The 23-year-old Yannis Alexis Mardas first arrived in England on a student visa in 1965, befriending
John Dunbar of the Indica Gallery in London, and later moving in with him in a flat on Bentinck Street, which was where Mardas first met Lennon. Known at this time as Yannis Mardas, he found employment as a television repairman. Dunbar later introduced Mardas to
Brian Jones, after Mardas exhibited his
Kinetic Light Sculptures at the Indica Gallery. Jones introduced Mardas to Lennon, and it was at this point that Mardas impressed Lennon with the
Nothing Box; a small plastic box with randomly blinking lights that Lennon would stare at for hours while under the influence of
LSD. Lennon later introduced the renamed John Alexis Mardas as his "new guru", calling him "Magic Alex". Mardas allegedly told Lennon about ideas for futuristic electronic devices he was "working on", which he later disavowed either promising or discussing: a telephone that responded to its owner's voice and could identify who was calling, a force field that would surround
the Beatles' homes, an X-ray camera, paint that would make anything invisible, car paint that would change colour by flicking a switch, and wallpaper speakers, which would actually be a part of the wallpaper. Mardas later asked for the
V-12 engines from Lennon's
Rolls-Royce and
George Harrison's
Ferrari Berlinetta car, so he could build a
flying saucer. Mardas had denied these in a formal statement. The Beatles set up a company for Mardas called Fiftyshapes Ltd. in September 1967; he later became one of the first employees of the newly formed
Apple Corps, earning £40 a week (equivalent to £ in ). and receiving 10% of any profits made from his inventions. The Beatles often called Mardas the "Greek wizard", and
Paul McCartney remembered being interested in his ideas: "'Well, if you [Mardas] could do that, we’d like one'. It was always, 'We'd like one. Mardas' ideas were not confined to the realms of electronic wizardry, but included songwriting involvement, with a Lennon–Mardas composition, "
What's the New Mary Jane", originally meant for inclusion on the Beatles'
self-titled double album (also known as the White Album). Lennon later removed Mardas' songwriting credit for unknown reasons. Mardas was given his own laboratory called Apple Electronics, at 34 Boston Place,
Westminster, London, and was helped to obtain a British work
visa. A mysterious fire at the laboratory prevented Mardas from presenting his inventions, but he later said: "I'm a rock gardener, and now I'm doing electronics. Maybe next year, I make films or poems. I have no formal training in any of these, but this is irrelevant".
Greece The Beatles had tried in 1964 to buy the Trinity Island, (Greek: Αγια Τριάδα), off the coast of the Greek island of
Euboea (resembling a guitar in shape) but the owners were not interested in a sale. Lennon was still interested in buying or leasing an island to live on together, and discussed it with the other Beatles on 19 July 1967. Mardas' father was a major in the Greek secret police, and Mardas explained that through him the Beatles would have access to Greek government connections, which would speed the acquisition of an island, because many islands did not have the right certificates of ownership and were subject to government restrictions. They eventually found what is referred to as the island of Leslo (although no Greek island is officially known by this name). The island had a small fishing village, four beaches, and a large olive grove. Four small neighbouring islands surrounded it (one for each Beatle). The Beatles sent Alistair Taylor back to London to handle the purchase of the island. Taylor received permission from the Greek government to purchase the island, and £90,000 of special "export dollars" required for the transaction were purchased. However, the Beatles changed their minds before the deal went through, and the export dollars were sold for a £11,400 profit a few months later when exchange rates went up (one of the few profitable business ventures for the Beatles).
Apple Boutique and marriage On 1 August 1967, Mardas, Aspinall and
Derek Taylor were invited by George Harrison to stay at the home of Robert Fitzpatrick on Blue Jay Way in Los Angeles, and on 7 August 1967, Harrison and his wife Pattie visited San Francisco's
Haight-Ashbury district with Mardas. The
Apple Boutique, at 94
Baker Street, London, was one of the first business ventures made by the Beatles' fledgling Apple Corps, and Mardas (at great expense) was commissioned to create one of his ideas: an "artificial sun" which would light up the night-time sky for the opening on 7 December 1967. When the time came for Mardas to demonstrate his artificial sun for the Beatles, he claimed that there was not a strong enough energy supply to power it; the Beatles accepted this explanation. Mardas appeared (uncredited) in the Beatles' TV movie
Magical Mystery Tour, which was first broadcast on
BBC1 on
Boxing Day in 1967. On 11 July 1968, 26-year-old Mardas married 22-year-old
Eufrosyne Doxiades (the daughter of a respected Greek architect) at
St Sophia's Church, London. Harrison and his wife attended, and Lennon (who was there with
Yoko Ono) was joint best man, along with
Donovan. Lennon replied that the Beatles (or Lennon and Harrison) were considering donating a large part of their income to the Maharishi's bank accounts in Switzerland. When Mardas questioned the Maharishi about this, he offered money to Mardas to build a high-powered radio station, so he could broadcast Maharishi's teachings to the whole of India. Alcohol was not allowed in the Maharishi's
ashram, but Mardas smuggled some in from
Dehra Dun, and later reported to Lennon and Harrison that the Maharishi had sex with a young American student, and had made a sexual advance toward
Mia Farrow. This was not supported in Farrow's autobiography
What Falls Away (1997), in which she wrote that she may have misinterpreted the supposed sexual advance. Mardas continued to insist the Maharishi was not what he said he was, making even Harrison unsure. Lennon mused in 1970: "Well, it must be true, because if George is doubting him, there must be something in it". Lennon and Harrison confronted the Maharishi, but the startled Maharishi's answers did not satisfy them, and they decided to leave the camp. Mardas insisted that they (Lennon, Harrison and their wives) must leave the camp at once, or the Maharishi might send down some "black magic" on them. Mardas then went down to Dehra Dun to organise taxis for the next morning to take them all to
Delhi. Cynthia Lennon personally believed that Mardas invented the story about sexual impropriety to undermine the Maharishi's influence on the Beatles, as Mardas was always jealous of anyone having Lennon's attention. Harrison and McCartney later offered their apologies to the Maharishi (McCartney said that he did not believe the accusation at all). In 2010, Mardas issued a statement to
The New York Times denying that he had spread rumours.
