Options: The Secret Life of Steve Jobs

by Daniel Lyons

  During the first week of December I fly into New York on a snowy day to meet with Yoko Ono at her apartment in the Dakota. This time she actually keeps the appointment, and she’s as crazy as ever. We’re drinking green tea on the floor of her living room and watching snow pile up on the window ledges and she’s acting all Zen and telling me how she prays for my soul and how she’s glad that my Apple and “the real Apple” are trying to make peace.

  “I know this is what John would have wanted,” she says. “He cared so much about peace. Not war, but peace. Yes. That was John’s way. And so it is mine as well.”

  She insists, as she has before, that if we put Beatles music up on iTunes the band must be called “John Lennon and the Beatles” and that Yoko Ono must be listed as a member of the group, even on the early albums, which were recorded before John met her.

  But then she tells me she’s opposed to the iTunes deal altogether, because she believes the Internet is an unholy space filled with pornography and sexual deviants. She also says it would be wrong for John’s music to be “smashed into these tiny bits and sprayed around on these wires.”

  I explain that it’s just a distribution deal, just like when the Beatles put out their music on cassette tapes, and eight-track tapes, and compact discs.

  “It’s just a new format,” I tell her.

  “But it is an evil format. This Internet, I don’t like it. It is not human. John was against computers. I am against them too. I do not allow them in my home. You see, they are not good things, Steven. I say this with all respect, but to me you represent everything that is evil about the modern world. Not only with music. You have cheapened movies too, by making them with computers. These are machines, Steven. These are not human. And the stories you tell in your movies, these do not uplift people. They only pander.”

  I tell her I’m a little bit taken aback by this criticism, considering that it’s coming from a woman who once hung pictures of a giant vagina all over Liverpool.

  “That was one of my favorite installations,” she says. “The vagina is so beautiful, don’t you think? It is where all of us enter the world. You should make a Pixar children’s movie about a vagina. It would be a tribute to motherhood.”

  She starts going on for the millionth time about how she wants to guard John’s legacy and what a precious gift to the world John was. Yoko’s thing is just to repeat things over and over in a monotone voice, to wear you down. It’s a Japanese business tactic; they all do it. For a while I’m just agreeing with everything she says and trying to be all Zen about it, and Yoko is giving me the Zen right back, and we’re both working our Zen and trying to be more passive aggressive and monotone and repetitive than the other one.

  But then I take her in a different direction—down the route that Ivan Arsim recommended. To be honest, even when I walked in the door today I wasn’t sure I would do this. But here we are.

  “There’s something I have to tell you,” I say, in my softest Zen-master voice. “I want you to hear it from me rather than from someone else. I’m buying the catalog from Sony.”

  She knows what I mean. I’m talking about the publishing catalog that Michael Jackson bought twenty years ago and then sold to Sony. Yoko has been trying to buy it for years, but Sony wants a billion and a half dollars and she doesn’t have that kind of money.

  “We’re going to record the songs all over again, fresh, using all digital equipment, so it’s totally high resolution. Way better than CD quality. It’s so exciting. Paul’s going to take the lead on the project. He’s got Ringo signed up to do the drum tracks. Paul says he can play the guitar parts himself, or we can get guest stars to do some tracks. Eric Clapton wants to get involved. George Martin says he’ll produce.”

  She smiles. “This is a wonderful fantasy,” she says, “but I’m afraid it is quite impossible.”

  She’s trying to look all Zen and detached and bemused, as if I’m some lunatic proposing that we should all go live on the moon. But I can see in her eyes that she’s freaked out.

  “Actually,” I say, “Paul says it’s very doable.”

  In fact that’s only half true. Paul did look into it, but there are some questions about legal issues. At the very least Yoko could turn herself into a very huge pain in the ass, which as we all know is something she very much likes to do. So we’re bluffing. Nevertheless Paul says he’ll back me up on this and that we should push Yoko as hard as we have to. He’s dying to sell the songs on iTunes. And he hates Yoko even more than I do.

  “Paul is a fool,” she says. “He has no talent. He never had any talent. John always said that. John was the soul of the Beatles. Without John there is no Beatles. And you won’t have John.”

