Across the universe, p.11
Across the Universe, page 11
They were first taken18 to the Philippine Navy headquarters where they held a perfunctory press conference, and then to a luxury yacht anchored out in the Manila harbour. The yacht was owned by a local industrialist, Don Manolo Elizalde, who had invited19 his close friends to party with the Beatles out in the harbour.
‘It was really humid, it was Mosquito City, and we were all sweating and frightened. For the first time ever in our Beatle existence, we were cut off from Neil, Mal and Brian Epstein. There was not one of them around, and not only that, we had a whole row of cops with guns lining the deck around this cabin that we were in on the boat. We were really gloomy, very brought down by the whole thing. We wished we hadn’t come here. We should have missed it out,’ rued George, looking back at their worst ever tour.20
As they waited, fretting in their cabin on the yacht, the Beatles tried to calm themselves listening to Indian classical music from a tape George had carried.
By the time their managers rescued them from the yacht, the boys were mentally traumatized and physically exhausted but perked up after hearing that their suitcases had been returned untouched by the authorities and their supply of pot was secure. They were grateful to be on land again and crashed in their Manila Hotel suites, not waking up before lunchtime. But unknown to the Beatles, an even worse ordeal than what they had experienced so far was brewing as they slept peacefully. The full horror of the Manila trip was about to unfold.
It started with a huge misunderstanding21 between the band and Imelda Marcos, the First Lady of the Philippines, who was married to Ferdinand Marcos, recently elected as the country’s President. The First Lady had extended an invitation to the band to attend a reception followed by lunch at the presidential Malacañang Palace the day after they landed, before they went for the scheduled public concerts in the late afternoon. Unfortunately, the invitation was sent to the Beatles when they were already in Japan and, in the confusion and panic over the threat from right-wing extremists, neither the Beatles nor Epstein had been informed.22
The ruling Marcos couple, who had just come to power in a country where an oligarchy of powerful industrialists and army generals formed an influential coterie, would earn worldwide notoriety for their dictatorial rule over the next few decades. But they were even then openly authoritarian in a way unimaginable in the Western democracies that the Beatles were used to so far. The First Lady Imelda who later became famous for her lavish spending and the thousand pairs of shoes she reportedly possessed23 was reputed to be particularly imperious. A beauty queen in her youth, Mrs Marcos was attracted to the world of celebrities and entertained her rich, powerful friends frequently, and visiting artistes from abroad were expected to attend without exception. On the other hand, the Beatles and Epstein had a policy of not attending any formal reception hosted by governments or diplomats while the band was touring abroad. They had adopted this strict stay off official functions stance ever since their otherwise successful first tour of the United States had been marred by ugly scenes at a British embassy welcome party24 in Washington. They had a miserable time physically fending off frenzied guests who tried to maul them. One of them even produced a pair of scissors and cut off a lock of Ringo’s hair.25 In any case, following the ordeal of their arrival, and with two concerts scheduled one after the other in the afternoon and evening, there was no question of the Beatles agreeing to attend a public reception no matter who the host was.
But it would not be that easy turning down an invitation from the presidential palace, particularly since the First Lady had assumed that the Beatles were coming, and many Manila newspapers had already announced the event. Of course nobody in the Beatles team had bothered to read the local papers.26
The four were fast asleep in the morning when two senior government officials arrived at their hotel to take them to the palace. Tony Barrow, one of the band’s team managers, provided a graphic account: ‘The officers spoke coldly: “This is not a request. We have our orders. The children who wish to meet The Beatles will assemble at eleven.”’ Barrow and his colleague Vic Lewis went to see Epstein, who was having a late breakfast. Lewis warned Barrow and Epstein that ‘these people are hot-blooded’ and a snub would be unwise. But Epstein refused to compromise and flatly refused to ask the Beatles to oblige.
