And then there were the intruders: more controversial figures whose names can still provoke a sharp intake of breath from true adherents of the Beatles cult. Suspected for their motives, hated for their disruptive power, they all arrived from America and were all regarded as suspects for the crime of breaking up the Beatles, on the assumption that without them the group would have continued happily in each other's company until their dying days. The first of these intruders was Yoko Ono; the second was Linda Eastman; and the third was Allen Klein.*6
With the possible exception of Alexis Mardas, who occupied a less central role, nobody in the Beatles' milieu has received a more damning verdict from historians than Allen Klein. He was, one said, 'a tough little scorpion'; for another, 'fast-talking, dirty-mouthed . . . sloppily dressed and grossly overweight'; again, 'short and fat, beady-eyed and greasily pompadoured'. Beatles aide Alistair Taylor said, 'He had all the charm of a broken lavatory seat.' Yet he inspired awe. In Eric Idle's satirical recasting of the myth he became (as impersonated by John Belushi) Ron Decline, so terrifying that his employees would hurl themselves out of skyscraper windows to avoid meeting him. So con sistent was the vilification that when biographer Philip Norman merely described Klein as 'a little tubby man', it sounded like a compliment.
Ono's sin was to be Japanese and to marry a Beatle; then, as it became apparent that she had dared to infiltrate the recording studio, she was maligned for interfering in their music and destroying their rapport. There was much sympathy in the late 1960s for the idea that she had turned Lennon 'weird'. Later, she was hated for her music, and for forcing that music upon Lennon's audience. Only after his death was she allowed to assume a milder role, as the grieving widow. Likewise, those who were appalled by McCartney's decision to marry Linda Eastman and then shocked to see wife on stage with husband, were mollified when Linda McCartney proved a caring mother, champion of animal rights and best-selling author of cookery books.
No such rehabilitation was available for Allen Klein, who entered the Beatles' story as a villain from central casting, and never escaped that role. Yet we are asked to believe that three of the four Beatles found this 'beady-eyed' 'grossly overweight' 'scorpion' such an attractive figure that they were prepared to trust him with their futures. Clearly the Demon King didn't always exude the stench of sulphur.
'Allen Klein could be the most charming and interesting person you'd ever met,' said Allan Steckler, who worked for him throughout this period. 'He knew more about music than most – he loved music. And he would have been the most brilliant psychologist of all time, because in ten or fifteen minutes he could get you to do anything he wanted. But he could be crude, rude and very uncaring. That's a strange mixture of qualities, but it was what made him a brilliant businessman.'
'I brought him to Apple,' Derek Taylor admitted, 'but I did give the Beatles certain solemn warnings. I told them to ask around, and said that he had various reputations, that he might get them a good financial deal, but might not be someone you would want to take home to your mother.' Klein's 'reputations' included an undeniable ability to squeeze cash out of record companies; like Lee Eastman, he excelled at locating royalty underpayments and other 'accidental' errors. It was a skill he had honed in the late 1950s, when he had persuaded Morris Levy, an entrepreneur with Mob connections, to pay singers Buddy Knox and Jimmy Bowen some belated royalties. His secret was meticulous examination of company accounts and an accountant's eye for loopholes. But his ability to conjure sizeable cheques out of entertainment corporations enabled him to appear as magical as Alexis Mardas to his famous clients (Bobby Darin and Sam Cooke among them), and with more justification.
Belying his subsequent image, Klein became a financial mentor to Cooke, treating him more like a brother than a client. Not that he overlooked opportunity: in March 1964 he agreed to represent the New York office of RCA Records in an audacious bid to steal the Beatles' recording contract from EMI. He offered Brian Epstein $2 million as a signing fee, plus a 10 per cent royalty, which would then have been the most lucrative deal in history. But for Epstein loyalty counted more than money. Klein approached Epstein again in 1966, when he heard that the EMI contract was being renewed, but this time he was refused a meeting. A year later Epstein was dead. 'I was driving a bridge out of New York and I heard on the radio that Epstein had died,' Klein admitted later, 'and I said to myself, "I got 'em!"'
