Hippie Hippie Shake

by Richard Neville

  A man from the Sun asked, ‘When are you going to Belfast?’

  ‘Any day now. Scotland Yard and I are fine-tuning the itinerary.’

  ‘What’s with all the rings?’

  ‘Made from B52s shot down in Hanoi. Want one?’ Abbie was selling the rings to raise funds for his appeal.

  ‘How come it’s so quiet on campus these days?’

  ‘It’s always quiet in winter. Anyway, after the Kent State massacre, we’re all scared of being shot.’

  ‘Is the counter-culture dead?’

  ‘Nuh. It’s changing. It’s spreading to the heart of America. Every single GI base now has an anti-GI newspaper, modelled on the Underground press.’

  ‘But who’s your main opponent?’ asked the man from Sporting News.

  ‘The System. We’re checking out the Old Bailey as a suitable theatre for yippie actions.’

  ‘The Old Bailey?’ queried the guy from Canvas. ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘I want the boys at Oz to teach me how to corrupt public morals – sounds like fun.’

  The Sun fell for his stars-’n’-stripes socks, the Evening Standard compared him to Jerry. Jerry Lewis, that is. I introduced Abbie Hoffman to Germaine Greer. Two matched firesticks, they burned together brightly. After his stint of Oz promotion, Abbie flew home to launch his latest manual of revolution, Steal This Book – to be published in New York on April Fool’s Day. ‘It’s a handbook of survival and warfare for the citizens of Woodstock Nation,’ he told me, ‘turned down by thirty publishers.’ I wished him well, little realising that Steal This Book would lead to warfare between the citizens of Woodstock Nation – him and myself included.

  In April, my life was divided between launching Ink and preparing for the trial. Thanks mainly to Ed and his publishing contacts, the target of £20,000, which we needed to launch Ink, was within our grasp. Soliciting funds from the rich had been loathsome. Ed and I flew to Paris to dine with Allen Clore, a millionaire said to be sympathetic to the left. At Orly, as Ed headed for le taxi, I steered him towards the airport bus. ‘Sorry. I didn’t know there was one.’

  In the gilded VIP room of a fashionable eatery, I tried to be nice to a squat sourpuss surrounded by models and bankers. Clore decided to goad me. ‘Your father did nothing to save the Jews from Auschwitz,’ he yelled, apropos of nothing, ‘why should I give a fuck about you?’

  ‘No reason at all,’ I said, heading for the door, followed by Ed. On the plane home, we agreed to stick to writers and rockers.

  John Lennon sent his chauffeur to the basement with two cheques – £5,000 for Ink, £2,000 for the Oz Obscenity Fund – and asked us to keep it confidential.

  Ink was due to appear on May Day 1971. Ed, Andrew and I, having convinced ourselves that Londoners were desperate to consume a local version of the Village Voice, found it all too easy to convince the whole of Fleet Street. ‘Eldridge Cleaver in Algiers,’ said Ed to the correspondent from the Guardian. ‘Who but Ink will interview him?’

  I chimed in. ‘Cleaver puts Tim Leary under house arrest – who but Ink will get the story?’

  Fleet Street was fascinated. Why had Ed Victor vacated his director’s chair at Jonathan Cape to throw in his lot with the hippies? ‘I want to disseminate new ideas and influence people,’ he told them. Ed spent most of his time lining up features from heavies: J. G. Ballard, Edna O’Brien, David Cooper, Robert Stone, Sally Beauman, Sonny Mehta, William Burroughs . . . The Guardian reported Doris Lessing’s excitement at the new newspaper and how she wanted to serialise her next book in Ink. Hey, maybe we were on to a winner.

  Job applicants banged on the door. Two key Ink positions were Art Director and News Editor. Mike, a ringleted pro from adland, submitted a design for the Ink logo and was hired on the spot.

  For News Editor, I had a brilliant idea. Who better than a crack investigator from the Sunday Times, quick on his feet, and sympathetic to the cause – Alex Mitchell. If he took the job, I offered to forgive him for recruiting my body for The Body.

  Alex loved the idea. So did Andrew and Ed. At last, a high-powered news sleuth with hands-on expertise. Two full-time news reporters were added, Andrew Cockburn and Anna Coote, as well as twenty clerical and production staff. The new Ink offices in Princedale Road, opposite Oz, began to resonate with the clatter and hum of Olivetti gone electric. Ed was working valiantly on his downshift, but his bright Morgan, parked outside, looked incongruous.

