The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  But this move cost Mary more of her health and energy. In the spring of 1956, those bouts of “indigestion” resurfaced and the harsh reality cast a shadow over her short-lived contentment. There was no denying it this time: the cancer was back. She’d probably known it was there all along but felt too good to deal with it.

  Yet, however much she suffered, Mary kept up appearances in an effort to counteract the inevitable. Work remained a perfect distraction. When midwifery proved too debilitating—which it did often now that the cancer flared up, wiping her out most days by noon—she reclaimed her old job as a health visitor for the Liverpool Corporation, while moonlighting at a clinic in the Dingle, a working-class ghetto. She even maintained an exhaustive regimen of housework: making the beds, washing the laundry, preparing the meals, cleaning the dishes, and vacuuming the rooms. It sometimes seemed as if she were able to defiantly squeeze out the last drops of reserve energy needed to tackle yet another punishing task. But at times the symptoms were too severe to keep hidden. Occasionally, she would yelp and double over, kneading her chest until the spasms passed. One day after school, Mike encountered her in an upstairs bedroom, sobbing, a silver crucifix clutched tightly in her fist.

  As the cancer spread unchecked, her stamina faded. Relatives vividly recall how Mary could barely get up the stairs to the bedroom without help. Pain and shortness of breath played havoc with her strength. In an attempt to staunch the metastasis of malignant cells, her doctor, gambling for time, ordered a mastectomy. Relatively assured of a successful outcome, Jim remained at work instead of accompanying Mary to the hospital. Once again, he asked his sister-in-law Dill Mohin to act as a chaperone, planning to visit soon after the Cotton Exchange closed. When on the morning of October, 30, 1956, Dill arrived at Forthlin Road, she found Mary scurrying around, putting the final touches on each room. Dill remembers thinking how the house looked like “a pin in paper,” which was the Scouse equivalent of “impeccably tidy.” The breakfast dishes were drying in the sink; wastebaskets had been emptied. Nothing was out of place. “She had all the boys’ things ready for the next day,” Dill recalls. “Their shirts were ironed, their underwear cleaned.”

  Standing back to admire her handiwork, Mary sighed and smiled sadly at her sister-in-law’s disapproving scowl. “Now everything’s ready for them,” she said, “in case I don’t come back.”

  By the next afternoon, her words were all too prophetic. The mastectomy had been successful—up to a point—but the cancer was entrenched; there was no hope. “We knew she was dying,” Dill Mohin recalls, explaining how the family now assembled to pay their last respects. “Jim rang me up [that afternoon] and said, ‘I’m bringing the boys to see you, Dill. I’m taking them in to see Mary for the last time. I’ve put clean shirts on them; they’ve got on their best clothes, their school ties. Their fingernails are clean; so are their teeth. Would you look them over for me? If they pass [inspection] with you, they’re all right.”

  The image Mary had cultivated so carefully was intact when Paul and Mike shuffled into her hospital room just after six o’clock on October 31. They had been groomed to perfection, “two little gentlemen,” and stood in sharp contrast to the “ghastly” figure of their bedridden mother that now struggled on an elbow to greet them. The operation had clearly ravaged Mary. Her usually open face was expressionless, rigid, grim; so dark were the circles under her eyes, so demonic and disfiguring, that a relative might have assumed they’d stumbled into the wrong room. Paul remembered that “there was blood on the sheets,” an image that never left him.

  Dill and Bill Mohin waited anxiously in the reception area “so that she would have a bit of time on her own with the boys.” When they finally joined the family, however, Dill noticed with astonishment that the boys “were romping all over her.” Mary, “putting on a brave face,” seemed not to mind—or was too sick to object. “Oh, leave them alone,” she said in response to her sister-in-law’s remonstrances. “They’re all right.” Jim, silent as a statue, stood stonily in the corner, his eyes flushed with tears, his face so anguished, laboring—fighting hard—to maintain his composure. Inconsolability was not a part of his character. His gift had always been optimism, an extra beacon of light thrown onto the path of adversity; friends and family relied on him to pump up their spirits, and he did, too, always without a qualm. Ever the salesman, he had immense strength and the right words at hand to reverse any dark mood. And yet all of it failed him now.

