Living The Beatles Legend, by Ken Womack:
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At twenty-six, Mal was much older than the [Cavern's] usual lunchtime crowd [...] “I could sit there for three hours and think maybe 10 minutes had gone by.” Mal took special note of the three vocalists—John, Paul, and George: “They were very high-pitched and there was harmony.” By the time he made his way back up to the street, he was hooked: “I fell in love with them.”
In Lily’s memory, Brian’s job offer was an agonizing prospect for her husband. “He had a lot of sleepless nights, wondering if he should go on with them,” she recalled. “I didn’t want him to. I told him, ‘You’re a person in your own right—you don’t need to follow others.’ But he was starstruck.”
“I was still green at the job of roadie, and the Beatles had been very tolerant with the mistakes I made while settling in and learning my new trade,” Mal wrote. “Mind you, in the first week I worked with them, I was to be fired about seven times, as first one thing then the other went wrong.”
“I’ve been called many things in my life, but it was on the Italian trip that the people backstage called me ‘Mammut.’ I kept thinking it was an Italian version of my name, until I found out it meant mammoth! [...] Everyone I met seemed to be small of stature, and I would see three of them struggling with a heavy piece of equipment, and strolling over, [I'd] take it off them, hoist it on my own shoulders and walk away with it, so gaining my own little admiration society. They thought I was one of the strongest men in the world. And for quite a while after, I got called Mammoth, instead of Mal, by the Beatles.”
“Brian and Neil and I had developed this policy that we wouldn’t pose in photographs with the Beatles,” [Tony Barrow] recalled. “Fans wanted to take pictures of the band, and they didn’t want us hanging around beside the boys.” But Mal had clearly developed a yen, early on, for being as near as possible to the Beatles’ vortex of fame. The flashbulbs and the band’s celebrity were simply too much for him to resist. Consequently, said Tony, “Mal was always in the fucking photographs.”
[...]the Beatles had several more gigs at the Olympia, including a February 1 show where Paul nearly missed his cue, having become enchanted with a woman backstage. With the curtain about to go up, Neil nervously strapped on Paul’s Höfner bass and took his place onstage. At the last moment, Paul leapt into action. But Neil had been ready to make a go of it, and he later scrawled in Mal’s diary that he had been “quite prepared to fake it.”
Victoria recalled following him through “this big, dark club way into the back, and suddenly there’s Paul McCartney, who says, ‘Hello, Vicky.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I could die now and my life would be complete.’ And then we sit down, and Paul orders drinks, and he says, ‘Scotch and Coke, three doubles.’ And I’m thinking, ‘I’m seventeen. I’ve never had a single’.” Poignantly, during her conversation with the Beatle, she remembered looking over at Mal, and “I could tell that he was really happy because he knew what he was doing for me. You know, he knew he was giving me this memory that would last forever.”
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“[George Martin] admitted to me that when I first joined the group, he was a little antagonistic at somebody else getting close to the Beatles. I understood exactly what he meant, for I have the same feeling for them. One not only gets very protective, but a little selfish and jealous of anybody who gets close to them.”
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“Mal introduced me to my first drug dealer,” [Kevin Harrington] later recalled, “a lovely Caribbean man who lived in Notting Hill. I used to buy an ounce a week for £11, and was told by Mal to put it down on expenses as ‘sweets.’” On two separate occasions, Apple’s Wigmore Street bookkeeper questioned Kevin about the amount he was spending on sweets—that is, until Harrington told Mal about the hassle he was getting from the accounting department. The next time Kevin turned in his receipts for sweets, the bookkeeper merely smiled.
[Mal was] summoned to 7 Cavendish Avenue in the middle of the night after the fans who kept vigil outside Paul’s house dognapped Eddie, McCartney’s Yorkshire terrier. “Mal had to go to the police station to get him back,” Francie recalled. “The girls insisted they wouldn’t release the dog unless Paul came. I talked to them on the phone, and somehow they returned the poor thing. Paul was less upset than I was.”
[Jann] Haworth vividly recalled Mal’s good-natured attitude during their lengthy sessions to stage the cover art. “He was a very sweet person in a world of poseurs,” she said. “Where everyone else seemed fractious and self-serving, Mal was laid-back and genuine.”
“I stayed as close to Paul as I possibly could,” Mal added, although his efforts had nothing to do with protecting the Beatle’s safety. Rather, they were a clumsy attempt to ensure he was photographed along with such A-listers as McCartney and Redgrave. He tried as hard as he possibly could, “but Paul still got photographed by himself!”
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Mal understood that he was, in a sense, mothering the band members. “I was always making tea, sandwiches, or scrambled eggs,” he said, “just doing anything to look after them, to make sure we kept them working well. The whole thing was, ‘You make the music, and I’ll do anything in the world to make you comfortable’.”
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“I realized that Malcolm lived to please those guys, just like Hare Krishnas live to please their guru. It’s like, ‘I’m going to scrub the banisters, and I’m going to get down on my hands and knees and polish these steps. And then I’m going to do it again, because I want to serve the guru’. That’s how I believe Mal felt about serving the Beatles. They were his guru.” - Victoria, a young girl Mal had an affair with.
By now, despite living in the same city as Mal, Lily knew that she and the children would always come second. “And it was very hurtful,” she later said. Mal would ditch the family for even the slightest hint of Beatle business, and “I would cover up for him, saying, ‘Daddy has to be away for work.’ One day, we were all ready for a family outing to the zoo,” she recalled, “when George rang to ask Mal for a guitar string. Instead of insisting on taking his kids out, he drove off to see George. I couldn’t bear to see the disappointment on [the children’s] faces.”
For several days in advance of shooting the scene, the other, vastly more experienced actors on the set had relentlessly hazed Mal, predicting that he would botch his lines. [...] Ringo heroically came to his friend’s aid, volunteering, in a moment of sublime role reversal, to act as Mal’s “road manager for the day,” tending to his makeup, sating his hunger, and plying him with coffee and tea on the set. In the end, a determined Mal delivered his lines perfectly, admitting that “it was a good day for me, for I love being in front of the camera.”
At the hospital, Mal received fifteen stitches above his left eye, while Harry required several stitches in one of his cheeks. Initially, there was some concern that Mal might lose vision in his left eye. For Mal, there must have been “a guardian angel looking out for fools and drunks,” he reasoned after learning he would retain his sight. “It must have been funny for the hospital staff,” he added, “because when they were stitching me up, I remember lying on the table chanting the Hare Krishna mantra, feeling no pain whatsoever, but poor old Harry was having a terrible time on the next table, shouting and kicking.”
Harry Nilsson remembered a particularly madcap evening at the hotel when he spotted Mal attempting to console John, lost to another bender. “One night he was crying on Mal Evans’s shoulder, saying, ‘I was always a good boy. I was always a good boy,’” Nilsson recalled. “And Mal said, ‘Right brother, you were always a good boy.’ And I told him, ‘What is this horseshit? Stop being a baby. You’re being a baby.’ ‘Well, if you don’t like it, you can get the fuck out!’ John yelled. ‘Well, all right,’ and I slammed the door, and I was crying.”
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“I want the four of them to love my book. That’s my whole dream. My whole dream would be realised if they said, ‘I love what you’re doing’.”
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