The Beatles (153 page)

When the next list of victims was issued, Ron Kass’s name appeared at the top. “Firing Ron—a nice, honorable, successful international record executive—was the only way for Allen to take control of the company,” according to Peter Brown. But it wasn’t that easy to simply sack a man like Kass, whose contract and reputation stood in the way. So Klein resorted to an old accountant’s trick of questioning an expense of Ron’s, making it appear as though something improper had transpired, when in fact there was a perfectly reasonable explanation.
In this case, it was a company check
made out to Kass for cash, which had been advanced to Neil Aspinall in America. Once Klein cast it in doubt, however, there was too much stigma involved. Not even the Beatles would come to his rescue.

Brown was ordered to oust Peter Asher as well. Since the days of Paul’s residency at his parents’ house, Peter had made quite a name for himself, first as half of the hit-making duo Peter and Gordon, then more recently developing talent as Apple’s chief A&R man. After producing James Taylor’s debut, Asher was in great demand, with a dozen acts vying for his services. But to Allen Klein, this power was intimidating.
Asher, who went on to become one of the most successful producers in the music business, refused to give Klein
the satisfaction of sacking him, and resigned.

At the time of the Apple staff liquidation, John Lennon had been staging a seven-day bed-in for peace in the Presidential Suite at the Amsterdam Hilton, ostensibly “
as a protest against violence
everywhere,” though anyone who knew John and Yoko understood that this was mostly an opportunity for them to capture the world’s headlines and promote their recent marriage, which appeared grotesque to the public eye.

The couple, convinced they’d be prevented from having a proper private honeymoon, decided to turn the tables on the annoying press and stage the postmarriage function as an international event. “
Instead of fighting it
,” as John explained, “we joined it,” choosing “to make maximum use of” the interest for their own purposes. Up to sixty newsmen at a time gained access to their bedroom any time of the day or night, as long as John and Yoko could lobby for a personal cause.
A “plea for peace
,” they believed, was the perfect attention-grabber.

The entire affair was (to the disappointment of the tabloids) tame enough for TV, a tranquilizing prime-time family spectacle, with John and Yoko dressed in neatly pressed pajamas, delivering messages filled with nonviolence and antiwar rhetoric. The room itself was a testament to flaky innocence, decorated with crude hand-painted signs that proclaimed
“Grow Your Hair,” “Stay in Bed,” “John Loves Yoko,” “Hair Peace.” Their aphorisms, delivered like gospel, were printed in boldface, including a new standby of John’s that found favor among the columnists: “Give peace a chance.” It was
part demonstration, part sideshow
, wrapped in the guise of Yoko’s self-indulgent performance art.

As to what had motivated him to begin preaching peace, all John could say was that “
it’s no good working for money
, and there’s nothing else to do but work—so working for peace is an objective.” But the real motivation may have simply been that John and Yoko craved attention. They loved using the media to stir up controversy, loved the way it painted them as incorrigible rebels, loved the exasperated reactions, loved the power it gave them. “
It came at a perfect time
in his life,” John’s biographer Ray Coleman would write, “with the Beatles at a crossroads.” Peace—and its power “to force people to re-act”—gave him another imposing vehicle, another public platform from which to reshape and sharpen his image. “
We are trying to make Christ’s message
contemporary,” John told an openmouthed audience at one of the Amsterdam press conferences. “What would He have done if He had advertisements, records, films, TV, and newspapers? Well, the miracle today is communications. So let’s use it!”

At Apple, each week, each day, it seemed, brought new and unexpected departures, along with division consolidations: Apple Retail was shut down, as was Apple Electronics, Apple Films, Apple Publishing, and other offshoots that produced little or no income.

Yet, with so many hands still in the pot, there were too many things that could go wrong—many of which did. On the heels of Allen Klein’s remarks that buying NEMS was inadvisable, John Eastman, in his overzealousness as the Beatles’ legal counsel, wrote to Clive Epstein in an attempt to stall the negotiations:

As you know, Mr. Allen Klein
is doing an audit of the Beatles’ affairs,
vis-à-vis
NEMS and Nemperor Holdings Ltd. When this has been completed I suggest we meet to discuss the results of Mr. Klein’s audit as well as the propriety of the negotiations surrounding the nine-year agreement between E.M.I., the Beatles, and NEMS.

Propriety:
Clive took the word as an outrageous slap in the face. A principled, moral man, he was indignant that anyone might imply that NEMS, an Epstein family company, had acted in bad faith. Rather than engage in a potentially ugly dispute, he promptly sold his 70 percent of the company to Triumph Investment Trust, giving it the right to pocket 25 percent of the Beatles’ record royalties, as well as a 4.5 percent interest in Northern Songs.

The Beatles had reason to be infuriated. As they had hoped, owning NEMS would have given them complete control of their financial interests and access to a much larger chunk of their income. The million pounds that NEMS was prepared to accept from Apple was a pittance compared with what the Beatles would have collected over the next seven years. Besides, the sale put their careers in the hands of a faceless, ruthless corporation whose only interest was the bottom line.

Klein attempted to strong-arm Triumph’s managing director, Leonard Richenberg, into selling the company back to the Beatles on reasonable terms. If not, he warned, they intended to have NEMS make good on large sums of money supposedly owed the Beatles for performances over the past ten years. No exact figure was established, according to Richenberg, but it was suggested that NEMS owed the Beatles far more than the company could ever hope to collect.

