The Love You Make

by Peter Brown

  his wife, and were not ashamed.

  —Gen. 2:25

  1

  In October of 1968 the Fleet Street gossip mill had uncovered an item that brought cries of moral indignation from kitchens and living rooms all over Great Britain: Yoko Ono was pregnant with John Lennon’s child. The public was outraged, fans as well as parents; first John had ditched his good English wife to take up with this interfering foreigner, now she was pregnant out of wedlock. To top it off, unknown to the public, the police were apparently tipped off that John and Yoko were using heavy drugs.

  The establishment came down on them with an iron fist.

  It was about eleven-thirty on the morning of October 18 that there was a knock on the door at Montague Square. John had just woken up and was trying to get himself in shape to appear at Apple for a press conference about his upcoming single. He was pale and felt sickly that morning; his hair hadn’t been washed in days. When he opened the door he was faced with Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher of the Scotland Yard Drug Enforcement Squad, along with six policemen, one policewoman for Yoko, and two drug-sniffing canines. As John and Yoko sat next to each other, this team tore through the apartment, turning it upside down as they searched for contraband. One of the police dogs sniffed out some marijuana residue in a binocular case on the mantel, and some marijuana seeds were found in a forgotten rolling machine hidden on the top of the bathroom mirror. A larger quantity of marijuana was later found in a film can inside an old camera case in a rear storage room.

  John and Yoko had already heard about Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher, who was making quite a name for himself as an antidrug zealot. Pilcher had launched a vigorous campaign against drugs in this very druggy era, and his primary targets were those he saw as the foremost purveyors of drugs to teenagers: rock stars. Mick Jagger and Keith Richards had already fallen victim to the Drug Enforcement Squad. The previous spring they had raided Keith Richards’ country house in Witterlings, known as “Redlands.” Pattie and George Harrison had spent all the day at Redlands, along with Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, art dealer Robert Fraser, and a big-time international dealer to the rock trade. Some of the guests passed the day tripping on LSD or dabbling in heroin. Pattie and George left rather hurriedly in the late afternoon when Marianne Faithfull appeared naked after a bath and wrapped herself in a tawny fur rug. Pilcher raided the house shortly after they left. Some newspaper accounts intimated that a famous rock star and his wife were at the house all day but that the Drug Squad had waited for them to leave before raiding the house. This was presumed to have been in deference to Brian Epstein’s reputation, as well as David Jacobs’ expertise as an attorney. But they were both dead now, and an open season had been declared on pop stars. John was the next righteous target.

  I was at a rehearsal hall watching Mary Hopkin prepare for an appearance on a TV show, when I received an emergency phone call from Neil. Neil said he had called the Montague Square flat and a strange man had answered the phone and said John was not there. “Who are you?” the man asked Neil. “Who the fuck are you?” Neil demanded. After a few moments John was put on the phone. “You better cancel the press conference for today,” John told him.

  “Okay, but why?”

  “Imagine your worst paranoia,” John said. “Because it’s here.”

  I set off for Montague Square at once and arrived just as John and Yoko were being formally charged with possession, with a charge of willful obstruction of search added for good measure. John, in a black army jacket, black pants, and white sneakers, was ashen-faced and frightened and chain-smoking cigarettes. Yoko was also dressed in black. They were marched out of the flat to a waiting mob of photographers, a pitiful sight as they were led to a police car, with Yoko trailing behind in the custody of a stern policewoman.

  Informed at his home that John had been taken to Marylebone Station to be booked, Paul McCartney loyally came to John’s rescue. He placed an emergency call to Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI, asking him if he could use his political influence and connections to help John. Sir Joe agreed to call Marylebone Station and advise John. By this time, John had regained his composure, and he answered Sir Joe’s phone call, “Hello! This is Sergeant Lennon, can I help you?”

