by Bob Spitz
The Beatles were the aristocracy of the new pop establishment, or “popocracy,” as George Melly has called it. As such, there was no need for them to play the clubs. The nucleus of the pop elite required an exclusive place of their own where they could languish in the aura, preen, indulge themselves, and behave as only the famously hip knew how. For the Beatles, that place was the Ad Lib, a discotheque just off Leicester Square in the penthouse of what had been an unsuccessful jet-setter nightclub called Wips. Upstairs it had the perfect ambience: dark as a bank vault and mirrored from floor to ceiling, with alcoves and banquettes situated around a tiny dance floor, where fashionable young couples danced agilely to deafening music—good music, nonstop R&B—and stared at their own reflection. John and Ringo hung out there first, attracting members of the emerging pop establishment: rock groups and their managers, models and their photographers, young actors, boutique owners, groupies, columnists, and dandies of all stripes.
Every night, the band arrived—usually separately—about ten o’clock and held court at a banquette opposite the stage. Over the course of several hours (and more than several scotch and Cokes), they attracted an incongruous mix of awestruck young musicians who would crowd in around the table to compare notes while others stopped by briefly to pay their respects and buy the Beatles another round of drinks. The Stones usually turned up with an entourage, as did the Hollies, the Moody Blues, the Yardbirds, John Mayall, the Searchers, Georgie Fame—just about anybody who was making waves in the Beatles’ wake. “It was a shouty, lively scene,” Paul recalled. “Lots of silly things happened there.” Silly things—away from prying eyes. For all that was unique about the club, for all its cachet, and all the words spent analyzing its contribution to the cultural boom, Paul offered a take on the Ad Lib that was probably closest to capturing its barroom spirit: “It was the pub, that’s what it really was.”
When a more intimate social scene was sought, the Beatles turned up at the frequent parties given by the West End’s self-proclaimed “golden boy,” Lionel Bart. One of Brian Epstein’s buddies, Bart was one of the most prolific songwriters in London, already several years and a good dozen hits ahead of his beat-oriented protégés, having crossed back and forth over stylistic lines as often as a couturier. He’d discovered Tommy Steele and Cliff Richard, and wrote each of their debut hits, before really striking it rich with Oliver!, which was still packing theaters in London and New York.
As the owner of a rococo turn-of-the-century mansion on Seymour Walk, nicknamed the Fun Palace by its faithful, Bart played the Pearl Mesta role that suited his sprightly personality. His parties became instant legends as much for their self-indulgent behavior as for their stellar guest lists: Anthony Newley, Leslie Bricusse, Noël Coward, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, Brendan Behan, and David Bailey, each of whom brought someone equally alluring. “Michael Caine and Terence Stamp came for breakfast every morning,” Bart recalls. “My next-door neighbor, Francis Bacon, showed up regularly. Peter Blake and Lucian Freud were longtime friends. And a typical party would also draw Princess Margaret, the Duke and Duchess of Bickford, the Rolling Stones, Cassius Clay—there could be six hundred people there from all walks of life.”
At Bart’s, John amused himself by being devious and petulant. “He liked to be outrageous—he liked to wind people up,” provoking them into a confrontation. Most nights, he got stoned in the spacious Gothic toilet. Since returning from the States, John had become more and more devoted to the giddy pleasures of pot, smoking it intermittently throughout the day, from the time he got up until he collapsed from exhaustion. Then he curled up on a couch, brooding and sending out the kind of barbed-wire vibes that discouraged idle chitchat, let alone anything close to intimacy. Guests avoided him, knowing how lethal the combination of sycophants and drugs (and/or alcohol) could be for John. Of course, the more distant he became, the more the guests ignored him and the harder he had to strike out to draw enough attention. No one was immune. “Everyone who came in was a potential target,” says a frequent guest. When Brian’s favorite, Judy Garland, arrived on Sid Luft’s arm one night, John berated her indiscriminately, implying that she was a hack and introducing her as “Judy Garbage.” On another occasion, feeling “particularly wicked,” he lashed out at an actor’s German girlfriend, blaming her parents for killing 6 million Jews, until the poor girl fled in terror. Other times he was content to pick on Brian, embarrassing him about his sexuality—“If he pretended to be straight, for instance,” says Bart, “John wouldn’t let him get away with it”—in front of as many people as he could attract.
