Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  In July, through NEMS, Brian broke the Monkees as an act in Europe, presenting them at the Empire Pool at Wembley. But he didn’t go to the party thrown for them by Vic Lewis at the Speakeasy because once again, he was unwell.

  The problems over his contract with the boys had never really gone away. He thought they were ignoring the subject and didn’t know how to broach it himself. He stammered and stuttered when he mentioned it, was abnormally distressed, convincing himself that they weren’t going to sign up again because they loathed him. Going through months of paranoia, he looked for reasons and forlornly asked the question, “Don’t they like me anymore?”

  It was so silly because it wasn’t like that at all. At different times, all of them commented to me that they would never have signed another contract as “Beatles” but they would have signed individually with Brian. John expressed it best when he said, “We don’t need a manager anymore, we don’t do that kind of stuff anymore.”

  But their business affairs were so extensive, their lives so complex, their requirements so bizarre, that they really didn’t know how to manage on their own and as individuals were perfectly happy with the idea of retaining Brian in some capacity. They never veered from their conviction that they needed someone to handle their affairs, as history was shortly to prove.

  Poor Brian was constantly overacting and reacting, as when he made a fool of himself one night by turning up at Abbey Road with a boyfriend, trying to show off a bit to demonstrate to the boy how he exerted influence over the Beatles and knew his way around the studio. He flipped the intercom switch and told John that the vocals he’d just done weren’t “quite right.” Whether he was trying to make a joke, or being flippant, I’ll never know. Everybody, including me, winced and cringed and waited for the inevitable, which came swiftly.

  John just looked up at him without smiling and said, “You take care of the money, Brian, and we’ll take care of the music.” It was an awful, embarrassing put-down.

  Brian fled. I can’t remember now what song John was doing, but afterward, Brian anguished over it. “I’ve made such a fool of myself,” he said. Such things affected him deeply. He looked pale and concerned.

  “Don’t worry about it, John didn’t mean it,” I said.

  When Brian was down, he got depressed; then all his insecurities came to the surface and he was on a roll of self-flagellation. He said, “No, I think John hates me now. I don’t know what I’ll do if they don’t sign. What will people think? I can see the headlines now: EPSTEIN DUMPED BY BEATLES.”

  “It will be okay,” I said, but he wasn’t listening. To cushion what he saw as the inevitable, Brian was running around doing deals. Six months earlier he had brought in Stigwood as a partner—though told everyone that it was a combining of forces on the agenting side and assured the Beatles at least that Stigwood had no share whatsoever in his management contract with them, their music, or anything else. He had also done that underhand deal with EMI whereby he retained 25 percent of the Beatles’ records regardless of whether he managed them or not. More crucially, he had made two attempts at suicide. A few weeks earlier, in New York, Nat Weiss had roused him from a bad Seconal-induced coma, when Brain had been late for a radio interview, and had been surprised by the speed of his recovery. One moment Brian had been out of it, half dead; the next he was in the studio, offering lucid and interesting opinions.

  Brian’s manic moods continued as he made and canceled several appointments with Dr. Flood, his psychiatrist. He was now seriously unhappy, not just troubled. His personality had radically changed. Joanne would sometimes discuss it with me, telling me how concerned she was. Brian acted like Howard Hughes. He’d push notes with instructions and money under his bedroom door for when she arrived in the morning. When he emerged, round about five o’clock in the evening; he took lots of uppers to come fully awake. But lately, she said, he needed more. This made him so edgy that the smallest thing would cause him to rant and rave and throw stuff around. A wrong number could make him go berserk. Laden tea trays were flung, once at Joanne directly. In between the uppers and downers he drank heavily, didn’t bother to eat and sometimes didn’t bother to get dressed. Joanne promised herself she would quit every day, but never did. Brian had resident nurses, doctors who stayed, psychiatrists who lived in, all crowded into that little doll’s house, getting on each other’s nerves. At times he’d make an effort. He would sweet-talk everyone and then escape when they weren’t looking.

  He ran around looking for boys in ridiculously obvious places like the alleyways at Piccadilly underground station, or Times Square when he was in New York. He was out of control and, given that his orientation was unfortunately still illegal, was probably happiest when there were artificial parameters on his behavior. He felt he needed his sexual demons restricted by visits to clinics, or curtailed by visits by his mum, or simply by pressures of work. Left on his own, like many men with similar inclinations, he couldn’t help but run away and do his own thing.

  In July 1967, the law was changed to allow consensual homosexual acts in private between adults but it was years too late for Brian. He’d been ridden by guilt for too long. He told me he was badly in need of a holiday where he could fully rest and switch off. The Beatles were making leaving-noises, too. George and Pattie, who had been to San Francisco on holiday, had been hassled by a mob in the street who wanted George to play guitar for them. On George’s return to England, the Beatles sat around discussing how they could never be free to be themselves, there were always cameras and fans. Three years before, all of the Beatles and their women had had a wonderful holiday cruising the Greek Islands in Peter Seller’s yacht, a happy time they still remembered affectionately.

