In September 1967, The Fool received one hundred thousand pounds to design a boutique for the Beatles and stock it with their own exotic garments and accessories. It was Paul, the most dandified Beatle, who announced “a beautiful place where you can buy beautiful things.” It was Paul who strove to think of a name befitting the new boutique’s ideal of chaste elegance, and who found inspiration in a Magritte painting he had recently bought as well as the general idea of a hippie Garden of Eden. The others agreed: they would call their boutique, simply, Apple.
The summer had produced another Beatles friend. His name was Alexis Mardas. He was a young, blond-haired Greek who had come to Britain knowing only two people: Mick Jagger and the Duke of Edinburgh.
Nicknamed Magic Alex by Lennon, Mardas was an inventor of electronic gadgets with ideas that, he believed, could revolutionize twentieth-century life. There was the transistorized hi-fi; the “scream” built into a phonograph record to prevent illicit taping; the force field around a house that would keep intruders at bay with a wall of colored air. His ideas appealed to the Beatles’ thirst for novelty and their endless quest for protection against a cheating, importunate world.
Meanwhile, on Baker Street, a respectable eighteenth-century corner house, not far from Sherlock Holmes’s mythical consulting rooms, was being transformed into a condition that might have baffled even Holmes. The Fool hired gangs of art students to help them cover the side wall along Paddington Street with psychedelic patterns whizzing and whirling around what seemed to be the face of an enormous Red Indian. Magic Alex was also there, designing floodlights.
All the Beatles relished the novelty of setting up a shop. The prettiest, swingingest girls—among them Patti Harrison’s sister, Jennie—were recruited as staff. Pete Shotton left his Hampshire supermarket to oversee the arrival of oriental fabrics and exotic jewelry ordered in profusion by The Fool. “John would come in every day,” Pete says. “‘You’ve got to put a partition over here,’ he’d say. Then Paul would come in and say, ‘What’s that partition here for? Better move it over there.’”
The Apple boutique opened on December 7, 1967, with a lavish party and fashion show. “Come at 7:46,” the invitations said. “Fashion show at 8:16.” In the elegant, sweating crush, sipping apple juice, only two Beatles were visible: John and George. Ringo was abroad, playing a small part in the film Candy, and Paul had decided to go away to his farm in Scotland.
Within a few days the pattern of trading had been established. Hundreds of people came to Baker Street to look at the Apple boutique, and look inside it. There was no obligation to buy, or to consider buying. Garments began to leave the premises rapidly, though seldom as a result of cash transactions. The musk-scented gloom, where feather boas hung helpfully from bentwood hat-stands, was a shoplifter’s paradise.
It was upstairs from the Apple boutique that the empire named Apple initially took root. On the second floor, in a snow-white office, Terry Doran, “the man from the motor trade,” ran Apple Music, the intended nucleus of the Beatles’ own independent publishing and recording company. On the next floor Pete Shotton administered Apple Retail, comprising the boutique and men’s tailoring and mail order subsidiaries. Pete also did much of the hiring for the other Apple provinces springing up almost daily. For the empire, unlike its symbol, did not ripen at leisure. It appeared all at once, like a conjuring trick at the imperious clap of four multimillionaires’ hands.
Its purpose—to begin with, at least—was clear and concurring in all four multimillionaires’ minds. It was to be theirs, rather than administered on their behalf. It was liberation from the control of “men in suits,” as John Lennon called the irksome powers at NEMS, Northern Songs, and EMI. It was to prove that people of less than middle age, without stiff collars or waistcoats, were capable of building and running an organization. Apple was to be the first triumphant annexation by youth’s living apotheosis of all the power and riches that youth had generated. It was to be free and easy and openhanded; above all, in that poignant sixties word, it was to be “fun.”
Magical Mystery Tour, in 1967, was the first production credited to Apple Films. Among future productions, it was announced, would be a film starring Twiggy, the model; possibly a screen version of the hippie world’s most sacred text after Sgt. Pepper, J. R. R. Tolkein’s The Lord of the Rings. Simultaneously there appeared an Apple Electronics division, run by Magic Alex from a laboratory financed by the Beatles. Alex was to design an entire recording studio for them; meanwhile, his Hellenic wizardry would be applied to such marketable novelties as luminous paint, domestic force fields, and plastic apples with miniature transistor radios inside.
