The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  The drugs fortified him for the social scene, but there was still a key element missing. Nothing satisfied Brian unless some kind of risk was involved. “He loved the danger, no matter what the cost,” says Ken Partridge, “whether it was bringing home a guardsman who would rough him up for twenty quid or dropping a bundle at a joint on Curzon Street.” The Curzon House, behind the Hilton Hotel, was only one of the posh clubs that played host to Brian’s rampant gambling habit. “He was a heavy gambler,” says Terry Doran, a boyhood friend who had come to London in the recent wave of migration that brought northerners to the Smoke. Doran, who spent a great deal of time bouncing around the clubs, would encounter Brian late at night during his own furtive escapades. “In Liverpool, he gambled at the Rembrandt and a couple of other places, losing more often than not. The dough wasn’t very much—maybe fifty or a hundred quid. But in London it started to get serious.” Doran, who came from a dirt-poor family, watched in horror one night as Brian placed an £8,500 bet at the White Elephant. Toting Francis Bacon along as a guest, he went to the Clermont and promptly lost a cool £10,000. Another time Nat Weiss “watched him drop $17,000 in one quick moment.” In fact, if he happened to hit a jackpot, he wouldn’t even bother to pick it up. Paul recalled running into Brian at the Curzon House, his jaw “grinding away” on pills, when his money had run out—but not his determination. “I remember Brian putting his Dunhill lighter on a bet—‘That’s a hundred pounds’—and he’d lose it all.”

  Throughout the summer of 1965, Brian continued to pick up rugged hustlers or other undesirable characters and take them back to Chapel Street for a night of forbidden excess. Lionel Bart remembers the time he hired a muscle-bound guardsman to abuse him—“the guy asked Brian what he had in mind and was told, ‘Whatever you like, as long you don’t break anything.’ ” Brian would show up at the office sporting “great purple bruises” or a black eye. One morning Ken Partridge was met at the door by Joanne Newfield, Brian’s young personal secretary, who wore a look of shocked distress. Between clenched teeth, she warned him, “You’re not going to believe this,” and ushered him into the living room. A few weeks earlier, Partridge had overseen the installation of a magnificent Crowders oak staircase that led from the entrance hall up to Brian’s study. “And when I walked in there, the whole staircase was piled up on the floor like matchwood,” Partridge recalls. “He told me he’d picked up two guardsmen at the [Golden] Lion but, after a drink, decided that he only wanted one of them. So, on the staircase, they beat the shit out of each other—and then out of Brian.”

  Another night, remembers Terry Doran, “he came back with some hunk that he was totally infatuated with, who then proceeded to rob him. But he enjoyed it—he really enjoyed getting robbed.” Doran recalls how the same person “took him off” again and again, as if it were a sport, a perverse sport. “George Harrison bought Brian a beautiful watch for his birthday—a really extravagant piece of jewelry, more expensive than a Dunhill. A month or so later he took this guy back to Chapel Street, and the guy robbed it. So Brian had to buy another one, because he didn’t want George to know what had happened to it.”

  Between all this, business continued. In early 1965 Brian arranged to meet with Vic Lewis, the celebrated big-band leader whose agency now booked American acts throughout the U.K. Lewis was “a fantastic character,” according to people who knew him, “a cricket-loving, jazz-loving hypochondriac.” A short man—under five foot eight—he “looked very much like a Persian carpet salesman,” with the manner to match. “There wasn’t a day he wasn’t ill,” says a colleague. “But it was never anything that normal people had. One day he’d say, ‘I don’t know what it is, but my hair hurts.’ Another day, his tongue wouldn’t feel right.”

  Lewis controlled GAC’s substantial roster of stars for the U.K. territory, but even more important was his marked foothold in the London entertainment establishment. “Norman Weiss [GAC’s president] rang Brian and advised him to buy me out—which he did—at which point he suggested that I run his agency,” Lewis recalls. NEMS absorbed all Vic Lewis’s acts, among them Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis, Mel Tormé, Sarah Vaughan, David Rose, Percy Faith, Anita O’Day, Tony Bennett, Henry Mancini, Herb Alpert, and Nelson Riddle. The ink wasn’t even dry on the deal when comedian Allen Sherman turned up for a concert tour, and after that, an appearance by the great Groucho Marx. A few months later they “took on” the Moody Blues, who “were crumbling at the time,” according to Tony Bramwell, but remained a fairly important name on the scene. There was also a new kid, an American expat who was still pretty raw, by the name of Jimi Hendrix.

