The Love You Make (38 page)

He was still madly in love with her. For him she was “Here, There and Everywhere,” and she did more for him than just inspire songs. Only Jane seemed to have any real control over Paul. Only she could gently deflate his impossible ego without destroying his pride. She was able to restore in Paul the one great quality that had been destroyed by his success: humility. Jane loved Paul; he was sweet and well-meaning; he would even make a wonderful father. But he could not be her whole life. She could not live in the shadow of a Beatle.

John and Ringo did not have this problem; their women were northern women and understood. George, who’d married a London girl with a career, simply put a stop to that career when it threatened him. Pattie Harrison told reporters, “A Beatle wife is just baggage. There’s no pretending any different.” But not Jane. Although they had officially announced their engagement and even had an engagement celebration for the benefit of Paul’s relatives in Liverpool over Christmas vacation, and although Jane made cute remarks to reporters like, “I would be most surprised if I married anyone else,” he could not get her to name the day. Instead she worked harder at her career, and her accolades and credits grew more impressive by the month. She was now the premier ingenue of the Old Vic.

To complicate matters, Jane left Britain on January 16, 1967, for a three-month tour of America with the Old Vic. Paul, at a loss without her companionship, threw himself into his work at the Abbey Road studios, where the Beatles were hard at work on their new album, now entitled
Sergeant Peppers Lonely
Hearts Club Band. The Beatles started work on the album in December, and Paul insisted that all work be finished in time for him to surprise Jane in America on April 5, her twenty-first birthday. Brian, in an attempt to flatter Paul, went through elaborate trouble to secure Paul’s transportation and accommodations for the trip, including the rental of Frank Sinatra’s private Lear jet.
²⁷

Mal Evans accompanied Paul to America on April 3, the day after work ended on
Sergeant
Pepper. At a stopover in San Francisco, Paul met with the Jefferson Airplane, the leading purveyors of American acid-rock. From San Francisco he took Sinatra’s Lear to Denver to surprise Jane on her birthday. They spent the next day alone in the Colorado Rockies and later attended the theater in Denver. The next night Paul went to see Jane in a performance of
Romeo and Juliet
and led the standing ovation she received. The next morning the modern-day lovers parted, and Paul was off in the Lear to Los Angeles for a day. In L.A. he met with John Phillips and Cass Elliott of the Mamas and Papas and attended a Beach Boys’ recording session, where Brian Wilson was working on his “masterpiece,”
The Four Elements Suite.

On the way home in the plane Paul was filled with visions of all the things he had seen during this trip, his most leisurely trip to America so far. Paul was especially fascinated with what was happening in California, where hundreds of thousands of young people were streaming to San Francisco to live in the dingy Haight-Ashbury district. The strength of the so-called hippie movement in America, which had coalesced with the growing peace movement, was staggering to Paul. There was nothing like it in London. London was all about affluence, stardom; the latest fab gear; because the hippies wore colorful clothes, Paul assumed they were just American cousins to the Swinging London set. It was curious that they both blended under the same global, peace-flowers-LSD umbrella. It was even more curious how well the Beatles’ already-finished album—
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band—
complemented all of this. Paul left America feeling certain the album would be a hit, never suspecting that it would come to signify one of the most thrilling and turbulent decades of the century.

Thus inspired, on the way home in the plane Paul began to make notes for the
next
Beatles project after
Sergeant Pepper.
This particular idea had been sparked by writer Ken Kesey and his adventures on a bus traveling cross-country with a group of psychedelized hippies who called themselves the Merry Pranksters. The Pranksters sounded like a fantastic collection of clowns and mad magicians, half seen in a colorful daydream. Sitting in the first-class compartment of the plane, Paul began to draw pictures—clowns and fat ladies and midgets. He was going to call it the
Magical Mystery Tour,
and he intended to speak to Brian about starting it as soon as he got back.

Paul never got to discuss
Magical Mystery Tour
with Brian. On Paul’s return I had to inform him that Brian was under a doctor’s care in an expensive private clinic in Richmond called the Priory. Brian’s sleeping and waking cycles were so disrupted that he was going days at a time without sleeping, and he would then suddenly come crashing down from the effects of all the stimulants. The stress was obviously too much, and at the insistence of Dr. Norman Cowan, Brian agreed to see a consulting psychiatrist, Dr. John Flood—“but only this once!” On May 13 Dr. Flood noted Brian’s main complaints as “insomnia, agitation, anxiety, and depression.” Brian was admitted at once to the Priory, where he was to undergo a “sleep cure.” During the cure he would be kept in a state of induced sleep and fed intravenously. When he was awakened he would feel revitalized and refreshed.

