Harrison felt he had every reason to trust O'Brien, who had appeared as his saviour in the aftermath of his relationship with Allen Klein and had masterminded his stunningly successful venture into the British film industry. 'When we got rid of Allen Klein,' he said in 1988, 'I was 15 years behind with my taxes, and Denis helped me sort out that mess.' HandMade Films' initial success – including hits such as TheLong Good Friday and A Private Function – suggested that business acumen, instinct and luck were working in their favour. But that streak ended with Shanghai Surprise, the Madonna vehicle that cost HandMade £10 million and took less than half that at the box office. Subsequent HandMade releases, such as The Raggedy Rawney, were even less successful; and the nadir was Checking Out, a comedy that grossed less than 3 per cent of its costs. For any independent film company these figures were ruinous, and in 1991 production was abruptly halted on all HandMade's projects. Harrison attempted to sever his ties with the industry, faxing the London office staff to tell them they were fired and announcing that he no longer wished to be involved with the company.
Even a Beatle, however, could not dispose of his business obligations so swiftly. O'Brien repaired the public damage that Harrison had caused, and the company stumbled on. But history was about to be replayed. In 1972 Lennon and Harrison had ordered a clandestine investigation of Allen Klein's business affairs. Now Harrison was forced into the same manoeuvre, knowing that the stakes were enormous. At risk, ultimately, was his Friar Park mansion and his quarter interest in Apple and the Beatles. HandMade had offered him a journey out of the past. Now only a return to the past could safeguard his financial future.*38
In 1990 Neil Aspinall had advised Yoko Ono and the three Beatles to reconsider the idea of producing an official documentary about their career. Harrison was dismissive, but the others remained open to negotiation. While Harrison grappled with potential disaster and Starkey battled to keep his addictions at bay, McCartney seemed secure and fulfilled. Ono was moved by his decision, during a Liverpool concert that June, to celebrate Lennon's memory by performing three of his best-known songs, 'Strawberry Fields Forever', 'Help!' and 'Give Peace a Chance'.†5 Despite his success as a live performer, however, McCartney had always found it difficult to communicate in public. His stage patter was wooden and often embarrassing, and after a brief period of unthinking honesty provoked by Lennon's death, he had returned to his standard interview technique of hiding his discomfort in familiar anecdotes. After former tabloid journalist Geoff Baker became his press spokesman, it did McCartney few favours when he told journalists that the album Off the Ground was 'the best thing Paul's done since the White Album', when it so blatantly wasn't. McCartney was at his most impressive when he wasn't trying so hard to impress – filming an episode of the MTV Unplugged series, for example, on which he revisited songs such as 'And I Love Her' with a delicacy that was all too rarely found in his performances. Even then, McCartney could not be entirely spontaneous. In one of the most endearing moments of the programme an attempt at 'We Can Work It Out' ground to a halt after a few bars. 'This is so informal that we'll start again,' McCartney said. What the audience didn't realise was that the mistake had been carefully planned. As an aside, MTV Unplugged marked the debut of Stella McCartney's fashion career; the 18-year-old received a wardrobe credit on the show.
The McCartney family widened its horizons in 1991, with Paul venturing into classical composition and Linda launching an enormously successful range of vegetarian foods. Their contentment was sharply at odds with Harrison's financial insecurity. With Handmade Films in disarray, he needed cash, and by autumn 1991 he had agreed to let Aspinall assemble a documentary crew. Inevitably, it was McCartney who announced the news, and Harrison who immediately dampened any illusions about a Beatles reunion. 'No, it can't be possible,' he insisted in late November, 'because the Beatles don't exist, especially now as John Lennon isn't alive. It just comes every time Paul needs some publicity, he announces to the press that the Beatles are coming together again, but that's all. I wouldn't pay too much attention to that.'