  “With Vic, NEMS really picked up steam,” says Bramwell, “and within a year we were the biggest entertainment agency in the world.” That was, of course, an exaggeration, but NEMS had certainly leapfrogged into the major leagues. “Instantly, it gave them size and an international reputation,” says Don Black, who came aboard as part of the Vic Lewis deal. The gifted Black, who had already written a string of hit songs and would later win an Oscar for “Born Free,” had a special place on the staff inasmuch as he personally managed the career of Matt Monro, “the English Frank Sinatra.” The connection paid off handsomely, too: George Martin, Monro’s producer, gave the vocalist first dibs on covering “Yesterday,” which shot to the top of the charts.

  “The office was growing, the joint was jumping,” recalls Black, who moved into a cubicle down the hall from Brian. A skeleton staff had been cached during the launch of Beatlemania, but now NEMS scrambled to recruit talented folks who could handle the serious flow of work. Wendy Hanson had been hired in New York as a favor to Capitol Records, and she had steered Brian through one crisis after another. Geoffrey Ellis, the starchy ex-Oxford lawyer who had known Brian from Liverpool, was prevailed upon to “run the office.” Along with Alistair Taylor and Tony Barrow, Brian formed the nucleus of a staff necessary to oversee the expanded organizational effort: capable, serious-minded managers whose experience would ensure growth and efficiency. Even Peter Brown, whose as-yet-undefined position rendered him more of “a glorified office boy,” proved skillful at handling many aspects of the business—to say nothing of those surrounding Brian’s personal life, which, frankly, not many other people would have wished to handle.

  Of course, it was still the Beatles that everyone desired. On a particularly busy evening when phones were ringing off the hook, Black remembers picking up a call from the producer of The Lucy Show in New York, who’d been trying desperately to reach Brian. She explained how they were preparing to film a segment in London. If the logistics could be worked out, Lucille Ball wanted to walk down Piccadilly, do a double-take, and see the Beatles standing on the corner. It would be only a ten-second shot, for which the network was willing to pay $100,000. But Brian wanted nothing to do with it. Furthermore, he warned Black never to interrupt him with such a ridiculous request.

  It seemed like madness at the time, but Brian was right. Everyone wanted some time with the Beatles—ten seconds, thirty, a minute and a half, just an hour or two. The office was inundated with calls like that every day, and not just three or four good offers but sometimes twenty or fifty. The Lord Mayor of Birmingham needed their support for a favorite charity, David Frost requested an interview, Sunday Night at the London Palladium would settle for a walk-on—“they won’t have to say a word”—two minutes with the P.M. to discuss communications, a scene in some Hollywood movie, backup vocals for the Animals, their own TV special… it never ended. As heartless as it sounds, it seemed there were more dying children with a last request for one of the Beatles to bid them farewell than there were healthy ones. And each request drew the same cold response: no! Not on any condition. Nada. Non. Nein.

  They’d already been through this with the cripples. At the outset of Beatlemania, handicapped or deformed children were wheeled into the theaters and placed along the front, at the foot of the stage, before each performance as a goodwill measure. “We were only trying to play rock ’n
roll and they’d be wheeling them in, not just in wheelchairs but sometimes in oxygen tents,” recalled George. “We’d come out of the bandroom to go to the stage and we’d be fighting our way through all these poor unfortunate people.” To make matters worse, they were the only part of the audience the Beatles could see from the stage, and the distraction was unimaginable. John would gaze down at a child whose drool hung in a solid string from mouth to lap, and he’d pfumpf a line. Spastics trying to clap would accidentally smack themselves in the face. Epileptics would have seizures in the middle of songs. “You felt like you were at the shrine at Lourdes,” says Nat Weiss. Even after the shows, it never let up. “Crippled people were constantly being brought backstage to be touched by a Beatle,” remembered Ringo. Parents would traipse into the dressing room with terribly deformed children who had no idea where they were or who they were looking at, and then the parents would leave. “They’d go off for tea or whatever, and they would leave [the kids] behind.”

