Give Me Some Truth

Lennon In America

New Lennon Book Hard to Imagine?
Author claims he had access to Beatle's secret diaries for controversial new book

-Updated 9:00 PM ET April 19, 2000 -

(E! Online) by Mark Armstrong- The way Geoffrey Giuliano tells it, John Lennon's true fantasy may well have been...snuggling up with Barbara Walters and watching 700 Club?! Yup, the 46-year-old author has generated plenty of controversy with his new book on Lennon, which he claims is based partly on the Beatle's much-talked-about secret journals, and years of research and interviews. The 270-page tome, titled Lennon in America, makes a host of new--and, by the way, very bizarre--claims about Lennon's private life from 1971 to 1980. Among them: that Lennon had a sexual encounter with his mother when he was 15. That he had sexual fantasies about, um, Barbara Walters, and George and Patti Harrison, among others. That he was so concerned about his weight he became bulimic. And that Lennon briefly was a born-again Christian, who watched Pat Robertson's 700 Club, but also once converted to Islam. Giuliano also claims Lennon beat his wife, Yoko Ono, and their son, Sean. Those close to Lennon, however, say Giuliano's tale is mostly plain old, Beatle-exploiting fiction, just like Albert Goldman's infamous hatchet job, The Lives of John Lennon. "Very little resembles material that appear in John Lennon's journals," says Elliot Mintz, Lennon's longtime representative and spokesman for Yoko Ono, who read Giuliano's book. "Some of the more sensational claims, to the best of my knowledge, just aren't true."

But the most interesting thing to Beatlemaniacs may be that many of the revelations purportedly came from Lennon's diaries in the first place. Since Lennon's death, the journals had been closely guarded, and supposedly read only by assistants and lawyers. A former assistant began stealing copies shortly after Lennon's death, but he was later caught and pleaded guilty to grand larceny. Giuliano, however, says he was given a photocopy of the writings in 1983--by Lennon's old drinking buddy Harry Nilsson. Nilsson died in 1994, but Giuliano claims Lennon passed copies to Nilsson and at least two other friends with the hopes of one day publishing them.Meanwhile, Giuliano, who's written nearly a dozen books on the Beatles, stands by Lennon in America, claiming that the singer's true personality has been distorted by handlers since his death in 1980. "I have the complete ability to prove that 100 percent of the book is accurate," he says. "It's absolutely imperative we seek to understand this artist on the deepest possible level. I don't need to lie, to distort, to spin. I'm a lone voice of truth in a world of public relations bullshit." Cooper Square Press has printed 50,000 copies of the new book, which already has been released in some areas. Editorial director Michael Dorr says the book "has been strenuously vetted from the legal and content perspective." As for the more salacious tales, Giuliano claims not everything came from Lennon's diaries. For instance, he says Lennon mentioned a sexual encounter with his mother during a 1979 taped interview, not in his writings. Mintz would like to see some proof. "If Giuliano is claiming that he interviewed John Lennon, then it would be very easy for him to present that tape, and I challenge him to produce it," Mintz says. "Since John's death there has been a cottage industry in this kind of sensationalized material," he adds. "He's just another guy trying to make a buck off another book."

Lennon sex claims are untrue, say his family
By Matthew Mervyn jones
EXPLOSIVE claims in a new book about John Lennon have been dismissed by his family and friends as completely untrue.

Author Geoffrey Giuliano says in his biography, Lennon in America, that the Beatle beat Yoko Ono, slept with Linda McCartney, was bulimic and bisexual, used male prostitutes and had a sexual relationship with his mother.

The book is being promoted as "based in part on the lost Lennon diaries" but critics say none of the controversial sections of the biography can be found in Lennon's journals.

His widow Yoko has been deeply hurt by the highly controversial work, according to one of her closest friends. Elliot Mintz said the allegations have caused her great upset. "This is very painful for Yoko and evokes pain and sadness, not anger. She has not read the book but I have told her of the false stories in it," said Mintz.

"Like other books on her husband and other untruthful accounts, she can't bring herself to read it or hear about it. Lennon was the love of her life. He was not a Beatle for her, he was a husband, a lover and a father to their son Sean."

Giuliano, a former actor who once played burger chain mascot Ronald McDonald, insists his book "is entirely the whole truth and nothing but the truth". He adds: "I am willing to have all my evidence examined by experts."

Author Bob Rosen made transcripts from the Lennon diaries in the early 1980s and is one of the few people to have seen the original notebooks. He was hired by Fred Seaman, Lennon's personal assistant, to transcribe the diaries after Seaman stole them following the Beatle's death in 1980.

"None of the really scandalous stuff that appears in Giuliano's book corresponds to what I read in the diaries. I would dismiss the book out of hand. It looks like a rushed job," said Rosen, who has written his own book on the singer, called Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon.

"There are mundane facts there that do seem to come from the diaries but the most interesting things seem completely unsubstantiated.

"Having sex with Linda McCartney and male prostitutes and being responsible for Stuart Sutcliffe's death, none of that is in there. Beating Sean and beating Yoko, from my research it simply didn't happen.

"When I transcribed the diaries I got a sense that Lennon was a very complex individual full of pain. He was torn between everything, he was torn between religion and drink and drugs, torn between following a microbiotic diet and chocolate chip cookies.

"The diaries are about this inner turmoil and the day-to-day mundane routine of his life, fights with his servants, going to the park with Sean and what he had for breakfast and how many cigarettes he smoked."

Giuliano says the diaries are just one aspect of what he used for the book. "I have used secret audio tapes that Lennon made, unpublished letters that he wrote and interviewed 37 people central to John Lennon's life," said Giuliano.

"I am just trying to tell the truth about John Lennon and I have made nothing up. I must be doing something right because I have upset people so much."

Steve Gutstein read Lennon's original diaries when he was an assistant district attorney in Manhattan in the early 1980s and involved in prosecuting Fred Seaman. "I don't recall anything that shocked or surprised me. The writing was a combination of philosophical musings and mundane details of everyday life," said Gutstein.

Mintz, who is spokesman for the Lennon estate and read the diaries when they were eventually returned to Yoko, says that Lennon did not keep a taped journal. But he accepts that Giuliano may have got hold of some copies of pages that were typed up from Lennon's written journals.

"He appears to have taken what in some cases was in the notebooks, embellished it and in some cases simply made things up. He makes claims without substantiation and this is disgraceful," Mintz said."The people who have listened to John Lennon for years know in their hearts that a guy like Geoffrey Giuliano is just trying to make a fast buck out of a memory that many of us hold to be very true and very special."
� Express Newspapers, 2000

Lennon's Disputed Days in the Life

By David Segal
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, April 18, 2000; Page C01

In the two decades since John Lennon was shot dead on a Manhattan sidewalk, the diaries he wrote during his last years of life have stood as one of pop music's most closely guarded secrets. The threat of litigation has shadowed anyone who wanted to quote the diaries in print, and a former employee of Lennon's was once prosecuted and found guilty of grand larceny for stealing them.

That history, however, doesn't daunt Geoffrey Giuliano. In the coming weeks, the 46-year-old celebrity biographer plans to release "Lennon in America," a highly critical, luridly detailed account of the ex-Beatle's life from 1971 to 1980. The book, he says, is based on years of research and interviews; but what's most eye-catching about this 270-page tome is right in its subtitle: "Based in Part on the Lost Lennon Diaries."

With an initial print run of 50,000 planned by Cooper Square Press, "Lennon in America" seems designed to stir a ruckus and infuriate Beatles fans. Among the book's many startling assertions: that at the age of 15, Lennon had a sexual encounter with his mother. That he was a sexual obsessive who fantasized about Barbara Walters. That he was briefly a born-again Christian and an ardent fan of evangelist Pat Robertson's "700 Club" television show. That he was so intent on slimming down that he was bulimic. That he beat both his wife, Yoko Ono, and their son, Sean.

Far-fetched? Elliot Mintz, a spokesman for Yoko Ono and one of just a handful of people who have read Lennon's diaries, says so.

"This is simply a work of fiction," he said in a telephone interview on Saturday, after reading a three-part serialization of the book published last week in London's Daily Mail. "It's a hyperactive work of imagination that bears little resemblance to John's journals and very little resemblance to the reality of the world of John Lennon."

That view is corroborated by Steven Gutstein, the former New York assistant district attorney who was asked to read the diaries in the early 1980s as part of the larceny lawsuit. After being read some of the book's more sensational claims, Gutstein said yesterday, "This is a Mad magazine version of the diaries."

It's been more than 15 years since he actually read those densely written pages, he cautioned, but none of it sounded familiar. "I remember a lot of philosophical musings combined with mundane details of everyday life," he said.

Giuliano, who has written more than 19 books and runs a vegetarian food bank on an animal sanctuary in Upstate New York, stands by his account. But he refuses to be pinned down on some key specifics. He won't say whether he still has a copy of the diaries, for example, nor will he say exactly what information he culled from them. Further, the man he says handed him a photocopy of the diaries--Lennon drinking buddy Harry Nilsson--died in 1994. So is there anyone who can corroborate that this purported handoff even took place?

"My wife knows, my son knows," Giuliano snapped yesterday, his voice rising in anger. "Look, I'm already a rich man. I own a $700,000 home that's paid for. It's obvious that I'm going to do things in an ethical manner."

Nobody questions that Lennon kept a detailed journal between 1975 and 1980, but only a tiny circle of assistants and lawyers has been officially allowed to read it. A few weeks after Lennon's murder in 1980, however, that circle unexpectedly widened when a Lennon assistant named Fred Seaman began stealing documents from the Dakota, the Manhattan apartment building where Lennon and Ono lived and conducted their business dealings.

Seaman began to raid Lennon's study, scooping up documents, stuffing them into shopping bags and delivering them to an aspiring writer and college buddy named Bob Rosen, according to a lengthy 1984 Playboy article.

Soon, Rosen's tiny 169th Street apartment became ground zero for what the pair dubbed "Project Walrus." With bestsellerdom on their minds, the two men stole and transcribed for a full 12 months. But in December 1981, Ono fired Seaman after he was discovered taking a bath, during work hours, in her private residence.

Soon the "Walrus" conspiracy fell apart, and original copies of the diaries were eventually returned. Ono declined to press charges until 1983, when she learned that Seaman reportedly had landed a $90,000 advance to write a book. He later pleaded guilty to grand larceny and was sentenced to five years' probation.

Since then, rumors have circulated that copies of the journals are floating around. But Giuliano and Cooper Square Press are the first established writer and mainstream publisher to release a book that claims to be based on Lennon's diaries. The Washington office of Baker & Hostetler, a national law firm, painstakingly vetted the book over the course of weeks--which is part of the reason why Cooper Square editorial director Michael Dorr says he doesn't fret that "Lennon in America" will spawn litigation.

