When first invited by George to go and hear the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi speak, one of John’s first thoughts was to make a joke along the lines of, ‘Why would I want to go and listen to some little fakir from India?’ But George, who had been following his own spiritual road for two years, was seriously interested and hoping to be given a mantra by the holy man. And, joking aside, John was curious about the yogi. The result was that three fashionably kaftan-clad Beatles turned up at the Hilton Hotel on London’s Park Lane on the afternoon of 24 August 1967, along with Pattie and a various assemblage of counterculture trendies. Ringo was with Maureen awaiting the birth of their second baby.
That the Maharishi, a diminutive middle-aged man in a white gown with flowing hair and beard and a squeaky little giggle in his voice, had chosen this precise moment to bring his ‘Spiritual Regeneration Movement’ (of which Pattie was already a member) to London, and to the very fashionable and expensive Hilton Hotel, was more than fortuitous. It spoke of shrewd marketing.
The Beatles were impressed, however – with John being fascinated by what sounded like a lecture in ‘meditation lite’, that is, a way of rising above the pressures of the world to attain pure awareness without much effort. You didn’t necessarily have to believe in God, which was handy because John didn’t. Meditating alone would calm the mind. And, best of all, there was no bed of nails involved, or need to chant for hours, like the monks John had imagined in ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’. Do it the Maharishi way, and meditation would only take half an hour a day; at an annual tithe of only a week’s income, it sounded like a bargain.
After having a private audience with the Maharishi, all three Beatles agreed to join the guru and his travelling band of disciples the following day and travel to Bangor on the North Wales coast to spend the August Bank Holiday weekend at a transcendental seminar. For John, it had been an instant conversion.
Like a group of rich hippies, young, carefree partygoers off on a weekend jaunt, the Beatles met the next afternoon at Euston Station to take the train to Bangor. Among them was Mick Jagger, having now been released from jail after just one night in a cell and pending an appeal, and Marianne Faithfull. As it happened, for once Brian had been invited too, but had declined. He had another more temporal kind of weekend in mind.
Naturally the press, presumably alerted by the Maharishi’s publicist, were there in force to see the new converts off. Quickly, however, the departure turned into a scrum with the result that Cynthia was left behind with the luggage. She hurried along the platform but could only watch as, with John at a carriage window shouting to her, the train pulled away. Once again she had been left behind, this time in front of a mob of photographers, whose cameras snapped away as she burst into tears. It wasn’t just dismay that she’d missed the train that upset her. That moment was symbolic in the rapidly unravelling state of her marriage.
Neil Aspinall, of course, was there to drive her up to Bangor, which she reached not long after the main party had arrived, but John was irritated with her rather than comforting. ‘Why are you always last, Cyn?’ he chided.
As usual, she swallowed her feelings. She’d been left out of so much of the Beatles’ careers for so long, she hadn’t known how to fight for her place.
In Bangor it was a bizarre weekend for everyone, finding on arrival that their accommodation was in a hostel at the University College of Wales – which meant two single beds in the rooms. But it was a funny, student-like adventure, too. They enjoyed it.
In fact, so exhilarated were they by the whole transcendental experience that the next day the Beatles put out a public statement renouncing the use of drugs . . . which amused Neil and Mal no end. Not only did it seem unlikely in the extreme that any of them would be able to forsake drugs for very long, it was less than a month since they’d all signed a full-page advertisement in The Times calling for the legalisation of marijuana. And which, incidentally, Brian, anxious to be seen to be supporting his boys after Paul’s LSD admission, had paid for.
The Maharishi, absolutely thrilled by the massive publicity he was getting, did his stuff by giving everyone a secret individual mantra as a going-home present.
Then on the Sunday lunchtime, the fun came to an end when the pay phone in the college refectory rang. Jane Asher answered it. It was Peter Brown asking if he could speak to Paul. The phone was passed to the Beatle. ‘I’ve got bad news,’ Peter said. ‘Brian is dead.’
The television news film of John’s expression that was broadcast that night showed a washed-out, almost vacant face as a TV reporter tried to get some response from him. ‘Where would you be today if it wasn’t for Mr Epstein?’ the reporter asked.
‘I don’t know,’ John said. What else could he say?
