Paul McCartney (48 page)

In its familiar edited form, the Apple rooftop concert looks like a continuous performance, but actually was more like a rehearsal-cum-jam session. It began with Paul singing two consecutive versions of ‘Get Back’ in his rather parsonical black suit and pale shirt, his beard blown back by the winter wind. He was singing it for a third time when the police appeared–and waited politely until he’d finished. ‘You’ve been playing on the roof again and you know your Mommy doesn’t like it,’ he ad-libbed. ‘She’s gonna have you arrested…’

And, of course, it was no comeback concert but the Beatles’ formal farewell to the world: not needed just yet, so put away for later.

‘Fuck you, money!’

With that metal din booming above Savile Row’s tailoring establishments and across London, the Apple house might have been giving voice to the conflict and confusion which now gripped it. Somehow, each new attempt to bring a semblance of rationality to the Beatles’ business only seemed to make things worse.

Apple has passed into legend as an unmitigated fiasco which saw the band comprehensively ripped off by con-artists and freeloaders as a prelude to their painful demise. Yet by the end of its first year, the company had notched up achievements of which its four owners–and one above all–could be proud. With Paul behind them as talent-spotter, writer, producer and session-musician, Ron Kass and Peter Asher had built Apple Records into an unarguably dynamic and innovative independent label. Not that it was viewed as what would later be called an ‘indie’: if the Beatles started a record company, people naturally expected it to compete on equal terms with all the giants.

Apple Records, at least, had kept faith with the company’s mission to sponsor unknown young talent. After Mary Hopkin and Jackie Lomax, it had signed the Iveys, a Welsh band discovered by Mal Evans, and the Scots songwriting duo Benny Gallagher and Graham Lyle. The allure of the Beatles was not limited to unknowns, however: established names on both sides of the Atlantic soon began putting out feelers to join Apple, notably Fleetwood Mac and the new supergroup Crosby, Stills & Nash.

The eclectic spirit implanted by Paul with the Black Dyke Mills Band remained integral to the label. Through Ron Kass, it signed the Modern Jazz Quartet–the nearest there had been to rock stars before rock–to make two albums, one including a cover of ‘Yesterday’. The MJQ were a ferociously cool and solemn-looking foursome whose leader, John Lewis, made them play in immaculate suits and ties, like Epstein-era Beatles. ‘But whenever Lewis was out of the way,’ Peter Asher remembers, ‘the jackets were taken off, the ties were loosened and the joints came out.’

And Apple records were selling. In March 1969, Mary Hopkin’s second single, ‘Goodbye’, went to number two in the UK and thirteen in America. As well as writing the song (still under the Lennon–McCartney credit), Paul demo-recorded it for Hopkin, produced it and played bass, acoustic guitar and drums with additional percussion. The following month, ‘Get Back’ was released as a Beatles single together with John’s ‘Don’t Let Me Down’, instantly going to number one in Britain–so denying the top spot to ‘Goodbye’–and topping the charts in America and around the world.

Apple was always meant to be about more than just music, and to discover and support struggling young creators across all the performing and visual arts. At the time, it seemed the vast sums that were doled out had not fostered a single original talent–but in the longer term, one notable one would reveal itself. This was 18-year-old Richard Branson who came to 3 Savile Row seeking support for his first business venture, a national newspaper for university students. Branson’s protuberant eyes took in everything he saw; a decade later, Apple’s concept of ‘an underground company above ground’ would be artfully synthesised in his multidivision, money-spinning Virgin organisation.

The house in itself had a diplomatic function as important as any conventional embassy’s. Derek Taylor’s second-floor press office fielded an incessant flood of requests from newspapers, magazines and broadcasting organisations all over the world for interviews or photo-sessions with the Beatles, together or individually. The room was kept in semi-darkness, with a psychedelic light show casting wriggling spermatozoa shapes across one wall. Taylor directed his three secretaries from a wicker armchair with a huge scalloped back; journalists waiting to see him moved along a line of velvet sofas until they finally gained his ear. A small ante-room dispensed brimming tumblers of Scotch and Coke, to visitors and press officers alike, and was stacked like a bullion-vault with cartons of Benson & Hedges Gold cigarettes.

