McCartney made a final attempt to persuade Harrison to join him in creating a third 'new' track for Anthology 3, but without avail. Even without this bonus, the set was arguably the most satisfying of the three retrospectives. It was released in October 1996, and promoted as 'The final chapter in the story of the greatest band there ever was . . . or ever will be'. Within days of its release, Apple issued an official statement with funereal grandeur better suited to the death of a monarch. 'The end has finally arrived,' it said. 'The Beatles are no more. The official word is that Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr will never play together again as a group, and they have decided that there will be no more singles issued from their back catalogue.'
The chief architect of the announcement was, of course, George Harrison. The Anthology had solved his financial problems; the Beatles had answered the prayers of the world; and now the world could leave the Beatles alone. But the world could not forget the Beatles that easily, and neither, it seemed, could they.
Finale
People still haven't gotten over the Beatles yet.
Sean Lennon, 1998
I should be more modest, but I don't care now. The Beatles is over. It's a body of work. I can now stand back and say, 'That was great.'
Paul McCartney, 2006
It was a conundrum that would have taxed the wits of any messiah. What if the Second Coming wasn't enough?
Those who had watched the constantly surprising drama of the Beatles unfold were deflated when the stars walked off stage because they were no longer enjoying the performance. People who loved the Beatles' music had experienced a sense of the possible, a dream of companionship, unity and love. After the split, they still had the music and the memories, but the glow of nostalgia couldn't match the gleam with which the Beatles had floodlit the past.
If there was something painful about life without the Beatles – and there was, even the Beatles knew it – then it surely followed that only a reunion could ease the pain. In 1964 sick and disabled children had been wheeled to the group's dressing room, as if their holy presence could effect a cure. After the group broke up, everyday miracles were no longer enough: now the Beatles had the responsibility of carrying the ideals of the 1960s, tangled and battered though they were, into a future that had a very different vision of utopia.
Within the collective belief that the Beatles could transform reality and recreate the past, expectations were divided. There were those who wanted to be delivered back to the real or imaginary paradise of 1967. Others had more modest ambitions: they simply desired some momentary distraction from a life that had never quite matched the dreams of the 1960s. Built into both fantasies was the desire that the Beatles should carry their listeners to some other place, spiritual, political or merely emotional. Each person's vision of what a Beatles reunion might bring was subtly different; what never varied was the weight of hope and the crushing certainty of disappointment.
After the Anthology the world had to accept that the Beatles had reformed – and nothing had changed. Reality took the place of illusion. In 1980 John Lennon had insisted that the group could never be responsible for anyone else's happiness. It took 15 years, and the reunion that he insisted was impossible, for the world to realise that he had been right.
Second time around, there was no global sense of grief when the Beatles split. Indeed, the decision was scarcely noticed. If anything, there was collective embarrassment that so much hope had been placed on this incomplete, fallible and slightly ill-fitting group of men. The long-anticipated reunion records, 'Free as a Bird' and 'Real Love', slipped quietly out of memory, as if they had never been, nor ever should have been.
In any case the institution was being undermined by age and fate, as if the effort required to bring it together was now taking its toll. Cancer spread callously through the Beatles' community – no hollow metaphor, but a grim alignment of chance. Its first victim was Maureen Cox, in December 1994. The next was Linda McCartney, who unexpectedly burst into tears at an awards ceremony in 1995 and told her husband that without him she wouldn't be able to carry on. That December the reason for her distress became clear: she had been diagnosed with breast cancer. There followed the ritual of surgery, containment and fear, all too familiar yet jarringly new to everyone who endures it. There were occasional bulletins, all of them optimistic; sometimes she would appear in public, smiling as her daughter Stella launched her career as a fashion designer, or beaming confidently alongside her husband at a premiere.
