With the Capitol deal Klein was assured of his 20 percent. He could now turn his attention back to the five months’ stalemate over Northern Songs and Lew Grade’s ATV network. Grade, having gained effective control of Northern, now hoped to woo the Beatles into accepting him as a sort of supercharged Dick James. His plan was to buy out the Howard and Wyndham consortium’s blocking 14 percent, but to persuade John and Paul to retain their 31 percent, and extend their song-writing contract beyond the present expiration date in 1973.
Late in October, ATV finally bought out its consortium partner, bringing Lew Grade’s share of Northern to slightly more than 50 percent. Hours afterward, it was announced that John and Paul, and Ringo, were selling their combined 31 percent shareholding to ATV. The news, when it reached Apple—by a tip-off from the Financial Times—sounded very like defeat. Allen Klein, interviewed during his customary afternoon breakfast, claimed it as a victory. A threatened lawsuit against Northern for five million pounds in allegedly unpaid Beatle royalties helped to persuade ATV to pay cash rather than stock for the Beatles’ holdings. Klein could thus congratulate himself on having enriched John and Paul by about a million and a half pounds each, and Ringo by eighty thousand pounds.
The American release of Abbey Road, together with Paul McCartney’s disappearance, now produced one of Beatlemania’s strangest and sickest by-products. A Detroit disk jockey claimed to have received a mysterious telephone call telling him that Paul McCartney was, in fact, dead, and that corroboration could be found in the Abbey Road cover photograph. This, though it might appear a somewhat unimaginative shot of the four Beatles walking over a St. John’s Wood zebra crossing, actually, the mystery caller said, represented Paul’s funeral procession. John, in his white suit, was the minister; Ringo, dark-suited, was the undertaker, and George, in his shabby denims, the grave-digger. Still stronger funereal symbols were divined from the fact that Paul himself walked barefoot, out of step with the other three, and smoking a cigarette right-handed. The clinching clue alleged was a Volkswagen car parked in the background, plainly showing its numberplate “28 IF”—or Paul’s age if he had lived.
Picked up by other disk jockeys, elaborated by Beatles fanatics, the rumor swept America, growing ever more earnestly complex and foolish. One faction claimed that Paul had been murdered by the CIA. Another—the most powerful—claimed he had been decapitated in a car accident and that actor William Campbell had undergone plastic surgery to become his double. Scores of further “clues” to support this theory were discovered in earlier Beatles albums—in the scraps of gibberish and backward tapes; the fictional “Billy Shears” mentioned in Sgt. Pepper, and various macabre John Lennon lines from “A Day in the Life” and “I Am the Walrus.” It was said that by holding the Magical Mystery Tour EP cover up to a mirror a telephone number became visible on which Paul himself could be contacted in the Hereafter. The number, in fact, belonged to a Guardian journalist, subsequently driven almost to dementia by hundreds of early morning transatlantic telephone calls.
In America, an industry grew up of “Paul is Dead” magazines, TV inquests, and death disks—“Saint Paul,” “Dear Paul,” “The Ballad of Paul,” and “Paulbearer.” It was all something stranger than a hoax: It was a self-hoax. Even when Paul himself surfaced on the cover of Life magazine, the rumors did not abate. Consequently, Beatles record sales in America in October 1969 rose to a level unequalled since February 1964. Abbey Road was to sell five million copies, a million more even than Sgt. Pepper. The Beatles, not Paul, had died; yet how could that be when they seemed bigger and better than ever?
John kept his promise to say nothing of the breakup. And in a strange way, his and Yoko’s continuing notoriety served as camouflage. In November, he renounced his MBE, taking it from the top of his aunt Mimi’s television set and sending it back to the Queen as a protest against Vietnam, the war in Biafra, and the failure of “Cold Turkey” to remain in the British Top Twenty. Though that final flippancy made the gesture futile, it was not without a certain coincidental irony. For the statesman who had bought his own popularity with that same small, pink-ribboned medal still reigned at 10 Downing Street. What Harold Wilson had started with the Beatles he had continued less and less discerningly, showering MBEs, CBEs, knighthoods, and peerages on any cheap entertainer who might cadge him a headline or a vote.
