After the show, Yoko joins the concert after-party at the Pierre, and she and John are photographed sitting together, talking and holding hands. The barriers between them are crumbling.

*  *  *

Although John and Yoko do not reconcile immediately after the Elton John show, the stage is set for a reunion.

But even as the two of them are coming back together, the Beatles are moving further—forever—apart.

A few weeks after John’s show with Elton, George Harrison is in New York, also booked to play Madison Square Garden to promote his album Dark Horse. Paul is in town as well. (For once, Ringo is the only Beatle not in attendance.) They plan to meet at the Plaza Hotel on December 19, 1974, along with their lawyers, to sign the papers that will formally dissolve the Beatles.

It’s the last step in a legal process that Paul began on December 31, 1970, when he filed a lawsuit in London’s High Court, an action that turned “these true buddies of mine from way way back, these truest friends of mine” into “my firmest enemies overnight.” Despite the trauma, though, Paul maintains “I had to do it. It was either that or [let] Klein have the whole thing, all the fortune we’d worked for all our lives since we were children.”

And for the most part, the hurt feelings have begun to dissipate over the past four years. After that jam session in LA, Paul and John are on good terms again. John has accepted George’s invitation to perform with him onstage at the Garden tonight. Ringo is friendly with all of them and is now on the phone, having already signed the papers in England. George and Paul are at the Plaza, waiting for John so they can all sign and be done.

But John doesn’t show up. There’s a tax issue that he’s worried will disproportionately affect him. Yet when his lawyers finally reach him, at home with May, John gives them the message that he can’t sign because the stars aren’t properly aligned. “I didn’t sign it because my astrologer told me it wasn’t the right day,” he later explains. (As friend and journalist Ray Connolly points out, “This was the first anyone had ever heard of him having an astrologer. But Yoko had one.”)

The group at the Plaza is shocked and annoyed—especially George, who immediately lets John know he’s no longer wanted onstage tonight. (George has been having an especially rough time; the tour has not been a success, and his wife, Pattie Boyd, has left him for his best friend, Eric Clapton.) Paul, the peacemaker, comes over to John and May’s apartment to work out what—other than astrology—is at issue.

Luckily, the hurt feelings blow over quickly, even for George, who reconciles with John the next day.