The Beatles

by Bob Spitz

  The most important concern was their precarious management situation. No one was steering the listing ship. And at times it seemed as though the Eastmans and Allen Klein were working at cross-purposes. The Beatles knew it was time to harness their cocaptains. “Let’s get them both together,” George recalled saying, and at that time it must have sounded like a reasonable suggestion. But the powwow itself was more like Waterloo. Bloodthirsty and bellicose, both factions squared off in Klein’s Dorchester suite, erupting with accusations and expletives. Reaching a consensus no longer mattered—if it ever had. First of all, John had brought Yoko, who had no business attending the meeting. Then Allen went to work, picking apart all of the Eastmans’ proposals as though they were nonsense. No pretense was made of respect or civility. According to Peter Brown, he dismissed their idea to buy NEMS as “a piece of crap” and ridiculed John Eastman as “a fool” and “a shithead,” implying in his most patronizing voice that only a dilettante would act so feebly for his clients. Eastman, under fire, derided Klein as “a perfect asshole.”

  A week later, in an attempt to salvage Paul’s position, Lee Eastman flew to London to confront Klein himself, but John and his bodyguard were ready for him. John’s list of grievances against Eastman, both real and imagined, had reached new heights of rancor. He had had enough of what he perceived to be Eastman’s “class snobbery.” He refused to associate, he said, with someone who “despises me because of what I am and what I look like,” who thinks “I’m some kind of guy who got struck lucky, a pal of Paul’s.” But nothing grated on John’s nerves more than hearing “a charlatan” like Eastman say, “I can’t tell you how much I’ve admired your work, John,” because beneath the smooth tone it had the ring of phoniness. He wasn’t about to let some flashy New York lawyer, some “middle-class pig” who had no instinct for rock ’n roll, exert power over him or, worse, “con” him with lofty references to Kafka (Eastman apparently referred to the Beatles’ recording deal as being Kafkaesque), Picasso, and de Kooning. John had learned from Neil Aspinall that Lee Eastman had changed the family name from Epstein, and he convinced Allen they should address him as such throughout the meeting. All that afternoon John picked at the name, dripping acid when he pronounced it, as if it were an open wound. “How Lee kept his cool was beyond me,” recalls Peter Brown, in whose office they met. “Even Yoko, who wasn’t supposed to be there, called him Epstein, daring him to respond.”

  Joining in, Klein continued to taunt Eastman in other ways, “interrupting everything he said with a string of the most disgusting four-letter words he could tick off his tongue.” As soon as Klein took a breath, Yoko barreled in, challenging Eastman’s judgment and assailing him for condescending to John. “Will you please stop insulting my husband,” she snarled. “Don’t call my husband stupid.” Lee Eastman sat on his hands while his fury mounted, but the tag-team effect took its toll. The whole meeting had been a trap, he concluded. Klein had deliberately baited him, attempting to humiliate him. Unable to take another word of abuse, he finally snapped. He leaped to his feet, exploding in righteous indignation, and tore into the snickering accountant. “You are a rodent,” he roared, “the lowest scum on earth!”

  Unwittingly, of course, he had played right into John’s hands. “We hadn’t been in there more than a few minutes when Lee Eastman was having something like an epileptic fit and screaming at Allen,” he told Rolling Stone, liberally editing the facts to shape his argument. “He had a fuckin’ fit…. This was supposed to be the guy who was taking over the multimillion-dollar corporation…. I wouldn’t let Eastman near me. I wouldn’t let a fuckin’ animal like that who has a mind like that near me.” One can only imagine how he described it for Ringo and George, but whatever the case, it served to ice John’s position. Eastman was out; Allen Klein was their man.

  The Beatles may have found a captain for Apple, at last, but he was at the helm of a slowly sinking ship.

