Hippie Hippie Shake

by Richard Neville

  A few weeks later, Louise and I resumed our rocky relationship. Tears, recriminations, a new start. She decided that a little distance between us would work better, and moved in with friends in Flood Street. Neither of us knew the model of a ‘good relationship’. Love remained a mystery.

  I wanted to screw around, and I wanted to be with the enigmatic Louise. I had abused her loyalty, cheated and lied, and dressed it up as brave new politics. ‘I guess I’m emotionally retarded,’ I’d confess to friends. Maybe I could blame my schooldays, when the late arrival of puberty turned sports days into hell. After rugby, under the showers, team mates ganged up, poking fun at my slowpoke development – harder to hide than you may think. By the time adolescence eventually burst forth, I was keen to shout it from the roof-tops – forever.

  Would we ever understand each other? ‘Maybe we should take a trip together,’ I said, goaded by the little orange tabs then flooding London.

  Felix made a formal apology and we shook hands, though I still felt like wringing his neck.

  On the last day of 1969, there was an editorial meeting at the Oz office, which had expanded to include a design studio a few doors along Princedale Road. A production manager and an advertising assistant had been recruited, neither of them Australian.

  ‘Most of the magazine goes over the heads of our readers,’ Felix insisted, as Jim and I drew up lists of projected articles.

  ‘So what?’ I argued. ‘It’s better than aiming beneath them.’

  ‘You edit Oz for your mates with degrees,’ he said, the staff nodding in agreement, ‘but with a bit of common sense we could triple our circulation.’

  I was happy for Oz to be read by intellectuals. That was the point.

  ‘You’re nearly thirty,’ Felix said, ‘you’re getting too old . . .’

  That night, New Year’s Eve, Louise and I went to dinner at the home of Danae Brook, a Chelsea writer who had profiled Rufus Collins of the Living Theatre for Beautiful Freaks Oz. We settled under a ceiling painted with silver clouds. Rufus was there passing around those orange tabs. Sunshine acid, one for each guest. Jim Anderson, I noticed, took two. We moved to the living room to watch Elvis Presley’s comeback special, a grandslam NBC colour extravaganza staged in a boxing ring.

  Later, the Archbishop of Canterbury popped on the screen with his New Year message. Guests jeered at his Christian effusions of peace and goodwill, or fled the scene. Danae’s mother, in tears, was shocked by the derision.

  ‘I thought it was a lovely speech,’ she said into her handkerchief.

  ‘So did I.’ Embarrassed by my own misty eyes, I had slunk off into a shadowy corner. Now I came forward and hugged her. Acid was like that.

  Midnight over, Louise and I walked along the King’s Road, heading for another party. Horns blared, crowds cheered. The footpath was a fancy-dress ball, lit up by the catherine-wheel eyes of the Beautiful People. Passers-by clapped and waved. We bumped into Jenny Kee and Michael Ramsden. Jenny was decked out in a chorus-girl coat from Diaghilev’s Coq d’Or. She threw her arms around Louise, and kissed her.

  ‘You look so fantastic in Oz,’ she said, ‘sexier than Vivien Leigh ever was.’

  ‘So do you.’

  ‘I look like a junkie tart.’

  ‘That was the idea,’ I said.

  The cover of Oz 25 was a satire on mounting media paranoia at the counter-culture. Junkie tart Jenny was shown cross-legged on the floor of a squat with a flower in her hand and a joint in her mouth, while her companion, a bare-chested long-hair, shot up with a syringe. On a filthy mattress, a naked couple made love while a baby looked on. Crumpled on the bloodstained carpet was a copy of the People, with its headlines of Oz depravity. The cover gave the issue its name, Hippie Atrocities Oz.

  Jenny inhaled deeply and embraced me, pressing her lips to my mouth. Then she blasted the smoke down my throat. It was a ritual she often performed when we met, as if in revenge for my prolonged anti-pot attitudes. It triggered hallucinations.

  A bearded freak on a bicycle, legs akimbo, arms in the air, soared along the King’s Road, eyes wild, a grin splitting his face.

  ‘The spirit of the Sixties,’ I said.

  He looked like he could soar that way to World’s End and beyond, into the starry skies of the next millennium. I felt like cheering. Suddenly an almighty thump; the clash of metal, a yelp of pain, the shout of ‘Ambulance!’ Brave souls belted to the scene, but I couldn’t bear to see the magical figure sprawled in the gutter. I had an intimation right then that our time was running out.

