Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Born Mahesh Prasad Varma in India sometime around 1917 (nobody was sure), the self-styled Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had studied maths and physics at Allahabad University before going into the Himalayas and re-emerging as a holy man whose message for the world was that heavenly bliss could be experienced through ‘transcendental meditation’ or TM. Knowing which side of his poppadom had curry on, the Maharishi went to Los Angeles to set up his Spiritual Regeneration Movement, which, rather than helping initiates for free - in the Indian tradition - asked for a week’s wages (the more you earned the more you paid). In exchange for this donation, one received a mantra - simply a phrase - to repeat endlessly until lulled into a state of oneness with the universe. Many wealthy Californians signed up.

  Next the Maharishi came to London, where he recruited more rich, unhappy fools. Pattie Harrison was first in the Beatles circle to embrace the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, informing her husband that the Maharishi was giving a talk on Thursday 24 August. They had to go. Perhaps surprisingly for a Himalayan yogi, the Maharishi was meeting the people of Britain at the Hilton Hotel, the luxurious high-rise favoured by the Rolling Stones’ sybaritic manager Allen Klein. George Harrison obtained the tickets - ‘I needed a mantra - a password to get through into the other world’ - and corralled John, Cyn, Paul, Jane Asher and Mike McCartney into joining him and Pattie at the master’s feet. When all were assembled the yogi emerged from behind a curtain to greet his audience, giggling and clutching flowers. He was a funny, happy little fellow with long hair like a girl. The Beatles were amused and impressed by the yogi’s shorthand route to nirvana, and acceded to an invitation to spend a few days with him at a teacher-training college in Bangor, Wales, where the holy man was to give a series of seminars starting that bank holiday weekend.

  The Beatles arrived at Euston Station just in time to catch the 3:50 to Bangor on Friday 25 August, before the metropolis disgorged its workers for the weekend. The weather was warm and sunny and there was a holiday mood in the Beatles party, which included Magic Alex, Donovan, Marianne Faithfull and Mick Jagger, who trailed about after the Beatles like their kid brother these days, eager to be where the action was. In the inevitable kerfuffle at the station, Cynthia Lennon was held back by a policeman who mistook her for a fan. ‘Tell them you’re with us!’ John yelled to his wife, but the train left without Mrs Lennon. ‘It was horribly embarrassing,’ Cynthia later wrote of the moment she found herself standing tearfully on the platform, watching her husband’s train pull away. ‘My tears were not simply because of the missed train. I was crying because the incident seemed symbolic of what was happening in our marriage. John was on the train, speeding into the future, and I was left behind.’

  There were other pockets of darkness surrounding the Beatles that August week. Two days earlier, Joe Orton had been found battered to death by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, who then committed suicide. ‘A Day in the Life’ was played at Orton’s funeral. Then there was Brian Epstein, who had been in decline since the Beatles’ last, unhappy tour, which reached its shabby conclusion in LA when Brian’s boyfriend stole his briefcase. Not long after that depressing incident Brian took an overdose at Chapel Street, leaving an ‘I can’t take it any more’ note, according to Peter Brown, who found him and took his friend’s word that he wouldn’t try anything so silly again. ‘When I discovered him, when I found him that night, you know, when I took him to the Priory [Clinic], and they pumped his stomach and everything, obviously we had a conversation subsequent to that. The conversation was him full of remorse.’

  The main problem was that Brian had become dependent on amphetamines, which made him erratic. Once so immaculate, so businesslike and well organised, Brian now slept late, missing appointments and key events, such as the Beatles’ last concert in Candlestick Park. ‘So that showed, you know, bad behaviour,’ notes Brown. The stable of acts Brian had built up and made good money with during the heady days of the Mersey Beat looked tired. The Mersey Sound was yesterday’s music, and Brian’s recent signings hadn’t made much impact. His new group Paddy, Klaus and Gibson had, for example, already disbanded. Then, in January 1967, Brian merged NEMS with the Robert Stigwood Organisation, allowing Stigwood, a young Australian, to take over part of his company. Brian kept the Beatles, but now that the boys had given up the road they didn’t need him on a daily basis. Brian had never been welcome in the studio, and his suggestion that Sgt. Pepper should be packaged in a plain brown sleeve showed how out of touch he was with the lads. He had successfully renegotiated the band’s contract with EMI in January, but the rumour was that when his own management contract came up in the autumn the Beatles might drop him in favour of Allen Klein, who’d impressed Paul by getting the Stones a $1.25 million (£816,993) advance from Decca.

