John Lennon: The Life (88 page)

During their short stay, he also codirected two more films with
Yoko.
Up Your Legs Forever
, another production “for peace,” showed 365 pairs of bare legs in succession, provided by, among others, Allen Klein, Jann Wenner, the filmmaker Donn Pennebaker, the actor George Segal, the journalists Al Aronowitz and Tom Wolfe, and the artist Larry Rivers.
Fly
was a twenty-five-minute color sequence of an ordinary housefly crawling over a young woman’s prone, naked body. There was an initial hitch when none of the flies provided would act as required, even with the woman’s skin thickly coated in honey. A fresh consignment, rounded up in neighborhood restaurant kitchens, were gassed with carbon dioxide until they were barely ambulatory. After almost a day’s filming, one of them finally staggered its way to stardom.

Yoko’s father, Eisuke Ono, had retired from his high-level banking job in America and returned with her mother, Isoko, to Tokyo. There she now took John to meet his new in-laws at last. Having visited Japan only once previously, as a captive Beatle, he had no real sense of the country or its culture, and expected all its inhabitants to be as diminutive as Yoko. “He said ‘I bet your Dad is a real dwarf. Because all Japanese men are like that,’” she remembers. “So I said, ‘Well, you’ll see.’ Because his Dad was a dwarf. And when we went there, he was so surprised that my father was taller than he was.”

In fact, Yoko’s family, especially its proud and socially prominent Yasuda side, had followed the adventures of the past eighteen months with no less dismay and embarrassment than had John’s. After her appearance nude on the
Two Virgins
cover, the Yasudas even issued a press release, saying they were “not proud” of her but were of her cousin, a classical cellist who had won a prize in Sweden. At the family’s ceremonial yearly get-together, her name was pointedly never mentioned. Most wounding of all was her mother’s assertion—first made after her elopement with Toshi Ichiyanagi—that her behavior adversely affected her father’s health.

She wondered how John would go down with the beautiful, cultivated Isoko, but need not have worried. “He said, ‘Just leave it to me”—and my mother adored him. There are pictures of her, holding his arm and gazing adoringly into his eyes.” The formidable Eisuke, too, was won over, though not as unreservedly. “With both
my parents, looks were everything. My father was wearing a velvet smoking-jacket, and John just his khaki tunic with the military insignia. And Tony, my first husband, had been very handsome. After meeting John, my father took me aside and said, ‘The other one was better looking.’”

Though Apple continued to release all four ex-Beatles’ solo records, it had shrunk to a wizened remnant of its former luscious self. Most of the staff at 3 Savile Row had been fired, the Georgian town house put up for sale, and the business transferred to a small, anonymous office in St. James’s. The last two key executives of the pre–Allen Klein regime had finally resigned, Peter Brown to run Robert Stigwood’s organization in New York, Derek Taylor to handle PR for the Warner/Elektra/Atlantic record label. From the Beatles’ former support team, there remained only their original, irreplaceable roadies, Neil Aspinall and Mal Evans. Neil tended to assist George on developing film projects, while Mal continued his special role, halfway between bodyguard and nursemaid, mainly with John. On the
Plastic Ono Band
album, he receives a credit for “tea and sympathy.”

With no press office to screen or program media interviews, John himself chose which publications and writers to engage with. And if their political credentials were right, prestige and circulation did not matter. In January 1971, he agreed to do an interview for
Red Mole
, a tiny ultraleft magazine edited by the Indian-born, Oxford-educated radical Tariq Ali, who had famously led the antiwar demo outside the American Embassy three years earlier. Ali’s co-interrogator was Robin Blackburn, a future professor of sociology and editor of the
New Left Review
. While neither could believe their scoop, John was worried his presence might lower the tone of such a serious publication.

