The Beatles (130 page)

For the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the Summer of Love was a perfect platform for his ministry of mind expansion, receptiveness, spiritual and sensual fulfillment, self-awareness, intercommunication, tranquillity, knowledge, and brotherhood. The celestial glitter of his spidery face was plastered on
walls throughout the London Underground, promoting a treatise on meditation,
The Science of Being and the Art of Living,
and his extraordinary image, a whispery, slight, but impressionable presence, figured prominently in television news stories. The media couldn’t resist the guru’s eccentric appearance or the oft-perceived flakiness of his spiritual message, extolling love, peace, and eternal happiness. To a skeptical audience of Brits, he came off like a sideshow freak, but as the new sensibilities and surface hedonism of 1967 gained acceptance, his message offered an inspirational refuge from the libertine excess.

Aside from the magnetic personality who captivated young audiences, precious little is known about his background. Born in 1911—“
my earthly age
is of no importance,” he answered in response to questions about his birth—he was the son of an Indian revenue officer who studied Sanskrit and Hindu scriptures with Guru Dev.
Later he fell under the spell
of another guru, the founder of the Spiritual Regeneration Movement, whose purpose, like many of these mystical followings, was an attempt to combine ancient Eastern religious beliefs with the search for inner truth and wisdom. Spiritual Regeneration instructed people in the discipline of Transcendental Meditation, “
a method of quickly and easily
reaching a spiritual state.”

In 1945 Mahesh (
Maharishi
means “great saint” and was an honorific adopted much later) began a solitary meditation in the Himalaya that lasted for thirteen years, after which he set off on a faith-healing crusade designed to take him seven times around the globe. In the process, he attracted widespread attention from the elderly, as well as the curious, the infirm, and other lost souls to whom Spiritual Regeneration was an attractive pursuit. Mahesh brilliantly and shrewdly cultivated these followers. Lectures, conferences, and retreats became a staple of his transglobal tours. A man of immense charisma, he was a natural performer, energetic and riveting, who could transform crowds of the unfulfilled, the suffering, the troubled, or the alienated with simple aphorisms that struck home. Borrowing liberally from the Bhagavad Gita, he popularized traditional Indian teachings, interlacing them with plainly applied self-help therapies that were elementary in their appeal.

Despite the embarrassing criticism from more traditional Hindu teachers and a predilection for publicity and fund-raising—followers were required to donate the equivalent of a week’s salary to the ministry, which ran contrary to the basic Hindu principles of free instruction—the Spiritual Regeneration Movement grew into a worldwide organization,
with a luxurious, air-conditioned ashram situated on a fifteen-acre estate in Rishikesh, in the foothills of the Himalaya. There were already meditation centers in more than fifty countries, with the London office attracting more new followers than it was able to process.

The three Beatles (
Ringo was visiting Maureen
in the hospital, where she had just given birth to their second son) were among nearly a thousand earnest freethinkers who listened to the Maharishi’s message on August 24 in a ballroom at the Hilton, overlooking Hyde Park. Years later George explained that they “were looking to reestablish that which was within.” George was feeling especially restless following a dispiriting trip to San Francisco, during which he decried the drug-besotted hippies he encountered there as “hypocrites” and “bums,” leading him to a startling renunciation of LSD. “
After having such an intense
period of growing up and so much success in the Beatles and realizing that this wasn’t the answer to everything, the question came: ‘What is it all about?’ ” Similarly, Paul would recall how he was “looking for something to fill some kind of hole.” He acknowledged feeling “
a little bit of emptiness
” in his soul, “a lack of spiritual fulfillment.” Much of it he blamed on “seeing all this stuff on acid,” as well as rampant stardom. “And the next step was to try to find a meaning for it all.”

Despite the institutional setting, complete with a cordon of bodyguards in three-piece suits and a gallery of doting blue-haired dowagers, the Beatles were clearly entranced by the Maharishi. He was an extraordinary sight to behold: an elfin, bronze-skinned holy man draped in an immaculate white dhoti, positioned in front of acres of soothing lemony yellow curtains. A picture of contentment, he sat cross-legged on a deerskin mat strewn with flowers and, between arpeggios of an irrepressible giggle, offered to clarify anyone’s experiences.

To young men who constantly struggled with their individuality—toward the public, toward their roles as Beatles, toward one another, and toward themselves—Maharishi advised them “to look within in order to find peace.” Happiness, he said, serves the purpose of creation. Using the flower as an analogy, with the sap the source of its energy, he explained how it was possible to transcend the relative states of their consciousness—in effect bypassing the intellect—to draw the sap upward. “
He said that by meditating
, you can go down your stem and… reach the field of nutrients, which he called the pool of cosmic consciousness, which was all blissful and all beautiful,” Paul recalled.

