The Love You Make (35 page)

“It was a foolish accident,” Brian answered feebly. “I just took one pill too many. I didn’t mean to do it. I promise I’ll be careful from now on.”

But when I returned to Chapel Street that night, I learned it was no accident. On Brian’s night table, next to an empty bottle of pills, was a suicide note I had not noticed before. It said, in part, “This is all too much and I can’t take it anymore.” A short will and testament followed, in which he left his house and business and money to his mother and Clive. I was also a small beneficiary.

The next day I took the letter to Brian in the hospital and confronted him with it. He was grateful I had not told anyone about it, but I had my doubts I was doing him a favor by not showing it to Dr. Cowan. In any event, Brian took the letter from me, saying he was going to burn it. He never did. I guess he thought it might come in handy some other time.

When Brian was released from the hospital, it was decided he should go away for a short time to an exclusive “drying-out” clinic in Putney for detoxification and rest.

chapter Twelve

I think the problem was we underestimated this crazy little Japanese lady.

—Neil Aspinall

I
n the fall of 1966
the Beatles each went their own separate ways. For the four young men who had been locked up together for so long under such extraordinary circumstances, being apart for the first time in nearly ten years was an odd and wrenching experience. They intended to reconvene sometime in December to begin work on a follow-up album to
Revolver,
but that left four months for them to occupy on their own.
²⁵
In a perhaps odd coincidence, although they were apart, they each grew moustaches and longer hair without consulting the others. Suddenly, everywhere you looked young men had moustaches and long hair.

Paul adjusted the best. He found lots to keep him busy. He and Jane were the essence of the glamorous young couple in Swinging London. Too old to still be living in the guest room at the Ashers’, Paul bought his first house. Distinctly unlike the other Beatles, Paul bought an urban house, on Cavendish Avenue in London’s smart St. John’s Wood. It was a square white Georgian minimanse, protected from the street by high brick walls and electronic gates. The old house had three baths, two guest bedrooms and separate quarters for the couple who came to take care of Paul and Jane’s needs. Instead of turning the decoration over to professionals, they decided to furnish it themselves. They took pleasure in shopping for each piece individually, sometimes buying used furniture at secondhand shops and refinishing it themselves. Paul was proud to point out that the Victorian clock on the mantel cost only £7, and the sofa and armchairs, which he had reupholstered in a bottle green velvet, cost only £20 together. Of course, there was also a gleaming bronze Paolozzi sculpture called “Solo” worth many thousands of pounds and an 1851 clock and a collection of Tiffany glass that were priceless. The floors were covered in deep-pile carpets in sedate tones of brown and gray, and Paul’s bedroom, which faced the front courtyard, had a king-size bed covered in Porthault linens, which were changed almost daily by his loyal housekeeper, Rose. Paul also had a closet built that ran the width of the twenty-two-foot room, which he stocked with the latest fashions from King’s Road and the top tailors. In the master bath, completely tiled in imported blue and white mosaics, he had built a sunken tub big enough for two.

Jane also encouraged him to find a hideaway from the world, a place for just the two of them, without autograph-seeking fans or the constant ring of the telephone. Paul purchased High Park, an isolated but beautiful farm in the boggy moors of Scotland. High Park was a very simple place, just an old wooden farmhouse and some barns, surrounded by miles of open fields. No outsiders, not even other Beatles, were invited up for a visit. Paul, it should be noted, was the first Beatle to show any distance or privacy from the others. One rare visitor to High Park was Alistair Taylor, the loyal office manager and general fixer at NEMS. Paul summoned Alistair to High Park so that he could pay a visit to the local pharmacy for him. According to Alistair, Paul had the crabs and needed a pesticide to shampoo with. Being Paul McCartney, the neighborhood celebrity, Paul was too embarrassed to ask the pharmacist in the small town for the pesticide himself, so he sent Alistair. There was also a sense of urgency to this mission, lest Paul give the tiny parasites to Jane, who would most certainly realize he had been unfaithful to her. The town pharmacist was baffled by Alistair’s request. He had nothing for that purpose other than “sheep dip,” which was used to delouse cattle. Paul presumably made do with that.

Paul also persevered with a vigorous self-improvement program. He read, he went to foreign films, he became sophisticated and, in a certain sense, very bourgeois. While the others went on vacation to sunny isles, Paul went on an educational safari to Africa, with Mal along to protect him from lions and cannibals. He also set to work writing a very ambitious motion picture score for the Boulting Brothers’ new movie,
The Family Way,
which starred the very popular young Hayley Mills. It was the first solo work by a Beatle.

George Harrison also blossomed once taken out of the vacuum created by John and Paul. As the years passed it had become clear to all of us that as far as John and Paul were concerned, George was only a third-class Beatle, and there was nothing he could do about it. His music was summarily dismissed at recording sessions, and his few songs to appear on Beatles albums were relegated to filler positions. Only his song “Taxman” had been a commercial hit. In public popularity as well, George seemed to be stuck in third place, in a tie with Ringo. The one talent that set him apart from the others was his growing ability in Indian music. Since he had first heard the sitar on the set of
Help!,
where Hindi musicians were seen playing in one scene in the Bahamas, George had been diligently studying the twenty-one string, guitar-like instrument. It first appeared on John’s “Norwegian Wood” song and then in “Rain,” which closed with one of George’s neo-Indian ragas.

