The response from Allen Klein was also rational, within his own world view. Spector had invited comment from McCartney, who had chosen not to speak. Now that the production process of the album had begun, McCartney had finally decided to object. Klein's motive was to safeguard the company against interference, no matter what the source, and on 14 April, the company needed to push ahead with the album, to ensure that the release date was met. The time for remixing was over. Klein attempted to phone McCartney but discovered that the musician had once again changed his number. So, Klein recalled, 'I sent a telegram to the effect that I did not understand his letter, and asking him to call me or Phil Spector direct. I added a postscript that Mr Starkey wanted his telephone number. The following day a message was relayed to me that the letter spoke for itself. By this time it was too late to do anything about altering the record, in view of the time required for its production before release.' A few days later McCartney ingenuously told a reporter, 'I've sent Klein a letter asking for some of the things to be altered, but I haven't received an answer yet.' But by then he must have known what the answer would be.
So McCartney took his case to the people. He used an interview with Ray Connolly of the Evening Standard to expose the full palette of his objections to Klein, the Let It Be album, the bizarre restrictions that he now faced from his own company, but not, at least overtly, the other Beatles. Even Klein was spared savage criticism. McCartney presented his case as a lament, not an accusation: 'The party's over, but none of us wants to admit it . . . Allen Klein keeps saying that I don't like him because I want Eastman to manage the Beatles . . . I thought, and still think, that Linda's father would have been good for us and I decided I wanted him, but all the others wanted Klein. Well, all right . . . that's up to them . . . but he doesn't represent me.' As an illustration of the gulf that had opened within the Lennon/McCartney partnership, he explained, 'We don't do harmonies like we used to. I think it's sad. On "Come Together", I would have liked to have sung harmony with John, and I think he would have liked me to, but I was too embarrassed to ask him.' He was a scared child, alone in the dark forest of intrigue. 'I don't work to the best of my abilities in that situation.' He ended with a Lennonesque cry from the heart: 'Give us our freedom, which we so richly deserve. We are beginning now only to call each other when we have bad news . . . We're all talking about peace and love, but really, we're not feeling peaceful at all. There's no one to blame, we were fools to get ourselves into this situation in the first place.' It was a clear gesture of conciliation: there was no one to blame, not even Klein; the responsibility was owned collectively by the four 'fools' and their advisers; all they needed to do was obey their inner longing for 'peace and love'. While he was undoubtedly hoping to appear as a man of reason and goodwill, these were not the words of someone who had issued a triumphant manifesto of liberation less than two weeks earlier. He wanted détente followed by reconciliation, but like his effort to alter the Beatles' album, he had – by accident or unconscious design – left it too late.
In any event his most important audience was scattered. His relationship with Richard Starkey had been scarred by the confrontation of 31 March. In late April John Lennon and Yoko Ono left England for Los Angeles, to pursue a summer of Primal Scream Therapy during which they were effectively out of contact with Apple, the Beatles and the attendant disputes. Harrison took the same flight, intending to work with Bob Dylan. Just before he left, McCartney phoned him in Henley, and as Harrison recalled, 'came on like Attila the Hun. I had to hold the receiver away from my ear.' Once again McCartney had let emotion sway his judgement. As Harrison would soon reveal, he was still open to the prospect of reconciliation, but rather than negotiating McCartney had poured out all the vitriol he'd been repressing, all the anger he felt about the way that his friends had gone behind his back and distorted his work, all the bitterness and grief.
Harrison retained a sense of objectivity. The youngest Beatle, he was now the group's wisest spokesman. 'We all have to sacrifice a little in order to gain something really big,' he explained as he arrived in New York. 'And there is a big gain by recording together, I think musically and financially and spiritually. For the rest of the world, you know, I think that Beatle music is such a big sort of scene, that I think it's the least we could do, to sacrifice three months of the year, at least, just to do an album or two. I think it's very selfish if the Beatles don't record together.' Could the Beatles work together again? 'It's easy,' he replied. 'We've done it for years. We all know that we're all separate individuals, and all we have to do is accept that we're all individuals and that we all have as much potential as each other.'
