The Love You Make (39 page)

The girl who turned up at Chapel Street that May nineteenth wasn’t the same sloppily dressed girl I had seen in my office a few days before. Her shiny blond hair was cut and washed and combed in a long, sweeping line under her chin. She wore impeccably applied makeup, including long, fluttering false eyelashes. She was dressed in a King’s Road double-breasted, striped, barbershop jacket, with a short skirt that showed off her long legs. She held her Nikon in front of her and used it aggressively, probing with her lens. It wasn’t long before she zeroed in on Paul. Paul sat in a chair by the fireplace in the lounge, dressed in pencil-striped trousers and a gray, striped jacket, nervously smoking cigarettes. He watched as Linda sank to her knees in front of the chair and began snapping photos of him. Although she tried to manage otherwise, she left with all the other photographers.

She tried to contact Paul by phone to learn that his unlisted number was billed to Harry Pinsker. Pinsker worked for Bryce-Hamner, and all the Beatles’ unlisted phone numbers were billed to him for security reasons. Later that night Linda phoned and asked for Paul. Pinsker explained to Linda that she had the wrong number, but Linda wouldn’t believe him. She kept calling back, insisting that it was Paul trying to trick her. Pinsker finally had to unplug all his telephones to get some sleep.

When Linda returned home to America, her close friend, Lillian Roxon, America’s doyenne of rock critics, found a picture of Paul and Linda taken by another photographer at the party. She sent it to Linda, who blew the picture up big enough to cover her bathroom door. She looked at it every day for two months, as if she could will him back to her.

Brian found himself deluged
by ideas from people who knew what the Beatles should do next instead of touring. Many of these people were would-be managers, circling Brian like sharks in the water, waiting for the right moment to come up and take a bite. The most aggressive of these was a man named Allen Klein. He was a fast-talking, dirty-mouthed man in his early thirties, sloppily dressed and grossly overweight. He had recently burst onto the English rock scene with an enormous show of muscle. Brian had met him previously, in 1964, when Klein was managing American R&B singer Sam Cooke. Klein came to see Brian at his Argyle Street offices to discuss the possibility of Cooke’s opening the bottom half of the next American Beatles’ tour but soon engaged him in another conversation. Klein said that he heard the Beatles’ low royalty rates from EMI were “for shit” and that he could renegotiate their contracts. Klein told Brian that he’d get them at least a million pounds guaranteed against 10 percent of their royalties—if only Brian would let him negotiate the deal for them and take a fee.

Brian was royally offended at the suggestion that someone else should do his job for him, and he had Klein shown to the door. In 1964 Klein had taken over the management of the English folk-rock star Donovan, and then in the summer of 1965 he grabbed one of the golden rings: the Rolling Stones. In a splashy move that was reported in all the papers, Klein renegotiated the Stones’ recording contracts with Decca and got them a $1.25 million advance, a highly publicized figure that Brian found himself having to live down. When Paul was asked what moment with Brian he regretted the most, he said it was in a crowded elevator with the other Beatles when he said to Brian, “Yeah, well Klein got the Stones a million and a quarter, didn’t he? What about us?” To make Brian’s paranoia even worse, Klein gave an interview from his suite at the Hilton Hotel in London the winter of 1967 in which he said he would “get” the Beatles. So many rumors followed this announcement, which alleged that Allen Klein would merge with NEMS, that Brian finally issued a formal statement to the press discounting Klein’s claims as “ridiculous” and “rubbish.”

But in his heart Brian was scared. First of all, he had not told the boys about his plan to sell the controlling share of NEMS to Robert Stigwood. In fact, the Beatles didn’t even know of Stigwood’s existence. Secondly, he was worried by what he saw as signs of the Beatles’ growing discontent. They were slowly hearing bits and pieces of the Seltaeb fiasco, and they were beginning to learn that Brian was unable to get out of bed until five o’clock in the afternoon because of the huge amounts of barbiturates in his system. He was scared most, however, because unknown to almost everyone, the Beatles’ management contracts with Brian were up in the fall of 1967. The possibility always lurked that the boys would take one of the many other offers to heart, and Brian would be “fired.” Late at night, drunk and stoned, Brian would discuss his fears with Nat. Nat thought the worst that could happen was that the Beatles might demand a reduction of the 25 percent commission they paid Brian to only 20 or 15 percent of the take, since Brian’s responsibilities were so greatly reduced without touring. Brian scheduled meetings from time to time to discuss renewing his contracts with them, and once he even assembled everyone at his country house for the express purpose of discussing it, but somehow the subject never came up.

