Others in The Work
Lennon comes across much better than Yoko Ono, for whom Goldman shows unbridled contempt. Goldman insults Ono's appearance, describing her as "simian-looking". Goldman alleges that Ono had been a prostitute while attending Sarah Lawrence College, and depicts her as a willing participant in various alleged crimes of her previous husband, Tony Cox. Goldman also goes into great detail about Ono's treatment of Lennon's first wife Cynthia, and Ono's unconventional behavior and personality. Details of this section appear to be lifted from Peter Brown's The Love You Make.Empty citation‎ (help) Goldman also depicts Ono as pressuring Lennon into heroin use, as greedy and stingy, and indulging in infidelity with gigolos.
Cynthia Lennon claims that the material for Goldman's depiction of her and Lennon's marriage was taken from her book A Twist of Lennon.
Goldman depicts Paul McCartney in an extremely positive light, as being the only true talent among the Beatles, and the man who made the band able to function. On January 16, 1980, customs officials in Japan found 7.7 ounces (218.3 g) of cannabis in McCartney's luggage as he and the other musicians in Wings tried to enter the country for a concert tour. Rather than lay the blame for this incident on McCartney, Albert Goldman asserts that it was orchestrated by Yoko Ono. She supposedly had advance notice that her husband's friend would be smuggling drugs into her homeland. She allegedly made overseas telephone calls to government officials she knew with the hope that he would be arrested, thereby giving her a good excuse to forbid her husband from communicating with his friend.
Much more controversially, Goldman depicts manager Allen Klein as being somewhat of a saint, as someone who had the Beatles' best interests in mind, and who was railroaded by the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission when he was tried, convicted, and served prison time for insider trading and securities fraud.
Goldman implies that Mark David Chapman's murder of John Lennon may have been part of a conspiracy by fundamentalist Christians. Chapman was a fundamentalist who viewed Lennon as a corrupter of youth. Goldman does not offer any conclusions, but mentions that the NYPD files on Lennon's murder are sealed and any conclusive answer would have to wait until the files are released to the public.
Read more about this topic: The Lives Of John Lennon
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