The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  Finally, John and George made the decision to leave the ashram. It had to be immediately, Alex insisted; otherwise, the Maharishi might send down some “black magic” upon them. When they awoke early the next morning, cars were already waiting outside the compound gates. Alex had gone into Dehra Dun at the crack of dawn to hire several drivers to take the Beatles to Delhi. The last thing he wanted was for the Maharishi to have an opportunity to talk John and George into staying.

  Jenny Boyd, who reluctantly left with her sister and brother-in-law, remembered seeing the Maharishi standing helplessly, looking small and quite forlorn, at the gates to the ashram, as they all filed past with their luggage. “Wait,” she recalled him pleading. “Talk to me.”

  It seemed pointless for them to hash out the accusations with the Maharishi. He would only deny them. And George was already feeling ashamed about the way they were leaving things. He already suspected they’d been set up by Alexis Mardas. (Though Peter Brown insists that some months later “John told me he knew for a fact that Maharishi had fucked that young girl.”) Why? the Maharishi repeatedly implored. A wave of belligerence swept over John, who responded: “If you’re so cosmically conscious, as you claim, then you should know why we’re leaving.”

  With those words, the two remaining Beatles walked out of the ashram at Rishikesh—and out of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s life forever.

  But John Lennon was not finished with the Maharishi. On the way back to Delhi, in a bruised little car that kept breaking down every few miles, he began work on a vengeful song titled “Maharishi.” He sang it for George after a long stretch of downtime in which the car developed a flat tire and the driver disappeared, ostensibly to seek out a spare. It had a pungent, assertive melody that gave form to inexplicable feelings. “Maharishi, what have you done…” George understood where it came from but was appalled by the undisguised lyric. “You can’t say that, it’s ridiculous,” he warned John. There was no reason why the Beatles should give the Maharishi a public flogging. It would ruin the man, George argued. It was completely inappropriate, nothing he wanted to be associated with. Instead, George proposed that John replace the Maharishi’s name with Sexy Sadie. Disappointed at first, John tried rearranging the names and laughed at the absurdity. Sexy Sadie—it was pretty funny, he admitted; it would be their private joke. “Sexy Sadie, what have you done… ”

  Although John clearly intended the song to distract him from the sorry events of the past twenty-four hours, as well as the obvious marriage difficulties, his attention began to drift as they arrived at the Delhi airport. He was already brooding over issues that would have to be addressed once they got home. George had said his good-byes in the car; he and Pattie were headed south, to Madras, for two weeks, where he planned to make an appearance in a documentary film about Ravi Shankar. And now, without George’s mediating influence, the tension between John and Cynthia filled the interminable silences.

  By the time the plane took off for London, John could endure it no more. He began drinking scotch and Coke—his first hard liquor in several months. And the liquor loosened his tongue in ways not even he had foreseen. Confessions poured forth: John decided to reveal ten years’ worth of infidelities, every squalid fuck he’d experienced on the road, including but not limited to intimate friends of theirs. Cynthia didn’t want to hear about it; however, John insisted. “But you’ve got to bloody hear it, Cyn,” he was reported to have said. Protests were useless. Nothing Cynthia said, no amount of tears, could staunch the flow of indiscretions. Joan Baez, Ida Holly, Maureen Cleave—John ticked off the names as if they were Beatles songs. No opportunity to inflict pain, no matter how insignificant, went unseized. Liverpool, Hamburg, London, America, Australia, Japan, France—he claimed to have screwed his way around the globe. Hundreds, thousands, of girls; he’d lost count a long time ago. It was a cruel, horrible way to put his wife on notice, but John, in his rage, saw no other way of doing it. Later Cynthia wrote: “I never dreamed that he had been unfaithful to me during our married life,” but that denial is so much blather. Whatever the case, she undoubtedly understood the indiscreet confession: her marriage, as everyone else knew, was teetering on the edge of collapse. Still, she swallowed her outrage and continued to play the dutiful wife. As if to underscore his disaffection, two weeks after they returned home, John sent Cynthia on a fateful vacation to Greece.

