And in the End

by Ken McNab

  *

  Mainland Italy and about six hundred Mediterranean miles separated George Harrison and Paul McCartney for the first two weeks of June 1969. But the disconnect between them was more than just geographical, it was musical and philosophical. In Harrison’s eyes, McCartney had behaved like a spoilt child over the past few months, spitting out his dummy because he couldn’t get his own way. Their caught-on-camera flare-up during the filming for ‘Get Back’ still left a bitter taste. And now they found themselves similarly divided over Allen Klein, the future of Apple and everything they had put their nervous systems on the line for.

  They were equally polarised over the future of The Beatles. McCartney couldn’t bear the prospect of life without the band he had invested so much in. Harrison frankly no longer cared if he never played again with the man he blamed for stifling his musical creativity, although he was always willing to throw his lot in with Lennon and Starr. Having written a song with Dylan and collaborated most recently with Cream, he had already glimpsed an alternative musical future, one where all the musicians were part of a cooperative rather than being under the heel of an autocratic bandleader. Their estrangement, professional and personal, was all the more poignant since they had started off as friends ‘growing up together playing guitar’. They were also on different pages domestically.

  McCartney was settled with a by-now five months pregnant Linda and had formed his own little nuclear family with her daughter Heather as a bulwark against the pressures of the outside world.

  Harrison, by contrast, was finding the walls of his four-year marriage to Pattie closing in. Temptation was a routine by-product of being a rock star and Harrison, a red-blooded man, as McCartney later testified, frequently indulged his own desires. Pattie, cuckolded in Kinfauns as a result of her husband’s adulterous dalliances, felt an icy chill blowing through their relationship. Harrison, by June 1969, had become bitter, withdrawn and was pulling the drawbridge up on his world. Very few were allowed inside, and Pattie wasn’t one of them any longer. More so since she simply could not match his obsession with meditation and Hinduism.

  She noted: ‘Things were not going well with The Beatles and he was bringing home bad vibes. We would argue and bicker, never reaching any conclusion so we were left feeling irritated with one another. He spent more and more time away from home – sometimes he wouldn’t get back until four or five in the morning. At others, not at all. When he wasn’t recording he would be at the Apple offices, which I knew was full of pretty girls. George was sexy, good-looking, witty and famous – an irresistible combination. He had never used aftershave in the past but since we had come back from India and the Maharishi, he had taken to wearing sandalwood oil, which I imagined was to attract other women. But if I accused him of anything he would deny it. He made me feel I was being unreasonable, nasty and suspicious . . . he didn’t really confide in me, he was so angry and he would just keep it all in. He was just angry, and didn’t want to talk about it.’

  Pattie hoped that a good holiday in the sun would thaw the frigid chill from their lives. On 1 June, the couple flew from Heathrow Airport to the island of Sardinia where Harrison had rented a luxury villa in the secluded coastal town of Costa Smeralda for himself, Pattie and Terry Doran, as well as Klaus Voormann, the German musician/artist who had been a close friend of George’s since the Hamburg Reeperbahn days.

  They travelled light, although Harrison’s guitar was rarely far from his sight. A committed sun worshipper, he was delighted to finally throw off the last vestiges of ‘a long cold lonely winter’ to feel the Mediterranean warmth on his back. And it provided the perfect setting for him to finish ‘Here Comes The Sun’, the song he had started a few weeks earlier while strolling in Clapton’s garden. The holiday also gave him the privacy he craved. During their time on the island, Harrison’s party remained pretty much free from media or fan intrusion. The only exception came when an Italian TV crew snatched some footage of George sitting lotus-like on a balcony while Pattie strolled round the grounds.

  Isolation, meantime, was also fundamental to McCartney’s month-long break on the Greek island of Corfu. The in-house fighting over Klein and the unyielding press speculation that The Beatles were finished had drained him of his sense of optimism. Nagging away was a feeling that he could no longer keep all the plates spinning. He had long stopped going to meetings at Savile Row, sending instead a lawyer to speak on his behalf. Apple, he felt, had become a prison, and Klein now had it in lockdown. He and Linda had never had a proper honeymoon but now the gap in all their schedules presented the right time for them to leave the pressures of Apple behind.

