by Peter Brown
But in his heart Brian was scared. First of all, he had not told the boys about his plan to sell the controlling share of NEMS to Robert Stigwood. In fact, the Beatles didn’t even know of Stigwood’s existence. Secondly, he was worried by what he saw as signs of the Beatles’ growing discontent. They were slowly hearing bits and pieces of the Seltaeb fiasco, and they were beginning to learn that Brian was unable to get out of bed until five o’clock in the afternoon because of the huge amounts of barbiturates in his system. He was scared most, however, because unknown to almost everyone, the Beatles’ management contracts with Brian were up in the fall of 1967. The possibility always lurked that the boys would take one of the many other offers to heart, and Brian would be “fired.” Late at night, drunk and stoned, Brian would discuss his fears with Nat. Nat thought the worst that could happen was that the Beatles might demand a reduction of the 25 percent commission they paid Brian to only 20 or 15 percent of the take, since Brian’s responsibilities were so greatly reduced without touring. Brian scheduled meetings from time to time to discuss renewing his contracts with them, and once he even assembled everyone at his country house for the express purpose of discussing it, but somehow the subject never came up.
Instead, without telling them, he renegotiated their recording contracts with EMI, which were up at the end of 1967.29 Brian had written into the contracts a clause wherein NEMS would collect all monies due to the Beatles, from which Brian would deduct his 25 percent. However, these EMI contracts ran for nine years—a full eight years past the duration of Brian’s management contracts. Now, even if they fired him, he would continue to collect record royalties. Brian never pointed this clause out to them. He asked me to get their signatures on the contracts for him while he was recuperating from glandular fever, and I brought the contracts to Spain, where Ringo and Maureen were visiting John and Cynthia while John was shooting How I Won the War. I got their signatures with no questions asked and had George and Paul sign the contracts later in London.
I personally believed that Brian was foolish to worry. The Beatles were as loyal to him as he was to them. Of the four, Brian only truly needed to fear Paul, who was outspokenly critical of him. While John could cut Brian with a glib remark, and George remained disturbingly distant, only Paul made him really worry. Paul called him almost daily with some complaint. He had also recently become interested in the day-to-day operations of NEMS, and he would often turn up at the office to snoop around. He had heard, obliquely, that Brian had lost the Beatles a lot of money through the Seltaeb deal, although it wasn’t until years later that Paul found out exactly how much.
When Paul finally made a mistake of his own, it was a whopper, but it gave Brian a welcomed opportunity to come to his aid. In an interview printed in Queen magazine in England and later in Life in America, Paul admitted that he had experimented with the dreaded drug LSD. Worse, he endorsed it. “It opened my eyes,” he said. “It made me a better, more honest, more tolerant member of society.” It was a moment of unsurpassed folly. When George once capriciously said he liked jelly beans, the Beatles spent three years performing in a perpetual hailstorm of them. If every jelly bean equaled a tab of LSD, there were going to be a lot of psychedelized children around, courtesy of Paul McCartney.
Not owning up to his responsibility in the matter when the daily papers called to question him about his Queen interview, he shot back, “If you’d only shut up about it, so will I. It’s your fault for putting it in the papers. You’ve got the responsibility not to spread it.”
Brian, too, was besieged with phone calls from reporters at his Chapel Street house. It was too late to issue a denial or to say it was a misunderstanding, as he had done in America about John’s “Jesus” remarks, so Brian well-meaningly did the worst thing possible. He admitted that he, too, took LSD and that he saw nothing wrong with it. “There is a new mood in this country re LSD,” he told reporters. “I am wholeheartedly on its side.” To Melody Maker, the teen music paper, he gave a more lengthy interview in which he said, “I did have some apprehension, but I took that risk. I think LSD helped me to know myself better, and I think it helped me to become less bad tempered.”
With this, all hell broke loose. Brian was widely criticized in newspaper editorials, TV commentaries, and by parent and church groups for his confession. It was discussed at length on the floor of Parliament, and the Home Office issued an official statement saying it was “horrified” at Epstein’s attitude toward this dangerous drug.