He was speaking in Tokyo at the start of his first concert tour in 17 years. 'I had to do something when I gave up smoking,' Harrison quipped, discounting his business problems. As in 1974, the constant enquiries about the Beatles irritated him. 'The press conference set the tone for the whole thing,' reflected Eric Clapton, who supported Harrison on the Japanese tour. 'They were asking him inappropriate questions and he went on the defensive and stayed that way.' In retrospect, Clapton viewed the tour as a last chance to tug Harrison out of the lethargy that had begun to envelop him. 'I only wish I could have been more help,' he said in his autobiography. 'It was a fine show, well rehearsed with great songs and tremendous musicianship, but I knew his heart wasn't in it. He didn't really seem to like playing live, so it did nothing for him, except maybe he saw how much he was loved, both by his fans and by us.' None of that affected the monetary significance of the tour, which comprised twelve sell-out shows in large arenas and spawned a double album. There was talk of taking the show to America, but Harrison's discomfort made that impossible.
He did agree to play one more show, however, on 6 April 1992, his first full-length British concert since 1969. It was another fund-raiser, not for HandMade Films but for the newly formed Natural Law Party. This mysterious organisation had put up several hundred candidates for the UK general election three days later. Their goal was ambitious: 'to create a disease-free, crime-free, pollution-free society – Heaven on Earth' based on the principles of Transcendental Meditation espoused by the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Harrison, not previously noted for any political allegiance, promised, 'I will vote for the Natural Law Party because I want a total change and not just a choice between left and right . . . I believe this party offers the only option to get out of our problems and create the beautiful nation we would all like to have.'
Welcome though the concert was, many regarded Harrison's support for the NLP as evidence of his total isolation from real life. The party did little to aid its cause with an election broadcast that demonstrated the joys of 'yogic flying' and asked the populace to imagine a future in which the entire British nation could defy the laws of gravity. Yet Harrison's enthusiasm was undimmed by public cynicism. A few days before his concert he phoned Paul McCartney, 'giggling', from Los Angeles. 'I've been up all night, and you may think this is a bit silly, but Maharishi would like you, me and Ringo to stand as Members of Parliament for Liverpool. We'll win! It'll be great!' McCartney politely declined.
Fortunately, Harrison's Albert Hall show was a celebration of his music not his political philosophy. Eighteen months earlier he had attacked McCartney for staging 'a Beatles tour. He's decided to be the Beatles. I'm not interested: for me, it's the past.' Now he opened his show with the Beatles' 'I Want to Tell You', sending a shiver down the spine of everyone who imagined how the group might have sounded in 1966 if they had only bothered to rehearse. He seemed genuinely moved by the audience response. 'I'm always paranoid about whether people like me,' he admitted from the stage. 'You never know.'
The night was triumphant, with cameo appearances from Starkey and Harrison's son Dhani; the election less so, as only one in every 250 people voted for the NLP. Even the adrenaline rush of the gig quickly dissipated. 'I really enjoyed playing,' Harrison admitted a few weeks later. 'But I have a conflict: I don't particularly want to play to audiences. It's unhealthy to be the star.' He was happy to accept the trappings of his stardom, the freedom, the vintage guitars and the mansion; but when he looked back at the Beatles he could only think, 'What a waste of time! The potential danger of forgetting what the purpose is supposed to be in life and just getting caught up in this big tangle and creating more and more karma. I wouldn't want to do it again.'
Yet that was exactly what he had just agreed to do. In January 1992 a film crew began work in an anonymous-looking office in west London. In May Apple was ready to announce that The Long andWinding Road – the Beatles' official h
istory of their own lives – was under construction, and that the three surviving musicians had agreed to work together. 'We went through the stages of the three of us saying hello in different situations, in restaurants and offices,' Starkey explained later, 'then we started working separately and then we started doing a bit together, and then of course it ends up with us recording together.' Initially their contribution was limited to scouring their private film archives for rare footage; soon they agreed to be interviewed for the project by
the unthreatening figure of musician Jools Holland. 'None of the guys saw what the others had said,' explained producer Bob Smeaton. 'We did interview the three of them together, but I preferred to speak to them individually, because they're a lot more honest. They became protective of each other.'