  “Well, see, that’s the beauty of it. Paul and George Martin have got all these old master tapes, and we can take John’s voice off those tapes. Granted, he’ll sound like shit compared to the other voices, because his recordings will be grainy and low quality. But we can alter his voice with digital tools.”

  “No,” she says. “No digital tools. John was opposed to digital.”

  “John died before digital recording was invented.”

  “But he saw it coming. He told me he would never do this.”

  “Well, the fall-back is that Paul says he can just sing John’s parts.”

  That does it. Now she’s left her Zen behind and she’s just plain furious.

  “Paul is a criminal. Paul stole John’s work and presented it as his own. Now he’s going to do this? I hate Paul. I always did. This is a ridiculous project. What’s the point? It would take years record all these songs all over again.”

  “Five years,” I say. “We’ve worked out the schedule. We’ll have different teams working all around the world and sharing files over the Internet. Paul will be the artistic director overseeing the project. And yes, it’s daunting, but think about how much money we’ll make. Do you have any idea how popular these albums will be?”

  “I’m sure that appeals to Paul. He loves money. More than anything else he loves money.”

  “But the beauty is that there’s also such great artistic merit to the project. It’s way better than just re-releasing the old songs for downloads. You’ve said it yourself, people already own these songs. Why buy them again? But this? This would be all new material. This would be the songs recorded the way they were meant to be recorded. This will become the new definitive Beatles catalog. It’s not just about the money. Paul says that with a lot of John’s songs he always hated the way John mixed them, and he’s been dying to take another crack at them.”

  “That’s outrageous. That’s a sacrilege. I will not allow this. Absolutely not.”

  “I’m afraid there’s not much you can do.”

  “You cannot record John Lennon’s songs without John Lennon.”

  “Well, see, you can, actually. That’s why I’m buying the catalog. I’ll own the rights, so then I can license the rights to Paul. And to myself, actually, because I’m going to get involved as a co-producer.”

  “You really would do this?”

  “I intend to do it.”

  “You said you loved John.”

  “I do love him. More than anyone in all of history.”

  This is true, sort of. Sometimes it’s John Lennon, though more often it’s Dylan. I go back and forth. But there’s no sense splitting hairs at a moment like this.

  “You even wear glasses like his.”

  “Yes,” I say. “As a tribute to him.”

  “Yet you would do this to him? To his memory? You would spend a billion and a half dollars to buy the catalog, and then spend years in a studio, and you would erase John Lennon from the Beatles, just to spite me?”

  “It’s not about spite. It’s about the money. The stuff we’re talking about goes way beyond this project with Paul. There’s huge interest in the catalog from other artists. The whole asset has just been terribly underutilized at Sony. You can’t believe the offers they’ve had, and they’ve alway
s turned them down because they don’t think they’re classy enough. Britney Spears wants to do an album of all-girl Beatles duets with guest stars like Madonna and Christina Aguilera. Garth Brooks wants to do country-western Beatles. Snoop Dogg and P. Diddy want to do a Beatles hip-hop album. Then there are the advertising deals. The Stones have been all over that market. But the Beatles? Nowhere to be seen. On commercials alone I’ll earn back my investment in two years. You know the company that makes Depends? Those adult diapers? They want to use “When I’m Sixty-Four” as an ad jingle. So do Viagra and Cialis and Levitra. They’re all bidding against each other. There’s just huge interest, and it’s never been exploited.”

  I let that last word hang in the air. I chose it on purpose. We sit there in silence. She’s beaten, and she knows it.

  Finally she says, in a soft voice, “Let me understand you. If I permit you to have the digital rights, you will drop this threat of desecrating John’s memory? You will not re-record the songs?”

  “There wouldn’t be much point in distributing two versions,” I say.

  “I see. Well.” She toys with her cup of tea. Her bottom lip begins to quiver. “It appears I am in an impossible position. I am placed between two bad choices.”

