by Bob Spitz
[IV]
Brian Epstein had been “too out of sorts” to attend the “All You Need” broadcast. Left to his own devices, Brian languished in seclusion, “zonked,” as one employee put it, “either drunk or on drugs.” There was no key role in it for him and therefore no emotional upside, nothing for him to grab hold of with which to lift himself out of the funk. Even though he busied himself with ongoing productions at the Saville Theatre (where, on one amazing bill in early June, he presented the Jimi Hendrix Experience, Denny Laine, the Chiffons, and Procol Harum), the sinister warp of moodiness was too strong for him to escape.
Once again Brian tried to blow out the cobwebs by throwing a party at his Kingsley Hill estate. While the affair was meant to lift his spirits, sources indicate that Brian intended to meet with the Beatles before the other guests arrived so that he could tell them about his relationship with Robert Stigwood. With only a few weeks remaining before Stigwood’s option came due, he worried that it would appear as though he had deceived them.
It was not to be. After a number of wildly productive months and a reinvented image, the Beatles decided to reinvent Brian’s party as a full-fledged acid blowout. Their tripping, which had always been dependent on the drug’s available supply, suddenly knew no bounds, thanks largely to John. He had figured out how to tap the mother lode—the source of the purest LSD ever made, courtesy of the legendary chemist Stanley Owsley, whose lab operated out of San Francisco. Buying it was no problem; John had the money and agreed to pay top dollar for a lifetime supply. The problem was smuggling it into Great Britain. With the help of a few film freelancers, he commissioned a cameraman named Steve Sanders to film the Monterey Pop Festival, over the June 17 weekend. It didn’t matter that the festival’s film rights had long been sold to ABC-TV. When Derek Taylor reminded John of that fact, John didn’t demur. The film wasn’t intended for distribution, he explained, but for his own private viewing. He might have enjoyed watching it, too, had there ever been film in the cannister, but that wasn’t John’s motive. Instead, the crew’s equipment was used to conceal the acid.
Over the next three weeks, under the influence of the especially potent blotter acid, the Beatles seemed locked on a course of reckless hedonism. First they traveled to Greece, under the clutches at the time of a despotic military junta, for the purpose of buying a cluster of islands in the Aegean, where they could live and record communally, in splendid isolation. “The idea was that you’d have four houses with tunnels connecting them to a central dome,” Neil Aspinall recalled. The scenic space in between would be filled with meditation posts, recording and painting studios, a go-kart track, and a private landing strip. Neil would also be provided for on the island, along with the usual suspects: Brian Epstein, Mal Evans, Terry Doran, Derek Taylor, and their families. According to several well-placed insiders, this was the brainstorm of Alexis Mardas, the son of a major in the Greek secret police, who had recently ingratiated himself into the Beatles’ circle by beguiling them with stories of his mind-boggling inventions. Magic Alex, as John dubbed him, was working as a television repairman when he met the Beatles. Nevertheless, he possessed a powerful imagination and masterly gift for sweet talk.
“Alex wasn’t magic at all,” George admitted, “but John thought he had something and he became friendly with us.” Alex immediately produced his signature artifact, a box decorated with lights that flashed in an irregular fashion. What was it? What did it do? Whatever you wanted, he replied in the spirit of cosmic coolness. John, spaced out on acid, found the box fascinating; he could stare at it for hours. He introduced Alex to Paul and others as his “new guru,” shrugging in response to their questions about his powers.
Taking advantage of John’s susceptible condition and deepest anxieties, Alex concocted other mystical enthusiasms designed to tantalize his new disciple. He was working on a telephone, he said, that responded to voice recognition and identified incoming callers. There was a substance he was secretly developing that would enable him to build a force field around their homes, another that prevented anyone from rear-ending a car, an X-ray camera, invisible beams, wallpaper speakers. “Magic Alex invented invisible paint,” according to Ringo, who marveled at each fantastic brainstorm. He also encouraged a practice he called “trepanning,” which involved having a hole drilled in one’s head. “Magic Alex said that if we had it done our inner third eye would be able to see, and we’d get cosmic instantly.”
