In early August came another portent of how the Summer of Love’s seemingly limitless sunshine was soon to turn rancid. The playwright Joe Orton, so nearly the scriptwriter of the Beatles’ third film, was battered to death by his jealous lover, Kenneth Halliwell, who then himself took an overdose of sleeping pills. John Lennon’s “A Day in the Life,” about the “lucky man who made the grade,” was Orton’s funeral music.
Visiting Nat Weiss in New York that spring, Brian had felt a strong premonition of death. “He was sure his plane would crash on the journey home,” Weiss says. “I persuaded him to take the flight—which, in fact, was delayed a long while on the runway at Kennedy.” The jet finally took off, leaving Nat Weiss with Brian’s last wish, scribbled in a note at the airport coffee shop. His last wish concerned the packaging of the Beatles’ new album: “Brown paper bags for Sgt. Pepper.”
When Weiss came to London a few weeks later Brian was back at the drying-out clinic in Putney. The attorney drove to visit him with Robert Stigwood, his Australian heir apparent at NEMS Enterprises. According to Weiss, Brian now regretted his decision to let Stigwood buy control of NEMS. “Stigwood had the option to buy, but they were still joint managing directors. Brian was telling Stigwood to do things, but it was obvious that Stigwood had no intention of doing them.
“While I was with Brian, a big bouquet of flowers arrived from John Lennon. The card from John said, “You know I love you—I really mean that.” When Brian read it, he just broke down.
“He begged me to stay on until he got out of the clinic, but I had to go back to New York. That was the last time I saw him.”
Not even Nat Weiss could comfort Brian in the dread that had begun to torment him—the dread foreshadowed in early summer when Cilla Black announced her intention of leaving NEMS Enterprises. Cilla disliked Robert Stigwood; still more had she been offended by the loss of that feminine solicitude with which Brian had built up her career. The emergency cleared Brian’s head. There were meetings with Cilla at Chapel Street: He apologized, was charming—from the haunted, drug-exhausted night-being, enough of the old Brian returned to persuade Cilla, at least, not to leave him.
But the greater, unassuageable dread remained. In October 1967, Brian’s five-year management contract with the Beatles ended. He had reason—or thought he had—to believe it would not be renewed.
There had been signs for many months that Paul McCartney, in particular, was discontented with Brian’s management. Their relationship, in any case, was never easy. Paul, with his looks, was the one Brian ought to have loved: He always felt he owed Paul compensation because he had chosen John. The worst moments of all for Brian, worse even than John’s sarcasm, were when Paul decided, in his smiling way, to play the prima donna. “Paul could get to Brian the way none of the other three could,” Joanne Newfield says. “Whenever I saw him put down the phone really upset, he’d always been talking to Paul.”
At the beginning, it was always George, in his dour Liverpool way, who cross-examined Brian closest over business deals. As George absorbed himself in spiritual things, Paul took over, with more unsettling effect, as Brian’s chief inquisitor. “He’d come into Chapel Street, doing his business Beatle bit,” Joanne says. “That always worried Brian. They never had a row, but you could see he was uneasy when Paul was there.”
Brian had hoped to please Paul, above all, in the new recording deal with EMI and American Capitol that he had negotiated the previous February. This replaced EMI’s risible “penny per record” for a 10 percent royalty on singles and albums, rising to 15 percent after 100,000 and 300,000 copies respectively. In America, the royalty was 10 percent, rising to 17 percent. The deal, in fact, transformed the economics of the record industry. No longer would record companies be able to sign impressionable young men to miserly contracts with the excuse of its being standard practice.
But Paul, rather than giving Brian the longed-for congratulations, had instead been full of the new recording contract negotiated for the Rolling Stones by the manager who had taken over from Andrew Loog Oldham—a New York businessman named Allen Klein. Faced with the threat of losing the Stones to another label, Decca had agreed to pay an unheard-of advance against future royalties of $1.25 million. In all the years that the Beatles had been sending EMI’s profits through the roof, it had not occurred to Brian to demand any money up front.