All politicians had learned something from Harold Wilson. In Canada, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau held talks with John and Yoko to hear their plan to turn 1970 into “Year One for Peace,” commemorated by another vast open-air concert in Toronto. Rolling Stone magazine named John as “Man of the Year.” “A five-hour talk between John Lennon and Richard Nixon,” said Rolling Stone, “would be more significant than any Geneva Summit Conference between the USA and Russia.”
In Times Square, New York, and prominent places in half a dozen other American cities, vast billboards carried a cryptic seasonal message. “War is Over if You Want it. Happy Christmas From John and Yoko.” In London, the Beatles Monthly ceased publication. Princess Margaret attended the premiere of a new film, The Magic Christian, featuring Ringo in a small cameo part. In Campbeltown, Argyllshire, Paul put the final touches to an album he had tried to make already, with Revolver, Sgt. Pepper, and Let It Be—an album for no one but Paul.
Before 1970 had even arrived came an event foreshadowing the new face of rock music. The Rolling Stones decided to conclude their current money-soaking American tour by giving another free show, this time on a motor-racing track in Altamont, California. The event quickly turned into a nightmare, thanks to the drunken brutality of the Hell’s Angels who had been hired as security. Its climax was the fatal stabbing of a young black spectator while Mick Jagger vainly appealed to the crowd to “cool out” and love one another. Good-bye Sixties; welcome to the future.
Three Savile Row already felt the vibes of the new decade. A house that had stood elegantly intact for two centuries before the Beatles’ coming seemed to decide deep within itself that the effort was no longer worthwhile. The rear promontory began to subside, throwing an ugly crack slantwise across the Cordon Bleu kitchen wall. The apple-green carpets were scuffed and threadbare. The deep leather sofas were cracked and split. Most of the framed gold records on the staircase wall had been stolen. On the front stairs the oil painting of lion cubs was torn at one corner where someone had tried to wrench it from its frame.
Though the front door frequently stood wide open, no invaders seized the chance to stampede through it. The Apple scruffs in their front-step purdah had risen above such immature displays. Now they wore badges, denoting seniority and precedence; they had their own magazine, even their own notepaper, headed ‘Steps’, 3 Savile Row. Margo, their leader, had crossed the ultimate threshold on their behalf: She now worked inside Apple as a teamaker. She had served George with cheese and cucumber sandwiches and Ringo with a one-egg omelette. She had seen how ordinary, how rather pale and pockmarked, were the gods whom she had worshipped for the past three years of her life, in all weathers.
The press office continued functioning, but in broad daylight and a quiet that grew steadily more ominous. John had unilaterally fired the whole department, transferring his publicity arrangements to the Rolling Stones’ press agent, Les Perrin. Derek Taylor had left, at George’s kindly insistence, to finish the book he had been trying to start since 1968. Carol Paddon was fired for telling the Daily Sketch the truth, that Apple was “just an accounting office now.” Mavis Smith, the ex–Ballet Rambert dancer, and Richard DiLello, the “house hippie,” stayed on for the present. All around the room, on the desk supporting a scarlet torso; on the desk with the light-show projector; on the desk next to the nodding birds—one by one the telephones stopped ringing.
It was in such a dismal morning-after spirit that the Beatles’ Let It Be project limped, at last, toward a conclusion. Klein had sold the film to United Artists, and expected it to open in London in late spring. The album tapes, recorded a year earlier, had bee
n exhumed from Apple’s now sepulchral basement studio. There remained only the job of making an LP from those uncounted hours of rehearsing, improvising, joking, jamming, and angry argument.
With the Beatles’ consent, Klein had brought in the American producer Phil Spector to do that sifting and editing job that they themselves could not face. Spector’s girl groups and “wall of sound” technique had been among their earliest and strongest influences: He was, at the same time, renowned for Gothic overelaboration and triumphant bad taste. His appointment to doctor what had begun as an “honest, no nonsense” Beatles album only confirmed the weary indifference they now felt to their music, as well as to each other.
