John liked journalists and journalists liked him, because more than anything he liked to talk. In 1969 there weren’t barricades of publicists to come between the star and the interviewer, and when fame and success depended to a large extent upon visibility in newspapers and magazines, the world famous would happily make themselves available. John was never less than open and entertaining with writers he trusted. Seeming to talk instinctively in headlines, he may not always have bothered with strict accuracy, but he always made certain that his florid versions of events were quotable.
That had been his mood when, at Twickenham Film Studios, he’d been interviewed by Ray Coleman, the editor of the Melody Maker, whom he’d known since the Beatles had come to London in 1963. It had started off as a regular chat about filming, but when asked, almost as an aside, if he was happy with the way things were shaping at Apple, he just couldn’t contain himself. It wasn’t easy for four musicians with no management experience to run the multi-millionpound, many-tentacled Apple company, he admitted. What’s more, they were approaching a cash flow problem.
They hadn’t got half the money people thought they had, he said. They needed a businessman’s brain to run Apple. ‘It’s been pie in the sky from the start,’ he admitted. ‘We did it all wrong . . . It needs a new broom and a lot of people will have to go . . . If it carries on like this, all of us will be broke within the next six months.’
Much of this was true. The Beatles were rich, but Apple money was being lavished daily on prodigious hospitality and expensive projects that never reached fruition. Basically, there was an absence of a powerful management structure at Apple, which might explain how a new Mercedes motor car could have simply disappeared into thin air – which was the rumour in Savile Row in 1969.
On the other hand, one part of Apple, the bit the Beatles knew most about, the record company, was proving extremely successful. While all the tapes sent by hopeful wannabes had by now gone to fill a land tip, Paul’s protégée Mary Hopkin had scored a massive hit with ‘Those Were The Days’, road manager Mal Evans had brought in Badfinger, and Peter Asher had signed James Taylor for his first album. Then there were recordings by the Modern Jazz Quartet, and one of John Tavener’s ‘The Whale’, a suggestion that had come from, of all people, Ringo. All Apple probably needed was a slimmed-down prospectus, a concentration on music, and a prudent, sensible boss whom the four owners of the company could agree upon. They didn’t get one. The few possible managers they had approached already had good jobs.
Then, over in New York, a man called Allen Klein read John’s interview with the Melody Maker and interpreted it as the cry for help for which he had been waiting. He flew immediately to London.
Klein, who already managed the Rolling Stones and had worked with Bobby Darin, Sam Cooke, Connie Francis and the Dave Clark Five, was a very clever lawyer and accountant and to say that he knew the record business was an understatement. At the same time, to say that he was universally liked, or even trusted, would be untrue. He had earlier tried, unsuccessfully, to prise the Beatles from Brian Epstein’s grasp, and now, through Mick Jagger, he set up a meeting at London’s Dorchester Hotel with John . . . who took Yoko with him.
John liked him on sight and convinced himself that they had things in common. Klein, a small, thickset man, had come up the hard way. Born in New Jersey and sent to an orphanage at four after his mother had died of cancer, he had taken advantage of the GI Bill by volunteering for the US Army after high school and then going on to college to study accountancy. Brilliant with figures, he would impress John by constantly scribbling calculations on a notepad at his side to prove his points as he talked. But what particularly got home to John was that Klein was totally familiar with his songs.
‘He not only knew my work, and the lyrics that I’d written, but he also understood them,’ John would immediately start telling everyone. ‘He knew every damn thing about us . . . He’s a fucking sharp man, and anybody that knew me that well, without having met me before, had to be the guy to look after me.’
Once again, John had acted on impulse. He saw Klein as he romantically liked to picture himself, as a working-class, motherless boy who by his own endeavours had raised himself up and taken on the snobbery of the establishment. For Klein it had been by questioning the accounting practices of US record companies, and devising independent recording schemes that would revolutionise the record industry. He had a reputation as a fighter in New York, a guy who made money for his clients, but maybe made too much for himself, too. None of that bothered John. He would, he promised Klein, talk to the other guys the following day.
He did. George and Ringo were interested. Paul was appalled. He’d reached the opinion that Linda’s father, the upmarket music lawyer Lee Eastman, should represent the Beatles, together with his son John Eastman. The Eastmans didn’t like Klein, and he didn’t like them. Socially they were a wide distance apart.
The Beatles now formed two camps, Paul and the Eastmans in one and John, George, Ringo and Klein in another. The wedge that Yoko had driven between John and Paul when she had appeared was now being dug ever deeper into that relationship over the management battle, and both parties had good reasons for their antipathies towards the other’s choice of representatives. Paul didn’t trust Klein and thought that his asking for 20 per cent of the Beatles income was, now that they were so famous, plain greedy. John, on the other hand, felt that if the Beatles were managed by Paul’s girlfriend’s father and brother, he, Ringo and George were likely to be less favoured by them than Paul in any internal Beatles dispute.