John’s behavior was nothing new. It was the usual outlet for a lifetime of anger, anger at being given up by his mother and her subsequent death, anger at his father for abandoning him without a fair chance, anger at all the parochial teachers who demanded he conform, anger at Brian for tidying up the Beatles’ jagged image (“I’ve sold myself to the devil,” he complained to Tony Sheridan), and anger at trusted friends like Stu Sutcliffe, who died without warning, and now even Paul, who continuously upstaged him.
Lately, however, it was the inflexibility of his marriage to Cynthia, not his past, that piqued his darkest and most bilious moods. Cynthia had virtually abandoned her artistic aspirations, dedicating all her personal energy to intensifying her husband’s star power. John couldn’t help but bask in that glow. And on those occasions, he found the marriage safe and convenient, especially following a string of long gigs. But there were as many times—during those long intervals between tours—when the marriage felt confining and oppressive.
“Cynthia wanted to settle John down, pipe and slippers” according to Paul—a decision that, to his mind, spelled imminent disaster. “The minute she said that to me I thought, Kiss of Death, I know my mate and that is not what he wants.” For another, they’d been cooped up rather annoyingly in the attic apartment of their new posh home while a team of local contractors gave the living quarters a thorough makeover. It had been hard enough living with Cynthia and Julian in the Emperor’s Gate flat, but in the attic—and miles from nowhere—the situation groaned under the strain. To make matters worse, Cynthia’s mother, Lillian Powell, recently returned from Canada, had moved in while John was on tour and now all of them squeezed into the accommodations like rabbits in a hutch. There wasn’t an ounce of love lost between John and Mrs. Powell, a spiteful, insufferable woman who had never forgiven him for impregnating her daughter and fulminated against her son-in-law every chance she got.
“It was catastrophic for Cynthia,” says Tony Bramwell, who made regular excursions to the house, delivering papers and other packages from NEMS. “She was stranded out there, with John in London or on the road most of the time.” Incredibly, neither Cynthia nor John knew how to drive. They had bought a new Rolls-Royce that sat in the garage until a chauffeur was eventually hired, but even then, with few friends and a young son to take care of, any attempt to steal time away from home was futile. “I would frequently spend weeks of being virtually housebound by duties to child and staff,” Cynthia complained in a memoir. Even when John was around, he usually slept until one or two, then took off for London, rarely coming home until the early hours of the morning, often stoned and drunk. Cynthia had learned to endure his new love of pot, which she viewed as being “relatively harmless” compared with alcohol, but despite the hip and social aspect of getting stoned, it was never something they would share. Alas, marijuana only made Cynthia “sick and sleepy,” further distancing them in their eroding relationship.
Meanwhile, the other Beatles—all bachelors—seemed to be having the time of their lives. Ringo’s relationship with Maureen Cox inched decisively toward the altar, although while she remained stashed conveniently in Liverpool, Ringo tooled around London with fashion model Vicky Hodge on his arm. The same occurred with George and Pattie Boyd. “George was the worst runaround of the bunch,” says Peter Brown, voicing an opinion heard frequently. “He had lots of girlfriends. Lots.”
Paul’s situation was apparently even more enviable. With Jane Asher by his side, Paul claimed one of the most beautiful and classiest girlfriends on the scene. But he was shockingly cavalier about his intentions. “Freedom and independence” was the creed Paul lived by, and as far as Jane was concerned—well, she could like it or lump it. As far as Paul cared, he “wasn’t married to Jane”; nothing else mattered as long as she understood he was “pretty free” to see whom he liked, which constituted, in his words, “a perfectly sensible relationship.” Even while he lived with the Ashers, Paul admitted: “I got around quite a lot of girls. I felt that was okay, I was a young bachelor, I didn’t feel ashamed of it in any way.” To John, this arrangement was most extraordinary, if not the least bit galling. “He was well jealous of [it],” Paul recalled, “because at this time he couldn’t do that, he was married with Cynthia and with a lot of energy bursting to get out. He’d tried to give Cynthia the traditional thing, but you kind of knew he couldn’t. There were cracks appearing but he could only paste them over by staying at home and getting very wrecked.”
