The Love You Make (27 page)

One day Nat was on business at the New York State Supreme Court when he heard through the grapevine that a $5 million judgment had been awarded against Brian and NEMS because no one had answered Byrne’s lawsuit against them. To make matters more complicated, Byrne was now reportedly being sued by his own partners, who were claiming that he had spent more than $150,000 of the company’s money on entertainment and a charge account at Saks Fifth Avenue.

Brian asked Nat to vacate the $5 million judgment, but Nat advised Brian to hire a high-powered lawyer to end the Seltaeb dispute for good. Nat’s recommendation for a man who could handle the chore was Louis Nizer. Although Nizer had recently written a best-selling book about his courtroom exploits and was at least as well known in the U.S. as David Jacobs was in London, Brian had never heard of him. Nat set up an appointment anyway, and a meeting was scheduled before Brian left America.

As soon as Nat and Brian were ushered into Nizer’s impressively large office, Nat smelled trouble; Nizer was a diminutive man who sat on a raised platform behind his desk in order to look bigger for his visitors. Chances were, the meeting would be a clash of egos. As things happened, it went quite well. The first thing Brian said was, “Have you read my book?” meaning
A Cellarful of Noise.

“Have you read
my
book?” Nizer asked even more grandly.

After some more posturing between the two gentlemen, Nizer agreed to take on the case. When Brian asked what his fee would be, Nizer asked, “Fifty thousand dollars retainer to start.” Without blinking an eye, Brian reached into his suit pocket, produced a checkbook, and began writing a check.

“You know, Mr. Nizer,” he said as he wrote, “I’m paying you this fifty thousand dollars out of my own pocket. The Seltaeb deal was my fault, and I don’t want the Beatles to pay any further for my mistakes.”

It would take Nizer two years to untangle the Seltaeb web and vacate the judgment against NEMS. When it was finally settled, in the summer of 1967, it was for only $10,000, which was allegedly paid to Nicky Byrne. The Beatles started over again with their own merchandising company called Maximus Enterprises, of which they owned 90 percent. But by then it was much too late—$100 million had slipped through their hands.

chapter Nine

The four
Beatles returned
to London physically and emotionally exhausted, wanting only to rest, but they learned they had only eighteen days respite before going out on tour again, this time on a grueling five-week sweep of Great Britain. In the intervening two weeks they were expected to go back to the EMI studios on Abbey Road and record their fourth album. Brian and the record company agreed that it was necessary to have a new LP in the record stores in time for the Christmas gift season. When the British tour ended, the group was booked for three weeks of Christmas shows at the Hammersmith Odeon, until January 16. Over 100,000 tickets had been sold two months in advance. Then they had two weeks off before starting another movie for United Artists and Walter Shenson.

The Beatles were so harried that Brian refused to allow them to appear on their night off at the Royal Command Performance for the Queen, much to the ire of Bernard Delfont. He wrote to Brian in September of 1964, begging him to reconsider his decision and reminding him how thrilled he was to have been asked the first time. When this drew no positive response from Brian, Delfont wrote again, threatening to announce to the press that the Queen had already extended an invitation to the Beatles, in an effort to embarrass them into accepting. But Brian held strong. He replied to Delfont that he didn’t see any advantage to the boys repeating themselves, no matter how exalted the event.

The album they were given eighteen days to complete came out in time for Christmas, and it was a wonder indeed, although it contained only eight Lennon-McCartney compositions. The rest of the songs were covers of some of the group’s favorite rock and roll songs. Called
Beatles for Sale,
it appeared with none of the earmarks of a hastily prepared album.
Beatles for Sale
replaced
A Hard Day’s Night
in the number-one spot on the charts, giving them four number-one albums in a row.

