Shout! (75 page)

George and Ringo were both at Savile Row that day. For Ringo, the errand was straightforward. He had come in to give Peter Brown details of the house he wanted to sell, having bought it from Peter Sellers a few months previously. Now he was tired of its extensive parkland, its private cinema and sauna baths and wide frontage, with fishing rights, on the River Wey.

“Do you want some apple jelly?” he asked Neil Aspinall.

“Apple
jelly
?” Aspinall echoed suspiciously, as if it were code for some new narcotic.

“Yeah, we’ve got hundreds of apples lying round our orchard,” Ringo said. “So Maureen’s made pots and pots of apple jelly.”

George arrived, accompanied by his assistant, Terry Doran, to do a photographic shoot for a German magazine named
Bravo
. He was suddenly in demand, thanks largely to the song that, by common consent, was one of
Abbey Road
’s very best. George had written it months before while sitting in his friend Eric Clapton’s garden. Forgetting his mantras and sitars, he had entitled it “Here Comes the Sun,” and in that simplicity at long last touched a chord of the mystical. Perhaps its ultimate accolade was that, on first hearing it, most people mistook it for a “John” song, lead-sung by John. In the same way, years of exposure to Paul’s melodic gifts had borne fruit in a ballad called “Something,” the first-ever George song chosen for a Beatles single as the A side.

Upstairs, the
Bravo
photographer was waiting patiently beside a set banked high with flowers in Hare Krishna yellow and orange. An elderly workman staggered in, carrying a box containing the disconnected components of an eight-armed Hindu deity. Between them the photographer and he began to assemble the figure, trying to figure out which arm went into which socket. Even George seemed impressed by the thoroughness of the preparations. “If I’d known it was going to be like this, I’d have washed me hair,” he said. As the shoot was about to start, he decided that his blue denim shirt and jeans were not a suitable outfit. A press office secretary was sent to the nearby Mr. Fish boutique to buy half a dozen silk shirts for him to choose from. As he looked through them he tried to answer an English journalist’s question, the same old one—how had Apple managed to go so wrong? “It was like a game of Chinese whispers, really,” George said. “We said one thing, it was passed along among lots of other people, and what came back to us wasn’t anything like we’d meant.”

The Beatles ceased to exist that afternoon, when Anthony Fawcett, John and Yoko’s personal assistant, picked up a ringing telephone from the debris of papers and plates. It was a Canadian entrepreneur asking if John and Yoko would attend a rock ’n’ roll revival concert in Toronto the following day. John took the telephone from Fawcett: He would go, he said, but only if he were allowed to perform. Within hours, the Plastic Ono Band had metamorphosed from Plexiglas robots into an ad hoc supergroup consisting of John, Yoko, Eric Clapton, Klaus Voorman, and Alan White. A charter airliner was booked to carry them, if John got up in time and did not take fright at the last minute at the thought of appearing with an unrehearsed band before an audience of thousands.

In the studio, George was still being photographed by
Bravo
magazine in his chosen Mr. Fish shirt, against the Hindu idol and the banked yellow flowers. Ringo wandered in to say hello and, as a keen photographer himself, to check out the professional camera equipment being used. “You want to use a zoom lens through that prism,” he advised the
Bravo
photographer.

“Do you fancy going to Australia to play?” George asked him in ironic reference to John’s impending twenty-four-hour Canadian visit.

“When do we get back?”

“Tomorrow.”

Two floors down, the press office was, as usual, plunged into darkness, speckly with psychedelic light shapes, crowded with expectant, seated figures, and reverberant with the aural sunshine of the
Abbey Road
album. In one corner, Mal Evans’s discovery, the Iveys—now renamed Badfinger—sat, like very young pantomime pirates, awaiting news of their first release on the Apple label. Mary Hopkin, a sweet, frail, bewildered girl, passed through with her even more bewildered Welsh parents. Neil Aspinall came in to say that the Plastic Ono Band had got away to Canada on the second charter airliner asked to stand by after they missed the first one.

Now on
Abbey Road
the Apple house heard the voice that had first imagined it, and argued to launch it, and that had now abandoned it, leaving only a song lyric behind as explanation. “You never give me your money,” sang Paul to the manager he would not recognize. “You only give me your funny paper.” He had contrived to make the album that was an act of reunion serve also as an outlet for his bitter frustration,
even though, being Paul, he could only do so in hints, between the smiles of one who still hated to admit any unpleasantness.

