The Love You Make (48 page)

The regular crew of groupies who stood in front of Paul’s house when he was in residence tried to warn him over the house intercom, but he thought they were playing a joke on him when they told him that Jane had returned from her tour and was letting herself in with her key. Just as had happened to Cynthia before her, Jane discovered another woman in her bathrobe. Jane stormed out of the house a few moments later and drove off in her car. Mrs. Asher arrived later that night to pick up Jane’s clothing, dishes, and pots and pans.

Although Paul and Jane were seen together once or twice after that, and Paul dutifully attended the opening night of her new play at the Fortune Theatre so that questions concerning his absence would not detract from the happiness of the evening for her, they were finished. A month later the public learned of this when Jane casually mentioned on the BBC’s “Simon Dee Show” that their engagement had been broken—by Paul.

Jane rarely saw or spoke to Paul again. As the years went by, she began to resent fiercely her public association with him and refused to discuss the subject in interviews. Today she is one of England’s most highly regarded actresses. She is married to political cartoonist Gerald Scarfe, and they and their son and daughter live in London.
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Francie Schwartz was soon sent on her way. Back in America she wrote a book about her short affair with Paul, called Body
Count,
which was published by the Rolling Stone Press.

Linda Eastman kept the calls and letters coming. In early autumn Paul invited her to London to see the house at 7 Cavendish Avenue, and she never left.

As the cash flow reports
crossed my desk, it became apparent that the Apple Boutique had turned into an enormous drain of money. In seven months the operation of the boutique lost nearly £200,000. Everything about it seemed to be a disaster of poor planning and incompetence. The Beatles and The Fool had since parted acrimoniously. The previous January, John Lyndon, who replaced Pete Shotton as the manager of the boutique, sent angry letters to The Fool and their management threatening to bar them from the shop if they removed any more garments from the premises or charged any further debts to Apple. The Beatles, who felt justified in taking legal action, dropped the whole matter quietly so as to avoid public embarrassment. The Fool subsequently moved to America and signed a recording contract with Mercury Records as a singing group. They were never heard from again.

The local citizens committee had succeeded in having the garish mural that graced the walls of the boutique scrubbed off. The customers seemed to be there only to shoplift or to stare at Jenny Boyd, Pattie’s sister, who was working there as a salesperson along with a self-styled mystic named Caleb. Caleb slept underneath a showcase during one of his many breaks. The store was also sometimes tended by a fat lady who dressed in authentic gypsy costumes. The inflatable furniture with the exaggerated price tags now sagged in the corners, the Hobbit clothing, a nostalgic reminder of the previous summer’s fashions, hung unpurchased on the racks. In the large stockroom on the floor above stood row upon row of unopened bolts of raw silks and lush velvet fabrics that had been ordered by The Fool. In the basement, hundreds of Nothing Boxes constructed by Magic Alex waited in the darkness, having blinked themselves to death.

The final blow came when the boutique caused them to be publicly embarrassed and derided. A newspaper column criticized the Beatles for having turned into shopkeepers. This infuriated John and Paul so much they decided to close the store without delay. Characteristically, they decided to liquidate the stock, not through sale but by giving it away. I was told that John and Paul had decided that on Wednesday, July 31, the entire contents of the store and stockrooms were to be opened to the public, who could take whatever they wanted.

The Monday night before the giveaway, Yoko Ono and John arrived at the shop. Before the amazed employees, Yoko spread large swatches of fabric out on the floor and began to pile merchandise onto it waist high. Then she knotted the corners of the fabric hobo-style and dragged it out of the store on her back, like an Oriental Santa Claus, into John’s Rolls-Royce.

The morning of the giveaway, which had been well publicized in newspapers and on TV, there was a queue three blocks long. The basement door was opened so that people could walk in the front way, wander around, and then exit from the other end. According to the Beatles’ strict instructions, there was to be no restriction on the amount any one person could take. As much as you could carry was the rule. Rack after rack of Hobbit clothing was brought down and fed to the ravenous public. People got back on line two and three times, snatching at articles like sharks at a frenzied feeding. When all the merchandise was gone, the bolts of raw silks and velvets were torn apart by the crowds. They took the hangers and the store fixtures, too, and no one stopped them until one woman tried to pry the carpeting off the floor. By noon it was all over.