The message was universal, but the implication was specific: for Harrison the Beatles could only function if the group was accepted as a partnership of four equals, and three equal songwriters, rather than a power base of two. 'There was a point in my life when I realised anybody could be Lennon/McCartney,' Harrison reflected. 'The point is, nobody's special.' And the particular 'nobody' he had in mind was his school friend Paul McCartney. 'Everybody changes, and sometimes people don't want other people to change, or even if you do change they won't accept that you've changed, and they keep in mind some other image of you.' Harrison didn't need to add that musicians beyond the Beatles were prepared to accept him as a creative artist. He was about to go into the studio with Bob Dylan, perhaps the only contemporary artist all four Beatles were prepared to recognise as their superior, and Dylan accepted him on a basis of equality, not polite sufferance or open derision. Their relationship had none of the jagged competition that had marked Dylan's sporadic friendship with Lennon. Dylan recognised the depth of Harrison's spirituality and found a gentle humour and heart in the Liverpudlian that ensured their relationship would survive for decades to come.
The creative freedom offered by the Dylan sessions and the prospect of an epic recording adventure with Phil Spector allowed Harrison to separate the Beatles as an institution from his repressed role in the group. Yet he still found it difficult to avoid pinpointing McCartney as the source of any conflict or tension. He could describe the 'bitchiness' between Lennon and McCartney as 'childish' and then say, 'I get on well with Ringo and John, and I try my best to get on with Paul.' It was McCartney, he said, who 'wouldn't let me out of the bag' and recognise his flourishing creativity. 'The conflict musically was [with] Paul,' he admitted, 'and yet I could play with any other band or musician and have a reasonably good time.'
The launch of Apple marked the moment when McCartney went off the rails, Harrison believed. 'Really it was his idea to do Apple, and once it started going Paul was very active in there, and then it got really chaotic and we had do something about it. When we started doing something about it, obviously Paul didn't have as much say in the matter.' And then the battle between Klein and the Eastmans had begun. Harrison said that he wished Klein had been their manager from the beginning, but that McCartney didn't agree – 'that's only a personal problem that he'll have to get over . . . It's a difficult one to overcome because – well, you can think of the subtleties. He's really living with it. When I go home at night, I'm not living there with Allen Klein, whereas in a way Paul's living with the Eastmans.' What McCartney failed to recognise was the power of democracy:
The reality is that he's outvoted, and we're a partnership. We've got these companies which we all own 25 per cent of each, and if there's a decision to be made, then, like in any other business or group, you have a vote, and he was outvoted three to one, and if he doesn't like it, it's really a pity. Because we're trying to do what's best for the Beatles as a group, or best for Apple as a company. We're not trying to do what's best for Paul and his in-laws.'
The Harrison quote that went around the world that spring was purely optimistic: 'Everyone is trying to do his own album, and I am too. But after that I'm ready to go back with the others.' No one doubted that Starkey would go along with the majority. Now even Lennon was prepared to hint at a positive outcome: 'I've n
o idea if the Beatles will work together again, or not. I never really have. It was always open. If somebody didn't feel like it, that's it! It could be a rebirth or a death. We'll see what it is. It'll probably be a rebirth.'
For McCartney it felt more like asphyxiation. 'It was murderous,' he recalled. 'I was having dreams, amazing dreams about Klein, running around after me with some hypodermic needle, like a crazy dentist.' But the nights paled alongside the days. 'I was impossible,' he admitted in 1984. 'I don't know how anyone could have lived with me. For the first time in my life, I was on the scrap heap, in my own eyes.' Since the age of 15 he had been John Lennon's friend, collaborator, partner, confidant; from 18 he had been a Beatle; from 20 he had been a star. His artistic abilities weren't in doubt, but what use was McCartney without the Beatles? His account of the spring and summer of 1970 reads like a textbook description of clinical depression: 'It was just the feeling, the terrible disappointment of not being of any use to anyone any more. It was a barrelling, empty feeling that just rolled across my soul . . . I really was done in for the first time in my life. Until then I really was a kind of cocky sod. It was the first time I'd had a major blow to my confidence.' The effect on his wife, he said, was devastating: 'She had to deal with this guy who didn't particularly want to get out of bed and, if he did, wanted to go back to bed pretty soon after. He wanted to drink earlier and earlier each day, and didn't really see the point in shaving, because where was he going? And I was generally pretty morbid.' He lingered in a state of psychological self-destruction, pointless, endless, inescapable.
