The Love You Make (28 page)

As is revealed here for the first time, the Bahamas were chosen as a location by Dr. Walter Strach of Bryce-Hamner strictly for financial reasons. Strach had finally come up with a solution to the Beatles’ enormous tax liabilities. He wanted to divert as much money as possible away from Britain before the tax officials got their hands on it. To this purpose Strach removed himself to the Bahamas and applied for a temporary residency. The Beatles sponsored Strach’s trip to the Bahamas, where he then formed an umbrella company with Walter Shenson called Cavalcade Productions. Dr. Strach was named an officer in the company. Gratuitous scenes were shot in the Bahamas purely to impress upon everyone the legitimacy of this venture, i.e., a film being made in the Bahamas and not in England. Although this was unorthodox, Dr. Strach claimed it was not in itself illegal. After a substantial sum had been deposited in a Bahamian bank, a small scandal occurred in London. It was that one of Bryce-Hamner’s chief executives, James Isherwood, allegedly had appropriated funds for his own use from Woodfall Productions, the production company that had made the movie
Tom Jones.
Isherwood left the company, but the scandal frightened Brian, who went to Lord Goodman, the Prime Minister’s solicitor, for advice. Goodman suggested they dissolve Cavalcade and pay the taxes immediately, which was done. As it turned out, the Bahamian scheme served no purpose, and the Beatles saved not a single penny.

It wasn’t difficult for anyone on the set of
Help!
to surmise something was making the boys a little silly. Director Richard Lester certainly knew that the Beatles were stoned on marijuana for most of the filming. Their continuous giggling, plus their periodic trips to the dressing trailer to “have a laugh,” was enough of a clue to what was going on without the telltale sweet scent of pot that followed them around. The seeds that Bob Dylan had planted the previous summer had by now blossomed in the minds of four full-blown potheads. The effects of the marijuana, and Dylan himself, are apparent on the soundtrack of
Help!,
because now instead of just laughing on the pot, they were beginning to find musical inspiration from it. John’s “You’ve Got to Hide Your Love Away” was strikingly Dylanesque in its images and vocals, with acoustic guitar chords replacing Dylan’s trademark harmonica. For the first time, George Harrison was allowed out of the composing shadows with two tunes on the album, “You Like Me Too Much” and “I Need You.”

There were two tunes of special interest. The one written by Paul was a revelation to the public and a milestone for the Beatles. It was early summer of 1965, just as they were finishing up the movie soundtrack, and Paul rolled out of bed one morning and went to the piano and wrote an entire song in one sitting. He used the lyric “scrambled eggs” until he could figure out real lyrics and named the song “Yesterday.” As Paul likes to describe it, it was a miraculous creation, like an egg: seamless, flawless, a wonder in itself.
¹⁵
“Yesterday” appealed not only to Beatle fans but to a wide cross section of ages and tastes. It became the first Beatle crossover tune to capture the attention of the adult market and give Paul real validation as a composer. Naturally, the hard-nosed rock press and inveterate noise fans criticized it as a Muzak sellout, and just as naturally it became the single most recorded song in history, with over 2,500 cover versions recorded by 1980.

The other song, lyrics written by John, was the title cut. Since it was, after all, written specifically for the title of the film, no one took special interest in the curious lyrics, a plaintive cry of loneliness and despair much greater than the previous “I’m a Loser,” or questioned why the slightly overweight pop star living in the house in Weybridge should be writing them.

It was in the spring
, during the filming of
Help!,
that John and Cynthia and George and Pattie unwillingly took a leap into the future. George had become friendly with the Beatles’ London dentist, Eric Cousins.
¹⁶
Teeth capping and dental cosmetic work had become a major preoccupation for the Beatles since they had become the most frequently photographed entertainers of their time. Cousins was doing a bang-up business with all four of the Beatles and their wives. He lived in a handsome flat on Bayswater Road behind Marble Arch with his girlfriend, Annie, a curvaceous blond who hired the bunnies for the Playboy Club. The Beatles considered the dentist somewhat of a hipster-swinger and were suspicious of his desire to be socially friendly with them, but after much insistence George and John accepted an invitation to dinner at his flat.

