Here at least Klein had gone too far. The Beatles could not function without Peter Brown, their immaculate minister of court. And Neil Aspinall, their oldest, truest, straightest friend, proved invulnerable to the headsman’s axe. For Neil, Klein’s coming was ultimately beneficial: It removed the weight of worry he had shouldered as road manager to the whole Apple fiasco. At first, when the burden went, Neil could not believe it had gone. He dreamed strange dreams that only a road manager to the Beatles could dream: of running in fear from some unknown pursuer, with both arms full of precious silver fish. The more he ran, the more his pursuer gained on him; as tightly as he tried to hold the silver fish, they always slipped from his grasp.
Gone was the holiday atmosphere of 3 Savile Row. Rather than showing up for work and leaving whenever they pleased, staff were now expected to clock in and out just like any other wage slaves in the unenchanted world outside. The perks they had formerly enjoyed—the food, the drinks, the drugs, the free gifts, the unlimited taxi rides—were all terminated. Nothing could be bought for the company without a purchase order signed by Klein or his lieutenant, Peter Howard. Charge accounts that had nourished hundreds dried up all over the West End.
It was no more than the way most hard-nosed American businesses were run, but Klein had a special genius for making people afraid of him. Everyone, from secretaries upward, felt themselves under the same nervous compulsion: to prove simultaneously that they were essential to Apple and that they posed no obstacle or threat to Klein. Even those he moved upward carried a kind of stigma. Jack Oliver, Ron Kass’s young deputy, found himself suddenly in Kass’s job as head of Apple Records, yet with no feeling that he had been promoted. “I was told: ‘You’re shit, you know that don’t you, but this and this needs doing so get on with it.’”
Klein had annexed Peter Asher’s old office on the third floor, opposite Derek Taylor’s press department. It only added to the terror felt throughout 3 Savile Row that this office remained empty for several days each week, while Klein was in New York dealing with ABKCO Industries business. Then at some unguarded moment in the late afternoon of a day when he appeared to be absent, he would return. Jimmy Clark, on the front doorstep, would hurriedly straighten a dove-gray back. The chauffeur-driven car would draw up and disgorge a squat figure that, even in its walk of a few yards to the front door, could not bear to break off its study of balance sheets or Billboard magazine. Margo Stevens and the other members of the doorstep brigade had already formed their own conclusions without seeing his scary sidekick, Pete Bennett. As the door closed on Klein one of them would dart forward and shout “Mafia!” through the letterbox.
Klein, in fact, despite the May 8 agreement, was still not absolutely sure of his position. How could he be until all four Beatles recognized him as their savior? John Eastman remained on the scene, representing Paul and supposedly cooperating with ABKCO Industries in what had been described to the press as a “warm, workable relationship.” Riven as he was with contempt for Eastman, Klein recognized that the relationship, if never warm, if barely workable, had to continue for the present. Sooner or later, he hoped to pull off a coup major enough to dazzle Paul out of his new fraternal obligations, and so complete the equation of Klein’s heart’s desire. Meanwhile, he contented himself with responding to Eastman’s many challenging and provocative interoffice memos in a tone of Groucho Marxist sarcasm. “Dear John…I am on a diet, so stop putting words in my mouth.”
A still greater incentive to Klein existed in the three-year contract that John, George, and Ringo had signed with ABKCO Industries. This, indeed, gave Klein 20 percent of their income—but only such income as was generated after his management began. Benefits gained through the NEMS and Northern Songs deal did not fall within the scope of the contract. To earn his 20 percent, as well as prove himself to the Eastmans and Paul, he must make a major killing in the field where he had strewn so many earlier corpses. Klein’s next targets, in other words, were the Beatles’ English and American record companies.
Sir Joseph Lockwood was surprised, shortly afterward, to be visited at his EMI office by Klein and all four Beatles. They had come, Klein announced, to renegotiate the nine-year contract that Brian Epstein had signed with EMI in 1967. “I said: ‘All right, we can talk about it,’ Sir Joseph recalled. ‘Provided both sides get some benefit, there’s no harm in renegotiating.’ Klein said: ‘No, you don’t understand. You don’t get anything. We get more.’”
