Paul McCartney (39 page)

Paul had long wanted them to make a film of their own devising and over which they had total artistic control, writing and directing and editing as well as acting and playing music. Andy Warhol productions like Empire, and his own travels with a cine-camera, had whetted his appetite for, as he put it, ‘films that you sort of just make because you fancy making a film’.

In April 1967, while visiting Jane in America, he’d come up with a seemingly perfect theme. An essential feature of British seaside holidays in the 1950s was the mystery tour by motor coach to an unannounced, but seldom surprising, destination, with beer, fish and chips and sing-songs en route, ending with a cash-collection for the driver in his own peaked cap. Paul’s idea was for the Beatles to take a ‘magical’ mystery tour in the same kind of vehicle and with the same lack of any preset destination, filming their adventures along the way.

As well as nostalgic–ironic in best McCartney style, the idea was also cool and cutting edge. In 1964, a group of proto-hippy performance artists known as the Merry Pranksters, including the novelist Ken Kesey, had crossed Middle America by psychedelically-painted school bus, handing out LSD diluted in the soft drink Kool-Aid to everyone they met. Tom Wolfe, father of so-called New Journalism, also joined the mischievous troupe, later chronicling their antics in his book The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.

Paul and John had written a title track, which the Beatles had recorded before the release of Sgt. Pepper, and Paul and Brian, in their latter, closer relationship, had discussed what the film might contain. Now, in the aftermath of Brian’s death, Paul persuaded the others there was one sure way to show themselves still united and able to carry on without him. They should press ahead with the Magical Mystery Tour.

In Denis O’Dell, the ideal person was on hand to manage the project. O’Dell had been co-producer of A Hard Day’s Night and producer of John’s screen-acting debut, How I Won the War, as well as a classic Cold War thriller, The Bedford Incident. A passionate horse-racing enthusiast, he’d earned Paul’s goodwill for arranging the purchase of Drake’s Drum for Jim McCartney’s sixty-second birthday. ‘One day, I was having lunch with Dick Lester when I got a call from Paul and John,’ he remembers. ‘They said “Denis, come and run us.”’

O’Dell’s first act on coming aboard was to suggest a far simpler, more manageable format for the Magical Mystery Tour–the Beatles as Victorian music-hall artistes, performing at a giant picnic. But Paul insisted they should stick to the Merry Prankster-ish road trip. He had taken overall command but–O’Dell soon realised–had little idea of what meticulous forward planning even the most spontaneous-seeming film requires. There was neither a script nor a shooting-schedule; only a circle he’d had drawn and marked off in segments to indicate different sequences, such as ‘People on coach’, ‘dreams’, ‘stripper and band’ and ‘end-song’. ‘Everything was off the top of Paul’s head,’ O’Dell recalls.

So, on 11 September 1967, in still-glorious Summer of Love weather, a customised yellow motor coach left London and headed for the West Country, carrying the Beatles together with hand-picked NEMS employees and their children, plus a selection of actors and old music-hall comedians chosen (mainly by Paul) from the Spotlight directory; a kind of Sgt. Pepper collage on wheels.

The four-day shoot quickly descended into chaos. No locations had been scouted in advance and none of the innumerable necessary permits and permissions necessary for filming along the way had been obtained, so problems and delays were continual. Cast and film crew alike grew increasingly confused and frustrated by the contradictory whims of their four different directors. An immense convoy of media vehicles preceded and followed the coach, causing traffic chaos and calling out retributionary police forces all the way to Devon and back.

The roadies Neil and Mal voiced the general sentiment as they struggled to cope with a more demanding and stressful road than ever. ‘If only Brian was still around… Brian would never have let any of this happen.’

The circular diagram Paul called his ‘scrupt’ (for ‘script’ it certainly wasn’t) also called for various interior sequences including an army recruiting-office, a wizards’ laboratory and a ballroom with a Hollywood musical-size staircase. No one had thought to book time at a film studio to shoot these interiors and when Denis O’Dell tried, he found every major studio fully occupied on the requisite dates. The only large enough available space was a hangar on a disused airfield in West Malling, Kent, whose pitted runway also served for an impromptu car-and bus-chase.

Scattered through the action were songs for the new album the Beatles were obliged to put out even though Sgt. Pepper still topped the charts worldwide. Paul’s ‘The Fool on the Hill’ featured him playing both recorder and penny whistle, as Jane’s mother, Margaret, had taught him. For the accompanying film sequence he went off with a single cameraman and Mal Evans to a mountainside in the South of France, cavorting alone and adorably in a navy blue pea-jacket. He forgot to take his passport but, in a gleam of genuine magic, charmed both the British and French customs into letting him pass without it.