Paul himself was the least grateful for Brian’s compounding his mistake. Phone calls between them shot back and forth, until they became so abusive in tone that Brian stopped taking Paul’s calls, and then he would sulk about guiltily for not having dealt with the problem. And Paul wasn’t the only member of the immediate family who was angry with him. Cilla Black and her husband Bobby Willis were furious with him. Cilla’s audience was more middle-of-the-road than the Beatles’, and those were the people who seemed most offended by Brian’s remarks. Cilia was strongly identified with Brian and felt, perhaps unfairly, that her career was not moving ahead as it should have been. The previous summer Brian had booked her into the Prince of Wales Theater headlining a variety show with Frankie Howard for four weeks, but the run slowly dragged out to nine months before Brian got her out of her contract. Cilla’s next project was her own television special, the first color TV special ever broadcast in Great Britain and a great honor. But all throughout the rehearsals Brian had been in Spain, making a movie of his own about matadors and bull-fighting, while Vyvienne Moynihan at NEMS did his work on the special for him. When the show was broadcast, to rave reviews, Brian was nowhere around, and he sent Cilla a color TV as a gift. Cilla was unimpressed. “I felt like a kid on sports day when your parents don’t show up.” Now, to top it off, Brian admitted he took drugs.
To calm Bobby and Cilia, Brian took them to lunch at l’Etoile. Brian ordered champagne, but Cilia was not about to be buttered up so easily. “What about this telling the press you take drugs, Brian?” she demanded.
“It was the fault of the reporters for publishing Paul’s statement,” Brian explained lamely. “After the cat was let out of the bag, I felt it would have been hypocritical for me not to say I did it too.”
“Well, I feel betrayed,” Cilia said. “What are me mom and dad gonna think? That I’m on LSD? It was a very selfish thing for you to say.”
Brian made an eloquent apology. When the champagne arrived, he toasted her and Bobby. He seemed so sincerely repentant and so sincerely helpless, that she forgave him again.
5
With the success of Sergeant Pepper, the Beatles became even more sensitive to their power to affect vast numbers of people, and thus we passed over into the era of message songs. The Beatles had decided that the message that summer was love. Love was all you needed. It was naive and banal, but somehow it was so earnest they gave us all hope. That was part of the magic of the Beatles, to renew our belief and neutralize our cynicism. They made this message into a new anthem, a dirgelike song called “All You Need Is Love,” which was premiered to the world on June 25 in an international broadcast called “Our World,” telecast via satellite to over 200 million viewers. “It’s easy,” they sang over and over. “All you need is love.”
Brian was inspired to give a party at Kingsley Hill to celebrate this mood of benevolence and love and LSD that was sweeping over us. He didn’t intend for it to be an acid party in particular, but there was very little chance it could have turned out any other way that warm June day. At that particular moment there was an abundance of very special LSD in the Beatles’ family. It had been prepared to order by San Francisco’s famed acid-chemist, “Owlsley.” An ingenious plan was devised to get the acid into England. That June the first major, outdoor rock festival was taking place in Monterey, California, not far from Owlsley’s laboratory in San Francisco. Although the Beatles knew the film rights to the Monterey Festival had been sold exclusively to an American film com
pany, they sent a large complement of film equipment to San Francisco, ostensibly to film the festival. When the camera crew was refused permission to film, as was expected, the airtight camera lenses were filled with liquid LSD and shipped back to England without any problem. Several pint-size vials of this Owlsley LSD now graced the bookshelves in the sunroom at Kenwood, while others had been converted to more convenient little pink pills, which made their way through the Beatles’ inner circle. The acid was especially potent, and tripping on it was very hallucinogenic and “electric.”
The guest list for the party included the Beatles and most of their immediate friends, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Lionel Bart, London Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Sir John Pritchard, radio and TV personality Kenny Everett, and Nat Weiss, who had flown in from New York for the event.
