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  Harrison remained opposed to any live show, particularly one that he viewed as ‘expensive and insane’. Starr was adamant that he was not going abroad. Lennon vacillated between being up for anything and opposing everything. ‘I’m warming to the idea of an asylum,’ he remarked.

  Harrison was vexed by yet another issue. As she had been during the White Album sessions, Yoko was impervious to all hints that her presence was unwanted, while Lennon revelled in the discomfiture of his friends. She often distracted him by kissing him or whispering in his ear during a take, causing him to miss a note or forget a lyric. It was virtually impossible for the cameras to get a shot of the four Beatles without Yoko being in the frame. It was obvious to everyone that Lennon, like Harrison, wanted to be anywhere but there.

  At other times, Yoko would be Lennon’s voice in group discussions about how best to break the impasse, but the others knew better than to take him on. McCartney reflected: ‘He would have used that as an excuse to leave the band.’ Harrison preferred straight-talking, having, months earlier, told Yoko that she gave off ‘bad vibes’. Lennon struggled to control his temper then, but now, little more than a week into the project, the gloves were off.

  On 10 January, Harrison’s tolerance snapped. Lennon was sabotaging the sessions, putting his own self-interest before that of the band, was continuing to patronise him personally and was treating them all with contempt. He railed bitterly at Lennon for his put-downs of George’s new songs, and brusquely added that he was leaving the band.

  ‘When?’ asked a startled Lennon.

  ‘Now,’ snapped Harrison. ‘See you round the clubs. Put an ad in the NME.’

  Reflecting on the incident later for the Beatles Anthology project, Harrison attributed his departure to a number of factors, among them the presence of film cameras, which he found particularly annoying when The Beatles weren’t getting along. ‘They were filming Paul and I having a row. It never came to blows, but I thought, “What’s the point of this? I’m quite capable of being relatively happy on my own and if I’m not able to be happy in this situation, I’m getting out.” It was a very, very difficult, stressful time, and being filmed having a row as well was terrible. I got up and I thought, “I’m not doing this any more. I’m out of here.”’

  Cameraman Les Parrott was part of the team assembled by Lindsay-Hogg and up-and-coming film-maker Tony Richmond. Though he didn’t witness this particular bust-up Parrott was sussed enough to know something was amiss when Lennon, McCartney and Starr returned to their instruments. ‘Well, George was missing for a start,’ he told me. ‘There was no reason for any of the crew to be told he had walked out or anything. But it was pretty awkward. We all knew something had happened and it was pretty serious.’

  As for Yoko: ‘She was a blob in black,’ Parrott added. ‘Always there. You could tell the others resented it. Especially George. You had the feeling he wanted to say something. He used to just glower at Yoko.’

  Lennon and McCartney’s immediate response to Harrison’s departure was to launch into an ear-splitting jam. Yoko eased herself into Harrison’s chair to lend her own inimitable vocals. It was the only time the cameras caught her smiling. Lennon betrayed the depth of his feelings towards Harrison by casually suggesting they had a ready-made replacement in Eric Clapton, Harrison’s closest friend. ‘If he’s not back by Monday, we’ll get Eric in,’ he declared. ‘He’s just as good and not such a headache.’

  As it turned out, they wouldn’t have to approach Clapton, who would most certainly have refused to fill the gap left by his closest friend. But at that precise moment, The Beatles were victims of their own indifference and as close to breaking up as they had ever been. The candle that once shone so bright was nearly out.

  *

  Incorporated in May 1967, Apple Corps, its Granny Smith logo inspired by a Magritte painting, was Paul McCartney’s vision for the world’s first multi-media company. The band envisaged, in the parlance of the day, a happening – ‘Western communism’, they called it, a way of amassing cash and using it to become patrons of the alternative arts. They imagined Apple as a support network that would link artist to audience under various guises.

  First came the Apple Boutique, peddling the regulation ’60s Hobbit-styled satin and velvet clothes, overseen by a team of Dutch designers called The Fool. Beatle wives dutifully modelled the stock for Rolling Stone. Lennon and McCartney even flew to New York for a media blitz to launch the venture. Impulsively, McCartney declared: ‘We’re in the happy position of not really needing any more money. So for the first time, the bosses aren’t in it for profit. If you come and see me and say “I’ve had such and such a dream,” I’ll say “Here’s so much money. Go away and do it.” We’ve already bought all our dreams. So now we want to share that possibility with others.’

  Derek Taylor, the group’s urbane press officer, recalled: ‘They said they had set up this company and that anyone who had a dream could come and see them in London and they would make it come true.’ Taking them at their word, London Airport immigration was crammed with Americans identifying The Beatles as sponsors.

  Apple’s philanthropic side was mainly McCartney’s baby, but Lennon was, initially at least, willing to lend a hand. He bristled at criticism in left-wing magazine Black Dwarf that Apple was a sell-out and that they only sang about revolution. He replied: ‘We set up Apple with money we as workers earned, so that we could control what we did.’ Except that The Beatles, in terms of managing a business, couldn’t control anything. Their manager, Brian Epstein, had supervised everything for them, insulating them from everyday reality.

