His misfortune was that he replaced Asher with Schwartz, an intelligent and literate woman who later penned an autobiography in which her relationship with McCartney provided the climax to a chronicle of sexual entanglements. She claimed that he demanded to know exactly where she was 24 hours a day; expected her to work full-time for Apple, cook, clean and score dope for him, and still be available on demand as a lover; and reserved the right to vanish without warning and sleep with other women. 'He was petulant,' she wrote, 'outrageous, adolescent, a little Medici prince, powdered and laid on a satin pillow at a very early age.' He became antagonistic towards the other Beatles and their songs, and after a session would often 'drink hideous Scotch–coke combinations, throw food at the dogs and cats, drop his clothes in a path from the door to the bed, and ignore me completely.'
The jilted Beatle hid this allegedly emotionally charged behaviour behind his customary facade of bonhomie. In his effort to distance himself from Lennon and Ono, he refused to participate in the recording of an experimental sound collage entitled 'Revolution 9'. Its assembly of effects tapes, 'found' sounds and random musical elements was an extension of the music that McCartney had been making at home for years and demonstrating to an envious Lennon. The avant-garde had been his London playground; now Lennon was claiming it as his own and choosing to collaborate with a genuinely alternative artist instead of McCartney. One can only assume that his only defence would be to deny his own past, to pretend that he had always found these experiments banal and pretentious, and to banish the avant-garde from his own repertoire for years to come.
In the midst of this turmoil McCartney invited Lennon and Ono to live with him and Schwartz in his home close to Abbey Road Studios while the Lennons' divorce was finalised. 'When John came over,' Schwartz recounted, 'all he could talk about was how much he loved Yoko. That disturbed Paul. In spite of John's obvious happiness, Paul stifled his jealousy with not-very-cute bursts of crap.' Schwartz remembered Lennon and Ono discovering an envelope on the mantelpiece one morning, addressed to them but not bearing a postmark. Inside was a single typewritten sentence: 'You and your Jap tart think you're hot shit.' While they stood there in shock, McCartney entered the room and said, 'Oh, I just did that for a lark,' and smiled. As Schwartz recalled, 'That was the moment when John looked at Paul as if to say, "Do I know you?" It was over, it was completely and totally over at that moment. They may have been able to work together, but it was never the same.' Soon afterwards Lennon and Ono moved into a central London flat that was being rented by Starkey.
The venomous atmosphere inevitably affected the Apple office. Derek Taylor said, 'I don't think I ever hated anyone as much as I hated Paul in the summer of 1968.' He remembered McCartney gathering the staff together and saying, 'Don't forget, you're not very good, any of you. You know that, don't you?' Neil Aspinall was still struggling to make sense of the Beatles' legal commitments and maintain some form of control over Apple's daily operations. 'Neil would come to my room in Apple in the middle of the day and collapse on the sofa and sit staring and staring,' Taylor said. 'He tells me now it was fear.'
Essentially, Apple was a record company, with a global launch scheduled for late August. Although the Beatles were still contracted to EMI, they had been granted permission to use the Apple logo on their future releases, to maintain the fantasy of independence. The initial batch of singles was released on Aspinall's wedding day. 'There were only a few of us at Apple who knew anything about the record business,' Taylor admitted. 'The Beatles certainly didn't. When they were struggling, they just knew it as something that said no to them, and then when they were big, they knew it as a thing that didn't know how to say no to them.' Taylor hyped the first Apple records with typical elan: '[The Beatles] are confident and cheerful and the human condition will be thrilled by the coming results of their willing and enduring Beatle bondage. Unhampered by the pressures of world stardom, entranced by their opportunities, stimulated by the blossoming of Apple, they will give all of us new wonders to soothe our pain.'
