by Bob Spitz
As always, Paul’s enthusiasm was complicated by the ambivalence of the other Beatles. It was hard for them to grasp the uniqueness of what he envisioned. An album made by the Beatles—but not the Beatles. Would it be Beatles music? they wondered. Then again, what was Beatles music these days? “We would be Sgt. Pepper’s band, and for the whole of the album we’d pretend to be someone else,” Paul explained. Pretend! Pretend was one of those words that always raised a red flag; the whole thing sounded like a gimmick. Besides, everyone’s head was in a different place.
George was especially skeptical. “I had gone through so many trips of my own,” he recalled, “and I was growing out of that kind of thing.” In fact, of all the Beatles, no one was undergoing as much change, with as much boundless and exciting speed. The skinny, pale boy with big ears and no ambition, the dropout burdened with intellectual insecurity, who used to follow half a block behind John Lennon, had developed into a grimly optimistic, pensive young man clamoring for “the meaning of it all.” LSD had jolted George awake. Tripping had given him enlightenment; it altered his consciousness and put him on the path to self-realization. “Spirituality,” George was starting to believe, was what he needed. “You’ve got to be connected spiritually if you hope to achieve anything in this world,” he wrote to Arthur Kelly soon after the Beatles had stopped touring.
In fact, George had been dancing around the fringes of spirituality for some time. As early as Speke, when he experienced frightening flashes of “divine awareness,” during which a “feeling would begin to vibrate right through [him]… so fast it was mind-boggling,” he had begun struggling with the concept of a greater power. Before his twenty-first birthday on the set of Help!, in the Bahamas, when he heard the trancelike call of Indian music—the same day, coincidentally, that Swami Vishnu-devananda gave him a copy of The Complete Illustrated Book of Yoga—George had already been exposed to Eastern and mystical philosophies. Now when George spoke, the ideas flowed effortlessly—about the doctrines of rebirth and reincarnation, serenity and self-fulfillment, as well as pacifism, which had padded to the forefront of the Beatles’ interests.
With John in Spain—along with Ringo, who claimed he “hung out with him [on the movie set] because he was lonely”—and Paul off in France, George and Pattie made an unprecedented trip to Bombay, where they were guests of the legendary sitar virtuoso Ravi Shankar. “The first time I heard Indian music,” George recalled in 1967, “I felt as though I knew it. It was everything, everything I could think of. It was like every music I had ever heard, but twenty times better than everything all put together. It was just so strong, so overwhelmingly positive, it buzzed me right out of my brain.” George had first met Shankar in June, at Peter Sellers’s house, at which time “he offered to give me some instruction on the basics of sitar.” There was challenge enough, he soon discovered, in “how to sit and hold the sitar,” which was murder on the hips. As he watched Shankar—actually playing the complicated instrument—deep in concentration but in perfect form and control, George must have felt overwhelmed by the extreme discipline involved. Even after a few cursory passes at it, he had difficulty achieving a proper tone. In India, however, George presented himself as a student, Shankar’s “disciple,” for intensive training, most of which was conducted by the master’s protégé, Shambu Das.
The instruction drew George more deeply into his teacher’s professional and personal life. Often after a long day of lessons—“Sometimes [George] would play up to eight hours a day,” Das recalled—Shankar would conduct him on enlightening visits to local temples or they’d meander through the maze of dusty streets, teeming with humanity and exotic musky scents, discussing the mystical enthusiasms necessary for “harmonizing with a greater power.” Although a fastidious performer who aggressively pursued a demanding concert schedule, Ravi implored George to “expand his consciousness.” They read books “by various holy men and swamis and mystics,” practiced meditation and yoga, and listened to music in the evenings. Gradually, but not often, they approached the study of Hinduism in a manner that was more philosophical than religious. The trip to India, ostensibly a musical pilgrimage, had served as a turning point for George. “Ravi and the sitar were excuses,” he came to realize. “Although they were a very important part of it, it was a search for a spiritual connection.”