Lennon's divorce After returning to England in May 1968, Lennon suggested that Cynthia take a holiday in Greece with Mardas, Donovan, Boyd, and her sister. Lennon said that he would be very busy recording what would become
The White Album and that it would do her some good to take a break with Mardas, his girlfriend
Jenny Boyd, and others. Cynthia arrived home one day early from Greece on 22 May 1968. She and Mardas discovered Lennon and Yoko Ono sitting cross-legged on the floor, staring into each other's eyes, and found Ono's slippers outside the Lennons' marital bedroom door. Cynthia asked Boyd and Mardas if she could spend the night at their apartment. At the apartment Boyd went straight to bed, but Mardas got Cynthia drunk and tried to convince her that they should both run away together. After Cynthia had vomited in the bathroom she collapsed on a bed in the spare bedroom, but Mardas joined her and tried to kiss her until she (in her words) "pushed him away".
Brian Epstein's personal assistant,
Peter Brown, maintains that Cynthia did sleep with Mardas, saying: "She knew it was a mistake the moment it happened, especially with Alex [Mardas], whom she had never trusted, nor even liked". Lennon went to New York with McCartney shortly afterward, telling Cynthia she could not go with them, so she went on a trip to Italy with her mother. During Cynthia's holiday in Italy, an "agitated" Mardas unexpectedly arrived (pacing up and down outside her hotel until she returned) and gave the news that Lennon was planning to sue Cynthia for
divorce on grounds of
adultery, seek sole custody of Julian, and send Cynthia "back to Hoylake". Mardas also said that he intended to testify in court that Cynthia had committed adultery with him. She said in 2005: "The mere fact that Magic Alex [Mardas] arrived in Italy in the middle of the night without any prior knowledge of where I was staying made me extremely suspicious. I was being coerced into making it easy for John [Lennon] and Yoko to accuse me of doing something that would make them not look so bad".
Apple Studio Mardas had often said that the
Abbey Road studio was "no good", much to producer
George Martin's annoyance: "The trouble was that Alex was always coming to the studios to see what we were doing and to learn from it, while at the same time saying 'These people are so out of date.' But I found it very difficult to chuck him out, because the boys liked him so much. Since it was very obvious that I didn't, a minor schism developed". Mardas boasted that he could build a much better studio, with a 72-track
tape machine, instead of the 4-track at Abbey which was being updated at the time to an so he was given the job of designing the new Apple Studio in the basement of Apple headquarters on Savile Row. One of Mardas' more outrageous plans was to replace the
acoustic baffles around Starr's drums with an
invisible sonic force field. Starr remembered that Mardas bought some "huge" surplus computers from
British Aerospace, which were stored in his barn, but "they never left the barn", and were later sold as scrap metal. Mardas gave the Beatles regular reports of his progress, but when they required their new studio in January 1969, during the
Get Back project that became
Let It Be, they discovered an unusable studio: no 72-track tape deck (Mardas had reduced it to 16 tracks), no
soundproofing, no
talkback (
intercom) system, and not even a
patch bay to run the wiring between the control room and the 16 speakers that Mardas had fixed haphazardly to the walls. The only new piece of sound equipment present was a crude
mixing console which Mardas had built, which looked (in the words of Martin's assistant, Dave Harries) like "bits of wood and an old oscilloscope". The console was scrapped after just one session. Harrison said it was "chaos", and that they had to "rip it all out and start again," calling it "the biggest disaster of all time." Harrison's suspicions of Mardas' competence had been raised when he saw him wandering around in a white coat with a clipboard, and considered the possibility that Mardas had "just read the latest version of
Science Weekly, and used its ideas". Mardas later stated that he had never been in the basement of Savile Row, as the studio equipment he was building was being tested in Apple Electronics, at Boston Place, Marylebone. In the film
The Beatles: Get Back, Lennon wondered how he would play guitar with the strings of the bass against his hand, and noted that it was impossible to tune. After
Allen Klein was brought in to be the Beatles' manager in 1969, he closed Apple Electronics and Mardas left the company. It was later estimated that Mardas' ideas and projects had cost the Beatles at least £300,000 (£ in pounds if it was essentially spent in 1968). Starr once approved of one of Mardas' ideas: "He [Mardas] had an idea to stop people taping our records off the radio – you'd have to have a decoder to get the signal, and then we thought we could sell the time and put commercials on instead. We brought EMI and
Capitol in from America to look at it, but they weren't interested at all." According to author
Peter Doggett, in the Beatles' history, Mardas is the only individual who occupies a place close to Klein's in terms of vilification from commentators and biographers. ==Security consultant==