Shout! (62 page)

They reached Devon and started back, still vainly trying to extemporize quicksilver comedy from the all too mundane disorganization and bad humor. Nothing was explained to the actors or even the cameramen. The script was anything that anyone happened to say.

“We missed the tour ourselves in the end,” Neil Aspinall says. “We were too busy driving. We drove all the way to Brighton and finished up just filming two people on the beach. What we
should
have been filming was the chaos we caused—the bus trying to get over this narrow bridge,
with queues of traffic building up behind us, and then having to reverse and go back past all the drivers who’d been cursing us, and John getting off in a fury and ripping all the posters off the sides.”

The climactic scenes were filmed on a disused airfield in West Malling, Kent. There, under Paul’s direction, a scene was improvised with forty dwarfs, a military band, a football crowd, and a dozen babies in prams. The bus, by now looking decidedly careworn, swerved round the pitted runway with limousines in hot, but unexplained, pursuit. That was the finish of the Magical Mystery Tour.

It was the finish, that is to say, but for the editing, which took eleven weeks. “Paul would come in and edit in the morning,” Tony Bramwell says. “Then John would come in in the afternoon and reedit what Paul had edited. Then Ringo would come in…” When not editing and reediting they would stand in the cutting room, having singsongs with a toothless Soho street busker who carried a port bottle balanced on his head.

The print eventually passed by all four Beatles was then handed to NEMS Enterprises for distribution. NEMS’s response was indecisive. “It was like giving your film to NBC and CBS and all the networks at once,” Neil Aspinall says. “Everyone came up with a different comment. ‘Couldn’t you do it this way?’ ‘Couldn’t you do it
this
way?’” NEMS eventually sold the British rights to BBC Television, even though the film had been shot in color and BBC TV, to all but a select handful, was still black and white. BBC 1 announced that it would be shown on Boxing Day, 1967.

The Beatles had been at Abbey Road since mid-September, recording material for an EP to accompany the film. Their pre-Christmas single, however, was a separate track, “Hello, Goodbye,” written by Paul, in which a grandstand of overdubbed voices chanted a lyric so simple as to be almost inane and so inane it appeared subtly ironic. “You say goodbye and I say hello. Hello, hello. I don’t know why you say good-bye, I say hello. Hay-la! Hey-hello…” By early December, “Hello, Goodbye” was number one in Britain and America. The Beatles continued to walk upon water.

Magical Mystery Tour
was launched by a party whose lavishness showed no doubt of
Sgt. Pepper–
like success. The Beatles specified fancy dress. John came as a Teddy Boy, accompanied by Cynthia in Quality Street crinolines. George Martin came as the Duke of Edinburgh, Lulu
as Shirley Temple, and Patti, George’s wife, as an Eastern belly dancer. John, that night, made no secret of powerfully desiring Patti Harrison. He danced with Patti time after time, leaving Cynthia so disconsolate in her crinolines that Lulu was roused to sisterly indignation. The climax of the party was the moment at which a little ringletted Shirley Temple, clutching an immense lollipop, confronted the chief Beatle in his greaser outfit and berated him for being so mean to his wife.

Fifteen million British viewers, on the dead day after Christmas, tuned their television sets hopefully to BBC 1 and
Magical Mystery Tour
. Expecting a miracle, they beheld only a glorified and progressively irritating home movie. The four donned crude animal costumes to perform “I Am the Walrus,” a song inspired by Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem about the “Walrus close behind us…who’s treading on my tail.” The Beatles themselves were only intermittently visible sitting among forty-three freaky passengers on the bus or as four red-robed wizards messing around in a chemistry lab. Paul, in one of the few professionally directed sequences, sang “Fool on the Hill” against a background of French Riviera mountains and sea. George, squatting Indian style, sang “Blue Jay Way,” repeating the line “don’t be long” twenty-nine times. A lengthy abstract interlude, devoid of its color, became merely puzzling cloud drifts and icebergs. The finale was one more idea that no one had quite bothered to think through. “Let’s do a Busby Berkeley sequence,” Paul had said. The Beatles, in white tailcoats, descended a staircase, singing “Your Mother Should Know” while ballroom dancing teams whirled in aimless formation beneath.

