Paul McCartney (49 page)

Clearly, it was a moment for extreme discretion where the media were concerned. Unfortunately, John Lennon recognised no such moments. In mid-January 1969, during the chilly Get Back sessions at Twickenham Studios, he gave an interview to Ray Coleman, editor of Disc and Music Echo and usually a safe pair of hands where Beatles coverage was concerned. Still in shock over Stephen Maltz’s revelations, John couldn’t help blurting it all out: ‘We haven’t got half the money people think we have. It’s been pie in the sky from the start. Apple’s losing money every week because it needs close running by a big businessman. If it carries on like this, all of us will be broke in six months. Apple needs a new broom and a lot of people there will have to go.’

Disc and Music Echo’s headline that week, ‘JOHN LENNON SAYS BEATLES IN CASH CRISIS’, if anything caused even greater worldwide shock, consternation and disillusionment than ‘JOHN LENNON SAYS BEATLES MORE POPULAR THAN JESUS’. The notion of a Beatle without unlimited gold in his pocket was as unthinkable as that of an archangel with halitosis. John himself made no effort to backtrack, causing redoubled horror by telling Rolling Stone he was ‘down to my last fifty thousand’ (which was rather like someone nowadays complaining of being down to their last million).

Among Apple’s management, there was despair that John should have broadcast the company’s predicament just as active measures were being taken to remedy it. Only Paul spared a thought for its rank and file, the secretaries and clerks who did not squander the Beatles’ money, in fact worked long hours for average wages without perks, yet still felt included in John’s denunciation and threat of mass firings.

A few days later, he met Ray Coleman on the stairs at 3 Savile Row and gave him a furious bollocking for having run the original story. ‘This is only a small company and you’re trying to wreck it,’ he shouted. ‘You know John shoots his mouth off and doesn’t mean it.’

He also sent round a morale-boosting staff memo, inviting anyone who felt worried about developments at Apple to write to him directly. ‘There’s no need to be formal. Just say it. Incidentally, things are going well, so thanks–love Paul.’

On 28 January, John and Yoko had a top-secret private meeting at the Dorchester Hotel with the Rolling Stones’ manager, Allen Klein. Afterwards, John wrote a note to Sir Joseph Lockwood which in effect was the Beatles’ execution warrant. ‘Dear Sir Joe,’ it read. ‘From now on, Allen Klein handles all my stuff.’

Thirty-eight-year-old Klein could claim, in his way, to have revolutionised pop music as completely as the Beatles had. Before his advent, recording artistes thought it a privilege to be with a major label and accepted minuscule royalty-rates and sclerotically slow payment as the inevitable price. Klein ended this age-old scam by forcing record companies to pay his protégés large sums upfront rather than peanuts years in arrears. Power thus shifted from the label to the artiste, and the money involved shot into the stratosphere.

Born into dire poverty in New Jersey and raised in a Jewish orphanage, Klein had started out as an accountant with a niche all of his own. Thanks to the record companies’ opaque and often devious bookkeeping practices, many top names were owed large sums in back royalties of which they were totally unaware. Klein would go in like a sniffer dog and, more often than not, find thousands, or hundreds of thousands of dollars due to them. As a result, he became known as ‘the Robin Hood of Pop’, a man who could conjure fortunes literally from thin air. Squat, oily-haired and uncouth, he cultivated the persona of a street-fighter with a touch of mobster. His ruthlessness and rudeness were as spectacular as his results.

Though he had made a first clumsy bid for the Beatles in 1964, Klein owed his entrée into UK pop to the Stones, for whom he secured their astounding $1.25 million advance on renewing their contract with the Decca label in 1965. The Beatles had never received any advance from EMI and two years later, when Brian Epstein renegotiated their contract, were still not thought to merit one.

Paul had been particularly envious of the Stones’ Decca deal, and–ironically in view of what was to come–suggested that Brian find a way of bringing Klein into the Beatles’ management. There were rumours of a merger between NEMS and Klein’s New York-based company, ABKCO Industries, before Brian managed to see off the threat. Since then, Klein had acquired a string of other big-in-America British acts including Donovan, Herman’s Hermits and the Animals, while all the time making no secret of his ultimate ambition. Now, ‘JOHN LENNON SAYS BEATLES IN CASH CRISIS’ brought it suddenly within reach.

