The Love You Make

by Peter Brown

  Shenson and Orenstein told Brian they were prepared to budget the film at $300,000, a low budget for a feature film but about average for a music exploitation film. They offered the boys a £25,000 fee for appearing in the movie, plus a percentage of the profits. Insofar as the percentage, they were prepared to be more generous. Between themselves they had agreed to offer Brian as high as a 25 percent cut. Brian thought about the percentage for a moment, then said, “I wouldn’t accept anything less than 7.5 percent.” To make a poor business deal even worse, Brian agreed to a three-picture deal, in which all rights to the movies would revert back to Walter Shenson in fifteen years. After all, Brian thought, the Beatles were a pop group, and what pop group would still be popular after fifteen years?

  Seven months later, when the Beatles assembled to make the movie, they were international stars and could have demanded to renegotiate their contracts. But Brian, ever the gentleman, had given his word, and financial matters proceeded as planned.

  Brian and Shenson chose a young British director of TV commercials named Richard Lester to direct the film. Lester was best known for his The Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film he made with Spike Milligan, and he promised to bring a fresh visual sense to the movie. It was Brian’s idea to hire Alun Owens, a writer of TV dramas and a fellow Liverpudlian, best known for his British TV film called No Trains to Lime Street. Owens was touted as having a special ear for Liverpool dialogue and was sent out to spend a few days on the road with the Beatles to pick up a sense of their personalities. The script turned out to be arguably the best cinematic representation of Swinging London, along with Blow-Up and Alfie. Owens had adeptly characterized each Beatle in cartoon strokes in the script; John was the sardonically funny one, Paul the adorable Lothario, George the handsome romantic, and Ringo the lonely, lovable runt of the litter. By virtue of Lester’s jump-cutting, op-art direction, the Beatles were turned into modern-day swinging Marx Brothers. It was another uncanny example of how the most potentially disastrous experiment could coalesce artistically into moments of great genius for them. The accolades the film received in the press when it opened the following summer reached a level of hysteria. American film critic Andrew Sarris later dubbed A Hard Day’s Night, “The Citizen Kane of juke-box movies.” Newsweek magazine summed it up when they announced, “The legitimacy of the Beatles phenomenon is inescapable.”

  As shooting for A Hard Day’s Night started in earnest, the Beatles found the pace of the six-week shooting schedule to be a snail’s crawl compared to the frantic pace of their lives over the last six months. Despite the fact that the Beatles were on-screen for virtually the entire length of the movie, they spent many hours just sitting around their dressing trailers, smoking and talking, and idle hands find the Devil’s work. Eventually an 8-mm projector was moved into one of their dressing trailers, and they were entertained by a caseload of porno movies. Boys being boys, the young girls on the set being used as extras were discreetly lured into the trailers for quickies between takes.

  One of the girls who wouldn’t visit in the dressing trailer was nineteen-year-old Pattie Boyd. George Harrison picked her out on the first day of shooting. A one-time Mary Quant model, Pattie had worked with Lester before in a Smith’s Crisps commercial. She was pretty and blond with a round face and big, blue button eyes, the essence of a Swinging London sex kitten in her pale makeup, fun-fur short jacket, and Quant mini that showed miles and miles of gorgeous legs. Pattie had a genuinely warm and kittenish personality, which could make the most Milquetoast man feel virile.

  Pattie remembers George staring at her the first day of shooting at the Waterloo train station but didn’t think much of the twenty-one-year-old pop star. After the day’s shooting ended, Pattie asked each of the Beatles— save for John who frightened her with his sarcasm—to sign autographs for her younger sisters, Jenny and Paula. “George signed his name and put two kisses under it for my sisters,” Pattie says. “Then he signed one for me and put seven kisses.”

  The next day he followed Pattie around the set but was turned down flat on an offer for a visit to the dressing trailer. When he was also turned down for a respectable date, he was a little annoyed. “I explained that I had a steady boyfriend of two years and that I had an old-fashioned view of romance,” Patti said. “That meant fidelity.” But George wouldn’t give up. Whenever his mind would stray, it would stray right to Pattie. On the third day he nearly begged her to go out with him, he was so attracted to her, and Pattie broke down and accepted a dinner invitation. “I was loyal, not stupid,” she says.

