One of the most dramatic revelations in an enormous new Beatles biography -- that a 19-year-old Paul McCartney got his first girlfriend, 18-year-old Dot Rhone, pregnant and was about to marry her in 1962 when she miscarried -- was unearthed by Beatles biographer Bob Spitz "near Toronto."
"I looked for Dot Rhone for two and a half years," says The Beatles: The Biography author Spitz on the phone from his Connecticut home. "And it was one of the very few trails that came to a dead end. Nowhere I looked could I find her. I talked to nearly 600 people and never had a dead end. This was it."
The Liverpool native is described in the book as an "elfin blonde with a tense, wounded look," whom John Lennon had nicknamed Bubbles when they all first met in 1959. She and McCartney, with Lennon and Cynthia Powell (who would go on to become Cynthia Lennon) became an immediate foursome.
Working on a dated lead, he learned that Rhone had left the U.K. in her late 20s and settled near Toronto, where she currently lives with her husband and family and "a very good job," as he puts it.
"She was very reluctant at first to talk. This takes her from being a very private person to a very public person," he says. "This was a story she had kept to herself for nearly 40 years. It took a lot of time to convince her talk to me. She told me her story very hesitantly, in a halting way. In the manner she told it, I knew it was absolutely accurate."
Spitz, whose other biography subjects include Bob Marley and Bob Dylan, says Rhone's revelations go way beyond the initial "sensational fact," of her pregnancy, miscarriage and subsequent break-up after two and a half years of dating McCartney. More important for history, he says, is her account of the Fab Four's early years.
In a way, it was fortuitous for Spitz that McCartney was something of a controlling boyfriend. In one passage of the 983-page book, Spitz writes about how she and Powell, the "inconspicuous cheerleaders," learned to stay silent while McCartney and Lennon discussed band business.
"If Paul glared," Spitz writes, "she would freeze like a rabbit."
"We weren't allowed to open our mouths," Rhone told Spitz of her and Powell's attendance at nightly discussions at their hangout, the Jacaranda coffee house. "They'd talk all night, and we just listened."
"That was perhaps the best payoff," says Spitz. "She was quiet during those times and internalized it, committed it to memory in a way other people wouldn't. So she was able to provide a very accurate reminiscence for me. Everything Dot told me just fell right into place."
McCartney, as she portrayed him, was the fiercely ambitious one who would allow no one to stand in his way. "We had to cut it out of the book but she had talked to me for quite some time about how Paul strove to impress [future band manager]Brian Epstein when he met him and how important it was to have this wealthy upper class Liverpool music person taking an interest in the band, and how John's approach to Brian, to use a Liverpool saying, was to take the mickey out of him. There were a lot of jealousies involved."
More than anything, Spitz says, Rhone gave him a clear picture of what happened that seminal night in Hamburg in May 1961 when Stuart Sutcliffe and McCartney battled it out, McCartney victorious.
"Hamburg for me is where the Beatles became the Beatles. So Dot was able to put a lot of that together for me.
"She said Paul hated Stu. He hated him for a lot of reasons, mainly because he wanted that bass. But what he also wanted was what Stu had with John. He was John's closet friend and Paul couldn't get to John because Stu was in the way.
"What Dot painted for me was that fateful night in Hamburg when Stu had had enough of Paul's little jibes and they were on stage. Stuart took off his base, threw it on the ground, lunged at Paul and they beat the crap out of each other on stage. That was it. That was the end of Stu."
Rhone hasn't been in touch with McCartney and spoke with Spitz of her own volition. Just about everyone else in the book who hasn't told their story before first got the okay from McCartney to speak with the author. Spitz earned McCartney's respect and access when the journalist (who once managed the careers of Bruce Springsteen and Elton John) wrote a New York Times story on McCartney's knighting, which ran in 1997.
"He admitted the Beatles story -- what all 600 books about the Beatles are based on -- is only about half true. They made up the other half to protect their wives and friends and family from the grittier part of their legacy. For 40 years they stuck to it.
"At the time, I knew that Paul was a little susceptible. Linda had cancer. Paul had been knighted. I said to him 'You're a man who's edging into his 60s . After you're gone do you want your legacy to be 50 per cent off?' It makes me look like a creep but nevertheless that's what I did.
"I slowly but surely started to pick away at the fabric of the story. Of the myth. Until it came unravelled. And at that point I think he and George, not so much Yoko, but all the other people around them, decided they were ready to tell their story.
Other poignant moments in the book include, via McCartney's aunt, the moment in 1956 when McCartney's mother Mary left for the hospital for what she suspected was the last time before she died the next day of cancer. She laid out Paul's clothes for the next day.
More revelations include evidence that Yoko Ono did not break up the Beatles. ("The marriage was already over and Yoko is the one who served the papers on Paul," say Spitz.) "I felt I was telling the Beatles story for the very first time."
He studied the Beatles private papers, reinterviewed sources, searched high and low for new eyewitnesses like Rhone, documented every line in the book, and was careful to discount McCartney and Harrison's own recollections (Ringo Starr himself did not participate; his manager asked for payment. But those around Starr did go on the record.). He found that them telling stories they themselves had only heard.
"That befuddled me completely but I understand it," he says. "The Beatles themselves were the most unreliable narrators."
So he's especially proud of the Rhone contributions.
"All that wonderful stuff about how the Beatles wrote together and John and Paul especially. Their partnership, how they interacted and removed themselves from the rest of the Beatles and made themselves a unit -- that all came from Dot's observations.
"In Liverpool they'd go out together at night, they sat around in the Jacaranda the club till all hours of the night," he says. "She told me so many stories about John and Paul that they were like two drunks talking about music. That's all they did all night while the girls sat there silently. But here she was observing the two greatest songwriters, perhaps of the 20th century."