  That night, about 9:30, Jim arrived unannounced at the Eagle Hotel, on Paradise Street, where the Mohins were tending bar in the back room of their half-filled pub. He was physically wasted, empty. All he could manage to say was “She’s gone.” Mary had suffered an embolism and died shortly after the boys left.

  Paul reacted to the news with misplaced alarm—it is rumored he blurted out: “What are we going to do without her money?”—but there was no misjudging the depth of his loss. It was a devastating blow. “The big shock in my teenage years,” he was to say. Jim may have helped shape Paul’s early attitude toward music, but no one had the impact on him that Mary did. In later years, after he was fabulously wealthy and knighted before the Queen, Paul would often talk about success in terms of his mother’s encouragement “to do better” than her and Jim, to improve his circumstances. Suddenly, without her stabilizing presence, without her insight and pragmatism, he felt desperate.

  For weeks afterward, Paul bumped around the house “like a lost soul,” suffering the symptoms of an emotional free fall. He was aloof, unresponsive; when he spoke, it was through a smoke screen of feints and grunts. No one recalls ever seeing him sink so low. “I was determined not to let it affect me,” he said. “I learned to put a shell around me at that age.” For long stretches, sometimes hours, he would retreat into a cloud of silence. In all the upheaval, there was nothing, other than time, to bring him out of this depression.

  To fill the gaps, Paul turned to music. He threw himself into playing the guitar, practicing chords and finger positions for hours on end, but not in any way that expressed a sense of pleasure. It was more therapeutic, a release—less musical than remedial. There was never any intention of sharing it with someone else. “He used to lock himself in the toilet and play the guitar,” says Dill, who visited often in order to help Jim around the house. “It was the only place he could disengage himself from the tragedy.”

  Jim, who was himself heartbroken and threatening suicide, had nothing left in reserve for Paul. Dazed, in a state of emotional shock, he depended entirely on his sisters, Jin and Millie, to keep the family afloat. Millie arrived regularly to cook and help clean the house, but she was “much more straitlaced” than Jin, with an aversion “to showing her feelings” and “a very dour husband,” Paul’s uncle Albert, who had undergone “a bizarre personality change” in the navy that bordered on hostile. Jin Harris, on the other hand, was “the motherly aunt” whose manner was not dissimilar to that of Mary’s. A big, heavy woman with a cool head and an unchecked liberal philosophy, she knew intuitively that what the McCartney boys needed more than anything else was TLC. She showered them with attention, listened dutifully to them, indulged them, held and consoled them, devoting a lot of time and energy to the healing process. “There was no one better suited to picking up the pieces in Paul’s life,” according to her great-niece Kate Robbins. “She lived entirely through her heart.”

  But Paul’s and Mike’s anguish spilled out in other, more detrimental ways. Paul’s grades, which had already been compromised to a degree, slipped even further. Grudgingly, he put in the necessary effort—but barely. He “skivved off” classes with alarming regularity, paid little attention to homework, and basically ignored the requirements necessary to prepare him for O-level exams, which were critical to his future.

  In the midst of so much emotional turbulence, Paul quickly reached out for the one lifeline that held him in thrall: rock ’n roll. Listening to it for long stretches, escaping into its defiant tone and fancif
ul lyrics, took him away from the painful memories. Paul loved the improvisational aspect of it, and he loved mimicking its exaggerated nuances. Thanks to his ear for languages, it was easy to pick up the subtle inflections and shadings in the performances. Buddy Holly and Elvis, Chuck Berry, and even Carl Perkins—they had the magic, all right. He wanted to sound how they sounded, look how they looked, play how they played. Stretched across his bed, he would sink into a kind of reverie, staring out the window, not looking at anything in particular, not even thinking, but lulled by the music’s alchemy, hour after hour. There was nothing he could point to that supported a claim that music was anything more than a hobby, especially this music. His talent was at the service of some hidden energy. And yet at the center of this vortex was the desire to do something more with it. What or with whom, he wasn’t sure. But he sensed it was only a matter of time until it all came together and he put his own stamp on it.

