The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  By the end of January, working together on the project had become completely unmanageable. During lunch at Apple on January 29, the Beatles, along with Glyn Johns and Michael Lindsay-Hogg, sat around the well-appointed conference table, debating how to finish the film, when the discussion turned to the office’s resident charm. In the course of conversation, Ringo mentioned that there was a wonderful open roof they intended to turn into a garden. “Oh, that’s fantastic,” Johns remembered saying. Catching Lindsay-Hogg’s eye, he said, “I have an idea. We should go up and look at this roof.”

  The roof, as it turned out, held the answer to all their problems. It became obvious from the minute they climbed the stairs. The unanimous opinion: “What a great idea it would be to play on the roof—play to the whole of the West End.” The Beatles could give a concert from the comfort of their own building, without any of the hassle that usually bogged down such affairs. They wouldn’t have to deal with promoters, tickets, security, fans, press, jelly babies—nothing. Just head upstairs, plug in the instruments, and let ’er rip. Brilliant. “Nobody had ever done that,” George recalled, “so it would be interesting to see what happened when we started playing up there.”

  The whole thing was to be very spontaneous, a secret. Not even the Apple staff was given advance warning. The next morning, a cold, cloud-streaked day, Mal and Neil set up the Beatles’ equipment while the film crew, working with a stripped-down unit, staked out territory along the outer retaining walls. The Beatles, along with Billy Preston, Yoko, and Linda, assembled in the basement, going over material. Not since the live broadcast for “All You Need Is Love” had they felt as excited—or more like a band.

  Just before noon the haze burned off unexpectedly, the clouds rolled back, and the sun broke through. Before the first song, a breathless version of “Get Back,” had even ended, the music had attracted a small lunchtime crowd of onlookers, and word began to circulate that the Beatles—the beloved Beatles, who hadn’t entertained in England for more than three years—were playing in public. People working in the surrounding buildings, mostly a district of tailors and haberdashers, felt the music before they heard it. Windows rattled, floors shook, and a symphony of horns blared from the caravan of traffic that had drawn to a standstill along Savile Row. All around, neighbors rushed into the street or raced to their own roofs to see what all the racket was about.

  One interested establishment was the Savile Row police station, only three hundred yards off, at the bottom of the street. Manning a bank of four phones, they’d fielded endless irate complaints since the first notes blared through the streets. A confrontation was inevitable. Shortly after 1:15 the fireworks started. The Beatles had just run through “One After 909” when two uniformed policemen strolled into Apple’s reception area and requested that the music be lowered. Mal Evans greeted them, steering the conversation toward one side of the room. “The Beatles had arranged for a camera to be hidden in a booth in the reception area for exactly such a situation,” recalls Jack Oliver, who worked in the press office. “Mal wanted to make sure it picked up all the action.”

  If they’d expected a raid or something comparable, it was a disappointment. The police were friendly but insistent: “Honestly, the music has got to go down, or there’s going to be some arrests,” they avowed. No one was being threatened, they assured Mal. “But can you please turn it down? Can you turn it off, please? Thank you.”

  Please and thank you—what a colossal letdown. Ringo was especially crestfallen. “When [the police] came up, I was playing away and I thought, ‘Oh, great. I hope they drag me off,’ ” he recalled. Ringo fantasized about being physically restrained “because we were being filmed and it would have looked really great, kicking the cymbals and everything.” No such luck, but they still achieved their purpose by having the police interrupt the concert. The Beatles against the establishment: it would look great on film.

  “I’d like to say thanks on behalf of the group and ourselves,” John mugged into the camera, “and I hope we passed the audition.”

  Even though the concert was cut short, the Beatles managed to play just enough material to cover a full performance. In a little under forty minutes, they ran through “Get Back” several times, as well as “Don’t Let Me Down,” “I’ve Got a Feeling,” “One After 909,” “I Dig a Pony,” and a brief, whimsical version of “God Save the Queen.” “With a bit of doctoring, we’ll be good,” Lindsay-Hogg assured them.

  Still, George was incensed that the police had the temerity to legislate the playing of music. “If anybody wants to sing and play on their roof, what’s the law say as to why you can’t do that?” he wondered.

  John responded decisively, “Disturbing the peace.” But his answer, even though convincing, resonated with ambiguity.

  [III]

  As Apple’s financial fabric unraveled, so, too, did the delicate peace that for all these months had kept the Beatles from self-destructing.

  John’s comments to Disc—that the Beatles would “be broke in six months”—undid the first knot. Whether it was true or not, Paul felt that their privacy had been breached, and he tore into Disc’s gentle columnist Ray Coleman for his role in disseminating potentially harmful information. “You know this is a small and young company, just trying to get along,” he roared at Coleman in front of a dozen openmouthed Apple employees outside of Ron Kass’s office. “And you know John always shoots his mouth off. It’s not that bad. We’ve got a few problems, but they’ll be sorted out.” The diminutive Coleman, who was on the verge of tears, hugged the wall as Paul, for whom he had great respect, continued the dressing-down. “I’m surprised it was you—we thought we had a few friends in the press we could trust.”