As he wrote, Lennon and McCartney's estrangement was widening, Harrison preferred to lose himself in meditation rather than interact with his colleagues, and Starkey had chosen to abandon the group entirely for two weeks. But Apple's debut releases included the Beatles' best-selling record to date, 'Hey Jude', an anthemic McCartney song that glowed with optimism after a summer that had burned with anxiety and rage within the group and in the troubled world beyond. McCartney's production of a sentimental folksong, 'Those Were the Days', for teenage singer Mary Hopkin was equally successful, and when the Beatles' white-sleeved double LP was finally completed late in the year it surpassed the sales and receipts of any album in history. It didn't matter that, as Lennon complained a few weeks later, 'All of us were dissatisfied [with the album]. As a Beatles thing, as a whole, it doesn't work.' Taylor spun the yarn that the four Beatles were 'firmly united one for all and all for one as the Beatles . . . administering the Happy Apple complex of companies in London'. And the world wanted to believe him.
Chapter 2
Our main business is entertainment – communication. Apple is mainly concerned with fun . . . We want to devote all our energies to records, films, and our electronics adventures. We had to zoom in on what we really enjoy, and we enjoy being alive, and we enjoy being Beatles.
Paul McCartney, July 1968
I can't talk . . . I daren't put my foot anywhere.
Paul McCartney, January 1969
The summer of 1968 was a time of political ideals and wounded dreams. In Czechoslovakia the rigid communist regime had been replaced by a more liberal Marxist government which for the first time was prepared to allow its citizens to sample the exotic tastes of freedom beyond the Iron Curtain. In Chicago the American anti-war movement centred its scattered energies on the Democratic Party's national convention, as if protesting to the president would end the conflict in Vietnam. Then, in late August, Russian tanks swept aside Czechoslovakia's 'communism with a human face', and Chicago police clubbed demonstrators to the ground outside the convention hall. Like the French union of strikers and students that had briefly threatened to seize power in Paris that spring, the crusades of East and West had ended in betrayal and despair.
The Beatles' Apple organisation grew out of that same flowering of hope and fantasy. 'If any of our dreams could come true,' Derek Taylor recalled, 'we would protect them as best we could.'
'There is no profit motive,' Paul McCartney's spokesman Barry Miles insisted that summer, 'as the Beatles' profits go first to the combined staff and then are given away to the needy.' Apple might be a corporation, he said, affiliated to the multinational EMI conglomerate, but it could still 'represent the workers seizing control of the means of production'. The Beatles' decision in July to close the Apple Boutique and give away its contents seemed to confirm the purity of their intentions. Yet the closure was a business move, not a political gesture, and suggested that the group were struggling to adapt to commercial reality. 'Everyone had their own autonomy,' Taylor said, 'and all of it cost money.'
Such qualms were overshadowed by the stunning debut of Apple Records. 'Hey Jude' and 'Those Were the Days' ensured that the company enjoyed instant success, but Apple's plans went far beyond mainstream pop. They were planning to launch a pioneering series of 'disposable records' – the aural equivalent of paperback books, which would offer readings or speeches by iconic figures of the age at a bargain price. There would even be albums of the Beatles in conversation, the company announced. McCartney and Harrison were prepared to spend half the year in California, to establish Apple as a truly transatlantic enterprise. As proof of the company's global reach, Apple even licensed a subsidiary operation in apartheid South Africa, where Mary Hopkin's hit was translated into Afrikaans by a local performer. Sensibly, this move wasn't publicised at home as Apple's political reputation would have been tarnished.
Far more damaging was the public reaction to Lennon's adultery with Ono. When the cou
ple launched dozens of balloons into the sky as a gesture of peace, each carrying a postcard asking its finder to respond, they were shocked by the racist abuse that they received. But there was still enormous public goodwill towards the institution of the Beatles. Their cartoon animation Yellow Submarine may have been widely criticised, with one British newspaper referring disdainfully to a 'film flop' from this 'over-exposed quartet'. But the release of 'Hey Jude' suggested that the group had never been more committed to their music, and to each other. With its rousing chorus, McCartney's song encapsulated the widespread feeling among Western youth that political setbacks could never shake their solidarity.