  By the end of their first week of dating, Pattie had already introduced him to her mother and sisters. At the end of a month he took her to see a magnificent country bungalow he was considering buying in the toney suburb of Esher. He said he didn’t want to be living there alone. It was a long, low, one-story bungalow on a private development owned by the National Trust, situated on a thickly wooded estate. Two long wings were separated by a spacious, rectangular courtyard, which had a heated swimming pool. Semicircular floor-to-ceiling windows projected out from the living room onto a landscaped backyard. As Pattie and George wandered hand in hand through the rambling, unfurnished house, Pattie giggled dreamily when George asked her for her decorating ideas. By the end of the fourth week George bought the house for them to live in together, and their relationship was official.

  George took some getting used to for Pattie. She was accustomed to the polished young men in the fast-moving, trendy set she traveled in that included model Jean Shrimpton and David Bailey. As far as polish went, George had none. He was virtually uneducated, graciousness was not his strong point, and he fluctuated between being an ill-mannered, know-it-all Liverpool lout to a sex-crazed teenager. George’s personality problems were an intricate web of monomania and self-doubt. He was an overnight sensation and yet was still treated like a kid and a third-rate citizen by John and Paul. Pattie noticed, as did everyone, that none of George’s compositions ever appeared on a Beatles album.

  George expected Pattie to tend to his ego, his sex, and his meals. He expected her to learn to be the perfect northern woman: servile, dedicated, available. Pattie decided that if their relationship was ever to work out, he would have to learn that she was no northern woman and never would be. In the interim, he adored and worshipped her and pointed out her resemblance to Brigitte Bardot to anyone who would listen.

  Brian was still maintaining that publicly acknowledging any of the single Beatles’ relationships with any one girl would be disastrous for the image, although this was now probably more a function of his misogyny than public relations. Brian requested that if George continued to see this young lady, that he do so in secret. This was a lot harder to do than when John first married Cynthia, simply because now the Beatles were routinely photographed wherever they went. It was decided that in order to get to know each other better without any attendant publicity, George and Pattie should take a secret vacation in West Ireland at Easter time, with John and Cynthia chaperoning them.

  The arrangements were made in cloak-and-dagger secrecy. Under assumed names the men and women flew from Manchester airport to Heathrow on separate planes, the two Beatles well disguised with hats, false moustaches, and mufflers. Then the two couples flew to Dromoland airport in the far reaches of Ireland in a private six-seater plane, and from there they went by private car to the Dromoland Castle Hotel, a staid and secluded resort where there would be no suspicious fans—or probably anybody under the age of sixty.

  The vacation got off to a wonderful start. Cynthia and Pattie were delighted with each other’s friendship. Women in the Beatles’ entourage were rare, and there was a lot about living with a Beatle that Cynthia could teach Pattie. Cynthia found her congenial and ready to laugh, and Pattie even managed to tone down some of George’s adolescent edge, although George never for a minute stopped saying how much Pattie looked like Brigitte Bardot. The first morning in Ireland it was pouring rain, but that made very little dif
ference to the two couples, who intended to spend most of the day lounging in bed anyway. It was barely ten o’clock when the manager woke them up. He was sorry to inform them that somehow word had leaked that they were staying at the hotel. Early that morning a contingent of twenty journalists and photographers had begun arriving at the hotel. The reporters were asking the name of the young girl George had spent the night with, and the photographers were sneaking around the lobby, determined to get a picture of her.

  Up in their rooms the four trapped young people became just as determined not to let this happen. They knew from personal experience that such a seamy-sounding story would find its way onto the wire services in fifteen minutes. Together they devised a complicated plan to escape.

