The Love You Make (26 page)

Aronowitz rode in from Woodstock with Dylan in a blue Ford station wagon driven by Victor Mamoudas, Dylan’s road manager and chum. They parked around the corner from the hotel, and Mamoudas, who’s tall, dark, and Sephardic, bombed Dylan and Aronowitz past the crowd of screaming kids into the relative safety of the hotel lobby. There they found themselves with a two-man police escort to accompany them up to the Beatles’ floor. When the elevator door opened Dylan and company were shocked to find still more police, plus a dozen people gaily chatting and drinking booze being served out of Derek Taylor’s room. Included in this group waiting to be admitted to the Beatles’ suite were various reporters, disc jockeys, and the singing groups The Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul and Mary.

Dylan was whisked past these people into the Beatles’ private domain. Brian, Neil, Mal, and the Beatles had just finished a room-service dinner around the dining room table when Dylan appeared in the doorway. He was smaller than the boys had expected, with a hook nose and merry, twinkling eyes, like a Semitic St. Nick. After clumsy introductions officiated over by Brian, the embarrassed tension in the room was palpable. Brian moved the guests into the living room, trying to keep the evening afloat. He asked Dylan and his friends what they wanted to drink, and Dylan replied, “Cheap wine.”

Brian was embarrassed to admit that there was only champagne, French wines, scotch, and Coke in the suite, and Mal was dispatched to get Dylan’s favorite cheap wine. During the wait it was obliquely mentioned that some pills of speed were available, and Dylan and Aronowitz reacted strongly against the idea. Both of them were antichemical at the time, especially speed. In lieu of pills, Dylan suggested, perhaps they’d like to try something organic and green, grown out of Mother Earth’s sweet flowing breast.

Brian and the Beatles looked at each other apprehensively. “We’ve never smoked marijuana before,” Brian finally admitted.

Dylan looked disbelievingly from face to face. “But what about your song?” he asked. “The one about getting high?”

The Beatles were stupefied. “Which song?” John managed to ask.

Dylan said, “You know …” and then he sang, “and when I touch you I get high, I get high, I get high …”

John flushed with embarrassment. “Those aren’t the words,” he admitted. “The words are, ‘I can’t hide, I can’t hide, I can’t hide …’”

Dylan couldn’t wait to initiate them. The preparations to secure the hotel suite took a half hour before Dylan was even allowed to produce the grass. The doors were closed and bolted, and towels from the bathroom were stuffed into every crevice and crack. The blinds were pulled tight and the drapes drawn against the Park Avenue traffic. Finally, a bemused Dylan was allowed to roll the first joint.

Dylan lit the joint, gave them instructions on how to smoke it, and passed it on to John. John took it from him but was too scared to try it himself and passed it on to Ringo, whom he called “my royal taster.” Ringo held onto the joint and finished it himself while Dylan and Aronowitz rolled half a dozen others.

Ringo started laughing first and set the others off. Like many novice pot smokers they found many trivial things funny. Dylan watched for several hours as the Beatles broke each other up, sometimes with something authentically funny, often at nothing more than a look or a word or a pause in the conversation. For a while they all laughed at Brian, who kept saying, “I’m so high I’m on the ceiling. I’m up on the ceiling …” After the smoke had cleared out they allowed a room-service waiter to come in to clear the dining room and found everything he did reason to convulse them with laughter. Months later “Let’s have a laugh” became the code for “Let’s get stoned.”

Paul was overwhelmed with the momentousness of the occasion. “I’m thinking for the first time,” he said, “really
thinking.”
So certain was he of uttering gems of wisdom, he demanded that everything he said that evening be recorded for posterity. He had Mal Evans follow him around the hotel suite, writing down every thing he said.
¹⁴

The evening was the start of a long, albeit intermittent, friendship with Dylan, and they made arrangements to see him again when they passed through New York at the end of their tour.