  Initially, in order to throw the paparazzi off the scent, McCartney hinted that they were heading to France. Instead, they travelled to the tiny fishing village of Benitses, which had become a favourite of Hollywood’s nouveau riche such as Warren Beatty, Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn and Paul Newman. For a month, until 16 June, the couple lived a low-key, almost frugal existence. Unlike Lennon, Harrison and Starr, who rarely went anywhere without an entourage in tow, McCartney only had Linda and Heather for company. And that was just enough.

  At first, the inevitable whispers from locals followed their arrival, but within days the visitors were able to stroll anonymously round the few shops and tavernas as the townsfolk discreetly turned a blind eye to the Beatle in their midst.

  Contact with Apple was non-existent. He didn’t even leave a forwarding number. Of course, he couldn’t escape his old life entirely. He continued his habit of buying British newspapers – and there, one day, staring back at him from a Montreal hotel bedroom, smiling benignly and clutching a symbolic rose with his Japanese wife beside him, was John Winston Ono Lennon. You had to laugh.

  Nevertheless, Benitses was, like the time he had spent at the Maharishi’s Ashram, a time-lapse moment. A lull amid the lunacy – and one that, according to seasoned observers, had arrived at the right time.

  Ray Connolly, a journalist on London’s Evening Standard, had a foot in both the Lennon and McCartney camps. He was liked and trusted by both of them, a neutrality that gave him privileged access to the world’s most exclusive showbiz club. Watching them close up, Connolly saw a friendship being torn asunder by circumstances that by now had spiralled out of control on either side.

  He told me: ‘Personally, I think they were all having a nervous breakdown at that point, round about June, especially John and Paul. They had always worked at a relentless pace and the need to come up with albums and singles so regularly was killing them. People today have simply no conception about the rate of the recording output up to Abbey Road in such a short space of time. It’s frightening when you look back.

  ‘It might have been a better idea for them to have taken, say, a year off after Let It Be, but of course they didn’t. Paul was a workaholic and he wanted them to get back in the studio. But by that time John had already decided he didn’t want to be a Beatle any more. He had made up his mind before they started work on Abbey Road. They were never out of the studio but the constant grind to come up with new albums and singles was killing them. I’ve long thought that. And I do think John and Paul were on the verge of nervous breakdowns, especially when you factor in all the business matters that were happening in the background. And then you have their own private lives, which were anything but private. John was with Yoko and Paul was with Linda and they were also an unwitting factor in pitting John and Paul against each other.’ Connolly’s observations were right on the money. The ripple effects from the internecine warfare had naturally fallen on partisan lines where their wives were concerned. Both Yoko and Linda were strong, independent women – and neither held back when the gloves came off over their menfolk and Klein.

  Linda said, ‘It was weird times. Allen Klein was stirring it up something awful. Between Allen Klein in one ear and Yoko in the other ear, they had John so spinning about Paul it was really quite heartbreaking. So stupid. It reminded me of the [Sergei] Eisenstein [early 1940s]
movie Ivan the Terrible; they were all whispering. It was like that with John; he was getting so bitter about Paul, and all Paul was saying was that he didn’t want to sign a big management contract with Allen Klein. Nothing to do with anything else.’

  Even outside their immediate circle, allies were being lost as Klein’s cost-cutting putsch continued. Peter Asher, brother of McCartney’s former fiancée Jane, was mourning the recent death of his father Richard when he got wind of Klein’s Apple coup – and promptly fled on 5 June. With him he took James Taylor, arguably the brightest star in the Apple Records firmament outwith The Beatles themselves. Angry that Asher had preempted his dismissal, Klein resorted to the age-old management tactics of threatening to sue Taylor for breach of contract until McCartney interceded on the latter’s behalf, arguing that Apple’s aim was to give artists freedom, not tether them to a punishing contract system.

  In an interview at the time Asher said, ‘I had a great affection for the way Apple used to be rather than the way it has now become. I have no wish to knock Apple, but I am simply not happy there any more . . . and that is the reason why I am leaving.’

