You Never Give Me Your Money
THE BATTLE FOR
THE SOUL OF THE BEATLES
PETER DOGGETT
In memory of Sean Body
and all those we lost along the way
Introduction
Fame is a curse, with no redeeming features.
Allen Ginsberg
The Beatles could be forgiven for doubting the value of celebrity. One of the quartet was shot dead outside his apartment building by a man who claimed to be a fan. Another was attacked brutally in his home; within two years, he too was dead. A third was involved in a marital breakdown that exposed every corner of his life to the public gaze. The fourth found it so difficult to survive outside the group that he lost himself in alcohol and cocaine.
These four men created music of such joy and inventiveness that it captured the imagination of the world, and has never lost its grip. Even a few bars of 'She Loves You' or 'Hey Jude' have the power to pull the listener out of the everyday, and into a fantasy world where every moment oozes with possibility, and love conquers pain. They have the magical ability to recreate the idealism that sparked their own creation, and open that source of inspiration to us all. The Beatles' songs seem to come from a time of dream-like innocence, and represent all the turbulence and splendour that we have learned to identify with their decade. The landmarks of their story have passed into myth, as familiar as the ingredients of a fairy tale. They provide a comforting collective memory – 'a universal gleam', as one observer noted, which could and still can illuminate the world.
Yet they were human, the heroes of this myth; stubbornly, sometimes distressingly human. Almost alone of their generation, they did not want the fantasy to continue. The public basked in the freedom that the Beatles evoked; the Beatles simply wanted the freedom not to be the Beatles. Through the late 1960s, while listeners mapped out their lives in their songs, the quartet plotted an alternative vision of the future in which they would be liberated from the four-man shackles that they had forged.
They soon realised that there could be no escape: they would always be the Beatles, and would always be judged against the peaks they had ascended in the past. Their individual efforts, no matter how inspired, would inevitably pale alongside the endless replays of their youth. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Richard Starkey ('Don't call me by my stage name,' Starkey asked in a 2009 TV ad) are locked together for all time as the guardians of popular music's most enduring legacy. But their bonds don't end there. Since 1967, they (or their heirs) have been the co-owners of Apple Corps, a venture that was envisaged as a tax dodge, and refashioned as a revolutionary alternative to the capitalist system, but then corroded to become a magnet for lawyers and accountants. What was conceived as utopia turned out to be a prison.
The uncanny consequences of that fate – to be divided and yet eternally combined, separate but still together – are the subject of this book, which traces the personal and corporate history of the Beatles from the heights of 1967, through the relentless decay of their final months, to the endless aftermath beyond. Their ability to survive and sometimes prosper in the eye of a legal, financial and emotional hurricane is perhaps one of their greatest, and most underrated, achievements. Through it all, together and alone, at odds and at one, the Beatles somehow managed to create and preserve music that is as enduring as their myth, perfectly encapsulating its own time and enriching every time to come.
Prologue:
8 December 1980
It was almost 11 p.m. in New York City, and singer-songwriter James Taylor was at home in the exclusive Langham Building on Central Park West. He'd just placed a call to Betsy Asher, whose husband had signed him to the Beatles' Apple label twelve years earlier. 'She was in Los Angeles, and she was complaining that things were getting very crazy there,' Taylor recalled. 'Something was happening to do with the Charles Manson family, something mad going on. Then I heard these shots. I'd been told that the police would leave an empty chamber under the hammer of their guns, so when you heard a police shooting, it would be five shots of a large-calibre weapon in rapid succession, to empty the gun. What I heard was bam- bam- bam- bam- bam – five shots. I said to Betsy, "You think it's crazy out there. I'm just listening to the police shooting somebody down the street." We rang off. Then about twenty minutes later she called me back, and said, "James, that wasn't the cops."'
The police were on the scene in minutes, and news crackled across the radio of a shooting outside the Dakota Building, a block downtown from the Langham. The press agency UPI wired the initial reports: 'New York police say former Beatle John Lennon is in critical condition after being shot three times at his home on Manhattan's Upper West Side. A police spokesman said, "A suspect is in custody." But he had no other details. A hospital worker said – quote – "There's blood all over the place. They're working on him like crazy."'