Derek Taylor and his wife Joan had also been invited to come to Brian’s party and were supplied with round-trip, first-class plane tickets from Los Angeles. Derek had moved to California the year before and had opened a successful rock publicity company. His client list included, among others, the Byrds and the Monterey Pop Festival. Brian had run into Derek in the interim at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Brian had just read the good reviews for Help! and was in an especially good mood. A little guiltily, he told Derek that the book Derek had ghosted for him, A Cellarful of Noise, continued to sell well and that perhaps Derek hadn’t been properly rewarded. When Derek told Brian that he had long ago lost his contract, Brian promptly pulled out his checkbook and wrote Derek a check for an additional £1,000.
Derek and Joan arrived at Heathrow shortly after dawn on the Saturday morning of the party. They were greeted by a most incredible sight. John and Cynthia and George and Pattie had come out to the airport to meet them, and they were acting like they had gone out of their minds. They were dressed like wizards and fairy princesses in costumes of purple and yellow satin. They were garlanded with flowers and bells around their necks, which tinkled and shimmered as they moved. With them were the three people who had designed the clothing. This group was referred to as “The Fool.” The Fool was Simon Posthuma, a slight ethereal man with curly hair, and his two pretty female companions, Josje Leeger and Marijike Koger. They had been introduced to the Beatles by a publicist for the Saville Theater and had recently become the Beatles’ Royal Clothing Designers. The Beatles and The Fool cavorted and pranced around the reception lounge, kissing and hugging Derek and his wife, who couldn’t figure out what was happening.
John and George said the plan was to drive directly to Kingsley Hill and arrive before the other guests. All nine of them poured into John’s Rolls-Royce, which had recently been repainted by hand in a bright psychedelic design of flowers and scrolls, and set out into the English countryside. Gaily colored clusters of balloons had been hung as signposts along the way to mark the route for the guests, and the roads were lined with smiling townsfolk, peering into the crowded Rolls as it went along the country roads.
Derek found the inside of the Rolls as different as the exterior paint job. John had installed not a tape deck but a studio-quality turntable delicately suspended on a platform. The doors were outfitted with similar quality speakers. John put the new Procol Harum album, A Whiter Shade of Pale, on the turntable, sending the Fool into waves of ecstasy. As a thermos of tea was passed around, Derek, too, soon began to notice that the music sounded extraordinary, almost as wondrous as the green hues of the countryside, which had begun to throb and glow. Derek was about to ask what was happening when John said, “This was the first morning I had acid for breakfast. You too. There was LSD in the tea.” Joan, who was seven months pregnant with her third child, had been spared this surprise, but when apprised of what was happening, she voluntarily took a dose herself. A small pillbox was produced and an acid-soaked tablet was passed around the car for everyone to further nibble on.
Squashed in the backseat between John and Pattie, Cynthia Lennon was now the only member of the group not tripping. Quietly refusing all offers of the tablet or tea, no one had paid much attention to her. Now she watched the flecked pink pill come her way with trepidation. She had only tripped once or twice since she was dosed by the dentist and she hated it each time. She found no cosmic consciousness like the others, only consuming anxiety. Yet that day in the back of the Rolls, with everyone happy and safe and confident for the future, the balloons marking the way, reassuring her with the promise of the party to come, she decided to try again. “Perhaps this is the time to hear John’s drum,” she thought. “It’s now or never.” And when the tab came to her, she swallowed it.
The party had a soft, dreamlike quality to it. The prophets were here, the masters were in control, there was good food and liquor and friends. A Whiter Shade of Pale, interspersed with Sergeant Pepper, played all afternoon and into the evening. Brian, of course, found something to ruin his fun. Paul had phoned earlier in the day with an impeccable excuse and was not coming. Brian was deeply paranoid about Paul anyway, and with his emotions magnified by the LSD he had taken, he was devastated by Paul’s absence. He strode around the living room at dusk and leaned dramatically up against the piano. “Paul ... didn’t come ...” Brian intoned softly. “This day of all days ... he should have come ...”
John and George, who were in the room with him at the time, rushed to where he stood to comfort him. “Come on now, Brian,” George said, hugging him, “we’re all here, and we’re good friends, and we love you!”
