Then, out of habit, he waved to the cameras and vanished into the safety of his car. 'I had just finished a whole day in shock,' he reflected later. 'I meant "drag" in the heaviest sense of the word. [But it seemed] matter of fact.' 'He was slated for that,' George Martin said. 'I felt every inch for him. He was unwise, but he was off his guard.'
That night the two British television networks treated the murder like the death of a minor royal. The BBC screened the Beatles' film comedy Help!, its pop-art playfulness adding a surreal veneer to the tragedy. ITV herded anyone with a faint claim to expert status into their studios: biographers, critics, ephemeral pop stars – 'all those people who were supposed to have been John's friends' McCartney raged later. 'Then the pundits come on, "Yes, so John was the bright one in the group. Yes, he was a very clever one. Oh well, he'll be sorely missed, and he was a great so-and-so." I said, "Bloody hell, how can you muster such glib things?" But they were the ones who came off good, because they said suitably meaningful things. I was the idiot who said, "It's a drag."' Powerless, bereft, stricken by the loss of the man whose approval he rated above all others', McCartney raged against the night. 'I did a lot of weeping,' he revealed. 'I remember screaming that [Lennon's assassin] Mark Chapman was the jerk of all jerks; I felt so robbed and emotional.'
Alcohol eventually calmed all of the surviving Beatles. Starkey flew to Los Angeles, where he dined at Mr Chow's in Beverly Hills with Harry Nilsson, the defiantly self-destructive singer-songwriter who had once been Lennon's companion-in-carousing. 'Ringo never brought up the events that had just transpired on the East Coast,' said fellow diner Ken Mansfield, 'and I found myself admiring the manner in which he handled the whole situation.' Yet such insouciance would become increasingly hard to maintain. Unbeknown to Starkey, his arrival at Los Angeles airport had been monitored by dozens of police, responding to a threat to his life made by a deranged man who arrived at the terminal building determined to rival Mark Chapman's sudden fame. Meanwhile, New York police informed Yoko Ono's staff that someone had been arrested at the Dakota entrance, seeking to kill her.
For some, the tragedy brought reward. David Geffen, who had just released Lennon's final album, watched in amazement as orders flooded his distributors' phone lines; cancelling all advertising for the album as a mark of respect didn't stem the flow. Lennon's attorneys were inundated with requests to license the musician's name. Workers at the EMI Records factory outside London were placed on emergency overtime to handle the demand for Lennon's back catalogue. In less than 24 hours he had been transformed from a musician into a global hero, and the three surviving members of the Beatles had joined the supporting cast with their own life stories.
'It is not difficult to imagine what a staggering blow his death inflicts on Paul, George and Ringo,' Daily Mirror columnist Donald Zec wrote after Lennon's death. 'Think of the sudden collapse of one of the steel stanchions supporting an oil rig. No answer to that kind of catastrophe.'
For all their stubborn talk that they no longer considered themselves Beatles, McCartney, Harrison and Starkey knew that they would always be defined by the monolith that shadowed their lives. The loss of Lennon was existential: it affected every atom of their being. For McCartney, it ended all hope of reunion with the man whose name would forever be linked with his, and the familiar hierarchy of that link – Lennon/McCartney, never McCartney/Lennon – would become increasingly uncomfortable in the years ahead. He had not just lost a friend, but a man whose approval or disdain could determine his self-confidence. McCartney had been grieving for the loss of Lennon's love and esteem since Yoko Ono supplanted him as Lennon's chosen collaborator in 1968. Now that grief would become permanent, without hope of relief. Twenty-five years after Lennon's assassination, the memory could still cause McCartney to break down in public.
George Harrison's relationship with Lennon was rooted in the cosmic realm. During the two men's early experiments with chemical mind expansion in the mid-1960s Harrison had experienced a feeling of profound kinship with his often aggressive and sarcastic friend. They might have enjoyed little personal contact in the decade before Lennon's death, but in Harrison's eyes the bond could not be broken: it was a spiritual union, which would survive the grave just as it had weathered years of public and private tension. At their final meeting Harrison could still detect the unspoken link in Lennon's eyes.
