The Beatles:The Biography
By Bob Spitz
Little, Brown, 983 pp., $39.95.

John
By Cynthia Lennon
Hodder & Stoughton, 404 pp., $34.95

A key lesson we can absorb from the careers of the Beatles and their manager, Brian Epstein: don't use marijuana as your financial planner, or LSD as your investment counsellor, and especially do not employ amphetamines as your psychiatrist.

The band in its heyday was a five-year fireworks display that got more and more colourful, and the world was utterly dazzled by the time a series of drug-drenched emotional explosions sent four young men in disparate directions while consuming Epstein entirely. For a long time their fans waited for a finale that had already come and gone. It is a fascinating story, and writer Bob Spitz takes a shot at claiming it as his own with The Beatles: The Biography. Spitz certainly has done the best job of anyone so far, weaving together thousands of snippets from hundreds of interviews, books, and unpublished accounts to produce a cohesive and compelling narrative that takes readers further into the Beatles's world than any author has taken them before.

In the preface to his impressive array of notes, Spitz decries the dearth of reliable facts amid the wishful fantasies and deliberate misinformation that cloud the tale of the Beatles. "What's more, all of it has been told and retold so many times that even [Sir Paul] McCartney is no longer certain where the truth begins and ends-one of the reasons, no doubt, that the wonderful [The Beatles]Anthology [Chronicle Books, 2000] is often referred to as Mythology," he writes.

Time, and examination of his text by still-living principles and other Beatles biographers, will tell us how well Spitz has succeeded in teasing truthful threads out of the massive tangle of sources. The Beatles is well organized, artfully paced, and draws you in irresistibly. But in more than 850 pages of text, there are times when the author's selection of which account to include can be questioned.

For example, Spitz says Capitol Records resisted releasing the Beatles albums in the U.S. because their first two singles had flopped in Canada. It is possible Canadian sales were disappointing, but I have distinct memories of lying in bed at night in southwestern Ontario in 1963, retuning my older brother's transistor radio from the Motown station in Detroit to a Canadian transmitter out of St. Thomas because it was playing "Love Me Do" and "Please Please Me" every hour for weeks on end. Maybe the St. Thomas station didn't know the records had flopped.

The preface has an allegation by Spitz that Cynthia Lennon "mangled facts" in her autobiography A Twist of Lennon (Star, 1978), not even getting the year of her marriage to John Lennon right. Given that Cynthia doesn't take drugs (if she had it just might have saved her marriage for a while), one might assume there was an editing mistake, but Spitz does not seem inclined to cut her any slack.

Handily enough, Cynthia has a book of her own out, and John provides some opportunities to compare versions of events. Hers seems to match Spitz's closely enough, with at least one exception.

In The Beatles, Spitz asserts that after Cynthia returned from a holiday to find Yoko Ono in her house with John, she fled to the home of George Harrison's sister-in-law, Jenny Boyd, where she succumbed to the charms of Boyd's roommate and Beatles hanger-on Alexis "Magic Alex" Mardas. After a seeming reconciliation with her husband, Cynthia vacationed in Italy, at John's suggestion, where Magic Alex came to her with the message that John was suing for divorce, and Mardas would be testifying to her adultery. Spitz drops the story there, other than a mention of her £100,000 divorce settlement.

It is no surprise at all that in John, Cynthia denies screwing Magic Alex, whom everyone agrees she despised, by the way. He did come see her in Italy with the message about the divorce, she says, but the alleged adultery he was going to testify about was based on her being seen dining and dancing with Roberto Bassanini, the son of the owners of the hotel where Cynthia was staying. The divorce decree was granted on Cynthia's countersuit, citing adultery by John and Ono. It was unkind of Spitz to leave that out. Score one for Cynthia, the facts-mangler.

In contrast to the enormous breadth and scope of Spitz's biography of the group, Cynthia's story of her ex-husband's life is about as up close and personal as you can get without her actually specifying the dimensions of John's "throbber". John resonates with love both past and present, and when she unselfconsciously descends into catty pettiness about ancient resentments, it at least alerts you that it's only her side you are hearing.

Cynthia's thesis is that John went from a grim existence with an obsessive, controlling woman (his Aunt Mimi) to the same thing with another (Ono), and that in between them she provided a several-year interval of relaxed happiness when he could be his funny, carefree, and loving real self. It is a viewpoint that she is entitled to, and it is romantically appealing, but she does talk about "distance" during times when others, according to Spitz, remember screaming matches.

Where Cynthia at least acknowledges the reality of the bond between John and Ono, Spitz generally subscribes to the theory that it was a combination of drugs and Svengali-like dominance that put John under Ono's spell. He accepts McCartney's assertion that her presence at recording sessions was always close to intolerable for all the other Beatles, and Spitz makes an emphatic case that Ono should have been barred from meddling with an already fragile dynamic.

What Spitz seems unable to see is that if Ono had been shown out of the studio, John undoubtedly would have walked out with her. The world might have been spared "Let It Be", but we also would have lost The Beatles (the White Album) and Abbey Road. Speculate all you want; it is hard to see how things could have turned out any differently from how they did in the end.