Beatles (3 page)

In March 2008 the Hon Mr Justice Bennett allowed the details of the divorce settlement, all 58 pages of it, to be published and available to all. The reason given was that it was to quell press speculation. It did the opposite – providing private and intimate details of the couple’s lives, which we would otherwise not have known, and thus leading to further speculation and gossip.

In his statement, the judge said the couple had first met in 1999, got engaged on 22 July 2001, married on 11 July 2002 and separated on 29 April 2006. The marriage, as far as he was concerned, had therefore lasted just four years, as the couple had not properly cohabited until their actual marriage. It was revealed that Paul had been using contraception until they got married, as he had not wanted to have a child until then. Their only child, Beatrice, had been born on 28 October 2003.

The bulk of the 58 pages concerns financial matters. Heather had originally claimed £125 million as a divorce settlement. Paul had originally offered £16 million. Heather maintained that Paul was worth £800 million – a figure that had appeared in many papers for some years. Paul denied this, his accountants confirming that he was in fact worth only £400 million.

Heather had argued she needed £3,250,000 a year to live on, which included items such as £499,000 a year for holidays
and £39,000 a year for wine, even though, as the judge noted, she doesn’t drink. She required, so she said, £627,000 a year for her charity contributions, a sum which included £120,000 for helicopter flights and £192,000 for private flights. The judge described this as ‘ridiculous’.

She also needed £542,000 a year for security to protect herself and Beatrice. By comparison, so we learned, Paul has been managing with virtually no security – a surprising revelation, when we all know what happened to John Lennon and also to George. It appears Paul has no bodyguards or security personnel at his London home; and on his Sussex estate he simply relies on farm workers to keep an eye out for anything suspicious.

In Paul’s statements, he describes how none of his children while young – all of whom had gone to state schools – had had any bodyguards or security except, for obvious reasons, while with him on world tours.

The full addresses of his Sussex home, where he has what the judge described as ‘a modest property’ set in 1500 acres, and of his London home are both given in the document. Keen Beatles fans will know these details already, but any suspicious characters, ignorant of the addresses, will feel grateful to the judge.

In one interesting aside, when explaining that most of his music income today comes from material written long before Heather came along, Paul admits that his music during the years of his marriage, 2002–2006, has not done well: ‘I have created new work during the marriage, which, though critically acclaimed, has not been profitable.’

We also got a long list of his possessions, his houses and works of art, including paintings by Picasso and Renoir, and business affairs, most of which would not have been known by even the keenest fans.

The judge, while admitting that Heather was ‘devoted to her charitable causes’ and was a ‘strong-willed and determined personality’, also considered her not to be an honest witness but instead inaccurate and not impressive. He saw her as her own worst enemy with ‘a volatile and explosive character’ and who
suffered from make-believe. Paul, however, in his opinion, was honest and accurate.

Before the case, some of Heather’s personal accusations about Paul had leaked into the papers, such as his use of drugs and alcohol and his abusive behaviour. These stories were referred to only in passing by the judge, who made it clear that they were not relevant, as his concern was to the financial settlement.

His final judgement was to award a total of £24.3 million to Heather – about £100 million less than she had first wanted. Paul therefore came out of it much better than he might have feared financially – and also with his good character intact, even if he’d had to reveal certain details that I’m sure he would have preferred kept private.

The strains and pressures and unhappiness caused by the breakdown – for both of them – must have been enormous. The best part of two whole years had been spent on statements, meetings with lawyers and accountants, investigations, countering allegations, smears, ending up with having their life and love exposed to the whole world. It came out, for example, just how generous Paul had been in that first heady year after they met, lavishing so much money on Heather and her family and concerns in the way of houses, loans, donations.

Many of the facts and details revealed by the judge will be used by biographers of Paul in years to come. But most of all it provided a field day for the press.

