The Beatles (100 page)

In August, Brian managed to renegotiate the deal, bringing the Beatles’ cut up from 10 to 46 percent, but even that seemed insufficient. All Nicky Byrne was doing, it seemed, was issuing licenses—and reaping a fortune.

Offended, Brian decided to take matters into his own hands. Convinced that the operation was “
a major ripoff
” and that “
Seltaeb was not accounting properly
,”
he summarily canceled Seltaeb’s authority to represent the Beatles abroad. He then instructed David Jacobs’s office in London to begin issuing its own licenses directly to American manufacturers and, thus, collect identical fees. As soon as American companies got wind of the conflicting agreements, all bets were off.
J. C. Penney and Woolworth’s
didn’t waste a moment canceling $78 million worth of orders, which triggered a lawsuit by Nicky Byrne against Brian and Walter Hofer, seeking $5,168,000 in damages.

It took nearly three years to settle the suit, untangling thirty-nine separate claims against NEMS and a $22 million claim for damages, which eventually broke Nicky Byrne and rent the merchandising deal asunder. “
The reality is that the Beatles
never saw a penny out of the merchandising,” says Nat Weiss, the avuncular divorce lawyer Brian befriended in New York who subsequently took over their American affairs. “Tens of millions of dollars went down the drain because of the way the whole thing was mishandled. Even after the judgment was vacated, you could smell the smoke from the ashes, that’s how badly they had been burned.”

Despite Brian’s fumbling, the whole of London moved to the beat of the swinging Beatles soundtrack. Almost everyone credited them with the new and buoyant spirit that now seemed to seep into all phases of ordinary city life. The semimythical concept of “Swinging London” had not quite emerged—in fact, the term wasn’t coined until April 1966
^*
—but you could already feel its essence in the air. When Harold Wilson upset the Conservative political establishment and returned Labour to office for the first time since 1951, it signaled “a [new] kind of freedom around which hadn’t been there before.” Total dependence on American culture began losing ground to new, homegrown forms of expression that sparked a revolution in the arts and seemed to undermine traditional attitudes. This energy was already at work on the walls of London’s galleries, where British pop art was in its earliest stages of experimentation. Several recent graduates of the Royal College of Art—including Peter Blake, Richard Smith, and David Hockney—were being exhibited all over the place, with a legion of talented young painters beginning to prowl the trail they had blazed. Fashion had been transformed by the cheeky insolence of clothing designer John Stephen, whose boutique turned a seedy lane in Soho called
Carnaby Street into “
a Mecca for the Mods
.” As one convert recalls: “
I can remember going down Carnaby
Street in 1964 and feeling like my humdrum life was being reoutfitted. I’d never seen anything quite like it. There were so many different things you could wear—red corduroy trousers, green corduroy trousers, flowery shirts, polka dots everywhere. Before that, all we had were gray and brown.”

The airwaves were still governed by the BBC’s despotic monopoly over what was suitable for transmission, but beginning that Easter, a fleet of “pirate” radio ships moored offshore to the east of Essex or Kent, just outside the twelve-mile international-waters limit, and began broadcasting rock ’n roll on its own terms. Radio Caroline, and later Radio London, showcased the latest records, describing what was fashionable and delivering a new language, sprinkled with words like
fab
and
gear
and
dig.
British kids of every class could agree, in the abstract at least, that music cut through all the bullshit and eloquently expressed all the feelings—frustration, fear, rage, and passion—they’d suppressed for so long.

The Beatles managed to sit comfortably on the fringe of this cultural revolution, having already contributed quite substantially to it. It went without saying that they rejuvenated, if not reinvented, the local beat scene. Their clothes dominated teenage fashion with round-necked jackets and high-heeled boots. And they appeared daring and anarchic thanks to the cut of their long hair. “
I can’t overpitch this
,” writes journalist Nik Cohn in his treatise on fashion,
Today There Are No Gentlemen,
“the Beatles changed everything. Before them, all teenage life and, therefore, fashion, existed in spasms; after them, it was an entity, a separate society.”

But the more the Beatles bathed in the limelight, the less they seemed willing to make a defiant splash. Considering that they had already scraped through the turbulent club scene, resigned themselves to the indignities of Hamburg, trudged cross-country in a circuit of endless one-nighters, overcome the age-old prejudice against northerners, conquered America, and captured the hearts of “ordinary blokes,” it was all they could do to enjoy their fresh success. The Beatles weren’t interested in upheaval. They wanted to make records, not statements. There was too much at stake, too much fever and magic, to antagonize their largely mainstream audience, leaving the extreme rule-breaking to newcomers like the Stones and the Who, both of whom were willing to be outrageous and risk everything for maximum impact.