The album’s two most notable songs were written by John. The first was a bluesy, waltzlike composition called “Baby’s in Black.” Pungently unlike the rest of the songs on the album, “Baby’s in Black” was a morbid composition about a young girl who refuses to stop mourning the death of a loved one. The second tune was even more curious, considering it was penned by a man who was the object of so much public adoration. It was called “I’m a Loser,” and it was ostensibly a love song about an affair gone awry but sounded distinctly like a lament. “Although I laugh and I act like a clown,” John wrote, “Beneath this mask I am wearing a frown./My tears are falling like rain from the sky / Is it for her or myself that I cry? / I’m a loser … I’m a loser / And I’m not what I appear to be …”

It was easy for anyone who knew John well to see how unhappy he was with his lot. He felt duplicitous in his success, hypocritical with his image of the literary but ultimately agreeable, huggable Beatle. His home life was to him the prime example of this hypocrisy. He was married to a woman he probably never really loved; he was bringing up a child “born out of a bottle on a Saturday night.” Even his big house in the country had turned into more of a headache than a joy. The house had been torn apart by Ken Partridge’s workmen, and John and Cynthia and the baby were relegated to a small servants’ apartment at the top of the house. The house was filled with plumbers and electricians from morning until night, and there was no privacy. One day he gave an old guitar of his to one of the carpenters and started an enormous fight between the carpenter and the foreman, who demanded it for his own children. The carpenter refused to give up the prized guitar, and the argument ended with the carpenter being sacked and leaving the mansion weeping. After that, John locked himself in the apartment and stayed away from the whole thing.

To make matters more claustrophobic at Kenwood, Cynthia’s mother, Lillian Powell, left all alone in Hoylake, decided to move to Weybridge, and a small bungalow was secured for her just a few miles away. Mrs. Powell was the archetypical mother-in-law, bossy, opinionated, and omnipresent. She arrived at the house every day along with the workmen and helped oversee the construction and decoration, as well as the rearing of Julian.

Perversely, John refused to let Cynthia hire a nanny to take care of Julian. He insisted he “wouldn’t have his son raised by a stranger,” and Cynthia was tied to the child most of the time. Fortunately for her, a good housekeeper, Dorothy Jarlett, had been left behind by the previous owners. A hearty and congenial woman, Dot, as she was called, came by in the mornings to help with the cleaning and ironing. When it became clear that more help was needed, John gave in and allowed Cynthia to hire a married couple as cook and handyman. Before long the husband was making passes at every woman in the house, and when John was away, the wife fed Cynthia and Julian hamburgers. At the end of the month, the couple’s recently divorced daughter moved back in with them and started making eyes at John. Dot hated the cook and accusations of dishonesty and petty theft were rife. “I was no match for the con agents,” Cynthia said. “I was hopeless when it came to standing up to people.” Added to this menagerie was a lumbering, unshaven chauffeur named Jock, whose rumpled clothes smelled of cigar smoke. One day a neighbor informed Cynthia that Jock spent the nights sleeping in the back of their Rolls-Royce, which was parked down the block from Kenwood. Eventually, cook, handyman, and chauffeur were duly fired by the NEMS office.

The house began to slowly come together under Partridge’s auspices, but Cynthia never stopped believing she could have done better. “[Partridge] having done his job of transforming our mansion into a very plush and modern home, left with, I’m sure, a very healthy bank account. It was very beautiful but my mother couldn’t resist buying us more and more junk, and the uncluttered design grew more like home as the months passed.” The dining room was furnished with a huge, white, scrubbed-wood table with a dozen antique chairs around it, which John thought looked as if they had been bitten by an angry dog. The master bedroom, which Cynthia thought far too large to be comfortable in, was built from three smaller rooms made into one. Its enormous super-king-size bed had a handpainted headboard ten feet long. The appliances in the kitchen were so “space-age” and complicated that an appliance expert had to come to lecture Cynthia and the housekeeper on their use. Even then they were so difficult to operate that the only machine Cynthia could work was the waffle machine. John eventually called Ken Partridge and told him to come up with another simple machine, because he was sick to death of eating waffles.

The house in Weybridge also had a hidden liability; it turned out that John’s long-lost father, Freddie Lennon, was working only a few miles away as a dishwasher in a hotel. John drove past this hotel almost every day on his way back and forth from London. Freddie might never have realized that his son had become a national treasure if it hadn’t been for a washerwoman who worked with him at the hotel. One day she came up to him with a picture of John in the paper and said, “If that’s not your son, Freddie, then I don’t know what.” The next day a small dapper-looking man with lush graying hair appeared at the front door of Kenwood and introduced himself as John’s long-lost dad. John and Freddie had a polite twenty-minute meeting during which Freddie managed to object to John’s lifestyle, to his music, and to the way his home was decorated. Then he asked for a loan. Freddie was ejected from the house.

