The Beatles (152 page)

Joining in, Klein continued to taunt Eastman in other ways, “
interrupting everything he said
with a string of the most disgusting four-letter words he could tick off his tongue.” As soon as Klein took a breath, Yoko barreled in, challenging Eastman’s judgment and assailing him for condescending to John. “
Will you please stop insulting my husband
,” she snarled. “Don’t call my husband stupid.” Lee Eastman sat on his hands while his fury mounted, but the tag-team effect took its toll. The whole meeting had been a trap, he concluded. Klein had deliberately baited him, attempting to humiliate him. Unable to take another word of abuse, he finally snapped. He leaped to his feet, exploding in righteous indignation, and tore into the snickering accountant. “You are a rodent,” he roared, “the lowest scum on earth!”

Unwittingly, of course, he had played right into John’s hands. “We hadn’t been in there more than a few minutes when Lee Eastman was having something like an epileptic fit and screaming at Allen,” he told
Rolling Stone,
liberally editing the facts to shape his argument. “He had a fuckin’ fit…. This was supposed to be the guy who was taking over the multimillion-dollar corporation…. I wouldn’t let Eastman near me. I wouldn’t let a fuckin’ animal like that who has a mind like that near me.” One can only imagine how he described it for Ringo and George, but whatever the case, it served to ice John’s position. Eastman was out; Allen Klein was their man.

The Beatles may have found a captain for Apple, at last, but he was at the helm of a slowly sinking ship.

Chapter 37
And in the End…

T
hough the Beatles had dodged questions about the bubble bursting ever since they first landed in America, they couldn’t help but feel the pressure mounting toward the inevitable, ugly bang. By March 1969, John, Paul, George, and Ringo knew the end was near. Months of bickering had steadily dispirited them. The last-ditch, desperate effort to carry on as a group only estranged them further and brought their squabbles more visibly into the open. To ease the tension, they each became involved in personal projects: John and Yoko finished production of an avant-garde film for Austrian TV titled
Rape;
Paul attempted to jump-start Mary Hopkin’s anemic career; Ringo accepted a role opposite Peter Sellers in the film adaptation of Terry Southern’s send-up
The Magic Christian;
George recorded a solo album,
Electronic Sounds,
at his home and groomed Billy Preston for stardom. But still, they behaved as itinerant Beatles, clinging to the legacy as one might a security blanket until they summoned the means to resolve their differences—or the courage to go their separate ways.

No one was prepared when rumors of Paul’s marriage to Linda Eastman began circulating around London. On March 11, a day in advance of the ceremony, Paul leaked word of it to the press before even telling the other Beatles about his plans.
^*
Evening Standard
recalls that Paul cornered him at Apple, winked, and said: “
If you don’t tell anybody
, I’ll tell you all about it.”
Except for a brief rendezvous at Abbey Road, the four mates hadn’t seen one another in weeks. John, Ringo, and George might have been surprised by the sudden announcement, but none was shocked that he wasn’t invited to attend. “
Why should we be asked
to help
Paul celebrate,” George wondered, “when we’re not even on speaking terms?” Besides, the last thing any of them wanted was to be part of a media circus.

Marrying off the “
last bachelor among the Beatles
” was big news, and despite appeals that “
Paul and Linda want it simple
” and a cold, driving rainstorm, nothing kept the fans from staging a crazy mob scene. Indeed, the wedding resembled a page torn from the Beatlemania scrapbook. On the morning of March 12, a few minutes before ten, an ashen-faced Linda, clutching her daughter, Heather, by the arm, “
plunged through a mob
of weeping teenagers” outside the Marylebone Registry while Paul waved and threw purple-wrapped candies into the crowd, inciting a mad scramble for souvenirs.
John, who had expressed “surprise”
at the marriage, found the scene stage-managed. “
It was just Paul being Paul
,” he told Peter Brown, “playing to the crowd.”

Unknown to Paul, George spent the wedding day lounging in Derek Taylor’s office at Apple, where he was paged around 5:00 by his wife, Pattie. There was a team of police at their home, she reported, tossing the place in preparation for a drug bust. They had already found a hefty chunk of hash stowed in a box on the mantel. (George insisted that the police had planted it.) Some grass would later turn up as well. (This was his private stash.) In any case, there was going to be an arrest, and when it came it would vie with Paul’s wedding for the morning headlines.

