by Bob Spitz
Paul always maintained that Apple was so named for the first schoolbook phrase that children learn: A is for Apple. An apple conveyed an undeceptively simple and pure image. Its nature was uncompromising, essential, vital. But like the apple in the Bible, it proved a sinfully irresistible temptation, and once the Beatles had bitten into it, there was nothing they could do to stop their expulsion from Eden.
Originally the company—a glorified tax shelter—was intended as a real estate operation. Clive Epstein and Harry Pinsker, NEMS’ principal financial adviser, devised an ambitious land and retail trading venture, which, of course, held no appeal for the Beatles. Without the benefit of a similar tax scheme, however, they were into Inland Revenue for 86 percent of the pie. “So we’d sit around the boardroom, kicking ideas around,” recalls Alistair Taylor, who had been appointed to the newly reshuffled NEMS executive board after Brian’s death. “But every time we came up with something and presented it to the boys, it was: ‘You’re joking! Bollocks to that!’ ” The board initially proposed opening a chain of record shops called Apple, but “selling records was dismissed as too commercial for the Beatles.” Another idea came from Clive Epstein. “He wanted to set up a chain of card shops—picture cards, Christmas cards, and invitations whose inscriptions would be written by the Beatles themselves,” Taylor explains. It seemed to the other board members like a “revolutionary” concept, a sure franchise, and the Beatles were called in for approval. Clive even commissioned a few pasteup cards for their inspection. The Beatles passed them around, turned them over, inside out, upside down. There was an embarrassing silence, followed by John’s blunt verdict: “How fucking boring!”
All this showed the Beatles how seriously out of touch the NEMS board was when it came to representing their interests. “You can just imagine the Beatles with a string of retail fucking shoe shops,” John fumed. “[T]hat was the way they thought.”
No, if there was going to be an Apple, it wasn’t going to be run by the suits but by the Beatles. After all, they’d just made a movie on their own. They knew a good deal about the recording process. Paul fancied himself a pretty good businessman. They had a secret resource—Magic Alex—and a cache of fabulous songs. Why shouldn’t they pool their creative resources and run their own company? “We’re just going to do—everything!” John told Pete Shotton during a visit soon after the card shop fiasco. “We’ll have electronics, we’ll have clothes, we’ll have publishing, we’ll have music. We’re going to be talent spotters and have new talent.” Shotton says there was none of the wholesale cynicism that routinely crabbed John’s opinions. “He was very excited about the Apple idea.”
And the excitement was infectious. Terry Doran, Brian’s old Liverpool friend, was enlisted to run Apple Music Publishing and manage new bands, a business he knew virtually nothing about. George got involved with launching a string of discotheques, beginning with the flagship establishment in New York. Paul opened discussions with Mick Jagger about the Beatles and Stones forming a partnership to open their own recording studio, with the possibility of starting up a joint label. Magic Alex was commissioned, at a salary of £40 a week and 10 percent of the profits, to patent and begin producing his wacky inventions under an Apple Electronics subsidiary.
First, however, Apple opened a clothing company. The Beatles were delighted by the idea of having their own boutique full of “groovy clothes.” At least, as John pointed out, the merchandise would be “something that we’d want, that we’d like to buy.” If the Beatles had learned anything from success, from superstardom, it was the extent of their tremendous influence. Fans watched them like hawks: how they talked and looked, what they said and wore, became as important as what they sang. The popularity of long hair alone testified to the impact of the Beatles’ style. By Paul’s own admission, they were already “dressing in such interesting clothes,” most of which had been created by the Fool. If they set the Fool up in business, they were liable to make a fortune.
Of course, the Beatles already had a fortune, which meant they could concentrate less on profits and more on sharing the wealth. Money wasn’t everything, they insisted; money was a trap. Money had a way of compromising true creativity. Nor did they want to come off as a bunch of hip tycoons. “The aim of the company isn’t a stack of gold teeth in the bank,” John said. “We’ve done that bit. It’s more of a trick to see… if we can create things and sell them without charging three times our cost.” A variety of concepts for the new company were kicked around. John liked Paul’s initial idea to “sell everything white.” But in the end, the style of clothes would be left entirely up to the Fool. The Beatles’ only concern was that the store be “a beautiful place where beautiful people can buy beautiful things.”
