Paul McCartney (40 page)

Among the assets Brian had acquired on their behalf was a corner building at 94 Baker Street, a thoroughfare immortalised by the mythical detective Sherlock Holmes. The ground floor of this now became a boutique named Apple, with the corporation’s–initially modest–offices above it.

The job of creating the boutique went to a Dutch hippy design collective known as The Fool, who had made the Beatles’ clothes for their ‘All You Need Is Love’ telecast and as a result become couturiers to London’s rock elite. The Fool received a budget of £100,000–£1 million-plus by today’s values–to decorate the boutique and make the garments it was to sell. Their plan involved the total transformation of the early Victorian corner-site with a giant psychedelic mural covering both walls: the figure of a sloe-eyed goddess or genii juggling with suns and moons. For such radical defacement of a historic building, permission had to be obtained from the local planning authority. This was refused, but the designers still went ahead, employing a team of art students to finish the mural in time for the boutique’s opening on 7 December 1967.

In the public mind, the project seemed more suggestive of Paul than any other Beatle; it was from him, naturally, that the media sought a raison d’être for the boutique, and were rewarded with ‘A beautiful place where beautiful people can buy beautiful things’. But at the glittering inaugural party, as celebrities like Cilla Black and Ken Tynan munched apples and drank apple juice and The Fool performed tinkly pipe-and-bells music, John and George were the only Beatles present. Paul was with Jane in Scotland, prior to announcing their engagement.

Soon the cramped upstairs rooms could no longer contain all Apple’s blossoming branches and the organisation moved to a suite of offices at 94 Wigmore Street, just round the corner from Paul’s former billet with the Asher family. A press and publicity department was established by Derek Taylor, who’d done the same job under Brian a few years earlier and had since been based in California, representing the Byrds and helping organise the Monterey Festival.

Jobs were given to Beatle friends and cronies, regardless of qualifications or experience. Apple Publishing was run by Terry Doran, Brian’s former partner in a car-dealership, forever tagged the ‘man from the motor trade’ in ‘She’s Leaving Home’. The boutique was managed by John’s old school crony Pete Shotton, whose only previous retail experience had been running a supermarket in Hampshire that John had bought, while its sales staff were headed by George’s fashion model sister-in-law, Jenny Boyd.

With Denis O’Dell already in place as head of Apple Films, the most pressing task was to set up the record label that would be the company’s centrepiece. To head it, Peter Asher recalls, the Beatles wanted ‘a big, impressive American record guy’, so they chose Ron Kass, chief executive of the prestigious Liberty label.

During the first flush of Paul-written hits for Peter and Gordon, Asher had become interested in record production, and had gone on to produce a solo single for Manfred Mann’s Paul Jones. ‘I asked Paul [McCartney] to play drums on one track because I always thought he was a great, underrated drummer. When the Apple label was being put together, he asked me if I’d like to produce some things for it. Then, somehow, it turned into my becoming head of A&R.’

One of the first recipients of Apple’s largesse was a blond young Greek named Ianni, or Alex, Mardas. He was always viewed as a John protégé, but actually had Paul–or rather Paul’s eclectic artistic taste–to thank for his entrée to the Beatles’ inner circle. He was currently lodging with the recently-divorced John Dunbar, from whose Indica gallery Paul had acquired so many pieces. Dunbar had met him through the wife of the Greek sculptor Takis Vassilikis, one of whose spindly metal-rod constructions had pride of place at Cavendish.

Twenty-one-year-old Mardas was good-looking and charming and, despite his unexalted work as a TV engineer, claimed to be the scion of a wealthy Greek family whose social circle included the Queen’s Greek-born husband, Prince Philip. He’d got to know the Beatles, fortuitously, when they were thinking of buying a string of Greek islands as a communal home, and needed a negotiator with the country’s newly-installed fascist military government. Mardas had accompanied them on a reconnaissance cruise in the summer of 1967, a maritime acid trip which ended without the purchase of a single island.

His real appeal, however, was as an electronics ‘wizard’ with a vision far beyond the TV sets he repaired for a living. Some of his ideas foreshadowed soon-to-be developments in telecommunications–such as phones that dialled automatically and displayed the numbers of incoming calls–but others belonged more to the realm of science fiction. John, a technophobe who couldn’t even change a light-bulb, was dazzled by Mardas’s plans for an ‘X-Ray camera’, a force-field of coloured smoke to replace conventional burglar-alarms, and a house that could be made to hover a short way above the ground. He named the young Greek ‘Magic Alex’ and took him into the most top-secret band-meetings, introducing him as ‘my new guru’.

