The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  The uneasiness turned to panic after the evening show at the stadium. Suddenly the Beatles’ police escort disappeared, and when their car pulled up to the hotel gates, it was clear they had been locked out. As if on cue, several dozen “organized troublemakers” converged on the car, banging on the windows and rocking the vehicles. Menacing epithets were shouted in several languages. Leaning forward, Vic Lewis instructed the driver: “Drive on! Go through the people and smash the gates down!” Which is exactly what they did. As the cars raced to the entrance, doors flew open and everyone ran into the hotel—two steps ahead of the angry throng.

  A short while later an official visited the hotel, demanding payment of local taxes. Lewis brought out the contract to verify that the promoter, Ramon Ramos, was responsible for the tax, but it was brushed aside. “Your fee is taxed as earnings regardless of any other contracts,” he was told. Until all taxes were paid, no one from the Beatles party would be permitted to leave the country.

  When he left, Lewis found Tony Barrow and said, “We’ve got to get out of here—now.” He went straight to the phone and called the front desk for help with collecting the luggage but was told none would be forthcoming. “The whole hotel is going on strike,” the manager told him. “They think you’ve insulted President Marcos.”

  The Beatles had already gotten a taste of the situation. The hotel staff refused to provide them with room service and their phones had been shut off. Paul had seen the newspaper headlines—BEATLES SNUB PRESIDENT—but didn’t connect the events. The story went on to claim that the Beatles had “spit in the eyes of the first family,” which, of course, wasn’t true—no one had told them anything about the visit. “Oh, dear!” he thought. “We’ll just say we’re sorry.” But then “things started to get really weird,” as Ringo recalled. He and John were sitting around in their bathrobes, watching television, when one of the roadies stalked in. “Come on! Get out of bed! Get packed—we’re getting out of here.”

  Vic Lewis, Tony Barrow, and the two roadies grabbed most of the baggage and headed to the airport. They hoped to have everything settled for a quick getaway by the time the Beatles arrived. Everyone else met in Brian’s suite and began to make their way downstairs. The main elevators had been turned off, which meant taking the service lift. But even though the halls were dark, they weren’t empty. “The passageway was lined with hotel staff who shouted at us in Spanish and English,” recalls Peter Brown, trailing a few steps behind the Beatles. “It was very, very frightening.” When they arrived downstairs, it was impossible to check out. The lobby was deserted; there was no security in sight. Even their cars were gone.

  “Nobody would give us a ride,” George recalled. “There was nothing available.” Someone—no one is sure who—managed to corral a Town Car and all seven of them squeezed inside. But the airport route was sabotaged. Soldiers, stationed at intersections, kept directing the car onto ramps that led in circles. Finally they took a back road and arrived half an hour later. Rushing inside the airport, they discovered that the terminal was totally deserted. “The atmosphere was scary,” Tony Barrow remembered, “as if a bomb was due to go off.” Even the individual airline desks were empty. The second the Beatles hit the escalators, the electricity was mysteriously shut off. “We were shitting ourselves by this time,” says Peter Brown. “There was no one to help us, no one to tell us where to go.”

  Barrow and Vic Lewis, who had gone ahead of the party, were carrying everyone’s flight tickets and documents. “Meanwhile,” recalls Vic Lewis, “I was in with KLM, pleading for them to hold the flight, which was coming in from Seoul and going on to Delhi.” The passengers had already boarded the aircraft; the plane was an hour late for takeoff. “I rang through to the pilot and was pleading with him. ‘Please, hold on. This is going to be an international situation. Please…’ ”

  “Mr. Lewis, I want to help,” the captain told him, “but if we don’t leave soon, we won’t get our clearance.”

  “Please…”

  Outside, Lewis and Barrow could see their worst nightmare unfold. On the tarmac, a crowd of two hundred Filipino men, many in military uniform, had gathered, waving pistols or clutching sawed-off clubs. “I didn’t fancy the chances of the Beatles, without police protection, getting through to the airport unhurt,” Barrow recalled. Lewis confirmed his fears. “I really felt the boys could be killed,” he says.