"There's no legal issue here," he said. "Geoffrey never quotes from the diaries and never paraphrases them. Information can't be copyrighted, only the expression of that information."

The question may be more complicated. While Giuliano carefully tiptoes around Lennon's precise words, the way he acquired a copy of the journals could raise legal questions, said Washington attorney Bruce Lehman. Yoko Ono or Lennon's estate could potentially file suit on the grounds that Giuliano's copy of the journals was unauthorized--a possible copyright violation. There might also be state common law actions, too, related to how the diaries were acquired.

Giuliano sounds downright defiant about the book, all but daring Ono to slap him with a lawsuit. "I object to everything that Yoko has ever done, and I feel that [she] and her buddy Elliot Mintz have been freely engaging in revisionist history for too long," he said. "I've decided to put a stop to it. . . . I'm tying myself to the whipping post."

The warlike tone seems directly at odds with Giuliano's other career. Giuliano runs something called the Spiritual Realization Institute from his estate, and describes himself as a dedicated lacto-vegetarian. He travels around the country giving speeches about animal rights and claims he was once employed by McDonald's to dress up as Ronald McDonald. An avowed Beatles fan, Giuliano said his goal isn't to besmirch Lennon's name but to explain the truth about him that's been lost amid the endless merchandising done in his name. If that irritates anyone--particularly Ono--then tough.

"They can either sue me and go through the Spanish Inquisition or they can pooh-pooh the book, and it's much cheaper to pooh-pooh it," he said.

Ono declined to comment. Mintz, her spokesman, said it's highly unlikely that she would ever attempt to refute Giuliano's book by sanctioning the publication of Lennon's journals. Lennon never intended those pages to have a wide audience, he said, and many of the people in scores of passages aren't public figures.

"It would be an enormous invasion of privacy," Mintz said. "But if John were alive today, he would have a lot to say about the allegation that he kicked his pregnant wife or his son or that he shot heroin. To offer reckless untruthful statements about a man who can't defend himself is particularly dishonorable and very, very odious."

As for filing a copyright infringement suit, Mintz would say only, "Yoko reserves all her legal rights."

Lennon, imagined
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A Lockport author's sensational biography of John Lennon is causing a stir. But his source material, including what he claims is a copy of Lennon's secret diaries, doesn't support many of the book's sordid claims.

By JAMES HEANEY
Buffalo News Staff Reporter
5/28/00

Geoffrey Giuliano, the world's most prolific profiler of the Beatles, has written a "trust me" biography of John Lennon that he contends "has the power to change the course of Beatles history completely and forever."  Giuliano's book says Lennon beat Yoko Ono and bedded Linda McCartney. Was suicidal, perhaps homicidal. Bulimic and bisexual. And did something with his mother that good sons and mothers don't do.

Shocking stuff, much of it unattributed. But the Lockport author says he has transcripts of the diaries Lennon kept during the last years of his life, plus private audiotapes that Lennon and Ono made over the years.

"I didn't make up a single thing in this book. It is 100 percent factual," Giuliano, 46, said in an interview last weekend. "I want the world to know - the whole truth and nothing but the truth."

Giuliano's primary source materials, however, tell a different story than the one he spins in "Lennon in America: 1971-1980, Based in Part on the Lost Lennon Diaries."

The author, when challenged about the lack of attribution in the book, allowed a reporter to spend seven hours reading what he said was key source material, including a typewritten transcript of Lennon's diaries from 1975 to 1979 and correspondence from Lennon to friends, family members and business associates. Giuliano also played what he said were segments of Lennon and Ono tapes that were the basis of several startling charges in the book.

The conclusion: Though the diaries and tapes allude to some elements found in the book, such as Lennon's preoccupation with his weight and a temporary embrace of fundamentalist Christianity, many of the scandalous revelations are not substantiated. In some cases, they're actually refuted.

A comparison of the book and key source materials that Giuliano provided, as well as interviews with Giuliano and others, shows:

• If indeed Giuliano is working from the diaries that Lennon kept, these transcripts are possibly incomplete and certainly distorted, according to three people who have seen the original handwritten diaries.

• Some of the book's most dramatic passages, such as those detailing sexual contact between Lennon and his mother and Lennon's suicidal tendencies, have been exaggerated by taking material out of context.

• Giuliano admits embellishing parts of the book with fictitious dialogue and descriptions.

• The author recycled numerous allegations made in other books that the Lennon camp disputed when they were initially published - such as claims that Lennon beat his wife, Ono, while she was pregnant and had sex with male prostitutes - without independently verifying the accounts.

• Giuliano could not provide notes or written source material to support some accusations, such as Lennon's having sex with Linda McCartney, the wife of Paul McCartney.

A careful reading of the diaries and a review of the other key source materials provided by Giuliano suggests that while Lennon had his quirks and unusual behaviors, his life on balance was a far cry from the nightmare of depression, debauchery and disillusionment portrayed by Giuliano in his book.

Nor do the materials support one of the book's central themes, that Lennon and Ono had a hellish marriage. If anything, the diaries suggest the opposite.

"Dear Y. one day - when you read all this - remember You're the one I loved," reads one 1979 entry.

Steve Gutstein read Lennon's original diaries when he was an assistant district attorney in Manhattan in the early 1980s.

"I don't recall anything that I would consider scandalous," said Gutstein, who prosecuted Fred Seaman, who stole the journals after Lennon's murder on Dec. 8, 1980, outside the Dakota apartment building on Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Rather than wild tales of sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll, Gutstein said, the diaries included "a lot of philosophical musings and a lot of (details on) mundane, everyday matters."

Bob Rosen, who spent two months transcribing the diaries from Lennon's handwriting, agreed, saying Giuliano's book bears little resemblance to the journals.

"I see little bits and pieces, pretty mundane stuff, that might have come from the diaries," Rosen said. "The sensational things, I don't know where he got them from. I'm assuming he made it up, because I've never seen anything like that."

It's not just Giuliano's interpretation of the key source materials that raises questions about the book's credibility. His recent past history includes a guilty plea to noncriminal charges involving the nonpayment of seven years of utilities and complaints filed against him with the Lockport police involving allegations of harassment, breaking and entering and making threats of violence.

Giuliano said neither his past nor his methods should cast doubt on the book.

"I'm clean as a whistle in the way I put the book together. "60 Minutes' couldn't have done it better," he said.

"What is it that I don't have?" said Giuliano, who said his writing career takes a back seat to his Hindu-based spiritualism. "People worship me. I sit on a throne. I'm famous. Why would I want to perpetrate fraud on anyone?"

Elliot Mintz, a close friend of Lennon's during the last 10 years of his life and now spokesman for Ono, described Giuliano as "a literary stalker" who has made a career of the Beatles, first by fawning over them in print and more recently by writing harsh and misleading books on band members.

"The journals are so mundane that Giuliano had to rewrite them. He had to create something that wasn't there," Mintz said.


Continued interest in Lennon

The book was released last month and is drawing attention in newspapers and television shows from Toronto to London.

Before "Lennon in America" hit the stands, it was serialized in the Daily Mirror, one of Britain's biggest tabloids, with some 2.3 million readers. An excerpt was published a week ago in the Globe and Mail, the most prestigious newspaper in Canada.

In the past few weeks, the book was featured on a National Enquirer television news program, "The O'Reilly Factor" on Fox TV, "AM Canada" and a syndicated program distributed to radio stations nationwide via Westwood One.

Cooper Square Press printed 40,000 copies of "Lennon in America," and its distributor reports the advance sale of 35,265 copies to bookstores. The book's first printing is considered a large run, and its distributor thinks it has a shot at becoming a best seller.

Meanwhile, Giuliano said movie studios are reviewing the book and "a deal is in the works."

The diaries are central to the biography, as evidenced by their mention in the book's title and by the estimate of Giuliano's editor, Michael Doar, that they account for 25 to 30 percent of the book's content.

"The diaries were, without a doubt, a treasure trove of factual information for Geoffrey and an important piece of the project, but just a piece," said Bruce Brown, one of the lawyers who reviewed the book for the publisher.

Lennon chronicled his life and thoughts in blank date books distributed by the New Yorker magazine. He maintained them from 1975 to the day he died. Seaman, one of Lennon's aides near the end of his life, stole the journals along with other personal belongings in the months after his murder. He turned them over to Rosen, and the two prepared to write a book about Lennon. Rosen, who maintains he didn't know at the time that the diaries were stolen, spent two months transcribing the journals.

The two eventually had a falling-out, and five of the six years of original, handwritten journals were later recovered after a police investigation culminated in Seaman's guilty plea to second-degree larceny. Only a photocopy of the 1980 diary has been recovered.

Giuliano maintains he obtained the transcripts from singer Harry Nilsson, a close friend of Lennon's. He doesn't explain how Nilsson acquired the diaries. But people who were close to Nilsson don't believe he ever had the transcripts.

Nilsson was talkative, yet never mentioned the Lennon diaries, nor did his wife find them among his belongings after his death in 1994, according to A. Lee Blackman, Nilsson's attorney and close friend.

"Harry's going to give Giuliano copies when he doesn't tell any of us?" Blackman asked.

And Blackman said Nilsson certainly wouldn't have turned over material that cast Lennon in an unfavorable light.

"Harry was not going to betray a friend," he said.

Ono's lawyers, who sued Seaman in a copyright dispute, are trying to subpoena Giuliano to question him about the diaries and any possible involvement with Seaman. Giuliano has vowed to go to prison rather than turn over his transcripts and other materials.


Little scandal in journals

Materials reviewed by The Buffalo News included 213 pages of the Lennon diaries from 1975 to 1979, a 2-inch-thick stack of photocopied personal correspondence, and portions of three Lennon and Ono audiotapes from 1968, 1970 and 1979.

Here's a summary of the anecdotes, thoughts and incidents recounted in these diaries:

Lennon dreamed a lot, often about sex. In another dream, he was killed at the Dakota.

He often had problems sleeping and maintained irregular hours.

He went through a religious phase that sounded a lot like born-again Christianity, and sometimes watched "The 700 Club" on television.

He took drugs on occasion, but seemed more interested in yoga.

He loved his wife, and his infrequent gripes mentioned typical subjects of marital discord: sex, religion and being in a rut.

He was enthralled by his son Sean, even though the child's behavior as a toddler sometimes frustrated him.

He was extremely conscious of his weight from 1975 to 1978, often going on fasts and diets and sometimes throwing up large meals, though it's never made clear whether the vomiting was self-induced.

He often worried about the health of his family and friends.

He turned to the FBI to deal with extortion threats that clearly unnerved him.

