journalism, had not written a single word about the Beatles. All the Fleet Street papers maintained full-time Fab Four correspondents who’d followed them from the beginning and cultivated personal relationships with them. At my own paper, The Sunday Times, Beatle coverage was jealously guarded by two older colleagues, Derek Jewell and Hunter Davies. On such a crowded bandwagon, how could there possibly be any room for me? Then a friend who was editing New York’s Show magazine asked me to find out what was really going on inside Apple. “Try to set up a picture of all four Beatles around a boardroom table,” he said, little realising the impossibility of such a shot. So it was that I first met the Beatles’ press
officer, Derek Taylor, an ex-Fleet Street journalist with a toothbrush moustache who was the most pursued and courted PR man on earth. Unconcerned by my lack of Beatle-reporting form, the quixotic Taylor granted me special access to 3 Savile Row because of my recent Sunday Times interview with the strongman Charles Atlas, whose bodybuilding course he’d followed as a boy. “Just come in and hang around,”’ he told me. The house’s elegant interior was the last word in late-Sixties style, carpeted throughout in applegreen, its white walls lined with framed gold discs. All the senior executives had interior- designed offices with furnishings they’d been allowed to choose for themselves. Everywhere was evidence of how freely the Beatles’ money was being spent. The Apple top brass had acquired a taste for a certain brand of vodka available at only one London restaurant, which did not do off sales. Two employees therefore would be sent to the restaurant (by taxi naturally) to eat a full meal, then buy a bottle of the vodka to bring back, again by taxi. The only security was a doorman in a dovegrey frock coat who conducted
a love-hate relationship with the Apple Scruffs on the front steps. Most of the time, the front door was
left unlocked, leading to continual opportunistic thefts of typewriters, hi-fi equipment and gold discs. At one point, it was discovered that Post Office messenger boys who delivered telegrams — of which multitudes arrived at Apple in those pre- email, pre-fax days — were systematically stealing valuable lead from the roof. The problem was that many of the
dodgiest visitors were personal friends of a Beatle and so impossible even to remonstrate with, let alone exclude. The previous Christmas, for instance, George had invited an entire chapter of Hell’s Angels from San Francisco, on their bikes, led by two ferocious characters named
The press office reeked of pot, a major risk with Savile Row police station a hundred yards away
Frisco Pete and Billy Tumbleweed. The Angels had virtually moved into the house, drinking, hell-raising and sexually harassing secretaries, immune from all consequences as George’s guests. They’d finally outstayed their welcome by gate-crashing a Christmas party for Apple staff’s children featuring a 42lb turkey warranted to be the largest in Britain and presided over by John and Yoko dressed as Father and Mother Christmas. When the Angels prematurely began devouring the monster turkey, a journalist who reproved them for bad manners was felled by Frisco Pete and crashed into Father and Mother Christmas’s laps. After Paul’s disappearance (so total that rumours began circulating that he was dead), John became Apple’s most visible and available Beatle.
In a front ground-floor office, sharing HELLO, GOODBYE …
Richard Anderson’s Master Tailor Brian Lishak saw that final performance …
When the Beatles did their last live performance on the roof of No 3 Savile Row there was a huge commotion going on. I saw all these people looking up. So I went onto the flat roof at No 11 and watched them in action. That was extraordinary. But one of the tailors – and I’m not sure which one – called the police because of the havoc. Recently, there was a 50th anniversary of that final performance and I met the policeman who actually had to go up and tell the Beatles to stop. I wouldn’t have liked to have been in his shoes.
54 SAVILE ROW STYLE MAGAZINE
the same desk, he and Yoko launched the anti-war campaign that would culminate in
their “bed-ins for peace”, first in
Amsterdam, then Montreal, and bring worldwide ridicule down on their heads. George and Ringo made irregular appearances, signalled by a big white limo nosing along Savile Row and sudden uproar from the Apple Scruffs. Klein had already got to work as their manager, commuting from New York with a set of portable filing cabinets. Though he was devoutly Jewish, the Apple Scruffs shouted “Mafia!” as his portly figure hurried into the building, poring over balance-sheets. His time was divided between attempting various company takeovers for the Beatles, renegotiating their soon-to-expire contract with their American record company, Capitol, and attempting to stem the haemorrhage of money from their business. He immediately axed several Apple sub-divisions and useless executives, along with some useful ones, like Apple Records’ head, Ron Kass, who might have threatened his position. Indeed, Klein was already wondering whether managing the Beatles, the ultimate entrepreneurial prize, might not be a poisoned chalice. Their next album, Let It Be, was abeyance
in after their inspirational
producer George Martin had walked out, tired of John and Yoko’s studio canoodling and the bickering between Paul and George. With the album there was to be a documentary of the same name, ending with their
first performance together
since the time of Hey Jude and Revolution. Suggested locations ranged from a 2,000-year-old Roman amphitheatre in Tunisia at sunrise to the deck of a liner in mid-ocean. It had ended up as a brief recital on the roof of 3 Savile Row — an impatient compromise that became one of their most iconic moments, imitated by other bands for evermore.
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