Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Paul thanked the author, and continued his search for a suitable movie vehicle.

  First the Beatles were contracted to play a series of concerts, their last as it turned out. What became their farewell tour began on 24 June 1966, when the band played three shows in Germany. Before they did so, Brian Epstein - intent on avoiding what his assistant Peter Brown describes as ‘general embarrassment’ - dealt with Hamburg barmaid Erika Wohlers’ claim to have given birth to Paul’s illegitimate daughter. Erika had recently married, becoming Erika Hübers, but her daughter Bettina, now three, was nevertheless still living in care. Erika claims that the German Youth Welfare Office had issued an arrest warrant for Paul that would have made his life difficult had he come back to Germany before reaching a settlement with her. ‘He would have been arrested if he stepped foot on German soil again.’ As a result, Erika says that in January 1966 a lawyer came to her home, explained that he represented McCartney, and made her a cash offer.

  On the instructions of the office in England, he should offer us a so-called ‘hush-money’ [payment] amounting to 21,000 Deutschmarks, 21 so that neither I nor my husband would ‘go public’. The lawyer explained that the Beatles were coming to Germany in July 1966 and that my daughter Bettina would receive more money, money which would be held in trust until her eighteenth birthday.

  Erika agreed to the deal, receiving 10,000 DM on signature, the balance payable when the Beatles left Germany. A further 30,000 DM was placed in trust for Bettina. No word of this story appeared in the press during the Beatles’ valedictory tour of Germany.

  Though the Hamburg barmaid had been mollified for now, the Beatles’ progress around the world that summer was dogged with trouble. From Germany, the boys flew to Japan where they had been controversially booked to play the Nippon Budokan Hall, a Tokyo auditorium with special, spiritual status because of its association with the martial arts. Many Japanese considered it a desecration to stage a pop concert there. NEMS had received death threats in advance of the tour, and when the Beatles arrived in Tokyo there were street protests, members of the public holding up signs that read BEATLES GO HOME. The authorities sequestered the band inside the Tokyo Hilton prior to the show for fear they might be assassinated, stopping the boys when they tried to sneak outside. At least the Beatles had some dope to smoke. Peter Brown claims they were carrying a supply on tour, which was reckless. The Japanese took a hard line on drug use. Luckily, they weren’t caught.

  This difficult world tour became seriously unpleasant when the Beatles flew from Tokyo to the Philippines to play two stadium concerts in Manila. Led by President Ferdinand Marcos, a former army officer with a murky past, the Philippines was a corrupt police state bolstered by the US as a strategic Cold War ally in South East Asia. With US patronage, Marcos was shaping up to be a fully-fledged dictator, while his young wife, Imelda, lived like a queen. Imelda Marcos was 27 in 1966, her husband a relatively young despot of 48, ‘so we were still attuned, we were close enough in age to be aware and sensitive and admirers of the Beadles’, says the former First Lady, mispronouncing the band’s name. Indeed, Mrs Marcos and her husband owned all the Beadles’ records and very much wanted to meet the group when they came to their country, as did most of the government, which is to say Ferdinand’s political and military cronies. An invitation had already been extended to visit the First Family at their palace. Brian received the invitation in Japan, and declined. The boys had grown to loathe civic receptions of this type. Unfortunately, nobody in the Philippines was brave enough to tell Imelda that the Beatles had turned her down.

  A large number of Filipinos gathered to greet the band at Manila Airport on Sunday 3 July 1966, but the Beatles weren’t permitted to meet their fans. Instead the boys were taken off the plane by police and driven to Manila Harbour, where they were put on a boat. ‘We’ve no idea why they took us to the boat,’ George Harrison said in an interview for the Beatles’ Anthology. ‘I still don’t know to this day.’ In her first interview about the Beatles’ visit to her country, Mrs Marcos says the boat was for their protection.