  Two hours later John and George checked out of the hotel in full view of the reporters. They were besieged with questions about the two women they stayed with. Was John with Cynthia? And what was the name of George’s friend? John and George casually insisted there weren’t any girls at all. They said they were vacationing alone to get away from it all. They rushed outside into the pouring rain and into a car waiting to take them to the airport. As the car pulled away from the front of the hotel, John and George looked out the rear window, hoping that the press corps would follow them. Instead, almost the entire contingent stayed behind, certain that the two girls had remained up in the rooms.

  Upstairs, Cynthia and Pattie were already disguised in maids’ uniforms with white frilly aprons and caps, courtesy of the management of the Dromoland Hotel. They pushed a large wicker basket of dirty laundry through the corridors down to the hotel’s laundry room where baskets of laundry were emptied. Pattie and Cynthia climbed in, and the baskets were wheeled onto a loading platform under the watchful eyes of reporters, put in the back of a laundry truck, and driven off. The driver, who had been hired by John and George, got carried away with the drama of his mission, and once out of sight of the hotel, he screeched away on two wheels like a getaway car fleeing a robbery. He never gave the girls a chance to get out of the baskets and drove them to the airport as they rolled around in the back pleading for help. “Cynthia, we’ll suffocate! We’ll die in here! Shout, Cyn, shout!” When the laundry truck arrived at the airport, the boys were waiting to get them, none too happy that they smelled of dirty sheets.

  They rode back on the plane, satisfied they had avoided the photographers in Ireland, only to find another contingent waiting for them at Heathrow. By the next day pictures and stories about Pattie and George filled the front pages, and their relationship became public.

  3

  As that spring passed, Brian learned to no longer ask, “Can anything be more important than this?” because there always was something. As the days grew warmer, the hysterical accolades and media attention only increased, and the unprecedented sales figures became more commonplace. “Can’t Buy Me Love,” their latest single, was number one in Great Britain and the United States, as well as in twenty other countries around the world. In the month of April the Beatles had an astonishing five songs in a row topping the American charts, and it seemed as if nothing else was being played on the radio.

  Already, their fame had transcended their craft; they became the single most popular entertainment story in the world and learned to live their lives in a goldfish bowl. The first concentrated dose of fame in London was a little hard to take. It wasn’t the limousines or the glamorous nights spent table-hopping at the Ad Lib with Mick and Chrissie Shrimpton and Verushka that were hard to get used to, but the omnipresent photographers, the reporters, and sycophants who hung on their every word, who analyzed their every nuance and gesture in the next day’s editions. While the Beatles were a little put out at being spied on constantly, they read all the newspaper accounts of their activities voraciously—Paul in particular didn’t miss a thing—and further took on the characteristics the reporters assigned to them. They became caricatures of themselves, partly because it was the only way to hide whatever privacy was left, and partly because it was expected of them.

  John wore his new mantle of fame most uneasily. While Paul and George could bask in the adulation, and Ringo seemed only happily bewildered, John felt slightly betrayed by it all. Here he was, the rebel, the iconoclast, who had become a plaster icon himself. John was being singled out as the great intellect, because of his wit and easy verbal facility in press conferences and interviews. Suddenly, all the wise-ass, mean-tempered humor he had exhibited as a youth that had gotten him into so much trouble was being interpreted as wit. It became, in a way, more difficult to insult people who didn’t know him, because he sounded so pithy and bright.

  That March a slim edition of his doodlings and puns was published in England under a title suggested by Paul McCartney, John Lennon in His Own Write. In it were the same sophomoric punning jokes and cartoons that once had gotten him into so much hot water at Quarry Bank High School, but which now rushed the book to the top of the nation’s best-seller lists. The Times Literary Supplement said it was “worth the attention of anyone who fears for the impoverishment of the English language.” It went on to say that John’s writings and drawings were reminiscent of “Klee, Thurber, the Goons ... and very noticeably, late Joyce.” The book became such a sensation that John was to be honored with a Foyles Literary Lunch on the occasion of Shakespeare’s four hundredth birthday.

