Pete Shotton found himself in overall charge of the Apple Boutique, which was to be stocked with psychedelic clothes, Oriental bric-à-brac, hand-painted furniture and inflatable chairs. The three young Dutch designers collectively known as The Fool were hired to design the shopfront and provide the stock, having already applied their swirly, curly, lava-lampy decorations to George’s bungalow, John’s grand piano and the set for ‘All You Need is Love’. Like many of those who fluttered around the Beatles, they dressed in gypsy head-dresses, great bundles of necklaces, bell-sleeved shirts splashed with stars and moons, Elizabethan jerkins and low-slung satin belts snaking around velvet ‘loons’. Their dreamy personas nevertheless concealed a shrewd instinct for money – or bread, as they preferred to call it – and how best to extract it from their utopian employers. On top of their regular wages, they gently asked for a bonus on signature of contract of £40,000, or £675,000 in today’s money. The Beatles’ startled accountant advised the group strongly against handing it over, but they ignored him. Once this deal was done and dusted, The Fool embarked on a ten-day ‘research’ trip to Morocco, with all expenses paid.
The clothes they designed, all rainbows and flowers and dreamy landscapes, were poorly executed, their shapes ungainly, their seams frail, their sleeves lopsided. ‘We had to find people to make these clothes,’ sighed Pete Shotton. ‘And when we finally did, the clothes were shit.’
Over a weekend – the same weekend the Beatles were recording their starry-eyed video for ‘Hello, Goodbye’ – The Fool gathered art students to paint the exterior of the Apple townhouse in Savile Row. The mural featured moons and shooting stars and an androgynous wide-eyed hippy figure, stretching across four storeys. The launch party – ‘Come at 7.46. Fashion Show at 8.16’ – attracted a mixed bag of celebrities, including John and George, Cilla Black, Eric Clapton, Victor Spinetti, Twiggy, Keith Moon and Richard Lester. A circus clown handed out apples, while a conga line of hippies played finger-cymbals and tambourines. Towards the end of the evening, rather too many people tried to squeeze into rather too small a space; as partygoers clambered outside for air, trampling half the stock underfoot, a man from the BBC fainted from lack of oxygen.
Within days the Westminster planning department were insisting on the removal of the mural, for which they had never granted permission. Further Apple money was spent on contesting the decision, but to no avail: down it went.
Pete Shotton never felt at ease in the boutique he had been hired to manage: ‘Every time I caught one of the blow-up chairs with my cigarette, I would collapse in a heap on the floor.’
In the spirit of the age, clothes flew off the rails and out of the door, with no intervening trip to the counter. The staff, being cool, didn’t like to insist on payment, though they themselves were happy to exit each evening carrying armfuls of bell-bottoms and Nehru jackets, with little attempt at concealment. Within seven months the Apple Boutique had lost £20,000, or £340,000 in today’s money.
At the end of July 1968 the Beatles decided to close it down. The night before it shut for the last time, the four of them arrived with friends and took what they fancied. John raced around, gleefully grabbing whatever he could, apparently unaware that he was purloining from himself. The next day, shoppers piled in, attracted by the idea that there was now no need to shoplift. In under twenty-four hours Apple offloaded £10,000 worth of clothes. But this left a fresh debt with which to deal: in their haste, the management forgot that all the stock was subject to purchase tax at 12½ per cent, even if it had been given away for nothing.
Having closed the boutique, the Beatles moved Apple’s headquarters to 3 Savile Row, losing their tax records along the way. Their new headquarters was turned into a free-for-all, with guests and employees alike vying to see who could charge most to Apple. Whenever John and Yoko dropped by, Yoko would order a pot of caviar costing £60; Barry Miles calculated that this was ‘about five weeks’ wages for one of the cooks who served it’.
The Apple phone bill came to roughly £4,000 a quarter. ‘Every time you turn around there are at least half a dozen people on the phone who don’t even work in the building,’ noted Richard DiLello, who perused the bills with astonishment. ‘Since when is there an Apple office in Katmandu? Or in Sausalito? Or Acapulco?’
Visitors and employees alike walked off with all sorts of stuff: televisions, electric typewriters, speakers, cases of wine, fan heaters. One employee removed the lead from the roof on a daily basis, soon creating leaks that caused thousands of pounds’ worth of damage. Musicians and artists and film-makers sponsored by Apple refused to acknowledge any distinction between loans and gifts. ‘We were giving out all that money and the cameras and equipment and half of the people we never saw again – they just went off with it,’ observed Ringo.
Once in a while, management made a half-hearted attempted to rein everyone in. On 2 June 1968, Neil Aspinall sent a memo to department heads:
Please ensure that your staff are prompt each morning. Recently, a number of people have been getting very tardy. There’s no excuse. Ten o’clock should be within everybody’s reach. Also, please don’t put joss sticks in the typewriter carriages, please keep drunken Irishmen out of our board meetings, please tell the girl hiding in the lavatory that Paul never uses that one [and] please don’t try to play jam butties on the hi-fi equipment.
Apple was a runaway horse. For a year the company employed a full-time mystic called Caleb, whose role was to steer the business with regular readings of tarot cards and the I Ching. ‘The weirdness was not controlled at the start,’ noted Derek Taylor. ‘You can’t control weirdness, anyway; weirdness is weirdness.’ He was one to talk: in the space of a fortnight, his own press office clocked up a bill for six hundred Benson & Hedges cigarettes, eight dozen Cokes, eight bottles of J&B whisky, four bottles of Courvoisier brandy, three bottles of vodka, two dozen ginger ales, one dozen tonic waters, two dozen bitter lemons, one dozen tomato juices, three bottles of lime and four dozen lagers. Having studied the invoice, another Apple employee commented, ‘Oh, they’ve cut back a bit then.’ In an editorial in the Apple house magazine Derek Taylor said, ‘We’ve had many guests at Apple, friends. Can’t remember any of them. Very stoned, you see. Affects the memory.’
