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| Beathoven |
| Studying the Beatles |
(c) Ian Hammond 1999
All rights reserved
Amazon delivered Body Count last week, an auto-biography that chronicles Francie Schwartz's emotional rite of passage, including an episode with Paul McCartney. It has this dry dusty style that hides its passion by being brutally honest. Morrisette is somewhat similar. Paul-wise, it's a gentle portrait and one which forgives him his frailties before they appear.
Even if I stress the McCartney angle in this review, it's important to see the context of the full book. This is not yet-another-insider-bio for the meat market. Macca appears in but one of the twelve chapters that relates the story of Francie's tense journey. He's a bit player, but all the more real for that.
The Story
Francie marries at an early age, for the usual reasons but loses the child. After eighteen months of domesticity she leaves, only to be left herself by the guy who goes back to his kids. The count has begun of "the bodies that would pass through my life without touching my soul". On the day after Kennedy's assignation she "lost that feeling that everything was going to be alright" and begins the sixties ritual of group therapy. This is a very sixties book.
Robert, Harry and others join the count as Francie enlists in the advertising industry. "There were too many of them, and too many without names." The process climaxes in 1967 in a haze of Speed, the reappearance of her sister, her work, the bodies and her mind: "I lost touch with everything. And so did my body".
On reading Apple's call for manuscripts, Francie ignores all warnings and jets over The Pond, announcing her arrival via telegram. It's one of those Right Time, Right Place things: when she walks into the Apple office, with her script and leggy photo, She Saw Him Standing There: Paul. They click. Still, a sluggish start prompts her to challenge Mr Plump, who responds.
In a few mad months, around the time of the White Album sessions, Francie moves from girlfriend to house mate. She visits sessions at Abbey Road, McCartney's relatives and helps him paint London in colors of Hey Jude. The relationship blows hot and cold:
| As he climbed into bed, he gentled me to sleep, saying, "When this
LP is finished, I'll take you to the farm, and we'll rest." "Oh, please mean that." "That's what I said. I promise." In the morning everything was different. My American accent was wrong, my looks were wrong, everything was wrong. |
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| Francie Schwartz, Body Count, p89 |
Retreating to L.A., Francie's restarts her advertising career, her life with her sister and the "count". After an article submitted to
Rolling Stone is edited out of recognition she decides to write The Book:
| I had spilled my guts' secrets on paper and I knew I was Francie
Schwartz. Not a vending machine. I didn't have to define myself by the men I'd loved. Even Paul McCartney had taken more than he'd given. I'd always been secretly glad to have been a catalyst in his life. He was afraid to let me get under his skin. In that he wasn't much different to the rest. |
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| Francie Schwartz, Body Count, p115 |
Francie finds her identity in writing the book that chronicles her passage. She and her sister start over.
The Book
The sixties searched for less decorative ways of handling truth. Two of the better films were the
The Knack and How To Get It and the incomparable Alfie. Both depict relationships where love is not communicated. The Four Letter Word syndrome.
Without mentioning the connection, I asked Francie about Alfie:
| Alfie is one of my fave 60s flicks... seen it dozens of times. Used to be fixated on that period in Michael Caine's career. After 68 I noticed Jane [Asher] more, of course... but Shelly Winters was stellar in it. | |
| Francie Schwartz, private e-mail. |
I had forgotten Jane Asher's role as the waif in
Alfie, a role which resembles Francie's brief appearance in McCartney's life except that Francie seems to have been more assertive.
Ultimately, Alfie (Lewis Gilbert, 1966) and The Knack (Dick Lester, 1965) were both about men and were both comedies. Perhaps the original script of
Alfie was less romantic, which would explain the lack of 'glam' roles in the movie. Francie's story, told with the deadpan style of Dashiel Hammet, provides no palliatives, no Hollywood ending and no redemption. All she asks is that "you not understand it too quickly".
Alanis Morrisette shares something serious with Schwartz. Both banish all taboos, stripping family and friends bare in a Faustian pact they've signed with Honesty. Alanis's has a "cavalcade" track where she enumerates her last half dozen partners. Like Francie, Alanis has a tough self-aware center that allows her the luxury of walking on the wild side of her own sanity. Both appear to have reckless regard for their own safety.
Macca Count
The Macca we meet in Body Count is dangerously adrift. The band, which provided the core of his life, is falling apart; his regular intimacy with Lennon is gone; his family treat him like a celeb rather than a person; his picture-book relationship with Jane Asher has not gone the distance.
An alienated and moody McCartney is submerged in his own Body Count of friends/lovers who do not touch his soul. What was at one time the breezy life of a London fop has become a meaningless ritual without feeling. McCartney loses control at times, haunted by the distance created by his fame.
Paul seeks his identity and contact. During the search, McCartney toils at a song, as he once had with
Yesterday. Hey Jude emerges as a document of the painful process and a set of instructions to himself. It's fruitful to compare the song with Lennon's
Nowhere Man, which is similar.
It's interesting to compare the technique and the outcome of Hey
Jude and Body Count. In theory, Paul has only three minutes for his
essay. Instead he feels the need to extend to seven minutes: a lifetime in Pop Rock. His outcome is triumphant and ecstatic. We hear
the same thing again a couple of years later when he celebrates: "Oh, we believe that we can't be wrong".
As books go, Body Count is short rather than long. There is little excess verbage. Compared to
Hey Jude the outcome is much more down to earth:
| Ruth had called to invite me to a very very exclusive party for
high echelon freaks only. I called to thank her and decline gracefully. I sat down at the piano with my sister and we wailed some blues together. I had more important things to think about than parties. |
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| Francie Schwartz, Body Count, p115 |
Body Count and Hey Jude both manage
to convey a vision of the toil that will be required to master the problems which will arise on the long road ahead. That's a major
factor of any decent cross-roads story. I hadn't really understood
that Hey Jude fell into that category until I read Body Count where
the two paths are so pregnantly counterpointed.
Casablanca is another classic cross-roads story. Looked at from this angle,
the ending really is quite wierd. He and She have put all the elements
together and are just about to march doggedly into the future when He
decides to flick the switch. It's as if Hey Jude stopped with Paul's
falsetto "yeah" just before the outro. He walks away.
Most people, if they are lucky, will come to a cross-road at least once in their epic journey. Body Count, Alfie and
Hey Jude are depictions of that event by essentially humble people who have few
pretensions of grandeur at precisely that moment in life where their frailties and impermanence are most apparent. The
great thing is that they can convey the silent drama of that moment, in book, film or
a song.
Perhaps, in that moment at Apple, Paul saw something in Francie that could help him. Francie contributes to the search and the song. We can better understand the monumental power of
Hey Jude when we understand the process it reflects. It is a
decision for life. At some
point McCartney tells Francie that he's met someone with whom he has made
contact: Linda.
Body Count
Was she fond of him? Did she love him? Despite the twelve course naked lunch we are served, that glass onion goes quietly unanswered. Perhaps Francie is just as elusive and just as secretive as Paul himself. In the end, total honesty is the best cloak because it leaves nothing that could be hidden. Isn't it is what we hide that leaves us vulnerable?
I've read a half dozen biographies of McCartney only to know less rather than more. This is the one portrait that presents him as a real human being. That's partly because Francie does not judge him, rendering instead a remarkably clear report of the painful initiation into adulthood of Paul McCartney. And of Franny Schwartz.
Acknowledgements:
Many thanks to Francie Schwartz for answering my questions and
providing the graphic. More information is available at her website