None of the other Beatles attended the ceremony: Lennon and Ono were at Abbey Road Studios, Starkey was filming with Peter Sellers and Harrison remained at Apple, where his wife phoned to report that they were being raided by the drugs squad. 'Tell them where it is,' Harrison said, and a minimal amount of marijuana was shown to the police. Two of the Beatles had now been targeted by the same officers; could further visits be ruled out? The landlords of Starkey's London flat, where Lennon had been staying, took the hint, instituting proceedings to have Lennon and Ono banned from entering the premises.
Within days of McCartney's wedding, Lennon and Ono flew out of the country in search of a venue for their own marriage. They couldn't wed in Britain without negotiating with immigration officials about Ono's status, and as usual Lennon wanted to act immediately. France was their first choice, and the couple spent 'four days shopping, eating and doing things. Just being in love, in the spring in Paris, it was beautiful.' But legal barriers remained until Apple executive Peter Brown discovered that the British colony of Gibraltar would permit them to marry without any legal delays. In those unlikely surroundings, on 20 March 1969, Lennon and Ono became man and wife. 'I broke down, and John nearly did too,' Ono said. 'Marriage is so old-fashioned, it's like dressing up in old clothes.' In fact, both bride and groom were dressed in virginal white, though her minidress and his unkempt beard and plimsolls weren't orthodox. Neither was the couple's vision of the ceremony as an art event. 'We are going to stage many happenings and events together,' Ono declared, 'and this marriage was one of them.' Lennon added, 'Everything we do we shall be doing together. I don't mean I shall break up the Beatles or anything, but we want to share everything.' The full implications soon became clear, when the couple devoted their honeymoon to a 'bed-in' for peace in front of the world's press. For the remainder of the year, global peace dominated the Lennons' lives. With almost obsessive fervour, they gave literally hundreds of interviews, each devoted to the same well-intentioned but simplistic message.
The Lennons' crusade distracted attention from the Beatles' future and cemented the public perception of the couple as two people with one identity. Yet even in bed the past tugged remorselessly at their pyjama sleeves. One reporter wondered what Lennon made of Starkey's recent comments that he had no intention of performing in public with the Beatles again. 'I don't miss being a Beatle any more,' the drummer admitted. 'You can't get those days back. It's no good living in the past.' From Lennon or McCartney, his statement would have been front-page news. Instead, it was trumped by Lennon's conviction that the group 'will give several public shows this year'. As Derek Taylor told the press, 'It would be indelicate for us to comment whilst John and Ringo are so obviously in disagreement.' But promoter Sid Bernstein, who had staged the first US shows by the group in 1964, felt this an appropriate moment to offer them $4 million for four North American shows. George Harrison offered a typically convoluted verdict on the Beatles' current status: 'We've got to a point where we can see each other quite clearly. And by allowing each other to be each other, we can become the Beatles again.'
Four was no longer their magic number, however. In 1968 the problem had been creative: how to function as four Beatles plus one avant-garde artist. Now their financial crisis dominated all thoughts of art, and the Beatles had to balance the two factions vying to control them.
Meanwhile, a new legal front had opened. While Klein and Eastman were distracted by the situation with NEMS, chaos was advancing from another direction. On 28 March, Dick James, managing director of Lennon/McCartney's publishing firm Northern Songs, agreed to sell his shareholding and that of his fellow director Emmanuel Silver to ATV, the entertainment conglomerate run by Sir Lew Grade. Sir Lew, a character in the great British storybook noted for the length of his cigars and the brevity of his wit, was one of three brothers who dominated show business in the 1960s. The Beatles had no time for them: they were the old-school impresarios who had first scorned Brian Epstein, and then embraced him as soon as the group became successful. For both symbolic and financial reasons, they were adamant that Grade should not win control of their songwriting catalogue. But with James's portion Grade now held around 35 per cent of the shares; the Beatles and their associates could only muster 30 per cent. The race was on to achieve a majority shareholding, and control of the company.
