The Beatles Are Here! (17 page)

Have I said our friends thought we were insane? We sprawled on the couches that the lady who had lived there had left . . . because who could carry a couch down a cliff? We were filthy but couldn’t bring ourselves to use the outdoor shower because of the black widows. Tom and I drank beer, along with Marina, and our little daughter Lisa sat, damp and pale and flaccid, as though she’d been drained of blood. We were exhausted but exuberant too, here at the top of a cliff where we couldn’t get television; we were antsy, itchy, bored.

“We could drive down into Santa Monica and see the Beatles movie,” Marina suggested.

As I remember it, Tom and I didn’t even know who the Beatles were. Our heads were filled with notions of Milton’s
Comus
and a thousand other unreadable things. We had just passed our qualifying oral exams. We were going to be PhDs in a couple of years. We had worked so hard! And now we were actually home “owners,” even if our home was only twenty-three feet by twenty-three feet, with one downstairs room built entirely of orange crates.

But sure, we’d go to the movie. We needed a break, and Marina said the Beatles were wonderful. She seemed faintly scornful that we hadn’t heard of them.

Now I come to a moment that changed my life. (And having written that, I had to get up and find a Kleenex to blow my nose and wipe my eyes.)

That chord! That chord that introduced
A Hard Day’s Night
, along with the sight of those four boys running through the train station chased by hordes of girls, running, running until they found themselves in a train compartment with two older men. One of them was, well, “Who’s that little old man?” “That’s Paul’s
grandfather
,” one of them answered, and the grandfather snarled, baring his teeth. The other man—don’t we all remember?—was some asshole English banker type and after some wrangling about whether the window should be closed or open John began to torment him from outside the train, running along, shouting, “Please, sir, can we have our ball back?” to inside the train where John snuggled up to his trainmate and said, “Give us a kiss.”

All this in the first five minutes. Another way of looking at the world. “Give us a kiss.” Give us a KISS?? Is that how you treat awful people?

We came home that night dazed with joy. Tom pulled out a shotgun and pulverized a couple of huge spiders and we slept outside that night under starry skies. We got up and went to work again, lighting the kerosene heater that heated up hot water for the shower and rolled up one or two of the five oriental rugs that the old lady had left, and at one point one of us asked the other two if he could have a hammer. “Hammuhs? No!” Marina said, and one of us said, “You filled his head with notions seemingly,” and we went back to work.

But around seven one of us said, “Well, shall we?” and not even thinking about showers, we drove back down again into Santa Monica, to see
A Hard Day’s Night
. During the following month we saw it twenty-three times, Marina went home and we still went to see it. We bought the Beatles’ first album, which was divine, of course, but for me, in those days it was the world of the movie that held me in its arms.

George in the ad executive’s office twanging a piece of modern art and remarking, to no one in particular, “You don’t see too many of these around nowadays. . . .”

That ad exec fretting that George may have been “an early clue to the new direction,” and then concluding, wrongly, that he’s not.

Or John’s playing with his toy submarine in the tub.

Or Paul’s grandfather leering at a chesty broad and saying, “You must have been a great swimmer.”

Or Poor Ringo, hounded by a waitress in a pub trying to foist off a sandwich as old as the hills, “that was fresh this morning!”

Or those moments when they escape, and one of them says, “We’re out,” and they spend ten minutes or so playing, just playing in the vacant lot outside.

WE HAD A
lot of parties in the Topanga house that summer, even before the wall slats were repaired. One of the first guests, winded and cranky after his climb up the hill, took a look off our dilapidated balcony at the prickly landscape and opined that it looked like “The Garden of Eden after the atom bomb fell.” He was right, the Canyon was a little dry. But as the seasons began to turn we saw its beauty unfold. Only a half hour away Southern California city life bustled; up in Topanga we could only see three houses down at the bottom of the cliff. One morning we saw a sweet young lady, stark naked, the sun catching the braces on her teeth glinting in the sun, doing a series of complex yoga poses. “You don’t see too many of those nowadays,” I said, and my husband answered, “Maybe it’s an early clue to the new direction?”

