Shout! (69 page)

First, ’Frisco Pete and Billy Tumbleweed straightened out Apple, partaking of hospitality made still more liberal by the terror their looks inspired. Carol Paddon, in the press office, was one of several Apple girls who mastered the knack, when a Hell’s Angel hand went up her skirt, of smiling with ghastly good humor. Naturally, it would have been discourteous, not to say dangerous, to exclude the two visitors from the Apple children’s Christmas party.

The party, in Peter Brown’s office, featured seas of jellies, blancmange, and a conjurer named Ernest Castro. Afterward there was to be
a grown-ups’ party, with John and Yoko officiating as Father and Mother Christmas. Of the lavish buffet that Apple’s Cordon Bleu cooks had prepared, the centerpiece was a forty-two-pound turkey, guaranteed by its suppliers to be the largest turkey in Great Britain.

The party proved a fitting climax to Apple’s Golden Age. John, sitting on the floor with Yoko, a white Santa Claus beard covering his dark one, was bewildered to find himself menaced by both ’Frisco Pete and Billy Tumbleweed. The Hell’s Angels resented what they felt was unnecessary delay in starting on the largest turkey in Great Britain. When the music journalist Alan Smith tried to intervene, ’Frisco Pete felled him with a single punch. Smith’s toppling body struck John as he was raising a teacup to his lips. Father Christmas sat there, protecting Mother Christmas, with tea dripping down his spectacles.

EIGHTEEN

“THE BEATLES ARE THE BIGGEST BASTARDS IN THE WORLD”

U
ntil 1969, the British public at large had never heard of Allen Klein. They had heard only of Alan Klein, a young Cockney songwriter briefly famous during the early sixties for a number entitled “What a Crazy World We’re Livin’ in.” To be sure, when the Klein named Allen first began to impinge on their consciousness, many people initially mistook him for the Klein named Alan, whom they remembered as young, wiry, and humorous, a kind of bargain-basement Lionel Bart. Not until Allen Klein’s stunning coup had put him on every national front page did the realization dawn that he was in fact a thirty-eight-year-old New Yorker whose shortness, tubbiness, and total absence of neck gave him a more than passing resemblance to Barney Rubble in
The Flintstones
.

Klein did not originally set out to manage the greatest pop act the world had ever known. He was born in New Jersey in 1932, the son of an impoverished kosher butcher. His mother died when he was still a baby and his father, unable to cope, gave him and his sister into the care of Newark’s austere Hebrew Shelter Orphanage. In later years, when his father remarried and his new stepmother proved unsympathetic, Allen was boarded out with an aunt. This fact was to prove crucial years later, during perhaps the most important business conference of his whole career.

His young manhood, as Klein himself liked to recall, was one of almost Dickensian hardship, endeavour, and self-denial. He worked as a clerk for a firm of New Jersey newspaper distributors, at the same time holding down two or three other part-time jobs to pay for a course in accounting at the Lutheran Uppsala College. As he sat in class there, he would often be so exhausted that his head would drop forward onto his arms. Yet whenever the teacher posed a problem in mental arithmetic, he would still always be first to rattle out the answer.

After graduating from Uppsala he married his college sweetheart and set up as the newest and hungriest of Manhattan’s million-and-one accountants. His vocation made itself clear when he accepted a small retainer to handle the finances of Buddy Knox, a teenage pop idol who had a nationwide hit with “Party Doll” in 1957. Klein discovered that Knox’s record company had failed to pay a substantial part of what they owed him in royalties. An equally interesting discovery was the mixture of guilt and confusion on the faces of the label executives when Klein confronted them with these discrepancies. The upshot was that Knox received what he was owed and Klein received three thousand dollars in commission, enough to buy him and his wife, Betty, their first-ever new car.

Klein thereafter specialized in clients from the pop music world, making each the same bluntly seductive offer: “I can get you money you never even knew you had.” He would ferret it out in the same way he had for Buddy Knox, trapped in ponderously slow accounting systems, or in unpaid performance fees or miscalculated royalty returns. He would then confront the miscreant company in the role of avenging angel, threatening legal action or criminal prosecution if the deficiencies were not instantly made good. Even record companies who dealt conscientiously with their artists could not be sure that Klein wouldn’t find something to stretch them on the rack. “If a corporation is big, it
has
to make mistakes,” was his maxim. “There’s no big organization in the world that doesn’t have something to hide.”

