The performance was scheduled to take place on the afternoon of Thursday, January 30. The day was unrelievedly dull and cold, with a biting wind and a suspicion of fog that ruled out the helicopter sequence. On Apple’s roof, the stage was prepared, the cameras were in position and about thirty spectators, friends or employees, had taken up vantage points on the surrounding walls and parapets; five stories below, the streets were crowded with unsuspecting passers-by. “About 10 minutes before we were due to start, all the Beatles were in a little room at the top of the stairs and it still wasn’t certain that they’d go ahead,” Lindsay-Hogg remembers. “George didn’t want to and Ringo started saying he didn’t really see the point. Then John said ‘Oh fuck—let’s do it.’”
His interview with Disc and Music Echo had appeared twelve days earlier and had spun and echoed around the world. BEATLE BITES APPLE, FINDS WORM, said Variety in the spirit of its famous 1929 headline, WALL STREET LAYS AN EGG. Far from trying to tone down the vision of chaos and imminent insolvency he had shared with Ray Coleman, John repeated it to the other reporters who instantly besieged him, adding more and better particulars all the time. The choicest were given to Rolling Stone, the “serious” music paper that had recently begun publication from San Francisco. Apple had become such a drain on his personal resources, he told Rolling Stone, that he was “down to my last £50,000.” Though £50,000 was an enormous sum in 1969, and the estimate patently unrealistic (what about the constant top-up from songwriting royalties?), the notion of a cash-strapped Beatle caused universal amazement and consternation.
Paul, that tireless PR man, tried to downplay the story, fearful of the damage it would do to Apple’s credibility as a company, never mind the morale of 3 Savile Row’s many decent, conscientious employees. Bumping into Ray Coleman there, he berated the scoop getter for not having realized it was “just John shooting his mouth off” with customary disregard for consequences. On the contrary, the revelation had been timed for the moment when Paul’s chosen new broom, Lee and John Eastman, were poised to sweep into Apple. It could be read as an open invitation to rival candidates to step forward, if not a coded message to the one who actually did.
On January 28 John and Yoko kept a secret rendezvous at the Dorchester Hotel with the Rolling Stones’ manager, Allen Klein. A thirty-seven-year-old accountant from New Jersey, Klein had made a specialty of British pop acts with bankability in America, also controlling the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, and Donovan. In the transatlantic music world, he was renowned for the ferocity with which he negotiated recording contracts for his artistes, securing them large advances against royalties (something never yet done for the Beatles) and pursuing his commercial adversaries through the courts. Klein himself had no quarrel with his reputation as—in one British newspaper’s words—“the toughest wheeler-dealer in the pop jungle.” On his desk he kept a plaque, half-quoting Psalm 23: “Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I shall fear no evil for I am the biggest motherfucker in the valley.”
Short and pudgy, with greased-back hair, somewhat like the forties comedy star Lou Costello, he seemed the very last person with whom John could ever strike up a rapport. “But Allen was very clever,” Yoko says. “He knew all the lyrics of John’s songs. He just kept on quoting lyrics. He’d memorised them all. And that got John.”
Klein’s proposition, expressed in blunt, colorful New Jersey-ese, was simple. He would go into Apple, stem the hemorrhage of waste, and, by reorganizing the Beatles’ contracts in his usual style, make all four wealthier than they’d ever dreamed—wealthy enough, as he put it, to say, “F.Y.M., Fuck You, Money.” After the Eastmans’ Park Avenue preciousness, he seemed to John like the honest, unpretentious whiff of a downtown kosher deli. Nor was he one of the hated “men in suits,” being addicted to turtleneck sweaters (despite being severely challenged in the neck department) and cardigans with leather facings. The vibe grew still better when it emerged that his parents had separated when he was very young and that, just like John, he had spent much of his childhood in the care of an aunt. At the end of a couple of hours, John had made up his mind, and there and then dashed off a note to EMI’s chairman Sir Joseph Lockwood: “Dear Sir Joe—from now on, Allen Klein handles all my stuff.”
