Their contemporaries the Rolling Stones come across as sex and drug extremists, perhaps even establishing the mould for 1970s arena rock bands (I'm looking at you, Zeppelin) who were known to take heroin and cocaine and sleep with multiple women every night while on tour.
Why have I never heard tell of the Beatles engaging in such behavior?
In an interview for the 1978 Beatles mockumentary The Rutles: All You Need Is Cash (a production of Saturday Night Live and Monty Python's Eric Idle), Mick Jagger tells a barely disguised tale of what he saw when the Beatles played Shea Stadium in 1965 (here renamed Che Stadium, named after, according to Eric Idle in the mockumentary, the Cuban guerilla leader called Che Stadium):
QUESTION: Were you at Che Stadium?
MICK: Yeh, I was at Che Stadium with the Rutles. That was the first big outdoor concert by a rock band, the Rutles at Che Stadium, so it was an exciting event. I even rented a helicopter for it. Came in, zooming over the crowd, never seen a crowd as big as that for a rock concert before, ran in and met them before they went on. I think they were nervous, you know, in front of all those people, but the thing I remembered most about is running out in the middle of this field and you couldn't see em and they were just miles away. Is it really the Rutles? It might be somebody else. And there was Barry [the Rutles' Ringo] on this eighteen foot drum riser swaying in the wind. I thought it was going to fall over. We had a good party afterwards though.
QUESTION: Did you hear much?
MICK: No. Nothing at all. You couldn't hear anything.
QUESTION: How long did they play?
MICK: About twenty minutes and that was it, off, helicopter, back to the Warwick Hotel, two birds each.
You can clearly see the glee in Jagger's face during the mockumentary as he mentions the Beatles' groupies, knowing the context of the mockumentary format means he can spill details with plausible deniability.
Peter Brown, who had started working at Brian Epstein's music store, and eventually worked on the Beatles management team (and who is mentioned by name on the Beatles' 'Ballad Of John And Yoko'), wrote a fairly gossip-y tell-all book called The Love You Make in 1983. In that book, talking about being on tour in America, Brown discusses the Beatles' groupies in one passage:
They could take little solace in the girls who were brought for them. The girls on the road consisted of either the professional groupie-cum-call-girl the promoter had arranged to drop by the boys’ hotel suite or, more usually, girls Neil and Mal had picked up for them. Supplying girls was one of Neil’s and Mal’s primary responsibilities on tour, and one that they both went about with great relish. Mal wasn’t above the “if you fuck me first I’ll introduce you to them” routine. The girls were screwed, blewed, and tattooed before Mal and Neil swept them out of the Beatles’ suite at dawn. The girls were escorted out the service entrance, each given an autographed picture—forged by Neil and Mal—and told to keep their mouths shut. Miraculously, for no reason anyone can explain, the girls kept their mouths shut. In America, at least, there were no “My Night with Paul” stories in the tabloids, nor were there paternity suits. It was no small wonder either, since it was not uncommon to find fifteen girls waiting in line in Neil’s and Mal’s rooms, passing the time by ironing the Beatles’ stage costumes.
Brown's book did not go down well with the Beatles and their associates, and they severed contact with him. But certainly some women later claimed to have slept with Beatles; Jenny Kee, an Asian-Australian who later became prominent as a fashion designer, claims in her autobiography to have slept with John Lennon during the Beatles' 1964 tour of Australia (a point when John Lennon was definitely married to Cynthia).
In regards to the Beatles' drug use, they were fairly well known to be profligate users of 'uppers' while in Hamburg and continuing through the 'Beatlemania' years, usually using Preludin (which they called 'prellies' or 'pep pills'). Lennon discusses this, for example, in the 1970 Jann Wenner interview in Rolling Stone
A Hard Day’s Night I was on pills, that’s drugs, that’s bigger drugs than pot. Started on pills when I was 15, no, since I was 17, since I became a musician. The only way to survive in Hamburg, to play eight hours a night, was to take pills. The waiters gave you them – the pills and drink. I was a fucking dropped-down drunk in art school. Help was where we turned on to pot and we dropped drink, simple as that. I’ve always needed a drug to survive. The others, too, but I always had more, more pills, more of everything because I’m more crazy probably.
