The Love You Make (31 page)

It never failed to amaze Nat that Brian could stay up all night talking and playing Beatles records and yet still be so fresh in the morning. One day at lunch, Nat was so tired and hungover from the previous night’s revels he couldn’t eat. Brian reached inside his jacket pocket to get a pen, and Nat noticed a whole row of little pockets had been tailored into his suit. Brian blithely explained that these were “pill pockets” and that each one was stocked with a different strength biamphetamine or tranquilizer.

Nat only then fully realized that Brian was completely artificially fueled. Pills put him to sleep, woke him up, kept him going. That explained, at least in part, some of Brian’s recent erratic behavior and tendency to lose control. One night recently he had made a terrible scene after Cilla Black’s opening in the Persian Room of the Plaza Hotel. Cilla had never had a hit record in America, and her career at home was not important enough to warrant her a booking at the Persian Room. But Brian had used his clout with the New York booking agency and had seen to it that she would play the Persian Room the same week the Beatles played Shea Stadium. The day of Cilla’s opening, Brian called Nat at his office in a terrible stew. He was angry and peeved that he was being “forced” into taking his secretary to the opening with him, while Nat had the luxury of taking a boy. Brian said being with his secretary would ruin his evening, but he didn’t see any choice.

“Take whomever you want, Brian,” Nat encouraged him over and over again. “Be true to yourself.”

“I can’t. I’m the Beatles’ manager. If I take a boy with me everyone will talk.”

“Then just make sure the boy is beautiful,” Nat said.

After Cilla’s performance, which was warmly received but obviously was not going to cause a sensation in New York, Brian threw a party for her in a hotel suite upstairs. The party was crowded with press and New York show business personalities when some woman within Brian’s earshot remarked that the lobby of the Plaza Hotel looked “Jewish.”

Brian flew into a wild rage. The party came to a halt around him as he screamed, “Madame, I happen to be Jewish!” The woman apologized and left, but Brian shook with anger for hours and made himself miserable. It was a small miracle the incident did not find its way into the press.

Yet Brian seemed just as able to prove himself totally in control in tight situations. The very next day after Cilla’s opening, Brian took Cilla and her husband Bobby to lunch at “21,” one of Manhattan’s more intimidating, status-conscious restaurants. After a long and elaborate meal, Brian discovered that he had left his wallet in his suite at the Waldorf Towers and was unable to pay the bill. The furious waiter stormed off to get the captain, who returned with the manager.

Brian met them with an imperious gaze. “I am Brian Epstein,” he intoned in his iciest West End accent, “and you shall send this bill to me at the Waldorf Towers.”

The three men nodded and left.

It seemed to Nat that Brian’s biggest problem was still his personal life. Nat believed that if Brian could only find some personal satisfaction he’d be more at peace with himself and learn to enjoy his professional success more. Yet Brian’s romances only seemed to be getting more sordid. He had arrived in New York two days ahead of the Beatles with a terrible dilemma: Dizz Gillespie had reappeared and was in New York at the moment. Brian had lunch with Nat at the Waldorf Towers and recounted for him the entire episode with Dizz, from their first meeting that spring to their last parting over the blade of a knife. Now Dizz had contacted Brian again and wanted to see him. Brian knew he shouldn’t, but he had no self-control. With the Beatles coming to town, Brian was afraid that Dizz would do something to embarrass them all, and he needed Nat’s help in keeping Dizz away.

Nat agreed to help. It didn’t take long for him to track Dizz down and invite him to his office for a talk. Nat sized up the young man the second he walked in the door. “I had met thousands of him,” Nat says. “He was the garden-variety type hustler. If you wanted to keep your beer cold you’d put it next to his heart.”

Dizz had another version of the story. “I love Brian,” he told Nat. “I don’t want anything from him, I just want to see him.”

“Good,” Nat said, “because you’re not going to get anything from him, and you’re not going to see him. I want you to stay away from him.”

“Well, then,” Dizz said. “Brian’s got lots of money. If he wants me to stay away… well, if I had a car I could go away.”