  Paul’s determination to keep their financial difficulties out of the papers was providential. Within hours of reading John’s remarks, a tough little scorpion named Allen Klein attacked the phones in an attempt to contact John about handling the Beatles’ assets. Klein, who managed the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, Bobby Vinton, Herman’s Hermits, and Donovan, had been circling the Beatles for years, just waiting for the opportunity to pounce. Klein, at the time a sharp-mouthed thirty-eight-year-old dynamo from Newark, New Jersey, who spoke with an almost comical truck driver brogue and bore “a distant resemblance to Buddy Hackett,” had spent part of his childhood in a Jewish orphanage before learning to survive on the streets by his wits. He taught himself the essentials necessary to be an accountant, earning a degree by attending night classes at Upsala College, and began an apprenticeship in the New York entertainment industry, where he became known for rooting through record-company ledgers in search of unpaid royalties. In the process, he unearthed a gold mine: because of the slipshod nature of the way records were kept, every audit revealed discrepancies. He wasted no time in impressing Bobby Darin with his sleuthing tactics. In 1962, at a party celebrating Darin’s unprecedented deal with Capitol Records, Klein introduced himself to the singer and handed him a check for $100,000. According to legend, Darin stared puzzlingly at the check and asked what it was for. “For nothing,” Klein supposedly replied, delighted with the impression he’d left. Two years later he performed the same feat at RCA for Sam Cooke, solidifying his reputation among artists as a financial gunslinger.

  With the Beatles, Klein’s timing was impeccable. He’d met John once before and only in passing, in December 1968, at the taping of the ill-fated “Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus” TV special. The Stones’ manager interrupted a noisy transatlantic phone call to introduce himself with unusual gentility. When Klein mentioned that he was also an accountant, John pulled a face and joked how he did not “want to end up broke, like Mickey Rooney.” The look that came over Klein “was orgasmic,” said one observer. “To him, John’s words seemed fraught with some extraordinary personal message.” But it seemed impossible for him to gain entrée; the layers of protection around the Beatles were airtight. No matter how Klein tried to make contact, he was rebuffed at every juncture.r />
  In his exuberant biography, Fifty Years Adrift, Derek Taylor admitted giving Allen Klein the introduction he longed for so that the Beatles “could determine whether the reputed coldness of his methods outweighed his undoubted capacity for securing the greatest deals for his clients.” On the evening of January 28, two days before the Beatles’ roof concert at Savile Row, John and Yoko met Allen Klein in the lavish Harlequin Suite at the Dorchester Hotel, where they formed a mutual, if snakebit, admiration society. Despite the fact that John and Allen, both extremely headstrong and volatile individuals, acted “very nervous… nervous as shit,” they were immediately drawn to each other for a multitude of reasons. If John Eastman came off as being suave and pretentious, Allen Klein was his polar opposite—ordinary, almost boorish, a real salt-of-the-earth type—in fact, not so much salt as salty, lacing his conversation with ripe, juicy expletives. Forget about uptight preppie attire; Klein was dressed less than casually, in a baggy sweater over blue jeans and beat-up old sneakers. After Brian Epstein’s sartorial refinement, John thought this was almost too good to be true. Later, John would call Klein “the only businessman I’ve met who isn’t gray right through his eyes to his soul,” and that about nailed his instant attraction. Klein was colorful. More than colorful: the man was gaudy, positively kaleidoscopic. “One of the… things that impressed me about Allen—and obviously it was a kind of flattery as well,” John said, “he went through all the old songs we’d written and he really knew which stuff I’d written.” Klein wasn’t the average myopic manager, with a single fix on the bottom line. Music informed every move he made.

  “I knew right away he was the man for us,” John recalled. Even after the meeting John could barely contain his enthusiasm. “I wrote to Sir Joseph Lockwood that night. I said: ‘Dear Sir Joe: From now on Allen Klein handles all my stuff.’ ”*

  It might have helped matters if John had discussed his selection with the other Beatles first, but John was angry, emotional, impulsive. His decision wasn’t based on what was good for the Beatles; it was personal and intuitive: him against Paul, rock ’n roll against pop, “a human being” against “an animal.”

  Besides, Yoko had weighed in. Klein had reeled Yoko carefully into the negotiations, soliciting her views and listening with rapt attention. Furthermore, he promised that Apple would support Yoko’s experimental film projects and persuade United Artists to distribute them, sweetening the deal with a million-dollar advance. A day or two later, when Paul confronted John about selecting Allen Klein as his manager, John sheepishly admitted it was more her decision than his, saying, “Well, he’s the only one Yoko liked.”

