Once There Was a Way

by Bryce Zabel

  Chapter Seven:

  LAST WORDS (1974)

  Talk of the Town

  Could it really have been ten years?

  February 8, 1974, marked the tenth anniversary of the Beatles’ U.S. debut on the CBS stage of The Ed Sullivan Show. Sullivan had been gone from television for three years already, but New York Mayor Abraham Beame, a Democrat who had been in office a mere nine days, knew an opportunity when he saw one. He declared the anniversary to be “New York Loves The Beatles Day!”

  None of the Beatles were keen to be loved in New York at that particular moment, but they did have an album to promote. Band on the Run was the #1 album on Billboard, but You Don’t Mess Around with Jim from the late Jim Croce, who had died just months earlier in a plane crash, threatened to knock it from its spot. To make matters more dire, Bob Dylan’s Planet Waves album would release next week and was expected to be huge.

  The Beatles’ presence in New York would be a politically tinged PR affair, given that the government of Richard Nixon was, at that very moment, attempting to deport John Lennon and Yoko Ono from the United States, while making Paul McCartney and George Harrison out to be drug abusers undeserving of any visas to visit or work.

  With the American political system convulsing with Watergate, however, the Nixon team needed to avoid unnecessary public confrontation. The word at the INS was to quietly let the outsiders in. Paul, George, and Ringo soon managed to qualify for temporary visas. By this point, the three of them had hired the same immigration attorney that John was using, the out-of-the-box thinker Leon Wildes.

  Out in California, the FBI was maintaining its regular and costly surveillance of John Lennon’s increasingly dissolute lifestyle. Agent Tad Ostroff had the opportunity to observe Lennon up close in a first-class seat on a nonstop flight from Los Angeles to New York. He watched his prey drink too much and almost have mile-high sex with a willing stewardess, stopped only because the woman in question had a jealous coworker. It was all in the report he dutifully made to the new director, Clarence Kelley, and released years later after a Freedom of Information Act request filed by Rockstar.

  Once on the ground in New York City, at Beame’s urging, all four of the Beatles appeared at a news conference that was staged in the same room at JFK Airport as their first meeting with journalists upon their arrival in 1964. The Beatles ended up making almost as much news in 1974 as they had a decade earlier. They sat in the same order they’d sat in all that time ago, and the photographs, when juxtaposed, were telling. The boys of 1964 had become independent men in 1974. They not only looked like they had changed, but they talked like it, too.

  The conference began predictably enough, when John, who had long shed any guise of innocence he might have previously maintained, told the news reporters, “Richard Nixon shouldn’t be in the White House; he should be in the Big House,” using the gangster slang term for prison. Even the typically politically reticent Paul made his position clear: “When it’s time to go, pack your bags and get out of town.”

  When another reporter asked McCartney if he was talking about the embattled American president or the Beatles always teetering on the verge of a breakup, Ringo tried to joke it off.

  “We just hope we can hang in longer than he can,” Ringo said, lighting another Marlboro.

  “Don’t put any money on that one,” added George.

  • • •

  In truth, all four of the Beatles had already accepted that they probably had only one final studio album left in them. That’s what they had agreed to in the Grand Bargain—at least one studio album a year for five years, which meant, as Ringo summarized, “One More in ’74.” After that, they would be done with each other, if that was what they wanted.

  It was odd for the Beatles to think of their group finally disbanding just as they were given a grand welcome by Beame’s New York. For a group of musicians on the brink of ending their collaboration, they presented themselves as a united front to the press people holding out microphones. By then, the Beatles knew from hard experience that airing their dirty laundry in public brought mixed results.

  Ironically, “New York Loves The Beatles Day!” became a three-day collection of events and appearances involving radio and TV interviews, a party at Gracie Mansion, and even a night out on Broadway to catch the revival of Gigi before it closed after a disappointing run of 103 days.

