The Beatles’ lack of involvement in the film was hardly conducive to enthusiasm in recording songs for its soundtrack and subsequent album. To be sure, they regarded it as a dustbin for second-rate tracks. “It’ll do for the film,” John would say whenever a song had not come up to expectations. Even after recycling “Nowhere Man” and “All You Need Is Love,” they found they hadn’t enough material for even one album side. So George went away for an hour and wrote “Only a Northern Song,” a sarcastic reference to the publishing company and the low standard to which its product seemed to have sunk. George Martin in the end had no option but to make up a side two of Beatles songs scored as orchestral pieces by himself. For the first time ever, the Beatles had given short weight.
Surprisingly, however, Yellow Submarine turned out to be an artistic triumph. Scripted by Erich Segal—soon to hit the fiction jackpot with Love Story—it translated Beatles lyrics and Beatles allusions into a genuinely appealing and inventive fantasy about the inhabitants of a dream world called Pepperland and its oppression by killjoy invaders called Blue Meanies. Through it floated four little cartoon Beatles with the same characters and much the same childlike insouciance as in A Hard Day’s Night and Help! and actors’ voices that could easily have been mistaken for their real ones. The film opened in London on July 17. Though patronizingly reviewed and—amazingly—denied a general release, it proved popular with fans, restoring much of the goodwill that Magical Mystery Tour had lost.
At Baker Street, meanwhile, the Apple boutique was sliding into chaos. Its psychedelic mural had been scrubbed away after petitions by local tradespeople, leaving behind what was, after all, just another clothes shop, distinguished only by the ineptitude of its management. Despite their alleged boutique experience in Holland, The Fool seemed to have no idea how to run a business, and borrowed many of the choice items of stock for their own use. Shoplifting raged on, barely noticed by assistants, some of whom regularly swindled up to fifty pounds each week on top of their wages. A new head of Apple Retail, John Lydon, was desperately trying to stop the rot. Stern memos went out to The Fool, warning them to take no more garments off the premises and forbidding any further expenditure without direct authorization.
At the end of July Pete Shotton was called to a meeting at Paul’s house. “John told me, ‘We’ve decided to close the shop down. We’re tired of playing shops.’”
The Apple boutique liquidated itself on July 30 by the simple process of giving away its entire stock. A dozen policemen fought to control the riot in Baker Street as hundreds grabbed at Afghan coats, Indian beads, Art Deco ashtrays, and whatever shop fittings could be wrenched loose. The Beatles and their wives had already gone in privately for first pick, gleefully carrying off the choicer spoils with no sense that it was their own property they were plundering. To the media, Paul repeated John’s remark, with an almost Napoleonic twist: “The Beatles are tired of being shopkeepers.”
Bright, fresh, apple-green carpet now covered all five floors at 3 Savile Row. On August 11, Apple Records released four inaugural titles on the label whose logo was a perfect Granny Smith apple. Teams of photographers, designers, and typographers, not to mention fruit sellers, working in London and New York, had labored for six months, rejecting whole crops, to produce that stunningly crisp and explicit motif. When you turned the record over you saw the same apple, cut into a heart-shaped creamy half. As a final touch Alan Aldridge, London’s highest-paid pop illustrator, contributed the copyright line message in hand-drawn italic script.
The Beatles’ new single, “Hey Jude,” was accompanied, in a shiny black presentation box, by three of the talents now under their wing: Mary Hopkin, Jackie Lomax, and the Black Dyke Mills brass band. Paul had produced Mary Hopkin’s ballad “Those Were the Days,” and conducted the Black Dyke Mills band’s performance of his own composition, “Thingummybob.” George had written and produced Jackie Lomax’s song “Sour Milk Sea.” The young press officer Richard DiLello was given the job of delivering one boxed set each to the Queen at Buckingham Palace, the Queen Mother at Clarence House, Princess Margaret at Kensington Palace, and the prime minister, Harold Wilson, at 10 Downing Street.