He kept in touch with McCartney and Beatle mates George Harrison and Ringo Starr, but wanted nothing to do with a late-1970s reunion a promoter proposed as a way of raising money for charity.

He enjoyed traveling abroad.

And he retained his wit, quipping in one entry: "Don't shave with your mouth full."

The mundane nature of much of the diary transcripts is consistent with the impression of the three others who said they read the original handwritten journals.

Gutstein, now an attorney in private practice in Manhattan, said the sensational claims made in Giuliano's book sound like a "parody" of the journals, which he said contained "no smoking guns, from my point of view."

Mintz, Lennon's friend, concurs, as does Rosen, who probably spent more time with the journals than anyone other than Lennon. Though the diaries include personal and intimate information, Rosen said, he saw nothing scandalous.

"It was day-to-day routines. It was philosophy," said Rosen, who is releasing his own book, "Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon."

"Everything that was John Lennon, that came out in his concerts, his interviews, his books, it was all there."


Giuliano defends portrayal

Does Giuliano have an accurate transcript of the diaries?

Interviews with those familiar with the journals said the transcript was never checked for accuracy against the original handwritten diary.

Does Giuliano possess a copy of the transcripts produced by Rosen?

It's uncertain.

Based on Rosen's description of what he produced, it appears Giuliano's version is somewhat abbreviated, formatted differently in some places and perhaps less detailed in others. But the general content of Giuliano's copy is similar to that described by Rosen, Mintz and Gutstein.

Giuliano insists that the diary he has is Lennon's, and he scoffed at the assertions of Mintz and Rosen, saying they have financial interests in challenging his account. Giuliano also stood by his interpretation of the transcripts and tapes, which he said were supplemented by interviews with 37 people and use of previously published material.

"When you put it all together, you get the picture," Giuliano said. "I don't believe I have drawn any conclusions. I was very careful that everything in the book is based on fact."


Interpretation in question

The transcripts aren't the only materials Giuliano used for the book. He also has the Lennon and Ono tapes. The tapes he played for The News suggest that he made leaps in conclusions and interpretations.

For instance, an audio diary from September 1979 with a voice sounding like Lennon's includes a recollection of touching his mother's breast when he was 14. The implication was that the contact was sexual in nature, though the voice on the tape provided few details beyond the fact he was playing hooky from school, a description of his mother's clothing and his thoughts about whether he should go further.

Giuliano begins his book with that encounter, but he writes in much greater detail than what the voice on the tape provides. The book describes the weather and notes the lingerie that hung on the clothesline. It reports, in quotation marks, the dialogue between mother and son. It recounts how the mother placed her son's hands on her breasts, the way her body reacted to his touch and the "jolt of native electricity that went through the boy."

None of those details are on the tape that Giuliano played for The News.

How does Giuliano explain it?

"There's a bit of artistic license - half of one percent," he said. "We have some ability to color things. It's nothing that's out of the ordinary."

"The biography is an imperfect science."

Elsewhere on the tape, the voice purported to be Lennon's talks about looking out the window of his hotel, wondering if he should jump or go back to bed. With a laugh, the voice says he decided to go back to bed.

Giuliano insists the quip is evidence of Lennon's deep depression and suicidal mind-set.

The book also makes claims for which Giuliano provides no corroboration.

For instance, the book says that Lennon once had sex with Linda McCartney. For this claim, Giuliano said he relied solely on a two-page recollection of the incident that he said was in Lennon's handwriting and was shown to him by one of Ono's employees. He does not have a copy of the handwritten recollection.

Finally, there are claims that are based on previously published allegations but that Giuliano did not substantiate himself.

These allegations include Lennon's kicking Ono in the stomach when she was pregnant with Sean; having sex with male prostitutes; allowing former band mate Stuart Sutcliffe to perform oral sex on him in the early days of the Beatles; and later injuring Sutcliffe in an argument, leading to Sutcliffe's death a year later.

Those claims have been disputed by those close to Lennon. If Giuliano didn't verify the claims himself, how does he know those incidents are true?

"How do you know anything is true? That's my answer," Giuliano said.

Giuliano's editor and lawyer said they reviewed Giuliano's key documentation and came away satisfied the book was credible.

"We certainly wouldn't have published the book unless we were able to confirm that the information within was accurate," said Doar, Giuliano's editor at Cooper Square Press. "The manuscript was carefully edited and vigorously vetted (reviewed) by our lawyers."


Friction with local authorities

So who is Giuliano?

"Geoffrey Giuliano" is a pen name. He changed his legal name in 1997 from Jeffrey Juliana to Jagannatha Dasa Puripada.

He did stints as the Magical Burger King and Ronald McDonald in the late 1970s and early 1980s, became a major collector of Beatles memorabilia and eventually parlayed his interest into a writing career. In 1986, Giuliano wrote the first of his 23 books on popular music, 18 of them on the Beatles.

Giuliano said he practices what he describes as "devotional yoga," similar to orthodox Hinduism. His brick house across from the Erie Canal doubles as a Hindu temple, guest house, animal sanctuary, recording studio and vegetarian food pantry.

Through his Spiritual Realization Institute, Giuliano said, he buys and distributes food and clothing in northern India, where he travels two or three times a year. Most of his book royalties go to that and other charitable work, he said.

Giuliano has had his share of run-ins with the local authorities. He pleaded guilty in 1998 to a noncriminal violation and received a one-year conditional discharge after authorities accused him, along with his wife and oldest daughter, of trying to avoid $21,672 in bills from New York State Electric & Gas. Something Fishy Productions, one of his corporations, pleaded guilty to a felony count of fourth-degree grand larceny in the case.

The Giulianos, according to authorities, tried to avoid paying their bills from 1990 to 1997 by changing the name on the account every time NYSEG threatened to shut off service for nonpayment. Giuliano agreed to pay $15,629 in restitution, though he said he is refusing to pay the last one-third of the debt.

He insists he was unfairly prosecuted - "they had nothing on me" - and that he pleaded guilty only because it was cheaper than fighting the charges.

Giuliano has been the subject of several complaints filed with Lockport police since 1995, including accusations from a tenant that Giuliano followed and threatened him, and later broke into his apartment and trashed his furniture; a report from workers who delivered appliances to Giuliano's house that he threatened to "split their heads open" after they damaged a door; and an obscenity-laced confrontation with police after they picked up his daughter on a driving violation.

"They were simply allegations," Giuliano said of the incidents. "Charges were never filed."

His difficulties, he said, are rooted in the bigotry of local authorities and "goon squad" tactics of the Lockport police.

"They don't know what to make of me, dude. They're squares," he said. "It's kind of an inversion of ignorance. It's the blue-collar oblivion in which they live."

The house he and his family live in also has been the focus of attention. The property taxes and water bills haven't been paid on time in five years, public records show. Currently outstanding is a $3,332 water bill. Giuliano recently told the Washington Post that he owns the house and that it's worth $700,000. Public records show that his in-laws own the property and that it's assessed at $86,400. Giuliano maintains that he was quoted out of context and that he has made improvements to the property to boost its value.

Mintz said Giuliano's background further erodes the book's credibility.

"People like Giuliano want to suggest it was all darkness, that John and Yoko had a loveless relationship and he was a creep of a guy. I imagine it makes for better copy in an age of cynicism," he said.

"I ask the reader, "Who are you going to believe?' "

THE SAINT AND THE MONSTER
Infamous Beatle Hack Remains Unrepentant

Eye Weekly - 05.11.00

GEOFFREY GIULIANO
Lennon in America

**

Cooper Square Press, $39.95

By Kevin Hainey (TORONTO EYE)

Making monsters out of martyrs makes money. Just ask Geoffrey Giuliano, the notorious Beatles biographer who's recently made headlines and bank queues with Lennon in America. Giuliano's latest work (based in part on the so-called "lost Lennon diaries") slings mud on the saintly image John Lennon has achieved since his murder 20 years ago.

Calling this biography controversial is an understatement -- Lennon fans, casual or devoted, will shake their head in disbelief at the shocking "facts" Giuliano, the author of 18 Beatles biographies, has culled over 16 years of research and interviews.

"I love John Lennon, man," says an outspoken Giuliano amid the lunch-hour din at Fred's Not Here. "But I love the real John Lennon, not the Disney character."

Giuliano is referring to a "real" Lennon that, according to his book, had sexual relations with his mother and Linda McCartney, raped a fan, consumed alcohol, heroin, cocaine and marijuana at a self-destructive rate, and possessed an uncontrollable temper that led him to abuse himself and his family on a regular basis.

Giuliano's Lennon is from a different planet than the media-contrived pop idol who penned such classics as "All You Need Is Love" and "Give Peace a Chance." For most, Lennon was a martyr, a brilliant artist who railed against a crumbling society and the final spokesman for a generation that wasn't content to sit back and watch its freedom be repressed.

But Giuliano shows no remorse in his contrary portrait. He offers no explanations, only accusations. He also clearly believes his word on Lennon is law and wants to make sure everyone knows it, spilling self-admiration and one-sided conversation with a roar, turning heads as he sputters and waves his arms about like an air-traffic controller on speed.

"I once sold all my research," he tells a collection of local reporters. "But I went and bought it all back at double the price. It's the only thing people want me to do. People pay me to do this."

Among Giuliano's sources is a copy of Lennon's handwritten diary (provided by Harry Nilsson) and a selection of "recently discovered" personal audiotapes.

"Nobody went to the Liverpool uncles that were 80 years old but me," boasts Giuliano. "Nobody went to the dying aunts' houses. I did."

But no matter how convincing Giuliano's spiel, it's hard to shake the feeling that this photograph isn't in focus. The rambling nature of the book races through shocking facts so quickly that it rarely stops to acknowledge that Lennon did anything but cause suffering. And why does a book that attempts to uncover the true Lennon focus so heavily on the bad while leaving the good shrouded in shadows?

"Your concepts of bad and good seem kind of childish," Giuliano tells me one-on-one. "I don't think we should put a value system on the activities of human beings caught in the web of their own emotional circumstances. Is it bad to be homosexual, is it bad to shoot heroin?"

Well, I suggest, it's bad to rape fans, for one. It's bad to beat your wife and kids.

"Are you Christian?" Giuliano asks with a venomous eye. No, I tell him. "Well, I don't think I share the same concept of good and bad. The book makes him neither more saintly nor demonic, because those are superhuman terms. It makes him look more human."

Lennon in America might be the only book that took 16 years to research and only three months to write. "It's not that well-written," admits Giuliano, who rushed writing the book to beat the competition of a second Lennon biography, due this summer. "Whoever gets out first sells. That's the way it is."

If there is one person who won't be happy with this book, it's Yoko Ono, who has spent her life fighting to preserve the Lennon name and estate. The couple's relationship has always been a hot topic among Beatles fans, and Giuliano is no exception.

