Shout! (61 page)

Despite Brian’s depleted personal wealth, his estate was liable to taxes, based on NEMS’s current value, of some half a million pounds. Word quickly leaked onto the London Stock Exchange that to meet the estate duty the Epsteins would have no choice but to sell NEMS. It was rumored that an offer would be made, linking NEMS with Brian’s 10
percent holding in Northern Songs, the Lennon-McCartney publishing company.

Since Brian’s death the Beatles had had several further, apparently fruitful, sessions with the Maharishi. They were now full members of the Spiritual Regeneration movement and, as such, liable to pay a week’s earnings per month to support it. They had also undertaken to visit their guru’s academy in India to further their studies and ultimately to qualify as “teachers of Meditation.”

At Buckingham Palace the same week, the Queen held a levée for the Council of Knights Bachelor, whose members included Sir Joseph Lockwood, chairman of EMI. As Her Majesty entered the room she called out to Sir Joseph: “The Beatles are turning awfully
funny
, aren’t they?”

A few days after Brian’s funeral the four of them met Clive Epstein at Brian’s house in Chapel Street. Queenie, too, had insisted on being there. “All the boys turned up in suits, out of respect for Queenie,” Joanne Newfield says. “We all sat around Brian’s sitting room, having tea together. It felt so strange—as though nothing had happened at all. I half-expected Brian to walk in, just the way he used to, and join us.

“It was all too much for me. I just burst into tears. George looked at me very sternly and said, ‘You’re ‘not crying for Brian. You’re crying for yourself.’”

At that and subsequent meetings the Beatles agreed to accept Clive as Brian’s successor, at least for the two months until their contract with NEMS expired. What they most emphatically did not want was any managerial relationship with Robert Stigwood. Lengthy consultations followed with Lord Goodman, the country’s most eminent lawyer, who had recently acted for Brian as well as for EMI. As a result, Stigwood was persuaded to relinquish his option on NEMS. He departed with some five hundred thousand pounds, plus half the NEMS artists roster—among them the Bee Gees, Cream, and Jimi Hendrix—to set up, with spectacular success, on his own.

A new company, Nemperor Holdings, was formed to administer NEMS in what Clive Epstein promised would be “a program of vigorous expansion.” Vic Lewis, the ex-bandleader, became managing director. Clive, as chief executive, commuted back and forth from Liverpool, conscientiously trying to fill his elder brother’s shoes.

Peter Brown, at the Epstein family’s request, lived on for a time at Brian’s Chapel Street house. His resemblance to Brian, and the consequent
reliance of Queenie Epstein on him, seemed to guarantee his accession to the role he had so long understudied. He took over Brian’s desk and Brian’s assistant—even certain of Brian’s little executive affectations. “Brian used to have this habit of dropping all the music papers on the floor and saying, ‘I’ve finished with these now,’ Joanne Newfield says. ‘A few days after he took over, Peter did exactly the same thing and used exactly the same words.’”

It was Brown who now had the direct line to all four Beatles and who, in a voice so very like Brian’s, passed along the inter-Beatles message he had just received. Paul wanted to have a meeting, just among themselves, to discuss future projects and plans. Could they all meet up on September 2 at Paul’s house?

The girls who stood outside Paul’s Cavendish Avenue house had never been formally introduced. They knew each other only as syllables, breathlessly gasped out in the running and jumping and climbing and neck-craning of the campaign they pursued in common. There was Big Sue and Little Sue, and Gayleen, and Margo, and “Willie,” and “Knickers.” Others came and went, or were shooed away, having tried to preempt the space allotted by mutual agreement among those half-dozen perennials. Waiting there, day after day, night after night until dawn, as days turned into months, as months lengthened to years, they somehow never did discover one another’s surnames.

They waited outside Paul’s because he was their favorite Beatle, but also because his house, being only a short walk from Abbey Road studios, was the recognized listening post for all Beatles intelligence. Pilgrimages would be made at intervals to John’s mock-Tudor Mansion in Weybridge or George’s Esher bungalow. But always the trail led back to St. John’s Wood and the big black double gates whose electric security lock, as time passed, grew less and less of an impediment.