'They are my shares and my songs and I want to keep a bit of the end product,' Lennon declared from his Amsterdam bedroom. 'I don't have to ring Paul. I know damn well he feels the same as I do.' Both Lennon and McCartney phoned Klein at the Puerto Rican hotel where he was enjoying a brief holiday, and asked him to come to London and save their publishing copyrights.
For the next few months these two legal battles dominated the Beatles' landscape. Even with a completely united team – musicians and businessmen alike – it was unlikely that they could outbid Triumph Investments and gain control of NEMS, while the balance of power in the Northern Songs dispute was delicately weighted. But rather than cementing their relationships, these legal complexities drove the Beatles and their defenders further apart.
Underlying both issues was a stark reality: the four musicians were running short of cash. 'I had many meetings with the Beatles,' Klein testified in 1971, 'and I made it clear to them that their financial position was perilous. I took the view that my first task was to help them generate enough income to alleviate this situation.' He decided that their recording deal was still the most stable, and potentially most lucrative, aspect of their empire. 'I wanted to negotiate a new recording arrangement with EMI,' he declared, aware that the group had already fulfilled their part of the 1967 deal. 'Discussions were held with the Beatles and John Eastman as to how EMI should be approached and who should go to a meeting with them.' Though Eastman insisted that legal matters were his affair, all four Beatles agreed to let Klein represent them – thereby causing McCartney some embarrassment with his in-laws.
The focus then shifted to the battle for Northern Songs. Lennon and McCartney confronted Dick James at McCartney's house on 2 April, as the publisher tried to explain why he had broken his word and sold his shares without warning them first. 'He wrapped it up in silver paper,' Lennon said afterwards. 'But it doesn't matter how you wrap it up, it's still a bomb.' To counter Grade's bid for control, the Beatles attempted to raise nearly £2 million to buy the 14 per cent of the company held by an independent group known as the Consortium; if this was added to the Beatles' existing shares, victory would be almost certain. These negotiations endured for months, and at various times both the Beatles and Grade claimed victory, only for an embarrassing retraction to be issued the following day. Two key questions remained. Could the Beatles muster the business acumen to run Northern Songs successfully, given the confused state of Apple's finances? And could Allen Klein be trusted?
Consortium members who saw the Sunday Times on 13 April 1969 might have felt that they knew the answers. The paper's celebrated 'Insight' team of investigative reporters had prepared a damning portrait of 'The Toughest Wheeler Dealer in the Pop Jungle'. As Derek Taylor recalled, the article said Klein 'was a liar, a self-publicist, said he was involved in tax-evasion charges, said he went to see Mr Morley Richenberg [of Triumph Investments] wearing a dirty polo-necked sweater'. Klein objected. 'He is funny that way,' Taylor noted ironically. The inevitable consequence was a libel suit.
With the scene switching from bed-in to boardroom, honeymoon to High Court, the Beatles' musical career – the supposed focus of this scattered, frantic activity – seemed strangely irrelevant. Their January 1969 film project was stagnant, although a single ('Get Back') had been extracted to give the impression of business as usual. No sooner had it reached the shops than Lennon wanted to cut another single for immediate release. Entitled 'The Ballad of John and Yoko', it chronicled the Lennons' wedding and honeymoon. As neither Harrison nor Starkey was available, just two Beatles entered Abbey Road studio on 14 April, McCartney playing drums and Lennon lead guitar. 'I didn't mind n
ot being on the record,' Harrison recalled, 'because it was none of my business. If it had been "The Ballad of John, George and Yoko", then I would have been on it.' A film clip was prepared to promote the song, mixing newsreels of the Lennons with footage from the January 1969 sessions. A drum skin showing the familiar Beatles logo was shown upside down for a few seconds, as if to reflect Ono's impact on the group. In America the single was packaged in a sleeve that pictured all five Beatles: Lennon, McCartney, Harrison, Starkey and Ono. 'Yoko used to sit in on the photos, and we didn't really know how to tell her to get out,' McCartney complained later, 'because she was John's bird. You couldn't really say, "Excuse me, John, can you get her out?" George wasn't too happy about it, but then none of us were.'
