Once There Was a Way

by Bryce Zabel

  At his children’s urging, Ford invited all of the Beatles to the White House in mid-February, and all of them came. John and Paul brought their spouses, while George and Ringo showed up alone.

  “I want to thank the Beatles for believing in America,” said Ford before the White House press corps, “and I want them to know that America believes in the Beatles.”

  After the public meeting before the press, President Ford, his wife, Betty, and their children, Jack, Steven, and Susan, all retired to the Old Family Dining Room on the State Floor for an early lunch. As they were walking inside together, Betty Ford took John aside.

  “Mister Lennon, I want you to know how sorry we are,” she said and then hugged him. “The America I love welcomes artists like you and your friends.”

  Lennon caught Yoko’s eye from the hug and winked. Then he smiled at Mrs. Ford. “Call me John,” he said. “That way I won’t feel so guilty eating all your food.” He had seen the menu for the lunch that included freshly baked bread, crab soup, and lean pork chops simmered in red wine.

  The lunch itself was a cordial affair, and the Ford children, to their delight, were seated amongst the Beatles. Jack, the middle son, made the White House press team panic after he admitted to the table that he smoked pot. There were no reporters in the room, and the president and the First Lady pretended not to hear.

  Looking to change the subject, Jack, who knew the discography of the Beatles down to which song was on which side of which album, asked the captive audience sitting at his father’s table when the next album might come out.

  “We don’t want to disappoint anyone,” said Paul. “We named the last one Last Words, you know.”

  “Whatever you do,” said President Ford with a broad smile, “don’t make any announcements for a while. I don’t want anyone to think I had anything to do with it.”

  Indeed, America had a new president, the Vietnam War was nearly over, and the feeling that the Beatles had finished their own jobs somehow seemed palpable. Although John Lennon and Paul McCartney had implied with the release of the last three albums that each would be their last together, a nearly universal recognition that Last Words really was the Beatles’ final album was emerging.

  Even so, there was something unfinished about that scenario, too. “We don’t mean to be all grandiose,” explained George to reporters. “It’s just that shutting the studio doors and taking a taxi home seems a little anticlimactic, considering how much we’ve fought over all this.”

  The Beatles in Central Park

  The good (and bad) news in all of this was that with the Beatles out of legal jeopardy and in the good graces of the U.S. government, Paramount Pictures finally decided to release Murder on the Orient Express at Christmas where it opened with a bang and chugged along into 1975. The film had been produced in 1973 with an all-star cast that made the Beatles look like bit players in their own film.

  Some critics felt the film’s train setting was a desperate callback to A Hard Day’s Night, and others, including a young Roger Ebert, thought the Beatles were a distraction in their own film.

  [Roger Ebert] “Having all four of the Beatles peppered about the ensemble cast is the film’s greatest distraction. I felt the same way about Stanley Kubrick Presents J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings Starring The Beatles, although it was easier to embrace because they were the film there. In this vehicle (literally, the train), my mind constantly wandered to what actor would have been cast in their roles had they decided to pass on the project. Even so, Murder on the Orient Express provides a good time, high style, and is a loving salute to an earlier period of filmmaking.”

  The leading role of Hercule Poirot had gone to Paul McCartney, a piece of casting that even McCartney felt undermined the credibility of the entire film. Director Sidney Lumet favored John Lennon for the part, but given that the majority of the film was to be shot outside of the United States, Lennon was deemed an impractical choice. He instead took the part of secretary and translator Hector McQueen. All of his scenes were shot on a Hollywood sound stage, where minimal sets were re-created and actors were flown in. It is estimated that Lennon’s inclusion cost the production over $200,000 in additional expenses.

  Ringo, as had come to be the norm, was a standout in a part that might have ordinarily amounted to very little. He played Beddoes, the English manservant to an enigmatic American businessman. George played Hungarian diplomat Count Rudolf Andrenyi, a part that would otherwise have gone to a young Michael York.