His other main contribution was ‘Your Mother Should Know’, a soft-shoe routine straight out of the Fred Astaire movies he’d adored as a child. For this, the four Beatles appeared as a chorus line in matching white tailsuits and red carnations–but still with hippy-length hair–descending a Hollywood-style staircase into the multitudes of extras, now augmented inexplicably by a squad of whirling ballroom dancers and a march-past of Air Training Corps cadets. The descent was accomplished without a slip, just about, but only Paul was rewarded with a floral bouquet.

Editing the ten hours of raw footage down to less than an hour took 11 weeks and was likewise a collective process, with the group mind anything but unanimous. ‘Paul would come in in the morning and edit,’ Tony Bramwell remembers. ‘Then John would come in in the afternoon and re-edit what Paul had edited. Then Ringo would come in…’

Ahead of the film came a single destined not to be part of it, Paul’s ‘Hello, Goodbye’, written in one day at Cavendish when NEMS executive Alistair Taylor asked him how he thought up his songs. Sitting down at his harmonium, he told Taylor to give the opposite of every word he called out. The resulting ‘Hello-goodbye-yes-no-stop-go’ became the lyric to a tune that came just as instantly. In this sphere, at least, the top of his head never put a foot wrong. ‘Hello, Goodbye’ was a monster Christmas hit, appearing to close the unnerving Maharishi episode and signal a return to lovely, sunny, normal Sgt. Pepper-land. Commented one British newspaper nannyishly: ‘It’s nice to see the roses back in the Beatles’ cheeks again.’

Expectations for their first essay into film-making therefore couldn’t have been higher. In America, two major television networks, ABC and NBC, were bidding for the privilege of screening its world premiere, an event confidently expected to top The Ed Sullivan Show’s 73 million audience in 1964. Paul, however, wanted it first shown on the BBC because of the Beatles’ long-standing links with the Corporation.

It was duly snapped up by BBC1 for £9000–a fraction of what America would have paid–and billed as the highlight of the channel’s Christmas schedule. It had been shot in colour, with psychedelic special effects added, but as few British homes yet had colour TV sets, the majority of its guaranteed huge audience would see it in black and white.

It went out at 8.35 p.m. on Boxing Day, a time when Britons traditionally slump around their TV sets with their children and relations, bloated with Christmas food and drink and equal to only the most unchallenging ‘family’ entertainment. What this torpid mass had been expecting were the cuddly Beatles of A Hard Day’s Night and Help! in something similarly slick, polished and charming. Instead, they got a rambling, disconnected narrative whose four heroes were only intermittently visible–‘extras’ in their own film like never before.

In the entire 53 minutes, only Paul lived up to expectations with ‘The Fool on the Hill’, alone on his Côte d’Azur mountainside, making big eyes from inside his turned-up coat-collar. Against that was John’s ‘I Am the Walrus’, a sequence like a Lennon cartoon featuring the Beatles in animal masks, big-footed policemen dancing hand-in-hand, the singer himself gowned and with a bandaged head like an escapee from some hospital, or psychiatric institution.

Most baffling was the instrumental ‘Flying’ sequence, when the tour bus supposedly left the everyday world and floated off into a psychedelic Nirvana. In black and white, the pulsating Dayglo clouds turned into a vague grey swirl which many viewers mistook for a breakdown in transmission.

In later years, Magical Mystery Tour would be seen as a pioneering piece which anticipated pop video and Monty Python free-form comedy, not to mention a time when anyone could make a movie on a mobile phone. But in technologically innocent 1967, it caused outrage. The Daily Express’s television critic received front-page space to declare that never in his career had he seen such ‘blatant rubbish’. It was repeated after the Christmas holiday, this time in colour for BBC2’s more intellectual audience, but provoked only the same mystification and mockery.

Today, a rock band making a flop movie wouldn’t be such a big deal. But this was the Beatles’ first miss in a line of hits that had seemed unbreakable and was as integral to Britain’s national self-esteem and international prestige as the monarchy or Shakespeare. Especially so soon after their Sgt. Pepper triumph, it seemed a dereliction of duty that left millions feeling personally let down. And, with Brian no longer around to take all the flak, there was only one other candidate.

