Shout! (71 page)

Late in 1968, Linda had taken Paul McCartney home to New York to meet her family. He had met her father, the elegant Lee Eastman, and her brother, John, a bright young Ivy Leaguer, already a partner in the family law and management practice. He had surveyed the list of show business VIPs and renowned painters whom the Eastmans represented, and tasted the high-caste Manhattan life that formed the highest rung of his ascent from a little row house in Allerton. By the time he returned to London, he had decided that Eastman & Eastman were the solution for both the Beatles’ management and Apple.

Paul having prepared the ground on both sides, John Eastman flew to London to meet the other Beatles a few weeks later. They were not bowled over—first, because Lee hadn’t thought it worthwhile to show up in person; second, because John came across as rather immature and overeager. No one was impressed by his efforts to make up to John and Yoko with arty talk about Kafka. Also, it was known to everyone inside the Beatles’ circle, though not yet to anyone outside it, that the Eastman and McCartney families were soon to be joined by matrimony. Nevertheless, a letter signed by all four Beatles authorized John Eastman to act for them in contractual matters. By the time Allen Klein appeared, Paul’s soon-to-be brother-in-law had begun an ambitious plan to consolidate their dwindling reserves.

NEMS Enterprises, Brian Epstein’s original management company, still hung ghostlike in the Apple firmament. Under its new name, Nemperor Holdings, it continued to receive the Beatles’ earnings and to deduct Brian’s 25 percent before passing on the residue to Apple. Yet NEMS had long since ceased to exercise control over them as agents and managers. The bond was purely technical—and sentimental, since Brian’s mother, Queenie, was NEMS’s main shareholder and his brother, Clive, was chairman. The Beatles themselves still held the 10 percent share in NEMS allotted to them by Brian’s tender conscience.

The Epsteins, on their side, while wishing to retain control of NEMS, still faced the bill for half a million pounds in estate taxes that Brian’s cash assets had nowhere near covered. Clive Epstein, for all his dutiful efforts to expand NEMS, knew he had no ultimate course but to sell the company. What restrained him was his sense of obligation—to Brian’s memory, to his mother, to the remaining Liverpool artists—to everything, in fact, but his own fervent desire to return to Liverpool’s quieter business climes.

Late in 1967, Clive had received an offer for NEMS from the Triumph Investment Trust, a city merchant bank with a reputation for aggressive takeovers. At that stage, however, NEMS, transformed into Nemperor, was committed to a “programme of vigorous expansion.” The expansion proved less than vigorous, and a year later, preempting a rumored bid by the British Lion Film Corporation, Triumph’s chairman, Leonard Richenberg, made a second approach to Clive Epstein. This time, Clive was ready to accept Richenberg’s offer.

John Eastman’s plan was that the Beatles themselves should buy up NEMS, matching Triumph’s offer of one million pounds. Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI had agreed to advance the entire sum against future royalty earnings. Clive Epstein, feeling that the Beatles had a moral right to the company that Brian had launched on their name, notified Leonard Richenberg that the sale to Triumph was off.

It was at this point that John met, and adopted, Allen Klein. George and Ringo, who met Klein soon afterward, were struck, as John had been, by Klein’s forthrightness and his thorough grasp of the Apple problem. They did not instantly accept him as their savior, but they were willing to listen. Paul was not. He attended only one meeting with Klein, and walked out soon after it had begun.

The plan agreed to by the other three was that John Eastman and
Klein should
both
work as advisers to Apple. Eastman was to follow up the NEMS deal while Klein looked into their financial position with special regard to EMI’s one-million-pound loan.

The Eastmans, father and son, made no secret of the disfavor with which they regarded Allen Klein. They were quick to inform Paul—as Leonard Richenberg had independently discovered—that Klein was viewed with suspicion in New York because of the Cameo-Parkway affair; that some fifty lawsuits decorated the escutcheon of Klein’s company, ABKCO Industries; and that Klein himself currently faced ten charges by the U.S. Internal Revenue Service of failing to file income tax returns.

To George and Ringo that was less important than the stunning promise Klein held out to them. He would go into Apple and clean up the mess. He would also make each of them wealthy in a way that even they, in their clouds of ready cash, had never imagined possible. He had a way of characterizing money as some dragonlike entity that had slain Brian Epstein, with his paltry seven-million-pound gross, but which Allen Klein, with his ABKCO sword, knew the secret of vanquishing: “You shouldn’t have to worry about money.
You
shouldn’t have to think about it. You should be able to say FYM—Fuck You, Money.”

George and Ringo responded, as John had, to Klein’s pungent fiscal imagery and down-to-earth manner. They liked him for the brusqueness he did not trouble to moderate, whatever the company. John Eastman, by contrast, wavered between urbane bonhomie and spluttering rage. It was a trait shared by his father, who had at length flown over from New York to meet the Beatles and Klein together at the Claridge Hotel. A few minutes after the meeting began, Lee Eastman rounded on Klein and began to shout abuse at him. The outburst was, in fact, skillfully engineered by Klein, to reveal Lee Eastman as a hysteric and himself as the stolid underdog. John, George, and Ringo naturally sided with the underdog.