Less than a month later, Apple Corp. moved into new headquarters more befitting its grandiose intentions. The Beatles purchased, at a cost of nearly £500,000, a beautiful five-story Georgian town house at 3 Savile Row, in the heart of the custom tailoring district. This imposing brick structure was once a popular gambling club called the Albany and was rumored to have been the sometime love nest of Lady Hamilton and Lord Nelson. Gamblers and lovers that the Beatles were, they set about transforming the building into their new home.

Each executive was given his own spacious office and allowed to decorate it. On the first floor, just off the glittering mirrored reception foyer, Ron Kass had a gleaming white office with a white desk and liquor cabinet and white leather Wassily chairs. On the second floor, up a flight of apple-green carpeted steps, was a large office for the Beatles and Neil, overlooking Savile Row. This office was never completely decorated, for as was the Beatles’ wont, they changed their minds so many times about what it should look like they never made any progress. I remember that only a short time after wall-to-wall carpeting was installed, they had it pulled up and the wood-plank floors polished. On the third floor was the press office, now presided over by Derek Taylor. My own office was across from the Beatles, on the second floor rear. It was a huge rectangular office with elaborate, handsome moldings around the ceiling. In lieu of a chandelier, Ringo had given me a huge lighting fixture of chrome headlights, designed by a firm he had invested in. At one end was a marble fireplace and four comfortable armchairs, and at the far side of the room there was a large, octagonal rosewood table. It was around this table that the dissolution of the Beatles would occur, as well as hundreds of other unhappy meetings over the next two years. On the higher floors were the A&R offices, a film department, accounting offices, music publishing, a film library, and an office for office management, headed by ever-loyal Alistair Taylor. In the deep basement Magic Alex set to work with a construction crew to build the Beatles’ own private studios, complete with, he promised, 78-track recording.

There was also, for executive use, a stately wrought-iron lift, and on the third floor, a well-appointed kitchen and pantry stocked with everything from bacon butties to caviar. Two Cordon Bleu chefs prepared an endless array of dishes all hours of the day, including ham and eggs for Ringo and roast leg of lamb for business lunches. The front of the building was sandblasted and whitewashed, and a flagpole was installed so that it looked like an embassy. A full-time footman-bouncer was hired and dressed in a Tommy Nutter frock coat. On the front steps, in every possible kind of weather and at any time of day, waited four girls the Beatles nicknamed the Apple Scruffs and whom George later immortalized in song. They stood vigil on those front steps as the weirdos and wackies of the world descended upon us.

In addition to John’s and Paul’s incautious proclamation on the “Tonight Show” in America soliciting projects for Apple, a poster and newspaper campaign appeared that summer asking aspiring artists to bring their wares to Apple. Alistair Taylor was recruited to appear in the advertisement costumed like a “busker” or street musician. He was pictured playing a guitar with a harmonica braced to his mouth, a drum hanging from his back, and a washboard glued to his foot. The headline announced, THIS MAN HAD TALENT. The copy read, “One day he sang his songs to a tape recorder (borrowed from the man next door) … sent the tape, letter and photograph … if you were thinking of doing the same thing yourself, DO IT NOW! This man now owns a BENTLEY!”

Lots of people wanted Bentleys, it turned out, and most of them appeared at 3 Savile Row.

The list of people with schemes and plots and plans is as long as it is sometimes astonishing. There was an American man who wanted the Beatles to purchase anonymously six square miles of Arizona land to hold a three-week rock and roll orgy attended by three million people to climax in a live performance by the Beatles. There was a man with a formula for a pill that could make you into whomever you wanted to be. There were several messiahs and one or two prophets of doom. There was a plan to save whales and a plan to build a commune in India. There was a woman who made tactile art from patent leather covered in oil. There were people who had seen flying saucers and God and needed money to go up, or down, or around in circles. Often they were stopped at Heathrow Airport for having no money or passports, and they simply gave John Lennon’s or Paul McCartney’s name as their sponsor. A family of psychedelized California hippies virtually moved into the Apple building, en route, they said, to the Fiji Islands, and they needed John’s aid in setting up a commune. The mother, a fortyish woman named Emily, would blithely breast-feed her youngest in the reception room, while a half dozen other totally naked children ran from office to office. The proposals and schemes sent to the office could fill a volume in themselves. They were piled into stacks in a storage closet nicknamed the Black Room, where they threatened to bury anyone who got near them.