This led to some scary behaviour from John Lennon in particular, according to Mark Lewisohn's Tune In:
George was second only to John in the swallowing of Prellies and knew better than most the sum effect of taking too many for too long, how the combination of pills plus booze plus several sleepless days caused hallucinations and extreme conduct. He’d describe one occasion when he, Paul and Pete were lying in their bunk beds, trying to sleep, only for John to barge into the room in a wild state. “One night John came in and some chick was in bed with Paul and he cut all her clothes up with a pair of scissors, and was stabbing the wardrobe. Everybody was lying in bed thinking, ‘Oh fuck, I hope he doesn’t kill me.’ [He was] a frothing mad person—he knew how to have ‘fun.’ ”
The Beatles' (re)introduction to marijuana via Bob Dylan from 1965 onwards and their discovery of LSD are major parts of the Beatles' story, usually being linked to their music becoming increasingly innovative and further away from their original formula; I presume that by your use of the phrase 'hard drugs' you already know all of this.
John Lennon began using heroin in 1968, according to Peter Brown:
It was at Montague Square, feeling more than a little bruised and already like outlaws, Yoko says, that they began to take heroin. As Yoko later put it, they took heroin “as a celebration of ourselves as artists.” “Of course,” Yoko says, “George says it was me who put John on heroin, but that wasn’t true. John wouldn’t take anything he didn’t want to take.” Still, many of John’s intimates saw heroin as the way Yoko could gain complete control over John. If there was one single element that was the most crucial in the breakup of the Beatles, it was John’s heroin addiction.
In that 1970 Rolling Stone interview, Lennon talks about his heroin use:
[Jann Wenner]: What was your experience with heroin?
[John Lennon]: It just was not too much fun. I never injected it or anything. We sniffed a little when we were in real pain. We got such a hard time from everyone, and I’ve had so much thrown at me, and at Yoko, especially at Yoko. Like Peter Brown in our office – and you can put this in – after we come in after six months he comes down and shakes my hand and doesn’t even say hello to her. That’s going on all the time. And we get into so much pain that we have to do something about it. And that’s what happened to us. We took “H” because of what the Beatles and others were doing to us. But we got out of it.
John Lennon's residence with Yoko was raided on October 18th, 1968 by Sergeant Norman Pilcher, who was attempting to make a name for themselves by doing drug raids on prominent rock stars (and, according to many sources, planting evidence to assure that the raids were successful). According to Brown, Lennon had been tipped off that there might be a raid in the near future, and had cleaned the house to try and remove the drugs that were stashed around the house. While doing so, they missed an amount of marijuana that had been stashed in a film canister, and which had likely been in the house for several years and simply forgotten about (or which may have been planted by Pilcher), and an amount of marijuana in a bowl that Lennon was sure he had cleaned a few days previously. Lennon was allegedly, according to Brown, flushing heroin down the toilet as the police entered the premises, and so he was charged with obstructing a search.
In the summer of '69, John and Yoko got their first real six string attempted to kick the heroin addiction. According to Yoko as quoted in the Peter Brown book,
“We were very square people in a way,” Yoko says. “We wouldn’t kick in a hospital because we wouldn’t let anybody know. We just went straight cold turkey. The thing is, because we never injected, I don’t think we were sort of—well, we were hooked, but I don’t think it was a great amount. Still, it was hard. Cold turkey is always hard.”
(Lennon's solo song 'Cold Turkey', recorded around August/September 1969 and released in October 1969, is obviously about quitting heroin)
So yes, at least according to one of their associates, the Beatles serially took advantage of the multitude of young women who wanted to get close to them, and treated such women rather shabbily. Additionally, there's a close relationship between childhood trauma and drug abuse. It's fairly unsurprising that John Lennon, in particular, who had experienced the death of his mother at a relatively early age, and whose father was absent, was prone to drug addictions as a way to dull emotional pain; as I quoted earlier, Lennon said in 1970 that 'I’ve always needed a drug to survive.'
The other two Beatles with childhoods that were notably difficult - McCartney, whose bond with Lennon was at least partially about the early deaths of their mothers, and Ringo Starr, who had a desperately poor upbringing and debilitatingly poor health as a child - also had long drug addictions, with Ringo spending much of the 1970s and 1980s an alcoholic until he entered rehab in 1988, and McCartney's prodigious marijuana habit being a fairly consistent factor in his life for decades (at significant personal cost, as he famously spent time in a Japanese jail in 1978 for bringing it into the country while on tour, and he was fairly regularly busted with it by law enforcement otherwise).