  The Beatles, meanwhile, made their way through the terminal as little bands of the demonstrators appeared. “We were all carrying amplifiers and suitcases,” George remembered, “nobody was helping us to do anything—but the mania was going on, with people trying to grab us, and other people trying to hit us.” Check-in lasted forever, it seemed. Eventually everyone was herded into KLM’s departure lounge, a double-story glass-enclosed room with a mezzanine, where “an abusive crowd and police with guns had also gathered.”

  It was impossible to tell the MPs from the thugs. Customs officials indiscriminately shoved bodies from one side of the room to the other. “Get over there!” they ordered the Beatles, following it with a hard hand to their backs. Of course, once they stumbled to the other side of the room, another cop would shove them back again. “No! Get over there!” It was like a game of Ping-Pong, a vicious game, using the Beatles and their mates as equipment. According to Ringo, “they started spitting at us, spitting on us.” It was complete chaos.

  “When they started on us at the airport, I was petrified,” John recalled. One of the policemen got in his face and yelled: “You treat like ordinary passenger! Ordinary passenger!” It occurred to John that ordinary passengers didn’t get kicked, but knowing what was good for him, he kept his mouth shut. Instead, he and the rest of the Beatles darted toward a group of nuns and monks huddled by an alcove, hoping that would discourage the thugs. Meanwhile, Mal fell and was kicked repeatedly in the ribs, along with Alf Bicknell, who was severely beaten.

  After about fifteen minutes everyone was allowed to run across the tarmac to the plane. “I was the last to go,” recalls Vic Lewis, “and I remember putting a hand on my back, thinking that’s where the bullet was going to hit.” The terrified Beatles climbed the stairs into the cabin. It was hot, well over ninety degrees, and they were dripping with perspiration—but relieved. Then two Philippine military officers stiffly came aboard. Scanning the passengers, they announced: “Mr. Barrow and Mr. Evans, we need you to come back into the departure office.” The cabin went silent. Tony, sitting in the back of the first-class compartment, grimaced. Mal struggled to his feet and walked unsteadily toward the exit. As he passed George Harrison, he stopped and tearfully whispered, “Tell Lil I love her.”

  Tony and Mal were detained for another half an hour. In a typical bureaucratic snafu, their papers hadn’t been processed with the others when they arrived from Tokyo; their passports hadn’t been stamped. After they handed over their passports, duly stamped, they were free to leave.

  Once the plane was safely in the air, the Beatles were unusually subdued. Sitting across the aisle from one another, sweating in the painfully sticky cabin, they calmed themselves, smoking cigarettes against the tension, while the anger and resentment that had been simmering over the past few days finally boiled over. The boys quickly developed a need to lay blame for the debacle. It “was Brian’s cock-up,” they decided. He’d obviously handled that invitation business badly, either ignoring it or misleading the authorities—or them. Whatever the reasons, it mustn’t ever happen again, they agreed. Even if it meant having someone double-check his arrangements.

  Brian, stewing quietly a row in front of the Beatles, couldn’t help but overhear the intensity of their complaints. And they were right, after all; he was their manager and ultimately responsible for their welfare. But to hear them go on like that, expressing their dissatisfaction with him, was brutal. Agonizing, he clutched the armrests with both hands and stared out the window. Peter Brown, who was in the seat next to him, noticed that Brian was “seizing with tension, and it was no
t just the Philippines.” Then, a little after five o’clock, when the pillow of thick clouds absorbed the last rays of sunlight, Vic Lewis leaned across Brown and gently shook Brian’s shoulder. “I’m sorry this happened,” he said. Brian took no notice of the agent; he was already on the edge. Brown shook his head ominously and said, “Another time, Vic.” But Lewis refused to take the hint. “No, you don’t understand,” he insisted, “it shouldn’t have happened like this. But I hope you got the money.” Several times throughout the ostensible apology, Brian muttered to Brown through clenched teeth: “Get him away from me, get him away!” Lewis was concerned—and rightly so—about a paper bag containing the box-office receipts, roughly $17,000 in cash, that were due the Beatles from the Manilla dates. “Go away, Vic,” Brown said, pushing Lewis’s hand away. Lewis stared murderously at Brown, deciding whether to hit him. All this trouble was their fault, he fumed; the least they could do was account for the money. Finally, Brian blew a gasket. “You turn to me at a time like this and talk about—money?” he screamed. A spray of saliva splattered Lewis’s cheek. That had done it. Vic reached for Brian’s collar; Brian tried to slap his hand away. Before anyone landed a punch, Neil Aspinall was out of his seat and between the two men.

