by Peter Brown
When she was twenty-nine she divorced Toschi Ichiyananagi to marry avant-garde artist Tony Cox, whom she met in Japan. On August 8, 1963, a daughter, Kyoko, was born. Yoko didn’t really want to have this baby. She said she wasn’t ready. Her mother had always warned her that marriage and children would ruin her career, but she had already had so many abortions in the fifties that the doctors advised her not to have another, and Kyoko was born. “I thought, ‘Maybe if I have a child, I’ll feel differently,’ because society’s myth is that all women are supposed to have children. But that was a myth. So there was Kyoko, and I did become attached to her and had great love for her, but at the same time I was still struggling to get my own space in the world.”
She moved back to New York with Cox, this time to a cold-water loft decorated with orange crates in the then unfashionable factory district of downtown Manhattan known as Soho. “I felt stifled in New York,” Yoko said. “I wasn’t sure what to do.” Then, in early 1966, an English journalist included her in an article on avant-garde artists published in England. Soon after she and Cox were invited to London to attend a symposium called “The Destruction of Art.” They arrived in London in October of 1966, nearly penniless. As soon as they got to town, she called an old American friend from the art world, Dan Richter, to find a place to stay. Richter got them the flat next door to his in a big Victorian building on Park Row. Yoko emptied the apartment of furniture and spent her last money on carpeting it wall to wall; she said she liked living in the barren space. A few weeks later she met John Lennon at the Indica Gallery.
Yoko’s second meeting with John Lennon was much less memorable than the first. It was at a Claes Oldenburg art opening of soft sculpture. John, stoned as usual on a mixture from his mortar, was wandering past a giant fabric cheeseburger, drinking white wine, when he spotted Yoko across the room, a small, striking figure again dressed entirely in black. They nodded at each other shyly, but both were too embarrassed to speak, and they spent the rest of the evening frozen in place, yards from each other.
One morning weeks later, Yoko turned up in the waiting room of the Beatles’ office, demanding to speak to John. She needed financial sponsorship for one of her conceptual projects; she wanted to wrap one of the lions in Trafalgar Square in canvas. The closest she got to John that day was an accidental encounter with Neil Aspinall. Neil came away from the encounter with the impression she might have been making a play for him. Yoko also managed, in passing, to collar Ringo, but her philosophical and conceptual ramblings about her art were so obscure to Ringo that she might as well have been speaking Japanese to him.
Eventually, she sent John a copy of a little book she had published in a limited edition of 500 copies by the Wunternum Press in Tokyo in 1964 called Grapefruit. The book was a collection of “instructional poems.” On each page there was a suggestion: “Draw a map to get lost” or “Smoke everything you can, including your pubic hair” and “Stir inside of your brains with a penis until things are mixed well. Take a walk.” John was at first annoyed by the book, then outraged, and finally amused. So amused he agreed to speak with her. Yoko convinced him to finance her next show at the Lissom Gallery, which was entitled “The Half Wind Show” and which was comprised of half-things: half-a-chair, half-a-bed, half-a-cup. John, cautiously, would not allow his name to be used in the catalog, and the sponsorship of the show was credited only as “Yoko plus me.” Later in the year, he noticed, she had one of her shows at the Saville Theater, where members of the audience came up and cut off pieces of her clothing, while she sat stoic and immobile on the stage. One night he asked her back to Neil Aspinall’s flat, but they only talked. Yoko curled up to sleep on the divan, while John slept alone in the bedroom.
Instead of a passionate, physical affair, John and Yoko simmered intellectually for over a year. John became a benefactor to the struggling artist, an elusive but important sounding board. She found him kind of square in a rock and roll way, a world from which she felt removed, but he somehow managed to keep one up on her. His mind was like quicksilver, and she admired that. John was teased and titillated by her, and her new art projects never failed to make him laugh. A major film project she was making with her husband was called Bottoms. John read a piece about it that Hunter Davies wrote in the Sunday Times. Yoko and Cox had rented a room at the Park Lane Hotel and were actively soliciting people to drop their drawers and pose for a few seconds of 16 mm film of their bare asses. Still, he never took her seriously. She wasn’t the answer to whatever it was he was looking for. She was just another bird.