His Apple codirectors were not informed of his decision until a board meeting on the day after the rooftop concert. Paul was hopeful this might have reawakened the others’ appetite for playing together, and suggested they might follow it up with some further appearances at selected small venues on the ground. John bluntly told him to forget any such ideas, then went on to capsize the new-broom strategy the others regarded as virtually a done deal. “I don’t give a bugger what anyone else wants,” he said. “I’m having Allen Klein for me.”
John would not back down, and Paul could not. He was irrevocably committed not only to the Eastman law practice but the Eastman family, through his involvement with Lee Eastman’s daughter, Linda. Ironically, a year or two before, he had been strongly in favor of hiring Allen Klein to light a fire under EMI Records on the Beatles’ behalf. Now, after a hostile briefing on Klein from all three Eastmans, he would sooner have put himself in the hands of Jack the Ripper. With John resigned and forbearing no longer and Paul angry that the Beatles’ traditional democratic spirit was being ignored—and atypically passionate and outspoken—this first-ever real quarrel between them was to prove fatal.
Despite John’s belligerently unilateralist tone, he knew that having one management for himself and another for the rest of the Beatles would be unworkable. The crucial question was how George and Ringo would take to Allen Klein. In the event, both were equally captivated by Klein’s down-to-earth manner and “Fuck You, Money” pledge, withdrawing their support from the Eastmans and aligning themselves behind John.
For now, an uneasy compromise was agreed to. John Eastman and Klein both moved into 3 Savile Row, ostensibly handling separate aspects of Apple business but in evident daggers-drawn competition. While their respective champions beavered away, John and Paul maintained an appearance of amity, though new tensions were bubbling under the surface. John clearly did not care overmuch for Linda, whom he regarded as little more than a spy for a hostile power. Paul thought that most unfair, considering the friendliness he felt he had shown to Yoko. Linda and Yoko found little in common, despite both being New Yorkers and divorcées with small daughters of similar ages. In contrast with John and Yoko’s low-key comings and goings, Paul liked to make an entrance with Linda, usually carrying her little girl, Heather, on his shoulders. “Here comes the Royal Family,” John would mutter as the stir of their arrival floated upstairs.
Klein played a clever game, always scrupulously giving Yoko the same respect and attention he did to John and putting their work together on the same level as the Beatles’. Though a veteran of a thousand bloody boardroom scraps, he refused let John Eastman rile him. The first meeting he had with Lee Eastman and the three in-the-bag Beatles, at Claridges Hotel, broke down when Eastman senior began shouting at him. The outburst had, in fact, been skillfully provoked by Klein to make Eastman look like a hysteric and himself like a stolid underdog. George, Ringo, and especially John sided with the underdog.
Klein also quickly found an arena in which to employ his fabled deal-making techniques and put the Eastmans’ noses out of joint. Despite the establishment of Apple, the Beatles’ earnings continued to be paid into NEMS, the management company Brian Epstein had built around them—and in which he had given them a 10 percent stake. Late in 1968, faced by punitive taxes on Brian’s estate, his brother, Clive, and mother, Queenie, had no choice but to sell NEMS. John Eastman had put together a plan for the Beatles to acquire the company, helped by a £1 million loan from EMI. The Epstein family felt a moral obligation to consider no other offer, and the deal seemed a foregone conclusion.
With Klein and his reputation added to the mix, however, Clive and Queenie Epstein took fright and on February 17 s
old out to a firm of London merchant bankers. There followed a protracted battle in the High Court over whether the Beatles’ earnings in future should be channeled through NEMS’s new owners or paid directly into Apple. Klein managed to sideline John Eastman and conclude a settlement that, if it did not win NEMS for the Beatles, at least broke its hold over them. The new owners would buy out their 10 percent share and cease receiving their income, and levying commission, in exchange for a lump sum to be paid from future EMI royalties.
The brickbats thrown at Klein by the British press during the NEMS affair only hardened John’s support and loyalty. Friends in the music business who begged him to think again all received equally short shrift. Even that least altruistic of pop stars, Mick Jagger, phoned one day and offered to brief him on the Rolling Stones’ growing disillusionment with their manager. But when Jagger arrived in Apple’s boardroom to see John, he found Klein also sitting around the table. Never one for confrontation, Mick departed without unburdening himself.
