The Beatles (104 page)

Someone—it is not certain who—mentioned the Ad Lib, which was within walking distance, just a few blocks north. That seemed to make sense—that is, until they got outside, where the gnarled skew of lights
and jangly sounds bombarded them. If their eyes could be believed, the sky was velvet, opaque, the buildings rimmed with jewels. The act of walking became overlaid with intervals of clumsiness and the need to vent anxiety. Everyone was “cackling” like hyenas. Pattie Boyd, normally a picture of cool poise, came undone in the garish neon nightscape. She cowered, trapped in the glare of blinking lights and the sound of car horns swelling and roaring around Leicester Square. Even with the others’ reassuring companionship, the acid flung her into fitful emotional states that alternated between dread and agitation. Later, “
half crazy
,” she threatened to break a store window until George dragged her away. “
We didn’t know what was going on
and [thought] we were going crackers,” John explained. “It was insane going around London on it.”

Beyond insane. A tiny red light in the elevator to the Ad Lib touched off a folie à quatre in which they imagined flames shooting up into the air-conditioned car. Said John, “
We were all screaming
, ‘aaaaaaagh,’ all hot and hysterical.”
Ringo, who was waiting
for them upstairs in the crowded discotheque, recalled how they tumbled out of the elevator, shouting:
“The lift’s on fire!”

The bizarre hallucinations continued until dawn, nightmare flashes interspersed with periods of sublime intimacy, laughter, and intense creativity; objects took on a fun-house distortion that exaggerated their appeal. John, enraptured by the experience, summed up the extremes by saying: “
It was just terrifying
—but it was fantastic.” It wasn’t anything like the fluttery highs they got from speed or pot. The LSD possessed an undeniable power—a
spiritual
power—that forced them to look inside themselves. Indeed, it seemed to offer everything John had been searching for in his music, writing, and art. And none of the Beatles was more receptive to LSD’s spiritual potential than George Harrison. From that very first trip, he felt “
a light bulb
” go on in his head that blazed the way to enlightenment. Years of misfit indifference to school and the alienation it generated had left him immature and callow. Even the cheeky facade that served as George’s personality in the Beatles collapsed behind the scenes in the auras of Lennon and McCartney, exposing the gawky, awestricken boy who used to trail behind his mentors in Liverpool. Having always competed for their favored attention, he had learned to fit in, not stand out. Feelings of inferiority persisted, reinforced in part by his age, John’s and Paul’s intimidating talent, and the lingering ambivalence of their companionship.

It was this sense of alienation as much as his interest in music that made George so susceptible to guiding spirits. In the Bahamas during the
filming of
Help!,
he heard the siren song of the sitar and came under the influence of Swami Vishnu-devananda, who introduced him to hatha yoga and Eastern religions. Later in life he would become vegetarian, consult an astrologer, and devote himself to Transcendental Meditation before embracing traditional Christianity. Like many others who flirted with mysticism, it gave him a sense of authority and confidence. But with LSD, George stepped out—and into the cosmic consciousness.

“Turn off your mind, relax, and float downstream”: it would eventually become the mantra of every seeker of enlightenment for whom experimentation and self-discovery were the portals to the new age. But in July 1965, after their first unwitting trip, the two Beatles were too shook up by the experience to storm those precarious gates. There was “too much to sort out,” George said, too much of an emotional upheaval. It would take another six weeks before they got up the nerve to take a second trip. In the meantime, they spread the gospel, cornering anyone who would listen to the fantastic tale. There was a fish-story extravagance to the retelling of the Great Acid Experience. “Each time they recounted it,” says a Beatles intimate, “the hallucinations got wilder and more incredible. They introduced marvelous visions and rainbow-colored submarines and all kinds of crazy stuff.” Friends and musicians were held in thrall by the shifting pool of details, and some, no doubt, felt inclined, or even pressure, to dive into the deep end, including the one companion for whom it would have disastrous effects.

