Most of the press who instantly converged on Amsterdam believed that the newlyweds had actually offered to make love in public. To their disappointment, they found John and Yoko merely sitting up in bed, in a suite decorated with placards reading “Bed Peace” and “Hair Peace.” Few papers could understand, any more than could their progressively exasperated readership, how two people cocooned thus in the casual squalor of rock star hyperluxury, had any relevance to burned babies in Vietnam or Biafra’s living skeletons. Even calling it, with that so-fashionable suffix, a “Bed-in” could not avert savage criticism of “the most self-indulgent demonstration of all time.” But the press was, as always, unable to deliver the ultimate rebuff. It could not stay away. “Day Two of the Lennon Lie-In,” ran a British headline. “John and Yoko Are Forced Out by Maria the Maid.”
They moved on to Vienna for the first television showing of their film Rape—an action they depicted being performed by reporters and TV cameras. Later, in the Sacher Hotel’s sumptuous Red Salon, they staged a second happening. This time, the press found them crouching on a tabletop inside a bag. It was, so John said, a demonstration of “bagism” or “total communication,” in which the speaker did not prejudice the listener by his personal appearance. More bagism, he suggested, would generate more peace throughout the world. The British Daily Mirror spoke for the whole world in mourning “a not inconsiderable talent who seems to have gone completely off his rocker.”
The loss of NEMS Enterprises had not discountenanced Allen Klein. The episode, indeed, had served Klein by revealing shortcomings in John Eastman that even his brother-in-law seemed to acknowledge. For it was with Paul’s tacit agreement, or nondisagreement, that Klein began a counterattack designed to extricate the Beatles from the hold of the Triumph Investment Trust.
A week after Triumph’s takeover of NEMS Klein visited the bank’s chairman, Leonard Richenberg. There followed what Richenberg subsequently described as “various vague and threatening noises.” According to Klein, the old NEMS company owed the Beatles large sums in unpaid fees from road shows dating back as far as 1966. They would forget these arrears if Triumph agreed to give up its 25 percent of their earnings Richenberg had bought up with NEMS. Richenberg’s response showed him a worthy adversary. He requested Klein in words of one syllable to go away. No more successful was Klein’s offer of a million pounds outright for Triumph’s stake in the Beatles. Richenberg merely repeated his request to his visitor to depart.
Sir Joseph Lockwood, chairman of EMI, was Klein’s next point of attack. Sir Joseph, a few days later, received a note, signed by all four Beatles, requiring that henceforward their record royalties were not to go to NEMS-Triumph but were to be paid direct to Apple. The letter was timely, since EMI was on the point of paying out Beatles’ record royalties in the region of £1,300,000.
Leonard Richenberg had received a similar notification. He wrote back to Neil Aspinall, tersely rejecting the Beatles’ claim that their contract with NEMS had expired when the management agreement did, in 1967. There remained the nine-year EMI contract, signed in January 1967, under which all record royalties were to be channeled via NEMS. Triumph Investments were thus entitled to collect their 25 percent for seven more years.
At EMI, Sir Joseph Lockwood faced the uncomfortable alternatives of breaking a manifestly binding legal obligation to NEMS-Triumph or alienating the affections of the four individuals on whom his company’s fortunes largely rested. Sir Joseph, with great wisdom, elected to do neither. Triumph then sought a high court order to freeze the £1,300,000 pending the obviously protracted legal battle over it.
The application was heard on April 2 in the high court before Mr. Justice Buckley. Counsel for Triumph, Jeremiah Harman, QC, said that the Beatles had “fallen under the influence of Mr. Allen Klein, an American of somewhat dubious reputation.” The judge, though inclined to agree, refused to freeze the money officially since, he said, EMI themselves would obviously not release it until the dispute was settled.
It was therefore left to Klein and Richenberg—in an atmosphere now tinged by mutual respect—to slug out a deal between them. Richenberg agreed to relinquish Triumph’s 25 percent of Beatles earnings in exchange for eight hundred thousand pounds cash plus a quarter of the suspended £1,300,000. Triumph would buy out the Beatles’ 10 percent of NEMS for just under half a million pounds’ worth of the bank’s own very desirable stock.
