The Love You Make

by Peter Brown

  The Beatles’ last American appearance on that tour was a charity concert at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn for Cerebral Palsy in which they were sharing the bill with Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. As soon as the concert was over, Derek Taylor commandeered Brian’s rented limousine, which was waiting near the crowded rear stage door. Derek had accompanied a group of important journalists covering the Beatles for national magazines to the concert and wanted to take them back with him to the Idlewild Hotel near the airport, where the Beatles were staying on their last night in town before catching an early flight back to London in the morning. Included in Derek’s charge was a young journalist named Gloria Steinem, who was doing a profile on John Lennon for Cosmopolitan. But by the time they got back to the hotel, they discovered that the Beatles had already returned and were again sequestered in their rooms with Bob Dylan. Derek and all his disappointed journalists retired to his room for a drink.

  It was just after midnight when Brian arrived at the hotel in a taxi. He stormed up and down the hallway in a screaming rage, bringing the Beatles’ entourage into the hallway to see what the matter was. Brian was furious that someone had taken his limousine and intended to make a scene about it in front of the gawking journalists. When he found out it was Derek, he ordered Derek into his room and screamed at him, near tears.

  “I don’t think your behavior is appropriate to the seriousness of the event, Brian,” Derek told him coldly. “I didn’t take the car joyriding. I used it for important journalists. What was so important about the limousine?”

  Brian began to shout, “Get out! Get out!” and Derek crept out the door and down to the bar in the lobby, where he proceeded to get blotto on scotch and Coke. He tried to be entertaining for the journalists who still waited to see the Beatles, but all he could do was sulk about Brian’s behavior. How could a man who had come so far on pure gumption get so thrown by a limousine? At dawn Derek wrote a letter of resignation and slipped it under Brian’s door.

  The next morning, on the plane going home, Brian and Derek sat at opposite ends of the first-class compartment, each suffering from a vicious hangover. Later in the flight Brian sent a note to Derek via a stewardess, asking him to rescind his resignation. Derek read the note and went to where Brian was sitting and sat down next to him. Derek declined to have his job back; the job was too time consuming, and he wanted more time with his wife and children. They both had a good cry over a bottle of champagne, and Derek held Brian’s hand. “Well, we can be friends, Brian, but I can’t work with you. It was only a limousine, after all.”

  5

  Brian had wanted the limousine to go out on the town with a new social friend and impress young boys with it. Losing the limousine put a dent in both Brian’s delicate ego and his last night in New York.

  Brian’s life began to undergo quite a change from the moment he became friendly with Nat Weiss, a successful New York divorce lawyer. Some say Nat was one of the best things that ever happened to Brian, a friend who showed him a way to be at ease and content with himself. Others said Nat showed Brian the path to his own destruction. In truth Brian had long before set down that path, and Nat was just a wise and experienced tour guide.

  Nat’s booming law practice was due in part to his enormous empathy for people and in part to his shrewd reading of character. Occasionally he would take on an “underdog case”—an accused pornographer or sex offender—just for the fun of championing the underdog. Tall, bespectacled, and slightly balding, he was about the same age as Brian and, like many of Brian’s friends, shared a solid middle-class background and had a doting Jewish mother.

  They were introduced at a party in the Plaza Hotel, where another business associate of Nat’s acquaintance often gave soirees for single young men. Nat remembers being fascinated at meeting the manager of the Beatles, but when he tried to engage him in conversation, Brian could not rip his attention away from a young man with whom he was obviously quite taken. The next morning Nat got Brian’s phone number from his host and called him at his hotel to ask how the conquest went. Brian said, “The boy was quite boring. He had nothing to say.” At first Nat thought Brian was joking, but it turned out that Brian had stayed up all night talking to the boy, pursuing intellectual encounters. Brian never made a move. Nat was mildly amused but disappointed that Brian had deprived himself of so much available pleasure, and he offered to take the reticent but impressionable young man on a tour of some of the delights of the city.

  One of their first stops was Kelly’s on West Forty-fifth Street, at the time New York’s most famous hustler bar. Brian agreed to go to this place of dubious repute only if Nat promised not to tell anyone who he was. But after a drink or two Brian was playing “A Hard Day’s Night” on the jukebox twenty times over. Once again, the boy Brian took back to his hotel suite with him was engaged only in conversation. Nat suggested that Brian be more aggressive, but there was no encouraging him. Once Nat even resorted to paying a call boy to seduce Brian, only to learn from Brian the next morning that he and the boy stayed up all night playing music, with Brian lecturing, “Now listen to the chords at the end of this song ...”

  Nat couldn’t figure it out. Brian was a lovely man. He was attractive, successful, he was romantic. Nat remembers one night at the Plaza Hotel when Brian ordered thirty-six scoops of ice cream just to delight one young fellow, without so much as hugging him before he left the suite. The only sex that seemed to spark Brian’s real interest was rough and degrading, with people who would just as soon spit on him as touch him.