'I was always worried about Ringo,' Lennon noted after the breakup of the Beatles. Lennon, McCartney and Harrison all carried proven songwriting skills into their solo careers; Starkey was forced to rely on charm and comradeship. They proved rich resources: in 1973 he had come close to engineering a Beatles reunion, and at the time of Lennon's death he was attempting to match that achievement on a new album. McCartney and Harrison had already contributed to the sessions, and Lennon was scheduled to complete the set in January 1981. But it was obvious that nothing less than the magical presence of all four Beatles could arouse significant interest in anything that Starkey did. His career had been in free fall since the mid-1970s, mirroring his decline into acute alcoholism, as Lennon had lamented to his friends. His relationship with Starkey was closer and less complicated than his dealings with Harrison or McCartney, not least because Starkey represented no artistic or financial threat. Lennon offered Starkey unconditional love and acceptance, qualities that the alcoholic millionaire was struggling to register in his own troubled heart.
Each of the surviving Beatles registered a uniquely personal loss in December 1980, but emotion was only one of the levels on which Lennon's murder took its toll. Despite the annulment of their legal partnership, the four Beatles were still caught in a claustrophobic web of financial obligations. Literally dozens of companies created, managed and squandered their individual and corporate wealth. Some of their advisers had invented methods of steering their earnings from one tax jurisdiction to another, with cash speeding around the world from company to company, en route to an offshore resting-place in an idyllic haven. None of the Beatles comprehended the full implications of the hundreds of legally binding documents that they had signed since 1962. Once upon a time they had collected their money from Liverpool promoters in grubby notes and coins, and split it equally in the back of their van. Now they employed armies of financial specialists, whose purpose was to expand their clients' riches and their own commissions. Once the Beatles had dealt solely in music. Now their interests ranged from film production to dairy farming, plus that mysterious form of money broking available only to the obscenely rich.
In the beginning the Beatles' affairs had been entrusted to their manager Brian Epstein. He recruited a team of assistants with comforting Liverpool accents, who continued to serve them after Epstein's death in 1967. The loss of their naive but devoted mentor opened the gates to financial confusion and men with vastly greater business experience than Epstein but sometimes less loyalty. A struggle ensued to gain mastery of the Beatles' business interests, but no sooner had New York accountant Allen Klein triumphed than his prize dissolved before his eyes. By the mid-1970s, when their professional partnership was finally annulled, the Beatles had each assembled – exactly how they found hard to remember – his own rich entourage of corporate lawyers and advisers.
While their representatives threw themselves gleefully into legal battles and financial coups, the Beatles could at least feel secure that they held some vestige of control over their music. The exact extent of their stake in their timeless 1960s catalogue was open to costly legal dispute, and would remain so for years to come. But until the late 70s, when record companies first dared to say no to Starkey and then Harrison, the recording studio remained a fiercely guarded bastion of independence for the four men.
In personal and creative terms the Beatles had never been entirely equal, but when it came to matters that affected them all each man's vote carried the same weight. Yet as early as 1968 Lennon had introduced a fifth element to the quartet: his partner, the experimental film-maker and artist Yoko Ono. First he insi
sted on her presence while the Beatles were working; then he abandoned the group and collaborated solely with her. Finally, after the birth of their son Sean in October 1975, he made the fateful decision to appoint her his surrogate in business meetings and contractual negotiations. The other three Beatles and their extravagantly rewarded advisers were now forced to work with a petite, softly spoken, wilful and utterly unpredictable woman whom they had always regarded with suspicion and unease.
Until December 1980 McCartney, Harrison and Starkey could reassure themselves that their former colleague was still a party to the deals being made in his name. When he died, Ono was entrenched as the sole guardian of the Lennon legacy: the self-appointed 'keeper of the flame', protector of his interests, curator of his archive, spokesperson for his memory, and controller of 25 per cent of the Beatles and their business empire. There were no longer four Beatles, but there was always Yoko Ono, maverick in Manhattan. Her elevation to ersatz Beatle status presented a baffling conundrum to Lennon's former colleagues.
