Fire and Rain (21 page)

With the news out prematurely, McCartney went into damage-control mode. For the first time since the fall, he called Lennon at home, telling him he'd finished his album and was leaving the group. By then, Lennon had already heard about the article; Connolly had called him for comment. To McCartney, Lennon sounded relieved, and to another reporter, Lennon joked, “I was happy to hear from Paul. It was nice to find out that he was still alive. Anyway, Paul hasn't left. I've sacked him.”

Privately, though, Lennon was peeved:
He'd
wanted to be the first to tell the world the Beatles—and the '60s, with which he was increasingly disillusioned—were over. Instead, it was McCartney, of all people, who'd done that—the same McCartney so intent on breathing life into the band all those years. To Lennon, the gesture felt like an ambush and a betrayal. The same process took place with Starr and Harrison: McCartney called them, but they too had already heard the news. Mal Evans, another member of the Beatles' inner circle, was at Friar Park with Harrison and Boyd that night. He left to drive back home—and then returned to the house soon after, ashen faced. A news report on the radio announced McCartney was breaking up the Beatles. Harrison took the news stoically, saying he wanted to write his own songs anyway and retreating upstairs to his bedroom. As if to drive it home further, a London variety show aired a clip of McCartney performing “Maybe I'm Amazed” from his album that night.

The next morning, Chris O'Dell, then living with the Harrisons at Friar Park, came downstairs to find Harrison and Boyd glumly reading the morning's papers. Lennon soon came by, and O'Dell watched as the
two men talked in the backyard. It was the first time she'd ever seen Lennon without Ono.

The British music newsweekly
Melody Maker
called the announcement “the non-event of the year.” After all, so many in the music business knew the Beatles were out of touch with each other. The previous November 11, Connolly had written an
Evening Standard
article headlined “The Day the Beatles Died,” about the events of the previous fall. The same month, a
Life
magazine spread meant to put a halt to all the “Paul Is Dead” stories of the time quoted McCartney as saying, “The Beatle thing is over, it has been exploded.”

Few in the media had picked up those comments then, but not this time. The
New York Times'
story, “McCartney Breaks Off with Beatles,” made it into section one, normally the domain of the most urgent national and international stories. Fans converged on Apple, spilling out on Savile Row and casting blame on Klein or, in some cases, Linda McCartney. (“You can't let a woman do that to a man, can you?” explained one female fan to a reporter, as if Linda had been manipulating her husband far more than Ono had Lennon.) On the front steps of the building, an Apple employee handed out copies of McCartney's press release. Wearing his usual carefree smile along with a red frilly shirt and jacket, Starr dashed out into a waiting car and was gone. One of many earnest, somber television reporters standing outside Apple intoned, “The event is so momentous that historians may mark it as a landmark in the decline of the British Empire.”

McCartney was spotted in the backseat of a dark green Rolls Royce tooling around London with Linda, Heather, and their sheepdog Martha, but no further comments were forthcoming from him or the other Beatles. Instead, their colleagues were left trying to explain what had happened. To a
Times
reporter, Klein asserted that McCartney's reasons for issuing such a statement were “personal problems.” To another, he twisted a knife: “Unfortunately, he's obligated to Apple for a considerable
number of years.” Past the wrought-iron gates and inside Apple Corps, Taylor sat in his wicker chair and, looking increasingly besieged and sleep deprived, conducted one interview after another to explain the events of the day. “It is certain that at the moment they could not comfortably work together,” he told one camera crew. Taylor wanted to remain optimistic, though: At one point he looked straight into the camera and said, “If the Beatles don't exist,
you
don't exist.”

Away from the cameras, Taylor sat behind his typewriter, stuck a cigarette in his mouth, and banged out an Apple statement. “Spring is here and Leeds play Chelsea tomorrow and Ringo and John and George and Paul are alive and well and full of hope,” he wrote. “The world is still spinning and so are we and so are you. When the spinning stops—that'll be the time to worry, not before. Until then, the Beatles are alive and well and the beat goes on, the beat goes on.” Reading it, DiLello had no idea what Taylor meant, but it was so Derek; it said nothing, but with flair. No one knew what to say or how to react, anyway. “It was just another dismal day in a year full of them,” Peter Brown recalled.

“You didn't need to do that, you know,” Brown told McCartney the next day.

“But I wanted to,” McCartney replied. Brown realized the statement was McCartney's way of explaining the situation to the other Beatles; given the communication breakdown between them, he couldn't do it any other way. It was also McCartney's savvy way of promoting his album. EMI was preparing to ship 480,000 copies of
McCartney
, far less than the last few Beatle albums. How better to publicize it than this?

Not surprisingly, the scheduled April 10 reunion of the Beatles at Apple Corps failed to materialize. The day before, Eastman cabled Apple to inform the company his client would not be able to make the meeting.

When Vivian Janov answered the phone in her Los Angeles home, the voice on the line announced it was Yoko Ono, calling from London. Unsure whether it was a prank, Janov handed the phone to her husband, Arthur. Arthur listened as Ono explained to him that someone at his publisher had mailed her and John Lennon a copy of Janov's three-monthold book,
The Primal Scream
—
Primal Therapy: The Cure for Neurosis
. Janov had no idea how that would have happened; he didn't have the Lennons' home address. Ono was saying her husband was in need of therapeutic work, and could Janov fly out to London as soon as possible to help him? Janov curtly told her he had seventy-five patients depending on him and hung up.

