“It was as if we suddenly found ourselves in the middle of a horror film. The room seemed to get bigger and bigger. Our host seemed to change into a demon. We were all terrified. We knew it was something evil—we had to get out of the house. But this man told us we couldn’t leave. We got away somehow, in George’s Mini, but he came after us in a taxi. It was like having the Devil following us in a taxi.
“We tried to drive to some club—the Speakeasy, I think it was. Four of us, packed into the Mini. Everybody seemed to be going mad. Patti wanted to get out and smash all the windows along Regent Street. Then we turned round and started heading for George’s place in Esher. God knows how we got there. John was crying and banging his head against the wall. I tried to make myself sick, and couldn’t. I tried to go to sleep, and couldn’t. It was like a nightmare that wouldn’t stop whatever you did. None of us got over it for about three days.”
Their host had playfully dipped their coffee sugar into a substance that, although widely used in mental hospitals and on prisoners of war as a truth serum, was so new as a recreational drug that it had not yet been declared illegal. It was a man-made substance, odorless and colorless; its chemical name, lysergic acid diethylamide, was usually shortened to LSD.
Britain, meanwhile, had changed governments and prime ministers. The general election of October 1964 had swept the Conservatives from power after thirteen years and brought back the Labour party for only the fourth term in its history. Supreme power had passed from an obscure Scottish laird to a plump, white-haired man who smoked a pipe and vacationed in the Scilly Isles, and about whom little else was known other than that he represented the constituency of Huyton, near Liverpool.
Harold Wilson—Yorkshire-born, a Merseysider only by electoral accident—restored Labour to office largely with the pop idiom used by teenagers and would-be teenagers. “Let’s Go With Labour!,” the decisive campaign slogan, borrowed pop music’s preeminent image—that of being galvanized, as by music, into keen and exhilarating life. Such was the New Britain that Mr. Wilson promised, in language as attuned to the mass mood as any juke-box hit—“a hundred days of dynamic action”…“a dynamic, expanding, confident, above all purposive Britain”… “forged in the white heat of the technological revolution.”
There was, however, another side to Harold Wilson. It had become visible, though not yet diagnosable, the previous April when, as leader of the opposition, he had presented the Beatles with their Variety Club award at the Dorchester Hotel. It was perhaps the most astute act of his political career to telephone Sir Joseph Lockwood, chairman of EMI, and offer to grace the occasion as a fellow Merseysider. Not that the Beatles recognized Mr. Wilson as such—or, indeed, recognized him at all. John Lennon, mistaking him for the Variety Club’s “chief barker or MC,” and getting confused with Barker and Dobson toffee, mumbled: “Thank you, Mr. Dobson.” But Mr. Dobson did not mind. His face, in the double-page newspaper spreads, wore the smile of one who had discovered a great secret.
Britons who had feared the socialist menace wondered how, for instance, such an apparition could possibly conduct his regular and necessary meetings with the Queen. Yet conduct them the apparition did, with every sign of confidence. And despite technology’s white heat, the old familiar state apparatus went on functioning as before. Early in 1965, just as today, the Queen’s official birthday was marked by a distribution of honors. Just as today, the Queen herself merely put a signature to the list drawn up by her prime minister.
On June 12, it was announced that the Beatles were each to receive the MBE—Membership of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire. One northern newspaper headlined the story: “She Loves Them! Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!”
The Beatles, recuperating from their second European tour, awoke to find a throng of press eager to ascertain how they would feel at being entitled to walk in state processions behind peers of the realm and hereditary knights but in front of baronets’ younger sons and “Gentlemen of Coat Armor.”
They felt confused.
“I thought you had to drive tanks and win wars to get the MBE,” John Lennon said.
“I think it’s marvelous,” Paul McCartney said. “What does that make my dad?”
“I’ll keep it to dust when I’m old,” Ringo Starr said.
“I didn’t think you got that sort of thing,” George Harrison said, “just for playing rock ’n’ roll music.”
In Harold Wilson’s Britain, as would become abundantly clear, you did. The country had elected its first Beatle prime minister.
The Wilson Age, which had promised such starkness, such austere purpose, was to produce, instead, an interlude of frivolity unmatched since Charles II sat on the English throne. Newly socialist Britain in 1965 is remembered, not for white heat or driving dynamism but for shortsighted euphoria and featherheaded extravagance. It is remembered above all for a hallucination that descended on England’s capital city, brilliant at first, but in quickly fading, tawdry colors—the hallucination of Swinging London.