  Only McCartney, Harrison, Starkey, and their spouses attended the Broadway night out. Paul led the charge, wanting to hear the several new songs that had been added to the Lerner and Loewe musical before the show disappeared, possibly for good. By this point, it seemed as though all of New York was obsessed with figuring out where the Beatles might be. Their security team leaked that the band would be attending another Broadway show called The Iceman Cometh and then diverted Paul, George, and Ringo to the Uris Theater at the last minute.

  [Ringo] “The entire time we were in New York that February felt like it was a Beatles revival anyway, so the idea of going to see a musical revival on Broadway seemed about right. We were in and out of cars a lot during that visit, going in the back doors, hiding in hallways, that kind of thing. We knew from the last time that fans might love us to death, but we were grown men by this time, and the whole Beatlemania thing seemed a bit silly by now.”

  Lennon chose not to participate in the caper to see Gigi because he knew he would be “bored to tears and fall asleep.” His real reason was that he had secured an invitation to take Yoko to dinner. They ended up at McSorley’s Old Ale House, not for the food but for the secluded table in the back and the management’s agreement to steer fans away.

  Yoko Ono had attended all but one event with John, which put her in contact with Linda McCartney, Pattie Boyd, and Maureen Starkey. Neither George’s marriage nor Ringo’s seemed to be in much better shape than John’s, but the show went on as if all were happily settled, a contrast to the last decade when everyone acted single and carefree.

  Dinner out was strange for both John and Yoko. They had so much to discuss, so many feelings to unearth, so many decisions to make. At the Beatles events, they were always surrounded by other people, and the timing was never right. At McSorley’s, though, they talked. Yoko told John in no uncertain terms that it was time for him to sober up, send May Pang packing, and start writing songs like nobody’s business. “You’re the leader of the Beatles,” she said. “It’s time to act like it.”

  This was not what John wanted to hear. He felt that being a Beatle had nearly gotten him killed in Nigeria. Now here they were in New York, the city he loved above all others, and he and Yoko had to skulk about like criminals just to get a beer and a burger. It was insane, and he told her so.

  They talked about him coming back and living with her in the Dakota again. “I wanted you to grow up, John,” she told him at the very beginning. “Instead, we have grown apart.”

  Yoko felt that John had not followed what she understood to be the terms of their separation. Rather than taking a short vacation and sleeping with her approved lover, Pang, he had bought a house, parked the Chinese-American assistant in it, and then shacked up with a rock diva in LA’s hippie Laurel Canyon. Plus, he was hanging out with a collection of friends who all seemed to be about the next party.

  [John] “I had this whole thing planned out in my mind, I did. Yoko and I would eat some dinner, we’d go back to the Dakota, and we’d make love like it was the old days. So it turned out to be something different than champagne and violins.”

  The problem was that Lennon had enjoyed his life in Los Angeles after returning from Nigeria. Ono asked him to tell her about his life now, giving him just enough rope to hang himself.

  Lennon explained that he was beginning to produce his friend Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats album. Plus, he had rented a Santa Monica beach house that had been built by film producer Louis B. Mayer. It had been a hot spot for movie royalty, including actor Peter Lawford, who continued the tradition by hosting fellow Hollywood luminaries
as well as his brothers-in-law, John Kennedy and Robert Kennedy, on many occasions. Marilyn Monroe had been a frequent visitor, which greatly piqued John’s interest—so much so that he and Pang had taken the master bedroom because, Lennon believed, “This is where they [JFK and Monroe] did it.”

  Yoko listened to all of this with an impassive expression, and when it was over, told John, “You are not ready to come home. You have more to learn.” She said that it sounded like John was living in some kind of college fraternity, a point with which he could not disagree.

  That night, Lennon slept alone in his hotel room, while Ono returned to the Dakota.

  • • •

  The three days in New York City represented the first real time since Friar Park in 1970 when all four Beatles, their significant others, their three managers, key Apple staffers, and even children were in one place together.

