So, every day of the week, Margot, Big Sue, Little Sue, Gayleen, “Willie,” and “Knickers” waited on Cavendish Avenue with their hungry eyes and small Instamatic cameras. They photographed Paul in the early morning as he came out to walk Martha the sheepdog on Hampstead Heath. They photographed him late at night, returning from vacation, his sunburned nose shining eerily in the flashbulb glow. They photographed him driving out, with Jane or without her, in the Aston Martin or Mini Cooper; then, hours, even days, later, they photographed him driving back in again.
Paul, for his part, presented token discouragement. The front gates would be thrown open suddenly, and the Aston Martin would roar out and away up Cavendish Avenue. The girls were by then so fit, they could beat the car on foot over at least the distance to Abbey Road studios. “We all got very tough as well,” Margo says, “through being thrown down the EMI front steps by Mal Evans, the roadie. But we understood that he was only doing his job. At other times he’d be concerned for us, standing out there in all weathers. At heart he was an incredibly gentle person.”
The bulk of the snapshots, however, showed Paul, in his endlessly changing suits and shirts and scarves and waistcoats, pausing at an entreaty: turning and smiling. The face—in real life slightly asymmetric—became for the cheapest Instamatic what it was in the glossiest magazines. Frequently, too, he would be in a mood for conversation. One snapshot from the hundreds shows him playing with a monkey one of the girls had brought. It bit his finger a moment afterward. “We told him once we could see him from the back of the house, sitting on the loo,” Margo says. “We stood him on a flowerpot to show him we were telling the truth.”
Each of the girls, by tradition, brought Paul gifts of varying usefulness. “I gave him three peaches in a bag once,” Margo says. “He’d eaten one of them by the time he got down the Abbey Road front steps. Another time, we shouted out, ‘What do you want for your birthday?’ He thought for a minute, then he said, ‘I haven’t got any slippers.’” The slippers were ceremonially handed over in front of massed Instamatics.
The vigil broadened in scope after someone discovered under which flowerpot Paul was accustomed to hide his backdoor key. Selected parties then began letting themselves into the house while he was absent, and moving from room to room in hushed wonder at the opulent chaos mingled with working-class formality: the lace-covered table, the Paolozzi sculpture, and the ranks and ranks of clothes. They would bring away some memento—small at first—a tea towel or a handful of toilet paper.
“The American girls were worst,” Margo says. “They started nicking his clothes.” The English girls, though refusing to pilfer, felt their scruples waver when offered a share in the booty. Margo acquired a pair of Paul’s underpants and a spotted Mr. Fish shirt. Some Harris tweed trousers were also brought out as a communal prize to be worn reverently, in turn. The hems would be shortened for Little Sue, then lengthened again so that Big Sue could have a turn at wearing them.
Six months earlier, Paul had written a song, or the beginning of one, called “Magical Mystery Tour.” It was to have been put on the Sgt. Pepper album: It had been arranged, rehearsed, even partially recorded before Paul conceded that it did not quite fit into Sergeant Pepper’s cabaret show. The track was held over—indeed, it was forgotten until early September, and the meetings to decide how the Beatles were to begin the era after Brian.
The idea, like the song, was Paul’s. He had been thinking in his whimsical way about little tourist buses, setting out with coy trepidation on Mystery Tours from British seaside towns. He had been thinking, too, of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, an American hippie troupe that, two years earlier, had journeyed by bus through the Californian backwoods, buoyed up by LSD diluted into thirst-quenching Kool-Aid. Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of their journey, The Electric KoolAid Acid Test, recorded, among other things, what visions the Pranksters experienced by taking acid during a Beatles concert in Los Angeles. So, yet again, something they had originally inspired came floating back to them almost unrecognizably as a new idea to copy and adapt.
Paul’s plan was to rent a bus and set out on a real life Mystery Tour, as the Pranksters had, to see what adventure—what magic—would be extracted from the unsuspecting English countryside. They would take cameras and film it, Paul said, but this time direct the film for themselves. He showed the others the scenario he had written—or rather, drawn. It was a neatly inscribed circle, segmented with what were to be the visual high points. In one segment, Paul had written “midgets”; in another, “fat lady”; in yet another, “lunch.”