Bored to distraction as the Beatles were by their female following, they could not help but marvel at the almost psychic power that enabled these hard-core fans to shadow or waylay them. At Paul’s house or Abbey Road, or any ad hoc rehearsal or film-editing rendezvous, Peter Brown’s secret call would bring the four together under the scrutiny of those same half-dozen rather red and breathless faces. “They used to shout at us, ‘How did you
know
?’” Margo says. “Paul always called us the eyes and ears of the world.”

Margo, a brisk, jolly, and otherwise deeply rational girl, worked as a children’s nanny in Kingsbury, North London. Both job and location had been chosen for their convenience to the greater purpose that had brought Margo to London from the Lincolnshire seaside town of Cleethorpes. She arrived in 1968, looked after her two charges conscientiously for forty-eight hours, then made her way to St. John’s Wood. For the next two years, with only the most necessary intervals, Margo stood and waited outside Paul McCartney’s house.

The other Beatles had their own faithful followers, usually identified by a nickname: “Sue John” or “Linda Ringo.” “We all respected John,” Margo says. “We were a bit afraid of him, really. Ringo would come along and you’d never notice him until someone said, ‘That was Ringo.’ George always seemed to hate us. He’d push past us and even try to tread on our toes or kick us. He seemed very unhappy in those days.”

The main objective, however, remained that Beatle who was not only the most irresistibly good-looking but also the most patiently amiable and accessible. Margo had first noticed this quality in 1964 while chasing the Beatles’ limousine down Monmouth Street, when Paul leaned out of a window and shouted, “Run, girls, run!” There was also a time outside the Scala Theatre, during filming of
A Hard Day’s Night
, when he emerged to talk to Margo and her cousin in one of his several disguises. “This man came up to us with blond hair and a clipboard. He told us where to go if we wanted to see the next day’s filming. It was only when he said, ‘Ta-ra’ that we realized it was Paul.”

So, every day of the week, Margot, Big Sue, Little Sue, Gayleen, “Willie,” and “Knickers” waited on Cavendish Avenue with their hungry eyes and small Instamatic cameras. They photographed Paul in the early morning as he came out to walk Martha the sheepdog on Hampstead Heath. They photographed him late at night, returning from vacation, his sunburned nose shining eerily in the flashbulb glow. They photographed him driving out, with Jane or without her, in the Aston Martin or Mini Cooper; then, hours, even days, later, they photographed him driving back in again.

Paul, for his part, presented token discouragement. The front gates would be thrown open suddenly, and the Aston Martin would roar out and away up Cavendish Avenue. The girls were by then so fit, they could beat the car on foot over at least the distance to Abbey Road studios. “We all got very tough as well,” Margo says, “through being thrown
down the EMI front steps by Mal Evans, the roadie. But we understood that he was only doing his job. At other times he’d be concerned for us, standing out there in all weathers. At heart he was an incredibly gentle person.”

The bulk of the snapshots, however, showed Paul, in his endlessly changing suits and shirts and scarves and waistcoats, pausing at an entreaty: turning and smiling. The face—in real life slightly asymmetric—became for the cheapest Instamatic what it was in the glossiest magazines. Frequently, too, he would be in a mood for conversation. One snapshot from the hundreds shows him playing with a monkey one of the girls had brought. It bit his finger a moment afterward. “We told him once we could see him from the back of the house, sitting on the loo,” Margo says. “We stood him on a flowerpot to show him we were telling the truth.”

Each of the girls, by tradition, brought Paul gifts of varying usefulness. “I gave him three peaches in a bag once,” Margo says. “He’d eaten one of them by the time he got down the Abbey Road front steps. Another time, we shouted out, ‘What do you want for your birthday?’ He thought for a minute, then he said, ‘I haven’t got any slippers.’” The slippers were ceremonially handed over in front of massed Instamatics.

The vigil broadened in scope after someone discovered under which flowerpot Paul was accustomed to hide his backdoor key. Selected parties then began letting themselves into the house while he was absent, and moving from room to room in hushed wonder at the opulent chaos mingled with working-class formality: the lace-covered table, the Paolozzi sculpture, and the ranks and ranks of clothes. They would bring away some memento—small at first—a tea towel or a handful of toilet paper.

