by Peter Brown
The following morning half a dozen uniformed aides from the presidential palace appeared at the door of Vic Lewis’ hotel room. Lewis was the NEMS booking agent who had arranged for certain parts of the international tour and had joined the touring party in Japan. The military police demanded to know what time the Beatles would arrive at “the party.”
“What party?” Lewis asked groggily. “I know nothing of any party.” He directed the officers to Brian, who was having a late breakfast with me in the hotel coffee shop. These military police in khaki uniforms had an unpleasant edge to their voices when they again demanded to know what time the Beatles would arrive at the “party.” We managed to learn from them that Imelda Marcos, the wife of president Ferdinand Marcos, was giving a luncheon party in honor of the Beatles, and they were expected shortly at the presidential fortress, Malachang. In some quarters Imelda Marcos was more feared than her dictator husband; she was an Eva Peronlike figure with a reputation for being as demanding as she was venal. She had a special taste for the famous and celebrated, and had invited 300 children to the palace to meet the Beatles with her.
Brian claimed that this was the first time he had heard of the invitation to the party. He later learned that in Tokyo the publicity man, Tony Barrow, had received such an invitation but somehow nothing had been done about responding. Whether or not it was ever relayed to Brian, by either Barrow or Vic Lewis, was now a moot point; the Beatles were simply not going. They were up in their rooms, fast asleep and in need of rest. Brian wasn’t about to have them woken up to be told they were due at the palace in a half hour.
Minutes later, upstairs in our suite, Brian received a call from the British ambassador to the Philippines, who said that he didn’t think it was a good idea for the Beatles to miss Mrs. Marcos’ party. All the help and protection they were receiving in Manila was courtesy of the president, and this was not the right country to stand on ceremony about an invitation. It was best not to insult them. Brian said he was sorry, but he was adamant they would not attend. Even if they had received the invitation in time to prepare, they would have refused. Long ago, in Washington, D.C., on their first trip to America, he had made it NEMS policy that the Beatles would refuse all official functions, whether given by diplomats, royalty, or dictators.
Ignorant of this turn of events, the Beatles slept peacefully right through the party. They were awakened by Neil and Mal in the afternoon and served breakfast, after which they were escorted to the Araneta Coliseum in twin limousines. There were two performances, one in the afternoon, one in the early evening, and 100,000 people were shuffled in and out of the stadium to hear the Beatles play two half hour sets, accompanied by the usual happy screaming and hysterics. Meanwhile, back in our hotel suite, Brian and I were watching television when the late-afternoon news came on. There on the screen was Imelda Marcos wandering forlornly around her palace, having been snubbed by the Beatles. The commentary explained that they had never turned up at a party held in their honor and, to add insult to injury, the 300 children who were also disappointed by the Beatles were war orphans and cripples. A palace spokesman said the Beatles had “spit in the national eye,” or something to that effect.
The moment the broadcast was finished, Brian was on the phone with the manager of the government-run TV station, determined to make an explanation to the people of the Philippines. He and I rushed right over to the TV station, where, much to our surprise, he was brought into the studios and put in front of a camera. Regular programming was then interrupted, and Brian went out live all over the country. He had only started his apology when word was received from the Malachang fortress to disrupt the sound portion of the broadcast. Brian’s explanation and eloquent apology were never heard.
The Beatles were totally ignorant of any of this. After their concerts they were brought back to the hotel in their limousines. The evening proceeded normally with a card game, a few scotch and Cokes, and a shared joint. The boys decided to turn in early, as we were due at the airport first thing the next morning to make an early flight to New Delhi, India, where we intended to vacation for a few days.
In the middle of the night, Vic Lewis was dragged from his hotel room by three army policemen and brought to a police station. He was interrogated for most of the night by two Gestapo-like officers who kept demanding, “Why did you not go to the party?”
