Shout! (39 page)

Peter Jones, of
Record Mirror
, found himself in the most difficult position. Jones had written the first article about the Beatles in a national publication; he was now contributor-in-chief to their fan magazine,
Beatles Monthly
. He was at once privy to their most intimate moments and sworn to secrecy concerning all that might have shown them not as cuddly toys but as ordinary, imperfect human beings.

The papers did not mind revealing that all four of these new national role models, especially George, were heavy smokers. But on other matters Peter Jones had to remain silent. He could say nothing about the hatred they already felt for performing night after night, and how Neil Aspinall sometimes literally chased them from their dressing room into the wings. Jones could not mention the rows they frequently had with one another, or with Brian. Nor could he make even the vaguest mention of what everyone in the Beatles’ entourage called “the girl scene,” the sexual encounters with young women, handpicked from their night’s audience or stage-door crowd, that continually went on in hotel bedrooms or bathrooms or out-of-the-way theater passages or toilets.

“At times,” Jones says, “they could pick on someone for a kind of corporate cruelty that was absolutely merciless. Down on the south coast there was this old journalist who went into the swimming pool with them while some photographs were being taken. All four of them really set on this quite elderly guy—pretending it was all fun, but it wasn’t. They were so rough with him, they actually broke one of his toes.”

Such stories, if written, would not have been printed. Fleet Street had settled on its view of the Beatles—the four happy-go-lucky Liverpool lads who looked absurd, but knew it, and whose salty one-line witticisms seemed to epitomize the honesty of the working classes, blowing through the seedy lies of the Profumo upper crust. “You
had
to write it that way,” an ex–
Daily Mirror
man says. “You knew that if you didn’t, the
Sketch
would and the
Express
would and the
Mail
and the
Standard
would. You were writing in self-defense.”

Within a week of the London Palladium show, Britain’s attitude toward
the Beatles had completely changed. No longer were they just a silly pop group that incited teenagers to be even sillier than usual. They were also, unprecedently, endowed with wit and intelligence. The inclusion among their cover versions of several songs originally recorded by American girl groups—notably the Marvelettes’ “Please, Mister Postman” and the Cookies’ “Chains”—underscored their Liverpool toughness with appealingly paradoxical sensitivity. Whatever the prejudice engendered by their hair and clothes, it vanished as soon as their voices began to speak, in what was half-remembered, through ages of music hall and radio, as comedy’s natural dialect:

“None of us has quite grasped wharrit’s all about yet. It’s washin’ over our ’eads like a yuge tidal wave—”

“—I don’t s’pose I think mooch about the future. Though, now we have made it, it would be a pity to get bombed—”

“I get spasms of being intellectual. I read a bit about politics. But I don’t think I’d vote for anyone. No message from those phoney politicians is coomin’ through to me.”

“—We’ve always ’ad laughs. Sometimes we find ourselves gettin’ hysterical, especially when we’re tired. We laugh at soft things that other people don’t get—we call it ‘The Cruelies’—”

“Is it true that you were turned down by Decca?”

“A guy at Decca turned us down.”

“He must be kicking himself now.”

“I ’ope he kicks himself to death.”

On October 16, an announcement was made that both confirmed their new status beyond any doubt and brought Fleet Street northward in a still more maddened pursuit. The Beatles had been chosen to appear in the Royal Command Variety Performance in London on November 4. Bernard Delfont, the organizer, told reporters he had picked them on the insistence of his ten-year-old daughter. Buckingham Palace, to which the list went for approval, offered no objection.

Late in October, Brian Epstein moved his entire organization from Liverpool to London. “It happened at about a week’s notice,” Tony Bramwell says. “Eppy walked in and said he was going south—were we coming?” Tony, Alistair Taylor, Laurie McCaffery the switchboard girl, immediately went home to pack. Freda Kelly’s father refused to let her go, although she pleaded. Almost the entire staff managed to reassemble
itself in London to greet Brian when he arrived, looking as if he had expected nothing else.