  Resisting the temptation to zoom off to a bistro in Charlotte Street, Ed sometimes accompanied me down the road to a greasy spoon patronised by plumbers and truckers. Here he would recite passages from Lenin’s seminal work, What is to be Done, and wonder if Ink would be a similar catalyst for revolution as well as a major best-seller. As I was shaking sauce on to my pork sausage, Ed boomed a request to a sleeve-rolled kitchen hand: ‘Hey man, send us over the pepper mill.’ The cafe got deathly quiet.

  As May Day approached, Fleet Street worked itself up into a lather. The Evening Standard assigned a reporter to cover the twenty-four hours till press time. The BBC wanted to film Ink hitting the streets, intercut with on-the-spot interviews with its editors. In our art room, the designer was baffled. Success with cornflakes packets had not prepared Mike for tabloid stress. The more marijuana he smoked, the longer he took to juggle the type and the graphics. Richard Adams, hastily seconded from Oz, beavered away at the complicated centre spread, a What’s On guide to London. We planned to capitalise on the success of Tony Elliott’s Time Out, published once a fortnight, and plunder its thriving ad base.

  The content and the look of the front page was still a mystery, as were the whereabouts of Alex Mitchell. What was the lead? A number of messages, increasingly desperate, were left for Alex at a string of phone numbers.

  Felix Dennis now ran two advertising departments. He sped about London in mini-cabs, carrying an ever-expanding executive briefcase, but the bookings were slim. The Underground ad base was overstretched.

  Alex padded into the office, plump and rumpled, radiating the reassuring look of a newshound on the scent of a scoop. ‘The most amazing story I’ve ever broken but I can’t tell you – yet.’ Ed Victor’s eyes shone.

  ‘We need to design the front page,’ I said.

  ‘Make it a three-decker head.’ On a layout sheet, Alex scribbled:

  THE GREAT

  SOMETHING

  ROBBERY

  ‘What do you mean . . . something?’ A group of us stood in the art room staring at the rest of the page, unnervingly blank.

  ‘Not yet. It’s hot, too hot.’

  ‘You mean Fleet Street could break it first?’

  ‘Worse.’

  ‘Worse?’ Alex had our full attention.

  ‘Foreign agents, MI5. This story’s a turning point in world terrorism.’

  ‘Wow!’

  ‘The cold war is about to hot up.’

  ‘Phew.’ This was fantastic. Ed opened champagne. Clink! ‘Congrats, Alex. But we need final copy in twenty-four hours.’

  ‘No problem.’

  He flew off to ‘get a quote from a senior Minister’, and our designer muttered, ‘Marijuana. It must be the Great Marijuana Robbery.’ Leaving him staring at the scribbled headline, I rushed home to write the page three lead.

  After Rupert Murdoch acquired the News of the World, he launched a campaign against the BBC. On 28 March 1971 the paper headlined allegations of sexual misconduct at Top of the Pops, claiming the producers were fornicating with under-aged members of the audience, the ones who could be seen each week dancing in front of the cameras. Girls without tickets were smuggled into the studio, ‘if they were known to be promiscuous’. Scotland Yard had been called in. The News of the World demanded answers – ‘How much more do we have to expose?’

  The day after publication of ‘the great pop scandal’, Samantha Macalpine, 15, committed suicide. She had been a regular dancer at Top of the Pops. THIS GIRL IS A VICTIM, screamed News of the World, NOW SHE IS DEAD!
>
  Instead of contemplating their own involvement in the tragedy, Murdoch’s team redoubled its efforts to expose Top of the Pops. They seized upon Samantha’s little red diary. ‘The contents of the leatherette bound book,’ rejoiced the news desk, ‘could well blow open the scandal at the BBC.’

  This brought back memories of another diary – the one used by Murdoch in the Sydney Mirror seven years before, almost to the day. In that episode, recounted in Sydney Oz, Murdoch had headlined allegations of ‘sexual misconduct’ at a high school, based on the diary of a fourteen-year-old girl. It resulted in the suicide of a schoolfriend. This precedent failed to curb Murdoch’s new reliance on little red diaries. Samantha’s steamy ‘revelations’ included a night with a disc jockey, who had given her a pill which made her ‘float on a cloud’. But at the inquest the following week, a senior officer from Scotland Yard said Samantha’s diary was fantasy – just like the Sydney one. Its publication was ‘ludicrous and irresponsible’. This was not reported by News of the World, nor was the finding by the local pathologist – identical to the Sydney case – that the young woman had been a virgin.