"She is a cold-hearted bitch," he says. Giuliano feels Lennon's marriage to Ono "made him more codependent and brought out his socio-sexual retardation -- he was pussy-whipped." Giuliano also says he considers Ono's art to be "shit" and even accuses her of theft. "I left a John Lennon gold record at her house and she refused to give it back!"

A telling story Giuliano related concerned a brief stint working for Pete Townshend. "I wrote Pete a letter and he said, 'You sound very interesting, come work as my personal assistant.' But I stole something and was fired. He tried to beat me up. I stole a tape..." he recalls, stopping himself. "I used to be a bit of a kleptomaniac: I wouldn't steal from people's rent money, but I might take an ashtray or something weird.

"Townshend said, 'You're not only a cunt, you're a lying cunt,' and I thought it was a really good quote."

The World Beatles Forum – Volume Five, Number Two – Sept. / Oct. 2000

A Conversation With Geoffrey Giuliano

by Geoff Franklin

Reader caveat: This interview contains mature themes and expletives that may be offensive to some readers. Portions of the text have been edited from the original transcription. Opinions expressed in this conversation do not necessarily reflect those of the publisher / editor.

Geoffrey Giuliano: you either love him or hate him. Some Beatles fans love to hate him, citing he not only distorts the truth, but makes up stories that taint the image of The Beatles. His supporters believe that he refreshingly tells the story as it really happened.

In this controversial interview, we present Geoffrey Giuliano as he’s never been told – warts and all.

Our conversation was conducted via a telephone call on Thursday, July 27, 2000.

Geoff FRANKLIN (GF): I’d like to open up discussing your new book, Lennon In America. Now, you knew going in that Lennon In America would raise a few eyebrows. Has it created more or less controversy than you expected?

Geoffrey GIULIANO (GG): The book didn’t get the media play that I suspected that it might or felt that it should have and I believe that’s a direct result of a whispering campaign to various, obvious media venues by person or persons unknown who might have a vested, continuing business interest to see that the Lennon Estate continues to do business unimpeded by the likes of me. We didn’t get things that I was sure that we would get – venues like Entertainment Tonight, I was positive we would get that; Inside Edition – these kinds of shows did not pick it up and I’ve done business with most of these shows over the years on various books and I know exactly the kind of thing that they’re looking for. I certainly don’t know, but it is my suspicion, that rather than confront me too much, publicly, which then calls for rebuttal and maybe stirs the thing up, so one gets more publicity, it’s just easier to give a call to your buddy who’s the executive producer . . . and keep whoever you want off by promising them something in the future.

GF: And this would be people in Yoko’s camp?

GG: Yeah, people like Elliot Mintz, in my opinion. That’s what I think happened. I certainly can’t prove that it did. But, it’s what I would do, if I was in their shoes. And it’s an easy thing to do. He’s a major public relations person in Los Angeles. That’s where all the important TV emanates from. He’s got ongoing relationships with those people. That is my assumption. It didn’t get the play that I thought it was going to get. And the play that it got in the media wasn’t on a very high level. They just picked out a few, less than a handful, of sensational bits from the book and just ran them into the ground without background or any regard to their importance or position in the book or any further commentary from me. They took comments from Elliot Mintz and Harry Nilsson’s lawyer and Yoko’s lawyer . . . and they just put them down as gospel, as though they were somehow carved in stone and I wasn’t very impressed with that. But, it’s par for the course for the media.

The American media certainly isn’t very deep. They’re just looking for sound bites, so they just did a slash and burn on the book and went through it. And the pity of that is, the problem is that the book isn’t really what all that is about. Yes, there are those elements in the book which are sensational. They have to do with sex and drugs and troubled marriages and emotional upsets and inner landscapes of John’s mind. So, I understand how people would want to pick on those, but they’ve missed the whole point of the book. Now, we don’t expect the media to get the point of anything. I’m pretty cynical about that. They just went through and picked out a couple of juicy, little tidbits and then ran with it and squeezed out what play they could and moved on.

But, I feel really badly . . . that these ardent, hardcore, year-after-year, decade-after-decade Beatles fans, I guess, they’re very closed, in many instances, are very closed minded people who have formed their world around them and refuse to allow anything as trivial as reality to intervene . . .

GF: . . . meaning that they don’t want the myths of their icons exploded . . .

GG: Yeah, and I think that’s an extremely dangerous way to live, and so, by the way, did John Lennon. These people need to get a life.

GF: Okay, so the media missed the point. What about the readers?

GG: Some got it. I got a lot of e-Mail, because I put my e-Mail address in the book, and I got a lot of e-Mail from people. Some of them got it, absolutely, which is, “Hey, you really have a lot of affection for John, and thank you for trying to go out on a limb the way you have, personally, to bust the myth, the many myths surrounding John.” I tried to give this man a humanity . . . There was a review called, Lennon Dismembered. But, I feel it should be more Lennon Resurrected, because I was trying to give a humanity and a reality to him that he deserves. I absolutely have the greatest respect for John Lennon. I cannot abide Yoko Ono. I think she’s just . . . manipulative, . . . cold, untalented, overambitious, moneygrubbing. I could go on and on with adjectives . . .

GF: Back in 1981, your relationship with Yoko was very different . . .

GG: Well, it wasn’t really. I did a couple of interviews with her. I was up there, socially . . . one time . . . and two times for business.

GF: You had photos taken with Yoko and Sean.

GG: Those were photo ops. People shouldn’t read too much into that.

GF: So, you were never friends, then?

GG: We were never . . . no, no. I don’t think Yoko has the capacity to be a friend with anybody . . .

GF: Did you realize this from the first time you met her, or did it take some time to develop that opinion?

GG: I think that before I met her, I understood that she was a highly manipulative human being and I just think that it is very unfortunate that John Lennon ever got involved with Yoko Ono. I really think that it was his downfall. As someone said to me, “Hey, if it wasn’t for Yoko Ono, we wouldn’t have great music like Imagine.” And I said, “That’s true, but we might have had about 30 more years of Beatles music.”

GF: So, the book got the notice of Yoko, obviously, and all the damage control that you surmise that she was probably the leader in . . .

GG: The problem doing damage control with me is that I’ve got a big mouth, and I’m too dumb to be afraid.

GF: Are you afraid of being sued by her?

GG: No . . . I would be delighted to be sued by Yoko. I’m sure it would do wonders for my career. They tried to do the same thing to me, the Beatles fans, that they did to John Lennon, trying to make this one dimensional, cardboard cut-out . . . [that] I’m an evil, terrible person. I saw on the Internet, somebody said I was worse than Mark David Chapman. All I can do is laugh, because this is not at all the person that I am. I have spent the better part of my life chronicling the life and times of The Beatles as very, very human beings, trying to set the record straight, as far as I can as an outsider, as to who these people were – and with absolutely no regard whatsoever for the myth. I think that it’s much more magical that this incredible, unparalleled, fantastic work emanated from four, very fallible human beings, than four demigods who touched down from planet Dingdong to save us all from ourselves, time, and decay. It’s just stupid. It’s stupid. They’re just people. And, the fans just apparently don’t want to hear that, and as they obviously don’t, it makes me fear for their state of mind.

GF: Was it a difficult decision to dissect him and reveal some of the things about John that obviously flies in the face about what we thought we knew about the man?

GG: First of all. You have to understand that this book has very little to do with me. Why do I say that? All of this bullshit about the diaries not being real, that is all fuckin’ smoke screen, smear campaign garbage. These are John Lennon’s diaries. There is zero question of that . . .

GF: . . . these are the unadulterated diaries . . .

GG: Absolutely, the full thing . . .

GF: . . . not the Fred Seaman ones?

GG: No. It hasn’t been augmented or deleted from. I have John Lennon’s diaries from 1975 through 1979. I do not now, and have never had nor have I ever seen the missing 1980 diary . . .

GF: . . . not the Robert Rosen versions?

GG: Absolutely not!

GF: So, can you tell us how you obtained these?

GG: No. Why? Why should we waste . . . everybody knows the story. It’s like a popular, urban myth. I got them from Harry Nilsson. I don’t think we should waste the interview with that, if you can forgive me.

GF: Okay.

GG: But, let me talk to you about how I wrote the book. I wrote the book from John Lennon’s genuine diaries. I wrote the book from a two-inch stack of photocopied letters in John’s handwriting and typed by John, augmented by his handwriting that I got from his family members and other business associates who gave me copies of letters that John had sent to them and I have these. I also have what I think is far more shocking, if you will, or sexy or telling or sensational than any of the aforementioned. I have some audio tapes of John and Yoko talking about some very bizarre things about their sex lives and all that in minute detail that absolutely no one has ever heard. There is just no question. These have not been out. I don’t even know if Yoko has them. I was able to use only a very small part of these audio tapes in the book and I look forward to using them as part of the basis of my next book which is called Revolution: The Secret History Of The Beatles. Again, I’m fighting this wave, this high-priced tidal wave of spin that’s put out by The Beatles and Apple and now the fans – you know, they get behind it, to tell the truth about The Beatles.

If anybody thinks that The Beatles Anthology [book] is going to be kind of the final word on the reality of The Beatles and their contributions to the world and themselves as people, then they are obviously very susceptible to being hoodwinked, because that’s going to be nothing but a 67-dollar, multi-colour . . . piece of fluff, put out to scratch the egos of three old men . . . I’m hoping, at least, there’ll be some good pictures, but if anybody think there’s going to be anything revelatory in The Beatles Anthology . . . there ain’t. Therefore, I’m writing my next book.

GF: And you have more revelatory stories?

GG: Oh, absolutely.

GF: More shocking stories?

GG: Well, you see. I don’t know if they’re shocking. To me, is [oral sex] shocking? Not in my world . . . Is drug taking shocking? Are people who are weak and tortured and tormented shocking? See, that’s the thing. What kind of grade school world are people living in, here? The world that I understand, that I live in, and I thought we all lived in has [oral sex], drug shooting, extra marital . . . whatever . . . embezzlement, fraud, and also the other side, good things, happy things, nice things, children, sunshine. But, we’re adults now. I just can’t believe that people are so easily shocked. So, when you say shocking, I don’t know. I’m going to write a book . . . Listen, the money’s not that good with these books, believe me. And, there are other things I want to do. I’m 46. I want to make TV documentaries. I want to act. I want to be involved with spiritual endeavors. The last thing I would do is waste my time on something that was a lie or was untrue or was more spin . . . I’m the truth teller. I’m the loose cannon, the lone wolf. I’m the guy who takes all the abuse from people. I’m everybody’s whipping boy for telling the truth. It’s not so hard on me. I just kind of feel sorry for people who are inspired to do that.