Early in the morning the Beatles were awakened by Neil and Mal in time to get dressed for their plane. Neil ordered a room service breakfast for all six of them, and the boys showered and dressed while they waited for it to come. When breakfast didn’t show up, Mal called down a few times but couldn’t seem to summon anyone at the desk. Finally he went down to the lobby to see what was the matter. The lobby was eerily quiet, without a hotel employee in sight. All the police protection and security men usually lurking around the lobby were gone. Out front the two limousines rented for the Beatles and their touring party were waiting without any escort, just two solitary drivers. When Mal finally raised somebody at the front desk, the man was gruff and angry; there was no more room service for the Beatles. In fact, some unnamed authority had wiped out all services for the Beatles, including bellhops. Mal was extremely puzzled by this, until he spotted an English-language newspaper in the lobby. The headline read, BEATLES SNUB PRESIDENT.
By the time Mal returned to the Beatles’ suite with the newspaper, the boys had turned on the TV and found themselves the subject of a national news story. We decided the best thing was to get the hell out of the country, and Tony Barrow, Mal, and Vic Lewis began to hand load all the equipment and luggage themselves into a hired van to take it to the airport. KLM flight 862 for New Delhi was waiting for us, and without any assistance it was certain we would be late and miss the plane. Brian called the KLM office and asked to be directly hooked up to the plane’s pilot by skyphone. He made a personal plea to the pilot not to leave us stranded in the hostile country, explaining that we were rushing to the airport. The pilot agreed to wait as long as he could before the plane would need refueling to make it to India; then he would leave Manila, with the Beatles on board or not.
Now the race was on. Without the police escort it seemed to take hours for us to get to the airport in the morning traffic. Accidentally or on purpose, the non-English-speaking drivers seemed to lose their way once or twice. When we finally came in sight of the airport there was no sigh of relief from the touring party; the once civilian-run airport had been turned into an armed military camp. Aside from what appeared to be thousands of soldiers with rifles and bayonets, there was also a mob of several hundred very angry citizens milling outside the terminal building, waiting for us. When our cars stopped outside the terminal, the crowd formed a gauntlet for us to pass in order to get to the door. They punched and kicked at us as we rushed by, trying not to panic and break into a run.
Inside the terminal we found the escalators, elevators, and flight departure information boards had been turned off. Many precious minutes elapsed as our entourage began to rush around the terminal trying to find out at which gate the KLM plane was waiting. Abruptly, an army officer commandeered our group and herded us into a customs room adjacent to a departure lounge. As he slowly and deliberately went over the details of our passports and visa, up above us on a glass-enclosed observation balcony, the angry mob from outside was allowed in to watch. Within moments they were pounding on the glass, screaming for blood. Down below the soldiers began ordering us from one side of the room to the other, poking us with wooden clubs and gun butts as the shouting from the balcony grew louder. At one point Mal tried bravely to intervene by putting himself between the soldiers and the Beatles, and the punches started to fly. Mal was overwhelmed by six soldiers who punched him and knocked him to the ground. Brian was punched in the back and shoulders several times, and Ringo was slammed so hard in the back he stumbled forward and dropped his traveling case.
After what seemed an eternity, during which we all wondered if we were going to be turned over
to the screaming crowd above us, we were allowed to board the airliner. The atmosphere in the plane was not much friendlier, however, as we were confronted by a planeful of frightened and angry passengers, impatient to leave for New Delhi. We sank into our seats, thinking the ordeal was over, when an army officer appeared on the plane and demanded that Tony Barrow disembark and have his passport rechecked. Tony was duly escorted off the plane. At this point the pilot asked to see Brian, and I went up to the cockpit with him. The pilot said he had waited as long as possible, and we would have to take off without Tony. Brian made an impassioned plea to the man not to leave Tony behind, since he would certainly be put in jail or be stranded. Brian kept the pilot busy arguing until Tony was finally returned to the plane. The pressurized doors were quickly sealed, and the huge airliner started to pull away from the terminal.