Beyond their record sales, the Beatles' earning potential appeared to be limitless. 'Magic' Alexis Mardas had invented a telephone that would respond automatically to spoken commands. The American corporation AT&T tabled an offer of one million dollars for exclusive rights – which the Beatles rejected, instinctively feeling that Mardas's gadget was worth more. No further bids were forthcoming, and the telephone was never manufactured. There were even higher hopes for another Mardas scheme. In a strange precursor of the 'Home taping is killing music' campaign of the 1980s and the 21st century concern about illegal downloads, Lennon and McCartney feared that record sales would suffer if the newly devised cassette tape recorder went into mass circulation. Mardas developed an electronic signal that could be added to recorded sound to prevent it being copied. 'It seemed quite possible,' noted commentator Tony Palmer in 1969, 'that within a few years, every single record sold anywhere in the world would carry this device, and thus pay to the Beatles a royalty.' This invention would have generated more income than the group's music, but it was delayed while Mardas concentrated on the more immediate task of building the Beatles a recording studio. 'Nobody at Apple had any management skill,' Derek Taylor explained. 'We were all amateurs.' And not just amateurs, but under exotic influences. 'I remember going into Derek Taylor's office,' said publisher Sean O'Mahony, 'and the entire room was a haze of cannabis. It was ridiculous – you could hardly breathe. I asked Derek for some new photos of the Beatles, and he wandered around the room in a daze, and eventually gave me some – which turned out to be the same ones I'd given them. But that was what Apple was like.'
McCartney was the only member of the Beatles who took an active interest in Apple that summer. Aware that he was the part-owner of an organisation that wasn't organised, he felt compelled to intervene but was wary of assuming too much personal responsibility: 'I wanted Apple to run; I didn't want to run Apple.'
There was another problem: after his partial estrangement from Lennon, he had lost the self-confidence that had been his mainstay. He felt, he admitted later,
like I was in an Alice in Wonderland scenario. I would say, 'Now, what's to be done here? Ah, I know, cut spending.' That would start in my brain as a reasonable assumption but by the time it reached my mouth, it was like the devil was speaking. It was like a traitorous utterance. So I started to think my logic was suspect and that to try and make money was a suspect act. I really couldn't say anything without feeling I was being devious. And yet I knew I wasn't.
He decided, in one of the few sober assessments of that tumultuous summer, to seek help. The Beatles had rejected the idea of appointing a successor to Brian Epstein, but now McCartney discreetly approached senior business figures, none of whom had any sympathy for the counterculture. After consulting EMI boss Sir Joseph Lockwood and former Conservative Party chairman Lord Poole, he met Lord Beeching, infamous in Britain as the man charged with slashing the rail network into economic shape. Beeching offered to impose similar sanctions at Apple but advised McCartney to search for a full-time manager.
Little assistance was offered by McCartney's colleagues. 'I was getting fed up with the Beatles by that time,' Harrison remembered, 'let alone anything else around it.' Starkey had never wanted to be a businessman in the first place. Lennon, meanwhile, was pursuing his own agenda: art exhibitions, experimental films, all of them alongside Yoko Ono, not McCartney. The most notorious of his projects was the Two Virgins album. Its whimsical musical content was irrelevant; all attention focused on the cover artwork, which featured nude portraits of Lennon and Ono.
Every member of the Beatles' entourage remembered seeing these photos for the first time, and reacting with shock or hysterical laughter. Neil Aspinall snapped, 'I don't like it, and Paul doesn't like it, and none of the others are going to like it, and I don't care what the fuck [John] says, I don't want it coming out.' Derek Taylor was more tolerant: 'I was very broad-minded, and my attitude was, if that's what John and Yoko want, that's fine, this is a far-out building. But I knew that it would cause problems with certain sections of the press, and it did.' Not only the press; EMI refused to distribute the album, and its chairman advised Lennon to put someone prettier on
the cover. He suggested McCartney, who according to Lennon 'gave me long lectures about [the cover], and said, "Is there really any need for this?" It took me five months to persuade them.' McCartney finally contributed an enigmatic sleeve note snipped at random from the pages of the Daily Express. 'All of us thought, why did he do it?' he remarked to Starkey the following year. 'It ended up that the answer was, why not?' For George Harrison, Two Virgins merely confirmed Lennon and Ono's arrogance. 'They got involved with each other and were obviously into each other to such a degree that they thought everything they said or did was of world importance, and so they made it into records and films.'