  She sighs, and puts her hands to her face, and starts to sob. I start thinking about all the shit this poor woman has been put through in her life. No wonder she’s so friggin nuts. I suppose she’s thinking that too. Or maybe she’s thinking about John. She starts to shiver, and shake. Her shoulders are heaving. When she looks up at me her mascara is running and her face is streaked with black tears. For a tiny moment I feel a flicker of guilt about doing this to the widow of the person I sometimes admire more than anyone else in the world. But this is my job. This is my fate. Because of who I am, because of what I do, this nasty piece of work has fallen to me.

  “I was right about you,” she says. “You are an evil man.”

  “I suppose I am.”

  “Please go,” she says.

  The lifts in the Dakota are the old-fashioned kind, rickety and slow-moving, with glass-paned wooden doors and an operator who drives the car with a brass shift lever. The operator is a squat, ugly old man dressed in a bellman’s uniform and cap. He smells of liquor. He eyes me but says nothing. The old lift grumbles and groans its way down through the floors. The wooden floor creaks. The light flickers. I close my eyes and feel myself descending. I think about Yoko, sprawled out on the floor, crying. For a moment I have the sense that this monkey-faced bellman is taking me not to the lobby, but farther still, down through the basement, down through the sewers, all the way down into hell. And you know what? I wouldn’t blame him. It’s what I deserve.

  Outside, night is falling. Big snowflakes, as fat as goose down, swirl around the streetlamps. Yellow cabs race down the street, tires whooshing in the slush. Across the street, in Central Park, kids are firing snowballs at each other. I’m flashing back to the years when I had an apartment in the San Remo, two blocks from here. I’m remembering being twenty-eight years old, newly wealthy, and going outside in a snowstorm like this with Sabrina Gould, the actress, on a night when the whole city seemed to have slowed to a halt. We walked along Central Park West, right where I am now. It was midnight and there was no sound at all, just the crunch of our boots in the snow.

  “Gosh, I remember that too,” Sabrina says a few minutes later when I arrive at her apartment. She’s still living in the city, tucked away like a piece of jewelry in a posh building on Fifth Avenue, a few blocks up from our retail store. In the ten years since I saw her last she has gone through two husbands, both of them super-rich Wall Street douchebags, both of them at least twenty years her senior. Big settlements have allowed her to disappear from the world and to live like a tsarina. Her apartment takes up the top two floors of the building and is wrapped by a balcony that is itself bigger than most apartments. From where we’re sitting, in her living room, we have a view out over the East River and all the way down to the bottom of Manhattan.

  “I’ve married well,” Sabrina says, “and divorced better.”

  She’s never in the tabloids, never on the news. She travels wherever she wants and does whatever she pleases and is left alone by the media. She hasn’t made a movie in fifteen years and swears she has no interest in ever making one again.

  “Do you have any idea what I’d have to do if I wanted to make a movie now?” she says in her Southern drawl, which sounds like honey and bourbon mixed in a glass. “The dieting, the plastic surgery. Just so I can play Batman’s girlfriend in some teenage jerkoff comic book fantasy? No thanks. Honestly I think the best thing that has ever come along in the movie business is this computer generated imagery stuff. Pretty soon y’all will just create characters with your computers and leave us poor human beings alone.”

  “No computer,” I say, “will ever create a woman who looks like you.”

  “True. But you know what I mean.” The great thing about Sabrina is that she knows she’s gorgeous, and she just accepts it. It’s simply a fact, like the fact that she’s tall, and that she’s half Irish, and that she grew up in Tennessee. She’s got this gorgeous curly black hair, green eyes, a little spray of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Age hasn’t diminished her looks; if anything she’s more beautiful than when I was dating her.

  “Here’s the thing,” she says. “I’m fifty-two years old, I’ve had no work done, I’m ten pounds overweight, and I’m happy. I see my old friends who are still in the business and my heart breaks for them. They’re out there in Los Angeles starving themselves for years at a time, mutilating themselves with plastic surgery. They look like monsters. Do you know why so many of them end up as activists for animal rights? It’s because they identify with the poor little minks and veal calves. They’re projecting, you see? They don’t dare to speak up about how the movie business treats actresses. So they join PETA and crusade for the poor little bunny rabbits in their cages. Because that’s who they are, Steve. Poor little bunnies, penned up in their mansions in the Hollywood hills, not allowed to eat. God, it’s awful.”