Paul was also mainly responsible for a feeling within the Beatles that they had now outgrown their need for a manager in the old proprietorial sense. Certainly, Sgt. Pepper, that multihued testament to their infallibility, had been made to a large extent against Brian’s wishes. By now, too, rumors were beginning to filter out of NEMS, and through each Beatle’s personal court, that even as that kind of manager Brian had made serious long-term mistakes. They were starting to hear about Seltaeb and Nicky Byrne; the 90 percent merchandising contract given to five strangers; the millions of dollars that had been allowed to blow away.
Brian, on his side, made strenuous efforts to prove that they did still need him. He took special trouble over the arrangements for Paul McCartney’s first private trip to America. It was, ironically, the trip that Paul used to formulate much of a future for the Beatles in which there would be little room for anyone named Brian Epstein.
To one person, the impresario Larry Parnes, Brian finally confessed what he could still barely articulate in his own mind. “He told me the Beatles were leaving him,” Parnes said. “He was losing Cilla and he was losing them. The Beatles were giving him notice.”
His support of Paul in the LSD furor revealed how fervent was Brian’s desire to stay at one with the Beatles. And, indeed, it brought him closer to them—certainly, closer to Paul—than for many months. Soon afterward, at Kingsley Hill, he threw a weekend party to which the Beatles and their women drove together, packed into John’s psychedelic Rolls. When the Rolls stopped at traffic lights people crowded round to try to see through its darkened windows. It was a day that Cynthia Lennon was to remember with horror. Brian’s party, at the house where Churchill used to meet his wartime chiefs of staff, turned into a mass LSD trip. Cynthia took some acid herself, for only the second time, in her fast-failing attempts to keep up with John. The result was a horrendously bad trip in which she almost jumped from a second-story window onto the heads of the beautiful people below.
In July, the Beatles began to think of leaving England and setting up in hippie-commune style on their own private Greek island. All of them and their wives took a lengthy boat cruise, looking at possible sites to buy. The plan went as far as negotiations with Greece’s fascist military government and with the British Treasury—who gave permission in principle for them to transfer the purchase price abroad—before being dropped in favor of the next big idea. Brian took no part in the plan and pretended mild amusement at it. “I think it’s a dotty idea,” he wrote to Nat Weiss, “but they’re no longer children, and must have their own sweet way.”
The fatherly tone is poignant, considering the moment. His own father, Harry Epstein, the hardworking, straight-dealing, uncomplicated Liverpool businessman, had died suddenly of a heart attack, aged sixty-three. It was his second within only a few weeks. When news of the first one reached Brian, at a party, he did not think it sounded serious enough to return home immediately.
The bereavement, paradoxically, had a stabilizing effect: It forced him out of his own depression into concern for his family—in particular, for his mother, Queenie, widowed after thirty-four years of marriage. From the age of eighteen, she had known no existence other than as Harry’s wife. After her religion, it was to her elder son that she turned for support. Brian was comforted to realize that someone in the world truly needed him.
He spent several days with Queenie in Liverpool, surprised to discover how a city that had once seemed so dully provincial now soothed and reassured him. After Harry’s retirement, his parents had moved from their Queen’s Drive house to a more convenient bungalow. Brian visited their old next-do
or neighbor Rex Makin and sat in Makin’s garden, staring at the house with the sunrise over its front door, thinking of the father who had returned from the shop one afternoon to find him sent home from school, and whose angry words were still etched on his son’s memory. “I simply don’t know what we’re going to do with you.”
He wrote to Nat Weiss from Liverpool, mentioning his plan to come to New York on September 2. Weiss, as his agent, had arranged for him to present a series of talk shows on Canadian television. Brian was excited by this opportunity to test himself as a performer. In comforting his mother he had himself evidently drawn comfort from the Jewish religion. “The week of Shiva [mourning] is up tonight,” his letter to Weiss continued, “and I feel a bit strange. Probably good for me in a way.”