Having tried various forms of facial hair since Sgt. Pepper and India, John now grew a long, bushy beard, weirdly similar to his joke disguise in Help! Its effect was to transform a face that never looked serious into one that looked nothing else. Framed by shoulder-length hair, it gave him a permanently tragic and aggrieved expression, like the stylized Christs in religious imagery of his boyhood—though he had only to open his densely whiskered mouth for the same old John to be instantly resurrected.
With Yoko he was discovering a new kind of live performance, arousing reactions very different from the joyous, uncritical Beatlemaniac screams that so used to disgust him. The two had made their debut together at the Alchemical Wedding, a Christmas party for London’s avant-garde art community at the Royal Albert Hall on December 18. They appeared onstage together hidden inside a large white sack, making no sound but writhing energetically. This was Yoko’s concept of “Bagism,” inspired by the dictum of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s cult novel The Little Prince: “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly. The essential is invisible to the eye.”
They were fully visible in an experimental music festival held at a Cambridge college on March 2. Yoko occupied the foreground, screaming and keening as she’d once heard her family servants do when discussing the horrors of childbirth, while John stood in the shadows behind her, vamping guitar chords with heavy feedback. The arty Cambridge crowd were as shocked and affronted to discover a pop star in their midst as the Beatles’ constituency had been by Yoko.
On March 12, Paul married Linda Eastman at Marylebone Register Office in London, amid scenes of hysterical grief from his female fans. None of the other Beatles was present. The news reached John as he and Yoko were driving down to visit Aunt Mimi in Poole. Yoko’s divorce decree had become final a few weeks earlier, and, in a resurgence of Beatle copycat spirit, John told her they, too, must get married as soon as possible.
Initially Yoko was far from enthusiastic. “I’d never really wanted to be married the other two times,” she recalls. “It was just something I’d fallen into. Having a child wasn’t something I’d wanted either, but had all come from Tony. I didn’t particularly like the thought of limiting myself to one guy again. And I still had that strange thought at the back of my mind that if I stayed with John, some terrible tragedy was waiting.”
He won her agreement by promising that, unlike Paul’s, their marriage would be the quickest, simplest, and most private of ceremonies. For his initial plan, he had to thank his upbringing in a seaport and knowledge of the powers traditionally invested in master mariners. “On the drive down to Mimi’s, John slid back the partition and told me they wanted to be married at sea by a ship’s captain,” his chauffeur Les Anthony remembers. “‘Can you get us on a ship, Les?’ he said. ‘I don’t care where it’s going. And don’t say anything to Mimi.’” While the pair were at Mimi’s, Anthony drove to nearby Southampton and discovered there was a P&O Line cruise to the Bahamas departing at eight that evening. “Book us on it,” John ordered. But by that time, P&O’s reservations office had closed for the day.
It then struck John that any ship’s captain must be empowered to perform weddings, even those commanding the humdrum ferries that plied across the English Channel to the Continent. He and Yoko drove posthaste to Southampton and tried to book tickets on a Sorensen Line ferry to France, intending to seek out the skipper and persuade him to marry them as soon as the vessel left dock. But because of an irregularity in Yoko’s passport, they were turned away. What made it doubly galling was that when Paul had gone to France to film “The Fool on the Hill” for Magical Mystery Tour two years earlier, he had forgotten his passport but been allowed to travel anyway.
Having failed to reach France as a humble day-tripper, John said, “Fuck it,” hired a private jet, and took Yoko to Paris, hoping that instant nuptials might be procurable somewhere or other in continental Europe. It so happened that Peter Brown, the Beatles’ fixer-in-chief, was spending that same weekend in Amsterdam. At John’s request, Brown tried to arrange a quickie wedding there, but found that Dutch law required a minimum two weeks’ residency beforehand. After further research, he reported back that the only place in Europe where such regulations did not apply was Gibraltar, off the south coast of Spain. Not only did it grant instant marriage licenses but it was an historic British possession and military base. To be granted entry, John would not even need a passport.