Klein could thus go back to the Beatles claiming to have turned defeat into victory. If they had not managed to acquire NEMS, at least NEMS had no further control over them. He had bought them freedom, in other words, from one cabal of men in suits. The Robin Hood of Pop, in his crumpled white polo-neck sweater, was one deal up on his rivals in the Apple camp. And if Allen Klein knew anything, he would soon be two deals up.
Dick James was always first to admit that he was one of the luckiest men alive. Pure chance had brought Brian Epstein to his office that morning long ago in 1962. Pure chance had ordained that James be there in person, to soothe Brian’s ruffled feathers and listen to the demonstration disk he carried in his briefcase. So by pure chance it came about, as the voices pealed round his dusty Denmark Street cubbyhole, that Dick James, the so-so crooner, average song plugger, and now struggling music publisher realized he was on his way to his first million.
He had seized on that luck, of course, with some prescient fair-dealing. As publisher of the early Lennon-McCartney hits he could have been greedy, and lost them. Instead, he looked to the long term. He saw not only quality but quantity. So Heaven whispered in James’s ear, prompting him to offer Brian a deal unprecedented in Tin Pan Alley. He would set up a song publishing firm exclusively for Lennon-McCartney music. It was piquant to remember Brian’s disbelieving gratitude when Northern Songs was formed: “Why are you doing all this for us?”
When the company came into existence in 1963 Dick James and his partner, Emmanuel Silver, between them owned 50 percent. John and Paul had 20 percent each and Brian, 10 percent. James administered the company through his own Dick James Music Ltd. Ironically, he himself only ever published two Lennon-McCartney songs—the first one he ever heard, “Please Please Me,” and the B-side “Ask Me Why.” It was as a middleman that he grew wealthy, husbanding a store of hit songs that piled up faster almost than an old-time Tin Pan Alley plugger could count.
The Beatles laughed at James for his tubby shape, his bald head, his constant pleas for more nice tuneful numbers like “Michelle” and “Yesterday.” His knowledge of the music business and its manifold dodges merged into the invisible shield that Brian Epstein built around them. It was James who, on the eve of a new Beatles single, would contact every American record station with dire legal admonitions not to break the release embargo. It was James who, after the initial chaos, maximized their American impact by ensuring that other singers and groups did not cover Lennon-McCartney material to excess.
In 1965, Northern Songs had been floated as a public company. Twenty-five percent of its 2s (10p) shares were offered on the London Stock Exchange at 7s 9d (38p) each and all were instantly snapped up—in financial as well as Beatles terms an instant number-one hit. Three thousand shareholders henceforward would turn to the record charts as well as the Financial Times to check on the health of their investment.
After the flotation, Dick James and his partner held 23 percent of Northern Songs. John and Paul held 15 percent each; NEMS Enterprises held 7.5 percent, and George and Ringo between them, 1.6 percent. By 1967—the year when two Beatles albums, Revolver and Sgt. Pepper, between them brought profits near the million-pound mark—shares in Northern had quintupled their 1965 value.
For any investor, the company’s pièce de résistance were the 159 Lennon-McCartney copyrights, and John and Paul’s contractual commitment to keep on composing until 1973. James, however, worked hard to create a wider catalog. By buying up moribund firms like Lawrence Wright Ltd., Northern Songs acquired such diverse musical properties as “Les Parapluies de Ch
erbourg”; “Among My Souvenirs”; and the theme from television’s Coronation Street soap. James, indeed, worked for Northern somewhat at the expense of Dick James Music Ltd. But he was happy. Everyone in Tin Pan Alley said so. He reminded himself all the time how lucky he was.
Just lately, Dick James had been a little less happy than before. It was not that Lennon-McCartney music had declined in quality. “Hey Jude,” in 1968, became a publishing success second only in worldwide sales to “Yesterday.” The trouble was the increasingly erratic behavior of one-half of the publishing credit, and its effects on that sensitive organ the London Stock Exchange. John Lennon’s espousal of the Maharishi, his involvement with Yoko, his bagism, his nudity—above all, his drug conviction—each produced disquiet among Northern’s shareholders and fluctuations in its share price. As John’s song publisher, James could be tolerant. As managing director of a public company with three thousand shareholders to consider, he fretted.
