The Beatles (94 page)

That smugness was nowhere to be seen two days later for the northern premiere of the film. On July 10 the Beatles arrived in Liverpool aboard a capacity-filled Britannia turboprop, but they might as well have flown in on their own buoyancy for all the butterflies in their stomachs. “
It was extraordinary
to see how very nervous the Beatles were,” recalled BBC deejay David Jacobs, a member of the London entourage that accompanied the boys north. “They were absolutely terrified [of going back].” Ringo acknowledged: “
[Friends] kept coming down
to London, saying, ‘You’re finished in Liverpool.’ ”

Outwardly, Paul scoffed at the “
one or two little rumors
,” as well as the hyperbole from routine “detractors,” but whatever tension he may have experienced was complicated by another development. A few months earlier
Paul had settled a paternity claim
with a young Liverpool woman, paying her $14,000 in exchange for her silence and the repudiation of all claims against him. Everyone assumed that the problem had gone away, but on the morning of the Beatles’ triumphant homecoming it seemed to have ghosted in from the cold. The night before, the girl’s disgruntled uncle papered Liverpool with thirty thousand leaflets baring the gory details of the alleged paternity. He had been thorough, too, hitting every public telephone kiosk in the center of Liverpool as well as the Press Club in Bold Street, where he was sure reporters would feast on the incriminating facts. Brian’s attempts to head it off proved too little, too late. Unable to face the inevitable tempest, he dispatched Derek Taylor in his place to warn Paul, who, to Taylor’s disbelief, seemed callously unconcerned by the news, shrugging “
with astonishing nonchalance
” and mumbling, “OK.” How
Paul kept his composure was beyond all explanation. Was he that insensitive to the predicament? Did hubris blind him to the possible backlash? It’s impossible to know. Whatever his intention, astonishingly the approach paid off, without a word of the accusation finding its way into print.

“
Being local heroes
made us nervous,” John admitted. The prospect of facing family, friends, and fans—and not just any fans but
the
fans,
their “own people
,” as Paul called them—was nerve-racking. No one knew what to expect. It didn’t help matters that as the airplane descended, the once-familiar landscape appeared strange and forbidding. “
Miles away from Speke
Airport… we saw them,” David Jacobs remembered, “thousands upon thousands of what looked like black currants packing the route to Liverpool.” The entire city had turned out to greet them! They hadn’t been forgotten—or worse, written off—after all. A wave of relief swept through the cabin, followed by childlike glee:
“Look! Over there! By the Ford factory… by the freight yard… by the bus depot…”
They were incredibly moved by the sight. People—
Scousers
—everywhere. And as they disembarked, a massive crowd surged forward—cheering deliriously, shouting their names. Two hundred thousand people crowded the square outside Town Hall. From the balcony high above the city, the Beatles could make out all the familiar old haunts: the movie theaters and chip joints, the institute and the art college, Gambier Terrace and Ye Old Cracke, Hessey’s, the original NEMS storefront, the Kardomah and the Jacaranda and the Cavern, and, across the docks, the river Mersey, dark and brooding in the enveloping dusk. “
Did you ever imagine
that this day was coming?” a reporter asked Paul, who for once was caught without a slick, ready-made comeback. “Never like this,” he answered haltingly. “We never imagined, you know, we’d come back to this.”

For his part, John could not resist the knife. “
You want to get some teeth
for these people who are cheering us,” John advised the Lord Mayor, who seemed befuddled by the outrageous remark. (Little did he realize the extent of the Beatles’ worldly exposure, having witnessed firsthand the superiority of other cultures’ hygiene. The contrast, glaring in front of them now, with rows of “gap-toothed grins,” was shocking.) King for a day—and fortified by pills—John wasn’t about to let it rest. “What’s the matter,” John persisted, “can’t you spare the money?” Then, without any forewarning, he strode to the front of the balcony, put a finger across his upper lip, and threw the Nazi salute to the unsuspecting crowd.