(1 / 3)
They slept around a lot and did a lot of drugs. If you haven't heard of it, you probably haven't read the right books about the group. While some books are more reliable than others, there's enough coming from corroborated sources, and often from their own mouths, that it's accepted as established fact.
John Lennon said in a 1975 interview with Tom Snyder, and quoted in the Beatles Anthology book:
"In the very early days, when we were playing dance halls, there were a certain type you'd call groupies now, available for 'functions' at the end of the night. Most kids would go home with their boyfriends or whatever, but there was a small group that went for any performer. They didn't care if it was a comedian or a man who ate glass, as long as he was on stage."
In the same book, Paul McCartney doesn't specifically say what went on, on tour, but is quoted as saying:
"There was a big period of freedom, which I always liken to God opening up the waves for Moses and then closing them again. AIDS has closed down the sexual freedom we had then, just as VD had shut it off for an earlier generation. I remember my dad saying he was quite envious of me because there was no longer any need to fear VD. It had been a major threat when he was a kid. We didn't have to worry about it - you just went down the clinic and got a jab. And all the girls were on the Pill, which removed another traditional worry, so we had an amazing sexual freedom."
Among groupies, they all slept around, especially on tour. Ringo Starr's first wife Maureen Cox, in fact, was something of an early groupie. As George Harrison's first wife Pattie Boyd wrote in her autobiography Wonderful Tonight:
"Ringo’s girlfriend, Maureen Cox, was also from Liverpool. She was a fan whose dream had come true. She had started out as one of the hundreds of teenage girls who queued day after day at the Cavern to get close to the front of the stage for the best possible view of the Beatles and in the hope that they might catch the eye of one. Every fan had a favorite, and Ringo was hers. She wouldn’t have called herself a fanatic—she would only queue, she said, for two or three hours while some girls were there all day—but she did run after Ringo in the street one day to get his autograph when she spotted him getting out of his car. She was seventeen, had just left school and was learning to be a hairdresser. Then, one day, it happened for her."
Pattie herself was another such sexual conquest. She was a nineteen-year-old extra on the film A Hard Day's Night and George asked her out. She had a boyfriend, but she broke it off with him to date George, and they became an item pretty much immediately. But, as she writes in her autobiography, George cheated on her throughout their relationship, especially on tour, with groupies.
In a 1970 interview with Rolling Stone magazine, John Lennon compared the Beatles' tours to the sexually-charged Federico Fellini film Satyricon:
"The Beatles' tours were like Fellini's Satyricon. If you could get on our tours, you were in. Wherever we went there was a whole scene going. When we hit town, we hit it, we were not pissing about. You know, there's photographs of me groveling about, crawling about in Amsterdam on my knees, coming out of whore-houses and things like that, and people saying, "Good morning, John," and all of that. And the police escorted me to the places because they never wanted a big scandal. I don't really want to talk about it because it will hurt Yoko, and it's not fair. Suffice it to say, just put it like they were Satyricon on tour and that's it, because I don't want to hurt the other people's girls, either, it's just not fair."
The Beatles' entourage (particularly roadies Mal Evans, Neil Aspinall) acted as interference whenever anybody tried to catch the Beatles in the act, whether that be drugs, or underage girls, or just paparazzi trying to snap a scandalous photo. There was only one time that any of them were actually caught in the act, and it was Paul. Paul was caught in his bedroom with a couple of underage girls on their tour stop in Minneapolis in 1965, and there's a rather infamous (in Beatles circles) surviving news report about it, where the police officer who caught Paul was interviewed. There were some news articles written about it at the time, but Paul was unmarried, and the scandal died down relatively quickly.
Nevertheless, Paul was in a serious relationship with actress Jane Asher when this occurred, and his serial cheating on her caused continuous problems during their rocky relationship. They were interviewed together in the 1968 biography The Beatles by Hunter Davies, while they were still together. There, they discussed (without saying it directly) that their short-lived breakup in 1965 was over Paul's cheating:
"'Another problem,' says Paul, 'was that my whole existence for so long centred round a bachelor life. I didn't treat women as most people do. I've always had a lot around, even when I've had a steady girl. My life generally has always been very lax, and not normal.