ABC-TV trailed the bones of the story across the screen as the New England Patriots visited
Miami Dolphins on Monday Night Football. Five minutes later commentator Frank Gifford interrupted his colleague Howard Cosell: 'I don't care what's on the line, Howard, you have got to say what we know in the booth.' 'Yes, we have to say it,' Cosell said wearily, adding a warning that sounded almost sacrilegious in his sports-obsessed country: 'Remember, this is just a football game. No matter who wins or loses.' Then, with the portentous cadence of a man accustomed to translating sporting contests into drama, Cosell announced, 'An unspeakable tragedy. Confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City. John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous perhaps of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospital' – he hit each word slowly and carefully like a nail into wood – 'dead . . . on . . . arrival. Hard to go back to the game after that newsflash.'
Richard Starkey and his girlfriend, actress Barbara Bach, were drinking in a rented house in the Bahamas when he was contacted by his secretary, Joan Woodgate. 'We got some phone calls saying that John had been injured,' he recalled. 'Then we heard he was dead.' He was the first of the surviving Beatles to learn the news. 'John was my dear friend, and his wife is a friend, and as soon as you hear something like that . . .' Horror pierced the anaesthetic haze of alcohol that had become his protection against the world. 'You don't just sit there and think, What to do? It was just . . . We had to make a move, and we had to go to New York.'
First, Starkey phoned his former spouse, Maureen Cox, in England. Her house guest Cynthia Lennon was woken by screams. Seconds later Cox burst into her bedroom, and told her: 'Cyn, John's been shot. Ringo's on the phone. He wants to talk to you.' Cynthia rushed to the phone and heard the sound of a man crying. 'Cyn,' Starkey sobbed. 'I'm so sorry. John's dead.' She dropped the phone and howled like an animal caught in a trap.
George Harrison's elder sister Louise had just retired to bed in Sarasota, Florida when she was phoned by a friend telling her to turn on her TV. 'My first thought was that something was wrong with George,' she recalled. 'When I heard, I felt two things – a wave of relief that George was OK, and horror at what had happened to John.' She immediately tried to phone her brother at Friar Park, his unfeasibly expansive Gothic mansion in Henley, but nobody answered. 'They kept the phone under the stairs in those days,' she remembered, 'because George didn't like to be disturbed by it.' For the next two hours she dialled the number again and again, but heard nothing but the endless bleat of the ringing tone.
Around 5 a.m. UK time, an hour after the shooting, the BBC was ready to deliver the news to the world.
In her home overlooking Poole Harbour 74-year-old Mimi Smith – John Lennon's aunt, who had raised him from the age of six – drifted in and out of sleep to the comforting drone of the BBC World Service radio broadcast. She had not seen her nephew for nine years, but two days earlier he had told her that he would be returning to Britain in the New Year. She heard his name, uncertain whether she was awake, and realised that the radio announcer was talking about Lennon. She just had time to register a thought familiar from his childhood – 'What has he done this time?' – before the newsreader confirmed the fear that had always haunted her. She lay alone in her bed and listened as hope and pleasure died in her heart.
An hour later Louise Harrison abandoned her attempts to call Friar Park and woke up her brother Harry, who lived in the gatehouse on his younger sibling's property. 'I blurted out that John had been shot,' she recalled. 'Harry said that there was no point in waking up George at that time of the morning, as there was nothing he could do about it. "I'll tell him when I take up the post after breakfast," he said.'
Gradually the news spread through the Beatles community. The group's longest-serving assistant, Neil Aspinall, shared an especially close bond with Lennon. When he was woken, his first impulse was to phone John's Aunt Mimi: his call persuaded the elderly woman that she was indeed experiencing a living nightmare. Then Aspinall went grimly through the Beatles hierarchy, calling Harrison's home, speaking to Starkey before he left for Nassau airport, but failing to reach McCartney, whose phone was disconnected at night.