Undaunted, Fred turned up again at Kenwood, unannounced, and had the door slammed in his face. He went directly to the nearest Fleet Street newspaper and became an overnight media star, happily granting interviews about his son for a few quid. Fred even managed to sell his life story to a magazine called
Tit Bits
for £40 and recorded a novelty single, “That’s My Life.” The small record company that distributed the single insisted Fred get his teeth capped so he could make public appearances, and in the end it wound up costing him more to pay the dentist than he earned from his recording career. After that, Freddie drifted back into obscurity.

The winter of 1965
also saw Ringo become the last Beatle to settle down with one girl. Ringo had entered life in the fast lane with the trepidation of someone who had just received his driver’s license. While the other three Beatles had at least learned to order brand-name drinks in bars or a good wine in a restaurant, Ringo was still eating eggs and chips for dinner, because he didn’t want to experiment with anything more exotic. With his big puppy eyes and self-effacingness, he seemed an easy target for every blond bombshell who could get near to him. For a time he was dating fashion model Vicki Hodge, but his friends could see he was going out with her just for the kick of it, and they were hardly the same speed.

The girl the same speed as “Ritchie” had been left behind in Liverpool. Maureen Cox and the girls at Ashley Du Pre’s hairdressing salon kept careful track of Ringo’s adventures around the world, and tenacious Maureen decided she was not giving up on Ritchie quite so fast. On December 1, 1964, when Ringo had his chronically infected tonsils removed at the University College Hospital in London, Maureen took the long train ride down from London and brought him ice cream. She was still there when he recovered and spent Christmas with him in London. Vicki Hodge went on a vacation to Sweden.

Like any northern girl, Maureen ensnared her man the northern way; by mid-January she was pregnant. Ringo, like any good northern man, did what was expected. One morning at three o’clock, good and drunk at the Ad Lib, he got down on one knee and proposed to her amidst the good-natured catcalls of his friends. They were married at a quiet ceremony on February 11. The newlyweds spent a short honeymoon at David Jacobs’ house in Brighton, after which they returned to a small, ground-floor flat they had rented on Montague Square, north of Oxford Street. The flat was small and impractical and offered them no security or privacy from the street, but Ringo and Maureen insisted on it, and it was there they lived for a while. Within a few days the address had leaked, and the street-front of the flat was besieged with fans. The only way to enter and exit undetected was to climb over the sink and out a small window into the mews out back.

Again no trailblazer, Ringo asked Ken Partridge to decorate the flat for them. But Ringo gave Partridge only four weeks to finish, from top to bottom, while he was away shooting the Beatles’ new film. The large living room on the first floor was decorated with blue silk wallpaper and white modern furniture. As per Ringo’s instructions, the apartment was stocked with the latest electronic inventions, including TVs, stereos, burglar alarms, and telephones. There were telephones everywhere, literally every four or five feet, and there was a red telephone in the bedroom that was connected directly to the NEMS office.

Maureen was more complacent than Cynthia about Partridge’s work. He was waiting in the flat for them when they returned from location. Ringo, followed by Maureen, alighted from a limousine. Maureen was carrying a tatty old teddy bear and an overnight case. She went from room to room in the house with a blank look on her face, stupefied that this splendor was to be her new home.

The Beatles began
work on their second film, tentatively entitled
Eight Arms to Hold You,
in late winter of 1965. Costing three times as much as A
Hard Day’s Night,
it took twice as long to shoot and produced only a third of the critical acclaim. It was a convoluted, poorly developed idea, with all the self-conscious anxiety of trying to duplicate their first success. With a final screenplay by screenwriters Marc Behm and Charles Wood,
Help!,
as it was finally called, was a parody of futuristic spy movies like the James Bond series. The silly plot centered around a mad scientist and a Hindu sect in search of a valuable ring that somehow wound up on one of Ringo’s fingers. A demented, slapstick chase ensues through the better half of the picture, which included location shooting in Austria and in the Bahamas.