That evening more than six thousand congregated outside the Odeon Cinema, the scene of countless teenage trysts, for the invitation-only
screening of
A Hard Day’s Night,
and more than fifteen hundred formed a queue around the block for its official public premiere, at 10:30 the next morning. No longer enchanted with their “awkward” acting turns, the Beatles waved under the marquee but refused to sit through another performance. As soon as the houselights dimmed, they ducked out a side door, went straight to the airport, and caught
a 1:30
A.M.
flight
back to London.

The Beatles had been in London only intermittently since returning from Australia, and there wasn’t much time left—a couple of weeks, at most—before the start of their American tour. As the next departure loomed, personal obligations requiring their attention piled up.

John, in particular, needed to rescue his family from their impossible housing situation. The tiny flat in Emperor’s Gate was under constant siege by fans who were staked out at the entrance for what seemed like twenty-four hours a day. Though security now accompanied John at all times, Cynthia was repeatedly confronted by “
really weird characters
… hovering around the flat, sitting on the stairs directly outside the door.” It was like a human obstacle course just trying to get in and out of the place, all the more threatening when Cynthia had Julian in tow. There were times, she said, when anyone could accost them. “We had no protection from nutcases when John was away,” she bemoaned.

There wasn’t a moment of privacy to be had in that place. A friend who visited for a weekend recalled: “
People were ringing
the phone all the time. John would answer… and disguise his voice. ‘I’m sorry, John’s not here.’ ‘But we seen him come in.’ ‘Well, he must have gone out the back door.’
‘There is no back door!’
It was amusing at first, but it just went on and on; it never ended.”

Finally, it became too much of a nuisance and John put his foot down: they were moving, he announced, instructing Cynthia to begin house-hunting at once. One of the Beatles’ corporate accountants, who happened to live in nearby Weybridge, invited them to tea in between house inspections—and the rest was kismet. The neighborhood seemed perfectly suited to John and Cynthia’s needs: it was tranquil and undisturbed without being secluded, with a whiff of exclusivity—Cynthia called the area “
select
”—that befitted a young celebrity. It took them about twenty minutes to locate a comparable house for sale: a twenty-seven-room timbered mock-Tudor mansion at the top of a leafy rise in the ultraposh enclave of St. George’s Hill Estate. The sprawling three-acre property, about twenty miles southwest of London, was called Kenwood and belonged to an
American woman who was asking £40,000. John bought it on the spot, despite its needing a good deal of work.

With the Beatles set to tour in three weeks, the task of preparing the house fell entirely in Cynthia’s lap. John, inundated by obligations, couldn’t be distracted; though his thoughts inevitably drifted to his family, the band’s dance card was booked solid by back-to-back TV appearances and one-nighters in an effort to strengthen the franchise before leaving the country. At the BBC’s Paris Studio, they taped another episode of
From Us to You,
their fourth in the hokey music series, then swept out to Blackpool, scene of so many riotous Beatles shows, for an ABC-TV special and a concert at the Opera House. On what should have been a rare day off, John and Paul crashed a Cilla Black recording session, where their old Cavern mate was cutting “It’s for You,” a single they’d written especially for her. There was a fund-raiser at the Grosvenor House for the British Olympic team, a visit to Madam Tussaud’s to check out their likenesses, and a breathless two-day excursion to Stockholm, all interspersed with a dozen or more interviews with local flacks to promote the release of the
A Hard Day’s Night
soundtrack. “
They were the hardest-working entertainers
I ever met,” recalls a fellow musician.

Between it all, Brian had coaxed the Beatles into attending a revue at the London Palladium to benefit the Theatrical Charities Appeals Council. The postmidnight show, on July 23, indicated just how far they’d risen in the London entertainment caste system. Billed as “The Night of 100 Stars,” it was a red-hot who’s who of establishment showbiz celebrities led by Laurence Olivier, Buddy Greco, Shirley Bassey, Harry Secombe, and Marlene Dietrich and fanned by rumors that Frank Sinatra, in town to promote
Robin and the Seven Hoods,
would most likely attend.

