Allen Klein: The Man Who Transformed Rock & Roll

by Fred Goodman

  When Capitol agreed to the contract for the Beatles, it had no idea that Abbey Road was the band’s final statement and that they would never record again. But there was an abandoned project sitting in the can that Klein, for a variety of reasons, thought the band should take another look at.

  Proposed and championed by McCartney, Get Back was conceived as both a television documentary and a back-to-basics album built on live in-studio performances. Coming on the heels of The Beatles, an exhausting five-month project that made extensive use of overdubs and frequently found the musicians working as individuals rather than in a group, Get Back was McCartney’s attempt to respark the band. But the others were never more than listless and halfhearted about it, treating it more like Paul’s project than a Beatles album. The constant presence of Yoko Ono, whom Lennon insisted on having by his side in the studio at all times, was another uncomfortable new wrinkle. Get Back might have been undertaken to revitalize the Beatles, but that wasn’t evident in the bare-bones tracks recorded by producer/engineer Glyn Johns. Much of the footage shot by director Michael Lindsay-Hogg didn’t show the Beatles coming back together, just drifting farther apart.

  Allen, however, wondered if it couldn’t be salvaged and put to good use. The Beatles still owed United Artists a third picture on the deal that had included A Hard Day’s Night and Help! Plus, Ringo was eager to pursue an acting career, and United Artists had raised objections when he’d signed to appear in The Magic Christian, saying they were owed his next movie. Maybe the unfinished documentary could be blown up into a theatrical release to satisfy UA. Klein showed the footage to Saul Swimmer, the director he had worked with on Mrs. Brown, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter and other films. Swimmer saw no technical reason the footage couldn’t be transferred from 16- to 32-millimeter film and released as a movie.

  In November, Klein screened some of the footage in London for McCartney, Harrison, Starr, and their wives, and he sold them on the idea. Since the song “Get Back” had already been released as a single six months earlier, he suggested to McCartney that the film needed a new name, and they considered The Long and Winding Road before agreeing on Let It Be. Over dinner that evening Allen reminded Paul, George, and Ringo that UA was also entitled to the soundtrack album and said producer Phil Spector had unexpectedly come by ABKCO’s office in New York to pitch his services to the Beatles. Klein, at Eastman’s request, had had lunch in New York with another producer, Jim Guercio, best known for his work with Chicago, whom Eastman had represented. When Klein told Lennon of the two approaches, John wanted Spector. Now, over dinner, the others agreed to meet him as well. That dinner proved to be the last time Klein ever met face to face with McCartney.

  Six weeks later, Klein flew from New York to London with Spector. The high-strung producer was so nervous about meeting the Beatles that he spent much of the flight lying in the middle of the first-class aisle. But he pulled himself together by the time they reached Apple’s Savile Row offices, and that evening he was in EMI’s studio with Lennon and Harrison cutting “Instant Karma.” The match was made.

  Klein, meanwhile, turned to resolving the problem that had initially brought Lennon to his hotel door. Apple desperately needed to be cleaned up and cleaned out. Allen was just the bulldozer for the job.

  Perhaps a more introspective or diplomatic man could have foreseen the traps lurking in the task ahead. The Beatles, after all, were the sun at the center of an exciting new universe—who would willingly leave their orbit? But if the thought even occurred to Klein, he didn’t care; he had a job to do, promises to keep and clients to impress. If that meant worlds would collide, well, he could guarantee how that would end: with a lot of unhappy former employees, friends, and hangers-on. He just couldn’t imagine the enormous impact it would have on his reputation.

  At the core of Apple was a quartet of dedicated Beatles intimates who functioned as directors and oversaw the day-to-day business: publicist Derek Taylor, former Epstein assistant Peter Brown, and ex-road managers and aides Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall. Working with them were department and operation heads, some appropriate to their jobs, some not: Apple Records president Ron Kass was an experienced record executive while Terry Doran, the head of Apple Music Publishing, was a former car dealer who had sold luxury vehicles to Harrison and later became his pal and gofer. At the end of the day, Klein concluded, no one was getting the job done and Apple needed a clean sweep. “Ron Kass was a good frontman but in over his head,” said Harold Seider. “It was a disaster.”