In a session almost as long as one given to
Rolling Stone
, he banished all memory of growing up in the comfortable, unoppressed bourgeoisie and declared himself a working-class hero for real. “I’ve always been politically-minded, you know, and against the status-quo,” he said in a passage at once true and fantastical. “It’s pretty basic when you’re brought up, as I was, to hate and fear the police as a natural enemy and to despise the army as something that takes everybody away and leaves them dead somewhere. I mean it’s just a
basic working-class thing, though it begins to wear off when you get older, get a family and get swallowed up by the system…. But I was always political in a way, you know. In the two books I wrote, even though they were written in sort of Joycean gobbledegook, there’s many knocks at religion and there is a play about a worker and a capitalist. I’ve been satirising the system since my childhood.”

An important new strand in his thinking was also unveiled. Germaine Greer’s
The Female Eunuch
had appeared the previous October, spurring women to demand liberation from age-old male dominance that the freedom-giving Sixties had somehow left out. Yoko, understandably, was in the vanguard of this Women’s Lib movement, having been schooled in male dominance in Japan and continued to suffer from it throughout her artistic career. To her, female subservience was analogous to the enslavement of Africans a century earlier, and in 1967, to Britain’s
Nova
magazine, she said so with a typically extreme metaphor: “Woman is the nigger of the world.”

John may once have been the archetypal “male chauvinist pig,” in Greer’s scornful phrase, but love had brought about a remarkable transformation. “We can’t have a revolution that doesn’t involve and liberate women,” he told
Red Mole
. “It’s so subtle, the way you’re taught male superiority. It took me quite a long time to realise that my maleness was cutting off certain areas for Yoko. She’s a red-hot liberationist and was quick to show me where I was going wrong even though it seemed to me that I was just acting naturally. That’s why I’m always interested to know how people who claim to be radical treat women. How you talk about power to the people unless you realise that ‘the people’ is both sexes?”

Next day, he phoned Tariq Ali to say he’d written a song around a phrase that had run through their discussion, “Power to the People.” He was so pleased with it that he sang and played its instantly chantable refrain to Ali over the wire. Its proposition was the same as had been aired so tentatively on the Beatles’
White Album
: “You say you want a revolution…” However, the payoff was no longer “You can count me out,” but “We gotta get it on right away.” There was a call to “give the workers what they really own” and a searching question to his new brothers in the proletariat, “How do you treat
your woman back home?…She got to be herself / So she can free herself….” Released as a Plastic Ono Band single, it reached number seven in the United Kingdom and eleven in the United States. Communism and feminism came together in the charts for the first and last time.

P
aul’s original intention had only been to sue Allen Klein. But his lawyers’ advice was that John, George, and Ringo’s appointment of Klein against his wishes breached the partnership agreement they made as Beatles & Co. in April 1967, and his best means of protecting himself against Klein in the future would be to have it legally terminated. Since the other three opposed the idea, he would be suing all of them as well as Apple Corps, which owned 80 percent of the partnership.

The case opened in the Chancery Division of the High Court on December 31, 1970, while John was still in New York. Paul’s counsel called for the dissolution of Beatles & Co., for impartial accounts of its dealings to be compiled, and for a receiver, or independent financial arbitrator, to oversee its finances henceforward. The judge, Mr. Justice Stamp, was told that the partnership’s bookkeeping had been “lamentable,” that despite income of between £4 million and £5 million per year, it might have insufficient reserves for outstanding income tax and surtax, and that Klein had been paying himself commission to which he was not entitled. The hearing was adjourned after undertakings from Apple’s legal team that a substantial interim sum would be paid into the partnership and Paul’s share released to him without delay.

When proceedings reopened on February 19, 1971, John, George, and Ringo’s counsel, Morris Finer QC, counterclaimed that Klein’s appointment had been a necessary measure to save the Beatles from “almost total bankruptcy.” Klein had transformed their finances, doubling their income in the first nine months of his management and earning them just over £9 million between May 1969 and December 1970, of which £8 million was record royalties.

Paul was the only one of the partners to attend court and give oral evidence. Mr. Finer read out an affidavit from John, saying that
before Klein’s advent, Apple had been “full of hustlers and spongers,” that two company cars had disappeared, and “we owned a house that no one could remember buying.” Surprisingly, in view of his own longing to break free, he portrayed the partnership as something that had always had its discords but was nevertheless urgently worth preserving. “From our earliest days in Liverpool, George and I on the one hand and Paul on the other had different musical tastes. Paul preferred pop-type music and we preferred what is now called underground. This may have led to arguments, particularly between Paul and George, but the contrast in our tastes, I am sure, did more good than harm and contributed to our success. If Paul is trying to break us up because of anything that happened before the Klein-Eastman power struggle, his reasoning does not make sense to me.”