  Eight months later, he met John Lennon.

  Chapter 5 A Simple Twist of Fete

  [I]

  The only real surprise about the 1957 St. Peter’s Church garden fete was that the Quarry Men were part of it.

  In the more than forty years that Woolton’s villagers had celebrated an event they commonly referred to as “the Rose Queen,” only marching bands had ever entertained. There was still a heroic glow, a natural emotional response, to all those ruddy-faced men in uniform playing stilted pop standards arranged as though they were meant to accompany the retreat at Dunkirk. The crowds who lined the church field each July cheered as a featured band pumped out all the good old songs, the melodies born in some distant smoke when husbands and fathers trooped off to defend the empire’s honor. But something had changed. The steady song of the men in blue failed to enchant their children, whose expanding world held little glamour for tradition. Bessie Shotton, Pete’s mother, convinced the church fete committee that a skiffle band would bridge the divide between young and old and proposed the Quarry Men—all but one of whom, she assured them, had been confirmed at St. Peter’s—as the obvious choice.

  The boys were understandably ecstatic. The garden fete (Scousers pronounced it fate) was “the biggest social event on the village calendar,” a church fund-raiser that coincided with the feast of St. Peter, for which the entire community turned out. In addition to performing, the Quarry Men were offered another distinction: riding in the annual procession, a parade of decorative floats presenting the Rose Queen and her entourage that threaded lazily through the village streets while members of the Discoverers, as the church youth club was known, worked the pliant crowd for contributions.

  The band clambered onto a flatbed truck that departed the church slightly after two o’clock on the afternoon of July 6. They were conveniently positioned at the rear end of the cavalcade, so far from the front car that they barely even heard the Band of the Cheshire Yeomanry, which led the procession. With a stretch, they could see the young queen herself, a sunstruck rosebud named Sally Wright, whose pink crinoline dress had wilted like gardenia petals in the sticky heat. Behind her, Susan Dixon, fourteen, whose reign was ending, waved at the crowd with the poise of a forty-year-old. Children in elaborate costumes, along with groups of Boy Scouts, Brownies, Girl Guides, and Cubs, perched gaily atop the floats, dangling their legs over the sides like fringe.

  The Quarry Men began to play as the procession turned onto King’s Drive, but it was clear from the start that even their staging was in disarray. “John packed it in straightaway,” Colin Hanton explains, “because people in the crowd were only getting [to hear] a couple strums as we [went by]. He, Eric, and Len just gave up; they fenced with each other, horsing around, which left it to Rod on the banjo and me on drums, just making a noise until we got back to the [church].”

  By that time, St. Peter’s was engulfed with people: clusters of adults, teenage couples, and children spilled rhythmically across the narrow courtyard and beyond it onto the graveled path that separated the sanctuary from the dilapidated church hall. A smell of circus lingered in the heavy blanched air. Long tables had been set up on the grass, teetering with sandwiches and cakes. Lemonade stands were posted at either end, diagonally across from a plywood booth where children, their bodies nicely poised in liftoff, leaned strategically over a rope in an effort to land wooden rings on the necks of milk bottles. There were literally dozens of such stalls on the field out behind the church: dart games, coin tosses, quoits, and a treasure hunt. Used books were stacked for sale, as were lacquered candy apples, handkerchiefs and scarves, even household bric-a-brac.

  Legend has it that the lads, anxious about playing in front of such a familiar crowd, decided to lubricate their nerves with a few hastily downed beers, but that simply isn’t true. “John wasn’t drinking, certainly not that day,” Colin Hanton insists. None of the other musicians recall there being any alcohol, either. Eyewitnesses say that John and Pete Shotton traveled together for a while but separated when John ran into his twelve-year-old cousin, David Birch, who had come to hear him play.

