Orton visited Brian Epstein at Chapel Street to discuss the project. Paul, who had much admired Loot, was also there. “I’d expected Epstein to be florid, Jewish, dark-haired, and overbearing,” Orton wrote in his diary. “Instead, I was face-to-face with a mousey-haired, slight young man. He had a suburban accent. Rather washed out. Paul was just as in the photographs. Only he’d grown a mustache. ‘The only thing I get from the theatre,’ Paul M said, ‘is a sore arse’…”
Orton, typically, produced an outrageous script entitled Up Against It in which the Beatles were to be portrayed as anarchists, adulterers, and urban guerillas. After a long delay, the script was rejected without comment. “An amateur and a fool,” wrote Orton angrily of Brian. “Probably he will never say Yes. Equally he hasn’t the courage to say No. A thoroughly weak, flaccid type.”
During November, the Beatles had returned to Abbey Road in what proved an abortive attempt to make an end-of-year follow-up to Revolver. All that appeared that Christmas was a cut-rate collection of Beatles oldies-but-goldies and the traditional zany recorded message to their fan club.
What with one thing and another these days, they seemed to see almost nothing of Brian. From various intermediaries like Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis they had heard that he seemed depressed. But at that moment the thought concerned them rather less than what in hell they were going to put out as their next album, if anything.
FIFTEEN
“I DON’T THINK THERE WAS ANY HOPE FOR HIM SINCE THE DAY HE MET THE BEATLES”
For those whose blessed good fortune it was to grow up in the 1960s, the year to be remembered above all is 1967. Already in the twentieth century, moments of especially purblind human delusion had been symbolized by summers—the long Edwardian summer before World War I; the hot summer of still trusting to Hitler’s essential good intentions in 1939. But none of those could compare, nor ever will, to 1967’s so-called Summer of Love.
Internationally, the world had probably never had less love in it. America’s “limited” military intervention to support South Vietnam’s friendly government against the communist north had swollen into an all-out conflict, demanding huge resources in machinery and men and remorselessly laying waste one of the most beautiful countries in Southeast Asia. It was the first war of the television age, and one in which America’s military had yet to learn the most fundamental techniques of news management. European TV crews flocked to record a conflagration in which women and children, often of stunning beauty and grace, perished by the thousand. Horrific images were beamed into every Western living room: of helicopter gunships strafing rice paddies; of toddlers blistered from head to toe by a state-of-the art incendiary called napalm; of a U.S. Army spokesman declaring in all earnestness, “In order to save this village, it was necessary to destroy it.”
America, for the first time in her history, found herself involved in a war she could not win, a war that, even more bewilderingly, was opposed by many Americans. A wave of pacifist feeling swept the country, not among cranks and beatniks only but among the ordinary teenagers now liable for military service. Protest as a concept left the lunatic fringe, spreading through formerly peaceable universities, spreading also into the black ghettos whose young men were impartially called on to fight for a system that still oppressed them. Pop music was a reflection—even aggravation—of the new rebellious mood. Bob Dylan’s bitter mockery, the sweet reproaches of Joan Baez, became the spur to antiwar demonstrations and marches, and the ever-increasing numbers who fled “the military draft” to Canada or Europe.
So the American Dream began to dissolve. Yet that bitter awakening, ironically, produced its own short, golden reverie in a city harboring more American dreams than most. Like the first settlers and the gold-seekers, like the Zen Buddhists of the early sixties, like Kerouac and his “beat” poets, America’s dissenting youth in 1967 turned their eyes to that side of the republic where the ocean began and, in particular, where the ocean’s space and freedom seemed reflected in the city of San Francisco.
San Francisco’s rundown Haight-Ashbury district had long ago been settled by a homespun and bewhiskered hippie community. That community now swelled with the arrival of draft dodgers, disaffected students, and social dropouts by the thousand. Fresh hippie colonies sprang up along the northern California coast, around the University of California at Berkeley, and in remote beach hamlets like Big Sur. The environment, with its natural beauty and leisurely policing, was ideally suited to resignation from all conventional American life. More and more came to share the hippie heaven: to grow their hair, put on flowing robes, and walk barefoot; to speak softly, behave meekly, offer each other flowers, and turn on by means of the small, limp cigarettes that somehow became more special the more mouths had previously dragged on them.