It was in this keen, highly tuned state, clearly pulsing with enlightenment, that George returned to London on October 22. He quickly transformed his Esher bungalow, filling it with brightly colored Indian artifacts and repositioning the furniture for maximum sunlight and serenity. Long, flowing robes replaced his customary T-shirts and jeans. When Donovan, another lotus-eater, arrived at Esher for a weeklong visit, they smoked hash, critiqued each other’s lyrics, and engaged in many dreamy, abstract discussions about life that lasted late into the night. The Scottish folksinger was mesmerized listening to George, who was as much a rascal as he, “speak with such confidence about truth and self-fulfillment.” He was no longer the cheeky little whacker, as Aunt Mimi had dubbed him, who would take the mickey out of others in order to amuse John and Paul. In a long, thoughtful evaluation, he acknowledged “the trip to India had really opened me up…. I’d been let out of the confines of the group.” The Beatles would always define him as a musician, but out of the limelight, George was ready to be his own man. Consumed with the burden of a developing identity, he even grew a mustache to assert his individuality.
Identity. Identity. Identity.
When he heard Paul’s proposal—that the Beatles take on alter egos—it sounded “mad,” as though they were somehow drifting into old, uncomfortable territory. George assumed they had been moving away from such silliness. Now, from what he could tell, “it felt like going backwards.”
For Brian Epstein, backward or forward didn’t seem to make much of a difference. Down was the direction he seemed directly headed. Since returning from America, his life had tilted on its side like a listing ship and now it felt as if he were sinking, drowning, and no one was there to rescue him.
To make matters worse: Diz was blackmailing him. A letter arrived at the Nemperor office in New York demanding money—$10,000 in cash—in exchange for Brian’s papers and those compromising photographs. Right off the bat, Brian decided to pay up. Grievously holed up in his bone-white Chapel Street flat, he considered it “blood money,” necessary to ending the hideous affair. There was no point in stirring up more trouble. “Don’t do anything else about it,” he instructed Nat Weiss by telephone. But Weiss’s briefcase was part of the hustler’s ransom, “and on that basis,” Nat says, “I called a lawyer named Bob Fitzpatrick, and we had [Diz] arrested.” Some of the money was recovered, along with the letters, but the photographs, the most damning material, had vanished. “And that’s what ultimately sent Brian into a suicidal depression.”
Those photographs haunted him, not so much for what they contained but for how they’d be used. Brian knew they’d turn up again—it was only a matter of time—and dreaded that somehow it would embarrass the Beatles. For days—weeks—he moped around the house, often not getting up until the late afternoon and then not even changing out of his pajamas. Even as the Beatles’ EMI contract was being renegotiated, Brian was lurching about the rooms “just indulging himself,” drinking cognac, popping pills, and sliding deeper into his depression. To Peter Brown, who had moved into the flat at the suggestion of Brian’s doctor, he poured out his agony in bursts of “morbid,” often incoherent tirades. Brown tried to comfort his friend but sensed the futility of it all. “Nothing I said or did seemed to help,” Peter recalls. “He was miserable. A lot. But he was such a drama queen. I assumed this was more of the same exaggerated behavior that would spend itself, like a passing storm.”
The collapse, when it eventually came, caught Brown off guard.
One evening in late September, after an informal dinner in his pajamas, Brian disappeared into his room. “I stayed in the library watching television,” recalls B
rown, “and when he didn’t come back, I thought, ‘That’s strange—he’d been home asleep all day, until almost after I’d got back from the office. He can’t have gone back to bed.’ ” Peter stopped to have a look in on Brian on his way upstairs, “and I couldn’t rouse him—he was out cold.” Finding him in this condition was nothing extraordinary. But the way Brian’s body was positioned looked unnatural—sprawled and twisted in a way that couldn’t be explained by dissipation.
Brown slapped him and threw some water in his face: nothing happened. The slack limbs had no elasticity. From what he could tell, Brian was breathing, but barely. Peter ran to call the servants, Antonio and Maria Garcia, who lived in the basement, but thought better of it. “They would have freaked out and left,” he says. Instead, he picked up the phone and called Norman Cowan, the eccentric, shamefully indulgent doctor they shared. Cowan, who was on call in a London suburb, insisted that Brian be taken to the nearest hospital. St. George’s was just around the corner, but Brown balked. “The hospitals always had someone on staff who reported to the press immediately,” he recalls, “and we would have been in the tabloids the next morning.” Recklessly, Peter decided to wait—half an hour, at least—for Cowan to arrive. Then, with the help of Bryan Barrett, the house chauffeur, they bundled Brian’s body in a blanket and rushed him back to Cowan’s private hospital, in Richmond, where his stomach was pumped.