In January 1968, Beatles Ltd. changed its name to Apple Corps Ltd. “It’s a pun,” Paul explained patiently. “Apple Core—see?” Neil Aspinall was appointed managing director and Alistair Taylor, general manager. The board of directors included Peter Brown and Harry Pinsker, head of Bryce, Hanmer, Brian Epstein’s old Albemarle Street accountants.
The new divisions, and their newly appointed directors and managers, quickly spilled over from the Apple shop into a suite of offices on Wigmore Street, a quarter of a mile away. Here were established Apple Records, with Jane Asher’s brother, Peter, as A&R man, and Apple Publicity, run by Derek Taylor, the idiosyncratic press officer whom the Beatles had wooed home from Hollywood for his second term of serving them. Also at Wigmore Street, Neil Aspinall exchanged his time-honored role as roadie for that of office manager, finally making use of his teenage accounting training.
In these early days a stark contrast emerged between friends of the Beatles, working for a moderate salary, and impressive outsiders, recruited to senior executive positions at almost any figure they cared to name. Pete Shotton, whose weekly take-home pay was £37 10s, found himself approving munificent salaries for Denis O’Dell, head of Apple Films; Ron Kass, head of Apple Records; and Brian Lewis, lawyer in charge of Apple contracts. “As soon as they arrived,” Pete says, “they started going out to lunch. I’d be left with a toasted sandwich from the café across the road.”
In February, in the midst of Apple’s blossoming, John and George, with Cynthia and Patti, flew to India to begin their much postponed religious studies under the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. The advance party also included Patti’s sister, Jennie. Paul and Jane followed soon afterward, with Ringo, Maureen, and a consignment of baked beans that Ringo had brought as insurance against the curry-eating weeks ahead.
The ashram to which their guru beamingly welcomed them was not devoid of worldly comforts. Situated in verdant foothills above the Ganges at Rishikesh, it was a settlement of stone bungalows, with English hotel furniture, telephones, and running water. A high perimeter fence and padlocked gate kept out sightseers, beggars, sadhus, wandering cows, and the clamor of everyday worship at the ghats, or holy bathing places, along the river bank. The Maharishi himself occupied an elaborate residence equipped with a launching pad for his private helicopter.
Apart from the Beatles an impressive netful of personalities had been trawled to sit at the Maharishi’s feet. They included Mike Love of the Beach Boys; Donovan, the English folk singer, and his manager, “Gipsy Dave”; and the film actress Mia Farrow. All took off their pop hippie finery, the girls to dress in saris, the boys in kurta tunics, loose trousers, and sandals. At Mike Love’s example, both John and George started to grow beards. John even experimented with a turban, though he could not resist the temptation to pull Quasimodo faces when wearing it.
The Maharishi took pains to ensure that ashram life would not be too stringent for his star disciples. The chalets were comfortable—like Butlin’s, Ringo said—and the food, though vegetarian, was ample; there were frequent excursions and parties. The Lennons were presented with Indian clothes and toys for their son, Julian, and George’s twenty-fifth birthday was celebrated by a seven-pound cake. Obliging houseboys would even smuggle the odd bottle of forbidden wine into the Beatles’ quarters.
Even so, the schedul
e of fasting, chanting, and mass prayer quickly proved too much for Ringo Starr. He left Rishikesh with Maureen after only ten days, complaining that his delicate stomach couldn’t take the highly spiced food and that he missed his son.
The others showed every sign of sticking out the course for its full three-month duration. Fleet Street journalists who had infiltrated the stockade reported seeing this or that Beatle seated contentedly at a prayer meeting, feeding the monkeys that inhabited the trellises, or aimlessly strumming a guitar. It emerged that they were holding a contest among themselves to see who could keep up nonstop meditation the longest. Paul led the field with four hours, followed by John and George with three-and-a-half each. They were also using the unwonted peace and immobility to write songs for their next album.