  Brian and Nat’s friendship solidified very quickly, in part due to the necessities of business. Nat was just the kind of attorney Brian needed, a New York version of David Jacobs. It didn’t take Nat a week of working with Brian to discover that the Beatles’ business affairs were a mess in the United States. To begin with, the United States Internal Revenue Service, concerned about all the millions of dollars that were flowing out of the country from their American tour, put a freeze on $1 million in concert proceeds in a New York court. Until the legality of the foreign payments could be sorted out, there would be no payment. This put Brian and the boys in the onerous position of having to float their entire U.S. concert tour out of their own pockets. The tour had cost them a fortune in expenses, far beyond anything they had imagined, and they needed $500,000 in cash desperately.

  Far worse, the problem with Nicky Byrne and the Seltaeb merchandising scheme had turned into a legal fiasco. Brian had insisted that Byrne renegotiate the percentages, which Byrne shrewdly agreed to do. NEMS cut was substantially raised to 46 percent, but even at that rate the Beatles were losing a fortune that could have been theirs. Then, something very odd began co happen. The NEMS offices in London began to issue licenses directly to American manufacturers and started collecting the fees themselves. It didn’t take long before several American companies owned duplicate agreements, and the lawsuits began to fly. JCPenney and Woolworth’s immediately canceled $78 million worth of orders for merchandise. Byrne unleashed a reported $22 million worth of lawsuits on NEMS, at which point Brian turned the matter over to their first American attorney, Walter Hofer.

  One day Nat was on business at the New York State Supreme Court when he heard through the grapevine that a $5 million judgment had been awarded against Brian and NEMS because no one had answered Byrne’s lawsuit against them. To make matters more complicated, Byrne was now reportedly being sued by his own partners, who were claiming that he had spent more than $150,000 of the company’s money on entertainment and a charge account at Saks Fifth Avenue.

  Brian asked Nat to vacate the $5 million judgment, but Nat advised Brian to hire a high-powered lawyer to end the Seltaeb dispute for good. Nat’s recommendation for a man who could handle the chore was Louis Nizer. Although Nizer had recently written a best-selling book about his courtroom exploits and was at least as well known in the U.S. as David Jacobs was in London, Brian had never heard of him. Nat set up an appointment anyway, and a meeting
was scheduled before Brian left America.

  As soon as Nat and Brian were ushered into Nizer’s impressively large office, Nat smelled trouble; Nizer was a diminutive man who sat on a raised platform behind his desk in order to look bigger for his visitors. Chances were, the meeting would be a clash of egos. As things happened, it went quite well. The first thing Brian said was, “Have you read my book?” meaning A Cellarful of Noise.

  “Have you read my book?” Nizer asked even more grandly.

  After some more posturing between the two gentlemen, Nizer agreed to take on the case. When Brian asked what his fee would be, Nizer asked, “Fifty thousand dollars retainer to start.” Without blinking an eye, Brian reached into his suit pocket, produced a checkbook, and began writing a check.

  “You know, Mr. Nizer,” he said as he wrote, “I’m paying you this fifty thousand dollars out of my own pocket. The Seltaeb deal was my fault, and I don’t want the Beatles to pay any further for my mistakes.”

  It would take Nizer two years to untangle the Seltaeb web and vacate the judgment against NEMS. When it was finally settled, in the summer of 1967, it was for only $10,000, which was allegedly paid to Nicky Byrne. The Beatles started over again with their own merchandising company called Maximus Enterprises, of which they owned 90 percent. But by then it was much too late—$100 million had slipped through their hands.

  chapter Nine

  1

  The four Beatles returned to London physically and emotionally exhausted, wanting only to rest, but they learned they had only eighteen days respite before going out on tour again, this time on a grueling five-week sweep of Great Britain. In the intervening two weeks they were expected to go back to the EMI studios on Abbey Road and record their fourth album. Brian and the record company agreed that it was necessary to have a new LP in the record stores in time for the Christmas gift season. When the British tour ended, the group was booked for three weeks of Christmas shows at the Hammersmith Odeon, until January 16. Over 100,000 tickets had been sold two months in advance. Then they had two weeks off before starting another movie for United Artists and Walter Shenson.

  The Beatles were so harried that Brian refused to allow them to appear on their night off at the Royal Command Performance for the Queen, much to the ire of Bernard Delfont. He wrote to Brian in September of 1964, begging him to reconsider his decision and reminding him how thrilled he was to have been asked the first time. When this drew no positive response from Brian, Delfont wrote again, threatening to announce to the press that the Queen had already extended an invitation to the Beatles, in an effort to embarrass them into accepting. But Brian held strong. He replied to Delfont that he didn’t see any advantage to the boys repeating themselves, no matter how exalted the event.

  The album they were given eighteen days to complete came out in time for Christmas, and it was a wonder indeed, although it contained only eight Lennon-McCartney compositions. The rest of the songs were covers of some of the group’s favorite rock and roll songs. Called Beatles for Sale, it appeared with none of the earmarks of a hastily prepared album. Beatles for Sale replaced A Hard Day’s Night in the number-one spot on the charts, giving them four number-one albums in a row.