His mother came to London to stay with him on August 14. The idea was that she should move down to London permanently, to be near Brian and her sister, his aunt Frieda. For the ten days of her visit Brian forced himself to keep to a normal routine. Queenie would wake him each morning, drawing his bedroom curtains as she used to when he was small, and they would have breakfast together in his room. Brian would then work a conventional office day with Joanne. Each night, he stayed in, watching television with Queenie, rarely going to bed later than 11:00 P.M. Joanne had never seen him so quiet and apparently content.
Mrs. Epstein returned to Liverpool on Thursday, August 24. That evening, at the Hilton Hotel, sitting on a bedroom floor and staring devoutly upward, the Beatles embarked, three days prematurely, on their post-Brian era.
A letter to Nat Weiss was in the mail—a cheerful note concerning arrangements Weiss was to make for Brian’s American visit, such as the chartering of a yacht and tickets to a Judy Garland concert. There was also mention of Eric Andersen, a folk singer whom Brian wanted to put under contract: “till the 2nd,” the letter ended, “love, flowers, bells, be happy and look forward to the future.”
Enclosed was a color snapshot, taken on the roof at Chapel Street, of a young man—hardly more than a boy—in striped trousers and a frilled shirt open to the waist. His hair was long; it fell in bangs over his eyes. Four days before his death, Brian at last became what he had strived hardest to be: a Beatle.
The new era took a form already long familiar to London Underground travelers. For it is on subway station walls that advertisements for Indian holy men and their spiritual crusades in Britain commonly appear. Among this bearded, cross-legged platform-wall fraternity the most clearly recognizable was the holy man named Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. In 1967, after a decade of regular visits, the maharishi—or great saint—could claim some ten thousand British converts to his doctrine of Spiritual Regeneration. A still larger number recognized him in the way they recognized chocolate vending machines, posters for Start Rite shoes, and illuminated signs to the Central or Bakerloo line.
It was, ironically, not George Harrison but his model wife, Patti, who brought the Beatles and the Maharishi together. Patti had joined the Spiritual Regeneration movement in February after hearing a talk by one of the guru’s lieutenants. George, although immersed in Hindu religious study since his Indian expedition, had found no real direction as yet. He had been to San Francisco and—accompanied by Derek Taylor, now a fashionable Hollywood publicist—had strolled among the Haight-Ashbury hippies. There he found less love and peace than beggars and souvenir stalls. He had also been in contact with a Britain-based guru who persuaded him to go down to Cornwall and climb a hill, with equally disappointing spiritual results.
In the week before August Bank Holiday Patti Harrison read that the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi had come to London to deliver a single lecture before retiring from his crusade and devoting himself to a “life of silence” in India. The valedictory lecture was to take place at the mystic’s hotel, the Park Lane Hilton, on Thursday, August 24. Patti made George contact the other Beatles and persuade them to attend.
Amid the small 7s 6d (37p) per head audience of the faithful, four Beatles garbed as flower-power aristocrats listened while a little Asian gentleman, wearing robes and a gray-tipped beard, described in his high-pitched voice an existence both more inviting and more convenient than mere hippiedom. The inner peace that the Maharishi promised, and which seemed so alluring to pleasure-exhausted multi-millionaires—not to mention the sublime consciousness so attractive to inveterate novelty-seekers—could be obtained even within their perilously small attention span. To be spiritually regenerated they need meditate for only half an hour each day.
Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, despite a highly developed nose for publicity, did not know the Beatles were in his congregation until after the lecture, when they sent a request to speak to him in private. There and then, acting as a group, they offered themselves as his disciples. The holy man, for whom “tickled” would be an insufficient adjective, invited them to join him the next day on a course of indoctrination for the spiritually regenerated at University College, Bangor, North Wales. The Beatles said they would go.