At regular intervals, Neil Aspinall would fly out from London to report the latest progress in setting up Apple, and the position of “Lady Madonna,” the single they had left for release in their absence. Neil was also making arrangements for Apple Films to finance a production in which the Maharishi himself would star. “We had a meeting about it in his bungalow,” Neil says. “Suddenly, this little guy in a robe who’s meant to be a holy man starts talking about his two-and-a-half percent. ‘Wait a minute,’ I thought, ‘he knows more about making deals than I do. He’s really into scoring, the Maharishi.’”
Paul, who filmed most of his and Jane’s nine-week stay, remembered their Rishikesh experience as being very like school, with the teachers delivering long, boring sermons and the pupils nudging each other and trying not to giggle. As he told John later, “We thought we were submerging our personalities, but really we weren’t being very truthful then. There’s a long shot of you walking beside the Maharishi, saying ‘Tell me, O Master,’ and it just isn’t you.”
It was in the ninth week, after Paul and Jane had decided to leave, that John himself began showing signs of restlessness. “John thought there was some sort of secret the Maharishi had to give you, and then you could just go home,” Neil Aspinall says. “He started to think the Maharishi was holding out on him. ‘Maybe if I go up with him in the helicopter,’ John said, ‘he may slip me the answer on me own.’”
By the eleventh week, despite trips above the Ganges in the Maharishi’s helicopter, the answer still had not come. Furthermore, it began to be whispered that the Maharishi was not so divine a being as he had seemed. There was also a rumor that his interest in Mia Farrow might not be spiritual only. Even George, the guru’s most impassioned disciple, seemed to be having second thoughts. So, to Cynthia’s dismay, John decided they were going home.
He led the way into the Maharishi’s quarters and announced his decision, characteristically mincing no words. The guru, for all his quick-wittedness, seems to have had no idea that the lights had changed. When he asked “Why?” John would say only, “You’re the cosmic one. You ought to know.” At this, he said later, Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, The Great Soul, gave him a look like “I’ll kill you, you bastard.”
John, in fact, was convinced for a long time afterward that the Maharishi would wreak some sort of transcendental vengeance. He told Cyn it was already starting when, on the way back to Delhi, their taxi broke down, and they both stood panic-stricken, trying to hitch a ride as the Indian dusk with its thousands of staring eyes closed in around them.
The Maharishi, his teachings and flowers and transcendental gurglings, were dismissed as utterly as last month’s groupie or yesterday’s Mr. Fish shirt. “We made a mistake,” Paul said. “We thought there was more to him than there was. He’s human. We thought at first that he wasn’t.” Into another airport microphone, George concurred: “We’ve finished with him.” The holy man was left in his mountain fastness to cogitate upon a mystery as profound as any offered by Heaven or Earth. Had the Beatles, or had the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, been taken for the bigger ride?
Last month’s ashram-dwellers were this month’s corporate executives, flying to New York with their numerous highly paid lieutenants to unveil Apple Corps to the most crucial of its prospective markets. The first board meeting was held aboard a Chinese junk, cruising round the Statue of Liberty.
At press conferences and on the NBC Tonight show John and Paul explained to Johnny Carson the revolutionary but also philanthropic motives that would guide the Beatles’ business. “The aim,” John said, “isn’t just a stack of gold teeth in the bank. We’ve done that bit. It’s more of a trick to see if we can get artistic freedom within a business structure—to see if we can create things and sell them without charging five times our cost.”
Paul said that Apple’s aim was “a controlled weirdness… a kind of Western communism.” It was he who announced the newest subdivision: an Apple Foundation for the Arts. “We want to help people, but without doing it like a charity. We always had to go to the big men on our knees and touch our forelocks and say, ‘Please can we do so-and-so?’ We’re in the happy position of not needing any more money, so for the first time the bosses aren’t in it for profit. If you come to me and say, ‘I’ve had such and such a dream,’ I’ll say to you, ‘Go away and do it.’”