The Beatles were the aristocracy of the new pop establishment, or “
popocracy
,” as George Melly has called it. As such, there was no need for
them to play the clubs. The nucleus of the pop elite required an exclusive place of their own where they could languish in the aura, preen, indulge themselves, and behave as only the famously hip knew how. For the Beatles, that place was the Ad Lib, a discotheque just off Leicester Square in the penthouse of what had been an unsuccessful jet-setter nightclub called Wips. Upstairs it had the perfect ambience: dark as a bank vault and mirrored from floor to ceiling, with alcoves and banquettes situated around a tiny dance floor, where fashionable young couples danced agilely to deafening music—good music, nonstop R&B—and stared at their own reflection. John and Ringo hung out there first, attracting members of the emerging pop establishment: rock groups and their managers, models and their photographers, young actors, boutique owners, groupies, columnists, and dandies of all stripes.

Every night, the band arrived—usually separately—about ten o’clock and held court at a banquette opposite the stage. Over the course of several hours (and more than several scotch and Cokes), they attracted an incongruous mix of awestruck young musicians who would crowd in around the table to compare notes while others stopped by briefly to pay their respects and buy the Beatles another round of drinks. The Stones usually turned up with an entourage, as did the Hollies, the Moody Blues, the Yardbirds, John Mayall, the Searchers, Georgie Fame—just about anybody who was making waves in the Beatles’ wake. “
It was a shouty, lively scene
,” Paul recalled. “Lots of silly things happened there.” Silly things—away from prying eyes. For all that was unique about the club, for all its cachet, and all the words spent analyzing its contribution to the cultural boom, Paul offered a take on the Ad Lib that was probably closest to capturing its barroom spirit: “
It was the pub
, that’s what it really was.”

When a more intimate social scene was sought, the Beatles turned up at the frequent parties given by the West End’s self-proclaimed “
golden boy
,” Lionel Bart. One of Brian Epstein’s buddies, Bart was one of the most prolific songwriters in London, already several years and a good dozen hits ahead of his beat-oriented protégés, having crossed back and forth over stylistic lines as often as a couturier. He’d discovered Tommy Steele
and
Cliff Richard, and wrote each of their debut hits, before really striking it rich with
Oliver!,
which was still packing theaters in London and New York.

As the owner of a rococo turn-of-the-century mansion on Seymour Walk, nicknamed the Fun Palace by its faithful, Bart played the Pearl Mesta role that suited his sprightly personality. His parties became instant legends as much for their self-indulgent behavior as for their stellar guest
lists: Anthony Newley, Leslie Bricusse, Noël Coward, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, Brendan Behan, and David Bailey, each of whom brought someone equally alluring. “Michael Caine and Terence Stamp came for breakfast every morning,” Bart recalls. “My next-door neighbor, Francis Bacon, showed up regularly. Peter Blake and Lucian Freud were longtime friends. And a typical party would also draw Princess Margaret, the Duke and Duchess of Bickford, the Rolling Stones, Cassius Clay—there could be six hundred people there from all walks of life.”

At Bart’s, John amused himself by being devious and petulant. “He liked to be outrageous—he liked to wind people up,” provoking them into a confrontation. Most nights, he got stoned in the spacious Gothic toilet. Since returning from the States, John had become more and more devoted to the giddy pleasures of pot, smoking it intermittently throughout the day, from the time he got up until he collapsed from exhaustion. Then he curled up on a couch, brooding and sending out the kind of barbed-wire vibes that discouraged idle chitchat, let alone anything close to intimacy. Guests avoided him, knowing how lethal the combination of sycophants and drugs (and/or alcohol) could be for John. Of course, the more distant he became, the more the guests ignored him and the harder he had to strike out to draw enough attention. No one was immune. “
Everyone who came in
was a potential target,” says a frequent guest. When Brian’s favorite, Judy Garland, arrived on Sid Luft’s arm one night, John berated her indiscriminately, implying that she was a hack and introducing her as “Judy Garbage.” On another occasion, feeling “particularly wicked,” he lashed out at an actor’s German girlfriend, blaming her parents for killing 6 million Jews, until the poor girl fled in terror. Other times he was content to pick on Brian, embarrassing him about his sexuality—“If he pretended to be straight, for instance,” says Bart, “John wouldn’t let him get away with it”—in front of as many people as he could attract.

