There had never been a welcome like it at Heathrow airport when, just under two weeks later, the Beatles came home from America to find thousands of fans waiting for them. Everything they’d done while they’d been away had been reported – the concerts at Carnegie Hall, the holiday in Florida where, accompanied by photographers, of course, they’d visited Muhammad Ali in his training camp . . . But now it was immediately back to work.
Before Christmas, Brian had agreed with Walter Shenson, an American movie producer who lived in Britain, that the Beatles would star in a quickie exploitation film packed with their own songs. The financial deal that Brian agreed was dreadful, in that the Beatles didn’t even get a royalty on a movie that is still earning over half a century later. Big mistake.
Brian, however, had other qualities, one of which was style. This wouldn’t be just another terrible pop film with a clichéd script, and, to make sure, an award-winning Liverpool-born playwright, Alun Owen, was asked to write a semi-documentary screenplay about the Beatles themselves. Furthermore, it would be directed by a quirky American who had made his home in England, Dick Lester. From the start, Lester got bonus points when John realised that he had directed a Goon film.
The Beatles’ task now was to record six new songs in time to start shooting at the beginning of March. And three days after getting off the plane they were back at Abbey Road. ‘We’d managed to get a couple written while we were in Paris, and three more completed in Miami while we were soaking up the sun in Miami Beach,’ John explained. The speed with which Lennon and McCartney could produce good new songs never ceased to astonish.
The first song they recorded wasn’t even for the film, as George Martin was also demanding material for their next single. It was ‘You Can’t Do That’, and would be seen later as one of John’s first confessional songs, in that it dealt with his fits of jealousy.
‘I can’t help my feelings I go out of my mind,’ he anguished as he sang, which was something Cynthia would have recognised from their days at art college. He was very proud of it and put it straight into the stage act as soon as the Beatles were on tour again. ‘It was my first attempt at being Wilson Pickett,’ he told me, ‘but it was a flip side because “Can’t Buy Me Love” was so fucking good.’ That had been Paul’s song.
Within five days the Beatles had recorded eight new tracks, including some classics, including Paul’s ‘And I Love Her’, John’s ‘If I Fell’ and ‘I Call Your Name’ (another of his favourites), and then, towards the end of filming, the movie’s title song. And this would be when the rivalry between John and Paul really showed.
Ringo was noted for muddling up phrases in malapropisms, and the way he would often say ‘it’s been a hard day’s night’ at the end of a day’s work always amused everyone. Then one evening after filming, director Dick Lester wondered to John whether they should call the still-untitled film A Hard Day’s Night.
John needed no further encouragement, but he knew he had to act before Paul did. Going straight home, he set to work on the title song and presented it to the others the following morning. It was almost perfect for playing over the movie’s opening titles, and it became absolutely perfect when in the studio George Harrison played the extended opening chord that would soon echo around the world. ‘Basically, it’s what musicians would call an F with a G on top,’ Paul later told me. ‘After you hear that, everyone knows what’s coming.’
In comparison with the race to have the songs ready on time, the filming of A Hard Day’s Night was almost a holiday. Naturally all the Beatles were nervous – ‘the director knew we couldn’t act and we knew it, too,’ said John – but, shot in black and white (the way most people saw television news then, at least in the UK), and with its running, hiding and chasing, it captured the zany innocence and high-energy intensity of the time.
‘It was a comic strip version of what was actually going on,’ was John’s verdict; ‘. . . a good projection of one facade of us on tour . . . But the pressure was far heavier than that . . .’
Nor was that pressure eased when, during shooting, Billboard announced that all top five positions on their US charts were held by the Beatles, with seven other Beatles records further down the Hot 100. No other artist or band had ever achieved anything approaching this level of instant cultural domination. And, as far as America was concerned, the Beatles had only just begun.
It was a frenetic time, but for John, life was about to get even more complicated. Shown a copy of the Daily Express one day, he found a photograph of his long-absent father staring out at him. It wasn’t a complete surprise. He’d always suspected that Freddie would turn up again one day. All the Beatles’ backgrounds were being picked over by the tabloid newspapers, and John’s runaway dad was a good story.
