So—a last Tolstoy moment before I go. It’s a sunny day in Havana, the wind high and whipping through the power lines outside my hotel window; the ocean is bluer than yesterday but still wild and white-capped. Many years have lapsed since Bangkok. I have remarried, but I have left my wife at home this time, have come for a holiday in my own company, something I have not done for many years.
Yesterday I took a walk along the seawall. A wedding procession roared by; it looked like a scene from Godfather Two, when Michael Corleone goes to Cuba. Later I had a coffee on the terrace of the Hotel Inglaterra in the old city. (What does one do with all this time on one’s hands? I can’t quite remember.) Another wedding procession, beribboned cars from the fifties, a white bride and a black groom perched on the back of a convertible. A Frenchman at the next table tells me Havana is a big town for public weddings. Which makes me think about my own wedding only a few years ago. We had it in the living room of our new house (my “starter” home, age fifty-six) in Kensington Market. My second ex-wife, Catherine, stood with our son, both of them lanky and lovely. How lucky I am, I thought, looking at them, that they are still here, still part of my life.
And there’s M., my first ex-wife—the one who gave me Tolstoy all those years ago—laying out the food and bossing the help around (she wants the food table against the wall, not “in the middle of the goddamn room”). Our daughter, all grown up now, tall and blond and somehow extravagant even at rest, calls the room to order. She is the Master of Ceremonies tonight and begins to read, stopping a sentence in. “I hope I can get through this without bursting into tears,” she says. The room falls silent. She continues.
Prince Andrei loved dancing . . . and chose Natasha for a partner because Pierre pointed her out to him, and because she was the first pretty girl who caught his eyes. But he had no sooner put his arm around that slender, supple waist, and felt her stirring so close to him, and smiling so close to him, than the intoxication of her beauty flew to his head.
Looking at my daughter and then at Rachel, my wife of only a few minutes now (so pretty in her black dress), I feel a wave of almost unendurable good fortune. And I think: You must not ask more from life than this.
6
Ladies and Gentlemen,
the Beatles!
The other night I did a search on my eight-year-old computer and discovered that there were over 250 different documents where I mentioned the Beatles by name. Book reviews, a screenplay (unproduced), a novel, a magazine article on Tolstoy, diaries, letters, even a wine review. They certainly got to me, those boys.
And so when I started to write this book, on going back to places where you’ve suffered, I had to mention them. Because if you’re my age and have ever suffered in the name of love, chances are you’ve done it with the Beatles in the background.
I went out and bought the paperback of Bob Spitz’s 2005, brick-sized Beatle biography. It’s a beautifully written, nine-hundred-page travail. Mr. Spitz spent six years on it, moved to Liverpool for six months, split up with his wife over it. But something surprising and vaguely discomforting happened. I got through maybe a hundred pages and then I stopped. I knew all the stories and I just didn’t care to hear them again. I was Beatled-out. A new verb, that, to be Beatled-out: to love something like you’ll probably never love anything again, but to have had enough for one lifetime.
But let’s go back for a moment or two. It was 1987, George Harrison had just released his final album, Cloud Nine, and I was going to London to interview him. Shooting through the darkness at 37,000 feet above the Atlantic, I stared into space with the gravitas of a man going to his execution. I had two stiff drinks to calm down, but they skated weightlessly over my excitement. The image of John, Paul and George singing “This Boy” into a single microphone on The Ed Sullivan Show in 1964 was paralyzing. A list of do-not-do’s: For God’s sake, don’t ask him if he got a lot of girls. Or if he ever felt “weird” about kicking Pete Best out of the band. Nor does he need to know that you once had a skinny girlfriend in Kansas City who, substituting a perfume bottle for a microphone, used to sing “If I Fell” in front of her bedroom mirror. Oh, and don’t bother telling him about Raissa and that time you heard “Don’t Let Me Down” at five o’clock in the morning in a Paris café and nearly died of longing for her. Don’t tell him your publisher moonlights occasionally in a Beatles cover band. And don’t ask the one question that no one on earth can answer except those four young men in the limo: What was it like to be in the Beatles?