The cities flew by
. Milwaukee, Chicago, Montreal, Jacksonville, Boston, Baltimore and Pittsburgh. On September 19, in an airplane over Houston, Texas, feeling like he was one hundred years old, Brian turned thirty. He was presented with cowboy guns and a holster as a gift. His birthday celebration had been only slightly marred when the Electra aircraft in which they were traveling was overrun by fans on the tarmac at Houston airport just before takeoff. A screaming horde of teenagers broke past security guards and actually managed to climb on the wings of the plane and tried to break the pressurized plane windows with Coke bottles before the airport police could pull them off. It was no less distressing to learn in flight that back at the Houston hotel a chambermaid had been slashed with a knife by a frenzied fan demanding to know the Beatles’ room numbers.

When they said they could not go on, would not go on, they did one more date. The people of Kansas City, where the Beatles could not fit in an appearance, felt left out and multimillionaire Charles O. Finley, the owner of the Kansas City Athletics baseball team, promised the city fathers he would get the Beatles for them. Finley had been trying to contact Brian in England previous to the tour, and his requests for a meeting were denied, along with hundreds of other similar requests. In frustration, Finley flew to San Francisco, where through Norman Weiss’ intercession he was granted a personal audience with Brian. Finley started negotiations for the boys to play in Kansas City by offering the Beatles $100,000 cash, up front, plus any percentage Brian named. A $100,000 fee was unheard-of in 1964, even as a weekly payment in Las Vegas. Brian was impressed, but he still refused; the boys were too tired, he said, and there was no time. Finley persisted, and finally, at a cash price of $150,000 plus expenses—the largest fee ever paid for a performance of a single concert—the Beatles played Kansas City on their last free night in America. This concert held special irony for them, since the audience, like the others, hardly heard a note they produced. When they left town, the sheets on which they had slept in their hotel rooms were removed from the beds in front of witnesses and sold for $1,150 to representatives of Chicago radio station WBKB. The sheets yielded 6,000 one-inch swatches, which were sold at a dollar apiece. As far as can be ascertained, the pillowcases are still in a bank vault, estimated to have appreciated more than the price of gold.

The Beatles’ last American appearance on that tour was a charity concert at the Paramount Theater in Brooklyn for Cerebral Palsy in which they were sharing the bill with Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé. As soon as the concert was over, Derek Taylor commandeered Brian’s rented limousine, which was waiting near the crowded rear stage door. Derek had accompanied a group of important journalists covering the Beatles for national magazines to the concert and wanted to take them back with him to the Idlewild Hotel near the airport, where the Beatles were staying on their last night in town before catching an early flight back to London in the morning. Included in Derek’s charge was a young journalist named Gloria Steinem, who was doing a profile on John Lennon for
Cosmopolitan.
But by the time they got back to the hotel, they discovered that the Beatles had already returned and were again sequestered in their rooms with Bob Dylan. Derek and all his disappointed journalists retired to his room for a drink.

It was just after midnight when Brian arrived at the hotel in a taxi. He stormed up and down the hallway in a screaming rage, bringing the Beatles’ entourage into the hallway to see what the matter was. Brian was furious that someone had taken his limousine and intended to make a scene about it in front of the gawking journalists. When he found out it was Derek, he ordered Derek into his room and screamed at him, near tears.

“I don’t think your behavior is appropriate to the seriousness of the event, Brian,” Derek told him coldly. “I didn’t take the car joyriding. I used it for important journalists. What was so important about the limousine?”

Brian began to shout, “Get out! Get out!” and Derek crept out the door and down to the bar in the lobby, where he proceeded to get blotto on scotch and Coke. He tried to be entertaining for the journalists who still waited to see the Beatles, but all he could do was sulk about Brian’s behavior. How could a man who had come so far on pure gumption get so thrown by a limousine? At dawn Derek wrote a letter of resignation and slipped it under Brian’s door.

The next morning, on the plane going home, Brian and Derek sat at opposite ends of the first-class compartment, each suffering from a vicious hangover. Later in the flight Brian sent a note to Derek via a stewardess, asking him to rescind his resignation. Derek read the note and went to where Brian was sitting and sat down next to him. Derek declined to have his job back; the job was too time consuming, and he wanted more time with his wife and children. They both had a good cry over a bottle of champagne, and Derek held Brian’s hand. “Well, we can be friends, Brian, but I can’t work with you. It was only a limousine, after all.”

