Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  By the time Pattie had finished wandering dreamily through rooms that George said would be hers to decorate and furnish in any way she chose, she had made up her mind. For a girl who looked like a doll, playing with a real doll’s house—and to be sharing it with one of the world’s most attractive and eligible young men—was a fantasy, let alone for a girl who was only eighteen.

  After the first flush of being seen with everyone, everywhere, as soon as they moved into the country with their women, the Beatles became quite reclusive. They didn’t hang out on the scene, and didn’t really know many musicians, not on a personal, friendship level. Their lives remained concentrated on the four of them and their small circle. Also, their domestic arrangements were very tight. George, normally the most private of people, became wildly jealous and possessive over Pattie. He holed up in Esher when they were married and would come into town only for recording sessions. He became very private and didn’t go boogalooing a lot, unlike Pattie who wanted to have fun—lots of it.

  It was unfortunate that she was a flirt. I’d often be at a club and there she would be, surrounded by any number of the dozen virile young rock and rollers. She was a successful model, mixing with the likes of David Bailey and the artsy-fartsy, feather-boas, Vogue-Tiffin & Foale-Biba crowd. She’d turn up at the Speakeasy with this camp entourage and we would stop and chat. I never asked her where George was, because we all knew that he was at home. If anybody did ask, she’d make that little moue and giggle, as if to say, “Poor George, he doesn’t understand me. I just want to have fun.” But she was never mean about it or spiteful. She was just so young and not ready to settle down in suburbia.

  Sometimes, when we were in the studio, George didn’t seem to care who heard him anguishing, tearfully begging her to come home. It was embarrassing having to listen to this. And it was even more embarrassing for me to see George, my old Liverpool mate who’d always had all the girls looking at him with big calf eyes since he’d been about twelve, on the end of the telephone, acting like a lovesick calf himself, as he pleaded with Pattie on the bar phone at whatever club she happened to be. Pattie was so beautiful. She was his first big love and he couldn’t stand the pain. In the end, being excessively worshipped, and being the worshipper, were too much for both of them—she wasn’t for him. She ran off with Eric Clapton, who had gotten ready for Pattie by taking out one of her sisters (who later came to work for the Apple Boutique when it opened). Oddly enough, George and Eric stayed good friends.

  Paul and Jane were like two lovebirds but they didn’t really mix with the others at all. Ringo and Maureen were two lovebirds who went dancing, George and Pattie were two lovebirds though only one of whom went dancing, and John and Cyn were like two “used to be lovebirds” who never did very much together at all, especially after she became a mum. The idea of everybody—the four couples—going over to Ringo’s, or George’s, for dinner, just didn’t happen.

  John’s circle consisted of peculiar people and a few rock stars, while Ringo’s clique was much more showbiz than the others, because he was the most show-bizzy of all of them, mixing with a different, more adult set from the rest of the Beatles. He and Maureen would go places, driven by their driver, Alan. They loved to dance, or they would go to the cinema and on then on to clubs, like the Crazy Elephant, or Dolly’s, where they would do the Madison. Often, they met up with Cilla and her husband, Bobby, who also loved dancing, or Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, who were great mates of theirs and always dropped in on Ringo and Maureen when they were in England. Maurice Gibb and Lulu were also neighbors and regular dinner guests.

  Paul and Jane went to the theater a lot with a young crowd, but in a way, Paul was more open. He mixed with literally anyone, but preferred mainly artistic people. Unlike Jane, who was into dinner parties, he liked to go to the pub as well. If he were about we’d go to the Green Man on Riding House Street, which he loved. It was behind Wigmore Street, not far from the BBC, and in those days run by a batty Viennese woman. It was a proper pub but unusually for the middle of the West End of London it had sawdust on the floor, bar billiards, darts, a pinball table and an old piano and it served wonderful pub food that’s going out of fashion now because of the “Hygiene Squad,” as Monty Python called the food police. We loved their cheese and onion pie (now called quiche) served with baked beans, their shepherd’s pie and chips and crusty baked bread. Before he met Linda and they became vegetarians, Paul lapped up everything. The landlady made great Vienna schnitzel, which she served with a couple of dollops of mashed potatoes and great gravy. Wonderful!

