The Beatles (139 page)

In India, songs came to the Beatles in the most mundane of ways. “Bungalow Bill” was written after two meditators, a middle-aged American woman and her teenage son, broke camp to go on safari—“
to go shoot a few poor tigers
,” as John facetiously put it—then returned to their
puri,
adjacent to the Maharishi’s, in order to commune with God. “Across the Universe” borrowed the expression of greeting that TM disciples exchanged when they encountered one another on one of the paths:
Jai Guru Dev,
or “long live Guru Dev,” in tribute to the Maharishi’s personal swami.

For most of the prolonged stay, Prudence Farrow, Mia’s emotionally fragile younger sister, remained locked in her tiny room, meditating as if her life depended on it. She failed to appear for meals or even the nightly question-and-answer sessions with the Maharishi. “
Prudence meditated and hibernated
,” Ringo recalled. “We saw her twice in the two weeks I was there. Everyone would be banging on the door: ‘Are you still alive?’ ”

Eventually, her meditation grew deeper and more extreme. “
She went completely mental
,” John recalled. “If she’d been in the West, they would have put her away.” Being as it was the East, however, they sent in the Beatles.
George and John had been selected
as Prudence’s “team buddies,” a designation comparable to court jesters, appointed to rescue her from a near-catatonic state. “One night when I was meditating, George and John came into my room with their guitars, singing ‘Ob la di ob la da,’ ” she told her sister, Mia, although it seems unlikely they’d play one of Paul’s songs. “Another time John, Paul, and George came in singing ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,’ the whole song!”

How Prudence responded to the gesture is not recorded, except that the boys “
got her out of the house
.” And for John, the experience provided inspiration:
using a finger-picking technique
he learned from Donovan, the structure for “Dear Prudence” was in place before the night was out.

By now, between them, Paul and John had written enough good songs
for two or three albums. “I came up with calling the next album
Umbrella,
”
Paul recalled, “an umbrella over the whole thing.”
An umbrella!
That was all George had to hear. “
We’re not fucking here
to do the next album,” he snarled at Paul, “we’re here to meditate!” But for Paul, the new repertoire emerging was already part of a masterful aural palette, the songs beginning to overlap and interweave. No doubt the body of an album was taking shape in his mind. He was satisfied with his own substantial output and thought several of John’s—notably “Across the Universe” and “Bungalow Bill”—were among his partner’s “great songs.”

For Ringo, the urge to see his two children became overpowering, and after two weeks he and Maureen decided they’d had enough of the academy.
Besides, Maureen had a phobia
of the fist-size insects that taxied through their room, and Ringo, still tormented by childhood gastrointestinal problems, couldn’t handle the spicy curries used to season the food. What was an intense emotional experience to most of the Maharishi’s students was, from Ringo’s outlook, “
very much like a holiday
.” But like any good holiday, the time had come to bid it farewell.

Ringo’s decision posed something of a public relations nightmare for the Maharishi. Since devoting themselves to his teachings, the Beatles had emerged as his unofficial ambassadors to the world; how would it look to the media, assembled outside the academy’s gates, when Ringo walked out early, with his suitcases? Almost immediately after announcing his departure, Ringo came under intense pressure to reconsider. Perceptive to a fault, the Maharishi must have also sensed he was losing his grip on Paul McCartney and Jane Asher. In Peter Brown’s estimation, “
Paul and Jane were much too sophisticated
for [the Maharishi’s] mystical gibberish.” Paul was obviously never as committed to TM in the way that John and George were, never one to expect “
some huge spiritual lift-off
.”

After a month in Rishikesh, Paul was eyeing an exit strategy that had been in place before he’d left London, but he was concerned that George and John “might never come back.”

“
John took meditation
very seriously,” Cynthia recalled. His approach to it brought with it a remarkable transformation; he seemed happier, certainly healthier, now that drugs and hard liquor were out of the picture. But Cynthia was beginning to suspect the Maharishi’s sweeping power over John: suspicion that there was some sort of mind control involved to wrest her husband away from his career. “He seemed very isolated and would spend days on end with the Maharishi, emerging bleary-eyed and not wanting
to communicate with me or anyone…. He went so deeply within himself through meditation that he separated himself from everything.”

