The Love You Make (58 page)

Moments after the
Life
representatives left, Paul realized what he had done. He quickly recovered, jumped into his Land Rover jeep, and chased the photographers and reporters across the Campbelltown hills. Once again his old charming self, Paul apologized for his outburst and asked if they could come to a compromise; in return for the exposed film of his temper tantrum, he would give them an exclusive interview, plus exclusive photographs of him and his newborn daughter Mary—taken by the family photographer, Linda. The resulting interview and picture became the cover story of
Life
magazine. It amused us at Apple when Paul was quoted as saying, “The rumors of my death have been greatly exaggerated. However, if I was dead, I’m sure I’d be the last to know…”

In March of 1970, after nearly six months away, he returned to London with his solo album,
McCartney
. While no tour de force, it was a pretty, worthwhile album, which contained the hit songs “Maybe I’m Amazed” and “Every Night.” Paul had improvised studio effects with home remedies, including recording in the bathroom and the living room for different echos. On some cuts you can hear the front door slamming or the children playing in the next room.

As soon as Paul hit London, he rang up John. “I’m doing what you and Yoko are doing,” he said. “I’m putting out an album and leaving the group.”

John couldn’t believe that Paul even thought there was still a group left to leave. “Good,” he said. “That makes two of us who have accepted it mentally.”

Paul then informed me and Allen Klein that for personal reasons he wanted his album released on April 10 through Apple. Klein explained that April 10 was out of the question. April was the release date of
Let It Be.
Phil Spector had done such a good job on John’s “Instant Karma” single that John and Klein had given him all the dusty
Let It Be
tapes that had been locked in a vault for over a year and had told him to make an album out of it. The album was going to be released in time to back up the finished
Let It Be
documentary, which was to be released in theaters on May 20. Since it was a United Artists film, the date could not be changed. Also, Ringo had recorded a solo album, an innocent but mawkish album called
Sentimental Journey
, of classics sung off-key like “Love Is a Many Splendored Thing.” Ringo’s album would have to be released next, after
Let It Be.

Paul would just have to wait his place in line.

Paul called Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI in a rage. “I’m being sabotaged, Sir Joe, that’s what they’re doing to me!” he ranted. Sir Joe said he would see what he could do to help, but in the end it was up to the other Beatles.

Ringo went to see Paul one night at his home in St. John’s Wood. Ringo was the least volatile of them all and the best mediator to effect some sort of compromise. Ringo was at Paul’s house only a few minutes when Paul flew into a rage and, according to Ringo, “went completely out of control.” He shook his finger in Ringo’s face and screamed, “I’ll finish you all! You’ll pay!” He gave Ringo his coat and threw him out of the house.

Ringo, reasonable fellow that he is, told the others that if it meant so much to Paul to have his solo album released in April, they should let him do it, just to show friendship. Ringo’s own solo album was pushed back and the release of
Let It Be
pushed up. As it turned out, all three albums hit the market within three or four weeks of each other, flooding the record bins with Beatles products. It was a dismal marketing decision.

Paul was angry but not as angry as he was when he eventually heard the
Let It Be
album. Spector had completely bastardized the Beatles sound. Although it had certain merits,
Let It Be
was purely a Phil Spector Wall of Sound Production, with his inimitable backdrop of vast choruses and lavish orchestrations. Paul was mortified by the kitschy female voices—the first female voices ever on a Beatles record—and by what Spector had done to one of his prettiest songs, “The Long and Winding Road,” which Klein had earmarked as the album’s first single. Paul had originally recorded the song with just an acoustic guitar, similar to the way he sang the song in the finished documentary, with just his sweet voice carrying the song along. Spector had turned it into a monumental pile of mush, complete with strings, horns, and an ethereal chorus in the background.

Paul tried everything in his power to get it changed, first through Spector, then through Klein; but it was too late, the record was already being pressed. This desecration of his work was the final straw.

On May 20, at the gala premiere of
Let It Be
at the London Palladium, none of the Beatles showed up. Instead of a film about the making of an album, it was a portrait of the dissolution of a group. Even more painful, it was about the dissolution of a friendship into animosity and hatred.

The night of the opening, George Harrison went into the studios with Phil Spector and began what was to be six months of work on his own solo album,
All Things Must Pass.
Not to be left out, Ringo went into the studios with Nashville producer Pete Drake to work on his next solo LP,
Beaucoup of Blues,
which took six days, instead of six months, to record.

On April 17 Paul McCartney’s solo LP,
McCartney,
with a cover photograph of a bowl of spilled cherries, was released to lukewarm reviews from critics. Inside the album package was an interview Paul had done with himself, making up the questions as well as the answers. It was self-serving, vain, and painted him in the poorest light. But it telegraphed one irrefutable message: the Beatles were dead.

On April 10 Paul announced to the newspapers what John had wanted to announce all along. He was leaving the Beatles “because of personal, business, and musical differences.”

Through the autumn of 1970,
Paul and the Eastmans continued to make polite inquiries as to whether the other Beatles were agreeable to letting Paul out of his partnership contracts. The major problem with the dissolution of the partnership was that an enormous tax burden would have to be paid in the near future if all the Beatles’ funds were divided up. The Eastmans weren’t sure how much this tax burden would be, because Klein was allegedly obstructing the Eastmans’ access to the account books. “I don’t give a damn about tax considerations,” Paul said. “I don’t want to be an ABKCO-managed industry. It was weird, my albums would come out saying ‘An ABKCO Company’ and [Klein] wasn’t even my manager.”

One day, rather offhandedly, Paul said to Klein, “Either let me out of my contracts or I’ll sue you.” Klein, who had been sued over forty times before, just laughed at him.