At one point in the party George discovered that Derek and John were curled up in the plush backseat of John’s Rolls, listening to A Whiter Shade of Pale for the hundredth time, and climbed in with them. The three men felt warm and secure in the backseat and stayed there for what seemed like a long time. Occasionally, John would slip into a bad trip, and Derek would have to talk him out of it. At one point barbed wire formed on the car windows, but it turned out to be Lionel Bart. George said to Derek, “Don’t worry, Derek, you’ll never have to worry about anything as long as you live. You’ll always have us.” Nine months later Derek and Joan sold their house and furniture in Los Angeles and moved back to London so Derek could work for the Beatles. Except for short periods, Derek has worked for one or another of the Beatles ever since.
There were two people at the party who were not enjoying the effects of the LSD. One was Brian’s assistant, Joanne Newfield, who became violently ill and threw up in Nat Weiss’ shoes, which were beside the bed in the guest bedroom. Another, predictably, was Cynthia. From the moment she’d arrived at the party she had been overwhelmed with anxiety. The gardens melted and oozed around her, strangers grinned at her from behind rubber lips, and again she was afraid that it would never wear off, that she would be that way forever. At moments she was so frightened that she was unable to speak or ask for help. At other times she felt physically paralyzed, and the only person whose presence calmed her was John. All she could do to keep her sanity was to follow him wherever he went, wordlessly hanging behind him. John began to glare furiously at her until she finally let him alone and went into the house. She made her way upstairs to the second floor bedroom and sat on the bed for a while, feeling desolate. Then she went to the window and watched the party taking place out on the lawn below her, like a movie; the other guests laughing and having a good time. She drifted in her thoughts. Why was she so different? It wasn’t far down, she thought, down to those other people having a good time. She could just step out the open window and float. She opened the window wider and started out.
“Cynthia!” Pattie Harrison called to her from the garden, waving and laughing. “What are you doing up there? Come on down.”
Cynthia withdrew back into the room and lay down on the bed. She stayed there until very late that night, until the acid wore off. Only this time she found that it had left behind a permanent effect: a sense of dread. One thought filled her mind; there was no hope for her marriage now. If the acid had brought to her one irrefutable truth, it was that she and John were do
omed.
6
Cynthia had an unexpected ally against drugs in Magic Alex. Although Magic Alex filled Cynthia with the most dread and paranoia of anyone she knew, they were sympathetic insofar as drugs were concerned. For Magic Alex, the mortar and pestle on the shelf of the sunroom was the single greatest cause of John’s unhappiness—and of Alex’s inability to control him. John under the influence of drugs was not John under Alex’s influence.
Magic Alex had seen too many crazy things happen when people took drugs. Once, when John sent Cynthia and her mother away on vacation to Italy to get rid of them for a while, Alex stayed at Kenwood with an Australian girl to keep John company. John encouraged them to take acid with him, but they refused. He took his own dose anyway, and the three of them sat up until early in the morning talking and drinking wine. Alex and the girl finally went to bed, while John stayed up alone, painting the white shirt Alex had been wearing in watercolor doodles. When John got bored with tripping alone, he woke Alex and the girl with a pot of tea. “One lump of sugar or two?” John asked, dosing them.
Alex was annoyed at being dosed, but he was at least familiar with the effects of LSD to some degree. The Australian girl had never tripped before, and she was terrified. When the trip started she became claustrophobic inside the house and ran out into the backyard, where she started to take her clothes off. Then she hallucinated that the pool vacuum cleaner hose was turning into a giant snake and proceeded to climb onto the low rear roof of the house. John and Alex had to climb up after her to get her down. They gave her a tranquilizer and locked her in a guest bedroom to sleep it off.
Fifteen minutes later, much to Magic Alex’s dismay, the Weybridge police arrived at the front door. It seemed that the Australian girl, left alone in the bedroom with a telephone, had called a girlfriend in London and told her she was being held hostage by two men, one of whom was impersonating John Lennon. Her girlfriend got the address and called the local police. The Weybridge constables assured the girl that the man at that address was no imposter but decided to go out to the house anyway. John greeted them at the front door, wearing a top hat and evening cape he had put on when he saw them coming up the drive. The police were mildly amused, and when John assured them nothing was wrong, they left without any questions. But it was too close a call for Alex; only a cursory search of the house would have uncovered enough drugs to put both of them in jail for years.