Richenberg, however, called Klein’s bluff.
He kicked Allen out
of his office and refused to meet with the Beatles as long as their acting manager was involved in the negotiations. For his part, Klein answered him threat for threat. He notified EMI in writing that from that time forth, the label was to pay the Beatles’ own merchant bankers “
all royalties payable
by you directly or indirectly to Beatles and Co. or Apple Corps.” Otherwise, it was implied, the Beatles would fulfill the remainder of their recording contract by singing various versions of “God Save the Queen.” With more than £1.3 million of royalties owed the Beatles, the company was damned no matter who it sided with. The whole sordid matter was referred to the courts.

The next theater of battle developed on the music publishing front. On March 28, during the Amsterdam bed-in, John opened the newspaper to discover that Dick James and his partner, Charles Silver, were selling their controlling interest in Northern Songs to ATV, the entertainment empire owned by Lew Grade, for roughly £1.2 million. John felt ambushed. He knew their songs effectively belonged to a publicly held corporation, which meant they were somewhere out there in the ozone, somewhere beyond his control, but he hadn’t expected a betrayal from what should have
been a devoted ally, a grateful ally. The Beatles
made
Dick James. His entire mini-empire was established on their northern backs.

John’s ire grew steadily as he absorbed the full meaning of the article until by nightfall he was fuming. “
I won’t sell!
” he bellowed to an audience of tickled journalists. “These are my shares and my songs and I want to keep a bit of the end product.” But what about his partner? reporters wanted to know. Shouldn’t he consult the reluctant Mr. McCartney for his view of the deal? John remonstrated. “I don’t have to ring Paul. I know damn well he feels the same as I do.”

The Beatles felt James had ripped them off. They hated him—and now this. James should have offered Northern Songs to the Beatles at the same price. But he was poised for the quick hit. He was afraid of the Beatles—afraid of their eccentricity, afraid of their instability, afraid of their unpredictability and increasingly weird behavior. He was also tired of taking the Beatles’ abuse, which had grown harsher since Brian’s death. Their behavior, too much of a liability, put his investment at risk, providing even more justification for the sale.

John Eastman spoke for everyone
at Apple when he called James “a bastard.” The Beatles were determined not to let Northern Songs slip away. But how to do battle with the Herculean ATV? There was one clever solution: have the Beatles declared “a national treasure”: under those conditions, they should be protected by statute. Hoping to win such designation, they appealed to a group of London city institutions heavily invested in Northern Songs for control of their blocks of shares. It was a wild long shot—but successful. When combined with the Beatles’ own holdings, these pledged shares,
totaling about 14 percent
, would give them majority interest in the company and a chance at genuine recovery. But as agreements were being signed, John grew suspicious—or paranoid—of his benefactors in the business establishment, whom he proceeded to denounce in the press. “
I’m not going to be fucked around
by men in suits, sitting on their fat arses in the city,” he fumed. It was a bizarre outburst, and in a somewhat stunned response the shares were promptly withdrawn, thus torpedoing the deal.

Throughout April and early May, the war for Northern Songs raged on between the Beatles, ATV, and a consortium of investors who rushed into the deal at the last minute, hoping to play spoiler. Meanwhile, the Beatles had their hands full on other fronts. There was still internal conflict over who would handle their business affairs—Allen Klein or the Eastmans—and hostilities between all the parties escalated as the legal consequences sharpened.

John, George, and Ringo were adamant: Klein was their man; Paul was just as adamant: anyone but Klein. “
Paul was getting more and more uptight
until [he] wouldn’t speak to us,” John recalled. He told the other three: “Speak to my lawyer. I don’t want to speak about business anymore,” which John interpreted as “I’m going to drag my feet and try and fuck you.”

“
We had great arguments
with Paul,” Ringo remembered, but none that compared with a confrontation that ultimately determined Klein’s fate.

On the night of May 9, 1969, the Beatles were booked into Olympic Sound for a recording session that had been ongoing since mid-April. In the midst of such protracted turmoil, the band managed to agree that making music helped clear the atmosphere, and they were laying down basic tracks for what would eventually become
Abbey Road.
Since the beginning, they had loosely structured “I Want You (She’s So Heavy),” “Oh! Darling,” “Octopus’s Garden,” “Something,” and “You Never Give Me Your Money,” all of which would be reworked throughout the summer. On this night, however, they were due to polish the forthcoming
Get Back
LP under George Martin’s direction when Paul was confronted with an ultimatum. John, Ringo, and George wanted his signature on Klein’s three-year management contract—
right away.
Klein was outside, waiting for it to be hand delivered.

In essence, Paul had already agreed to the representation, but he hated like hell to formalize it. Now the contract, rolled loosely in his hand, made it official. He couldn’t do it; he couldn’t put his name on it. The fee to Klein—20 percent across the board—was too rich, Paul told them. “
He’ll take fifteen percent
.” This last-minute obstacle enraged the other Beatles. “You’re just stalling,” they complained. Paul insisted: “No, I’m working for us. We’re a big act—the Beatles. He’ll take fifteen percent.”

They went back and forth over the percentages, neither side budging from its position, until Paul threw up his hands. It was growing late, a Friday evening. “We could easily do this on Monday. Let’s do our session instead,” he proposed. The others wouldn’t hear of it. Voices were raised, threats leveled. The hotter tempers got, the further Paul withdrew. Finally, he’d heard enough: he was waiting until Monday, at which time his lawyer would be present. For the others, that was it. “Oh, fuck off!” they bellowed, before storming out of the studio.

Over the next several weeks the Beatles not only aggressively pushed for a solution that would give them control of the company but, clearly acting
with their merchant banker’s blessing, waged a public campaign against ATV, asking undecided shareholders to reject the conglomerate’s offer. John and Paul, realizing that they were vulnerable to the takeover, appeared almost daily in the press, where, to build public support, they painted themselves as helpless victims of corporate rapacity. They promised to fight on, to turn back the repugnant opposition, the haters of music and all that was good.