In preparation for the interview, I spent a sunny morning driving around Liverpool with Nancy Rutledge, a middle-aged real estate agent. Nancy was George’s girlfriend for a few months when they were both sixteen, but with that hard-headed common sense so typical of northerners she didn’t appear to think it was a big deal.
She drove me to the Cavern Club, or its replacement rather. Unwise city fathers tore down the original in 1973 to make room for an underground rail loop. It was here, under the famous brick archway, that the boys made it big, playing 292 shows, afternoon and night, from 1961 to 1963, the last gig only a month or so after recording “She Loves You.” It was also here that a gay young record store owner, Brian Epstein, fell in love at first sight (those black leather jackets helped) and offered to get them a record deal. Which, after an imprudent executive at Decca Records told him that guitar bands were “finished,” he did.
While Nancy stopped at a pastry store to pick up a birthday cake for a client, I hopped out of the car and phoned a friend in Toronto, himself a scrupulous Beatles fan.
“Guess where I am?” I said breathlessly.
“Where?”
“I’m at the Cavern Club.” But his response was not what I’d hoped for.
“They tore down the Cavern Club years ago,” he said.
“Yes, I know that, but . . .” I began to explain but the moment was lost, and walking away from the red phone booth (Nancy waiting for me in a restaurant) I was perplexed by my friend’s coldness, his appetite to diminish my excitement, and I was again reminded that you have to be careful to whose ears you bring good news, that the world, even your friends, sometimes especially your friends, doesn’t always wish you good fortune. Still, it troubled me, and for the next few days I found myself returning to it.
We looked at other spots: George’s childhood home, the hairdressing salon where Ringo’s wife, Maureen, worked, the Strawberry Field orphanage and the Casbah Coffee Club, which was run by Pete Best’s mom. “Pete’s fine now,” Nancy said brightly. “He had a rough spell, you can only imagine, but he’s gotten quite famous, even a bit rich.”
She had a two o’clock showing, a triplex in a nearby town, and asked would I mind if she got on the road. Which was a nice way of saying that she didn’t have much more to say about George or any particular nostalgia about that time of her life. Dropping me off in front of my hotel, she unwound the window and said, “Ask him if he remembers my little blue car.” And then, glancing over her shoulder, she pulled into the light Liverpool traffic without, I bet, giving me or the Beatles another thought.
Two days later, I followed a polite, normal-looking young woman up a flight of stairs to the third floor of George Harrison’s pleasantly appointed office, Handmade Films, in London. The camera crew had already arrived and was setting up. From what I gathered, they’d just returned from shooting an interview with Mikhail Gorbachev in Moscow. The Soviet Union was disintegrating, but this, meeting George Harrison, was apparently a bigger deal. Like the pharmaceutical supplier who had sat next to me in the plane on the way over, they knew more about the Beatles than an adult should know, than anyone should know: which verse of “Help” was forgotten during the Miami leg of The Ed Sullivan Show, that George got a black eye when a drunken Pete Best fan head-butted him outside the washroom in the Cavern Club. That Paul McCartney’s father, after hearing the just-written “She Loves You” (acoustic guitars in the living room), suggested a minor lyric change: “Yes, yes, yes would be bett
er,” he offered.
Two cameramen, two soundmen, a producer, two assistant producers and a lighting “guy.” They were nervous or excited, I couldn’t tell which, but they wouldn’t shut up. I wasn’t doing any better. Like a man about to be shot, I stood by the window looking out at the empty trees, the thin sunlight, a woman walking a dog. February in London, everything so sad, so defeated. It was, of course, anxiety cloaking itself as melancholy. Some people get hungry when they’re frightened; I get sad, which I knew, but it didn’t help. Not a bit.
I heard a voice behind me, the up-and-down musicality of a Liverpool accent. “I didn’t realize it was television. Give me a sec to brush my hair.” A slim man in a rumpled shirt and worn blue jeans stood in the doorway, smiling pleasantly. His face was older, more deeply lined than I’d expected. He extended his hand to the barrel-chested cameraman who was staring at him as if he’d just seen a cobra standing on its tail.