For George, who had already devoted himself to the practice of yoga
and the study of Eastern philosophies, the Maharishi provided him with a practical approach “
to further the experience
of meditation.” Even Paul, a natural skeptic, “
thought he made a lot
of sense.” But it was John, more than anyone, who emerged from the lecture a changed man. Having laid off acid that night, he still bore the look of someone so far gone that it seemed an impossible state without chemicals. “
It takes time to come down
to earth after an experience like this,” he told a reporter on his way out of the Hilton.

In fact, John, along with the others, was gearing up for an unimaginable trip.

Chapter 33
From Bad to Worse

O
n the afternoon of Friday, August 25, 1967, the platforms and waiting rooms of Euston Station were jammed with travelers of all sizes and ages. It was a hot, suffocating day and the pitiful excuse for air-conditioning gave off only sticky whiffs of dampness, raising the temperature in that human pressure cooker to an ungodly swelter. To make matters worse, trains were insufferably late. Every few minutes the same emotionless voice crackled over the public address system, trying to convince the ornery mass that salvation was only minutes away, but nobody, not even a conductor, was willing to believe it.

Then the unexpected proclaimed itself. A fretful clustering had developed near one of the side entrances. A phalanx of bodies sliced smoothly through the crowd, a maneuver sudden and effortless, coinciding with a unanimous murmur—
Ooh!
—from those nearby. Bursts of recognition, heavy with excitement, echoed through the hall:
The Beatles!
Impossible. Not in public, certainly not in a common rush-hour train station. Wide-eyed passengers converged from all directions, determined to get a better look at the men traveling by themselves, dragging luggage and elbowing their way toward the distant Platform 8.

The night before, during their introduction to the Maharishi, an invitation was extended to the Beatles to attend a Transcendental Meditation seminar he was giving at University College that weekend. A midnight message was left for Ringo, who hastily arranged to sneak away from Maureen, with her blessing.
Brian was also invited
,
John making the call himself
.

As far as Brian was concerned, meditation was the last thing he wanted to participate in that weekend. He was desperate, if anything, to raise a little hell. For the past ten days, his mother had been a houseguest at the Chapel Street flat. She’d moved in with Brian immediately following
Harry’s sudden death in July, and together, mother and son endeavored to put their lives back on track. In the opinion of Brian’s chauffeur, Bryan Barrett: “
It was the best damn thing
that ever happened to him.” Queenie woke him early each morning and they discussed their daily plans over breakfast. Then, Brian dressed in a suit and, for the first time in ages, put in long days at the office. There was no prowling about after sundown, no multidrug highballs. Evenings were spent quietly in each other’s company. They were very attentive, very content. “Each night, I drove them to dinner, and often to the theater,” says Barrett. “He was like the old Eppy again, sharp, focused, and in control.”

It was a good thing, too, because there was a lot on the company drawing board. There was the “Magical Mystery Tour” project that Paul was still hounding about; another Beatles single to schedule with EMI (it would be “Hello Goodbye”); the Stigwood/Shaw deal to untangle;
a staging of three short comedies
by novelist Saul Bellow in which Brian had invested $14,000; and more—much more. “
That very weekend
,” says Tony Barrow, “he’d finally gotten confirmation from the BBC that Cilla Black would host her own major TV series, which was quite extraordinary, and he was in the process of trying to get hold of her to relate the news.” Meanwhile, Brian and Nat Weiss were preparing to release an album by lanky folk heartthrob Eric Andersen, as well as signing Harry Nilsson to a recording contract. And there were plans for a trip to Toronto, where Brian was seriously entertaining an offer to host a weekly television show. But right now Brian wanted some action, and to that end he invited Peter Brown and Geoffrey Ellis to Kingsley Hill, where they planned to meet, according to Brown, “
four or five young, amusing guys
to distract us for the weekend.”

As expected, it was a mob scene at Euston Station. The Beatles had arrived in their chauffeur-driven cars and those inconspicuous psychedelic clothes they favored. In addition to Cynthia, Jane, Pattie, and her sister, Jenny, they’d cobbled together an entourage that included Mick Jagger, Marianne Faithfull, and Donovan. And just in case they felt unnoticed or out of place, thirty or forty reporters had converged on the party as they made their way to the train.

Somehow as they raced along the platform, Cynthia fell behind the others a step or two. “
I was struggling
… with the hand baggage, trying to keep up,” she remembered in a subsequent interview. “In front of me, the
others leapt on the train. I moved forward, arms full, to follow them, when suddenly a policeman was barring my path.” Stammering, she identified herself as Cynthia Lennon, but he’d already turned back a dozen other Cynthia Lennons.

Ahead of her, oblivious, John swung himself jauntily up onto the train. A long blast on the whistle drowned out Cynthia’s cries as the heavily laden train chugged forward, out of the station.

Inside, the Beatles bundled into a parlor car adjacent to a first-class compartment containing the Maharishi, who sat lotuslike, in statuesque repose, on a mat strewn with flowers.
George drew the blinds
and lit incense, while the others, tense yet exhilarated, filled the overhead rack with baggage and got settled. As everyone found seats, it dawned on John that Cynthia was missing.