  The party was a stiff crowd shuffling to the wrong music. My sister Jill was there, trying to get the mood going. ‘It’s New Year’s Eve, for Christ’s sake, put on some rock and roll,’ she yelled, but I could only smile and shrug.

  ‘What’s up with you?’ she asked. ‘On drugs?’ I smirked, totally incapable, for once, of verbalisation. ‘Drugs make you stupid,’ she said, ‘stupid and giggly.’ On her lips, a ring of claret flickered like fire. ‘Giggly Richard,’ she teased. ‘Giggly, giggly Richard . . .’

  The Love Germ had just been plugged in Oz: ‘a fantastic, earth-shattering, dynamic, brilliant, beautiful, touching, unbelievably sensitive, outasight book written by my sister’. Hyperbole apart, it was an intimate look at the May events in Paris – a corrective to the macho view of leftists in libraries. On her big publication day, however, Disney Studios had released The Love Bug, a holiday blockbuster, and Old Walt managed to muddy the book’s reception.

  Sebastian Jorgensen lurched our way. ‘Any news from the cops?’

  The confiscated copies of Homosexual Oz had been returned, I told him, but when Jim and Felix had gone to Scotland Yard to pick them up, they were issued with a stern warning. Next time . . .

  Later, the drunks thinned out. Jim Anderson and Rufus Collins rolled through the door, along with a group of Jamaicans. The vibes picked up. Party-goers smooched and held hands; Louise and I had taken a trip together. Whether we understood each other any better I don’t know, but we danced like there was no tomorrow.

  Jill fled in shock, after seeing Jim and Rufus openly kiss. The pair vanished soon afterwards, off to spend the night together at the crashpad of a Mayfair dope-dealer.

  Sometime that night, with Louise and me still burning up the dance floor, I started to think of the claims made by Felix against Oz and its editor. Too old, huh? Out of touch, huh? Suddenly I was struck by the notion of handing an issue over to schoolkids. A collective guest-editorship. Eureka! What a blast – a Schoolkids Oz. As the idea dawned, so did a new decade.

  In an effort to surmount a few class and colonial barriers, I returned the dinner invitation of our Hampstead hosts Nicholas and Claire Tomalin.

  ‘I suppose every good editor has to do a little social climbing,’ said David Widgery, another of the guests.

  Claire wore a red PVC raincoat, possibly as armour against an unruly exchange of bodily fluids, and I plonked her next to Ed Victor, who dutifully talked Spring Books. Her husband, Nick, a counterculture-sympathetic news-sleuth for the Sunday Times, was put next to Manfred Mann, refreshingly eager to trade his rock career for that of a jingle-writer. Louise played hostess, still embarrassed by memories of nausea rising in the Tomalin bathroom, courtesy of Lee’s opium.

  Sharp passed a smouldering spliff. Claire blushed the colour of her coat and said, ‘All day, Nick and I have been dreading this moment.’

  A bang at the door marked the unexpected arrival of Michael X, his wife Desiree, and Joe, his bodyguard. ‘I felt like rapping with some hippies,’ he said, as we reassembled ourselves on the carpet. The next visitor was also a surprise, another repercussion of my meeting with Lady Anne Neville in Kathmandu. It was Gyanendra Bir Mahendra, the brother of the King of Nepal.

  ‘If this is marijuana, it’s amazing,’ said Nick, ‘because I think I’m hallucinating.’

  Michael X explained at length how six militants could paralyse London, while his bodyguard stared at Claire with a ferocity
that intensified her blush. Louise served strawberry tart. David Widgery regaled us with his Allen Ginsberg story – how as a star-struck student journo he had been seduced by genius, and got much more than he bargained for.

  Claire’s complexion now made her coat look like a whiter shade of pale. Prince Mahendra didn’t care for tart, and was becoming something of a worry. He had produced a chillum of temple hash, but seemed gloomy and disconnected. Sharp put on David Bowie’s ‘Space Oddity’, unravelled the headphones and stuck them on the prince’s head. This is Major Tom to ground control . . . Mahendra’s face lit up, his mouth opened, his body swayed.

  At 4 a.m., after all other guests had departed, I unhooked the brother of the King of Nepal from the cans and put him in a taxi. He thanked me for the use of the device which had taken him higher than Everest.

