Paul McCartney (38 page)

Despite the expansion of NEMS and the manifold demands for his attention, he kept the Beatles jealously under his wing–as he also did his second favourite NEMS artiste Cilla Black–dropping everything else if ever they needed him, knowing no greater pleasure or excitement than to be in their company. He was like a parent who couldn’t acknowledge his children had flown the nest.

In common with royalty, the four never needed to carry money yet Brian still paid them the weekly cash wage he’d started when they first signed with him. Every Friday, £50 in £5 notes was sent to each of them in the same office wage-packets that other NEMS employees received. The money was delivered by Tony Bramwell, the NEMS assistant who nowadays worked mainly for Paul. One day at Cavendish, Paul asked Bramwell to fetch something from the safe he kept, unlocked, in his bedroom. ‘Inside, there were dozens of these little pay packets from Brian that had never been opened,’ Bramwell remembers.

In September 1967, the five-year management agreement Brian and the Beatles had signed in 1962 was due to expire. And lately there had been plenty of reasons to think it mightn’t be renewed.

The situation was one that British pop, with its traditional six-month career spans, had never seen before, but which would be replayed by many other managers and artistes in the future. The deals Brian had made for the Beatles five years earlier when they were nobodies remained mostly still in place, looking laughably inadequate for the ultimate somebodies they’d become. And the once-naive, thrilled and grateful boys were now vastly more independent, discerning and worldly-wise; one of them in particular.

The most retrospectively ludicrous of those deals, at least, had been rectified. The ‘penny-a-record’ royalty rate the Beatles had received from EMI throughout their prodigious run of hit singles and albums had risen to a healthy 10 per cent in January 1967. But there was still no question of an advance against royalties, a practice the UK music industry was starting to pick up from America. It rankled that the Rolling Stones, their nearest rivals–and often shameless imitators–had received $1.25 million from Decca, thanks to the unBrian-like strong-arm methods of their American manager, Allen Klein.

Other past misjudgements on Brian’s part remained shrouded in mystery. When Beatlemania first hit America, for instance, the licensing of themed merchandise, wigs, plastic guitars and the like promised to generate fortunes on a Disney scale. But Brian had assigned the merchandising rights to a group of British businessmen on a 90–10 split in their favour (from which the Beatles stood to earn only 10 per cent of his 10 per cent) and the ensuing legal tangle had halted the bonanza in its tracks.

On a personal level, they felt they no longer needed the meticulous care and unerring instinct for the classy with which Brian had guided their career hitherto. Their supreme achievement, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, had, after all, been conceived and carried through with only minimal input from him. A note he’d written about how the finished album should be packaged showed just how far he was out of the creative loop: ‘Plain brown paper bags for Sergeant Pepper’.

‘We’d always wanted to get the tools of the art into our own hands and at that point we were virtually managing ourselves,’ Paul would later observe. ‘So Brian had become a bit sidelined… and I’m sure it contributed to his unhappiness.’

There were many other contributors. As a gay man with years of secrecy and guilt behind him, Brian ought to have benefited from the Permissive Society, which reached its apogee in July 1967 when homosexual acts between consenting males over 21 were legalised in Britain. Unfortunately, his taste for rough trade and soliciting in public toilets left him still outside the law and a constant victim of violence or extortion by his pick-ups. To his lasting remorse, one such scrape had prevented him from seeing the Beatles’ farewell live show in San Francisco.

He was also more hooked on drugs than any of his boys–pot and acid but mainly the amphetamines to which he’d been introduced at the Cavern, mixed with reckless quantities of alcohol. During most of the Sgt. Pepper recording sessions, he’d been an in-patient at The Priory, London’s celebrity drying-out clinic: a cure that hadn’t taken. The once immaculate businessman had turned into a tousled, ruffle-shirted would-be hippy who slept in until mid-afternoon and spent his nights importuning young Guardsmen from Knightsbridge Barracks or losing thousands on roulette at Mayfair gaming clubs.

His relationship with Paul had always seemed slightly uncomfortable, though no one could explain exactly why. Back in Liverpool, the gossip used to be that he felt guilty for becoming as fixated on John as much as he had, and was always trying to make amends to Paul without ever quite succeeding.

