The Beatles (151 page)

With the Beatles, Klein’s timing was impeccable.
He’d met John once before
and only in passing, in December 1968, at the taping of the ill-fated “Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus” TV special. The Stones’ manager interrupted a noisy transatlantic phone call to introduce himself with unusual gentility. When Klein mentioned that he was also an accountant, John pulled a face and joked how he did not “want to end up
broke, like Mickey Rooney
.” The look that came over Klein “was orgasmic,” said one observer. “To him, John’s words seemed fraught with some extraordinary personal message.” But it seemed impossible for him to gain entrée; the layers of protection around the Beatles were airtight. No matter how Klein tried to make contact, he was rebuffed at every juncture.

In his exuberant biography
,
Fifty Years Adrift,
Derek Taylor admitted giving Allen Klein the introduction he longed for so that the Beatles “could determine whether the reputed coldness of his methods outweighed his undoubted capacity for securing the greatest deals for his clients.” On the evening of January 28, two days before the Beatles’ roof concert at Savile Row, John and Yoko met Allen Klein in the lavish Harlequin Suite at the Dorchester Hotel, where they formed a mutual, if snakebit, admiration society. Despite the fact that John and Allen, both extremely headstrong and
volatile individuals, acted “very nervous…
nervous as shit
,” they were immediately drawn to each other for a multitude of reasons. If John Eastman came off as being suave and pretentious, Allen Klein was his polar opposite—ordinary, almost boorish, a real salt-of-the-earth type—in fact, not so much salt as salty, lacing his conversation with ripe, juicy expletives. Forget about uptight preppie attire; Klein was dressed less than casually, in a baggy sweater over blue jeans and beat-up old sneakers. After Brian Epstein’s sartorial refinement, John thought this was almost too good to be true. Later, John would call Klein “
the only businessman I’ve met
who isn’t gray right through his eyes to his soul,” and that about nailed his instant attraction. Klein was colorful. More than colorful: the man was gaudy, positively kaleidoscopic. “
One of the… things
that impressed me about Allen—and obviously it was a kind of flattery as well,” John said, “he went through all the old songs we’d written and he really knew which stuff I’d written.” Klein wasn’t the average myopic manager, with a single fix on the bottom line. Music informed every move he made.

“
I knew right away
he was the man for us,” John recalled. Even after the meeting John could barely contain his enthusiasm. “I wrote to Sir Joseph Lockwood that night. I said: ‘Dear Sir Joe: From now on Allen Klein handles all my stuff.’ ”
^*

It might have helped matters if John had discussed his selection with the other Beatles first, but John was angry, emotional, impulsive. His decision wasn’t based on what was good for the Beatles; it was personal and intuitive: him against Paul, rock ’n roll against pop, “
a human being” against “an animal
.”

Besides, Yoko had weighed in. Klein had reeled Yoko carefully into the negotiations, soliciting her views and listening with rapt attention. Furthermore, he promised that Apple would support Yoko’s experimental film projects and persuade United Artists to distribute them, sweetening the deal with
a million-dollar advance
. A day or two later, when Paul confronted John about selecting Allen Klein as his manager, John sheepishly admitted it was more her decision than his, saying, “Well, he’s
the only one Yoko liked
.”

That sounded more like a convenient dodge, except for one thing: Yoko was clearly pulling John’s strings. Since they became an item, at her insistence John never strayed more than a few inches from her side. Everything he did, everything he said, filtered through her for approval. There was no resistance on his part, primarily because of what she gave him—confidence and control—and because he was so clearly damaged by drugs and his past. No one was going to derail her grand design, especially now that she had a weapon like John Lennon in her arsenal. John was her insurance policy, her safeguard. He gave her instant credibility as a media star.

Now she also had Allen Klein. A man like Klein wouldn’t back down to the McCartney-Eastman alliance. Indeed, he’d enjoy wresting John from the grasp of those smoothies, those “
big-headed uptight people
” (John’s description), and kicking some ass in the process. And Klein would aid in her crusade against Paul. No matter how Yoko might deny it, Paul remained her lone nemesis, her obstacle to claiming complete control over John.
Paul was the one responsible
for holding the Beatles together, for lashing John to that frothy pop confection, “
all that Beatle stuff
,” as she called it. From the outset, she convinced herself that Paul wanted her out of the picture. “
Paul began complaining
that I was sitting too close to them when they were recording,” Yoko said, “and that I should be in the background.”
The background!
Never.
Paul discouraged her from attending
business meetings with the other Beatles. Never. He demeaned and insulted her, scoffed at her style of art. She would destroy him. She had to.

As far as Paul knew, the Eastmans seemed like a shoo-in to represent Apple. They’d even begun negotiations with Clive Epstein about purchasing a majority interest in NEMS. John’s unconscionable act of maneuvering behind his back smacked of something insidious, something personal. Whether he realized it or not, it had Yoko’s fingerprints all over it. Maintaining his cool, Paul agreed with the others to at least meet with Allen Klein and to keep an open mind, but in fact he had no intention of aligning himself with such a tawdry figure. Paul got around, he’d heard the scuttlebutt; he was familiar with Klein’s reputation and wanted no part of it.