  Brian had always found Paul slightly difficult, more questioning and less biddable than the other Beatles. One Liverpool acquaintance recalls Paul ‘taking the piss’ out of Brian’s sexuality, ‘sort of mincing along after him’, though McCartney’s friendship with the art critic Robert Fraser, who was openly gay, is evidence against him being truly homophobic. When Paul went to Paris with Fraser to shop for pictures, some of his fellow Beatles made comments, as Paul later recalled in his authorised biography: ‘Because he was gay [but] I was secure about my sexuality. I always felt this is fine, I can hang out with whoever I want and it didn’t worry me.’

  Above and beyond having a laugh at Brian’s expense, as all the Beatles did to a degree, there is, however, evidence that Brian Epstein had problems with Paul. When Epstein was dictating his memoirs to his assistant Derek Taylor, published in 1964 as A Cellarful of Noise, he said critically: ‘Paul can be temperamental and moody and difficult to deal with,’ adding that McCartney had a tendency not to listen to what he didn’t want to hear and possessed an ‘angry exterior’. Yet Brian’s American business partner Nat Weiss insists that Paul and Brian were on better terms by the summer of ’67, having resolved many of their issues, adding that he expected Brian to retain management of the Beatles. ‘As a matter of fact I think Brian - and I can say this from a conversation I had with him - his thinking was to keep Cilla Black and the Beatles for himself and let Stigwood handle the rest of NEMS artists, and adjust the commissions down to 15 per cent.’

  Still, Brian was increasingly volatile, bad-tempered and drug dependent, sleeping late at Chapel Street and losing his temper with his staff when he did get up. In May he checked back into the Priory Clinic. In July Brian’s father died, which he took hard. His mother Queenie came to stay at Chapel Street. Paul saw Brian and his mother there on 24 August. Brian minded Martha while Paul and Jane went to see the Maharishi speak at the Hilton. When the Beatles told Brian they were going to Bangor to spend more time with the yogi, he said he’d join them after the weekend, which he planned to spend in the country with Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis from the office. Brian drove down to Sussex in his white Bentley convertible on the Friday, while the band was travelling to Bangor. He had arranged for some young men to visit over the weekend, but dinner came and went without the guests arriving. Brian tried to rustle up other companions but, being a bank holiday, his contacts were unavailable. He told Pete and Geoff that he was driving back to town, and headed off into the night.

  London has an enervated feeling during bank holidays, especially the August bank holiday when the streets are empty, the shops closed, and many residents are away. Those who remain in the city are often lonely people like Brian, who returned home to Belgravia in his ghostly car in the middle of the night and went to bed. He telephoned his country guests the following afternoon, and assured them he was coming back. He also mentioned that he’d taken some sleeping pills. Sunday dawned. Brian didn’t stir. His staff knocked on his bedroom door to see if he wanted anything, but there was no answer. The door was locked. Eventually they called a doctor, who forced the door and found Epstein dead, surrounded by pill bottles. Peter Brown called the Beatles in Bangor, getting Paul on the line. ‘Paul was sho
cked and saddened but strangely sedate.’ The press were on hand to cover the Beatles’ weekend with the Maharishi. They clamoured for a reaction. John looked lost. George spoke twaddle about there being ‘no such thing as death’. Paul muttered that he was deeply shocked and put his arm around Jane, who looked increasingly like she was in a play she wanted her agent to get her out of.

  11

  PAUL TAKES CHARGE

  ROLL UP! ROLL UP! FOR PAUL MCCARTNEY’S MYSTERY TOUR

  ‘EPSTEIN DIES AT 32’, screamed the front page of the Daily Mirror on Monday 28 August 1967, adding in parenthesis that Epstein was ‘The Beatle-making Prince of Pop’. There was a hint in the coverage that the Prince of Pop may have taken his own life, but Brian’s friends agree with the coroner that the death was accidental. Brian had been taking too many pills for too long and had finally overdone it. He left no note, which counted against self-murder. Likewise he had plans for the week ahead. Still, there was a sense that Brian had been going downhill for a while, and despair can come suddenly and overwhelmingly in the night. ‘Brian’s death was a tragedy,’ says his lawyer Rex Makin, ‘but a tragedy waiting to happen.’