  With that in mind, they started looking about for a retreat from the world, and Magic Alex was delighted to show them that he wasn’t just a weird hippie who hung around them, that he was actually a person of some importance in his homeland. He used his Greek connections and found them a cluster of twenty-four idyllic islands for £95,000. Alistair Taylor even worked out that the sale of olives and olive oil would repay the purchase price in seven years. Brian, who was making his own plans to escape to Spain, took the Beatles seriously enough to write to Nat Weiss for advice.

  At the time, the British government was in a financial crunch. British citizens were only allowed to take fifty pounds a year spending money out of the country. Capital foreign investments were levied a dollar premium. That is, for every pound spent abroad, an additional 25 percent had to be lodged with the Bank of England; but on top of that, a limit was still imposed on currency allowed out of the country. There was a minor flurry of concern when the accountants informed the Beatles that they only had about £137,000 in the bank. John thought they were alarmists. “I don’t give a toss,” he said. “We’re going to live in Greece and that’s it. Find the money.”

  The Chancellor of the Exchequer, James Callahan, got involved. He even wrote a personal letter to the Beatles, saying he would make an exception in their case over the limit allowed out, but would only allow them enough to buy the islands. His cryptic P.S. read: “. . . but not a penny more . . . how will you buy the furniture?”

  John, with his son, Julian, and Alex went off to Greece to inspect the islands. Because of Alex’s connections, they were met by a colonel or two and treated like royalty. Despite that, John hated the way in which they were exploited by the Greek press and a right-wing junta that disgusted him. Ultimately, the idea fizzled out.

  19

  The death of his father, Harry, of a heart attack while on holiday in Bournemouth on July 17, 1967, threw Brian into an even deeper slough of despondence and grief.

  “I so wanted him to see me settled and happily married,” Eppy said to me dolefully. “Now he never will, will he, Tony?” He stared at me, telling me something, willing me to understand.

  I looked back at him in disbelief. I think that was when I realized what his pursuit of Alma, and then Marianne, had been all abou
t. After his father died, a wife no longer mattered and Eppy dropped the charade.

  There was little time for us to convey condolences since it was all so rushed. Jewish funerals were held within twenty-four hours. Brian disappeared to Bournemouth and escorted his father’s body home to Liverpool for the funeral, which was attended only by his family and members of the Jewish community. After it was all over, he invited Queenie down to London so they could discuss the future. Brian wanted her to live in London near him and her sisters, but she had lived in Liverpool for thirty-four years and all her friends were there. At any rate, she came down to London on August 14 and stayed at her usual hotel. It was close enough for her to walk around to Chapel Street in the morning before Brian was up. She would tiptoe into his room and draw back his bedroom curtains so they could share breakfast and discuss what they would do that day. The constraints kicked in and we were all surprised to see how normal Brian could be. He even seemed calm and happy, though it was an empty sort of happiness, as if he were drained. At times, it seemed as if he were acting in a play.

  They spent their days together, pottering about, doing a bit of shopping, seeing friends and the family in London. One day Brian took his mother to meet Cilla and Bobby at Euston Station on their return from Liverpool. They went on to lunch, a friendly informal meal, where they all talked of old times. However, Brian made a small error of judgment when he told Cilla he had arranged for her to represent England on the Eurovision song contest. She was instantly alarmed and defensive. It was far too risky—suppose she lost? It wouldn’t look good. Her career was booming, she’d had hit after hit and recently had starting presenting her own TV show that looked as if it would run and run (it did, becoming an institution). She didn’t need to enter a song contest; she wasn’t a racehorse.

  Brian’s temper started to flare. He told Cilla that he knew what was best for her. She politely disagreed. The meal ended on an uneasy atmosphere, although Queenie affected not to notice.

  On the twenty-third of August Brian took his mother to the Saville and seemed to gain a moment of his old sense of pride as he solicitously seated her in the royal box with its zebra-skin sofas. You could almost sense her looking about at the red damask walls, the gilded columns and thinking, “My boy has achieved all this, despite everything. Look how well he has done.”

  The next day, Brian took her to the station and put her on the train back home to Liverpool. He had done his duty as a good son and now it was time to frolic at Kingsley Hill. As if to save himself from rent boys, he asked Joanne and Lulu to go down with him over the approaching long bank-holiday weekend, but they had already made other plans.

  While Brian was planning his weekend, Pattie and Alex had convinced the others to attend a lecture given at a West London hotel by a strange little fellow from India. His name was almost unpronounceable: the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Alex didn’t approve of drugs and pressed hard for the meeting. He said that the yogi was wonderful, that his brand of magic, Transcendental Meditation, was far more powerful than drugs. On a whim, John, Paul and George, their entourage of women and Paul’s brother, Mike, said they would go. At the lecture the Maharishi went into a deep trance and the Beatles were captivated. It looked so easy and to be able to go into a trance to order without drugs was a something they needed to know more about. Afterward, the Maharishi asked them for a private audience in his suite, during which he asked them to attend his induction course that bank-holiday weekend—starting the next day in fact—at Bangor, North Wales.