Topanga was the delightful opposite to everything we had known before. Three enormous eucalyptus sheltered the cabin, a few cypress and clumps and clumps of California lilac, sumac it was called, and came in every shade of deep purple to sparkling white. There were webs and webs of an orange lacy thing called dodder, and the old lady who had lived here for years had put in beds of nasturtium and morning glory and for a few weeks every year the cliff was a carpet of orange and blue. We planted half a dozen citrus trees along the switchback path; they would grow up bushy, green and gold, brushing our arms as we trudged up the path carrying groceries, stamping the earth and chanting “Out of the way, snakes!” And for the most part they stayed out of the way. And we bought Beatles albums, and went to see
A Hard Day’s Night
, all the while exploring what the movie told us, which was that there was a way to live in the world without working too hard, that there was a way to live in which we could play our days away. If we could only figure out how.

The story of
A Hard Day’s Night
is simple. The day before a concert the boys catch a train (“Give us a kiss!”) to a big city—all the while pursued by flocks of love-sick girls. They travel with three grown-ups; Paul’s grandfather, he of the fiendish snarl, and two handlers, one of them Norm, who has hell’s own amount of time opening a plastic milk carton, and his sidekick, whose name I don’t remember. The function of the handlers is to keep the boys out of trouble and see that they don’t have any fun. At their hotel that evening an invitation awaits them to a casino with a champagne buffet (which Paul, reading out loud, pronounces to rhyme with little Miss Muffet.) The grandfather barges into this posh event, leering at a lady with a huge chest, saying “You must have been a great swimmer.” The boys make it out to a party, where a tall young man dances with such exuberance that he throws it all over and just begins dancing up and down. They’ve already been singing when they get a chance, Paul looking like the Virgin Mary herself, singing in the baggage car, but the next day begins in an everyday way with John in the bathtub playing with his submarines.

Their day begins with a publicity party where none of them can grab onto an hors d’oeuvre, and a lady journalist seductively asks Ringo, “Are you a Mod or a Rocker?” He thinks about it for a minute and replies, “I’m a mocker.” And it’s somewhere around in there that George wanders into the odious ad executive’s office, twangs the modern art and tells the executive that the girl he’s using as a selling lure is no more than a figure of fun: “We turn the sound down on her and say rude things. . . .”

By this time everyone we knew had a favorite Beatle. Paul, for those who preferred androgynous beauty; John, for those who prized intellect and wit; George, because he possessed that ineffable something we would later recognize as a spiritual life; and Ringo, patron saint of fuckups the world over. And everyone we knew had, by now, absorbed the message of the film: Have fun! Revere it—and of course, buy three Beatles albums.

Soon, a good part of our world began to smell strangely aromatic. Grass had invaded it. I remember my husband and I attending a party in the Hollywood Hills given for Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager. He brought a house gift of prerolled, fat little joints and we were each given our own, instead of passing them around in the usual, civilized way. As a party it registered as Serene, with Oak Leaf clusters. We sat in a circle in straight chairs, our eyes closed, without a peep out of any of us. And inevitably (at least right-wing maniacs would say it was inevitable), LSD followed as night follows day. My first time my best friend stood watch over me, as I in turn watched flowers and marinated artichokes yawn and breathe, and George told me to relax and float downstream. This wasn’t dying.

So our parties grew into the hundreds, with young adults spilling out and around our cliff, which was really just one side of an acoustical bowl which caught that sweet Beatles sound and amplified it out, sending it west to catch the waves of the Pacific, and south to twinkle over larger L.A.

My husband, when he took his first LSD, politely declined to have me as his watcher. “I might say something that would hurt your feelings,” he said, not unkindly, “and neither one of us would like that.” And my little sister, who had come to live with us the year before, took Timothy Leary’s advice to “Turn on, tune in, drop out” a little too enthusiastically.