  Birch reported seeing John’s mother and Aunt Mimi somewhere on the grounds, which, unbeknownst to the younger boy, set off an alarm. Earlier that morning Mimi had castigated John for “coming downstairs dressed like a Teddy boy,” in skintight jeans and a checkered shirt, and that was one scene he preferred not to have replayed in public, if it could be avoided. Instead, the boys drifted in the opposite direction to watch a Liverpool police dog obedience display, featuring Alsatians trained to jump through fire-encrusted hoops.

  About four o’clock, the band was introduced by the vicar himself, “a simple soul” of weatherproof rightness named Maurice Pryce-Jones. Though accounts differ somewhat, this appears to be what happened next: The Quarry Men played a spirited set of songs—half skiffle, half rock ’n roll—that was greeted enthusiastically by the wide-eyed youngsters who had pressed around the stage. “The singing got raunchier and raunchier,” recalls someone who was standing in the crowd, “and the sound got louder and louder.” John recalled: “It was the first day I did ‘Be-Bop-A-Lula’ live on stage,” and one can only imagine how he cut loose on it. He also mangled a version of “Come Go with Me” to hilarious effect.

  At some point Julia heard the music and dragged Mimi with her to investigate. John’s radar picked his aunt right out of the crowd, though he misread her stunned reaction for dismay. “I couldn’t take my eyes off him,” she told a writer as late as 1984. “I was pleased as punch to see him up there.” And yet in a different rendering, Mimi claimed she “was horrified to behold [John] standing in front of the microphone.” Either way, her presence threw John slightly off balance, and aside from a little wordplay that incorporated Mimi cleverly into a lyric, he toned down the remainder of the performance.

  Shortly before they were finished, both Eric Griffiths and Pete Shotton noticed Ivan Vaughan standing below them, off to the right of the stage, with another boy in tow. They were both particularly happy to see Ivy—a dear, charismatic, unflagging friend and occasional member of the Quarry Men, who stood in for Len Garry when he was unavailable to rehearse. Smiles were exchanged, and somewhere in the communication it was understood that they would all hook up with one another after the show.

  Afterward, in the Scout hut, Ivan came in like a cannon. He said hello to everyone, then introduced his friend from school—Paul McCartney. Everyone glanced up from around a table, where they were having coffee, and nodded perfunctorily. Colin Hanton remembers, “I was sitting off by myself, just playing drums; a couple of older Boy Scouts were playing their bugles and just messing about. But it was clear once Ivan and Paul got around to John, there was a lot of ‘checking out’ being done.”

  Len Garry recalled: “There was a bit of a stony atmosphere at first…. Ivan had told John about Paul being a great guitarist, so he felt a bit threatened.” And Pete Shotton noted that John, who was “notoriously wary of strangers… acted, at first, almost standoffish.” John’s eyes slit to pin Paul fast in the taupey lampli
t room. McCartney, who was younger and looked it, wore an outfit that required a little getting used to: a white sport coat with an underweave of fine silvery thread that sparkled, depending upon how the light hit it. The jacket, which was meant to convey a cheeky, debonair look, seemed almost comical on Paul, whose body was helplessly plump, his moonface putty-soft and pale. He had beautiful eyes, though, like a spaniel’s, and his spunk was jacked up several notches, almost to the point of being cocky for a boy who was, for all intents, on foreign turf.

  Curiously, Paul had brought his guitar along with him. Sensing an opportunity, he stole the spotlight, running through a version of Eddie Cochran’s “Twenty Flight Rock,” complete with the sibilant rockabilly phrasing and an Elvisy catch in his throat. “He played with a cool, authoritative touch,” recalls Nigel Walley. There is a tricky little downshift in the chord progression when the chorus, played in the key of G, drops in a difficult F chord, and Paul handled it effortlessly, vamping on the guitar strings with the heel of his hand. He had also succeeded in memorizing the lyrics, which was no mean feat, considering how Cochran jammed them up against one another in the galloping minute-and-three-quarters-length song. His voice almost hiccuped the chorus: