5. The mystery of the Beatles’ ‘personal boffin’ Magic Alex
Alexis Mardas has faced suspicion about his activities both during and after his time with the Beatles – but some of those who met him speak of his ‘genius’ and charm
Alexis Mardas returned to Greece permanently from 1997. He had a house on the island of Hydra. Image: Marko Verch on Flickr / CC BY 2.0
In 1967 Greece wasn’t the most obvious destination for the Beatles to visit. And they may well not have gone there were it not for the influence of their Greek friend (and soon to be employee) Alexis Mardas. But despite Mardas becoming an important part of the Beatles’ lives and work at this time, there’s still a lot that we don’t know about him.
As summer that year approached, the Beatles were discussing the possibility of living communally, recalls Derek Taylor, a publicist for the group, in his autobiography Fifty Years Adrift (1984). But according to him, the mooted location was East Anglia rather than the Aegean:
"We were all going to live together now, in a huge estate. The four Beatles and Brian [Epstein, their manager] would have their network at the centre of the compound: a dome of glass and iron tracery (not unlike the old Crystal Palace) above the mutual creative/play area from which arbours and avenues would lead off like spokes from a wheel to the four vast and incredibly beautiful separate living units. In the outer grounds, the houses of the inner clique…complete with partners, families and friends. Norfolk, perhaps; there was a lot of empty land there. What an idea!"
This idea seems to have been driven mainly by John Lennon (who earlier that year had already bought the island of Dorinish off the coast of Ireland). And it was apparently through the influence of Mardas on Lennon that the group begun to think about locating this planned residence in Greece.
According to Paul McCartney’s biographer Barry Miles1: "Alex seized on John's dream as a way to get involved with the Beatles and their finances. He quickly sold the idea to John that the Beatles' compound should be on a Greek island."
Yiannis Alexis Mardas is said to have arrived in London in 1965 on a student visa, where he found work repairing TVs. Through a mutual acquaintance2 he met John Dunbar, co-owner of the Indica bookshop and its sister gallery – hubs of the city’s avant-garde culture. Mardas had a strong interest in electronics, which apparently intrigued Dunbar. The two began working together on projects such as providing the lighting for a Rolling Stones tour of Europe, and shared a flat.
John Dunbar was also a friend of the Beatles, which is how Mardas met them. Mardas is said to have entertained the group, and John Lennon in particular, by making gadgets such as a box with randomly flashing lights. "It was just a fun object with no practical application but seemed incredibly amusing to someone on an acid trip," writes Miles. Lennon dubbed Mardas ‘Magic Alex’ and called him his ‘guru’; before long Mardas had established a place in the group's inner circle.
According to Peter Brown (who was then working as a personal assistant to the Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein) John Lennon's wife Cynthia was immediately wary of the way Mardas sought John’s attention3:
"Although it was decidedly not sexual, Alex courted John like any female power-and-stardom groupie she had ever observed at work around the Beatles. He became John's unshakeable, constant companion."
Brown also recalls that Mardas had a way with words: "Alex, as he was called, spoke heavily accented English at breakneck speed, although his tongue tripped over every syllable. His accent, however, was no impediment to his gift for gab.”
As well as delighting the group with his thoughts about what wondrous gadgets it would be possible to create, Mardas reportedly spoke of having high-level connections in Greece. Some accounts say that he claimed to know Prince Philip, others that he said his father was an officer in the Greek military police. According to George Harrison (in The Beatles Anthology book) "His dad was something to do with the military in Greece, and Alex knew all the military there, very strange."
Soon Mardas was in discussions about joining Apple – the new company then being created to manage the Beatles’ rapidly expanding business ventures – to run its electronics division. Stephen Maltz, who was the group’s accountant and later became Apple’s business and financial manager, recalls his impression of Mardas in his book The Beatles, Apple and Me:
"I was told that he was an electronics genius and that he made amusing electronic toys for the boys...He was a very friendly, likeable person but with a rather naive view of the world".
When they met in June, Mardas told Maltz that his experience included receiving electronics training in Germany and Sweden, and that he had (in Maltz’ words) "worked for a time in the Atomic Research Centre in Greece as an electronic engineer".
