The Beatles (147 page)

For John, it was yet another shot aimed at an uptight establishment and a chance to instigate more flak among the other Beatles, who had seen more than enough of Yoko Ono, with or without clothes. He was still steamed over what he perceived as their open hostility toward Yoko, the way “
they all sat there
, with their wives, like a fucking jury, and judged [her].” Well, he’d take his revenge where he could get it.

Paul remembered John showing him the cover and being “
slightly shocked
” by the nudity, but Ringo, following his initial embarrassment, turned to John in exasperation and said, “
Ah, come on, John
. You’re doing all this stuff and it may be cool for you, but you know we all have to answer… for it.” How, he wondered, was this going to affect the Beatles’ image as musicians? How were they supposed to explain it to the fans? And not just the cover photo, but the so-called music on the record. “
Ringo and Paul hated
every last note on that album,” says Peter Brown,
who admits doing his share to stall the project as long as he could. Mostly everyone agreed there wasn’t a redeemable measure on it; it was “
a collection of bizarre sounds
and effects… neither surprising nor important musically,” a complete put-on. The kids who bought it, thinking that somehow the Beatles were involved, were sure to feel ripped off.

No one other than John wanted to put it out, but he insisted. Referring to Apple’s current lineup, he pointed to the others’ pet projects—Paul with Mary Hopkin and the Black Dyke Mills Band, George with Jackie Lomax—as examples of the label’s artistic freedom. They had even signed a classical artist, John Tavener. According to John, he had intended all along to produce an album with Yoko and demanded they accept
Two Virgins
as his contribution.

Sir Joseph Lockwood made EMI’s position perfectly clear: the company would press the album but had no intention of distributing it (
Two Virgins
was eventually released in London on Track Records, and in the United States by Tetragrammaton). The weekly music magazines—
Disc, Melody Maker,
and
NME
—refused to run ads for it, citing the ages of their impressionable young readers. And the Beatles’ accounting firm, Bryce Hammer, resigned in protest over the cover. But the antagonism that
Two Virgins
aroused gave new impetus to John’s conviction that the Beatles had become passé and were, moreover, useless to him. As he saw it, the band was content to continue making more Beatles records, content to hone their image as the lovable lads from Liverpool, content to go on treating one another as if they were indispensable friends. And worse: just content.
The “togetherness had gone
…. [R]ound about
Sgt. Pepper’s
it was wearing off,” John recalled. “There was no longer any spark.” As far as creativity was concerned, it seemed that they were headed in opposite directions. He had nothing left to give them. The collaboration with Paul was over, as was his marriage. The Beatles’ music no longer intrigued him. Yoko offered John a way out, a way to liberate himself from the stagnation, as well as a radically different perspective. “
I decided to leave
the group when I decided that I could no longer get anything out of the Beatles. And here was someone who could turn me on to a million things.” Yoko represented his ultimate rejection of the Beatles—a rejection that John had been entertaining for some time. With Yoko there to stimulate him, John said, “
the boys became of no interest
whatsoever, other than they were like old friends.” From that moment on, he told Ray Coleman, “It was ‘
Goodbye to the boys
in the band!’ ”

Chapter 36
Disturbing the Peace

A
fter six years’ work
, for the most part of which you have been at the very top of the music 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 a five-page letter of resignation sent to each of the Beatles on October 23, 1968, by Stephen Maltz, their young and levelheaded in-house accountant. It was a nervy piece of criticism, a blistering indictment of their business practices, which he said had been carelessly conducted almost from the day Apple opened its doors. The company was “a debacle,” Maltz avowed, a mosaic of disarray and incompetence. There was so much waste, so much unscrupulous recordkeeping, so much outright
stealing,
that it was a wonder there was anything left in the till for operating expenses.

Throughout the months that followed, troubling details about the Beatles’ finances began to emerge. Because of payment cycles snafued by byzantine accounting procedures and slipshod deals, the Beatles had earned virtually nothing in 1968, a “
pitiful £78,000
.” That would not even begin to cover their personal expenses, which had no restrictions. “
The deal among the Beatles
was: you just charged what you need,” according to Peter Brown, who rubber-stamped their vouchers. “The boys used to get cash every week, as they needed it, plus their bills would just be paid for by the accountants, no questions asked.” Meanwhile, everyone borrowed against a seemingly bottomless Apple loan account. “John was the biggest spender; he had no sense of money at all. Ringo was next: houses, cars, toys, presents for Maureen.” Maltz tried repeatedly to warn them about the enormous tax bite that required ratepayers in the Beatles’ bracket to earn almost £120,000 for every £10,000 they spent. What he didn’t tell
them was that the often disgraceful way they behaved made them a target for criminal investigation.

The final straw came a few days before Maltz’s resignation, on October 18, when John and Yoko were busted for possession. It was a seedy, shameful affair at the Montagu Square flat, with a dozen police swarming in windows and doors to search for illegal drugs.
John, who had been tipped
off before the raid, thanks to a call from Don Short, scoured the place from top to bottom, “
flushing handfuls of pills
down the toilet,” according to Pete Shotton, and madly “hoovering the carpets because Jimi Hendrix and Ringo had lived there.” But John was no match for the dogs that sniffed out marijuana residue in a binocular case on the mantel and in a rolling machine stashed in the bathroom. The press had a field day, snapping roll after roll of photos as John and Yoko, looking nervous and disheveled, were marched outside to a paddy wagon idling at the curb.