  ‘THIS GIRL WAS A VICTIM! all right,’ I concluded in my story for Ink, ‘A VICTIM OF NEWS OF THE WORLD.’

  Back at the office, a few hours before press time, Alex Mitchell chugged upstairs with his copy. In the headline, the SOMETHING had been replaced by the word URANIUM. Our world scoop. The Great Uranium Robbery. Five bars – ‘almost enough to make an atom bomb’ – had disappeared from a nuclear plant in Wales. Yes, yes, I could see the implications – terrorist stockpile, cities ablaze, war alert – and chucked the copy to the IBM typesetter. Richard Adams was laying out the rest of the news pages, nineteen pages single-handedly. The Art Director was sitting backwards on the loo in the lotus position. Adams himself was barely conscious. Ed stood by his side breaking off pieces of grapefruit and stuffing them into his mouth. Foreseeing the danger of Ink’s Entertainment Guide, Time Out relaunched as a weekly and added a news supplement.

  In the pre-dawn hours, as Ink rolled off the inner-city press, Ed, Andrew and I held up the copies for the BBC’s cameras. It was no more than a momentary elation. Our ‘scoop’, we were gleefully informed, had appeared a few weeks before in The Times, tucked inside. The alleged uranium theft had taken place the previous year. While five bars did not an atom bomb make, they were more than enough to bomb Ink out of the water. Desperately, I tried to get hold of Alex. We needed substantiation, an in-depth follow-up, a lead for the next issue. But the News Editor of Ink was nowhere in sight. The black briefcase which he had left under his desk was later found to contain a bottle of Johnny Walker and a bag of grass.

  Ink 2 was already thundering towards press time. What the hell had I got myself into?

  At Palace Gardens, the phone calls, the visitors, the mail, were overwhelming. Louise filtered the time-wasters and trouble-makers, but the look on her face said it plain: Fuckwit. Even the Electric Lighting Act of 1899 was brought to bear. Unless an arrears of £59.41 was paid within seven days, the London Electricity Board would pull the switch on the basement. And they wanted a bond. Radio Rentals adopted the gentle approach. ‘We do not like reminding you to pay as this can easily disturb our good relationship,’ but the repo-man was heading for our TV. Louise had a sustained asthma attack. A carbuncle erupted on my neck, grotesque and painful, like the ones which plagued Marx. For days, I groaned in bed. No wonder Karl plotted the downfall of God and Czars.

  In Sydney, Martin Sharp acquired a building in Kings Cross, painted it irridescent yellow, filled it with his paintings, his friends and his fans, and threw an opening night party. His new girlfriend, Little Nell, tap-danced her way into the Sunday headlines and launched Sharp’s latest dream – the Yellow House, a meeting place for creative artists, dedicated to the spirits of Van Gogh, Magritte and Tiny Tim. The Sun Herald asked of the opening night, ‘Can such a moment ever come again?’ The interior walls were painted pale blue with fleecy clouds dancing across the ceiling. ‘What a fascinating horde of grandmother girls and hirsute hobgoblins,’ gushed one columnist. ‘How the sun did shine.’ Martin wore a paint-speckled artist’s coat and multi-coloured velvet trousers. In the pictures and the reports, he was surrounded by familiar figures – Colette St John, late of Ibiza, who was taking the newly arrived Sebastian ‘Gay Oz’ Jorgensen off to the beach for a charge of sun, surf and magic mushrooms. ‘Life here is a constant ball,’ wrote Albie Thoms, in the throes of making Sunshine City, a movie part-funded by the federal government. A rush of letters and clippings made the Yellow House sound like the Arts Lab combined with both UFO and the Speakeasy. Hippies happened, photographers flashed, filmos screened their rushes. ‘What an incredible trip,’ Sharp scrawled on a postcard, ‘a mind-blower – come and see Little Nell do the shimmy.’ But I was otherwise engaged.

  The date of the Oz trial was fixed for 22 June 1971. Along with the conspiracy charge, we faced two lesser counts – publishing an obscene magazine and sending indecent articles through the post. At a series of meetings in the basement, Geoff Robertson, daily growing in confidence, demonstrated both legal prowess and a gritty determination to win. Geoffrey had worked with Richie Walsh on Sydney Oz and, like him, became a big wheel in campus politics. Obscenity laws were based on a fantasy, he argued, because of the lack of a victim. Pointing out that the smut pedlars of Soho were ignored by Scotland Yard, Geoff shared our belief that the real motive of the prosecution was political – to silence the alternative press. He combed my address book and the bylines of Oz for a list of potential witnesses.