George and Ringo, on the other hand, were intrigued. They liked Klein’s straight talk, his unconventional appearance, his painless solutions to their problems. “
Because we were all from Liverpool
, we favored people who were street people,” George said, free of irony. Despite Allen’s ritzy Dorchester suite and chauffeured limousine, George felt “Lee Eastman was more of a class-conscious type of person. As John was going with Klein, it was much easier if we went with him, too.”

Paul opposed Klein’s intervention, confident that the group’s democratic stopgap would prevail on his behalf. In the past, a one-for-all, all-for-one policy would have scotched the deal. But when the smoke cleared and the votes were tallied, it was three against one for the first time in eleven years. Without much choice, Paul gave in. He agreed to grant Klein authority to perform an audit on the Beatles’ behalf, delving into every financial arrangement they had, as long as the Eastmans were appointed as their general counsel. It was a compromise of sorts, but ultimately pointless. The fox had gained the keys to the henhouse, and on February 3, 1969, Allen Klein moved into the Apple offices, where he proceeded to secure his berth for a long, eventful stay.

For the most part, the audit of the Beatles’ finances produced fairly unastonishing results. The sorry shape of their business affairs was already a known quantity. Klein quickly deduced they’d been “
fucked around by everybody
.” The terms of their contract with EMI were grossly inadequate, leaving them enslaved to the record label for another ten years; the management agreement allowed NEMS to continue collecting 25 percent of the Beatles’ royalties for the next seven years, even though the company no longer performed any significant service; dreadful merchandising deals had cost the Beatles a small fortune; and Apple, while profiting somewhat as a boutique record label, was still hemorrhaging money—hundreds of thousands of pounds—on myriad useless salaries and expenses.

On the surface, this scenario may have seemed like a nightmare, but none of these handicaps presented Allen Klein with sleepless nights. With time, he could perform whatever surgery was necessary to correct or renegotiate each disadvantage. The record sales for the White Album were through the roof (
it remained the top-selling album
in Britain throughout most of the winter); some basic belt-tightening would put the Beatles’ finances back on solid ground. The audit did, however, turn up one ticklish spot. In the process of examining John and Paul’s publishing deal with Dick James, Klein discovered that Paul, unbeknownst to John, had been quietly buying shares of Northern Songs for his portfolio.

On the surface it seemed harmless. “What better way to invest our money than in ourselves?” Paul offered unctuously, sidestepping the real issue: that he and John were supposed to be equal partners. But if Paul was impervious to the disclosure, his collaborator and partner was not. John regarded it as out-and-out treachery, underhanded, a covert attempt to
wrest control of their copyrights. No matter how Paul justified it, “
it belied his innocence and honesty
,” says Peter Brown, who had been ordered by Paul to purchase the additional shares. Brown knew John wasn’t being told—and foresaw the inevitable outcome. “They confronted each other in the office, where John flew into a rage. At one point, I thought he was actually going to hit Paul, but he managed to calm himself down before really laying into him. ‘You’re a fucking arsehole! You pretend to be this honest and straightforward guy—and you’re not!’ ”

Try though he might, Paul didn’t deny it. It would have just added more fuel to an already roaring fire. Besides, there were other serious flare-ups that required more diplomacy.

The most important concern was their precarious management situation. No one was steering the listing ship. And at times it seemed as though the Eastmans and Allen Klein were working at cross-purposes. The Beatles knew it was time to harness their cocaptains. “
Let’s get them both together
,” George recalled saying, and at that time it must have sounded like a reasonable suggestion. But the powwow itself was more like Waterloo. Bloodthirsty and bellicose, both factions squared off in Klein’s Dorchester suite, erupting with accusations and expletives. Reaching a consensus no longer mattered—if it ever had. First of all, John had brought Yoko, who had no business attending the meeting. Then Allen went to work, picking apart all of the Eastmans’ proposals as though they were nonsense. No pretense was made of respect or civility. According to Peter Brown, he dismissed their idea to buy NEMS as “
a piece of crap
” and ridiculed John Eastman as “a fool” and “a shithead,” implying in his most patronizing voice that only a dilettante would act so feebly for his clients. Eastman, under fire, derided Klein as “a perfect asshole.”

A week later, in an attempt to salvage Paul’s position, Lee Eastman flew to London to confront Klein himself, but John and his bodyguard were ready for him. John’s list of grievances against Eastman, both real and imagined, had reached new heights of rancor. He had had enough of what he perceived to be Eastman’s “class snobbery.” He refused to associate, he said, with someone who “despises me because of what I am and what I look like,” who thinks “I’m some kind of guy who got struck lucky, a pal of Paul’s.” But nothing grated on John’s nerves more than hearing “a charlatan” like Eastman say, “
I can’t tell you how much I’ve admired
your work, John,” because beneath the smooth tone it had the ring of phoniness. He wasn’t about to let some flashy New York lawyer, some “middle-class pig” who had no instinct for rock ’n roll, exert power over him or,
worse, “con” him with lofty references to Kafka (Eastman apparently referred to the Beatles’ recording deal as being Kafkaesque), Picasso, and de Kooning.
John had learned from Neil
Aspinall that Lee Eastman had changed the family name from Epstein, and he convinced Allen they should address him as such throughout the meeting. All that afternoon John picked at the name, dripping acid when he pronounced it, as if it were an open wound. “
How Lee kept his cool
was beyond me,” recalls Peter Brown, in whose office they met. “Even Yoko, who wasn’t supposed to be there, called him Epstein, daring him to respond.”