In McCartney's Sussex cottage nobody turned on the TV or radio; Linda McCartney drove the couple's children to school as usual. While she was away, her husband plugged in the phone and learned that his songwriting partner and estranged friend, the man who had shaped and sometimes scarred his entire adult life, was dead.
Minutes later, his wife returned home. 'I drove into the driveway,' she remembered, 'and he walked out the front door. I could tell by looking at him that there was something absolutely wrong. I'd never seen him like that before. Desperate.' Linda described his face as 'horrible'. Then he told her what had happened. 'I can see it so clearly,' she said later, 'but I can't remember the words. I just sort of see the image.' Sobbing and shaking, the couple staggered back into the house. 'It was just too crazy,' McCartney said. 'It was all blurred.'
A year later Paul McCartney was asked how he had felt. 'I can't remember,' he said, though he could, all too clearly. He relived the clanging emotions of that moment: 'I can't express it. I can't believe it. It was crazy. It was anger. It was fear. It was madness. It was the world coming to an end.' Reeling with grief and unreality, he began to imagine that he too might become the target of an assassin. 'He started wondering if he was going to be next,' Linda McCartney revealed, 'or if it would be me or the kids, and I didn't know what to think.' 'You couldn't take it in,' her husband confirmed. 'I still can't.'
George Martin, who had supervised the Beatles' recording career with fatherly care, was woken by an American friend anxious to pass on the news. 'Not a good way to start the day,' he remembered. 'I immediately picked up the phone and rang Paul.' The two men were scheduled to meet later at Martin's London studio, where McCartney was making an album. Martin recalled: 'I said, "Paul, you obviously don't want to come in today, do you?" He said, "God, I couldn't possibly not come in. I must come in. I can't stay here with what's happened."' As McCartney explained later, 'We heard the news that morning, and strangely enough all of us reacted in the same way. Separately. Everyone just went to work that day. Nobody could stay home with that news. We all had to go to work and be with people we knew.'
As in the 1960s, 'we' was the Beatles, another of whom was scheduled to record that afternoon. Having been told that his latest album was insufficiently commercial, George Harrison had reluctantly agreed to submit four new songs. His collaborators included percussionist Ray Cooper, and American musician Al Kooper, an insomniac who, like Mimi Smith, had learned of Lennon's death from the BBC World Service. 'I called Ray and said, "Do you know about this?"' Kooper recalled. 'I said, "We should go and take [Harrison] in the studio and work and take his mind off it" as opposed to letting him stew. So he said OK, and we drove out there, and when we got to the gate there was like a million press people there, just standing there in the rain. I got out of the car and they started shouting at me. I said, "Don't you have anything better to do?"'
McCartney faced a similar gauntlet at Martin's AIR Studios in London. 'I did a day's work in a kind of shock,' he said later. Irish musician Paddy Moloney was there. 'It was a strange day,' he remembered, 'but playing music seemed to help Paul get through it.' George Martin recalled music taking second place to therapy: 'We got there and we fell on each other's shoulders, and we poured ourselves tea and whisky, and sat round and drank and talked and talked. We grieved for John all day, and it helped.'
Lennon's childhood friend Pete Shotton, who had worked for the Beatles in the late 1960s, 'decided I wanted to be with someone who knew John as well as I did'. He arrived at Harrison's home around midday. '[George] wrapped his arm around my shoulders and we went silently into his kitchen and had a cup of tea. We spoke quietly, just for a bit, not saying much, and George left the room to take a transatlantic call from Ringo.' Then Starkey left for his early-morning flight to New York. 'There's nothing else we can do,' Harrison told Shotton; 'we just have to carry on.' Al Kooper was taken into the kitchen, where he found Harrison 'white as a sheet, all shook up. We all had breakfast. He took calls from Paul and Yoko, which actually seemed to help his spirit, and then we went into the studio and started the day's work.'