From the beginning the four men had commanded different levels of respect. Starkey was the drummer, with the saving grace of appearing lovable and self-deprecating, and being armed with a simple but droll wit. Harrison was 'the quiet one,' though 'If I was the quiet one,' he complained once, 'the others must have been really noisy.' A dedicated student of the guitar, he was in thrall to Eastern philosophies, possessed of dry humour and seriousness in equal measure, and incidentally the creator of what Frank Sinatra described as 'the greatest love song of the twentieth century'. (All of Harrison's humour was needed to ignore Sinatra's conviction that 'Something' had been penned by Lennon and McCartney.)
McCartney was an enigma. Fiendishly talented, driven to near-obsession by a work ethic implanted in early childhood, the proud owner of a pure seam of creativity almost unmatched in the history of popular music, he was also insecure, clumsy in front of the media, a natural entertainer and a born ham. Ex-employees dubbed him a control freak. But his melodic gift outweighed all his human frailty. So too did his determination, which sometimes overpowered his artistic judgement. This medley of traits and characteristics combined to make him the most commercially successful songwriter of all time. But at some level of his psyche none of this counted if he did not have the respect of John Lennon. With Lennon gone, he was locked into intimate financial partnership with a woman whom he had never understood, and who seemed never to have valued him or his talent.
In the years after his death Lennon was portrayed in vivid, clashing colours. Some observers claimed that his final years were shaped by creative bankruptcy, drugs and suicidal despair. Others – not least Lennon himself, in his final testimony – declared that he was at the height of his powers, fully re-engaged with his muse, ready to celebrate another dazzling chapter of the romantic saga he had once dubbed 'The Ballad of John and Yoko'. The obituary writers declared him 'a hero', who 'reached out beyond entertainment to offer a gentler philosophy of life'. His promise and stature were compared to those of the late President Kennedy: 'both represented, in their different ways,' The Times claimed, 'the aspirations of a generation'. In the editorial columns that still represented the voice of the British establishment, the same paper declared, 'Lennon was only one member of the group, but he was its most charismatic and interesting one, and perhaps its most important.' His death 'commits to history the decade that so utterly changed British society'.
How could Paul McCartney maintain his own career while his former partner was being canonised? How could he stake his claim to a proper share of the Beatles' artistic legacy when he was uncomfortably mortal and Lennon was up among the gods? Personal grief was only one of his curses; for the rest of his life McCartney would be battling Yoko Ono for his place in history. There were now three Beatles, and one saint. Perhaps that was McCartney's cruellest fate: he desired nothing more than to regain Lennon's love, but now he was condemned to compete with Lennon's memory for the recognition that, rightfully, should already have been his.
Two days before he shot Lennon, Mark Chapman spent several hours waiting fruitlessly outside the Dakota Building. Then he hailed a cab, which took him downtown to Greenwich Village. He told the driver that he was a recording engineer who had spent the afternoon working on an album that reunited John Lennon and Paul McCartney.
Chapman could not have known that McCartney had attempted to contact his ex-colleague during the making of Lennon's recently completed Double Fantasy album, but that communication had been prevented by a third party. Neither was he aware that New York City officials had been asked to undertake a feasibility study for a possible Beatles reunion concert in Central Park; nor that Lennon had just sworn in an affidavit that he was planning to collaborate with the group for the first time in eleven years.
All of these fantasies and schemes died with Lennon on 8 December 1980. The four Beatles had last worked together in August 1969; had effectively disbanded a month later and had announced the fact in spring 1970. A year later the tatters of their reputation were scattered around the London High Court when Paul McCartney sued his friends in an attempt to dissolve their legal partnership. The four Beatles had always squabbled like brothers; now their confrontations were worthy of a Mafia family. The moptopped idols still known as 'the boys' to their long-suffering staff were exposed as jaded, embittered men who had slipped inexorably out of time.
