by Peter Brown
“And then, who knows, the guys might feel like playing,” he said to me in 1987. “You never know, the Beatles might feel like getting back together. But I mean, we’d do it very privately. If we were ever to do it, we’d just have to record some tracks, really. If anything good came out of it, there’d be no one more pleased than myself: ‘Great, almost some new Beatle music.’ Although, obviously, you can never re-form the Beatles, because of John. I hate people who ask that—just blindly like that. It’s a bit idiotic.... But the three guys—the other two guys and myself—you think of it, we are the basic rhythm section. It is there: bass, drums and guitar. So it’s interesting that that still exists.”
The day after I did that interview with McCartney, the notion of a possible Beatles reunion came up with George Harrison. Predictably, his outlook on it was far less sanguine than McCartney’s. He was explaining to me why he didn’t perform at Live Aid, even though he was invited, when he raised the issue. “And also, you know, I have a problem, I must admit when people try to get the Beatles together,” he said. “They’re still suggesting it, even though John is dead. They still come and say, Why don’t the Beatles get together?’ Well, the Beatles can’t.”
But of course, the Beatles could. It happened when, for the Beatles Anthology project, McCartney, Harrison, and Starr performed along with homemade demos that Lennon had recorded and that Yoko provided to them. That electronically enhanced reunion was not perfect, needless to say. The new music was slight, if appealing, and in the filmed footage of the recording sessions, Harrison’s discomfort around McCartney was palpable.
But the three-volume double-CD Anthology series—and the lengthy documentary, broadcast on network television in the U.S, that accompanied them—were one of the music industry’s great success stories of the nineties. Indeed, remarkable as it may seem, the Beatles have proved to be one of the bestselling bands of the past ten years. Released in 2000, and titled simply 1, the collection of the band’s number-one singles became an international sensation, rising to number one itself in no fewer than thirty-four countries. In addition, the band’s oral history, also called The Beatles Anthology, hit number one on the New York Times bestseller list in 2000, an extraordinary achievement for a coffee-table book priced at $60.
So while it may have seemed that the Beatles were truly finished when Lennon died, they have achieved a miraculous life after death since then. The Beatles are arguably more popular now than they were even during the group’s lifetime. It’s safe to say that probably no one is happier about that than Paul McCartney, who never shared Lennon’s and Harrison’s ambivalence about the band. “I did always love it,” he said of being in the Beatles when I interviewed him for Rolling Stone last year. “Sure you go through things—fame is very difficult to deal with. I think George once said, ‘It cost me my nervous system,’ and I know exactly what he means. But I try and rationalize things—that’s my way. You wanted to get famous and rich. What did you expect? You expected it to be the same as being infamous and poor? So I accepted it.” More than merely accepting it, he reveled in it. And as I write this, he is touring America, playing Beatles songs to packed arenas filled with adoring fans and having a great time doing it.
There no longer can be any talk of a Beatles reunion in any configuration, however. George Harrison’s death from cancer in November 2001 destroyed the sturdily triangular “basic rhythm section” that McCartney evoked so hopefully in 1987, and now only McCartney and Starr remain. Moreso even than Lennon’s death, Harrison’s passing was a cold intimation of mortality to the generation that grew up along with the Beatles. The youngest member of the band, Harrison died at fifty-eight not because of a dramatic street shooting, but from natural causes. And the surviving Beatles are no longer lads. McCartney, forever enshrined in the world’s consciousness as the cherub-faced cute one, turns sixty this year. Starr is already sixty-one. It is many, many years ago now that Sgt. Pepper taught the band to play.
But the Beatles’ story will never die. People will return to it over and over again, just as they have in the more than three decades that have passed since the band’s breakup. Part of the reason for that is the sheer quality of the band’s work. Writing about the Beatles in the Rolling Stone Album Guide, critic Paul Evans stated it perfectly: “Theirs is the final, great consensus in popular music,” he wrote, “not liking them is as perverse as not liking the sun.” We all believe in Beatles.
