Swan Dive

And in the end, they even tried to take the carpet.

The ravenous mob who tore through the Apple Boutique on July 30, 1968 had snatched up everything else, from psychedelic frocks and inflatable chairs to store fixtures and hangers. The prices were certainly right. The Beatles had decided to abruptly end their eight-month experiment in retail with an everything-is-free blowout.

“We came into shops by the tradesman’s entrance but we’re leaving by the front door,” the group said in a press statement. “I suppose what we’re really doing is spring cleaning in mid-summer. The amazing thing is our giving things away. Well, the answer is that it was much funnier to give things away.”

Funnier perhaps, but with the £10,000 of merchandise given away fully subjected to British tax law, this was but the last in a series of whimsical decisions that brought down what Paul McCartney had dubbed the “beautiful place where you can buy beautiful things.”

Why did The Beatles open a shop in the first place? It was partly on recommendation from their accountants. By investing in related businesses, the boys could ease their tax situation. But more than that, they wanted to share their Pepperland-ish sense of style with the world.

“We were all very much like a clique, the people who were aware,” says Jenny Boyd, who was a salesgirl at the boutique and younger sister to George’s wife Pattie. “Part of that awareness did have something to do with smoking pot and trying mind-expanding drugs. There was a real feeling of fellowship and camaraderie and it felt like it was us and them. When The Beatles opened the boutique it was about making that available - some of the fun and the stuff that we’d experienced - to them.”

A Dutch quartet known as The Fool, who’d impressed the Fabs by painting trippy designs on John’s piano and dressing the band’s wives and girlfriends in a kind of Middle Earth chic, was given £100,000 to produce an exclusive line of garments and accessories (that the hippie artistes’ previous shop in Amsterdam, The Trend, had gone belly up because of overspending didn’t seem to worry anyone at Apple). To set the boutique apart, The Fool covered the entire face of 94 Baker Street with a psychedelic mural, finished in time for the opening night party on December 7, 1967. The mural - a three-story bearded mystic floating among moons and stars - defied a warning from Westminster City Council and angered conservative neighbors, who petitioned and had it removed within the month.

“Trying to influence people and doing things like painting the Apple shop was all just part of the teddy boy in us,” recalled George in Anthology. “The teddy boy theme of ‘We’ll show them’ . . . Once we were told we had to get rid of the painting, the whole thing started to lose its appeal.”

From the beginning, the shop was a money pit. Simon of The Fool went on a buying trip to Morocco that turned into an expensive opium holiday, with most of what he purchased later “lost in the post.” He also insisted, against the protests of store manager Pete Shotton, on having pure silk labels woven into all Apple clothing. According to Shotton’s book John Lennon In My Life, when Pete complained to his old Liverpool mate, the response was, “‘Oh, just do it the way he wants. Remember, Pete, we’re not business freaks, we’re artists. . . If we don’t make any money, what does it fucking matter?”

Then there was the shoplifting. Not only did The Fool have to be continually reprimanded for skimming choice items for themselves (they eventually fell out with The Beatles and moved to America to become a singing group), but everyday customers were taking advantage of the shop’s general lack of supervision to help themselves.

Jenny Boyd, who today works for the Cottonwood rehab treatment center in Tuscon, AZ, recalls with a chuckle, “I wouldn’t have got into that bit [shoplifting]. Maybe the manager of the shop would have been involved in that. I was definitely a sort of flower child. I was interested in talking to people and trying to convert them. There was a good friend of mine called Amos who worked there, and Amos and I would find a little bit of hash most days and put it in a cup of tea, and just really enjoy the day.”

By June 1968, the boutique had lost over £200,000. When a newspaper column criticized The Beatles for having turned into shopkeepers, that was the last straw. John and Paul decided to liquidate. But not before the band had their way with the stock the night before (according to Peter Brown in The Love You Make, it was Yoko who grabbed the most, carrying a huge bindle that made her look like an “Oriental Santa Claus”).

The policemen on hand at the closing did finally prevent the mob from prying up the carpet. The next week, the whited-out shop windows became an advertisement for The Beatles’ single of Hey Jude and Revolution. For Apple, it was on to 3 Savile Row and equally money-draining ventures.

If the whole boutique episode seems hard to fathom today, with pop groups being ultra-business-savvy and corporate sponsored, Boyd puts it in perspective: “It was at a time when we felt that anything was possible. We believed in magic. We were so gullible. But in a lovely way, though.”