Spector labored, and an album duly went to EMI for pressing. It was, inevitably, a strange, inconclusive affair. Half of it chronicled the sessions as they had happened, with tuning-up noises and parody announcements by John, amid sycophantic laughter from the film crew. The other half had been remixed and augmented by Phil Spector in his own inimitable way. An acetate went to each Beatle accompanied by a long letter from Spector, justifying what he had done but assuring them he would make whatever changes they wished.
When Paul played the acetate he found that his ballad “The Long and Winding Road” had been remixed, then dubbed with a violin and horn section and topped with a sickly celestial choir. Paul tried to contact Spector, but could not. He wrote to Allen Klein, demanding the restoration of his original version, but to no avail. It was the final affront of the Klein era that the most tyrannically particular and perfectionist Beatle should find he no longer controlled even the way he sang his own songs. Paul decided at last to stop fighting against fighting.
He had completed his solo album in Scotland, with no editor but Linda and no help but from Linda, that untried musician, on backing vocals. In March he returned to London and rang up John, breaking a silence of almost six months.
“I’m doing what you and Yoko are doing,” Paul said. “I’m putting out an album and I’m leaving the group, too.”
“Good,” John replied. “That makes two of us who have accepted it mentally.”
Paul then notified Apple, or what remained of it, that he wanted his solo album, McCartney, to be released on April 10. The date was vetoed by Klein and all the three other Beatles as clashing with the release of Let It Be, and also Ringo’s first solo album, Sentimental Journey. Paul, suspecting Klein of sabotage, appealed directly to Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI. Sir Joseph said he must accept the majority decision.
Ringo well-meaningly visited Cavendish Avenue to add his personal explanation to letters he had brought from John and George, confirming that Paul’s solo debut would have to be postponed. Ringo, in his own subsequent high court affidavit, described his dismay when Paul “went completely out of control, prodding his fingers towards my face, saying, ‘I’ll finish you all now,’ and, ‘You’ll pay!’ He told me to put on my coat and get out.”
The outburst showed Ringo, at least, what a gigantic emotional significance the McCartney album had for Paul. It is a testament to his eternal good nature that after Paul threw him out, Ringo went straight back to John and George and talked them into giving Paul his way. Ringo’s Sentimental Journey LP was brought forward and Let It Be put back so that McCartney could appear, as Paul now agreed, on April 17.
Its release gave Paul the opportunity to do what John had been dissuaded from doing the previous October. Included with the album was a smiley yet barbed “self-interview” in which he made clear that he was leaving the Beatles—at least, as clear as Paul could make anything:
Q: Are all these songs by Paul McCartney alone?
A: Yes, sir.
Q: Did you enjoy working as a solo?
A: Very much. I only had to ask me for a decision and I agreed with me. Remember Linda’s on it too, so it’s really a double act.
Q: The album was not known about until it was nearly completed. Was this deliberate?
A: Yes because normally an album is old before it comes out. (Aside) Witness “Get Back.”
Q: Are you able to describe the texture or feel of the album in a few words?
A: Home. Family. Love.
Q: Will Paul and Linda become a John and Yoko?
A: No, they will become Paul and Linda.
Q: Is it true that neither Allen Klein nor ABKCO Industries have been or will be in any way involved with the production, manufacturing, distribution, or promotion of the record?
A: Not if I can help it.
Q: What is your relationship with Klein?
A: It isn’t. I am not in contact with him and he does not represent me in any way.
Q: What do you feel about John’s Peace effort? The Plastic Ono Band? Giving back the MBE? Yoko’s influence? Yoko?
A: I love John and respect what he does—it doesn’t give me any pleasure.
Q: Are you planning a new album or single with the Beatles?
A: No.
Q: Is this album a rest away from the Beatles or the start of a solo career?