  It was finally clear: touring was a nightmare, it wasn’t about performing anymore. “It was just sort of a freak show,” John complained. “The Beatles were the show and the music had nothing to do with it.”

  From the moment they landed in India, so George could buy a decent sitar, the Beatles discussed among themselves the feasibility of not touring. Ever. “Who fucking needs this?” was an oft-heard lament. They were tired of simply going through the motions, tired of acting like the “four waxwork dummies” John thought promoters could “send out… [to] satisfy the crowds.” George had already intimated as much to a reporter back in June. “I’ve increasingly become aware that there are other things in life than being a Beatle,” he observed. “I prefer to be out of the public eye anyway.” And after Shea, John had never hid his contempt for stadiums filled with screaming thirteen-year-old girls. Now there was impetus to take a harder stand. “And they decided then and there,” Neil recalled, “that they weren’t going to do America the next year.”

  The finality of the Beatles’ decision unnerved Brian. “It wasn’t like the boys to be so uncompromising with him,” says Tony Barrow. “They usually ran things like this past him, to hear his input.” Peter Brown, who thought it was still all in the talking phase, saw Brian afterward “completely distraught and inconsolable.” He remembered thinking, “He’s blowing this all out of proportion.”

  By the time they boarded the plane back to London, Brian’s mood had grown “very dark,” according to Brown, “sinking into a hideous funk.” To make matters worse, the flight was awful. Several of the Beatles got food poisoning. Everyone had been so careful about what they ate while in India that they dove into the beef Stroganoff served after takeoff, which did the real damage. John and Ringo took turns throwing up, and Brian got hives. It was a long flight, and everyone was “very disgruntled, very unhappy.”

  To Brian, it was clear from what he overheard that the end had come; that after four years of success and prosperity, his position was redundant; that the Beatles had precipitously cut him loose. “He was distraught about what he’d do if they stopped touring,” says Brown, who sat beside Brian throughout the trip. “ ‘There’s no place for me,’ he kept saying. I finally got impatient with him. He was just being a drama queen. There was so much other business for him to tend to, but it didn’t register.”

  By the time they neared their destination, Brian was reeling from nerves and alcohol. His effort to contain the anxiety had backfired. A wave of manic depression swept over him that manifested itself like a shock. Slack, almost catatonic, he was consumed by the repressed anger. He was “so sick, so shaky,” that the airline radioed ahead for an ambulance to meet the plane.

  Whatever happened, he begged Peter Brown not to send him to a hospital or an asylum; that would have been too much of a humiliation with the Beatles looking on. Instead, they transferred Brian to a limo headed to Portmerion, an eccentric little beach resort in northern Wales run by two “campy, upper-class guys” that served as a “weekend getaway” for the Liverpool gay community. Bertrand Russell lived down the hill, it had wonderful food. An extravagance of gently wooded walkways wound through the Victorian-style countryside. To Brian, it felt “rather chic and sophisticated,” the perfect place for him to contemplate the future and to mend. The hotel manifest said he would be there for a month, but that was really only for show. “Brian never stayed anywhere for a month,” Brown explains. Even ten days of rest, however, would do wonders for his badly rattled equilibrium.

  But on the fourth day, just as he had settled in comfortably, the operator put through a call from Wendy Hanson, at NEMS in London. There was a story circulating in an American magazine, she said, about John and some comments he’d made about Christianity. “You’d better get on top of this,” she warned him. The shit had hit the fan.

  Chapter 30 A Storm in a Teacup

  [I]

  Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink….” The words sounded vaguely familiar to Brian as Wendy Hanson read him a telex that had come over the wire from America. “We’re more popular than Jesus now.”