“I told them to get out. They went, looking very sheepish. Paul was pulling faces behind the others’ backs, as if to say, ‘Sorry, it was nothing to do with me.’
“My assistant was very worried. ‘You shouldn’t have sent them off like this,’ he said. I said, ‘It’s all right. I recognize the sort of man Klein is. He’ll be back in half an hour.’ And sure enough, half an hour later he rang me to apologize.”
At 3 Savile Row Klein and the Beatles—except Paul—went into conference again. Margo and the other girls were beginning to recognize those conferences by the lights burning late in the big top-floor window. In the press office Derek Taylor’s light projector cast its wriggling colored shapes over the wall. Journalists, still waiting for interviews, strained to catch scraps of gossip among insiders who were now all far on the outside.
“—they’re just puppets now. I took something in to John and he just said: ‘Give it to Klein.’”
“—they’ve calmed down a bit. They’re eating scrambled eggs.”
“—you know what happened to that note you sent in? Screwed up into a ball and thrown across the room.”
On May 26, in a suite at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel, Montreal, John and Yoko staged a second, even more ambitious Bed-in. They had meant to hold it in the Bahamas but they decided on Canada as being closest to the country at which their Peace campaign was chiefly aimed (and which John, through his drug conviction, was now prohibited from entering). The Montreal Bed-in lasted seven days: It included an extended visit from Dr. Timothy Leary, live broadcasts to Canadian and U.S. radio stations, a hook-up with insurgent students at the University of California at Berkeley, and an encounter with right-wing humorist Al Capp, whose racist digs against Yoko almost got him thrown out on his ear. The climax was the recording at John and Yoko’s bedside of the newly written campaign anthem “Give Peace a Chance” with a chorus that included Timothy Leary, Murray the K, Tommy Smothers, a rabbi, and a troupe of bald-headed, bell-ringing, chanting Radha Krishna Temple singers.
It was the prelude to two months in which John, with Yoko at his side, consciously set out to saturate the media with their demonstrations, their slogans—above all, with themselves as a living slogan: “Mr. and Mrs. Peace.” For John, the campaign was tinged with aggressive satisfaction. He was turning the tables on the press, exploiting them in precisely the way he, as a Beatle, used to be exploited. He said so in a voice that still incised through the curly apostle beard, the woolly thought, the inherent heart-sinking fatuousness of representing sitting up in bed in a luxury hotel as a political, humanitarian act. “The Blue Meanies, or whatever they are, still preach violence all the time in every newspaper, every TV show, and every magazine. The least Yoko and I can do is hog the headlines and make people laugh. We’re quite willing to be the world’s clowns if it will do any good. For reasons known only to themselves, people print what I say. And I say ‘peace.’”
In June, the campaign moved to 3 Savile Row. The front ground-floor office formerly occupied by Ron Kass was commandeered by John and Yoko for their own company, Bag Productions, and their continuing saturation of a still-acquiescent press. In a rooftop ceremony, before a somewhat bemused commissioner for oaths, John changed his name, dropping the Winston his mother had given him as a talisman against Hitler’s bombs, becoming, instead, John Ono Lennon. Yoko became Yoko Ono Lennon. John was delighted to realize that their combined names contained nine letter O’s, since nine had always been his lucky number.
Ron Kass’s elegant salon next to the fro
nt door took on the appearance of a hotel bedroom during a Bed-in. Hand-lettered peace slogans and Lennon drawings papered the paneled walls. Newspapers, dirty plates, Magic Markers and Gauloises packets submerged the chaste white telephones. In the Georgian fireplace a plastic doll that had somehow escaped the King’s Road napalm holocaust, stood on its head in a mess of cigarette butts. Yoko sat at the large executive desk with John a little to one side of her. The journalists were brought in at fifteen-minute intervals.