  Remember, ’66 was at the height of the Cold War, when China, Russia and America were fighting in Vietnam. And the Philippines was in the centre of all of this, the Left was fighting the Right and the communists were very strong nearby, which was China. They had their cultural revolution [and here in the Philippines] the rich and the poor … So it was not a secure place. [So when the security services] saw the mob and the hysteria that met the group they placed them in the boat to make them secure.

  When Brian threw a tantrum, and demanded they be taken ashore, the Beatles were transferred to the Manila Hotel. Officials came to their suite the next day to remind them they were expected at the Malacañan Palace as honoured luncheon guests of the First Family. Mrs Marcos had promised her friends the Beadles were coming and members of the Cabinet, Congress and Senate had assembled in readiness, with their wives and children, many dressed in Beatles costumes. Furthermore, the Filipino people had been informed by television that the party was to be broadcast. ‘And they were sure of course that [we] would ask them to perform a bit,’ says Mrs Marcos, revealing her real purpose: she expected the Beatles to give her a private show at the Malacañan Palace. Without consulting the boys, Brian Epstein waved the men from the palace away, saying he’d already declined this invitation.

  The Beatles played their two Manila shows on schedule on Monday 4 July, a matinée and evening performance. That night they started to see news reports on television about how they had insulted the nation by standing up the First Family. When the boys called downstairs for breakfast the next morning, inedible and apparently tainted food was sent to their suite. The newspapers screamed news of the snub. ‘I was a little embarrassed,’ Mrs Marcos now says of the Beatles’ failure to come to the palace, insisting however that she and her husband didn’t orchestrate the censure in the press or the way the band was mistreated as they tried to leave the country. She had no idea, for example, that Brian Epstein was having trouble collecting money due for their concerts, or that officials were demanding a tax on the withheld takings. ‘We had nothing to do with [that],’ she says, claiming that the misfortunes that befell the Beatles after the shows were entirely a result of the hurt pride of the Filipino people.

  When the Beatles party reached Manila Airport that afternoon airport staff refused to help with their luggage and switched off an escalator to inconvenience them further. The Beatles and their entourage were jostled, kicked and punched as they made their way to the departure gate for their KLM flight to London (via New Delhi, where George was planning to take his first Indian holiday). They feared they would never make it. When they finally boarded the plane, Mal Evans and Tony Barrow were called back by officials, who questioned them about irregularities in the Beatles’ paperwork. Brian was obliged to hand over $17,000 cash (£11,111) at the last minute, after which the jet was cleared for take-off. Mrs Marcos claims she was on her way to the airport to intervene on the Beatles’ behalf. ‘I was rushing to the airport, only to be told halfway that the Beatles had been to the plane already and gone.’ As the KLM jet climbed into the safety of international air space, the Beatles felt relieved to have got out of the country in one piece. Then they blamed Brian. When they stopped in New Delhi, the band informed Brian they wouldn’t tour again once they’d fulfilled the rest of their summer engagements. Epstein took the news badly.

  ‘What will I do if they stop touring?’ he asked Peter Brown. ‘What will be left for me?’

  For her part, Imelda Marcos looks back on the Beatles’ now-notorious visit to Manila with regret. ‘I feel sorry that it had to happen in the Philippines during our time,’ she says. ‘I’m sure the Beatles were not there to humiliate the President and the First Family and the government. ’ She and Ferdinand continued to like Beadles’ music, and she has followed Paul’s career with interest. ‘It was a sad miscommunication. But you can be sure that the Filipinos are very sensitive to music and any
great music is always appreciated by Filipinos. Even to this day they love the Beadles and I do, too.’22

  THE LAST TOUR

  Home again, Paul enjoyed a summer break in advance of the release of Revolver. The sleeve of the new LP featured artwork by Klaus Voormann: a collage of photos and Beardlseyesque drawings of the boys, John watching Paul through slit eyes. As the album was played and admired, widely considered an advance even on Rubber Soul, the Beatles steeled themselves for what would be their final live shows: a short, late summer tour of the United States, starting in Chicago on 12 August 1966. The cloud of ill-fortune that had followed them from Germany to Japan to Manila now turned black.