  Fed up with the continued imposition, John took to doing “spastic impersonations” while onstage. According to Paul, “he had a habit of putting a clear plastic bag on his foot with a couple of rubber bands” and stumbling around in a circle, until Brian had seen enough. “Finally, he took it upon himself to say ‘no’ to every request by the parents of these kids and even to the hospital wards,” says Nat Weiss. “It was depressing the Beatles, and he couldn’t expose them to it any longer.”

  Nada. Non. Nein.

  Early in July, after looking over their schedule, Brian announced to the press that contrary to the group’s usual practice, the Beatles would not be doing any radio or TV appearances to promote their new record. He was imposing a media blackout, although he didn’t call it that, and to underscore his point, he canceled their appearances on Ready, Steady, Go!, on Top of the Pops, and on Thank Your Lucky Stars, substituting, in lieu of the boys, a rather feeble clip of the Beatles lip-syncing to “Help!”

  The very next day, predictably, the tabloids made headlines out of the announcement, overshadowing an Australian initiative in Vietnam, and fans across Great Britain reached for their pens and fired off angry letters to local editors, damning the Beatles as insensitive prima donnas. “These lads have become far too big for their boots,” wrote Anne Laury of Harrogate, “and it’s time the fans paid them back and quit forking out their hard-earned pocket money to buy their records.” Another disappointed teenager complained, “I used to be one of the Beatles’ biggest fans… BUT I’m beginning to wonder….” An NME poll of its readers revealed that a majority of fans felt cheated, accusing the Beatles of “taking a leaf from Mr. Presley’s book.” Still, Brian stood firm, and just in case that wasn’t crystal-clear, NEMS dashed off a press release emphasizing that the Beatles would “definitely not tour Britain” for the remainder of the year.

  The strategy behind this maneuver was entirely pragmatic. Brian had no intention of alienating anyone; he had argued with the Beatles for years about staying accessible to the fans. But John’s second book of nonsense, A Spaniard in the Works, was published in early July, earning mostly puzzled, if not outright negative, reviews, and soon after that Help! took a beating from the once-adoring critics, with NME calling it “100 minutes of nonsense” and, worse, “unfunny.” Part of the backlash, Brian was convinced, arose from the Beatles’ being everywhere at once—in print, on record, in the news, on the telly, in the movies. “It was saturation point,” John agreed. “You couldn’t walk down a street without having us staring at you.” It stood to reason that when the press finally got good and bored with singing the band’s praise, they’d amuse themselves by taking potshots. Making the Beatles scarce took them out of the critical crosshairs. It would offset the constant glare of exposure, giving them distance and creating demand. “We need less exposure, not more,” George said. “It’s been Beatles, Beatles, Beatles.”

  Whether George realized it or not, the audience wasn’t tired of the Beatles as much as grown weary of the Beatles’ glossy personae. While “the Beatles had inspired an upheaval in pop music, mores, fashion, hairstyles, and manners,” as Robert Shelton wrote, a new attitude was developing among rock ’n roll partisans that had no musical antecedent and distanced itself from the tame protopop that, up to now, had sustained the form. Its enthusiasts, who defined themselves culturally instead of by age, offered a tough, toothier alternative—rock, as opposed to rock ’n roll—steeped in gritty urban blues, art school romanticism, and folk music’s outsider intellectualism. A trend emerged, inspiring songs with more meaningful lyrics intent on saying something about reality, conformity, and injustice.

  The spectacle of four irrepressible woolly-jumpered lads shaking their hair and trilling, “Oooooooooo,” was inadequate for the emerging rock culture, and the Beatles knew it. “Things were changing,” Paul realized. “The direction was moving away from the poppy stuff, like ‘Thank You Girl,’ ‘From Me to You,’ and ‘She Loves You.’ ” Shrewdly, the Beatles anticipated the need to move with it.

  All of that, however, took a backseat to the upcoming American tour.