But as The Love You Make conveys so compellingly, the narrative of the Beatles’ story traces a difficult, if all too uncomfortably familiar, path. What began with such innocence and optimism—the ecstatic “whoos” of “She Loves You,” the resounding chord that opens “A Hard Day’s Night”—ended in such a morass of bitterness and suspicion. The group that had once declared, “I don’t care too much for money/Money can’t buy me love,” now wearily complained, in the final minutes of Abbey Road, that “You never give me your money/You only give me your funny paper/And in the middle of negotiations/You break down.”
It is the story of so many love affairs, of so many relationships that seemed as if they could never go wrong, and then did. “I want a divorce,” Lennon insisted, and he could not have chosen a more telling image. The breakup of the Beatles was the shattering of a cultural family, and it left the same scars that divorce does in the lives of ordinary people. The children and the former partners inevitably and determinedly get on with their lives. But somewhere among them, hidden in the secret places of the heart, remains the fantasy that the family will reunite again, that the circle will not be forever broken.
Each time we return to the story of the Beatles, it is always with the silent wish that somehow things will turn out different, better, this time. It seems impossible that those four boys in the back of the van, fighting off their fears in a call and response game that ended with their screaming in unison that they were going to “the toppermost of the poppermost,” would end up singing about having to “carry that weight a long time.”
In a brilliant Saturday Night Live skit, the late Chris Farley, playing the hopelessly earnest host of The Chris Farley Show, interviews Paul McCartney and asks him if it’s really true that “The love you take/Is equal to the love you make.” “Yes, Chris, in my experience it is,” McCartney answers, inspiring an ecstatic Farley to point at him wildly and mouth, “Awesome!” to the audience.
It is an awesome idea, and one that turned out to be the Beatles’ epitaph. It can seem glib, as easy a formulation as it is a rhyme. But there is an unsettling element of challenge in it, one that is difficult to face if you are truly honest with yourself. Have you really been so generous and good-hearted a person that you would be pleased to get in return only as much love as you freely gave? This “Insider’s Story of the Beatles,” then, is a story that is inside all of us. And that’s why it is as valuable now as when it first came out, if not moreso.
—Anthony DeCurtis
New York City
April 2002
introduction
Peter Brown first introduced me to John Lennon in autumn of 1974. At the time I was “Top of the Pop” columnist for the New York Sunday News, and Peter was president of the Robert Stigwood Organization, which was producing a show called Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on Broadway. Peter was associated with the Beatles from their beginnings in Liverpool until 1970, when he joined the Robert Stigwood Organization. His positions with the Beatles included a directorship of NEMS, their management company; member of the board of directors of Beatles and Co., their partnership company; and chief operating officer of Apple Corp., their famed and ill-fated financial empire. The best man at John and Yoko Ono’s wedding, he was also a close and trusted personal friend. As a favor to Peter, John Lennon agreed to lend his support to Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on Broadway by attending a press conference at the Beacon Theater and giving a few select interviews. I was one of the lucky journalists.
After my interview with terse and inti
midating John Lennon, Peter and I rode downtown to the East Village in his chauffeur-driven Mercedes to watch a rehearsal of the show in progress. On the way down I tried to extract a few anecdotes from Peter about his Beatles days, but he was reticent. He explained that no one who was closely associated with the Beatles ever gave interviews about them. Over the years a code of silence had grown among the Beatles immediate clan that was strong as any secret society, like a Liverpool Mafia. Peter said that Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ famous manager, even made his employees sign a confidentiality pledge never to give interviews or talk about their work. “That’s a pity,” I remember telling him as I got out of his car. “You could write a fascinating book. If you ever decide to do it, call me.”
By 1979 Peter Brown was producing movies in Los Angeles and was by then besieged with offers for projects about the Beatles. There were various plays and musicals, book and script offers, and positions as “special advisor” on films and documentaries. There were several offers for TV specials and requests to be interviewed on talk shows. Except for a rare and guarded interview with legitimate journalists, Peter refused all these requests. Over the years he read each of the multitude of books, watched the movies and TV shows, and listened to the experts expounding on what had happened. A few were vaguely accurate, most were grossly incorrect. Even Philip Norman’s formidably documented Shout!, told only the public story but not the real reasons why it all happened as it did. That was partly because of the silence code, and partly because there were only a handful of people left alive who could tell the real story if they chose to: those people were John; Paul; George; Ringo; the “fifth Beatle,” road manager Neil Aspinall; and Peter Brown himself.