  We liked to go to the Champion just across Wigmore Street and down from the Green Man. We’d play spoof, a game involving guessing how many coins your opponent had in his closed fist. Sometimes we’d spend the day playing nine-card brag and drinking good ice-cold lager, which came in tins, rare in those days. Often Alice Cooper would come along and play when he was in London, or Allan Clarke from the Hollies and Mike Appleton, the producer from the BBC’s Old Grey Whistle Test, would join in. We only put in a pittance, perhaps a sixpence a throw, but because you needed a lot of the cards to get out and win, by the time someone did there would be a huge amount of cash in the middle. Each hand ended up with more than a week’s wages. Winners would fill their boots up. Alice loved it. He used to come straight there if he was in the U.K. He was used to drinking at least a case of canned beer every day anyway. Later he told me with a big smile that when he took to playing golf with Paul Newman, they had a case of Bud each and the greens got watered even when it didn’t rain.

  We sat in the Green Man pub one wet day in midsummer, Paul and I, talking about life in general, as we often did, about rainy-day things and about how certain things can shape your life. Our conversations were always about films, the news, music—a lot about music. The charts in New Musical Express, new records, gossip about the Stones or Elvis. Paul loved Elvis. He’d discuss how the awful movies he made, and the fact that he did no concerts after the army, ruined his career. He didn’t think much of the colonel, who Paul thought was a destructive monster. Paul was fond of Brian and thought he was the best possible manager: one who was courteous, who didn’t interfere with their private lives, but achieved all he said he would do. He never criticized him—none of us did. Brian was a god. (It was only later that the façade cracked a bit, but even then we loved him. He was like family, and you accept your family for what they are and forgive them most anything.)

  Some conversations and moods stick with you. I remember that rainy day going to the Green Man and can still smell that unique scent of hot, wet pavement. The pub door was propped open and we watched the rain pour down outside, bouncing up off dusty flagstones, gurgling into gutters. When we’d come in the door Paul had treated everybody to a bit of Buddy Holly’s “Rainin’ in My Heart” while we were served. He got a round of applause, took a bow, got high on it as usual—Paul loves to perform live—and he started ribbing me about Buddy Holly.

  Looking around at a handful of regulars, Paul told everybody I’d met him. He digressed a little from the truth (Paul and John were always making such digressions) by saying that I’d won this competition to meet Buddy in Housewives Weekly by correctly guessing the name of Cliff Richard’s cat, or by making up a little rhyme about Bisto gravy.

  I started to laugh. When he sat down, Paul grinned and said, “Sorry about that.”

  I said, “No you’re not. You’re always doing it. And it was the name of Cliff’s budgie, not his cat.”

  Paul asked me again about the competition that I’d entered that won me a trip backstage at Liverpool Empire to meet Buddy Holly and the Crickets. He was always asking me to name the three top records from that week I won—again—and about meeting Buddy. Paul had been there that day with our whole gang, but he’d not gone backstage, and to him it was the big thing. When he was a kid, Paul often hung around the stage door of the Empire when the Americans came to town. Like a lot of kids he collected autographs but, in a nice way, I knew
he was a little bit jealous that I’d met Buddy Holly and now Buddy was dead and he’d never get to hang out with him. In fairness, he was nuts about Buddy and so was I.

  “So what was Buddy like then, Tone?”

  “I’ve told you a million times,” I said.

  “It should have been me that met him, you know, not you. So come on, tell me again. And then tell me what’s your favorite Buddy song. And what did he look like? And what were the Crickets like? I wanna know everything ’cos you might have missed something. Me? I wouldn’t have missed anything.”

  “Well, you know … he was just very polite. “True Love Ways” is my fave song and he looked just like his photographs. So did the Crickets.”