Swinging London was born at a moment when government debts at home and abroad had brought the country to the edge of economic ruin. Yet the hard times, so earnestly promised by Mr. Wilson, were nowhere visible. All that could be seen was a spending boom registered on the now familiar gauge of teenage fashion. London girls, whey-faced and crop-headed, now tripped along in black-and-white Op Art dresses terminating scandalously far above the knee. The boys who queued outside the Marquee Club wore hipster trousers and spotted or flowered shirts. Opulence was the rage, and offered to all through Sunday color-supplement ads for “pure new wool,” “real cream—pour it on thick,” the “unashamed luxury” of sleekly packaged, though inexpensive, after-dinner mints. Magazines like Town and Queen mirrored the new preoccupation with taste and style, publishing extravagant picture stories on emergent arbiters of fashion whose extreme youth and humble backgrounds were invoked, almost unconsciously, as a parallel with the Beatles’. Fame, almost equaling that of pop stars, descended on the fashion model Jean Shrimpton, the photographer David Bailey, and the clothes designers Mary Quant and John Stephen, whose menswear shops were already transforming a West End backwater called Carnaby Street.
Swinging London was a look—of short skirts, floppy hats, white rabbit fur—it was also, at the beginning, an attitude. That attitude, to a great extent, came from the Beatles. As they had looked, wide-eyed, around the strange world of their celebrity, so young Londoners now looked round a capital whose ancient sedateness seemed suddenly hilarious. The essence of Swinging London was in its happening against a tolerant background of non-Swinging London—of black taxis, red buses, Grenadier Guardsmen, the sacred monuments and statues past which the young, outrageously dandified, zoomed laughingly in open-top Mini Mokes, the Union Jack itself translated to a novelty kitchen apron or tote bag. The essence was audacity, like the Beatles’; it was certainty that because they had gotten away with it everyone could.
Swinging London was also big business like none before or since. All summer, in the West End around Carnaby Street, in Chelsea around the King’s Road, in formerly down-at-the-heel byways of Fulham and Kensington, there sprang up boutiques, as clothes shops were now called; there sprang up hairdressers offering the Beatles or Mary Quant bobs; bistros, serving newly fashionable cream-laden dishes; windows jumbled with the latest crazes in Victorian bric-a-brac. A rash of new clubs vied with the Ad Lib to attract those who, in the yearning terminology of that hour, were the with-it set, the new faces, the In crowd.
The innermost In crowd, the ultimate clique, continued to be the Beatles. Their hair now sculpted and razored, their clothes one jump ahead of Carnaby Street, they were the model, and their songs the background, for boutique shopping, bistro dining, feather boa wearing, Swinging London life. They, together with Union Jacks and wooden-headed dolls and Great War recruitment posters, were founding effigies in the Pop Art vogue, born of the period’s childlike brilliance and brica-brac. Queen magazine reported in July that P
eter Blake, London’s leading pop artist, was employed on a major study of them, while the sculptor David Wynne was casting their heads in bronze for what was predicted to be “one of the most profound English philosophical portrait sculptures of the 20th century.”
Their second film, Help!, is Swinging London personified—part music, part color-supplement travelogue, part Pop Art strip cartoon. Again the producer was Walter Shenson and the director, Richard Lester. Again the theme was the Beatles’ private life—not real life this time, but a fantasy one such as their song lyrics and public clowning had led their fans to half-imagine. The opening sequence shows John, Paul, George, and Ringo each entering a front door in four identical row houses. Within is a communal pad equipped with vending machines, a sunken floor, a grass carpet, and a cinema organ.
Various writers, among them the dramatist Charles Wood, had labored on a plot that, in its final, much rewritten form, dealt with the efforts of a Hindu murder sect to recover a ring stuck on Ringo’s finger. No less appropriate to the moment, the cast included character actors like Eleanor Bron and Roy Kinnear, well known from fashionable television satire shows. There being no restraint on budget now, the action moved from London to Salisbury Plain, where the Beatles performed inside a ring of Centurion tanks; then to Austria and the Bahamas.