From the band’s earliest days, Paul certainly had played the prima donna–as when preferring to soak in a bath rather than be on time for the first, crucial business meeting with Brian. A Cellarful of Noise, Brian’s otherwise bland autobiography, said that Paul could be ‘moody and temperamental and difficult to deal with’, and tended not to listen to what he didn’t want to hear.

He was never bothered by Brian’s homosexuality, even at the very beginning when, as the prettiest Beatle, he might have expected himself rather than John to be a target. In fact, as he’s since recalled, Brian always made determined efforts to be ‘macho’ around the Beatles. And other gay men had continually crossed his path, from Hamburg drag-queens to Robert Fraser, whom he often accompanied to Paris on art-buying expeditions. ‘I was secure about my sexuality,’ he would later reflect. ‘I always felt “I can hang out with whoever I want.”’

His independence and discernment having leapt far ahead of the other Beatles’, he was inevitably the one most resistant to Brian’s paternalism and keenly questioning of decisions taken on his behalf. Brian’s last personal assistant, Joanne Newfield, later recalled how ‘Paul would come in, doing his business-Beatle bit. There was never a row, but you could see Brian was uneasy while [he] was there… Whenever I saw him put down the phone really upset, he’d always been talking to Paul.’

At the same time, whenever anything needed fixing, smoothing out or covering up, Paul still turned to Brian as instinctively and with the same confidence as did the other three. One of EMI’s conditions for using the Sgt. Pepper cover had been that all the figures in Peter Blake’s ‘heroes’ collage still extant must give permission for their likenesses to be reproduced. Paul handed the onerous task of contacting agents all over Europe and America to Brian, who–without a murmur that ‘plain brown paper bags’ would have been easier–put his PA, Wendy Hanson, onto it full time.

His was likewise the only helpline when, during the Beatles’ final world tour, the spectre of Paul’s Hamburg sex-life raised its head again. Just prior to the West German concerts, former St Pauli bar-worker Erika Hubers had come forward with renewed claims that he was the father of her small daughter, Bettina. Brian quietly paid her off, forestalling a scandal that could have rivalled ‘more popular than Jesus’.

In the months leading up to Brian’s death, he and Paul seemed to become much closer. ‘Paul was the only Beatle living in London, so the two of them socialised a lot, at receptions and first nights,’ Tony Bramwell says. ‘And Paul loved what Brian was doing with the rock shows at the Saville theatre.’ This new bond was sealed when Brian publicly stood alongside Paul in the furore over his LSD-taking, became a signatory to The Times’s ‘legalise pot’ advertisement Paul had sponsored and made a substantial contribution to its cost.

It was never seriously on the cards that the Beatles would fire Brian outright when his management agreement expired in September. Nonetheless, he told several people, including fellow impresario Larry Parnes, that he was fully expecting it. Already he had almost lost Cilla Black, thanks to his seemingly loosening grip on NEMS. The best he hoped for was some kind of consultancy role with the Beatles and Cilla, at a reduced rate of commission.

He seemed to be preparing himself for this, deliberately standing back when, in July, the Beatles had the short-lived idea of buying a set of Greek islands on which to set up a communal home. ‘I think it’s a dotty idea,’ he wrote to an associate. ‘But they are no longer children and must have their own sweet way.’

Their discovery of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi seemed final confirmation of having found a replacement father figure. But Brian was classy to the last, refusing to join in the general chorus of incredulity that such a figure could have thus mesmerised them. Indeed, despite his Jewish faith, he, too, signed up to the Transcendental Meditation movement, promising to join the initiation course in Bangor as soon as he could get away from the office.

Instead, he died alone at his Belgravia home from an overdose of barbiturates chased with brandy. Although the verdict was accidental death, there were theories he might have been killed in a sex-game that went wrong, or even murdered. But Paul later talked to an employee who’d been in the house at the time, and was satisfied the inquest had got it right.

Amid the popping flashbulbs in Bangor, John was so stunned that he could barely get a word out. Paul, with Jane beside him, seemed quite composed, speaking of the ‘terrible shock’ of Brian’s death and how ‘very upset’ he was. Years were to pass before he’d say what no young Englishman in 1967 yet could: that he’d ‘loved the guy’.