The plan was kept secret from everyone at Apple but Neil Aspinall. A photographer named David Nutter, whose brother Tommy lived with Brown, was flown to Gibraltar under cloak-and-dagger conditions, having no idea why. On March 20, 1969, John and Yoko, clad in matching white, made the three-hour flight from Paris by private jet. They drove straight to the British Consulate, where they were joined in matrimony by the elderly Registrar, Cecil Wheeler, with Peter Brown as best man. David Nutter did some quick pictures of them on the Consulate staircase surrounded by bemused staff, and on their own outside, with Yoko steadying her wide-brimmed hat in the Mediterranean wind. In less than an hour, they were heading back to Paris to reveal their coup to the world’s media. John explained they had picked Gibraltar because it was “quiet, British and friendly…. Intellectually, we knew marriage was a stupid scene, but we’re romantic and square as well as hip and aware.” Looking down from their hotel window on the French newspaper placards that trumpeted the story, Yoko burst into tears to think Kyoko might see similar ones in English.
If the wedding had been quiet, the reception would be something else. Les Anthony was waiting in Paris with John’s Rolls-Royce and, next day, drove them two hundred miles north through the Low Countries to Amsterdam, where they had originally hoped to tie the knot. There they dispatched Anthony back to England with the Rolls, checked into the ninth-floor Presidential Suite of the Hilton hotel, and announced they would hold a weeklong “bed-in for peace.” “Yoko and I decided that we knew whatever we did would be in the papers,” John later explained. “We decided to use the space we would occupy anyway with a commercial for peace. We sent out a card ‘Come to John and Yoko’s honeymoon….’ The press seemed to think we were going to make love in public because we made an album with us naked—so they seemed to think anything goes.”
The reporters and cameramen of every nation who stampeded through the doors of suite 902 certainly received a jaw-dropping surprise. Instead of the expected two Virgins–style nude bacchanal, they found the newlyweds propped up by side by side in the double bed, decorously pajama-clad, surrounded by flowers and hand-lettered placards saying BED PEACE, HAIR PEACE, I LOVE YOKO, and I LOVE JOHN, with a normally clad Derek Taylor as Groom of the Bedchamber. His thick beard oddly in contrast with his pristine sleep attire, John explained the rationale. Rather than march and fight with the militant counterculture to make a better world, he had resolved to “do it Gandhi’s way,” but using a power to command attention that the Mahatma had never known.
“Marching was fine and dandy for the Thirties. Tod
ay you need different methods—it’s sell, sell, sell. If you want to sell peace, you’ve got to sell it like soap. [The media] have war on every day, not only on the news but on the old John Wayne movies and every damn movie you see, war war war, kill kill kill. We said ‘Let’s get some peace, peace, peace on the headlines, just for a change.’…For reasons known only to themselves, people do print what I say. And I’m saying ‘Peace.’” Along with Gandhi, another, perhaps even more surprising, spiritual ally was invoked. “We want Christ to win. We’re trying to make Christ’s message contemporary. What would he have done if he’d had advertisements, records, films, TV and newspapers? Christ made miracles to tell his message. Well, the miracle today is communications, so let’s use it.”
For seven days, the couple held court in this eighteenth-century salon manner, John talking almost nonstop to the relays of interviewers or over TV and radio hookups, with frequent promptings and interjections from Yoko. They had all their meals in bed, leaving their nest of pillows under the panoramic window only for essential ablutions or when brisk Dutch maids needed to change the sheets.
In later years, pop stars who used their headline-grabbing power to preach humanitarianism, such as Bob Geldof or Bono, would be admired and honored. Yoko and John’s Amsterdam bed-in was the first time such a thing had ever occurred, and they paid the usual price of pioneering. The world’s commentators were at one in dismissing it as fatuous, presumptuous—above all, sublimely pointless. The pajama-Mahatma begged passionately to differ: “In Paris, the Vietnam peace talks have got about as far as sorting out the shape of the table they’re going to sit round. Those talks have been going on for months. In one week in bed, we achieved a lot more…. A little old lady from Wigan or Hull wrote to the Daily Mirror asking if they could put Yoko and myself on the front page more often. She said she hadn’t laughed so much for ages. That’s great! That’s what we wanted. I mean, it’s a funny world when two people going to bed on their honeymoon can make the front pages in all the papers for a week. I wouldn’t mind dying as the world’s clown. I’m not looking for epitaphs.”
John Lennon: The Life Page 68