  McCartney asked Lee Eastman to rent out Danny’s Hideaway for their last evening in the city. At eleven dining rooms and seating for two hundred people, this was no small ask. Still, the restaurant had been the scene of the post-show debauchery with Johnny Carson, Ed McMahon, John, and Paul back in 1968, and it had spawned the memorable collaboration song “Show Up.” Even so, under new Apple policy, Eastman had to ring up Allen Klein, who in turn rang up Lord Beeching. Beeching complained that the party could not be expensed as publicity or entertainment, given it would be a secret. “These guys are always looking for a way not to work together,” pushed back Klein. “You want to give them another reason, take away their party.” Seeing the value in this fractious clan coming together, even for a few hours, Beeching approved the expenditure.

  In 1972, The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson had moved from New York to Burbank, California, so there would be no Johnny or Ed McMahon to reprise their roles. To respect their memory, however, McCartney saw to it that the bar featured the vodka sours and J&B scotch and waters the two entertainers favored.

  There was an attempt to control the guest list, but, as had been the case at Friar Park, it soon expanded. Mayor Beame, his staffers, and their friends were in charge of coordination. Actors like Robert De Niro and Liza Minnelli made the scene for about twenty minutes, as did Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis. Local musicians, including members of Elephant’s Memory, a band that John liked, also put in an appearance.

  Both Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel came separately—they had broken up in 1970, at the same time the Beatles nearly had. Garfunkel lamented his own breakup and asked Harrison what the Beatles’ secret was. “We all write songs, even Ringo, and the others make them better,” was his response, not realizing how that might have cut Garfunkel to the bone.

  When Lennon invoked the challenge of the two Pauls (McCartney and Simon) to Garfunkel, the singer told him to “put all the personality crap aside and go make music with somebody who brings out the best in you.”

  Even with all this madness swirling about them, the Beatles had some important conversations with their families and respective entourages that night.

  As always, McCartney remained the band’s greatest cheerleader. He wanted to plan the Beatles’ exit from the stage methodically, as if it was inevitable, rather than let it play out as publicly as the Savile Row warfare that had shattered the rock world nearly three years earlier. He wanted them to go out singing.

  [Paul] “It’s true. I thought we should shake ourselves up one final time and do a world tour. We had more hits than anyone ever, or it seemed that way. We’d been tight as a band before and we could be again. It would be a great way to say goodbye and thanks. I mean, we’d played the Roundhouse, we’d played at Woodstock, and we’d played at George’s concert. We knew what we were doing. The only question was whether we’d agree to do it for more than one night in a row.”

  Ringo seconded the motion, but George was noncommittal, and John acted like he was just too busy with personal issues to consider such a decision at this time. “I can understand what a burden it must be to produce a Harry Nilsson album, John,” said Paul, dripping irony. “Maybe when that’s behind you, we can take up the Beatles again.”

  “Oh, bugger off, Paul,” said John.

  What seemed different from past years when Paul and John had jousted about the Beatles was that now they did so without the overt anger. “John seemed more ready to admit he said things just to drive Paul mad, and Paul knew not to always take John at his word,” observed Ringo. “I just made sure to keep the number for Rory and the Hurricanes in my Rolodex.”

  As their spouses argued, Yoko and Linda had another of their private get-togethers. Yoko told Linda that she wanted the Beatles to stage a group intervention to rescue her errant husband from the charms of Los Angeles and get him back into a recording studio, where he could sober up and double down on his music. Linda said she would discuss it with Paul, but she wasn’t optimistic.

  The night was fueled by liquor and pot—the group took turns sneaking behind the restaurant to smoke the weed Paul had brought in from London. The Beatles and their affiliates discussed that two things needed to happen before a final decision about the group could be reached: the immigration case needed to be resolved, and the final studio album needed to be recorded.

  Peter Brown observed the discussion ping back and forth from a short distance. “I realized that what I was watching was this ever-so-strange but completely real, extended family,” Brown explained to author Hunter Davies, whose untitled follow-up to his 1968 authorized biography was due out within the year. “It became so clear that this group of people, most of them at least, would never, ever be free of themselves, even if the band itself went away.”