The following year Derek Taylor – recovering alcoholic, long-term smoker, champion of the jazz cigarette – underwent major surgery for cancer of the oesophagus. He retained his stoic, cynical idealism. 'They tell me I can't smoke dope any more,' he told me with a characteristic twinkle of the eye, 'so I'm just going to have to eat it instead.' He died on 7 September 1997, robbing George Harrison of a loyal friend, Apple of its spokesman and talisman, and the world of a humane and witty soul who had epitomised the ideals of the 1960s social revolution.
Two months before Taylor died Harrison discovered a sizeable lump on the side of his neck. Geoff Baker, the McCartney aide who succeeded Taylor as Apple PR man, insisted that Harrison 'doesn't think he has cancer and is totally cool about it'. Talking himself deeper into trouble, he claimed, 'There's been no cancer scare,' and, 'I'm not a lump person.' Neither, it can be imagined, was Harrison, but the lump had to be surgically removed and examined, and was shown to be malignant. 'I'm not going to die on you folks yet,' Harrison said in June 1998. 'I am very lucky because it didn't go anywhere – all it was, was a little red mark on my neck.' He blamed cigarettes and claimed to be fully recovered. But by then he was aware of what might lie ahead, having attended the funeral of another cancer victim, his friend and hero Carl Perkins, in January;*40 and more recently a memorial service in London for Linda McCartney, who had died on 17 April 1998.
Her death was shrouded in confusion in which Geoff Baker played a part. It was announced on 19 April as if it had just occurred. Baker said she had died in Santa Barbara, California, but local authorities launched an investigation and discovered that no death certificate had been filed. 'There is an inference that there is something to be hidden,' said a spokesman for the coroner's office. 'It does present the possibility of an assisted suicide or some other sinister-type thing going on.' It transpired that she had actually died at a previously secret McCartney ranch in Arizona. 'It was a decoy,' Baker confessed. 'It was nothing to do with the McCartneys. It was my decision. I said she had died in Santa Barbara because if I had said where she died it would have been overrun straight away, and they needed time because of their grief to come back in private. I am just trying to keep this family together.' But his statement simply raised more questions, as the McCartneys had already returned to England by the time the announcement was made. What should have been reported as an agonising family tragedy had become a story about media manipulation instead.
There had been a recognisable shift in Linda McCartney's public reputation during her final decade: her skills as a mother (evident in the no-nonsense worldliness of her children) had long been acknowledged, and she had won widespread support for her campaigns against animal cruelty and in favour of vegetarianism. When she died, one reporter managed a final twist of the knife: 'The [Beatles'] demise was often attributed to her supposed ambition to record with Sir
Paul herself,' wrote Mark Henderson in a cruel case of mistaken identity. But one of Britain's most conservative newspapers dubbed her a 'crusading vegetarian whose successful marriage defied all the doubters'. Her husband penned a tribute of heartbreaking honesty, to which the Daily Mirror responded, 'Nothing Paul McCartney wrote before was as beautiful and moving as the tribute to his late wife Linda.'
As his friend George Martin noted later that year, McCartney was sent headlong with grief. 'He is managing, but only just,' Martin revealed. 'It's a tough time for him. He's so alone now.' His wife's illness had shadowed him through 1997 and a succe
ssion of events that should have been celebrations. On New Year's Day it was announced that he had been awarded a knighthood. He claimed that his fellow Beatles now addressed him as 'Your Holiness', but that sounded like the invention of a PR man. Thirty-two years after the Beatles' MBE awards had sparked widespread controversy, this honour was eagerly anticipated and warmly welcomed. In April 1997 Sir Paul McCartney debuted his Flaming Pie album – his most exhilarating work in recent memory, which he attributed to the desire to create something that would match up to the Beatles' legacy. Almost as a matter of habit, he promoted the record by suggesting that the Beatles might yet reassemble to complete the third song they had left unfinished two years earlier, and at the same time he revealed the difficulties he had recently experienced in communicating with Harrison. In October he and his wife watched the unveiling of Stella McCartney's first collection. The following month he attended the Q magazine awards ceremony, pointedly walking out when his old nemesis Phil Spector made a speech. And then, as his wife's health declined, the widow of his former best friend chose to revive a family feud that seemed destined to outlive them both.