  That sounded more like a convenient dodge, except for one thing: Yoko was clearly pulling John’s strings. Since they became an item, at her insistence John never strayed more than a few inches from her side. Everything he did, everything he said, filtered through her for approval. There was no resistance on his part, primarily because of what she gave him—confidence and control—and because he was so clearly damaged by drugs and his past. No one was going to derail her grand design, especially now that she had a weapon like John Lennon in her arsenal. John was her insurance policy, her safeguard. He gave her instant credibility as a media star.

  Now she also had Allen Klein. A man like Klein wouldn’t back down to the McCartney-Eastman alliance. Indeed, he’d enjoy wresting John from the grasp of those smoothies, those “big-headed uptight people” (John’s description), and kicking some ass in the process. And Klein would aid in her crusade against Paul. No matter how Yoko might deny it, Paul remained her lone nemesis, her obstacle to claiming complete control over John. Paul was the one responsible for holding the Beatles together, for lashing John to that frothy pop confection, “all that Beatle stuff,” as she called it. From the outset, she convinced herself that Paul wanted her out of the picture. “Paul began complaining that I was sitting too close to them when they were recording,” Yoko said, “and that I should be in the background.” The background! Never. Paul discouraged her from attending business meetings with the other Beatles. Never. He demeaned and insulted her, scoffed at her style of art. She would destroy him. She had to.

  As far as Paul knew, the Eastmans seemed like a shoo-in to represent Apple. They’d even begun negotiations with Clive Epstein about purchasing a majority interest in NEMS. John’s unconscionable act of maneuvering behind his back smacked of something insidious, something personal. Whether he realized it or not, it had Yoko’s fingerprints all over it. Maintaining his cool, Paul agreed with the others to at least meet with Allen Klein and to keep an open mind, but in fact he had no intention of aligning himself with such a tawdry figure. Paul got around, he’d heard the scuttlebutt; he was familiar with Klein’s reputation and wanted no part of it.

  George and Ringo, on the other hand, were intrigued. They liked Klein’s straight talk, his unconventional appearance, his painless solutions to their problems. “Because we were all from Liverpool, we favored people who were street people,” George said, free of irony. Despite Allen’s ritzy Dorchester suite and chauffeured limousine, George felt “Lee Eastman was more of a class-conscious type of person. As John was going with Klein, it was much easier if we went with him, too.”

  Paul opposed Klein’s intervention, confident that the group’s democratic stopgap would prevail on his behalf. In the past, a one-for-all, all-for-one policy would have scotched the deal. But when the smoke cleared and the votes were tallied, it was three against one for the first time in eleven years. Without much choice, Paul gave in. He agreed to grant Klein authority to perform an audit on the Beatles’ behalf, delving into every financial arrangement they had, as long as the Eastmans were appointed as their general counsel. It was a compromise of sorts, but ultimately pointless. The fox had gained the keys to the henhouse, and on February 3, 1969, Allen Klein moved into the Apple offices, where he proceeded to secure his berth for a long, eventful stay.

  For the most part, the audit of the Beatles’ finances produced fairly unastonishing results. The sorry shape of their business affairs was already a known quantity. Klein quickly deduced they’d been “fucked around by everybody.” The terms of their contract with EMI were grossly inadequate, leaving them enslaved to the record label for another ten years; the management agreement allowed NEMS to continue collecting 25 percent of the Beatles’ royalties for the next seven years, even though the company no longer performed any significant service; dreadful merchandising deals had cost the Beatles a small fortune; and Apple, while profiting somewhat as a boutique record label, was still hemorrhaging money—hundreds of thousands of pounds—on myriad useless salaries and expenses.

  On the surface, this scenario may have seemed like a nightmare, but none of these handicaps presented Allen Klein with sleepless nights. With time, he could perform whatever surgery was necessary to correct or renegotiate each disadvantage. The record sales for the White Album were through the roof (it remained the top-selling album in Britain throughout most of the winter); some basic belt-tightening would put the Beatles’ finances back on solid ground. The audit did, however, turn up one ticklish spot. In the process of examining John and Paul’s publishing deal with Dick James, Klein discovered that Paul, unbeknownst to John, had been quietly buying shares of Northern Songs for his portfolio.

  On the surface it seemed harmless. “What better way to invest our money than in ourselves?” Paul offered unctuously, sidestepping the real issue: that he and John were supposed to be equal partners. But if Paul was impervious to the disclosure, his collaborator and partner was not. John regarded it as out-and-out treachery, underhanded, a covert attempt to wrest control of their copyrights. No matter how Paul justified it, “it belied his innocence and honesty,” says Peter Brown, who had been ordered by Paul to purchase the additional shares. Brown knew John wasn’t being told—and foresaw the inevitable outcome. “They confronted each other in the office, where John flew into a rage. At one point, I thought he was actually going to hit Paul, b
ut he managed to calm himself down before really laying into him. ‘You’re a fucking arsehole! You pretend to be this honest and straightforward guy—and you’re not!’ ”

  Try though he might, Paul didn’t deny it. It would have just added more fuel to an already roaring fire. Besides, there were other serious flare-ups that required more diplomacy.