Nat Weiss relayed the conversation to Brian, who insisted that Nat give Dizz $3,000 to buy a car. Nat was strongly against this idea; to give Dizz any money at all would keep him coming back for more. But Brian insisted he wanted Dizz to have a car, and Nat struck a deal with the boy. In return for the $3,000, Dizz agreed to be kept locked in a hotel room at the Warwick Hotel on Sixth Avenue—with a private guard hired by Nat—until the Beatles and Brian left town. After that, it seemed, Dizz disappeared. But no one knew for how long.

The story of the prisoners
of fame is an old one, but it had never been more electrifyingly played out than by the Beatles. There were moments when, despite their fame and riches and success, I felt sorry for the Beatles. While normal people marked the turning points in their lives with births and graduations and new jobs, the days in the lives of the Beatles melted into one another in a never-ending grind of tours and concerts, separated only by short periods in London when they would record another album. It wasn’t until the winter of 1965-66 that the Beatles were able for the first time to spend some months at home and indulge themselves in the spoils of their success.

There were some spoils to be indulged in, too. Northern Songs, the Beatles’ song publishing company that had been established in 1963, was turned into a public company and floated on the London stock exchange. It had become clear that while no simple tax savings could be found, John and Paul could at least save a great deal of money by turning highly taxed income into capital gains. Northern Songs was the obvious asset to use, but no one had ever sold what was basically a songwriting partnership as stock before. Although the copyrights to songs had long been making publishers into millionaires, the value to the rights of the fifty-nine pieces of music then in Northern Songs was at first an ethereal entity to the London financial community.

The man who deserved most of the credit for convincing the City that Northern Songs was a valuable commodity was Dick James, the Beatles’ music publisher. Dick James knew the value of Northern Songs best of all, because the Beatles’ music had made him into a multimillionaire. Brian had met James at the start of the Beatles’ success, when “Love Me Do” was first high on the charts. “Love Me Do” had been published by EMI’s house-owned publisher, which had also put out the sheet music, and Brian was unhappy with the sales. George Martin recommended Dick James who ran a small but aggressive publishing company that would have a real stake in the Beatles’ future.

Dick James became for the Beatles a symbol of the music business. He was a balding, Jewish uncle to the boys, a man with a big cigar and a sly smile, who taught John and Paul one of the biggest lessons in their lives. Dick James had been born Richard Leon Vapnick, the son of a kosher butcher. At the age of fourteen, after seeing a Bing Crosby movie, he dropped out of an East End London high school and became a singer. Richard Vapnick became Lee Sheridan, who became Dick James as he worked his way from one dreary dance band to another. In the late fifties, as a session singer, he sang the lead on the theme music for the English TV series “Robin Hood.” The song became an international hit, but James was paid a total of only £17 for the session. By the time he was thirty-two years old, Dick James had a pretty good idea of how some people in the music business got rich while others didn’t. That’s when he went into the publishing business. In 1962, when Brian first met him, he had a small, shabby, two-room office on Charing Cross Road.

James instantly recognized Lennon and McCartney’s potential as songwriters and offered Brian a clever deal. John and Paul would form a songwriting partnership called Northern Songs. They would each own 20 percent of this company, and Brian, in lieu of a 25 percent management fee, would own 10 percent. Dick James, in return for his responsibilities as a music publisher, would get 50 percent of the earnings. In literal terms Brian signed over to Dick James 50 percent of Lennon-McCartney’s publishing fees for
nothing.
It made him wealthy beyond imagination in eighteen months.

Three years later, five million shares of Northern Songs were being offered on the stock market. In the flotation John and Paul each retained 15 percent of the stock, which was valued at $640,000 at the time. NEMS retained 7.5 percent, and in an act of largesse, George Harrison and Ringo Starr were given 1.6 percent between them. Dick James and his business partner, Charles Silver, were left with 37.5 percent, valued at $1,687,000.

Ironically, although this flotation realized some capital for John and Paul—most of which they used to pay past taxes—George and Ringo, due to their own tax problems, were still in financial straits. Not that you would have known it from their spending.