Paul once again tried to talk to each of the Beatles individually, but John and George didn’t care to listen. He invited Ringo to his house on Cavendish Avenue again to play arbiter. “Look,” Paul said, “it’s not the rest of the group, it’s just that I don’t want to have anything to do with Klein. It’s Klein that’s the problem.”

“It’s not just Klein,” Ringo told him. “It’s the Eastmans, too.” Then Linda started to cry hysterically, so Ringo shut up. Every time Ringo tried to speak, defending Klein, Linda would dissolve in tears. Thus frustrated in his discussions, the meeting ended without any solution.

Next, Paul tried writing a long letter to John, asking him to agree to a formal dissolution. All he got in return was a cartoon drawing from John with the words “How and Why?” in a bubble.

Paul wrote back, “By signing a piece of paper agreeing to dissolve the Apple partnership? Why? Because we don’t have a partnership anymore.”

John responded with a postcard. “Get Well Soon,” it said. “Get the other signatures and I will think about it.”

For most of November and December Paul sat around his house in St. John’s Wood mulling over whether or not he had the heart to sue the other Beatles. It was Klein he really wanted, but the only way to get at him was through the others. He kept thinking, “I can’t do this. I can’t sue my pals. It would ruin my reputation. I’ll be characterized as the villain. I can’t possibly sue the others…”

But he did.

And he did it on New Year’s Eve. He had John, George, and Ringo each served with writs on December 31, 1970, and started proceedings in the High Court Chancery Division.

I handed in my resignation that same day. Paul begged me not to do it, because I was his only sympathetic contact at Apple, but I wasn’t able to be much help to him anyway. My departure had been coming for a long time. Robert Stigwood had asked me to join his now very successful company, and Klein had long wanted me out of the way. Klein would have tried to fire me and Neil Aspinall if he thought the Beatles would have stood for it, as they had with Alistair Taylor; but we were clearly invaluable to the running of the company, and Neil and I were their last links with Liverpool. In any event, things had become so ugly at Apple over the last year that I was looking for a way out myself. Handing in my resignation was really only a formality.

Neil Aspinall was lost after the lawsuit began. Neil without the Beatles was unthinkable. He seemed like a man who was falling from a great height without ever reaching bottom. At first he stopped coming into the office, saying he was on vacation. He had married Suzie Orenstein, an attractive, petite American girl, in 1968 and was the father of three, so there was much to keep him busy at home. But Neil was soon bored with family life, and he started visiting one or another of the Beatles at their homes almost daily. He settled in for a time at George’s place, making 16 mm experimental movies and eventually set himself to the task of editing together thousands of feet of documentary footage on the Beatles that he had gathered over the years, most of it never before seen by the public. It was a pathetic project, Neil standing over an editing machine all day, watching his youth roll by on a small screen. The documentary took years to finish and has never been seen by anyone outside of Neil’s immediate circle of friends.

Neil was never taken off salary. Deservedly, too, for although John, Paul, George, and Ringo would deny it, he was as much a Beatle as any of them. And now that it was over, the four others survived intact, as personalities and as stars; Neil Aspinall lived in limbo as an executive of Apple, which is now just a moribund record label, in existence only to collect the substantial royalties from the never-ending sale of old Beatles albums. As Neil put it, “I am the custodian of the graveyard.”

The court trial itself began on January 10, 1971, and lasted for nine days. Paul was the only one to show up in court, winning a two-shilling bet with a courtroom attendant who insisted that John and Yoko would be there too, not wanting to miss a chance to have it out with Paul in public. But the three others were represented only by affidavits. These affidavits were read aloud in court, the details of which became the next day’s headlines. Some of the less soiled of the Beatles’ dirty laundry was thus washed in public, including the Twickenham Studio tensions and Paul throwing Ringo out of his house.

Paul’s lawyers, who were very well prepared by the Eastmans, took the position that Allen Klein was unscrupulous and they feared for Paul’s interests. They roasted Klein in the process of the trial, bringing testimony to the court that Klein had recently been convicted of ten charges of tax fraud in the United States. The court was urged to appoint a receiver and to freeze the funds.

John, George, Ringo, and Klein’s lawyers had a different story; evidence was introduced that Klein himself had drawn only £150,000 commission from the group since he joined them, a nominal sum indeed when it was disclosed that the Beatles’ earnings had increased by nine million pounds in the previous nineteen months. In fact, Klein had doubled the Beatles’ record royalties of the last eight and a half years. This, it was pointed out, did not include the vast income from John’s and Paul’s songwriting royalties.

On March 10, the high court appointed Mr. J. D. Spooner as receiver of the Beatles’ assets. As a group, at least, Allen Klein no longer represented the Beatles, but he still represented John, George, and Ringo. As large sums of money began to accrue to the receiver, both sides frantically tried to figure out a way to unfreeze them. One major problem, as usual, was the tax. A large tax would have to be paid almost immediately, and John, George, and Ringo wanted Paul to sign a personal indemnification against it. The Eastmans wouldn’t hear of it, and so the money sat.

What followed was a barrage of mean and vitriolic interviews. If Beatles fans were disillusioned by the nastiness of the trial, John and Paul proceeded to destroy any respect for them that might have been left. The most notable interview of this period was John’s 30,000 word “Working Class Hero” interview with
Rolling Stone’
s Jann Wenner, in which the Beatles’ breakup was discussed with any truthfulness for the first time. The interview also touched on John’s relationship with Brian and Yoko and accounted for the Beatles’ breakup “because we were tired of being side-men for Paul.”

In response, Paul gave a rare interview to England’s
Melody Maker
in which he said, “I just want the four of us to get together and sign a piece of paper saying it’s all over, and we want to divide the money four ways… But John won’t do it. Everybody thinks I am the aggressor, but I’m not. I just want out.”