  Chapter 37 And in the End…

  [I]

  Though the Beatles had dodged questions about the bubble bursting ever since they first landed in America, they couldn’t help but feel the pressure mounting toward the inevitable, ugly bang. By March 1969, John, Paul, George, and Ringo knew the end was near. Months of bickering had steadily dispirited them. The last-ditch, desperate effort to carry on as a group only estranged them further and brought their squabbles more visibly into the open. To ease the tension, they each became involved in personal projects: John and Yoko finished production of an avant-garde film for Austrian TV titled Rape; Paul attempted to jump-start Mary Hopkin’s anemic career; Ringo accepted a role opposite Peter Sellers in the film adaptation of Terry Southern’s send-up The Magic Christian; George recorded a solo album, Electronic Sounds, at his home and groomed Billy Preston for stardom. But still, they behaved as itinerant Beatles, clinging to the legacy as one might a security blanket until they summoned the means to resolve their differences—or the courage to go their separate ways.

  No one was prepared when rumors of Paul’s marriage to Linda Eastman began circulating around London. On March 11, a day in advance of the ceremony, Paul leaked word of it to the press before even telling the other Beatles about his plans.* Evening Standard recalls that Paul cornered him at Apple, winked, and said: “If you don’t tell anybody, I’ll tell you all about it.” Except for a brief rendezvous at Abbey Road, the four mates hadn’t seen one another in weeks. John, Ringo, and George might have been surprised by the sudden announcement, but none was shocked that he wasn’t invited to attend. “Why should we be asked to help Paul celebrate,” George wondered, “when we’re not even on speaking terms?” Besides, the last thing any of them wanted was to be part of a media circus.

  Marrying off the “last bachelor among the Beatles” was big news, and despite appeals that “Paul and Linda want it simple” and a cold, driving rainstorm, nothing kept the fans from staging a crazy mob scene. Indeed, the wedding resembled a page torn from the Beatlemania scrapbook. On the morning of March 12, a few minutes before ten, an ashen-faced Linda, clutching her daughter, Heather, by the arm, “plunged through a mob of weeping teenagers” outside the Marylebone Registry while Paul waved and threw purple-wrapped candies into the crowd, inciting a mad scramble for souvenirs. John, who had expressed “surprise” at the marriage, found the scene stage-managed. “It was just Paul being Paul,” he told Peter Brown, “playing to the crowd.”

  Unknown to Paul, George spent the wedding day lounging in Derek Taylor’s office at Apple, where he was paged around 5:00 by his wife, Pattie. There was a team of police at their home, she reported, tossing the place in preparation for a drug bust. They had already found a hefty chunk of hash stowed in a box on the mantel. (George insisted that the police had planted it.) Some grass would later turn up as well. (This was his private stash.) In any case, there was going to be an arrest, and when it came it would vie with Paul’s wedding for the morning headlines.

  Pete Shotton, who lived nearby, was at Esher when George, dressed in a flamboyant yellow suit, arrived in a stretch limousine with Taylor and a lawyer. The indiscriminate atmosphere in the parlor resembled nothing if not “a party.” Several cops were slouched in armchairs with their feet propped up, watching television. Others drank coffee and thumbed through George’s record collection, while a police dog clad in a beet-red neckerchief nosed through the bedroom closets. George scanned the scene with a sweep of his head, at which point his eyes went blank. Shotton had seen George riled up before, often, and he could be mean. But this was different. “I’d never seen George so angry in my life,” Shotton recalls. “He came into the house—and went berserk.” He would have told the police where his dope was stashed, but they seemed more interested in playing out the bust, as though it, too, were being stage-managed—which, in a way, it was: even the press had been tipped off to chronicle their handiwork. When a photographer popped out of the front hedge, that was the final straw. “George chased him murderously around the garden,” recalls Shotton,
who couldn’t help laughing at the improbable scene. “George was chasing him; the police were chasing George. It was like something out of the Keystone Kops.” Leaping over garden ornaments and bushes, George kept shouting: “I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!” Later, being led away by Derek Taylor, he pointed at a reporter and yelled: “The fox has its lair, the bird has its nest. This is my fucking house!”

  By mid-March the Beatles’ escapades commanded an unprecedented amount of ink. Just five days after Paul married Linda, Peter Brown took a call in his hotel room in Amsterdam, where he had gone for the weekend to hear John Pritchard conduct the philharmonic. John Lennon was on the phone, with a discernible swell in his voice. “Why don’t you stay there,” John suggested. “Yoko and I will come over and get married.”