If the bust signified anything, it demonstrated that the press and police had finally taken off the gloves. Until now, according to Ray Connolly, who was the
Evening Standard
’s pop columnist, the Beatles had been lionized by the press. “
It was a measure of their popularity
that no bad word was ever written about them in the daily papers,” he says. “It was an unspoken contract. The press was rooting for them—and protecting them.” Connolly included. He recalls visiting with John one afternoon at the Harrow Road Clinic, a few days before Yoko’s miscarriage. “Suddenly, a character called Michael X turned up, a real bad guy [who was later hanged for his part in a murder]. He opened this huge suitcase and took out enough grass to turn on the entire city of Westminster. Now, I’m a member of the press. Do I ever mention it? No, nor would John expect me to. That was the deal at the time.” And an exclusive deal, if contingencies were any indication. The Stones were routinely hounded by the press and police, as were other rock bands with a bad-boy image. “Never the Beatles. They were considered untouchable, by the police also. No one wanted to spoil the party.”

But that phase of the party, it seemed, was over. John’s outrageous public affair, Yoko’s out-of-wedlock miscarriage, the scandalous
Two Virgins
cover, even the escapades with the Maharishi—for respectable fans, it was too much to accept. They could deal with John’s outbursts, his rebellious nature, his opinions about the war. But with Yoko, apparently, he had crossed the line. No one knew better than John how grim the situation had become. Toward the end of the year, he told friends that everyone—the press, the police, even the fans—“were out to get” him. Convinced that
the bust “was a frame-up
,” he worried that the authorities would relentlessly pursue him from now on, destroying his reverie with Yoko.

As the volatile year 1968 drew to a close, the prevailing mood among the Beatles was both melancholy and uncertain. The complexion of the band had changed, it was in upheaval. The boys’ relationship to one another was being drastically realigned. Even their personal issues demanded a break with the past.

On November 8 John’s divorce
from Cynthia was finalized by the courts.
^*
Earlier, in June, Paul ended his five-year relationship with Jane Asher in much the same fashion that John had dispatched his wife. That summer, with their engagement more or less in limbo, both Paul and Jane sensed that things were going nowhere. Like the Beatles, they’d changed and grown in opposite directions. Paul, especially, knew it had to end. But—how? Who would initiate the break? Ultimately, as was custom, Paul just forced her hand.

As soon as Jane went on tour with the Bristol Old Vic, it was virtually inevitable that he would find, if only temporarily, a replacement. Everyone at Apple detected the familiar symptoms. “
When Paul got bored
,” says Peter Brown, “his dick got twitchy.” It was dispiriting coming home from the studio each day to an empty house. He craved some kind of nurturing, some intimacy. In the meantime, Paul entertained himself with an American girl who’d arrived on Apple’s doorstep seeking help to finance a screenplay and wound up, instead, with one of the Beatles. Through early June they were seen around town together, dining at restaurants or camped out at one of the clubs. “
It wasn’t anything serious
,” says Alistair Taylor, who heard enough of the office gossip to appreciate the situation, “just the usual distraction with a pretty bird.” But when Jane arrived home unexpectedly and discovered Paul and the girl in bed together, that was the line in the sand. The relationship was “
broken off, finished,
” as she described it on a popular TV chat show.

No sooner had Jane removed her things from Cavendish Avenue than Paul’s interest in Linda began to heat up. In September, Paul invited her to London as the Beatles were putting the finishing touches on the White Album. Then, after the record had been delivered to EMI, they flew to New York together, where the courtship turned serious—and seriously fun. “
I loved [it in] New York
,” he recalls, brimful with lasting memories of those weeks. “Linda had a cool little flat on Lexington and
Eighty-third… and we’d go around a lot.” Unlike those surreal New York experiences during Beatlemania, when he was a prisoner in the Plaza and the Delmonico, they trolled the city streets unnoticed, whirling in and out of local galleries and clubs in an effort to take it all in. New York in October was even more magical than he’d remembered. For Paul, life began and ended on those city streets. Together, he and Linda explored every neighborhood, from Chinatown to Harlem, where Paul lingered in local record shops disguised in army-navy surplus and “a big beard, like Ratso out of
Midnight Cowboy.
” In a way, it was the culmination of a dream. These were among the rare times when he was absolutely relaxed, in a place he considered the music capital of the world. “Linda eventually took me to the Apollo,” Paul recalls. “We just went on our own, took a cab.” It was one of those chaotic Wednesday-night talent free-for-alls with Billy Stewart headlining, and they rooted for a soulful little girl in a gray dress who lit up the jaded crowd.

One night, wandering through Chinatown, a feeling crept up on Paul without warning. “
Linda was showing me around
,” he recalls, “and we passed a sign that said, ‘Come in now and get a Buddhist wedding.’ ” He drew a breath and without giving it much thought said, “C’mon, Linda—what about it?” The traffic, the street sounds, the buzz of voices, her heartbeat—everything stopped. He was
serious,
she gathered. Paul McCartney was asking her to marry him,
right now.
He watched as she ran through a whole laundry list of emotions, grinned broadly, and said, “No, no! I
can’t
do that.”

Later, Paul insisted that he’d only been kidding, but she wasn’t so sure of that. And neither was he.

In any case, something important had taken hold that week, something that opened a window onto the future. Paul had fallen deeply in love with Linda Eastman: “
her womanliness
”; her daughter, Heather (from a brief marriage); her extended family; her “
slight rebelliousness
”; her seemingly normal life—the whole package. She turned him on in so many ways. She was organized, but in a relaxed way, as opposed to Jane’s more rigid manner. There was no pretense, none of the uncertainty. Everything just felt right.

One unusually cool and crisp October afternoon, after a serene stroll shopping on the Upper East Side, Paul suggested to Linda that she and Heather return to London with him—permanently. It was Linda’s nature to be spontaneous, but even she had to admit this was fairly extreme. It meant packing up everything she had and moving from a comfortable
home. She dreaded leaving New York. “
It was great living
how I lived [there],” she said, recalling how it felt less “restrained” in New York than in stately England. Her career was in New York, as well as her family, her friends.