Other elements of the British pop scene were more malleable. Between 1964 and 1967 Klein collected a financial interest in many of the era's most successful acts, among them the Rolling Stones, the Kinks, the Animals, Herman's Hermits, the Dave Clark Five and Donovan. He let their managers – the likes of Rolling Stones mentor Andrew Oldham – have the fame, and raked in his percentage as business manager. He was so diligent that he ended up owning many of the catalogues he represented. Among those who lost out was Oldham, who nonetheless retained fond memories of his ex-partner: 'He was in his early thirties, casually dressed in sports shirt and slacks, and I liked him. He was not greasy; he did not have three chins. He did not swear like a trooper or a gangster. He spoke calmly, invitingly and warmly and had eyes that pierced through you.' According to Klein, it was Oldham who embellished his image: 'Andrew liked having me portrayed as this shadowy American who could take care of anything. That was Andrew; he just created it, that I was like a gangster. He said they'd love it in England.'
The fact remains that, in Oldham's words, 'He started out representing us and ended up owning us.' Klein founded a US company with the same name as the Rolling Stones' UK publishing firm. Oldham and the Stones innocently assumed that when the US firm took over the rights to the Stones' catalogue in America, the band would end up in control. Instead, Nanker Phelge's US operation rested solely in the hands of Klein. When Oldham and the Stones fell out in 1967, Oldham had to sign over the UK Stones catalogue to Klein in order to finance his court battle. As Apple staffer Ken Mansfield recalled, 'Klein was virtually unbeatable in negotiations. His business dictionary had only one word in it: win! A picture of Klein's smiling face followed as the definition.'
Klein was still operating as the Rolling Stones' business manager in January 1969, when he read Lennon's admission that Apple was collapsing. He tried in vain to reach Lennon from New York, and then asked Tony Calder, Oldham's business partner in London, to intervene. Calder persuaded Derek Taylor to speak to Lennon. On 27 January, after another inconclusive day in the studio, Lennon and Ono met the American in the Harlequin Suite of the Dorchester Hotel on Park Lane. The following day Lennon wrote to EMI boss Sir Joseph Lockwood: 'I've asked Allen Klein to look after my things. Please give him any information he wants and full co-operation.' Five years after his first attempt to carve himself a slice of the Beatles, Klein had secured a quarter of the group in a single evening.
'Everyone knew that Klein wasn't a pleasant guy,' contended Apple aide Tony Bramwell. 'Don't get me wrong. I liked Klein, and I still do. But John had this attitude of dumb blindness as far as Klein was concerned.' Ignorant about business, and not interested in adding to his knowledge, Lennon relied solely on instinct. Klein, he decided, was a charming bruiser, a tough but vulnerable bear who had lost his mother young, like Lennon, and been raised in an orphanage.
Lennon instantly warmed to Klein's earthy humour, his obvious passion for music, his gratifying awareness of Lennon's own work, all qualities that marked him out from other businessmen. Ono too was flattered that Klein appeared to treat her seriously as an artist, and not just as an inconvenient adjunct to a Beatle. Klein told Lennon stories about the music business and Hollywood (he'd produced three Westerns, and a musical starring Herman's Hermits), and gossip about the Stones. Wary of meeting an accountant, Lennon was won over by Klein's humanity. Reputation counted for nothing: Lennon felt that Klein understood him, and that was enough. In any case, as Klein recalled, 'Yoko said that when she and John came to me, they were looking for a real shark – someone to keep the other sharks away.'
Le
nnon arrived at Apple the following day and told his colleagues that they had to meet this guy – he was great; he could solve all their problems. But there was an immediate complication. Clive Epstein had recently told the group that he wanted to sell his brother's company NEMS, in which the Beatles held a 10 per cent stake. McCartney had asked the Eastmans for advice, and they recommended that the Beatles buy NEMS outright, thereby ending the company's claim to commission on their record sales. To finance the deal, the Beatles should borrow the money from EMI. The Eastmans believed that they were acting on behalf of all four Beatles, but now they had to secure Klein's approval as well.
On the night of 28 January, Klein came to Apple, where he held a lengthy meeting with the entire group – so lengthy, in fact, that McCartney cried off shortly before midnight, complaining that there was more to life than business. The others remained, and by 2 a.m. both Harrison and Starkey had agreed to let Klein represent them too. He advised them not to proceed with the NEMS purchase, pointing out that to repay EMI's £1 million loan, they would have to earn many times that figure for the company. McCartney had already insisted that he was not prepared to discuss the problem unless John Eastman was present, and so a further meeting was scheduled after the Beatles' filming was completed.
