The ballad of Paul and Yoko

But Ono was adamant that the Lennon-McCartney billing should not be altered, arguing that it would be "opening a can of worms." McCartney did not forget: Two years later, when Linda McCartney died of cancer, Ono was not invited to the New York wake.

So McCartney took matters into his own hands with "Back in the U.S.," and if the act seems a bit petty, no musicologist could make a convincing argument that Lennon is being shortchanged. Several of these songs, like "Hey Jude," "Yesterday" and "Mother Nature's Son," were written with no input at all from Lennon. The rest of them are McCartney songs that Lennon merely helped complete.

When Mintz told Rolling Stone that McCartney had kidnapped "Eleanor Rigby," it may have set a new standard of absurdity for Beatle-related propaganda. By even the most conservative accounts, McCartney wrote the song's melody and first verse, automatically making him the song's primary songwriter. And while Lennon claimed to have written the majority of the lyrics, Lennon's own friend Pete Shotton recalled that "'Eleanor Rigby' was one Lennon-McCartney classic in which John's contribution was virtually nil." It's hard to determine whom McCartney is kidnapping the song from, considering that none of the other Beatles even performed on the original track.

While McCartney is unlikely to attempt a similar credit switch on future Beatles releases, another source of contention could be looming for Paul and Yoko. The 1970 Beatles film "Let It Be" has long been out of print, reportedly because both Lennon and George Harrison hated it. But since Harrison's death in 2001, McCartney has talked not only about rereleasing the movie, but also issuing a stripped-down, revisionist version of the "Let It Be" album, without Phil Spector's 11th-hour orchestral overdubs. McCartney has always hated the syrupy treatment Spector gave to "The Long and Winding Road," while Lennon thought Spector did an admirable job of salvaging bad material. With relations between McCartney and Ono at a new low, "Let It Be" might emerge as the next battleground.

Ultimately, Ono's concern for songwriting propriety might have some credibility, if not for her own history of taking credit for others' work. In 1972, as part of their "Sometime in New York City" album, Ono and Lennon released four live tracks recorded at the Fillmore East with Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention. One track, the Mothers' standard "King Kong," was retitled "Jamrag" by John and Yoko, who inexplicably took full songwriting credit. Zappa remained miffed for years, telling Rolling Stone in 1988: "I can't imagine that album really sold a lot; anyway, it's the principle of the thing, you know?"

Three years earlier, Ono had taken full songwriting credit -- undoubtedly with Lennon's approval -- for the song "Don't Worry Kyoko," which amounted to the bluesy riff for Lennon's unreleased song "Watching Rainbows," over which Yoko simply shouted "Don't worry, don't worry."

In 1980, Ono lifted the melody and musical structure from the Gus Kahn-Walter Donaldson classic "Makin' Whoopee," and put new lyrics on it. Retitling the song "Yes I'm Your Angel," she took full songwriting credit, which provoked a $1 million lawsuit from the publishers of "Makin' Whoopee."

Ono also went to court with "Double Fantasy" co-producer Jack Douglas over royalty payments that Douglas claimed he had been wrongfully denied. In 1999, he told Beatlefan magazine: "I waited like three years, then I finally said to Yoko, 'It's really a lot of royalties probably accruing here ... You don't have to deal with it, let's just sort it out, let our people sort it out.' And I got like a nasty letter, almost like, 'Fuck you, you're not getting anything.'" Douglas added that Ono's camp offered his associates money to say bad things about him in court.

In spite of such controversies, Ono has settled into a kind of avant-garde elder stateswoman role in recent years, winning critical acclaim for her 1995 album "Rising," generating dance-club enthusiasm for a house remix of her salacious 1971 track "Open Your Box," and sending retrospective exhibits of her artwork on tour.

Among longtime Beatle fans, she's still tolerated more than loved. But Ono has developed considerable P.R. savvy over the years. She knows she can't win a one-on-one media skirmish with McCartney, so she's framing it as a contest between McCartney and the sainted memory of John Lennon. That's a battle McCartney's been losing for more than 20 years.

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