The Love You Make (40 page)

John and George said the plan was to drive directly to Kingsley Hill and arrive before the other guests. All nine of them poured into John’s Rolls-Royce, which had recently been repainted by hand in a bright psychedelic design of flowers and scrolls, and set out into the English countryside. Gaily colored clusters of balloons had been hung as signposts along the way to mark the route for the guests, and the roads were lined with smiling townsfolk, peering into the crowded Rolls as it went along the country roads.

Derek found the inside of the Rolls as different as the exterior paint job. John had installed not a tape deck but a studio-quality turntable delicately suspended on a platform. The doors were outfitted with similar quality speakers. John put the new Procol Harum album,
A Whiter Shade of
Pale, on the turntable, sending the Fool into waves of ecstasy. As a thermos of tea was passed around, Derek, too, soon began to notice that the music sounded extraordinary, almost as wondrous as the green hues of the countryside, which had begun to throb and glow. Derek was about to ask what was happening when John said, “This was the first morning I had acid for breakfast. You too. There was LSD in the tea.” Joan, who was seven months pregnant with her third child, had been spared this surprise, but when apprised of what was happening, she voluntarily took a dose herself. A small pillbox was produced and an acid-soaked tablet was passed around the car for everyone to further nibble on.

Squashed in the backseat between John and Pattie, Cynthia Lennon was now the only member of the group not tripping. Quietly refusing all offers of the tablet or tea, no one had paid much attention to her. Now she watched the flecked pink pill come her way with trepidation. She had only tripped once or twice since she was dosed by the dentist and she hated it each time. She found no cosmic consciousness like the others, only consuming anxiety. Yet that day in the back of the Rolls, with everyone happy and safe and confident for the future, the balloons marking the way, reassuring her with the promise of the party to come, she decided to try again. “Perhaps this is the time to hear John’s drum,” she thought. “It’s now or never.” And when the tab came to her, she swallowed it.

The party had a soft, dreamlike quality to it. The prophets were here, the masters were in control, there was good food and liquor and friends.
A Whiter Shade of Pale,
interspersed with
Sergeant Pepper,
played all afternoon and into the evening. Brian, of course, found something to ruin his fun. Paul had phoned earlier in the day with an impeccable excuse and was not coming. Brian was deeply paranoid about Paul anyway, and with his emotions magnified by the LSD he had taken, he was devastated by Paul’s absence. He strode around the living room at dusk and leaned dramatically up against the piano. “Paul … didn’t come …” Brian intoned softly. “This day of all days … he should have come …”

John and George, who were in the room with him at the time, rushed to where he stood to comfort him. “Come on now, Brian,” George said, hugging him,
“we’re
all here, and we’re good friends, and
we
love you!”

At one point in the party George discovered that Derek and John were curled up in the plush backseat of John’s Rolls, listening to
A Whiter Shade of Pale
for the hundredth time, and climbed in with them. The three men felt warm and secure in the backseat and stayed there for what seemed like a long time. Occasionally, John would slip into a bad trip, and Derek would have to talk him out of it. At one point barbed wire formed on the car windows, but it turned out to be Lionel Bart. George said to Derek, “Don’t worry, Derek, you’ll never have to worry about anything as long as you live. You’ll always have us.” Nine months later Derek and Joan sold their house and furniture in Los Angeles and moved back to London so Derek could work for the Beatles. Except for short periods, Derek has worked for one or another of the Beatles ever since.

There were two people at the party who were not enjoying the effects of the LSD. One was Brian’s assistant, Joanne Newfield, who became violently ill and threw up in Nat Weiss’ shoes, which were beside the bed in the guest bedroom. Another, predictably, was Cynthia. From the moment she’d arrived at the party she had been overwhelmed with anxiety. The gardens melted and oozed around her, strangers grinned at her from behind rubber lips, and again she was afraid that it would never wear off, that she would be that way forever. At moments she was so frightened that she was unable to speak or ask for help. At other times she felt physically paralyzed, and the only person whose presence calmed her was John. All she could do to keep her sanity was to follow him wherever he went, wordlessly hanging behind him. John began to glare furiously at her until she finally let him alone and went into the house. She made her way upstairs to the second floor bedroom and sat on the bed for a while, feeling desolate. Then she went to the window and watched the party taking place out on the lawn below her, like a movie; the other guests laughing and having a good time. She drifted in her thoughts. Why was she so different? It wasn’t far down, she thought, down to those other people having a good time. She could just step out the open window and float. She opened the window wider and started out.