  Three months after Apple was formed, Epstein was dead from a drug overdose. Chaos quickly usurped order. By January 1969, upwards of £20,000 a week was leaving the company, and no one could account for where it went. ‘Apple,’ said Lennon, ‘was like playing Monopoly with real money.’ The Beatles accused everyone of ripping them off, while giving carte blanche to every opportunist to do just that. Such as Magic Alex Mardas, a young Greek entrepreneur who had assiduously courted Lennon and was the money-eating inventor of an electronic pulsing apple and the aptly named ‘Nothing Box’.

  Or Stocky, the Massachusetts artist who sat on a filing cabinet and drew pen-and-ink drawings of genitals. Some California hippies even set up a commune in an empty office. ‘Apple,’ said Taylor, ‘had an aim, but it didn’t have enough order or structure. There were lots of vague phrases like “get it together” and “be there and just see what happens”.’

  Harrison was working with Ravi Shankar, the Indian sitar maestro who was also his mentor in most other things. McCartney, more mainstream, was recording not just Mary Hopkin but also James Taylor, a young, honey-toned American singer-songwriter; Lennon was well down the road of indulging Yoko’s avant-garde whims. By January, The Beatles were attempting to fight on too many fronts as well as fighting among themselves.

  The first casualty was the boutique. The Beatles announced they would give the clothes away. When they threw the doors open everything disappeared, carpets included. ‘All our buddies that worked with us for years were living, drinking and eating like fucking Rome. It was just hell, and it had to stop,’ raged Lennon. Apple had by now become, in the words of Epstein’s de facto replacement Peter Brown, ‘a mausoleum waiting for a death’.

  Faced with the realisation that Apple was decaying from the inside out, drastic action was called for. When the evidence was presented in the bluntest of terms by a young accountant named Stephen Maltz, it was the wake-up call The Beatles never dreamt they would hear.

  McCartney now had cause to regret his New York declaration. ‘I wanted Apple to run,’ he said. ‘I didn’t want to run Apple.’ Maltz’s warning was also his kiss-off to The Beatles, with whom he had worked throughout the Beatlemania years. He knew it was akin to a resignation note when he told them: ‘After 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 c
ountless 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.’

  The company may have largely been McCartney’s brainchild, but they were all accountable to the bottom line. In Maltz’s calculations, they had only earned ‘a pitiful’ £78,000 in 1968 and Apple’s spending was out of control. In the eighteen months up to January 1969, it had blown £1.5m – the staggering equivalent of £30m today. The Beatles had already spent £400,000 earmarked for investments by the accountants mostly on undeserving or far-fetched schemes. Apple even owned an upmarket London townhouse that no one could remember buying. Individually, they had hugely overdrawn their personal company accounts – Lennon by £64,000, McCartney by £60,000, and the other two each owed around £35,000.

  Bill Oakes, Brown’s personal assistant, reckoned trying to control the company’s spending was like riding the back of a tiger. ‘John was always the most profligate spender. George was perhaps the most thrifty, but it is still ranging between £2,000 and £10,000 every week,’ he said. ‘Some [of the accountants] questioned why Mr Lennon was spending so much money on “sweets”. I had to point out they weren’t really “sweets”.’

  Lennon was the first to feel the effects of the oncoming storm. He had always been consumed by an inner dread of ending up penniless ‘like Mickey Rooney’, forced to eke out a pittance on the cabaret circuit, singing songs like ‘She Loves You’ well into his middle age. The prospect now seemed perilously close. His divorce settlement with Cynthia had allegedly cost him £100,000. He had hired expensive lawyers to help extricate Yoko from her second marriage to American film-maker Tony Cox.

  To complicate matters further, in January, Pete Best, the drummer they had fired while on the cusp of fame, brought a multi-million-pound defamation case against his former friends over a 1965 article, which suggested he had been axed due to a ‘pill-popping’ habit developed during their musical apprenticeship in Hamburg. The matter was quietly settled out of court later in the month.

  It was obvious that The Beatles desperately needed a company doctor. To that end, Lennon set up a meeting, at McCartney’s suggestion, with Baron Beeching. Dr Richard Beeching was notorious in Sixties Britain as the man who had taken a cost-cutting scythe to the country’s nationalised rail network.

  The meeting was short and far from sweet. Beeching cast a perfunctory glance at the Apple books Lennon had brought with him and curtly told him that he should ‘stick to making records’.

  Other potential saviours such as Lord Arnold Goodman, an advisor to Harold Wilson’s Labour government, and media magnate Cecil King were discussed and discarded.

  For McCartney especially, this was a fraught period. Not only did he have the Apple crisis to deal with, but in the studio he was the one bringing in the more fully formed songs. Fate, however, had offered up a potential solution. Linda Eastman, his girlfriend of the last ten months or so, had fallen pregnant just as filming began on ‘Get Back’. She had been living with McCartney in his home in St John’s Wood since late October, having abandoned her slightly erratic career as a photographer with Country Life magazine in New York. Her coltish looks and unfashionable dress sense rankled with the fans who huddled constantly outside his home and the Apple offices. McCartney, though, the last bachelor Beatle, was properly in love for the first time.