Brian’s autocratic rule at NEMS meant he had no natural successor inside the company. His younger brother, Clive, became managing director–promising ‘a programme of vigorous expansion’–while his closest aide, Peter Brown, took over day-to-day attendance on the Beatles. A half-negotiated merger with the Australian manager Robert Stigwood, which had brought the Who, Cream and the Bee Gees into NEMS (and to which the Beatles strongly objected), was called off. Stigwood pocketed half a million pounds’ compensation and formed his own company, going on to produce smash-hit films like Saturday Night Fever and Grease.

After their era-defining album, their telecast to 400 million, their elevation to hippy deities, their high-risk role in the LSD debate, their conversion to Transcendental Meditation and their loss of a manager now seen to have been irreplaceable, John, George and Ringo might have thought nothing more could possibly be crammed into the Summer of Love. But they were wrong.

A few days after Brian’s death, Paul summoned them to a meeting at Cavendish. One of the first to know its purpose was Frieda Kelly, Brian’s former secretary and still a trusted NEMS insider. ‘Paul told the others that if they didn’t find some way of working together again, right now, the Beatles would disintegrate.’

One of many questions Brian had left unresolved was that of their film career. A Hard Day’s Night and Help! had both been huge critical as well as commercial successes, in which their ensemble comedy work had led more than one reviewer to dub them ‘modern Marx Brothers’. Yet two years on from Help!, a follow-up had still to be announced.

The critics had not singled out Paul for special praise in the acting or comedy departments as they had John and, especially, Ringo. But he was the one most interested in film-making–as well as in insuring against that inevitable day when the public finally tired of Beatles music. He thus took the lead in seeking a new movie project, both in tandem with Brian and on his own.

Numerous producers had pitched ideas for developing the ‘modern Marx Brothers’ line. One was to feature the Beatles as D’Artagnan and the Three Musketeers in a zany updating of the Alexandre Dumas classic (a money-spinner time and again for others in the future). Another proposal cast them as a ‘group mind’ just like their real-life one, playing four different sides of a man’s split personality.

A suggestion even came from the great philosopher and pacifist Bertrand Russell. At his meeting with Paul and Jane, Russell mentioned that the spy novelist Len Deighton had just bought the film rights to Oh! What a Lovely War, the celebrated theatrical satire on the carnage of 1914–18. An anti-war film in ironic military gear seemed the perfect Beatles vehicle, and Paul met with Deighton, its co-producer, to see if it could be so adapted. But the production was to consist entirely of songs from the Great War period, leaving no room for Lennon–McCartney.

Early in 1967, there was an attempt to team the Beatles with Joe Orton, the young working-class dramatist whose plays Loot and Entertaining Mr Sloane, with their mixture of sex and social anarchy, were the sensation of London’s West End. Paul had much admired Loot, so was in on Brian’s meetings with Orton, whose original brief was merely to rewrite the split personality script. Instead, he came up with an original story called Up Against It which turned the Beatles into drag-wearing urban guerrillas who all ended up in bed with the same woman.

The script was rejected without comment–though Paul later blamed its heavy gay overtones. And the sequel was somehow entirely in character with the Summer of Love. A few days before Brian’s body was found in Belgravia, Orton was bludgeoned to death by his lover, Kenneth Halliwell, in the Islington bedsitting-room they shared.

The American United Artists Corporation, to which Brian had signed the Beatles in a three-picture deal, was waiting impatiently for the third in the trilogy. At the end of his life, he’d apparently despaired of putting them back on the screen in person, so had authorised a feature-length cartoon about them, based on Paul’s ‘Yellow Submarine’, hoping that would clear the commitment to UA.

Thanks to Brian’s poor deal-making, the Beatles had earned only a pittance from A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Nor had they found either artistically satisfying. John voiced a general sentiment that, thanks to the number of scene-stealing British character actors involved, they were merely ‘extras in our own film[s]’. Richard Lester, their director both times, further stirred the pot by opining that ‘[the Beatles] shouldn’t be limited to the conventions of the professional film-maker. They should go on and develop their talents in this field and make a movie as they make their albums.’