The prospect, as Paul outlined it, was generally appealing. At last they would be able to make a film unhampered by Walter Shenson, Dick Lester, and all the petty restraints that had made Help! and A Hard Day’s Night such tedious and disappointing experiences. Filmmaking, as they well knew, was easy enough. All you needed was money and cameras, and someone saying “Action!”
So exhilarating did the project—and other projects—seem that they decided to postpone their pilgrimage to the Maharishi’s Indian ashram until early 1968. John and George gave their first television interview in two years, appearing on the David Frost Show to explain their newfound religious beliefs. Even about Transcendental Meditation they were pithy and funny: They seemed calm, cheerful, and restored to sanity. Best of all, they no longer incited Britain’s gullible youth to experiment with LSD. The Daily Sketch spoke for all in noting maternally, “It’s nice to see the roses back in the Beatles’ cheeks.”
Certainly, it was simple enough to hire a luxury coach and commission the best graphic artists to design placards reading MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR, though not quite so easy to make the placards stick to the coach’s highly polished sides. It was easy to hire actors to play the characters specified in Paul’s diagram—a fat lady, a midget, a music-hall funny man. It was easy to engage cameras, and three crews to operate them, and to persuade a sprinkling of journalists and NEMS employees to go along as extras. Forty-three people eventually boarded the bus that, early in September 1967, in a secrecy somewhat compromised by its insecurely fixed MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR placards, headed out of London along the Great West Road toward a still unspecified destination.
Chaos set in from the beginning. The Magical Mystery Tour, far from floating off into a psychedelic sunset, labored sluggishly and all too materially around Britain’s summer vacation routes, hounded by a cavalcade of press vehicles, surrounded at every random halt by packs of sightseers and fans. Encountering a sign to Banbury, they followed it, to see if Banbury had a fair. It didn’t, so they turned round and headed for Devon.
The journey, it became quickly evident, held neither magic nor mystery: only poignant reminders of how things used to be when Brian Epstein looked after the travel arrangements. Aboard the bus, becalmed in traffic jams, or trying to register at hotels that were not expecting them, everyone realized at last what a protective shield had been wrenched away. Neil Aspinall realized it, trying to apportion overnight rooms among midgets and fat ladies squabbling over who had to double up with whom: “When Brian was alive, you never had to worry about any of that. You’d just ask for fifteen cars and twenty hotel rooms and they’d be there.”
They reached Devon and started back, still vainly trying to extemporize quicksilver comedy from the all too mundane disorganization and bad humor. Nothing was explained to the actors or even the cameramen. The script was anything that anyone happened to say.
“We missed the tour ourselves in the end,” Neil Aspinall says. “We were too busy driving. We drove all the way to Brighton and finished up just filming two people on the beach. What we should have been filming was the chaos we caused—the bus trying to get over this narrow bridge, with queues of traffic building up behind us, and then having to reverse and go back past all the drivers who’d been cursing us, and John getting off in a fury and ripping all the posters off the sides.”
The climactic scenes were filmed on a disused airfield in West Malling, Kent. There, und
er Paul’s direction, a scene was improvised with forty dwarfs, a military band, a football crowd, and a dozen babies in prams. The bus, by now looking decidedly careworn, swerved round the pitted runway with limousines in hot, but unexplained, pursuit. That was the finish of the Magical Mystery Tour.
It was the finish, that is to say, but for the editing, which took eleven weeks. “Paul would come in and edit in the morning,” Tony Bramwell says. “Then John would come in in the afternoon and reedit what Paul had edited. Then Ringo would come in…” When not editing and reediting they would stand in the cutting room, having singsongs with a toothless Soho street busker who carried a port bottle balanced on his head.
The print eventually passed by all four Beatles was then handed to NEMS Enterprises for distribution. NEMS’s response was indecisive. “It was like giving your film to NBC and CBS and all the networks at once,” Neil Aspinall says. “Everyone came up with a different comment. ‘Couldn’t you do it this way?’ ‘Couldn’t you do it this way?’” NEMS eventually sold the British rights to BBC Television, even though the film had been shot in color and BBC TV, to all but a select handful, was still black and white. BBC 1 announced that it would be shown on Boxing Day, 1967.
