The Beatles (119 page)

Those photographs haunted him, not so much for what they contained but for how they’d be used. Brian knew they’d turn up again—it was only a matter of time—and dreaded that somehow it would embarrass the Beatles. For days—weeks—he moped around the house, often not getting up until the late afternoon and then not even changing out of his pajamas. Even as the Beatles’ EMI contract was being renegotiated, Brian was lurching about the rooms “
just indulging himself
,” drinking cognac, popping pills, and sliding deeper into his depression. To Peter Brown, who had moved into the flat at the suggestion of Brian’s doctor, he poured out his agony in bursts of “
morbid,” often incoherent
tirades. Brown tried to comfort his friend but sensed the futility of it all. “
Nothing I said or did
seemed to help,” Peter recalls. “He was miserable. A
lot.
But he was such a
drama queen. I assumed this was more of the same exaggerated behavior that would spend itself, like a passing storm.”

The collapse, when it eventually came
, caught Brown off guard.

One evening in late September, after an informal dinner in his pajamas, Brian disappeared into his room. “
I stayed in the library
watching television,” recalls Brown, “and when he didn’t come back, I thought, ‘That’s strange—he’d been home asleep all day, until almost after I’d got back from the office. He
can’t
have gone back to bed.’ ” Peter stopped to have a look in on Brian on his way upstairs, “and I couldn’t rouse him—he was out cold.” Finding him in this condition was nothing extraordinary. But the way Brian’s body was positioned looked unnatural—sprawled and twisted in a way that couldn’t be explained by dissipation.

Brown slapped him and threw some water in his face: nothing happened. The slack limbs had no elasticity. From what he could tell, Brian was breathing, but barely. Peter ran to call the servants, Antonio and Maria Garcia, who lived in the basement, but thought better of it. “They would have freaked out and left,” he says. Instead, he picked up the phone and called Norman Cowan, the eccentric, shamefully indulgent doctor they shared. Cowan, who was on call in a London suburb, insisted that Brian be taken to the nearest hospital. St. George’s was just around the corner, but Brown balked. “The hospitals always had someone on staff who reported to the press immediately,” he recalls, “and we would have been in the tabloids the next morning.” Recklessly, Peter decided to wait—half an hour, at least—for Cowan to arrive. Then, with the help of Bryan Barrett, the house chauffeur, they bundled Brian’s body in a blanket and rushed him back to Cowan’s private hospital, in Richmond, where his stomach was pumped.

When Brian regained consciousness, he was, Brown says, apologetic and referred to the episode as “
a foolish accident
.” But when Brown got back to Chapel Street the next day, he found a note on Brian’s night table, next to an empty vial of Nembutal. Written in Brian’s familiar script, it said: “
I can’t deal with this anymore
. It’s beyond me, and I just can’t go on.” There was a codicil attached, in which he left his estate to Queenie and his brother, Clive, with other belongings to be distributed among Brown, Geoffrey Ellis, and Nat Weiss.

Brian’s desperate act shocked his closest friends. Throughout the tour, his erratic behavior and manic depression had stirred up sympathy and concern. But in the many years they’d known him, even grown accustomed
to the emotional jags of his “torturous life,” there was never any indication that he intended to kill himself. Certainly there had been irrational talk, even some low-grade drama. “
But none of us, however shortsighted
, suspected he was suicidal,” says Nat Weiss.

At Peter Brown’s insistence, Brian spent two weeks “drying out” in the Priory, a spalike sanitorium in Roehampton that catered to well-to-do patients with embarrassing personal problems. But once back in London, Brian slipped back into a disturbing groove paced by indulgence and self-destructive behavior.

While he’d all but neglected the affairs of his other artists, it seemed that for the Beatles there was always enough juice. The deal Brian had recently struck with Capitol had been renegotiated for a hefty 10 percent royalty, with built-in escalators that could rocket the Beatles’ share to an unheard-of 17 percent. According to Weiss, “Brian was never a great push-them-to-the-wall businessman.” But he’d toughened up for Alan Livingston, and when Capitol announced plans, prematurely, to put out a
Best of the Beatles
package, Brian gave the label president a terrible tongue-lashing, threatening to bolt for a competitor unless the album was shelved. But otherwise, the stairs were steep, and Brian stumbling.

