The Love You Make (51 page)

Like Ringo before him, George sulked at home while recording and filming were delayed. But when they had a business meeting a few days later, George showed up with the rest of them as if nothing had happened.

The final concert that was to end the movie was not held in some grand location but only on the rooftop of 3 Savile Row. Braving the bitter cold, they ran through a few numbers, giving a frozen, ironic performance. The noise from the rooftop brought a crowd of pedestrians to the street below, and eventually a bobby arrived and tried to stop it all. But by then it was too late. The Beatles had given their last public performance.

At the end of the filming they had twenty-nine hours of raw tape and ninety-six hours of sound film. The film, the tapes, the bad vibes, all went on a shelf for a long, long time. “Nobody could look at it,” John said. “I really couldn’t stand it.”

chapter Seventeen

I’m not the new Epstein. I’m the old Allen.

—Allen Klein

Trying to control
the spending at Apple was like riding the back of a tiger; it’s hard enough to hold on, but if you let go the tiger turns around and eats you. It wouldn’t have been so bad that Apple had turned into a three-ring circus if at least there had been a ringmaster to run the show. But with no final authority to control the cash flow, money was simply pissed away. The Beatles had already spent £400,000 earmarked for investments by the accountants, mostly on undeserving or farfetched schemes. Among other fruitless projects, they had sunk money into the design of a new “demobilization suit” and a puppet show in Brighton. Individually the Beatles had overdrawn their company accounts as well. John was £64,000 in the red, Paul £66,000, and George and Ringo £35,000 each.

The largesse of the Beatles, combined with the willingness of those who benefited from it, bordered on organized crime. The liquor continued to flow, as did the fancy lunches from the Cordon Bleu chefs. Caviar was stocked at all times for Yoko Ono, and the charge account at Fortnum and Mason was used daily. Magic Alex had so far produced nothing of any value. He had been loaned a £20,000 home to live in and was given his own laboratory on Boston Street in which to invent. After the Apple Boutique closed, Pete Shotton left with a Jaguar automobile owned by the company. It was missing for months before anybody noticed. Promotional records were disappearing by the gross, to be sold on the black market to unscrupulous record stores. Television sets vanished out the front door, as did an occasional pay packet left on some trusting soul’s desk. With all the traffic in the building, even the messenger boys were stealing by peeling the lead roof right off the building and hauling it out the front door in huge sacks to be resold to metal dealers.

The vast expenditures had already been brought to the Beatles’ attention by Stephen Maltz, the young staff accountant who had resigned the previous October in protest over the way the Beatles were handling their finances. In a letter sent to each of the Beatles, Maltz wrote, “After six years’ work, for the most part of which you have been at the very top of the musical world, in which you have given pleasure to countless millions throughout every country where records are played, what have you got to show for it? … Your personal finances are a mess. Apple is a mess …”

Thus began the ill-fated search to find someone to head Apple. Paul decided that if Apple needed a chief, they should get the biggest chief of all. In Paul’s mind that was, improbably, Lord Beeching. It was Lord Beeching and his “Beeching Axe” that had consolidated British Railways and made it financially healthy. The Beatles extended an offer to him, but he immediately declined. Next they turned to Lord Poole, chairman of Lazard’s Bank, who offered to sort out Apple’s finances for them at no charge without becoming officially involved. But Paul quickly lost interest in the generous but formal banker and never called him back. They also consulted with Lord Goodman, the lawyer to the Prime Minister, and with Cecil King, the newspaper baron, but both men declined. Ronan O‘Rhielly, the visionary who had started Radio Caroline, was invited to attend a meeting at Apple to discuss the possibility of his becoming involved, but he was voted down when Caleb, the former salesman at the Apple boutique, consulted the
I Ching
and found that Ronan O’Rhielly didn’t have the right “vibes.” In fact, Caleb and his pickup sticks were being consulted with such great frequency that Caleb was making as many important decisions as anyone else.