Paul, on the other hand, lived between the cracks. Beatlemania was rampant in London, yet for some inexplicable reason he was free to move about with little regard for the usual encroachments. Throughout the end of 1964 and well into the New Year, Paul became a habitué of London nightlife, aggressively cultivating an image as a young man of substance. Each night, after the Beatles’ business ended, he hit the streets like a tornado, picking up energy as he spun from theater to theater, nightspot to nightspot, often ending the whirlwind spree at one of the posh gambling clubs in Mayfair. Paul loved the upscale atmosphere almost as much as the recognition, both intoxicants to an ambitious young man only two years removed from a Liverpool council estate via Hamburg. There was a wide-eyed fascination as once-closed doors were flung open to him. “Right this way, Mr. McCartney.” “Our best table, Mr. McCartney.” “It’s on the house, Mr. McCartney.” Mr. McCartney! He could barely contain his joy over the classy ring to it.
Paul always aspired to tastes he perceived as having “class.” Respect was class, fine art was class, French dining was class. Social status especially provided class, which he solicited in earnest through his ties to the Ashers. Whether it meant courting intellects such as Harold Pinter and, fearlessly, Bertrand Russell—Paul professed to be “very impressed by… the clarity of his thinking”—or having his cigarette lit by the maître d’ at an exclusive joint like Annabel’s, acquiring class became his overriding mandate. Now, with Jane’s stabilizing influence, Paul staged an assault on legitimate theater, exposing himself to the best the West End had to offer, as well as maintaining a steady diet of repertory at the National. Jane herself was deeply immersed in the process of building a distinguished theatrical career. This pleased Paul no end. It was classy in and of itself and provided the perfect contrast to his celebrated splash. Besides, it kept Jane busy while he spread his wings on those nights he wished to fly solo, the upwardly mobile young bachelor haunting such tony nightspots as the Saddle Room, the Talk of the Town, the Astor, and other swish clubs where a “rubbing-up” occurred with famous and recognizable figures. Not that they intimidated Paul, who put his own Beatlesque spin on the situation: “They were on the way out,” he concluded, “[and] we were on the way in.”
[III]
But the social scene, for all its glamour and appeal, took a toll on their work. The critical reaction to the Beatles’ second annual Christmas show had been less than enthusiastic. Even though its staging was more visually elaborate and the Beatles played their usually thrilling set of songs in a cocoon of screaming, nothing could excuse what some viewed as “the feebleness of the show as a whole.” Despite deliriously happy audiences, the Beatles couldn’t disguise their discomfort. “Obviously this show has its weaknesses,” Paul conceded, but most reviewers had taken a harder look. In NME, Chris Hutchins echoed the consensus that the Beatles appeared “bored” and seemed to sleepwalk through the skits. “In the second sketch,” he wrote, “these top world entertainers neither move, nor speak, nor sing. They’re cast as waxwork dummies!”
Much the same could be said of their second film, Help! Unlike the groundbreaking A Hard Day’s Night, which boiled over with reflexive wit and gave insight into the Beatles’ lifestyle, Help! was a patchwork of generic wisecracks that sounded flat and artificial. The script, originally entitled Eight Arms to Hold You, about the possession of a ring with mysterious powers and those vying for control of it, had been tailored especially for Peter Sellers, who rejected it in favor of an equally frivolous picture called What’s New Pussycat? Rewritten in ten days as a Beatles vehicle, the story took on a fractured, fairy-tale silliness from which it never recovered. No one was really happy with the script, least of all the Beatles, who called it “a mad story” as a cover for what they were saying in private.
Not that they could recall much from the shoot. They had packed ample reserves of pot to get them through the process. The Beatles were so stoned, so distracted, they couldn’t remember lines. Brian’s effort to contain the damage went for naught. Even though, as John revealed, they were “smoking marijuana for breakfast,” mornings seemed to be the only time scenes got completed. By noon they were out of their gourds. “Dick Lester knew that very little would get done after lunch,” Ringo recalled. “In the afternoon, we very seldom got past the first line of the script.”
The only one of the Beatles who capitalized on the opportunity was Ringo, the unwitting star of Help! A lifelong movie fan, Ringo projected a vulnerability and unaffected appeal that had come across in A Hard Day’s Night and now blossomed in Help! He’d always been the Beatles’ unofficial mascot of sorts, the runt of the litter, less handsome and sophisticated than Paul, John, and George and, as such, often a lightning rod for their comic relief. There was also no other band that would have given him the visibility or highlighted his versatility, and by the time they blazed through the States, their intuition had paid off. “In a poll taken at Carnegie Hall,” Nora Ephron wrote in her New York Post column, “Ringo received the most applause, screams, and gasps from the audience.” “I Love Ringo” badges outsold all their other merchandise. The same proved true wherever the Beatles went. “In the States, I know I went over well,” Ringo admitted in a moment of pardonable pride. “It knocked me out to see and hear the kids waving for me. I’d made it as a personality.”
