With the Beatles

Ever since last summer's scandal involving the London defamation trial of Roman Polanski vs. Vanity Fair magazine, I'd been curious to find out more about Lewis Lapham, who was quoted in Vaniity Fair as saying that Polanski had propositioned a Swedish model at Elaine's in New York on his way to Sharon Tate's funeral. Polanski's lawyers had made mincemeat out of Lapham, and what was left got kicked to the curb by Mia Farrow, who had accompanied Polanski to Elaine's that evening and said that Polanski had done nothing of the sort. Mia Farrow appears in Lapham's new book, WITH THE BEATLES, and she comes across like a nitwit! Revenge for the London testimony? I'm sure Lapham, a principled journalist, had heavy misgivings before painting Mia Farrow's portrait in this book, and yet Mia, when you joined the Beatles and the Mahharishi in Rishikesh, Lapham makes you look like a nut. He remembers things verbatim that occurred more than 40 years ago, and whole conversations too. Of course he was there as a journalist, and wrote the whole thing up for the once popular magazine SATURDAY EVENING POST. The Beatles aren't in the book very much, more's the pity, and the social satire that Lapham offers seems curiously out of date. The person Lapham finds most articulate and intelligent is Candice Bergen--that's saying a lot! If you are a Candice Bergen fan, and to a lesser extent a White Album period Beatles fan, you'll find much to amuse you here. I know I'm both!

This book does a number of things with grace. To my taste, the most important thing it does is to capture the moral and cultural confusion, doomed innocence, and lively idealism of the cusp of the 1960's. Lapham's prose is lapidary: clear, precise, vivid, dryly witty. And his mind has the same qualities as his prose. He does not make snap judgments, or wild accusations. His fairness is a moral quality, and so he never calls the Maharishi Yogi a charlatan, because he was not. Lapham was present in Rishikesh at the moment when the forces of good, as exemplified in Eastern spiritual consciousness, attempted to convert the world to peace and sanity via a Western cultural and musical phenomenon called the Beatles. Lapham observes closely and judges charitably, and freely admits that he plumbed no mysteries. But the scrupulous care with which he reports the scene at Rishikesh and the personalities he became slightly acquainted with sheds more light on what happened there than three hundred hours of taped interviews would have. In a brief afterward, he says "The scene retains its force because I now know that it occurs at almost the precise moment, late in February 1968, at which the flood tide of generous thought and optimistic feeling that formed the promise of the 1960's turns on the ebb--toward the assassination on Martin Luther King in April, followed by the assassination of Bobby Kennedy in June, in July by the riots engulfing the Democratic National Convention in Chicago." It's a small book, beautifully designed, with very good photographs which capture the sadness of Cynthia Lennon, the increasingly absent presence of her husband, the gayety of the Maharishi, the good cheer of Paul McCartney, the sanity of Ringo Starr, and the dignity and humor of George Harrison. Every important personality reported on in the book retains his or her separateness and complexity and individuality. Lapham is a grown up reporting on grown ups, even when they behave like exotic species of animals, as a few of them do. This book is highly recommended for students of the 1960's, or of the Beatles, or of life in general.

This book effortlessly demystifies several of the largest icons of the period. How important it is, too, in an era of plastic transfigurations of art and music, to see the Beatles as skeptics of their own idolaters. Not to mention the book is beautifully designed and a pleasure to hold. Lapham is as modest an author as he must have been an observer when he reports the habits and considerations of the Beatles, yet leaves the iconoclasm, if cleverly critiqued, still quite intact. The culture of TM, Timothy Leary and other 1960s superstition-bound followings only magnify the true savvy of the band, and what it managed to accomplish politically, by refusing to 'drop out' even in the midst of feverish popularity and spiritual support, manifested in the figure of the Maharishi himself. This story quietly invokes the slant and movement of young religious seekers in India without the use of historical accounts or an artificial lens. It is a great piece of cultural reportage.

Contrary to the assertion made on Melville House's web site, "With The Beatles" isn't the book to "...finally (tell) the whole story" of what went on inside the Marharishi's compound when the Beatles came to India to learn Transcendental Meditation between February and April 1968. At 147 pages it's a slim volume, the first 28 pages devoted to photographs taken by Larry Kurland (which accompanied the text when it first ran in the "Saturday Evening Post") and Paul Saltzman, whose excellent photo book "The Beatles in Rishikesh" is now sadly out of print. Lapham doesn't even relate his first observations of the group in the widely spaced text until page 96. Even so, Mr. Lapham's studied and erudite prose provides an engrossing summary of the Marharishi's brand of TM within the context of the Sixties, the Beatles and, to a lesser extent, the Beach Boys. While you still won't know precisely why the Beatles and the Marharishi parted company, Beatles scholars will appreciate Lapham's period overview of the group's involvement in TM, gleaning intriguing bits of Beatles minutiae: George Harrison's declaration that his mantra was a word that appears in the lyrics of "I Am The Walrus" and John Lennon opining that while he wasn't sure if the Marharishi was any wiser than Lewis Carroll, "...he knew that if a person could find within himself an inner wonderland impervious to the pressures of space and time,'then nothing's going to shake my world'."

Lapham's account of his time in India is a great read--and funny too. What seems most important about the book is that it contextualizes the '60s zeitgeist for all things Eastern within the period's real political significance. 1967 brought the summer of love, and it was in '68 that the Beatles went to India to search for transcendence within their own minds. Lapham shows that many of those who went to India were confused about the search, a confusion shared by the fab-four. The war in Vietnam is somehow always in the background here, and Lapham sensitively investigates the meaning of Transcendental Meditation--TM--in both the political and cultural contexts. The title of the book is quite playful, since Lapham was "With The Beatles" while never really getting one-on-one interviews with them. He does, however, speak with them often, and what he observes in India turns out to be both an intimate portrait of the band and the larger cultural moment.