GF: Let’s talk about the British edition of Lennon In America. I understand it’s going to contain about 30 more pages. What information is missing from its North American counterpart?

GG: That’s right. I had to write this [book] very quickly, admittedly, to whip Robert Rosen’s ass, which I did profoundly. I got out a month or something before him and took all the sales. “And oh, I see. He’s doing it for commerce.” Yeah, that’s one of the reasons. I do this for a living, folks. I write books so they’ll be informative and entertaining and be part of a body of work, but, also to sell and make money, yeah sure. And guess what? Everybody else in show business does that, too! Show business? Any business. It’s called commerce. I don’t see anything wrong with it.

The British edition of the book goes into more detail about the content of phone calls between Julia Baird and John’s Liverpool family and John. There’s also the Will. His Will is in there and some comments on the Will. And I worked in a few more snide comments about Yoko. Given the chance, I’ll never miss an opportunity, there.

GF: You have an axe to grind with her . . .

GG: Yeah. I don’t like her . . . Anybody who falls for this idea that Yoko’s some kind of incredibly, highly sophisticated artist, wherein her current M.O. is to go to Brazil where they’re just happy to have any celebrity go there – she goes to some Art gallery. They paint it white. She puts two piles of stones and the pebbles . . . or whatever in the middle of the floor and says with a sign in front of them, “Where would you like to spend Eternity?” I don’t think that’s Art. I don’t think it’s particularly clever or intelligent. It’s been done to death, starting with Fluchess and Andy Warhol and all this minimal, conceptual thing. I just think it’s rich people not having anything . . . why doesn’t she open a Yoko Ono cancer hospital or a Yoko Ono – John Lennon feeds dying Indian kids hospital? What a fucking waste of money on this bullshit.

GF: In your opinion, with the intelligence, the creativity, and sensitivity of John Lennon, how did he fall under her spell?

GG: . . . Because he was an emotional cripple, frozen in time from the day of his mother’s death. He was shunted about as a kid. It affected his ability to ground himself in real, adult relationships. He was, I believe, sexually retarded and objectified women, in the way he used women . . . he was unable to relate on a meaningful level. Being a Beatle did nothing but encourage his insolation, which as a protective device, he had to enact – because he had the whole world at his door. In the beginning, Yoko or Mommy, as he called her towards the end of his life, served the purpose of running interference between John and the world. But, that running interference soon turned into something far more sinister, which was isolating John and keeping John a virtual prisoner in the Dakota, a bird in a gilded cage. Just because he was a good musician, and a good lyricist, and a clever commentator on society and a good armchair Pop philosopher, doesn’t mean that he was emotionally healthy or that he was any kind of demigod. As far as I’m concerned, what makes John Lennon even more wonderful than he was is the realization, after 20 years gone from this world, that he was so weak, so fragile, so made of glass, so susceptible, and he just found someone who took full advantage of his emotional state and his proclivity to show the world a veneer and then, of course, a very different John behind closed doors, and took full advantage of it, and she continues to this day to milk that fucking cash cow until it’s dry with her John Lennon baby clothes.

I’ll tell you what. If John Lennon could come back for five minutes, he’d probably kick two people’s asses: me first, and then Yoko Ono’s. Me for fucking stirring up all this shit, and Yoko Ono for putting out this goofy line of doodles, barbeque aprons, greeting cards, baby clothes, baby booties, sunglasses, sun visors, sweatshirts, t-shirts, thong underwear, and whatever the Hell else she’s put out. Julian hates it. Anyone with any brains or taste hates it. She takes John’s doodles. Fair enough: they’re fairly interesting . . . you could do as well. I could do as well. But, we’re not John Lennon, so there you go. And then, she colours on some damn . . . she gets some crayons out and colours onto a plate and gets some of her minions to go down to the factory someplace . . . and run them off on lithograph and then the estate signs them and sells them for thousands of dollars. Give me a break.

The defining thing that I have to say about Yoko Ono is that she has the ambition of a diva with none of the talent. And this must have been incredibly frustrating for this poor woman, because here she is living with a man to whom the whole world adores. And, nobody particularly likes her. Her Art is kind of e-h-n, and it never caught on and people made fun of her. In the end, all she had was the money. She’s like Mrs. Haversham [from Great Expectations], sitting there in her wedding dress, after 40 or 50 years: “Hey, look. I was married to John Lennon and I got all the money.” Like Julian Lennon said, “She doesn’t have the Lennon DNA.” She doesn’t have that pioneer blood flowing through her veins. She got the money.

GF: Let’s remove the word “shocking.” What was the most interesting thing or the biggest revelation, during your research, about John Lennon.

GG: . . . the extent of how dominated he was by Yoko. The only way for him to get any peace was to go into the bedroom and lock the door. Fifty per cent of this book was left on the cutting room floor by the lawyers. It’s a much more shocking story than I was able to tell for legal reasons.

GF: Will that be told in the subsequent book?

GG: I’m going to try.

GF: Let’s back up a bit. This is a great discussion on the book, your current . . .

GG: Nobody talks like this. This is so obvious. I’ve read some of your interviews. Nobody talks like this.

GF: Our readers will love this . . .

GG: No. They’ll love to hate me.

GF: No. I don’t think so. I’m a huge Lennon fan, a huge Beatles fan and I did not hate the work that you put together and I can tell that by the number of things that you’ve put together over the years that you are not a guy who hates John Lennon.

GG: No. No. He was very important to me as a child. When I was a kid, I really didn’t have a father and my mother was chronically depressed. She didn’t want to leave the house and she didn’t clean up the house. It was tough. I used to go in my bedroom and put those headphones on . . . and this was like a big brother talking to me, talking to me through the music, and I don’t mean it in any psychotic way – just listening to the lyrics. I was a young man and they would help me to form my opinions and ideals. I have a great, great debt to John Lennon. The last thing that I would ever want to do is go to my grave knowing that I had in any way demeaned or diminished such a great man.

GF: Let’s fill in some of the blanks for our readers. You were born in Rochester, New York, lived and worked in Canada for a while. This is interesting.

GG: Yeah. In 1976, I graduated from drama school. The idea was to be an actor and the only job I could get, right out of drama school, (I had a couple of kids, and I had to immediately get some work) was playing Ronald McDonald in Canada. Sorry, first I was the Marvellous, Magical Burger King in New England. Then, I was Ronald McDonald in Canada. It’s just a coincidence that it happened. I was a vegetarian the whole time and now that gives me a really good platform to speak about animal rights, which I do frequently. I lived there [Canada] for five years.

I was kind of lost. I was like these people. I was like these Beatles people, not all Beatles people, but the Beatles people who go too far – the Beatles people who are obsessive, compulsive. I was like that. I have, in the far distant past, spent the rent money on Beatles memorabilia. It became a compulsion, almost like gambling. My father was a gambler, so maybe I inherited some kind of gene for that.

I was at a Beatles convention, maybe just after I wrote The Beatles: A Celebration, and I saw a flyer on the floor that said, “Hey! Do you really need that Yellow Submarine lunch box? Is it really going to make your life perfect? Why don’t you people get a life?” At first, I was really pissed off and then I looked at it. And I tell you, the light went on in my head and it’s never gone off. I got rid of all my memorabilia and I decided that since nobody was really telling The Beatles’ story in the intensely human way that I try to do, I would do it myself.

Now I tell you . . . Mark Lewisohn is a statistician. He’s like a civil servant. He sits there and . . . he gives you this information that’s very meticulous and that’s very well organized and chronicled and probably as perfect as we could get with the passage of time, but he doesn’t tell you anything about their cultural impact, the kind of people they were, what their private lives were like, what inspired them to create, what their foibles were, what their good points were, what their relations with their families were. He just tells you that they used this guitar here and they did these vocals at ten o’clock. It’s okay, and I use his books to keep my stories straight, as research. But, he’s not a biographer. Mark Lewisohn is categorically not a biographer. He’s a statistician.

GF: But, he has come up with some incredible stuff for those books.

GG: Absolutely! I’ve got all the books and they’re referenced. They’re all well worn, because I use them to check dates and facts. I give them to my researchers. He’s also ingratiated himself to The Beatles, and so . . . it’s not like I’m jealous of Mark Lewisohn. I would never do that . . . if I was offered that job, I would not do it. So, it’s not a question of that . . . The biographical art, people don’t understand it. They don’t understand what it is. First of all, it’s not Mark Lewisohn, that’s statistician. And then, George Harrison’s . . . theory is that you have to physically know and be intimate with the people about whom you write. And, I also don’t buy that. What about all those books about Hitler and Churchill? We’re called historians and biographers. We do have a place. Yes, there is a place for sisters and mothers and friends and next door neighbours writing memoirs about the time they spent with celebrated people. No question about it. And there’s certainly room for autobiographies. But, there’s also room for biographies wherein the people don’t know the people at all, physically, and yet, they conduct these incredibly exhaustive investigations into their backgrounds in a scouring way. And that’s what I do. And I wish people would understand that.

GF: Now, you’ve mentioned brothers and sisters. Louise Harrison, George’s sister, at the Ottawa Beatles convention back in 1996, stated that she did not really care for your book, Dark Horse: The Secret Life Of George Harrison. Apparently, she didn’t like your portrayal of George and she’s not listed in the first edition’s acknowledgements. Did you ever interview her for the book?

GG: No. Her relationship even with George isn’t that great, right now. This is a sad thing . . . Ruth McCartney has tried to make a life for herself. She’s a real sweetheart. These people, Bob Wooler, even Bill Harry . . . okay, Bill’s been able to . . . by the way, I’ve written more Beatles books than anybody. I don’t know if you know that. I can’t say anything for the quality, but the quantity, I’ve written more. I counted Bill’s up, the other day, and I think he’s about three behind me. Bill’s the guy who’s been able to make a living out of this. But, anyway . . . it’s kind of like being Frank Sinatra, Jr. Okay, Louise Harrison doesn’t like my book, big deal. That’s a long, fucking line of people who don’t like Geoffrey Giuliano’s work. But, what I know is bullshit is this whole thing that I’m this terrible person. That’s ridiculous. I don’t know if you’ve gone to any of my websites, not the commercial one, but I have a spiritual one. We give away a lot of money that my wife and I make. We’re just going to India in a couple of days. We’re taking food with us – food relief. We have orphans that we pay for. You know, we’re not bad people. We’re ethical vegetarians. We run a food bank. So, that I don’t accept that I’m this horrible man.

GF: I think this is an important thing to continue discussing. Beatles fans may be aware of your strong spiritual and religious convictions, but . . .