  Once he had heard the whole thing, straining through the crackles of provincial static, the source grew clearer, the March interview John had given to the Beatles’ longtime press groupie, Maureen Cleave. But it was more than an old story, Wendy explained. The night before, on July 31, Nat Weiss had gotten a call about six o’clock in the evening, informing him that Beatles records were being burned in Birmingham, Alabama. A few calls later he had determined that the makings of a firestorm had been ignited. Some of John’s comments to Cleave had been syndicated in Datebook, a cheesy American teen magazine, and sensationalized by some slippery editing. A headline slashed across the cover shouted, JOHN LENNON SAYS: “BEATLES MORE POPULAR THAN JESUS,” and inside, CHRISTIANITY WILL GO! The reaction was swift and predictable. Southern fundamentalists went apeshit over the remarks, labeling them blasphemous. A pair of Bible-thumping disc jockeys at WAQY immediately banned the playing of all Beatles records and sponsored a community bonfire fueled by the offending LPs for August 19 “to show them they cannot get away with this sort of thing.” Once the wire services picked up the story, similar “Beatle Burnings” and boycotts spread to other, mostly hardscrabble communities.

  It would come to be a personal joke among the Beatles that in order to burn their albums, one first had to buy them, “so it’s no sweat off us, mate, burn ’em if you like.” And at the outset, the religious backlash seemed absurd. KZEE, in Weatherford, Texas, “damned their songs ‘eternally’ ”; in Reno, KCBN broadcast an anti-Beatles editorial every hour; WAYX, in Waycross, Georgia, burned its entire stock of Beatles records; a Baptist minister in Cleveland threatened to revoke the membership of anyone in the congregation who played Beatles records; South Carolina’s Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan nailed several Beatles albums to a cross and set it aflame. Boycotts were announced by radio stations in Ashland and Hopkinsville, Kentucky; Dayton, Bryan, and Akron, Ohio; Dublin, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; Barnwell, South Carolina; and Corning, New York, “joining stations,” the New York Times reported, “in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, and other states” that bought into the controversy. “We were being told” through operatives in New York, says Tony Barrow, “that there were now religious zealots who were actually threatening to assassinate John Lennon if the Beatles came to Memphis,” one of the scheduled stops on the upcoming American tour.

  The Beatles, according to Paul, “didn’t really take it too seriously at all,” and he, particularly, wrote off the excitement to “hysterical low-grade American thinking.” Brian dissembled to the press, calling it “a storm in a teacup,” but beneath the icy elegance he was “deeply disturbed” by the implications an
d decided that a trip to the States was in order.

  Nat Weiss met Brian at the airport in New York. “The moment he got in the car, he asked: ‘How much will it cost to cancel the tour?’ ” Weiss’s estimation of a million dollars didn’t faze Brian. “Okay,” he said, “I’ll pay it.” Then, in the next voice and despite the tension, he got down to vital concerns. “Are there any boys around?” he asked.

  For the next two days Brian ran damage control from an office in the Paramount Building, on Broadway. Nat prepared the underlying strategy: John’s statements, as reported in Datebook, “were taken completely out of context.” Most people, he argued, ignored that John was saying “We are more popular than Jesus,” not “We are more important…” “He did not mean to boast about the Beatles’ fame,” Maureen Cleave insisted in a carefully scripted response. “John was certainly not comparing the Beatles to Christ. He was simply observing that, so weak was the state of Christianity, the Beatles was, to many people, better known.” It was highly unusual for any reporter to issue such a ringing defense of the subject of his or her story, especially going so far as to interpret his remarks. Cleave also appeared on a number of radio shows to discuss her viewpoint, at which point Brian “request[ed] emphatically no [further] comment from her.” But whatever the official reason, whatever the excuse, the situation remained volatile. Radio stations, especially in the South and the West, “were having a field day,” as George later recalled. Not that John cared. “I’d forgotten [all about it],” he said upon later reflection. “It was that unimportant—it had been and gone.” But once he had a chance to “reread the whole article,” his tune changed. “Tell them to get stuffed. I’ve got nothing to apologize for,” John snarled. As far as canceling the tour, that was fine with him. “I’d rather that than have to get up and lie. What I said stands.”