In late 1965 Brian had called Ken Partridge and asked him to rush around to the NEMS office to see something “fabulous” he’d just acquired. Brian was waiting in his car when Partridge arrived, and after a brief enigmatic exchange, they drove to the West End, pulling to the curb in front of a once-stately but now rather dowdy building on Shaftesbury Avenue. “I’ve just bought this from Bernard Delfont,” Brian announced grandly, gesturing outside. Partridge gazed up at the Saville Theatre, then back at Brian, and exclaimed, “
You must be
mad!
” In Partridge’s opinion, “it was the worst theater in London—a real pup—dirty, filthy, dilapidated, with row after row of broken seats.” Delfont and his brother Lew Grade had tried in vain to fill the 1,200-seat theater. How did Brian expect to succeed with it?

For Brian, the Saville was a second chance at a theater career, an opportunity to replay his botched season at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts, albeit on a grander, more legendary stage, and at his own whim. “
He wanted to be Ziegfeld
,” says Don Black, who admired Brian’s spunk. “The theater was a perfect foray.” And he had the acts to fill it.

But the first season was an unqualified disaster. A “
terrible” musical
about Houdini that Brian produced set the tone for much of the woolly, lightweight fare that would thin out the more discerning audiences. “He
also put on several revues that didn’t work,” recalls Ken Partridge. Tony Bramwell, who took over running the Saville Theatre, says they were forced to reshuffle the repertory, mixing in rock ’n roll with a variety of legitimate productions. “
During the week, we had Gilbert and Sullivan
or Shakespeare, switching to rock concerts every Sunday night:
Brian Epstein Presents.
” The name, however, was the only association Brian maintained with the shows. The fact was he had already lost interest in the theater, other than the weekly parties at his flat in honor of the Saville’s current attraction. In early November, Brian sent out invitations for a reception with the Who. George and Ringo planned to attend; Paul, still in Africa on safari with Mal and Jane Asher, wired his regrets. John and Cynthia had only just returned to London, suffering from travel fatigue and
an ominous melancholy
. Friends described John’s mood as “tense” and “bitter.” “
There was so much going on
in his head that he couldn’t get on top of,” recalls John Dunbar.
The future of the Beatles
had arrived at a strange point; his marriage, long plagued by lethargy, waded into decline. Still, after weeks trapped on a film set, with his hair swept back and wearing distinctive granny glasses, John stood eager to accept. But two days before Brian’s shindig at the Chapel Street flat, he was steered to an exhibit at Dunbar’s Indica Gallery.

In the ten months since the Indica had been open, both the bookshop and gallery had developed a tidy following, catering to the alternative literary and artistic movement—the emerging counterculture—that craved anything avant-garde. Upstairs, its bowed shelves were crammed with American independent-press imports, interspersed with magazines, beat poetry, and a hodgepodge of philosophy, while the gallery space in the basement hosted conceptual installations. There was nothing quite like it in London. The long-haired young crowd that milled through Mason’s Yard lavished upon it immediate cachet, as did William Burroughs, a widely recognized habitué who lived nearby, on Duke Street. “
There were all those Chelsea people
,” says another regular, “and they suddenly appeared.” Inevitably, the Indica, along with its next-door neighbor, the Scotch of St. James, became the epicenter of all that was hip and cool.

If there was one theme that ran through the gallery, that extended the Indica’s reputation as a countercultural force, it was
radical
—anything
that smashed the formal categories of art. Whether it meant exhibiting Gustav Metzger’s autodestructive monuments that disappeared before your eyes, Christo’s wrapped objets d’art, or the environmental art of Stuart Brisley, in which the artist performed within the piece, resisting traditional form and structure became the Indica’s overriding mandate. “
We never had a painting as such
in the place,” recalled John Dunbar, who commissioned each show. Exhibits were chosen without regard for commercial return—
to “liberate art as a commodity
,” says Dunbar.

It was in that liberated, happily stoned spirit that Dunbar underwrote an exhibit with an elfin Japanese event-art practitioner named Yoko Ono. He had heard about her breakthrough show in Trafalgar Square, during which she lunged about inside a black bag, and thought it was “a hoot, exactly the kind of thing that would bring us notoriety.” Besides, she and her husband, Tony Cox, had become part of the Indica’s “clubby atmosphere.” Dunbar liked to support familiar artists and provide a space where they could be shown.