The first night Brian was in the hospital the night nurse came into his room to check on him and found him sitting up in bed writing letters, although he had been given a dose of sedatives that would have put three men to sleep. He wrote one of those letters to me that night, in which he said, “If only they knew what it takes to put this poor body to sleep…” He finally succumbed to a massive amount of drugs and was kept in induced sleep for nearly a week. When he was revived he called me in London to say that the beneficial effects were marginal at best. Nat Weiss, who was in London on business, made a special trip to the Priory to see Brian, along with Robert Stigwood.

Stigwood and Shaw were apparently proceeding successfully in raising the
£
500,000 to take over NEMS. Recently, Brian and Robert had a contretemps over a new group Stigwood had signed to NEMS called the Bee Gees. Three British-born lads from Australia, they had arrived on NEM’s doorstep one day hoping to see Brian. They were routinely referred to Stigwood, who was responsible for signing new acts. Stigwood was so impressed by their beautiful, poignant harmonies and by Barry Gibbs’ pop-idol good looks that he signed them immediately. Brian hated the Bee Gees from the start, perhaps because they weren’t his discovery. When Stigwood told Brian on the phone that he had bought 51 percent of the Bee Gees’ publishing for NEMS for
£
1,000, Brian shouted, “Well that’s a thousand out the window!” and slammed the phone down on him. Almost immediately the Bee Gees had a number-one hit single with their own composition, “New York Mining Disaster, 1941,” and Brian was even more annoyed.

The day Stigwood arrived with Nat Weiss at the Priory, Brian was cranky and argumentative. His major complaint was that Stigwood had been riding herd on the Liverpool clan. He had been openly critical of Geoffrey Ellis and was hinting he wanted him out. Stigwood was just as contemptuous of Vic Lewis, who, he said, had been gone from the office for weeks, presumably to sign the Monkees for a concert tour of England. Brian launched into a lecture to Stigwood on how to treat the people he worked with. “Be more sensitive to them,” Brian scolded from his bed. “I don’t want to hear that you’ve slighted people again.”

The lecture was interrupted by the arrival of an enormous bouquet of flowers. Brian eagerly opened the note and read it aloud. “You know I love you, I really do…” It was signed “John.” Brian broke down weeping, and a nurse ushered Stigwood and Nat out to the hallway.

Stigwood turned to Nat and said, “You know we can’t listen to a word he says, you know that.”

“Why not?” Nat asked.

“Because he’s not in his right mind, that’s why. I’m going to ignore him completely,” Stigwood said, and proceeded to do just that.

It was also from his bed in the Priory that Brian first heard the Beatles’ new album,
Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band.
The Beatles arranged for a special acetate of it to be made, and I brought it to him myself from London, along with a stereo record player. We set it up on the dresser, and Brian sat up in bed as he listened. Both of us marveled at what we heard, just as the rest of the world was about to marvel.

The twelve songs on
Sergeant Pepper
set a new standard of achievement in popular music. It took only four months to record, at a cost of $100,000. It was so different and stunning to hear at first that when the Beach Boys’ Brian Wilson first listened to it, he gave up work on his own forthcoming album, thinking that the quintessential album had already been made.
Sergeant Pepper
became not only the album of the summer but the album that most perfectly personified the incense-laden, rainbow-colored, psychedelic sixties themselves. It functioned as an anthem, orchestrating our lives. With
Sergeant Pepper,
the Beatles ascended from pop heroes to avatars and prophets. The album was praised and dissected and studied like the Torah or the Koran, and even within our own Liverpool family, we were dazzled by this achievement.