Only one avenue promised relief: full legal separation from the rest of the Beatles. If they didn't want him any more, why did they insist on keeping him locked into this financial and spiritual prison? The Eastmans couldn't soften his despair, but they could spar with Klein, parry his blows and hope to land a punch. John Eastman made the initial assault, inviting Klein to a meeting at the University Club in midtown Manhattan. The venue, perhaps the grandest of New York's private rooms, might have been designed to intimidate Klein. Eastman negotiated with the politesse that the venue demanded. Was there a way, he wondered, in which McCartney might be able to secure the fruits of his own labour, rather than adding them to the Beatles' collective pot? Klein didn't reject Eastman's proposal; he merely pointed out the potential tax liability that might be accrued if, as Eastman suggested, the individual Beatles exchanged some of their assets within the Apple group. Then Lee Eastman entered the ring with characteristic bluntness. He drafted a letter to Klein demanding that McCartney be freed from his partnership with the other Beatles immediately. Klein didn't bother to reply. Next McCartney suggested that he should cover all his own expenses in future in return for being allowed to take £1,500 per month from the Beatles' account. The reply was predictably negative.
'Eventually,' McCartney recalled, 'I went and said, "I want to leave. You can all get on with Klein and everything, just let me out."' Having not spoken to Lennon for several weeks, he sent him a letter that summer, pleading that the former partners 'let each other out of the trap'. As McCartney testified, Lennon 'replied with a photograph of himself and Yoko, with a balloon coming out of his mouth in which was written, "How and Why?" I replied by letter saying, "How by signing a paper which says we hereby dissolve our partnership. Why because there is no partnership." John replied on a card which said, "Get well soon. Get the other signatures and I will think about it."' Communication was at an end. Yet the press continued to believe, fired by hope more than evidence, that it was only a matter of days before the four men healed their wounds. The stories taunted McCartney, who fired off a letter to the prime offender, Melody Maker: 'Dear Mailbag, In order to put out of its misery the limping dog of a news story which has been dragging itself across your pages for the past year, my answer to the question, "Will the Beatles get together again?" . . . is no.' He had finally pronounced the verdict that was missing from his self-interview in April: the Beatles were no more.
There had been little evidence to the contrary during the intervening months. Apple released the McCartney album on 17 April 1970, and Klein couldn't resist a public riposte to the musician's jibes. In US music trade magazines Apple took out their standard advertisements for the record, to which Klein affixed an incendiary statement of fact: Apple, it said, was 'an ABKCO-managed company'. McCartney was incensed, and booked rival ads for his album which featured photographs of him looking inappropriately coy or mock-serious, but carried no mention of Apple, let alone ABKCO. The clear victors were the advertising salesmen, able to sell space for the same record to both sides.
In an effort to reinforce McCartney's separation from Klein, the Eastmans contacted EMI to insist that all royalty payments for his album should be sent directly to them, not paid to Apple. EMI executive Len Wood replied apologetically that this was impossible: the company had a contract with Apple not the Eastmans.