"'I knew it was selfish. It caused a few rows. Jane left me once and went off to Bristol to act. I said OK then, leave, I'll find someone else. It was shattering to be without her.' This was when he wrote 'I'm Looking Through You'."
Paul would later claim that they had something of an open relationship, which Jane has never responded publicly to, having refused all interviews about her time with Paul since shortly after their breakup in 1968. But according to various accounts, this wasn't true. Paul was sleeping with fans and friends of friends and not telling Jane about it, and trying his best not to get caught.
Peter Brown, an employee at the Beatles' company Apple Corps (and referenced in the song "The Ballad of John and Yoko") wrote a scandal-filled book The Love You Make that pissed off all the surviving Beatles, because he solicited scandalous stories from them and their friends, and published them, which they were not expecting. Some of his stories may be exaggerated, but they mostly seem to be true. Among the stories:
"One rare visitor to High Park was Alistair Taylor, the loyal office manager and general fixer at NEMS. Paul summoned Alistair to High Park so that he could pay a visit to the local pharmacy for him. According to Alistair, Paul had the crabs and needed a pesticide to shampoo with. Being Paul McCartney, the neighborhood celebrity, Paul was too embarrassed to ask the pharmacist in the small town for the pesticide himself, so he sent Alistair. There was also a sense of urgency to this mission, lest Paul give the tiny parasites to Jane, who would most certainly realize he had been unfaithful to her."
And in the same book:
"In fact, unknown to Jane, Paul had once “dated” one of Dunbar’s and Faithfull’s babysitters."
Philip Norman's biography Paul McCartney offers details on one of these babysitters:
"What [Jane] didn’t know, and never would, was that for almost the whole time they’d lived together at Cavendish he was having an affair with an actress and model named Maggie McGivern.
"In 1966, 20-year-old Maggie had been hired by John Dunbar and Marianne Faithfull as a nanny for their six-month-old son, Nicholas. ‘One day, John was out, Marianne was entertaining some of her girlfriends and I was cooking a casserole for their lunch,’ she recalls. ‘The front-door buzzer went and a voice said, “It’s Paul McCartney to see John.”...At that time, I was in a relationship I wanted to get out of, so I told Paul about that, and from what he said I gathered he was in a similar situation.’...
"The affair remained totally secret, even from her employers. Paul warned her especially not to confide in the gossipy, mischievous Marianne...
"Latterly, while still seeing Maggie McGivern, he’d begun another affair which, likewise, never got back to Jane..."
In Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney by Howard Sounes, the author quotes several different girls, one of them being a young, aspiring actress named Peggy Lipton, later to co-star on the TV series The Mod Squad:
"Though he still refrained from trying LSD, Paul did get laid in Los Angeles, according to starlet Peggy Lipton, his squeeze from his last trip to the coast. Paul invited her over to the house for dinner, to John’s amusement, as the actress recalls: ‘I got the idea that he thought Paul was an idiot to take a girl so seriously he’d actually invite her to dinner, when all he really needed to do was fuck her after dinner.’ Again, the chief point of interest is that Paul was prepared to cheat on Jane, whom he was still with. He’d just given her a diamond pendant for her 19th birthday, and was planning to move into Cavendish with her when the decorators were finished. Considering what was on offer to the Beatles, it would of course have been amazing had Paul remained faithful on the road, and it seems he was far from that."
Peggy Lipton is further quoted in the book about the incident:
"'I arrived almost sick to my stomach with butterflies. I had lost my virginity only six months earlier and I’d been thinking about Paul day-in, day-out for a year. He greeted me sweetly and checked me out with a quick once-over. He liked what he saw. We sat downstairs. He played the piano. The next thing I knew we were on our way upstairs [where] he took me in his arms and kissed me … I took a shower to slow things down and when I came out wrapped in a towel, he caressed me in front of the window and let the towel fall to the floor. This to me was an utterly romantic gesture. Paul was a romantic.'"
"Afterwards Peggy left the house feeling cheap. She returned the next day, though, clear evidence of Paul’s unfaithfulness to Jane Asher..."