By late afternoon, after its umpteenth play, it was as though
Abbey Road
told the Beatles’ whole life story in miniature, from the effortless good sex of “Come Together” to the finish of side two, where the narrative splintered into unfinished scraps and intros that led nowhere: the mystical “Sun King,” the Sergeant-Pepper-ish “Mean Mr. Mustard,” the Scouse wisecracking “Polythene Pam” (“she’s the kind of a ge-erl who reads the
News of the We-erld
…”), the memory of some relentless groupie in “She Came in through the Bathroom Window.” Here, if not in real life, Paul had the last word, with his tender cradle song “Golden Slumbers”; his little wink and nod (“Her Majesty’s a pretty nice girl”) to the monarch who would one day knight him; his coded warning to those who had beaten him that they would “carry that weight a long time.” Here, prematurely, from Paul was an epitaph for the band that would never be bettered:

And in the end, the love you take

Is equal to the love

You make
.

That September, in the heady aftermath of festivals and free concerts, Paul made one last effort to reunite the others on stage again. His idea now was that they should play at small clubs, unannounced, perhaps even in disguise. Ringo supported the idea and George, though noncommittal, did not refuse outright. But John told Paul bluntly he must be daft. “I might as well tell you,” John continued, “I’m leaving the group. I’ve had enough. I want a divorce, like my divorce from Cynthia.”

He had reached his decision while flying back with Yoko, Eric Clapton, and Klaus after their tumultuous welcome at the Toronto rock ’n’ roll festival. Standing up there with Yoko and the robots, singing any words that came into his head, he had realized that ceasing to be a Beatle need not strike him blind. “Cold Turkey,” his new song, named for heroin’s withdrawal horrors, was written to renounce an even worse addiction. He would never again be hooked by “Yesterday” or “Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da.” All that remained was to do what his idol Elvis Presley had never been able to, and “break out of the palace.”

What restrained him was an urgent plea from Allen Klein not to jeopardize the deals Klein still hoped to do on behalf of the Beatles as a unit. For Klein, at that very moment, was on the brink of an unequivocal coup concerning their record royalties. Having failed to browbeat EMI he had set about browbeating their American label, Capitol. Bob Gortikov, Capitol’s president, under pressure from Klein, was proving less inflexible than Sir Joseph Lockwood. But clearly, for John to announce his resignation would seriously weaken Klein’s bargaining position. John, therefore, agreed to keep silent—even to the other Beatles—until the Capitol deal was done.

It was a promise he found impossible to keep when Paul, in another long boardroom wrangle, brought up the subject of live performing again. A furious row developed, with John railing bitterly at Paul for his “granny” music, especially “Ob-la-di” and “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer,” on the
Abbey Road
album, which John had particularly detested. He told Paul he was sick of fighting for time on their albums, and of always taking the B sides on singles. Then, rather tactlessly, he pointed at George as perennial victim of the Lennon-McCartney “carve-up.” Paul replied that only this year had George’s songs achieved comparable quality with theirs. George interrupted resentfully that songs he had recorded this year were often those he had written years earlier but not been allowed to release. He added that he had never really felt the Beatles were backing him. As John rounded angrily on George, Paul made a sudden, quiet plea to them to remember how they had always overcome disagreements in the past. “When we go into a studio, even on a bad day, I’m still playing bass, Ringo’s still drumming, and we’re still
there
, you know.”

Paul could not believe that John’s resignation was anything other than a fit of temperament—like George’s during the
Let It Be
sessions. When the white Rolls-Royce moved off down Savile Row that afternoon, it had been agreed not to dissolve—for the time being. Not long afterward, a slightly stunned president of Capitol Records agreed to Allen Klein’s demand for an unheard-of royalty of sixty-nine cents on each Beatles album sold in America. Derek Taylor spoke to Bob Gortikov shortly after Gortikov ended his last session with Klein. “We would have done the deal anyway,” Gortikov said, “but did he have to be so
nasty
about it?”

According to Klein, the deal with Capitol swung Paul in his favor at
last. “Paul congratulated me on the agreement. He said, ‘Well, if you
are
screwing us, I can’t see that you are.’” Paul’s version, sworn subsequently in a high court affidavit, was that, on the contrary, he felt uneasy to think the Beatles had received a massive royalty increase at the very moment when their future together was so uncertain. Also, by that time, he had ceased to believe anything Klein said. The most public and PR-conscious Beatle retreated into complete seclusion, with Linda and their newborn daughter, Mary, on his farm in Argyllshire.