All afternoon details of Brian’s death had been reaching him and the others. Brian’s alternative plan for the weekend had involved a party at his new country house in Sussex. But when some boys intended as the weekend’s entertainment hadn’t arrived, he’d become depressed and had driven back to London alone. With his Bentley still parked outside his home in Chapel Street, Belgravia on the Sunday morning, and finding his bedroom door locked, his Spanish butler, Antonio, had telephoned his secretary, Joanne Newfield. Together with Alistair Taylor, who had been on Brian’s staff since they’d worked together selling records in Liverpool, the door had been forced. Brian’s body was curled up in his bed.
‘I understand that the Maharishi comforted you all?’ pursued the television reporter. ‘Can I ask what advice he offered?’
‘He just told us not to be overwhelmed with grief,’ John replied, ‘and, whatever thoughts we have of Brian to keep them happy, because whatever thoughts we have of him will travel with him, wherever he is.’ And, with that, he got into a car to be driven back to London. The unexpected death of those he loved was not a new experience for him.
Pictures of Brian travelled with him in his mind’s eye that night on the two-hundred-mile drive home. The Maharishi had called for only positive thoughts, but in these situations conscience plays a disobedient part. Had the Beatles been neglecting Brian since they’d given up touring? Certainly, John had seen little of him during the past year. When the Beatles weren’t touring there was no reason why they should meet their manager very often. And he knew, too, from gossip among his staff, that Brian was often unhappy, had terrible problems sleeping, and would disappear for days on druggy benders. But did he also know that Brian’s every day was fired by amphetamines, and that he was hooked on a regimen of uppers and downers?
‘I didn’t watch his deterioration,’ John would say later, but he must have known of at least some of it. ‘Whenever someone dies, you think, “If only I’d spoken to him he might have been a bit happier,”’ he added. But he’d known that Brian had been still in love with him. A few weeks earlier, when Brian had taken an overdose and been confined to the Priory private hospital, he’d sent him some flowers with the message, ‘You know I love you . . . I really do. John’. But both of them had also known that John could never love Brian in the way Brian wanted him to.
‘I felt guilty because I was close to him earlier,’ John said years later. ‘But then I was having my own problems, and didn’t see him much and had no idea what kind of life he was living.’ But another thought was lurking there, too. ‘I introduced Brian to pills – which gives me a guilt association with his death.’
Inevitably, though, as the car carrying John and a tearful Cynthia drove through the night, the wound of life without Brian opened deeper as new realities surfaced. What would the band do now? Brian had been the channel through which everything Beatles had gone. Because of him, neither John nor any of the Beatles had ever had to think about anything to do with the business. Perhaps they should have done, because Brian hadn’t always given either good advice or done the wisest things for them.
‘I knew we were in trouble then,’ John would often reflect. ‘I didn’t really have any misconceptions about our ability to do anything other than play music, and I was scared. I thought: “We’re fucked”.’
Brian was thirty-two when he died. As their presence would only have summoned a huge mob of fans, none of the Beatles attended his funeral. It was held two days later at Long Lane Jewish Cemetery in Liverpool. Addressing the mourners, Rabbi Samuel Wolfson said: ‘Brian Epstein was a symbol of the malaise of our generation . . .’
From the moment his body had been found, broad hints from the tabloid press had suggested that he had committed suicide. So, it was some relief for his family and those who loved him to learn from the inquest that, in the opinion of the coroner, death had been the result of an accidental overdose of a sleeping pill Brian had been taking in excess over many weeks.
Not that suicide hadn’t been on his mind a few months earlier. In despair then over yet another blackmail attempt by a boy lover as he had struggled to cope with the financial complexities of his many businesses, while terrified that the Beatles would leave him when they discovered how incompetent he had sometimes been, he had deliberately taken an overdose. There had been a difference on that occasion. In his punctilious way, he had carefully written a suicide note and then left his will alongside it – to be later discovered by his assistant Peter Brown while Brian was recovering in hospital.
But, over that August weekend when he had driven home from Sussex disappointed and alone, wondering perhaps if he should have gone up to Bangor with the Beatles, and then probably dismissing the thought because he knew he wouldn’t have fitted in, as he had never fitted in anywhere, no note was written. Nothing had been planned. Desperate for sleep to escape from what he saw as the empty, threatening, disintegrating, abandoned world of his waking life, his death had almost certainly been an accident.