Shout! (48 page)

George Harrison had begun dating Patti Boyd, a nineteen-year-old model with a quirky, gap-toothed smile who had played one of the schoolgirl nymphets in
A Hard Day’s Night
. Pale and waiflike, Patti was the archetype of 1964 high fashion. She now became an object of hatred
to George’s fans, who booed and jostled her, even once tried to beat her up.

Equally rough treatment was suffered in Liverpool by Maureen Cox, Ringo’s steady since Cavern Club days. Maureen worked as a hairdresser: On many occasions, the very head she was shampooing would be uttering threats at her via the mirror. At last, Maureen, too, became public, visiting the hospital where Ringo was having his tonsils removed. A dark-haired, rather undernourished girl stood on the London pavement in bewilderment, clutching a carrier bag.

The Beatles gave entertainment also for the millions they were presumed to earn; for existing, like boy maharajahs, in clouds of spending money. George, it was reported, had changed his E-Type Jaguar for a white Aston Martin like Paul’s. Ringo, fresh from his driving test, now drove an Italian Facel Vega. John, who had not yet learned to drive, owned a Rolls-Royce, a Ferrari, and a Mini Minor. Their adoption of such consumer status symbols gave vicarious pleasure; their verdict on unattainable luxury was earthily reassuring. An entire newspaper article was based on the revelation that George had tasted his first avocado. “I’ve had caviar and I like it,” he told Maureen Cleave, “but I’d still rather have an egg sandwich.”

All four spent with diminishing pleasure but at increasing speed, in the few seconds possible before the shop became a riot. John, while filming in Bond Street, ran into Asprey’s silversmiths through one door and out through another, having managed to spend six hundred pounds. All day, wherever they were, they bought themselves presents, scarcely heeding the accumulation of presents behind them: the suits by the dozen; shirts by the hundred; the movie-cameras; projectors; watches; gold lighters; the Asprey’s silverware and cocktail cabinets shaped like antique globes. Asprey’s was as good as Woolworth’s, Ringo said—they had everything spread out in the open so you could see it.

The clouds of ready money bought new homes for their families, according to pop star precedent. John’s aunt Mimi left Woolton for a luxury bungalow near Bournemouth, overlooking Poole Harbor. Jim McCartney, now retired from the Liverpool Cotton Exchange, moved out on to the Cheshire Wirral to enjoy the house, the wine cellar, and the racehorse that Paul had given him. Harry and Louise Harrison gave up their Speke council house for a bungalow in the country near Warrington. Only Ringo’s mother, Mrs. Graves, said she was happy where
she was. She stayed in the Dingle at Admiral’s Grove, and her husband, Ringo’s stepfather, continued to paint the local authority’s lampposts.

The acquisition of country houses and estates for the Beatles themselves took place in late 1964, in the spirit of yet another swift shopping trip. Again, the task devolved chiefly on Dr. Strach, their accountant. Strach lived in Esher, Surrey, and so concentrated his search around that semirural haven of accountants and stockbrokers.

For John and Cynthia, Dr. Strach found “Kenwood,” a thirty-thousand-pound mock-Tudor mansion on the select St. George’s Hill estate at Weybridge. “Sunny Heights,” a similar, closely adjacent property, was earmarked for Ringo after his—as yet unannounced—marriage to Maureen Cox. The idea at that stage seems to have been for all four Beatles to live together in a mock-Tudor, topiary-encircled compound around a fifth property owned by Brian Epstein. It was one of Brian’s more impossible dreams to have them in his sight for always, to know that John was literally at the far end of his garden.

For John, that location could not have been more unfortunate. A mile or so from Weybridge, in the kitchen of an Esher hotel, a 52-year-old dishwasher was even now working up courage to step forward and claim the leading Beatle as his son and heir. It was, indeed, Freddy Lennon, the father John had not laid eyes on since the age of six.

Aunt Mimi had always feared that Freddy might turn up again—though not in this terrible way, selling his life story to
Tit Bits
and
Weekend
magazine. “When they told me who it was,” Mimi remembered, “I felt a shock run right through my body to my fingertips and the tips of my toes.”

