The Beatles (134 page)

Stigwood needed control, the Beatles craved complete freedom—neither was willing to give an inch. Of course, Brian’s unsecured 70 percent stake in NEMS raised the possibility of a hostile takeover. Such action was never threatened per se, although elements in the heated exchange gave the impression that it might be considered, prompting the Beatles to issue a public statement. “
They would be willing to put money
into NEMS if there was any question of a takeover from an outsider,” a spokesman told
NME
. “The Beatles will not withdraw their shares from NEMS. Things will go on just as before.”

After a bit of back-and-forth, Stigwood agreed to disassociate himself from NEMS, taking Cream, the Bee Gees, and a few other assets with him as the foundation of a new company, the Robert Stigwood Organization, that would grow into a multimedia empire; the rest of the roster, such as it was, for the moment remained under Clive Epstein’s languid control, with Vic Lewis at the helm. (Later, Stigwood would claim, “
We shook hands
, and I don’t think we’ve ever had a cross word about it.” At the time, however, he demanded a £25,000 buyout to leave quietly, which, according to Ringo, “
was a very reasonable price
” to pay for their freedom.)

After all this time, the Beatles were finally on their own, finally free to make every decision as they alone saw fit.

Throughout the fall of 1967, while Britain waged an all-out assault on conformity, the Beatles hastened to consolidate their interests. The longtime holding company, Beatles Ltd., was officially renamed Apple Music Ltd., after which
seven subsidiaries were formed
: Apricot Investments Ltd., Blackberry Investments Ltd., Cornflower Investments Ltd., Daffodil Investments Ltd., Edelweiss Investments Ltd., Foxglove Investments Ltd., and Greengage Investments Ltd., each capitalized with a substantial financial endowment. Money was no problem. “
There was an enormous sum
of money—well over a million pounds—that had been accumulated by EMI while the new contract was being negotiated,” recalls Peter Brown. “The Beatles received twenty-five percent of that—and
that
was the money that set up Apple.”

Paul always maintained that Apple was so named for the first schoolbook phrase that children learn: A is for Apple. An apple conveyed an undeceptively simple and pure image. Its nature was uncompromising, essential, vital. But like the apple in the Bible, it proved a sinfully irresistible temptation, and once the Beatles had bitten into it, there was nothing they could do to stop their expulsion from Eden.

Originally the company—a glorified tax shelter—was intended as a real estate operation.
Clive Epstein and Harry Pinsker
, NEMS’ principal financial adviser, devised an ambitious land and retail trading venture, which, of course, held no appeal for the Beatles. Without the benefit of a similar tax scheme, however, they were into Inland Revenue for 86 percent of the pie. “
So we’d sit around the boardroom
, kicking ideas around,” recalls Alistair Taylor, who had been appointed to the newly reshuffled NEMS executive board after Brian’s death. “But every time we came up with something and presented it to the boys, it was: ‘You’re joking! Bollocks to that!’ ” The board initially proposed opening a chain of record shops called Apple, but “
selling records was dismissed
as too commercial for the Beatles.” Another idea came from Clive Epstein. “He wanted to set up a chain of card shops—picture cards, Christmas cards, and invitations whose inscriptions would be written by the Beatles themselves,” Taylor explains. It seemed to the other board members like a “revolutionary” concept, a sure franchise, and the Beatles were called in for approval. Clive even commissioned a few pasteup cards for their inspection. The Beatles passed them around, turned them over, inside out, upside down. There was an embarrassing silence, followed by John’s blunt verdict: “
How fucking boring!
”

All this showed the Beatles how seriously out of touch the NEMS board was when it came to representing their interests. “
You can just imagine
the Beatles with a string of retail fucking shoe shops,” John fumed. “[T]hat was the way they thought.”

No, if there was going to be an Apple, it wasn’t going to be run by the suits but by the Beatles. After all, they’d just made a movie on their own. They knew a good deal about the recording process. Paul fancied himself a pretty good businessman. They had a secret resource—Magic Alex—and a cache of fabulous songs. Why shouldn’t they pool their creative resources and run their own company? “
We’re just going to do
—
everything!
” John told Pete Shotton during a visit soon after the card shop fiasco. “We’ll have electronics, we’ll have clothes, we’ll have publishing, we’ll have music.
We’re going to be talent spotters and have new talent.” Shotton says there was none of the wholesale cynicism that routinely crabbed John’s opinions. “He was
very
excited about the Apple idea.”