Why did it happen? Why did Paul, normally so careful and canny, used to checking out people and their character and stories – unlike, say, John, who tended to believe almost anyone who came to his front door – why did Paul, of all people, get himself into this situation? A mixture, presumably, of lust, love and loneliness after the death of his beloved Linda.

Among revelations about other people in the Beatles story, the most surprising, nay amazing, recent revelation concerned Mimi Smith, John’s Aunt Mimi, the lady who brought him up. Mimi played a major part in his early life and in the book I went along
with John’s and her family’s image of her as a strict, snobbish, puritanical, old-fashioned and authoritarian figure. That was also how I found her in my many interviews with her. She was clearly a strong individual who didn’t swim with the tide. She’d been a widow for a long time, having been married to the rather dull and unambitious-sounding George, who’d once been a milkman, though Mimi maintained he’d been a dairy farmer.

Mimi died in 1991. Then, in 2007, John’s half-sister Julia Baird, in her book,
Imagine This: Growing Up with my Brother John Lennon
, came out with the assertion that Mimi, while living in Liverpool and bringing up John, had for some years been secretly having an affair with one of her young lodgers, a student 20 years younger than herself, who later emigrated to New Zealand. Julia never liked Mimi, so at first I rather doubted this allegation, suspecting it could be fantasy, but it’s now been accepted as true by many Beatles experts. Mimi, of course, being dead, cannot refute it.

I still find it hard to believe. Mimi, of all people. Shows you just can’t tell by outward appearances or apparent attitudes. Such a shame John never knew, when you think of all the reprimands he’d had to suffer from Mimi for his behaviour and his morals. I can imagine John’s astonishment, hear him now saying, ‘Fookin’ hell,’ then collapsing with laughter, rubbing his specs as the tears rolled.

Another revelation in a similar vein has come out about George, in a book written by his first wife Pattie Boyd. In it she says that George had an affair with Maureen, Ringo’s wife. In both cases the marriages were collapsing. I somehow didn’t find this gossip quite as surprising or revealing as the Mimi story.

With all these titbits now coming out about affairs and relationships, and with presumably more to come, it’s always noticeable that the main participants are almost always dead, like Mimi, George and Maureen. They therefore can’t deny, explain, give their side of it. Perhaps we need a judge to investigate, look at the known facts, decide what happened, and then of course give us the benefit of his wisdom.

Meanwhile, the two living Beatles are going strong – and for a long time to come, we hope. They both appeared and performed in Liverpool in 2008 to celebrate the city’s year as European City of Culture.

Each is as busy as ever, but Ringo’s busy-ness has been mostly abroad, mainly in the USA where he has done many very exhausting tours with his All Starr Band. The line-up has varied over the years and he’s also done one-off appearances with well-known musicians. He’s regularly produced albums. He did say in 2000, when he reached 60, that he was hanging up his drumsticks, but it didn’t happen. He doesn’t need the money, of course, just the fun. He is still married to Barbara and appears to live mainly in the USA and in Monaco.

Paul has also been regularly producing new albums, which do well, get nice reviews, but – by his own admission – don’t sell as well as in the old days.
Memory Almost Full
in 2007 was enjoyed and admired by all his fans, and most people could see in it memories and emotions sparked off by Linda – at a time, of course, when he had even greater reasons to remember her.

He has also produced poetry, paintings, children’s books and classical music. His
Ecce Cor Meum
was named the UK’s classical album of the year in 2007. Now that the trauma of Heather is behind him, perhaps he’ll go on to be even more productive and creative in the years to come. He has said that he is now going to do his last world tour as a performer, spread over two years, so that he can spend more time with his daughter Beatrice as she grows up. But we shall see.

It is of course the classic period of the Beatles I like best and am most concerned with here. I never did become as fascinated by all the later legal arguments or the rows between them at the time of their break-up.

I also find my eyes glazing over when the experts start going on about the various versions of albums, about the bootlegs, the minutiae of each recording session, where they were each day, if
not each minute, of every year. I leave that to the modern Beatles Brains. They know so much.