Then one day Paul realized that he had the perfect Big Daddy for Apple right under his nose. Linda Eastman’s father, Lee, had recently been giving Paul advice on his personal and business holdings, and Paul liked what he had heard. Lee was a sound and conservative lawyer whose legal background in the music business had been with the big bands, including Tommy Dorsey. When Paul mentioned to the other Beatles that perhaps Lee Eastman would be able to help them, the suggestion was met with groans of disbelief. Paul was informed that he was sadly mistaken if he thought he was not only going to run the group musically but also arrange for the financial management to be taken over by someone who seemed likely to be his future father-in-law. Characteristically, Paul dug in at this challenge and insisted that at least they all should have a meeting with Eastman to hear what he had to say.

Lee Eastman misjudged the importance of this meeting and never showed up. Instead he sent John Eastman, his twenty-eight-year-old son and partner in his law firm. John was very different from his wilder younger sister. He reeked of urban sophistication and old money. He was clean-cut and handsome in a “Kennedy” sort of way. He represented many of the things Paul aspired to himself—and at the same time everything that would turn the other Beatles off. At their very first encounter, John and Yoko pegged him as a phony intellectual when he tried to engage them in esoteric conversation about Kafka.

John Eastman’s legal advice, however, was not pretentious. It was first class and intelligent. He suggested that the very first thing they do was to buy NEMS, now renamed Nemperor Holdings. Clive Epstein was desperate to get Nemperor Holdings off his hands. The death taxes were due by March 31, 1969, and there was very little in ready cash to pay for them. To make the situation more urgent, John Eastman pointed out to the Beatles that although Nemperor Holdings provided no services for the Beatles, they continued to deduct a whopping 25 percent income from their recording royalties. Indeed, Nemperor Holdings was entitled to collect 25 percent of their earnings for
nine more years,
even though Brian was dead, even if Clive sold the company to total strangers. Since Clive had to sell Nemperor, they damn well had better buy it from him themselves.

Clive Epstein, in the meanwhile, had put the word out in the City that Nemperor and its 25 percent cut of the Beatles was for sale. It wasn’t long before he got a serious bid from Leonard Richenberg, the aggressive managing director of a successful company called Triumph Investment Trust. Richenberg offered one million pounds for Nemperor, which would pay the death taxes and guarantee a handsome profit to boot. Clive dutifully reported this offer to the Beatles; if they wanted to match it, Nemperor was theirs. Clive said he would wait a few weeks for the Beatles to make a firm counteroffer. All they needed was the money.

The Beatles asked for a meeting with Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI. The four of them, plus Yoko and John Eastman, had tea with Sir Joe in the EMI conference room. After some small talk, John Eastman told Sir Joe why they had come. “We need an immediate cash advance against royalties for one million, two hundred and fifty thousand pounds.”

Sir Joe didn’t blink. “When do you want it?” he said.

And Eastman said, “Wednesday afternoon.”

It was just at this moment
that Allen Klein arrived on the scene. A few weeks before, John had told an editor of Britain’s
Disc
magazine that “if Apple goes on losing money at this rate, we’ll be broke in six months …” While most dismissed the statement as typical Lennon hyperbole, Allen Klein recognized it as a signal that his services were needed, and in he swooped to the rescue.

Since Brian’s death, Allen Klein had called the Apple office frequently, and I had many phone conversations with him. I once even acquiesced to a meeting with him, one that Clive Epstein also attended, but he was so foul-mouthed and abusive, I ended the meeting in a few minutes and had him shown to the door—just as Brian had done years before. After John’s “bankrupt” statement, Klein unleashed a new barrage of phone calls to Apple. I would dutifully return the calls, but Klein was now insisting that he would only speak to one person—John Lennon. I told him this was impossible.

One day in early February, Tony Calder, the former co-manager of the Rolling Stones, gave Derek Taylor a lift to the train station on the way to work in the morning. Calder had recently heard from Klein, who was under the impression that it was Derek Taylor who was standing in the way of his getting to John. Derek hated being characterized as the bad guy and said he would speak to me about it. Later that day, Derek asked me as a personal favor to turn Klein’s phone messages over to John and I relented.