Throughout the 1970s their disagreements captivated the press and public, who charted their shifting positions like armies on a general's map. Hints of détente between the two main protagonists would be countered by a sudden surge of animosity from Harrison; one Beatle might suggest that a reunion would be 'fun', only for another to respond with contempt. Yet no matter how often the Beatles denied that they were about to regroup, there was a shared understanding – shared at least by their fans – that eventually they would be reconciled, and (equally contentious) that the reunion would be artistically valid. The commercial potential of a reformed Beatles was never in doubt, but it was not just money that sparked the offers of unimaginable sums for a single concert or tour. Nor was it music, the ostensible purpose of any reunion. Depending on their mood, the Beatles greeted the inevitable questions about their future with a mixture of supreme self-confidence ('If we did do something, it would be great') and insecurity ('Could we ever be as good as people expect us to be?'). Ultimately, as the collaboration between McCartney, Harrison and Starkey in the 1990s proved, their artistic achievement was irrelevant; what counted was the symbolism.
'Sexual intercourse began in nineteen sixty-three,' the poet Philip Larkin wrote, 'between the end of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles' first LP.' And from 'sexual intercourse' you could infer every facet of that cultural phenomenon now known as 'the Sixties' – erotic liberation, flamboyant fashion, student protest, the anti-war movement, Carnaby Street, Grosvenor Square, the Prague Spring, Paris in May, acid, pot, free dope, free love, free music, freedom from the past and, as it turned out, the future. Numerous factors combined to place the Beatles at the heart of this cultural upheaval, or revolution, or whatever best described the collective sense that something in the world had changed irrevocably. There was the coincidence of the calendar: it was mere chance that led the group to split in the final months of the decade, not a keen eye for self-mythology. Their youthful exuberance and unwillingness to accept the status quo chimed with the restlessness of the baby boomers who were achieving demographic dominance. They displayed an uncanny ability to assimilate the enthusiasms of the artistic and cultural vanguard, from psychedelic drugs and Indian spirituality to musique concrète and pop art, and reproduce them for the mass audience. The Beatles didn't create the Sixties, but their music and charisma sold it to the world.
Beyond their active lifetime the Beatles were borrowed to support wildly varied depictions of the 1960s. Some commentators blamed them for the decade's cultural ills: lack of respect for
authority, extramarital sex, drug use, swearing, the moral decay of socie
ty. Less controversially, the Beatles joined the era's other icons in an apparently seamless collage, as evocative and – in time – culturally empty as JFK, miniskirts, urban riots, flower power, the Vietnam War and the first landing on the moon. Reduced to a few seconds of matching suits and hysterical fans, the Beatles provided the smoothness of nostalgia with no unsettling jolts of reality.
There was indeed a sense that the group had passed through the 1960s immunised from history, as removed from the times as they were from the everyday necessity of feeding themselves. Wealth and fame exiled the Beatles from the youth revolution that they were supposedly leading, and one of the symptoms of their impending disintegration was their increasing clumsiness when they were confronted with life outside their bubble – notably in the creation of their utopian business empire, Apple. The group had imagined that they could bypass commercial necessities with the sheer power of their name. Theirs was not the child-like wonder of a generation coming to flower, but the naivety of men (no longer 'the boys') who had forgotten how to deal with reality. Like closeted princes faced with a high-street vending machine, they were clueless and confused. That left them prey to businessmen who were anything but starry-eyed, and who recognised earning potential when they saw it. As their empire decayed from within, the Beatles were forced to confront the things that separated them as individuals, and which gradually overcame the solidarity that had supported their dizzying rise to fame.
Much of this was forgotten when people talked about a Beatles reunion. Nobody dreamed of a return to the dark days of 1969, when Lennon and McCartney were often reluctant to occupy the same room, and Lennon ensured he was absent whenever a George Harrison song was due to be recorded. There was no heady glow attached to the memory of a court case that pitted the Fab Four against each other, or exposed their bitter recriminations to the world. Even the most unrealistic supporters of a reunion could not expect them to look or sound like they did in 1964, when their irrepressible energy conquered the world. No, what was required of a reunited Beatles was that they should make their audience feel as they had done when they first heard 'I Want to Hold Your Hand' or smoked a joint to the accompaniment of Sgt Pepper. What people wanted wasn't the Beatles; it was their own past, stripped of pain and ambiguity. But it was precisely the combination of pain and ambiguity which had already destroyed the dream.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 2