Drugs or no drugs, the Beatles had to suspect that they were being taken for a ride, especially when Alex requisitioned the V-12 engines from George’s Ferrari and John’s Rolls so that he could build a flying saucer. Paul claimed that they were onto Alex early but still enjoyed hearing his interesting ideas. “We didn’t really call anyone’s bluff,” he said, “it would have been a bit too aggressive. So we just let him get on with it.”
For the Beatles, the trip was sun-filled and joyous, but the Greek Islands were not, in fact, deemed residence-worthy. Between the rocky slip of a coastline, intermittent severe thunderstorms, and the boredom that set in as soon as the acid wore off, the thought of homesteading never came up. Even so, they instructed their accountants to purchase the islands anyway, paying £95,000, plus a 25 percent premium, which was taken off their hands a few months later for a modest profit. They would not always be so lucky.
For the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Summer of Love was a perfect platform for his ministry of mind expansion, receptiveness, spiritual and sensual fulfillment, self-awareness, intercommunication, tranquillity, knowledge, and brotherhood. The celestial glitter of his spidery face was plastered on walls throughout the London Underground, promoting a treatise on meditation, The Science of Being and the Art of Living, and his extraordinary image, a whispery, slight, but impressionable presence, figured prominently in television news stories. The media couldn’t resist the guru’s eccentric appearance or the oft-perceived flakiness of his spiritual message, extolling love, peace, and eternal happiness. To a skeptical audience of Brits, he came off like a sideshow freak, but as the new sensibilities and surface hedonism of 1967 gained acceptance, his message offered an inspirational refuge from the libertine excess.
Aside from the magnetic personality who captivated young audiences, precious little is known about his background. Born in 1911—“my earthly age is of no importance,” he answered in response to questions about his birth—he was the son of an Indian revenue officer who studied Sanskrit and Hindu scriptures with Guru Dev. Later he fell under the spell of another guru, the founder of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, whose purpose, like many of these mystical followings, was an attempt to combine ancient Eastern religious beliefs with the search for inner truth and wisdom. Spiritual Regeneration instructed people in the discipline of Transcendental Meditation, “a method of quickly and easily reaching a spiritual state.”
In 1945 Mahesh (Maharishi means “great saint” and was an honorific adopted much later) began a solitary meditation in the Himalaya that lasted for thirteen years, after which he set off on a faith-healing crusade designed to take him seven times around the globe. In the process, he attracted widespread attention from the elderly, as well as the curious, the infirm, and other lost souls to whom Spiritual Regeneration was an attractive pursuit. Mahesh brilliantly and shrewdly cultivated these followers. Lectures, conferences, and retreats became a staple of his transglobal tours. A man of immense charisma, he was a natural performer, energetic and riveting, who could transform crowds of the unfulfilled, the suffering, the troubled, or the alienated with simple aphorisms that struck home. Borrowing liberally from the Bhagavad Gita, he popularized traditional Indian teachings, interlacing them with plainly applied self-help therapies that were elementary in their appeal.
Despite the embarrassing criticism from more traditional Hindu teachers and a predilection for publicity and fund-raising—followers were required to donate the equivalent of a week’s salary to the ministry, which ran contrary to the basic Hindu principles of
free instruction—the Spiritual Regeneration Movement grew into a worldwide organization, with a luxurious, air-conditioned ashram situated on a fifteen-acre estate in Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalaya. There were already meditation centers in more than fifty countries, with the London office attracting more new followers than it was able to process.
The three Beatles (Ringo was visiting Maureen in the hospital, where she had just given birth to their second son) were among nearly a thousand earnest freethinkers who listened to the Maharishi’s message on August 24 in a ballroom at the Hilton, overlooking Hyde Park. Years later George explained that they “were looking to reestablish that which was within.” George was feeling especially restless following a dispiriting trip to San Francisco, during which he decried the drug-besotted hippies he encountered there as “hypocrites” and “bums,” leading him to a startling renunciation of LSD. “After having such an intense period of growing up and so much success in the Beatles and realizing that this wasn’t the answer to everything, the question came: ‘What is it all about?’ ” Similarly, Paul would recall how he was “looking for something to fill some kind of hole.” He acknowledged feeling “a little bit of emptiness” in his soul, “a lack of spiritual fulfillment.” Much of it he blamed on “seeing all this stuff on acid,” as well as rampant stardom. “And the next step was to try to find a meaning for it all.”