Unbeknownst to the other Beatles, John and Yoko went to meet with Klein in his suite at the Dorchester Hotel that very night. John had met Klein once before at the filming of the Rolling Stones’
Rock and Roll Circus,
but John didn’t remember him. John couldn’t understand why. The man who confronted John and Yoko in the Dorchester Hotel was truly memorable. He was short and fat, with a sallow complexion and several chins that came over a dirty stretched-out turtleneck sweater. His socks hung around his ankles, his shoes were scuffed and worn. He was bigger than life. He talked loudly and incessantly in grandiose generalizations and with a New York Jewish accent that made John’s scouse sound like the King’s English. John and Yoko liked him. In some ways Klein had many of the same ethnic elements as a Liverpudlian; he was blunt and he was common. This kind of crass honesty, even his frequent use of four-letter words, appealed to Yoko, too, who admired Klein as one street fighter does another. Most of all, John and Yoko were impressed by Klein’s true appreciation of John’s music. Klein was, at his deepest center, a true-blooded record businessman; he loved his clients and he loved their music. He was able to quote from every song of John’s already large body of work. This left John feeling terribly flattered and slightly softheaded, a bit of putty in Klein’s hands.

They spent the night talking over a long dinner of macrobiotic rice that Klein had thoughtfully arranged to be served by the hotel. Over the course of the evening, Klein’s fascinating story unfolded. Like John, he was an orphan who had lived with an aunt, but Klein’s story was even more dramatically tragic. The son of a Hungarian butcher from New Jersey, Klein’s mother had died when he was only a few months old, and his distraught father had put him in an orthodox Jewish orphanage in Newark, where he lived until he was fifteen, when an aunt took him in. He worked his way through accounting school at night, a profession for which he had perfect affinity. Numbers added, subtracted, and divided magically in his computerlike mind, which was full of schemes for ways in which numbers could be put to use. As an accountant he had the best pitch for prospective clients. “You should be rich,” he would say, stabbing the air with a pudgy finger. “Let me make a lot of money for you.”

One night Klein was a guest at a wedding where pop singing star Bobby Darin was the best man. Klein introduced himself to Darin and said, “How would you like a hundred thousand dollars?”

Darin said, “What for?”

“For nothing,” Klein told him. “Just let me go through your accounts.”

Klein moved his wife and mother-in-law into Darin’s offices as assistants and reportedly found misappropriated royalties. From there his fame as a business barracuda grew with his client list, which soon included Connie Francis, Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, and finally, as manager, Sam Cooke, which was when he first met Brian. In 1965 Klein ingratiated himself with the Rolling Stones business office, then attended to by Andrew Oldham and his partner Eric Easton. Shortly after Klein took the reins, he pounced on Decca, the Stones’ record company, and came up with the much discussed advance of $1.25 million that had irked Brian and the Beatles so much.

Klein promised John and Yoko that he would do the same thing for them. He would renegotiate for the Beatles a much higher percentage of royalties from EMI, plus a huge cash advance that would solve all their financial problems. On top of that, he would get Nemperor Holdings for them—but he would get it for
free
; don’t ask how, just rest assured that he would do it. He would also, he promised Yoko, get United Artists to distribute the films she was making with John, and he would get her an advance of a million dollars, a figure that John repeated to me in the office the next day with pride. I found this quite astonishing, considering that John and Yoko’s latest cinematic venture was a long film of them smiling at each other in soft focus.

Before John and Yoko left Klein’s suite that night, John wrote a note in longhand. It said, “From now on Allen Klein handles all my stuff.” The next day at the Apple offices, he dictated another memo, this one to be sent to Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI, who was in the process of loaning them a million pounds. It said, “I don’t give a bugger who anybody else wants, but I’m having Allen Klein for me.”

Now the war began in earnest. As John later admitted, he wanted somebody to go after Paul and the Eastman family for him, and Klein obliged him with a vengeance. John insisted that just as the Beatles had met with John Eastman, they would meet with Allen Klein, and a conference was arranged in Klein’s suite in the Dorchester Hotel. George and Ringo arrived with John and Yoko; Paul arrived with John Eastman. Klein started the meeting by telling them that they should hold off buying Nemperor Holdings from Clive Epstein until he had finished an audit of their books. He said that John Eastman’s idea to buy Nemperor for a million pounds was “a piece of crap.” He said that in order for Sir Joe to loan them a million pounds against royalties, the Beatles would have to earn approximately two million pounds before taxes to pay it all back. He called John Eastman a fool and a “shit head.” Eastman gritted his teeth and didn’t answer, but when he went to the bathroom he emerged holding a glass jar full of suppositories left there by Klein. “Why, Allen,” Eastman said, “I thought you were the perfect asshole.”