Since the death of John F. Kennedy speculation has been the coda to American assassination. Conspiracy theorists soon found the hand of the FBI or CIA in Lennon's murder, his killer acting under sophisticated mind control like Sirhan Sirhan, who shot Robert Kennedy in 1968, or a hapless patsy like Lee Harvey Oswald. Paranoia hinted that the newly elected President Reagan must have ordered the hit, to prevent Lennon from leading a renaissance of the counterculture. But Lennon's final interviews lent more weight to the killer's own story, that he had shot his hero because he felt betrayed by the former Beatle's materialistic lifestyle.
After more than a decade of public ridicule, Ono was now portrayed as the grieving widow. 'For ten years I was the devil,' she noted wryly. 'Now I'm an angel. Did the world have to lose John for people to change their opinion of me? It's unreal. If it brought John back, I'd rather be hated.' She pleaded with Lennon's fans to control their grief after hearing that two had committed suicide. She organised a global vigil in her husband's memory. She solicited charitable donations, to be handled by the couple's Spirit Foundation. She said that people should not be afraid to profit from Lennon's name by selling magazines or posters, but that they should not exploit him or his followers. She penned a message to her husband, reproduced inside a tribute issue of Rolling Stone magazine: 'I love you I miss you You're with god I'll do what I said "Yoko hold on" I'll make sure I promise XX'. And a month after his death she asked fans not to harbour thoughts of revenge: 'The only "revenge" that would mean anything to us is to turn the society around in time, to one that is based on love and trust as John felt it could be.'
Double Fantasy went to No. 1 all over the world, as Lennon had hoped it would. So did singles new and old. The McCartneys visited Ono at the Dakota. 'We all cried so hard,' McCartney recalled. Lennon's elder son, Julian, announced his intention to live with Ono. 'Yoko was in a terrible state,' he revealed. 'She breaks down when she goes places she went with Dad, or if a programme comes on that they watched together.'
Shortly after Lennon's death his long-time friend Bill Harry paid tribute: 'So many dreams were killed with him, so many potential rock masterpieces lost forever, all speculation about a Beatles reunion finally laid to rest.' By early February 1981 the speculation had undergone a miraculous resurrection. Paul McCartney flew to Montserrat, where Beatles producer George Martin had installed a state-of-the-art studio, to begin work on a solo album. The studio manager revealed that McCartney was planning to record with both Harrison and Starkey; 'John Lennon may well have been on the album as well if he had still been alive.' A guest at the sessions was the Beatles' long-time friend rockabilly pioneer Carl Perkins. He played McCartney a song he had just written, entitled 'My Old Friend'. 'After I finished,' he recalled,
Paul was crying, tears were rolling down his pretty cheeks, and Linda said, 'Carl, thank you so much.' I said, 'Linda, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to make you cry.' She said, 'But he's crying, and he needed to. He hasn't been able to really break down since that happened to John.' And she put her arm around me and said, 'But how did you know?' I said, 'Know what?' She said, 'There's two people in the world that know what John Lennon said to Paul, the last thing he said to him. But now there's three, and one of them's you, you know it.' I said, 'Girl, you're freaking me out! I don't know what you're talking about!' She said that the last words that John Lennon said to Paul in the hallway of the Dakota building were, he patted him on the shoulder and said, 'Think about me every now and then, old friend.'
And that, with minor alterations, was the chorus line of Perkins' song. 'McCartney really feels that Lennon sent me that song, he really does.'
Later, Perkins played the song to George Harrison. 'Well, Paul has told me,' Harrison said, 'John
will come back, there'll be another thing that'll hit you some day.' The three ex-Beatles were now in more frequent contact than at any time since 1969. 'We were constantly talking to each other but saying nothing,' Starkey said of the aftermath of Lennon's death. 'We were just phoning up to check everyone was OK. "Hi, George." "Hi, Ringo." "Well, well, well." "Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear." There was nothing you could really say at the beginning. We were just stunned.'