Lately, too, his relationship with the boys had grown somewhat strained. The deal that had seemed so miraculous in 1963 had, by 1969, become a source of vague resentment. The Beatles felt, quite simply, that James owned too large a share in their music. Nor was their resentment assuaged by James’s habit of sending out inexpensive Christmas gifts such as plastic DJM monogrammed playing cards. A frosty reception had greeted him when he visited Twickenham studios during the Let It Be sessions.
As Northern Songs grew in prosperity, Dick James had received many offers for his 23 percent. Of these, the most persistent came from Lew Grade, Britain’s most famous showbiz mogul, whose ATV network was already a minority shareholder, and who, in the dear dead musichall days, had been James’s own theatrical agent. “He’d been romancing me to sell out to him ever since Brian’s death,” James remembers. “It was a standing joke between us. ‘Oh no,’ I’d say, ‘not that again, Lew!’”
It was the addition of Allen Klein to an already unstable Beatles landscape that suddenly changed James’s mind. In March 1969, without prior warning, he sold his 23 percent of Northern Songs to ATV for something over one million pounds.
That the deal went through in secret was, as James would later admit, “rather unfortunate.” In fairness, both John and Paul were out of the country on their respective honeymoons. John read the news in the papers on March 28, during his Amsterdam Bed-in. Paul found out a few days later in America. The news by then was that ATV, with 35 percent of Northern Songs under its belt, had bid £9,500,000 for the rest of the company.
John and Paul contacted one another, united in fury that Dick James had sold them down the river. It would have been fruitless to point out—had anyone dared try—that Northern Songs had long ago ceased to be theirs, but was the legitimate prey of whichever shareholder could gain the upper hand. All they knew was that, behind their backs, a major stake in their music had gone to a man who, with his large bulk and still larger Havana cigar, epitomized the hated breed of men in suits. The conciliatory noises that Lew Grade was already making might just as well have been the snarl of an alligator on the banks of the Zambesi.
Allen Klein was recalled from vacation in Puerto Rico to formulate plans for the Beatles themselves to oppose ATV’s takeover of Northern Songs. The Eastmans, though still advising Paul, figured little in the subsequent drama. Paul, once again, was willing to let Klein act for him, in the troubleshooting capacity that was still unconfirmed by any written contract.
Klein’s strategy was that the Beatles, already owning 31 percent of Northern Songs, should publicly offer £2 million for the further 20 percent that would give them a majority shareholding. The money was to come partly from the Beatles’ own coffers, partly from a merchant banker, Henry Ansbacher & Co. Two Beatles companies, Subafilms and Maclen, together scraped up almost £1 million. Ansbacher’s would provide the remaining £1 million, on collateral furnished by Apple shares and John Lennon’s entire stock holding in Northern Songs. Paul—though he had recently increased his own Northern shareholding—refused to pledge any shares as security. Allen Klein completed the bond by guaranteeing £640,000 worth of ABKCO Industries’ share in the MGM film corporation.
There now began seven weeks of business meetings, long and tortuous enough to surfeit even Allen Klein, in the winding course of which John and Yoko drifted, like rumpled white wraiths, through the grim purlieus of Threadneedle Street. John—to begin with, at least—enjoyed the negotiations. “It’s like playing Monopoly,” he said, “but with real money.”
A third element in the ATV–Apple struggle had by now shown its hand. This was a consortium of city broker firms that, over several months, had quietly built up its own stake in Northern Songs to 14 percent. To capture the company, ATV or the Beatles must buy out—or, at least, win over—the consortium. And from the beginning it was clear the consortium, which included the Howard and Wyndham theater chain, was inclined to favor the Beatles.
The main stumbling block to what might otherwise have been an instantly done deal was Allen Klein. For the Robin Hood of Pop was currently enjoying a spell of notoriety in London’s financial world just as intense as his recent one in New York’s. The Sunday Times’s Insight investigative unit had just published a lengthy piece headlined “The Toughest Wheeler-dealer in the Pop Jungle,” delving into Klein’s recent exploits, from the Cameo-Parkway shares furor to his activities as the alleged savior of the Rolling Stones. Insight also revealed how the Stones themselves had begun to turn against him, complaining that only a small portion of the $1.25 million advance he had wrung from Decca two years earlier had yet found its way into their bank accounts. There was also an impending lawsuit against Klein from the band’s exmanager, Andrew Loog Oldham, over Oldham’s £1,000,000 payoff. From having pressed Klein on the Beatles as their only possible hope, the Stones were now urging them to have nothing to do with him.