Pete Shotton, who lived nearby, was at Esher when George, dressed in a flamboyant yellow suit, arrived in a stretch limousine with Taylor and a lawyer. The indiscriminate atmosphere in the parlor resembled nothing if not “a party.” Several cops were slouched in armchairs with their feet propped up, watching television. Others drank coffee and thumbed through George’s record collection, while a police dog clad in a beet-red neckerchief nosed through the bedroom closets. George scanned the scene with a sweep of his head, at which point his eyes went blank. Shotton had seen George riled up before, often, and he could be mean. But this was different. “
I’d never seen George so angry
in my life,” Shotton recalls. “He came into the house—and went
berserk.
” He would have told the police where his dope was stashed, but they seemed more interested in playing out the bust, as though it, too, were being stage-managed—which, in a way, it was: even the press had been tipped off to chronicle their handiwork. When a photographer popped out of the front hedge, that was the final straw. “George chased him murderously around the garden,” recalls Shotton, who couldn’t help laughing at the improbable scene. “George
was chasing him; the police were chasing George. It was like something out of the Keystone Kops.” Leaping over garden ornaments and bushes, George kept shouting: “I’ll kill you! I’ll fucking kill you!” Later, being led away by Derek Taylor, he pointed at a reporter and yelled: “The fox has its lair, the bird has its nest.
This is my fucking house!
”

By mid-March the Beatles’ escapades commanded an unprecedented amount of ink. Just five days after Paul married Linda, Peter Brown took a call in his hotel room in Amsterdam, where he had gone for the weekend to hear John Pritchard conduct the philharmonic. John Lennon was on the phone, with a discernible swell in his voice. “
Why don’t you stay there
,” John suggested. “Yoko and I will come over and get married.”

“John made it clear that he didn’t want to get married like Paul [had],” Brown recalls. “That is, he did not want crowds; they wanted to get married quietly.” But Brown delivered bad news: Holland, like most countries, required a two-week minimum residency. According to the (London)
Times,
England was also out of the question because of “difficulties over Yoko’s citizenship” and her recent divorce from Tony Cox. They’d even tried getting married on a cross-Channel ferry, but their car broke down in Basingstoke on the breakneck drive to Southampton, and they were forced to turn back. What were the lovebirds to do?

Brown put Apple’s lawyers on the question and discovered that the only place without a residency requirement was Gibraltar, which, as a British possession, recognized John as a citizen.
Gibraltar?
All anyone knew was that it was a
rock.
But if John and Yoko turned up there bearing the proper papers, they would be married in whatever fashion—and speed—was requested.

Brown arranged for them to fly to Paris, where Alistair Taylor met them with the papers and “
a load of money
.” On Tuesday, March 20, John and Yoko arrived in Gibraltar at 8:30 in the morning and were immediately spotted by other tourists. They’d made no effort at all to be inconspicuous, let alone subtle. “Yoko stood out like a sore thumb, dressed in this funny, white knitted miniskirt outfit, with a floppy white hat,” says Brown, who met them at the plane. John, who appeared to be
very
nervous, wore a long white corduroy jacket over a white polo sweater, white trousers, and sneakers. “You had to be blind to miss them.”

Despite the distraction, John found the setting “beautiful,” a flat, open harbor view surrounded by an expanse of turquoise water. He had little time, however, to take in the colony’s attractions. In a little under an hour,
they swore out affidavits, bought a special license, and were immediately married by the registrar at the British consulate before returning directly to the airport.

Even in a location as remote as Gibraltar, there were already photographers surrounding the plane. “
Intellectually, we didn’t believe
in getting married,” John told them. “But one doesn’t love someone just intellectually. For two people, marriage still has the edge over just living together.” Everyone scrambled aboard for the flight back to Paris, where John and Yoko planned to relax for a few days. Springtime in Paris—it sounded so romantic to the small entourage, who envisioned a traditional, old-fashioned honeymoon. But John and Yoko weren’t traditional by any stretch of the imagination. “We had our honeymoon
before
we got married,” John explained. No, they had something else up their sleeve, something calculated, something more intriguing.

Before John had left for Paris, he huddled with Allen Klein in an attempt to “
rationalize” the situation at Apple
. Klein determined that everyone on the payroll was riding what John referred to as the “
gravy train
,” even Neil and Mal, who “
were living like kings
… like fucking emperors,” thanks to the Beatles’ deep pockets. After much prodding, Peter Brown turned over the employee records to Klein and pleaded for leniency, but to no avail. Many of those in the first wave to be fired were obvious choices. Magic Alex got the early thumb along with Denis O’Dell, whose film division lay dormant; Tony Bramwell; the chefs; and much of the extraneous staff. But the number one name on Klein’s hit list raised a few eyebrows: Alistair Taylor. “
He’d been with us since 1962
,” says Brown, who’d been appointed as Klein’s hatchet man. “He was an honorable employee through all those years, Paul’s gofer, his mate. Whenever any of the boys needed something done, Alistair always saw to it.” Brown trembled as he delivered the news. “It was terrible, terrible. Having to do this was the worst,” he recalls. Taylor received a “generous” severance: three months’ pay as well as rent toward his flat, but he had to leave the premises at once. It was a cruel finale for the man who’d accompanied Brian Epstein to the Cavern on the day he first saw the Beatles. Crueler still was the scene that followed. Shocked and indignant, Alistair called Paul at his home to commiserate and say good-bye. “
But Paul refused
to come to the phone,” he recalls. “Nothing in my life ever hurt as much as that.”