  Input came from another source – our ‘brothers and sisters’. The court was now seen as a vital arena of propaganda, and Tom Fawthrop, an anarchist, wanted to demystify the whole legal establishment. Working with militants in the Petty Sessions, Fawthrop had been promoting the concept of the ‘Mackenzie Lawyer’, a shaky precedent derived from a divorce case. It enabled a defendant in the dock to draw on the help of a non-qualified friend, who could freely roam the court. Winning the right to assign a Mackenzie Lawyer at the Old Bailey, Tom insisted, would empower all future political prisoners.

  These Movement meetings – noisy, stoned and unstructured – infuriated Geoff. He distrusted Fawthrop and the ‘street leeches’, who were pushing us to taunt the authorities. It was a clash of styles – anarchists wore shabby clothes, slept in squats and railed against the bourgeoisie. Geoff rowed for Oxford before breakfast and played championship tennis after lunch. At the end of these basement free-for-alls, he would zip off to Covent Garden for another opening night. ‘These guys could be sent away for ten years,’ he admonished the rabble, ‘on the conspiracy charge alone.’

  ‘Yeah – then they can organise the jails,’ replied Fawthrop.

  Geoff voiced his suspicions. ‘That man must be a police provocateur.’

  No – in that London spring of ’71, Tom was a genuine agitator for social justice.

  Our legal strategy fell into place. Tom Williams QC would act for Felix and Jim, briefed by David Offenbach and assisted by Geoff Robertson. Separate counsel would be obtained for the company, Oz Publications. I would defend myself. This way, I could include political issues. It also underscored our credo of ‘taking control of your own life’. David Widgery, who said he had been expelled from school for producing an unauthorised magazine, agreed to be my Mackenzie Lawyer. ‘The word that still excites me the most,’ he said, plundering André Breton, ‘is freedom.’ Louise replied, plundering Janis Joplin, ‘It’s just another word for nothing left to lose.’

  Louise’s role was to assist Geoff in co-ordinating the defence experts. One of the first people she approached was Sheila Rowbotham, the highly regarded feminist historian. For her, the Rupert Bear strip posed a problem. Oh, dear, Rupert was a childhood favourite, violated by the Oz collage. She told Louise, ‘In many ways, the person I am today was shaped by Rupert Bear.’ Understandably, Sheila could not appear for the defence.

  Germaine Greer was
also unavailable. On the phone from Italy, she told Geoff that the triumph of The Female Eunuch had complicated her tax affairs. She would be unable to return to Britain before the trial was over.

  Lee Heater called me from Los Angeles. He wanted me to fly there. His heiress wife would pay. ‘Richard, the fuzz is on my back. I need your help to rally the Underground like you did in Oz.’ I pleaded I was busy with the trial. Lee let out a groan. ‘I just gotta run free, brother.’

  California? Jim Anderson said he would go. ‘Maybe I’ll do a bunk?’

  He wasn’t away long. There was nothing he could do for Lee. The Underground press in LA was horrified – understandably. Lee was facing charges of rape and child molestation.

  So that’s what he had been so mysteriously a fugitive from, all along the pot trail. Having finally got their man, the LAPD had classified Heater MDSO – a mentally defective sexual offender. So much for our symbol of beautiful freakdom. Lee had warned me, of course, the first moment we had met in Marrakesh: ‘I was an evil bastard before I joined Sergeant Pepper’s band.’

  Fifteen years after his arrest in the US, I received a letter from Lee Heater. He was in a San Quentin cell, still reading the Book of Tao, due for release in 2009.

  Back at the Ink newsdesk, I was up to my ears in issue two, standing in for the nowhere-to-be-found Alex Mitchell. In Washington on 4 May, over 5,000 anti-Vietnam demonstrators were jailed by police. Tear gas filled the air. Two thousand demonstrators were crammed into a wire cage with two portable loos and no food. Danne Hughes collated the copy as it clattered off the telex and phoned her husband, Bob, at his desk at Time magazine. ‘Got any inside dope on the Washington uprising?’ ‘What uprising?’ He was rushing off to an art opening. Among those arrested were Dr Spock, Abbie Hoffman and three other Chicago Seven conspirators. I sorted through the wire photos from UPI, while Richard Adams splashed pink and green on the front-page overlays. The headline reflected our hysteria and our paranoia: INSIDE STALAG AMERICA.