The album that would finally be released as Let It Be in fact contained only the tiniest fraction of what the Beatles recorded in that crowded basement during January 1969. More than a hundred songs, by every artist they had ever admired or copied, and also from every epoch of their own career, piled up on spools destined never to be released, or even listened to, again. It was as if, to rediscover themselves as musicians, they were putting themselves through the kind of endurance test that Hamburg used to be, seeking to renew themselves with music that stretched back to their collective birth. They even recorded “Maggie May,” the Liverpool sailors’ shanty that John sang at the Woolton fete that day in 1957 when Paul McCartney cycled across from Allerton to meet him.
It was after they stopped jamming and returned to today’s material that the breakdown always came. Determined to be “honest,” to forsake all artifice, they still wanted from George Martin what he had always given them: a flawless final product. “We’d do sixty different takes of something,” Martin says. “On the sixty-first take, John would say, ‘How was that one, George?’ I’d say, ‘John—I honestly don’t know.’ ‘You’re no fookin’ good then are you,’ he’d say. That was the general atmosphere.”
Ironically, the best and happiest song on the finished album was one that grew out of random studio ad-libbing. Paul gave it the shorthand name “Loretta”: Only later did it receive the album’s original title of “Get Back.” Several versions of Paul’s vocal were taped, including one that sarcastically made “Get Back” a warning to Asian immigrants in the tones of the racist lobby inspired by Enoch Powell. Another featured John as lead singer, giving the song a bitter drive and bite that even Paul’s best version lacked. Halfway through the John version, both he and Paul suddenly tailed off into silence: It was Ringo, redeeming himself at last in George Martin’s eyes, whose quick-witted drum solo forced them back again on target.
The film crew, with twenty-eight hours of footage, finally packed up and left. The Beatles themselves did so a few days later, leaving behind an aural rag-bag that not even Paul could face hearing, let alone editing down to fourteen songs. John was all for putting out the album as it stood: a confession of their own internal chaos. “It’ll tell people, ‘This is us with our trousers off, so will you please end the game now?’”
For the benefit of the film crew, they had already given their much debated live performance—not in Tunisia or L.A. or on an oceangoing liner, but on one arbitrarily chosen afternoon on the roof of the Apple house. In keeping with the atmosphere of reticence and self-deprecation, no one knew about the event but their own employees and a few close friends. They little realized they were creating yet another scene to be replayed, and many times imitated, in decades to come, as passersby stopped to stare up in amazement at the electric din erupting in the sky; as traffic between the custom tailors’ shops ground to a halt; as policemen appeared, at last, from nearby Savile Row station; as the law decided it must put a stop to it, and a thickset sergeant crossed the road to knock sternly at Apple’s white front door.
• • •
It was, in fact, a British music paper, Disc, that had first broken the story now blazoned all over American Rolling Stone: “John Lennon Says Beatles In Cash Crisis.” Disc’s editor Ray Coleman, a longtime Beatles follower and friend, later received an angry dressing-down from Paul on the stairs at Apple for having run the original piece. “This is only a small company and you’re trying to wreck it,” Paul shouted. “You know John shoots his mouth off and doesn’t mean it.” Coleman had been close to the Beatles long enough to recognize what was off or on the record.
So it proved when the world’s press poured over the Apple threshold, asking for further and better particulars. John confirmed what he had told Ray Coleman—that Apple was losing some twenty thousand pounds a week to its myriad hangers-on, and that he personally calculated he was “down to my last £50,000.” George, as a rule the closest one in money matters, was equally willing to talk. “We’ve been giving away too much to the wrong people—like the deaf and the blind,” George said. “This place has become a haven for drop-outs. The trouble is, some of our best friends are drop-outs.”
The story that the Beatles were going broke somewhat abated the Apple orgy. It also placed the honest, and rather underpaid, regular staff members under the same stigma as predatory Hell’s Angels and larcenous visitors. Paul, in a thoughtful PR gesture, sent round a morale-boosting letter to all Apple artists and employees: “In case you’re worried about anything at Apple, please feel free to write me a letter, telling me about the problem. There’s no need to be formal. Just say it. Incidentally, things are going well, so thanks—love, Paul.”
