Magical Mystery Tours

by Tony Bramwell

  “Why don’t you come too?” Ron said to Paul.

  Paul said, “Okay,” and, turning to me, he added, “and you come as well, Tone. And we’ll take Ivan.” This was Ivan Vaughan, Paul’s oldest school friend, who had been in the Quarrymen. I think Paul agreed to go because he wanted to see Linda again. We literally rushed to the airport to get flights and, since we couldn’t get a direct flight to L.A., had to make a stopover in New York. The first thing Paul did on arrival at Kennedy on June 20, 1968, was to dig out that check with Linda’s number on it that, tellingly, he had carefully kept in his wallet, and telephoned her. She was out, so he got her answering service.

  “Hey, I’m in America!” he said. “Come and hang out for a couple of days. I’m staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel.” He seemed disappointed that she hadn’t been in to answer the telephone herself.

  “Do you think she’ll come?” I asked.

  Paul shrugged. “She’s a very independent lady,” he said. Like most men of his age, Paul’s ideas about women had really been shaped in the fifties, when most mothers stayed home and looked after the kids. However, his own mother had managed to combine both a career as a midwife—earning more than his dad—with being a wonderful mother to Paul and his younger brother, Michael. Paul did have a fairly broad view about how women should be and Linda was fitting in with his images. The busy, independent woman. Someone who showed a genuine interest in him as a man and not as a Beatle. She was also like Jane Asher, in that she was smart and classy.

  At the luxurious Beverly Hills Hotel we were given a bungalow beside the pool. It seemed like heaven! The first thing we did was change and go for a swim. Cliché it might be, but, this is the life, I thought, as Paul and I floated side by side on lilos, drinks in hand and gazing at the blue sky as the heavy scent of jasmine and orange blossom wafted on the air.

  That afternoon, we decided to shop on Sunset Strip. To me, everything was wildly expensive, but Paul didn’t care.

  “Sign for anything you want,” he told me. It was a bizarre situation. Here was a young man worth many millions who didn’t have a penny on him. A bit like royalty, I suppose. At any rate, everyone was more than happy to have our signatures.

  “Make the bill out to Apple,” Ivan and I said grandly, collapsing into giggles around the corner on Rodeo Drive. It seemed unreal. Even Paul said that after several years he still couldn’t get used to this way of life. Many years later, he loved to tell the story about how, when his young daughter, Mary, came home from their local school she was to say to him when they were out riding horses at their home in Sussex, “Dad, are you Paul McCartney?”

  “It made me sit up and think about it,” Paul said. “You know, sometimes, I would suddenly stop dead wherever I was and say, “Hey, you’re Paul McCartney!” It’s an eerie feeling, sort of like stepping outside yourself and asking, “Who the hell are you really?” Like you’re someone playing the role of a Beatle, and some day you’ll wake up, find it was just a dream and you’re Pete Best!”

  Those few days in Beverly Hills were like that, very Hotel California, with the sun, the fun and the girls. On our shopping trip, Paul and I bought Nehru jackets. Paul’s was red velvet and mine was white silk. We also bought several pairs of exotic sunglasses with pink lenses at a psychedelic optique, which we clowned around in. One pair would have done, but we couldn’t make up our minds which we liked and in the end Paul said, “To hell with it. Let’s have ’em all.” Once again, as we signed the outrageous bill, we found it wildly funny and ran into the street, laughing like people who had done a runner from the Chinese restaurant without paying.

  That night, after another dip in the warm silky water of the swimming pool, we dressed in our new gear, put the psychedelic glasses on, and swanned off in a limo with tinted windows, ten miles long. This was the sixties and in the accepted parameters of cool, we were the coolest of the cool.

  “Man, we could play snooker in here,” said Ivan. The Beatles had always had big cars when they went on tour, but this one was huge. We lolled back in the seats watching beautiful Californian girls roller-skate by with their fabulous tans and even more fabulous legs, their long blond hair blowing in the breeze behind them. All the girls seemed blond, and with tans. Sometimes a sports car would cruise up level with us and there would be some fabulous girl driving it. It was like they were all born to be in Hollywood.