Our touring party clustered together in the first-class lounge and tried to stop shaking. Outside the windows we could still see the angry mob, now allowed out on the tarmac, where they continued to shake their fists and yell curses at the plane.
Brian took it very badly. He was perspiring profusely, mopping at his face with a handkerchief as we waited for the plane to take off. “How could I let this happen to the boys?” he asked me plaintively. “How? I’ll never forgive myself. I put the boys in physical danger. I’ll never forgive myself for that.”
Unexpectedly, Vic Lewis appeared in the aisle. While a stewardess admonished him to sit down in his seat and fasten his seat belt, he leaned across me and demanded from Brian, “Did you get the money?” The money was the “brown paper bag” money that Brian had collected from the Manila promoter in cash, this time almost 50 percent of the performance fee. The rest of the guarantee had already been reported to the Inland Revenue Service and deposited in a London bank.
Brian was enraged that all Lewis could think about was money. Here the boys had almost been hurt, we all had narrowly escaped what seemed to be great physical danger, and all Vic Lewis could think about was the money. “Who was it that screwed up the party invitation?” Brian shouted at him. “Don’t talk to me about money!”
I tried to calm Brian so that the Beatles and the other passengers wouldn’t hear them, but it was too late. Vic Lewis blew up at him. “I’ll talk to you about money!” Lewis shouted, reaching across me and grabbing Brian by the throat. “I’ll fucking kill you!” As the plane hurtled down the runway, I managed to wrestle Lewis’ hand from Brian’s throat and force him down the aisle.
Only a few minutes airborne Brian started to vomit and run a high fever. By the time we reached New Delhi he was sick enough to need to be helped from the plane to a waiting car. He was attended to by a physician at the Intercontinental Hotel every day of our four-day stopover.
The Beatles were furious with Brian. They blamed his ineptitude for the entire incident. Down the hall from Brian’s suite, in their own interconnecting rooms, they drank scotch and Cokes and passed joints as they discussed the terrifying events in Manila and the hysterical scene on the plane. It was the general consensus that Brian had “fucked up” and was no longer in control of the situation.
“And he’s got another world tour already booked for next year,” Neil said. “We’ve gotta do this again.”
Everybody in the room groaned. “Is this touring a fucking annual event?” George asked.
“Nobody can hear a bloody note anyway,” John said. “No more for me. I say we stop touring.”
They told Brian of their decision on the BOAC plane from New Delhi to London. After the American part of the present tour was over, they did not want to go out on the road again, at least in the foreseeable future. This upset Brian so much that by the time the jet reached Heathrow Airport his body was covered with hives and welts in an almost uninterrupted pattern. Brian was so sick that the plane’s pilot radioed ahead for an ambulance to meet us at the airport. “What will I do if they stop touring?” Brian asked me feverishly. “What will be left for me?”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “There’s lots for you to do.” I meant it, too. Brian had more exciting options open to him than almost any man in show business. But without the Beatles to actively consume his time, Brian saw nothing ahead of him. The Beatles’ decision to stop touring was an enormous blow. The hives proved to be glandular fever, and Brian was put to bed for a month. Dr. Norman Cowan prescribed a quiet vacation after that for Brian to convalesce. He went by himself to a luxury hotel in Portmerion on the northwest coast of Wales that overlooked the sea and windswept beach, as remote a place as he could get from London. Everyone’s advice was the same: “Try not to worry.”
3
But poor Brian was in Portmerion only four days when word arrived from America that the Beatles were in the midst of a terrible scandal. It had started innocently enough several months before with a profile on John Lennon written by the Evening Standard’s pop journalist, Maureen Cleave. The previous spring she had been allowed into each of their homes to interview them extensively and observe them with their wives. These rare and fascinating portraits of the Beatles ran one a day for a week, including one on Brian. In John’s profile, Cleave got him to wax philosophical on those topics not usually discussed with a pop star. In talking about the futility of organized religion, John mused, “Christianity will go. It will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that. I’m right and I will be proved right. We are more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first—rock and roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary.”
