The Love You Make (22 page)

It took a long, long time for the magnitude of it to sink in. Nicky Byrne’s personal income alone, Brian estimated, could add up to five million dollars. Brian was sick.
They had given it away!
An incomprehensible sum signed away for nothing! He wondered what the Beatles would say when they found out. He decided it was best they know nothing about it, for the time being, and plotted to keep it from them. The task of getting it back began to gnaw at him. It was his first major failure, and for all the good success, he felt a fool.

chapter Seven

The Sixties were not so much a decade, an era, an epoch, as a very long happening.

—Peter Evans Goodbye
Baby
&
Amen

It had a touch
of the naughty nineties of Paris, the decadence of prewar Berlin. It had a sprinkling of the glamour of Hollywood in the forties and the sexual passions and peccadilloes of la dolce vita in the fifties. It was like an F. Scott Fitzgerald novel rewritten by Ian Fleming. Like all good dramas, it had a.beginning, a middle, and an end. It was the single most important creative period in modern history, irrevocably changing all that followed it in fashion, music, and mores. Yet it wasn’t until 1967, when it was nearly halfway over, that
Time
magazine gave it a name, “Swinging London.”

Peter Evans, in his wickedly snide commentary on the era called
Goodbye Baby
&
Amen,
suggests that Swinging London started at precisely 11:03 A.M. on the morning of March 22, 1963, when John Dennis Profumo, the Minister of War, rose in the House of Commons to lie about his association with call girl Christine Keeler. “There was no impropriety whatsoever,” he said in his famous speech. “I shall not hesitate to issue writs for libel and slander if scandalous allegations are made or repeated outside the house.” On June 4 Profumo issued a statement saying he had lied to his colleagues and was resigning as both Minister of War and as a member of Parliament. Three days after Profumo resigned, Dr. Stephen Ward was arrested for “living off the improper immoral earnings” of Keeler and Mandy Rice-Davies. The ensuing trial, with testimony of orgies in high places and two-way mirrors, destroyed the government. On August 3, Stephen Ward took an overdose of Nembutal and died. On October 2 Harold Macmillan resigned as Prime Minister from a hospital bed at King Edward VII Hospital, where he was confined for a prostrate operation. Anything Goes, Swinging London was then formally inaugurated the following week by the Beatles’ appearance on “Sunday Night at the London Palladium.”

For all its creativity and real excitement, Swinging London was something of a joke, a capricious prank on the old guard. The leaders of this revolution were the so-called new aristocracy, who came from the working classes. In fact, it was so important to have a modest background in Swinging London that socially active, born aristocrats shed their titles in order to be accepted, and one up-and-coming rock star, Mick Jagger, pretended to be from the tough East End, when in fact he was rather well off. David Bailey, the handsome, blond photographer who epitomized the era, was the son of a tailor. Terrance Donovan, another popular photographer, was the son of a lorry driver. The most popular new actors, Michael Caine and Terence Stamp, spoke with Cockney accents and were the sons, respectively, of a fish porter and a tugboat captain.

There was a general aversion to anything faintly conventional. Indeed, even the professions that were venerated had changed. For the first time in modern history, being a male hairdresser was an esteemed and envied position. At Christmas of 1965, David Bailey immortalized the Swinging London set in a published collection of oversized photographs. The cast of characters included, generically, two actors (Caine and Stamp); eight pop singers (John and Paul and Jagger included); one pop artist; one interior decorator; four photographers; two managers of pop groups (including Brian Epstein); one hairdresser (Vidal Sassoon); two photographers’ designers; one ballet dancer (Rudolf Nureyev); three models; one film producer; one dress designer; one milliner; one discotheque manager (Brian Morris of the Ad Lib); one creative advertising man; plus the murderous underworld twins, the Kray Brothers.

