The Love You Make (30 page)

John was less diplomatic. Army officers, he said, get their awards for “killing people. We received ours for entertaining…. I’d say we deserve ours more.” John also pointed out that money was the real reason they were given the award. “We were given the MBE for exports, and the citation should have said that… if someone had got an award for exporting millions of dollars’ worth of manure or machines everyone would have applauded. Why should they knock us?”

The following fall one of the largest and youngest crowds in history surrounded Buckingham Palace on the day of their investiture, crying “God save the Beatles!” The Beatles giggled their way through the elaborate rehearsal and ceremony, just as they had giggled their way through the filming of
Help!,
high on grass. On the day of the investiture itself, John secreted several joints in his boots. Just before the ceremony they retired to a small toilet off a private anteroom and smoked a joint among them, trying to expel the smoke through the small window. John had brought along an extra joint in the hope of running into Prince Charles, then sixteen and undoutedly a Beatles fan. Charles was nowhere to be found, however, and history will never know what might have happened if the two had met that day.

chapter Ten

-Neil Aspinall

In August of 1965
John’s Aunt Mimi made a rare trip to London for the opening of
Help!
and stayed with John in Weybridge. Mimi had acknowledged John’s success with grudging pride but let him know that being famous didn’t make him too grand for her to give him a piece of her mind. She had reservations about John’s fame and all it brought, not the least of which was the notoriety it had caused her. Mimi still lived in the neat house on Menlove Avenue, all alone with a cat. The house had now become the primary stop of the Liverpool tourist trade, and Mimi was subjected to journalists and fans ringing her front doorbell all hours of the day and night demanding to know if this was really John’s house and if she was really John’s Aunt Mimi.

John begged her to move out on many occasions, offering to buy her any house she wanted, or to at least let him redecorate Mendips for her. But Mimi only smiled at him. “Why should I? You silly little sausage, there’s no need to lift me out of the mire.”

The morning after the premiere of
Help!
John and Mimi were eating breakfast when John said, “Okay, I’m going to find you a house. Where would you like it?”

Mimi for want of something better to say, said, “Bournemouth,” a picturesque, seaside town. John called up his chauffeur, Les Anthony, and told him to get maps for Bournemouth. They left within a half hour. Rumseys, the local real estate agency, was happy to provide them with a selection of available homes. Mimi finally found one she liked, a white bungalow with an unobstructed view of Poole Bay. When she found out the owners were still living in it, she was too embarrassed to go and see it with them there, particularly because John was dressed in jeans with holes in them, a jacket one size too small, and a yachting cap. “This house is far too smart to just land on them like this,” she said.

“This is just a ha’penny little bourgeois house, and if you’re not careful you’ll get a mind to match,” John warned her. He got out of the car himself and rang the front doorbell. When the owner and his wife found John Lennon standing on the front doorstep they couldn’t do enough for him. Mimi and John toured the house. Her favorite part was the terraced backyard with steps that led down to the waterway where she could watch the ocean liners go up and down the bay.

“Do you like it Mimi?” John asked her. “If you don’t, I’ll have it myself.” He rang his accountant at Bryce-Hamner and bought it for her on the spot. Unenthusiastically, Mimi subsequently sold her house on Menlove Avenue for £6000 but never spent the money, as if one day she might have to return there. She never did, because there was never any going back.

Summer always Seemed
to revive Brian’s spirits. Summer was touring time, and the tours kept him busy with a sense of daily purpose. While the Beatles excluded him from the studios and their film work, the tours were Brian’s speciality. He looked forward to tending his flock as they set out around the world for a second time. They began in June with a European tour, starting with a triumphant sold-out appearance at the Palais des Sports in Paris, which was broadcast nationally in France. From there they went on to give concerts in Lyons, Milan, Genoa, and Rome, where Brian disappeared and missed the Beatles’ plane when it took off for the south of France. They played the Cote d’Azur, Nice, and Madrid, where Brian reappeared, sporting a black eye and a story about bumping into a closet door.