  Later that afternoon John and Yoko were released, and on the way back to the apartment, John filled Neil in on the details behind the day’s events, which are told here for the first time. Actually, John and Yoko had been tipped off days before that there was a rumor they were targeted for a bust. John had decided to “clean house” and dispose of any large amounts of drugs—larger than could be disposed of at a moment’s notice. That’s why no heroin was found and also why a charge of obstructing the search was pressed; John wouldn’t let them in while he flushed the remnants down the toilet. John also told Neil that he was high on heroin when the police knocked on the door, but Yoko later denied that this was so. As far as the marijuana they found, John had no idea it was there. He had been so meticulous in his housecleaning that he even had washed the bowl they kept the marijuana in. The film can the police found hadn’t been touched in two years. It had been moved into the storage room by the chauffeur, and John didn’t have a clue it was there.

  A few hours after the harrowing arrest, Yoko almost miscarried and was confined to bed. On October 18 she was rushed to the Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital for a series of blood transfusions. John insisted on staying with her in the hospital at all times. For the first few nights he slept in the next bed in her room, but when the hospital needed the bed for a real patient, he slept on pillows on the floor. On November 21, when it became clear that Yoko would not carry to term despite all the emergency medical treatment, and that their unborn child would die inside Yoko’s womb, John asked that a Nagra tape recorder be brought to the hospital. Using a stethoscopic microphone, he recorded the embryo’s last fluttering heartbeats as it died.

  Since the dead baby was old enough to legally warrant a death certificate, they had to name it. John called it John Ono Lennon II. He ordered a tiny coffin for him and had it buried in an undisclosed location without telling anyone but Yoko. That night at the hospital he cried himself to sleep on the floor at her bedside.

  The Times treated the loss with brevity, but it was certain to note that on November 22 “Yoko Ono, the Japanese artist and friend of John Lennon and the Beatles, has had a miscarriage in Queen Charlotte’s Maternity Hospital. Mr. Lennon has said he was the father.”

  Later, on November 28, still weak and sick, Yoko appeared with John at the Marylebone Magistrates Court. They clung to each other, depressed and beaten, glassy-eyed with the pain of the world’s persecution. John pleaded guilty to possession of cannabis, with the understanding that his guilty plea would absolve Yoko of any responsibility. He was fined £150. It seemed like a small price on the surface, but in John’s and Yoko’s minds, at least, the arrest had cost them their child.

  The same day John was found guilty at Marylebone court, he and Yoko gave the finger to the establishment with the release of their first joint album, Unfinished Music No.1—Two Virgins. This was an album comprised mostly of tapes they had made together their first night in Kenwood while tripping on acid. The long, seemingly endless tracks were filled with Yoko’s peculiar screaming and John’s earsplitting feedback. But it wasn’t the album itself that was so controversial, it was the cover. When the photographs first arrived at Apple I thought it was a joke. The photos were so scandalous I locked them away in my desk drawer and didn’t share them with anyone. Weeks later John called to make sure they had been put into production. I tried to convince him that he was making a mistake, that the pictures would cause untold legal problems and general aggravation, but he wouldn’t listen.

  The photographs were taken in the basement bedroom of the Montague Square flat by a remote-control camera. The bedroom is a pigsty, a junkie’s haven of rumpled sheets, dirty clothes, newspapers, and magazines heaped all over the floor. In one picture John and Yoko are grinning ove
r their shoulders at the camera, stark naked. In the second shot, they face the camera, holding hands. Yoko is smiling coyly, her breasts sagging toward the floor, a courageous display.34 John, glassy-eyed and heroin-stoned, is grinning idiotically, so proud to be exposing to the world his shriveled, uncircumcised penis. Two virgins indeed.