  “John made it clear that he didn’t want to get married like Paul [had],” Brown recalls. “That is, he did not want crowds; they wanted to get married quietly.” But Brown delivered bad news: Holland, like most countries, required a two-week minimum residency. According to the (London) Times, England was also out of the question because of “difficulties over Yoko’s citizenship” and her recent divorce from Tony Cox. They’d even tried getting married on a cross-Channel ferry, but their car broke down in Basingstoke on the breakneck drive to Southampton, and they were forced to turn back. What were the lovebirds to do?

  Brown put Apple’s lawyers on the question and discovered that the only place without a residency requirement was Gibraltar, which, as a British possession, recognized John as a citizen. Gibraltar? All anyone knew was that it was a rock. But if John and Yoko turned up there bearing the proper papers, they would be married in whatever fashion—and speed—was requested.

  Brown arranged for them to fly to Paris, where Alistair Taylor met them with the papers and “a load of money.” On Tuesday, March 20, John and Yoko arrived in Gibraltar at 8:30 in the morning and were immediately spotted by other tourists. They’d made no effort at all to be inconspicuous, let alone subtle. “Yoko stood out like a sore thumb, dressed in this funny, white knitted miniskirt outfit, with a floppy white hat,” says Brown, who met them at the plane. John, who appeared to be very nervous, wore a long white corduroy jacket over a white polo sweater, white trousers, and sneakers. “You had to be blind to miss them.”

  Despite the distraction, John found the setting “beautiful,” a flat, open harbor view surrounded by an expanse of turquoise water. He had little time, however, to take in the colony’s attractions. In a little under an hour, they swore out affidavits, bought a special license, and were immediately married by the registrar at the British consulate before returning directly to the airport.

  Even in a location as remote as Gibraltar, there were already photographers surrounding the plane. “Intellectually, we didn’t believe in getting married,” John told them. “But one doesn’t love someone just intellectually. For two people, marriage still has the edge over just living together.” Everyone scrambled aboard for the flight back to Paris, where John and Yoko planned to relax for a few days. Springtime in Paris—it sounded so romantic to the small entourage, who envisioned a traditional, old-fashioned honeymoon. But John and Yoko weren’t traditional by any stretch of the imagination. “We had our honeymoon before we got married,” John explained. No, they had something else up their sleeve, something calculated, something more intriguing.

  Before John had left for Paris, he huddled with Allen Klein in an attempt to “rationalize” the situation at Apple. Klein determined that everyone on the payroll was riding what John referred to as the “gravy train,” even Neil and Mal, who “were living like kings… like fucking emperors,” thanks to the Beatles’ deep pockets. After much prodding, Peter Brown turned over the employee records to Klein and pleaded for leniency, but to no avail. Many of those in the first wave to be fired were obvious choices. Magic Alex got the early thumb along with Denis O’Dell, whose film division lay dormant; Tony Bramwell; the chefs; and much of the extraneous staff. But the number one name on Klein’s hit list raised a few eyebrows: Alistair Taylor. “He’d been with us since 1962,” says Brown, who’d been appointed as Klein’s hatchet man. “He was an honorable employee through all those years, Paul’s gofer, his mate. Whenever any of the boys needed something done, Alistair always saw to it.” Brown trembled as he delivered the news. “It was terrible, terrible. Having to do this was the worst,” he recalls. Taylor received a “generous” severance: three months’ pay as well as rent toward his flat, but he had to leave the premises at once. It was a cruel finale for the man who’d accompanied Brian Epstein to the Cavern on the day he first saw the Beatles. Crueler still was the scene that followed. Shocked and indignant, Alistair called Paul at his home to commiserate and say good-bye. “But Paul refused to come to the phone,” he recalls. “Nothing in my life ever hurt as much as that.”

  When the next list of victims was issued, Ron Kass’s name appeared at the top. “Firing Ron—a nice, honorable, successful international record executive—was the only way for Allen to take control of the company,” according to Peter Brown. But it wasn’t that easy to simply sack a man like Kass, whose contract and reputation stood in the way. So Klein resorted to an old accountant’s trick of questioning an expense of Ron’s, making it appear as though something improper had transpired, when in fact there was a perfectly reasonable explanation. In this case, it was a company check made out to Kass for cash, which had been advanced to Neil Aspinall in America. Once Klein cast it in doubt, however, there was too much stigma involved. Not even the Beatles would come to his rescue.