  Budgeted at just under $2 million, Murder on the Orient Express was a great success at the box office, earning $49 million in North America alone. Financed by EMI Films, it was the first movie completely funded by a British company to make the top of the weekly United States box office charts in Daily Variety.

  By the time of the film’s release, given Lennon’s recent globally publicized ordeal, it was jarring for audiences to see him playing what had been re-written as a comic role the year before. His performance now came across as a two-hour wink at the camera.

  Murder on the Orient Express threatened to keep Lennon in the Beatles just a while longer, in much of the same way Lord of the Rings became his reason for sticking it out back in 1970 when it was filmed, and in 1971 when it was released. It was one thing to go out on the creative artistry of Last Words. It was another matter entirely for Murder on the Orient Express to go down in history as the Beatles’ conclusive artistic expression.

  • • •

  Even though they had managed to make it to 1975, the Beatles still had not toured together since 1966—almost a decade now.

  What the Beatles had seemingly excelled at was the surprise concert venue. They had shown up at the Roundhouse in 1969 to test out their Get Back material and ended up making a classic live album. That same summer they had turned up at Woodstock, seemingly out of thin air. Then there was the group appearance at George’s The Concert for Bangladesh, another one-off that made an indelible impression on fans.

  Now President Ford had settled the family business, as it were, by making America a free zone for the Beatles, especially John Lennon, the group’s most recalcitrant member. There were no more obstacles about locations or access. John, Paul, George, and Ringo were, more than ever before, the masters of their own destinies.

  Suddenly, the unthinkable became thinkable. Paul had wanted to perform live again during the bad old days of Get Back and Everest, telling his mates, “Let’s get back to square one and remember what we’re all about.” John said then that he was daft and vetoed the plan in no uncertain terms.

  After waiting six months since John’s release, and with Yoko’s blessing, Paul and Linda planned a surprise visit to the Dakota. At first, John was angry, refusing to come out of his bedroom to greet them. Paul reminded him through the bedroom door of Ed McMahon’s assessment that the person being showed up for would always act like it was an imposition, but the important thing was to show up anyway. It was a moot point soon enough, as Yoko invited Linda into the kitchen for tea.

  At this point in their history, John and Paul had come to respect their long-standing friendship, even if they were not always friendly. The one thing that always cut through the tension between them was music, so, after a brief bickering, they broke out their guitars. John showed Paul how the surgery had given him back the ability to play most of the chords he used to play and how he’d gotten around the ones he still couldn’t manage.

  In the kitchen, Yoko and Linda drank tea and made dinner. Linda was in the midst of embracing a vegetarian diet and wanted to share a new recipe for a vegetable soup.

  As they chopped onions, carrots, and leeks, Yoko dropped a bombshell. She had recently discovered that as early as 1973, New York City officials had funded a feasibility study for a live Beatles concert in Central Park. Everybody was ready. The Beatles only had to say yes.

  “Does Paul know this?” asked Linda.

  Yoko smiled. “He told me about it last week. He’s talking to
John now.” The idea that Yoko Ono and Paul McCartney had shared a secret with each other before their own spouses was mind-blowing. Yet Yoko and Paul had stepped up to take an active role in Apple, and their relationship had been bolstered by their six months of working together when they were looking for John.

  The truth was that New York City in 1975 was a city teetering on bankruptcy. Central Park, an oasis that functions as the city’s “green lung,” was in a state of deterioration, even though it had been designated a National Historic Landmark in 1962. Still, the city lacked the financial resources to spend the estimated $3 million that would be needed to restore the park. A Beatles concert would give the band a send-off worthy of their historical importance, would provide a chance to say goodbye to their fans, and would jump-start a much-needed campaign to raise renovation funds.

  McCartney waited until Lennon had strummed a closing chord before suggesting the two smoke a joint before dinner. Even though Lennon was now drug-free, he stood with McCartney at the window, watching his friend toke while looking out over Central Park in the late afternoon light. John explained how he had spent months in near total silence, standing in this very spot looking out over the same view. When he was in captivity, he retreated inside his own head, far deeper than he had ever been before.

