Stepping on a Beatle

...Even a National Enquirer reporter would know better...

...Goldman says that Lennon had a long-standing homosexual relationship with the Beatles' first manager, Brian Epstein...

...He is grudging in his praise, usually undermining any positive remarks with some subtle twisting of the knife...

...Cynthia Lennon, John's first wife, has labeled Goldman a "grave robber...

...Is he a trustworthy witness...

...Similarly, Goldman stales that Lennon was a wife-beater...

...Perhaps more important is the overall tone of his book, its aura...

...By calling themselves the Beatles, Goldman categorically declares, the group violated "the universal practice of the day, which was to feature the star's name above his backing group, as in Bill Haley and the Comets or Buddy Holly and the Crickets...

...Lennon's female companion during the famous 18-month "long weekend" when he was separated from Yoko Ono intimates that he was purposely drugged after returning to his wife...

...Additional examples abound...

...Worse than these confusions about the music is Goldman's handling of the facts of the life...

...A similar drive pervaded the Elvis biography, yet that was a better book because of the nature of its subject...

...With so many powerful and well-placed voices raised against him, there is a natural tendency to side with Goldman as an underdog...

...Someone apparently forgot to mention this "universal practice" to the Coasters, the Platters, the Dell-Vikings, the Chords, the Monotones, the Cadillacs, the Rays, the Elegants, to Phil Spector before he named his first group the Teddy Bears, or to the band that most influenced the Beatles' choice of a name, not Buddy Holly and the Crickets as Goldman would have it, but simply the Crickets...

...as a "nigger...

...Nonetheless, his legend since his death has taken on awesome, bewildering proportions...

...A barrage of criticism, led and to some degree orchestrated by Lennon's widow, Yoko Ono, has challenged Goldman's facts, sources, research, judgments, and motives...

...After arguing that Lennon and the band "sold out," betraying their freedom and artistic integrity for commercial success—"the missing chapter in the history of the Beatles...

...It is not questions about fact alone, however, that cast doubt on Goldman's credibility...

...Presley has become a true icon, a fit target for Goldman's hammers and clubs...

...According to a family acquaintance, Ono suffered a miscarriage because of one of his attacks...

...The singer's widow and others heatedly deny this, as did Lennon himself, who once explained: "I was on holiday with Brian Epstein in Spain, where the rumors went round that he and 1 were having a love affair...

...Well, it was almost a love affair but not quite...

...His labors wereguaranteed to make him a pariah in many circles, albeit a wealthy one...

...Goldman has offered an explanation for his methodology, or lack of it: "There are contradictory statements I couldn't resolve, so I simply presented them...

...He proclaims unequivocally that "the Beatles would have had far greater strength and freedom if they had known more about music...

...With more sophistication, they might have sounded like Dave Brubeck or the Four Freshmen...

...Selection is the biographer's job, and Goldman's abdication of responsibility brings no credit to a scholar like himself who presumably has been trained to dig deep in order to separate fact from rumor...

...Yes we do...

...The first thing a jury might notice is that Goldman tends to play fasi and loose with his facts, writing with an assurance that is unwarranted...

...That suggestion finds its way into the book...

...He never wrote his own material, and his period of accomplishment was extremely brief, limited to the Sun sessions at the beginning of his career and the first few recordings he turned out for a broader audience at RCA...

...Charges have been brought against John Lennon and the prosecution's case stands or falls on the testimony of Albert Goldman...

...He had to have a partner or a gang...

...Paul McCartney, who along with Ono refused to be interviewed by the author, has urged a consumer boycott...

...Those visitors to Graceland, his home in Memphis, who have not been caught up in the mania report that they felt like they were attending the shrine of a new religion...

...Every nasty conjecture, every insidious piece of gossip, is grist for his mill, no matter how questionable the source...

...the turning point in the whole story"—he reverses himself a few pages later and notes: "Every identifiable feature of the Beatles' fabled image...

...He incorrectly claims that their first American audience consisted solely of prepubescent girls, although the truth is that from the start the Beatles had a remarkably wide appeal, reaching everyone from screaming teeny-boppers at Shea Stadium to graduate students on the campuses of Harvard and MIT...

...Most sympathetic listeners would probably argue it was precisely their ignorance that allowed them to create in the way they did...

...People often say, 'Why don't you just present the facts?' Well, I've presented the facts, but that's not good enough, you want the facts to agree...

...He cannot, after all, have made everything up, and the courts are always open to those who believe they have been libeled...