Sales of McCartney soon outstripped those of the Hey Jude compilation album assembled by Klein, but in turn were overtaken by the Beatles' Let It Be in May. NEW LP SHOWS THEY COULDN'T CARE LESS, trumpeted Britain's best-selling pop paper, the New Musical Express. Reviewer Alan Smith characterised Let It Be as 'a cheapskate epitaph, a cardboard tombstone, a sad and tatty end to a musical fusion which wiped clean and drew again the face of pop music'. And there was more: 'narcissistic pin-ups and chocolate box dressing', 'contempt for the intelligence of today's record-buyer', 'lost their self-respect', 'sold out all the principles for which they ever stood', 'hype in a pretty packet'. There were complaints about the cost of the package, with its elegant paperback book chronicling the January 1969 sessions in enigmatic words and sumptuous photographs. In keeping with the Beatles' current level of cohesion, the binding of the book soon disintegrated: 'a cheapskate epitaph' indeed.
There were harsh words too for the Let It Be film, and its 'pseudo- cinéma-vérité attempt to canonise' the Beatles. One US reviewer, Billboard's Ed Ochs, pronounced sentence on the Beatles and the age they represented with a contemptuous demolition of their appeal: 'four moppet dolls who, for the good part of a decade, have danced and squealed as the creative playthings of a great mass who built an economy around their pleasant music'. And this from a magazine that still depended on Apple's advertising dollars. Was the Beatle decade nothing but collective self-deception?
Apple's beleaguered managing director Neil Aspinall hoped not. As Let It Be was premiered, the company announced that Aspinall was compiling a second documentary, which would span the Beatles' career from Liverpool to the London legal offices where their future was decided. It was assumed that the four members of the group would be interviewed for the project, which would in any case be released before Christmas 1970. Its working title was borrowed from McCartney's controversially abused song 'The Long and Winding Road'.
While the film did little more than mediocre business, the Let It Be soundtrack – symbolically packaged in a sleeve that featured separate portraits of its creators, with a fatuous note claiming that it was 'a new phase Beatles album' – was a remarkable success, as fans rushed to experience what they believed would be their final taste of the Fab Four. Allen Klein proudly announced that he had ordered four million copies of the album to be pressed in the USA, and that 3.2 million of those had been sent out to stores. The gulf between those two figures would become the subject of legal arguments several years later. For now, the album topped the American charts, and so did the two singles that accompanied it: the title track followed by a sardonic choice from Klein, the much-maligned Phil Spector production of 'The Long and Winding Road'. If the track was so lousy, he could have asked McCartney that summer, why had it reached No. 1?
This commercial success could not disguise the fact that Klein's empire was precariously placed. He had arrived at Apple when the company was unprofitable but still steaming ahead on idealism. 'Apple was an astonishing place to come into from the outside world,' press officer Derek Taylor commented twenty years later. 'All the rooms were d
ifferent, but none of them was at all conventional, or like anything that anyone had known before. And it was all done unselfconsciously; it wasn't as if we were all walking around showing off, we were all free spirits.' Any spirit of freedom had vanished with the sackings, the checks on expenses, the ABKCO accountants monitoring the Liverpool insiders who had served the Beatles since the beginning. 'We were working for people who were so famous that there was really no precedent,' Taylor said. 'It was like a bizarre royal court in a strange fairy tale. But nothing should have turned out like that, should it?'
The first public recognition of how things had turned out came in July 1970, when disc jockey and pop pundit Anne Nightingale visited the Apple office on a particularly lethargic day. Her findings were presented in the Daily Sketch newspaper under the heading APPLE COMING APART AT THE CORE. When Klein heard about the story, the phone line from New York to Savile Row glowed with incandescent heat. By the end of the month the press office was closed and the staff had been dismissed – with the exception of Derek Taylor, who was regarded too affectionately by three of the group and, with certain reservations, by Klein to be sacrificed immediately. *17 As another London paper reported glumly, 'Since the break-up of the Beatles, their Apple empire has diminished to little more than a centre for collecting their royalties, and dealing with their private affairs.' There was still an Apple Records, defiantly throwing occasional releases into the marketplace by artists such as Badfinger and Mary Hopkin. But there was no talk of unearthing talent, changing the working methods of the industry, subverting capitalism or any of the proud boasts of 1968.
You Never Give Me Your Money: The Battle for the Soul of the Beatles Page 17