It didn’t occur to Cynthia at the time that John was struggling to separate himself from her. He’d moved into a separate bedroom, hardly exchanging a word with her, even in private moments. Knowing that John despised confrontations with her, Cynthia chose to ignore the bad vibes. “
Something had gone very wrong
between John and me,” Cynthia concluded. “It was as if a brick wall had gone up between us.”

It wasn’t brick, but paper: a flurry of postcards sent by Yoko Ono were arriving in India almost every day. John rose early and stole away to collect them at the postal drop near the dining hall—another glaring sign because, as Cynthia well knew, John hardly ever got up early. But the postcards were like catnip; he couldn’t resist getting the next one to see what kind of cosmic mischief Yoko had cooked up. “
I’m a cloud
,” she scrawled on one, “watch for me in the sky.” Others echoed her loopy instructional poems from
Grapefruit
. “I got so excited about her letters,” John recalled, “… and from India, I’d started thinking of her as a woman, not just an intellectual woman.” Yoko Ono, not the Maharishi, had taken control of John’s mind.

Paul and Jane decamped on March 24, 1968, a month and a half ahead of schedule. John and George, convinced that enlightenment still lay within reach, pressed ahead in the next stages of their spiritual development on the path to perfection. Although deeply impressed with the strength and insight of the Maharishi’s wisdom, John continued to struggle with his own demons. He had certainly tried—tried hard—but the thicket in his skull was too thick to clear. Feeling miserable, John longed for a playmate (George had grown annoyingly introspective), someone to help him blow off a little steam. There are various accounts of the way Magic Alex Mardas appeared in India. Some say
John “missed his company
” and sent for him. Others maintain Alex came on his own “
because he didn’t approve
of the Beatles’ meditating, and he wanted John back.” No matter how he materialized or the real reason that he went, all agree that everything unraveled soon after Alex arrived.

Alex didn’t share his benefactor’s passion for the idyllic ashram. He was “
appalled” by the accommodations
and quickly pegged the Maharishi as a controlling, holy hoax. It didn’t suit Alex’s scheme that someone could
have more influence over John than he did, and from the outset he looked for a way to regain the upper hand. Somehow, during the course of long walks through the woods, John revealed to Alex that the Beatles intended to tithe a huge chunk of their income to the guru’s Swiss bank account. Shortly afterward Alex told the others that the Maharishi was, among other transgressions,
supposedly
having sex with one of his disciples, a young American nurse. The veracity of his claim has never been proved. In her memoir Mia Farrow intimates that the
Maharishi
might have
come on to her
, but then acknowledges she may have been disoriented and misinterpreted the “advance”: it may have been nothing more than the traditional embrace given by a holy man after meditation. The Maharishi, she said, had never shown anything but consideration and respect toward his guests. Paul, upon hearing the charges, also said: “
I think it was completely untrue
.” But George and John were crushed by the accusation. They’d put great faith in the Maharishi, given themselves over completely to his ministry. Faced with these circumstances, they were shaken—and angry. George was indignant. The Maharishi had become his spiritual mentor; thanks in no small part to his holiness, George had managed “
to plug into the divine
energy and raise [his] state of consciousness,” evolving in ways even he’d never imagined were possible. Now this threw everything into a spin. George and John went back and forth all night, arguing heatedly: was it true, or not? Throughout their soul-searching, Alex continued to pour it on, tossing in excoriating details to inflame their doubt. There was really no way the beleaguered guru could defend himself in this situation. The more Alex talked, the more guilty—and despicable—the Maharishi seemed. Eventually George’s faith buckled ever so slightly. “
When George started thinking
it might be true,” John said, “I thought, ‘Well, it must be true, because if George is doubting him, there must be something in it.’ ”

Finally, John and George made the decision to leave the ashram. It had to be immediately, Alex insisted; otherwise, the Maharishi might send down some “black magic” upon them. When they awoke early the next morning, cars were already waiting outside the compound gates. Alex had gone into Dehra Dun at the crack of dawn to hire several drivers to take the Beatles to Delhi. The last thing he wanted was for the Maharishi to have an opportunity to talk John and George into staying.