  The album’s two most notable songs were written by John. The first was a bluesy, waltzlike composition called “Baby’s in Black.” Pungently unlike the rest of the songs on the album, “Baby’s in Black” was a morbid composition about a young girl who refuses to stop mourning the death of a loved one. The second tune was even more curious, considering it was penned by a man who was the object of so much public adoration. It was called “I’m a Loser,” and it was ostensibly a love song about an affair gone awry but sounded distinctly like a lament. “Although I laugh and I act like a clown,” John wrote, “Beneath this mask I am wearing a frown./My tears are falling like rain from the sky / Is it for her or myself that I cry? / I’m a loser ... I’m a loser / And I’m not what I appear to be ...”

  It was easy for anyone who knew John well to see how unhappy he was with his lot. He felt duplicitous in his success, hypocritical with his image of the literary but ultimately agreeable, huggable Beatle. His home life was to him the prime example of this hypocrisy. He was married to a woman he probably never really loved; he was bringing up a child “born out of a bottle on a Saturday night.” Even his big house in the country had turned into more of a headache than a joy. The house had been torn apart by Ken Partridge’s workmen, and John and Cynthia and the baby were relegated to a small servants’ apartment at the top of the house. The house was filled with plumbers and electricians from morning until night, and there was no privacy. One day he gave an old guitar of his to one of the carpenters and started an enormous fight between the carpenter and the foreman, who demanded it for his own children. The carpenter refused to give up the prized guitar, and the argument ended with the carpenter being sacked and leaving the mansion weeping. After that, John locked himself in the apartment and stayed away from the whole thing.

  To make matters more claustrophobic at Kenwood, Cynthia’s mother, Lillian Powell, left all alone in Hoylake, decided to move to Weybridge, and a small bungalow was secured for her just a few miles away. Mrs. Powell was the archetypical mother-in-law, bossy, opinionated, and omnipresent. She arrived at the house every day along with the workmen and helped oversee the construction and decoration, as well as the rearing of Julian.

  Perversely, John refused to let Cynthia hire a nanny to take care of Julian. He insisted he “wouldn’t have his son raised by a stranger,” and Cynthia was tied to the child most of the time. Fortunately for her, a good housekeeper, Dorothy Jarlett, had been left behind by the previous owners. A hearty and congenial woman, Dot, as she was called, came by in the mornings to help with the cleaning and ironing. When it became clear that more help was needed, John gave in and allowed Cynthia to hire a married couple as cook and handyman. Before long the husband was making passes at every woman in the house, and when John was away, the wife fed Cynthia and Julian hamburgers. At the end of the month, the couple’s recently divorced daughter moved back in with them and started making eyes at John. Dot hated the cook and accusations of dishonesty and petty theft were rife. “I was no match for the con agents,” Cynthia said. “I was hopeless when it came to standing up to people.” Added to this menagerie was a lumbering, unshaven chauffeur named Jock, whose rumpled clothes smelled of cigar smoke. One day a neighbor informed Cynthia that Jock spent the nights sleeping in the back of their Rolls-Royce, which was parked down the block from Kenwood. Eventually, cook, handyman, and chauffeur were duly fired by the NEMS office.

  The house began to slowly come together under Partridge’s auspices, but Cynthia never stopped believing she could have done better. “[Partridge] having done his job of transforming our mansion into a very plush and modern home, left with, I’m sure, a very healthy bank account. It was very beautiful but my mother couldn’t resist buying us more and more junk, and the uncluttered design grew more like home as the months passed.” The dining room was furnished with a huge, white, scrubbed-wood table with a dozen antique chairs around it, which John thought looked as if they had been bitten by an angry dog. The master bedroom, which Cynthia thought far too large to be comfortable in, was built from three smaller rooms made into one. Its enormous super-king-size bed had a handpainted headboard ten feet long. The appliances in the kitchen were so “space-age” and complicated that an appliance expert had to come to lecture Cynthia and the housekeeper on their use. Even then they were so difficult to operate that the only machine Cynthia could work was the waffle machine. John eventually called Ken Partridge and told him to come up with another simple machine, because he was sick to death of eating waffles.

  The house in Weybridge also had a hidden liability; it turned out that John’s long-lost father, Freddie Lennon, was working only a few miles away as a dishwasher in a hotel. John drove past this hotel almost every day on his way back and forth from London. Freddie might never have realized th
at his son had become a national treasure if it hadn’t been for a washerwoman who worked with him at the hotel. One day she came up to him with a picture of John in the paper and said, “If that’s not your son, Freddie, then I don’t know what.” The next day a small dapper-looking man with lush graying hair appeared at the front door of Kenwood and introduced himself as John’s long-lost dad. John and Freddie had a polite twenty-minute meeting during which Freddie managed to object to John’s lifestyle, to his music, and to the way his home was decorated. Then he asked for a loan. Freddie was ejected from the house.

  Undaunted, Fred turned up again at Kenwood, unannounced, and had the door slammed in his face. He went directly to the nearest Fleet Street newspaper and became an overnight media star, happily granting interviews about his son for a few quid. Fred even managed to sell his life story to a magazine called Tit Bits for £40 and recorded a novelty single, “That’s My Life.” The small record company that distributed the single insisted Fred get his teeth capped so he could make public appearances, and in the end it wound up costing him more to pay the dentist than he earned from his recording career. After that, Freddie drifted back into obscurity.