After the Greek island plans fell through, Mardas was indeed recruited to head Apple’s electronics department when the company launched in 1968. A Daily Mail article that year hailed him as the Beatles’ “personal boffin”. It said that Mardas, the “son of a Greek ex-general”, “wears a white doctor’s coat and works in a tiny London mews house trying to make millions of pounds for [the Beatles]”. Inventions the article attributed to him include an electronic camera, a “record jammer”, intended to stop people tape-recording records, and a “composing typewriter”, which we would now call voice recognition technology.
Mardas also makes a brief appearance about four minutes into this promotional film for Apple Electronics from the time:
But he fell out of favour from 1969 once the US businessman Allen Klein took charge of Apple. Mardas was blamed for problems with a planned new studio for the group, which was rejected as unusable, and left the company. From the 1970s, he ran his own electronics and defence companies, supplying governments around the world with technology and equipment. He returned to live permanently Greece in 1997, with a house on the island of Hydra, and died in Athens in 2017.
Dispute with the media
Magic Alex has often been portrayed with scepticism by those writing about the Beatles, with some suggesting he made exaggerated claims about his ideas. There has also been controversy over his later business activities. In 1978 the Times reported that three bullet-proof Mercedes limousines had been returned by the Sultan of Oman to Night Vision Systems, a company run by Mardas, because the security they provided was “just not good enough”.
But in 2008 Mardas pushed back against his critics, bringing a libel claim against the New York Times and the International Herald Tribune for referring to him as a “supposed inventor and charlatan”. In a statement published by the New York Times in 2010, Mardas argued that he had been “seriously defamed” by a number of media articles and claimed to have “invented a large number of electronic devices”, such as those listed in the 1968 Daily Mail article:
“It must be remembered that none of these had even been thought about by others at the time, although most of them are now in common use… All these products were invented by me and we were in the process of patenting most of them in the United States.”
Mardas also denied that he had ever promised or even discussed various ideas previously linked to him, such as “magic paint” that would make objects invisible and an X-ray camera that could see through walls. He added: “The suggestion that I constructed a studio that was ‘unusable and of hopelessly poor quality’ is a complete fabrication.”
The statement also says that after leaving Apple, Mardas’ work included supplying numerous governments with electronic equipment, armoured cars and bullet proof vests. “As a result of these connections, I developed personal friendships with the kings of Greece, Jordan, Spain, Morocco, South Africa, Iran, Singapore, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Jordan and the United Arab Emirates.”
‘Theoretical genius’
Such connections were presumably helped by the personal magnetism which those who met Mardas speak of. In his book You Never Give Me Your Money, Beatles biographer Peter Doggett describes him as “charming, debonair and persuasive”. And when I spoke to Stephen Maltz (the Beatles’ accountant in 1967 and later the finance director of Apple) in 2017 I, he described Mardas as a "great person":
"He was a theoretical genius. He wasn't very practical, but his ideas were well ahead of their time… I always got on very, very well with him. He was a nice person."
Maltz acknowledged that Mardas was “a bit of a dreamer” but said he believed the inventor had sometimes been unfairly portrayed. He told me he didn’t know much about Mardas’ background, except that he had experience in electronics, and he never knew whether his father worked for the Greek state (the subject “never really came up”).
Scheming or naïve, unreliable or visionary – Mardas has left contradictory impressions on people, and much remains mysterious about him. It’s sometimes difficult to separate fact and rumour about his life. There’s no clear evidence I’ve seen that his father worked for the Greek state, for example. And there’s even some confusion over the story of the flashing light box said to have captivated John Lennon. A device that sounds very similar to this, the ‘Nothing Box’, was sold by the US company Hammacher Schlemmer from the early 1960s. The box was covered by the New Yorker in 1962, and John Lennon was photographed holding one in 1965, soon after returning from the Beatles’ US tour that year. This was presumably before Lennon had met Mardas.
It would certainly be interesting to know more about Mardas’ background before coming to London. It’s not every day that a TV repair man gets involved in planning possible overseas property investment for the world’s most famous pop group. And what’s more, according to some accounts Mardas played a significant role in discussions with Greece’s government about the Beatles’ visit to the country – more about that soon.
In his authorised Paul McCartney biography, Many Years from Now (1997)
Mardas is said to have met Dunbar through the artist Liliane Lijn, who exhibited work at the Indica gallery
In his book The Love You Make (1983)