The four guests remember seeing the sugar cubes all neatly lined up on the mantelpiece in the lounge as soon as they arrived, but no one ever mentioned them. Dinner conversation revolved around sex and an American fellow named Timothy Leary, whom none of the guests knew about save for John, who had only tangentially heard about a new, awesome drug called LSD. After dinner was served, and without explaining the significance of what he was doing, the dentist ritualistically put a sugar cube in each cup of coffee he served. When Pattie was reluctant to finish hers, Cousins insisted she drink every last drop. “Finish it now, come on, finish it.”

When the coffee was all drunk, they retired to the drawing room, and Cousins explained what he had just done. Cynthia and Pattie were terrorstricken,not because they as yet understood the effects of LSD, but because they were given the impression that it was some sort of an aphrodisiac and that an orgy would ensue. George and John and the girls immediately excused themselves, but the dentist insisted they stay put; it would not be safe for them to be on the streets when the effects of the drug took hold. But the Beatles were adamant about leaving, and in a few moments they had put on their coats and started down the stairs.

Cousins, concerned for their safety, followed with his girlfriend. George and John and the girls piled into George’s minicar, where there was intentionally no room for Cousins and his girlfriend. The dentist said he would follow them wherever they went in his own car, and George drove through the London streets at breakneck speeds, trying to lose him. Cousins managed to keep right on their tail all the way to the Pickwick Club, a popular nightspot where they decided to go to hear Paddy, Klaus and Gibson, an upcoming rock trio, perform. More annoyed than concerned, they entered the crowded club with Cousins close behind them, and seats were cleared for them at a prime, stageside table.

It was at the Pickwick that strange things first began to happen. The room seemed larger, longer, the dark lights dazzling pinpoints of fire. The staring crowd around them seemed to swell and pulsate, making them so uncomfortable they all decided to leave after just a few minutes. With Cousins trailing along, advising them to return to his flat with him, the two couples now headed for the Ad Lib club, where they hoped the more familiar surroundings and faces would help calm them. Along the way Pattie had to be restrained from an inexplicable compulsion to smash all the store windows along the street.

They parked the mini around the corner from where the Ad Lib entrance should have been, but instead of the small marquee, they saw what at first looked like a movie premiere with hundreds of clamoring fans outside. Not until they got up to the door did they realize it was just an ordinary light. “Shit,” John thought, “what’s going on here?”

“When we finally got on the lift,” John said, “we all thought there was a fire, but there was just a little red light. We were all screaming like that, and we were all hot and hysterical, and when we all arrived on the floor, because this was a discotheque that was up a building, the lift stopped and the door opened and we were all screaming.”

They were at the Ad Lib only a few moments when the dentist, who had arrived shortly after them, sat down at their table and turned into a pig in his seat. “Then some singer came up to me and said, ‘Can I sit next to you?’ and I said, ‘Only if you don’t talk,’ because I couldn’t think,” Pattie said.

Somehow they managed to make it out of the club, leaving the dentist and his girlfriend behind. George drove all of them to Esher in his mini. The forty-minute trip took hours to make because George couldn’t drive any faster than fifteen kilometers an hour. Cynthia sat in the back, sticking her fingers down her throat, trying to throw up the sugar cube. John couldn’t stop talking. “I was getting all these sort of hysterical jokes coming out like speed, because I was always on that, too,” he said. Pattie, frightened and claustrophobic in the small car, begged to stop and sit in a quiet, open field alongside the road. John kept laughing and repeating, “But you can’t play football now, Pattie.”

When they finally arrived at George’s house, they locked the gate and the door and all the windows. George picked up his guitar and began to play, amazed that the notes came out of the instrument like sheets of colored plastic. John busied himself making drawings. One was of the faces of all four Beatles saying, “We all agree with you.” He gave Ringo the originals. “I did a lot of drawing that night,” John said. “And then George’s house seemed to be just like a big submarine. I was driving it and they all went to bed. I was carrying on in it; it seemed to float above his wall which was eighteen foot, and I was driving it.”