By far the greatest augury of Apple was the Beatles’ appearance together on television, for the first time in two years, to perform “Hey Jude” on the David Frost Show. The studio audience came and stood round them as Paul, at his piano, sang the wistful wounded ballad that turns, midway, into an anthem seven minutes long. At the Abbey Road session all of the forty-piece symphony orchestra had joined in that final, mesmeric la-la chorus. So did the studio audience—and much of the country—join in tonight. It was as though the Beatles were reaffirming their oneness with their audience and with each other, instead of just beginning their drift into chaos and bitter enmity.
SEVENTEEN
“YOUR FINANCES ARE IN A MESS. APPLE IS IN A MESS”
Cynthia Lennon knew there was no hope left for her and John. The marriage survived only because John could not be bothered to end it. For months, Cyn had been little more than a prisoner in the mock-Tudor mansion at Weybridge, with its miles of untrodden pastel carpet, its unused gadgets, its antique globe cocktail cabinet from Asprey’s, its suits of armor and medieval altar pieces. By day she looked after Julian; at night she watched television, wondering if she would see her husband on it. She did yards of embroidery, and took up drawing and painting again. She slept alone in the huge master bedroom, often awakening to find only her half of the bed disturbed. She would then nerve herself to voyage through the house to look for John among the empty bottles, the scattered album sleeves, and the groggy, sprawling figures of whatever new strangers he had brought home at dawn.
Sometimes, at her embroidery when the house was quiet, Cyn would speculate on the type of woman John ought to have married. In this, as in all else about him, she faced impenetrable mystery. She could think only of Brigitte Bardot, his adolescent passion whom Cynthia herself had tried so hard to copy. And Juliette Greco, who was not at all pretty and who played the guitar and sang like a man. His unknowable strangeness used to disappear, at least, when they made love. But that had stopped happening more than a year ago.
Cyn knew John could suffer bouts of depression—desperation even—that were entirely separate from his outward success. One such trough had been in 1965, at the height of Beatlemania, when no one thought to ask why the idol of millions would write a song called Help! Another, still deeper trough came in 1967, in the months before he met the Maharishi, when John, under Dr. Timothy Leary’s influence, tried to destroy his ego by expanding it to ludicrous proportion. He would arrive at Abbey Road dressed like Sabu the Elephant Boy in a cloak, curly slippers, and a turban. At a dinner party given by Jane Asher, a guest happened to ask for an ashtray. John crawled under the table and invited her to flick her ash into his open mouth.
Now, in early ’68, Cynthia felt another trough beginning. So far as she could divine, it had something to do with student riots—the savage street warfare in Paris, West Germany, even London’s own elegant Grosvenor Square. John, in some obscure way, felt himself a part of this worldwide change from lisping hippie love and peace to brick-hurling activism. The underground looked on him as a potential leader, to join Tariq Ali and Daniel Cohn-Bendit and the others whose charisma, was akin to that of rock stars. He had even written a song called “Revolution,” but then, apparently, lost his nerve. One version said, “You can count me in”; the other said, “You can count me out.” Part of him wanted to be a pamphleteer, a rabble-rouser, a street fighter. The larger part was still buttoned into his Beatle self, still forged to a corporate smile, still fearful of what his aunt Mimi might read about him in the press.
Occasionally, summoning up her courage, Cynthia would ask him if he had found someone else. John always vehemently denied it. He still did not think in remotely that way of the Japanese woman he had met two years earlier at John Dunbar’s Indica Gallery, and who, instead of speaking, had handed him a car
d inscribed “Breathe.” And yet, as the months passed, as his restlessness grew to match the outside world’s, for some unfathomable reason he could not get Yoko Ono off his mind.
The woman whose name in English means “Ocean Child” was born seven years before John, in February 1933. On her mother Isoko’s, side, she could trace her ancestry back through a line of wealthy bankers and aristocrats to a Japanese emperor. Her father, Keisuke Ono, was a talented classical pianist who had opted to abandon his dream of turning professional to work in a bank. One of Yoko’s earliest memories was of her father spreading out her fingers to see if she might become the classical pianist he had wanted to be.
Keisuke’s career prospered, and Yoko was brought up in sheltered luxury with her younger brother, Keisuke, and sister, Setsuko. Her mother was fanatical about cleanliness, often insisting that seats should be disinfected before Yoko was allowed to sit in them. At the same time her mother encouraged Yoko to be hardy and self-sufficient. As a tiny tot, if she happened to slip and fall, the household servants had instructions not to help her but to let her get up by herself.
