Could Anything Have Saved the Beatles?

Maybe—if management had kept out of their wallets and got inside their minds

By Hugo Lindgren

Editor's Rating:

The Good: A deeply-researched account of the forces that tore the Beatles apart, Doggett recounts many antics that Beatles-lovers will savor.

The Bad: While thorough, Doggett doesn't offer any theories as to what might have kept the band together.

The Bottom Line: The exhaustive research and delicious tête-a-têtes between band-members make this an instant entry in the Beatles cannon.

Reader Reviews

You Never Give Me Your Money:
The Beatles After the Breakup
By Peter Doggett
Harper; 390 pp, $24.99

Of all the breakups across human history, the end of the Beatles has to be one of the most wasteful. Imagine what the Fab Four could have raked in over the years if they had behaved more like their rivals, the Rolling Stones, and not let their personal indulgences and adolescent resentments drive them apart. At the peak of their mutual disgust, the Beatles were world-famous multimillionaires in their late 20s, barely grown-ups in age and not at all in temperament. Their differences were surely heartfelt, but were they irreconcilable? Enlightened management might have kept them together.

As Peter Doggett demonstrates in his exhaustive, absorbing You Never Give Me Your Money: The Beatles After the Breakup, John Lennon and Paul McCartney fought over nothing and everything, like hurt lovers determined to inflict their pain on one another. George Harrison and Ringo Starr were, for the most part, bystanders to this blood feud, and would have been only too happy to be a part of a solution, if any of the Beatles handlers had ever thought to offer one.

Doggett throws ample light on the two dominant schools of thought about what caused Lennon and McCartney's personal enmity. The leading one, of course, is the Evil Yoko Ono Theory, which holds that Ono, threatened by Lennon's relationship with McCartney, did all she could to undermine the band, notoriously turning up for the recording of The White Album, sitting on top of an amplifier like it was no big deal. For this, Ono has been vilified by Beatles fans. But Doggett provides the context of utter craziness that helps us see her as more rational than nutso. A rock band is, after all, the best mechanism ever invented for mate acquisition, or, to use the slang, getting chicks. Once long-term mates are on the scene, they don't much care for this dynamic and seek to intervene. Both Ono and Linda Eastman, McCartney's girlfriend, then wife, were strong women who fought to stay close to the men they loved. Their actions, while not always laudable, are at least understandable.

Theory No. 2, heralded last year in a Rolling Stone magazine cover story, blames the greed and dirty dealing of New York entertainment lawyer Allen Klein, who represented the Rolling Stones and eagerly filled the void left by the 1967 death of the Beatles' longtime manager, Brian Epstein. Klein promulgated an alliance of Lennon, Ringo, and George Harrison against McCartney, who preferred that Linda's family—her father was a lawyer who had represented Jack Lawrence, songwriter of Frank Sinatra's All or Nothing At All and Bobby Darin's Beyond the Sea—handle his affairs. In Doggett's account, Klein is a scoundrel, though ultimately an accessory to the band's demise rather than the trigger man.

Rolling Stone was right to see the problem as primarily one of adult supervision, or lack thereof. Like many celebrities, the Beatles were surrounded by two complementary species of sycophants —dope-addled hangers-on and money-sucking enablers. None understood the severity of psychological warfare that was going on in their midst. The creative rivalry that fueled the Lennon-McCartney songwriting partnership had come unhinged, as both men struggled to assert their independence. But they couldn't stop themselves from acting like children. Lennon's conduct, in particular, was so petty and embarrassing it's amazing he's remembered as a peace-loving martyr. He was the most resolutely opposed to reconciliation, so much so that McCartney felt obliged to do the same. "I can't just let John control the situation," he said, "and dump us as if we're the jilted girlfriends."

The actual grown-ups around the Beatles provided little guidance. George Martin, their beloved producer, was no more than a "kindly musical chaperon [sic]." Insofar as they did anything useful, Klein and Neil Aspinall (a former roadie who rose to be the custodian of Apple, the Beatles' holding company) focused on making deals, as if the personal conflicts were beside the point.

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