Sooner or later, in each interview, the talk would turn from peace and bagism to a question far more deeply significant to Western civilization. Was John truly, as he had said, reduced to his “last fifty thousand pounds’? Yes, he said. “All that stuff about us being millionaires is only true on paper, you know. All we’ve really got is our houses, our cars, and this place. In the old days with Northern Songs, you used to get a check occasionally. There’s a deal now where a certain percentage of our royalties is paid into this place. So I haven’t had any income for about two years. It’s all been bloody outcome.
“Allen’s putting it right for us now. We’ve made a lot of mistakes, but we’re still here. The circus has left town, but we still own the site.”
The presence of John and Yoko downstairs gave a new complexity to the already complex “vibes” gripping 3 Savile Row. Fear of Klein required that clerical staff should look brisk and businesslike, and sit behind their IBM typewriters like stenographic mice. Fear, no less well-founded, of the chief and ever-present Beatle demanded their help in collecting acorns to be sent by John and Yoko as a peace gesture to all world leaders from President Nixon to the king of Yemen. Since early summer is not acorn season, a countrywide appeal had to be launched. One elderly spinster sent in two dried-up specimens she had kept for forty years in a silver box. An entrepreneur, well-versed in the principle of Beatles supply and demand, offered a supply at one pound per acorn.
His Peace Campaign, in fact, aroused John to a belligerence frequently vented on this or that awe-struck Apple employee, unable to tell him, for instance, how to plaster the whole of London with Peace slogans. Ever since the Two Virgins fiasco he had suspected the whole house of intent to sabotage his and Yoko’s personal projects. He suspected it even more now that their second album, Unfinished Music No. 2—Life with the Lions, had gone on release. The cover this time showed Yoko in the hospital after her miscarriage, with John in his sleeping bag beside her bed. The tracks were screech and electronic scribble, and a few seconds’ heartbeat from the baby that had not survived. John bitterly resented the fact that the album was not mentioned in Apple’s current radio promo.
And yet none of the Beatles, however artfully approached, would let slip a word against Yoko. “People think they’re mad, both of them,” Ringo said, “but that’s not Yoko. That’s just John being John.”
On May 30, Apple released a single that at once seemed to show the Beatles reconciled to Yoko, and Yoko herself to be capable of figuring in an art form that was quite intelligible. This was “The Ballad of John and Yoko,” a diary of the pair’s recent peregrinations from the Amsterdam Hilton, “talking in our beds for a week,” and “eating chocolate cake in a bag” in Vienna, to “honeymooning down by the Seine” when Peter Brown sent word that they could “get married in Gibraltar, near Spain.” “Christ, you know it ain’t easy!” ran the refrain, so guaranteeing worldwide bans on airplay. As a gesture of apparent unity, the song was credited to Lennon-McCartney and its performance to the Beatles.
In fact, “The Ballad of John and Yoko” had been recorded by John virtually single-handed. George and Ringo were both out of the country. The drumming, overdubbed later, was Paul’s.
It had been a typical gesture by a personality that, though outmaneuvered, outvoted, and furiously affronted by the events of the past months, still followed its old vocation of presenting the Beatles as a united and invulnerable front. It was no less symbolic of Paul’s belief that the Klein era must pass and that, meantime, there was one safe refuge from him. Not even Allen Klein could harm the Beatles in any sphere where they made music together.
Early in July, Paul asked Ringo to drive up and have dinner with him and Linda at Cavendish Avenue. He had by then given up trying to dissuade John or George from appointing Klein. Ringo was, perhaps, a different story. Ringo had gone along with the others, saying that Apple needed “a hustler.” But Paul evidently still had hopes of the solid common sense that, in so many ways, had given the Beatles their inner strength and balance.
The evening, however, did not turn Ringo against Klein so much as against Linda. “It seemed that as soon as I started saying, well, maybe Klein wasn’t so bad and we should give him a chance, Linda would start crying. In a few minutes, I’d be saying the same—well, maybe he isn’t so bad—and Linda would start crying again. ‘Oh, they’ve got you, too,’ she kept saying.”