Music was their most eloquent form of communication. There was no reunion on Montserrat, although Starkey did participate in McCartney's sessions. Harrison took a song he had originally offered to Starkey, entitled 'All Those Years Ago', and wrote new lyrics pertaining to Lennon. He invited the McCartneys and Denny Laine to add background vocals, and George Martin to supervise the session. Starkey wasn't present, although his drumming appeared on the track. 'All Those Years Ago' was banal and inappropriately jaunty, but the fact that it featured all three Beatles ensured it was seen as their official tribute to their fallen colleague. Meanwhile, McCartney channelled his impossible feelings into another song, 'Here Today'. 'Paul is a complex guy,' Denny Laine commented later. 'He is the best person I have met in all my life at hiding his innermost feelings.' His lyrics, with their imaginary characters and cartoon situations, often reinforced Laine's judgement. But 'Here Today' came from a different place. It was self-conscious, perhaps because McCartney wasn't used to expressing his emotions so clearly. But his sincerity was unmistakable, as he told Lennon what he could never have said to his face: I love you.
Around this time McCartney had several 'strange conversations' with Beatles biographer Hunter Davies. He kept going back to his relationship with Lennon, like a child picking at a scab: 'John and I were really army buddies. That's what it was like, really. I realise now we never got to the bottom of each other's souls. We didn't know the truth. Some fathers turn out to hate their sons. You never know.' Each sentence needed to be deciphered like a gnostic text. Maybe, McCartney told himself, he and Lennon had never been as close as he had imagined. Then he turned the argument on its head: now Lennon was his surrogate father, and 'Some fathers turn out to hate their sons.' The only certainty was that Lennon was gone and he remained. The rest? 'You never know.' As he admitted in his first formal interview after the murder, 'I thought it all. I went through it all.' But it became no clearer or less painful; there could be no resolution without the one thing he could not have: validation from his old friend.
Time passed, and the world continued. Yoko Ono issued the single that represented Lennon's final work, and 'Walking on Thin Ice' suggested that he had glimpsed a way of moving into the future rather than relying on echoes of the past. In June 1981 she released Seasonof Glass, a chillingly fragile album haunted by the tragedy. 'Eighty per cent of my power and personality is being an artist,' she explained later, 'and I had to live. I had to survive. I would have gone crazy or become very ill if I didn't do that.' One song, 'No No No', tackled her grief via the language of sexual dysfunction; the track opened with a flurry of gunshots and a heart-rending scream. Where Harrison was glib and McCartney sentimental, Ono had the courage to be real. Attention focused on the cover, which pictured the blood-spattered glasses Lennon was wearing when he was shot. 'People are offended,' she admitted. 'Well, there was a dead body, you know. I wanted the whole world to be reminded of what happened. If people can't take the picture of glasses because they're bloody, I'm sorry but I'm not sorry. John had to stomach a whole lot more. His whole body was
bloody. There was lots of blood all over the floor. That's the reality.' But her exploration of darkness ended there. Subsequent albums showed a surprising talent for experimental pop, and remained resolutely positive in a conscious attempt to maintain Lennon's credo that 'all you need is love' to 'imagine'. 'It's a blessing,' she would say relentlessly of everything that happened, offering a benediction to Lennon or some unnamed deity.
Beyond grief, there was always business. Sunday Times journalist Philip Norman had been working on a Beatles biography for three years, but benefited from his timing: the boldly titled Shout! The TrueStory of the Beatles appeared to great acclaim in March 1981. 'John Lennon was the Beatles,' Norman declared on US breakfast TV, thereby winning an invitation to tea
from Ono; McCartney must have seen the broadcast, as he held an otherwise unfathomable grudge against the book. Jack Douglas wasn't invited to the Dakota, however. The producer of Double Fantasy contacted Ono, wondering when he would receive his royalties, and 'I got a nasty letter. Almost like, "Fuck you, you're not getting anything." All kinds of nasty business went down after that. All I could ever think of was that I knew too much. She suspected that everyone who knew a lot was gonna write a book. But I made enough in the royalties, and she really lost a good friend.'
The Beatles' empire continued to keep the legal profession afloat. In February 1981 a court in New York awarded Bright Tunes – owned by Allen Klein – $587,000 as compensation for the damage caused to their copyright by 'My Sweet Lord'. The sum was exactly what Klein had paid to purchase the company, the judge clearly feeling it would be immoral for Harrison's ex-manager to profit from the deal. 'It's a total joke,' Harrison said. The saga finally ended in 1990 with copyright of both 'My Sweet Lord' and 'He's So Fine' awarded to Harrison in Britain and North America, and to Klein elsewhere.