  Years down the line, he expanded on his ill-feeling towards Klein. ‘Allen Klein was a very bad idea . . . I had spent some time in New York and knew of his reputation. I’d heard a lot about him and knew people who’d worked for him. I just didn’t think he was the right man for the job, that’s all. The Rolling Stones were already wary of him, so I didn’t think he’d work for The Beatles. The decision to leave wasn’t that difficult, really. James Taylor had already decided that he wanted to go back to America, and since I was a firm believer in his talents and was going to be his manager, I decided to take the gamble and go to the States, as well.’

  Thumbing through his own back pages, Taylor was less charitable when he laid bare his own thoughts in the pages of Rolling Stone: ‘That old craperoo, the bullshit music biz thing, is creeping in. I think The Beatles have discovered the business trip isn’t fun. You can’t goof off. I get the feeling Apple is like a rich toy. I’m bitter, I guess. I feel they’ve let me down.’

  Like Harrison and Lennon, McCartney had packed an acoustic guitar for his Corfu trip. One night he reached for it to complete a song that had been swirling inside his head for several months. He had already made a couple of half-hearted passes at ‘Every Night’ on 21 and 24 January at Twickenham Studios during the ‘Get Back’ sessions. He only had the first two lines and every word hinted at an aching, desperate plight. Four months down the line, though, and those pangs had been supplanted by the kind of domestic bliss he had long craved and found with Linda, a happiness that was reflected in the words that followed.

  He recalled the period in an interview with Mojo magazine. ‘It had been a heavy, difficult period, but meeting Linda and starting a family was the escape. I’d see there was life out there . . . I said, “How the hell am I ever going to get out of these heavy meetings? And it was, well, don’t go.” Ching. Brilliant plan! Boycott them. That was like the Idea of the Century. We did that, so they had to ring us up. “Oh, we’re going to have a meeting, what’s your decision?” No or whatever. We just escaped, got out of Dodge, went and enjoyed life.’ However, as his Benitses break wound down on 16 June, he had made his mind up over the future of The Beatles.

  By the time McCartney set foot back in Cavendish Avenue, Harrison was the only Beatle still on holiday, having headed for a brief stopover in Rome. No studio sessions had been earmarked but McCartney was prepared to take the first step, carefully traversing the landmines he knew lay ahead. Lennon, despite his hypedup public statements, was nevertheless right to be worried about money. No new music meant no new money. Those IOUs were still burning a hole in the Apple safe. And the taxman was waiting in the wings with reams of paper saying ‘You Owe Us Millions’.

  Swallowing hard on his misgivings, McCartney recognised Klein’s plan to renegotiate royalty rates with EMI and Capitol was fundamentally important. But this left him exposed to accusations of hypocrisy. On the one hand he wanted nothing to do with Klein; on the other, he was happy to benefit financially from any deals Klein might make. The solution, as it always did, lay in the studio. If his songwriting partner could be persuaded to resuscitate the band, no matter how reluctantly, Harrison and Starr would surely follow. But there would have to be some ground rules. No one wanted to return to the dark days of Twickenham. He had by now heard an acetate of the Glyn Johns-produced ‘Get Back’ album – and he didn’t hate it.

  He told music journalist Paul Du Noyer: ‘Listening to it one night in June, I thought, Jeez, this is brave, but it’s a great album. It really is just The Beatles stripped back, nothing but four guys in a room. Or five with Billy Preston. I remember getting a thrill ’cos I was in this empty, very white room listening to this album – very minimalist – and thinking, “Great, very impressed. This is gonna be a great album.”’

  Deep down, however, reservations remained that the Great British Record-Buying Public was not yet ready to ‘see The Beatles with their trousers down’. Tapping into that instinct, they ultimately baulked at releasing an album of unvarnished material showing the band at its self-indulgent worst.

  Lennon had already been back home for several days when McCartney returned from Greece. When they made contact, Paul wasted no time in pitching his idea to further delay ‘Get Back’ and instead agree to make a real album. Like they used to.

