Doctrinal differences have led to schisms among Beatles historians quite as fierce as those that beset the early Christian Church. Behind and a bit to the left of John Mackenzie’s gravestone another gravestone commemorates various other members of the Rigby family, including, roughly halfway down, Eleanor Rigby. Stevie T complains that rival guides encourage people to believe that this is the famous Eleanor Rigby. ‘It’s a lovely romantic story. Only trouble is – it’s just not true!’
Stevie T has faith in those Beatles theologians who believe that Paul took the name ‘Rigby’ from a wine-shippers in Bristol, and ‘Eleanor’ from Eleanor Bron. Paul himself has confirmed this version of events on a number of occasions, but that has done nothing to stifle the voices of the dissenters.
Lionel Bart once declared that ‘Paul always thought he came up with the name Eleanor because of having worked with Eleanor Bron in the film Help!, but I am convinced he took the name from a gravestone in a cemetery close to Wimbledon Common where we were both walking. The name on the gravestone was Eleanor Bygraves. He then came back to my office and began playing it on my clavichord.’
The nominative etymology of Father Mackenzie has been subject to similar schisms. Pete Shotton remembered being in the room when Paul named the priest in his new song ‘Father McCartney’. Shotton recalled saying, ‘Hang on a minute, Paul. People are going to think that’s your poor old dad, left all alone in Liverpool to darn his own socks.’ He then said, or claimed to have said, ‘Give us that phone book, then, and I’ll have a look through the Macs.’ First he suggested ‘McVicar’, and then, when that didn’t fit, ‘Mackenzie’.
However, in a 1966 interview with Hunter Davies in the Sunday Times, Paul, who suffers from a forgivable tendency to place himself centre-stage, recalled that it was he, not Pete, who looked through the telephone directory in search of an alternative Mac: ‘I went through the phone book and got the name Mackenzie.’
Thirty-one years later, in 1997, Paul told Barry Miles of false Father Mackenzies popping up in his life, along the lines of false Anastasias. ‘A man appeared, who died a few years ago, who said, “I’m Father Mackenzie.” Anyone who was called Father Mackenzie and had any slim contact with the Beatles quite naturally would think, “Well, I spoke to Paul and he might easily have written that about me.”’
There are divisions, too, over who composed the song – Paul or John or both of them. In Melody Maker in 1971, John claimed to have written ‘at least 50 per cent’ of it. By 1972, in an interview with Hit Parader, this had risen to ‘70 per cent’. Later that same year, talking to Ray Connolly, he increased it to ‘80 per cent’. A week before he died in 1980, he was less specific about percentages but equally proprietorial, claiming to an interviewer from Playboy that ‘The first verse is his [Paul’s] and the rest are basically mine.’
But those who were present when the song was composed remember John’s contributions as negligible. Even his most loyal friend, Pete Shotton, reckoned they were ‘virtually nil’. When Paul couldn’t think of an ending, Pete had been ‘seized by a brainwave. “Why don’t you have Eleanor Rigby dying?” I said, “and have Father Mackenzie doing the burial service for her? That way you’d have the two lonely people coming together in the end – but too late.”’
Then John spoke up for the very first time, just to put his friend down: ‘I don’t think you understand what we’re trying to get at, Pete.’ Pete felt humiliated. ‘All I could think of to say was “Fuck you, John.”’ With that, the composing session came to an end. But when Pete heard the record for the first time, he felt ‘over the moon’ that Paul had gone along with his suggestion. ‘Perhaps, I reflected, it was John who hadn’t understood what we were getting at.’
Why would John have so exaggerated his contribution to ‘Eleanor Rigby’? Perhaps it was simple envy. Of all the Beatles’ songs, its lyrics have been the most extravagantly praised, and by all the right people. On its release, George Melly said, ‘Pop has come of age,’ and Jerry Leiber said, ‘I don’t think there’s ever been a better song written.’ ‘Eleanor Rigby’ was taken up by poets, including Allen Ginsberg, who claimed to have played it to Ezra Pound, who, he said, ‘smiled lightly’. Thom Gunn compared it to Auden’s ballad ‘Miss Gee’. Karl Miller included it in his anthology Writing in England Today. James Fenton remembers Auden listening to it ‘in search of something to be influenced by’. More recently, the novelist and critic A.S. Byatt praised the lyric for displaying ‘the minimalist perfection of a Beckett story’. Its appeal is wide-ranging: over the years it has been chosen as a Desert Island Disc by, among others, the cosmologoist Professor Carlos Frank, the actress Patricia Hayes, the American mezzo-soprano Cathy Berberian, the Armenian balladeer Charles Aznavour and the former Chancellor of the Exchequer Geoffrey Howe.
One Beatles theologian, Erin Torkelson Weber, author of The Beatles and the Historians (2016), offers another reason for John’s dubious claims. In an interview with Playboy in 1971, the Beatles’ dodgy business manager, Allen Klein, admitted that, in his attempts to cultivate John through flattery, he had taken care to ‘remind’ him of his authorship of ‘Eleanor Rigby’, assuring him that he wrote 60 or 70 per cent of the lyric. ‘He just didn’t remember until I sat him down and had him sort through it all.’
Torkelson pins John’s misattribution to Klein’s persuasiveness. ‘It appears that in his efforts to become Beatles manager and gain Lennon’s approval, Klein may have convinced the songwriter that he had written lyrics actually by McCartney.’