The fashion and cosmetics business dubbed what was happening a “youthquake,” and it was certainly in fashion and grooming that the changes were most apparent. A young designer named Mary Quant had single-handedly revolutionized the look in women’s clothing with what she called the miniskirt, unleashing upon the world an unobstructed view of legs of all sizes, shapes, and attractiveness. A narrow side street named Carnaby Street was now the center of fashion excitement, spewing out new designers from its many shops every week. Long hair for men, a trend directly attributable to the Beatles, was de rigueur. To be considered attractive one needed to be very thin, very pale, very bored, and exclusively British. Candy-striped shirts were in vogue for a time, as was driving an E-Jag, but no trend seemed to last more than a few weeks. Two new, eye-boggling geometric art forms, called Pop Art and Op Art, assaulted the eye from the walls of every smart gallery in Mayfair.

Sex, too, was very different, as were morals. Sex was “free,” talked about frequently in public, indulged in only slightly less frequently, and all without the shame or messy guilt of the fifties. Kenneth Tynan said “fuck” on television, and homosexuality was legalized among consenting adults. Everything was very casual but had an edge of the outrageous to it. When David Bailey dumped model Jean Shrimpton to marry Catherine Deneuve, he wore a sweater and she smoked at the ceremony. Best man Mick Jagger wore jeans. “David Bailey makes love daily” became the nursery rhyme of the Chelsea set. Stores were no longer shops but “boutiques,” and the esteemed form of comedy was satire; the targets were pomposity and tradition.

There were new words too, like pow! and Zap! and gear and grotty. Everybody smoked, cigarettes by the packfuls, then marijuana. Eventually LSD came along and crystalized it all. As the Swinging Sixties progressed, the drugs got harder—heroin was chic—and a lot of people were arrested or died. It was thought to be a compliment to be called “decadent,” and the suicide rate was peaking. It was more of a sparkler than a full fireworks show, but it was a beautiful bright burst. When the Beatles returned to London that winter, this was the Swinging London they came to lead, as easily as monarchs returning to their ancestral seats of power.

On March 2
, less than two weeks after their return from America, the Beatles began work on their first feature film, tentatively entitled
Beatlemania.
Brian had arranged this deal six months before, when the idea was as dangerous as it was glamorous. Music exploitation films of the fifties and sixties were inevitably cheap-looking and moronically scripted, usually of the
Beach Blanket Bingo
genre. But Elvis had made movies, and successful ones, too, so Brian decided the Beatles would make one. Anyway, Brian’s showman’s mentality couldn’t resist the lure of the silver screen, with his boys thirty feet high. Now
that was
Brian’s idea of show biz.

At the time the Beatles had made the deal, at the beginning of their success, they had been in a vastly different bargaining position than they were just a few months later on the first day of production. The previous October Brian had been approached by an American film producer named Walter Shenson who had the financial blessings of United Artists in asking the Beatles to appear in their own movie. Brian happily agreed to a meeting with Shenson and Bud Orenstein, the United Artists executive in Great Britain. Although Brian didn’t realize it at the time, U.A. was less interested in making the movie than they were in releasing the soundtrack album; even if the movie was a flop, United Artists would almost certainly make a profit from record sales.
¹¹

Shenson and Orenstein told Brian they were prepared to budget the film at $300,000, a low budget for a feature film but about average for a music exploitation film. They offered the boys a £25,000 fee for appearing in the movie, plus a percentage of the profits. Insofar as the percentage, they were prepared to be more generous. Between themselves they had agreed to offer Brian as high as a 25 percent cut. Brian thought about the percentage for a moment, then said, “I wouldn’t accept anything less than 7.5 percent.” To make a poor business deal even worse, Brian agreed to a three-picture deal, in which all rights to the movies would revert back to Walter Shenson in fifteen years. After all, Brian thought, the Beatles were a pop group, and what pop group would still be popular after fifteen years?

Seven months later, when the Beatles assembled to make the movie, they were international stars and could have demanded to renegotiate their contracts. But Brian, ever the gentleman, had given his word, and financial matters proceeded as planned.