One major problem facing Smeaton, Aspinall and director Chips Chipperfield was the missing Beatle. The crew had access to hours of Lennon interviews and were adamant that they didn't want Yoko Ono to act as a surrogate for her late husband. 'We didn't want her talking about John when she hadn't been around,' Smeaton recalled. 'But we said, "The guys are obviously going to talk about you. Do you want to be on screen?" But we wouldn't let her see what they had said about her. She had to make a decision there and then. And she said no.' She retained the same power of veto as the three Beatles, but her absence from the screen offered McCartney, Harrison and Starkey a sense of psychological freedom.
By agreeing to participate in Apple's documentary, the surviving Beatles were, consciously or not, sacrificing some of their carefully guarded privacy. But Harrison could no longer afford isolation. By late 1992 he had been advised that he was on the verge of bankruptcy, as HandMade's debts ate into his capital. It transpired that for years Harrison's wealth had been cross-collateralised to finance HandMade's features: in effect he was liable for 100 per cent of the company's losses, but only 50 per cent of its profits. 'To have someone sit at your table with your family every night and then betray your trust is one of the worst experiences imaginable,' he commented later. After almost 20 years O'Brien was removed as Harrison's manager and a director of Apple in early 1993 – Harrison assuming the latter role himself.
Two years of investigation followed before Harrison, his Harrisongs company and HandMade Films collectively filed suit against O'Brien in January 1995. Harrison's claim alone amounted to $25 million. In 1988 O'Brien had described his client as 'an absolutely extraordinary individual . . . I'd do anything for that guy.' Now Harrison alleged in his legal complaint that O'Brien had been 'a faithless and fraudulent manager' whose intention was 'to get a "free ride" at Harrison's expense' and 'to aggrandise himself personally, professionally and socially'. As one commentator noted, the allegations were effectively 'an 18-page insult'. When Harrison had split from Klein, the musician had retained a grudging affection for his former manager. This time the breach was total. Twelve months later the Los Angeles Superior Court issued a summary judgement that O'Brien was responsible for half of HandMade's debts, and that he therefore owed Harrison $11.6 million. 'It's a help, but I didn't actually get any money,' the musician commented. 'We've got to follow him to the ends of the earth, getting the case registered in every different area where he could have any assets. It's one thing winning, but actually getting the money is another thing.' Meanwhile, HandMade was sold to the Paragon Entertainment group for a reported £5 million.
The saga took its toll on Harrison's goodwill and health, and forced him into the unwelcome role of nostalgic Beatle. His colleagues were enjoying somewhat better fortune. In the mid-1980s Starkey had narrated a series of children's films, Thomas the Tank Engine, for British TV. His reward was an 8 per cent stake in the production company, which paid enormous dividends when the series was reworked as Shining Time Station for US consumption, with Starkey's lugubrious voice at its heart. He was locked into a healthy marriage and regular touring routine, had resumed his recording career, and appeared to have found the stability he had lacked since the demise of the Beatles. McCartney's situation was even rosier. In December 1992 he signed a new recording deal with EMI/Capitol, ambitiously described as a lifetime agreement that could net him as much as $100 million.
On 10 December McCartney and Harrison met in California. The following day McCartney announced, 'We're getting together, you know, for this [documentary] – it's bringing us together. And there's a chance we might write a little bit of music for it.' It was the kind of statement that he'd been making for years – every time he had an album to promote, Harrison would have said. But this time there was no sarcastic response from Harrison; merely silence. He insisted only that the project must not be named after McCartney's song 'The Long and Winding Road'. And so The Beatles Anthology was born, comprising a TV series of six or eight or ten episodes (the scope seemed limitless), a set of videotapes and possibly, just possibly, some new music from the surviving group members – some instrumental backgrounds, McCartney suggested, rather than a fully fledged studio reunion.
Once he had promoted his inconsistent Off the Ground album, suggesting as usual, 'John's spirit was in the studio with us,' McCartney embarked on his New World Tour. Like its predecessor, this was a gargantuan affair that leaned heavily on his heritage. Every show opened with a film dominated by footage from the Beatle era, although none of it post-dated the arrival of Yoko Ono. When the tour reached London in September 1993 Harrison attended one of the shows. 'He came back afterwards,' McCartney recalled, 'and criticised the gig in a sort of professional way. "A bit too long," George reckoned. Well, fuck you. And the old feelings came up. But George is a great guy. Even with old friends, this shit happens.'