  “Yeah. Hell, you’re a lucky bastard.” Paul shoveled a ton of shepherd’s pie into his mouth, washed it down with half a pint of beer. “I’m fookin’ starving, me,” he said. Paul was always starving. Even though he had a housekeeper and Jane also cooked when she was around, he never seemed to get enough to eat at home. Usually, he’d get caught up with something and forget.

  I knew he’d reverted to being the kid from Liverpool hanging around the Empire in the cold, thinking about a fish-and-chips supper. He said, “I was going to eat last night in this casino, but I got me usual thirty quids’ worth of chips and then for some stupid fookin’ reason I started winning at this thing called thirty-six to one and I don’t even know how it works! I ended up winning a lot of money. I took it all outside and distributed it to homeless people and—”

  I said, “There aren’t any homeless people in Mayfair at four A.M.”

  “Yeah, there are, too. Anyway, I never got around to dinner and I was too late for breakfast. Hey, did I tell you I met the Crew Cuts outside the Empire once?”

  I nodded. “Many times.”

  He grinned. “They did that song, ‘Earth Angel.’ Remember that one?”

  I said, “It’s a corny song. Why don’t you do ‘True Love Ways’?”

  Paul nodded. “Nah, I like ‘Earth Angel.’ John says I won’t be told anything. Did you know he said that about me? He’s been putting this rumor round the office saying I’m a know-all and an arrogant bastard.” Paul was teasing. Our conversations were always a mixture of mocking throwaway lines and serious music discussion. The two often merged into the other, and only someone who understood would know what we were talking about.

  Paul said, “John’s only the rhythm guitarist, yer know. I taught him everything he knows, yer know. He were rubbish when I found him. Playin’ on the back of a lorry outside the church hall, he were.”

  Paul might have suddenly gotten all Northern, but the pub door was propped open and outside it was raining even harder on streets that were paved in gold for us, especially for the Beatles. It was like we still couldn’t believe life had moved so fast, so we clung onto memories of our younger days—and how odd that thought was, when I was still just eighteen and they were still barely twenty.

  There was something about London’s streets when it rained that smelled and felt good. The cobbles in Liverpool have a different smell, of the salt sea that was close and blew a fine mist over everything, diesel from the trains and trams that ran over the cobbles and coal dust. The smell of the suburbs where we were brought up was different again, probably a mix of farmland and factory and the river constantly flowing by.

  Paul said, “Hey, you know it’s funny about the photo thing.”

  “What photo thing?”

  “You said Buddy and the Crickets looked just like a photo. Right? Well, when I first saw them early photos of Elvis I was knocked for six. He ruined me at school, yer know? Yeah, academically speaking.” Paul was beginning to enjoy himself. He loved the pubs, sitting there while it rained too hard to go anywhere. I knew we were in for the day.

  I said, “So tell me, maestro. How did these pictures of Elvis ruin you at school?”

  “Because the pictures looked just like the records sounded. All moody and great, yer know? I wanted to be him. I did! I would have had me hair done like him but we could only afford one haircut and it was me brother Mike’s turn. Hey, you don’t know what it’s like bein’ a kid from a council estate, do you, Tone? Privileged you were, just like that fookin’ Lennon. He doesn’t get me to tune up his guitar anymore. He gets George to do it.”

  “George does it properly.”

  The class thing was a favorite ribbing theme of Paul’s, even though he had taken to hanging out with the nobs far quicker than any of us. Even so, he could be very funny when he got going.

  “If I’d have met Buddy Holly I would have—”

  “You’d have tried to sell him a song.”

  Paul’s face lit up. “Yeah, I would’ve, wouldn’t I? Can you imagine, Buddy Holly singing something I wrote?”

  Paul went over and sat down at the old piano. I still thought he was going to play “Earth Angel,” but he played “True Love Ways.” It was absolute magic. We stayed all afternoon.

  Many years later Paul bought the whole Buddy Holly song catalogue. So here’s a rainy day thought: isn’t it strange that Paul owns all Buddy’s songs but not all of his own?