“Cynthia!” Pattie Harrison called to her from the garden, waving and laughing. “What are you doing up there? Come on down.”

Cynthia withdrew back into the room and lay down on the bed. She stayed there until very late that night, until the acid wore off. Only this time she found that it
had left
behind a permanent effect: a sense of dread. One thought filled her mind; there was no hope for her marriage now. If the acid had brought to her one irrefutable truth, it was that she and John were doomed.

Cynthia had an unexpected
ally against drugs in Magic Alex. Although Magic Alex filled Cynthia with the most dread and paranoia of anyone she knew, they were sympathetic insofar as drugs were concerned. For Magic Alex, the mortar and pestle on the shelf of the sunroom was the single greatest cause of John’s unhappiness—and of Alex’s inability to control him. John under the influence of drugs was not John under Alex’s influence.

Magic Alex had seen too many crazy things happen when people took drugs. Once, when John sent Cynthia and her mother away on vacation to Italy to get rid of them for a while, Alex stayed at Kenwood with an Australian girl to keep John company. John encouraged them to take acid with him, but they refused. He took his own dose anyway, and the three of them sat up until early in the morning talking and drinking wine. Alex and the girl finally went to bed, while John stayed up alone, painting the white shirt Alex had been wearing in watercolor doodles. When John got bored with tripping alone, he woke Alex and the girl with a pot of tea. “One lump of sugar or two?” John asked, dosing them.

Alex was annoyed at being dosed, but he was at least familiar with the effects of LSD to some degree. The Australian girl had never tripped before, and she was terrified. When the trip started she became claustrophobic inside the house and ran out into the backyard, where she started to take her clothes off. Then she hallucinated that the pool vacuum cleaner hose was turning into a giant snake and proceeded to climb onto the low rear roof of the house. John and Alex had to climb up after her to get her down. They gave her a tranquilizer and locked her in a guest bedroom to sleep it off.

Fifteen minutes later, much to Magic Alex’s dismay, the Weybridge police arrived at the front door. It seemed that the Australian girl, left alone in the bedroom with a telephone, had called a girlfriend in London and told her she was being held hostage by two men, one of whom was impersonating John Lennon. Her girlfriend got the address and called the local police. The Weybridge constables assured the girl that the man at that address was no imposter but decided to go out to the house anyway. John greeted them at the front door, wearing a top hat and evening cape he had put on when he saw them coming up the drive. The police were mildly amused, and when John assured them nothing was wrong, they left without any questions. But it was too close a call for Alex; only a cursory search of the house would have uncovered enough drugs to put both of them in jail for years.

 

 

During the summer of 1967 there was another, more important, convert to the antidrug contingent. George Harrison had given up drugs after a short trip to the West Coast of America. When Paul returned from his trip to San Francisco after his birthday visit with Jane, he was full of wondrous tales of the hippy movement and Haight-Ashbury, making it sound like a heaven on earth. On August 1, George and Patti set off to see for themselves. They were accompanied by Neil, Magic Alex, and Pattie’s sister, Jenny Boyd. They arrived on a beautiful, sunny Saturday in a rented Lear jet and were met at the airport by Derek Taylor, who knew his way around San Francisco and offered to act as their local tour guide. No sooner had they settled into the backseat of a rented limousine, then George produced some famous Owlsley acid, and they set off, tripping, to see the blessed hippies.

“I expected something like the King’s Road,” George said, “only more. Somehow I expected them all to own their own little shops, because I heard they’d all bought out blocks. I expected them all to be nice and clean and friendly and happy.”