  “Must be something in the water,” Paul said, and for some reason we found that hilarious. After all, it was all sun, sea and swimming pools.

  As the news that Paul was in town spread like wildfire, the girls began to appear in their droves again. Our first stop was Romanoff’s, Frank Sinatra’s favorite restaurant, run by a sort of Russian prince. Then, we were off clubbing. The Factory was next on the agenda. Located in the middle of a large industrial warehouse, the members were mostly Hollywood elite, people like Paul Newman and Steve McQueen. Paul Wasserman, “Wasso,” the top Hollywood press agent, sat with us, greeting and introducing, pointing names out. (He’s still in the business, at the top of the tree as the Stones’ press officer.) Sammy Davis Jr. was there and came over to our table for a chat.

  “Hi, Paul, how’re you doing, man? Glad to see ya.” I was fascinated by the amount of gold jewelry this very short man could drape on his wiry little body and still dance. Ringo would have been impressed. Ringo loved gold, loved to dance, and he was good at it, too. Meanwhile, models and starlets were throwing themselves at us. If they couldn’t grab Paul’s attention, then Ron, Ivan or myself would do. The Scotch and Cokes didn’t stop flowing until the early hours, all of us on such a natural high that we didn’t feel any ill effects. We tipped out of the club, still accompanied by Wasso and several girls. I think I ended up with an air-hostess, but it was hard to tell. Dozens of girls were mobbing around and came back to the hotel with us. Traveling back down Sunset Strip to the hotel with a carload of girls, Wasso took great delight into bumping our car from behind with his equally gigantic Cadillac before he overtook us, waved, and roared off home.

  The following morning Paul got up and swept out everyone like sweeping away the ashes with a broom because there was work to be done. On checking the equipment and promo film at the Beverly Hills Hilton, where the convention was due to be held that afternoon, I discovered that the film’s soundtrack was on the wrong system for the American projector. For the next few hours we ran around in a panic trying to find somewhere open on a Saturday to transfer the sound. Al Corey, promotion man at Capitol, eventually took me to Hanna-Barbara Studios where this was done very fast and efficiently, and the day was saved.

  Paul delivered a short speech to announce that EMI/Capitol would distribute Apple Records and, from now on, the Beatles were on the Apple label. That was a cue for me to show the film. Paul spent time doing the old meet-and-greet and being photographed with top Capitol executives, Alan Livingstone, Stanley Gortikov and Ken Fritz. It was a PR masterpiece. Relieved at how well it had gone we were ready to return to the hotel and leap into the swimming pool again. When we went into the bungalow to change, followed by the trail of girls, we were rather surprised to find Linda sitting there radiantly, totally spaced out, waiting for Paul. She had a joint in one hand and a beatific smile on her face. Paul immediately detached himself from the circus surrounding him and took Linda aside. As I looked across the room, I suddenly saw something happen. Right before my eyes, they fell in love. It was like the thunderbolt that Sicilians speak of, the coup-de-foudre that the French speak of in hushed tones, that once-in-a-lifetime feeling. Paul was struck almost dumb as he and Linda gazed at each other. Then he realized how crowded it was.

  Like a poacher caught with a string of salmon, he pretended that the leggy beauties who were hanging around were not his catch. “They’re with Ivan and Tony,” he said. It was very difficult to carry this off because not only were the groupies arriving in droves, but models and starlets were trying to get access, calling incessantly, begging to be allowed around. We had to get hote
l security to ask them to leave, but still, luscious little nymphets were breaking in, climbing over walls and crawling through the groves of orange blossom and jasmine. All they wanted was to see Paul, and all he wanted now was some privacy with Linda.

  That night we all went clubbing again, to the Whiskey-A-Go-Go, where B. B. King and the Chicago Transit Authority (who later shortened their name to Chicago) were playing. The club was hot, dark and crowded. Paul and Linda sat in a corner booth while we acted as a kind of hedge. By a strange coincidence, both Eric Burden and Georgie Fame were in the booth next to us, a fact not missed by Linda or Paul in their state of heightened awareness. Eric and Georgie had been at the Bag O’Nails on the night they had met some thirteen months ago. Now here they were on the night they had fallen in love. It was a sign.