  “I’ve never told anybody this, not even Yoko,” he said. “I had a vision one day, looking out over the park. I saw a million people out there and a stage that was built just for the Beatles.”

  Paul was flabbergasted. He had all the arguments planned out in his head, ready to pitch to his challenging partner. Only now his partner was pitching to him. He ventured cautiously: “That would be bigger than Woodstock.”

  “Only with working toilets and good food.” Lennon still had his sense of humor.

  Over Linda’s meal, both couples joined in discussing the possibility of a Central Park blowout concert. The one thing they knew was that if the Beatles did not take advantage of the city’s openness, another group surely would. Already there was talk that a Simon & Garfunkel reunion was the backup if the Beatles said no.

  “The only thing I want to hear from them is the sound of silence,” said Lennon, working in their hit song effortlessly. “Somebody needs to go there and rock it out, and it might as well be us.”

  McCartney still couldn’t believe what he was hearing. He had spent the better part of eight years fighting with this man about the Beatles and running into constant obstacles. His partner had never before seemed so at peace about issues involving the Beatles—or anything else, for that matter.

  • • •

  The Apple PR machine ran with the good-news-bad-news nature of the announcement: the Beatles really, really meant that they would never record in the studio again, but they had agreed to play one final live blowout concert in order to say goodbye to fans in a more personal way. The Michael Doret-designed posters began to show up all over New York City with a date of July 19 fixed for what promised (and threatened) to be the largest gathering of people ever assembled in New York’s Central Park.

  While backing musicians would achieve some of the musical effects from the Beatles’ more studio-oriented songs, there would be no special guests. No Eric Clapton, no Elton John, no Badfinger or anyone of that status. Four men in their early to mid-thirties would take the stage that night—John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison, and Richard Starkey—and they would rock the house down.

  Both planning and rehearsal for the concert were held secretly at Players Theater in Manhattan and took about three weeks in total. While so many other rehearsals and recordings involving the Beatles had been marred by tensions and resentments, these sessions were remarkably trouble free.

  [Ringo] “It was like getting ready for a school graduation. It’s going to be a big deal and everybody’s coming, but you know after it’s all over, it’s really all over. Everyone is going to move on with their lives. Since this is it, and you’re going to remember it forever, you want it to be a good memory.”

  The group formed an early consensus that the concert should adhere to the same rules about equality that had guided the 1970s albums, but that was abandoned in order to concentrate on putting together the best concert possible.

  “We knew we’d be playing a lot of songs that night,” said George. “We knew everybody would have plenty to do. So we decided to try to make it more about the music and less about us.” George was being kind. The concession was his to make, and he made it, not wanting to be seen as the spiritual Beatle who also counted songs to get his fair share.

  The musical arrangements for the concert were written by George Martin. Even though other producers had been involved in Beatles material over the past few years, the band decided that, as Lennon put it, “we should dance with Georgie-boy since he brought us to the party.”

  • • •

  The concert, billed as “Live From New York: The Beatles!,” was to take place on the Great Lawn, the central open space of Central Park. The first spectators, many carrying chairs or picnic blankets, began arriving a full week before the event and were chased away by New York police every night. As a consequence, the Saturday morning of July 19 saw over hundred thousand people show up at dawn to claim a space.

  Throughout the rest of the day, a huge projection screen featured a photo from the Apollo-Soyuz linkup in space that happened two days earlier, when the American and Soviet commanders exchanged a much-ballyhooed handshake as a gesture of detente between the two superpowers. The Beatles decided to make it part of their own mythology, fusing a bit of “Back in the U.S.S.R.” with “Give Peace a Chance.”

  “I thought it was great,” said Ringo, who had gotten divorced from his wife, Maureen, on the day of the handshake. “One door closing, one door opening, that kind of thing, so let’s party.”