Clive Epstein, meanwhile, had begun to suspect that selling NEMS to the Beatles was a process that might drag on for months. He therefore reopened negotiations with Leonard Richenberg and Triumph, though stressing he would still prefer to accept the Beatles’ offer. He undertook not to sell for three more weeks to give them time to conclude their bid.

But the Beatles’ advisers were by now bogged down in internecine warfare. Klein claimed that the Eastmans were blocking his access to vital financial details within Apple. John Eastman accused Klein of imperiling
the deal by boasts that he could get NEMS “for nothing” on the strength of sums owed to the Beatles in back payments. Though the deadline had not expired, it clearly would not be met. Clive Epstein sold out to Triumph for a mixture of cash and stock on February 17.

John Eastman flew back to New York. The Beatles continued discussions with Allen Klein—minus Paul. Instead, Paul would send along his lawyer, a Mr. Charles Corman. The others were amused at first that such a personage was meant to fill Paul’s place at the board table. They would ask Mr. Corman why he hadn’t brought along his bass guitar.

On March 11, Apple’s press office issued a brief communiqué confirming the rumor it had for weeks been vigorously denying. Paul McCartney
was
to marry Linda Eastman. The ceremony would take place the following day in London, at Marylebone Register Office.

The bombshell exploded, among other places, in a small house in Redditch, Worcestershire, where Jill Pritchard, a traveling hairdresser, was giving one of her regular customers a shampoo and set. “Even before I heard it on the radio,” Jill says, “I had a sort of premonition it had happened. I remember looking at the customer’s little girl and wondering how she’d react.

“It was just a short announcement on the BBC News. I finished the shampoo and set, then I drove straight home and packed a little overnight bag. I’d got a bit of money that I’d always kept put by for an emergency. I got a friend to ring up my mum later and tell her where I’d gone. Then I drove to New Street Station in Birmingham and left my car on a No Waiting sign. I bought myself a ticket to London—first class, so I wouldn’t have to sit and cry in a compartment full of people.”

Late that night, wet-eyed and still carrying her suitcase, Jill Pritchard walked up Cavendish Avenue and joined the large, stunned crowd that had gathered there. The first girl she spoke to was Margo Stevens. “Is
she
in there?” Jill asked. Thousands of girls throughout Europe and America found it similarly impossible to articulate Linda’s name.

“We all knew it was going to happen,” Margo says. “We even knew Linda was pregnant. We’d seen the prescription that Rosie, the housekeeper, collected for her. But we kept hoping Paul would get out of it somehow. He was upset because we were taking it so badly. He’d come out to the gates to talk to us earlier in the day. ‘Look, girls,’ he said, ‘be fair. I had to get married some time.’”

Every British newspaper, the day after Paul’s wedding, carried pictures of the same desolately weeping girl. It was Jill Pritchard, the traveling hairdresser from Redditch. Photographers whirled her this way and that for most of the afternoon, shouting, “Go on—cry. You’ll be in the papers.” When Paul drove back with Linda after the ceremony, grief began to turn to violence. The security gates were forced apart, the front door was kicked, and wads of burning newspaper were pushed through the letterbox. After that, the police appeared and told everyone to disperse.

Margo, Jill, and the other regulars, drained of all emotion, adjourned to the nearest pub. “We heard later from Paul’s housekeeper, Rosie, that he was really upset about us,” Margo says. “He was standing just inside the front door, saying, ‘I
must
go out and talk to them again.’ But when he did come out, none of us was there any more. He couldn’t believe we’d all gone away, so Rosie said. When he came back into the house, he was almost in tears.”

That same night, a squad of police officers raided George Harrison’s Esher bungalow, and found a total of 570 grains of cannabis. George was in London, recording his friend Jackie Lomax; when he returned he found the officers sitting with his wife, Patti, watching television and playing Beatles records. By an unkind coincidence, the name of the sniffer dog was “Yogi.”

Eight days later, at the British consulate on Gibraltar, John and Yoko were quietly married. John wore a crumpled white jacket, an apostle-length beard, and tennis shoes. Yoko wore a wide-brimmed white hat, a matching mini-dress, and outsize sunglasses that made her face as expressionless as a panda’s. They had decided on marriage suddenly while on vacation in Paris, and chosen Gibraltar as being “quiet, friendly, and British.” Peter Brown made the arrangements from London, and himself flew out to be best man. John and Yoko posed for pictures with the consulate staff, saw what little of Gibraltar there was to see, then flew back to Paris to own up to the international press. “We’re going to stage many happenings and events together,” Yoko said. “This marriage was one of them.”

The Beatles’ American fan club organizer issued an appeal for tolerance of what the whole world greeted as John’s worst aberration yet: “I know this news is shocking. Please try to understand that we should at
least give Yoko the same chance we are giving Linda, and that Maureen and Patti got. If it makes John happy, I suppose we should all be enthused too.”

Their honeymoon was the first of Yoko’s promised happenings: It also inaugurated their campaign to promote that much desired but fastfading hippie commodity, Peace. To promote the cause of peace they announced they would spend seven successive days in bed, at the Amsterdam Hilton hotel.

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.