On a hot and sticky August 13, the Beatles and their entourage arrived in New York to kick off their third concert tour of the United States. This tour the schedule was more leisurely, only thirteen concerts in nine cities, leaving them over a week for relaxation in Los Angeles.

On August 15 the Beatles took perhaps the most breathtaking of their many journeys. A helicopter lifted them from a pad on the East River and flew them over to Shea Stadium, where 56,000 people waited for them in the gathering dusk. The helicopter took them to the World’s Fair heliport, from which they were transported in a Wells Fargo armored car to the stadium itself. The truck discharged them on the infield, and they raced across the baseball diamond to a stage constructed at first base. Fifty-six thousand was the largest outdoor concert in history to date, and the humid weather helped induce fainting among the audience, and within ten minutes the emergency nursing facilities were filled to overflowing.

The Beatles performed in Toronto on the seventeenth, Atlanta on the eighteenth, Houston, Chicago, and Minneapolis.

On Monday, August 16, before leaving for Toronto, they were visited at the Warwick Hotel by the Supremes, the Exciters, the Ronettes, and, again, Bob Dylan. The following days, in rapid succession, they hit Atlanta, Houston, Chicago, and Minneapolis. It wasn’t until they hit California, where they were scheduled for two nights at the Hollywood Bowl, plus a concert in San Diego, that they took a six-day respite. Brian had arranged for them to rent a large house in Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills. Before long the address was general knowledge, and the house was a mecca for hundreds of Beatle fans, all of whom came in cars, causing a traffic backup all the way down to Sunset Boulevard. The huge, Spanish-style house was tucked into the side of a mountain. Its smoking green swimming pool seemed to edge its way out over the city below. The steep drop to a certain death did not stop hearty fans from trying to climb the face of the cliff, however, and a special tactical force of the Beverly Hills police was assigned to protect the house and its occupants. The more extravagant Beverly Hills brats simply rented helicopters to fly over the house, so they could take pictures of the Beatles sunbathing in the backyard.

Instead of going out a lot—an impossibility because of the fans—they received guests most of the time. Eleanor Bron, the actress who played the female villain in
Help!,
stopped by to spend a few hours with John. Later in the afternoon a few members of the folk-rock group the Byrds arrived, and later in the day actor Peter Fonda turned up. Fonda, who had driven into the Canyon in his Jaguar, was mobbed by fans, who swarmed all over the car and pounded dents into it.

Fonda picks up the narrative in a reminiscence he wrote for
Rolling Stone
magazine:

Later in the day the group huddled in the security of a large sunken bathtub in the master bedroom. Fonda got hung up on an anecdote about an operation he had during which he almost died. He kept going on about what it was like to be dead, until John couldn’t take it anymore and barked, “Listen mate, shut up about that stuff.”
¹⁷
When one of the group remembered they hadn’t eaten all day, they tried to rustle up a makeshift meal in the kitchen, but John couldn’t figure out how to use his knife and fork, and to stop his food from moving around on his plate he wound up spilling it onto the floor.

This LSD experiment marked the unheralded beginning of a new era for the Beatles. The impact of this LSD trip was not apparent for the first few months, but before long the LSD experience would have a prominent effect in their music and thinking.

Since the band’s arrival in Los Angeles, members of Hollywood’s film community had made many requests to meet them. The list of inquiries and invitations from the famous was impressive, but not to the Beatles who had no interest at all in meeting “boring” movie actors. Like most rock stars, they were only interested in meeting other rock stars. Brian, however, knew the value of the publicity of Hollywood’s royalty turning out to meet the boys and suggested that Capitol Records throw one gala party for them and get it over in one fell swoop. The party was held in the garden of a Capitol Records executive’s home in Beverly Hills. The boys were placed on four stools in a row, amused but not especially thrilled as scores of Hollywood royalty and their children lined up to shake hands and chat. Included among the luminaries were Groucho Marx, Tony Bennett, Richard Chamberlain, Gene Barry, Rock Hudson, Dean Martin, James Stewart, Gregory Peck, and Kirk Douglas. Some celebrities were so charmed by the Beatles they got back on line a second time.