Brian had wanted
the limousine to go out on the town with a new social friend and impress young boys with it. Losing the limousine put a dent in both Brian’s delicate ego and his last night in New York.

Brian’s life began to undergo quite a change from the moment he became friendly with Nat Weiss, a successful New York divorce lawyer. Some say Nat was one of the best things that ever happened to Brian, a friend who showed him a way to be at ease and content with himself. Others said Nat showed Brian the path to his own destruction. In truth Brian had long before set down that path, and Nat was just a wise and experienced tour guide.

Nat’s booming law practice was due in part to his enormous empathy for people and in part to his shrewd reading of character. Occasionally he would take on an “underdog case”—an accused pornographer or sex offender—just for the fun of championing the underdog. Tall, bespectacled, and slightly balding, he was about the same age as Brian and, like many of Brian’s friends, shared a solid middle-class background and had a doting Jewish mother.

They were introduced at a party in the Plaza Hotel, where another business associate of Nat’s acquaintance often gave soirees for single young men. Nat remembers being fascinated at meeting the manager of the Beatles, but when he tried to engage him in conversation, Brian could not rip his attention away from a young man with whom he was obviously quite taken. The next morning Nat got Brian’s phone number from his host and called him at his hotel to ask how the conquest went. Brian said, “The boy was quite boring. He had nothing to say.” At first Nat thought Brian was joking, but it turned out that Brian had stayed up all night talking to the boy, pursuing intellectual encounters. Brian never made a move. Nat was mildly amused but disappointed that Brian had deprived himself of so much available pleasure, and he offered to take the reticent but impressionable young man on a tour of some of the delights of the city.

One of their first stops was Kelly’s on West Forty-fifth Street, at the time New York’s most famous hustler bar. Brian agreed to go to this place of dubious repute only if Nat promised not to tell anyone who he was. But after a drink or two Brian was playing “A Hard Day’s Night” on the jukebox twenty times over. Once again, the boy Brian took back to his hotel suite with him was engaged only in conversation. Nat suggested that Brian be more aggressive, but there was no encouraging him. Once Nat even resorted to paying a call boy to seduce Brian, only to learn from Brian the next morning that he and the boy stayed up all night playing music, with Brian lecturing, “Now listen to the chords at the end of this song …”

Nat couldn’t figure it out. Brian was a lovely man. He was attractive, successful, he was romantic. Nat remembers one night at the Plaza Hotel when Brian ordered thirty-six scoops of ice cream just to delight one young fellow, without so much as hugging him before he left the suite. The only sex that seemed to spark Brian’s real interest was rough and degrading, with people who would just as soon spit on him as touch him.

Brian and Nat’s friendship solidified very quickly, in part due to the necessities of business. Nat was just the kind of attorney Brian needed, a New York version of David Jacobs. It didn’t take Nat a week of working with Brian to discover that the Beatles’ business affairs were a mess in the United States. To begin with, the United States Internal Revenue Service, concerned about all the millions of dollars that were flowing out of the country from their American tour, put a freeze on $1 million in concert proceeds in a New York court. Until the legality of the foreign payments could be sorted out, there would be no payment. This put Brian and the boys in the onerous position of having to float their entire U.S. concert tour out of their own pockets. The tour had cost them a fortune in expenses, far beyond anything they had imagined, and they needed $500,000 in cash desperately.

Far worse, the problem with Nicky Byrne and the Seltaeb merchandising scheme had turned into a legal fiasco. Brian had insisted that Byrne renegotiate the percentages, which Byrne shrewdly agreed to do. NEMS cut was substantially raised to 46 percent, but even at that rate the Beatles were losing a fortune that could have been theirs. Then, something very odd began co happen. The NEMS offices in London began to issue licenses directly to American manufacturers and started collecting the fees themselves. It didn’t take long before several American companies owned duplicate agreements, and the lawsuits began to fly. JCPenney and Woolworth’s immediately canceled $78 million worth of orders for merchandise. Byrne unleashed a reported $22 million worth of lawsuits on NEMS, at which point Brian turned the matter over to their first American attorney, Walter Hofer.