The Beatles had been at Abbey Road since mid-September, recording material for an EP to accompany the film. Their pre-Christmas single, however, was a separate track, “Hello, Goodbye,” written by Paul, in which a grandstand of overdubbed voices chanted a lyric so simple as to be almost inane and so inane it appeared subtly ironic. “You say goodbye and I say hello. Hello, hello. I don’t know why you say good-bye, I say hello. Hay-la! Hey-hello…” By early December, “Hello, Goodbye” was number one in Britain and America. The Beatles continued to walk upon water.
Magical Mystery Tour was launched by a party whose lavishness showed no doubt of Sgt. Pepper–like success. The Beatles specified fancy dress. John came as a Teddy Boy, accompanied by Cynthia in Quality Street crinolines. George Martin came as the Duke of Edinburgh, Lulu as Shirley Temple, and Patti, George’s wife, as an Eastern belly dancer. John, that night, made no secret of powerfully desiring Patti Harrison. He danced with Patti time after time, leaving Cynthia so disconsolate in her crinolines that Lulu was roused to sisterly indignation. The climax of the party was the moment at which a little ringletted Shirley Temple, clutching an immense lollipop, confronted the chief Beatle in his greaser outfit and berated him for being so mean to his wife.
Fifteen million British viewers, on the dead day after Christmas, tuned their television sets hopefully to BBC 1 and Magical Mystery Tour. Expecting a miracle, they beheld only a glorified and progressively irritating home movie. The four donned crude animal costumes to perform “I Am the Walrus,” a song inspired by Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem about the “Walrus close behind us…who’s treading on my tail.” The Beatles themselves were only intermittently visible sitting among forty-three freaky passengers on the bus or as four red-robed wizards messing around in a chemistry lab. Paul, in one of the few professionally directed sequences, sang “Fool on the Hill” against a background of French Riviera mountains and sea. George, squatting Indian style, sang “Blue Jay Way,” repeating the line “don’t be long” twenty-nine times. A lengthy abstract interlude, devoid of its color, became merely puzzling cloud drifts and icebergs. The finale was one more idea that no one had quite bothered to think through. “Let’s do a Busby Berkeley sequence,” Paul had said. The Beatles, in white tailcoats, descended a staircase, singing “Your Mother Should Know” while ballroom dancing teams whirled in aimless formation beneath.
The Daily Express TV critic received front-page editorial space next morning to declare that never in all his days of viewing had he beheld such “blatant rubbish.” The unanimous decision of the British critics was picked up by American papers like the Los Angeles Times (“Beatles Bomb With Yule Movie”) and brought speedy cancellation of the film’s U.S. television deal. The BBC, meanwhile, took belatedly old-maidenly fright at John’s lyrics for “I Am the Walrus”—especially the references to “knickers” and “yellow matter custard,” i.e., snot—and denied it any further airplay.
For the first time since they’d worn leather jackets at a Young Conservatives dance, the Beatles found themselves being collectively criticized in every newspaper they opened. It came hardest of all to the one who’d initiated the whole catastrophe, drawing a clock face and trusting to his Pied Piper magic to do the rest. Dusty Durband at Liverpool Institute Grammar School could have cited many similar instances long ago when Paul McCartney did insufficient preparation.
Now, too, it came home to them with full force what life was like without Brian to protect them and clear up the messes they made. “If Brian had been alive, the film would never have gone out,” Neil Aspinall says. “Brian would have said, ‘Okay, we blew forty thousand pounds—so what?’ Brian would never have let it happen.”
John Lennon’s old schoolfriend, Pete Shotton, had long felt a distinct impression that John was trying to tell him something. Pete still lived in Hampshire, managing the supermarket John had bought him: on visits to John in London he could not but notice what larger business preparations were afoot. “I’d known John so long and had so many laughs with him, he could never come out with anything straight. He’d just grin across the room and say: ‘When are you coming up here to work then?’
“Eventually he did come out with it. He said he wanted me to come to London and run a boutique the Beatles were opening. He said: ‘We’ve got to spend two million or the taxman will get it.’”