As Barry Miles recalls, the charming, hospitable Taylor and his department served as a substitute for the Beatles in the flesh. ‘Any time a big American act like the Mamas and Papas came through London, they naturally expected to see Paul or John, but Paul and John didn’t necessarily want to see them. So they’d come in to Apple, talk to Derek, be given a drink and a joint and go away happy.’

Miles also notes that by far the greatest extravagance was that of the Beatles themselves. Whenever John and Yoko were expected, Beluga caviar had to be fetched from Fortnum & Mason in Piccadilly. On one occasion, when the pair failed to arrive as scheduled, the two in-house cordon bleu cooks spread the entire contents of a pot on a single round of toast and ate it themselves.

During a trip to California, George met a troupe of Hell’s Angels and invited them to London, promising them the hospitality of 3 Savile Row. They duly arrived on their motorbikes, and terrorised the house for a week, consuming its food and drink in epic quantities and sexually harassing its secretaries, all under the inviolable protection of their Beatle host. The climax to the Angels’ visit, ironically enough, was their gatecrashing and wrecking of a Christmas party for Apple employees’ children, presided over by John and Yoko dressed as ‘Father and Mother Christmas’.

That extravagance inevitably filtered down to employees who believed the Beatles’ coffers to be bottomless. Travel was always first-class, limos were always ordered in preference to taxis and all meals at the company’s expense taken at the best restaurants. One small example sums up the general climate: a certain brand of vodka popular with Apple senior executives was available only at a restaurant in Knightsbridge which refused to sell it as a takeaway. So two underlings would be sent there to eat lunch and bring back the prized bottle, their food, wine and return taxi-fares having roughly quadrupled its cost.

Of all the Beatles, only Paul ever showed any concern about Apple’s outgoings. ‘He’d look at the budgets for the various departments,’ Chris O’Dell recalls, ‘and try to curb any waste he found.’ The press office worried him especially, with its numerous secretaries, flowing booze and atmosphere of a psychedelic rave. He had never got along that well with Derek Taylor, who was closest to John and George. ‘I had a good lunch with Paul today,’ Taylor would confide indiscreetly to the next journalist in line to see him. ‘We just about got through it without a row.’

At one stage, mindful of Savile Row police station only a couple of hundred yards away, Paul banned all drug-taking on the premises. It made little difference to the press office, where secretaries took turns to bring in batches of home-baked hash brownies and a deranged-looking boy known only as Stocky squatted on top of a filing-cabinet every day, stoned on acid, drawing endless pictures of genitalia.

The nearest Apple had had to a financial watchdog thus far was Brian’s old accountant, Harry Pinsker–the man who’d written to Paul at Wimpole Street to tell him he was now a millionaire. Pinsker sat on the board of directors with the aim of keeping an eye on expenditure, but increasingly had found it a hopeless task. When John and Yoko appeared nude on their Two Virgins album, he resigned in protest but, fearing the worst, assigned a junior member of his firm named Stephen Maltz to conduct a detailed survey of the company’s books.

Maltz spent several weeks on the task, then sent each of the Beatles a five-page letter outlining his grim findings. In less than a year, Apple had spent the whole of the £2 million set aside as a tax write-off, plus an additional £400,000, the first instalment of their collective payment for selling their services to their own company. In addition, each had overdrawn his partnership account–Paul the most heavily at £66,988–and each faced income tax liabilities of around £600,000.

‘As far as you were aware,’ Maltz wrote, ‘you only had to sign a bill and pick up a phone and payment was made. You were never concerned where the money came from or how it was being spent, and were living under the idea that you had millions at your disposal… Each of you has houses and cars… you also have tax cases pending. Your personal finances are in a mess. Apple is in a mess.’

It was a bitter pill for the Beatles to swallow. Their attempt to run their own affairs–into which Paul above all had poured such energy and dedication–had failed utterly. They had sworn never to have another manager after Brian, but that was just what they needed desperately at this moment: somebody to sort out the mess at Apple and also the psychological mess they’d got into as a band. And needed in double-quick time, before any more of their money and creative vitality haemorrhaged away.

There was one obvious internal candidate. Neil Aspinall had discharged most of the duties of a manager for years while still technically only their roadie, and was trusted and respected equally by all four. ‘Come on, you may as well have the 20 per cent,’ John urged him. But Neil, that seemingly quintessential Liverpool hard man, lacked the confidence to take on the job officially. So a saviour would have to be brought in from outside.

