The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  The following morning everyone was introduced to the seminar’s cross section of participants, of which there were nearly three hundred—most of them strangers—as well as to the resident staff instructors. The initial sessions were devoted to the basics of meditation, which, for inveterate movers and shakers, was a difficult concept to absorb. “You just sit there and let your mind go,” John explained in his characteristic stripped-down style. Of course, for John, who dropped acid, then zoned out for hours in front of the television, that might have been a snap, but Paul found it difficult to concentrate. His head was cluttered with too many ideas and projects that competed with the spiritual process. “You spend all your first few days just trying to stop your mind dealing with your social calendar,” he recalled.

  Everything changed, however, after they received a mantra, the mystical form of incantation that guides a meditator, “like a prescription,” to a higher level of spiritual consciousness. The password or phrase was conveyed in a private ceremony on Saturday afternoon, during which the Maharishi encouraged all students to “immerse themselves completely in the energy of the soul, to make contact with it and establish a fathomless level of consciousness.” Except for a few handicapped cases, all participants took off their shoes and entered a fragrant, candlelit room, where they deposited a few stems of flowers at the guru’s slippered feet. After a brief Hindu prayer was intoned, the Maharishi whispered a handpicked mantra in the disciple’s ear, along with advice that he or she was never to share it with anyone. “It has been specially chosen to harmonize with your personal vibration,” he said. Weeks later, after the novelty had worn off, Mal Evans divulged that his mantra was I-ing, at which point everyone discovered they’d been given the same word.

  After a casual lunch on Sunday, the famous friends bounded in and out of one another’s dorm rooms, expressing their views with cautious fascination and looking for corroboration. No one was sure what to make of it all, but they were surely onto something important. John couldn’t resist comparing the Maharishi’s message to inhaling a potent drug for which “you get a sniff and you’re hooked.” Even Mick Jagger, who was a very bright, sensible, and extremely cautious young man, viewed the seminar with an enthusiastically arched eyebrow. Suggestions were made to invite Keith Richards and Brian Jones.

  About three o’clock, in the hallway, the infernal pay phone started to ring. Again. No one paid it any attention, thinking it would eventually stop. After an interminably long and noisy stretch, however, Jane Asher excused herself to answer it.

  “Jane,” the voice on the other end said, “it’s Peter Brown. Could you find Paul and put him on the phone?”

  Peter Brown: The last thing Paul wanted that day was to speak with anyone from NEMS, but if there was Beatles business that needed immediate attention, then he was the only one suited to take care of it. As it turned out, however, this was business of the kind that even Paul was incapable of processing.

  Brian had so looked forward to the weekend “divertissement” that he skipped the Beatles’ send-off to Wales and headed straight for Sussex in his precious Bentley convertible. There were too many last-minute details that required his attention—an alluring dinner menu, drugs, recreation, discreet sleeping arrangements. The invitees were young, rugged East Londoners and naive, which intrigued him. Things could get rough, which intrigued him even more, although it would be difficult explaining that to Geoffrey Ellis, who, by Peter Brown’s definition, was “something of a tight ass.” But when the boys canceled at the last minute, Brian lapsed into one of his depressions. Peter says he could tell instantly upon his arrival that Brian was in a “dark mood.” He was “drinking and stoned, very disappointed that there wasn’t going to be any action.” Even so, they all sat down to a very civilized dinner, a leg of lamb and root vegetables, served by the staff. “Many bottles of wine” were consumed, along with brandy after the meal. It didn’t take long until the three men found themselves “sitting there, looking at each other with boredom.” About ten, after calling around London trying to drum up other action, Brian announced that he was going for a drive. “Don’t worry about me,” Brian assured them. “Go to bed. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Brown suspects that Brian drove back to London, stopped off at home, made a few calls, then cruised around the city’s usual gay haunts. He obviously found something to amuse him, because on Saturday he didn’t wake up until after five in the afternoon. “Brian called us just after that,” Brown recalls. “Clearly, he’d just woken up, because the sleeping pills, those infernal Tuinals, were still in his system and he was slurring his words.”

  “I’m sorry for fucking up the weekend,” he apologized. “I’ll try and come back later.”