Marijuana was the badge of hippie brotherhood, the odor most common in hippie refuges, the initiator of the hippie belief that through drugs lay a path to higher wisdom and humaneness. A middle-aged university physicist, Dr. Timothy Leary, was already their leader—or guru—following his dismissal from Harvard for experiments into the psychedelic (literally, mind-expanding) properties of LSD. Leary and his academic converts led the awakening interest in drug-inspired literature, from Byron to Aldous Huxley, and of drug-sanctioning Eastern religions. Joss sticks were thus tentatively lit in California, and Buddhist prayers phonetically intoned. Astrology became a youth fad to rival the hula hoop. It was through astrology most of all that wisdom became available: an age-old wisdom settling, in the pot smoke, over woolly and impressionable minds. An entire new vocabulary evolved to distinguish the hippie from his persecutor, the beautiful from the short-haired and workaday, the divine souls who turned on, tuned in, freaked out, and blew their minds from the residue of unenlightened humanity.
Musicians, being natural converts, blew the hippie happening like pollen across America. By early 1967, San Francisco groups like Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead were bringing the first rumors to British youth—of Haight-Ashbury and Big Sur and a huge outdoor concert at Monterey; of harsh new metal sounds and flashing lights; of a new dream world that young Britons, having no Big Sur, only Margate and Llandudno, supposed they must be content to experience at second hand.
On February 17, Parlophone released two new Beatles songs: “Penny Lane” and “Strawberry Fields Forever.” The tracks had been recorded late in 1966 for the album that was to surpass Revolver: With a lightweight ditty called “When I’m Sixty-Four” they represented the sum of almost three months’ work. Since a single was long overdue, George Martin had no choice but to sacrifice the two three-minute productions that, each in its own way, had involved more time and expense than most entire LPs. The double-A-side formula was less a boast than a political necessity, since one side was wholly John’s and the other entirely Paul’s: The weight of creativity packed into each only emphasized what a gulf lay between them.
Strawberry Field was the name of a Salvation Army children’s home John remembered from his Liverpool boyhood. The song he had named after this childhood landmark began with the air of a nostalgia trip (“Let me take you down, ’cause I’m goin’…”) then dissolved into LSD hallucinations, intensified still further by chronic myopic pun making (“Nothing is real. And nothing to get hungabout”). The lyric was a stream of semiconsciousness conjuring forth all the elements in John’s character—now loftily philosophical, now angry, now fearful, now sarcastic, now despairing, now wearily resigned—seesawing between the surreal and the colloquial (“Er, yes but it’s all right…”), in total adding up to nothing that remotely resembled a Salvation Army children’s home nor a field of strawberries, yet destined to imprint each obscure image and clouded thought on the listener with the burning-brand indelibility of Blake’s “Jerusalem.”
Paul’s “Penny Lane,” by contrast, re-created with photographic clarity a part of Liverpool well known to all the Beatles, the place where Aunt Mimi used to see John off to Dovedale Primary and where the Quarry
Men had played their earliest gigs at the little hall called Barney’s. It mentioned the traffic circle, the fire station, the barber’s with its shop-window portraits of satisfied customers; it had a cast of characters including the fireman with his loyal “picture of the Queen,” and a “pretty nurse” like Paul’s own much missed mother, “selling poppies from a tray.” It evoked the “blue suburban skies” and “pouring rain” of their Liverpool childhood, the “four of fish” (i.e., four-pennyworth) they would order at their local fish ’n’ chips, the “finger pie” (poking at a girl’s crotch with a forefinger, then sniffing it) that was their ultimate sexual thrill before they were old enough to make love in earnest. It was surrealism from a rational mind, as recognizable yet mysterious as looking at someone else’s family snaps.
As an arranger, Martin’s only guide was Paul’s enthusiasm for the piccolo trumpet passage in Bach’s “Brandenberg Concerto.” David Mason of the London Symphony Orchestra stood by in Studio Two with his piccolo trumpet while Paul hummed the notes he wanted and Martin inked them into a score.