  [IV]

  Readers who leafed through the London dailies on the morning of April 20, 1968, stopped paging as they came upon a peculiar-looking advertisement. It was so outlandish, so un-British, that it was impossible to ignore. Most people who saw it and read through the copy couldn’t help but grin abstractedly as they realized who was behind the shenanigan. THIS MAN HAS TALENT, the banner read. Underneath it sat a bespectacled little busker in a pegged suit and bowler hat (Alistair Taylor, pressed into the role over strong objections) with a bass drum strapped to his back, a harmonica poised at his mouth, a litter of instruments, a reel-to-reel tape recorder, a washboard, and other musical paraphernalia scattered around his feet, bent over a guitar and singing into a microphone: a one-man band. “One day he sang his songs to a tape recorder (borrowed from a man next door),” the ad continued. “In his neatest handwriting he wrote an explanatory note (giving his name and address) and, remembering to enclose a picture of himself, sent the tape, letter, and photograph to apple music, 94 Baker Street, London, W.1. If you were thinking of doing the same thing yourself—do it now! This man now owns a Bentley!”

  It had the Beatles’ fingerprints all over it. Only two weeks after arriving back from India, they launched Apple with their customary fireworks, in a way that would demand instant worldwide attention. They had kicked around ideas for over a week, trying to decide how to best express the company’s philosophy and make the proper splash at the same time. “We want to help people, but without doing it like a charity,” explained Paul, whose brainstorm produced the ad. “We’re in the happy position of not needing any more money, so for the first time the bosses aren’t in it for a profit. If you come to me and say, ‘I’ve had such-and-such a dream,’ I’ll say to you: ‘Go away and do it.’ ” Apple would cut a check to underwrite the project, just like that.

  This announcement touched off a gold rush. The promise of a blank check and the Beatles was too much for anyone to resist, whether they had talent or not. “Overnight, we were swamped with calls and kids who wandered in, demanding an audition,” says Alistair Taylor. “Everyone tried to get through the door in the next couple of weeks.” Worthy artists made their pitch—but so did schemers and crackpots. George, the resident skeptic, called it “madness” and was not too far off the mark. “By the time I came back [from India],” he recalled, “they’d opened the offices in Wigmore Street. I went in… and there were rooms full of lunatics, people throwing I Ching [John had hired a fortune-teller named Caleb who advised him on business matters based on the readings] and all kinds of hangers-on trying to get a gig.” Through it all, the spirit of peace and love abounded—a spirit dedicated to the notion that what goes around comes around. Kids wearing loose-fitting flowered shirts and wide bell-bottoms, with strings of beads around their neck, were camped out, smoking dope and grooving on the vibes. It all seemed positively blissful, but their ultimate objective only betrayed the greed and sloth emblematic of the hippie movement. Everyone’s heart was in the right place, George supposed, but “basically, it was chaos.”

  In fact, among the Beatles, Apple was anything but a collective affair. George, by choice, “had very little to do” with the company. “I hate it,” he confided to Derek Taylor on his first day back from India. He’d considered it a “ridiculous” idea from the start and kept himself otherwise preoccupied, scoring a small independent film called Wonderwall and communing with the spiritual world. As for Ringo, business wasn’t his forte. He was happy to be included in the creative sessions, but as for decision making, whatever the others wanted was fine by Rings. “Paul, for the longest time, was
Apple,” says Peter Brown. “It was his baby. He was coming in every day, and decisions were made by either Neil or me going to him and saying, ‘Do you approve?’ ‘Yes.’ Okay, it was done. Paul oversaw everything, from building the offices to designing the layouts.” Technically, George and John were also directors of the company and, therefore, necessary to any major decisions, but Brown, as much as possible, avoided getting either one of them involved. “John wouldn’t give me an answer,” he says, “and George would give me a runaround.”

  For several months the structure established at Apple was the structure Paul devised. And for the most part, it was a pretty efficient and effective one. The company was run like Decca and EMI, but more relaxed and communal, which is how all record companies were run thereafter. Paul had the young staff hopping—one employee said that “he’d stay there all day and he’d go around checking on things, little weird things, like was there toilet paper in the bathrooms”—but feeling that they were an essential part of the show. Without John hanging over his shoulder, Paul had complete control.