  Brown, sensing that Brian wasn’t in any condition to drive, suggested that he take the train—a forty-minute trip to Lewes Station, where someone on the staff would pick him up. But Brian never showed up—and never called.

  On Sunday, Brian’s housekeepers—Antonio and Maria Garcia—grew concerned that the Bentley, which had been parked at the curb late Friday evening upon its return from Kingsley Hill, hadn’t been moved. They called Joanne Newfield, who thought nothing of the matter. “It wasn’t unusual for Brian to go in his room and stay there and take some pills and… check out for twenty-four hours,” she thought. Indulgently, she told them not to worry and thanked them for the call. After lunch with her mother, however, Joanne decided to drive over to Chapel Street “just to make sure that everything was okay.”

  When she arrived, about twelve-thirty, the house was immaculate and still. There were no telltale signs of an orgy or a rowdy boys’ party. Joanne summoned Antonio from the basement staff quarters; together, they went upstairs and knocked on Brian’s bedroom door: no answer. That wasn’t unusual, either, but when Joanne couldn’t rouse her boss on the intercom, she became alarmed. The intercom was in the phone, but you didn’t have to lift the receiver to speak into it. Even when Brian was completely out of it, he usually managed a few choice words. Apologetic to a fault, Joanne called Kingsley Hill and eventually reached Peter Brown, who had gone to the Merry Harrier pub in Cabbage for a drink before lunch.

  “I’m going to have [Antonio] break the doors down,” Joanne sighed.

  Brown, however, pleaded with her to wait. They’d broken down doors before, which only made Brian furious. Instead, he suggested that she contact Brian’s doctor, Norman Cowan, whose specialty was keeping these indiscretions quiet. But Cowan was away for the weekend, so she called Peter’s doctor, John Gallway, a young gay man who would know how to deal with Brian once they got him up and around.

  Throughout the unendurable wait for Gallway’s arrival, Joanne and Antonio continued to beat on Brian’s door. Joanne also called Alistair Taylor, who only half an hour earlier had gotten off a plane from California, where, at Brian’s instructions, he’d gone to walk Cream through a visa problem at the American embassy. Frantic, she explained how Brian refused to answer his door. Taylor, a veteran of two previous suicide false alarms, felt no misgiving. (Once, in 1966, Brian had called him “to say goodbye.” A heartsick Taylor rushed right over, only to find him sitting up in bed, reading, with an annoyed look on his face: “What do you want?”) “So? What’s new?” he responded now to Joanne. Alistair assured her there was nothing to worry about, but Joanne begged him to hurry over. “Oh, Joanne, I’ve been flying all night!” Besides, he’d “drank the Pan Am 707 dry on the flight back” with Cream, he was out of uniform (in sandals, a denim shirt, and jeans), and he lived in Clapham, a neighborhood quite a ways out of town. Still, there was something in her voice that disturbed him. “All right,” he relented. “As soon as I can get a cab.”

  John Gallway arrived at Chapel Street at 2:45, a few minutes before Alistair, and spoke on the phone briefly with Peter Brown, who decided it was time to break down the door. Gallway and Antonio put their shoulders into the task. Alistair Taylor rushed up the stairs just as he “heard the door give.”

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p; “Just wait outside,” Gallway advised Joanne as he entered the darkened chamber, but Joanne didn’t want to wait and stood inside the doorway of the outer dressing room, holding her breath. Directly in front of her, she could see Brian’s tiny pajamaed figure in shadow, lying eerily on his side. Blood streamed from his nose. Nothing stirred; the room was perfectly still. As Joanne remembered it, Gallway examined Brian for a few minutes—although he probably didn’t take more than a few seconds—and when he turned back to her she noticed that all the blood had drained out of his face.

  “Is there any brandy in the house?” he asked Antonio. “I think we should all go down to the study and have some brandy.”

  Gallway walked past Joanne, who was rigid, “in total shock,” and picked up the phone receiver, which was dangling off a table. “He’s lying on the bed,” the doctor told Peter Brown, “and he’s gone.”