GG: By the way, George and I are the same religion. There’s no question about that and that’s everything to me . . . The Beatles were my first gurus. My first guru means teacher. They were my first gurus, when I was a young kid and I didn’t know anything about life, at all, and I looked to The Beatles for inspiration and guidance and leadership through their music and through their larger than life personalities, particularly John and George. Then, when The Beatles went to India, I also, at twelve, purchased a book on Yoga’s philosophy. And, I read that book. It absolutely changed my life. After that, I got a little bit into LSD. In those days, that was very powerful – clean, pure psychedelics and it also showed me some things and was helpful to me. I absolutely have nothing to do with drugs, now, and am adamantly opposed to any type of drugs. But, at that time, in that place, they were somewhat helpful to me. But, I learned everything I learned after three or four trips and there was no need to continue to repeat the process. So, I dropped that. But, I didn’t drop the Yoga philosophy. I didn’t drop the . . . you call it Hare Krishna, here in America, but it’s really a 5,000-year old religion from Bengal, West Bengal. But, all right, you can call it Hare Krishna and George and I certainly share that in common. I might not look or talk like a devoutly religious person and neither would George, with his cigarette smoking, although I think he’s kicked that, now . . . or just the generally way he acts. Like he said in a press conference in 1984, he doesn’t do it in the road anymore. It’s something that’s personal to him. I suppose I shouldn’t try to compare myself . . . It’s not important to me to compare myself with George Harrison. But, the religious and spiritual thing is absolutely, unequivocally the most important thing in my life. It’s more important than my family. It’s more important than my life. It’s everything that I aspire to and if it was possible for me never to write another Beatles book, again, that would be fine.

GF: And you also augment these beliefs with your extensive, daily charity work that you’ve mentioned.

GG: I do. I go to India two or three times a year and I spend maybe 200 dollars for some Indian clothes. I wear 5-dollar sandals. I don’t have a watch. I don’t have jewellery. I don’t read the newspapers. I don’t watch TV. I am a strict vegetarian. I don’t drink, smoke, take drugs. I have a very limited sex life, only with my wife. I meditate in the morning. I have a beautiful . . . the one thing I did do with the money that I’ve made is we’ve built a beautiful . . . I don’t even live in a house. I live in an ashram with other people who are from around the world who are devoted to this path. We eat communally and live communally. I don’t have a bank account. I don’t have a credit card. I’m not, at all, the moneygrubbing guy that people say. I see a lot of that on the Internet that I’m some kind of guy that’s just after money. The point is that I was fairly ruthless in my first half of my life. And, at the end of the first half of my life, my mother, father, and brother died, in rather close succession. And, I realized that I did not want to continue on the path of ruthlessness. The end justifies the means, but I should try to really open myself up and be as selfless as I can. I literally . . . I can say this, and I don’t know of many people who can, but I don’t spend any money on myself. All my money goes for other people. We’re involved with raising a couple of kids whose parents are incarcerated in prison due to drug offences – one’s a crack baby. I don’t really talk about the things I do . . . When you give, the left hand shouldn’t know what the right hand is doing, so I don’t really like to publicize too much what I do. Some of it, I do. But, we just built a school in America. We’re just building a school in India . . . let’s just put it this way, the money from my books goes to charity, pretty much. I have a bedroom that I stay in and the rest of it is public. People can come and visit and it’s an ashram.

GF: How long have you been doing that?

GG: Since 1994, formerly. If you came to this place, there’s a sign in the front, “such and such Spiritual Realization Institute, all welcome.” There’s a school on the property. There’s a guesthouse for guests. There’s a really beautiful temple room with stain-glass windows of Krishna. There are ten acres. We have an animal sanctuary, here, where we take animals that we saved from the slaughter house and other things . . . we have a couple of cows, peacocks, and other distressed animals that we’ve taken . . . and we do a lot of work with children. I’ll tell you something: it’s absolutely a fact . . . this is not anyone’s opinion. This is a fact, a law of the Universe. When you get into a habit of giving, it’s much better than when you were moneygrubbing for yourself. You can say, “Well, this really doesn’t sound like the guy who wrote a book like Lennon In America.” But, the point is, to me, I don’t see any dichotomy. Why? Because in my spiritual life, which is my real life, the real me . . . that’s why I can laugh at a lot of this crap, because it’s just so not me. It so misses the point that I don’t even feel connected to it. At least if they said I was fat or something, I had a big, fat stomach . . . there’s an element of truth there. But, they come up with this wild shit that’s so out in the ozone that all I can do is laugh about it or just scratch my head.

There’s no dichotomy between my spiritual life and the books that I write, because it’s in-your-face truth. My spiritual life is in-your-face truth and my work life and my writing life are in-your-face truths and if you don’t like it and if you can’t handle it [then] . . . it doesn’t really matter. It really doesn’t matter if they [readers] like me or they don’t like me. All I’m going to do for the rest of my life is to try as anonymously as possible, using whatever energies that come to me, to assist other people to awaken spiritually and also to assist people who are having a difficult time.

GF: You speak of the outspokenness you show in your books versus the outspokenness that you are showing in this interview. These are very different forms of speaking out. If people were to go on the perceptions of what they think they know about you from what they’ve read, do you think that your outspokenness in that form has had a negative affect on book sales?

GG: I don’t think that any publicity is good publicity. I think that bad publicity can keep people away from purchasing books. As a result of that mentality, I would say that my speculation, although the book’s selling well . . . we’ve had very few returns after two and a half months, which is good. I think they put 40,000 on the street and they’ve only had a couple of thousand returned. That’s really good. And, I’m going to England to promote the English edition of the book, after I go to India and Nepal . . . then, I will go to London in September to promote the book. I would say that my speculation is that it does have a negative impact and that people who might have read the book and enjoyed it got some insight out of it, didn’t get the opportunity because they were influenced by some other people’s ideas which may or may not be accurate.

GF: Yet, this interview may change people’s perception of who you are and they might go back and look at that book and give it another read.

GG: Two or three years ago, I would say that we can only hope. But, I don’t really care. One of the things that happens is that as you go deeper and deeper and deeper in to a spiritual path, you disconnect from a lot of the things that most other people feel are just so incredibly important. What’s important to me is a report that one of my orphans in India may have tuberculosis. What’s important to me is that there is a young lady who has overcome a crack addition, a terrible crack addiction – from a good family – who ended up as a prostitute and who has successfully been clean for several months, but now they’re trying to send to prison on some stupid technicality. And they’ve not seen that she’s worth saving. My point is this is that Rolling Stone used to have a motto, “Think globally and act locally.” I think people should philosophically and spiritually embrace the whole world. But, I think that they should just look at their own lives and one thing I know, there’s always something good to do. You can always do good. “Gees, I’d like to do good, but there’s nothing around here.” No. It doesn’t work like that. There’s always somebody who you can assist. And where did I get many of these ideas? From The Beatles, as a kid. There’s a Beatle politic that all these so-called fans are missing, which is, “Quit dreaming about the past. Get off your ass. Go feed somebody. Go help somebody off drugs. Go to some old folks home and talk to these poor bastards who are looking death right between the eyes and quit sitting around moon-dogging over four, sixty-year old men and get a fucking life. Forget about yourself and your daydreams and don’t be afraid of life and get out there and make a contribution.” That, I’m sure, must be the Beatle dream, the Beatle politic at its highest level. They just need to get a life. God bless them. They need to get a life for themselves.

GF: Did you get the Beatle message in the first half of your life?

GG: The Beatle message is a timeless, eternal message that has been said in every successive generation by many, many people of all genders, gurus, teachers, artists, musicians, painters, ordinary people – butchers, bakers, candlestick makers. As George said, “We were just four loonies taking drugs and trying to be honest.” That’s a direct quote about The Beatles and the psychedelic years. They were trying to be honest. They were trying to give some truth – all I want is the truth, just give me some truth! I had thought about writing a book called The Gospel According To John, Paul, George, and Ringo. I still might do it – and show the spirituality of The Beatles. This is something that’s been completely overlooked, as everybody’s lost in this Entertainment Tonight cardboard, cut-out, celebrity bullshit that everybody’s wasting their valuable life with. How come there isn’t a John Lennon hospital? I just can’t believe . . . if she wants to sell the barbeque aprons and baby booties, she could at least give the money to the John Lennon Liver Cancer Hospital or something. It is so dumb and selfish. You’ve got to judge the tree by the fruit, and the fruit of this Beatles worship is a lot of self-indulgence . . . I just feel that a lot of these Beatles people are lost souls who don’t need to be. If they just try to take The Beatles’ and John Lennon’s work at the highest level, they could really do something great.

GF: Do you think that some of your early things you wrote, in your first half of your life, feed that false idea that you’re clearly unhappy with now?

GG: Well, just the mere fact that I’ve written so many. It’s something like 28 books, and 86 spoken word projects. Yes. I would say that I do share a certain measure of responsibility for trivializing The Beatles and by promoting this kind of hero worship that I now absolutely condemn as a foolish waste of time.

GF: Analysing your first book, The Beatles: A Celebration . . .

GG: That was all right. Everybody says that was my best book.

GF: It was great!

GG: I got a fear that the truth about that book is what somebody said about Julian Lennon once. They said it took him 20 years to write and record Valotte, in terms of life experiences and about six months to record his follow up. So, that Beatles: A Celebration was just all those years of me being a lonely boy, being in my room, and having those headphones on, and seeking refuge in the White Album and Sgt. Pepper. I didn’t like the early stuff very much, at all. It’s okay. It’s fine. It’s good. It’s tuneful. It’s cheery. But, I like the heavy stuff . . . They were friends to me. See, I understand. I’m like a recovering Beatleholic. I encourage everybody to get on that 12-step programme, away from any addiction.

My daughter said to me, because we had a lot of addiction and stuff in our family, and she said, “What? You don’t think that just because you don’t take drugs, you’re not an addict?” I said, “What do you mean?” She said, “You’re addicted to work. You’ve written 30 books or something in less than 10 years. You’re just hiding in your work.” I take all these things to heart . . .

I’m just taking off and going to Nepal. And don’t think that I stay in some five-star hotel when I go to Nepal, either. First of all, I’m not a rich man. We just travel ordinary, and we will be staying in a $9 a night hotel, which is actually a pretty damn good hotel in Nepal. So, like Paul McCartney says, “Live a little. Get around. Get your feet up off the ground. Live a little. Get around.” So, that’s what I’m trying to do.

GF: What you’re trying to do and what you’re allowed to do, obviously, has been supplemented by all the various books that you’re put together. The Beatles: A Celebration must have opened the door for other opportunities.

