff to charge it to their account. The Fool looked like a band of medieval jesters, so when they strolled in, jangling their bells and asked accounts for a big wedge of money to get a few things for the shop, it was no good saying, “You’re joking,” because they were. They were The Fool.
The boutique would eventually get it together like the competition down in Carnaby Street. They got a guy named John Lyndon in as head of Apple Retail and he got it organized. He banned The Fool from the clothing workrooms unless they stopped taking garments without payment, he got the prices right, started looking at items that would sell, but by that time the Beatles were “fed up with being shopkeepers.” Besides, John Lennon’s life was getting very complicated. He had a great deal on his mind—and her name was Yoko.
Meanwhile, Christmas was approaching and with it, the broadcast of Magical Mystery Tour on BBC television. Paul had worked for weeks on the edit, delighting in the bright carnival colors. If he knew that it was all going to be broadcast in black-and-white, he didn’t say. That Christmas of 1967, their first without Brian, Paul decided to organize a big fancy dress party to celebrate the broadcast of his film. It was to be held at the Royal Lancaster Hotel on December 21, with a sit-down Christmas dinner and a dance. The invitations were sent out secretly, and for once there was no leak. The press and the public didn’t turn out in droves and the whole thing went very smoothly.
Fancy-dress balls and events were all the rage. Everyone seemed to dress up at the drop of a hat, whether for a wedding, a birthday or a dance. There was a fancy-dress party nearly every week at various London hotels and clubs or the posh houses in Hampstead, where you’d see the same people, dressed in the same outfits each time. We hired our costumes from Bermans, the theatrical costumiers. The Beatles nearly always wore the same outfits to these parties. I wonder if the fans ever found out that for a few pounds they could have walked around in John’s rocker gear, which came with a black plastic jacket, or Paul’s pearly king outfit. George Martin and Judy were always the queen and Prince Philip—and I was always the court jester with gold bells on my hat and the toes of my shoes.
At the dinner, Mystery Tour was toasted many times over, and everyone looked forward to watching it. It was ahead of its time. Without knowing it, Paul had created the blueprint for the first reality TV show. He should have won an Emmy. Instead, when it was broadcast in black-and-white on Boxing Day (December 26), watched by an audience of fifteen million, the critics panned it. In part it was because this was a revolutionary new format they didn’t recognize, and in part it was because the charm of the film with its colorful costumes and makeup and special effects was lost in black-and-white. How could you show clowns dancing, or a magical sky where the clouds changed color, without color? It was enormously frustrating for Paul, having dreamed up something in Technicolor, and shooting it in color, being constrained by the shortcomings of the medium it was broadcast on. A year later, when color TV was launched, the film was shown again and redeemed itself, but by then, it was too late; the critics had done their worst. However, the album made something in the region of £11 million as soon as it was released, which satisfied the accountants.
22
Early in January 1968, shortly after we had moved from the overcrowded offices above the boutique to more spacious ones at 95 Wigmore Street, John suddenly made up his mind to accept the Maharishi’s pressing invitations and persuaded the others to follow suit. That winter, all of the Beatles had been regular visitors to the Maharishi’s luxurious flat in South Kensington; John had even taken Yoko. The Maharishi constantly stressed that the only way they could grow spiritually was to go far away to India and meditate with no outside influences and give him a large slice of their money.
But it wasn’t an urgent desire to learn transcendental meditation or practice yogic flying that prompted John’s decision to go to India. It was fear of his marriage being destroyed. Yoko had stepped up the pressure. Her constant presence became more visible on a daily basis. At first, John, an inveterate tormentor, had slyly encouraged Yoko in the same way that one might prod a leopard in a cage with a very long stick. But the cage door had sprung open.
Yoko told John that their karmas called and their destinies were united, but for a long time John didn’t hear. At heart, he was still a conservative. The normal middle-class side of his upbringing, the Aunt Mimi factor, made him fret about rocking his domestic boat. Back in the sixties, people valued their marriages. You couldn’t just go in for a quickie divorce; it was very unpleasant and drawn out, the full Dixie knife finals.
For weeks, Yoko had been haunting Apple, something she could do very easily from the enormous flat she and her husband had laid their hands on at 25 Hanover Gate Mansions at the south end of Regent’s Park. Her daily routine seemed to be to telephone our reception as soon as she had done her deep-breathing exercises, eaten her grapefruit, shot up some smack or whatever took her fancy first thing in the morning, to find out if John were there, or when he was expected. All the Beatles were remarkably accessible now and the staff had instructions to be open and frank with callers, so tracking John down was not hard. It wasn’t like calling MI5. It was perestroika. If more fans had realized this, the circus we already lived in would have been unbearable. Fortunately, most of the fans imagined that they would get the brush-off, so they didn’t bother to telephone.
Only half of Yoko was inscrutably Japanese; the other half was pushy. She had so irritated Robert Fraser by constantly demanding space in his gallery that he told Paul she was the pushiest woman he had ever met. Omnisciently, he added, “She persists until she gets what she wants.”
It seemed only moments after her preliminary telephone call before
Yoko herself would turn up at Apple in person. We would spot her and say, “Oh God! She’s here again!” This tiny figure dressed in black, usually wearing some kind of a hat or headdress, would slip in through the front door with a shy, downcast face behind the curtain of slightly frizzy long dark hair that hid a steely glint in her eyes. Then she would lisp in her high, Japanese-American little girl’s voice, “John’s expecting me.”
If he was already in, someone would buzz him and he would appear. If he didn’t feel like showing his face, Yoko would sit in the hall with an inscrutable expression and wait, sometimes for hours, like a living piece of installation art, until he gave in. At other times, if she felt that John were deliberately avoiding her, she would wait on the pavement, or hide behind a car or in a shop doorway. As soon as she saw John arriving or leaving, she would hurry up to him, often holding out some small token, such as her latest poem, an invitation to an art gallery or some happening event.
But almost perversely, sometimes John would sit in reception with her and they would talk. About what, none of us could even guess. At times, he seemed animated and amused, but I would guess that he was probably stoned. Other times, he would look anxious and hunted. Yet, as Robert Fraser had predicted, Yoko kept up the pressure, and John gradually began to cave in. I saw it happen and couldn’t believe my eyes. Usually, when he’d been brusque, he would feel guilty and he’d take her to lunch or to dinner to compensate, almost as if he owed her something. The less charitable said she was hypnotizing him.
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