An apparent truce between the Lennons and McCartneys had endured for two years but collapsed when Ono commented on the respective merits of the two Beatles. 'I know Paul thinks he was leading them,' she said, insisting that the Beatles' real leader was Lennon. 'The way John led the band was very high level, on some kind of magical level. Not on a daily level, like Paul said, 'Oh, I was the one who told them all to come and do it. I made the phone calls.' John didn't make the phone calls. John was not on that level of a leader. He was on a level of a spiritual leader. He was the visionary, and that's why the Beatles happened.' She added, 'Paul's put in the position of being Salieri to Mozart' – a craftsman forced to compete with a genius, in other words. After which Ono can hardly have been surprised that she was not invited to the memorial services staged for Linda McCartney in London and New York. But she did post her own tribute: 'Linda and I did not meet up and have coffee and muffins in a corner café, or anything like that. But we communicated. We communicated in deeds more than in words. When she was strong, I felt strong.' And Ono also seemed to gain strength from Paul McCartney's weakness, as if the pair shared an eerie symbiosis. McCartney might have insisted in 1995, 'There are those who think John was the Beatles; that is not true and he would be the first to tell you that.' But he was permanently at risk of sounding churlish and oversensitive, while the same rules did not apply to Ono, who was widely expected to be unreasonable and only evoked surprise if she appeared (as she often did) considerate and modest.
McCartney intended to set history straight, but his efforts were understandably impeded by his wife's worsening health. In October 1997 his friend Barry Miles published Many Years From Now, an authorised biography of McCartney centred around their mutual adventures in the
alternative London of the mid-1960s. The book was the apotheosis of the theme that McCartney had introduced a full decade earlier: he was the original avant-garde Beatle. Here was all the evidence to prove the point, but presented in such a defensive way that it begged criticism from those who felt that he ought to let history run its course and the facts speak for themselves.
The process of revisionism continued in 2000 with the belated publication of The Beatles Anthology, an epic oral history of the group that would have appeared years earlier had its original editor Derek Taylor not been stricken with cancer. The difference was that here McCartney's views were often contradicted by his colleagues; while Many Years From Now was, quite rightly, the unchallenged verdict of one very opinionated participant. The person with the strongest claim to feeling diminished by McCartney's book was George Harrison, whose contribution to the Beatles was consistently underplayed. Yet the time for Harrison and McCartney to fight had passed.
As he recovered from his cancer treatment, Harrison distanced himself from his past and the industry it had created. 'In my heart I still am on a mountain in India somewhere,' he said when required to do some Beatle business, 'and that suits me . . . It's hard to think of leaving the privacy and quiet of the happy life I have.' As his wife Olivia recalled later, 'When I met him, his ambition was to have no ambition. And I think he achieved that. For the last five years he felt like that, actually.'
Yet still the industry claimed him back. In March 1998 he intervened to prevent the Beatles from forming a business relationship with Volkswagen – the gimmick was that they would receive $10 million for sanctioning a branded Beetle model. It was VW's second attempt at enticing the group, who had already rejected $5 million to authorise the manufacture of a White Album car. 'Unless we do something about it, every Beatles song is going to end up advertising bras and pork pies,' Harrison complained, and the deal was quietly abandoned.
Two months later he unexpectedly appeared at the London High Court as the official representative of the Beatles. 'I got the short straw and was the one who had to go to court for Apple,' he explained, grumpily shoving a press photographer. The case was triggered by Apple's belated attempt to regain control of the Star-Club tapes made in 1962 and first released in 1977. Since then the 1988 Copyright Act had been passed, and Apple's lawyers could demonstrate that the tapes were recorded when the group was under contract to EMI (Apple's partner in this action). Looking like a teddy-boy-turned-college-professor, Harrison gave a virtuoso performance in the witness box, delivering a rare history lesson in vintage Beatle lore while never hiding his contempt for the entire subject. 'Unlike the experts who wallow in Beatle trivia,' he explained, 'I spend a lot of time getting the junk out of my mind through meditation, so I don't know or remember – I don't want to know or remember – every last detail, cos it was trivial pursuit.' Countering the testimony of the man who'd originally made the tape, Ted Taylor, he described it as 'the crummiest recording ever made in our name' and said, 'One drunken person recording another bunch of drunks does not constitute a business deal.' Impressed by his testimony, the judge ruled that the tape should be returned to Apple – though it was safe to assume that most interested parties had already purchased a copy during the previous 21 years.