The news that Allen Klein, the Rolling Stones’ manager, was in London and wanted to see the Beatles with a view to helping them, did not at first seem vastly portentous. When Klein’s first call reached Apple, they were still immured at Twickenham studios, refusing to see anyone. It was simply another message from the hundreds left hanging in the psychedelic twilight of Derek Taylor’s press office. “Allen Klein! What the fuck does he want, man?” “How the fuck should I know?”
That Klein’s message should have reached John Lennon was surprising enough. What was still more surprising was John’s instant agreement to meet him, as requested, at Klein’s suite in the Dorchester Hotel. John went without telling the other Beatles, accompanied only by Yoko, and, as he later admitted, petrified with nerves.
Klein played the scene perfectly, meeting John and Yoko alone in his room, wearing a sweater and sneakers, the nearest to their hippie threads that he could muster. Having expected a one-dimensional businessman, John found a fan of more than usual devotion, for Klein knew by heart every Beatles song dating back to the very start of their career. He showed an instinctive grasp of the Beatles’ peculiar problems, and had clear and forceful proposals for remedying them. He impressed John with his straightforward manner and the blunt New York wit that put him spiritually not far from a Liverpudlian. The fact that he, too, had lost his mother in early childhood and been boarded out with an aunt cemented the bond between them.
By the end of that first meeting John had made up his mind. There and then he wrote a note to EMI’s chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood: “Dear Sir Joe—from now on, Allen Klein handles all my stuff.”
Sir Joseph read the note with a bewilderment shared by others to whom John announced his adoption of Allen Klein. For so far as their closest associates knew, the Beatles had already decided on the man who would rescue them and Apple Corps from chaos.
Late in 1968, Linda had taken Paul McCartney home to New York to meet her family. He had met her father, the elegant Lee Eastman, and her brother, John, a bright young Ivy Leaguer, already a partner in the family law and management practice. He had surveyed the list of show business VIPs and renowned painters whom the Eastmans represented, and tasted the high-caste Manhattan life that formed the highest rung of his ascent from a little row house in Allerton. By the time he returned to London, he had decided that Eastman & Eastman were the solution for both the Beatles’ management and Apple.
Paul having prepared the ground on both sides, John Eastman flew to London to meet the other Beatles a few weeks later. They were not bowled over—first, because Lee hadn’t thought it worthwhile to show up in person; second, because John came across as rather immature and overeager. No one was impressed by his efforts to make up to John and Yoko with arty talk about Kafka. Also, it was known to everyone inside the Beatles’ circle, though not yet to anyone outside it, that the Eastman and McCartney families were soon to be joined by matrimony. Nevertheless, a letter signed by all four Beatles authorized John Eastman to act for them in contractual matters. By the time Allen Klein appeared, Paul’s soon-to-be brother-in-law had begun an ambitious plan to consolidate their dwindling reserves.
NEMS Enterprises, Brian Epstein’s original management company, still hung ghostlike in the Apple firmament. Under its new name, Nemperor Holdings, it c
ontinued to receive the Beatles’ earnings and to deduct Brian’s 25 percent before passing on the residue to Apple. Yet NEMS had long since ceased to exercise control over them as agents and managers. The bond was purely technical—and sentimental, since Brian’s mother, Queenie, was NEMS’s main shareholder and his brother, Clive, was chairman. The Beatles themselves still held the 10 percent share in NEMS allotted to them by Brian’s tender conscience.
The Epsteins, on their side, while wishing to retain control of NEMS, still faced the bill for half a million pounds in estate taxes that Brian’s cash assets had nowhere near covered. Clive Epstein, for all his dutiful efforts to expand NEMS, knew he had no ultimate course but to sell the company. What restrained him was his sense of obligation—to Brian’s memory, to his mother, to the remaining Liverpool artists—to everything, in fact, but his own fervent desire to return to Liverpool’s quieter business climes.