  As they left the hotel, John and Cynthia went to get into their car when, out of nowhere, Yoko appeared and hopped into the car, to sit between them. Someone had tipped her off about John’s attendance at the lecture and she had arrived, to wait quietly in the lobby for this moment. Cynthia froze. All the months of strange mail, the cut-off phone calls, the waiting silently at the gate were encapsulated in this tiny, terrifying woman. She glanced questioningly at John. He shrugged, as if to say, “I haven’t a clue.”

  “I’d like a lift home,” Yoko said. It wasn’t a polite request; it was the order of an assured woman. Cynthia was seriously concerned when the car drove to Yoko’s flat off Regent’s Park, seeming to know the way without being told. The next day, Paul, George and Ringo and their women, together with Mick and Marianne, arrived at Euston Station to catch the train to Bangor. Cynthia and John arrived at the station in his painted Rolls. The station was packed with holiday-makers and the press. As John and Cynthia fought their way through the melee, a flashbulb went off in Cyn’s face, blinding her. By the time she could see, everyone had vanished and she didn’t know which was the correct platform. She raced along, but the police didn’t recognize her and thought she was another hysterical fan. Suddenly, all the Beatles stuck their heads out of the windows of the train, urging her to run faster. “Run, Cyn, run!” John yelled. Those were the words Paul had used when chased by fans in their early touring days. As his car sped away, he’d put his head out of the window and called out, “Run, girls, run!” and the girls would redouble their efforts.

  Cynthia stopped. It was no good; the train was going too fast. John hadn’t come back for her, no one else bothered; it was as if she didn’t exist. At that moment, she said, as she watched the train pull out, she saw how utterly irrelevant she was.

  Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Brian was preparing to leave for Sussex. Geoffrey Ellis, the accountant from the NEMS office, and Peter Brown were also going down to Kingsley Hill, but Peter had to make a last-minute change in plans because he had to arrange to have Cynthia driven to Bangor. He arrived late in Sussex. Brian announced that he had expected to travel down with a particular young man, who hadn’t shown up. After a quiet dinner served by the Australian butler, Brian spent time on the phone, trying to find some amusing people to join them. He even had a kind of key card to a call-boy agency—a rent now, pay later, kind of thing—and used that to try to drum up some fun, but was told it was too late, too far, and all the best boys were booked.

  According to Peter and Geoffrey, when they described the events later, Brian said, “I’m going to town, I’ll find some boys and bring them back.”

  “Leave it,” Peter said. “It’s late and you’ve had too much to drink.”

  But Brian was single-minded and left in his silver Bentley Continental convertible. He had been on his best behavior for days with his mother around and was ready for some action. Geoffrey Ellis called Brian’s town house just after midnight, and Antonio, the Spanish “Town Butler” confirmed that Brian had arrived safely but gone straight to bed. Meanwhile, in response to Brian’s previous frantic telephoning after dinner, three boys had arrived at Kingsley Hill in a taxi from London probably passing Brian on the road.

  On the following day, Saturday, Brian called at about five in the afternoon and spoke to Peter Brown. He said he had been asleep most of the day but would drive on down that evening. Pete urged him to take the train instead. Brian agreed. He said he would call from Lewes Station when he arrived and Peter could pick him up. He never called. On the Sunday morning he still hadn’t called and as usual, Peter and Geoffrey went to the village pub for a drink before lunch. The Australian butler was in the house to answer the phone if necessary.

  In London, concerned that Brian had not emerged from his room since Friday night, and that everything was too quiet, Antonio telephoned down to Kingsley Hill to be advised what to do. But Peter and Geoffrey were still in the pub, so Antonio immediately telephoned Joanne at home in Edgware. He told her that Brian’s car was still parked at the front; he’d tried the internal intercom and couldn’t rouse Brian. Later, Joanne told me that she had instantly felt something was wrong. She telephoned Alistair Taylor to meet her at Chapel Street. On their arrival, they stood outside Brian’s double bedroom doors with his chauffeur, Brian Barrett, and decided they should call a doctor. Brian’s doctor was Norman Cowan, who lived too far away. The nearest one was Peter Brown’s physician, Dr. John Gallway, who lived just two str
eets away. But it didn’t matter anyway. Brian was already dead. Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis were back from the pub by then and were actually on the phone to Chapel Street, listening in while the bedroom doors were forced. They left immediately for town.

  I had stayed in London that weekend to look after the Saville. Jimi Hendrix was on for two shows that Sunday, with Eric Burdon supporting. Brian had told me that he was having a party down at his house in Sussex, but would be returning on the Sunday and would be at the theater as usual.

  “So you’re not spending Monday at Kingsley Hill?” I had said. It was a three-day weekend so I expected Brian to take the extra day.

  “No, I have too much to attend to,” Brian said. He sounded normal for once, and I put this down to the influence of his mother during the past ten days.

  I kept glancing up at the box, wondering if Brian would turn up. Whatever else he was doing, however out of it he was toward the end, it was a point of honor with him to make an effort to attend the Sunday shows, either alone or with a small party. He often brought Stigwood and Kit Lambert, the Who’s manager, who was also gay, to a Sunday show. “All good queens together in the royal box,” Lambert would say, and laugh. But the box remained empty. Toward the end of the first performance, we were just getting ready to open the doors to clear the theater for the second performance, when the phone call came from Brian Barrett.