The
Daily Express
TV critic received front-page editorial space next morning to declare that never in all his days of viewing had he beheld such “blatant rubbish.” The unanimous decision of the British critics was picked up by American papers like the
Los Angeles Times
(“Beatles Bomb With Yule Movie”) and brought speedy cancellation of the film’s U.S. television deal. The BBC, meanwhile, took belatedly old-maidenly fright at John’s lyrics for “I Am the Walrus”—especially the references to “knickers” and “yellow matter custard,” i.e., snot—and denied it any further airplay.

For the first time since they’d worn leather jackets at a Young Conservatives dance, the Beatles found themselves being collectively criticized in every newspaper they opened. It came hardest of all to the one who’d initiated the whole catastrophe, drawing a clock face and trusting
to his Pied Piper magic to do the rest. Dusty Durband at Liverpool Institute Grammar School could have cited many similar instances long ago when Paul McCartney did insufficient preparation.

Now, too, it came home to them with full force what life was like without Brian to protect them and clear up the messes they made. “If Brian had been alive, the film would never have gone out,” Neil Aspinall says. “Brian would have said, ‘Okay, we blew forty thousand pounds—so what?’ Brian would never have let it happen.”

John Lennon’s old schoolfriend, Pete Shotton, had long felt a distinct impression that John was trying to tell him something. Pete still lived in Hampshire, managing the supermarket John had bought him: on visits to John in London he could not but notice what larger business preparations were afoot. “I’d known John so long and had so many laughs with him, he could never come out with anything straight. He’d just grin across the room and say: ‘When are you coming up here to work then?’

“Eventually he did come out with it. He said he wanted me to come to London and run a boutique the Beatles were opening. He said: ‘We’ve got to spend two million or the taxman will get it.’”

Dr. Walter Strach, their chief financial adviser, had many times implored Brian to invest the colossal Beatle earnings simply left on deposit at various British banks. Socialism had as yet closed few of the Tory loopholes for channeling money abroad into tax-exempt trusts and companies. Brian would never do it, partly through a naive respect for capital, partly from a belief that to take money abroad was unpatriotic. “After the Beatles got their MBEs,” Dr. Strach remembered, “Brian always insisted they had to be whiter than white.”

It was therefore on “Uncle Walter’s” advice rather than Brian’s that individual Beatles made personal investments, such as John’s Hampshire supermarket and Ringo’s brief, unsuccessful foray into the building trade. On one occasion, all four came to Strach, eager to put money into a washing-machine company run by a bearded young tycoon named John Bloom. The doctor took credit for talking them out of involvement with one of the decade’s more spectacular financial crashes.

Strach figured in the single attempt during Brian’s lifetime to divert Beatles money from its huge liability under British income tax. In 1965, the proceeds from
Help!
were paid directly into a Bahamian company,
Cavalcade Productions, formed jointly by the Beatles and the film’s producer, Walter Shenson, and administered by Dr. Strach as a temporary resident in Nassau. “That was why we shot part of
Help!
in the Bahamas,” Shenson admitted. “It was a goodwill exercise to persuade the Bahamian authorities we were an asset to their business community.” Unfortunately, the
Help!
proceeds were banked entirely in sterling. When Harold Wilson devalued the pound in 1967, Cavalcade Productions lost approximately eighty thousand pounds.

Toward the end of his life Brian had been considering more complex measures to protect the Beatles’ accumulated fortunes. His concept was not much different in essence from that which would soon spectacularly emerge—a corporation built around the Beatles that would both lighten their personal tax liabilities and give them control of their own work at every level, from songwriting to recording, even of distribution, marketing, and retailing. Brian had also visualized a string of Beatles boutiques, or pop supermarkets, selling records and clothes.

In addition to their original company, Beatles Ltd., the four were now incorporated into a partnership, Beatles & Co. The maneuver took place in April 1967 as a means of providing each with some quick capital. Beatles Ltd. paid eight hundred thousand pounds for a share in the partnership. By this absolutely legal method of selling themselves a share in themselves, each Beatle received two hundred thousand pounds and, later on, a tax demand to match.

In 1968, they had joint reserves of around two million pounds that, after the taxman’s punitive bite of 90-plus percent, would leave scarcely enough to buy them each a new Mr. Fish shirt. Far better, their advisers agreed, to write off the money as a business loss. And if they could have a little fun—even do a little good—in the process, so much the better.