The search began at a level more suggestive of a troubled nationalised industry than a spendthrift pop group. John made contact with Lord Beeching who, as Dr Richard Beeching a few years earlier, had ‘rationalised’ Britain’s state-owned railway network by closing down huge swathes of it. After looking over Apple’s figures, Beeching offered a similar remedy–they should axe unproductive branch-lines like Apple Electronics and Apple Tailoring and concentrate on the high-volume Pullman-class business,
i.e.
Apple Records.

Paul, typically, chose a more upmarket route. From Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI he obtained an introduction to Lord Poole, chairman of the exclusive Lazard’s merchant bank and a personal financial adviser to the Queen. For all Poole’s eminence, he proved a friendly, sympathetic man who took off his tie to make his pop star visitor feel more at ease. ‘He offered to sort out the Beatles and, what was more, he offered to do it for nothing,’ Lockwood was to remember. ‘But they never followed up on it.’

This was because Paul had found another potential solution much closer to home. Linda’s father, the New York entertainment lawyer Lee Eastman, had decades of experience in managing the finances of major figures in the show business and art worlds. Her older brother, John, was also a lawyer and a partner in the family firm of Eastman & Eastman which Lee had set up in 1965.

Although only 28, John Eastman possessed a talent for untangling the complex contractual problems from which young pop artistes, above all, tend to suffer. Already to his credit was a deal whereby the American band Chicago merely leased their record masters to Columbia Records rather than the label owning them outright. He would go on to act for Andrew Lloyd-Webber in curbing unauthorised performances of Lloyd-Webber’s first musical, Jesus Christ Superstar.

Paul therefore put forward Eastman & Eastman as the Beatles’ ‘new broom’. Because of his special expertise–and as a passionate and knowledgeable Beatles fan–John Eastman rather than his father came to London, at his firm’s expense, to look into the situation at Apple.

He arrived just before Christmas 1968, registering, impressively, at Claridge’s. ‘I had the cheapest room in the place,’ he recalls, ‘and the whole time I was there, I didn’t order so much as a Coke on room service. It was just to show that [Eastman & Eastman] were at the best hotel in town, so we were serious.’

Among Paul’s fellow Beatles, John especially, there was some initial frostiness because Linda’s father hadn’t come in person but sent what they, mistakenly, took to be an inexperienced junior. Eastman’s immaculately conventional appearance, in contrast to his sister’s, also raised some eyebrows to the hippy hairline. ‘In those days I figured that if I couldn’t think like a lawyer I could at least dress like a lawyer, so I always wore a suit.’

Once they had got used to his suits, the Beatles were ‘generally welcoming’. Not so Apple’s senior executives, who were appalled by this young American interloper and the threat to their jobs he represented. (They hadn’t seen anything yet!) ‘I didn’t get any help from any of them,’ Eastman recalls. ‘Every door was closed.’

At 3 Savile Row, he found ‘a company that was bleeding money’. But far more serious to his mind was the way Apple had been structured with an eye to capital gains more than to protecting the Beatles’ brand and securing their copyrights in the long term. ‘There was no understanding of the value of great creativity. It was as if their career was still expected to come to an end at any moment.’

As it happened, a chance had just arisen to put the emphasis where John Eastman believed it should be. Two years on from Brian Epstein’s death, his old NEMS management company, now renamed Nemperor Holdings, continued to receive all the Beatles’ income (except that from songwriting) and deduct commission of 25 per cent. Brian’s successor, his less dynamic younger brother Clive, had initially promised ‘vigorous expansion’ for the company, but hated being a pop impresario and now longed to return to his former quiet life in Liverpool.

Clive and his widowed mother, Queenie, the major shareholder, had lately received an offer to sell to a London merchant bank named Triumph Investment Trust. But they felt that as NEMS/Nemperor’s foundation and greatest asset–and for old times’ sake–the Beatles should be given first refusal.

Buying the company made sound financial sense, at a time when little else did. At a stroke, they could increase their income by a quarter–and in the process also acquire the 7.5 per cent stake Brian had owned in their publishing company, Northern Songs. Sir Joseph Lockwood at EMI agreed to advance the whole purchase price out of their future royalties, offering to write John Eastman a cheque for £1.4 million there and then. Properly impressed, all four signed a letter authorising Eastman to negotiate the deal for them.