Yoko spent World War II in Tokyo, frequently in terror from bombing attacks, though spared the horror of the atom bomb attack on Hiroshima that completed Japan’s annihilation. Keisuke’s bank job had taken him to America frequently before the war, and in 1945, when Yoko was twelve, he decided to move his family there permanently and settled with them in the New York suburb of Scarsdale. Yoko attended the highly respectable and conventional Sarah Lawrence College, where she studied art and musical composition. At the age of eighteen, she outraged both her family and Sarah Lawrence by marrying a Japanese musician and going off to live with him in a Greenwich Village attic.
Here she fell in naturally with the crowd of avant-garde painters, sculptors, and poets who collected around the anemic figure of Andy Warhol. Warhol’s dictum that art should aim principally to surprise, or even shock, found a willing convert in Yoko. In direct lineage with his Campbell’s soup cans, she became known for works seemingly designed to stir people into bewilderment, if not outright fury, that they should be presented as art at all. One of her creations was an “eternal time clock,” showing only seconds and encased in a sound-proof Plexiglas bubble attached to a doctor’s stethoscope. Another was a book called Grapefruit, a collection of cards bearing one-line “instructional poems.”
She came to England in 1966 to attend a symposium entitled “The Destruction of Art.” Swinging London was in full bloom, and ripe for events and happenings such as she had staged in New York. She settled in London, with her second husband, an American filmmaker named Tony Cox, and had a daughter by him, Kyoko. She received the mild notoriety the era so freely bestowed by photographing naked human bottoms and, later, wrapping the Trafalgar Square lions in white canvas. She had not, however, heard a single Beatles record until that night at the Indica when John Lennon walked in on her “Unfinished Paintings and Objects Show,” and John Dunbar sent her across to sweet-talk as a likely sponsor.
Shortly after their first meeting she asked John to finance her next exhibition, at the Lisson Gallery in north London. This new Yoko Ono event was entitled “The Half Wind Show,” because everything was in halves. There was half a chair, half a table, half a bed, half a pillow, half a washbasin, and half a toothbrush. Like the apple with its two-hundred-pound price ticket, the idea delighted John’s sense of the absurd. He put up the money but recoiled in horror when Yoko suggested his name should appear in the catalog. Instead, the show was credited enigmatically to “Yoko plus Me.”
She also sent John her book, Grapefruit, with its enigmatic messages, like “Bleed” or “Paint Until You Drop Dead.” John, alternately puzzled and fascinated, kept the book at his bedside. While organizing yet another happening, entitled “Dance Event,” Yoko sent him further message cards: “Breathe” or “Dance” or “Watch the Light Until Dawn.”
John met her again at different galleries and again was unaccountably disturbed. He could not explain the disturbance: It occurred in an unused organ, his mind. It was unrelated to his inbred northern concept of servile womanhood. It was something he had only ever felt for men—for the tough, mad Liverpool Teds who could make even him defer and keep silent. Yoko Ono, quite simply, did things that John Lennon did not dare.
He began to look out for her across rooms. He would stand with her and simply listen while the little white face, in its clouds of black hair, poured forth ideas bent on only one purpose: to challenge and upset the conventional, complacent art world. “As she was talking to me, I’d get high, and the discussion would get to such a level, I’d be getting higher and higher. Then she’d leave, and I’d go back to this sort of suburbia. Then I’d meet her again, and my head would go open, like I was on an acid trip.”
He did make one outright move on Yoko in this period, though unfortunately it had about as little finesse as propositioning a groupie in his Beatles touring days. “John had invited me to the recording studio,” Yoko remembers. “He suddenly said, “You look tired. Would you like to rest?” I thought he was taking me to another room, but instead we went off to this flat—I think it belonged to Neil [Aspinall]. When we got there, Neil started to fold this sofa down into a bed. Maybe John thought we were two adults: we didn’t have to pretend. But it was so sudden, so crude, I just rejected it. I slept on the divan, I think, and John went into another room.”
