Tags
Today George and Pattie Harrison appeared at Esher and Walton Magistrates, where they pled guilty to cannabis possession and each was fined £250 plus 10 guineas for court costs. The low fine and lack of jail time may be why they seem so happy in this picture, where George appears to be wearing a policeman’s hat and Derek Taylor’s moustache makes a cameo:
Pattie looks saucy and alluring, George dashing and resolute. It’s a pretty good advertisement for cannabis, though I’ll bet Derek is the only one in the photo who’s actually high.
Speaking of ol’ DT, I believe that’s him talking at the beginning of this excerpt from Richard “The House Hippie” DiLello’s The Longest Cocktail Party, which touches upon the other major Beatle events of the day:
“What’s that barrel doing in the Black Room?”
“That’s the one we had at Mary’s reception.”
“I know that but what’s it doing there?”
“I just never got around to returning it but we’ll find a use for it someday.”
“Well the press in this country is certainly going out of their way to make John and Yoko look like two deranged gorillas and do you ever read those cuttings you’re always filing away?”
“Fuck you! Of course I do.”
“They’ve just blasted them with ridicule. Donald Zee slashed them to ribbons in print and I don’t believe the way they were treated on the Eamonn Andrews Show! It was disgusting and the hostility isn’t going to stop either because this is just the first Bed-In, which reminds me. Take this down. It’s the caption for the Ono pics for Camera Press. Dateline today. John Lennon and Yoko Ono have codirected a startling and revolutionary TV film subtitled Rape, which is expected to run into censorship trouble. Lennon and Miss Ono in collaboration with Austrian TV producer Hans Preiner have carried out ‘rape by camera’ of a Hungarian girl known as Eva, an unsuspecting member of the public.
“Says Yoko, who names the work Film Number 6 and subtitles it Rape, ‘It is an ambitious film, the unveiling of more of human nature than we normally see. It is going deeper than skin deep, much deeper.’ Eva is followed over a three-day period by a relentlessly probing, searching movie camera. A camera which will not let her be. The results, a one-hour thirteen-minute film, premiered on Austrian National Network Television on March 31 because, says John Lennon, ‘TV is where it’s at!’ in color and it will later be shown at the Montreaux television festival in Switzerland in late April. It is then aimed at major cinema circuits. Read it back.”
“John Lennon and Yoko Ono have codirected….”
“All right. And you know about Vienna?”
“No—”
“Well, they conducted a press conference from inside a white bag in Vienna’s most exclusive hotel, Sacher’s, an hour before the premier of Rape and the hotel was in complete pandemonium.
“The management was totally freaked out of their brains and didn’t know how to handle it and anyway John has finally verbalized what they’ve been doing with that bag routine of theirs. He calls it Bagism and we’ve got to get our hands on one hundred acorns because John wants them sent to all the world leaders, kings, presidents, prime ministers, the lot—”
“Acorns?”
“Yes, acorns. To be planted for World Peace in the spring of 1969.”