  It seemed like such a giggle to the Beatles and their girls that a celebration was held at the Ad Lib club. But what was planned as a small party ended up as a long drunken bash that didn’t wind up until five in the morning. John and Cynthia had only a few hours sleep and were so hung over and bleary eyed at the awards luncheon at the Dorchester Hotel ballroom that they could hardly keep their heads up straight. When a reporter shoved a microphone in John’s face and asked, “Do you make conscious use of the onomatopoeia?” John snapped back from behind dark glasses, “Automatic pier? I don’t know what you’re going on about, son.”

  After a queasy lunch, during which Cynthia watched in awe as John drowned his hangover in white wine, he was asked to make a speech. Now nearly as drunk as the night before, he stumbled to the microphone, mumbled, “Thank you very much. It’s been a pleasure,” and went back to his seat.

  There was a shocked stillness in the room. “What did he say?” a lone voice finally asked aloud.

  Another guest suggested, “He said, ‘You’ve got a lucky face.’ ”

  News of this witticism, this Lennonesque gem, raced through the room as the cream of the literati repeated it from table to table: “He said, ‘You’ve got a lucky face.’ ”

  “What did he say?”

  “He said, ‘You’ve got a lucky face!’ ”

  In a few more seconds the room burst into applause, enthralled by John’s obscure brilliance. Once again, the king wore no clothes but never caught cold.

  Cynthia, too, became a celebrity as a Beatle wife, and even little Julian was known to all the fans. John’s home address could be learned by any fan who wanted to know it badly enough, and by now a constant sentinel of girls waited on the front steps of the Emperor’s Gate flat. When Cynthia dragged Julian’s pram down the six flights of steps to take him for a walk every day, the girls waiting out front were so anxious to see and touch him that they sometimes pushed Cynthia aside to get to him. It was always frightening, for both mother and child, to see those anxious hands with long fingernails flying into the carriage to pinch his cheek or chuck him under the chin. If Cynthia refused to be touched by them or to sign autographs on demand, the girls would spit and curse at her. At times the crowd was so large she was afraid to go out of the building altogether and stayed home for days at a time.

  John’s phone number was no less of a secret than his address, and soon a well-orchestrated assault of phone calls was launched, from both male and female callers. Most of them were just pranks, but some of them were obscene and a few authentically menacing. Cynthia became apprehensive about answering the phone, and opening the mail was sometimes
not much better. The letters from young women offering to entertain John with various sexual tricks were an education in themselves for the still-innocent Mrs. Lennon. So innocent that she could not understand why their friendship with the young couple downstairs had dissolved in a cloud of disapprobation.

  Much to Cynthia’s great relief, John announced they were moving out of the maisonette and buying a house. The Beatles’ accounting firm, Bryce-Hamner, had advised that they spend some of their untaxed income on real estate and that they should each purchase a home. John found one he liked in Weybridge, a polished little suburb in the “stockbrokers’ belt” some twenty miles southwest of London. “Kenwood,” as it was called, was a £40,000 mock-Tudor house built on a hill in St. George Hills estates. It was a rambling house, a little run down and in need of renovation. John budgeted £30,000 to fix and decorate it, bringing the price to around £70,000. What pop star John Lennon was doing renovating a home in this fussy neighborhood of manicured gardens and lawns, twenty miles outside of London, where he belonged, no one could guess, least of all John himself, except to say that one of the Bryce-Hamner accountants lived there, and it seemed respectable. Of course for Cynthia the new house was a godsend. It was like a reprieve from prison. Weybridge was a lovely place to bring up Julian and a chance to make a real home for John for the first time in their marriage. The £30,000 budget for decoration and renovation would have thrilled any wife, and she couldn’t wait to move in and begin work on it.

  4

  Fame also had come to Brian Epstein, and his close friends were most fascinated to note what Brian’s public reputation was like. Brian had become so world famous as the Beatles’ manager, he was photographed almost as much as they were. He was a warm, Christmassy figure to the youth of Great Britain, a kind of loving “inventor” of this great gift to the world. The words “impresario” or “idol-maker” often preceded his name. He was also a symbol of wealth and largesse. If one went into a pub in Kilburn and put a ten-pound note down on the bar, someone might pipe up, “Who do you think you are, Brian Epstein?”