  When their manager had been laid to rest, the Beatles convened a series of meetings to decide how they should proceed without him. Robert Stigwood had an option to take over all of NEMS, and thereby the management of the Beatles, which the boys didn’t want. Stigwood was paid off and the Beatles remained with the rump of the old company, now headed by Brian’s brother Clive. At a meeting at Ringo’s London flat, in Montagu Square, it was decided that the reins of the band’s day-to-day management should be picked up by Brian’s assistant and friend, Peter Brown, a member of the original Liverpool ‘family’ who’d come down to London with the boys (the others being, notably, Neil, Mal, ‘Measles’ Bramwell and Brian himself). Paul doubted frankly that Brown was up to the job. Who was Peter, after all, but a mate of Brian’s who used to sell records in Lewis’s? Peter himself felt out of sorts at the first band meeting after Brian’s death. ‘I was emotionally very distraught, and I wasn’t sure what I could do, and I wasn’t sure whether I was ready to [lead] the band.’ During a break in discussions, he got up and walked to the window.

  The next thing I felt was arms being put around me and somebody hugging me and it was John - it always upsets me to tell the story - and he just looked at me and said, ‘Are you alright?’ And I realised that only he and I felt this enormous emotional loss of Brian.

  Certainly Paul was the most businesslike this day and during the days ahead. ‘Then Paul took the initiative of saying, “We’ve gotta do something. We’ll do Magical Mystery Tour.” Paul took the lead and everyone went along with it, disaster though it was.’

  Having already recorded some material for Magical Mystery Tour, Paul led the Beatles back into the studio in September with a renewed sense of purpose, laying down John’s mighty ‘I am the Walrus’, and George’s typically insubstantial ‘Blue Jay Way’, as well as the instrumental ‘Flying’, all of which would feature in the forthcoming picture. The Beatles were in a hurry to get these songs down, and the film made, because they wanted to spend time with their new guru, the Maharishi, at his ashram in the Himalayas. It was Paul who decided Magical Mystery Tour could be shot very quickly indeed, having observed a two-man TV crew filming the Maharishi at the London Hilton. If the Beatles worked in a similar way, Paul figured they could make their film in a matter of weeks. Pre-production was therefore hurried and absurdly inadequate. The Beatles didn’t even have a director, just a mate of Barry Miles’s named Peter Theobald, a young film-maker who’d been hired as a ‘Director/Cameraman’, handed 15 pages of notes and told he had six weeks to shoot the picture. ‘We never want that Help! scene again,’ McCartney told Theobald, who noted that the band ‘didn’t want chalk marks to walk to, with lines to get right, or “Take for the 28th time - ACTION!”; they wanted it to be freewheeling, to pick up things as they happened, and they did want it to be their film as well as being in it’.

  Paul’s initial discussion with Theobald took place on Wednesday 6 September 1967. Madly, Paul decreed that the Beatles would start filming the following Monday. His idea was to hire a coach, put the Beatles in it, along with a diverse cast of supporting actors, to be plucked from the pages of the show business directory Spotlight, then motor down to the West Country, which Paul had fond holiday memories of, and film an impromptu road movie with musical interludes. Not only did Theobald have no script; no budget had been prepared, the coach hadn’t been hired, and no actors had been engaged. John Lennon spent an afternoon floating in his swimming pool thinking of the sort of people he might like to have in the picture, and decided he’d quite like a music hall comic he’d once seen named Nat ‘Rubber Neck’ Jackley, so Nat received a call. Meanwhile, no one thought to consult the relevant trade unions, which had considerable control over how films were crewed in the United Kingdom at the time. As far as the unions were concerned, the whole production would be illegitimate, which caused problems later on.

  The starting point for this misconceived adventure was Allsop Place, a quiet turning behind Madame Tussaud’s museum, traditionally used as an embarkation point for provincial package tours of the type the Beatles once played with Helen Shapiro. Allsop Place was also close to Paul’s London home. The auteur arrived bright and early on Monday 11 September 1967, dressed in costume (Paul’s normal clothes, plus a Fair Isle sweater), to meet his hastily assembled crew and cast which, in addition to ‘Rubber Neck’ Jackley, included a heavy-set actress named Jessie Robbins, who would play Ringo’s aunt; the eccentric Scots performer Ivor Cutler, who would play a courier named Buster Blood-vessel who lusted after the aunt; a dolly-bird guide; a dwarf photographer; and an accompanying team of friends and associates including Magic Alex, Nell Aspinall and Mal Evans.