  Earlier in the year, John and Paul had given in-depth interviews to one of their pet reporters, Maureen Cleave of the London Evening Standard , in which they let their guard down to an unusual degree. In his profile, Paul came across as a pretentious young man bent on self-improvement. ‘I don’t want to sound like Jonathan Miller,’ he told Maureen, referring to the polymath intellectual,but I’m trying to cram everything in, all the things that I’ve missed. People are saying things and painting things and writing things and composing things that are great, and I must know what people are doing … I vaguely mind people knowing what I don’t know.

  Paul criticised the US for the plight of its black citizens, contrasting their struggle for Civil Rights with life in dear old England, ‘O sceptred isle!’ he said, misquoting Shakespeare,23 as he often did. It was a habit that could make him appear pompous when reported in print, but may only have been meant playfully in conversation. ‘He was a relentless tease,’ recalls Cleave.

  The journalist’s subsequent interview with John Lennon at Kenwood resulted in one of the best-observed profiles of the musician ever published. Cleave found John in many ways unchanged since she had first met the band at the start of Beatlemania, still peering down his nose at her, ‘arrogant as an eagle’. Kenwood was more a giant playpen than home: a suit of armour named Sidney in one corner, a gorilla suit in another; one room set out with model racing cars; another with blinking light boxes John had bought as Christmas gifts but forgotten to give away. Although he shared this house with a wife, son, staff, and a cat named Mimi, John lived like a millionaire teenager, staying up half the night playing with his toys, watching TV and reading Just William books; not knowing what day it was when he got up. ‘He can sleep almost indefinitely, is probably the laziest person in England,’ Maureen observed, which was not something one could say of Paul.

  Like his partner, John enjoying pontificating, and religion held his interest at the moment. ‘Christianity will go,’ he predicted portentously. ‘It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right.’ Paul had expressed similar irreligious sentiments to Maureen, saying he leaned towards atheism, but Paul would never have been so injudicious as to say: ‘We’re more popular than Jesus now,’ as John did in his interview. ‘I don’t know which will go first - rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary.’

  Whereas British readers took John’s comments as no more than an opinionated young man sounding off, when Maureen’s interviews were reprinted in the American teen magazine Datebook American readers were hugely offended, the USA being a far more religious country than Britain. Alarming reports reached an already overwrought Brian Epstein that US radio stations were banning Beatles records because of what John had said, while their erstwhile fans were staging ceremonial burnings of the albums. The Ku Klux Klan was promising ominous ‘surprises’ for the Beatles when they came over for their tour. It was therefore in a state of high anxiety that the Beatles flew into Chicago in August.

  Though they had enjoyed the United States in the past, the Beatles didn’t feel entirely comfortable in America now. George was scared of flying and disliked the long continental flights they had to take in order to tour the US, while the excessive reactions of American fans were disconcerting. The prevalence of guns in everyday life also struck the Beatles as strange and unnerving, as it did all British visitors, with Americans seeming to be a more volatile, violent people, especially in light of recent race riots and assassinations. Paul was fascinated with the assassination of President Kennedy in particular, reading everything he could about the Dallas shooting, and frightening himself into thinking he might be a target for a marksman. ‘Paul was always terrified of being shot,’ says Peter Brown. ‘So he was very nervous on stage.’ As to what John had said to Maureen Cleave about Jesus, that had made everything more tense and difficult. Paul didn’t blame John. None of the band members did. They took the view that John’s comments had been taken out of context in America. But they all had to deal with the fallout.

  John attempted to diffuse the situation as soon as they arrived in the United States by facing the media at the band’s Chicago hotel. He apologised if his comments had been misconstrued, indicating that he was a Christian (which was more than Paul was prepared to say), and didn’t have any ‘un-Christian thoughts’. The Beatles gave their first concert the next day at Chicago’s International Amphitheatre, Paul scanning the bleachers at this and every subsequent show for a sniper. Though no shots rang out, there were other more banal indications that America’s love affair with the band might be waning. Most obviously there were unsold seats in Detroit the next day, also in New York where the band played a return engagement at Shea Stadium on 23 August. Sid Bernstein, who was once again the promoter, looked up from the baseball diamond to see a whole block of empty seats during the show.24 Interestingly, standing in the press box shooting pictures was Paul’s future wife Linda Eastman, who had just embarked on a career as a rock ’n’ roll photographer.

