by Peter Brown
During the summer of 1967 there was another, more important, convert to the antidrug contingent. George Harrison had given up drugs after a short trip to the West Coast of America. When Paul returned from his trip to San Francisco after his birthday visit with Jane, he was full of wondrous tales of the hippy movement and Haight-Ashbury, making it sound like a heaven on earth. On August 1, George and Patti set off to see for themselves. They were accompanied by Neil, Magic Alex, and Pattie’s sister, Jenny Boyd. They arrived on a beautiful, sunny Saturday in a rented Lear jet and were met at the airport by Derek Taylor, who knew his way around San Francisco and offered to act as their local tour guide. No sooner had they settled into the backseat of a rented limousine, then George produced some famous Owlsley acid, and they set off, tripping, to see the blessed hippies.
“I expected something like the King’s Road,” George said, “only more. Somehow I expected them all to own their own little shops, because I heard they’d all bought out blocks. I expected them all to be nice and clean and friendly and happy.”
Instead, from behind the tinted windows of the limousine, all they saw was a depressing slum area inhabited by a multitude of lost and disillusioned kids. They were stoned all right, stoned beyond all comprehension or necessity. They stood on the street corners, begging, selling incense, loafing in the sun. They were, for the most part, barefooted and unwashed. The limousine stopped not far from the famous intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets, and the occupants got out to take a walk. George Harrison alighting from a limousine in Haight-Ashbury, summer of 1967, was akin to Christ stepping out of a flying saucer. The long-haired kids on the streets parted in waves around him as he strolled along. At the first corner, George and his party encountered a Hell’s Angel named Frisco Pete, a big, burly tattooed guy in a sleeveless denim jacket with a skull and crossbones on the back. The LSD made Frisco Pete seem even larger than his already intimidating size, and George quaked at the sight of him. Frisco Pete, it turned out, only wanted to shake the hand of this young god, just like everybody else, and joined the crowd. Relieved that Frisco Pete meant them no harm, he invited him to London. “Come visit us sometime. We’ll put you up.” It was an offer George would live to regret.
George and Pattie and friends wandered past the seedy psychedelic head shops, the dingy boutiques selling tattered secondhand clothing, and into Golden Gate Park, site of the famous San Francisco love-ins. The park was swarming with teenagers on this warm summer day, the air filled with a rainbow of frisbees. Word spread like wildfire through the park that George Harrison was in their midst. In the blink of an eye, perhaps a thousand very stoned kids surrounded the tripping celebrity, pushing and shoving. The air was rife with the smell of sweat. Out of the crowd came a guitar, which was thrust into George’s hands.
“No ... no, please,” George stammered, trying to return it.
“Play!” someone shouted in the crowd, and then all of them began chanting, “Play! Play! Play!”
George gave Pattie a sick look. He began to strum a few chords, but the acid made the cheap guitar feel like a lump of cheese in his hands. He tried to sing “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” the Beatles’ present singles chart-topper, but he didn’t have the heart. The crowd closed in to a little circle five feet in diameter before George insistently returned the guitar, with profuse apologies, and they tried to make a break for it back to the car.
Angry hoots were heard as the mood of the rejected crowd turned malevolent. George and his entourage could practically hear the change in the footsteps as the crowd turned into a mob. George and his friends quickened their pace, so did the mob behind them. By the time they got to their limousine, they were practically running, with Neil bringing up the rear to protect them. They threw themselves into the limousine and slammed the door locks shut. Now the mob surrounded the car, pressed up against the windows, pounding and shouting as they rocked the huge car from side to side. The driver managed to start the car and drive it slowly through the crowds, but the occupants barely escaped unhurt.
When George returned to England, he was so disgusted with what he had seen in San Francisco that he swore he would never take another drug, a promise, of course, he would not keep. Yet this was an important turning point for George, the recognition that LSD was not the key, that there was a higher, purer form of contentment waiting for him somewhere. He told John about giving up drugs, but John only shrugged and said, “Well, it’s not doing me any harm, so I’ll just go on with it for a while.”
7
Yet sometimes it was hard to tell what part of their madness was drug induced and what part was pure whimsy. I was in my office one day that summer when the Beatles’ private phone rang. It was John calling to say that the Beatles were moving out of England! The idea had come to him the previous night in the studio, when Magic Alex was attending a session. The Beatles were talking about how sick and tired they were of notoriety and were bemoaning how restrictive it was for them to live in London. John suggested they escape it all by creating their own little kingdom, like an island. On the island they would build beautiful houses and the best studio money could buy and even a school, where Julian could be taught in a one-room schoolhouse with the children of Bob Dylan, who would be invited to join. Alex, hearing opportunity knocking loudly, said he knew just the place off the coast of Greece, where there were thousands of islands the Beatles could buy “dirt cheap.”