  Where was the coach? It still hadn’t shown up. So Paul went for a cup of tea at the nearby London Transport canteen. By the time he came back, the coach had arrived. It was a Bedford VAL hire coach, of the type commonly used to take school kids to the swimming baths and pensioners on touring holidays, its sides freshly painted yellow and decorated with hippie decals and the words MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR. The coachwork was so freshly painted the paint was still wet. Everybody climbed aboard and drove west out of London, pausing in Surrey to pick up the three suburban Beatles.

  Filming began immediately all four stars were aboard, the starting point of the plot, such as it was, being that Ringo was taking his Aunt Jessie on a coach trip. Along the way there would be songs and semi-improvised set pieces influenced by the Goons, the Theatre of the Absurd (which Paul was familiar with from seeing plays such as Ubu Roi) and recent LSD trips. Viewed afresh, it all looks strikingly like Monty Python’s Flying Circus, which is a compliment to the Beatles because Python didn’t come into existence until the following year. Unlike Python, however, Magical Mystery Tour wasn’t funny.

  The picture was a hoot to make, though. By evening, this twentieth-century ship of fools had reached picturesque Teignmouth, in Devon, where everybody checked into the Royal Hotel. One of the many aspects of film-making the Beatles hadn’t put sufficient thought into was the logistics of looking after a cast and crew on location; Paul found he had to spend hours making sure everybody had a room for the night and something hot to eat - a terrible bore. After breakfast the following day they got back on the coach and drove towards Dartmoor, intending to film at Widecombe Fair. Negotiating the narrow country byways, the Beatles’ coach got stuck on a hump-back bridge, causing a traffic jam of angry, honking motorists, who were themselves held up behind a convoy of press. Frustrated by the delay, John leapt out and started tearing the stickers off the side of the Beatles’ coach in a rage. Then it rained, causing the still-wet paint to run down the sides of the vehicle.

  The Beatles abandoned Widecombe Fair and drove instead to the seaside resort of Newquay, in Cornwall, where they checked into the Atlantic Hotel. The original idea had been to stay in a different loc
ation every night, but that was obviously impractical, so the Beatles used the Atlantic as their base for the remaining three days of the tour. Despite the chaos, Paul showed every sign of enjoying himself, riding a tandem on the beach with dwarf actor George Laydon, leading a singsong in a pub in Perranporth, and chatting up female holiday-makers, such as 17-year-old bikini-clad Catherine Osborne, who, on the final day of her summer vacation, found herself to her surprise in a Beatles movie. ‘All I wanted was an autograph,’ she told the man from the Daily Express.29

  When they got back to London the boys filmed a striptease scene at the Raymond Revue Bar in Soho, hiring the absurdist Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, with whom the Beatles had become friendly, to perform a piece of nonsense titled ‘Death Cab for Cutie’ (a headline Bonzo member Neil Innes had spied in an American crime magazine). Innes recalls John and Ringo filming everything with their own 16mm cameras, while Paul directed the main production. ‘What are you doing?’ Innes asked.

  ‘We’re doing the Weybridge version,’ Lennon replied laconically, revealing the (perhaps) tantalising prospect of an entirely different cut of Magical Mystery Tour.

  To complete the picture the Beatles needed a studio. As nobody had thought to book Twickenham, they shot the requisite scenes at a disused air force base at West Malling in Kent, including a wacky car chase and the Beatles miming to John’s ‘I am the Walrus’, the only real point of interest in the whole film, for this was weird and powerful music, performed by Lennon wearing an egg-head while his fellow Beatles donned strangely disquieting animal masks. Paul put on the head of a hippo.30 The lads then moved into a hangar to shoot ‘Your Mother Should Know’, which gave Paul an opportunity to emulate Fred Astaire, putting on a white tuxedo and dancing down stairs with his band mates. The whole thing was truly nutty, as visitors observed. ‘The day I went down, Paul was directing 40 assorted dwarfs, vicars, footballers, mums and dads with prams full of babies and George and Ringo dressed as gangsters,’ journalist Hunter Davies reported for the Sunday Times. ‘As a starting rocket went off, [Paul] had them all charging across the empty airfield, then charging back again. John was asleep in his Rolls Royce.’ Paul was now directing full time, Peter Theobald having left the production after a dispute blew up with the unions over the crewing of the picture.