Early in 1967, as part of a long-term investment, the Beatles had purchased a cute little three-story building zoned for commercial use, at 94 Baker Street, on the corner of Paddington. It was the perfect location for a hip new venture—a few steps off Oxford Street, where it might be considered too mainstream and slick, but close enough to attract steady pedestrian traffic; in other words: shabby chic. The top floor provided suitable space for Apple’s corporate offices, such as they were, with accommodating proximity so that the Beatles could keep their fingers in what was going on downstairs.
While the matter of place was settled, however, people close to the Beatles were becoming increasingly unsettled by the Fool. Right off the bat, the designers raised concerns with Harry Pinsker by demanding an employment contract with a signing bonus of £40,000. Pinsker, a relatively conservative accountant who held the Beatles’ purse strings, recounted being “horrified” by the payment and advised his clients to reconsider what he felt to be a superfluous expense. The Beatles, however, couldn’t be bothered. “Give it to them,” Pinsker was told, effectively opening the floodgates.
The Fool passed themselves off as the picture of countercultural perfection, a trio of pale-faced, exquisite sylphs, with more self-possession than Sybil. Their everyday wardrobe could have been lifted out of an Edwardian costume spectacle. According to a description in the New York Times, “they wear gypsy headdresses, at least ten necklaces between them, bells, tight pants, boots, 16th-century-looking jerkins, long, full-sleeved blouses and low belts of satin around the hips.” The image they cultivated, from their public face to all the workmanship that went into their designs, right down to the embroidery accenting their clothing, “splashed with stars and moons,” gave the appearance that they were touched by poetry.
But their true gift was cunning. Like Magic Alex, they dazzled the Beatles with hippie double-talk about spiritual bliss, how the boutique would “have an image of naturel”; it would approximate “a paradise” whose guiding principle wasn’t based on “bread” but rather “love” and “turning people on.” Stoned and starry-eyed, that was all the Beatles needed to hear. John, besotted by the peace-and-love vibe, urged Pete Shotton to get involved with the project. “You should move to London and run it,” Shotton remembers John telling him. “Run it—run Apple.” To Shotton, whose experience was managing a supermarket John had bought him, it seemed like a demotion. But Shotton says he misunderstood; John was offering him “the whole thing”—the whole Apple pie. “I couldn’t do that,” he protested, shaken by the offer, but John remained adamant. “Come on,” he insisted, “it’s just a joke. We’re only spending money, having a laugh. Nobody knows what to do, so just have a go at it.”
Ultimately, Shotton turned the day-to-day operation of the supermarket over to his mother and joined the Apple alliance. His first assignment—getting the Apple Boutique off the ground—gave him an eye-opening view of the cock-up he was inheriting. When he arrived at Baker Street, the scene reminded him of an asylum. “Everybody was smoking dope and taking acid,” Shotton recalls. “So, to them, anything could be done, anything was possible.” Magic Alex was even commissioned, at considerable expense, to provide an artificial sun that would light up the sky over the boutique. There was
a lot of loose talk about being ready for the holidays. The Beatles squinted dizzily at the calendar and picked a date out of the air—November 2. “We’ll open then,” they decided. Just five weeks off! Shotton says he tried to convince them that more time was needed; there were so many details that had to be worked out and arranged for, to say nothing of stocking the shelves with clothing and trinkets. None of this, however, deterred the Beatles from announcing the grand opening to the press. It would be ready, they assured Pete. Somehow these things always took care of themselves.
But as late as October 5, the entire shop still had to be renovated. “It was a shithole,” Shotton remembers, “an absolute mess.”