In England these comments went unremarked by the public and press, by now inured to John’s irreverences, but several months later, when the quote was reprinted in an American teen magazine called Datebook, a firestorm erupted. The American religious community was up in arms. The Bible Belt was so infuriated by John’s remarks, they had come out gunning for the Beatles, literally as well as figuratively. Beatles records were being burned by the truckloads. Church rallies were being held in at least six southern states to collect Beatles memorabilia. Garbage cans were being distributed in a house-to-house canvass. Record stores, including large chains, were refusing delivery on Beatles records. In the first five days of the controversy, over thirty-five radio stations banned all airplay of Beatles records, bowing to pressure from religious groups. The Reverend Thurman H. Babbs, the pastor of the New Haven Baptist church in Cleveland, threatened to excommunicate any member of his congregation who went to a Beatles concert. In South Carolina the Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan nailed Beatles albums to burning crosses and made dark threats against the Beatles’ safety when—and if—they ever arrived in America. Even the Vatican newspaper felt it necessary to comment on John’s remarks, warning that “some subjects must not be dealt with profanely, even in the world of beatniks.”24 Worse, promoters across America who had lined up dates for the Beatles’ upcoming summer tour were threatening to cancel the concerts.
Brian lurched from his convalescent bed in Portmerion and was driven directly to the Chester airport, where he was met by a private plane to fly him to Heathrow. From there he took the next flight to New York, where a limousine met him at the airport and brought him directly to Nat Weiss’ office. Not twelve hours had gone by since the first phone call informing him of the trouble.
“What will it cost to cancel the tour,” Brian asked Nat. “The boys have suffered enough abuse this year already.”
Nat didn’t think that Brian was being realistic. “With a million dollars in cash you could probably pay back the promoters, who in turn would probably have to refund millions of dollars,” Nat told him.
“I’ll pay it,” Brian said. “Cancel it. I’ll pay every cent out of my own pocket. If anything ever happened to them I couldn’t live with it.”
Nat persuaded Brian that there was no need to cancel the entire tour. The whole thing could probably be settled if John made a public apology. Brian used the phone on Nat’s desk to call John in Weybridge and tell h
im the plan. John was furious at the thought of having to apologize for what he felt was simply true, that the Beatles were more popular than Jesus. He told Brian he would prefer not to go out on tour rather than apologize. After much arm twisting, Brian got John to agree to at least try to explain what he meant at a press conference.
In the meantime Brian held his own press conference in New York and announced to the assembled newspaper reporters, “The quote which John Lennon made to a London columnist nearly three months ago has been quoted and misrepresented entirely out of the context of the article, which was in fact highly complimentary to Lennon as a person and was understood by him to be exclusive to the Evening. Standard. It was not anticipated that it would be displayed out of context and in such a manner as it was in an American teenage magazine.“Back in London Maureen Cleave, who regretted having caused so much trouble, made her own statement to the press: “[John] was certainly not comparing the Beatles to Christ. He was simply observing that so weak was the state of Christianity that the Beatles were, to many people, better known. He was deploring rather than approving this.”
When the Beatles arrived at O‘Hare Airport on August 11, a mob of hostile newsmen and disc jockeys was waiting for them. Later that night the media was invited to the hotel for a press conference. John appeared pale and nervous as he took the microphone. “If I said television was more popular than Jesus, I might have got away with it,” he said. “As I just happened to be talking with a friend I used the word Beatles as a remote thing, not as what I think—as Beatles, as those other Beatles like other people see us. And I just said ‘they’ as having more influence on kids and things than anything else, including Jesus. But I said it in that way, which was the wrong way. But, I’m not saying that we’re better or greater or comparing us with Jesus as a person, or God as a thing, or whatever it is. I just said what I said and it was wrong, or it was taken wrong, and now there’s all this.”