And the excitement was infectious. Terry Doran, Brian’s old Liverpool friend, was enlisted to run Apple Music Publishing and manage new bands, a business he knew virtually nothing about.
George got involved with
launching a string of discotheques, beginning with the flagship establishment in New York.
Paul opened discussions
with Mick Jagger about the Beatles and Stones forming a partnership to open their own recording studio, with the possibility of starting up a joint label.
Magic Alex was commissioned
, at a salary of £40 a week and 10 percent of the profits, to patent and begin producing his wacky inventions under an Apple Electronics subsidiary.

First, however, Apple opened a clothing company. The Beatles were delighted by the idea of having their own boutique full of “
groovy clothes
.” At least, as John pointed out, the merchandise would be “
something that we’d want
, that we’d like to buy.” If the Beatles had learned anything from success, from superstardom, it was the extent of their tremendous influence. Fans watched them like hawks: how they talked and looked, what they said and wore, became as important as what they sang. The popularity of long hair alone testified to the impact of the Beatles’ style. By Paul’s own admission, they were already “
dressing in such interesting clothes
,” most of which had been created by the Fool. If they set the Fool up in business, they were liable to make a fortune.

Of course, the Beatles already had a fortune, which meant they could concentrate less on profits and more on sharing the wealth. Money wasn’t everything, they insisted; money was a trap. Money had a way of compromising true creativity. Nor did they want to come off as a bunch of hip tycoons. “
The aim of the company
isn’t a stack of gold teeth in the bank,” John said. “We’ve done that bit. It’s more of a trick to see… if we can create things and sell them without charging three times our cost.” A variety of concepts for the new company were kicked around. John liked Paul’s initial idea to “
sell everything white
.” But in the end, the style of clothes would be left entirely up to the Fool. The Beatles’ only concern was that the store be “
a beautiful place
where beautiful people can buy beautiful things.”

Early in 1967, as part of a long-term investment, the Beatles had purchased a cute little three-story building zoned for commercial use, at 94 Baker Street, on the corner of Paddington. It was the perfect location for a hip new venture—a few steps off Oxford Street, where it might be
considered too mainstream and slick, but close enough to attract steady pedestrian traffic; in other words: shabby chic. The top floor provided suitable space for Apple’s corporate offices, such as they were, with accommodating proximity so that the Beatles could keep their fingers in what was going on downstairs.

While the matter of place was settled, however, people close to the Beatles were becoming increasingly unsettled by the Fool. Right off the bat, the designers raised concerns with Harry Pinsker by demanding an employment contract with a signing bonus of £40,000. Pinsker, a relatively conservative accountant who held the Beatles’ purse strings, recounted being “
horrified
” by the payment and advised his clients to reconsider what he felt to be a superfluous expense. The Beatles, however, couldn’t be bothered. “
Give it to them
,” Pinsker was told, effectively opening the floodgates.

The Fool passed themselves off as the picture of countercultural perfection, a trio of pale-faced, exquisite sylphs, with more self-possession than Sybil. Their everyday wardrobe could have been lifted out of an Edwardian costume spectacle. According to a description in the
New York Times,
“
they wear gypsy headdresses
, at least ten necklaces between them, bells, tight pants, boots, 16th-century-looking jerkins, long, full-sleeved blouses and low belts of satin around the hips.” The image they cultivated, from their public face to all the workmanship that went into their designs, right down to the embroidery accenting their clothing, “splashed with stars and moons,” gave the appearance that they were touched by poetry.