  Brown was ordered to oust Peter Asher as well. Since the days of Paul’s residency at his parents’ house, Peter had made quite a name for himself, first as half of the hit-making duo Peter and Gordon, then more recently developing talent as Apple’s chief A&R man. After producing James Taylor’s debut, Asher was in great demand, with a dozen acts vying for his services. But to Allen Klein, this power was intimidating. Asher, who went on to become one of the most successful producers in the music business, refused to give Klein the satisfaction of sacking him, and resigned.

  At the time of the Apple staff liquidation, John Lennon had been staging a seven-day bed-in for peace in the Presidential Suite at the Amsterdam Hilton, ostensibly “as a protest against violence everywhere,” though anyone who knew John and Yoko understood that this was mostly an opportunity for them to capture the world’s headlines and promote their recent marriage, which appeared grotesque to the public eye.

  The couple, convinced they’d be prevented from having a proper private honeymoon, decided to turn the tables on the annoying press and stage the postmarriage function as an international event. “Instead of fighting it,” as John explained, “we joined it,” choosing “to make maximum use of” the interest for their own purposes. Up to sixty newsmen at a time gained access to their bedroom any time of the day or night, as long as John and Yoko could lobby for a personal cause. A “plea for peace,” they believed, was the perfect attention-grabber.

  The entire affair was (to the disappointment of the tabloids) tame enough for TV, a tranquilizing prime-time family spectacle, with John and Yoko dressed in neatly pressed pajamas, delivering messages filled with nonviolence and antiwar rhetoric. The room itself was a testament to flaky innocence, decorated with crude hand-painted signs that proclaimed “Grow Your Hair,” “Stay in Bed,” “John Loves Yoko,” “Hair Peace.” Their aphorisms, delivered like gospel, were printed in boldface, including a new standby of John’s that found favor among the columnists: “Give peace a chance.” It was part demonstration, part sideshow, wrapped in the guise of Yoko’s self-indulgent performance art.

  As to what had motivated him to begin preaching peace, all John could say was that “it’s no good working for money, and there’s nothing else to do but work—so working for peace is an objective.” But the real motivation may have simply been that John and Yoko craved attention. They loved using the media to stir up controversy, loved the way
it painted them as incorrigible rebels, loved the exasperated reactions, loved the power it gave them. “It came at a perfect time in his life,” John’s biographer Ray Coleman would write, “with the Beatles at a crossroads.” Peace—and its power “to force people to re-act”—gave him another imposing vehicle, another public platform from which to reshape and sharpen his image. “We are trying to make Christ’s message contemporary,” John told an openmouthed audience at one of the Amsterdam press conferences. “What would He have done if He had advertisements, records, films, TV, and newspapers? Well, the miracle today is communications. So let’s use it!”

  [II]

  At Apple, each week, each day, it seemed, brought new and unexpected departures, along with division consolidations: Apple Retail was shut down, as was Apple Electronics, Apple Films, Apple Publishing, and other offshoots that produced little or no income.

  Yet, with so many hands still in the pot, there were too many things that could go wrong—many of which did. On the heels of Allen Klein’s remarks that buying NEMS was inadvisable, John Eastman, in his overzealousness as the Beatles’ legal counsel, wrote to Clive Epstein in an attempt to stall the negotiations:

  As you know, Mr. Allen Klein is doing an audit of the Beatles’ affairs, vis-à-vis NEMS and Nemperor Holdings Ltd. When this has been completed I suggest we meet to discuss the results of Mr. Klein’s audit as well as the propriety of the negotiations surrounding the nine-year agreement between E.M.I., the Beatles, and NEMS.

  Propriety: Clive took the word as an outrageous slap in the face. A principled, moral man, he was indignant that anyone might imply that NEMS, an Epstein family company, had acted in bad faith. Rather than engage in a potentially ugly dispute, he promptly sold his 70 percent of the company to Triumph Investment Trust, giving it the right to pocket 25 percent of the Beatles’ record royalties, as well as a 4.5 percent interest in Northern Songs.