“Strawberry Fields” proved an even greater test of the producer’s ingenuity. The song, as John first played it on acoustic guitar, was a simple, reflective melody. With the other Beatles added, it changed to the heavy metal style they were already absorbing from the San Francisco psychedelic groups. John liked it that way at first but then, a few days later, asked Martin to produce a softer arrangement with trumpets and cellos. In the end, he could not decide between the two versions. He said he liked the beginning of one but preferred the ending of the other. Martin had to find a way of splicing half the heavy metal version with half the orchestral one. To his lasting credit, no one noticed the join.
With each song came a color film sequence designed to be shown on television pop shows in place of the band themselves. Rather than the usual straight performance shots, however, these were minifantasies heightening the mood of the music, with the Carnaby-colored Beatles appearing as actors rather than musicians. For “Strawberry Fields” they were shown romping through a landscape that was actually Knole Park, the Kentish stately home, playing tag around an oak tree, and seated around an open-air dinner table laid with candelabra, being waited on by footmen in stockings and powdered wigs (one of whom, in an unwitting moment of truth, was their roadie, Mal Evans). For “Penny Lane” they were seen riding white horses through cobbled streets that actually belonged to London’s East End, with intercut shots of the real Penny Lane, still scarcely altered since their childhood. The age of pop video starts here.
Self-surpassing talent, given in double measure, resulted in the first Beatles single since 1962 that did not reach number one in the Top Twenty. It climbed to second place, but was just nosed out for the top spot by a middle-of-the-road ballad containing no innovation whatever: Engelbert Humperdinck’s “Release Me.”
The fact was, the Beatles now had an influence no longer measurable by the Top Twenty alone. George Melly, the jazz singer and critic and a fellow Liverpudlian, reviewed “Penny Lane” as poetry: It was, he said, a true evocation of Liverpool in the 1950s with “great sandstone churches and the trams rattling past.” The imagery worked with no less power on those who had never seen Liverpool and barely remembered the fifties, those for whom Penny Lane’s blue suburban skies, like Strawberry Fields’ acid-swirling bridle path, became a mirage eclipsing even that of San Francisco. You heard it even better, people said, when you were high.
Late in 1966, at his Belgravia home, Brian Epstein tried to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping tablets. Fortunately, both his secretary, Joanne Newfield, and his chauffeur, Brian Barratt, were on hand to thwart him. Barratt broke down the double doors to his bedroom while Joanne telephoned for Dr. Norman Cowan, the physician who had been regularly treating him. The three managed to keep Brian conscious until they could get him to his usual clinic.
The attempt was kept secret among those, like Joanne or Peter Brown, who were privy to his homosexual life and so familiar with its leitmotif of despair. Doomed love affairs with brutal boys had driven him often to the brink before. But always before he had had the means to recover, to convince himself, as no rational argument could, that his life still held pleasure and purpose.
For Brian, that pleasure and purpose were extinguished on August 29, 1966, when the Beatles gave their last concert in Candlestick Park, San Francisco; when Brian, terrified and preoccupied as he was that day, would have given anything to unravel the years and the wealth and be back at Barnston Women’s Institute, watching four boys arrive with their new stage suits in Burton’s shopping bags.
On the homeward flight he had almost let his unhappiness show. “What am I going to do now?” he kept saying. “Shall I go back to school and learn something new?”
The Beatles, for five years, for the centuries contained in each of those years, had been his all-eclipsing passion. He had lived for them, and through them, with an intensity granted to few born under his unlucky star. He had loved them, not shamefully, not furtively, but with an idealism that millions found fit to share. That love was as the painter for his canvas, the parent for his children, the lost soul for its salvation. Having been hardly noticed, it was not rejected with any great show of regret.