The books about them in the future will grow much fatter, in multiple volumes, as authors go down even more side alleyways, telling us all about the lives of minor characters, giving us exhaustive details of minor events.

I am of course impressed and pleased by their diligence, especially by the work and research of Mark Lewisohn, and by the fact that people who never met the Beatles, or saw them play live, should be keeping up the research, the interest, the passion, ensuring that the flag is being carried and will in turn be handed over to the generations to come.

It’s the music that matters most, of course. The Beatles gave us 150 songs that will remain for ever, as long as the world has the breath to hum the tunes.

This is the book that tried to cover that period, when they were at their most productive. But first, let’s go back to how I came to write the book in the very first place …

The Beatle I first met was Paul in September 1966. It was a great year, 1966. In July, England won the World Cup at Wembley, England’s first-ever world success. I sold the film rights of my first novel, which had come out the previous year, to United Artists, and I was commissioned by BBC TV to write a Wednesday play. In October 1966 there was the world premiere of
Georgy Girl
, a film written by my wife, from her own novel. It was
annus mirabilis
in the Davies household.

My full time job was as a journalist on
The Sunday Times
of London, where I was writing the Atticus column. I had been on the staff since 1960, though for the first three years I had beavered away without once getting my name in the paper. It is hard to believe it now, but in those days, bylines were infrequent and
The Sunday Times
was a very traditional newspaper. Atticus, the newspaper’s gossip column, had always been equally old fashioned, devoting itself to news about bishops, gentlemen’s clubs, ambassadors. As a working-class lad from the North, who
had grown up in a council house, gone to the local grammar school and then a provincial university, I didn’t have the background, the accent nor the interests of the accepted Atticus columnists. They had tended to be old Etonians, Oxbridge types, who actually did know bishops and went to the best clubs. Some had also been very distinguished – Ian Fleming had only recently given up Atticus (in 1959) and before him previous incumbents had included writers like Sir Sacheverell Sitwell.

But a funny thing happened to British life in the mid 1960s. Not just on the Atticus column, but out in the world at large, traditional roles and rules were being upset. My interests, when I took over the column, were in novelists from the North, Cockney photographers, jumped-up fashion designers, loud-mouthed young businessmen. I did it partly to annoy, as I knew that the old guard on the paper hated such people, but mainly because I was fascinated by their success.

We all laughed and scoffed when
Time
magazine in New York came out with the idea of Swinging London and sent over battalions of writers and photographers to report and analyse all the exciting things supposedly happening here. Looking back, there
was
a sort of explosion in London in the 1960s. Now that we see how life can be so dire and desperate for so many, what happened in the 1960s was exciting and revolutionary for young people. The Beatles, of course (you thought I’d never get to them), were a vital element in this overthrowing of old values and accepted manners.

I didn’t take much notice of ‘Love Me Do’ when it came out, thinking here was a one-off group, who showed no signs of being able to develop, and when I first heard John copying the Americans and screaming ‘Twist and Shout’ it gave me a headache. But I loved ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, and from then on could not wait for their next record. I went to one of the concerts – I think it was at Finsbury Park in London – which was fascinating, but the girls’ screaming annoyed me. I wanted to hear them properly, not be deafened by adolescent shop girls and hairdressers.

I identified completely with their background and attitudes. My home town is Carlisle, further up the northwest coast from Liverpool, where we consider ourselves real Northerners and Liverpool might as well be on the Mediterranean. Although I was four years older than John, I felt his contemporary, as he, Paul and George had gone to the same type of school as me.

Until the Beatles, nobody had sung songs for
me
, songs that had a connection with
my
life, from their own experience, about my experience. I had enjoyed but despised the American-style pap we had all been brought up on, with middle-aged men in shiny suits saying we were a very wonderful audience, and they sure were glad to be here, before singing another sloppy ballad with banal words. All the same, I can still remember all the words of at least three Guy Mitchell songs.