But Pattie and Cynthia had not gone to sleep, nor were they having happy hallucinations. Pattie was cuddled with her cat on the bedroom floor, convinced that she had been altered permanently and would never be sane again. She kept thinking, “How will I explain it?” Cynthia lay down on the bed and tried to logically figure out what was happening to them, piecing together the mystery of the sugar cube and Timothy Leary. She was hoping to discover a way to get rid of it, to make it stop, because she too was struck with the terrible conviction that what was happening to her was irreversible. Cynthia stayed awake most of the night, until slowly, slowly, everything seemed to die down, the colors faded, and she dropped off to sleep, more exhausted than she had ever been in her life.

In the beginning of 1965, I,
Peter Brown, was asked by Brian to move to London to assist him in dealing with John, Paul, George, and Ringo exclusively. For the next five years the Beades and I lived parallel lives. I supervised and conducted all of their personal and business affairs, from getting their signatures on contracts to getting them out of jail. I helped marry them and divorce them. On my desk was a red phone to which only they had the phone number, and locked in a desk drawer I kept their passports. Yet when I moved to London to be with them, they were only pop stars; we had no idea what was yet to come.

NEMS’ London office was burgeoning into a miniconglomerate with half a dozen new departments, including travel and booking, and nearly twenty new staff members. By the time I arrived in London the NEMS offices on Argyle Street had become too congested with new staff, so Brian and I moved to a quiet suite of offices in a modern building on Stafford Street called Hilly House. These offices were decorated in leather and chrome furniture with dark wood desks. The location and phone number of these new offices were supposed to be top secret according to Brian; he intended these offices as a secret rendezvous point where we could meet with the Beatles without being disturbed by the throngs of fans who were now keeping careful vigil for them at the Argyle Street offices. But only minutes after moving into Hilly House Brian was on the phone in his office, distributing the number and address to all his friends, asking them to come by for a drink and see the office.

Brian’s brother Clive was reluctant to leave Liverpool, but he agreed to help Brian with the financial administration of the company, while still keeping an eye on the family stores in Liverpool. To run the day-to-day office administration in London, Brian hired an old Liverpool chum and social confidant, Geoffrey Ellis. An Oxford graduate, Geoffrey had become an executive with the Royal Insurance Company’s New York office. Brian had kept in touch during his three American trips and managed to hire Ellis away from the insurance company Although Ellis had no experience in the entertainment business at the time, he was a precise and meticulous man whose love of detail would serve him well as a chief administrator of NEMS. A creative executive with Redifusion TV, Vyvienne Moynihan, was hired to create a television production division of NEMS and to help develop stage productions. Vyvienne was a small, motherly woman with the air of a stern but kindly headmistress. She became Brian’s in-office Queenie substitute; she had Queenie’s same forgiving quality yet managed never to overstep her employee’s role.

Brian bought outright a small theatrical booking agency headed by a short, round gentleman with a pencil-thin moustache named Vic Lewis. Lewis was an officious type who didn’t mind letting you know his opinion. He had booked pop singers Donovan and Matt Monroe among others, and Brian gave him a position on the board of directors of NEMS. This was a gesture he instantly regretted; as soon as the two men were in day-to-day business together, Brian realized he had a terrible antipathy for Lewis. He had a self-aggrandizing, pompous quality that clashed with Brian’s own imperial manner. Lewis liked to dispense advice; Brian was overly sensitive and headstrong.

Tony Barrow, the onetime “Disker” record columnist who had sent Brian to Decca when he was trying to get the boys a recording contract, was hired to replace Derek Taylor in dealing with the press. Bernie Lee, another booking agent, was added to the organization, as were, eventually, four more full-time bookers. In 1966 the accounting department was expanded to include Martin Wesson, an executive accountant who had been an administrative assistant to the chairman of the Rank Organization. In yet another office on Monmouth Street, a staff of six ran the
Beatles Monthly Fan Club Magazine,
a profitable business in itself that was selling 300,000 copies a month.