  By the end of the first week in August, the preparations were all but complete. The bags were packed, the wives and girlfriends provided for. John and Paul spent one of their last days in London producing a cover of “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” for the Silkie, a quartet of long-faced Hull University students that Brian had signed to NEMS; otherwise, most of the last-minute arrangements focused not on music but on real estate. Ringo and Maureen closed a deal on a small but graceful estate, Sunny Heights, literally around the corner from John and Cynthia’s place in Weybridge. With a baby on the way and the ongoing harassment from fans, they felt it was easier to live in the suburbs. Paul didn’t share their concerns and was about to be ensconced in his handsome, newly renovated three-story Regency house on Cavendish Avenue, near Abbey Road. George had already moved into a modest California-style bungalow in Esher, about twenty miles south of the city. And in one final and overdue act of generosity, John bought Aunt Mimi an ivy-covered cottage in Poole, set in a loose cluster of houses just off the dunes, with a long front porch and a bay window that gave a huge, breathtaking view of the English Channel.

  Finally, on the morning of August 13, as a heat wave swept in and scorched the streets with ribbons of heat, the Beatles and their entourage piled into the first-class cabin of a Pan Am Clipper and took off into the desolate white sky, leaving the last traces of innocence behind.

  [III]

  No sooner had the Beatles touched down in New York than the shift in the scene was evident. Music was everywhere; it seemed to have taken over the streets. They not only heard the new groove on the radio but could see it in the styles as well as the manner in which the kids carried themselves. Everywhere they turned there was a residue of the cultural fallout. The airwaves were awash in popular records by the Byrds, Sonny and Cher, Jody Miller, the Turtles, the Dixie Cups, and Bob Dylan. “The Eve of Destruction” belabored the stinging social message by whining, “This whole crazy world is just too frustratin’.” Even the Righteous Brothers, their throwaway opening act from the last U.S. tour, had hijacked the Top Ten with the symphonic tearjearker “Unchained Melody,” and as the Beatles’ caravan of limos plodded like circus elephants into the city, everyone inside remarked how cool and sexy the Brothers’ last hit, “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’,” had turned out. Little did they know that, at that very moment, Mick Jagger was aboard the luxury yacht Princess moored in the Hudson River, dancing on deck to a test pressing he’d been given of the new Bob Dylan single, “Like a Rolling Stone.”

  The scene had shifted slightly downtown and farther west, to the Warwick Hotel at Fifty-fourth Street and Sixth Avenue, but gone was the “happy hysteria” evident during the Beatles’ previous visits. This crowd was determined—ferocious. About fifteen hundred strong, they confounded the more than one hundred “tense and red-faced” cops who were brought in to provide security at the hotel, breaking throu
gh barricades and storming police lines. Everywhere one looked there were scuffles, aggression, and discord, not only between female fans and the police but also with malevolent construction workers who egged on the violence from atop nearby scaffolding.

  Gone was the innocence that had accompanied the previous tour. There was no official greeting at the airport, no prearranged waving to the fans; despite a heavy turnout at Kennedy Airport, the boys remained completely out of sight throughout the arrival process. Later, at the requisite press conference, they showed none of the staccato wit that paced earlier performances. Their answers came fast, to be sure, but were strained and with a contemptuous edge, indicating how bored they had become with the “farcical affairs.” Even the hotel situation grew strange. Outside of a few scheduled appearances, the Beatles remained locked in the Governor’s Suite on the thirty-third floor. There was no sneaking off to a restaurant or club, none of the easy socializing with deejays and the press. Part of this turnabout might be ascribed to drugs; the Beatles didn’t mind drinking scotch and Cokes or cursing in front of journalists, but smoking dope was too dicey. Or they’d simply had it with the barrage of inane questions.

  The only visitors to the suite were other performers, some old friends reasserting old claims, with new acquaintances scrambling for a place in the entourage. Frank Sinatra, who once derided the Beatles as “unfit to sing in public,” sent a valet bearing an invitation to a private party. (The Beatles politely declined.) Bob Dylan and Del Shannon arrived early, to much hurrahs, followed by the Supremes, who were treated to “the coolest reception [they’d] ever received.” The girls showed up alone, without their handlers, looking like porcelain figurines, outfitted in precious day dresses accented with hats, gloves, costume jewelry, and little fur wraps. One can only imagine the impression this made on the Beatles, considering they were stoned and behaving in an excessively silly manner. “We felt we had interrupted something,” recalled Mary Wilson, who couldn’t fathom what the boys kept laughing about and left in a flash with Florence and Diana.