While Ringo would never be the Beatles’ central attraction, in Help! he certainly made his presence felt. Perhaps part of the transformation was due to Ringo’s feeling more settled. Two weeks before filming started, during a day off in London, he had married his eighteen-year-old girlfriend, Mary “Maureen” Cox, in an early-morning ceremony at Caxton Hall, a registry office near Ringo and George’s Montagu Square flat. Everyone, especially George, expressed how “amazed” he was at the suddenness of it. It was a hasty, intimate affair, designed to provide the utmost privacy; even the other Beatles learned of it only a day in advance. Besides the couple’s parents, very few people were invited. George arrived by bicycle, followed by John, who complained that Ringo had forgotten to buy them appropriate boutonnieres (“We were going to wear radishes actually,” he told a reporter), and Brian, who served as the best man. (Paul, on holiday at a Tunisian villa, learned of the wedding hours afterward, from an international operator who delivered a telegram from Brian that read, RICH WED EARLY THIS MORNING.) Everyone had been sworn to absolute secrecy.
There were plenty of reasons for that. “Maureen hated the spotlight and was worried that fans might disrupt things,” says Roy Trafford, Ringo’s boyhood friend, who was excluded from the event as a security precaution. “We went to the Ad Lib, and in the ladies’ room Maureen confessed how hard everything was for her,” Marie Crawford recalls. “Fans would scratch and spit at her all the time, and call her names. Why, the moment we walked in there, everyone stopped talking.” But there was more to Maureen’s discomfort than the harassment. “I recognized that weekend t
hat Maureen was pregnant,” Crawford says. “She was very sick in the mornings and was beginning to show.”
In spite of everything, Ringo was excited to tie the knot. “He’s the marrying kind,” John explained after the news hit the papers, “a sort of family man,” which was true enough. Only a few months earlier, Ringo had told a reporter: “No matter what the consequences, I don’t want to remain single all my life. I want to get married some day and I don’t plan to wait too long about it. I’m 23 now and that can seem pretty old when you look out every night and see an audience full of 13-and 14-year-old girls.”
Ringo’s celebrity meant something for the success of Help!, but in the end, it was the music that saved their hides. John and Paul had written a splendid collection of songs for the soundtrack. Gone are the standard progressions, rheumy lyrics, and simplistic arrangements. Structurally, the songs still abound with gorgeous, supple melodies complemented by sudden downshifts of chords and wiry guitar licks, interwoven with the sensuous three-part harmonies identified with the Beatles sound. But the creative momentum of the previous year, buttressed by marijuana and a powerful Dylan influence, had broadened the Beatles’ perspective, giving them a new palette of ideas to draw from and explore.
In the weeks during their Christmas show, John and Paul had sketched out most of the material that would provide the soundtrack. John’s music room in the new house—always littered with toys, hundreds of records, and “twelve guitars”—was suddenly ankle-deep in sheets of sloppy, pencil-smudged, nearly illegible lyric fragments, the terminally foul air severely polluted by a dense cloud of cigarette and marijuana smoke, aided and abetted by overflowing ashtrays and half a dozen half-filled teacups abandoned in the squalor. A pair of Brunell tape recorders (John claimed he “had about ten… all linked up”) lay within arm’s reach of the red couch, both of them overheated—practically cooking—from being left on for days, one or the other always frozen on PAUSE as though waiting for someone to finish his thought. Mostly John and Paul ignored the machines, preferring to jot ideas on paper that they ripped profligately from spiral-bound tablets like traders in the futures market. Sometimes words or phrases they’d considered perfect were rudely scratched out in favor of an alternative with a more wry twist to it. Almost every line of every verse was reworked several times. They spit words out quickly, not self-consciously, sometimes both of them talking over each other, testing rhymes and expressions and inflections in the outpour. Things sometimes got lost in the exuberant flow, but that had always been the way they worked best. “We made a game of it,” Paul recalls. “John and I wrote songs within two or three hours—our ‘time allotted.’ It hardly ever took much longer than that.” Or else they lost interest and moved on.