The only celebrity the Beatles cared about meeting was Elvis. Brian had been trying to arrange a meeting with Elvis for a long time, but the now-waning King had been unavailable—secretly threatened by the Beatles’ enormous popularity. In lieu of a meeting, Colonel Parker had sent Brian and each of the boys impressive suits of cowboy clothing, complete with holsters and real six-shooters. That August Elvis was also living in Los Angeles, shooting
Paradise, Hamaiian Style,
and Colonel Parker prevailed upon him to meet with the Beatles while they were in town. Elvis agreed under the condition that the Beatles come to him.

The Beatles’ meeting with Elvis at his house on Perugia Way has been amusingly recreated in Albert Goldman’s book,
Elvis.
The Bel Air police force, alerted to the stellar event, encircled Elvis’ house. The Beatles arrived along with Brian and Neil and British journalist Frederick James. Elvis himself answered the door, dressed in a red shirt and tight gray trousers. He was surrounded by his Memphis Mafia of playmates and bodyguards. A jukebox alternated Beatles and Elvis hits. It had been some years since Elvis’ mere presence had instigated riots, and almost as long since he had had a song in the top ten, but the Beatles were still in awe of him. Five minutes had passed with the four of them sitting around and staring at Elvis when Elvis finally exploded, “Look, if you damn guys are gonna sit here and stare at me all night, I’m gonna go to bed!”

Colonel Parker, much to Brian’s delight, uncovered a roulette wheel hidden inside a coffee table. The Colonel found a very eager gambler in Brian, who felt right in his element; kingmakers pitted against Lady Luck for high stakes. Later, the Beatles and Elvis jammed. When Elvis played Paul’s bass part on “I Feel Fine,” Paul remarked glibly, “Coming along quite promising on the bass, Elvis.” When the ice had broken a little, the Beatles and Elvis started to compare stories about the trials and tribulations of megastardom. When the Beatles left, they invited Elvis to visit them at their house the next evening, and the Colonel gave them all little covered wagons that lit up as souvenirs.

The following night a few members of the Memphis Mafia showed up, but no Elvis. Paul played the gracious host and showed them around the rented house. He opened one of the bedroom doors to reveal Joan Baez stretched out on the bed, talking to George. Elvis’ guys later reported, incorrectly, that she was there to see George, when in fact it was John’s bedroom. Baez had developed a wild crush on John and was reportedly following him wherever he went.

It was with great reluctance that they left the house in Benedict Canyon and headed for San Francisco, where they were to perform the last concert of this American tour at the Cow Palace on August 31.

As the final date
of the tour approached, Brian’s spirits fell like a barometer in a desert. It had been a long and arduous August, and Nat Weiss, who had spent almost the entire month with Brian, was beginning to worry about him. Brian had reserved suite 35E in the Waldorf Towers on a regular basis, and Nat was always fascinated to observe him in action there. Brian was the cynosure of attention twenty-four hours a day. His phone would ring constantly, quite literally at any time, with calls from exotic points all over the world. It would be a fan club or a concert promoter or a photographer or a radio station that wanted to give the Beatles a Cadillac car in exchange for some promotion. Brian would laugh at these offers and say, “Only if it’s gold,” before gently hanging up the phone. Sometimes the phone rang so much that Brian would sneak out of the Waldorf Towers and move into Nat’s small, two-bedroom apartment on East Sixty-third Street and Third Avenue for a little peace and quiet. As soon as Brian arrived-ever the Walton Road furniture salesman—he would rearrange every stick of furniture in the apartment until he was satisfied with the way it looked.