But their true gift was cunning. Like Magic Alex, they dazzled the Beatles with hippie double-talk about spiritual bliss, how the boutique would “
have an image of naturel
”; it would approximate “a paradise” whose guiding principle wasn’t based on “bread” but rather “love” and “turning people on.” Stoned and starry-eyed, that was all the Beatles needed to hear. John, besotted by the peace-and-love vibe, urged Pete Shotton to get involved with the project. “
You should move to London
and run it,” Shotton remembers John telling him. “Run it—run Apple.” To Shotton, whose experience was managing a supermarket John had bought him, it seemed like a demotion. But Shotton says he misunderstood; John was offering him “the whole thing”—the whole Apple pie. “I couldn’t do that,” he protested, shaken by the offer, but John remained adamant. “Come on,” he insisted, “it’s just a joke. We’re only spending money, having a laugh. Nobody knows what to do, so just have a go at it.”

Ultimately, Shotton turned the day-to-day operation of the supermarket over to his mother and joined the Apple alliance. His first assignment—
getting the Apple Boutique off the ground—gave him an eye-opening view of the cock-up he was inheriting. When he arrived at Baker Street, the scene reminded him of an asylum. “Everybody was smoking dope and taking acid,” Shotton recalls. “So, to them, anything could be done, anything was possible.” Magic Alex was even commissioned, at considerable expense, to provide an artificial sun that would light up the sky over the boutique. There was a lot of loose talk about being ready for the holidays. The Beatles squinted dizzily at the calendar and picked a date out of the air—November 2. “We’ll open then,” they decided.
Just five weeks off!
Shotton says he tried to convince them that more time was needed; there were so many details that had to be worked out and arranged for, to say nothing of stocking the shelves with clothing and trinkets. None of this, however, deterred the Beatles from announcing the grand opening to the press. It would be ready, they assured Pete. Somehow these things always took care of themselves.

But as late as October 5, the entire shop still had to be renovated. “It was a shithole,” Shotton remembers, “an absolute mess.”

Meanwhile, the Fool requisitioned expense money for a ten-day trip to Morocco, ostensibly to buy fabric and jewelry, but in reality as an excuse for “
eating majoun and smoking hashish
.” When the Fool got to work, they were carried away with extravagance; their clothing line cost more to produce than Coco Chanel’s latest collection. Silks, velvets, tapestries, and brocades from every international fashion capital were incorporated into their not-so-ready-to-wear line. “
The clothes looked more like
fancy-dress costumes than anything one could wear day to day,” wrote an observer. “[C]ourt jester crossed with harlequin crossed with Peter Pan, rainbow colors, zig-zag hems… ballet tights and operatic coats for flower children.” It was a dollhouse array of ill-conceived outfits—pretty to look at but completely impractical. “We had to find people to
make
these clothes,” recalls Pete Shotton, “and when we finally did, the clothes were shit.” Seams burst open, sleeves didn’t quite match, sizes never reconciled. Simon Posthuma, the chief Fool, further demanded that the labels for his creations be woven from pure silk. “I did some calculations and figured out that the labels would actually cost more to produce than the items of clothing, so I put my foot down.” But John overruled him. “It’s a different form of art,” he lectured Pete. “Besides, it doesn’t matter whether we make money or not. If the labels make that much of a statement, we should have them. Let it go.”

Pressure started to mount as the opening neared, and the date had to
be pushed back—to early December, at least. But there had to be some kind of trade-off, something tangible, something that the press and public could
see
that more or less justified the delay.

No problem. Over the weekend of November 10–12, while the Beatles were preoccupied with filming a video of their new single, “Hello Goodbye,” the Fool set about painting the shop’s ancient white brick facade, erecting a scaffolding and draping it with oilcloth so that the work could be done in secrecy. “
They refused to tell
any of us what it was going to look like,” recalls Alistair Taylor. No one, other than the art students hired to execute the design, was permitted to peek at the work in progress. Even the Beatles were warded off like overeager children. “When the time finally came to unveil it, we all gathered in the street. The tarpaulin dropped dramatically, and underneath was the most incredible psychedelic mural covering this beautiful little building, with a two-story genie and stars and moons and fairies and what have you.
Oh my!
We were absolutely
gobsmacked
. It was fabulous! People leaned out of buildings and buses to get a good look. And any car that turned into the street nearly smacked into the one in front of it that had also stopped to stare.”