The reclusive, paranoid George was equally smitten by Mardas’s many projected devices for keeping unwanted intruders at bay. But practically-minded Paul, to begin with anyway, seemed just as impressed. The result was another new division, Apple Electronics, with premises in Bayswater and Magic Alex assigned a hefty budget to design revolutionary new forms of lighting for the Apple boutique.

The Beatles seemed unable to start a business without giving it as many tracks as one of their albums. Plans were further announced for an Apple bespoke tailoring shop on Chelsea’s King’s Road and an Apple Foundation for the Arts to fund youthful talent in every creative medium. There was even to be an Apple school, run on hippy principles and bearing no resemblance to the rigorous (and excellent) academies the Beatles themselves had attended. Its head was to be Ivan Vaughan, who’d once lived over the garden wall from John, been Paul’s classmate at Liverpool Institute and brought the two together at St Peter’s church fete. After gaining a degree in classics, ‘Ivy’ had become a primary school teacher–the career that had once beckoned strongly to Paul also.

Since the previous August, the band had made no further statement about Maharishi Mahesh Yogi or their conversion to Transcendental Meditation. But they had kept in touch with the Maharishi and steered several celebrity friends into the TM movement. Now, just as the public were adjusting to the idea of them as businessmen, and with all their new companies barely up and running, they put Mammon firmly behind them, departing for a three-month course of study with the guru in Rishikesh, north India.

Lennon and McCartney were not too immersed in spirituality to leave behind a single to hold the charts in their absence. This was Paul’s ‘Lady Madonna’, a piano-pounding ode to a homeless and chaotic single mother, depicted with a realism that didn’t flinch even from the ‘baby at your breast’. It was equally a feast of McCartney wordplay echoing the nursery rhyme ‘Three Blind Mice’, its chorus of ‘See how they run!’ becoming a comment on the subject’s laddered stockings.

Recorded at the same time, but not destined for release until 19 months later, was John’s ‘Across the Universe’, melding the sweetest and loneliest of his lyrics (‘Thoughts meander like a restless wind inside a letter box…’) with the mantra he’d soon be chanting in the Himalayas. He wanted a female chorus totally without artifice so, rather than professional backing singers, it was decided to use two of the fans permanently on watch outside Abbey Road studios. Paul was deputed to fetch them, and picked out a pair he recognised from his own front gate in Cavendish Avenue.

The girls’ awestruck voices created just the right effect for ‘Across the Universe’, although their wavery chorus–‘Nothing’s gonna change my world’–would prove as untrue in Paul’s case as in John’s.

It was in effect a Meditational Mystery Tour which arrived at Rishikesh in the spring-like warmth of a north Indian February. With the Beatles, their three wives and one fiancée were their roadie-in-perpetuity Mal Evans and Magic Alex Mardas, who was to apply his electronic wizardry to building the Maharishi a radio station that could reach all round the world. Several other star converts were on the same study course: folk singer Donovan, actress Mia Farrow with her sister, Prudence, and Mike Love from the Beach Boys.

Although situated in the foothills of Asia’s remotest mountain-range, the ashram offered the comforts of an hotel or, at least, superior youth hostel–individual cabins with carpets, hot and cold water and reliable plumbing. The vegetarian cuisine was good and plentiful. The guru himself spent long periods meditating alone inside his impressive detached residence, but his deputy and a staff of 30 were always on hand to minister to VIP disciples. An (initially) enraptured John dubbed it ‘a recluse holiday camp’ and ‘the Butlin’s of Bliss’.

Paul adjusted easily to the vaguely school-like routine he later recalled as ‘eating, sleeping and meditating, with the occasional little lecture from Maharishi thrown in’. He set himself the target of sticking it out for a month, but soon found himself no longer counting the days until the end of term.

It was in fact the first complete rest the Beatles had ever had: a Club Med with mantras and mountains instead of a Med. The world’s media, which had trekked after them en masse, were kept at a distance throughout. Snapshots taken by fellow inmates show them evidently relaxed and content in locally-made tunics and flower-garlands, with Jane, Cynthia Lennon, Pattie Harrison and Maureen Starkey (Starr) all looking beautiful and tranquil in the soft sunshine.