  Which only made things worse for John. By all accounts, John had hit an all-time low. “John was in a rage because God had forsaken him,” George recalled. “Then he went and completely reversed himself. He turned from being positive to being totally negative.” According to Pete Shotton, who was spending time with John at Weybridge, there was an overriding feeling of humiliation—from the Maharishi, from the Apple Boutique shambles, from his deteriorating marriage, from what he felt was his shrinking position in the Beatles. “He was more fucked up than I’d even seen him,” Shotton remembers. “It seemed like everything was going to the dogs. He’d been desperately grasping [at] straws, as far as I was concerned, and there wasn’t even a straw there.” The nonstop drug-taking had left John hollowed-out. Stoned and cranky during his brief outings to the Apple office, he growled at the inexperienced young staff, firing off obscenities at the most insignificant provocation. Otherwise, he just checked out. At a London party on April 18 for the launch of Bell Records, an independent pop label, John arrived already higher than a kite and drank so much champagne that he passed out at the table and had to be carried to his car.

  Something had to give. It came as a welcome relief that John and Paul, along with Neil Aspinall, planned a quick trip to New York on May 11, where several press events had been scheduled to announce Apple Records in the States. Friends agreed that getting John away might do him a world of good; being alone, with just Paul to steady him, might have a calming influence. But Paul was grappling with his own set of anxieties. “We wanted a grand launch,” Paul said, “but I had a strange feeling and was very nervous.” Drugs, he later admitted, may have been at the root of his problem; there was a lot of dope-smoking before takeoff and even during the transatlantic flight. But Jane Asher also helped spike Paul’s mood. The grudging engagement between Beatle and actress had been ticklish at best. But since traveling together in India and a subsequent ten-day trip to Scotland, Jane’s eccentricities rankled. Paul was having serious second thoughts about the relationship, which had reached a kind of critical, now-or-never stage.

  Between John’s attitude and Paul’s paranoia, the Beatles were a PR nightmare. “It was a mad, bad week in New York,” recalled Derek Taylor, who met the two Beatles there to chaperone a round of press conferences, followed by interviews. Taylor had fashioned himself into a debonair drug aficionado since the Beatles first dosed him at Brian Epstein’s housewarming party, and now he and John gorged themselves on speed and a “mild and extremely benign hallucinogen” called Purple Holiday, courtesy of their New York chauffeur. The effect of it came through in the interviews. John was gallingly withdrawn and dismissive, Paul unusually distracted—which made them come off as two rich, snooty rock stars peddling another product.

  Once two major press conferences and a television appearance were stumblingly completed, John and Paul headed to yet another press party. There the Beatles worked the room, performing their duties with élan. At one point Paul noticed a woman taking photographs of the crowd. In fact, he’d seen her earlier that afternoon, at the Americana function, where she’d also caught his eye. He remembered her from Brian’s house, when she’d squatted at his feet and shot two rolls of close-ups, and the allure he experienced then hadn’t abated.

  “He said, ‘We’re leaving, give me your number,’ ” Linda Eastman recalled, “and I remember writing it on a check.” By the time she got home that night, he’d already called. There was no time for a drink or an informal walk. He and John were leaving the next afternoon, which made the rest of their schedule airtight. Instead, he invited her to join them in a limo for the ride out to the airport. “There was something awfully steamy going on in that car,” recalls Nat Weiss, another passenger to Kennedy, “a lot of heavy checking out, a lot of body heat. It was palpable; you could feel it.” There had always been hordes of available women about, but this was the first time, according to Weiss, that he sensed something more than a quick hustle. “Paul’s whole demeanor—that cocky defensive shield he wore like armor—melted away and, for a moment, he seemed fairly human.”

  Despite later claims that he “didn’t think she was particularly attractive” and “[a] bit too tweedy,” John couldn’t have been surprised by Paul’s interest in Linda Eastman. She was certainly his type—blond, “high-breasted and extremely attractive,” a bit aloof—and she had a pedigree that impressed. He also knew Paul’s relationship with Jane Asher was flagging. The irony of it couldn’t have been lost on John that he and Paul—increasingly different in so many ways—were on the same timetable with regard to their changing relationships.