Ringo became a father for the first time when his son Zak was born, and his apparent contentment seemed complete. In preparation for the baby’s birth, Ringo moved out of his compact ground-floor flat on Montague Square
¹⁸
and bought a £37,000 house in Weybridge, just down the road from John’s house. Sunny Heights, as it was called, was immediately renovated to the tune of £40,000. Ringo asked Ken Partridge to decorate it for him, but Brian insisted Partridge was already too busy, so the Starrs got another decorator to indulge them in their creative whims. Ringo spent money on the house like a poor man who had just won the Irish Sweepstakes, which in a way he had. For serious construction, Ringo simply formed his own construction company and changed the house as he pleased: a wall there, an extra room here. At the back of the house, which he had landscaped in cascading terraces and ponds, he built a semicircular wall that alone cost him £10,000.
¹⁹
Later came a whole new wing, with an extra living room, a third guest room, a workroom for his video and audio equipment, a screening room, and a pool-room with a pool table flown in from the United States expressly for him.
²⁰

The rest of the house was decorated with the same disregard for cost. The chocolate brown Wilton carpet in the main living room was woven to order in one piece, because Ringo didn’t like the way seams looked, an extravagance that embarrassed even him at the time. The house was outfitted with six TVs; intraroom stereo systems; over twenty telephones, two to a room, including a hot line to Brian’s office; plus every imaginable kind of space-age, remote-control electronic gadget on the market. He bought cameras of every size and description and frantically began to take pictures, like a tourist on vacation in some enchanted land.

George was a bit more practical about his life. He finally proposed to Pattie Boyd on Christmas day of 1965, while driving to a holiday dinner in London. They were married on January 21, 1966, with Paul McCartney in attendance. This was a very happy time for George, the happiest he would know for some years. He was in love and still not too oppressed by John and Paul. He and Pattie were a much-admired young couple. Pattie turned out to be one of the most delightful young women in London. Under her glamorous, high-fashion veneer, she was a warm, caring girl with good sense and good taste. Her modeling career skyrocketed because of her marriage to George, but she turned down almost all work so she could be with him. She occupied her time decorating the bungalow he had bought for her in the country. The house was done in a low-key, eclectic style that was very much a reflection of the handsome newlyweds who lived in it. For all the money John and Ringo spent on their homes, George and Pattie’s was perhaps the most admired of all.

chapter Eleven

-Brian Epstein

In terms of clout,
the Beatles practically owned EMI’s Abbey Road studios. In just the last two years they had recorded at Abbey Road nineteen gold records, of which eighteen had been number one on most major record charts. When the Beatles said they wanted to record, it was like the sound of some distant giant cash register ringing for EMI, and the studios were cleared for them. Every whim of theirs was catered to, like the royalty they had become, and when Ringo complained of the roughness of the toilet paper in the EMI john, it made headlines in several daily papers.
²¹
The Beatles spent most of that winter and spring in the Abbey Road studios, producing their two most important albums to date,
Rubber Soul
and
Revolver.

These two albums were the first of the minor masterpieces the group would produce. Beatleologist Nicholas Schaffner describes this point in their musical progress as the moment in the movie
The Wizard of Oz
when everything goes from black-and-white to color. Here the simplistic love songs begin to wane, replaced with a dazzling spectrum of subjects and curios, from the banal to the ephemeral. The very sound of the music was strikingly different: richer, more melodious, haunting. Now, instead of producing an album that was just a disconnected hodgepodge of hit songs (which could be blithely juggled by Capitol Records in America from album to album),
²²
the albums had a sense of collective identity, a mood and a sound linking them.

Yet at the time
Rubber Soul
was something of a critical disappointment. Although it was in the top ten on the album charts for over seven months—four of them in the number-one position—it was a puzzlement to all the confused kids expecting to hear more juvenile “yeah, yeah, yeah” songs. It was the best of the many challenges the Beatles posed to their fans: to keep up. Little could the fans have known that this new musical approach was directly attributable to the Beatles’ now habitual use of marijuana. It was in John’s songs, seemingly filtered through a haze of marijuana smoke, that the change was most obvious. It was the elegiac “Norwegian Wood” that first made us stop what we were doing to listen to the music. It was on this album that his introspection came to full bloom. “In My Life” was John’s first certifiable piece of genius, an autobiographical voyage. This small deceptively simple song is as superb in its economy as it is in the poignant images it conjures up. John sang it in his sweetest, most hypnotic voice. “There are places I’ll remember all my life, though some have changed./Some forever, not for better;/Some have gone and some remain./All these places had their moments/with lovers and friends I still can recall./Some are dead and some are living,/In my life I’ve loved them all.”