Their aide Tony Bramwell, based at a luxury hotel in Delhi, paid frequent visits, bringing mail and updates about the manifold developments at Apple. Bramwell also kept them supplied with non-spiritual comforts like cigarettes, records, music trade papers and film for the movie camera Paul was seldom seen without. Even ‘behind the wire’, as John put it, a handful of two-rupee notes could buy anything, from alcohol to superior grades of pot.

Lennon and McCartney made use of the time to write songs for the album the Beatles had to record when they returned home–the first to be released on their Apple label. George, the Maharishi’s most serious student, protested that they weren’t here to think about making albums. But Paul couldn’t stop composing, however hard he tried to focus on higher things. One evening, the group walked to a nearby village for an open-air cinema show where the entire population watched a four-hour Hindi-language epic projected onto a white sheet. Paul, as usual, had his guitar with him: on the way back through the jungle, amid exotic bird-calls and chattering monkeys, he suddenly thought of ‘Desmond has a barrow in the marketplace’, the first line to what would become ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’.

Ringo went home after two weeks; his stomach, weakened by childhood surgery, couldn’t deal with even that mildly-spiced vegetarian food, and Maureen hated the flies. Into their cabin moved two members of the Apple team, Neil Aspinall and Denis O’Dell, who’d arrived from London. O’Dell was there to discuss John’s idea for a documentary about the Maharishi and the hard-headed Aspinall to make sure it never got off the ground.

O’Dell brought with him what he considered the best idea for the Beatles’ next feature film since the Joe Orton script. This was J.R.R. Tolkien’s fantastical trilogy The Lord of the Rings, already an enormous hit on American college campuses but still relatively unknown in Britain. Consequently, neither Paul or John had ever encountered Tolkien’s world of hobbits, elves and wizards which–so their film ‘guru’ said–offered plum screen-acting roles for them.

Knowing that no Beatle could be expected to plough through a 1000-plus-page trilogy, O’Dell gave the three remaining meditators a volume each, subconsciously maintaining their usual order of precedence: John was to read the first in the sequence, The Fellowship of the Ring; Paul was to read the second, The Two Towers; and George the last, The Return of the King.

Paul and Jane stayed on for a further three weeks, leaving just as John’s infatuation with the Maharishi was turning to disillusion and resentment. He had expected to be given the Secret of Life in one quick hit, like a pill or a tab of acid, but it hadn’t happened. The guru fell under suspicion of exploiting his famous disciples for personal publicity; there were also rumours that he’d made sexual advances to Mia Farrow’s sister, Prudence. The transformative spiritual pilgrimage thus ended on a note of smutty character-assassination more suited to some backstage on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn.

The expedition left its deepest mark on George, who came home convinced the Maharishi had taught him to levitate, and remained a loyal TM practitioner and propagandist for the rest of his life, leaving behind most of his sense of humour in the process. But Paul, too, felt the guru’s influence overall had been beneficial and, more discreetly, continued to practise what he had taught.

Already in his back garden at Cavendish he had a ‘meditation chapel’–a glass geodesic dome with a floor that could be raised to bring the meditator closer to Heaven. There in years to come, he would continue to practise what he’d learned in the Himalayas, the spiritual ambience only slightly marred by a gift he received from the rock-horror star Alice Cooper–a circular bed that had once belonged to Groucho Marx.

‘It was the coup de foudre the French speak of in hushed tones’

Paul’s engagement to Jane Asher had in fact marked the beginning of the end of their relationship. And after their return from India, where they’d looked so happy and at peace together, the end came quickly.

He would later say that throughout the two years they had lived together, for all their seemingly perfect domestic harmony, he’d never really felt that Jane was the woman for him. ‘I liked her a lot and we got on very well. She was a very intelligent and very interesting person, but I just never clicked. One of those indefinable things about love is some people you click with and some people, who maybe you should click with, you don’t.’

Much of the problem–paradoxically in those ‘classless’ Sixties–was the huge difference in their backgrounds. As sophisticated and civilised as Paul had become on the journey from Liverpool, his attitude to women still had more than a touch of traditional northern male chauvinism. Once the novelty of dating a posh young actress had worn off, he began to resent it that Jane had an independent and flourishing career of her own, which she continued to pursue energetically rather than focusing all her attention on him.