Despite the institutional setting, complete with a cordon of bodyguards in three-piece suits and a gallery of doting blue-haired dowagers, the Beatles were clearly entranced by the Maharishi. He was an extraordinary sight to behold: an elfin, bronze-skinned holy man draped in an immaculate white dhoti, positioned in front of acres of soothing lemony yellow curtains. A picture of contentment, he sat cross-legged on a deerskin mat strewn with flowers and, between arpeggios of an irrepressible giggle, offered to clarify anyone’s experiences.
To young men who constantly struggled with their individuality—toward the public, toward their roles as Beatles, toward one another, and toward themselves—Maharishi advised them “to look within in order to find peace.” Happiness, he said, serves the purpose of creation. Using the flower as an analogy, with the sap the source of its energy, he explained how it was possible to transcend the relative states of their consciousness—in effect bypassing the intellect—to draw the sap upward. “He said that by meditating, you can go down your stem and… reach the field of nutrients, which he called the pool of cosmic consciousness, which was all blissful and all beautiful,” Paul recalled.
For George, who had already devoted himself to the practice of yoga and the study of Eastern philosophies, the Maharishi provided him with a practical approach “to further the experience of meditation.” Even Paul, a natural skeptic, “thought he made a lot of sense.” But it was John, more than anyone, who emerged from the lecture a changed man. Having laid off acid that night, he still bore the look of someone so far gone that it seemed an impossible state without chemicals. “It takes time to come down to earth after an experience like this,” he told a reporter on his way out of the Hilton.
In fact, John, along with the others, was gearing up for an unimaginable trip.
Chapter 33 From Bad to Worse
[I]
On the afternoon of Friday, August 25, 1967, the platforms and waiting rooms of Euston Station were jammed with travelers of all sizes and ages. It was a hot, suffocating day and the pitiful excuse for air-conditioning gave off only sticky whiffs of dampness, raising the temperature in that human pressure cooker to an ungodly swelter. To make matters worse, trains were insufferably late. Every few minutes the same emotionless voice crackled over the public address system, trying to convince the ornery mass that salvation was only minutes away, but nobody, not even a conductor, was willing to believe it.
Then the unexpected proclaimed itself. A fretful clustering had developed near one of the side entrances. A phalanx of bodies sliced smoothly through the crowd, a maneuver sudden and effortless, coinciding with a unanimous murmur—Ooh!—from those nearby. Bursts of recognition, heavy with excitement, echoed through the hall: The Beatles! Impossible. Not in public, certainly not in a common rush-hour train station. Wide-eyed passengers converged from all directions, determined to get a better look at the men traveling by themselves, dragging luggage and elbowing their way toward the distant Platform 8.
The night before, during their introduction to the Maharishi, an invitation was extended to the Beatles to attend a Transcendental Meditation seminar he was giving at University College that weekend. A midnight message was left for Ringo, who hastily arranged to sneak away from Maureen, with her blessing. Brian was also invited, John making the call himself.
As far as Brian was concerned, meditation was the last thing he wanted to participate in that weekend. He was desperate, if anything, to raise a little hell. For the past ten days, his mother had been a houseguest at the Chapel Street flat. She’d moved in with Brian immediately following Harry’s sudden death in July, and together, mother and son endeavored to put their lives back on track. In the opinion of Brian’s chauffeur, Bryan Barrett: “It was the best damn thing that ever happened to him.” Queenie woke him early each morning and they discussed their daily plans over breakfast. Then, Brian dressed in a suit and, for the first time in ages, put in long days at the office. There was no prowling about after sundown, no multidrug highballs. Evenings were spent quietly in each other’s company. They were very attentive, very content. “Each night, I drove them to dinner, and often to the theater,” says Barrett. “He was like the old Eppy again, sharp, focused, and in control.”