On most nights he went back to Kenwood, still high on his drugged jaunts. Upstairs Julian lay sleeping in the nursery, and Cynthia was in the big bed in the master bedroom, waiting for him. Sometimes, at dawn, he would lay down beside her. But most often he would curl up on the too-small wicker sofa in the sunroom and look at magazines and picture books of surrealist painters. He wrote down words and sentence fragments, such as “I am the walrus” from a Lewis Carroll poem, or things that came to him in acid flashes, like the propaganda-spouting Hare Krishna devotees that became “element’ry penguins.” Often he would stare at the blinking “nothing box” Alex had presented to him or at the walls and shadows until the drugs wore off. Somewhere, in the back of his mind, he heard with dim irony the question-and-answer pep chant the Beatles once used to console themselves in hard times.
“Where are we going fellows?”
“To the top, Johnny!”
“Where is that, fellows?”
“To the toppermost of the poppermost.”
4
As winter drifted into spring, Brian seemed to deteriorate even further. His misadventures continued. A guardsman he picked up one night turned violent and broke the banister on the staircase as he was forcibly rejected. Another time Brian brought a young man home with him for £20. The boy took with him Brian’s £1000 gold watch when he left and sold it hours later in an underground station for £5. When the unsuspecting buyer realized that the name “Brian Epstein” was engraved on the back, he brought it to the Savile Row police station, where it was returned to Brian. Brian gave the man back the £5, plus a £10 reward, ironically less than he had paid the hustler who stole it from him.
Edgy and easily bored, Brian began to travel restlessly, making the same loop from London to New York to Spain every few weeks. For a time he entertained himself by managing his own bullfighter, who was an Englishman improbably named Henry Higgins. Brian’s favorite recreation was drugs, however. That winter he discovered LSD for the first time. One Saturday night when Brian returned home to Chapel Street, I confessed to him that I had just started my first trip, and Brian insisted he be given some acid for himself. He downed it on the spot, and we stayed up all night tripping. He enjoyed the experience so much that he immediately took another dose upon waking up on Sunday afternoon. I felt no regret that I had given Brian his first acid but did regret that he chose to do it so frequently and incautiously.
The psychedelic mixed with the uppers and downers and booze were taking quite a toll on Brian. Sometimes he was up for three days at a time without sleep. He was psychologically and physically on the edge of collapse. It was obvious that he was in desperate need of professional help, but Brian wouldn’t even discuss the subject. He was fanatically against psychiatry, especially after his experience with the court-enforced psychiatric treatment he underwent in Liverpool after his first blackmail experience. We continued to gently hint that Brian seek help, but there were some subjects one did not press too heavily with him, no matter how close you were, even if you were willing to dare.
I dared one morning in New York in suite 35E at the Waldorf Towers while accompanying Brian on one of his three-pronged trips. Brian was due that morning at a live interview with disc jockey Murray the K at the WNEW studios. Brian intended to again allay the public’s fears that the Beatles were breaking up. When Brian didn’t awake in time for breakfast, I knocked on his bedroom door and went in. He was sound asleep
; he had taken so many Tuinals to get to sleep just a few hours before, he was too groggy to sit up. Nat Weiss arrived in the suite to accompany Brian to the radio studio, and he was enlisted to help revive him. As soon as Brian was conscious and lucid, I started screaming at him with such rage that it even shocked Nat. “Don’t you realize how sick you are?” I shouted. “You can’t go on like this! You have to stop! Do you hear me, Brian? Go to a doctor, go to a hospital, but get help!”
“Calm down,” Brian said weakly. “Calm yourself.”
“No, I won’t. I won’t have it. I can’t stand by and watch you do this to yourself.”
Brian stood, clutching the night table, and made his way slowly to the bathroom. “I’m going to have to shower and get dressed for my interview,” he said.
“You can’t go to your interview,” I said. “You’ll make a fool of yourself. You’re full of pills and slurring like a drunk.”