The West End premiere, in Princess Margaret’s by now almost inevitable presence, brought reviews hailing the Beatles as “modern Marx Brothers.” They had, in fact, prepared for their roles by studying the Marx Brothers’ classic Duck Soup. Ringo Starr received special praise for a Chaplinesque performance recognizable to everyone around him as just Ringo being Ringo on camera. On the sleeve of the soundtrack album, four ski-clad Beatles semaphored a title song that had been number one in Britain for most of the two preceding months.
Their evolution into national treasure received an extra boost through the growing notoriety of the band they’d helped find a first foothold in the charts. After initially trying to market the Rolling Stones as ersatz Beatles, Andrew Loog Oldham had hit on the brilliant idea of turning his discovery into anti-Beatles, shattering every convention of charm and family friendliness that John, Paul, George, and Ringo had laid down for all pop groups. The Stones did not smile, but sneered. Their hair was not barbered into neat bangs, but left to hang in Byronesque tangles over their ears and collars. They did not perform in shiny stage uniforms, but in the same unmatched, unpressed clothes they had worn to the gig. Their music was not tuneful and catchy like the Beatles’, but charged with an animal fury and sexuality that goaded their audiences to violence and vandalism like nothing seen since the earliest days of rock ’n’ roll.
Oldham realized that a huge segment of the teenage pop audience felt they had lost the Beatles to their parents, even their grandparents. Boys who attended school with Stones-style hair down to their shoulders were now being sent home with instructions to get it “cut neatly like the Beatles.” From the five hitherto law-abiding Stones their teenage manager fashioned rebels and outlaws whose subliminal message was they’d never sell out in the same way. A series of publicity stunts staged by Oldham had turned the Stones into a national scandal that obsessed the media almost as noisily as Beatlemania once had. They were the bêtes noirs of every pulpit-thumping clergyman, youth leader, and columnist for a catalog of crimes that ranged from urinating in public to refusal to ride the revolving platform on TV’s Sunday Night at the London Palladium. And, just as Oldham had predicted, the more the grown-up world mocked and reviled them, the more teenagers adored them.
Pop fans not just in Britain and America but the world over now polarized into two camps. It was the first question whenever one raver met another: “Are you Beatles or are you Stones?” To reply “Beatles” meant that one was essentially conventional and law-abiding; to reply “Stones” meant that one gloried in anarchy, subversion, and free love. “The Beatles want to hold your hand,” famously wrote the New York journalist Tom Wolfe, “but the Stones want to burn your town.” Wolfe, of course, had no idea that the squeaky clean Fab Four had been no less averse to a bit of town burning in their Liverpool and Hamburg days.
The Stones, too, had now conquered the States and were enjoying a run of huge hit singles, recently cowritten by their vocalist Mick Jagger and lead guitarist, then known as Keith Richard. Jagger, the former shy student, under Oldham’s influence had become a star in his own right, focusing the band’s insolence and provocativeness in his strutting, girlish body and enormous, rubbery lips. What few people outside the Ad Lib club realized was that, although polar opposites and deadly rivals in public, the Beatles and the Stones were privately the best of friends. John, in particular, admired Jagger and Richard as well as envying them their license to speak and behave as they chose. As time went on, the two bands would even cooperate, making sure they did not release a new single at the same time and so impede each other’s progress up the charts.
The Beatles’ investiture as MBEs was performed by the Queen on October 26, 1965. Swinging London was thus united with Buckingham Palace in a spectacle whose solemn pomp and hilarious incongruity spoke prophecies of the Wilsonian honors system. Mr. Wilson’s idea had not been universally applauded. Several MBE holders, together with sundry OBEs and BEMs, had returned their decorations in protest that an honor hard won through war or subpostmastership should be given to what one outraged naval hero described as “a gang of nincompoops.” Colonel Frederick Wagg announced his resignation from the Labour party and cancellation of a twelve-thousand-pound bequest to party funds. The general delight showed that Mr. Wilson had achieved his object: to reflect the Beatles’ popularity upon himself. No single commentator expressed surprise that, despite achievements which nowadays would probably have taken him into the House of Lords, Brian Epstein received no honor of any kind.