  In 2001, after the palace massacre of his father and most of his family, Gyanendra ascended the throne for seven years, until the monarchy was abolished.

  The phone began ringing with a sinister insistence. It was the police. Lee Heater had vanished. His failure to report daily to Notting Hill station was a breach of his bail conditions. Had I seen him? No – and frankly, I was relieved. Except that I was accountable for the £1,000 bail. David Offenbach, the drug lawyer for Release, advised me to make an effort to find Lee, so that when I ‘threw myself on the mercy of the court’, the penalty might be reduced. On the crashpad grapevine, it was rumoured that Lee had fled to Northern Ireland. I took a day trip to Belfast. I showed photos of Lee to the airport police, asking if they had any clues. ‘Special Branch, huh?’ I tried to look like a spy. Within minutes, I was sitting in the back of an unmarked police car, heading for the rows of derelict tenements on the wrong side of town – Lee’s suspected abode. The cops complimented me on my disguise, reeling off jokes about deadbeat hippies, their sexual perversions, jitterbugging bedbugs and obscene Underground magazines. The police dropped me off near Lee’s last known address and sped off. The last thing I wanted, of course, was to find my demon lodger. I didn’t.

  At Marylebone Court the following morning, I told the magistrate of my relentless search to find the defendant, and threw myself on his mercy. The penalty was slashed to a hundred pounds.

  Advance copies of Playpower appeared, the phones rang hot. Harlech Television in Wales invited me to debate a panel of five MPs.

  ‘How would you like to go on the road?’ I asked Widgery, handing him a review copy. He was up for a lark, and took the train to Cardiff. In London, the Saturday night Frost Report assembled a panel to debate the counter-culture. Before the show, I found myself in the green room with the usual suspects, a loose coalition of writers and radicals dedicated to the overthrow of Western Civilisation. A joint rolled by. It was not the right time – on air I yearned to be coherent, urbane, convincing, but what the hell? These were the days when we were riding the crest of the wave, even though the sands below were imperceptibly shifting.

  David Frost’s firing squad included an assortment of vicars, MPs and professors. Cannabis filled the studio, seeping into the air ducts and inducing an atmosphere of merriment. The squad beamed and lost the plot. It was pop guns versus the pot heads. In stating its vision of a freer, more sensible society, our green-room gaggle of freaks took wing. The phones ran hot at ITV, with callers eager for information on how to prepare a macrobiotic meal, become a yippie, turn a carrot into a hookah or live in a commune with John and Yoko. The politicians remained lukewarm, but the vicars and the sociologists couldn’t move to Woodstock fast enough.

  Widgery returned from Harlech Television in triumph. Brandishing a copy of Playpower, he claimed to have wowed five MPs with the master plan of International Socialism. On the train to Cardiff, solemnly practising his Strine, he had suffered a bout of stage fright. But once the show started, he said, it felt like standing on a soap-box in October Square. What an event – Ten Minutes which Shook the Welsh. When an MP expressed surprise that Neville didn’t sound more like Rolf Harris, Widgery asked, ‘Where can I point Percy at the porcelain?’ Another MP queried his crewcut. ‘Oh, we’re all into this skinhead thing now,’ he boasted. ‘And we did it at least three weeks before John and Yoko.’ The trip heightened his contempt for the managers of mass media, and over a celebratory inhalation he remarked, ‘It shows how superficial opinion makers are about opinion.’

  I leaked the hoax to the Sunday Times. In the Atticus column, David Widgery – ‘alias Richard Neville’ – was pictured naked to the waist: ‘If the media can’t tell the difference between a skin-headed British Trot and an Australian druggy, it’s not surprising that they can’t tell an imperialist war from a peace probe.’ The column broke the hoax against the People, with a portrait of Lee Heater – ‘alias Richard Neville’ – also naked to the waist. All part of the credo of Playpower, opined the Sunday Times, ‘with its simple message: Have Fun’. The book was off to a flying start.

  Lee Heater was busted in Belfast for hash offences, and jailed.

  Ed Victor’s major concern was orchestration of the forthcoming reviews in the ‘quality’ Sunday newspapers, the Observer and Sunday Times. These would set the critical agenda. Ed was the supreme networker, even before the term was invented. He was disappointed to learn that one assigned reviewer was a highly refined, high-camp connoisseur, who wouldn’t know Panama Red from the Yellow Rose of Texas. Of all the reviews, Ed considered that in the Observer to be the most crucial. But who? The world’s first Filofax flapped and fluttered in Bloomsbury Square. It would be Ken Tynan.