He remained the Beatles’ manager; a celebrity in that due proportion. He was, indeed, rather more often in the papers nowadays since their submersion in private projects and recording. Was it true they had started to break up? Quite untrue, Brian patiently said. They were simply resting. After what they had been through, who could blame them? Just before Christmas 1966, when a nursery school in the Welsh village of Aberfan was engulfed by a coal slag heap, several public voices as good as demanded that the Beatles do a live show to help raise funds for the bereaved families. The concept of the charity benefit pop concert was then an unknown one and, much as all four sympathized with Aberfan’s plight, they rejected what seemed a further move to turn them into national public property. As ever, Brian was there to explain the position on their behalf and stop the media criticism from rising above a mutter.
He might convince the press, but he did not deceive himself. A bond was broken that had, in any case, been so fragile, composed of arrangements, schedules, timetables, and notes. Despite the years and miles he had traveled with them, despite a fame and reckless wealth to equal theirs, he had no point of communication with them but a contract. Once their talent outran his efficiency Brian Epstein had no further part to play. With all else that was to be heard in their brilliant new music, Brian could hear the sound of his own doom.
He was, to outward appearances, still the epitome of that youthful success associated with Swinging London. Not yet thirty-two, he controlled an entertainment organization that, as well as the Beatles, represented some of the best-known names in show business. His personal wealth was estimated, by the Financial Times, at seven million pounds. Outside 13 Chapel Street his red Rolls-Royce or his silver Bentley convertible stood in the mellow Belgravia sun.
NEMS Enterprises, though administered by many hands, still owed its main direction to Brian’s personal business judgment, that strange mixture of rashness and prescience. In 1965, he had bought the Saville Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue, impervious to objections that it was just a few yards on the wrong side of the West End. The building appealed to Brian with its Art Deco exterior, its boxes with private anterooms in which leopardskin couches stood. At the Saville, he planned to put on straight plays in alternation with Sunday night pop shows. “We brought the Four Tops over from America, on the Sunday before their big record, ‘Reach Out, I’ll Be There,’ went to number one in Britain,” Tony Bramwell says. “Brian paid them $32,000 for a £2,000 gross at the Saville. Then, of course, he was able to bring them back to do a seven-week British tour.”
His passion for theater led Brian to subsidize the Saville through seasons of excellent, barely profitable productions, both drama and dance. He spent a fortune on the place, much of it unnecessarily—as with h
is insistence on taking out all the existing seats and replacing them with more comfortable ones. He had his own box there, and his own private bar. At the Saville, he could play theatrical impresario right to the borderline of his true desire, undimmed since his RADA days—that one night on the lit stage the leading man who entered left, through French windows, would be Brian himself.
The fantasy recurred in various projects with which, after August 1966, he attempted to fill his life. There was, for instance, his plan, in partnership with the disk jockey Brian Matthew, to build a new theater-cum-record studio in Bromley, Kent. He also dabbled in bullfighting, his other surreptitious passion. He put money into a film about El Cordobes and became a sponsor of the English matador Henry Higgins.
These ventures were not for profit, since he had more than enough money: They were symptoms of Brian’s desperate wish to find some other role than entrepreneur and businessman. He wanted to be creative, as the Beatles were—to establish by any possible means that credential for reentry into their world. So he tried to produce a record, for the Liverpool singer Rory Storm. He had always felt guilty at having poached Ringo Starr from Rory’s group. He even tried directing a play, Smashing Day, at the New Arts theater. John Fernald, his old RADA teacher, had been supposed to direct it but had fallen ill. “Brian took over and really threw himself into rehearsals,” Joanne Newfield says. “He was totally involved, right up to the evening of the dress rehearsal. All the cast were waiting in their costumes—but no Brian. He’d forgotten all about it.”
Joanne had joined NEMS originally as secretary to Brian’s assistant, the high-powered Wendy Hanson. She inherited Wendy’s job in late 1966, when Brian closed down his Stafford Street office and announced he would be working entirely from Chapel Street. Sitting upstairs, under two life-size David Bailey portraits of her employer, Joanne was first to see the marked change in Brian’s dress and habits. His clothes grew more flamboyant, his gestures more overtly camp; it became a struggle for Joanne to keep him to his business engagements. “I’d find notes for me in the morning, asking me to get him out of appointments—meetings or lunches. I once had to cancel Bernard Delfont four times.”
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