But it wasn’t good for John. All he felt was bitterness that only now that he was famous had his father wanted to see him again. Little by little, over the next few weeks, details reached him from Mimi and his Uncle Charlie, Freddie’s younger brother, of his father’s vagabond life.
Freddie had never got to New Zealand as he had planned. Instead, John learned, he’d spent the years since saying goodbye to his son roaming the country, sometimes as little more than a tramp, in better times as an itinerant worker, a kitchen porter in a pub here, a dishwasher in a hotel there. Freddie’s career had been the kind of life that Mimi had dreaded John might follow without her stabilising hand, and her sharp tongue hadn’t been idle when it came to criticising her miscreant brother-in-law.
At first, John resisted Freddie’s efforts at a reunion. Not only had he absolutely no desire to see his father again, he knew it would upset Mimi if he did, and it really wouldn’t be worth the aggravation it would cause. Nevertheless, neither Freddie nor Fleet Street gave up, and a meeting was eventually negotiated, during a break in filming at London’s Scala Theatre, by Daily Mirror reporter Don Short, whom John happened to like.
‘It wasn’t what you would call a happy reunion,’ Short remembers. ‘John didn’t exactly throw his arms around his dad’s neck. It was very tense.’
‘What do you want then?’ John snapped, first off the mark as his father entered the room.
For ten minutes, Freddie then sought to reassure John that he wasn’t after any money, and that he only wanted to explain to his son how circumstances had come between them. Then, after sharing a few mutual vague memories of their stay in Blackpool, John, assuming he would now hear no more from his father, went back to filming; while Freddie left with the reporter to pick up the large cheque he’d been promised for his part in the story.
The reunion had been a classic tabloid stunt, but John would later tell his friend Pete Shotton that he’d found it impossible to dislike his father. That wasn’t perhaps surprising. Freddie might have been a hopeless father, but he wasn’t a bad man, nor, despite the havoc of his life, was he devoid of charm.
Before John had wanted to become a rock star, his ambition had been to be a writer, and just a few days after the end of filming that dream was realised, too, with the publication of his first book, In His Own Write.
Pop stars were not then known for having hidden literary ability. It’s impossible to think of any others. But Michael Braun, the journalist who was following the Beatles for his own book, had become intrigued when he’d seen some of the little poems and stories that John would be continually tapping away at on his portable typewriter, and the cartoon characters he was drawing while on tour. Braun had, therefore, mentioned the jottings to a London publisher friend, who had rushed to claim his company’s share of Beatlemania.
John had no illusions. He knew very well that it was only his sudden fame that had propelled him to become a published author. ‘There was never any real thought of writing a book,’ he admitted at the time. ‘If I hadn’t been a Beatle I wouldn’t have thought of having the stuff published,’ he told Cliff Michelmore on the BBC-TV programme Tonight. He would, he added, have just been ‘writing it and throwing it away . . . crawling around, broke. I might have been a “beat” poet . . .’ That was a joke, because he was almost embarrassed to think of himself as an author.
But, beyond the jokes, he was thrilled just the same. In His Own Write, the cover of which was designed by his friend and neighbour Robert Freeman, validated him, he believed, as a creative force beyond popular music, and, spurred by its critical success, he would continue to write for his own amusement for the rest of his life. Supplying a short author’s biographical note for the cover of the book, he wrote: ‘I was bored on the 9th of October, 1940, when, I believe, the Nasties were still booming us led by Madalf Heatlump (who only had one). Anyway, they didn’t get me.’
The book was a collection of his sometimes grotesque cartoons, nonsense stories and poems in which he deliberately mixed the wrong words with archaic phrases of English, modern-day references and occasional mangled Biblical quotes to puzzle and amuse.
Liverpool readers who had read his pieces in Mersey Beat – where several of the stories had previously been published – were familiar with his style, but the black comedy came as a surprise to most.
The story of ‘No Flies On Frank’, for instance, is that of an ordinary man who, when waking up to discover that he has grown ‘twelve inches more tall heavy’ overnight, clubs his wife to death. ‘She shouldn’t see me like this . . . not all fat and on her thirtysecond birthday’, Frank thinks, then takes her body, ‘covered in flies’, to her mother’s house, where he is disappointed when he isn’t offered a cup of tea.