Both had valid points. In any sensible world, the Beatles would all have stood back and sought an alternative manager to sort out their problems, one that they could all agree upon. But the Beatles’ world wasn’t always sensible.
For the next few weeks the Eastmans and Klein attempted to work together in a tangled web of conflicting financial interests and affairs that involved NEMS, a company called Triumph Investment, Northern Songs, ATV, EMI, Klein’s company ABKCO, the Eastmans, Apple and the Inland Revenue. But soon that became impossible. When Paul was outvoted by the Apple board of directors to make Klein the group’s business manager, he only accepted it through gritted teeth. Klein might speak for Apple but not for him, he insisted. Lee Eastman did that.
So, it was hardly surprising that when Paul married Linda Eastman at Marylebone Town Hall on 12 March, none of the other Beatles was invited. He’d hoped to keep it a secret, but that was impossible, and hundreds of fans, the majority being girls and young women, mobbed the event.
To John, who heard about it when he and Yoko were being driven down to Sandbanks to see Mimi, this seemed like a challenge. Whatever Paul could do, so could he, but hopefully without any fans being present. And as Yoko’s divorce from Tony Cox had now come through, Peter Brown was immediately put to finding a quiet place for an instant marriage.
Interestingly John, who had only married Cynthia because he felt he had to, was initially keener to marry than Yoko. She enjoyed, and valued, the idea of being an independent woman, and was quite open that she had never really wanted to be married the first two times. Nor, she would say, had she wanted to have a child. Now she was heading for a third marriage. But she did wonder if she needed to get married. ‘I didn’t particularly like the idea of limiting myself to one man again,’ she would tell writer Philip Norman.
John had no such doubts. Whenever his behaviour over that period is questioned, and the spur-of-the-moment decisions he made in everything he did, it has to be seen through the prism of a man who was head over heels in love.
There was something else, too. By marrying Yoko, John would, in his terms, be marrying into the avant-garde intelligentsia. Cynthia had been a not very good illustrator from art school. In John’s eyes, Yoko was the real thing. With her, he was no longer just a rock and roll singer, albeit with the most famous group in the world. He was, like her, an artist, and he began to use the word constantly in conversation about himself.
In the early days of the Beatles’ success he had always been slightly embarrassed about the teenybopper fans. But he now loved that his fans were university students, and he was thrilled to accompany Yoko to Cambridge University to join in one of her events. He had been distracted while at school, playing to the crowd, enjoying being the class clown, and had missed the further academic education that Mimi had wanted him to have. Now Yoko, the Sarah Lawrence-educated artist, the well-read sophisticate from New York, was, by their association, helping him to move, in his eyes, into a social status where his eccentricities would be seen as a manifestation of the genius he believed he was. Of course he wanted to marry her. She was helping him to reinvent himself and his life. He was starting again.
At first, he fancied the idea of being married by the ship’s captain on an ocean liner, but on finding there were no cabins available he considered a ceremony on a ferry to France across the English Channel. That wasn’t possible either. Finally, Peter Brown came up with the solution. John and Yoko could be married in Gibraltar. Located on the southern tip of the Spanish peninsula, Gibraltar had been a dependency of Great Britain since 1713, and therefore, as it was legally part of the UK, no proof of residency was required.
Yoko, wearing a short white dress, a big hat and large sunglasses, and John in a white suit and tennis shoes, were flown in a private jet to Gibraltar and driven straight to the British Consulate where they were married by the registrar. An hour later they were back on the plane to Paris, a city John had long considered to be romantic.
‘Intellectually, of course, we don’t believe in getting married. But one doesn’t love someone just intellectually,’ John told a reporter on arriving. Yoko saw it in a far less romantic way. ‘We’re going to share many happenings and events together,’ she said, ‘and this marriage is one of them. We are planning a big happening.’ And, after a couple of days in Paris, the newly-weds stepped into John’s Rolls-Royce to be driven to Amsterdam’s Hilton Hotel, for their honeymoon.
The joke in those days was that honeymooners spent their first week of marriage together in bed, enjoying what had, until then, been forbidden, or at least furtive. But, in the sexual sense, John and Yoko’s honeymoon had been months earlier when, as John would say, ‘We were either in the studio or in bed.’
Their Amsterdam honeymoon was quite different. For a week the pair sat side by side in bed wearing striped pyjamas, and surrounded by flowers and hand-drawn posters that read ‘Bed Peace’ and ‘Hair Peace’, inviting reporters to come and listen to them as they espoused the cause of world peace.