  Tynan was generous and funny, dealing with the arguments chapter by chapter. He spotted an obsession with generational watersheds. ‘We have gone through three generations in less than ten years . . . instant obsolescence with a vengeance.’ Despite its messianic aberrations and dayglo glibness, Tynan professed much pleasure in this ‘enormously sane and healthily challenging book’.

  In the Sunday Times, Bevis Hillier decided that Playpower contained ‘the germs of a new fascism’. It was all violence and viciousness, masquerading under slogans of love. Neville was one of those clever, but not quite clever enough, idealists who see in a vicious movement only the fluttering glamour of the oriflammes and banderoles. It was a pity, he confessed, as he had been quite swept away by the incantations and spells on The Frost Show. As for Timothy Leary, whose Politics of Ecstasy was reviewed in the same column, he had helped ruin more young minds than anyone in our time: ‘Once again, horror dressed as fun in another visually exploding jacket by Martin Sharp.’

  It was a thrill-a-minute Sunday.

  The reviews came thick and fast, mainly favourable. Alerted by the hoaxes, the Times Literary Supplement suspected the author’s name was an invention and the book a collective wheeze. Even so, it found it witty, amusing and wholesome – and urged a post-imperial Britain to allow dissent, change and unorthodoxy without mounting forces of totalitarian repression.

  Back home, the Sydney Sunday Telegraph headlined the important news: HIPPIE BOOK BY OZ MAN ATTACKED. ‘One reviewer said the book terrified him, another that it could lead to Hitler.’ This latter beat-up was based on a review in the Guardian by Mordecai Richler, which was lengthy and even-handed, calling it a ‘deeply felt and honourable book’. But the review I cared about most was still to be written – by David Widgery, in a forthcoming Oz. Meanwhile, Private Eye summed it up in a pungent line: ‘The human story of a young Australian who comes to London and finds happiness by bringing out the worst magazine in the history of the world.’

  On BBC 2’s Late Night Line-Up, its supportive ambience making it seem like an extension of the basement, I took out a stupendous reefer. Another ‘first’, I gloated, and a chance to demonstrate playpower in action. The interviewer soldiered on as I puffed madly and spun into verbal overdrive. Hey, this is fun. At the end credits, the crew danced about the studio, ‘TV history, TV history’, hustling me to a cab before the police appeared. In the morning, John Lennon phoned.

  ‘Line-up was gr
eat, Richard,’ he said, as if we had known each other all our lives. ‘If you’re free, I’ll send a car.’ Afternoon tea at his Ascot estate. ‘Playpower’s a gas, let’s rap.’ It sounded like a song, already.

  I was watching out the window when the white Rolls-Royce glided to the step top, a TV aerial sprouting from the roof. The windows were tinted and the world slid by with dreamy remoteness as I was chauffeured to Tittenhurst Park, a white Georgian mansion set in seventy-two acres of trees and rolling fields. Yoko Ono in dungarees welcomed me at the door, leading the way to the kitchen. She said she had liked Oz from the beginning, because two Australians involved with it, Ian Stocks and Jane Oehr, had been so supportive during her pre-Beatle stint as a performance artist. Lennon signalled a welcome from the phone – his new convict haircut was a shock. Yoko and I sat at the kitchen table, as roadie-types stacked drink crates against the wall.

  ‘Dr Pepper. You can’t get it in London.’ Yoko invited me to try it.

  ‘Sure.’ I’d never heard of it.

  Yoko filled a glass. ‘John has it flown here from Texas.’ The tan fizz tasted of caramel.

  ‘Did the Beeb call the fuzz?’ John swung his jean-clad legs over the back of the chair. He gave a steely smile.

  ‘Are you kidding?’ I said. ‘Afterwards, the producer grabbed the roach and took a puff.’

  John was summoned back to the phone. Yoko said, ‘Don’t ever let lawyers come into your life.’

  Mopping up the Beatles’ battles, I thought, but when John reappeared, he said, ‘The silly fuckers think they’re obscene.’ A few days earlier, Scotland Yard had raided the London Arts Gallery and seized eight of his lithographs – depictions of him and Yoko in various sexual contortions. John expected obscenity charges.