  During 1964 and 1965, as the months of our new life “down south” progressed, John and Cynthia grew more reclusive. Cynthia’s mother came down from Liverpool and attempted to live with them, but John thwarted that by buying her a bungalow down the road. She still spent every day at their home, and John was forced to give her huge sums so she would go away and shop for antiques. “It gets her out of me hair, Tone,” he’d say. “Hey up! It’s money well spent. I can’t stand her.”

  John was so nervous of strangers catching him on the phone that you had to use a code name to get through. It’s in my old phone book: “Mr. Pilgrim: Wey-bridge 45028.” Sometimes I’d put on a funny Goon Show voice like Bluebottle and said, “Hello, it’s Min, is that Mr. Pilgrim?”

  John would brighten up. “Hello Tone, what’s up?”

  But he came to hate the huge house, which was decorated in a stark modern style—at odds with its fake-Tudor exterior—by the same trendy interior decorator Brian had used for his apartment. The man charged a king’s ransom to make it look chilly and cold. Cynthia was frankly threatened by its haughty glamour and craved John to herself in a cozy domestic environment. Mostly, he spent his time in the attic, in music rooms painted entirely in black or red, where he had a vast array of musical instruments, jukeboxes and pinball machines. He also had a train set that ran from room to room. When he came down from his dark eyrie like a bat blinded by the light, he and Cynthia ignored the rest of the palatial, echoing rooms and holed up in a cramped sun lounge off the kitchen. The kitchen was filled with so many gadgets that Cynthia was in terror of them. She didn’t know how any of them worked and treated them as if they were bad genies hiding behind doors ready to jump out and attack her.

  John kept a big box on a convenient shelf filled with pot. He often stayed stoned or dropped acid, something else that terrified Cynthia. She had been persuaded to drop acid at a dinner party where she, John, George and Pattie had been introduced to it, and had such a bad trip that she wouldn’t use it again. She was convinced that sooner or later John would literally lose his mind, that his brain cells would melt and dribble out through his nose. The way in which he lay for hours on a wicker sofa in the sun lounge sleeping or gazing into the sky ignoring her and Julian convinced her that the rot had already started. She would hover helplessly over him, telling him to stop, watching him like a hawk in case he died—all of which wound him up, pissed him off, made him even more paranoid.

  Kenwood became a prison. John was bored and lonely, rarely speaking a word to Cynthia, sneering at her mother and looking for ways to escape. I was a regular choice of playmate and co-conspirator. Every two weeks or so, he would come into London and get totally out of it. He would spend nights in the clubs or sleep in the back of the Roller, which would be parked behind the offices in St. James Yard. He would start these little adventures by suddenly arrivi
ng at my desk in the NEMS office, where he’d kind of hover.

  “Hi, Tone, what’re you doing?”

  “Whatever you want, John.”

  “Let’s go round,” he would say, meaning he wanted to do the rounds. We never walked anywhere. Bill or Anthony would chauffeur us in the Rolls Royce, the Princess or the Mercedes, one of the half-dozen cars Eppy kept as runabouts.

  John was now on the loose, looking for his fortnightly fix of freedom. We would start off at the pub at the top of Carnaby Street, have a couple of drinks, then it would be, “Where next?”

  I became his tour guide, but I have to say that I always thoroughly enjoyed these outings. At least, I enjoyed the first few hours or so. The talk was good, the ideas a mile a minute. People gravitated toward John the moment we went in a door, genuinely pleased to see him. John was one of us, one of them, one of the lads. He was funny, as well as being irreverent and totally insecure. Despite being a brilliant songwriter, John wasn’t as deep as people thought he was, but he was an original.

  If it was still early, we’d go to our regular pubs, or we’d go to the movies in Leicester Square until midnight. “C’mon, let’s go to a club, Tone,” John would say at this point. That would be when my heart sank into my suede chukka boots because John was a notoriously lousy drinker. Two of anything was his limit, but he always demanded large Scotches and Coke. When the first drink hit the back of his throat and his eyes rolled back in his head, I knew we were in for a great deal of silliness. If I was lucky, John might fall asleep in the back of a car, either to sleep it off in the yard behind or to be quickly driven back to Weybridge, hauled out and handed over to Cynthia to be put to bed.