The very next day I dispatched Magic Alex and Alistair Taylor, who was now office manager and took care of sundry chores for the Beades, off to Greece to find an island. Not forty-eight hours later Alex phoned to say that he had located a place God had created just for them. It was a tiny cluster of islands twenty-five miles out into the Aegean, 100 acres in all. There was a large main island with four secluded beaches and five smaller satellite islands surrounding it. There were also sixteen acres of rich olive groves on the large island, which Alex computed would pay back the cost of the six islands in just seven years’ time. All this a bargain at £90,000. The Beatles impetuously agreed to leave for Greece at once.
Magic Alex had not bothered to remind the Beatles that in 1967 Greece was struggling under the power of one of the most repressive military governments in the world. The ruling military junta had banned both long hair and rock music, and a rock and roll group moving to Greece would be viewed with the same suspicion as the long-haired American hippies who were smuggling hashish from Istanbul via Athens. Long-term and life sentences for small offenses were common. Certainly, if any of the Beatles carried drugs into Greece with them, it would be discovered by the customs officers at the airport.
According to Alex, in a story told here for the first time, before the Beatles set out for Athens, he contacted a high government official he identifies as the “vice president of Greece” and asked the man if he knew who the Beatles were. “Yes, they’re a pop group,” the man answered. “But what does this have to do with me?”
“They could be of tremendous publicity value to you if you cooperate in making their journey pleasant,” Alex said. He struck a deal with the government official; if the Beatles were given VIP treatment, and not searched at the airport, they would pose for a set of publicity pictures for the Ministry of Tourism to show how benevolent Greece was; in effect, diplomatic immunity in exchange for an endorsement of the junta.
Alex warned John by phone before he left England not to criticize the junta to the press, either in Athens or in London, and to behave himself at all times in Greece. But when the commercial jet arrived at the airport, John emerged from the door wearing a military jacket and immediately began saluting every soldier in sight. When Alex got up close to him, he could see by John’s glazed eyes how stoned he was and barely got him out of the airport before he insulted the general who had come to greet him.
Alex had gone to a lot of trouble for nothing; John wasn’t in Greece five minutes before he discovered he had left his LSD supply in London. He was inconsolable when he realized this. “W
hat good is the Parthenon without LSD?” he demanded. Magic Alex knew of no LSD in Greece and wasn’t about to try to find any. The only way John was going to get any LSD would be to import it from London.
Alex, believing his phone was tapped, made a cautious phone call to Mal Evans at the NEMS office. “John isn’t well, Mal,” Alex told him cryptically. “You’ve got to come to Greece and bring his medicine.”
“What medicine?” Mal asked, baffled.
“You know, the medicine for his acidity...”
Mal was on the next flight for Athens, and John was tripping the next day. The Beatles were unmercifully exploited by the Greek government. They were driven around from location to location in the hot Mediterranean sun without a break for fourteen hours straight. The photographs of them appeared on wire services throughout the world. The Beatles’ sudden endorsement of Greece caused some puzzlement but was never explained.
The Beatles loved the islands that Magic Alex picked out for them, and I tried to make the arrangements to purchase them in London. Bryce-Hamner was instructed to purchase the necessary “premium dollars” from the English government to buy foreign property. The Beatles applied for £95,000, on which they had to pay a 25 percent premium per pound. The Beatles’ accountant prepared an analysis that showed the Beatles had only £137,000 in cash to spend and that purchasing the islands would be disastrous to their finances. But the Beatles persisted, and arrangements for the purchase were made directly with James Callahan, the Chancellor of the Exchequer. In a letter Callahan sent to the Beatles, he pointed out that £95,000 was the absolute limit to the amount of pounds he would allow to flow outside of the country. He added at the bottom of the letter, in his own hand, “But not a penny more... I wonder how you’re going to furnish it?”
The islands finally turned into so much of a hassle, like everything else they wanted to do, they quickly tired of the problems and sold the property dollars back to the government at the new going rate of 37 percent, making a handsome profit of £11,400 in the process.
8
In his den at 24 Chapel Street, Brian fretted over the boys’ scheme to buy a Greek island. He didn’t especially trust Magic Alex, and there was never any suggestion from the Beatles that Brian come to Greece with them. He wrote to Nat Weiss while they were away in Greece that he thought the idea was dotty. “But they’re no longer children, and they must have their own way.”
Brian had more pressing problems. He had now come to completely regret his option agreement with Stigwood and Shaw. With every day he was growing increasingly more upset over what he saw as Stigwood’s personal extravagance: NEMS executives had a charge at a local butcher where they were charging Sunday turkeys; articles of personal clothing were charged to the company account at Harrods; and when Stigwood took the Bee Gees to New York for a promotional trip, he rented a yacht for them to sail around Manhattan Island. Stigwood told Nat to charge the boat to his personal account, and Nat forwarded this information to Brian in London. “What personal account?” Brian fumed. “When the Bee Gees are as successful as the Beatles, then Robert can rent them a yacht around Manhattan!” Brian’s personal hope was that Stigwood and Shaw would not be able to raise the £500,000 to close the option. There was some doubt they were going to be able to raise the money in the financial community, but Stigwood insisted there was no problem and that Brian should inform the Beatles of what was taking place.