John’s behavior was nothing new. It was the usual outlet for a lifetime of anger, anger at being given up by his mother and her subsequent death, anger at his father for abandoning him without a fair chance, anger at all the parochial teachers who demanded he conform, anger at Brian for tidying up the Beatles’ jagged image (“
I’ve sold myself to the devil
,” he complained to Tony Sheridan), and anger at trusted friends like Stu Sutcliffe, who died without warning, and now even Paul, who continuously upstaged him.

Lately, however, it was the inflexibility of his marriage to Cynthia, not his past, that piqued his darkest and most bilious moods. Cynthia had
virtually abandoned her artistic aspirations, dedicating all her personal energy to intensifying her husband’s star power. John couldn’t help but bask in that glow. And on those occasions, he found the marriage safe and convenient, especially following a string of long gigs. But there were as many times—during those long intervals between tours—when the marriage felt confining and oppressive.

“
Cynthia wanted to settle John down
, pipe and slippers” according to Paul—a decision that, to his mind, spelled imminent disaster. “The minute she said that to me I thought, Kiss of Death, I know my mate and that is not what he wants.” For another, they’d been cooped up rather annoyingly in the attic apartment of their new posh home while a team of local contractors gave the living quarters a thorough makeover. It had been hard enough living with Cynthia and Julian in the Emperor’s Gate flat, but in the attic—and miles from nowhere—the situation groaned under the strain. To make matters worse, Cynthia’s mother, Lillian Powell, recently returned from Canada, had moved in while John was on tour and now all of them squeezed into the accommodations like rabbits in a hutch.
There wasn’t an ounce of love lost
between John and Mrs. Powell, a spiteful, insufferable woman who had never forgiven him for impregnating her daughter and fulminated against her son-in-law every chance she got.

“
It was catastrophic for Cynthia
,” says Tony Bramwell, who made regular excursions to the house, delivering papers and other packages from NEMS. “She was stranded out there, with John in London or on the road most of the time.” Incredibly, neither Cynthia nor John knew how to drive.
They had bought a new Rolls-Royce
that sat in the garage until a chauffeur was eventually hired, but even then, with few friends and a young son to take care of, any attempt to steal time away from home was futile. “
I would frequently spend weeks
of being virtually housebound by duties to child and staff,” Cynthia complained in a memoir. Even when John was around, he usually slept until one or two, then took off for London, rarely coming home until the early hours of the morning, often stoned and drunk. Cynthia had learned to endure his new love of pot, which she viewed as being “relatively harmless” compared with alcohol, but despite the hip and social aspect of getting stoned, it was never something they would share. Alas, marijuana only made Cynthia “
sick and sleepy
,” further distancing them in their eroding relationship.

Meanwhile, the other Beatles—all bachelors—seemed to be having the time of their lives. Ringo’s relationship with Maureen Cox inched decisively toward the altar, although while she remained stashed conveniently
in Liverpool, Ringo tooled around London with fashion model Vicky Hodge on his arm. The same occurred with George and Pattie Boyd. “
George was the worst runaround
of the bunch,” says Peter Brown, voicing an opinion heard frequently. “He had lots of girlfriends. Lots.”

Paul’s situation was apparently even more enviable. With Jane Asher by his side, Paul claimed one of the most beautiful and classiest girlfriends on the scene. But he was shockingly cavalier about his intentions. “Freedom and independence” was the creed Paul lived by, and as far as Jane was concerned—well, she could like it or lump it. As far as Paul cared, he “
wasn’t married to Jane
”; nothing else mattered as long as she understood he was “pretty free” to see whom he liked, which constituted, in his words, “a perfectly sensible relationship.” Even while he lived with the Ashers, Paul admitted: “
I got around quite a lot
of girls. I felt that was okay, I was a young bachelor, I didn’t feel ashamed of it in any way.” To John, this arrangement was most extraordinary, if not the least bit galling. “
He was well jealous
of [it],” Paul recalled, “because at this time he couldn’t do that, he was married with Cynthia and with a lot of energy bursting to get out. He’d tried to give Cynthia the traditional thing, but you kind of knew he couldn’t. There were cracks appearing but he could only paste them over by staying at home and getting very wrecked.”