When Brian regained consciousness, he was, Brown says, apologetic and referred to the episode as “a foolish accident.” But when Brown got back to Chapel Street the next day, he found a note on Brian’s night table, next to an empty vial of Nembutal. Written in Brian’s familiar script, it said: “I can’t deal with this anymore. It’s beyond me, and I just can’t go on.” There was a codicil attached, in which he left his estate to Queenie and his brother, Clive, with other belongings to be distributed among Brown, Geoffrey Ellis, and Nat Weiss.
Brian’s desperate act shocked his closest friends. Throughout the tour, his erratic behavior and manic depression had stirred up sympathy and concern. But in the many years they’d known him, even grown accustomed to the emotional jags of his “torturous life,” there was never any indication that he intended to kill himself. Certainly there had been irrational talk, even some low-grade drama. “But none of us, however shortsighted, suspected he was suicidal,” says Nat Weiss.
At Peter Brown’s insistence, Brian spent two weeks “drying out” in the Priory, a spalike sanitorium in Roehampton that catered to well-to-do patients with embarrassing personal problems. But once back in London, Brian slipped back into a disturbing groove paced by indulgence and self-destructive behavior.
While he’d all but neglected the affairs of his other artists, it seemed that for the Beatles there was always enough juice. The deal Brian had recently struck with Capitol had been renegotiated for a hefty 10 percent royalty, with built-in escalators that could rocket the Beatles’ share to an unheard-of 17 percent. According to Weiss, “Brian was never a great push-them-to-the-wall businessman.” But he’d toughened up for Alan Livingston, and when Capitol announced plans, prematurely, to put out a Best of the Beatles package, Brian gave the label president a terrible tongue-lashing, threatening to bolt for a competitor unless the album was shelved. But otherwise, the stairs were steep, and Brian stumbling.
In late 1965 Brian had called Ken Partridge and asked him to rush around to the NEMS office to see something “fabulous” he’d just acquired. Brian was waiting in his car when Partridge arrived, and after a brief enigmatic exchange, they drove to the West End, pulling to the curb in front of a once-stately but now rather dowdy building on Shaftesbury Avenue. “I’ve just bought this from Bernard Delfont,” Brian announced grandly, gesturing outside. Partridge gazed up at the Saville Theatre, then back at Brian, and exclaimed, “You must be mad!” In Partridge’s opinion, “it was the worst theater in London—a real pup—dirty, filthy, dilapidated, with row after row of broken seats.” Delfont and his brother Lew Grade had tried in vain to fill the 1,200-seat theater. How did Brian expect to succeed with it?
For Brian, the Saville was a second chance at a theater career, an opportunity to replay his botched season at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, albeit on a grander, more legendary stage, and at his own whim. “He wanted to be Ziegfeld,” says Don Black, who admired Brian’s spunk. “The theater was a perfect foray.” And he had the acts to fill it.
But the first season was an unqualified disaster. A “terrible” musical about Houdini that Brian produced set the tone for much of the woolly, lightweight fare that would thin out the more discerning audiences. “He also put on several revues that didn’t work,” recalls Ken Partridge. Tony Bramwell, who took over running the Saville Theatre, says they were forced to reshuffle the repertory, mixing in rock ’n roll with a variety of legitimate productions. “During the week, we had Gilbert and Sullivan or Shakespeare, switching to rock concerts every Sunday night: Brian Epstein Presents.” The name, however, was the only association Brian maintained with the shows. The fact was he had already lost interest in the theater, other than the weekly parties at his flat in honor of the Saville’s current attraction. In early November, Brian sent out invitations for a reception with the Who. George and Ringo planned to attend; Paul, still in Africa on safari with Mal and Jane Asher, wired his regrets. John and Cynthia had only just returned to London, suffering from travel fatigue and an ominous melancholy. Friends described John’s mood as “tense” and “bitter.” “There was so much going on in his head that he couldn’t get on top of,” recalls John Dunbar. The future of the Beatles had arrived at a strange point; his marriage, long plagued by lethargy, waded into decline. Still, after weeks trapped on a film set, with his hair swept back and wearing distinctive granny glasses, John stood eager to accept. But two days before Brian’s shindig at the Chapel Street flat, he was steered to an exhibit at Dunbar’s Indica Gallery.
