McCartney Paul - You never give me your money: the Beatles after the breakup

The Beatles could be forgiven for doubting the value of celebrity. One of the quartet was shot dead outside his apartment building by a man who claimed to be a fan. Another was attacked brutally in his home; within two years, he too was dead. A third was involved in a marital breakdown that exposed every corner of his life to the public gaze. The fourth found it so difficult to survive outside the group that he lost himself in alcohol and cocaine.

These four men created music of such joy and inventiveness that it captured the imagination of the world, and has never lost its grip. Even a few bars of She Loves You or Hey Jude have the power to pull the listener out of the everyday, and into a fantasy world where every moment oozes with possibility, and love conquers pain. They have the magical ability to recreate the idealism that sparked their own creation, and open that source of inspiration to us all. The Beatles songs seem to come from a time of dream-like innocence, and represent all the turbulence and splendour that we have learned to identify with their decade. The landmarks of their story have passed into myth, as familiar as the ingredients of a fairy tale. They provide a comforting collective memorya universal gleam, as one observer noted, which could and still can illuminate the world.

Yet they were human, the heroes of this myth; stubbornly, sometimes distressingly human. Almost alone of their generation, they did not want the fantasy to continue. The public basked in the freedom that the Beatles evoked; the Beatles simply wanted the freedom not to be the Beatles. Through the late 1960s, while listeners mapped out their lives in their songs, the quartet plotted an alternative vision of the future in which they would be liberated from the four-man shackles that they had forged.

They soon realised that there could be no escape: they would always be the Beatles, and would always be judged against the peaks they had ascended in the past. Their individual efforts, no matter how inspired, would inevitably pale alongside the endless replays of their youth. John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Richard Starkey (Dont call me by my stage name, Starkey asked in a 2009 TV ad) are locked together for all time as the guardians of popular musics most enduring legacy. But their bonds dont end there. Since 1967, they (or their heirs) have been the co-owners of Apple Corps, a venture that was envisaged as a tax dodge, and refashioned as a revolutionary alternative to the capitalist system, but then corroded to become a magnet for lawyers and accountants. What was conceived as utopia turned out to be a prison.

The uncanny consequences of that fateto be divided and yet eternally combined, separate but still togetherare the subject of this book, which traces the personal and corporate history of the Beatles from the heights of 1967, through the relentless decay of their final months, to the endless aftermath beyond. Their ability to survive and sometimes prosper in the eye of a legal, financial and emotional hurricane is perhaps one of their greatest, and most underrated, achievements. Through it all, together and alone, at odds and at one, the Beatles somehow managed to create and preserve music that is as enduring as their myth, perfectly encapsulating its own time and enriching every time to come.

It was almost 11 p.m. in New York City, and singer-songwriter James Taylor was at home in the exclusive Langham Building on Central Park West. Hed just placed a call to Betsy Asher, whose husband had signed him to the Beatles Apple label twelve years earlier. She was in Los Angeles, and she was complaining that things were getting very crazy there, Taylor recalled. Something was happening to do with the Charles Manson family, something mad going on. Then I heard these shots. Id been told that the police would leave an empty chamber under the hammer of their guns, so when you heard a police shooting, it would be five shots of a large-calibre weapon in rapid succession, to empty the gun. What I heard was bam-bam-bam-bam-bam five shots. I said to Betsy, You think its crazy out there . Im just listening to the police shooting somebody down the street. We rang off. Then about twenty minutes later she called me back, and said, James, that wasnt the cops.

The police were on the scene in minutes, and news crackled across the radio of a shooting outside the Dakota Building, a block downtown from the Langham. The press agency UPI wired the initial reports: New York police say former Beatle John Lennon is in critical condition after being shot three times at his home on Manhattans Upper West Side. A police spokesman said, A suspect is in custody. But he had no other details. A hospital worker saidquoteTheres blood all over the place. Theyre working on him like crazy.

ABC-TV trailed the bones of the story across the screen as the New England Patriots visited Miami Dolphins on Monday Night Football . Five minutes later commentator Frank Gifford interrupted his colleague Howard Cosell: I dont care whats on the line, Howard, you have got to say what we know in the booth. Yes, we have to say it, Cosell said wearily, adding a warning that sounded almost sacrilegious in his sports-obsessed country: Remember, this is just a football game. No matter who wins or loses. Then, with the portentous cadence of a man accustomed to translating sporting contests into drama, Cosell announced, An unspeakable tragedy. Confirmed to us by ABC News in New York City. John Lennon, outside of his apartment building on the West Side of New York City, the most famous perhaps of all of the Beatles, shot twice in the back, rushed to Roosevelt Hospitalhe hit each word slowly and carefully like a nail into wooddeadonarrival. Hard to go back to the game after that newsflash.

Richard Starkey and his girlfriend, actress Barbara Bach, were drinking in a rented house in the Bahamas when he was contacted by his secretary, Joan Woodgate. We got some phone calls saying that John had been injured, he recalled. Then we heard he was dead. He was the first of the surviving Beatles to learn the news. John was my dear friend, and his wife is a friend, and as soon as you hear something like that Horror pierced the anaesthetic haze of alcohol that had become his protection against the world. You dont just sit there and think, What to do? It was justWe had to make a move, and we had to go to New York.

First, Starkey phoned his former spouse, Maureen Cox, in England. Her house guest Cynthia Lennon was woken by screams. Seconds later Cox burst into her bedroom, and told her: Cyn, Johns been shot. Ringos on the phone. He wants to talk to you. Cynthia rushed to the phone and heard the sound of a man crying. Cyn, Starkey sobbed. Im so sorry. Johns dead. She dropped the phone and howled like an animal caught in a trap.

George Harrisons elder sister Louise had just retired to bed in Sarasota, Florida when she was phoned by a friend telling her to turn on her TV. My first thought was that something was wrong with George, she recalled. When I heard, I felt two thingsa wave of relief that George was OK, and horror at what had happened to John. She immediately tried to phone her brother at Friar Park, his unfeasibly expansive Gothic mansion in Henley, but nobody answered. They kept the phone under the stairs in those days, she remembered, because George didnt like to be disturbed by it. For the next two hours she dialled the number again and again, but heard nothing but the endless bleat of the ringing tone.

Around 5 a.m. UK time, an hour after the shooting, the BBC was ready to deliver the news to the world. In her home overlooking Poole Harbour 74-year-old Mimi SmithJohn Lennons aunt, who had raised him from the age of sixdrifted in and out of sleep to the comforting drone of the BBC World Service radio broadcast. She had not seen her nephew for nine years, but two days earlier he had told her that he would be returning to Britain in the New Year. She heard his name, uncertain whether she was awake, and realised that the radio announcer was talking about Lennon. She just had time to register a thought familiar from his childhoodWhat has he done this time?before the newsreader confirmed the fear that had always haunted her. She lay alone in her bed and listened as hope and pleasure died in her heart.