Brian and Shenson chose a young British director of TV commercials named Richard Lester to direct the film. Lester was best known for his The
Running, Jumping and Standing Still Film
he made with Spike Milligan, and he promised to bring a fresh visual sense to the movie. It was Brian’s idea to hire Alun Owens, a writer of TV dramas and a fellow Liverpudlian, best known for his British TV film called
No Trains to Lime Street.
Owens was touted as having a special ear for Liverpool dialogue and was sent out to spend a few days on the road with the Beatles to pick up a sense of their personalities. The script turned out to be arguably the best cinematic representation of Swinging London, along with
Blow-Up
and
Alfie.
Owens had adeptly characterized each Beatle in cartoon strokes in the script; John was the sardonically funny one, Paul the adorable Lothario, George the handsome romantic, and Ringo the lonely, lovable runt of the litter. By virtue of Lester’s jump-cutting, op-art direction, the Beatles were turned into modern-day swinging Marx Brothers. It was another uncanny example of how the most potentially disastrous experiment could coalesce artistically into moments of great genius for them. The accolades the film received in the press when it opened the following summer reached a level of hysteria. American film critic Andrew Sarris later
dubbed A Hard Day’s Night,
“The
Citizen Kane
of juke-box movies.”
Newsweek
magazine summed it up when they announced, “The legitimacy of the Beatles phenomenon is inescapable.”

As shooting for
A Hard Day’s Night
started in earnest, the Beatles found the pace of the six-week shooting schedule to be a snail’s crawl compared to the frantic pace of their lives over the last six months. Despite the fact that the Beatles were on-screen for virtually the entire length of the movie, they spent many hours just sitting around their dressing trailers, smoking and talking, and idle hands find the Devil’s work. Eventually an 8-mm projector was moved into one of their dressing trailers, and they were entertained by a caseload of porno movies. Boys being boys, the young girls on the set being used as extras were discreetly lured into the trailers for quickies between takes.

One of the girls who wouldn’t visit in the dressing trailer was nineteen-year-old Pattie Boyd. George Harrison picked her out on the first day of shooting. A one-time Mary Quant model, Pattie had worked with Lester before in a Smith’s Crisps commercial. She was pretty and blond with a round face and big, blue button eyes, the essence of a Swinging London sex kitten in her pale makeup, fun-fur short jacket, and Quant mini that showed miles and miles of gorgeous legs. Pattie had a genuinely warm and kittenish personality, which could make the most Milquetoast man feel virile.

Pattie remembers George staring at her the first day of shooting at the Waterloo train station but didn’t think much of the twenty-one-year-old pop star. After the day’s shooting ended, Pattie asked each of the Beatles— save for John who frightened her with his sarcasm—to sign autographs for her younger sisters, Jenny and Paula. “George signed his name and put two kisses under it for my sisters,” Pattie says. “Then he signed one for me and put seven kisses.”

The next day he followed Pattie around the set but was turned down flat on an offer for a visit to the dressing trailer. When he was also turned down for a respectable date, he was a little annoyed. “I explained that I had a steady boyfriend of two years and that I had an old-fashioned view of romance,” Patti said. “That meant fidelity.” But George wouldn’t give up. Whenever his mind would stray, it would stray right to Pattie. On the third day he nearly begged her to go out with him, he was so attracted to her, and Pattie broke down and accepted a dinner invitation. “I was loyal, not stupid,” she says.

By the end of their first week of dating, Pattie had already introduced him to her mother and sisters. At the end of a month he took her to see a magnificent country bungalow he was considering buying in the toney suburb of Esher. He said he didn’t want to be living there alone. It was a long, low, one-story bungalow on a private development owned by the National Trust, situated on a thickly wooded estate. Two long wings were separated by a spacious, rectangular courtyard, which had a heated swimming pool. Semicircular floor-to-ceiling windows projected out from the living room onto a landscaped backyard. As Pattie and George wandered hand in hand through the rambling, unfurnished house, Pattie giggled dreamily when George asked her for her decorating ideas. By the end of the fourth week George bought the house for them to live in together, and their relationship was official.

George took some getting used to for Pattie. She was accustomed to the polished young men in the fast-moving, trendy set she traveled in that included model Jean Shrimpton and David Bailey. As far as polish went, George had none. He was virtually uneducated, graciousness was not his strong point, and he fluctuated between being an ill-mannered, know-it-all Liverpool lout to a sex-crazed teenager. George’s personality problems were an intricate web of monomania and self-doubt. He was an overnight sensation and yet was still treated like a kid and a third-rate citizen by John and Paul. Pattie noticed, as did everyone, that none of George’s compositions ever appeared on a Beatles album.