  Linda came from New York wealth and, like Yoko, had attended Sarah Lawrence College. Her father, Lee, was a successful showbusiness lawyer whose client roster included some of the most famous names in the world. The family, part of America’s post-war nouveau riche, wanted for nothing. Her brother John was already enrolled as a partner in the family business.

  Paul later recalled: ‘I remember when I first met John Eastman, I asked him, “What do you want to do? What’s your ambition in life?” He said, “To be the president of the United States of America,” which fairly soon after that he didn’t want to do. They were very aspirational.’

  For McCartney, always the most class-conscious of The Beatles, Lee Eastman provided him with an entrée into American high society, and, suddenly, the solution to The Beatles’ problems seemed to present itself. Eastman had already offered him advice on how to make serious money by investing in music publishing and buying up the copyrights of other artists, adding that he should even consider setting up his own, stand-alone company.

  At some point in early January, Eastman notionally agreed to map out a financial road for Apple’s recovery, but McCartney quickly acknowledged that his bandmates would surely capsize the whole idea before discussions could take place. ‘He would have been good business-wise, but of course he would have too much of a vested interest,’ he recalled years later. ‘He would have looked after me more than the others, so I can understand their reluctance to get involved with that.’ Even so, a seed had been planted in Lee Eastman’s mind.

  It is worth recollecting that, to the public at that time, Apple seemed to be a huge success. The music label was thriving. In addition to everything else, McCartney understood the importance of keeping Apple’s financial woes private. Like Harrison and Starr, he was well aware that a loose remark could spark disaster. Lennon, however, had a more cavalier approach. In an interview published in Disc and Echo on 18 January, conducted by Ray Coleman, a confidant of many years’ standing, he casually laid bare their travails in sixty-two words.

  He told Coleman: ‘We haven’t got half the money people think we have. It’s been pie in the sky from the start. Apple’s losing money every week because it needs close running by a big businessman. If it carries on like this, all of us will be broke in six months. Apple needs a new broom and a lot of people will have to go.’

  It was a provocative statement, one that would set in motion a dire chain of events. Even in those pre-internet days, Lennon’s remarks quickly echoed all over the globe. Wire services clattered out the story and newspapers had a field day with headlines that spoke of ‘Beatles Cash Crisis’.

  Derek Taylor quickly discerned the implications. He said later: ‘By 1969 it was real madness. We didn’t know where we were . . . Apple was like Toytown and Paul was Ernest the Policeman. We couldn’t have gone on and on like that. We had to have a demon king.’

  Across the Atlantic, sitting in his office off New York’s theatre district at 1700 Broadway, a pudgy, thirty-eight-year-old man, dressed in his customary turtle-neck sweater and sneakers and pulling on a pipe, read the stories with relish. Instinctively, his accountant’s mind was already reeling off the numbers. Without having to say it out loud, Allen Klein knew it meant just one thing: Gotcha!

  *

  George Harrison’s walkout on Friday, 10 January, had turned out to be more than a fit of pique. In fact, he felt so frustrated over the impasse between all four that he succinctly summarised matters in his diary for that day: ‘January 10. Got up. Went to Twickenham. Rehearsed until lunchtime. Left The Beatles. Went home.’

  Over the weekend, discreet calls were made to coax Harrison back into the fold. Eventually, he agreed to a meeting between all four of them on the Sunday night at Ringo Starr’s house – the one place always considered neutral ground – and laid down the conditions for tearing up his resignation. But the meeting quickly broke up and Harrison again stormed out. This time it seemed like there was no way back. Not even Starr, always the architect of arbitration, could smooth this one over.

  Unlike McCartney, Harrison didn’t have a reverse gear when it came to inter-band diplomacy. Lennon, numbed and dilatory due to his heroin habit, sat in stony silence whenever his bandmate berated him over their plight. Now, though, with The Beatles’ very future – and all their fortunes – on the line he would have to listen.

  Over the years, tiny details have emerged of what happened during this attempt at appeasement at Starr’s house. But what has become clear is Harrison’s unbridled rage at Lennon’s abandonment of his own sense of self. One by one, he itemised his complaints. Lennon had very little decent
new material to offer up for ‘Get Back’. He was fed up with being treated like some star-struck kid. Yoko had now become his mouthpiece in the studio and at band meetings when, if anyone was being brutally honest, she had no right to be there. His deferment to Yoko at every God-given opportunity was no longer tolerable.

  Lennon’s artistic and emotional withdrawal, his increased dependence on Yoko and his sullen, stoned passivity had left them all in a state of abject surrender. It was a make-your-mind-up moment. When Lennon refused to even engage in the discussion, Harrison angrily picked up his jacket and headed for the door. The more things changed, the more they stayed the same.

  One discussion caught on tape during the month reveals Starr trying to drum some common sense into Lennon over his lover’s constant presence at the sessions. But Lennon says, ‘Yoko only wants to be accepted, she wants to be one of us.’ Starr for once spoke for the three other band members when he said softly, ‘She’s not a Beatle, John, and she never will be,’ before Lennon, digging his heels in, managed to get the final word: ‘Yoko is part of me now. We are John and Yoko, we’re together.’