Instead, without telling them, he renegotiated their recording contracts with EMI, which were up at the end of 1967.
²⁹
Brian had written into the contracts a clause wherein NEMS would collect all monies due to the Beatles, from which Brian would deduct his 25 percent. However, these EMI contracts ran for nine years—a full eight years past the duration of Brian’s management contracts. Now, even if they fired him, he would continue to collect record royalties. Brian never pointed this clause out to them. He asked me to get their signatures on the contracts for him while he was recuperating from glandular fever, and I brought the contracts to Spain, where Ringo and Maureen were visiting John and Cynthia while John was shooting
How I Won the War.
I got their signatures with no questions asked and had George and Paul sign the contracts later in London.

I personally believed that Brian was foolish to worry. The Beatles were as loyal to him as he was to them. Of the four, Brian only truly needed to fear Paul, who was outspokenly critical of him. While John could cut Brian with a glib remark, and George remained disturbingly distant, only Paul made him really worry. Paul called him almost daily with some complaint. He had also recently become interested in the day-to-day operations of NEMS, and he would often turn up at the office to snoop around. He had heard, obliquely, that Brian had lost the Beatles a lot of money through the Seltaeb deal, although it wasn’t until years later that Paul found out exactly how much.

When Paul finally made a mistake of his own, it was a whopper, but it gave Brian a welcomed opportunity to come to his aid. In an interview printed in
Queen
magazine in England and later in
Life
in America, Paul admitted that he had experimented with the dreaded drug LSD. Worse, he endorsed it. “It opened my eyes,” he said. “It made me a better, more honest, more tolerant member of society.” It was a moment of unsurpassed folly. When George once capriciously said he liked jelly beans, the Beatles spent three years performing in a perpetual hailstorm of them. If every jelly bean equaled a tab of LSD, there were going to be a lot of psychedelized children around, courtesy of Paul McCartney.

Not owning up to his responsibility in the matter when the daily papers called to question him about his Queen interview, he shot back, “If you’d only shut up about it, so will I. It’s your fault for putting it in the papers. You’ve got the responsibility not to spread it.”

Brian, too, was besieged with phone calls from reporters at his Chapel Street house. It was too late to issue a denial or to say it was a misunderstanding, as he had done in America about John’s “Jesus” remarks, so Brian well-meaningly did the worst thing possible. He admitted that he, too, took LSD and that he saw nothing wrong with it. “There is a new mood in this country re LSD,” he told reporters. “I am wholeheartedly on its side.” To
Melody Maker,
the teen music paper, he gave a more lengthy interview in which he said, “I did have some apprehension, but I took that risk. I think LSD helped me to know myself better, and I think it helped me to become less bad tempered.”

With this, all hell broke loose. Brian was widely criticized in newspaper editorials, TV commentaries, and by parent and church groups for his confession. It was discussed at length on the floor of Parliament, and the Home Office issued an official statement saying it was “horrified” at Epstein’s attitude toward this dangerous drug.

Paul himself was the least grateful for Brian’s compounding his mistake. Phone calls between them shot back and forth, until they became so abusive in tone that Brian stopped taking Paul’s calls, and then he would sulk about guiltily for not having dealt with the problem. And Paul wasn’t the only member of the immediate family who was angry with him. Cilla Black and her husband Bobby Willis were furious with him. Cilla’s audience was more middle-of-the-road than the Beatles’, and those were the people who seemed most offended by Brian’s remarks. Cilia was strongly identified with Brian and felt, perhaps unfairly, that her career was not moving ahead as it should have been. The previous summer Brian had booked her into the Prince of Wales Theater headlining a variety show with Frankie Howard for four weeks, but the run slowly dragged out to nine months before Brian got her out of her contract. Cilla’s next project was her own television special, the first color TV special ever broadcast in Great Britain and a great honor. But all throughout the rehearsals Brian had been in Spain, making a movie of his own about matadors and bull-fighting, while Vyvienne Moynihan at NEMS did his work on the special for him. When the show was broadcast, to rave reviews, Brian was nowhere around, and he sent Cilla a color TV as a gift. Cilla was unimpressed. “I felt like a kid on sports day when your parents don’t show up.” Now, to top it off, Brian admitted he took drugs.