  That this was the Lenny Bruce of rock and roll, that John was a mad-cap yet destructive genius, never crossed anyone’s mind at the moment. No one at Apple was amused. Paul McCartney hated the cover beyond words. He took it as a personal affront, probably just as John had planned it. When Ringo saw the photographs he just rolled his eyes and told everyone not to get upset. “It’s just John being John,” he said. When the cover was forwarded to Sir Joseph Lockwood, he refused to believe that John actually intended to manufacture an album with such a cover. He called John and Yoko and begged them to change their minds. “Why do you want to do something like this?” he asked. Yoko said it was art. “Well, then, why not show Paul in the nude? He’s so much prettier!” Sir Joe’s final decision was that although he deeply regretted turning John down, he could not allow EMI to distribute an album with such a cover—although EMI was perfectly willing to manufacture the record for them at its usual fee. The record was reluctantly released on the Apple label and distributed by Track, a maverick label owned by the rock group the Who. The album cover was wrapped in a plain brown wrapper wherever it was sold, like a piece of pornography, which is how it was treated throughout the world. In America, the New Jersey police confiscated 30,000 copies waiting for distribution in a Newark warehouse. But copies sold quicker than they could be pressed, while people everywhere wondered why John would do such an outrageous thing.

  The day the album was released, Harry Pinsker, the sober, waistcoated head of Bryce-Hamner, the Beatles’ accounting firm since the start, resigned his position as financial advisor to Apple Corp. and washed his hands of all Beatles affairs. Now that John and Yoko, in defiance of all moral authority, were involved in drugs and nudity, Pinsker no longer cared to be associated with the group. He was the first of many supporters and friends to break away. Sides were being drawn.

  2

  On December 4, 1968, the Apple staff received the following memo from George Harrison: “Hell’s Angels will be in London within the next week on the way to straighten out Czechoslovakia. There will be twelve in number, complete with black leather jackets and motorcycles. They will undoubtedly arrive at Apple, and I have heard they may try to make full use of Apple’s facilities. They may look as though they are going to do you in but are very straight and do good things, so don’t fear them or uptight them. Try to assist without neglecting your Apple business and without letting them take control of Savile Row.”

  It seemed that George’s encounter with Frisco Pete, the Hell’s Angel who had accosted him on the Haight-Ashbury street corner, was bearing nightmarish fruit. Frisco Pete had actually taken George up on his invitation to visit him in London. Fortunately, not twelve but only two Hell’s Angels arrived at Heathrow: Frisco Pete and his swastika-tattoed pal, Billy Tumbleweed. The others were refused visas because of pending criminal charges against them or because they were out of jail on probation. Frisco Pete and Billy Tumbleweed brought with them two motorcycles—which arrived collect at a shipping cost of £250, which Apple paid—and a traveling entourage of smelly, stoned, long-haired California hippies in bells and love beads. These were dubbed the California Pleasure Crew by the press office.

  The arrival of the Hell’s Angels and the California Pleasure Crew stopped all activity dead at Savile Row. The employees gathered in doorways and corners and tried not to stare as the contingent marched up the green-carpeted stairs, past the vulnerable gold records on the walls, and into the press office, where I waited with Derek Taylor.

  After a slightly horrified pause, I extended my hand to Frisco Pete and said as pleasantly as possible, “It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance, I’m sure,” and promptly left the room.

  Derek headed for his scotch and Coke. “Well,” he said hurriedly, “you are here and so are we and this is Sally who has just joined us and that is Carol who has always been with us and Richard you know and if you’d like a cup of tea then a cup of tea it is but if you would rather have a glass of beer or a bottle of wine or a scotch and Coke or a gin and tonic or a vodka and lime then that it is because it is all here and if it is not then we will come up with something but have a seat or have a cigarette or have a joint and I will be back in three minutes so please don’t go away because there is a lot to talk about and more to find out and stranger days to come!”

  Derek had matters of much greater consequence on his hands at the moment. A few months before he had slightly overstepped his responsibilities by promising a monthly magazine that he would obtain for them an original recorded message from John and Yoko. This message was to be pressed as a “flimsy,” a pliable plastic record that could be stapled into the magazine. The text of the message was to be a plea for world peace and an end to the war in Vietnam. It sounded like a stroke of genius at the moment, but throughout the fall, when the recording should have been prepared, Derek was unable to get in touch with John. We assumed that most of the time he was too drugged to come to the phone. Soon, it was the beginning of December, the magazine had been advertising the flimsy for a month, and there was still no message. The magazine’s solicitors had already been on the phone with me, threatening an expensive lawsuit.