Meanwhile, the Fool requisitioned expense money for a ten-day trip to Morocco, ostensibly to buy fabric and jewelry, but in reality as an excuse for “eating majoun and smoking hashish.” When the Fool got to work, they were carried away with extravagance; their clothing line cost more to produce than Coco Chanel’s latest collection. Silks, velvets, tapestries, and brocades from every international fashion capital were incorporated into their not-so-ready-to-wear line. “The clothes looked more like fancy-dress costumes than anything one could wear day to day,” wrote an observer. “[C]ourt jester crossed with harlequin crossed with Peter Pan, rainbow colors, zig-zag hems… ballet tights and operatic coats for flower children.” It was a dollhouse array of ill-conceived outfits—pretty to look at but completely impractical. “We had to find people to make these clothes,” recalls Pete Shotton, “and when we finally did, the clothes were shit.” Seams burst open, sleeves didn’t quite match, sizes never reconciled. Simon Posthuma, the chief Fool, further demanded that the labels for his creations be woven from pure silk. “I did some calculations and figured out that the labels would actually cost more to produce than the items of clothing, so I put my foot down.” But John overruled him. “It’s a different form of art,” he lectured Pete. “Besides, it doesn’t matter whether we make money or not. If the labels make that much of a statement, we should have them. Let it go.”
Pressure started to mount as the opening neared, and the date had to be pushed back—to early December, at least. But there had to be some kind of trade-off, something tangible, something that the press and public could see that more or less justified the delay.
No problem. Over the weekend of November 10–12, while the Beatles were preoccupied with filming a video of their new single, “Hello Goodbye,” the Fool set about painting the shop’s ancient white brick facade, erecting a scaffolding and draping it with oilcloth so that the work could be done in secrecy. “They refused to tell any of us what it was going to look like,” recalls Alistair Taylor. No one, other than the art students hired to execute the design, was permitted to peek at the work in progress. Even the Beatles were warded off like overeager children. “When the time finally came to unveil it, we all gathered in the street. The tarpaulin dropped dramatically, and underneath was the most incredible psychedelic mural covering this beautiful little building, with a two-story genie and stars and moons and fairies and what have you. Oh my! We were absolutely gobsmacked. It was fabulous! People leaned out of buildings and buses to get a good look. And any car that turned into the street nearly smacked into the one in front of it that had also stopped to stare.”
“The painting was gorgeous,” Paul said, echoing an opinion shared by the rest of the Beatles and most of the public. Citywide, the Apple Boutique mural was a huge conversation piece. London had never seen anything like it. People came from every district to get a closer look, clogging the sidewalk outside the shop, tying up traffic. It became as popular a tourist attraction as any of the traditional sights. But the City of Westminster’s planning commission, whose official permission to paint the facade had been required but seemingly ignored, was less than enthused. “It wasn’t long before we heard from their solicitors, saying we had to restore the building to its original appearance,” Taylor recalls. Three weeks of overheated legal wrangling ensued until, ultimately, the mural was painted out by the Fool.
Inside, the shop was in no less of a muddle. A layout, with sections and aisles, was needed to give the interior some symmetry, but its style was the subject of constant contention. “There was no direction, no focal point,” Pete Shotton remembers. “Paul wanted dividers up. Then John would come in and say, ‘Why in the hell are we cutting people off from each other?’ and he’d have the dividers ripped out.” It went back and forth like that for days, building up and ripping out, until the dispute had less to do with style than with ego. It mirrored their bickering over the music: each of the two Beatles wanted to put his own stamp on the boutique, each suspicious and jealous of the other’s contribution. Unable to take sides in the matter, Shotton struggled, ineffectually, to please both John and Paul. “They needed someone strong, someone like Brian, to say no, and I wasn’t the one who could do it…. I only ever wanted to be friends with them.”
The Apple Boutique finally opened—without dividers—on December 7, 1967. A by-invitation-only gala was slated for 8:16 P.M. (one of John’s affectations), with a fashion show scheduled at “8:46 sharp.” Neither Paul nor Ringo attended—Paul being on vacation with Jane Asher at High Park, an isolated farm he’d purchased in the Scottish moors, and Ringo, off in Rome, putting in a cameo appearance as Emmanuel the gardener in the screen adaptation of Candy. Nor was there an artificial sun, its inventor, Magic Alex, pleading a lack of adequate “energy.”