Apple, Paul’s brainchild, his living Magritte, his Western Communism, was now repugnant to him. London was becoming almost as bad. The girls outside his gates showed increasing hatred of Linda: They broke into the house not just to look now but to steal the new Mrs. McCartney’s clothes and photographic prints. When money began to vanish, even Paul’s tolerance became exhausted. One day, he and Linda pretended to go out, then kept watch on the house from a garden across the street. Unfortunately, it was the moment chosen by Margo Stevens, his longest-standing admirer, to leave a bunch of flowers on the front step. “Suddenly, Paul ran up and started shaking me. ‘It’s you all the time, isn’t it?’ he kept shouting. I was terrified. I said, ‘No—I only wanted to leave some flowers.’ I think he could see how much he’d frightened me. He stopped shaking me and started stroking my hair.”
Late in July, Paul got in touch with George Martin. It was now five months since Martin had worked on the Let It Be album. According to Paul, no one had yet been able to face editing the hours of ramshackle playing. The book that was to have accompanied the record had been written, but then heavily censored in proof by EMI. The film, originally intended for television, was now to be a full-length cinema feature, and so impossible to release before early 1970. The album, when edited, must therefore be held over to accompany the film.
Then Paul made a surprising request. The Beatles, he said, wanted Martin to produce an album for them “the way we used to do it.” Martin, remembering his latter experience, responded cautiously. “I said: ‘If the album’s going to be the way it used to be, then all of you have got to be the way you used to be.’ Paul said: ‘Yeah, we will. We promise. Only please let’s do the album.’”
So it happened, in July and August 1969, as the decade began to wear out, that its chief creators agreed to turn back the clock a little way. John suspended his Peace Campaign. George broke off from recording the chants of the London Radha Krishna Temple. Ringo interrupted his burgeoning film career. Paul steeled himself to remain in London a little longer. The four Beatles met, for the last time, at Abbey Road.
NINETEEN
“EVERYBODY SAW THE SUNSHINE”
On July 22, 1969, a human being first set foot on the moon. It was an oddly anticlimactic moment. Fictive representations of the great event for half a century past had imagined a planet inhabited by bellicose little green men, not the dead white wilderness that later close study had revealed. Storytellers in print and film alike had failed to realize, too, that as rocket science advanced, other technologies would keep step with it. Consequently, no one expected that when a first moon landing finally came, it could be televised to the whole world exactly as it happened; that, shown on black-and-white screens for hour after hour, it would gradually lose its initial stupendous fascination, becoming commonplace and ultimately even boring; so that by the time the astronaut Neil Armstrong took his carefully scripted “One small step for [a] man—one giant leap for Mankind,” he would seem less like history’s greatest explorer since Columbus than a kind of intergalactic disk jockey.
So, in their expiring months, the sixties turned from t
he dusty feathers of the past and shuffled reluctantly toward a new world shaped by the myriad tools and byproducts of space exploration: computers, microchips, digital clock faces, digital typefaces, nonstick saucepans, moon boots, clingfilm, the expression “We have lift-off.”
For millions of the young, paradoxically, that moon-shot summer was devoted to getting as close as humanly possible to earth. In August came the free Woodstock festival when, on a small farm in upstate New York, a four-day pageant of top American and British rock acts was watched by a nonpaying crowd of 450,000, their spirits undampened by periodic rain and the sketchiest of life-support facilities; good-humored even in their message to a government that still wished to export their young men as cannon-fodder to Vietnam. “There ain’t no time to wonder why,” sang the giant open-air chorus led by Country Joe and the Fish. “Whoopee! we’re all gonna die.”
After Woodstock, the exotic notion of playing music for nothing spread like wildfire through the small, mutually imitative top echelon of rock bands. Doing a free concert was an easy way of becoming patron saints to the hippie subculture, who would afterward buy their records by the million at full price; it also symbolized a widespread breakaway from the control of old-fashioned, money-motivated managers. London had seen its own pioneering free festival earlier in the month when Eric Clapton and his new “supergroup” Blind Faith performed in Hyde Park before a crowd estimated at 150,000. That event also passed off happily and peacefully, and was followed by news of one still larger and more impressive. The Rolling Stones would give a free concert, also in Hyde Park, on July 5.