In the witness box, Paul was questioned about another somewhat surprising statement in John’s affidavit—that even when making their respective solo albums, “We always thought of ourselves as Beatles, whether we recorded singly or in twos or threes.” He replied by quoting John’s climactic assertion on the Plastic Ono Band album: “I don’t believe in Beatles….” Klein had not been a passive appointee of the other three, he maintained, but had actively tried to create dissent, sometimes even pretending to side with him against John. He instanced a telephone conversation in which Klein had allegedly confided, “You know why John is angry with you? It’s because you came off better than he did on
Let It Be
.” In another exchange about John, he recalled Klein observing, “The real trouble is Yoko. She’s the one with ambition.”

After an eleven-day hearing, Mr. Justice Stamp proposed appointing an arbitrator who would combine the roles of manager and receiver and would in turn appoint submanagers—including Klein—to run the Beatles’ and Paul’s financial affairs as separate entities. Neither side would accept this, so on March 12 the judge appointed Douglas Spooner, a partner in a firm of City accountants “as receiver and manager of the group’s business interests pending trial of the main action.” While concluding that their financial position was “confused, uncertain and inconclusive,” Stamp found no evidence
that Klein “had or would put partnership money into his pocket.” An appeal on behalf of John, George, and Ringo was lodged, but dropped a few weeks later because “they considered it to be in the common interest to explore means whereby Mr. McCartney could disengage himself from the partnership by agreement.”

Receivers being associated with business disaster and bankruptcy in the British mind, it was widely assumed that the Beatles had finally fulfilled John’s prophecy and gone broke. However, this one was not only dealing with his clients’ debts but also the massive income, mostly in record royalties, they continued to generate. All the Beatles received intermittent payouts from the receiver and had additional substantial sources of extra-partnership income not affected by the court judgment. Apple owned only 20 percent of Maclen, John and Paul’s music-publishing company, and John’s 40 percent of the proceeds from cover versions and worldwide radio play continued to flow in from Northern Songs under its new owners, ATV. Even after a receiver was appointed for Maclen also, the Lennon-McCartney royalties continued piling up on a Himalayan scale. Although technically superseded by Mr. Spooner, Klein remained John’s manager in practice and was more than ready to advance him any additional capital he needed. In short, while plotting the end of the capitalist system with Tariq Ali and the
Red Mole
boys, he could go on spending as if there was no tomorrow.

This was just as well, since Tittenhurst Park and its motley collection of servitors and passing guests ate up money on an epic scale. Lavish open house was kept for John and Yoko’s musical and artistic cronies, and anyone they considered a victim of establishment persecution or repression found generous sanctuary with them. In late 1970, for example, Michael X had been charged with robbery and extortion and, rather than face trial, had fled back to his native Trinidad. Despite the damning evidence, John remained his stalwart supporter and offered his wife, Desiree, indefinite rent-free use of Tittenhurst’s Tudor cottage while she tried to sort out the legal and financial chaos he had left behind.

John’s son Julian, by now a moon-faced seven-year-old, was a frequent weekend visitor, delivered by chauffeured Rolls from his moth
er’s less-than-mansionlike home in West London. Tittenhurst was a seven-year-old’s paradise (a “house of fun,” grown-up Julian would call it), and father and son found their first sense of real togetherness racing over the hilly greensward on an Amphicat or rowing on the lake. Though an endearing little boy in many ways, Julian had none of John’s precocious creativity and charm at the same age, and his relations with his new stepmother were—and would remain—uncomfortable. Yoko says she did her best to be nice to him, but admits she knew little about small boys or how to connect with them. Inevitably, Julian’s visits reminded her of the problems she and John were experiencing in having a baby together. She also felt it keenly that, while his son had free run of their home, her daughter did not.