In New York thousands of mourners had gathered around the Dakota Building. By 2 a.m. EST police had erected barricades, and armed guards were stationed at the site of the shooting. Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, recalled, 'I came back here and went into our bedroom, which faces 72nd Street. All I could hear all night, and for the next few weeks, was the fans outside playing his records. It was so excruciating, just spooky. I asked my assistants to beg his fans to stop it.' Her staff informed the mourners that Ono was attempting to sleep and intercepted calls on her private line.
Lennon's 17-year-old son Julian told his mother Cynthia that he wanted to fly immediately from Britain to New York to join his stepmother and half-brother. 'We were put straight through to [Yoko],' Cynthia remembered, 'and she agreed that she would like Julian to join her. She said she would organise a flight for him that afternoon. I told her I was worried about the state he was in, but Yoko made it clear that I was not welcome: "It's not as though you're an old school-friend, Cynthia." It was blunt, but I accepted it.'
When Ono spoke to McCartney a few hours later, her tone was more conciliatory. 'She was crying and cut up,' McCartney said that evening, 'and had no idea why anyone should want to do this. She wanted me to know that John felt warm about me.' For more than a decade Lennon and McCartney's relationship had been fragmentary and strained, and McCartney's self-confidence had clearly been shaken by their estrangement. Ono's reassurance helped to bolster his ego: 'It was almost as if she sensed that I was wondering whether the relationship had snapped.'
Lennon's death had robbed both McCartney and Harrison of someone with whom they felt a precious rapport. 'The consolation for me,' McCartney reflected in 1992, 'was that when [Lennon] died, I'd got our relationship back. And I feel sorry for George because he never did. George was arguing until the end.' Harrison and Lennon had not spoken for several years, and Lennon's final interviews revealed resentment towards his old friend. Yet Harrison's grief was flecked with fury rather than self-doubt. Derek Taylor phoned him that afternoon and found him 'shocked, dreadfully upset and very angry. He said he didn't want to give a statement at such a time, but [business manager] Denis O'Brien had said there ought to be one. After an hour or so I telephoned George again and this time we worked out a short statement based on his real response to the tragedy.' Harrison's deep sense of spirituality was masked by his rage. 'After all we went thr
ough together,' his statement read, 'I had and still have great love and respect for him. I am shocked and stunned. To rob life is the ultimate robbery in life. This perpetual encroachment on other people's space is taken to the limit with the use of a gun. It is an outrage that people can take other people's lives when they obviously haven't got their own lives in order.' Later he spoke to his sister in America. 'George phoned me,' Louise Harrison said, 'and he was obviously very upset. He just told me, "Stay invisible."' Then Harrison returned to his home studio. Al Kooper reported, 'We kind of got him drunk, and kept going as long as we could until we just ran out of stuff to do.'
While McCartney and Harrison soothed their grief with alcohol and companionship, Richard Starkey and Barbara Bach flew to New York. 'You had to say hello to the guy's wife,' he explained, 'just to say "Hi" and "We're here."' They took a cab to the apartment where Bach's sister lived, and phoned Ono at the Dakota. 'Yoko didn't really want to see anybody,' he recalled. 'She was really up and down – she wanted to see someone and then she didn't. So we sat around for a bit and then she said, "Come on over." We got to the apartment, and she said she just wanted to see me – mainly because she's known me a lot longer, and she'd only met Barbara twice before.' A decade earlier Lennon and Ono had informed the world that they were now inseparable, indissoluble: 'Johnandyoko'. In an unconscious tribute to his friend, Starkey now mirrored this stance, telling Ono, 'Sorry, we go everywhere together.' Ono agreed to see them for a brief, traumatic meeting. 'Then we flew out,' Starkey said, 'because we didn't feel too partial to New York at that time.'
In London the numbing effects of McCartney's recording session had worn off, and he walked outside onto Oxford Street. A phalanx of reporters surrounded his limousine, asking obvious but unanswerable questions. McCartney remained polite but sullen, chewing gum determinedly as a distraction from his pain. To bring his ordeal to a close, he compressed everything he couldn't say into three words, tossed contemptuously towards the voracious microphones: 'Drag, isn't it?'
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 1