The Beatles (135 page)

“
The painting was gorgeous
,” Paul said, echoing an opinion shared by the rest of the Beatles and most of the public. Citywide, the Apple Boutique mural was a huge conversation piece. London had never seen anything like it. People came from every district to get a closer look, clogging the sidewalk outside the shop, tying up traffic. It became as popular a tourist attraction as any of the traditional sights.
But the City of Westminster’s
planning commission, whose official permission to paint the facade had been required but seemingly ignored, was less than enthused. “It wasn’t long before we heard from their solicitors, saying we had to restore the building to its original appearance,” Taylor recalls. Three weeks of overheated legal wrangling ensued until, ultimately, the mural was painted out by the Fool.

Inside, the shop was in no less of a muddle. A layout, with sections and aisles, was needed to give the interior some symmetry, but its style was the subject of constant contention. “
There was no direction
, no focal point,” Pete Shotton remembers. “Paul wanted dividers up. Then John would come in and say, ‘Why in the hell are we cutting people off from each other?’ and he’d have the dividers ripped out.” It went back and forth like that for days, building up and ripping out, until the dispute had less to do with style than with ego. It mirrored their bickering over the music: each of the two Beatles wanted to put his own stamp on the boutique, each suspicious
and jealous of the other’s contribution. Unable to take sides in the matter, Shotton struggled, ineffectually, to please both John and Paul. “They needed someone strong, someone like Brian, to say no, and I wasn’t the one who could do it…. I only ever wanted to be friends with them.”

The Apple Boutique finally opened—without dividers—on December 7, 1967. A by-invitation-only gala was slated for 8:16
P.M.
(one of John’s affectations), with a fashion show scheduled at “8:46 sharp.” Neither Paul nor Ringo attended—Paul being on vacation with Jane Asher at High Park, an isolated farm he’d purchased in the Scottish moors, and Ringo, off in Rome, putting in a cameo appearance as Emmanuel the gardener in the screen adaptation of
Candy
. Nor was there an artificial sun, its inventor, Magic Alex, pleading a lack of adequate “energy.”

What they lacked in solar power, however, was made up by gate-crashers lighting in the doorway and storming the gates. “It was a mess,” Taylor says, “a glorious mess. The worse things got, the more pleased everyone seemed. No one minded the crushing crowds or the confusion. Shoplifting was completely overlooked; it was regarded as a kind of benevolence, hippie philanthropy.”

John and George may have been satisfied with the economics—but they weren’t amused by the opening-night festivities. Unexpectedly there had been an outbreak of screaming, pushing, and shoving when they arrived.
It reminded them of Beatlemania
, smaller in scale and more concentrated perhaps, yet another mutant form of it. Their uneasiness continued to deepen afterward, over a “tense dinner” with their wives and Derek Taylor, who had arrived from the States especially to attend the gala. Questions kept surfacing about what they’d gotten themselves into.

If they couldn’t free themselves from the grip of crazy celebrity, they wondered, was there ever any hope of restoring some normalcy to their lives? That had been the intention when they stopped touring, the underlying purpose of Transcendental Meditation, the restructuring of Apple. Now John and George began to wonder if any escape was possible.

If there was one constant the Beatles could rely on, it was record sales. The day after the boutique opened, when everything seemed so topsy-turvy again, EMI released a six-song EP (tucked inside a small book) that served as the soundtrack for
Magical Mystery Tour
. Overall, the music was anything but spectacular; only “I Am the Walrus” and “The Fool on the Hill” measured up to the Beatles’ unique standards. Whispers of dissatisfaction
murmured through the underground ranks. Knocks like “trivial” and “soft” accompanied reviews. There was even a plot, some claimed, to derail its airplay. In response to a petition by two housewives accusing the BBC of disseminating a “propaganda of disbelief, doubt, and dirt,” the radio station’s Tory watchdog, Lord Hill, banned “I Am the Walrus,” objecting to the line “Boy, you’ve been a dirty girl, you’ve let your knickers down.” It was a feeble excuse to make headlines off the Beatles’ backs; there was nothing indecent about
Magical Mystery Tour,
other than perhaps its uninspired musical quality. However, while critics expressed reservations about the unusual package, the fans were hardly underwhelmed,
with 450,000 advance orders
and another 300,000 copies in the pipeline by the launch.

Coincidentally, Capitol Records announced that American sales of “Hello Goodbye” had reached the million mark on the same day, giving the Beatles a boost against drastic losses at the Apple Boutique. “
There was plenty of stock
,” recalls Peter Brown, “but no stock control. No one knew where anything was; people were stealing things left and right, much of it by the interminably stoned young staff.” Dressing rooms accommodated any shopper who set out to stash something under his clothes or in a bag. No questions asked. Invariably, more things were stolen from the Apple Boutique than were purchased. “
It was
disastrous
from start to finish,” says Alistair Taylor, who roamed the aisles each day on his way upstairs to the office. Concludes Peter Brown, “
Anyone
who touched
anything
fucked it up with great skill. It was a mess, it was—
disastrous
.”