I remember one all-night party with wonderful food, wonderful music, and all the weed you could smoke, where Maureen grabbed a nice boy named Fast Eddie, crawled off underneath a sumac bush, and came in at dawn the next morning, sat on the dining room table kicking her heels, shaking off little grass buds that floated about her, oversized moats of light, catching the sun. She told me she had already done LSD a dozen times, injecting it into her foot, before she was eighteen. “I’m not the same person I was,” she told me. And the Beatles albums became more and more complex. They were more beautiful than before, but—in my opinion at least—some of the raw joy was gone.

“The Beatles were the Christ child, all naive and like that,” my husband told me. “The Stones are like the Devil. I like the Devil more, myself.”

It was as if the world, having been given an overdose of joy, scratched it away like a pesky rash, leaving something inflamed and somehow infected beneath. If you could have anything you wanted, what would you choose? Love? Maybe not. Fun? I SAID, Maybe not!

Up north in San Francisco, people began to steal from the Free Store.

The last fourth of
A Hard Day’s Night
takes a barely perceptive, melancholy tone. John, Paul, and George fall back on their own devices. The plot requires only that the Beatles show up for their performance later in the evening—so there’s a fair amount of waiting going on. Ringo is left alone at the television station and finds himself in the commissary. He runs into Paul’s grandfather, who berates him for reading a book.

“Books are good,” Ringo says, and the grandfather leans in with his familiar snarl. “Paradin’s better,” he says, and suggests that since the other boys don’t care for him, he’d be better off around and about, disconcerting pretty girls “with your cool appraisin’ stare.” Ringo buys it. He leaves the station, where various people begin to have a series of nervous breakdowns, including the producer, who grieves that if Ringo doesn’t appear in time for the show, he, the producer, will end his career out in the sticks, doing “the news in Welsh.”

But there’s something funny going on with the show—that’s already begun. No flower children, nothing remotely “new” or New Age-y—just a magician who works with pigeons, a piece from a Wagnerian opera, flocks of cheesy but madly traditional chorus girls. In other words, the same old thing. It took me maybe a dozen times of seeing this film to realize that the end was embedded in the story, inevitable and somewhat sad. Meanwhile, Ringo is out on the town. He buys a coat that doesn’t fit him, lays his cloak down in front of a lovely woman like Sir Walter Raleigh did for Queen Elizabeth I, but the cloak covers a hole in the ground and the woman disappears. Finally, he encounters a little boy by the river and the two of them skip rocks for a while, while back at the station the boys go looking for him, and the executives, in an agony of warling around, shift into high gear. No songs in this part of the movie, just a tinkling tune of yearning and possible loss.

THE LAST PARTY
we had at the old Topanga cabin was the wedding of my husband’s best friend to his long-time girlfriend. It was at the height of the summer of love. A talented dressmaker ran up a dress for me that she’d made for Sharon Tate before she was impaled by members of the Manson Gang, and a long, green, beribboned shirt for my husband. “You’re the flower, he’s the stem,” she enthused, but to tell the truth, he seemed crabbier than usual. No matter. About three hundred guests climbed the cliff and drifted out over the ridge. My dad, who’d turned out to be a great stoner, stationed himself in the kitchen, rolled an endless succession of blunts, and handed them out into the party. My sister Maureen was there, dusted with leaves and twigs, laughing like mad, and it wasn’t until about one in the morning that I found out my husband had been sleeping with a lady named Lynda and had one of those spectacularly depressing moments that (also) change your life forever.

More than adultery, my husband was addicted to sermons. He loved delivering them at the top of his voice, only now the Stones were his Scripture. “You can’t always get what you want!” Over and over. He developed endless variations on this, until I finally began to believe it. It’s the easiest thing in the world to believe.

You could say things went back to normal. John once said that the sixties went from 1967 to 1972. Over, all too soon. Today, I can say my two beautiful daughters are middle-aged women who don’t smoke, or even take a drink. That man who got married at the top of the cliff is dead, as is his old girlfriend, as is his first wife. And my husband too, such a hell-raiser, who had a butterfly appliquéd on his crotch, who used to say, “Mescaline is a great teacher,” died relatively young. My beautiful little sister died very young indeed, from too many drugs.