The opening of
Unfinished Paintings and Objects
on November 10, 1966, created a strong buzz among the city’s curious trendsetters. Dunbar expected a hearty opening-night crowd, and subsequently he enticed John to a private preview—“
a real happening
,” he called it—on November 9, “to ensure that he wasn’t harassed.” Attracting a celebrity of John’s magnitude, he knew, would boost the Indica’s crowd—word of a Beatle’s interest would spread like wildfire—and so he “laid it on pretty thick,” implying that part of the exhibit, “fun and games inside a bag,” could lead to, well… anything, anything at all. “
I thought, ‘Hmm,’ you know, ‘sex,’
” John recalled, misunderstanding, just as Dunbar had intended. But John had other reasons for going. Even though he’d been home for only two days, he was already bored out of his skull, ready for anything that might spark a little excitement.

Certainly, John and Cyn had little more than familiarity left to give each other. There was Julian, of course, but John was hardly an attentive father. He left the parenting to his wife, along with most other household responsibilities. Days went by in which they barely exchanged five words between them, even when living—or rather, coexisting—under the same roof. John was aloof, uncooperative, disappearing into the music room for hours on end or staring hypnotically at the television until he passed out from fatigue. Paul, who seldom saw John during this time, remembered encountering him once in London and asking what he’d been up to. “
Well, watching telly
, smoking pot,” John replied.

In the chauffeured Mini Cooper on the way to the Indica, the weeks of boredom and frustration—the dormant Beatles, the unfulfilling movie role, the resentment of Paul, the stultifying marriage, the creeping inertia—caught up with him. “
I was in a highly unshaved and tatty state
,” John recalled in an interview. “I was up three nights… tripping. I was stoned.” When they pulled up to the curb outside Mason’s Yard, he’d practically lost his nerve. Les Anthony, who’d been John’s driver for two years, said they
sat in the car for “some time
”—perhaps as much as half an hour—while John debated whether to go inside. “I’m not ready yet,” he agonized every few minutes. “Let’s just sit here. Let’s see what happens.” Anthony thought the wavering was a by-product of the drugs, but more probably, like most of John’s indecision, it was the result of insecurity. All this time, he’d had the Beatles to cover his anxieties. Yes, he wanted to be the leader, but there was safety in numbers. He wasn’t
good
on his own. Besides, he dismissed a lot of gallery art as “
bullshit and phony
.” The longer he sat there, the more he resented coming. But there he was, and, well, fuck it. In he went.

Recalls Dunbar, “
When he came in, it was like
the parting of the Red Sea. Everyone who was there, some of the staff and a few friends, just stepped aside and gave him space.” Apparently convinced that John was a potential collector with deep pockets, Dunbar was “
flittering around like crazy
,” and John went stiff from the star treatment. Protectively, he buried himself in the exhibition’s attractive catalogue.
“…
mirror to see your behind
… sky T.V…. eternal time clock… bag wear… Painting to hammer a nail… Painting to let the light go through… Crying machine…”
“
Is this stuff for real?
” he wanted to know. The descriptions sounded like a put-on.
“Danger box: machine that you will never come back the same from (we cannot guarantee your safety in its use)… Underwear to make you high, for women, description upon request…”
“I wasn’t quite sure what it was about. I knew there was some sort of con game going on somewhere.” Then one of the exhibits caught his eye and he moved in for a closer look. On a shelf, he stared at several nails atop a Plexiglas stand and, next to that, an apple—it looked real, as far as he could tell, and quite ordinary—with a little table card that said:
APPLE
. “
This is a joke
, this is pretty funny,” he thought. “I was beginning to see the humor of it.” When he asked Dunbar for the price of the apple, he was told: £200.
Oh-ho!
Definitely a joke. The dry, almost inadvertent sense of humor appealed to John, who was encouraged to see the rest of the show in the downstairs gallery.

There, John’s mood brightened. All sorts of contraptions, connected
by gangplanks, beams, and ladders, were spread across the brightly lit basement, where a few “scruffy people” were putting the finishing touches on the installation. As he stood there, taking it all in, Dunbar excused himself to confer with the staff. When he returned, a slip of a young Asian woman was by his side, prim, in a black leotard and pale as porridge. In her tension of small bones, she resembled a serious small-faced animal. “Hey, man,” Dunbar said, “allow me to introduce Yoko Ono.”