  As the time drew increasingly closer, everyone knew that Central Park was packed to the breaking point. No measurement of crowd size has ever pleased everyone, but computer programs in the 2000s have fixed the number, based on photos from the night, at between seven hundred thousand and nine hundred thousand.

  Within that crowd, the concert was heavy on celebrities, with everyone from Bob Dylan to all of President Ford’s children, and film and TV stars like Dustin Hoffman, Steven Spielberg, Jack Nicholson, Lynda Carter, John Travolta, Gabe Kaplan, Mary Tyler Moore, Robert Redford, Warren Beatty, and even Woody Allen. What everyone had in common was a profound sense of history—if this was actually the last time the Beatles would ever play together, then they would be there to see it.

  At twilight, Mayor Abraham Beame was supposed to walk on stage and announce the Beatles, but a substitution was made at the last minute. The crowd was astonished when newly re-crowned heavyweight boxing champion Muhammad Ali strode onto the stage and up to the center microphone. Ali had famously met all four of the Beatles in 1964 when he was training in Miami for the fight with Sonny Liston that would make Ali heavyweight champion. Now, over a decade later, Ali had just regained his championship by defeating George Foreman in the famous “Rumble in the Jungle” and was a few months away from a third brutal fight with Joe Frazier, the “Thrilla in Manila.” Ali knew that introducing the Beatles would be good publicity and opened up with a bit of poetry.

  [Muhammad Ali] “We met in ’64 when boxing was just a snore. I kayoed the Big Bear when their songs were all over the air. We both go up and down, we both say what we want. The Man said I had to go to Nam, and they had to fight Uncle Sam. You ain’t never gonna have another night like this, and you gonna be telling the kids about the show you could not miss.”

  The crowd, knowing that the time had come, let loose with an awesome roar. Allen Klein, standing backstage with all four of the Beatles, yelled to them, “You fucking earned every fucking decibel.”

  “At least that’s what Klein claims he said,” McCartney has always clarified in interviews. “None of us could hear him.”

  By prearrangement, Klein grabbed the backstage micropho
ne and screamed into it. “Ladies and Gentlemen,” he yelled like a ring announcer, “live from New York, it’s the Beatles!”

  On stage that night in Central Park, Muhammad Ali raised the arm of each Beatle, one by one, as the symbol of victory, and then left the stage. The audience was wild. Observers claim, with only a bit of hyperbole, that the ruckus could be heard in Queens.

  In the electric present, the party got started with McCartney’s smash hit “Band on the Run.” The song was great when McCartney played his first version to everyone in Nigeria. Tonight, after everyone’s input, and after being practiced repeatedly in preparation, it was tight, powerful, and fun.

  After the opening song, McCartney, who had been nominated by his fellow Beatles, was supposed to be the first to speak. “I want to hear what you have to say first,” said Lennon when the decision was made. “Then I’ll set the record straight.” He said it in jest, but it also sounded vaguely like a threat.

  As a result, Paul wrote some words and committed them to memory. When he found himself looking out at this massive outdoor audience that spilled across the night landscape, he was overwhelmed. He looked over first at Lennon, Harrison, and Starkey.

  “We never expected this, did we?”

  McCartney pivoted back to the crowd. “We love New York City going back the first time we came here to do The Ed Sullivan Show, and we love that you’ve all stuck with us over the years, and now you’ve come out here tonight to do a bit of celebration with us. John’s even written a rocker for you.”

  McCartney teed up the perfect segue to John Lennon’s “New York City,” a song he had written with a revolutionary slant years before, and played it this evening with a revised set of lyrics about John’s love for the city as his new home.

  When it was over, John peered out over the crowd, standing packed together for as far as the eye could see. “One of the reasons we love New York City,” he continued, appreciating the vast scale of what was being attempted, “is that they always do these nice little neighborhood concerts to bring the locals out.”