It was also just at this time that Cilia Black informed Brian that she had decided to leave NEMS. While the Beatles didn’t seem to mind Brian’s unpredictable hours and behavior, it was an impossibility for Cilia to nurture a still-growing career with Brian so incapacitated. When Cilia called him at home she got either his secretary or a butler, who made embarrassed excuses for him. He canceled or missed half a dozen appointments and sent flowers and candy or notes of apology the next day. Sometimes Vic Lewis would be sent in his place and would refer to Cilla as “my star,” affronting her. Cilia didn’t even think she was Brian’s star.
In a last-ditch effort to save their relationship, Brian sent Clive to make a personal plea that Cilla and Bobby attend one last luncheon at Chapel Street. On the Wednesday morning of the lunch, I called Cilia to make sure they were coming. Brian was very nervous all morning, and I joined them at lunch for moral support. Brian had the butler lay out the best silver and china and served fillet of beef and champagne. No mention of Cilla’s departure was made at all. Later, just Brian, Cilia, and Bobby went up to the roof garden and stood at the railing, looking out over the city. “There are only five people I love in the world,” Brian said, tears coming to his eyes. “And that’s the four Beatles and you, Cilla.” Cilla hugged him tightly. “Please don’t leave me, my Cilia, please ...” he whispered.
The next day Brian arranged a meeting with the BBC to produce a new TV series for Cilia. It went on the air a few months later, and became a sensation. “The Cilia Black Show” was one of the most successful female variety TV shows in British history, winning Cilla the TV Personality of the Year award for several years in a row and establishing her as a major star.
It must have seemed to Brian that whatever tenuous hold he had on those around him was slipping. That July his father died of a heart attack while away on vacation in Bournemouth. A badly shaken Brian returned to Liverpool to be at Queenie’s side for the funeral. Queenie was deeply depressed at this tragic end of her thirty-four-year-long marriage. When Brian and Queenie returned home from the funeral together, they sat on a sofa in the living room of Queenie’s house.
“What will you do now, Mother?” Brian asked her quietly.
“I don’t know,” Queenie said.
“Come to London, then,” Brian begged her. “Come to London to live. What do you want with Liverpool? I’ll find a flat for you near my house, and we’ll decorate it splendidly. We’ll have the best time!”
Queenie hugged him and wept. “I need you, Brian,” she told him. “I do so need you.”
“Now, now, Mother,” Brian said softly. “I need you more than you could ever need me.”
On August 14 Queenie arrived in London to stay with Brian at Chapel Street, and an immediate change came over him. Queenie woke him each morning by coming into his room and pulling back the drapes to let the sun in. He showered and dressed, and they ate breakfast together in his room while discussing his plans for the day. He went to the office every day and worked diligently. At night he took Queenie to the theater or a restaurant. His use of barbiturates was discreet, and he didn’t seem to let it interfere with his work or his sleep. He was clearly a man more in control of himself, and his close friends felt a sense of relief. One day Cilla Black and Bobby Willis were pleased to find him waiting for them at Euston Station when she returned from a visit to Liverpool. Brian said he had come by just to show her how much he loved her. He took her out to lunch that day, and it seemed like old times for a while. Then he told her he had a surprise for her; he had arranged for her to appear on the Eurovision TV contest, which was broadcast all over the continent. Cilia and Bobby were surprised at what they thought was a ridiculous decision. Only the year before another English female singer had won the contest. To think Cilla could win was hopeless. But Brian insisted; he knew what was best, and she would appear on the show. Cilia and Bobby left lunch that day, determined that her management contract had to be terminated.
On a warm Sunday night near the end of August, Brian was leaving the Saville Theater with his mother when the paparazzi closed in around them, strobe lights flashing like so many excited fireflies. “When will I see these photographs?” Queenie asked, getting into the backseat of Brian’s Rolls-Royce with him.
“Either when I’m bankrupt or I’m dead,” Brian told her.
Queenie left London the next day, August 24.
9
As Queenie sat in the train on the way home to Liverpool, John, Paul, and George were on their way to the Park Lane Hilton Hotel to hear the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi speak his wisdom. They
had first been alerted to the Maharishi through Pattie Harrison, who had been introduced to Transcendental Meditation as a way to get “high” on her first trip to India with George. Although George had become an aficionado of Indian music and food, the religious aspects of the culture still eluded him. Pattie taught herself mysticism and TM from books, and that previous February she had surprised George by enrolling in the Spiritual Regeneration Movement. She attended these meetings once a week without him. When Pattie told George that she had been “indoctrinated” and given a “mantra”—a secret word to chant—George felt left out. “What kind of scene is this if they make you keep secrets from your friends?” When Pattie heard that the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi himself would lecture on August 24 at the Hilton, she started a ground-swell movement to get the Beatles to go. As an added inducement, Magic Alex had heard the Maharishi lecture years before at a university in Athens, and he helped Pattie lobby for all the Beatles to hear him speak. John brought Cynthia, Paul took Jane Asher and his brother Michael, and George came with Pattie and her sister Jenny. Ringo, the only Beatle who did not attend, was at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital visiting with Maureen and his newborn second son, five-day-old Jason.