Barrow said that if everyone had acted quickly and positively even at this point, the boys could have made it to the palace and avoided a disaster. Instead, Epstein left his breakfast to inform the general personally and very pompously that he knew of no formal invitation and he would not wake up the boys until it was time to prepare for their afternoon concert. The officers left without another word but, within minutes, Epstein received a phone call from the British ambassador’s office advising him that they would be playing a highly dangerous game if the Beatles failed to comply with the wishes of the First Lady, and reminding him that the ‘help and protection’ that the Beatles were receiving in Manila was courtesy of the President. But according to Barrow, Epstein remained stubbornly adamant and washed his hands of the matter.27
Meanwhile, First Lady Imelda and her three children, Imee, Bong Bong and Irene, along with a large contingent of children and their parents, all good friends of the First Family belonging to the high and mighty of Manila, waited impatiently28 inside the presidential palace for the Beatles to arrive. After a few hours, when the band failed to turn up, Mrs Marcos walked out in a huff, livid with rage according to eyewitnesses. Some of the children started crying.29 The mounting chorus of anger against the Fab Four was led by the furious Marcos children who saw all this as a personal snub. ‘I’d like to pounce on the Beatles and cut off their hair! Don’t anybody dare me to do anything, because I’ll do it, just to see how game The Beatles are,’ eight-year-old Bong Bong was quoted as shrieking.30 Five-year-old Irene sounded even more menacing as she declared, ‘There is only one song I like of the Beatles, “Run for Your Life”.’31 It was an uncanny prediction of what was to come.
By now the Beatles had woken up and were slowly becoming aware that things had gone awfully wrong with their Manila sojourn.
‘The next morning we were woken up by bangs on the door of the hotel, and there was a lot of panic going on outside. Somebody came into the room and said, “Come on! You’re supposed to be at the palace.” We said, “What are you talking about? We’re not going to any palace.” “You’re supposed to be at the palace! Turn on the television.”
‘We did, and there it was, live from the palace. There was a huge line of people either side of the long marble corridor, with kids in their best clothing, and the TV commentator saying, “And they’re still not here yet. The Beatles are supposed to be here.”
‘We sat there in amazement. We couldn’t believe it, and we just had to watch ourselves not arriving at the presidential palace,’ remembered George.32
With the television station in Manila now openly berating the Beatles for humiliating the First Lady, Epstein sensed that things had really got out of hand. He rushed to deliver a personal apology on television. But as he started his eloquent apology in front of television cameras in a live broadcast supposed to go out all over the Philippines, he was cut off, apparently on orders from the palace.33 The First Lady had declared open war.
None of the team managers dared to tell the Beatles of the gravity of the situation and they went ahead with their concerts of the day. The first one in the afternoon passed without incident but by the end of the second concert in the evening, there were ominous signs of rough weather ahead.
Barrow recalled:
At the end of the second concert, our police escort back to the hotel was withdrawn and gates were locked against our convoy. This left our stationary limousines at the mercy of organised troublemakers, scores I would say, rather than dozens, pressing menacingly against our windows, rocking the vehicles to and fro and yelling insults at The Beatles which none of us could understand. Eventually the gates were opened and we sped away.34
The Beatles team management was surprised to learn in the morning while ordering breakfast that they could do so no more. ‘No room service for you. You have insulted our leaders,’ they were told by a surly waiter. Rushing down to the lobby with their bags, they were aghast to find that the hotel porters had disappeared and so had the police and security escort. A hotel staff member, when asked why the Beatles were being treated so badly, pointed to the morning newspaper which had a bold exclamation as the main headline: ‘Beatles Snubs the President!’35
To add injury to insult, a representative of the Philippines Bureau of Internal Revenue visited Epstein in the morning, demanding36 a large fee amounting to 80,000 dollars as income tax for the concerts they had performed, although it was clear from their contract with the local promoter that it would be the latter who would take care of all tax liabilities arising out of the Beatles tour. Obviously this was another way the palace chose to harass the Beatles and the story had been already leaked to the press. A headline in the Manila Mirror said, ‘Beatles Told to Pay First, Leave Later’.37
But the worst leg of the nightmare in Manila still lay ahead. Following the harrowing time after their arrival, John had sarcastically quipped to a Filipino journalist, ‘We got a few things to learn about the Philippines. First of all is how to get out of here.’38 It turned out to be an extraordinarily prescient remark because the Beatles found that the ordeal facing them at their departure from Manila airport was far worse than what they had suffered on arrival. Epstein rushed to pay the tax fee as the Beatles arrived at the airport and found that the management and staff there had been instructed not to give them any assistance. This meant that escalators had stopped working and no porters were available, leaving the boys and their managers and technical crew to struggle with bulky amplifiers and musical equipment. More worryingly, an angry crowd of Filipinos, some of them brandishing guns, cudgels and coshes, had gathered inside the airport and was moving menacingly towards the Beatles and their team.