In the midst of this retail train wreck, another disaster loomed. On December 16 Paul gathered the Beatles and their friends to screen the final cut of
Magical Mystery Tour
. It was a fifty-odd-minute crazy quilt of scenes—“formless, disconnected, disjointed and amateurish,” according to its critics—cut and pasted together without the slightest regard for narrative. “
There was no plot
,” Paul admitted, “… [d]eliberately so.” But his bluff that its essence was “magical” carried no weight. “
Nobody had the vaguest
idea what it was about,” according to Neil Aspinall. There was a lot of chair-shuffling and nervous coughing throughout the seemingly endless screening, during which several people excused themselves, ostensibly to use the loo, and never came back. “
It looked awful
and it was a disaster,” recalled George Martin, who watched it stupefied, in openmouthed horror, as others seated around him decried it as “pretentious and overblown.” Afterward, John told Ray Coleman it was “
the most expensive home movie
ever,” which, intended as a boast or not, wasn’t too far off the mark.

The Beatles had dropped roughly £40,000 on
Magical Mystery Tour
—
up to that point. Most of the negative expense, if not more, they hoped to recoup from an exhibitor. But who in their right mind would pick up the tab for such a sorry spectacle? Not a cinema chain; it was too short a mess to qualify as a feature. Peter Brown, who “
thought it was dreadful
,” had been enlisted by Paul to help sell it. Initially, in November, they pitched it to the BBC and ITV as a Christmas holiday special, and he says the BBC “were drooling at the mouths at the very idea of it until they got a look at the finished product.” ITV passed, on the premise of a scheduling problem. Paul Fox, the head of BBC1, recalled: “
I saw it four times
before I began to understand it.” He admitted that “there were large parts that were unprofessional” but felt “there were also moments of drama and poignancy, which [he] found quite fascinating.” Ultimately, it came down to the Beatles, as sure a draw as anything on TV. Even considering the extravagant mess on the screen, Fox “thought it was worth showing.”

Brown, however, didn’t share his opinion. He worried about the blow it would certainly deal the Beatles’ unblemished reputation and urged Paul to reconsider. “After the lackluster response from the BBC,” he says, “I tried to suggest writing off the £40,000 and moving on. But Paul didn’t know it was a mess and insisted on making the deal.” The BBC agreed to show it twice—in black and white on Boxing Day and again in color on January 5—
for the paltry fee of £9,000
. Rather than appear insulted, Paul insisted that money was never the issue. “
Sod it,” he thought
, “that’s not really the important thing.” It was a well-known fact that Boxing Day TV audiences were the largest of the year. The coverage they’d get would be unprecedented. As Paul envisioned it, close to 20 million viewers who had eaten “too much turkey and sherry” would sit around living rooms throughout Britain waiting for the “plum pudding special”: the Beatles in
Magical Mystery Tour
.

Unfortunately, in this case, all they’d get was more turkey, and it was no surprise that the critics knocked the stuffing out of it. “
Appalling!
” the
Daily Mail
harrumphed. “
It was worse than terrible
.” James Green, who covered TV for the
Evening News,
stammered over suitably damning adjectives, advising readers to “take your pick from the words: rubbish, piffle, chaotic, flop, tasteless, nonsense, emptiness, and appalling.” Accordingly, the
Daily Mirror
chose “
rubbish… piffle
… nonsense!” The
Daily Express
limited its slurs to “
blatant rubbish
” and said, “The whole boring saga confirmed a long held suspicion… that the Beatles… have made so much money that they can apparently afford to be contemptuous of the public.” Punishment was demanded of the culprits. “
Whoever authorized the showing
of the film on BBC1,” wrote the
Daily Sketch,
“should be condemned to a year squatting at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi.”

But Paul had other things on his mind. During the holiday, “
perhaps slightly to [his] own surprise
,” he gathered the family together and announced his engagement to Jane.

Chapter 34
An Additional Act

T
hroughout the first ten years of the Beatles saga, women knew their place. A fan screamed, wept, engaged in some heavy personal fantasy, and, on the off chance of a close encounter, flung herself recklessly in the general vicinity of one of the Beatles, hoping at the very least for a re-ciprocal smile. A lucky bird might even get to spend the night. But for a girlfriend or a wife, the role was severe. They were at best a prop in the grand scenario; at worst, a handicap. Aside from creature comforts, which were glorious, the disadvantages of pairing with one of the band outweighed the benefits. For one thing, there was no room for a woman in that crowded spotlight. They gave up whatever individuality they had to support the boys’ careers and, as such, were swallowed whole by the monster Beatlemania.

The Beatles were an unconditionally exclusive fraternity—one for all and all for one. Cynthia Lennon, envious of their rapport, called it “
a marriage of four minds
… [that] were always in harmony.”
Always
may be too strong a word, but on those occasions when it became necessary to close ranks, the Beatles formed an airtight bond that knew no equivalent; there was nothing and no one capable of infiltrating the core group. Neil and Mal gained entry—at times—but that only made their slavish devotion and loyalty more painful. Perhaps those two more than anyone recognized the boundaries of real friendship; after twenty-hour days that might begin with driving hours on end, then lifting heavy equipment and running what some might view as demeaning errands, a word, even a look, often reminded them exactly who they were and left them outside looking in, just like everyone else.

The Beatles’ women, on the other hand, never got that close. Decisions were routinely made without their input. Their opinions were seldom, if
ever, sought. It was unthinkable that a project dreamed up and green-lighted by one of the Beatles, even something as significant as Apple, would be referred to the women for comment. “
When it came down to business
,” says Alistair Taylor, “the girls were usually the last to be told.”