From the moment George and John sang the praises of LSD, Brian Epstein had made up his mind to take it. Friends remember that he had been trying for some time to find a buffer for his snowballing unhappiness. For all his outward poise, Brian seldom spent a waking moment without being medicated to some extent. Amphetamines had served him ably through the tension-filled days—a blast of speed to keep him
up
—followed by a capful of Seconals washed down by brandy before bedtime to ensure a soft landing. Even so, he took great pains to maintain a respectable front. Few people—not even the Beatles, at this point—were privy to his indulgence. At a
party with “some kids
” arranged by Nat Weiss, Brian chattered, clowned, danced, and played disc jockey—long after everyone had passed out. “The next morning, when we woke up, he’d be refreshed, making
notes,” Weiss recalls. It wasn’t until sometime later that he discovered Brian’s secret. “He had suits made with little pockets on the inside, with pills tucked into each of them, which he popped like candy. And he told me that this was what kept him going.” Amphetamines and pot: he had a person come by the house each week to roll thin little joints that he’d stash in a cigarette case, behind the Dunhills.

As the summer heated up and the demons became intolerable, Brian moved from the designer flat in William Mews to considerably more glamorous quarters in a Belgravia town house on Chapel Street that he decorated from top to bottom with the sleek white furniture that was all the rage that season. Together with his longtime Liverpool friend Peter Brown, who had moved to London in May to lend a hand around the office, Brian got everything situated and resumed a frantic social pace: drinking, carousing, dinner parties, anonymous sex, and nightly drug-taking until he passed out in the early hours of morning.

The drugs fortified him for the social scene, but there was still a key element missing. Nothing satisfied Brian unless some kind of risk was involved. “
He loved the danger
, no matter what the cost,” says Ken Partridge, “whether it was bringing home a guardsman who would rough him up for twenty quid or dropping a bundle at a joint on Curzon Street.” The Curzon House, behind the Hilton Hotel, was only one of the posh clubs that played host to Brian’s rampant gambling habit. “
He was a heavy gambler
,” says Terry Doran, a boyhood friend who had come to London in the recent wave of migration that brought northerners to the Smoke. Doran, who spent a great deal of time bouncing around the clubs, would encounter Brian late at night during his own furtive escapades. “In Liverpool, he gambled at the Rembrandt and a couple of other places, losing more often than not. The dough wasn’t very much—maybe fifty or a hundred quid. But in London it started to get serious.” Doran, who came from a dirt-poor family, watched in horror one night as Brian placed an £8,500 bet at the White Elephant.
Toting Francis Bacon along
as a guest, he went to the Clermont and promptly lost a cool £10,000. Another time Nat Weiss “
watched him drop $17,000
in one quick moment.” In fact, if he happened to hit a jackpot, he wouldn’t even bother to pick it up. Paul recalled running into Brian at the Curzon House, his jaw “grinding away” on pills, when his money had run out—but not his determination. “
I remember Brian putting his Dunhill
lighter on a bet—‘That’s a hundred pounds’—and he’d lose it all.”

Throughout the summer of 1965, Brian continued to pick up rugged hustlers or other undesirable characters and take them back to Chapel
Street for a night of forbidden excess. Lionel Bart remembers the time he hired a muscle-bound guardsman to abuse him—“
the guy asked Brian
what he had in mind and was told, ‘Whatever you like, as long you don’t break anything.’ ” Brian would show up at the office sporting “
great purple bruises
” or a black eye. One morning Ken Partridge was met at the door by Joanne Newfield, Brian’s young personal secretary, who wore a look of shocked distress. Between clenched teeth, she warned him, “
You’re not going to believe this
,” and ushered him into the living room. A few weeks earlier, Partridge had overseen the installation of a magnificent Crowders oak staircase that led from the entrance hall up to Brian’s study. “And when I walked in there, the whole staircase was piled up on the floor like matchwood,” Partridge recalls. “He told me he’d picked up two guardsmen at the [Golden] Lion but, after a drink, decided that he only wanted one of them. So, on the staircase, they beat the shit out of each other—and then out of Brian.”

Another night, remembers Terry Doran, “
he came back with some hunk
that he was totally infatuated with, who then proceeded to rob him. But he enjoyed it—he really enjoyed getting robbed.” Doran recalls how the same person “took him off” again and again, as if it were a sport, a perverse sport. “George Harrison bought Brian a beautiful watch for his birthday—a really extravagant piece of jewelry, more expensive than a Dunhill. A month or so later he took this guy back to Chapel Street, and the guy robbed it. So Brian had to buy another one, because he didn’t want George to know what had happened to it.”