Crowds even larger than those that await royal births and deaths collected along the palace railings and around the Victoria Monument’s winged chariot to watch the Beatles take their place in the hierarchy of State. Once again, real life had exceeded any scriptwriter’s fantasy—in the cries of “God save the Beatles” as they entered by the Privy Purse Door; in the Lord Chamberlain’s official six feet three inches in knee breeches, who instructed them how and when to bow; and, finally, the white and gold State ballroom, and the long red carpet leading to the regal figure destined, on this occasion, to play only a bit part.
Later at a press conference, holding up their rose-ribboned silver crosses, they were asked their opinion of Buckingham Palace. Paul McCartney replied that it was a “keen pad.” They had been to other palaces, of course—such as the San Francisco Cow Palace. And the Queen? They liked her, Paul said—she had been “like a mum.” The Queen had asked how long they had been together and Ringo had replied, “forty years,” at which Her Majesty had laughed. “Were you scared?” John was asked. “Not as much as some others in there,” he replied. “What will you do with your medal?” “What do people usually do with medals?” Paul replied. Paul would later claim—or, at least, strongly hint—that they had been created Members of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in a happy haze of a marijuana joint, quickly puffed by turns in a mahogany-lined palace washroom.
In Birmingham that same day Princess Margaret was opening the new offices of the Birmingham Post and Mail. The first issue off the new presses had the Beatles’ investiture as its lead story. Glancing at it, the princess made what seemed like a veiled comment on the most inexplicable absentee from her sister’s Honors List: “I think MBE must stand for ‘Mr. Brian Epstein.’
At the end of 1964 a New York business syndicate had offered Brian 3 million pounds outright for the Beatles. He was also considering an offer for NEMS Enterprises from the powerful British Delfont Organization. “What shall I do? Shall I take it?” he would ask, resting his forefinger along his cheek as the paper millions danced around him.
The Beatles, though the most colossal element in Brian’s success, were by no means the only one.
Gerry and the Pacemakers had remained consistently popular and were themselves now making a feature film. Even greater had been the impact of Cilla Black, the Cavern Club’s metamorphosed cloakroom girl. Strangely unsuccessful with Lennon-McCartney material, Cilla made her breakthrough with a song that Brian found for her in America: the Burt Bacharach ballad “Anyone Who Had a Heart.” Hit records continued into 1965 for Cilla Black, as they did for Billy J. Kramer, the Dakotas, and the Fourmost.
Success beyond exaggeration had brought obvious personal wealth. Brian’s suits came from Savile Row, his shirts—of pure monogrammed silk—from Jermyn Street: his presence had the crispness of new banknotes, the cool fragrance of cologne and triumphant deals. In Chapel Street, Belgravia, he had a Georgian house, furnished with fastidious taste, glittering with ceremonial silver, pale with white gold, and quiet with excellent art. There he maintained a domestic staff befitting a young lord, and entertained with a generosity and thoughtfulness that few of his guests have ever forgotten. He took pains, for instance, to notice which brand of cigarettes each visitor smoked, and to ensure that brand would be next to his or her place at dinner. When George Martin married Judy Lockhart-Smith, each table setting was marked by Brian’s gift of “M” monogrammed silver napkin rings—not the conventional dozen but eleven, commemorating the number present.
It was the same solicitousness that Brian devoted to all his artists at the beginning—the finicking almost feminine perfectionism that chose Cilla’s dresses and worried over Billy J.’s tendency to plumpness; that sent telegrams on first nights, placed flowers and fruit and champagne and portable TV sets in dressing rooms; that provided hairdressers, tailors, doctors, lawyers; that, in a thousand, almost unnoticed ways, eased gawky Liverpool boys and an even gawkier Liverpool girl into their roles as international celebrities.
The Beatles came first, and everyone knew it: the Beatles were not in Brian’s head but his heart. Whatever desire he had once felt for John Lennon had changed, amid the world’s worship, into a quadruple infatuation, an affair with an image he had created yet still doted uneasily on. To be with them, or a few paces behind them, represented his life’s only absolute happiness. On their return from America late in 1964 he had gone up to Liverpool; he was in his old office, talking to Joe Flannery, his longtime friend and confidant. “We made an arrangement to meet for coffee the next morning,” Flannery says. “That night, the Beatles flew into London airport. Next day, I was with Brian in his office, the television was on—and there was Brian with the Beatles on the screen. He’d driven all the way down to London to meet them at the airport, then all the way back up to Liverpool to keep his appointment with me. He had to be with them. He could never let go.”