Engineers at that recording session reported that Lennon and McCartney had rarely seemed happier. But any hint of rapprochement was quickly dispelled. Lennon veered between fascination at the machinations of the business world ('Businessmen play the game the way we play music, and it's something to see') and contempt ('I'm not going to be fucked around by men in suits sitting on their fat arses in the City'). McCartney simply felt out of his depth. 'This was like playing Monopoly on a very large scale with lawyers,' he recalled. 'I never used to be very good at the game, anyway; I used to get real tense. And when it was real houses and real money and real Park Lanes and real Savile Rows, it got very fraught.'
Then something happened that polarised the two Beatles so dramatically, the rift was impossible to repair: Lee Eastman came to town, to lend his weight to his son's struggle against Allen Klein. At 59, he was twice as old as Lennon, and 21 years the senior of Klein. He represented Park Avenue privilege, old-school values, tailored conservatism and, as Harrison had already noted, 'class-consciousness'. When Klein and John Eastman insulted each other – as they had, after the 'propriety' letter to Clive Epstein in February – the invective was raw but somehow equal, Klein's 'piece of crap' and 'shithead' being matched scatologically by Eastman's 'perfect asshole'. The confluence of imagery seemed to suggest some form of grudging mutual respect.
There was no rapport, however, between Klein and the senior (and more voluble) Eastman. As Lee remarked later, 'I won't do business with him; he's a swine. When you go to bed with a louse, you get lousy.' At two successive meetings, Klein reported, Eastman 'launched into an emotional tirade against me' and 'created another unpleasant scene'. He claimed, 'I thought it best not to retaliate.' Klein was a shrewd judge of human frailty. He reckoned that Eastman senior was operating on a short fuse, and that sarcasm would provide the spark. Klein chipped away at Eastman's dignity, and Eastman duly exploded. Lennon had just learned that Eastman had been born Lee Epstein, but had changed his name to aid his assimilation into smart New York circles, so he pointedly called him 'Mr Epstein' throughout. When Eastman bit back, Ono asked him, 'Will you please stop insulting my husband? Don't call my husband stupid.' Eastman yelled at Klein, 'You are a rodent, the lowest scum on earth.' It was effectively an admission of defeat. Lennon goaded Eastman, telling him that he was the 'fucking animal', not Klein. Through it all, McCartney watched in horrified silence, feeling a grim sense of responsibility for both his colleague and his father-in-law. Lennon showed no such sensitivity: to him, McCartney was now merely another member of the Eastman family.
On 18 April, four short days after the apparent rebirth of the Lennon/McCartney partnership, the two men came close to blows at Apple. The Eastmans advised McCartney not to add his block of Northern Songs shares to Lennon's as collateral for the loan the Beatles needed for their takeover bid. Allen Klein offered to make up the shortfall with his £750,000 worth of shares in the film company MGM, but the symbolism was inescapable: the Eastmans wanted McCartney to treat himself as a separate entity from the other Beatles. Then Klein informed Lennon that McCartney had secretly been increasing his stake in Northern Songs. 'John flew into a rage,' recalled Apple executive Peter Brown. 'At one point I thought he was really going to hit Paul, but he managed to calm himself down.' One unconfirmed report of this meeting had Lennon leaping towards Linda McCartney, his fists raised in her face.
After the meeting Lennon, Harrison and Starkey signed a letter officially banishing Lee Eastman: 'Dear Mr Eastman, This is to inform you of the fact that you are not authorized to act or hold yourself out as the attorney or legal representative of "The Beatles" or of any of the companies which The Beatles own or control.' McCartney could only interpret this as a personal rejection.
Incredibly, the Beatles continued to collaborate during this traumatic week, laying down the initial track for a new George Harrison song, 'Something'. Its opening line – 'Something in the way she moves' – was lifted from a song on a James Taylor album Apple had issued the previous year. 'I was pleased to think that I'd had an impact on the Beatles,' Taylor remembered. 'Anyway, the end of my song was just like "I Feel Fine". So I didn't think of what George had done as plagiarism, because I had already stolen from them.' Harrison seemed to have been unaware of the borrowed lyric; maybe he simply regarded the theft as an employer's prerogative. In either case, Lennon found an excuse to leave the studio, as he often did when Harrison's material was recorded in 1968 and 1969.