The new NEMS office was on Argyll Street, only a few doors away from the London Palladium. Brian drew great satisfaction from being so close to this famous old theatrical monument. He drew equal satisfaction from his new cable [telegram] address: Nemperor, London. It was Bob Wooler, the Cavern’s pun-loving disk jockey, who had once said to him on the telephone, “Is that the Nemperor?”

Brian now had his own London flat, in a fashionable building in William Mews, Knightsbridge. One of the first people he took there was Brian Sommerville, an old friend of his who had recently left the Royal Navy and was now working in Fleet Street. “The flat was very Brian,” Sommerville says, “all white walls and black leather cushions. While I was there, he showed me a proof of the Beatles’ new LP cover. He was already starting to suggest that we might work together.”

Once installed in the new flat Brian began to entertain lavishly. David Jacobs, his lawyer, had introduced him to many of the show business celebrities for whom Jacobs’s firm also acted. He developed a particular friendship with Lionel Bart, the East End ex-skiffler who had won, and was rapidly losing, a fortune as a composer of West End musicals. He loved all show people, and in their cocktail chatter found a measure of security. Show people did not care who was, or was not, gay.

He had, as his success grew more hectic, placed increasing reliance on Jacobs and on his accountants, Bryce, Hanmer and Isherwood of Albemarle Street, Mayfair. Bryce, Hanmer were, in fact, a Liverpool firm whose London office made a speciality of theatrical clients. Dr. Walter Strach, one of the firm’s senior members, a gaunt and melancholy Czech, thus found himself, in late 1963, charged with the responsibility of finding London accommodation for all four of the Beatles. Total secrecy was maintained, to evade the fans and to keep the rents within reason.

For John and Cynthia a flat was rented in Emperor’s Gate, Kensington, just behind the Cromwell Road terminal where, in those days, one could check in for flights from Heathrow airport. Thanks to the almost psychic powers of detection bestowed on Beatles fans, the hideaway became instantly and universally known. Girls waited all day, as well as most of the night, around the pilastered front porch, even venturing into the hallway, if the front door was left open, to settle down with
blankets, sleeping bags, and vacuum flasks. Across the road was a student hostel with a balcony that looked directly into the Lennons flat. Whenever Cyn looked, she would see figures hanging over the balcony and waving. Six flights up, without a lift, she spent days at a time, with baby Julian, in conscientious isolation.

George and Ringo moved together into a flat lower down in the William Mews block where Brian lived. Old ladies, carrying Pekinese dogs, looked askance at the girls who instantaneously took up stations on the front steps. Brian was torn between excitement at having two Beatles so closely under his wing and terror that George and Ringo might find out what, in any case, they had known about him for years. Even when he asked them to one of his gay parties he seems to have hoped they would view the all-male gathering as no more than coincidence. “Do you think they noticed?” he later anxiously asked a friend.

As to the living arrangements of Paul McCartney, not even the most tenacious journalist trying to get his foot in the door could hazard a guess. Whereas George and Ringo’s address, like John’s, would invariably be specified in newspaper reports, Paul, since leaving the President Hotel, could only be said ambiguously to be living at “an address in Central London.”

Four months earlier, at a pop concert in the Albert Hall, the Beatles had met a young actress called Jane Asher, herself on the way to becoming a celebrity through her appearances on the BBC TV show
Juke Box Jury
. The Beatles crowded round her in their usual way, all four instantly proposing marriage. The others guessed at once that such a “classy” girl, red-haired and madonna-like, would appeal strongly to the socially ambitious Paul. They had asked her back to their hotel for a drink and, after some winking and nudging, had left her and Paul alone in the bedroom. It quickly transpired that Jane, as well as being only seventeen, was still a virgin. When the others came back she and Paul were sitting there, deep in discussion about their favorite kinds of food.

Jane’s background, as much as her chaste beauty, fascinated Paul. Her father, Sir Richard Asher, was a noted psychiatrist. Her mother, a professional musician, had taught George Martin the oboe. Her brother, Peter, belonged—as did Jane herself—to a teenage top drawer that played its rock records in the studies of elegant town houses and formed the earliest clientele of the music clubs and boutiques now springing up in the West End and Chelsea. Since heeding his mother’s plea not to talk like other
children in the projects, Paul McCartney had dreamed of worlds like this.