  Alistair Taylor walked slowly into Brian’s room and lightly, mournfully, touched Brian on the shoulder while Antonio’s wife, Maria, sobbed in the hall. Afterward, everyone assembled in the study to gather their thoughts. “It was some time before we called the police,” Joanne remembered, “because we wanted to make sure that things were okay in the house—that there were no substances for them to find.” They combed through Brian’s study, tidying up this and that, and waited for David Jacobs, Brian’s lawyer, who was already on his way, via fast train, from Brighton.

  Alistair said: “We’ve got to get hold of Clive before Queenie hears about this on the radio.” But no one answered the phone at Clive’s house. In the interim, the doorbell rang. Thinking it was the police, Taylor answered without looking through the peephole and came face-to-face with Mike Housego of the Daily Sketch. “What are you doing here on a Sunday?” the reporter wondered. “Oh, you know what Brian’s like,” Taylor responded too quickly. He looked past Housego and wondered whether the garage door was shut or if he could see the Bentley in its space. “Oh, that’s a bit weird,” said Housego. “We heard he’s ill.” “Nooooo! He’s fine. He’s got a bit of a headache. That’s why he’s gone out.”

  A few minutes later another reporter called. The police must have passed the word to them, Taylor figured, making it more urgent than ever to contact Clive Epstein. “This is going to break,” he told Joanne. “The press aren’t stupid. If Queenie hears it over the air, we are in trouble.”

  He finally reached Clive at home and broke the news. “There’s been an accident,” Alistair remembers telling him. “Oh—not… not Brian,” his brother stammered. “Is it bad?” Alistair hesitated. “Clive, he’s dead.” Clive Epstein’s reaction was unforgettable. “There was a big scream—a horrendous scream. I’ll never forget it to my dying day.” Joanne Newfield could hear it over the line, from across the room.

  Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis left Kingsley Hill immediately for London, with stolid Geoffrey behind the wheel, racing the car like a madman along the Eastbourne Road. First, however, Brown had placed a call to David Jacobs at his country house in Hove—it was presumed that Jacobs would know how best to deal with the police—then followed it with the call to Bangor. “The Beatles had to be told before anyone else, and I didn’t want them to be told by the press,” Brown recalls. “They had to be protected. The press knew where they were; there were photographers in Bangor. I thought they should all come back to their guarded situations in London as soon as possible.”

  “I’m sorry, but I’m afraid I’ve got bad news,” Brown told Paul when he came on the phone. “Brian has died.” Brown thought Paul’s reaction to the news of Brian’s death was “noncommittal” but says, “Then I suppose he was stunned. Paul never said how terrible a blow it was or how sorry he felt. It must have been confusing, following, as it did, two days of purging the spirit of material energy.” The boys had known little or nothing about the state of Brian’s health or the extent of his emotional unraveling. Later, at a hastily arranged press conference on the Bangor campus, Paul managed to express the group’s reaction: “This is a terrible shock. I am terribly upset.” But in the “confusion and disbelief” that followed the phone call, there was only numbness.

  What could they do? Who would they turn to for advice? For the moment, Paul recalled, the Beatles “traipsed off to the Maharishi,” who was holding court in his inner sanctum amid piles of wilting flowers. “Our friend’s dead,” they told him. “How do we handle this?” Because Hindu theology dictates that mortals not focus on death but in the transcendence of the spirit—the soul’s moving on to another plane—the Maharishi disdained any comments about Brian’s physical death. Instead, as Ringo remembered, he advised them not to try holding on to Brian, “to love him and let him go,” so that his soul could continue on its upward journey. “You have to grieve for him and love him, and now you send him on his way.”

  John put it into layman’s terms when he faced a crush of agitated reporters sometime later that afternoon. “Well, Brian is just passing into the next phase,” he told the stunned press corps, which had never heard such mumbo jumbo. “His spirit is still around and always will be. It’s a physical memory we have of him, and as men we will build on that memory.” But deep down, John remembered thinking: “We were in trouble then.” True, Brian’s business edge had been dulled badly by his drug addiction and demons. But he still provided some glue and, in a scene increasingly populated with Magic Alex types and vampires, he could provide some ballast. John admitted feeling “scared” about the Beatles’ ability to function, to remain together as a group, without Epstein’s instinct and finesse. Indeed, as soon as the news of his death had struck home, John thought, “We’ve fuckin’ had it.”