[IV]
In the ten months since the Indica had been open, both the bookshop and gallery had developed a tidy following, catering to the alternative literary and artistic movement—the emerging counterculture—that craved anything avant-garde. Upstairs, its bowed shelves were crammed with American independent-press imports, interspersed with magazines, beat poetry, and a hodgepodge of philosophy, while the gallery space in the basement hosted conceptual installations. There was nothing quite like it in London. The long-haired young crowd that milled through Mason’s Yard lavished upon it immediate cachet, as did William Burroughs, a widely recognized habitué who lived nearby, on Duke Street. “There were all those Chelsea people,” says another regular, “and they suddenly appeared.” Inevitably, the Indica, along with its next-door neighbor, the Scotch of St. James, became the epicenter of all that was hip and cool.
If there was one theme that ran through the gallery, that extended the Indica’s reputation as a countercultural force, it was radical—anything that smashed the formal categories of art. Whether it meant exhibiting Gustav Metzger’s autodestructive monuments that disappeared before your eyes, Christo’s wrapped objets d’art, or the environmental art of Stuart Brisley, in which the artist performed within the piece, resisting traditional form and structure became the Indica’s overriding mandate. “We never had a painting as such in the place,” recalled John Dunbar, who commissioned each show. Exhibits were chosen without regard for commercial return—to “liberate art as a commodity,” says Dunbar.
It was in that liberated, happily stoned spirit that Dunbar underwrote an exhibit with an elfin Japanese event-art practitioner named Yoko Ono. He had heard about her breakthrough show in Trafalgar Square, during which she lunged about inside a black bag, and thought it was “a hoot, exactly the kind of thing that would bring us notoriety.” Besides, she and her husband, Tony Cox, had become part of the Indica’s “clubby atmosphere.” Dunbar liked to support familiar artists and provide a space where they could be shown.
The opening of Unfinished Paintings and Objects on November 10, 1966,
created a strong buzz among the city’s curious trendsetters. Dunbar expected a hearty opening-night crowd, and subsequently he enticed John to a private preview—“a real happening,” he called it—on November 9, “to ensure that he wasn’t harassed.” Attracting a celebrity of John’s magnitude, he knew, would boost the Indica’s crowd—word of a Beatle’s interest would spread like wildfire—and so he “laid it on pretty thick,” implying that part of the exhibit, “fun and games inside a bag,” could lead to, well… anything, anything at all. “I thought, ‘Hmm,’ you know, ‘sex,’ ” John recalled, misunderstanding, just as Dunbar had intended. But John had other reasons for going. Even though he’d been home for only two days, he was already bored out of his skull, ready for anything that might spark a little excitement.
Certainly, John and Cyn had little more than familiarity left to give each other. There was Julian, of course, but John was hardly an attentive father. He left the parenting to his wife, along with most other household responsibilities. Days went by in which they barely exchanged five words between them, even when living—or rather, coexisting—under the same roof. John was aloof, uncooperative, disappearing into the music room for hours on end or staring hypnotically at the television until he passed out from fatigue. Paul, who seldom saw John during this time, remembered encountering him once in London and asking what he’d been up to. “Well, watching telly, smoking pot,” John replied.
In the chauffeured Mini Cooper on the way to the Indica, the weeks of boredom and frustration—the dormant Beatles, the unfulfilling movie role, the resentment of Paul, the stultifying marriage, the creeping inertia—caught up with him. “I was in a highly unshaved and tatty state,” John recalled in an interview. “I was up three nights… tripping. I was stoned.” When they pulled up to the curb outside Mason’s Yard, he’d practically lost his nerve. Les Anthony, who’d been John’s driver for two years, said they sat in the car for “some time”—perhaps as much as half an hour—while John debated whether to go inside. “I’m not ready yet,” he agonized every few minutes. “Let’s just sit here. Let’s see what happens.” Anthony thought the wavering was a by-product of the drugs, but more probably, like most of John’s indecision, it was the result of insecurity. All this time, he’d had the Beatles to cover his anxieties. Yes, he wanted to be the leader, but there was safety in numbers. He wasn’t good on his own. Besides, he dismissed a lot of gallery art as “bullshit and phony.” The longer he sat there, the more he resented coming. But there he was, and, well, fuck it. In he went.