The Beatles party had no alternative but to run the gauntlet of the mob. Epstein was punched in the face and kicked in the groin. Evans was kicked in the ribs and tripped up but he managed to drag himself, with blood streaming down one leg, across the tarmac towards the aircraft. With their team members throwing a shield around John, Paul, George and Ringo, the boys managed to escape direct blows but only just.
Finally, after agonizing delays caused by last-minute bureaucratic hassles with the authorities in Manila over faulty immigration papers, the plane with the Beatles and their team was allowed to leave. As the aircraft leapt into the air, they could see the crowd down below on the tarmac shaking their fists at them. Used to being idols who commanded public adulation, the Beatles were visibly shaken at having turned into objects of hate first in Tokyo and now even more so in Manila. Even the easy-going Ringo recalled it as ‘the worst experience of my life . . . I thought they were going to put us in jail’. George, the quiet Beatle known to be a diehard pacifist, sounded violent when asked later whether he would ever go back to Manila: ‘The only way I am going back there is to drop a Hydrogen bomb.’ It was a strange threat from a man who so vigorously opposed the nuclear bomb.39
The Beatles and several of the team members were also upset40 with Epstein, the driving force behind the tour, for messing it up so badly. Tempers flared in the aircraft, with Epstein and one of the team managers almost coming to blows over the botched-up money collection from the concerts in Manila. The Beatles, reluctant to tour in any case for a while now, found a reason to tell Epstein that they had had enough of doing public concerts abroad and that the upcoming American tour was the last they would be doing. ‘Nobody can hear a bloody note anyway. No more for me. I say we stop touring,’ Brown remembers John declaring.41
Guilty about putting the boys in physical danger, yet deeply hurt by their criticism of him, Epstein flew into a huge bout of insecurity. He almost had a nervous breakdown, developing a severe rash of hives all over his body. Panicking that the Beatles were slipping away from him, the manager who had turned the four boys from Liverpool into the world’s biggest celebrities now rested all his hopes on the reception of the band in America where the last two tours in 1964 and the following year had gone off splendidly.
But George, who was sick of touring, was not so optimistic. Asked what the Beatles planned to do after getting back to London from Manila before they took off once again for the United States, the usually restrained Beatle commented acidly, ‘We’re going to have a couple of weeks to recuperate before we go and get beaten up by the Americans.’42 It was one more stray remark from a Beatle that would turn out to be ominously prophetic.
Epstein’s hopes of reviving the Beatles’ interest in touring with their busy schedule of public concerts across the United States in August 1966 crashed spectacularly almost a fortnight before the boys crossed the Atlantic. An obscure US teen magazine called Datebook published43 at the end of July a quote from John describing the Beatles as ‘more popular than Jesus’, triggering off a ferocious controversy. It was from an interview, carried several months earlier in the Evening Standard, the London evening paper, to journalist Maureen Cleave who was well known to the Beatles, particularly John, who would some years later confess to a brief fling with her. It was a very small part of a much longer freewheeling conversation between John and Cleave that sought to paint an intimate and largely sympathetic portrait of him.