GG: Publishers don’t like Beatles books, at this point. Publishers think that the public is sick of Beatles. Beatles books don’t sell that well. When was the last time that you saw a Beatles book, any Beatles book on the best sellers list? Maybe Peter Brown did it. Maybe he was on the best sellers list. I’m a solid mid-list author. Actually, you’d be amazed. There are a lot of people who are pretty ardent fans of my work. And, we talked tonight about the many people who have a problem with my stuff. But, there are many, many, many or more who love it, and think that, “Oh, yeah. That’s right. I agree. That’s the way it was. You’re right. Thank you.” I get that all the time . . . but, then I get the other side too! The reason I don’t talk so much about the people who get it is that, I figure, they’re not as sick. They don’t need as much help . . . I feel sorry for people who are obsessed with The Beatles. Are you obsessed with The Beatles?

GF: I am not. I have always been a fan and . . .

GG: Good, healthy fanship, there’s nothing wrong with it.

GF: I went to England, last year, for the first time, and I had a great deal of fun doing the walking tour of all The Beatles sites . . .

GG: But, there are guys who go to Star Trek conventions and dress up as Klingons. Clearly, there’s something wrong there. Clearly.

GF: I’ll give you that. Now, I did not go to Abbey Road dressed in a Beatles Pierre Cardin suit.

GG: But, we’ve seen those people, haven’t we? It’s a little scary.

GF: A lot of people refer to the Celebration book.

GG: Yes. It’s a long road from The Beatles: A Celebration to Lennon In America. [laughter]

GF: Big Time! Up until Celebration, Beatles books were generally bad quality, bad photos, bad book stock. But, Celebration oozes with quality.

GG: . . . I’ll tell you another arm of my work that I’m pretty proud is my interview books. I’ve done around seven or eight of those now and I’m working on another one now. And, I think those are really good . . . I see on the Internet, people say, “Well, you know you can’t trust Giuliano,” and this and that. Believe me, those are from tapes. All those interview books are from tapes. They’re exactly verbatim from the tapes and any researcher, now . . . if you put those 8 books, The Lost Lennon Interviews, The Lost Beatles Interviews, Things We Said Today, Conversations With The Beatles, Glass Onion – there are several others – you put them all together, it would be like a 1,000 or 1,500-page encyclopedia of everything The Beatles have ever said.

I’ll tell you about one project that will be coming out within the next five years, absolutely, I must do this, is all my books on one CD-ROM, and then there will be archives. There’ll be letters and there’ll be a database where you will be able to type in, “George Harrison’s hat from Magical Mystery Tour” and everything that I’ve said in my books or has ever been mentioned about George Harrison’s hat will show up. So, that’s one of the things I’m doing to do. When I finally write my last Beatles book, I’m going to put them all on one CD-ROM and release it as The Complete Geoffrey Giuliano Library Of Beatles. And then that’s it. I’ll hang up my hat and I’ll probably end up in the Himalayas somewhere up in Rishikesh chanting Hare Krishna . . .

GF: With the quality of the Celebration book with its high quality paper, photos, the personal text that wasn’t always available from other authors, I think readers want to know how you accumulated all of that incredible memorabilia.

GG: Well, I had always intended to be a movie star. That was my early goal in life. And, when that didn’t happen for various reasons, I just veered off into this Beatles addiction and became obsessive – compulsive. People say, “Well, you’re very critical of these Beatles fans.” Yeah, because I was the worst. I was one. I’m a recovering Beatleholic. I’m probably more aggressive than most people, who keep their addictions private. But, I go very public with everything that I do. I just got out there and made sure that I went around to see the relatives that everybody had forgotten about and business associates. And, that’s the way I’ve put together all my books. I’ve just sat here and figured out strategies . . .

Absolutely, there’s one thing: you can love me or hate me, but the photos in my books . . . I never repeat photos, once or twice maybe, but by in large, all the photos are genuinely really good that people have not seen before. Most publishers just pick the same crappy photos over and over. And, I’ve always insisted and fought with the publishers to make sure that I had the highest quality of everything . . . I was going to put John . . . I’ve got some autopsy photos. But, I stopped myself, there. Maybe that’s not good. Maybe we won’t use the autopsy photos of John Lennon. But, I have tried to use good photographs and images in my books, and I have a very, very large archive of photographs and images in my books, and I have a very, very large archive of photographs of The Beatles. I have 10,000 photos of The Beatles that I own the rights to, which I’ll probably end up selling to Apple or something when I go out of business here in a few years.

GF: Geoffrey. Who was the first Beatles you met and interviewed?

GG: Ah. George Harrison is the answer, in 1983. But, in 1988, whenever I wrote John Lennon My Brother, with Julia Baird, she got a last minute interview with Paul and there wasn’t time for me to fly over, because it was, like, the next day. He just gave a short, “Okay, I’ll do it. Come tomorrow.” So, I authored something like 80 questions and I typed them up and faxed them to Julia Baird. So Julia Baird went in there, and on tape asked all my questions. And, it was a long interview, and I have the tape of it. They constantly refer to the paper and the fact that the questions were written by me. So, that’s how I interviewed Paul McCartney. I interviewed Yoko Ono extensively and then right on down the line from Cynthia to Julian to everybody else. But, I’ve sat in a room with George Harrison and interviewed him. That was at a mutual friend’s house – John Lord from Deep Purple. Actually, that interview’s in The Lost Beatles Interviews. It’s not a great interview. I actually sat down and talked with him for about an hour.

GF: And how did that feel?

GG: . . . it would be a lot different now, than it was then . . . he was sitting in front of me, and I was sitting on this ottoman. As I was making my point, I got excited and I was kind of tapping on his knee with my finger and that wasn’t cool. I was too familiar. I was nervous. I embarrassed myself. He picked up on it and he split and it was a cause of some concern for me for sometime . . . I would not treat them or accept them as people . . . He said something about, “In the Sixties, we all . . .” And I said, “Yeah, but when you guys did things, you really . . .” It wasn’t normal. I didn’t act normal. I didn’t act like I’m acting with you. I couldn’t be myself. That was the problem. That was the fucking fan crap that got in the middle of a golden opportunity to sit down and spend some time with George Harrison, the guy. But, I fucked it up by being a fan. So, that’s why I’m a little bit weary of all of this stuff.

GF: Now, you’ve written a few books on John, Paul, and George, but not about Ringo . . .

GG: . . . Nobody wants it. The publishers won’t touch . . . you’ve got to understand that I’m not the publisher. You’ve got to convince other guys that this is a great idea that will make lots of money and believe me, whether I care about the money or not, that’s all they care about. So, it’s an upward battle to get anything published. But, because I’ve done so much work, it’s easier for me than many other people. People listen to me. When I have an idea, I can actually get a meeting with pretty much anybody in book publishing anywhere in the world, sit down and talk to them and they’ll listen to me and consider it and they usually say, “No.” I still would like to do a book about The Beatles’ whole experience with the Maharishi, which I’d probably call The Beatles Rishikesh Diary and their whole idea of the Indian experience . . . then, maybe something called The Gospel According To John, Paul, George, And Ringo, which would look at the whole Beatles lyrics through the whole spiritual idea in mind. But, I’m going to write Revolution . . . You see, I’m a bit of a bad boy, too. I kind of like to rile people up. I’m a bit of a rabble rouser . . . I don’t mind messing with people a little. Sometimes, just for fun, I’ll mess with people . . . push buttons. I’m a button pusher. So, sometimes I do enjoy pushing buttons with people and saying things that will really rile them up. That’s just a human side of me. It’s not a really big thing. I don’t sit there and design the whole book to push people’s buttons. But, I might throw in a few inflammatory things just to piss people off, if I’m in that kind of a mood.

GF: Let’s see if this pushes a button. I know that you have been accused of inventing some of the dialogue in the new Lennon In America book. Can you comment on this?

GG: Yeah, sure. Oh, absolutely. That’s . . . from Jim Heaney from the Buffalo News. Let me tell you how that worked.

GF: May 28, 2000 Buffalo News interview.

GG: Yeah. That article is so . . . if you think Lennon In America is a crock of shit, you better check this article out. It is totally bogus. And that guy’s a slime-ball. He contravened every agreement we had. He quoted from the diary. He agreed that he would not. I’m not going to talk about Jim Heaney. If you look at my website, geoffrey-giuliano.com, there’s a rebuttal to his article. So, I’ve already said whatever I want to say about Jim Heaney. Look, I’ve got a tape, in my possession, that talks about John having sex with his mother. I setup the scene in the book with two fucking sentences of dialogue. “Hi, how are you? Good morning. Come on in. Sit down.” Just completely analogous, generic, not meaningful setups to set the scene and give a little colour to the book. I see absolutely nothing wrong with that, whatsoever. And how does everybody know that I did that? Because, I told everybody. Jim Heaney didn’t catch me with me pants down. I told him that. I played him the original tape. “Well, that’s not on the tape.” No, it’s not on the tape. He had to come in the house. He had to have sat down on the bed. He was riding his bike in those days . . . see, I’ve been to that house and I’ve spent hours there looking at it and studying it, plus there’s a little thing in there about lingerie on a clothes line. Julia Baird told me the house was like that. She lived there with her mother, Julia Stanley Lennon. There was a clothes line with a negligee on it and stuff. I took it from a few different sources and did I concoct those two sentences? Yes. Is it a big deal? Not in my mind. But, if you’re looking for a fucking scape-goat, if you’re looking to punch holes in the book, I suppose you could try to dig a little one there.

The real allegation is that I don’t have the diaries, when I say the real one, not that it’s truthful, the meaningful allegation would be, if it were true, which it is not, is that I do not have the diaries; I do not have John Lennon’s personal correspondence, and I do not have hours of him talking about very personal things on tape. I do have all of those things. And, if I could find a legitimate media venue to air those things, I thought it was the Buffalo News, but I was wrong . . . I would be happy to show the world that I have these things. These things are very, very safe, somewhere on this planet . . . and no matter what happens to me physically, at any time in the future, those things will exist and will be part of my possessions. I would hope and would feel that in the future, it would be very, very . . . I guess I probably won’t be around for people to say, “I’m sorry,” for the way they treated me – calling me a liar and stuff. I think there’ll be a time when these diaries will be made public.

GF: Let’s talk about some of the copies that you have of some of Lennon’s audio diaries. You’ve got these? How are they laid out, Geoffrey?

GG: Yeah. Well, he says like, “Six of September, 1979. Here I am sitting alone in the bedroom . . .” And he just goes on and just talks into the tape.

GF: So, he runs through what he’s going to do?

GG: No. He just gives a date. “Six of September, 1979. Here I am blah, blah, blah. Hey, I did this today. I did that. You know, I was thinking about this. And I was wondering about that, blah, blah, blah.”

GF: Is there any of John’s music on these tapes?