“I’m George Harrison,” he said.
I was thirteen when I first heard “She Loves You” and found it, with its unusual chord progression, G to Bm (folk song chords), something of a disappointment. It almost went where you wanted it to—that great start!—but then didn’t. And that anticlimactic guitar riff just before the second verse made me wonder what all the fuss was about.
But a few months later I heard “I Saw Her Standing There.” No song, no piece of music before or since, has ever churned me like that. That busy bass line, a snare drum whack that seemed to hang just a split second behind the beat, and Paul’s inimitable shriek (try it sometime) just before the guitar solo made me want to throw something, swear, scream out the window, as if my young body simply could not contain the sensations it was experiencing. And the count-in, for me the most galvanic count-in in rock music.
Unhappy with the song’s original second line—it was a sugary McCartney flourish comparing the girl to a “beauty queen”—John Lennon smirked and suggested “You know what I mean” instead. I’ve always felt that that exchange was the key to the Beatles’ collaboration, why it worked and why, on their own, they never quite matched their former, alchemical je ne sais quoi.
My father, whose interests extended to golf, Scotch and sleeping with my mother’s friends, scolded me in the car one afternoon for wasting my allowance on Beatle magazines. It wasn’t the scolding that stung, it was the waft of contempt that came with it. I examined these glossy publications with a kind of forensic scrutiny. I was looking for something, an explanation that might diffuse the tension in my body. Nearly forty years later I came across a passage in a Chekhov short story, and I understood not what I was looking for in those pictures of four young men in black suits and white shirts but what I was experiencing while I was looking at them. In the 1888 Chekhov story “The Beauties,” a teenage boy catches sight of a peasant girl as she flits about inside a hut in the Russian countryside. Chekhov writes:
Whether it was envy of her beauty, or that I was regretting that the girl was not mine, and never would be, or that I was a stranger to her . . . or whether, perhaps, my sadness was that peculiar feeling which is excited by the contemplation of real beauty, God only knows.
Sadness, it has since occurred to me, is an inexplicable response to great art. I felt it when I flipped through those Beatle magazines the same way I would feel it later when I came across a description of a party in Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby:
There was music from my neighbour’s house through the summer nights. In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.
It is, this sadness, a reaction to something that you can never possess, that always moves away from you no matter how fast or how hard you try to grab it.
Because of Ringo Starr, because of the way he looked behind a pearl grey set of Ludwig drums, because of the almost unendurable happiness that I imagined he was feeling, I chose to be a drummer. When my parents left the house for the evening, I hurried to my mother’s bedroom on the second floor and put “It Won’t Be Long” on her stereo. Tap, tap, tap went my little knife blades, dancing along the top of her glass dressing table. Sometimes my brother, Dean, stuck his head in the door; he wasn’t yet so furious at life, but rather remote and admirable, and I adored his approval. He’d look in, watch for a moment and then, quietly closing the door, return to the baseball game on his maroon bedroom radio.
The snow melted outside my window; ice fell from the eavestroughs and the Beatles released “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Was there ever so irresistible a sight as the three of them stepping forward to the microphones to harmonize.
I played with real drumsticks now; on school books, on walls, on my thighs. I played after school, after dinner. I practised all the time. But I could never manage the drum roll that comes at the end of the song’s titular line in “I Want to Hold your Hand.” Was it a hand-over-hand thing or was it a succession of single, staccato beats on descending drums? Snare, tom-tom, floor tom. I must have listened to it two hundred times, picking up the needle, dropping it back down, picking it up, dropping it down, picking it up, dropping it down. (“Jesus H. Christ!” my mother shrieked down the stairs.)
But I couldn’t figure it out. Ever. In fact only the other day I saw a black-and-white tape of Ringo doing it on The Ed Sullivan Show. The camera went in for a close-up. I replayed it. Then replayed it again, until a kind of sickening sensation spread through my body.