To calm Bobby and Cilia, Brian took them to lunch at l’Etoile. Brian ordered champagne, but Cilia was not about to be buttered up so easily. “What about this telling the press you take drugs, Brian?” she demanded.

“It was the fault of the reporters for publishing Paul’s statement,” Brian explained lamely. “After the cat was let out of the bag, I felt it would have been hypocritical for me not to say I did it too.”

“Well, I feel betrayed,” Cilia said. “What are me mom and dad gonna think? That I’m on LSD? It was a very selfish thing for you to say.”

Brian made an eloquent apology. When the champagne arrived, he toasted her and Bobby. He seemed so sincerely repentant and so sincerely helpless, that she forgave him again.

With the success
of
Sergeant Pepper,
the Beatles became even more sensitive to their power to affect vast numbers of people, and thus we passed over into the era of message songs. The Beatles had decided that the message that summer was love. Love was all you needed. It was naive and banal, but somehow it was so earnest they gave us all hope. That was part of the magic of the Beatles, to renew our belief and neutralize our cynicism. They made this message into a new anthem, a dirgelike song called “All You Need Is Love,” which was premiered to the world on June 25 in an international broadcast called “Our World,” telecast via satellite to over 200 million viewers. “It’s easy,” they sang over and over. “All you need is love.”

Brian was inspired to give a party at Kingsley Hill to celebrate this mood of benevolence and love and LSD that was sweeping over us. He didn’t intend for it to be an acid party in particular, but there was very little chance it could have turned out any other way that warm June day. At that particular moment there was an abundance of very special LSD in the Beatles’ family. It had been prepared to order by San Francisco’s famed acid-chemist, “Owlsley.” An ingenious plan was devised to get the acid into England. That June the first major, outdoor rock festival was taking place in Monterey, California, not far from Owlsley’s laboratory in San Francisco. Although the Beatles knew the film rights to the Monterey Festival had been sold exclusively to an American film company, they sent a large complement of film equipment to San Francisco, ostensibly to film the festival. When the camera crew was refused permission to film, as was expected, the airtight camera lenses were filled with liquid LSD and shipped back to England without any problem. Several pint-size vials of this Owlsley LSD now graced the bookshelves in the sunroom at Kenwood, while others had been converted to more convenient little pink pills, which made their way through the Beatles’ inner circle. The acid was especially potent, and tripping on it was very hallucinogenic and “electric.”

The guest list for the party included the Beatles and most of their immediate friends, Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, Lionel Bart, London Philharmonic Orchestra conductor Sir John Pritchard, radio and TV personality Kenny Everett, and Nat Weiss, who had flown in from New York for the event.

Derek Taylor and his wife Joan had also been invited to come to Brian’s party and were supplied with round-trip, first-class plane tickets from Los Angeles. Derek had moved to California the year before and had opened a successful rock publicity company. His client list included, among others, the Byrds and the Monterey Pop Festival. Brian had run into Derek in the interim at the Polo Lounge of the Beverly Hills Hotel. Brian had just read the good reviews for
Help!
and was in an especially good mood. A little guiltily, he told Derek that the book Derek had ghosted for him, A
Cellarful of Noise,
continued to sell well and that perhaps Derek hadn’t been properly rewarded. When Derek told Brian that he had long ago lost his contract, Brian promptly pulled out his checkbook and wrote Derek a check for an additional £1,000.

Derek and Joan arrived at Heathrow shortly after dawn on the Saturday morning of the party. They were greeted by a most incredible sight. John and Cynthia and George and Pattie had come out to the airport to meet them, and they were acting like they had gone out of their minds. They were dressed like wizards and fairy princesses in costumes of purple and yellow satin. They were garlanded with flowers and bells around their necks, which tinkled and shimmered as they moved. With them were the three people who had designed the clothing. This group was referred to as “The Fool.” The Fool was Simon Posthuma, a slight ethereal man with curly hair, and his two pretty female companions, Josje Leeger and Marijike Koger. They had been introduced to the Beatles by a publicist for the Saville Theater and had recently become the Beatles’ Royal Clothing Designers. The Beatles and The Fool cavorted and pranced around the reception lounge, kissing and hugging Derek and his wife, who couldn’t figure out what was happening.