The two men did agree on one subject: they weren't happy about delving too deeply into the Beatles' archive of unreleased recordings. Their producer George Martin was sent to investigate the possibilities and emerged unimpressed. 'I've listened to all the tapes,' he declared in March 1993. 'There are one or two interesting variations, but otherwise it's all junk. Couldn't possibly release it!' Then the financial potential of a series of archive releases was explained to Martin and the Beatles. Within a few months Martin had agreed to assemble three double CDs of unissued material, by which time the vaults of junk had magically become a treasure trove.
The Beatles Anthology was now proceeding on several fronts: the film team in Chiswick editing the archive footage and the new interviews with the Beatles; George Martin at Abbey Road preparing an alternative musical history of the group; and Derek Taylor at Apple gathering quotations old and new for a Beatles autobiography. Only one piece remained elusive: the music that McCartney, Harrison and Starkey had agreed to record together.
On New Year's Day 1994 Paul McCartney placed a call to Yoko Ono. 'She was a little surprised,' he admitted, but we got chatting. I rang her a few more times after that, we got quite friendly, and this idea came up. I said, 'Look, the three of us were thinking of doing a little instrumental for the film, just to get together.' But as the thought of the three of us actually sitting down in a studio started to get nearer and nearer, I got cold feet about it. I thought, does the world need a three-quarter Beatle record. But what if John was on, the three of us and John, like a real new record? I talked to Yoko about that and she said she had these three tracks.
On 19 January McCartney and Ono attended the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame dinner, where McCartney had agreed to induct Lennon – on the understanding that he would be honoured himself the following year.*39 He read an open letter to his late friend, recounting familiar anecdotes, and shared a magnificently awkward hug with Ono – she throwing her head back in mock-ecstasy, he leaning in tentatively as if he was about to embrace a crocodile. After the ceremony Ono handed over a bundle of tapes containing Lennon's home recordings of several songs, most of which had been aired on the Lost LennonTapes radio series. 'We know we can't do anything better than the Beatles,' McCartney said modestly, 'but for old time's sake, we thought it would be nice to give it a whirl.'
That was the story that went
around the world: the Beatles were reuniting, and McCartney had made it happen. But Ono soon let slip that she had first been approached by George Harrison and Neil Aspinall in 1991, relegating McCartney to the role of messenger: 'It was all settled before then. I just used that occasion to hand over the tapes to Paul.' Whereupon McCartney revised his narrative, now claiming to have suggested the concept to Ono earlier still. 'I checked it out with Sean,' he said, 'because I didn't want him to have a problem with it. He said, "Well, it'll be weird hearing a dead guy on lead vocal. But give it a try." I said to them both, if it doesn't work out, you can veto it. When I told George and Ringo I'd agreed to that, they were going, "What? What if we love it?" It didn't come to that, luckily.' Ono admitted that she had initially been dubious about the project: 'I remember how John always said there could be no reunion of the Beatles because, if they got together again, the world would be so disappointed to see four rusty old men. I also felt that those tracks were private. It was like a kind of physical hurt to me to think of someone taking them and messing with them.' It was perhaps not the most diplomatic way to describe the other Beatles' input, but Ono concluded, 'The Beatles have become a very important power to many people. I felt that for me to stand in the way of that reunion would be wrong. So I decided to go with the flow. And after all the Beatles were John's group. He was the band leader and the one who coined the Beatles' name.' She had lost none of her flair for annoying McCartney while appearing to act with grace and dignity. The origin of the Beatles' name – always ascribed humorously by Lennon to 'a vision' of a man on a 'flaming pie' – would cause a rift during the final edit of the Anthology documentary. According to McCartney, Ono insisted that Lennon's account was literally true, not a joke, and wouldn't hear otherwise. The argument inspired the title track of McCartney's 1997 album Flaming Pie, which tapped into the Beatles' spirit more successfully than anything he'd composed in years.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 38