The offending portion related to John declaring while talking about the future of organized religion: ‘Christianity will go. It will vanish and shrink. I needn’t argue about that; I’m right and I will be proved right. We’re more popular than Jesus now; I don’t know which will go first—rock ’n’ roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.’44
The comments were dynamite in parts of the United States, particularly in the Bible belt in the Midwest and the conservative South. Assorted groups of American evangelists and Christian fundamentalists who wielded considerable clout in both society and politics saw John’s remark twisted out of context by the teen magazine that sought to demonize the hapless Beatle in a cover story called ‘The 10 Adults You Hate/Dig the Most’ as a direct onslaught on their faith. Sensing an opportunity, the white supremacist Ku Klux Klan, a powerful force across the South in the mid 1960s, also got into the act of the Beatles hate campaign.
As more and more radio stations in the Midwest and the South banned Beatles songs and frenzied crowds burnt their albums in public bonfires, Epstein, going out of his mind45 thinking about the impact on the tour barely a week away, rushed ahead46 to try and calm things down. Addressing a press conference in New York, he read out a statement which he said47 had been approved by John. It said, ‘Lennon didn’t mean to boast about The Beatles’ fame. He meant to point out that The Beatles’ effect appeared to be a more immediate one upon, certainly, the younger generation. John is deeply concerned and regrets that people with certain religious beliefs should have been offended.’
The clarification had little impact on the anger and resentment against the Beatles sweeping parts of America. Epstein and his boys were in a state of complete panic. Unlike Japan and Manila, Asian countries that comprised a small part of the Beatles’ outreach in the world, the United States was their mainstay. It was really here that the full proportions of the Beatles legend had unfolded, where the unprecedented public hysteria of screaming teenage American girls had brought them fame, glory and riches beyond their dreams. They could not afford to turn their back on the US and cancel their tour because they knew, even without their manager telling them so, that it would deal their careers as musicians a crippling blow. Yet after their narrow escape from physical danger in Japan and Manila just a few weeks ago, they were once again walking into what could turn out to be an even worse ordeal. Epstein, petrified of risking his boys’ safety again, seriously considered cancelling and asked Nat Weiss, the lawyer who looked after the Beatles’ interests in the US, how much it would cost to pull out of the tour at the last moment. When told it would be over a million dollars, the distraught manager was ready to pay the amount from his own pocket, but was persuaded that the Beatles could still go to the US if John personally apologized.
It was a big dilemma for John who felt absolute contempt for the Christian fanatics who were up in arms against what he thought was his freedom to express a perfectly valid point of view on religion.
‘After much arm-twisting, Brian got John to agree to at least try and explain what he meant at a press conference,’ recalled Brown.48
When John did speak to the media soon after he landed in the US, he delivered what by his standards was a grovelling, if somewhat long and unconvincing, apology.49 Clearly the most egotistical Beatle, John had broken down and wept in private about humiliating himself in public according to the Beatles’ press officer Barrow. ‘He actually put his head in his hands and sobbed,’ Barrow wrote. ‘He was saying, “I’ll do anything . . . whatever you say. How am I to face the others if this whole tour is called off just because of something I’ve said?”’50
John’s conciliatory statement and obviously contrite mood did somewhat lower tempers but not all fanatics were ready to call the anti-Beatles campaign off. The day after his long, rambling apology in Chicago, the KLUE radio station in Longview, Texas, organized a public bonfire to ‘burn the Beatles’. A formal statement issued by the radio station director read: ‘We are inviting local teenagers to bring in their records and other symbols of the group’s popularity to be burned at a public bonfire on Friday night, August 13.’ To add a touch of colourful menace during the ritual burning, the Grand Dragon of the South Carolina Ku Klux Klan torched a Beatles record on a wooden cross. Interestingly, just the day after, in a freak accident,51 a bolt of lightning hit the KLUE radio station’s transmission tower, damaging broadcasting equipment, knocking the station news director unconscious and switching the station off air for several hours. But such was the tension and trauma in the Beatles camp that nobody gloated or joked.