  After Derck practically begged the household staff, John finally came to the phone. Derek explained the problem to him and the urgency of taping a simple message, even if it was over the phone. John sounded very tired and stoned. “I have a recording for you,” he told Derek. “Have somebody come here and pick it up.”

  A few days later Derek invited the magazine editors and their lawyers to 3 Savile Row. Derek asked them to sit in a row of chairs in front of huge, studio-quality speakers. He said, “This is John and Yoko’s contribution for a Christmas message,” and turned on a tape. The room was filled with the sound of a baby’s heartbeat growing fainter and weaker until it slowed to silence. Derek said, “And then the baby died.”

  The magazine people were incredulous. “This has to be some sort of monstrous joke,” one of them said.

  “No, it’s no joke,” Derek said. “It’s unique, it’s them, it’s authentic, and it’s yours for free. What can I tell you? That’s my story.”

  Apple was sued by the magazine for damages. The case was eventually settled out of court. At the time of the settlement, Derek wrote a memo that was circulated throughout Apple. It said: “If I’m to be held responsible for this, take it out of my salary. You know where to find me. Derek.”

  3

  That New Year’s Eve was rather sad. It didn’t really dawn on them that the end was coming yet, but it was obvious that things weren’t what they used to be. It had become a New Year’s Eve tradition for all of us from Liverpool to celebrate together, frequently at Cilia Black’s large terraced flat on Portland Place. These celebrations were befittingly warm, noisy affairs. In the northern tradition, just before midnight the “darkest” member of the house is sent outside with a piece of bread and coal, symbolizing food and warmth, and is then the first person let inside after midnight. The previous year Ringo had been sent out into the snowy London street and we had been having such a good time, we forgot about him for half an hour, until the sound of the doorbell was finally heard over the revelry.

  But this year the celebratory mood was subdued. Cynthia was gone. So, of course, was Brian. John and Yoko didn’t show up. Ringo was growing bored with Maureen. And now Jane Asher was missing, too. In her place was Linda Eastman, whose tenacity had triumphed in landing her a Beatle. And now George and Pattie seemed to be having a hard time of it. Rumors were rife that George had lots of girlfriends on the side, while Pattie sat home and played the good hausfrau. The young couple spent most of New Year’s Eve arguing, and at midnight Pattie was locked in the bathroom, cr
ying.

  The Beatles’ spirits were not much higher when on January 2 they assembled at a cold and dreary sound stage at the Twickenham Film Studios to begin work on a new album and documentary tentatively titled Get Back, later renamed Let It Be.

  Get Back was once again mostly Paul’s idea. Paul increasingly regretted the Beatles’ decision to stop touring. The Beatles had lost contact with their audiences, and he felt that was a mistake. His creativity was nurtured by the immediate feedback of a live audience. That public adulation was half the fun of being a musician, he felt, and his need for the sound of applause was so strong that one day, high on LSD, he stopped at a roadside pub in Bedfordshire and played the piano for the delighted patrons. Paul had decided that it was important for the Beades to “get back to their roots,” and that’s what Get Back was supposed to be.

  However, the idea of a huge tour was greeted with great reluctance by the others, and it was whittled down to having a documentary filmed of them making the album, capped by a single live performance. Paul wanted to justify the idea of one show by holding it in some grandiose location. A Tunisian amphitheater was considered but dismissed as impractical, as was holding the concert on an ocean liner in the middle of the Atlantic. John’s personal suggestion was that they hold the concert in a “lunatic asylum,” and perhaps he was right. The Beatles needed their heads examined to embark on such a project.

  An angry and tense atmosphere hung over the whole project from the start. Twickenham Studios was an awful place to be in early January. The Beatles were brought there early every morning—while they preferred to meet at night—and put under the scrutiny of two 16-mm cameras filming their every move. “We couldn’t get into it,” John remembered. “It was a dreadful, dreadful feeling in Twickenham Studios being filmed all the time. You couldn’t make music at eight in the morning, or ten, or whatever it was, with people filming you and colored lights.”