A: Time will tell. Being a solo album means it’s the start of a new career and not being done with the Beatles it’s a rest. So it’s both.
Q: Is your break with the Beatles temporary or permanent, due to personal differences or musical ones?
A: Personal differences, business differences, musical differences, but most of all because I have a better time with my family. Temporary or permanent? I don’t know.
Q: Do you foresee a time when Lennon-McCartney become an active songwriting partnership again?
A: No.
Q: Did you miss the Beatles and George Martin? Was there a moment, e.g., when you thought: “Wish Ringo was here for this break”?
A: No.
The announcement enraged John, who had longed to quit years ago but had always kept on in the band for the sake of their common good. Now here was Paul, self-centered as ever, not only walking out when he felt like it, but also making out he was first to want to. Or as John put it bitterly, saying he’d had enough long after everyone else had left the stage.
On May 20, Let It Be, the Beatles’ last film and final appearance together, received its British premiere simultaneously in London and Liverpool. A large billboard had been erected over the London Pavilion, on which four faces, fenced off from each other, stared out with expressions of faint nausea befitting this one more perfunctory ordeal. In Liverpool, a civic welcome waited in the foyer of the movie theater: the lord mayor, aldermen, dignitaries, and old friends. The train supposed to be bringing the Beatles pulled in to Lime Street, but they did not alight from it. Nor did they from the train after that. The civic welcome waited for the next train, and the next.
The Beatles were gone, but how could they be when the screen showed them as always: together, advancing? It was their last trick to make those tired, year-old scenes, at Twickenham studios and in the Apple basement, seem fresh and exciting, full of promise for the future that so obviously could not be. Let It Be was their sad fading; it was also the desperate sadness that they must fade. It was Paul and John singing “Two of Us,” rather pale and subdued like marriage partners after a terrible row, admitting they had been “chasing paper, getting nowhere,” but now seemingly in agreement about being “on our way home.” It was Paul when he sang “The Long and Winding Road” in its proper version, with only Billy Preston’s keyboard and himself on piano: his make-believe beard, his make-believe hobo suit, his great, round, regretful eyes. It was Paul again, singing “Let It Be,” the mollifying phrase of a Liverpool mother to a fractious child, as if he forgave and had been forgiven and everything would get better now.
It was the scene in Savile Row when lights still filled every Apple window, and the big white cars drew up outside. It was the day when clamor split the Mayfair skies; when people came across rooftops and climbed down fire escapes to look, and people in the streets stared upward. It was the old soldier in a porkpie hat whom the film crew stopped and asked for comment: “Yus—well, the Beatles, what I
say is, you can’t beat ’em. They’re out on their own. They’re good people. I say, good luck to ’em.”
It was the rooftop concert with their hair blowing into their eyes, with Ringo in a red plastic raincoat, George in green trousers, John in a ladies’ short fur coat. It was four musicians playing together as no four musicians ever could or ever would again. It was voices singing “The One After 909,” the way they used to on truant afternoons at Forthlin Road. It was slow-motion guitars in the biting wind as John summed up their gift to their generation, all those World War II babies who’d thought there was nothing ahead but grayness and rationing. “Everybody had a good time. Everybody had a wet dream. Everybody let their hair down. Everybody saw the sun shine.” It was “Get Back” dying into discord as the police finally found their way up to the roof, as the drumbeat failed, the electricity was turned off, and the derisive Lennon voice speaking as if in mock humility to Larry Parnes, all those years ago at the Jacaranda Club:
“I’d like to thank you very much from the group and ourselves, and I hope we passed the audition.”
PART FIVE
LASTING
TWENTY
“I JUST BELIEVE IN ME. YOKO AND ME”
The breakup, in fact, was to stretch over fifteen months, between September 1969, when John told the other three privately that he wanted out, and December 1970, when Paul confirmed the split unequivocally by beginning unilateral legal action against Allen Klein. It was an odd period of limbo, with all four Beatles leading determinedly separate lives and billions of fans still hoping, even praying, for their reconciliation.
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