...Much of the material he has gathered from his hundreds of interviews, such as the stories about the Lennon/Epstein affair, came in the form of hearsay...

...If no one has yet branded the biography an "attempt at cultural genocide," theaccusalion leveled at Goldman's previous work on Elvis Presley, the reason is not any want of outrage...

...He bases his finding on comments by Pete Shotton, a childhood friend of Lennon's, Allan Klein, the group's second manager, a gay intimate of Epstein's, and a gay hairdresser who lost a lover to Ono...

...By focusing on the private existence, The Lives of John Lennon swallows up the public man—and does so without even providing the satisfaction that what we are learning is accurate...

...Sometimes, scurrilous items are reproduced with no attribution at all, like the tale of how Lennon's aides once brought a girl backstage for him to rape because he insisted on having sex before a Beatles' concert...

...Their campaign against the book has a tinny ring...

...Idolatry is always distasteful, and in Lennon and Presley he has gone after two of the biggest idols of our time...

...Did he refer to Martin Luther King Jr...

...Writers & Writing STEPPING ON A BEATLE BY BARRY GEWEN ALBERT Goldman's The Lives of John Lennon (Morrow, 719 pp., $22.95), portraying the former leader of ihe Beatles as a drug-addicted, bisexual, violence-prone emotional cripple, has stirred up a hornets' nest of controversy (and so assured healthy sales...

...But for anyone with more than a prurient interest, the substance of Lennon's life was his music and his work with the Beatles...

...The name, he states, indicates that "Lennon was too insecure to assert himself boldly as a star...

...Another fight, when Lennon is reported to have tried to set her on fire, left "the whole floor...

...I don't know which version is right, so what was I supposed to do...

...He was always a pawn in the hands of his manager...

...She insists that Lennon never raised a hand lo her...

...There is aquality of maliciousness throughout, an eagerness to uncover dirt that goes far beyond the iconoclast's ambitions...

...Beneath the waves of opprobrium, it is fair to conclude, lurk unpleasant truths about the singer and his wife ? hat friends of the couple and other interested parties would have preferred to keep under wraps...

...Dismissing Lennon and McCartney's early work up to the Rubber Soul and Revolver albums as songs about puppy love aimed at a preteen market, he fails to notice their strong musical originality (within a rock context)—the striking modulations, unusual chords, pentatonic melodic sequences, rhythmic and harmonic complexities, ambiguous keys, all the elements that moved rock away from the squared-off, harmonically simple sounds of the '50s and revitalized it for the '60s...

...The point would be a minor one, except that Goldman goes on to draw a major conclusion from it...

...We cannot trust Goldman on any of the details, and possibly not on the broad outlines, either...

...Lennon's achievements were considerably greater than Presley's, yet Goldman does not convey this...

...Was Lennon's marriage on the rocks at the time of his death...

...Clearly an outsider to the Beatles and their music, Goldman is wobbly wherever rock is concerned...

...If you plan to read only one biography of John Lennon, this farrago of gossip and innuendo should not be it...

...hence, he became the unfeatured leader of a star group...

...The problem for the public is how to sort through the accusations and counteraccusations, the red herrings and media manipulations, to arrive at the truth about Lennon...

...That is inevitable in a work of this type, but what is not acceptable is Goldman's lack of discrimination...

...It was never consummated, but it was a pretty intense relationship...

...was the product of the boys' own tastes and invention...

...With no ear for the early music, it is little wonder that Goldman takes a cynical, sarcastic approach to the Beatles' success, but as a result his assessments are not to be trusted...

...On some particulars, there are outright disagreements over fact...

...All of his energy is in the malice, and a reader is left to wonder why he would choose to writesuch an unbalanced account...

...Presley lacked Lennon's intelligence, wit and self-consciousness...

...So do insinuations about the paternity of John and Yoko's son, Sean, despite the child's resemblance to his father...

...Almost every page of this massive volume contains an assertion or statement that has been challenged in some way, and unless one is prepared to devote (he better part of a lifetime to Beatle scholarship, checking sources, verifying claims, following up every rivulet of disagreement, The Lives of John Lennon constitutes something of an empirical quandary...

...In the end—especially since mosl of the dispulants have some ax to grind or interesi to defend—we can do no more than lake the book on its own terms...

...Every possible effort is being made to discredit this book...

...strewn with Yoko's torn-out hairs...

...What is more, Goldman genuinely deserves credit for playing the iconoclast...

...John Lennon's drug addiction was the substance, the tissue of his life," Goldman has declared in an explanatory interview...