Instead, from behind the tinted windows of the limousine, all they saw was a depressing slum area inhabited by a multitude of lost and disillusioned kids. They were stoned all right, stoned beyond all comprehension or necessity. They stood on the street corners, begging, selling incense, loafing in the sun. They were, for the most part, barefooted and unwashed. The limousine stopped not far from the famous intersection of Haight and Ashbury streets, and the occupants got out to take a walk. George Harrison alighting from a limousine in Haight-Ashbury, summer of 1967, was akin to Christ stepping out of a flying saucer. The long-haired kids on the streets parted in waves around him as he strolled along. At the first corner, George and his party encountered a Hell’s Angel named Frisco Pete, a big, burly tattooed guy in a sleeveless denim jacket with a skull and crossbones on the back. The LSD made Frisco Pete seem even larger than his already intimidating size, and George quaked at the sight of him. Frisco Pete, it turned out, only wanted to shake the hand of this young god, just like everybody else, and joined the crowd. Relieved that Frisco Pete meant them no harm, he invited him to London. “Come visit us sometime. We’ll put you up.” It was an offer George would live to regret.

George and Pattie and friends wandered past the seedy psychedelic head shops, the dingy boutiques selling tattered secondhand clothing, and into Golden Gate Park, site of the famous San Francisco love-ins. The park was swarming with teenagers on this warm summer day, the air filled with a rainbow of frisbees. Word spread like wildfire through the park that George Harrison was in their midst. In the blink of an eye, perhaps a thousand very stoned kids surrounded the tripping celebrity, pushing and shoving. The air was rife with the smell of sweat. Out of the crowd came a guitar, which was thrust into George’s hands.

“No … no, please,” George stammered, trying to return it.

“Play!” someone shouted in the crowd, and then all of them began chanting, “Play! Play! Play!”

George gave Pattie a sick look. He began to strum a few chords, but the acid made the cheap guitar feel like a lump of cheese in his hands. He tried to sing “Baby You’re a Rich Man,” the Beatles’ present singles chart-topper, but he didn’t have the heart. The crowd closed in to a little circle five feet in diameter before George insistently returned the guitar, with profuse apologies, and they tried to make a break for it back to the car.

Angry hoots were heard as the mood of the rejected crowd turned malevolent. George and his entourage could practically hear the change in the footsteps as the crowd turned into a mob. George and his friends quickened their pace, so did the mob behind them. By the time they got to their limousine, they were practically running, with Neil bringing up the rear to protect them. They threw themselves into the limousine and slammed the door locks shut. Now the mob surrounded the car, pressed up against the windows, pounding and shouting as they rocked the huge car from side to side. The driver managed to start the car and drive it slowly through the crowds, but the occupants barely escaped unhurt.

When George returned to England, he was so disgusted with what he had seen in San Francisco that he swore he would never take another drug, a promise, of course, he would not keep. Yet this was an important turning point for George, the recognition that LSD was not the key, that there was a higher, purer form of contentment waiting for him somewhere. He told John about giving up drugs, but John only shrugged and said, “Well, it’s not doing me any harm, so I’ll just go on with it for a while.”

Yet sometimes it was hard
to tell what part of their madness was drug induced and what part was pure whimsy. I was in my office one day that summer when the Beatles’ private phone rang. It was John calling to say that the Beatles were moving out of England! The idea had come to him the previous night in the studio, when Magic Alex was attending a session. The Beatles were talking about how sick and tired they were of notoriety and were bemoaning how restrictive it was for them to live in London. John suggested they escape it all by creating their own little kingdom, like an island. On the island they would build beautiful houses and the best studio money could buy and even a school, where Julian could be taught in a one-room schoolhouse with the children of Bob Dylan, who would be invited to join. Alex, hearing opportunity knocking loudly, said he knew just the place off the coast of Greece, where there were thousands of islands the Beatles could buy “dirt cheap.”

The very next day I dispatched Magic Alex and Alistair Taylor, who was now office manager and took care of sundry chores for the Beades, off to Greece to find an island. Not forty-eight hours later Alex phoned to say that he had located a place God had created just for them. It was a tiny cluster of islands twenty-five miles out into the Aegean, 100 acres in all. There was a large main island with four secluded beaches and five smaller satellite islands surrounding it. There were also sixteen acres of rich olive groves on the large island, which Alex computed would pay back the cost of the six islands in just seven years’ time. All this a bargain at £90,000. The Beatles impetuously agreed to leave for Greece at once.