They did subsequently contact Brian and ask him to join the party. He, too, had been showing some interest in Indian religion. Brian said he had other plans for the Bank Holiday weekend, but that he’d try to get down to Bangor later during the ten-day course.
The next day an incredulous mob of reporters and TV crews saw them arrive at Euston station and climb aboard the dingy blue and white train that now had to serve instead of their usual private jet. Also in the party, thanks to a spur-of-the-moment decision, were the country’s favorite anti-Christ and scarlet woman, Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull. Cynthia Lennon missed the train; when she arrived at the barrier, the ticket inspector mistook her for just another fan and refused to let her through until after the guard’s whistle had blown for departure. As Cyn sprinted vainly along the platform John leaned from his compartment window, laughing and calling, “Run, Cindy, run!”
It was the first journey they had ever made without Brian—without even the two protective road managers. John compared it to “going somewhere without your trousers.” They all sat rather guiltily, wedged into one first-class compartment, afraid to venture so much as to the lavatory. They then had a second audience with the Maharishi, who occupied his own first-class compartment, squatting on a sheet spread over British Rail’s green upholstery. He held up a flower—the first of many—and explained that its petals were an illusion, like the physical world. In a telling simile he compared spiritual regeneration to a bank, from which its practitioner could always draw dividends of repose.
It had become apparent by now that the Maharishi considered himself fully as great a star attraction as the Beatles, and believed the crowds and media attention to be on his account rather than theirs. As the train finally limped toward Bangor station, another frantic multitude and battery of television cameras came into view on the platform. The Beatles, with no shield of roadies to protect them, were all for staying on the train a couple of extra stops, then returning to Bangor by taxi. With his beatific smile, the Maharishi told them to stick close beside him and they’d be all right.
That night the Beatles’ party found themselves ensconced with the Maharishi’s three hundred other conference students, in the spartan bedrooms of a teacher-training college. Later they went out to the only restaurant open late in Bangor—serving Chinese food. Only after a long and rowdy meal did they realize they weren’t carrying enough money between them to pay the bill. In London, any restaurant would have pressed the dinner on them gratis, but Chinese waiters in a remote North Wales seaside resort were clearly a somewhat different proposition. Things had begun to look decidedly tricky when George pried open the heel of one of his sandals and produced a wad of ten-pound notes he had secreted there.
The following day the Beatles used a press conference with their new guru to announce that they had given up taking drugs. “It was an experience we went through,” Paul McCartney said. “Now it’s over. We don’t need it any more. We think we’re finding new ways of getting there.”
On
e of the journalists present was George Harrison, their old Liverpool Echo acquaintance—for Bangor is just in the Echo’s circulation area. Harrison was with them the next afternoon—Sunday—as, fully initiated into Spiritual Regeneration, they strolled around the college grounds.
“There was a phone ringing inside,” Harrison said. “It rang and rang. Eventually, Paul said, ‘Someone had better answer that.’ He went in and picked up the phone. I could hear him speaking. Yeah,’ he said. ‘Yeah…’ Then I heard him shout, ‘Oh, Christ—no!’”
• • •
That Friday, Brian had suddenly asked Joanne down to spend the Bank Holiday weekend at his house in Sussex. He also told her to invite a mutual friend of theirs, the Scots singer Lulu. But he had left it too late: Both Lulu and Joanne herself had other arrangements. As Brian did not seem too disappointed, Joanne presumed he would be entertaining a large house party. “He went off on his own on the Friday afternoon. He seemed really bright and happy that day. He’d put the top of the Bentley down. He was waving to me as he drove off.”
At Kingsley Hill, other disappointments waited. A young man whom Brian had hoped to get to know better that weekend would not, after all, be able to make it. Peter Brown had not arrived yet. He was still in London, trying to get Cynthia Lennon off to Bangor by car. Peter, and Geoffrey Ellis from the NEMS office, would be the only house guests. They were old friends and familiar companions. Brian, after two quiet weeks, had looked forward to more exciting company.