  Paul and Linda left to be on their own back at the bungalow, while the rest of us partied into the early hours. The next day, even more fans turned up and mobbed the hotel. Crowds of fans were milling in and around the main entrance, lobby and grounds, while Paul and Linda were still in bed making love. Finally, to thank them all for coming, Paul got up and sat on the steps of the bungalow, playing his guitar and singing to them—I think it was “Blackbird”—while Linda kept quietly in the background, not wanting to be seen.

  I wandered off into the main part of the hotel, where I bumped into Colonel Tom Parker, Elvis Presley’s manager. He invited me to Elvis’s comeback affair, an NBC concert in Hawaii the following week, handing me some tickets. I showed them to Paul later, and he said, “What a drag, we can’t go! We’ll be back in London.”

  “The colonel says it’s Elvis’s comeback concert,” I said. “At the age of twenty-eight!”

  I gave the tickets to Ray Connolly, the writer, and a major Elvis fan. Toward midday, Ivan was assigned to take care of Linda, while Paul, Ron and I visited Alan Livingstone, the president of Capitol Records, at his glamorous home in Beverly Hills. After a buffet lunch, we dropped in on Ken Fritz, where we spent the rest of the afternoon lazing around his pool.

  On returning to the bungalow, Linda passed around a Victorian cloth draw-string bag stuffed full of grass. In London this bag became her trademark, the legendary “spice-bag” that Plonk Lane of the Faces wrote about in a song. All kinds of music people started to drop by, like Roger McGuinn from the Byrds. Boyce and Hart, the songwriters for the Monkees, telephoned to invite us to one of their notorious toga parties, a Hollywood version of a Roman orgy. Paul asked me to turn down all invitations so he could spend time alone with Linda. I did, but a leggy young starlet named Peggy Lipton, who had met Paul during their last American tour and still had designs on him, kept calling all through the night.

  The next day, Ron Kass was invited to go sailing on the boat belonging to movie director Mike Nichols of The Graduate. Mike and Dustin Hoffman, the film’s star, had always been two of Paul’s biggest fans, and Mike extended the invitation to include us all, but Paul knew that if Linda went with him on the boat, the news would get out very quickly. He was torn between going, or keeping her a secret for a little longer by hiding her back in the bungalow. In the end he decided they would both go, and Linda could always say she was just taking pictures.

  As we left the hotel to get into the limo, Peggy Lipton suddenly appeared, bikini and towel packed in her beach bag, ready to spend the day with us. Somebody must have told her we were going sailing. “Oh my God,” said Paul when he spotted her. “She can’t come.”

  I had to tell her in the nicest possible way that it was a private party, while Linda stood quietly to one side pretending she wasn’t with us. Peggy was very upset and got very argumentative. I realized that she needed the publicity for her career and had been told to make sure she got it, but Paul was tired of girls who used him. We drove off fast, leaving Peggy standing on the hotel steps in tears.

  It was one of those perfect days, though not for Peggy, of course. We sailed to Catalina, feeling like Bogart and Bacall for whom the island was a favorite destination, along with the Flynns and the Fairbanks. We dived off the sides of the sailboat into the clear blue sea where dolphins swam, sunbathed on the decks, ate bacon sandwiches and drank champagne. It was a wonderful day, an antidote to the months of madness in London.

  Late that afternoon, we checked out of the hotel to return to London. Paul and Linda were like Siamese twins, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes all the way to the airport. In the VIP lounge, they sat apart from us on a small group of seats in a central aisle, the kind of seats that are back to back with another row. Suddenly, the doors burst open, like the sheriff and his men at the big bad saloon.

  “FBI!” one of them barked, flashing a badge. “There’s a bomb warning on your flight. Do you know of any Caucasian male with a grudge against you?”

  Paul looked surprised. This was years before stars were assassinated and needed bodyguards. He said, “No, nobody.”

  “Do you mind if we search your baggage?” they asked.