Dr. Walter Strach, their chief financial adviser, had many times implored Brian to invest the colossal Beatle earnings simply left on deposit at various British banks. Socialism had as yet closed few of the Tory loopholes for channeling money abroad into tax-exempt trusts and companies. Brian would never do it, partly through a naive respect for capital, partly from a belief that to take money abroad was unpatriotic. “After the Beatles got their MBEs,” Dr. Strach remembered, “Brian always insisted they had to be whiter than white.”
It was therefore on “Uncle Walter’s” advice rather than Brian’s that individual Beatles made personal investments, such as John’s Hampshire supermarket and Ringo’s brief, unsuccessful foray into the building trade. On one occasion, all four came to Strach, eager to put money into a washing-machine company run by a bearded young tycoon named John Bloom. The doctor took credit for talking them out of involvement with one of the decade’s more spectacular financial crashes.
Strach figured in the single attempt during Brian’s lifetime to divert Beatles money from its huge liability under British income tax. In 1965, the proceeds from Help! were paid directly into a Bahamian company, Cavalcade Productions, formed jointly by the Beatles and the film’s producer, Walter Shenson, and administered by Dr. Strach as a temporary resident in Nassau. “That was why we shot part of Help! in the Bahamas,” Shenson admitted. “It was a goodwill exercise to persuade the Bahamian authorities we were an asset to their business community.” Unfortunately, the Help! proceeds were banked entirely in sterling. When Harold Wilson devalued the pound in 1967, Cavalcade Productions lost approximately eighty thousand pounds.
Toward the end of his life Brian had been considering more complex measures to protect the Beatles’ accumulated fortunes. His concept was not much different in essence from that which would soon spectacularly emerge—a corporation built around the Beatles that would both lighten their personal tax liabilities and give them control of their own work at every level, from songwriting to recording, even of distribution, marketing, and retailing. Brian had also visualized a string of Beatles boutiques, or pop supermarkets, selling records and clothes.
In addition to their original company, Beatles Ltd., the four were now incorporated into a partnership, Beatles & Co. The maneuver took place in April 1967 as a means of providing each with some quick capital. Beatles Ltd. paid eight hundred thousand pounds for a share in the partnership. By this absolutely legal metho
d of selling themselves a share in themselves, each Beatle received two hundred thousand pounds and, later on, a tax demand to match.
In 1968, they had joint reserves of around two million pounds that, after the taxman’s punitive bite of 90-plus percent, would leave scarcely enough to buy them each a new Mr. Fish shirt. Far better, their advisers agreed, to write off the money as a business loss. And if they could have a little fun—even do a little good—in the process, so much the better.
Simon Posthuma and Marijke Koger were beautiful people from Holland. Couturiers and interior designers, famous for their Amsterdam boutique Trend, they had migrated to London in 1967, hoping to widen their activities to the theater. Among their first patrons were a pair of publicists named Barry Finch and Simon Hayes whose clients at the time included Brian Epstein’s Saville Theater. By this means, Simon and Marijke gained access to the Beatles’ circle, where their exotic clothes and dreamy, Dutch-accented hippie talk made an immediate impression. So successful were they, both as stage designers and Beatles friends, that they brought their former Amsterdam boutique partner, Josje Leeger, over from Holland to join them. The three, plus PR man Barry Finch, then formed themselves into a design group named The Fool.
All through the Summer of Love and the still-affectionate autumn that followed it, The Fool enjoyed the quasi-royal status of designers and couturiers to the Beatles. They made the costumes for the “All You Need Is Love” television sequence. They painted a piano and a gypsy caravan for John and designed a fireplace for George’s Esher bungalow. They began to appear in newspaper fashion spreads as heralds of an era to follow wasp stripes, PVC, and miniskirts. “Simon,” explained the Sunday Times, “is dressed to represent Water. His jacket is glittering Lurex in bluey, greeney colours; his trousers are blue velvet. Marijke is Nature, in blue and green, and has a pastoral scene on her bodice. Josje is Space, her midnight-blue trousers covered with yellow appliqué stars.” To the Sunday Times, Simon explained that The Fool was a name with meaning beyond the obvious one. “It represents Truth, Spiritual Meaning and the circle, which expresses the universal circumference in which gravitate all things.”
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