It was a good thing, too, because there was a lot on the company drawing board. There was the “Magical Mystery Tour” project that Paul was still hounding about; another Beatles single to schedule with EMI (it would be “Hello Goodbye”); the Stigwood/Shaw deal to untangle; a staging of three short comedies by novelist Saul Bellow in which Brian had invested $14,000; and more—much more. “That very weekend,” says Tony Barrow, “he’d finally gotten confirmation from the BBC that Cilla Black would host her own major TV series, which was quite extraordinary, and he was in the process of trying to get hold of her to relate the news.” Meanwhile, Brian and Nat Weiss were preparing to release an album by lanky folk heartthrob Eric Andersen, as well as signing Harry Nilsson to a recording contract. And there were plans for a trip to Toronto, where Brian was seriously entertaining an offer to host a weekly television show. But right now Brian wanted some action, and to that end he invited Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis to Kingsley Hill, where they planned to meet, according to Brown, “four or five young, amusing guys to distract us for the weekend.”
As expected, it was a mob scene at Euston Station. The Beatles had arrived in their chauffeur-driven cars and those inconspicuous psychedelic clothes they favored. In addition to Cynthia, Jane, Pattie, and her sister, Jenny, they’d cobbled together an entourage that included Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and Donovan. And just in case they felt unnoticed or out of place, thirty or forty reporters had converged on the party as they made their way to the train.
Somehow as they raced along the platform, Cynthia fell behind the others a step or two. “I was struggling… with the hand baggage, trying to keep up,” she remembered in a subsequent interview. “In front of me, the others leapt on the train. I moved forward, arms full, to follow them, when suddenly a policeman was barring my path.” Stammering, she identified herself as Cynthia Lennon, but he’d already turned back a dozen other Cynthia Lennons.
Ahead of her, oblivious, John swung himself jauntily up onto the train. A long blast on the whistle drowned out Cynthia’s cries as the heavily laden train chugged forward, out of the station.
Inside, the Beatles bundled into a parlor car adjacent to a first-class compartment containing the Maharishi, who sat lotuslike, in statuesque repose, on a mat strewn with flowers. George drew the blinds and lit incense, while the others, tense yet exhilarated, filled the overhead rack with baggage and g
ot settled. As everyone found seats, it dawned on John that Cynthia was missing.
Frantic, he wrenched open a window and leaned halfway out of the train, squinting to find her in the dispersing crowd. Cynthia could barely make out the words as her husband’s pleadings were swallowed by the train’s roar. “Tell him to let you on!” John shouted. “Tell him you’re with us!” But it was already too late. They were too far apart, without any chance of the train coming to a stop. Peter Brown put an arm around an inconsolable Cynthia Lennon as the caboose disappeared in the distance. He assured her that she could hitch a ride to Bangor with Neil Aspinall, who was driving north later that evening. But Cynthia knew in her heart that though she’d eventually rejoin the gang, her train had finally pulled out of the station.
An expanse of concrete and sun-bleached brick, surrounded by acres of lawn, the University College—or Normal, as it was known—spread across a leafy fringe of Bangor like an abandoned sanitorium. As the school was currently on holiday, the Beatles and their mates were quartered in one of the empty nondescript dormitories, a far cry from the luxurious suites they’d occupied on tour for the past few years. “It suddenly felt as if we were back in school again,” recalled Marianne Faithfull, who shared the others’ excitement about the unglamorous atmosphere.
The freedom they felt was exquisite. There were no handlers, no press, no fans, no obligations. That night, in a show of solidarity, the entire entourage went to a local Chinese restaurant for dinner, where, unrecognized by the staff, they talked with real gusto about the protocols of meditation and the significance of receiving a mantra. No one really knew what to expect, and perhaps to combat the feeling of the unknown, they grew catty and made snickering references to their eccentric Indian guru. “There were already some misgivings being aired about the Maharishi,” Faithfull recalled. “We’d heard from Barry Miles that the word in India was that [he] was suspected of certain financial improprieties and sexual peccadilloes, and also an obsession with fireworks.”