A meeting was arranged between John and Freddy that seemed to go well. But when Freddy called at Kenwood later he had the door slammed in his face. Subsequently, via the Beatles’ accounts, he received a flat and a small pension. He resold his life story for diminishing fees, and even made a pop record entitled “That’s My Life.” Julian Lennon did not acquire a long-lost grandfather.

Nor at Weybridge did there materialize Brian’s hoped-for village of Beatles mansions. George broke the pattern by buying a bungalow on a different stockbroker estate, at Esher. And Paul, though offered several properties in the district, refused to commit himself yet. The house that Paul bought, and everything in it, was to be the result of minute social calculation. “He telephoned me one night,” Walter Shenson said, “but it
was my wife he wanted to speak to. They talked for a long time. Paul was asking about a red velvet couch he’d seen at our house. He wanted to know where he could get one made exactly like it and how much it would cost.”

Patti Boyd was discovering that to be a Beatle’s girlfriend was like joining a cell of Resistance fighters. Her initiation had been when she and George and the Lennons attempted a weekend at a secluded hotel in Ireland, and awoke next morning to find the world’s press all had their address and room number. Patti and Cynthia left the hotel disguised as chambermaids and concealed in two wicker laundry hampers.

That summer, in a bid to go on vacation, they split into two groups. Paul and Jane with Ringo and Maureen flew to the Virgin Islands by way of quick airline changes at Paris, Lisbon, and San Juan, Puerto Rico. The Lennons, George, and Patti were sighted variously in Amsterdam, Vancouver—where a radio station incited local teenagers to form “Beatles posses” to hunt them down—then Honolulu and Papeete, Tahiti. From Papeete they put to sea in a cabin cruiser stinking of diesel oil and largely provisioned with potatoes. The vessel at once ran into heavy seas, causing Cynthia to be sick in the nearest receptacle: her new flowered sun hat.

Drugs occurred, like everything else, in almost wearisome profusion. The need dated from Hamburg and the months without sleep; it remained, amid the dizzying fame, to prop their eyes open through each night’s arduous pleasure. Now the pills were bright-colored, like new clothes and cars—French Blues, Purple Hearts, Black Bombers, and Yellow Submarines. The reflex grew in their growing boredom with everyday pleasures. More exciting than worship or sex, champagne or new toys, was to swallow a pill, just to see what would happen.

In 1964, in certain fashionable London circles, a curious after-dinner ritual was beginning to take place. A member of the party, upon a certain conspiratorial signal, would take out a small plastic bag, a cigarette-rolling machine such as previously used only by the poorest classes, and a packet of similarly proletarian Rizla cigarette papers. With much thumb twisting and paper licking, a meager, loosely packed cigarette would be made. It would be then passed round the table for each guest to puff, with a deep inhalation, then handed on to the next as reverently as if it were a portion of the Host.

Marijuana, resin of the Indian hemp or cannabis plant, had been
used in England hitherto chiefly by West Indian immigrants to allay, with its languorous fumes, the misery of their Brixton tenements. Now, as “pot” or “hash,” the ancient Oriental dream substance became the latest social accessory. That it was also strictly illegal, under laws that had cleansed the drug-crazy Victorian age, bothered no one very much at first.

The Beatles were initiated into pot smoking in 1964. The telltale medicinal fragrance of marijuana joints hung about the set of their second feature film,
Help!
“They were high all the time we were shooting,” the director, Richard Lester, says. “But there was no harm in it then. It was a happy high.”

It was a laugh, even better than earning millions, to watch the awkward little cigarette rolled; and to breathe down the sweetish smoke that made laughing even easier. It was a laugh to see what characters began to sidle up, their mouths twitching with the promise of even more sensational pleasures. “I saw it happen to Paul McCartney once,” Richard Lester says, “the most beautiful girl I’ve ever seen, trying to persuade him to take heroin. It was an absolutely chilling exercise in controlled evil.”

Early in 1965, George Harrison took John and Cynthia Lennon and Patti to a dinner party given by a friend of his. “I’ll always remember,” Cynthia says, “that when we walked into this man’s drawing room, there were four lumps of sugar arranged along the mantelpiece. We all had a delicious dinner with lots of wine. When coffee came, one of the four sugar lumps was put into each of our cups.

“It was as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a horror film. The room seemed to get bigger and bigger. Our host seemed to change into a demon. We were all terrified. We knew it was something evil—we had to get out of the house. But this man told us we couldn’t leave. We got away somehow, in George’s Mini, but he came after us in a taxi. It was like having the Devil following us in a taxi.