'We met with Allen Klein,' Starkey recalled, 'and were convinced by him. Well, I was convinced by him, and John too. My impression of him when I first met him was brash – "I'll get it done, lads." Lots of enthusiasm. A good guy, with a pleasant attitude about himself in a really gross New York way.' Harrison concurred. 'I thought, Well, if that's the choice, I think I'll go with Klein, because John's with him, and he seemed to talk pretty straight.' And, like Lennon, Harrison could be swayed by social status: 'Because we were all from Liverpool we favoured people who were street people. Lee Eastman was more like a class-conscious type of person.' By 'class-conscious', Harrison meant precisely the social niceties that had always impressed McCartney (but never Lennon). 'Eastman wasn't a polo-neck and chinos kind of guy, like Allen,' said Tony Bramwell. 'The Eastmans were always in suits.'
Unlike Harrison and Starkey, McCartney was no longer prepared to follow Lennon's leadership without challenge. Mick Jagger, he decided, would tell them the truth, but when the Rolling Stones vocalist came to Apple, he was uninformative, saying only, 'He's all right if you like that kind of thing'.*7 Klein's presence at the meeting presumably encouraged Jagger to guard his tongue. Lee Eastman, who could glimpse his potential stake in the Beatles ebbing away, was
more forthright. Klein, he said, could not be trusted. The financial regulators of Wall Street had been investigating the operation of Cameo-Parkway, the company that Klein now ran. Eastman was convinced that Klein had been guilty of insider trading, though he had been cleared of any wrongdoing. Within a matter of days, Klein renamed Cameo-Parkway ABKCO – ABK denoting Allen and Betty Klein. Moreover, Eastman informed McCartney that Klein was being investigated on charges of failing to file tax returns; the implication was that Klein had been caught evading tax. †3 John Eastman agreed to fly immediately from New York to present the facts to the other Beatles.
'Apart from the fact that John Eastman [became] my brother-in-law, I trusted him,' McCartney recounted. 'I distrusted Klein.' It was against this background that the Beatles played their rooftop concert. 'This was the first time in the history of the Beatles that a possible irreconcilable difference had appeared between us,' McCartney said in legal testimony two years later. 'I was most anxious not to stand out against the wishes of the other three except on proper grounds. I therefore thought it right to take part in discussions concerning the possible appointment of Klein, though I did not in the least want him as my manager.'
The day after the Beatles had recorded McCartney's conciliatory ballad 'Let It Be', the group returned to Apple to discuss their future with Allen Klein and John Eastman. Lennon immediately took offence because Lee Eastman had sent his son rather than attending the meeting himself; of course, if the senior Eastman had appeared, Lennon would have accused him of being old and out of touch. Lennon noted later, 'John Eastman gave me the impression of being an inexperienced and somewhat excitable and easily confused young man.' Klein had spent the intervening days on his favourite turf, scouring the small print of the Beatles' accounts. The ostensible agenda for the 1 February meeting was the possible purchase of NEMS, but that was merely the ground on which Lennon and McCartney had chosen to exhibit their show ponies. Eastman opened the contest by setting out the case for the Beatles owning NEMS, as they would thereby regain a crucial stake in Lennon/McCartney's publishing firm Northern Songs. Aside from the 2 per cent of shares that Lennon had given to his son and first wife, he and McCartney held equal quantities of Northern Songs shares – or so he thought. In fact, the Eastmans had been encouraging McCartney to buy shares held by outside parties, to boost his negotiating power.
Klein responded by advising caution: he had been asked by three of the group to look into the Beatles' financial affairs, he said, and his work was not yet complete. 'It was agreed by all four Beatles that I should be the person to look into the financial position of those com panies,' he recalled. But Eastman wasn't about to leave his supremacy unchallenged. In Klein's words, he 'launched an attack on my personal integrity' and 'alleged I had a bad reputation in general'. It was a grave tactical error. Eastman hoped he might loosen Klein's grip on Lennon by showing him cuttings about the unusual trading in Cameo-Parkway shares, but his assault merely solidified Lennon's sympathy for his victimised champion. Eastman may have expected Klein to launch a volley of New York street rhetoric, but Klein calmly defused the row, and the meeting was adjourned for two days. When it resumed, both sides had a trophy to display: Apple announced that it had asked Allen Klein – 'a New York business expert' in the words of The Times – to 'look into all their affairs, and he has agreed to do so'. Klein promised to produce a full statement of the Beatles' financial situation. That night he persuaded Clive Epstein to delay the sale of NEMS for three weeks, and then booked a flight to New York, so he could investigate the group's US income. Meanwhile, the Eastmans were appointed Apple's legal advisers. Music business analysts took their appointment as proof of 'a stepped-up campaign to maximise the act's business potential on a world level. Eastman's office will act as a clearing-house for all deals involving the Beatles and their activities in recording, writing, filming and other matters.'