Harrison continued to wage a private war on those who wished to take financial advantage of his name. He took a particular dislike to the sales of Beatles memorabilia held regularly in prestigious auction houses in London and New York. On one notable occasion a fan's scrapbook was sold, which included items collected from the Harrison family home in 1963, including corners of toasted bread left uneaten by the guitarist. 'That's total bullshit,' Harrison retorted. 'I ate all my toast. I never left any. The madness is the people selling it, and the people actually buying it.' In June 1999 he attended the private party for a charity auction of guitars from the collection of Eric Clapton. Harrison arrived late, clutching a tiny kids' guitar which he proudly placed alongside Clapton's valuable Fenders and Gibsons. But he exuded an aura of discontent that acted as a force field around him for the rest of the evening.
Harrison's obsession with privacy had long seemed like a fetish, but the events of December 1999 demonstrated that paranoia is sometimes justified. On the 23rd a young woman named Cristin Keleher broke into his home in Maui, the residence which he had been seeking to protect from outside gaze for nearly two decades. The Harrisons weren't present, so having triggered the alarm system Keleher tucked into a frozen pizza and waited for the inevitable police response. On the 30th she appeared in court and was sentenced to four months' imprisonment; it transpired that she had been stalking the Harrisons for several years.
As she answered the charge of trespassing, Harrison lay in a Henley hospital, undergoing emergency surgery. Around 3.30 that morning he had been woken at his Friar Park mansion by the sound of breaking glass. 'There were security cameras by the main gates and the back entrance,' his gardener Colin Harris explained, 'but in some parts of the grounds the fence was falling down. Anybody could wander in, and doors to the mansion were often left wide open in daytime. Security should have been a
lot stricter. I knew someday somebody would get in there.'
Harrison ventured downstairs to investigate, wearing only pyjama bottoms, while his wife rang for help. There he was confronted by Mick Abram ('Mad Mick' to the British tabloids), a mentally disturbed young man who attacked him with a long kitchen knife. In an attempt to calm himself and Abram, Harrison began chanting the Hare Krishna Mantra – which Abram interpreted as the tongue of the devil, spurring him to further violence. As the blade slid repeatedly into Harrison's bony chest, he admitted, 'I thought I was dying. I vividly remember a deliberate thrust of a knife and I could feel the blood entering my mouth and hear my breath exhaling from the wound.' His life was saved by the courageous intervention of his wife, who brought down a weighty lamp on Abram's head, knocking him out. 'I was terrified,' she remembered, 'but it is one of those things that you just do in a heightened sense of awareness so that you can never really forget any of it. It was a freaky thing.'
The seriousness of the incident was deliberately underplayed by the Harrison family. He was quoted as saying of Abram, 'He wasn't a burglar and he certainly wasn't auditioning for the Traveling Wilburys.' But like Ronald Reagan's celebrated quips after the attempt on his life in 1981, the remark was designed to suggest that Harrison had scarcely been touched by the assault. The reality was much less pleasant. As Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts explained,
I spoke to Ringo about a month after it happened and he told me exactly what went on, and it was horrific. George was stabbed about 40 times. It happened outside his bedroom on the landing. He would have been dead if he'd been lying in bed, he wouldn't have been able to fight. The papers did say that one wound punctured his lung, but a lot of the others were just as horrific. The man was slashing him everywhere. George's wife hit him again and again on the head with this brass lamp, but he just wouldn't stop. There was blood everywhere.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 40