“We tried to drive to some club—the Speakeasy, I think it was. Four of us, packed into the Mini. Everybody seemed to be going mad. Patti wanted to get out and smash all the windows along Regent Street. Then we turned round and started heading for George’s place in Esher. God knows how we got there. John was crying and banging his head against the wall. I tried to make myself sick, and couldn’t. I tried to go to sleep, and couldn’t. It was like a nightmare that wouldn’t stop whatever you did. None of us got over it for about three days.”

Their host had playfully dipped their coffee sugar into a substance that, although widely used in mental hospitals and on prisoners of war as a truth serum, was so new as a recreational drug that it had not yet been declared illegal. It was a man-made substance, odorless and colorless; its chemical name, lysergic acid diethylamide, was usually shortened to LSD.

Britain, meanwhile, had changed governments and prime ministers. The general election of October 1964 had swept the Conservatives from power after thirteen years and brought back the Labour party for only the fourth term in its history. Supreme power had passed from an obscure Scottish laird to a plump, white-haired man who smoked a pipe and vacationed in the Scilly Isles, and about whom little else was known other than that he represented the constituency of Huyton, near Liverpool.

Harold Wilson—Yorkshire-born, a Merseysider only by electoral accident—restored Labour to office largely with the pop idiom used by teenagers and would-be teenagers. “Let’s Go With Labour!,” the decisive campaign slogan, borrowed pop music’s preeminent image—that of being galvanized, as by music, into keen and exhilarating life. Such was the New Britain that Mr. Wilson promised, in language as attuned to the mass mood as any juke-box hit—“a hundred days of dynamic action”…“a dynamic, expanding, confident, above all purposive Britain”… “forged in the white heat of the technological revolution.”

There was, however, another side to Harold Wilson. It had become visible, though not yet diagnosable, the previous April when, as leader of the opposition, he had presented the Beatles with their Variety Club award at the Dorchester Hotel. It was perhaps the most astute act of his political career to telephone Sir Joseph Lockwood, chairman of EMI, and offer to grace the occasion as a fellow Merseysider. Not that the Beatles recognized Mr. Wilson as such—or, indeed, recognized him at all. John Lennon, mistaking him for the Variety Club’s “chief barker or MC,” and getting confused with Barker and Dobson toffee, mumbled: “Thank you, Mr. Dobson.” But Mr. Dobson did not mind. His face, in the double-page newspaper spreads, wore the smile of one who had discovered a great secret.

Britons who had feared the socialist menace wondered how, for instance, such an apparition could possibly conduct his regular and necessary meetings with the Queen. Yet conduct them the apparition did,
with every sign of confidence. And despite technology’s white heat, the old familiar state apparatus went on functioning as before. Early in 1965, just as today, the Queen’s official birthday was marked by a distribution of honors. Just as today, the Queen herself merely put a signature to the list drawn up by her prime minister.

On June 12, it was announced that the Beatles were each to receive the MBE—Membership of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. One northern newspaper headlined the story: “She Loves Them! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”

The Beatles, recuperating from their second European tour, awoke to find a throng of press eager to ascertain how they would feel at being entitled to walk in state processions behind peers of the realm and hereditary knights but in front of baronets’ younger sons and “Gentlemen of Coat Armor.”

They felt confused.

“I thought you had to drive tanks and win wars to get the MBE,” John Lennon said.

“I think it’s marvelous,” Paul McCartney said. “What does that make my dad?”

“I’ll keep it to dust when I’m old,” Ringo Starr said.

“I didn’t think you got that sort of thing,” George Harrison said, “just for playing rock ’n’ roll music.”

In Harold Wilson’s Britain, as would become abundantly clear, you did. The country had elected its first Beatle prime minister.

The Wilson Age, which had promised such starkness, such austere purpose, was to produce, instead, an interlude of frivolity unmatched since Charles II sat on the English throne. Newly socialist Britain in 1965 is remembered, not for white heat or driving dynamism but for shortsighted euphoria and featherheaded extravagance. It is remembered above all for a hallucination that descended on England’s capital city, brilliant at first, but in quickly fading, tawdry colors—the hallucination of Swinging London.