At their secret rendezvous at the Dorchester, Klein handled John with consummate skill, introducing himself first and foremost as a besotted fan who knew every Lennon song and could recite all their lyrics word-perfectly. He further had the wisdom to declare himself an admirer of Yoko’s art, expressed shocked disbelief that there had never been a major exhibition of her work and promised to arrange one, however this present discussion might turn out.

Having studied John in advance, Klein knew just which cards to play, and played them expertly: his impoverished childhood, his fostering by an aunt (just like John), his indomitable rise to the top of his profession in the face of snobbery and prejudice, his crusading triumphs against music-business crookery whose beneficiaries had included one of the Beatles’ great soul idols, Sam Cooke. From there, it was the smoothest segue into observing that no Beatle, especially not this one, should ever be down to his last fifty thousand.

A few days later, in the Apple boardroom, John introduced Klein to the other three as the answer to all their problems. The meeting went on so long that Paul upped and left, saying there was more to life than sitting round a table. George and Ringo stayed on, and both were won over by Klein in their turn.

Like John, they warmed to his down-to-earth manner and sharp wit, and were amused, yet reassured, by his determinedly un-rock ‘n’ roll appearance (George thought he looked like Barney Rubble from The Flintstones). Most of all they warmed to his promise to make them wealthy beyond their dreams, expressed in a salty acronym: ‘You shouldn’t even have to think about whether you can afford something or not. You should be able to say FYM–Fuck you, money.’

Paul learned of their adoption of Klein when he arrived at Apple the next day. He clearly couldn’t agree, having already asked Linda’s father and brother to do the same job and brought the latter across the Atlantic to make a start on it. Besides, everything about Klein that appealed to John, George and Ringo was calculated to appal him: greasy hair, nylon polo necks, a pipe belching smoke that smelled of prunes and custard.

With the Eastmans’ aid, Paul also learned that in New York Klein’s reputation was currently in the toilet. He had recently bought an almost defunct label named Cameo-Parkway (which had once made millions with Chubby Checker’s ‘Let’s Twist Again’) and then apparently tried to inflate its value by spreading false rumours that various wealthy music companies, including Britain’s Chappell & Co., were in hot competition to acquire it. As a result, dealing in Cameo-Parkway shares had been suspended by the New York Stock Exchange and Klein was facing investigation by its regulatory body, the Securities and Exchange Commission. If that were not enough, his ABKCO company was embroiled in around 50 lawsuits while he personally was in trouble with the Internal Revenue Service for serial failures to file income tax returns.

But sharing this information with John, George and Ringo proved of no use whatsoever. If anything, they felt it a plus for Klein to be so notorious on his home turf, a confirmation that he truly was the tough guy they needed. Rumours that he might actually be involved with the Mafia (which he himself encouraged, although devoutly Jewish, with no known underworld affiliations) only increased his appeal, especially to John.

There was one powerful anti-Klein voice on which Paul could call for support and which, he thought, even John would be unable to ignore. The Rolling Stones, once the stars of Klein’s stable, had grown increasingly discontented with his management and even now were secretly plotting to get rid of him. By the end of 1969, thanks to his peculiar remunerative methods, the whole band would find themselves owing such huge amounts in UK income tax that their only alternative to bankruptcy was emigration to France. The Stones’ ‘Lennon and McCartney’, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, would also discover that Klein owned the copyrights on their biggest hits, like ‘Satisfaction’, ‘Get Off of My Cloud’ and ‘19th Nervous Breakdown’, which he’d secretly bought years earlier from their previous manager, Andrew Oldham.

Paul had heard about the Stones’ Klein problems from Mick Jagger and, at his request, Jagger called at Apple to tell the other Beatles (walking there from the Stones’ office, off Piccadilly, which by contrast was a model of efficiency and frugality). He’d expected to meet John, George and Ringo privately but found Klein sitting round the boardroom table with them; never one for confrontation, he pretended it was just a social call and left after a few minutes. Later, he phoned John at home and urged him not to make ‘the biggest mistake of your life’. But John refused to listen.