The world’s teenyboppers who had bought ‘She Loves You’ must have been confused by In His Own Write, but, on its rushed publication, fans and students everywhere immediately drove it to the top of the bestseller lists. ‘There’s a wonderful feeling about doing something successfully other than singing,’ said the author, drawing a deliberate line between himself and the other Beatles. ‘Up to now we’ve done everything together, and this is all my own work.’
The sales were unsurprisingly massive, but it was the literary reviews that surprised him, as the word ‘genius’ was banded around, and perhaps over-generous comparisons were made with the work of his childhood literary hero, Lewis Carroll. Perhaps more important to him was that Mimi told him she liked it, that it had made her laugh.
When asked to explain what the stories were about, though, he just smiled disarmingly. ‘It’s about nothing. If you like it, you like it. If you don’t, you don’t. That’s all there is to it. There’s nothing deep in it, it’s just meant to be funny. I put things down on sheets of paper and stuff them in my pocket. When I have enough, I have a book.’
But, when invited to be a special guest of honour at a Foyles literary lunch, packed with critics and writers, probably for the first time in his life, nerves got the better of him.
He had assumed that he would just have to say a few words and make the odd joke, and hadn’t therefore planned anything. Realising too late that he was expected to make a proper speech, and with television cameras bearing down on him, his mind went blank. Standing up, he just said: ‘Thank you all very much. It’s been a pleasure.’ And then sat down again.
Clear disappointment, and even a murmur of boos, could be heard from the six hundred other diners who had paid to be present at the expensive event. For someone who could, and usually did, talk about anything and everything, it was an uncharacteristic mistake. The sophistication of literary London had unnerved him.
Even Beatles need a holiday sometimes, and after a pulverising eighteen months, John and Cynthia flew off to Tahiti, leaving baby Julian in the care of Cynthia’s mother. It was the first proper holiday they’d ever had together, the first opportunity they’d had to spend much more than a couple of days alone in their married life. But they didn’t go alone. Accompanying them were George and his new girlfriend Pattie Boyd, a model the guitarist had met when she’d been cast as one of the schoolgirls in A Hard Day’s Night.
A few months earlier they could have gone just about anywhere in the world without being much noticed. But, now, only on a boat in the South Pacific could they be sure not to be followed, or even mobbed. John enjoyed the sailing and the feeling that they could go in any direction. But there was a crew on board to take care of all that. So, he read everything on board that he could find that was in English, and after finishing a collection of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, he began writing a pastiche of one. He called it ‘The Singularge Experience of Miss Anne Duffield’, with a character called Shamrock Womlbs doing the investigating.
Cynthia would remember ‘a lovely, fun-filled holiday’, but, although John didn’t disagree, he seems to have missed the whole point of the break. ‘I don’t give a damn about the sun. You go out to these places and you waste your time lying on the beach,’ he grumbled, slightly tongue-in-cheek, when he got back. ‘We were as brown as berries and it had all gone the next day, so what’s the point. I didn’t feel any healthier . . . I was dead beat.’
While the Beatles’ lives were now changing beyond recognition, so was that of Brian Epstein. Still only thirty, he was becoming an international celebrity. With a home in London’s Mayfair, in addition to managing the Beatles he was now also running a management company that looked after a host of other chart-making artistes – most of whom were benefiting from a seemingly inexhaustible supply of cast-off songs from Lennon and McCartney. The kind and sensitive young man who had struggled at RADA and in the British Army, and who had become bored managing a record shop, was now the show businessman of the moment. So when he, too, was asked to write a book, he was immensely flattered, only to have that joy quickly punctured when he unwisely asked the Beatle he was closest to for suggestions for the book’s title.
‘Queer Jew,’ came back John without hesitation.
Once again John had twisted the knife. He must have known how hurtful that would be to Brian, of whom he was very fond. But that didn’t stop him. The casual cruelty of his tongue was always there.
As for Brian, fame and success weren’t the panacea for his insecurities. To John and the other Beatles, he was a supremely confident businessman. Only he knew about the mistakes he was regularly making on their behalf, and his sense of loneliness when he was excluded from their lives. And only he knew about the pills he was starting to regularly take to hide his insecurities.