But Brian would have it no other way. He showered and dressed, and Nat helped him down to the waiting limo. I refused to have anything to do with it and swore I wasn’t even going to listen to the live broadcast on the radio. In the limo Nat steadied Brian on the drive to WNEW and sat next to him in the studio to prop him up in case he keeled over. Murray the K, who couldn’t possibly have missed how zombielike stoned Brian was, pretended it just wasn’t happening and played the whole scene in his usual strident way, calling Brian “Eppy” like a close friend.
Back at the Waldorf Towers I tuned into WNEW despite myself. Murray the K’s first question was about the future of the Beatles. Brian’s voice came over the speakers slurred and deep, the syllables attenuated, yet what he said was undeniably eloquent. “I think they might play together again,” he said, “but in another concept entirely.... At the moment they’re doing great things in the studio. They take longer nowadays, of their own volition, to make records...” As the interview continued Brian’s words became clearer, his conviction stronger in the future of the Beatles, the youth movement, virtually everything we wanted to hear. Even I was enthused.
Toward the end of the interview, Murray the K asked Brian what “the next big thing” was going to be, and I could almost see Brian smiling wearily in the studio as he said, “A good tune. A good tune is always the next big thing.”
When Brian returned to the Waldorf, the incident was never mentioned again. We left New York for some rest and recreation in Acapulco and Mexico City, where we stayed for nearly three weeks. Brian went back to New York for a time, while I flew to London to sign the papers for him on a country estate he had recently purchased. Kingsley Hill in Sussex was a lovely, £35,000 brick and wood eighteenth-century country house that was going to be Brian’s retreat, the place where he could get away from it all.
5
That same autumn, when the Beatles first went their separate ways, and with much of his responsibility taken away from him, Brian made the most implausible of his decisions to date. He decided that the pressure of running NEMS with its many acts and multitude of functions was too much for him, and he wanted to get rid of it all, except for the Beatles and Cilla Black. The boys and Cilla, after all, were all he ever really cared about. The rest had turned out to be very unsatisfying for the most part. Finding a buyer for NEMS would not be a problem. Over the last few years there had been offers for the company practically every day, but none of them by the right people. One American entertainment conglomerate had offered upwards of $20 million the previous year, but the offer included the Beatles and left Brian no further say in their management. Brian needed someone he could trust, someone who would do NEMS justice. One evening that fall, he met just the perfect person at a party.
It was a Saturday night, and Brian and I had heard that Robert Stigwood gave regular Saturday night parties at the large, fashionably decorated duplex flat on Waldon Court he shared with Christopher Stamp, the brother of actor Terence Stamp. Stigwood was a rosy-cheeked, ginger-haired Australian who at the age of thirty-two had already earned himself a formidable reputation as a shrewd and quick-footed businessman. As a rock manager, his acts included Cream, an enormously popular new “heavy rock” band, and Graham Bond. He had also set the precedent for an innovation in the English recording-production process with “leasing taping.” Instead of the record company owning and producing an album with on-staff producers and then doling out a small percentage of the profits to the artists and managers, Stigwood financed and produced his own tapes. He then sold the finished products to the record company, thus retaining a much larger share of the profits—usually 15 percent—for himself and his artists. This eventually became standard in the British recording industry.
However, Stigwood was also known for his grandiose lifestyle, which reportedly had capsized his last company and thrown it into an undischarged bankruptcy. It was also known to Brian, through Sir Joseph Lockwood, the Beatles’ loyal friend at EMI, that only a few days before Stigwood had liquidated his company he had borrowed £10,000 from EMI—allegedly to pay off his personal debts. According to Sir Joe, he took the money knowing the company was going under and that the sum would never be repaid. Sir Joe never forgave him and refused to allow EMI to do any further business with him.