He considered asking Yoko to join the pilgrimage to Rishikesh, but couldn’t pluck up courage enough to do it. Instead, she went off to Paris, feeling—as she now says—“like we’d never get started.” He wrote to her there from India—long, rambling letters like the ones he used to send to Stu Sutcliffe. Yoko replied with further message cards. “I’m a cloud,” one card said. “Watch for me in the sky.”
It was at Rishikesh, ironically, that Cynthia felt a small revival of hope for her marriage. She, at least, remained convinced that the Maharishi was a power for good and that only envious whispers were turning the Beatles against him. In India, John seemed calmer and happier than Cyn had ever known him. He began writing songs, about childhood and his mother, Julia, that Cyn could again understand. Then, on the plane back to England—still half-fearful of the Maharishi’s revenge—he told Cyn something that caused her vast astonishment. He told her that, over the years, he had not been completely faithful to her.
Back in Weybridge, their estrangement deepened. Cynthia even suggested, rather wildly, that John would be better off with someone like Yoko Ono than with her. She begged to go with him to New York for the Apple launching, but he refused. In May, he packed her away on vacation to Greece with Jennie Boyd and Magic Alex. His old school crony Pete Shotton came down to Weybridge to keep him company.
“We were just sitting round together one night.” Pete says. “John suddenly asked me, ‘Don’t you feel like having a woman around again?’ Then he said, ‘I’ve met this woman called Yoko. She’s Japanese.’ Yoko came over and John took her off to listen to his tapes. I just went to bed.
“When I got up the next morning John was sitting in the kitchen, eating boiled eggs. He said he hadn’t been to bed. Then he said, ‘Will you do us a favor? Would you get us a house?’ I said, ‘What do you want a house for?’ ‘To live in,’ he said. “With Yoko. This is it.’”
When Cyn walked in to Kenwood unexpectedly a few days later, she found John and Yoko seated together, with the curtains drawn, in a sea of dirty cups and plates. Both looked nonchalantly up at her and said: “Oh, hi…” A pair of Japanese slippers, standing neatly on an upstairs landing, opened the gentle, nearsighted girl’s eyes at long last.
The Beatles first became aware of Yoko at Abbey Road studios. They could hardly do otherwise. She did not stay, as was proper—as was womanly—in the control room. She came down onto the sacred floor of the studio, where none but Beatles and their closest male aides were allowed, and settled herself down at John’s side. Paul, George, and Ringo exchanged eloquent glances but—for the moment�
��said nothing. They could not have survived so long as Beatles without a deep tolerance of one another’s fancies and blind spots. They expected John to tire of this soon, the way he tired of everything. They tried not to notice Yoko, and referred to her obliquely as “Flavor of the Month.”
She was still there, however, as Apple grew and its divisions multiplied. She had now left Tony Cox and her daughter, Kyoko, to live with John, at Kenwood first, then in London, at Ringo Starr’s Montagu Square flat. Pete Shotton drove them around, glad to have been superseded as John’s personal assistant. Such was Yoko’s introduction to Sir Joseph Lockwood, the EMI chairman, at a boardroom lunch with all four Beatles, Neil Aspinall, and Apple executive Ron Kass. In the visitor’s book after her name, John wrote “female.” “This little white figure followed the Beatles in,” Sir Joseph said. “She sat further down the table with my assistant, but hardly said a word all through the meal. Afterward, my assistant told me she’d had a tape recorder running all the time.”
Her first night with John at Kenwood had begun an artistic partnership that was to perplex and enrage the world. When Yoko first arrived John played her all the experimental tapes he had made, knowing they were useless for Beatles albums. After the final tape Yoko said, “Let’s make one of our own.” It was only as dawn broke that they got around to first making love.
In the character that everyone believed so uninhibited and audacious, Yoko found bottomless wells of shyness and self-doubt, exacerbated by years of having to keep his mouth shut as a cuddly mop top. “He was a genius, but he had this huge inferiority complex. He was brilliant as an artist, but he didn’t think he was capable of it. Like, when someone wanted to do an exhibition of his lithographs, he was just too scared to get started on the drawings. We both took mescaline, and then he tried. I told him, ‘That’s brilliant, it’s beautiful.’ John said, ‘But it’s only a circle, like a child would do.’ I said ‘Maybe it’s childish, but it’s still beautiful.’”
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