I was therefore delighted when in October of 1979 Peter asked me to write this book with him. We agreed it was not to be a tedious documentary, or the definitive Beatles’ biography that included a reference to each and every personal appearance, nor a musical analysis, but a dramatic insider’s look at the saga of the Beatles’ lives.1 Over the next three years Peter Brown led me on an odyssey through England and the United States, unlocking doors, making introductions, arranging and assisting in interviews, and making available to me personal files and documents and diaries never before seen by the public. Under Peter’s auspices I not only became privy to the Beatles’ secrets but was slowly accepted into their inner circle. Cynthia Lennon, in particular, became a close friend and confidante, as did Neil Aspinall, who spent long hours with me in revealing conversation. I hope I have served them both well in these pages.
Peter Brown and I would like to thank the many people who sacrificed their time and privacy to add to the truth. John Lennon gave us his blessings. Yoko Ono was gracious and helpful during the long preparation of this book, including many hours of direct interviews. John’s tragic death—halfway through the writing—only strengthened her conviction to help, which included giving Peter the use of her Palm Beach estate while we were writing the book. Paul and Linda McCartney also gave wholeheartedly of their time and trust. Paul invited us into his home and spent several days with us in Sussex and in London cooperating on the most sensitive material. George Harrison, perhaps the most private Beatle of all, invited us to his Friar Park estate at Henley on the Thames for a rare and open interview. Our gratitude also to Ringo Starr, for his long and candid interview.
We would also like to thank for their first-time-ever taped interviews, Neil Aspinall, the Beatles’ aide-de-camp and closest friend; Maureen Starkey, Ringo’s first wife; Pattie Harrison Clapton, George’s first wife; and Alexis “Magic Alex” Mardas, who gave us nearly seven hours of his never-before-told experiences with the Beatles and the Maharishi.
Special thanks to Cynthia Lennon, who trusted us with the story of her heart as well as her marriage, and to Queenie Epstein, who painfully relived Brian’s life for us as a gesture of her love for Peter Brown.
Peter Brown and I would also like to thank the following people, many of whom patiently agreed to three or four interviews: Derek Taylor, Allen Klein, Clive Epstein, Nat Weiss, Rex Makin, Hunter Davies, Robert Frazer, Geoffrey Ellis, Vic Lewis, Jenny Boyd Fleetwood, Allan Williams, Bob Wooler, Roman O‘Rahilly, Ray Connolly, Martin Polden, Harry Pinsker, Stella Shamoo Dana, Ken Partridge, David Shaw, Ron Kass, Cilla Black, Bobby Willis, Robert Stigwood, Vyvienne Moynihan, Bruce Omrod, Terry Doran, David Puttnam, Alistair Taylor, John Eastman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, Martin Wesson, Barbara Bennett, John Lyndon, Victor Spinetti, Tony King, May Pang, Laurie McCaffrey, Arma Andon, Tony Bramwell, Dick James, Wendy Hanson, Lionel Bart, Tommy Nutter, John Dunbar, Leonard Richenberg, Al Aronowitz, David Nutter, Dan Richter, Sean O’Mahoney, and Mick Jagger.
My personal thanks to Leslie Meredith, Nancy Rosenthal, David Hollander, and Marvin Olshan.
Finally, I would like to thank my agent, John Hawkins, for his selfless effort and guidance; Joseph Olshan for his astute editorial suggestions and unflagging support; and my wise and savvy editor, Gladys Justin Carr, who kept the spirit of this book and the author alive through many arduous times.
—Steven Gaines
Wainscott, New York, 1982
chapter One
I was able to observe the whirlpool of events without drowning ...