To an outside eye it appeared as if the Beatles had solved their financial crisis. The Eastmans promised to bring security to the group's affairs, with a conservative integrity reminiscent of the Epstein era. The more mercurial Klein, meanwhile, would terrify the Beatles' commercial partners, especially EMI and its US arm Capitol Records, into producing any unaccountably delayed royalties. Meanwhile, the Beatles could continue their 'recording, writing, filming and other matters', convinced that they would no longer be exposing themselves to ruin.
This settlement depended on several assumptions, however: that Klein and the Eastmans could work in harmony; that neither had any aspirations towards assuming total control of the Beatles' management; and, most important, that the Beatles could still function as a creative unit. All three were soon in doubt.
The arrangement between Klein and the Eastmans depended on mutual communication and cooperation, and both principles swiftly collapsed. 'We co-operated with Klein for about two weeks,' John Eastman said. 'It was agreed that both of us would see all the Beatles' documents, but Klein took out all the important stuff and sent along a huge bundle of documents containing nothing of importance.' Klein was unapologetic: 'I ripped off those documents, damn right! But Eastman and McCartney had already gone behind our backs buying Northern Songs shares.'
A more immediate problem was NEMS. On 14 February, Lee Eastman wrote to Clive Epstein to suggest a meeting at which they could discuss not only the state of Beatles affairs, but also 'the propriety of the negotiations' that Brian Epstein had conducted with EMI on the group's behalf in 1966. 'Prop
riety'? As far as Clive Epstein was concerned, the language was incendiary: this American was calling his late brother a crook. He demanded an explanation and then authorised the sale of his mother's stake in NEMS – 70 per cent of the company's shares – to a merchant banker, Leonard Richenberg of Triumph Investment Trust. A quarter of the Beatles' earnings from EMI would now effectively be controlled by financiers with no personal interest in the group. Hastily recalled from New York by a panicked phone call from Neil Aspinall, Klein was quietly elated: in his eyes Eastman had just damaged his credibility. There was a conference at the Dorchester Hotel, and the group signed a memo to EMI demanding that all their future royalties – including the 25 per cent intended for NEMS – now be sent to the Beatles' own merchant bankers. Confused about exactly where the money should go, EMI decided to retain it and wait for a clinching legal opinion. The new alliance of Eastman and Klein was already in disarray.
Klein returned to New York on 12 March 1969. As his flight left Heathrow, crowds of crying teenagers gathered at Marylebone Register Office in central London, where Linda Eastman had finally agreed to become Paul McCartney's wife. Now it was McCartney's turn to worry: was it still possible to separate his personal life from his business problems? The Eastmans had been eager to see the wedding proceed, but was that because it suited their professional purposes? On the eve of the marriage the couple quarrelled, and the event was nearly cancelled. Beatles aide Mal Evans recalled, 'He was saying to me, "Look, I'm scared stiff of getting married. Do you think I should?"' But the McCartney marriage proved to be a remarkable success story.
One of Evans's colleagues had misgivings about the match. To Alistair Taylor, Linda was 'a hard-faced star-chaser from the United States' who had 'set out to get Paul' and who was determined to divide her husband from 'anyone who had been close to Paul, especially during his relationship with Jane'. But despite the catcalls of disappointed fans that greeted the newly married couple, Linda's position was hardly enviable. She was acutely aware that her husband's future and her family's business reputation were now mutually dependent. 'You can't know how hard it was,' she told her friend Danny Fields. 'I was suddenly in the middle of a situation where the Beatles were breaking up; Paul was really upset; there was a whole business and legal thing happening which took everyone's energy; and I hated it. I thought it was going to be all peace and love and music, and it was wartime. Plus, everyone hated me, those horrible groupies always in front of the house, calling me names, spitting at me.'
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 9