  On the plane ride home, they talked about Ron Kass, a man they’d met in New York. Kass had been the top executive for Liberty Records in Europe, serving at the company’s outpost in Switzerland, and he’d come highly recommended by people at Capitol. “He was a fairly hip person, and very sophisticated,” recalls Peter Brown, “he’d been around. The key for us, however, was that he was an American who lived in Europe and understood the international complications of the music business.” After Paul and John had given Kass the once-over, the decision was made to provide him with the tools necessary to launch Apple Records. Anyone who thought the Beatles would relinquish creative control to an outsider was, however, seriously mistaken. This very point was demonstrated immediately upon their return, when Paul dined with Twiggy Lawson, who urged him to check out the recent winner of the talent-discovery TV show, Opportunity Knocks, a seventeen-year-old chanteuse named Mary Hopkin. Paul tuned in the next week to watch the girl defend the title and was enchanted by her voice. Besides, he recalled, “she looked very pretty, young girl, blonde, long hair, so I thought, Okay. Quite right. We should sign her for Apple, maybe make an interesting record with her.”

  That was the way the process would work at Apple: see it, hear it, sign it. There would be none of the drawn-out, arduous auditions that had disappointed the Beatles in the early sixties, none of the nitsy policy battles with label functionaries and bean counters. Auditions were “a drag,” as the boys saw them. Record executives—“a drag.” Mazy contracts—“a serious drag.” Expedience became the highest priority. In fact, no sooner had Peter Asher come on board at the end of May than he officially signed Apple’s first outside artist, a lanky, twenty-year-old folkie named James Taylor. “He is an American song writer and singer who is extremely good,” Asher explained with typical understatement, in a June 1 memo to Ron Kass. “We intend to start recording him 20th June…. He is ready to discuss contracts and things as soon as you are.” An introduction, a recording date, contract discussions—that was Apple expedience in all its glory.

  George, too, was busy with his own Apple project: recording an album with northern guitar swordsman Jackie Lomax, with whom he had developed an enthusiastic relationship. A lot of theorizing about music, about playing, went into their daily rehearsals, long unconscious jams exploring new interpretations and techniques. Paul
, a prodigious innovator in his own right, might have satisfied George’s hunger when it came to musicianship, but Paul had never given him the time of day; like an unfulfilling marriage, George had to get it from someone else. “It all came as a shock, with the freedom Apple brought, when the Beatles started playing with other musicians and finding out what other people did,” recalls Tony Bramwell. “They had never played with anyone [outside of the other Beatles], they’d never jammed. When George prepared his Jackie Lomax record, he suddenly found himself playing with other musicians—and loved it. He discovered there was another world outside of the Beatles, and it eventually drove a wedge between the boys.”

  Not that by now animus or infighting would require a great deal of effort. Record production, movies, music publishing, clothing boutiques, electronics… “They could never agree on anything,” Bramwell says. “Ego started becoming more important than success. John automatically blackballed any of Paul’s suggestions, Paul killed George’s, George rejected John’s. I can’t remember one decision that was unanimous or even near-unanimous.” Even their forthcoming recording sessions for a new album, drawn from the “tons of songs” written in Rishikesh, produced fresh tensions, riven with indecision. Each of the Beatles’ chief writers—John, Paul, and more recently George—lobbied fiercely for his personal efforts, extra-sensitive that one of the others’ might upstage his individual contributions. “The Beatles were getting real tense with each other,” said John, who pegged Paul and George as being “resentful” with regard to his songs.

  The resentment might have been coming from a different place. With his marital problems still unsettled and Cynthia gallivanting around Greece, drugs continued to govern John’s fitful moods. He dosed himself continuously with LSD, tweaking its random effect with any spare pills he happened to find lying around the house. In the right company, it plunged John into a deep, unfathomable trance that altered between indecipherable rambling and deadpan silences. At Weybridge, into which Pete Shotton had moved in order to keep his friend company, he stayed up nights, tripping and battling wave after wave of incendiary rage. One night, after the usual snack of hallucinogens, Shotton says he noticed John moving his arms around very slowly in a circle. “I said, ‘What are you doing?’ ” recalls Pete, “but John couldn’t explain it. He said, ‘I can’t stop. There’s something making me do this. I can’t help myself.’ ” Tears followed, uncontrollable rivers of tears, intermingled with hideous laughter. When Shotton tried to comfort him, John resisted. “I’m not crying,” he insisted peevishly, wiping his eyes with the back of a hand. Suddenly John declared that he was Jesus Christ, back from the grave. “He was convinced of it,” Pete recalls, “saying… ‘This is it, at last—I know who I am.’ ” The next day the Messiah convened an emergency meeting at Apple to announce his identity to the other Beatles. Unimpressed, they said: “Yeah, all right then. What shall we do now?” After someone suggested lunch, the matter was dropped.