George, once so beady about money and so wary of the taxman, succumbed to the anti-materialism in the air. Only when the clouds had lifted could he see the Beatles’ big mistake. ‘We’ve been giving away too much to the wrong people,’ he told Pattie. ‘This place has become a haven for dropouts. The trouble is, some of our best friends are dropouts.’
In this barmy army, it didn’t help that the top brass were, more often than not, out of their heads. When the Beatles finally heard the sirens wail, they had no idea which way to run. ‘It’s really like Vietnam,’ said George, with a touch of hyperbole. ‘It’s escalated. It’s got so big, but we can’t really see the way out.’
Having woken up to what was happening, John went from stupor to panic, with nothing in between, pointing an accusing finger at everyone but himself: ‘People were robbing us and living on us … Eighteen or twenty thousand pounds a week was rolling out of Apple and nobody was doing anything about it. All our buddies that had worked for us for fifty years were all just living and drinking and eating like fuckin’ Rome! And I suddenly realised it. We were losing money at such a rate that we would have been broke, really broke. We didn’t have anything in the bank really, none of us did. Paul and I could probably have floated, but we were sinking fast. It was just hell, and it had to stop.’
Dismayed at all the money pouring out of their money-saving scheme, John met Derek Taylor and Neil Aspinall to work out a plan of action. The three men kicked off their business meeting by taking LSD, before deciding – quite reasonably, given the circumstances – that all Apple’s problems could be solved by walking down Weybridge High Street and knocking on the doors of the local bank manager and the local solicitor. ‘Listen,’ they planned to say, ‘Apple is in a mess, but we need a simple solution: a simple bank manager who is reliable and a simple solicitor who can see his way through all this mess.’
John, according to Paul – or Paul, according to John – then called in the very same big businessmen that Apple had been founded to oppose. Sir Joseph Lockwood of EMI suggested they hire the former Conservative Party chairman Lord Poole, who in turn suggested Lord Beeching, whose 1963 report into the future of the British rail network had resulted in the axing of a third of all railway stations. Beeching examined Apple’s financial records, before advising the Beatles to stick to music.
On 21 March 1969, John, George and Ringo asked the New Jersey bruiser Allen Klein, a man characterised by Alistair Taylor as having ‘the charm of a broken lavatory seat’, to be their business manager. In a series of deft manoeuvres, Klein had managed to persuade John that he was just the man to take charge of their affairs. He won Yoko over by promising to arrange a major show of her work in the US.1 Ringo had been even more easily wooed: ‘All I wanted was to be looked after. I would get off the plane or the QE2 in New York and there’d be a guy there: a pretty stocky guy who would get me through, get me in a limo, give me a pack of money, get me a suite in a hotel – and that was it. That was cool for me. I was easily pleased. Just get me to the place on time!’
A bull in this most higgledy-piggledy of china shops, Klein charged about upsetting almost everyone at Apple, including the diligent Geoff Emerick, who was perturbed by his habit of saying ‘Ker-ching!’ whenever a Beatles song came on the radio. Derek Taylor compared this period to ‘the last days of Pompeii, when the boiling shit hit the fan and sprayed over leaders and followers alike, leaving us all feeling grubby and ugly and useless’. Within days, Klein had fired most of the Apple staff, including the general manager, Alistair Taylor, who had worked for the Beatles since the day they were first signed by Brian Epstein. Taylor rang each of the four Beatles in turn to tell them what had happened, but none of them was able to come to the phone.
Many unrealised ideas, at various stages of development or undevelopment, died with Apple. John had championed Apple Limousines, a fleet of psychedelic Rolls-Royces. Paul planned to open a store selling only white products: ‘You can never get anything white, like cups and all that. I’ve been looking for a decent set of white cups for five years.’ All four Beatles envisaged opening an Apple School, offering carefree education to the children of the Beatles and their staff. Other unrealised projects included an Apple Entertainment and Shopping Centre on Regent Street, with a cinema, sauna and restaurant; Apple Cosmetics, offering a range of perfumes, lipsticks and lotions in apple-shaped containers; and an international franchise of Sgt. Pepper discothèques.
In a sense, the spirit of Apple lived on in John and Yoko. Throughout the rest of 1969 they initiated a variety of schemes more impractical and improbable than any they had just abandoned. Most came to nothing. In the autumn they wrote a long letter to Eric Clapton suggesting what they called ‘a kind of “Easy Rider” at sea’: a ship for thirty people, including musicians and crew, plus ‘doctors, etc, in case of any kind of bother’, cruising from Los Angeles to Tahiti, all being filmed and financed by EMI or a film company. ‘The whole trip would take 3–4–5–6 months, depending how we all felt – all families, children whatever are welcome etc.’
Generally, John’s ideas would come and go. Paul developed a technique for letting them float away on air, like bubbles. One day John suggested the two of them undergo joint trepanning: ‘It’s an ancient Roman thing – you have a hole drilled in your skull.’ Paul ummed and erred before saying, ‘You have it done, and if it’s fine we’ll all have it done as well.’ These vaguely encouraging noises were, he had worked out, the best way to ensure that nothing happened. ‘Otherwise he would have had us all with holes in our heads the next morning.’
1 This finally took place on 9 October 1971. As Yoko had not completed enough work to fill the available space, a team of workers was hired to construct further installations. Cost overruns meant that all four Beatles were left with a bill for $80,000.