I must have already been thwarted by other things in life—skating to the left, drawing a tree, juggling, tuning a guitar, slide rules, patching a bicycle tire—but this impasse was a pinching lesson on the exigencies of talent. Which is to say, in the parlance of my ex-wife, M., “Sometimes you’re fucked just by who you are.”
I wonder, though, if the unlucky drummer, Pete Best, could do it. If I ever met him, I’d have a million questions, but that would certainly be one. Can you do the drum roll in “I Want to Hold Your Hand”? I bet not. I bet if he could—
It was a shameful episode and I have, sadly, always associated it with the only time I saw the Beatles perform live. I was fourteen years old, and I was bewitched by a girl from, in my mother’s dreadful parlance, “the wrong side of the tracks.” Her name was Shauna. (“Only girls who have sex in automobiles are called Shauna,” my mother said.) Short, with teased hair and a sleeveless, fuzzy sweater, Shauna turned up at a Sunday morning church group; all the pretty girls in Forest Hill went there; but no one knew Shauna. She just appeared out of nowhere, this creature in a cloud of erotic pollen.
“What’s a girl like that even doing in this neighbourhood?” my mother asked. By which she meant that girls like Shauna invariably got themselves knocked up and then asked for a whole lot of money to go away. My mother, a curious mixture of authentic left-wing liberalism and cruel snobbery.
I ignored her admonitions, of course. And who wouldn’t? I came home late at night that fall with leaves all over my sweater and my eyes so bright they could peel the paint off walls.
Summer came; boys took off their ties and wrote exams in a holy silence; and then we left the city for our white house in the country. Like a Chinese water torture, my mother’s acidic disapproval chewed through my affection for Shauna until, in a moment of disgraceful compliance, I allowed her to dictate an ending-things letter which I left that same afternoon for the mailman in the box at the top of our lane. I did this in exchange for permission to go to Toronto to see the Beatles at Maple Leaf Gardens. Frozen with embarrassment and shame—a month had since lapsed—I sat next to Shauna in a crowd of twenty thousand hysterical teenagers. Even the man who unpacked Ringo’s snare drum got a scream that day. Staring straight ahead, I could feel Shauna looking at me. I could feel her waiting. Then she said, “You could at least look at me.” But there was a tone to her voice which I hadn’t expected, a kind of breezy disdain that said, “Don’t think you’re so important, bub.”
I know the Beatles played “Long Tall Sally” that day; I know Shauna asked
me if she could borrow my binoculars, I know that when John Lennon clowned around onstage— he was pretending to be Frankenstein—the crowd blew the ceiling off the Gardens. I remember all that only fuzzily. But those words, or rather the way she said them, retain a peculiar freshness, like an audible report card of someone who has caught you at your most unattractive.
Five years go by. I’m in Paris with Justin Strawbridge. It’s my first time in Europe and I’m experiencing the unhappy fragility of waking up after dark in a foreign country with nothing having turned out the way you had hoped it would. It was five o’clock in the morning, I was in an overlit café drinking a glass of red wine—how awful it tasted, like a glass of blood—when “Don’t Let Me Down” came on the jukebox. By 1969, the Beatles didn’t much like each other, but even in the initial descending chords of that song, the announcement as it were, it’s as if all antagonisms have been momentarily forgotten and the four of them revert to a kind of mother tongue that not even the insistent and toxic presence of Yoko Ono could disrupt. “Don’t Let Me Down” is one of the great Beatles buried treasures, as effortless in its execution as the gait of a loose-limbed country boy.
That early morning in Paris, it seemed to me that I’d never heard the song properly before, that it was, in fact, a miniature symphony with complete, individual movements. Except that I liked it more, it moved me more, than Beethoven or Mozart. It had that thing which all great Beatles songs have, which all great art has, a sense of inevitability, that the progression of chords could only go in that order, and only with those lyrics; that if only you’d been given the first few bars you could have written it yourself.
The Perfect Order of Things Page 9