With the Capitol deal Klein was assured of his 20 percent. He could now turn his attention back to the five months’ stalemate over Northern Songs and Lew Grade’s ATV network. Grade, having gained effective control of Northern, now hoped to woo the Beatles into accepting him as a sort of supercharged Dick James. His plan was to buy out the Howard and Wyndham consortium’s blocking 14 percent, but to persuade John and Paul to retain their 31 percent, and extend their song-writing contract beyond the present expiration date in 1973.

Late in October, ATV finally bought out its consortium partner, bringing Lew Grade’s share of Northern to slightly more than 50 percent. Hours afterward, it was announced that John and Paul, and Ringo, were selling their combined 31 percent shareholding to ATV. The news, when it reached Apple—by a tip-off from the
Financial Times—
sounded very like defeat. Allen Klein, interviewed during his customary afternoon breakfast, claimed it as a victory. A threatened lawsuit against Northern for five million pounds in allegedly unpaid Beatle royalties helped to persuade ATV to pay cash rather than stock for the Beatles’ holdings. Klein could thus congratulate himself on having enriched John and Paul by about a million and a half pounds each, and Ringo by eighty thousand pounds.

The American release of
Abbey Road
, together with Paul McCartney’s disappearance, now produced one of Beatlemania’s strangest and sickest by-products. A Detroit disk jockey claimed to have received a mysterious telephone call telling him that Paul McCartney was, in fact, dead, and that corroboration could be found in the
Abbey Road
cover photograph. This, though it might appear a somewhat unimaginative shot of the four Beatles walking over a St. John’s Wood zebra crossing, actually, the mystery caller said, represented Paul’s funeral procession. John, in his white suit, was the minister; Ringo, dark-suited, was the undertaker, and George, in his shabby denims, the grave-digger. Still stronger funereal
symbols were divined from the fact that Paul himself walked barefoot, out of step with the other three, and smoking a cigarette right-handed. The clinching clue alleged was a Volkswagen car parked in the background, plainly showing its numberplate “28 IF”—or Paul’s age
if
he had lived.

Picked up by other disk jockeys, elaborated by Beatles fanatics, the rumor swept America, growing ever more earnestly complex and foolish. One faction claimed that Paul had been murdered by the CIA. Another—the most powerful—claimed he had been decapitated in a car accident and that actor William Campbell had undergone plastic surgery to become his double. Scores of further “clues” to support this theory were discovered in earlier Beatles albums—in the scraps of gibberish and backward tapes; the fictional “Billy Shears” mentioned in
Sgt. Pepper
, and various macabre John Lennon lines from “A Day in the Life” and “I Am the Walrus.” It was said that by holding the
Magical Mystery Tour
EP cover up to a mirror a telephone number became visible on which Paul himself could be contacted in the Hereafter. The number, in fact, belonged to a
Guardian
journalist, subsequently driven almost to dementia by hundreds of early morning transatlantic telephone calls.

In America, an industry grew up of “Paul is Dead” magazines, TV inquests, and death disks—“Saint Paul,” “Dear Paul,” “The Ballad of Paul,” and “Paulbearer.” It was all something stranger than a hoax: It was a self-hoax. Even when Paul himself surfaced on the cover of
Life
magazine, the rumors did not abate. Consequently, Beatles record sales in America in October 1969 rose to a level unequalled since February 1964.
Abbey Road
was to sell five million copies, a million more even than
Sgt. Pepper
. The Beatles, not Paul, had died; yet how could that be when they seemed bigger and better than ever?

John kept his promise to say nothing of the breakup. And in a strange way, his and Yoko’s continuing notoriety served as camouflage. In November, he renounced his MBE, taking it from the top of his aunt Mimi’s television set and sending it back to the Queen as a protest against Vietnam, the war in Biafra, and the failure of “Cold Turkey” to remain in the British Top Twenty. Though that final flippancy made the gesture futile, it was not without a certain coincidental irony. For the statesman who had bought his own popularity with that same small, pink-ribboned medal still reigned at 10 Downing Street. What Harold
Wilson had started with the Beatles he had continued less and less discerningly, showering MBEs, CBEs, knighthoods, and peerages on any cheap entertainer who might cadge him a headline or a vote.