—Cynthia Lennon Bassanini Twist
1
It took her breath away, catching them like that. Oh, she had been expecting it, almost hoping it would happen for years now; but still, when Cynthia Lennon returned home from a two-week vacation in Greece on a warm, sunny afternoon in May of 1968 and found her husband and the petite Japanese artist named Yoko Ono having breakfast in their bathrobes, she was struck mute. She tried to say something witty and self-possessed, but when she opened her mouth to speak she realized she couldn’t even breathe. It wasn’t that she was so surprised it was Yoko Ono, only that the moment was so casual, so cruel.
It was nearly four o’clock in the afternoon when Cynthia Lennon and her traveling companions had arrived at Kenwood, the £70,000 mock-Tudor mansion that John had purchased four years before in Weybridge, the “stockbrokers” suburb some forty minutes west of London. Cynthia had been on a short holiday with Jenny Boyd, whose sister Pattie was married to George Harrison, and one of John’s best cronies, the “electronics wizard” called Magic Alex. When the three of them arrived in a taxi from the airport, the front gates were unlatched, the porch lights were on, and there was no need for Cynthia to use her magnetically coded identification card to open the front door.
Inside the high-beamed entrance foyer, the drapes were drawn and the lights off. Cynthia and her friends paused for a moment to listen. The house was oddly quiet. There was no sign of Julian, her five-year-old son; or of Mrs. Jarlett, their loyal housekeeper; or of John himself. Cynthia went to the foot of the broad, mahogany staircase that led up to the bedroom and studio levels and called out, “Hello? Where are you? Is anybody home?” But there was only silence. Shrugging her shoulders at Jenny and Magic Alex, she turned to the left and went down four steps into a vast, beamed rectangular living room. It was not the living room of a reigning pop star but the lounge of a tasteful yet prissy stockbroker. The floors were covered in thick black wool carpeting, set off by two eighteen-foot lime green sofas and two matching club chairs. The sofas faced each other across a coffee table cut from a thick slab of Italian marble, polished like a giant slice of glazed cheesecake. The open hearth, carved of oak and marble, was tall enough for a man to stand in. Around the perimeter of the room the rich oak wainscotting had been sinfully covered in an extravagant silk yellow and lime check pattern that matched the drapes on the French windows overlooking the garden. Everywhere, on every shelf and table, were little antique chachka. These had been purchased by Cynthia’s mother, Lillian Powell, who lived nearby and often stayed with her daughter and son-in-law. John disliked his mother-in-law so much he would give her £100 every day and send her off on afternoon antique-hunting trips to get rid of her.
Still, for all the careful attention, the room looked a
s cold as a furniture showroom; since it had been decorated, Cynthia and John had never entertained in it much less sat in it. Instead, they spent most of their time at the back of the house in a small, cozy sunroom, which is where she went to look for him next. The sunroom was a bright, pretty room, with large windows that overlooked tiers of landscaped brick terraces leading down to a swimming pool. The pool itself had a giant green mosaic eye inlaid in the bottom that stared back aqueously at the house. The sunroom was a clutter of furniture and pop-star artifacts. Across one wall was a white shelving and cabinet unit, which contained a jumble of stereo equipment, magazines, and books on spiritualism and art. Across one of the cabinet doors John had stuck an advertising sticker that said “Milk Is Good.” On the top shelf was a set of black light boxes, twinkling silently, while on a table in the corner a green lava lamp slowly undulated. On the walls were displayed framed posters and caricatures of John, mostly promotional pieces for the two books and one play he had written, but pointedly no gold records. There was also a curved wicker sofa with brown cushions. This impractical sofa was much too short for John to stretch out on comfortably, but it was upon this sofa that he usually could be found, curled up with a book or magazine. But not today.
“John? Are you here?” Cynthia called from the empty sunroom. She thought she heard something in the kitchen, like a muffled laugh. Apprehensively, she went through a large, paneled oak door to see what it was.
John, in his dressing gown, stood facing her, holding a steaming cup of tea in his left hand and a lighted Lark cigarette in his right. Yoko Ono was sitting at the kitchen table, her back to the door. She didn’t bother to turn around, but Cynthia recognized her by the voluminous columns of black hair that fell to her shoulders. The white, modern, multileveled kitchen was strewn with dirty dishes and half-eaten meals, as if the housekeeper hadn’t been let in for days. The shades were drawn, the lights dim.
