Beatles vs. Stones by McMillian John

Author:McMillian, John [McMillian, John]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2013-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SIX

WHEEL-DEALING IN THE POP JUNGLE

In 1967, the Beatles spent the last weekend in August in North Wales, attending a conference on “spiritual regeneration” hosted by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Their entourage—wives, assistants, and friends, including Mick Jagger and Marianne Faithfull—numbered about sixty people, all of whom were housed in an otherwise empty student college dormitory. Everyone slept in tiny rooms with bunk beds and plain furniture, and everyone paid the same standard rate for lodging: £1.50 per night, including breakfast. Members of the press were forbidden from the campus, and since only one person from the Beatles’ management team had a phone number with which to reach the group—to be used only in case of an emergency—it was expected to be a quiet weekend. But on the afternoon of August 27, the pay phone in the dormitory lobby just kept ringing and ringing.

The news was devastating: Brian Epstein was dead. At that point, the cause of his demise had not yet been officially determined, but authorities noticed that his bedside table was cluttered with eight pill bottles. He was thirty-two years old.

“It was simply terrible how lost, how heartbroken, the Beatles were,” Marianne recalled. “They kind of went into close family mode from the sorrow and the pain.”

The Maharishi tried assuaging the Beatles’ grief with his boring homilies. Brian had not really died, he told them. Rather, he had merely departed the earthly, physical realm; now he was gliding toward some other plane of existence. As they headed out of town, John and George—both glum and visibly shaken—spoke briefly with press. “Meditation gives you comfort enough to withstand something like this, even the short amount we’ve had,” said John. George added, “There’s no real such thing as death anyway.” Of the four Beatles, these were the two who were the most committed to Eastern teachings, but they didn’t sound terribly convincing. Later, Lennon revealed what was truly on his mind. “I knew that we were in trouble then,” he said. “I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music. And I was scared you know, I thought ‘we’d fucking had it now.’ ”

• • •

Before he poisoned himself with sleeping pills, Brian had become highly adept at cultivating press relations. One of the Fleet Street newshounds to whom he’d become especially close was Don Short, a reporter for London’s Daily Mirror. Although Short was known as a tenacious journalist, he and Brian had reached an understanding: when it came to covering the Beatles, there were certain “no-go” areas—things that he might become privy to, like Brian’s homosexuality or the Beatles’ drug use—that he would not report on. If, on the rare occasion, Epstein felt the need to vent about the Beatles, or to talk about them in a way that was not entirely flattering, he could do so with Short, confident that his remarks would not show up in the press.

One evening over drinks at his Chapel Street town house, Brian asked Short

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