Klein filed suit against Insight, then did his best to reassure the nervous city consortium that if they joined up with the Beatles to purchase Northern Songs, he would personally play no part in either the negotiations or the company’s administration. He gave the same assurance in typically salty terms at a press conference that, the Financial Times said, “must have set some kind of a record for unprintable language.” This promise was repeated two days later in a message to Northern’s shareholders from Henry Ansbacher’s. If their takeover bid were accepted, neither Klein nor the bankers themselves would play any part in the company’s management. The board would be strengthened by the appointment of David Platz, head of the powerful Essex Music Corporation, as chairman. As a further inducement, John and Paul would extend their songwriting contract with Northern beyond its present 1973 expiration date.
By mid-May, Lew Grade was ready to concede defeat. The Beatles had successfully wooed the consortium, both with assurances of Klein’s nonparticipation and also with promises of directorships for the Howard and Wyndham theater faction. Then, at the very last minute, the pact dissolved. John pulled the plug on the negotiations, announcing he was “sick of being fucked about by men in suits sitting on their fat arses in the City.”
The consortium melted into Lew Grade’s open arms—if not as sellers yet, then as fully committed allies. On May 20, ATV achieved effective control of Northern Songs. Grade expressed delight at having acquired a cache of songs that would live forever and hopes for an amicable future working relationship with their creators.
That same day’s papers announced that Allen Klein had now officially been appointed the Beatles’ business manager. Earlier reports that he would receive 20 percent of their earnings were described as “exaggerated.”
The agreement had been signed on May 8. It bore the names of only three Beatles: John, George, and Ringo. Paul still had not refused outright: He said he wanted more time—as Klein had repeatedly promised he should have—to go through the management document with John Eastman and his English lawyer. But the others, John especially, had lost patience with Paul. Klein now told them he needed the signed agreement urge
ntly to take back to New York to present to his ABKCO board. When the four Beatles met at Abbey Road on May 9, the deed had been done. “I see you’ve outvoted me,” Paul said.
So Allen Klein and ABKCO Industries Inc. moved into 3 Savile Row, W1. Shortly afterward within the house, a soft and regular sound became audible. It was the sound of Apple executives perishing under the ax. Ron Kass, head of Apple Records; Denis O’Dell, head of Apple Films; Peter Asher, head of A&R; Brian Lewis, head of the contracts department, all left the Beatles’ employment with as much dispatch as if a medieval catapult had propelled them through the white front door. It was the first phase of Klein’s promised economy drive against those he condemned as pampered and unproductive management figures. That Kass and Asher between them were responsible for selling some sixteen million records on the Apple label did not for one instant stay the hand of their turtlenecked executioner.
After unnecessary management figures on Klein’s death list came friends and dependents. The scythe swept upward through Apple’s subdivisions: through Magic Alex and his electronic workshop; through Zapple, the spoken word label; through Apple Retail, Apple Publishing, and the Apple Foundation for the Arts. In vain did the victims appeal to their good friends John, Paul, George, or Ringo. The Beatles had suddenly become as remote as Tudor monarchs after signing warrants of execution. So it was even when Klein fired Alistair Taylor, Brian Epstein’s original NEMS assistant, and a longtime friend and fixer for each of the four. Taylor, when his sentence was pronounced, spent a whole day on the telephone, trying to reach John or Paul to have his dismissal confirmed first-hand. Neither was available to discuss the matter. “The Beatles,” John would admit, “are the biggest bastards in the world.”
Klein’s original intention was that not a single Apple executive should survive to stand between the Beatles and him. He even succeeded, for a short time, in toppling their two closest aides, Neil Aspinall and Peter Brown. Both were on the Apple board of directors, itself a gallows mark. “I gave Klein the perfect excuse,” Peter Brown says. “We were just coming up to the annual general meeting. I told him that all the directors had to resign as a formality and then be reelected. Neil and I both resigned, but we weren’t reelected. We thought the Beatles wouldn’t ditch us, but they did.”