The album was not without its problems. The cover, designed by pop artist Peter Blake, was a collage of photographs, with the Beatles dressed in brightly colored satin Victorian militia uniforms, surrounded by a surreal collage of sixty-two faces, including those of Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, Carl Jung, Edgar Allan Poe, Bob Dylan, and Stu Sutcliffe. Brian hit the roof when he saw the cover and realized the legal entanglements of getting permission to use the photographs. He begged the boys to use a brown paper bag as the album cover instead, but the Beatles insisted it be kept the way it was. In the end, the Beatles had to indemnify EMI for £20 million against possible lawsuits.

Many songs on the album were swiftly banned by various radio stations around the world, including the BBC, because of their alleged references to drug use. “A Day in the Life”
²⁸
was banned in England because of Paul’s lyric, “found my way upstairs and had a smoke/And somebody spoke and I went into a dream,” quite obviously about pot; although in the same song, “four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire” had nothing to do with the tracks in a junkie’s arm, as was also alleged. Ringo does sing, “I get high with a little help from my friends,” although the Beades claimed at the time they meant
spiritually
high. Certainly John’s dreamlike “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” and its “tangerine trees and marmalade skies” were inspired by an acid trip, but it was only an accident that the title of the song was an acronym for LSD. Lucy was little Julian’s school chum, and “Lucy in the sky with diamonds” was a phrase Julian used to describe a drawing of her he made in school one day. Likewise, the hole Paul was fixing in “I’m Fixing a Hole” was not in the arm of a heroin addict, nor was John’s “Henry the Horse” in the surrealistic circus of “Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite” a code word for heroin. John took the name from a poster for a Victorian circus he had purchased in an antique shop.

Brian’s homecoming
from the Priory was on May 19, the same day of the
Sergeant Pepper
press party to be held at Brian’s Chapel Street town house. I organized the event for Brian, trying to keep it small by inviting only the ten most important representatives of the press to listen to the new album and enjoy a “family” dinner with one or two of the Beatles around the Chapel Street dining table. An invitation to such an event for a journalist was worth its weight in gold, and for two weeks before the party I was inundated with requests for invitations.

One of the calls came from a young American girl named Linda Eastman. I had met Linda in New York, where she was a budding rock photographer but better known as an ardent groupie. In 1967, at the age of twenty-five, she was a striking combination of preppy penny-loafers and seductive star-snarer. She was tall and leggy, with straight blond hair. Her father, Lee Eastman, was a well-known New York attorney in the entertainment and art fields, whose clients included Tommy Dorsey, the TV show of Hopalong Cassidy, and the artist Robert Rauschenberg. Linda and her younger brother John were raised on the Westchester-East Hampton-Park Avenue circuit, moving from one of the family’s homes to another, according to weather or inclination. When Linda was eighteen her mother was killed in a plane crash, and her father remarried. The loss of her mother affected her deeply, and soon after she enrolled in college in Denver to escape the East. Later she married a geology student named Bob See. In 1962 Linda gave birth to a daughter, Heather, but the marriage soon broke up, and Linda moved to Tucson, Arizona, for a year before returning to New York. In New York she became an assistant at
Town and Country
magazine. One day an invitation to a Rolling Stones press party aboard a yacht arrived at the magazine, and Linda pocketed it. She brought her camera to the party and managed to strike up a friendship with Mick Jagger. After that she was hooked. Photography and rock stars became her consuming preoccupations.

When she wasn’t cavorting in Harlem with Eric Burdon and the Animals, she was backstage at the Fillmore East. Heather had an unusual childhood. Linda once bragged that her babysitters included Mike Bloomfield, Stephen Stills, and Al Koopcr. Her apartment and portfolio began to fill with rock stars. In May of 1967 she had flown to London to photograph Stevie Winwood and the Animals, which is when she called me.

One night Chas Chandler, the former bass player of the Animals, took Linda to a popular club called the Bag of Nails to hear Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. Paul and I were at the “Bag” for a drink after he had finished a long mixing session, and I introduced Linda to him. Linda went on with Paul to a second club, the Speakeasy, but they got separated later in the evening as they were joined by Eric Clapton, Keith Moon, Peter Townshend, and Roger Daltrey. Linda went home alone. The next day Linda called me in the office. She said she had a new portfolio of Rolling Stones pictures, and since I was a fan, I asked her up to my office to have a look. I admired one of Brian Jones, whom we had coincidentally run into the night before, and Linda gave it to me as a gift. In return, I gave her an invitation to the
Sergeant Pepper
photo session.