The Beatles endeavored to put their best faces on the event, but as the night wore on, as one old hoofer after another plodded across the Palladium stage, lines of boredom and outright scorn began to show through the facade. The revue was
unending.
To relieve the boredom, the Beatles began downing flutes of champagne, a drink for which they were particularly unsuited. Sitting around small, dimly lit cocktail tables at the back of the stage, they smoked to neutralize their discomfort while the resentment and disdain slowly bubbled toward the surface. The set of their mouths was impossibly lipless, grim, giving their faces the same anesthetized cast as their wax effigies in Madam Tusaaud’s. Ever resourceful, Mal Evans found an old wooden oar backstage and began using it to shuttle whiskey and
Cokes to the boys onstage. That immediately did the trick. “
By the time we were getting drunk
, we’d become fed up with all that bullshit showbiz nonsense anyway!” George recalled.

The final outrage came when a disturbance ruffled from the wings, and the frail, insectlike figure of Judy Garland wandered into the spotlight. It seemed impossible, like a mirage. Only two weeks earlier
she’d suffered a nervous collapse
in Hong Kong, and a few days after that she checked into a London hospital with mysterious “cuts” on her arms. The mere sight of her alone—alive—brought down the house. The audience leaped to its feet, cheering and whistling, shouting,
“Sing, Judy, sing!”
“Do ‘Over the Rainbow!’ ” Shaking her head, she waved humbly and began to back away from the footlights, but when the orchestra broke into the inimitable introduction, Garland regaled them with the song.

It was too much for John. Drunk and indignant, everything about the “star turn” reeked of stagy pathos. Several times during her rendition, he cupped his hands around his mouth and let out a string of obscenities. “
Aw,
fuck off,
Sophie!” he hollered, thrashing about in his chair and waving her toward the wings. Finally, mercifully, the song and an encore ended, and the other stars, “
very edgy and nervous
,” massed around Garland, ostensibly to congratulate her but no doubt to keep the Beatles away.

For Brian, it was ghastly, a nightmare, not only because of the boys’ disturbing behavior but also for the humiliation it had caused him. In his book, Garland “
was the epitome of great talent
,” everything he’d always loved about theater and the musical stage. It put him in a precarious position, now that the Beatles’ hostility betrayed their anti-establishment sentiments, especially since he’d invited Garland to a party at his flat in their honor.

The party was supposed to be “
a send-off
for the boys,” and as Brian envisioned it, “nothing less than spectacular.” Two hundred invitations had been sent out to London’s most eligible young scenemakers, among them Russ Conway, Dusty Springfield, Mary Quant, Lionel Bart, Alma Cogan, Cilla Black, Gerry and the Pacemakers, the Stones, the Searchers, George Martin, most of EMI’s top brass, the city’s most important disc jockeys, and, as a concession to the public, a handful of Beatles-friendly press. Everything had to be on a grand scale; no expense was to be spared. He hired Ken Partridge, a fancy interior decorator, to stage a setting lavish enough to rival the coronation; John Edgington and his craftsmen to install a breathtaking tented rooftop retreat with an inlaid dance floor and French windows overlooking all of Hyde Park; and Mr. Copple of Covent
Gardens, the exclusive society caterer, whose menus were legendary for their sumptuousness.

But as the plans knitted together, an indistinct cloud drifted ominously over the preparations. It hadn’t taken Partridge long to determine that Brian was no ordinary client. After a string of casual evenings in the manager’s company, he concluded that much about the party was a placebo to mask the desolation and torment that churned inside the Beatles’ manager. The demons that weighed on him in Liverpool had turned inward again. “
He tried hard to conceal
the pain, but it had marked him like a beacon,” recalls Partridge.

That summer the two men ate dinner together almost every night, table-hopping among the city’s smartest restaurants. In gilded seclusion at the Coup de France, La Caprice, or the Connaught, caught up in the flow of alcohol and anxiety, Brian revealed “how empty his life had become and how increasingly lost he felt.” There was nothing to enjoy from all the money and opportunity. With his leprechaun charm, Partridge tried to shift the small talk onto a less-burdensome track, but Brian was inconsolable. He never discussed the Beatles or any of his other successes; it was as if they didn’t exist. Instead, he sulked, chafed, brooded, drank to excess, and wandered out looking, for all his sophistication, like an uneasy guest in an unaccommodating city.