Dan Richter in “‘John wanted The Beatles over with – so he used Yoko to do it’: Lennon’s former assistant tells all” by Helen Brown, The Telegraph Dec. 28, 2022
[Richter] says it’s no surprise that both Lennon and McCartney ended up marrying women who’d been born into wealth.
“Both of them ended up with women who knew how to deal with money, property, companies, staff … One of the things that surprised me about John when I first met him was how little he knew of those kinds of things. He called himself working class, but he was really lower-middle class.”
Lennon was also determined to keep up with the other Beatles. Richter recalls him returning from Friar Park (George Harrison’s neo-gothic mansion near Henley) saying: “I could see water from George’s window. Do you think we could put in a lake here?” But the biggest rivalry remained with McCartney. “It bugged him that Paul could write those sweet melodies like Yesterday and Hey Jude. He couldn’t do that. He was just too acerbic, or too intelligent…”
Richter recalls the acrimony spilled into life at Tittenhurst when “John got somebody to make a list of all the Beatles’ songs and then we had to say which were his and which were Paul’s.” He shakes his head. Then laughs at the memory of a trip out to a “fancy restaurant that had a band. When they saw John come in they started playing Yesterday. John was so p----d off!”
....Richter is no longer in touch with Starr or McCartney, whom he last talked to in 1973. “John and Yoko were at their Bank Street place [in New York] and I was trying to get John and Paul to talk to each other. Paul was at a hotel in Berlin and I called his people. I said: ‘If I got John on the phone would Paul talk to him?’ They said yes, and so they talked. I felt really good about that because they really loved each other.”