Lennon was a master of compartmentalisation during this period: he retained the ability to scream at McCartney in meetings, insult his wife and her family, and then expect to work with him as if nothing had happened. So it was that on 30 April Lennon and McCartney completed work on a playful song left unfinished in 1967: 'You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)'. It was no more than a collage of musical pastiches, but McCartney remembered this as his favourite Beatles session – perhaps because it only involved him and Lennon, or because it represented the final occasion on which the two men worked as an authentic partnership.
In public the pair still presented a united front. Lennon later presented himself as a vigorous opponent of the legendary 'medley' that dominated Side 2 of their Abbey Road album, but he was the first member of the group to boast about the idea. In the same interview he revealed that he and McCartney were enjoying a ferocious creative spurt, and claimed that 'the outcome of this whole financial business doesn't matter. We'll still be making records, and somebody will be copping some money and we'll be copping some money, and that'll be that.' The more practical McCartney channelled his frustration into a melodious song entitled 'You Never Give Me Your Money'. Looking back in 1996, he explained that the song wasn't directed 'to the other members of the band. I didn't really feel like they were to blame. We were kind of all in it together, and it wasn't really until Allen Klein came in that we got really divisive and started getting our own lawyers and stuff. Cos he divided us. It was basically him that divided us.' The role played by the Eastmans, and McCartney's preference for them over Klein, was conveniently forgotten.
Certainly McCartney lacked Lennon's knack for separating his personal and professional lives. Lennon was proclaiming that he had finally rediscovered himself: 'I got lost in the Beatles, and now it's John Lennon again. I'm always John and Yoko, that never stops, we're a 24-hour couple. So whatever I'm doing as Beatles, Yoko's sitting on my shoulder like a parrot.' But McCartney believed in himself as a Beatle, first and foremost, and an equal partner with Lennon, and he understandably felt each assault from his colleague as a thrust to the heart. Gill Pritchard, one of the so-called Scruffs, the fans who stood patiently outside Abbey Road Studios and Apple's HQ waiting for the Beatles to appear, remembered the night when 'Paul came racing out of the front door of the studio in tears, went home and didn't come back. The next day he didn't turn up at all even though the studio was booked.' Another fan, Wendy Sutcliffe, continued the story:
John was really angry because they were all waiting, and he came storming out of the studio and made off towards Paul's house. We followed and when he got there he stood outside and just banged on the door again and again, calling for Paul to open up. Paul didn't answer so John climbed the gate and hammered on his door. Then they had a screaming match. He was s
houting that George and Ringo had both come in from the country and Paul didn't even bother to let anyone know he couldn't make the session.
While the Beatles' erratic progress towards a new album continued, Allen Klein sought to consolidate his position. He believed he was about to achieve the ambition that he had first revealed in 1964: becoming the Beatles' manager. He had already established dominion over their Apple headquarters in March, with permission from all four of the group to impose the redundancies that McCartney had wanted the previous year.
'On a bad day,' Derek Taylor conceded, 'Apple could look as if it was being trespassed upon. We might run into one of our paymasters on the stairs, holding what John described as a steak sandwich. Then they would say, "Who are these cunts? We're paying for them all." But a certain amount of extravagance was necessary, because we had invited the great and near-great to come to Apple.' Among the acts who approached the company that spring were two of the best-selling groups of the next decade, Fleetwood Mac and Crosby, Stills and Nash, although eventually neither was signed. Taylor understood, however, that 'if you are one of the Beatles, paying for it all, it doesn't matter that this is an institution that you have created, you can still be bad-tempered about it. And all of them finally said, "I didn't mean it to be like this." No one was in charge. Everyone had their own autonomy, and all of it cost money. But people did turn up to work every day, and work. The work never stopped.'
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 10