One night at a London dinner party, George was introduced to Ravi Shankar, India’s best-known sitar virtuoso, who was then little known by the Western world. Shankar invited George to come to India to study with him. It marked the beginning of a long, fruitful alliance for the two musicians. In the years to come, George would make Indian music (and Shankar) part of the commercial music mainstream. In October of 1966 the Harrisons left London for Kashmir for a two-month study vacation. They spent the first night at Shankar’s home in Bombay, but the house was surrounded by the inevitable frantic Beatles’ fans, and Shankar and his guests were forced to move out. They lived for the next seven weeks at Shankar’s Himalayan retreat, where George and Pattie studied Indian mysticism and religion, and George worked at mastering the new instrument.

Ringo, who needed much less out of life than it already seemed to have handed him on a silver platter, felt no unrest that autumn. He tinkered with his expensive toys and his cars and enjoyed the London nightlife. Maureen, his loving and dedicated wife, waited up for him no matter how late he came home, always with a hot meal if he was hungry. By winter she was happily pregnant with their second child.

Of all the Beatles,
John Lennon suffered the most from the abrupt separation. He felt some relief from the pressure, but most of all he felt lost. “It seems like the end,” he said later. “No more touring. Life without the Beatles … it’s like there’s a black space in the future.” He considered leaving the Beatles altogether at that point and striking out on his own, but he depended on Paul too much, if not musically, for spirit and industry. “What will I end up doing?” he wondered. “Where will I wind up when it stops? Las Vegas?”

Life with Cynthia in Kenwood was stultifying. She cooked dinner for him every night and brought it to him in the sunroom, where they watched TV as they ate, changing the channels every few minutes, not speaking. A chilling portrait of them was drawn in Hunter Davies’ authorized biography of the Beatles:

Although John was deluged with offers for his individual services, he did nothing. He was begged to write books, movie scores, to supply lyrics, to write plays for the National Theatre, to execute drawings for an art exhibit, to design greeting cards. Not knowing “what the hell to do all day,” he took a small role in the Richard Lester antiwar movie,
How I Won the War.
John felt comfortable working with Lester again, since Lester knew the extent of his acting talents, and the locations, a brief stop in Germany and then two months in Almeria, Spain, sounded interesting. John took Cynthia with him, along with Neil Aspinall and a suitcase full of drugs. In Germany they cut John’s famed Beatles locks into an army crew cut, a daring and symbolic break with tradition. He also dispensed with his contact lenses for the first time since he became famous, replacing them with oval, wire-framed, army-issue spectacles from the first World War. The glasses became as much of his trademark as his Beatles haircut had been, and around the world, “granny glasses” became the rage.

In Almeria, a coastal town on the southeastern tip of Spain, they rented a palatial villa in the mountains with co-star Michael Crawford and his wife. Although Ringo and Maureen came for a visit as a diversion, the month and a half in Almeria turned out to be a lesson in boredom for John. Most of his time was spent sitting in a canvas chair in a dressing trailer or waiting in the hot sun in his army uniform for the next shot to begin. It was far worse than any Beatles movie, where he was the star. His role of Musketeer Gripweed turned out to be small and uninteresting. Though he garnered fair reviews, the most fun he had making the movie was playing a death scene after being shot. When he and Cynthia watched a screening of the movie, she broke down and cried hysterically. She told John it was exactly the way he would look when he died.

By the time John and Cynthia returned to London, it was late autumn and the long holiday season was already underway, the perfect backdrop for John’s unrest. There seemed to be a never-ending round of cocktail parties, crowded Chelsea “happenings,” psychedelic club openings, or literary parties in basement Hampstead flats. That fall was also the beginning of his heavy experimentation with psychedelics. Swinging London was just as much about acid as it was about anything else that year. Acid was the perfect drug for the moment; it gave the already shimmering world just the right effervescence. Naturally, John went overboard and took acid almost every day—by his own admission he experienced
thousands
of trips. He became convinced that through acid he would find the key, the answer. Acid was a tool through which problems could be solved. This was when John added his mortar and pestle to the sunroom shelf, with its compound of various drugs that were either purchased or given to him as gifts. Drugs were laid on John wherever he went, like laurel wreaths thrown in his path, for to say that you had turned on John Lennon was a badge of honor.

At night he would roam the city in his chauffeur-driven SS Mini Cooper, with its black-tinted windows so no one could see in, taking along with him one or another of the many nonessential employees of the Beatles organization, usually Terry Doran. For many people it was difficult to fathom that the twenty-six-year-old man so stoned and unhappy in the backseat of the Mini Cooper had that autumn appeared solo on the cover of Look magazine in America as one of the prominent leaders of the “youth generation.”

John gravitated not so much to the fast crowd in Chelsea as he did the struggling Bohemian artists, a fringe element always in pursuit of the next buck, the next lay, and the next drug. Somewhere in the ever-changing crowd he was introduced to John Dunbar, the twenty-four-year-old owner of the Indica Gallery, an avant-garde art gallery in Mason’s Yard. Small, attractive, and shrewd, Dunbar had once been married to Marianne Faithfull, the sexy, blond, somnambulistic singer who was now famous as Mick Jagger’s girlfriend. To make the circle even smaller, Peter Asher, Jane’s younger brother, who had by now become a major pop star in his own right, had invested in the Indica Gallery, and Dunbar had been a childhood friend of the Asher family. In fact, unknown to Jane, Paul had once “dated” one of Dunbar’s and Faithfull’s babysitters.

Dunbar was a Cambridge graduate who had hitchhiked across America in 1964 and had returned to London to open the Indica as a sort of salon for underground artists to meet and display their wares, artistic or otherwise. John liked Dunbar’s glib and easy banter and was eager to meet more of Dunbar’s circle. For a time Allen Ginsberg lived in a flat next door to the gallery, and Roman Polanski, who was a good customer, often appeared in the middle of the night to purchase whatever the gallery was selling from the many passing vendors.