The fans knew that Paul and Jane were often seen together, at parties or the theater. The Ashers’ house in Wimpole Street was plagued by telephone gigglings and breathings that Sir Richard could not shut off because the line belonged to his medical practice. What few people knew, even within the Beatles’ entourage, was that Paul now spent all his time in London with the Ashers. Returning from the Continent late one night he had missed his connection to Liverpool, and Jane’s mother had offered him the spare room. That room was now permanently his.

To young men long used to staying out all night, London in 1963 offered many diversions. The old West End night spots, with their clientele of debutantes and Guards officers, were giving way to with-it clubs like Wips, whose advertisement promised “pirhanas in the dark above London’s skyline…black velvet and new faces…music, strong, hard and moody.” In Soho, for a brief season, flourished the Establishment Club, named for all the hapless official targets, from Royalty downward, flayed nightly by the satirists in its floor show. In Mayfair, handily close to George and Ringo’s shared flat, was the super-posh Saddle Room, kept by the television personality Hélène Cordet, from which the two Beatles would often return home to Williams Mews by horse-drawn carriage. Just off Leicester Square was the Ad Lib—its very name a declaration of London’s unlimited treats—where pop stars mingled with their own kind and excluded outsiders in the same way that Pall Mall gentlemen’s clubs had for the past two centuries.

Newspaper acquaintances, like Ray Coleman, who ran into the Beatles after dark at the Ad Lib, could be sure both of an eventful night and of a large bill to be camouflaged among expenses. “None of them ever seemed to have any money,” Coleman said. Peter Jones, the journalist in closest contact with them, received an impression, not so much of Liverpool thrift as of spasmodic insolvency. “If I was on my way to see them, I’d ring up first. Often they’d say, ‘Here, pick up some food for us on the way, will you?’”

The fact is that, although the Beatles were Britain’s biggest-selling pop group, their income was—and for a long time remained—astonishingly small. The records now selling in millions earned them, under their original Parlophone contract, a fourth of a penny per double-sided disc. Their concert appearances, richly profitable to promoters and cinema circuits, often realized barely enough to cover their travel and hotel
expenses. For Brian was still letting them work at rates agreed to months previously.

At Bryce, Hanmer and Isherwood, Dr. Strach’s first act—after sorting out certain small tax difficulties arising from their Hamburg days—was to form the Beatles into a limited company for which the grave Czech gentleman himself acted as both treasurer and secretary. It was to Strach that the bills for their flats and living expenses came. In those days, the doctor remembered, his main concern was to amass a reserve of money to pay income tax after—as must invariably happen—the Beatles had stopped earning money as pop stars. The residue of their earnings, therefore, simply lay in bank accounts, expecting that evil day. For meals, drinks, the suits and shirts and boots they wore once and then discarded, they turned to Neil Aspinall, their road manager, and the float Neil always carried. Larger expenditure was discouraged by the black-suited figure whom, without much conviction, the Beatles called “Uncle Walter.”

Dr. Strach remembered how Brian Epstein strove at every step to make his dealings with the Beatles fair. “He always worried that he might be taking advantage of them. He came to me once and said he wanted to give them a piece of
his
company, NEMS Enterprises. He gave them 10 percent of it, so they would get back some of the 25 percent they paid him. Brian didn’t have to do that, but he wanted to. He was a decent, honest, average human being.”

Punctilious in small matters, and small amounts, Brian could not adjust his sights to the bigger and bigger commercial prospects now materializing on every side. At the same time his pride would not allow him to ask advice from older, more experienced people in the same business. Resolutely he did every deal for the Beatles in person, never revising a payment scale still based more on Liverpool’s values than London’s. And among his pursuers the word rapidly spread. Brian Epstein—in the American entrepreneurial phrase—was not streetwise.

In the autumn of 1963 he received an offer for the Beatles to appear in their first feature film. This was already a recognized way of capitalizing on pop music success—simple exploitation movies in which the thinnest background was given to the regurgitation of Top Twenty hits for a cinema audience. United Artists, the company that approached Brian, were at that stage chiefly interested in sales of a Beatles soundtrack album.