  The company’s employees certainly loved the Beatles—not to mention the incomparable perk of having the world’s hippest job—but the Beatles were no longer loving them back. “People were robbing us and living on us,” Lennon said bitterly, “to the tune of 18 or 20 thousand pounds a week.” The money “was rolling out of Apple and nobody was doing anything about it. All our buddies that worked for us for 50 years were all just living and drinking and eating like fuckin’ Rome.” The Beatles were hardly blameless. Though frequently in the office, they simply did not or could not provide thoughtful hands-on leadership as to how time and money should be spent, sometimes to the detriment of loyal friends and employees. While Apple wasted thousands of pounds every month, Mal Evans, who had been with the Beatles since their days at Liverpool’s Cavern Club, was still being paid a surprisingly modest thirty-seven pounds a week. Apple had become an unsupervised playground. When the Grateful Dead’s manager Rock Scully dropped in unexpectedly for an extended visit, he brought a crew that included several Hells Angels. They added insult to injury by not only brawling at an office party but charging Apple the cost of flying their motorcycles to London. On another occasion, a family wandered in and announced they’d come to carry John and Yoko off with them to Fiji. Since John and Yoko weren’t around, they set up camp and lived in the office, the mother taking to wandering the halls naked, her fifteen-year-old daughter pestering assistant Chris O’Dell to help her bed George Harrison.* Magic Alex, the TV repairman turned resident inventor, was outfitted with a laboratory from which he sent out approximately one hundred half-baked patent applications through EMI’s attorneys, none of which were ever approved. Klein estimated that Alex had cost Apple over £180,000 all told. Klein also discovered that Apple had bought a building for reasons no one could remember, that two company cars had disappeared, and that a series of payments on Apple’s books marked “erections and demolitions” had gone to prostitutes.

  The real money drain, however, was daily expenses; the Apple offices were the best press club and hangout in London. Despite a personal plea from McCartney, who’d called the staff together and begged them to stop wasting money, Apple continued to run an open bar for the world, employees and visitors going through several cases of scotch and cartons of cigarettes every week. There were also tabs run for journalists at a nearby restaurant and telephones available to anyone for worldwide calling. Any box of new records that arrived in the office disappeared immediately. Kass tried to limit the employees to one free record each, insisting that they pay wholesale prices for any more, but it didn’t stop the thievery. Anything not nailed down was likely to walk out the door, as it had at the Apple Boutique.

  Klein’s job was to be the Beatles’ hatchet man, to bring order to the chaos and an end to the rampant expenses. Everyone at Apple knew what that meant: the bastard was going to tear the playhouse down, and he was hated and feared. For his part, Klein, though never able to personally fire anyone, had no qualms about the job and set about cutting Apple down to seeds and stem. For the actual dirty work of face-to-face dismissals, his attorney and aide Peter Howard wielded the hatchet.

  Tony Bramwell, a Beatles gofer who’d grown up with them in Liverpool, managed to survive Klein’s purges but expressed nothing but contempt for him. To Bramwell, Klein was a greasy, dirty American, a usurper and crook who had no right to be paid for what he did. “He wanted to get rid of everybody so he could cook the books and milk the company dry,” said Bramwell. “He
spent his days conspiring about how to get rid of us, whispering about everybody behind their backs to John and George, who thought he was some kind of New York financial genius. Klein’s tentacles were long. He tore everything apart. Within a few months of him taking over, I was the only member of the old staff left in the company.” Still, Bramwell managed to hold his nose long enough to accompany Klein to the Capitol Records convention in Hawaii, “before it became so touristy.” There, he and Jack Oliver, who’d become head of Apple Records when Klein fired Kass, camped out by the pool, drank cocktails from pineapples, and traded witticisms as they watched “that fat bastard” working the executives from Capitol and, as Bramwell put it, “playing tennis with the Italian crowd from New York.”

  Singer Mary Hopkin, a protégée of McCartney who enjoyed one of Apple’s biggest hits with “Those Were the Days,” also detested Klein.