Jenny Boyd, who reluctantly left with her sister and brother-in-law, remembered seeing the Maharishi standing helplessly, looking small and quite forlorn, at the gates to the ashram, as they all filed past with their luggage.
“Wait,”
she recalled
him pleading.
“Talk to me.”

It seemed pointless for them to hash out the accusations with the Maharishi. He would only deny them. And George was already feeling ashamed about the way they were leaving things. He already suspected they’d been set up by Alexis Mardas. (Though Peter Brown insists that some months later “
John told me he knew
for a fact that Maharishi had fucked that young girl.”)
Why?
the Maharishi repeatedly implored. A wave of belligerence swept over John, who responded: “
If you’re so cosmically conscious
, as you claim, then you should know why we’re leaving.”

With those words, the two remaining Beatles walked out of the ashram at Rishikesh—and out of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi’s life forever.

But John Lennon was not finished with the Maharishi. On the way back to Delhi, in a bruised little car that kept breaking down every few miles, he began work on a vengeful song titled “Maharishi.” He sang it for George after a long stretch of downtime in which the car developed a flat tire and the driver disappeared, ostensibly to seek out a spare. It had a pungent, assertive melody that gave form to inexplicable feelings.
“Maharishi
,
what have you done…”
George understood where it came from but was appalled by the undisguised lyric. “
You can’t say that
, it’s ridiculous,” he warned John. There was no reason why the Beatles should give the Maharishi a public flogging. It would ruin the man, George argued. It was completely inappropriate, nothing he wanted to be associated with. Instead, George proposed that John replace the Maharishi’s name with Sexy Sadie. Disappointed at first, John tried rearranging the names and laughed at the absurdity. Sexy Sadie—it
was
pretty funny, he admitted; it would be their private joke. “
Sexy Sadie, what have you done…
”

Although John clearly intended the song to distract him from the sorry events of the past twenty-four hours, as well as the obvious marriage difficulties, his attention began to drift as they arrived at the Delhi airport. He was already brooding over issues that would have to be addressed once they got home. George had said his good-byes in the car; he and Pattie were headed south, to Madras, for two weeks, where he planned to make
an appearance in a documentary
film about Ravi Shankar. And now, without George’s mediating influence, the tension between John and Cynthia filled the interminable silences.

By the time the plane took off for London, John could endure it no more. He began drinking scotch and Coke—his first hard liquor in several months. And the liquor loosened his tongue in ways not even he had foreseen. Confessions poured forth: John decided to reveal ten years’ worth of
infidelities, every squalid fuck he’d experienced on the road, including but not limited to intimate friends of theirs. Cynthia didn’t want to hear about it; however, John insisted. “
But you’ve got to bloody hear it
, Cyn,” he was reported to have said. Protests were useless. Nothing Cynthia said, no amount of tears, could staunch the flow of indiscretions. Joan Baez, Ida Holly, Maureen Cleave—John ticked off the names as if they were Beatles songs. No opportunity to inflict pain, no matter how insignificant, went unseized. Liverpool, Hamburg, London, America, Australia, Japan, France—he claimed to have screwed his way around the globe. Hundreds,
thousands,
of girls; he’d lost count a long time ago. It was a cruel, horrible way to put his wife on notice, but John, in his rage, saw no other way of doing it. Later Cynthia wrote: “
I never dreamed
that he had been unfaithful to me during our married life,” but that denial is so much blather. Whatever the case, she undoubtedly understood the indiscreet confession: her marriage, as everyone else knew, was teetering on the edge of collapse. Still, she swallowed her outrage and continued to play the dutiful wife. As if to underscore his disaffection, two weeks after they returned home, John sent Cynthia on a fateful vacation to Greece.