  I tell her about my meetings in Los Angeles, about Jake Green from Poseidon murdering the homeless guy.

  “That’s why I got out of the business,” she says. “I hated the people. Even more than that, I hated the person that I was becoming. I was becoming one of them.”

  I tell her about my meeting with Yoko Ono, and how I just strong-armed her into letting me sell Beatles songs on iTunes. “I feel like shit,” I say.

  “You should feel like shit,” she says. “That’s terrible.”

  “It was awful. The look on her face. I couldn’t believe I was doing it to her. I felt like the devil.”

  “Yeah.” She looks down at the glass in her hands. She rolls the ice around in it. “Honey,” she says, “you need to do some thinking.” Then she looks up and gives me this bright smile and says, “Hey, you know what? Let’s go out. There’s a place I want to take you. Are you hungry?”

  It’s a hole in the wall, uptown in Spanish Harlem, where the specialty is roasted chicken and you order either half a chicken or a whole chicken and they serve it with rice and beans, a basket of tortillas, and wedges of lime. Sabrina orders a half chicken and eats all of it along with a Mexican beer. I get a plate of rice and beans, yucca and plantains. The place is crowded, noisy, lots of Spanish being spoken, Mexican music on the stereo, Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera prints on the wall.

  “So have you noticed?” Sabrina says, when we’re finishing our flan and coffee. I shrug. The only thing I’ve noticed is that there’s a cockroach sitting up on the counter next to the cash register, perched there like a pet. The hostess is ringing up customers and making no effort at all to chase it away.

  “Nobody knows who we are,” she says. “None of the waiters, none of the customers. They’ve never heard of you. They’ve never seen my movies, or if they have, they don’t recognize me.

  It’s like we’re invisible. Do you
realize we’re going to have to pay for this meal? How cool is that?”

  “It’s not like the old days.” Back when we were dating we would arrive at a club, or a restaurant, and they’d clear a path for us and give us some special table and we’d never get billed for anything. It was all part of Sabrina’s job—half of these places had made deals with her movie studio, or paid off her manager, so that she’d show up and stay for an hour or two and let herself be photographed going in and out.

  “Do you remember when we had to have my publicist put out a statement denying that we were dating, even though we were? Because I was supposed to be dating—who was it? Someone gay. I can’t remember.”

  “Jimmy Nelson,” I say. “You were in a movie with him.”

  “Poor Jimmy. He’s dead. Did you know that? Killed himself.”

  “I remember seeing something in the papers.”

  “His agent dropped him. He couldn’t get work. Poor guy. He didn’t want to be a has-been.”

  “Who does?”

  “You know what? It’s great being a has-been. The whole thing about being famous, whatever that means, well, the price you pay for that, the chunks it takes out of you, it’s just not worth it. People don’t appreciate anonymity. It’s great, honestly. You should consider it.”

  “As a matter of fact,” I say, “I am.”

  I explain my situation with the feds. She claims she hasn’t heard anything about it. I find that hard to believe. She says she never reads the newspaper. Maybe she’s just being polite. I tell her about Francis X. Doyle, and about Tom Bowditch and his crazy plan to zip me out of the country and off to someplace in the South Pacific.

  “That sounds marvelous,” she says.

  “You think? I’m afraid I’ll go nuts if I stop working.”

  “Life is short. You’ve done plenty.”

  Outside, my car is waiting. We ride downtown in silence. At her building she asks if I want to come inside. I know what this offer means. And I’ll admit, I think about it. I really do. But in the end I tell her I’d better not. Truth is, I’ve never been a big lady killer type. Even when I was single, I wasn’t all that interested in getting laid. Larry used to call me “Gandhi” because I wouldn’t go out and chase pussy with him. Now he’s on his fourth marriage and he’s still the biggest gash hound I’ve ever known. It’s like a disease. In my case it’s not that I’m some nice guy. It’s just that I never found other people all that interesting. At least not enough to be worth putting that much effort into. I’ve had feelings for people, sure. But not love, really. The only person I’ve ever felt that for was myself.