  The tour concluded in California, where the Beatles played firstly to a vast crowd at Dodger Stadium in Los Angeles on 28 August, an event that descended into a near-riot as fans swarmed over their limousine, threatening to crush it as they tried to leave the gig. The limo driver took shelter under a grandstand behind a high fence, which fans attacked, beaten back by cops with billy clubs. In return, the rioting concert-goers started hurling missiles at the police. ‘Meanwhile the Beatles, virtually imprisoned beneath the grandstand by fans stampeding from one spot to another in the vast outdoor stadium, made good their escape by armoured car at the opposite end of the field,’ wrote a news reporter of the warlike scene. The next day, the Beatles flew north to San Francisco for their final show.

  The fact that Brian Epstein didn’t accompany his boys to San Francisco, electing to stay at the Beverly Hills Hotel with his American business partner Nat Weiss, showed he wasn’t his old self. Since Manila, Brian had been trying to adjust to the idea that the Beatles wouldn’t tour again, wondering where this left him. A large part of his life these past four years had been occupied arranging publicity opportunities and concert bookings for the boys. He’d never been much involved in the other side of their career, making records. That was something they did with George Martin.

  As he pondered an empty future, Brian was joined at the Beverly Hills Hotel by a young hustler from Ohio, whom Brian had met the previous year. Their relationship had turned sour on that first occasion when the boy attempted to blackmail him. ‘I think Brian gave him $3,000 [£1,960] to get rid of him,’ says Weiss, dismayed to see the lad back at Brian’s side at the swimming pool and hardly surprised to find that, when they returned to their respective rooms, their briefcases were missing, apparently stolen by the young man, who was nowhere to be found. Brian’s case contained contracts, cash and amphetamine tablets, which he was using so heavily he was becoming addicted. Peter Brown says Epstein also had compromising personal letters and pictures in his case, and the hustler tried to blackmail Brian again with these documents. Weiss disagrees, saying there was nothing incriminating in Brian’s attaché case, and doesn’t recall any blackmail this time around, but concedes that Brian was very upset by the theft. ‘Whenever someone steals from you, you feel diminished and ripped
off, and it certainly hurts your ego, [especially] if it’s someone you trusted and liked. That’s what really bothered him,’ says Weiss, who engaged a private detective to recover their property, which he did successfully. At the end of the day Brian wanted the affair hushed up. ‘He didn’t want any notoriety because of the Beatles being on tour.’

  Meanwhile, the Beatles had reached San Francisco to play Candlestick Park, a baseball stadium outside the city. Although it was late summer, Monday 29 August turned out to be one of those unseasonal Bay Area days when cold air and fog rolls in from the ocean, making it feel like winter. Paul apologised for the weather from the stage, which was set up on the diamond as it had been at Shea, with the additional protection of being ringed with a wire fence, so they were effectively playing in a cage again.

  Knowing it was the last show, Paul asked Tony Barrow to tape the concert. Tony did the best he could, but it was a futile exercise with the PA equipment as it was and the fans howling. The boys could just about make themselves heard when they performed boot stompers like ‘Long Tall Sally’, but when they attempted more subtle new songs, including ‘Paperback Writer’, with its harmonised intro, the nuances blew away on the wind. ‘All you heard was screaming and these flash light bulbs [were] going off everywhere,’ recalls Bay Area musician Marty Balin, who’d recently formed what would become an influential new band, Jefferson Airplane. ‘It was bright as day, and you could not hear a note they played.’ So it was, in a squall of white noise and white light, that Paul retired from his life as a touring Beatle.

  9

  LINDA

  TIME FOR A NUMBER OF THINGS