Paul accepted sole responsibility but insisted he remained proud of the film which, he said, ought to be viewed ‘more like an abstract painting’. For him, just the Beatles playing ‘I Am the Walrus’ minus their animal heads, handling John’s nonsense words and Marquis de Sade visuals–as, in the past, they’d handled Beatlemania, Hamburg and Litherland Town Hall–made the whole thing worthwhile.

Musically, it fared considerably better. In Britain, its six tracks had been released before Christmas as two old-style ‘extended play’ discs, together with a 28-page booklet and the lyrics in full. Because of the smaller disc format, it had to compete in the singles rather than album charts, but still reached number two (denied the top spot by ‘Hello, Goodbye’) and sold 600,000 copies by the New Year. In America, bulked out by ‘Hello, Goodbye’ and other recent singles, it became a full album which reached number one and was nominated for a Grammy.

In the aftermath of Brian’s death, Paul and Jane had seemingly become close again. December found them alone in the peace and seclusion of Kintyre, and on Christmas Day–with Britain still looking forward to a Beatle TV treat the following night–they announced their engagement.

‘A beautiful place where beautiful people can buy beautiful things’

Nineteen sixty-eight was the year when John and Paul got together with two women who, in widely different ways, would break the bond between them, so making the Beatles’ break-up inevitable. Paradoxically, it happened against a backdrop of consolidation and diversification, intended to give them more longevity than they believed their music alone ever could.

During these past three years of ever more colossal success, there had been little attempt to shield their collective earnings from the UK’s punitive top rate of income tax. Brian Epstein was at heart an old-fashioned provincial shopkeeper who regarded even quite legitimate tax-avoidance as unpatriotic. But in the last months of his life, a greater sum than ever before had been at stake. EMI Records owed the Beatles some £2 million of back royalties which was to be paid over in a single instalment. The only way to avoid handing almost the whole sum to the taxman, their accountants advised, was for them to put it into a business.

In 1963, they had become equal partners in a limited company, The Beatles Ltd, whose tax advantages had been minimal. In April 1967, this was replaced by a more complex partnership structure, Beatles & Co., 80 per cent of which was to be owned by a corporation receiving all the band’s earnings, bar those from songwriting. It meant they would now be paying only corporation tax, a fraction of the personal tax rate; moreover, by contracting their services to the new corporation, each received a whopping cash windfall of £200,000.

Under the Beatles & Co. umbrella appeared a nest of companies pursuing activities in which they were already involved–recording, music publishing and film-making. The corporation’s overall name was Apple, suggesting simplicity, freshness, innocence–a Garden of Eden even–and its branding couldn’t have been classier. One day, the art dealer Robert Fraser called at Cavendish with a 1966 work by René Magritte which Fraser felt sure Paul would wish to add to the other Magrittes on his walls. Entitled Le Jeu de Mourre (The Guessing Game) it showed a pristine green apple with ‘Au revoir’ written slantwise across it. Paul was filming out in the back garden so, rather than interrupt him–in a display of cool guaranteed to clinch its sale–Fraser simply left the painting propped on the dining-room table.

The Apple logo, a version of the Magritte image minus ‘Au revoir’, made its first, inconspicuous appearance on the back of the Sgt. Pepper cover. The name was also copyrighted in some 30 countries–a move which would pay off incalculably a quarter of a century later.

After Brian’s death, Apple continued to evolve in the Beatles’ group mind. At the suggestion of his brother, Clive, following the example of the Epstein family’s own original business, they decided to go into retailing, a huge Swinging London growth area headed by Terence Conran’s Habitat stores and Barbara Hulanicki’s Biba boutique. Paul was particularly excited by the prospect, visualising a department store in which everything would be white–furniture, clothes, pianos, even domestic pets.

With all four Beatles throwing in ideas, and no authority figure to restrain them, what had started out as the plain fruit of financial wisdom took on a candy coating of hippy idealism. Across the multisegmented corporation–now punningly named Apple Corps, pronounced ‘core’–profitability was to be a secondary motive. The Beatles would not be bosses but philanthropists, using their wealth and influence to give young people opportunities which they felt they themselves had once been denied by a grey and grudging older generation. (Actually, for most of their career, they had received extraordinary encouragement and indulgence from their elders: Brian, George Martin, Dick James and others.) Above all, Apple would have a spirit of freedom, democracy, fairness and fun never known in conventional business. Paul coined various oxymoronic mission statements for it: ‘An underground company above ground’; ‘A kind of Western Communism’; and ‘a controlled weirdness’.