A certified psychologist, the curly-haired, movie-star-handsome Janov was riding the wave of the new self-help movement coming into vogue. (Also on the West Coast, another psychologist, Werner Erhard, was about to launch EST, for Erhard Seminars Training.) Forty-six years old, Janov had received a master's in social work at the University of California, where he met his future wife, Vivian. Starting in the early '50s, Janov had a private practice but was thinking bigger. Searching for clues to behavior through childhood memories wasn't Janov's idea, but he took it one thunderous step further, advocating patients unlock their inner pain and repression by screaming it out. In 1968, the Janovs opened the Primal Scream Institute on Sunset Boulevard. “In the beginning we had so many applications, we couldn't see all the people who wanted to come,” recalled Vivian. After his book was published in January 1970, Janov was greeted at his office by what he called “all the druggies and lost kids who'd been in the protests against the Vietnam War.”

Ono immediately called back and made the invitation harder to resist. She and Lennon would pay for the Janovs and their children to fly to London, all expenses covered. When the Janov children heard about
the offer, they were so excited they ran up and down the stairs of their home for twenty minutes. With that, the Janovs began making their way to Tittenhurst in early April.

When their town car dropped them off at the estate, the Janovs were stunned by Tittenhurst's opulence and expansiveness. Lennon struck Vivian Janov as funny and charming, although her husband sensed he was also in deep psychic pain. Together, Ono and Lennon appeared earnest and serious, not quite the same playful couple who, on April 1, had issued a fake press release saying they were planning to have “dual sex change operations.” After they all took seats in the kitchen, the Lennons and Janovs mutually decided to start the sessions—$6,000 for three weeks—in the recording studio being built next to the kitchen.

Still living in one of the estate's cottages, Dan Richter heard the screams whenever he walked into the kitchen. Richter was cynical about primal scream, but also knew Lennon and Ono needed some form of help—-and that primal scream was probably tied in with their desire to stop snorting smack. “Heroin isn't easy to kick,” he recalled. “You don't just stop. It leaves you very empty. You're left with yourself. That's why they felt they had to do the Janov thing.” Even with the studio builders coming in and out as he spoke, Lennon talked about his wayward father, the death of his mother, and how upset he was with McCartney and the breakup of the Beatles. “The drugs blew out his defense system,” Janov recalled. “The sessions with the workers going back and forth in this sound room were amazing.” To Janov's surprise, Lennon's father, Fred, who seemed like a sad, broken man, showed up one day; Lennon gave him some cash and sent him on his way.

When the construction noise became too much, the sessions shifted to the London hotel where the Janovs were installed. Janov also welcomed a change in cuisine: He didn't love what he called the “strange, uncooked fish” the Lennons would serve in their kitchen and was starving most of the time. But the Janovs couldn't stay in London forever, so
it was agreed that the Lennons would visit Los Angeles for several months to continue their therapy. Although Lennon had earlier been denied a visa as a result of his drug bust in 1968, the therapy—medical reasons—allowed him to reenter the States. On April 23, he and Ono boarded a plane for California, leaving the rest of Apple and the world to decipher what had happened about two weeks earlier.

Just when McCartney thought he was done with the Beatles, he wasn't. In early April, he received an advance acetate of the
Let It Be
album from Spector. Only then did he learn that, on April 1, Spector had overdubbed a string section, choir, harp player, and additional drums (by Starr) onto “The Long and Winding Road,” his once fairly naked ballad. An accompanying letter from Spector, addressed to all the Beatles, noted that if they had any concerns, they could contact him at his room at the Inn at the Park. (In an aside, Spector also said he thought the album should be titled
The Long and Winding Road
, not
Let It Be
.) “If there's anything you'd like done to the album,” he wrote, “let me know, and I'll be glad to help.” He added, though, that major changes could be a problem given the album's imminent release.

Spector had long been known for his gloriously over-the-top production style, the way he built dense, almost orchestral tracks by using multiple musicians. But even knowing what he did about Spector's approach, McCartney was livid. On April 14, he phoned the Apple office and dictated a letter to Klein by way of Apple employee Bill Oakes. In the letter, McCartney admitted he'd once considered orchestrating “The Long and Winding Road” but had “decided against it.” Then he let loose: “In the future, no one will be allowed to add to or subtract from a recording of one of my songs without my permission,” he decreed. His list of demands included reducing the volume of the strings, horns, and
voices and mixing the Beatles' own playing higher; “harp to be removed completely at the end” and “original piano notes to be substituted.” As his fourth and last condition, he spat over the phone, “Don't ever do it again,” which Oakes also added into the letter.

Ultimately, McCartney's suggestions were ignored; it was either too late or no one wanted to bother to make him happy. (He later claimed he left a message for Spector at his hotel but received no response.) The backlash to McCartney's surprise announcement to the world was making itself known, especially to McCartney himself.