Stigwood had recently formed a new company called the Robert Stigwood Organization. His partner was a small, nervous man named David Shaw, who was a well-known businessman in his own right. Shaw had many times made the pages of the venerable Financial Times with a company he ran called Constellation. In a sense, Constellation was like a giant pension fund for show business figures who had short-term, high income that was usually eaten by the Inland Revenue Service. Instead of experiencing a huge tax bite during the peak years—the way the Beatles had—income would be deferred into the future by careful distribution. Shaw had once approached Brian about the Beatles joining Constellation. We had all met accidentally in Eze, in the south of France, when I went away with Brian after the first Dizz Gillespie incident. Shaw was staying on the Constellation-owned yacht, Eridiana, and asked Brian and me to join him for dinner in the hotel restaurant. On his way back from the men’s room, Shaw walked through a sliding glass door leading onto the terrace and was badly cut, bringing the business conversation to an abrupt halt. In any event, it turned out that it was a good thing none of the Beatles had ever invested in Constellation. The company was soon shut down bv Parliament when a law was passed to close the tax loophole through which it operated. Some tax experts saw Constellation as more of a “pyramid scheme,” into which new income had to be continuously generated to keep up the price of the shares, than a sound financial investment.
It was perhaps less well known that in the summer of 1966 David Shaw was made a public scapegoat in a “bond washing” scandal in which the Church of England and the Royal Bank of Canada were also reprimanded. The scandal centered around Toby Jessel, a Conservative candidate from Hull North, who was a director of Constellation. With Shaw’s reputation somewhat tarnished in the City, he had to resign his position. It was about that time he met up with Robert Stigwood, and they formed an alliance.
None of Stigwood’s and Shaw’s previous misadventures put Brian off, however. The first night they met at Stigwood’s party a plan was made to go to Paris together for what Shaw called “a dirty weekend.” It was in Paris in a three-bedroom suite at the Lancaster Hotel that Brian told Stigwood he was planning to retire because he wasn’t enjoying it anymore, and he wanted to go to Spain and manage bullfighters. To Brian, Stigwood and Shaw seemed like the perfect choice to take over the daily operation of NEMS. He felt that Stigwood had the right amount of creative potential and that Shaw had a sharp financial mind. Most important to Brian, Stigwood was intelligent, amusing, and affected an elegance similar to his own.
Brian made the following offer to Stigwood and Shaw: He would sell them 51 percent of NEMS—a controlling interest—in a reverse takeover to avoid sustaining a large capital gain. Brian would remain chairman of the board and would continue to look after Cilia and the Beat
les exclusively. Stigwood and Shaw could have all the rest. The price was an astonishingly paltry £500,000, considering that Brian had been offered $20 million only two years before. The written deadline for Stigwood and Shaw to raise the money was in May of 1967, but when that date passed, Brian made a verbal agreement with them to wait until September. Why Brian would agree to these terms, especially when selling controlling interest, remains a mystery, except to say that Brian was intent on selling the company to Stigwood and Shaw. He was so afraid to confront the staff and executive officers of NEMS with this proposal that he never announced it until it was a fait accompli. One night, when the NEMS offices were closed, I secretly met with Stigwood and Shaw at the Argyle Street offices for them to pick out which offices they wanted, evicting a very peeved Geoffrey Ellis the following day.
The news of the intended sale of NEMS to Stigwood and Shaw was also greeted with dismay by the entertainment community. Brian received sharp admonishments from Sir Joe and the Grade Organization, which criticized Stigwood as “an undischarged bankrupt and an Australian to boot.”
chapter Thirteen
Picture yourself on a boat on a river with tangerine trees and marmalade skies ...
—“Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds”
1
At the age of twenty-five, Paul McCartney had turned into a self-assured, slightly pompous “culture chaser,” as the Evening Standard called him, noting that he never missed a play opening or declined an invitation to the right party. A young, handsome multimillionaire and idol of his generation, he had been called a genius enough times, justifiably, to believe it himself with a deep conviction. He had, it appeared, everything—his beautiful and famous girlfriend; his beautiful sheep dog Martha; his St. John’s Wood home, which was slowly filling with Beardsley originals; the platinum albums he sent to his father’s home in the Wirral. He had everything except the one thing every northern man wants most: a wife and children. Because for all the glamour and perfection of his life, Jane Asher would not settle down with him.