John put it this way: ‘Yoko and I decided that whatever we did would be in the papers, so we decided to use the space . . . as a commercial for peace . . .’ Marching was fine and dandy for the Thirties, he said, but today different methods were needed. ‘It’s sell, sell, sell. If you want peace you’ve got to sell it like soap.’ The newspapers were filled with ‘war, war, war . . . so let’s get some “peace, peace, peace” in the headlines for a change’.
It was a noble sentiment, and he didn’t care if people laughed at them. They did. ‘Yoko and I are willing to be the world’s clowns if it will do some good,’ was his reaction.
The following week the Lennons flew to Vienna where a film they had produced was being shown on television. It was called Rape, and was a cinéma-vérité documentary in which a camera team had picked on a girl in London, seemingly at random, and followed her as she became increasingly afraid. It had echoes of the way the Beatles had been hounded, but it also forecast a world in which the paparazzi could accidentally play a part in hounding a woman to her death. Think only of Princess Diana who was to die twenty-eight years later in a crash in a Paris underpass as the paparazzi raced to keep up with the car in which she was travelling.
It was a good subject for discussion, but for its promotion John and Yoko decided to utilise a Yoko bagism event, and hid inside a very large bag from which, at a press conference, they answered questions. Inevitably it was the bag, not the film or its subject, that grabbed most of the headlines.
At around this time it became not unusual to begin to hear usually sensible commentators privately asking if John had in fact gone mad, so bewildering was some of his behaviour. With his thin, drawn face, white suits and long hair and beard he had taken on a quite different public persona. But when, during an interview one day, I suggested to him that he was now thought of as ‘Nutty John’, he rather liked it. ‘Yes, that’s what I am, “Nutty John”.’
Mad he may not have been, but he was certainly very angry when he learned that Dick James, who had so astutely spotted the Lennon and McCartney songwriting talent, had decided to quit while he was ahead. Seeing the disintegration of their partnership James had, without warning them, sold his controlling shareholding in Northern Songs to ATV magnate Lew Grade.
John and Paul may have had their differences, but control of their songs, the most important element of their lives’ work, united them. For the next six months they would join together to fight to prevent ATV owning their songs. ‘I’m not going to be fucked around by men in suits sitting on their fat arses in the City,’ was how John put it. In the end he would be.
Ironically, at a moment when in a business sense they couldn’t speak without falling out, musically John and Paul were drawn closer together. Coming home from his European honeymoon tour with a new song, ‘The Ballad Of John And Yoko’, John was insistent that it should be an instant Beatles single – despite the fact that ‘Get Back’ had only just gone to the top of the charts. And, anxious to build at least one bridge with his old friend, Paul agreed to record it with him.
Neither George nor Ringo was in London at the time, but that didn’t stop them. Going to Abbey Road, John sang and played both rhythm and lead guitar, while Paul was on bass, drums, piano and maracas, and then added a harmony. One of them even played a few guitar chords lifted from when ‘The Honeymoon Song’ had been part of their Cavern act. Altogether, it was almost a more sophisticated version of the sessions the two had enjoyed as teenagers at Paul’s father’s house in Forthlin Road, Liverpool. One Abbey Road engineer at the time said it was a while since he’d seen John and Paul working so happily together. Yoko wasn’t there.
It wasn’t a great record, certainly the weakest single the Beatles ever released, but, as a kind of talking blues, it was witty and good-humoured with John even having a joke at his chief tormentors, the tabloid pundits, by singing ‘She’s gone to his head, they look just like two gurus in drag’. His great hero, Chuck Berry, would have been proud of that line.
Of course, Yoko had gone to his head, and he was glad of it. ‘It was Yoko that changed me,’ he scoffed to me. ‘She forced me to become avant-garde and take my clothes off, when all I wanted was to become Tom Jones. And now look at me. Did you know, “avant-garde” is French for bullshit?’
A week later, returning to the Apple roof, he went through a ceremony before a Commissioner of Oaths, changing the middle name his mother had given him. Out went John Winston Lennon and in came John Ono Lennon.
For anyone who still doubted his resolve, John hammered it home when he said: ‘I’m always John and Yoko. That never stops. We’re a twenty-four-hour couple. So, whatever I’m doing as a Beatle, Yoko is sitting on my shoulder like a parrot.’
Which might have been how the other Beatles considered her when they saw that the sleeve of their new single, as it was released in America, portrayed not just the usual four Beatles . . . but Yoko as well.
‘Yoko used to sit in on the photos,’ Paul would remember. ‘And we really didn’t know how to tell her to get out . . .’