Yet this apparently endless case would be outstripped by another legal marathon. In 1978 Apple managing director Neil Aspinall learned that a young computer company in California was using the Apple name and a fruity logo. He filed a suit claiming infringement of the Beatles' copyright. The two companies eventually agreed that Apple Computers would only use its name and logo on computing products, and it would never stray into the music business. Indeed, Apple Computers founder Steve Jobs admitted that he had chosen Apple as his company's name because it reminded him of his musical heroes. And here the case rested until it rose zombie-like later in the decade.
There was no shortage of opportunities to make money. Albert Goldman, who had appalled fans of Elvis Presley with a biography that accentuated the star's failings and frailties, signed a $1 million deal for a book about Lennon. Scurrilous 'revelations' were offered by Ono's tarot card reader, Lennon's assistant at the Dakota and assorted survivors from the NEMS and Apple payrolls. Those who couldn't muster a book depended on a magazine or newspaper exposé, such as the 'exclusives' credited to Wings guitarist Denny Laine. 'He wrote two articles,' retorted Linda McCartney. 'One said I led Paul around totally, the other that Paul totally dominated me. I thought Denny came off badly.'
Laine's disaffection with McCartney probably stemmed from the decision, formally announced in May 1981, to disband Wings. Laine insisted that he'd quit before he was sacked. 'Paul is doing other things, that's all,' said McCartney's press spokesman Tony Brainsby. As the group's drummer Steve Holly recalled, 'I picked up the Evening Standard and read that Wings had broken up. I rang Paul up and said, "What's this?" and he replied, "Well, I'd been meaning to tell you."' We just picked the wrong people,' Linda McCartney said ungraciously of Wings' multiple incarnations. '[Paul] needed the band to work with, but he had to carry almost all the weight. None of the Wings were good enough to play with him. They were good, but not great.' Years later McCartney admitted, 'To me there was always a feeling of letdown, because the Beatles had been so big that anything I did had to compare directly with them.'
Working as a solo artist hereafter, McCartney no longer needed to display even the faintest hint of democracy. Every musician was for hire and could be replaced. The one person who had the power to challenge him was George Martin, whom he courageously chose to produce three early 1980s albums. Martin laid down his terms, rejecting most of the songs McCartney auditioned for him. As a gesture of rebellion, the musician revived one of the rejects. 'He thought it was worthwhile,' Martin recalled, 'and he was hammering himself into the ground. I went in and said, "Paul, it's not working." He said, "Why isn't it working?" looking at me accusingly. "Because the song's not good enough." He looked at me and there was a kind of stand-off; and then he said, "Do you think I don't know?"' Eventually McCartney chose to work with producers who would be more wary about questioning his judgement.
Richard Starkey wielded less power than his former colleague. When he delivered his first album after Lennon's death, it was turned down despite cameos from Harrison and McCartney. Only after much revision was the playful Stop and Smell the Roses released in late summer 1981, to minimal sales and critical disdain. Nor was Starkey able to escape entirely unscathed from the legal cavalcade. In April 1981 his ex-girlfriend Nancy Andrews filed a suit against him in the LA Superior Court, claiming more than $5 million as her share of his earnings during their relationship. The trigger was the news that Starkey was planning to marry Barbara Bach. He had been wary of television since a disastrous chat show appearance in 1979, when his alcohol-soaked performance endangered a lifetime of goodwill. But he and Bach were under contract to promote their feeble film comedy Caveman, and TV allowed the couple to publicise their most valuable asset – their celebrity. It also exposed Starkey to public scrutiny of his reaction to Lennon's death – visibly shaken on The Barbara Walters Special, grimly fatalistic on Donahue, almost tearful on Good Morning America. 'He'd like to smile,' he told one audience, before looking up and addressing his old friend: 'How are you doing, Johnny?' More often, he leaned on an actor's repertoire of tricks to avoid displaying the depth of his emotion, employing gallows humour, gulping down his tears or biting his lips to distract him from his pain.