Two Virgins tipped the balance of public opinion so firmly against Lennon and Ono that they became easy targets. *4 After attending a 24-hour session for the Beatles' new album in October, the couple returned to Starkey's flat in Montague Square and were woken by the Metropolitan Police drugs squad. The officers and dogs found a small quantity of cannabis resin, which Lennon swore had been planted. The couple were arrested, and he pleaded guilty to possessing illegal drugs to save Ono – who was now pregnant – from deportation. Nobody at Apple realised that his conviction would threaten his ability to enter the United States. Soon after the bust, Ono was hospitalised, and on 21 November, 1968, she suffered a miscarriage. †2 In keeping with their open-ended philosophy of art, Lennon had taped the unborn baby's heartbeat. It was included on the couple's second album, Lifewith the Lions, which – as if to support Harrison's view – also featured photographs of their court appearance and Ono's hospital bed.
As the euphoria of their early months together evaporated, Lennon and Ono felt less like Edenic virgins than survivors of a medieval siege. Apple staff muttered racist comments about Ono just out of earshot; the press and public despised her; Lennon's fellow Beatles, with the exception of Starkey, barely attempted to engage with her. Lennon penned a satirical poem in which he complained about 'some of there beast friends' and wrote songs that reflected his depression: 'A Case of the Blues' and 'Everyone Had a Hard Year'. The pair even composed an epitaph for their lost baby: 'You had a very strong heartbeat, but that's gone now. Probably we'll forget about you.'
Within days of Ono's miscarriage, she and Lennon were using heroin. 'George says it was me who put John on heroin,' Ono said later, 'but that wasn't true – John wouldn't take anything he didn't want to take.' McCartney claimed that he had never seen Lennon on heroin, but that simply meant he didn't want to see. 'Unfortunately, he was drifting away from us at that point,' he conceded, 'so none of us actually knew. He never told us; we heard rumours, and we were very sad.' Even in the more innocent climate of 1968 heroin was considered decidedly more perilous than any substance the Beatles had sampled in the past. Lennon was entranced by the romantic image of the junkie/artist, and was in sufficient pain not to care how it was relieved. He would be battling against addiction for the next five years.
With Lennon distracted and Harrison uninterested, McCartney was left to maintain control. He had split from Francie Schwartz, who flew home with McCartney's parting words in her ears: 'Don't cry, I'm a cunt. I'm going out for a while, will you make din
ner?' After completing work on the Beatles' double album, he contacted photographer Linda Eastman in New York and spent the final weeks of the year there. He left behind plans for the Beatles to make their first public appearance for more than two years. Even the reluctant Harrison was briefly enthusiastic: 'I'd like to be resident in a club, with the amps there all the time so you could just walk on stage and plug in.' Initially planned as a showcase for their new album, the concert was soon reshaped as the climax of a documentary film, to be made in January 1969, which would portray the Beatles creating and performing an entirely fresh set of material. With Lennon's approval, McCartney arranged for Twickenham Film Studios in London to be booked for the entire month, with sessions scheduled to begin every morning at ten o'clock. Just four weeks after the 30-track White Album was released, the Beatles – Lennon and McCartney, effectively – were now under pressure to compose another dozen songs.
The Beatles prepared in vastly different ways. Lennon snorted heroin, shot films and participated in a Rolling Stones TV special. Harrison experienced a more democratic form of music-making in the bucolic company of Bob Dylan's former backing musicians The Band, before staying with Dylan and his family in Woodstock. He was touched that Dylan, one of the few Western musicians he admired, did him the honour of helping him write a song – something that Lennon or McCartney had never been prepared to do.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 7