  Out of the corner of my eye, I noticed Linda very swiftly aiming a neat little backward kick with her heel. Her square vanity case, which she had placed on the floor beneath her seat, skidded to the row of empty seats and, fortunately, came to rest exactly underneath one of them. Casually, she stood up. “Well, guys, I guess this is good-bye,” Linda said. “I’d better check on my flight.”

  “What flight are you on?” one of the agents asked.

  “New York,” Linda said. “I’m not traveling in Mr. McCartney’s party.” She smiled at us all and sauntered off through the door of the VIP lounge as if she had all the time in the world, and as if there wasn’t enough marijuana packed into her vanity case to get a herd of elephants stoned.

  We all wondered if Linda had managed to sneak back for her vanity case, or if it remained there. Who knows? I never asked.

  25

  Almost immediately upon our return from California, on June 29, 1968, a Saturday, Paul and I, with Peter Asher and Derek Taylor, together with dear old Martha, Paul’s sheepdog, drove up to Saltair near Leeds to record the Black Dyke Mills Band do one of Paul’s TV themes, “Thingumybob” and a brass band version of “Yellow Submarine.”

  They were an old-fashioned brass band from Yorkshire that had recently won the all-England brass bands competition at the Albert Hall—very much like the later film, Brassed Off. Ringo had discovered them through a builder working on his house, whose brother happened to be in the band. Paul loved their sound because it was so Northern, very working class and authentic. This recording was all part of Paul’s ambitious plan to launch the Beatles’ Apple record label with four new but totally diverse singles all on the same day. All in a promotional gift box, one of which would be delivered to the queen at Buckingham Palace.

  Saltair was a traditional little Yorkshire town, full of masterpieces of the industrial age built by a millionaire mill owner. We did the first session in the village hall, which went fine. But between sessions, Paul roamed about with Martha and fell in love with the town itself. It was a beautiful day and he suggested a bit of authentic marching in the street, before finishing off in the village square. Everyone came to listen and watch and it went very well, with a carnival atmosphere.

  We stayed over in an ancient hotel and I didn’t know where to look when Paul handed Martha to the hall porter in a deadpan way with some cryptic instructions. “Er, remove her clinkers, would you?” Well, Martha was a shaggy sheepdog and sometimes things clung that shouldn’t have clung. Without blinking, the porter said, “Why gladly, Mr. McCartney, and will Madam be requiring a dish of water and her supper?”

  “Thanks,” Paul said, and we all went off to sink a few pints of good Yorkshire ale.

  We finished the recording on Sunday and then it was back to London. I noticed that Derek Taylor had washed down some LSD with his breakfast coffee and was out of his brain, but I didn’t comment. You don’t, do you? We were cruising along in the back of the big limo when the Stones’ new single, “Jumping Jack Flash,”
came on the car radio. We couldn’t believe it, and I leaned forward to turn the radio up loud.

  Ever since radios were installed in cars we’d dreamed of bopping about, snapping our fingers, cruising our hometown’s moonlight mile or hanging out and looking cool with the motor parked by the “monkey walk” with the windows down, a place where the girls paraded up and back. Wiggling. Giggling. Giving you the eye. Tossing the ponytail. Shaking that tail feather. “Here she comes again,” sang Tom Petty, Bruce Springsteen and Willie de Ville—who all understood something of these matters.

  And what a sales tool the car radio was! As a record promoter radio is my medium. My channel. Something sexy coming over the airwaves always does the trick but songs always sound so good in the car that musos with a bit of clout will often talk deejays into playing a newly recorded track over the radio just to hear how it will sound. To hell with the audiophiles and their two thousand bucks’ worth of Bose; a car radio is where it’s at. And in their own way, musos are as bad as the audiophiles. They will talk about the five to one sound compression that radio stations use to give it oomph and power. Turning a knob, squeezing the sound out to give it juice.

  In fact they will all talk about what turns ’em on, but what it all comes down to—because everybody’s somebody’s punter, everybody’s somebody’s fan, is this: does Keef Richards’ rhythm guitar getcha goin’? Does it bend your back? Does Charlie’s snare drum make your neck move sideways to the offbeat? Do you wanna get up and dance in the back of a car?