Lennon's absence clouded the wedding of Richard Starkey and Barbara Bach on 27 April 1981. The three Beatles and their wives posed for their first joint portrait since 1969, suggesting that if Lennon had lived the ceremony might have achieved the reunion that Sid Bernstein and the United Nations could not. The press claimed to have witnessed 'the days of Beatlemania all over again on a small scale', as a few hundred fans 'screamed and shouted and one even fainted'. To his delight, Harrison's arrival at the register office was scarcely noticed, so seldom had he been seen in recent years. An array of instruments was delivered to the reception at Rags, a celebrity haunt in Mayfair, in case the Beatles wished to perform together. 'Paul played the piano and Ringo was playing the spoons,' said photographer Terry O'Neill. 'It was fabulous.' Life magazine printed a photograph of McCartney behind the piano, Harrison sporting a guitar and Starkey – suitably enough – armed with a champagne bucket. Yoko Ono was not invited to the party. 'They felt intimidated about inviting me, because it was really not the right time to encounter people being happy,' she observed. 'But it would have been nice to have been told about it.'
A fiendishly complex etiquette now surrounded Ono's role as Lennon's widow. EMI Records was exploring the possibility of plucking unreleased Beatles material from its archive but had a 'gentleman's agreement' with the group not to release anything without their approval. 'Yoko Ono doesn't enter into this, because it's strictly an artistic decision and she's not a Beatle,' said a company spokesman. But after her husband's death she chose not to sell the family portion of Apple and appointed herself the guardian of his artistic heritage – and effectively a voting member of the Beatles. Moreover, she and McCartney were now the joint curators of the Lennon/McCartney songwriting empire. 'I had so many responsibilities,' she recalled. 'There was so much I had to do as Yoko Ono Lennon, that I forgot about being Yoko Ono.'
Still doubting the depth of his relationship with Lennon, McCartney needed to deal with Ono on some level of intimacy. He often telephoned after the murder, and then kept phoning, until eventually Ono asked him why he was so keen to keep in touch. 'I think I've misunderstood you,' McCartney admitted. 'Don't do me any favours,' Ono retorted. 'I don't want any charity.' A few weeks later he tried again. 'Look, I'm real nervous about making this phone call,' he began. 'You're nervous?' Ono replied. 'You're kidding! I'm more nervous than you!' That broke the ice, and in April 1982 the McCartneys, the Eastmans and the Ono-Lennons met in New York at Le Cirque.
Under discussion was the vexed issue of the Northern Songs catalogue. Sir Lew Grade, whose ATV corporation had bought the publishing rights to Lennon/McCartney's songs in 1969, was nearing retirement, and had offered to sell Northern back to McCartney
for £20 million. 'I gulped, thinking, Oh my God, I wrote them for nothing! Your own children are going to be sold back to you at a price,' McCartney recalled. By his account, he offered Ono the chance to be part of the deal, and she claimed that she could call in some favours and get the price reduced to £5 million. She later disputed this story, but either way Grade was soon ousted during a boardroom tussle, and the opportunity was lost.
Ono's bereavement had won her an unprecedented level of public support. Gradually, however, sympathetic profiles began to be balanced by more negative reporting – much of it provoked by her 18-year-old stepson Julian Lennon. Having elected to move to New York, he returned home in October 1981, admitting, 'Yoko's OK, but she doesn't mean anything more to me than the fact that she was married to my father.' He naively seemed to relish publicity, and was soon complaining about the meagre stipend (£150 per week) he received from the Lennon estate. Once again Ono was portrayed as a witch-like figure: 'Dad was always totally under her influence. She is a very strong person. She has a lot of power. She is a bit scary too.' Ono herself sent out contradictory signals, asking, 'I don't intend to spend the rest of my life alone, but could I bring another man into all this?' as she gestured at the pictures of Lennon that filled the Dakota, while being seen arm in arm with antique dealer Sam Havadtoy, her close companion for nearly two decades. More damaging were the revelations of tarot card reader John Green, the first of the Dakota insiders to break ranks. He claimed that the Lennons' sex life had been perfunctory, and that Ono regarded contact with her husband 'as an assault on her person. When this happened, John would go out to whorehouses' or, so Green alleged, grope other women in front of Ono, in the hope she might find it erotic. True or not, each tabloid revelation widened the chasm between two irreconcilable legends, each kept alive by the media: the romantic ballad of John and Yoko, and the noir portrait of a couple in distress.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 34