Fonda points up at a helicopter flying far too close to the mansion. It’s a familiar sight. “They come over to the house with telephoto lenses and take pictures to see if I’m smoking pot or taking LSD,” Fonda later tells Esquire magazine. “Hello, fellas, you dirty bastards!”

“You have to be a bastard to make it. That’s a fact,” John later says. “And the Beatles were the biggest bastards of all.”

Now, only George is distressed.

To ease his thoughts, Fonda tells George a story about when he was ten years old and did something dangerous—he accidentally shot himself in the stomach. It must be true. Fonda has a four-inch scar across his midsection.

Fonda keeps whispering, “I know what it’s like to be dead, man.”

*  *  *

Alone, John writes a letter to Cyn, filled with longing and regret.

“We gave the whole of our youth to the Beatles,” he laments, reflecting on his family—Cyn and Julian, who is now two and a half.

“I’ve missed years of Julian’s life.”

Back in 1963, he’d insisted that “touring was a relief, just to get out of Liverpool and break new ground.” Now the pressures of that life are weighing on him.

“I spend hours in dressing rooms and things thinking about the times I’ve wasted not being with him…of those stupid bastard times when I keep reading bloody newspapers and other shit whilst he’s in the room with me and I’ve decided it’s ALL WRONG! He doesn’t see enough of me as it is and I really want him to know me and love me, and miss me like I seem to be missing both of you so much.…”

Chapter 26

Chapter 26

A working class hero is something to be.

—“Working Class Hero”

It’s October 26, 1965, and the police at Buckingham Palace are unprepared for the heaving crowd of thousands, including an intrepid few who even climb the palace gates. But it’s not Queen Elizabeth they’re hoping for a glimpse of—it’s the Fab Four, who are among 189 individuals due to be receiving honors from Her Majesty that morning.

A few months earlier, each of the Beatles had received a nondescript brown envelope at his home address, alerting him to this news. The rest of the world found out on June 12, when the Beatles’ names were included on the thirty-nine-year-old queen’s annual “Birthday Honours List.” The Beatles are to be distinguished as Members of the Order of the British Empire (MBE), which—though lowest among the five classes of appointment to the order—is an honor never before given to a pop band. In fact, an MBE has never before been given to anyone under the age of twenty-five.