Between all this, business continued. In early 1965 Brian arranged to meet with Vic Lewis, the celebrated big-band leader whose agency now booked American acts throughout the U.K. Lewis was “
a fantastic character
,” according to people who knew him, “a cricket-loving, jazz-loving hypochondriac.” A short man—under five foot eight—he “looked very much like a Persian carpet salesman,” with the manner to match. “There wasn’t a day he wasn’t ill,” says a colleague. “But it was never anything that normal people had. One day he’d say, ‘I don’t know what it is, but my
hair
hurts.’ Another day, his
tongue
wouldn’t feel right.”

Lewis controlled GAC’s substantial roster of stars for the U.K. territory, but even more important was his marked foothold in the London entertainment establishment. “
Norman Weiss [GAC’s president] rang Brian
and advised him to buy me out—which he did—at which point he suggested that I run
his
agency,” Lewis recalls. NEMS absorbed all Vic Lewis’s acts, among them Andy Williams, Johnny Mathis, Mel Tormé, Sarah
Vaughan, David Rose, Percy Faith, Anita O’Day, Tony Bennett, Henry Mancini, Herb Alpert, and Nelson Riddle. The ink wasn’t even dry on the deal when comedian Allen Sherman turned up for a concert tour, and after that, an appearance by the great Groucho Marx. A few months later they “
took on
” the Moody Blues, who “
were crumbling
at the time,” according to Tony Bramwell, but remained a fairly important name on the scene. There was also a new kid, an American expat who was still pretty raw, by the name of Jimi Hendrix.

“With Vic, NEMS really picked up steam,” says Bramwell, “and within a year we were the biggest entertainment agency in the world.” That was, of course, an exaggeration, but NEMS had certainly leapfrogged into the major leagues. “
Instantly, it gave them size
and an international reputation,” says Don Black, who came aboard as part of the Vic Lewis deal. The gifted Black, who had already written a string of hit songs and would later win an Oscar for “Born Free,” had a special place on the staff inasmuch as he personally managed the career of Matt Monro, “the English Frank Sinatra.” The connection paid off handsomely, too: George Martin, Monro’s producer, gave the vocalist first dibs on covering “Yesterday,” which shot to the top of the charts.

“The office was growing, the joint was jumping,” recalls Black, who moved into a cubicle down the hall from Brian. A skeleton staff had been cached during the launch of Beatlemania, but now NEMS scrambled to recruit talented folks who could handle the serious flow of work. Wendy Hanson had been hired in New York as a favor to Capitol Records, and she had steered Brian through one crisis after another. Geoffrey Ellis, the starchy ex-Oxford lawyer who had known Brian from Liverpool, was prevailed upon to “
run the office
.” Along with Alistair Taylor and Tony Barrow, Brian formed the nucleus of a staff necessary to oversee the expanded organizational effort: capable, serious-minded managers whose experience would ensure growth and efficiency. Even Peter Brown, whose as-yet-undefined position rendered him more of “a
glorified office boy
,” proved skillful at handling many aspects of the business—to say nothing of those surrounding Brian’s personal life, which, frankly, not many other people would have wished to handle.

Of course, it was still the Beatles that everyone desired. On a particularly busy evening when phones were ringing off the hook, Black remembers picking up a call from the producer of
The Lucy Show
in New York, who’d been trying desperately to reach Brian. She explained how they were preparing to film a segment in London. If the logistics could be
worked out, Lucille Ball wanted to walk down Piccadilly, do a double-take, and see the Beatles standing on the corner. It would be only a ten-second shot, for which the network was willing to pay $100,000. But Brian wanted nothing to do with it. Furthermore, he warned Black
never
to interrupt him with such a ridiculous request.

It seemed like madness at the time, but Brian was right. Everyone wanted some time with the Beatles—ten seconds, thirty, a minute and a half,
just an hour or two.
The office was inundated with calls like that every day, and not just three or four good offers but sometimes twenty or fifty. The Lord Mayor of Birmingham needed their support for a favorite charity, David Frost requested an interview,
Sunday Night at the London Palladium
would settle for a walk-on—“they won’t have to say a word”—two minutes with the P.M. to discuss communications, a scene in some Hollywood movie, backup vocals for the Animals, their own TV special… it never ended. As heartless as it sounds, it seemed there were more dying children with a last request for one of the Beatles to bid them farewell than there were healthy ones. And each request drew the same cold response: no! Not on any condition.
Nada. Non. Nein.