  “Everyone hated him,” she said. “A creep. A real creep.” She added, “I was never directly involved with him financially, thank God. I just didn’t like the man. I don’t like people that try and patronize me. . . . He’d say, ‘Do this and that.’ I remember walking away from him in the middle of a meal once. I like to think I’m a good judge of character. Maybe I’m not. Maybe that’s why I’m divorced now.”

  When Klein fired Kass, Kass and an assistant, Ken Mansfield, were quickly hired by MGM Records. But Allen hadn’t fired Mansfield and didn’t like it when someone quit his employ or rejected a job offer. He decided he had to get him back and offered to triple Mansfield’s salary if he would come to ABKCO and oversee Apple Records in the United States.

  Though a Kass loyalist, Mansfield confessed to his mentor that he found the money very tempting and wasn’t sure he should say no. “You lay down with pigs and you get up dirty,” the angry executive replied. More to the point, though, Mansfield feared that working for Klein would make him a pariah in the business. Allen’s in-your-face manner had always made enemies, but his hard-charging style and aggressive cost-cutting for the Beatles had stirred so much ill will and jealousy that there was now a Klein brush, and Mansfield didn’t want to be tarred with it. Meeting with Klein at the Beverly Hills Hotel, he realized he had underrated him—especially as a salesman. Allen’s relentless pursuit was both flattering and confusing. “He had derailed me and a lot of other people’s worlds by upsetting the Apple cart,” Mansfield said. “And here I was being beguiled. You couldn’t help being taken in by this guy. He was charming and disarming in some obtuse, off-the-wall way. . . . I didn’t like anything about him, but I was enjoying listening to him and I liked what he was saying to me.”

  Mansfield didn’t want to say yes, but Klein was so unwilling to accept no that he offered to expand Mansfield’s responsibilities to include working with the Rolling Stones and Donovan. Fearing he was about to give in, Mansfield hit on what he assumed was a foolproof plan to get himself off the hook and away from Klein’s increasingly tempting offer. An outstanding tennis player who had won club tournaments in California, Mansfield knew he could destroy the older, portly Klein handily, and so he offered him a sucker’s bet: If you beat me at tennis, he told him, I’ll take the job; if I win, I stay with Kass at MGM.

  When Mansfield caught a glimpse of Klein on the court the next day he felt a little guilty; in tennis whites, Klein looked like “an egg on rejected drumsticks.” Mansfield was going to trounce him without breaking a sweat. Then they started playing, and Mansfield, to his eternal shock, discovered he couldn’t get a ball past Klein. “He couldn’t have looked worse yet couldn’t have been more formidable,” he said. “I thought I’d gone to tennis hell.” Most unnerving was the realization that Klein wasn’t near the tennis player Mansfield was; the man played on will alone, the sheer refusal to knuckle under to someone else. “This was not really a tennis match—it was a negotiation, and Allen Klein was virtually unbeatable in negotiations and was not about to lose this one no matter what form it had taken. I was in over my head.”

  It took hours but Mansfield eventually outlasted the older man, finally putting Klein away, 15–13. Shaking hands with Allen at the net, Mansfield saw Klein’s intensity evaporate. The game and the player had already been forgotten, and Mansfield imagined Allen was considering whom to offer the job to next. He never saw or spoke to Klein again.

  As directors of Apple, Peter Brown and Derek Taylor had front-row seats to Klein’s wholesale firings and massive restructuring. Well aware of Apple’s problems, they nonetheless had very different reactions—both to Klein and to the firings.

  Brown saw Klein as a lout bent only on achieving his own ends, believing, for example, that the sole reason Klein had fired Kass—whom Brown liked—was so he could move into the townhouse Apple and Brown had rented for Kass in Mayfair. If that was the case, Brown foiled him by signing over the house’s lease to Kass. “I got supreme pleasure in seeing Kass get that town house,” he said, adding that he strove to soften what he thought of as Klein’s callous and impersonal assaults on the staff, sometimes at the expense of his own reputation. “Some of the dirty work was left to me. I have been criticized for serving Allen Klein in this task but I unhappily agreed to do the job only because I hoped the news could be delivered with kindness and dignity, instead of from Klein’s mouth.” After leaving the Beatles, Brown launched and chaired the public relations firm BLJ Worldwide, where he continued his dedication to kindness and dignity as publicist for Muammar Qaddafi.