If there was a source of energy at 3 Savile Row, it was Derek Taylor. In some ways Derek was the most brilliant choice of all the department heads, and in other ways he was the worst. On the good side, he was one of the few people who could plausibly and concisely encapsulate the purpose and idealism of Apple Corp. Derek believed in the Beatles’ good intentions, and his enthusiasm was infectious. He was also blessed with the gift of charm, wit, and imagination. But Derek, at the time, was also a man with a great capacity for alcohol and drugs. As a kind of inebriated, psychedelic visionary, he was the dispenser of Apple’s good vibes, and it became Derek Taylor and his brand of inspired lunacy the world saw as Apple’s best foot forward. It was hardly the best foot. From his second-floor office, Derek encouraged a kind of benevolent anarchy to develop. Derek’s specific responsibility was to deal with the press, enough of a chore in itself; but since no one in the organization could really deal with the collection of freaks who turned up in the entrance hallway, Derek took it upon himself to screen these people, too. He sat behind a large desk in a fantail wicker chair, cigarette or joint in hand, scotch and Coke before him, greeting a never-ending stream of visitors. The office shades were always drawn, and the majority of light was contributed by a light show of a giant amoeba projected on the wall.

Derek had all the screwballs. When someone came into the building announcing he was Adolf Hitler, Derek might invite him up for a drink and ask about Eva’s health. Someone, or something, nicknamed “Stocky” was allowed to sit on the file cabinets all day and draw pictures of genitalia. The receptionist at the front desk didn’t even blink when one day a young donkey named Samantha was walked into the lift and sent up to Derek’s office. Derek and I only now remember the persistent phone calls from someone named Squeaky Fromme in Los Angeles to talk to us about Charles Manson. I took many of those phone calls or transferred them over to Derek. Derek’s bushy-haired assistant, a young American lad named Richard DeLillo, began squirreling away notes and clippings about the Apple madness for an hysterically funny book called, quite appropriately,
The Longest Cocktail Party.

And a party it was. The kitchen was kept busy preparing snacks and elaborate lunches. A fifteen-day tally of the supplies for Derek’s office alone included 600 packs of Benson and Hedges cigarettes, four bottles of Courvoisier brandy, three bottles of vodka, two dozen of ginger ale, one dozen of tonic water, two dozen of bitter lemon, one dozen of tomato juice, three bottles of lime, and four cases of lager. The office manager, Alistair Taylor, noted with relief that the provision list had decreased; the previous one had included two cases of J&B Scotch. The liquor bill eventually peaked at £600 pounds a month.

At the beginning of Apple’s inception on Savile Row, the Beatles took great interest in the company, particularly Paul who acted like a kid with an expensive set of new trains. The first few months he arrived at the office bright and early every morning and went over details of running the company, including whether there was enough toilet paper in the bathroom. His personal pride and joy, however, was the record division. Paul insisted that the company be a class production. Ron Kass struck a distribution deal with EMI in Great Britain. EMI was not particularly happy when he informed them the Beatles intended to start their own record label. At the time the Beatles were still being distributed on the Parlophone label in Great Britain, a label that existed virtually for their benefit. For EMI to let them out of their contracts to distribute the Beatles on their own label was of no value, and they were reluctant to change the structure without a fight. To put pressure on them, Kass threatened to sign Apple in American distribution to a company other than the EMI-owned Capitol label. In the end the EMI executives gave in and signed a new agreement to release Apple records worldwide. Kass’s next task was to buy back George Harrison’s publishing in America, which had been sold off to Terry Melchior by an inexperienced Terry Doran.