GG: No. But, I do have some other tapes that he recorded at Kenwood in 1967, in which there is some very bizarre music and I don’t know if you ever heard about John in the Hunter Davies book, he talks about he had something like nine Grundig German tape-recorders that he hooked up together and made weird tapes just for fun with his buddies. I have about four hours of those, and nobody has those. Nobody. I don’t think even Yoko has those. So, I was thinking about putting them out, calling them The Kenwood Tapes.

Actually, I have lots of stuff that no one’s ever heard. I have a Beatles album. I have a Beatles album that nobody’s ever heard. Denny Laine gave me an acetate of London Town – a test pressing, not an acetate, a test pressing of London Town. And I was playing it and when I turned over the other side, there’s a completely, never-before-heard Beatles album from around 1965 period. Now, that’s not to say that there are songs we haven’t heard, but versions of songs that we’ve never heard. Very unusual.

GF: Stuff that has not been bootlegged?

GG: Oh, I’ve got tons of stuff that hasn’t been bootlegged . . .

GF: If you had to pick the top two or three . . .

GG: Oh, The Kenwood Tapes. Oh, they’re incredible. I wish you could hear them. I wish everybody could hear them.

GF: Anything else?

GG: The whole content of this eight hours I have of John and Yoko talking about their sex lives. Yoko . . . lived with a woman for six months. I do say that in the book. But, she goes into great detail. John’s asking her how big Tony Cox’s penis was. All this is crazy. These tapes are crazy. I have those.

GF: You’ve already expanded into audio books.

GG: Yeah. I couldn’t put . . . if you listen to my audio books, there are some rare tapes in there. But, the really rare stuff, I haven’t . . . the stuff I knew that no one else had, I have not put out.

GF: Because?

GG: Because I can’t, probably, legally in some cases, and because it has great monetary value, in some cases, and if I did, there’s no way to control that, once you put it out. If you put a tape out, especially now with the Internet, MP3 and all that, you can’t control anything that you’ve got. So, I’m just sitting on a lot of stuff. Although, I’ll be honest. I may put out the Kenwood tapes in the next couple of years.

GF: Now, when you say you’re sitting on a lot of stuff, over the past 15 years or so, you’ve also written about some of the biggest Hollywood people – Elizabeth Taylor, Frank Sinatra, Rock Stars – like Jimi Hendrix, and Elvis . . .

GG: That’s because people paid me lots of money to do those things. Those weren’t necessarily things that I would have done of my own volition.

GF: And that includes the controversial political figures – Linda Tripp, Monica Lewinsky, Ronald Reagan?

GG: [laughing] I got a call from Random House and they offered me crazy money to do those. So, I did them. That was just for money.

GF: Sports icon Michael Jordan.

GG: Sports are not bad. I have no interest in sports whatsoever. But, sports figures like Mohammed Ali . . . well, Mohammed Ali is a great man. There’s no question about that. Everybody loves him. There’s a reason Mohammed Ali is so well loved around the world, and he is an amazing figure. So, I really enjoyed doing that. It’s funny, I enjoyed doing the two baseball ones. I’ve got two new baseball ones coming out with Babe Ruth and Joe DiMaggio. When I was a kid, I heard all this from my father and we were silly, watching the game and all that. And I was a hippie. I didn’t pay attention to any of that shit. Now, that I’m an old man, too bad my father’s not around. He’d probably be proud that I did a Joe DiMaggio CD. A lot of this stuff, I do for money. The Beatles book is more of a love, a kind of a mission, to tell the truth about The Beatles.

I respect Mark Lewisohn. I don’t want anybody to think that I don’t or I belittle his work. I do not in any way. He also tells the truth about The Beatles, but it’s a different facet of the truth about The Beatles.

GF: But, if he’s the world’s premiere statistician on The Beatles . . .

GG: I am the world’s premiere Beatles biographer.

GF: You are the premiere biographer . . .

GG: Absolutely . . .

GF: And he is the premiere statistician . . .

GG: That’s right. There are only two people in the game. Me and Mark Lewisohn [laughing] . . .

GF: You were asked to do some projects. Why are publishers so attracted to your work?

GG: Because I’m a good, solid bet. I don’t win many races, but I always place. I guess I must make enough money for them that they’re interested in carrying on to the next, to see what he can do next.

GF: Is it the way you pitch the story?

GG: Yeah. I’m a salesman. I’m a convincing fellow. I have a good ability to talk to these people and convince them that these are great projects and they’ll be terrific. Whether they are or not, I don’t know. I do my best. We work like dogs over here. This isn’t just some armchair thing. My wife Vrnda and I are a team and we’ve been together since 1971. Sometimes it’s a very high stress level. If I didn’t have the religion, I would be a drug addict, for sure. We were just working when you called. I was writing captions for a vegetarian cook book that my wife’s just written called, Compassionate Cuisine. We’re just putting the finishing touches on it, by the same publisher, by the way. So, there are always many projects going on here. There is never a time when there aren’t several important projects . . . I’ve just been offered, well I guess I can tell you. I’ve just been offered my own National radio show by a very major player. I will be making a demo for that soon. It’s tentatively called, Real Rock Stories With Geoffrey Giuliano. It’s weekly, one hour a week, National and it will be heavy duty . . . kind of like Lennon In America on radio. It’ll be heavy, not so happy, sugary, behind the music – more hard-edged than that. That’s the plan. I’ve been offered a job and I’m doing a demo for it. I don’t know what’s going to happen with it. But, it’s definitely the direction I’d like to go.

I tell people, when The Beatles: A Celebration came in the post, the first copy from the publisher, I cried. Then, when John Lennon: My Brother came, my second book, I got a little teary-eyed. Now, when they come, I don’t open the damn package. I just throw it in the corner and there they sit. After you’ve written like 20, 21, 22, 23 books, the bloom is off the rose. It’s not such a big deal. I’m tired of writing. I’m tired of writing these kinds of books. I’d like to write spiritual books . . . I’m 46, so I have to do them. I can’t keep fooling around with this Beatles thing.

GF: But, you have plans for more Beatles projects.

GG: I do. I do. That’s one thing that really, I’m sure, pisses everybody off, that I manage to come up with a new . . . there would be no need for me to write Revolution: The Secret History Of The Beatles, if The Beatles were going to do it themselves, do a good, proper job with the Anthology, but I just know they won’t. I know it’s written by Derek Taylor who I have great respect for and he was very charming and very funny. I knew him, personally. But, it’s just a PR. These are PR people. The Beatles didn’t write that book. They were interviewed by somebody on a tape, same way they did the Anthology [video] . . . now they’ve turned it into print. It’s not what it seems. I know it’s not going to be that good, from my point of view, what I consider good. What I consider good is the whole truth, and nothing but the truth at every millisecond.

GF: And there are more truths to come.

GG: There are more truths to come.

GF: Geoffrey. Fascinating talking with you.

GG: Thank you.

The World Beatles Forum - Volume Five, Number Three - Nov. / Dec. 2000

A Conversation With Julia Baird

by Geoff Franklin

[...]

Geoffrey Franklin: What about Geoffrey Giuliano's new book?

Julia Baird: Ooh, I haven't read it. Geoffrey Giuliano and I wrote together, John Lennon My Brother. I'd handwritten a book, and my friend had a printing press in her living room and we did it together and we have a joint friend who actually works for a big printing company. He gave us all the advice, and in fact, opened his place overnight, unbeknownst to the boss and ran this book off for us. And, we collated it ourselves, and glued it together. I took it to a Beatles Convention . . . and I sold it. It was a very short book. At this conference . . . I met Geoffrey Giuliano, who sank to his knees in front of me, convincing me that I ought to expand it. He was right. I don't know if it was right to do it with him, but he was right. That was the book that we wrote together. But really, the original short-story . . . was the one that I'd written in response to a programme that had been made in 1985 . . . this is five years after John had died. It was a programme that depicted John's childhood, Beatledom, Yokodom. It was wrong. The bit that I knew about was totally and absolutely wrong. I was devastated. I sat and watched it and just cried and cried. They'd got my mother as some cheapskate nitwit. They'd got Mimi with three flying ducks on the wall. They had Cynthia married with almost black hair and a head scarf. If anything, Cynthia, who is beautiful, did not get married with black hair and a head scarf. I can tell you that. And Julian wasn't even mentioned. I just couldn't believe it. At the end of this programme, there was an addendum, just a bit added on, a couple of minutes. Yoko was sitting on a settee with Sean, in New York, saying, "Well, I think this is a really good documentary and it'll help Sean to learn about his father's family." I was just incensed, totally incensed. My cousin Leila actually wrote a long, long letter . . . telling Sean all about his father's family, so that he would have a proper record of it years later. And Yoko got on the phone to her and said, "Don't you dare try to indoctrinate my son," or word to that effect. "Don't you dare interfere with Sean's life." They haven't got the real story.

[...]

GF: Did you tour with Geoffrey Giuliano to promote your book?

JB: I did one thing with Geoffrey Giuliano and that was in Toronto . . . [The publishers gave me] the Princess tour. They did treat me like a princess - all around the States . . . When I did TToronto, Geoffrey came up. He was very kind . . .

GF: Mr. Giuliano will probably read this interview.

JB: . . . "Hello, Geoffrey!" His wife is lovely, an absolutely delightful woman, really, really nice. He was a nut case . . . a Hare Krishna nut case. I'm not putting that down. He had a hot tub in his living room, which I've never seen before. But, maybe . . . I don't live that big a life . . .

He did convince me that [the book] needed to be bigger. I'm not saying that it wasn't a commercial thing, but it did need to be bigger. I'm just thinking now that I might put pen to paper over John's childhood and get things sorted out.

GF: What about the allegations in Giuliano's new book?

JB: What are they? Tell me. I don't know what they are . . .

GF: Okay . . . Well . . . how about John having sexual relations with your mother . . .

JB: Absolute bollocks! How could Geoffrey know? And, it's NOT true. Absolutely not true . . . How can he know it's true?

GF: Well, he claims that his research . . .

JB: Bollocks. It's bollocks . . . absolute nonsense . . . It makes a good story, doesn't it? It's not true.

GF: To his readers, Geoffrey Giuliano sometimes gives mixed messages. He claims to be a huge fan. He claims to be the unofficial biographer or the biographer with the truth, and he's quite convinced that the stuff that he's dug up has substance.

JB: . . . It's like anything. There's a ring of truth to things. In the case about John with my mother, they were ultra, ultra close. We are a very huggy family. Even now, we are a very huggy lot. And he has translated that into something that . . . you can't liven the dead, so he can write what he likes. Like Yoko can write what she likes. Where was she when John was small? Was she in Japan or the States . . . There are people here who were living with John, at the time.

GF: These stories bother you a lot.

JB: . . . I haven't read Geoffrey's book. I read your little interview about Geoffrey's book, instead.

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