The technique worked with spectacular success for the singing husband and wife Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé, for Bobby (“Splish-Splash”) Darin, and most notably Bobby (“Blue Velvet”) Vinton, whom Klein approached at a mutual friend’s wedding and asked, “How would you like to make a hundred thousand dollars?” Within just a few days that very sum in ferreted-out fees and back royalties was paid into Vinton’s bank account. Among these grateful clients he became known as “the Robin Hood of Pop,” though Klein himself never claimed such dashingly altruistic motives. Despite his general orthodoxy in religious matters, he chose as his desktop motto a slightly amended version of Psalm 23: “Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I will fear no evil, for I am the biggest bastard in the valley.”

In 1964, he took over the affairs of Sam Cooke, a talented soul singer then riding high on the Twist dance craze. Klein negotiated an unheard-of
one-million-dollar advance for Cooke from the RCA label, though unhappily the singer did not live long to enjoy it. A year later, he was shot to death in a Los Angeles motel while in the company of a lady other than his wife.

When the Beatles conquered America in 1964 Klein looked on with the same hungry, helpless eyes as a hundred other indigenous agents and managers. A couple of months afterward, on a trip to London, he called on Brian Epstein to offer Sam Cooke as a support act on the Beatles’ soon-to-follow second U.S. tour. During the meeting, with typical chutzpah, he also offered himself as their financial consultant, implying that the same huge sums in unpaid royalties could be pried from their record companies as from Bobby Darin’s and Bobby Vinton’s. Brian did not take the suggestion seriously. But Klein came away boasting that he would have the Beatles, even setting a deadline of Christmas 1965. Meantime, he occupied himself in sucking up other significant names from the so-called British invasion: the Dave Clark Five, the Animals, Herman’s Hermits, Donovan. and, finally, the Rolling Stones.

Klein’s acquisition of the Stones showed his unerring ability to spot the most vulnerable points in his prospective quarry. He had observed how the band’s young manager, Andrew Loog Oldham, cast himself as a star equally glamorous as Mick Jagger, and also how much Oldham longed for wealth and status symbols to equal those of his one-time employer, Brian Epstein. Meeting Oldham in London in mid-1965, Klein’s opening gambit was, as usual, devastatingly simple. “Andrew,” he said, “whaddaya want?”

“I want a Rolls-Royce,” Oldham replied.

“You got it,” Klein told him.

The dazzled Oldham thereupon dropped his existing partner, Eric Easton, and hired Klein as his personal business manager, so giving the New Yorker effective control of all the Stones’ financial dealings. The move, as it happened, came midway through Oldham’s and Easton’s negotiation of a new contract for the Stones with Decca Records, one that as usual promised royalty payments only after the records had been sold. Klein weighed into the negotiations with all the tactics that had made him feared in New York. The upshot was that a stunned Decca found themselves agreeing to pay the Stones an advance of $1.25 million.

Following this apparent huge coup on their behalf, the supercilious,
supercool Stones were as enraptured by Klein as Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gormé ever had been. They were also impressed by his organization of their 1966 American tour and announcement of a three-movie deal aimed at making them just as big on the big screen as the Beatles. Not the least exhilarating feature of Klein’s management was a rumored direct connection with the underworld, which Klein himself always firmly denied while being obviously not displeased by it. One of his closest associates, a promotion man named Pete Bennett, dressed just like a mafioso in sharkskin suits and shades, and was given to patting his left armpit as if a holstered handgun were secreted there.

The Stones naturally were not slow to extol the achievements of their new miracle man to their good friends, the Beatles. That wonderful $1.25 million Decca advance in effect quite eclipsed the new contract with EMI that Brian Epstein negotiated for the Beatles early in 1967, and further complicated the always fraught relationship between Brian and Paul McCartney. Ironically, in view of later events, Paul suggested that Klein be hired to do for the Beatles what he had for the Stones. Rumors spread of an impending merger between Klein’s company and NEMS, negotiated by a so-called third man, which Brian angrily dismissed as “rubbish.”