Late in 1967, Clive had received an offer for NEMS from the Triumph Investment Trust, a city merchant bank with a reputation for aggressive takeovers. At that stage, however, NEMS, transformed into Nemperor, was committed to a “programme of vigorous expansion.” The expansion proved less than vigorous, and a year later, preempting a rumored bid by the British Lion Film Corporation, Triumph’s chairman, Leonard Richenberg, made a second approach to Clive Epstein. This time, Clive was ready to accept Richenberg’s offer.
John Eastman’s plan was that the Beatles themselves should buy up NEMS, matching Triumph’s offer of one million pounds. Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI had agreed to advance the entire sum against future royalty earnings. Clive Epstein, feeling that the Beatles had a moral right to the company that Brian had launched on their name, notified Leonard Richenberg that the sale to Triumph was off.
It was at this point that John met, and adopted, Allen Klein. George and Ringo, who met Klein soon afterward, were struck, as John had been, by Klein’s forthrightness and his thorough grasp of the Apple problem. They did not instantly accept him as their savior, but they were willing to listen. Paul was not. He attended only one meeting with Klein, and walked out soon after it had begun.
The plan agreed to by the other three was that John Eastman and Klein should both work as advisers to Apple. Eastman was to follow up the NEMS deal while Klein looked into their financial position with special regard to EMI’s one-million-pound loan.
The Eastmans, father and son, made no secret of the disfavor with which they regarded Allen Klein. They were quick to inform Paul—as Leonard Richenberg had independently discovered—that Klein was viewed with suspicion in New York because of the Cameo-Parkway affair; that some fifty lawsuits decorated the escutcheon of Klein’s company, ABKCO Industries; and that Klein himself currently faced ten charges by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service of failing to file income tax returns.
To George and Ringo that was less important than the stunning promise Klein held out to them. He would go into Apple and clean up the mess. He would also make each of them wealthy in a way that even they, in their clouds of ready cash, had never imagined possible. He had a way of characterizing money as some dragonlike entity that had slain Brian Epstein, with his paltry seven-million-pound gross, but which Allen Klein, with his ABKCO sword, knew the secret of vanquishing: “You shouldn’t have to worry about money. You shouldn’t have to think about it. You should be able to say FYM—Fuck You, Money.”
George and Ringo responded, as John had, to Klein’s pungent fiscal imagery and down-to-earth manner. They liked him for the brusqueness he did not trouble to moderate, whatever the company. John Eastman, by contrast, wavered between urbane bonhomie and spluttering rage. It was a trait shared by his father, who had at length flown over from New York to meet the Beatles and Klein together at the Claridge Hotel. A few minutes after the meeting began, Lee Eastman rounded on Klein and began to shout abuse at him. The outburst was, in fact, skillfully engineered by Klein, to reveal Lee Eastman as a hysteric and himself as the stolid underdog. John, George, and Ringo naturally sided with the underdog.
Clive Epstein, meanwhile, had begun to suspect that selling NEMS to the Beatles was a process that might drag on for months. He therefore reopened negotiations with Leonard Richenberg and Triumph, though stressing he would still prefer to accept the Beatles’ offer. He undertook not to sell for three more weeks to give them time to conclude their bid.
But the Beatles’ advisers were by now bogged down in internecine warfare. Klein claimed that the Eastmans were blocking his access to vital financial details within Apple. John Eastman accused Klein of imperiling the deal by boasts that he could get NEMS “for nothing” on the strength of sums owed to the Beatles in back payments. Though the deadline had not expired, it clearly would not be met. Clive Epstein sold out to Triumph for a mixture of cash and stock on February 17.
John Eastman flew back to New York. The Beatles continued discussions with Allen Klein—minus Paul. Instead, Paul would send along his lawyer, a Mr. Charles Corman. The others were amused at first that such a personage was meant to fill Paul’s place at the board table. They would ask Mr. Corman why he hadn’t brought along his bass guitar.