  ‘The idea was that we should put down the boxing gloves and make a really special album,’ said McCartney in the Beatles Anthology twenty-six years later. Harrison chimed in: ‘The feeling was that we should get back together and tidy the whole thing up.’

  Starr, just back from the West Indies but planning to round off the month with a few days in France with Maureen, was a shoo-in. Notionally, all sides of the square had been carefully reassembled. Now only one other familiar piece was needed to turn it into a familiar pentagon . . .

  *

  Lennon had returned home drained but elated from the Montreal bed-in. ‘Give Peace A Chance’ had gone from being a throwaway line to becoming almost an incantation – and that was before the song of the same name would seep into the public’s consciousness. Public exposure for the Lennons, however, had reached saturation point. At that moment, they were probably, for better or worse, the two most famous people on the planet.

  So what now? Like his bandmates, he was still officially on sabbatical for the rest of June. And he had taken a genuine shine to Yoko’s daughter Kyoko, who had innocently clambered over bedsheets in Montreal having become a mini-me celebrity in her own right. But his close attachment to the little girl had triggered an age-old guilt complex over the way he had neglected his own child, Julian. There he was playing happy families with another man’s child while his own son languished thousands of miles away with Cynthia, a sad by-product of a broken marriage and a broken home. So he came up with a spur-of-the-moment plan to whisk six-year-old Julian away for a traditional British seaside holiday that would attempt to mend broken fences. The idea was to take a road trip to Wales and then head up to Liverpool for a whistlestop tour of his Merseyside relatives. He could kill two birds with one stone – do the right thing by Julian and gently introduce Yoko to his inner family circle for the first time.

  Gripped by his customary impulsive eagerness, he then widened the circle to include a visit to his cousin, Stan Parkes, and aunt Mater in Edinburgh before heading up to Durness, the picturesque Highland village perched on the rugged coastline of Scotland’s northernmost fringes, where he and Stan had roamed happy and free for several adolescent summers.

  What’s more, he would drive all four of them – him, Yoko and the two kids – every step of the way, a happy-go-lucky quartet crammed into his Mini Cooper. The fact that he had barely been behind the wheel of a car since passing his test in 1965 mattered not a bit. Nor was the fact that, even with his glasses on, he was a myopically poor driver.

  Setting off on 23 June, the first part of t
he journey was uneventful. They pitched up at Tywyn, a seaside resort on Cardigan Bay on the west coast of Wales. They stayed the night in the Corbett Arms Hotel before starting on the next leg north to Liverpool. For all his good intentions, Lennon was aware he faced a frosty reception from the network of aunts, uncles and cousins who thought he had taken leave of his senses by ditching a homely, local lass for a weird Japanese artist. And, of course, there was no way to avoid the latest vainglorious stunt – John was on the front pages of every newspaper in the country almost every day. And was that really our nephew peering from beneath the shaggy, shoulder-length mane and thick beard, wondered his aunts.

  Nervously, Lennon arrived outside his aunt Harriet’s home – a property he had bought for her family in 1965 – in Gateacre Park Drive in the suburb of Woolton. A mile down the road lay St Peter’s Church, where, almost twelve years ago to the day, he had first encountered the musically precocious Paul McCartney. Take the same road in the other direction and you would eventually arrive at 251 Menlove Avenue and Mendips, the Thirties-built semi-detached house where he had been brought up by Harriet’s oldest sister Mimi.

  Harriet was his mother Julia’s youngest sibling, one of ‘five, fantastic, strong, beautiful, and intelligent Stanley women’, he later said. Those qualities, however, didn’t include a filter when it came to speaking their mind and Harriet, having been put in the picture by Mimi during several fraught phone calls, wasted little time in berating Lennon over his lifestyle and peculiar new bride. Not to mention the embarrassment he was bringing to the family name. Then there was the small matter of him putting his privates on parade on the cover of Two Virgins. Not even the prospect of using Julian as a kind of human shield offered him any protection.

  The temperature fell further when Yoko declined the offer of a roast dinner in favour of macrobiotic food they had brought with them from London. It was an inauspicious, though hardly surprising, start to his tour of the relatives.