What they lacked in solar power, however, was made up by gate-crashers lighting in the doorway and storming the gates. “It was a mess,” Taylor says, “a glorious mess. The worse things got, the more pleased everyone seemed. No one minded the crushing crowds or the confusion. Shoplifting was completely overlooked; it was regarded as a kind of benevolence, hippie philanthropy.”
John and George may have been satisfied with the economics—but they weren’t amused by the opening-night festivities. Unexpectedly there had been an outbreak of screaming, pushing, and shoving when they arrived. It reminded them of Beatlemania, smaller in scale and more concentrated perhaps, yet another mutant form of it. Their uneasiness continued to deepen afterward, over a “tense dinner” with their wives and Derek Taylor, who had arrived from the States especially to attend the gala. Questions kept surfacing about what they’d gotten themselves into.
If they couldn’t free themselves from the grip of crazy celebrity, they wondered, was there ever any hope of restoring some normalcy to their lives? That had been the intention when they stopped touring, the underlying purpose of Transcendental Meditation, the restructuring of Apple. Now John and George began to wonder if any escape was possible.
If there was one constant the Beatles could rely on, it was record sales. The day after the boutique opened, when everything seemed so topsy-turvy again, EMI released a six-song EP (tucked inside a small book) that served as the soundtrack for Magical Mystery Tour. Overall, the music was anything but spectacular; only “I Am the Walrus” and “The Fool on the Hill” measured up to the Beatles’ unique standards. Whispers of dissatisfaction murmured through the underground ranks. Knocks like “trivial” and “soft” accompanied reviews. There was even a plot, some claimed, to derail its airplay. In response to a petition by two housewives accusing the BBC of disseminating a “propaganda of disbelief, doubt, and dirt,” the radio station’s Tory watchdog, Lord Hill, banned “I Am the Walrus,” objecting to the line “Boy, you’ve been a dirty girl, you’ve let your knickers down.” It was a feeble excuse to make headlines off the Beatles’ backs; there was nothing indecent about Magical Mystery Tour, other than perhaps its uninspired musical quality. However, while critics expressed reservations about the unusual package, the fans were hardly underwhelmed, with 450,000 advance orders and another 300,000 copies in the pipeline by the launch.
Coincidentally, Capitol Records announced that American sales of “Hello Goodbye” had reached the million mark on the same day, giving the Beatles a boost against drastic losses at the Apple Bouti
que. “There was plenty of stock,” recalls Peter Brown, “but no stock control. No one knew where anything was; people were stealing things left and right, much of it by the interminably stoned young staff.” Dressing rooms accommodated any shopper who set out to stash something under his clothes or in a bag. No questions asked. Invariably, more things were stolen from the Apple Boutique than were purchased. “It was disastrous from start to finish,” says Alistair Taylor, who roamed the aisles each day on his way upstairs to the office. Concludes Peter Brown, “Anyone who touched anything fucked it up with great skill. It was a mess, it was—disastrous.”
In the midst of this retail train wreck, another disaster loomed. On December 16 Paul gathered the Beatles and their friends to screen the final cut of Magical Mystery Tour. It was a fifty-odd-minute crazy quilt of scenes—“formless, disconnected, disjointed and amateurish,” according to its critics—cut and pasted together without the slightest regard for narrative. “There was no plot,” Paul admitted, “… [d]eliberately so.” But his bluff that its essence was “magical” carried no weight. “Nobody had the vaguest idea what it was about,” according to Neil Aspinall. There was a lot of chair-shuffling and nervous coughing throughout the seemingly endless screening, during which several people excused themselves, ostensibly to use the loo, and never came back. “It looked awful and it was a disaster,” recalled George Martin, who watched it stupefied, in openmouthed horror, as others seated around him decried it as “pretentious and overblown.” Afterward, John told Ray Coleman it was “the most expensive home movie ever,” which, intended as a boast or not, wasn’t too far off the mark.