  Taylor, the most admired and beloved employee at Apple, was likely also its most thoughtful. It pained him to see Apple in convulsions and his friends fired. Yet he understood Apple could exist only if it was run like a business, and he was philosophic. “Money is pouring into Apple and the only extra overheads are Klein’s transportation and accommodations so I guess you could say that Allen Klein straightened out Apple as the Beatles wanted it,” he said. “The only thing is . . . where is Apple and where are the Beatles?” Indeed, Taylor was one of the few people at Apple able to summon a little sympathy for the devil. “It’s not the same Apple at all when he is there,” he said of Klein. “It is so much heavier, so much more serious, so much more interesting. I think we need him more than we know. He is the Man We Love to Hate and I am not sure we are fair to him.”

  Taylor’s young protégée Chris O’Dell was among those fired. Although she continued to socialize and work in the Beatles’ circle afterward, her first reaction was pain and anger at Klein and Peter Howard for dismissing her; she initially spoke of them with unusual rancor. Years later, after O’Dell had worked for the Rolling Stones and as a tour manager for Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young, she saw things in another light. “The most important piece is that the Beatles were running the whole show and wanted it to be different,” she said. “We had fun, and the sky was the limit for creativity and possibilities. Sadly, however, it cost them a lot of money. The party just had to come to an end.” Perhaps most clear-eyed and sensible was Peter Asher. The head of A&R for Apple Records, Asher understood the players and the business as well as anyone. A former recording artist with the duo Peter and Gordon, Asher was married to the publicist Betty Doster, who had worked with Klein, and Asher’s sister, Jane, had been engaged to McCartney. He believed Apple Records could be a successful artist-oriented label like A&M in America if it took care of business and dispensed with silliness like Magic Alex and the Apple Boutique, so in that regard, the cutbacks were essential. But he also immediately and correctly recognized that Klein’s hiring would widen rather than bridge the gulf between McCartney and Lennon. The existence of warring camps was evident to Apple’s employees, some of whom at first declined to cooperate with Klein or provide him with the documents he needed. Lennon and Harrison had to personally insist that people help Allen.

  “The fact that John was completely convinced that Allen was the right person for the job and Paul was convinced with equal tenacity and determination that he wasn’t meant that Allen Klein’s arrival drove a giant wedge between two people who already were ha
ving quite a number of arguments,” Asher said. “So it seemed to me that the future looked very bleak with Allen Klein at the helm.” Asher had other concerns as well. He had signed and produced James Taylor for Apple, which released his first album, and Taylor, after a brief meeting with Klein, knew the company would change drastically and wasn’t keen on staying. After resigning his position at Apple, Asher became Taylor’s manager and continued to produce him for Warner Brothers Records. When James Taylor’s Warner Brothers debut, Sweet Baby James, proved an enormous hit, Klein was criticized for having lost Apple a major artist.

  Klein’s most provocative act at Apple was directed not at an employee, but at an owner. During a staff meeting at Savile Row, the receptionist buzzed Allen. Everyone in his office heard the message: Paul McCartney was on the line for him.

  “Tell him I’m in a meeting and I’ll call him back later,” he said.

  After a few seconds, the receptionist stuck her head in the door. Paul was insistent; Klein would talk to him now—or never. The Beatle clearly knew he was being snubbed in front of a roomful of his employees. Klein shrugged. “I can’t talk to him now.”

  Paul McCartney kept his word. He never spoke to Allen Klein again.

  Klein nonetheless worked tirelessly to set the Beatles’ financial house in order. If McCartney objected to any of his cost-cutting decisions at Apple, he never said so. Just as important to the group’s financial picture, Klein’s decision to negotiate with United Artists for the release of Let It Be proved a very savvy and lucrative move for the Beatles. Between the film and its soundtrack album, Klein could claim that Apple made six million dollars in just the first month following its May 1970 release—at a time when the Beatles were grateful for a real payday. The best thing may have been that it was found money, a project McCartney had shelved and the others hadn’t cared about.