Simon Posthuma and Marijke Koger were beautiful people from Holland. Couturiers and interior designers, famous for their Amsterdam boutique Trend, they had migrated to London in 1967, hoping to widen their activities to the theater. Among their first patrons were a pair of publicists named Barry Finch and Simon Hayes whose clients at the time included Brian Epstein’s Saville Theater. By this means, Simon and Marijke gained access to the Beatles’ circle, where their exotic clothes and dreamy, Dutch-accented hippie talk made an immediate impression. So successful were they, both as stage designers and Beatles friends,
that they brought their former Amsterdam boutique partner, Josje Leeger, over from Holland to join them. The three, plus PR man Barry Finch, then formed themselves into a design group named The Fool.

All through the Summer of Love and the still-affectionate autumn that followed it, The Fool enjoyed the quasi-royal status of designers and couturiers to the Beatles. They made the costumes for the “All You Need Is Love” television sequence. They painted a piano and a gypsy caravan for John and designed a fireplace for George’s Esher bungalow. They began to appear in newspaper fashion spreads as heralds of an era to follow wasp stripes, PVC, and miniskirts. “Simon,” explained the
Sunday Times
, “is dressed to represent Water. His jacket is glittering Lurex in bluey, greeney colours; his trousers are blue velvet. Marijke is Nature, in blue and green, and has a pastoral scene on her bodice. Josje is Space, her midnight-blue trousers covered with yellow appliqué stars.” To the
Sunday Times
, Simon explained that The Fool was a name with meaning beyond the obvious one. “It represents Truth, Spiritual Meaning and the circle, which expresses the universal circumference in which gravitate all things.”

In September 1967, The Fool received one hundred thousand pounds to design a boutique for the Beatles and stock it with their own exotic garments and accessories. It was Paul, the most dandified Beatle, who announced “a beautiful place where you can buy beautiful things.” It was Paul who strove to think of a name befitting the new boutique’s ideal of chaste elegance, and who found inspiration in a Magritte painting he had recently bought as well as the general idea of a hippie Garden of Eden. The others agreed: they would call their boutique, simply, Apple.

The summer had produced another Beatles friend. His name was Alexis Mardas. He was a young, blond-haired Greek who had come to Britain knowing only two people: Mick Jagger and the Duke of Edinburgh.

Nicknamed Magic Alex by Lennon, Mardas was an inventor of electronic gadgets with ideas that, he believed, could revolutionize twentieth-century life. There was the transistorized hi-fi; the “scream” built into a phonograph record to prevent illicit taping; the force field around a house that would keep intruders at bay with a wall of colored air. His ideas appealed to the Beatles’ thirst for novelty and their endless quest for protection against a cheating, importunate world.

Meanwhile, on Baker Street, a respectable eighteenth-century corner house, not far from Sherlock Holmes’s mythical consulting rooms, was being transformed into a condition that might have baffled even Holmes. The Fool hired gangs of art students to help them cover the side wall along Paddington Street with psychedelic patterns whizzing and whirling around what seemed to be the face of an enormous Red Indian. Magic Alex was also there, designing floodlights.

All the Beatles relished the novelty of setting up a shop. The prettiest, swingingest girls—among them Patti Harrison’s sister, Jennie—were recruited as staff. Pete Shotton left his Hampshire supermarket to oversee the arrival of oriental fabrics and exotic jewelry ordered in profusion by The Fool. “John would come in every day,” Pete says. “‘You’ve got to put a partition over here,’ he’d say. Then Paul would come in and say, ‘What’s that partition here for? Better move it over there.’”

The Apple boutique opened on December 7, 1967, with a lavish party and fashion show. “Come at 7:46,” the invitations said. “Fashion show at 8:16.” In the elegant, sweating crush, sipping apple juice, only two Beatles were visible: John and George. Ringo was abroad, playing a small part in the film
Candy
, and Paul had decided to go away to his farm in Scotland.

Within a few days the pattern of trading had been established. Hundreds of people came to Baker Street to look at the Apple boutique, and look inside it. There was no obligation to buy, or to consider buying. Garments began to leave the premises rapidly, though seldom as a result of cash transactions. The musk-scented gloom, where feather boas hung helpfully from bentwood hat-stands, was a shoplifter’s paradise.