“The American girls were worst,” Margo says. “They started nicking his clothes.” The English girls, though refusing to pilfer, felt their scruples waver when offered a share in the booty. Margo acquired a pair of Paul’s underpants and a spotted Mr. Fish shirt. Some Harris tweed trousers were also brought out as a communal prize to be worn reverently, in turn. The hems would be shortened for Little Sue, then lengthened again so that Big Sue could have a turn at wearing them.

Six months earlier, Paul had written a song, or the beginning of one, called “Magical Mystery Tour.” It was to have been put on the
Sgt. Pepper
album: It had been arranged, rehearsed, even partially recorded before Paul conceded that it did not quite fit into Sergeant Pepper’s cabaret show. The track was held over—indeed, it was forgotten until early September, and the meetings to decide how the Beatles were to begin the era after Brian.

The idea, like the song, was Paul’s. He had been thinking in his whimsical way about little tourist buses, setting out with coy trepidation on Mystery Tours from British seaside towns. He had been thinking, too, of Ken Kesey’s Merry Pranksters, an American hippie troupe that, two years earlier, had journeyed by bus through the Californian backwoods, buoyed up by LSD diluted into thirst-quenching Kool-Aid. Tom Wolfe’s chronicle of their journey,
The Electric KoolAid Acid Test
, recorded, among other things, what visions the Pranksters experienced by taking acid during a Beatles concert in Los Angeles. So, yet again, something they had originally inspired came floating back to them almost unrecognizably as a new idea to copy and adapt.

Paul’s plan was to rent a bus and set out on a real life Mystery Tour, as the Pranksters had, to see what adventure—what magic—would be extracted from the unsuspecting English countryside. They would take cameras and film it, Paul said, but this time direct the film for themselves. He showed the others the scenario he had written—or rather, drawn. It was a neatly inscribed circle, segmented with what were to be the visual high points. In one segment, Paul had written “midgets”; in another, “fat lady”; in yet another, “lunch.”

The prospect, as Paul outlined it, was generally appealing. At last they would be able to make a film unhampered by Walter Shenson, Dick Lester, and all the petty restraints that had made
Help!
and
A Hard Day’s Night
such tedious and disappointing experiences. Filmmaking, as they well knew, was easy enough. All you needed was money and cameras, and someone saying “Action!”

So exhilarating did the project—and other projects—seem that they decided to postpone their pilgrimage to the Maharishi’s Indian ashram until early 1968. John and George gave their first television interview in two years, appearing on the
David Frost Show
to explain their newfound religious beliefs. Even about Transcendental Meditation they were pithy and funny: They seemed calm, cheerful, and restored to sanity. Best of all, they no longer incited Britain’s gullible youth to experiment with
LSD. The
Daily Sketch
spoke for all in noting maternally, “It’s nice to see the roses back in the Beatles’ cheeks.”

Certainly, it was simple enough to hire a luxury coach and commission the best graphic artists to design placards reading
MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR,
though not quite so easy to make the placards stick to the coach’s highly polished sides. It was easy to hire actors to play the characters specified in Paul’s diagram—a fat lady, a midget, a music-hall funny man. It was easy to engage cameras, and three crews to operate them, and to persuade a sprinkling of journalists and NEMS employees to go along as extras. Forty-three people eventually boarded the bus that, early in September 1967, in a secrecy somewhat compromised by its insecurely fixed
MAGICAL MYSTERY TOUR
placards, headed out of London along the Great West Road toward a still unspecified destination.

Chaos set in from the beginning. The Magical Mystery Tour, far from floating off into a psychedelic sunset, labored sluggishly and all too materially around Britain’s summer vacation routes, hounded by a cavalcade of press vehicles, surrounded at every random halt by packs of sightseers and fans. Encountering a sign to Banbury, they followed it, to see if Banbury had a fair. It didn’t, so they turned round and headed for Devon.

The journey, it became quickly evident, held neither magic nor mystery: only poignant reminders of how things used to be when Brian Epstein looked after the travel arrangements. Aboard the bus, becalmed in traffic jams, or trying to register at hotels that were not expecting them, everyone realized at last what a protective shield had been wrenched away. Neil Aspinall realized it, trying to apportion overnight rooms among midgets and fat ladies squabbling over who had to double up with whom: “When Brian was alive, you never had to worry about any of that. You’d just ask for fifteen cars and twenty hotel rooms and they’d be there.”