In other words, the Apple Foundation for the Arts would grant struggling unknown artists in every genre the finance and fulfillment they had been denied by a mercenary, unsympathetic, middle-aged world. Paul designed a proclamation to that effect, issued via full-page advertisements in the British music press. Alistair Taylor, Apple’s general manager, was coerced into posing for a photograph weighed down with the impedimenta of a one-man band. “This man has talent!” ran Paul’s caption. “One day, he sang his songs into a tape recorder and, remembering to enclose a picture of himself, sent the tape to Apple Music at 94 Baker Street. You could do the same. This man now owns a Bentley.”
The response was as anyone but a Beatle might have predicted. An avalanche of tapes, of novels, of plays and poems and film scripts and synopses and scenarios, of paintings, etchings, sketches, lithographs, sculptures, designs, blueprints, working models, and other, less easily classified submissions fell at once, with a huge, soft, slightly deranged thud upon Apple’s Wigmore Street office. Many were delivered in person, the artists electing to wait the short time necessary before they received their bursaries from the Apple Foundation for the Arts. The reception area all day thronged with creative, insolvent humanity, from ethnic bards to seaside Punch and Judy men, reminding Richard DiLello, a young San Franciscan working for the press office, of nothing so much as the VD clinics back home in his native Haight-Ashbury. Brighter even than hope of penicillin shone the belief that the Beatles meant it: that behind those very partition walls even now they were reading, listening, looking, nodding, and saying, “Yes. Go away and do it.”
They were certainly there, though not engaged precisely as imagined. They had a big corner room in which open house was kept for the fellow rock stars and friends who dropped in continuously to wish Apple luck and drink, and smoke, its health. John and Paul each kept more or less regular office hours, enjoying the novelty of a fixed destination, a desk, and secretaries. John employed an astrologer named Caleb to cast a daily horoscope for senior staff and guide major policy decisions by consulting the I Ching Book of Changes. Paul’s concern was that people arrived on time in the mornings and that there was enough lavatory paper in the Ladies.
It was pleasant, now that they themselves could rise no higher, to act as sponsors of new, young pop talent to join them on their very own Apple record label. Terry Doran had made the first signing—a teenage group named Grapefruit, and launched to the music press on an avalanche of Fortnum & Mason grapefruit in special presentation boxes. A second group, The Iveys, was Mal Evans’s discovery. George had his own protégé, a fellow Liverpudlian named Jackie Lomax; in America, Peter Asher had found a raw-boned singer-songwriter named James Taylor. Twiggy the model also kept telling Paul about a sweet little Welsh soprano named Mary Hopkin, the longest consecutive winner of the television talent show Opportunity Knocks.
By June
1968, Wigmore Street could no longer contain all this bright, bustling activity and expansion. Neil Aspinall was given half a million pounds and told to find Apple a larger orchard.
Within a few days, Neil found 3 Savile Row, a five-story Georgian house standing deep in the heartland of custom tailoring and dealers in handmade cigarettes. The house knew something of show business: It had previously been owned by Jack Hylton, the theatrical impresario, who in latter days ran it as the Albany Club. On its left, Gieves, the military tailors, guarded the crevice into Regent Street. To its right stretched timbered casements displaying Royal warrants, in which elderly men with tape measures still toiled around the waistlines of peers and archbishops.
Savile Row was never to be quite the same again.
Throughout June and July, the Beatles’ new business occupied them to the exclusion of almost everything else—including music. In the past six months, indeed, they had been to Abbey Road only to record a new single, “Hey Jude,” and some tracks for a project about which they felt zero enthusiasm. The problem of what to do as their contracted third film for United Artists had finally been solved by a compromise that mercifully spared them from having to go in front of the cameras again. A cartoon feature film would be made, featuring their music and themselves as principal characters but with voices overdubbed by actors. The theme would be their song “Yellow Submarine,” which since its 1966 release—despite its association with ochre-tinted pep pills—had become one of the best-loved melodies in Britain. Tiny tots were taught to sing it in kindergartens. Strikers chanted it on protest marches, changing “We all live in a yellow submarine” to “We all live on bread and margarine.”