  Eventually, the press descended on Chapel Street like jackals. Alistair Taylor, dog-tired and “in shock,” remembers staying long enough to “fend off the first wave.” He refused to let anyone in, but finally even Taylor couldn’t handle the relentless crowd on the sidewalk. “There was nothing more I could do,” he recalls. Slipping out the back, he went around the corner to a pub whose name he cannot recall. Mike Housego was at a table by the window, nursing a pint. “And I poured my heart out to Mike. Everything I ever felt about Brian came pouring out. Everything!” The reporter just sat and listened, without taking out his notepad. Finally, Alistair asked: “Are you going to print all that, Mike?” Housego shook his head mournfully. “I never asked you to talk,” he said softly. “That’s not an interview, mate.” And not a word of it has ever appeared.

  Nothing about the death had been heard backstage at the Saville Theatre, where at 7:30 that night the latest entry of “Brian Epstein Presents…” was playing before a packed house. Jimi Hendrix was headlining, with the Crazy World of Arthur Brown and Keith West’s Tomorrow as the opening acts, and collectively the combos were burning up the place—literally. Arthur Brown had been electrifying crowds by setting his hair on fire during his finale. And as for the headliner, there was no shortage of excitement.

  “We did the first show, which was really great,” recalls Tony Bramwell, “but I noticed that Brian hadn’t taken his box yet.” He’d usually sit in the royal box with friends, and between sets he’d make a rather grand entrance to have drinks with the artists at a bar at the side of the stage.

  They were just about to start the second performance and were letting the audience in when there was a phone call backstage saying that Brian had been found dead. “We thought it wouldn’t be right to carry on with the show,” Bramwell says with typical understatement, “so Eric Burdon, who had stopped by to watch Jimi, went out into the street and told the crowd that the show was canceled, Brian Epstein was dead.” Brian’s name was up there on the marquee. He’d been a fixture on such shows as Juke Box Jury and Desert Island Discs, a recognizable part of the scene. In no small way, he’d revitalized the British pop music scene, giving rock ’n roll its most identifiable sound since Elvis Presley hit the turntables. All of this registered as the news of his death rippled along the line outside. Tony Bramwell says the crowd’s collective r
esponse was palpable. “The kids put their heads down and walked off in absolute silence.”

  All evidence indicates an accidental overdose. His bedroom door had been locked from the inside, and pages of correspondence and amateur poetry lay scattered about the floor. The police recovered seventeen bottles of assorted pills in the bedroom, plus a residue of brandy shellacked the bowl of a crystal snifter found on his night table. “I believe it was an accident,” George Harrison concluded. “In those days everybody was topping themselves accidentally by taking uppers and/or amphetamine and alcohol—loads of whiskey or brandy and uppers… and that’s the kind of thing that Brian did.” Paul, who heard the rumors of “very sinister circumstances,” also believed “it was a drink-and-sleeping-pills overdose.”* Suicide—threatened before—seemed out of the question. Says Alistair Taylor vehemently, “His father, Harry, had died only six weeks before, and Brian would never have done that to Queenie—not in a million years, no matter how down he was. It just wasn’t in the man.”

  What was in the man, however, was enough of a substance called carbrital to kill a small horse. Norman Cowan had prescribed the drug on two occasions for Brian, along with Librium and Tryptizol, issuing large amounts of pills, he told the coroner, “because he was off on holiday and Epstein needed drugs to tide him over.” It was impossible not to be suspicious, and the authorities were. “Our main concern was to convince the coroner that it was an overdose and not a suicide,” recalls Peter Brown, who starred in the witness box at the inquest on the morning of September 9, 1967. Brown and Norman Cowan also planned “very carefully” to claim Brian’s body immediately upon delivery of the official verdict and have the funeral the same day. To avoid a media circus in Liverpool, they had arranged to transport the enameled black coffin there directly by limousine and to bury Brian before sunset, as Jewish custom dictates, before the press expected the funeral to have taken place. Everyone else would come by train, except for the Beatles, who had been asked not to attend for fear they would attract a large crowd. Brian Epstein was all of thirty-two years old. On a lovely summer night, he finally got the one thing that had always eluded him: eternal peace.