On March 11, Apple’s press office issued a brief communiqué confirming the rumor it had for weeks been vigorously denying. Paul McCartney was to marry Linda Eastman. The ceremony would take place the following day in London, at Marylebone Register Office.
The bombshell exploded, among other places, in a small house in Redditch, Worcestershire, where Jill Pritchard, a traveling hairdresser, was giving one of her regular customers a shampoo and set. “Even before I heard it on the radio,” Jill says, “I had a sort of premonition it had happened. I remember looking at the customer’s little girl and wondering how she’d react.
“It was just a short announcement on the BBC News. I finished the shampoo and set, then I drove straight home and packed a little overnight bag. I’d got a bit of money that I’d always kept put by for an emergency. I got a friend to ring up my mum later and tell her where I’d gone. Then I drove to New Street Station in Birmingham and left my car on a No Waiting sign. I bought myself a ticket to London—first class, so I wouldn’t have to sit and cry in a compartment full of people.”
Late that night, wet-eyed and still carrying her suitcase, Jill Pritchard walked up Cavendish Avenue and joined the large, stunned crowd that had gathered there. The first girl she spoke to was Margo Stevens. “Is she in there?” Jill asked. Thousands of girls throughout Europe and America found it similarly impossible to articulate Linda’s name.
“We all knew it was going to happen,” Margo says. “We even knew Linda was pregnant. We’d seen the prescription that Rosie, the housekeeper, collected for her. But we kept hoping Paul would get out of it somehow. He was upset because we were taking it so badly. He’d come out to the gates to talk to us earlier in the day. ‘Look, girls,’ he said, ‘be fair. I had to get married some time.’”
Every British newspaper, the day after Paul’s wedding, carried pictures of the same desolately weeping girl. It was Jill Pritchard, the traveling hairdresser from Redditch. Photographers whirled her this way and that for most of the afternoon, shouting, “Go on—cry. You’ll be in the papers.” When Paul drove back with Linda after the ceremony, grief began to turn to violence. The security gates were forced apart, the front door was kicked, and wads of burning newspaper were pushed through the letterbox. After that, the police appeared and told everyone to disperse.
Margo, Jill, and the other regulars, drained of all emotion, adjourned to the nearest pub. “We heard later from Paul’s housekeeper, Rosie, that he was really upset about us,” Margo says. “He was standing just inside the front door, saying, ‘I must go out and talk to them again.’ But when he did come out, none of us was there any more. He couldn’t believe we’d all gone away, so Rosie said. When he came back into the house, he was almost in tears.”
That same night, a squad of police officers raided George Harrison’s Esher bungalow, and found a total of 570 grains of cannab
is. George was in London, recording his friend Jackie Lomax; when he returned he found the officers sitting with his wife, Patti, watching television and playing Beatles records. By an unkind coincidence, the name of the sniffer dog was “Yogi.”
Eight days later, at the British consulate on Gibraltar, John and Yoko were quietly married. John wore a crumpled white jacket, an apostle-length beard, and tennis shoes. Yoko wore a wide-brimmed white hat, a matching mini-dress, and outsize sunglasses that made her face as expressionless as a panda’s. They had decided on marriage suddenly while on vacation in Paris, and chosen Gibraltar as being “quiet, friendly, and British.” Peter Brown made the arrangements from London, and himself flew out to be best man. John and Yoko posed for pictures with the consulate staff, saw what little of Gibraltar there was to see, then flew back to Paris to own up to the international press. “We’re going to stage many happenings and events together,” Yoko said. “This marriage was one of them.”
The Beatles’ American fan club organizer issued an appeal for tolerance of what the whole world greeted as John’s worst aberration yet: “I know this news is shocking. Please try to understand that we should at least give Yoko the same chance we are giving Linda, and that Maureen and Patti got. If it makes John happy, I suppose we should all be enthused too.”
Their honeymoon was the first of Yoko’s promised happenings: It also inaugurated their campaign to promote that much desired but fastfading hippie commodity, Peace. To promote the cause of peace they announced they would spend seven successive days in bed, at the Amsterdam Hilton hotel.