  Hunter Davies would cull his title from that conversation with Brown. The Beatles: A Life Within came out that summer.

  Happy Days?

  The next day, Lennon parted company with Ono and flew back to Los Angeles, where factotum Harry Nilsson met him at the airport and drove him back to the rented beach house. John told him immediately about Paul’s cutting remarks, even though he knew it would only cause trouble later.

  Lennon explained that Yoko was insisting that his eleven-year-old son Julian come visit his father in Los Angeles. John had initially resisted, saying, “I’m not exactly living like the Dad of the Year now, am I?” In response, Yoko sent May Pang to London to pick up Julian and fly with him to LA. Once he was there, John was faced with the problem that confronts all divorced fathers who get a few weeks with their children: How would he keep his kid entertained?

  Lennon, who most often lived life with the television set on, had recently caught the premiere of the new sitcom Happy Days, a show that took a nostalgic look at the 1950s in much of the way the sitcom That ’70s Show riffed on the 1970s. Filmed on the Paramount lot, the series was a one-camera show in its first season (to be turned into a more conventional three-camera sitcom by its third season). In other words, there were no fans in a studio audience who would turn an appearance by Lennon into an event that would disrupt filming.

  Pang set to work scoring John and Julian an invitation to hang out on the set and watch the filming of an episode. On February 27, they arrived with Pang to see several scenes that involved most of the cast, which, at that time, included star Ron Howard, star-in-the-making Henry Winkler, Tom Bosley, Marion Ross, Anson Williams, and Donny Most.

  Characterized by crew members as “kind, gentle, and shy,” the Beatle did dozens of doodles during the day, partly because everyone loved them, and partly because they seemed to impress Julian. Nearly everyone John met would later use the word “humble” to describe his demeanor. Lennon was still such a fan of ’50s music that he wanted to see the show up close and personal.

  Producer Garry Marshall knew that a rare and genuine magic had just entered his life. Several episodes of Happy Days had already aired. The critics loved them, and so did ABC. But there could always be more viewers. Marshall, no shrinking violet, created a plan to give his show a launch that would get eyeballs across America watching.

 
; [Garry Marshall] “Making a great TV show isn’t enough to stay on-the-air. You need people to find it on their TV set, and they have to have heard about it to do that. When I saw we had a Beatle on the set, I told Jerry Paris, our director, to start shooting fast, to get the shots he needed in a single take. Another series had used a school bus in an episode, and it was still on the Paramount lot. The whole thing came together in minutes.”

  The “whole thing” was a plan to use Lennon’s celebrity to get people talking about the show. The first thing Marshall did was ask two of his actors, Anson Williams and Donny Most, to hang out with the Lennon group while Ron Howard and Henry Winkler shot a scene together in the Cunningham kitchen set. Most was recruited to ask Julian if he had ever been to Disneyland. As it turned out, Julian, who had been in LA a mere three days, had not, but his excitement at hearing about it was hard to miss.

  Marshall, a decent actor himself, then approached John as if he had just gotten an idea. They’d already shot their bare minimum of production, he said. It would be possible to suspend shooting for the day and take Julian to Disneyland with the cast and crew. He made it sound just plausible enough that Lennon, Pang, and Nilsson all gave the plan the thumbs up.

  “It happened so fast we weren’t even sure what was going on,” said actor Most, the redhead who played Ralph Malph. “Within ten minutes the bus was outside and we were all getting on.”

  Marshall had seen Julian’s eyes light up like any child’s would at the possibility of visiting the Happiest Place on Earth, and Lennon was unable to deny his son the opportunity. Soon, nearly forty-five people, including John, Julian, and the Happy Days cast and crew, were on their way to Disneyland in a truly Magical Mystery Tour bus, courtesy of Paramount Television.

  John regaled the passengers with the story of how he and Paul had used the real Magical Mystery Tour bus to lure the Hells Angels out of the Apple offices. He managed to make it sound exciting and dangerous and more fun than most people have in a lifetime.