On 3 February, the Beatles authorised Klein to conduct his own audit of their finances. Paul strongly opposed the idea but went along with it when he was outvoted. As he would explain in a High Court deposition 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 original idea was that the two rival new brooms would work as a team. As Klein embarked on his audit, John, George and Ringo agreed to a proposal from Paul that Lee and John Eastman be appointed general counsel to Apple and themselves. Accountants and lawyers fulfil totally different functions and their servicing of the same client is standard practice from which the client normally benefits.

But there was never any chance of Klein and John Eastman working as mutually helpful colleagues. ‘We were in opposition right from the beginning,’ Eastman says, though he denies the stories of them trading insults and obscenities in rallies worthy of Wimbledon’s Centre Court. ‘I’m a pretty patient sort of guy. In all our arguments, I never raised my voice once.’

Eastman, by now, was finalising the seemingly straightforward deal for the Beatles, through Apple, to acquire Brian Epstein’s NEMS management company, latterly renamed Nemperor Holdings. ‘The Epstein family said that Brian had always wanted the boys to end up owning NEMS, so there was no question of them choosing the rival bidder [Triumph Investment Trust] instead of Apple. The situation was that there was around half a million pounds in Nemperor that the Epsteins couldn’t take out without losing most of it in tax. We were going to give them that half-million for the company.’

But Klein pooh-poohed Eastman’s terms, claiming to have a strategy of his own to acquire Nemperor ‘for nothing’. The negotiations stalled, and the goodwill of the cash-strapped Epstein family evaporated. In February 1969, Clive Epstein sold to the Triumph Investment Trust for a mixture of cash and stock. Klein immediately made a threatening phone call to Triumph’s chief executive, Leonard Richenberg, claiming that NEMS/Nemperor owed the Beatles large sums in unpaid back fees, which would be pursued in the courts unless Triumph waived its right to 25 per cent of their income. He also instructed Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI not to make the Beatles’ next royalty payment, of around £1.3 million, to Nemperor Holdings, but directly to Apple.

After an initial skirmish before a High Court judge, Richenberg elected to settle the matter out of court, with Nemperor giving up its quarter-share of the Beatles’ income in exchange for £800,000 plus a quarter of the £1.3 million. ‘It was an absolutely disastrous outcome for the Beatles,’ says John Eastman, ‘when they could have got the company for half a million.’

Klein, however, managed to dress it up as a victory, and early in March a band meeting was called to vote for his appointment as business manager. Paul refused to attend, instead sending along his solicitor, Charles Corman, to register a token ‘No’. ‘I was very nervous about how the Beatles would react to me,’ Corman remembers. ‘But John Lennon just looked at me and said, “Where’s yer bass guitar then?”’

Though ‘business manager’ was not quite the totalitarian title Klein sought, it gave him a mandate to sort out Apple as he had promised. All the peripheral branches, however dear they had once seemed to this or that individual Beatle, were instantly lopped off. It soon became clear that Klein was as intent on axing potential rivals as reducing waste. So Apple Records suffered a drastic pruning despite its success, and the two men who’d made up Paul’s winning team left 3 Savile Row without any intercession from him. Label boss Ron Kass received a lavish golden handshake and took an identical job with MGM Records in Los Angeles. Peter Asher went with him as head of A&R, then became the manager of Apple’s first signing, James Taylor, and enjoyed a spectacular career as an independent producer for Linda Ronstadt and other major names in the 1970s.

Being a close mate of John or Paul–or even John and Paul–proved no help now that Klein was in charge. After spending a year on developing the Apple school, their old Liverpool friend Ivan Vaughan was told the idea had been dropped. Likewise, Paul made no protest when the Zapple ‘spoken-word’ label was shut down, leaving Barry Miles stranded in New York midway through a recording session with Allen Ginsberg. Like the other Beatles, he felt he had to grit his teeth and take the medicine, however repugnant it–and the nurse administering it–might be.

Among Klein’s first firings was Alistair Taylor, who’d been Brian’s assistant back in the Liverpool days, and had done everything conceivable for Paul from house-hunting to posing as the ‘one-man band’ in his first Apple advertisement. But when Taylor phoned Cavendish to plead for his job, Paul preferred not to come to the phone.