By 1967, Klein’s control of the Stones was absolute and exclusive. Relations between the band and Andrew Loog Oldham, which had seriously declined during Jagger’s and Richard’s drugs trial, hit rock bottom as the Stones struggled to finish
Their Satanic Majesties Request
, the album intended to be their answer to
Sgt. Pepper
. One day, goaded beyond endurance by their slipshod playing and unfocused attitude, Oldham walked out of the studio, never to return. Klein subsequently bought out his management share for around one million pounds.

Brian’s death might have seemed the perfect moment for Klein to move in on the Beatles. Yet he continued to bide his time and watch from afar the confusion among Brian’s too many heirs apparent. Among the plans swirling round in late 1967 was an ambitious—and rather sensible—one whereby the Beatles and Stones would have shared the same UK front office and jointly financed their own recording studio at North London’s Camden Lock. Mick Jagger approached Peter Brown to see if he would act for the Stones, as he did for the Beatles, as ambassador, fixer, and social secretary. But Klein violently opposed the idea, and flew straight over from New York to scotch it. There was a meeting,
also attended by Clive Epstein, when Klein struck Brown as “a rather hysterical, unstable person. Then he realized I wasn’t trying to take over the Stones, and calmed down a bit. As he walked out, he suddenly turned to Clive and said, ‘How much d’ya want for the Beatles?’”

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, Klein’s reputation as a ruthless opportunist and wheeler-dealer was reaching new heights. He had recently acquired Cameo-Parkway, a record label once successful with Twist king Chubby Checker but now on the edge of bankruptcy. No sooner had Klein bought the label than its shares rose steeply in value, from three dollars to more than seventy-five dollars each. He was suspected of talking up Cameo-Parkway’s share price by inventing rumors of impending lucrative takeovers or mergers with larger organizations, like the British music firm Chappell. As a result, the New York Stock Exchange suspended dealings in Cameo-Parkway shares and ordered an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission. Cameo-Parkway’s stockholders also began legal proceedings against Klein, enraged, among other things, by the $104,000 per year salary he had awarded himself as chief executive. Klein denied any wrongdoing. In the event, Cameo-Parkway was to make only one significant acquisition: the Allen Klein accounting company. Klein took himself over in reverse, naming the resultant entity ABKCO Industries (the “ABK” part standing for Allen and Betty Klein).

As 1968 drew to a close, and Apple stood revealed as a bottomless financial pit, Klein’s dream of winning the Beatles seemed as far away as ever. The Rolling Stones had extolled his genius to them time after time, without result. He himself had put in a telephone call to John Lennon, but John could not be bothered to accept it. They had also met briefly, in December 1968, when John and Yoko took part, with Eric Clapton, The Who, and other pop luminaries, in the Stones’ Sgt. Peppery
Rock ’n’ Roll Circus
film. But Klein, surprisingly, made no attempt to capitalize on the meeting, and John barely glanced at the tubby little man with his unfashionable greased-back hair, cardigan, and pipe.

Not until the following January did Klein’s moment come—when he picked up
Rolling Stone
, the new intelligent music paper named after his first supergroup protégés, and saw the story splashed all over it. John had said that, if the Beatles carried on spending money at their present rate, he’d be “broke in six months.”

• • •

With Paul McCartney, the need to breathe was scarcely more important than the need to perform. It was a need that transcended mere vanity and his love of his own bewitching, beguiling, melodic power. He would sing and play for as many, or as few, people as happened to be there when the impulse came that was as natural as breath. Once, on a car journey with Derek Taylor, he stopped in a Bedfordshire village and played the piano in a village pub. He would sing softly through the dark to the girls on watch outside his house. Late in 1968, he and Linda spent a week with friends in Portugal. His hosts noticed a phenomenon unchanged since a decade ago on Forthlin Road, Liverpool. Even in the lavatory, Paul could not stop singing and playing his guitar.

Paul had always felt that by giving up road tours and retiring into album work, the Beatles had broken faith with the public to whom, fundamentally, they owed everything. So he began arguing with renewed persistence after the
White Album
was finished. He had lately—at Linda’s encouragement—grown a dark, bushy beard. It might have been a keen and determined young schoolmaster who sat in the Apple boardroom, urging the other three that their next project together ought to be a return to playing live concerts.