Fire and Rain

by David Browne

  During interviews he began doing to promote the album, Taylor seemed uncomfortable discussing his stays at McLean and Austin Riggs. But neither did he completely run from that part of his past. In a press release that accompanied Sweet Baby James, he wrote, “In the fall of 1965 I entered a state of what must have been intense adolescence . . . and spent nine months of voluntary commitment at McLean Psychiatric Hospital in Massachusetts.” At early club shows, he would turn his stay there into a quizzical in-joke: “McLean, that’s a mental hospital,” he told one audience. “Okay, anybody here from McLean? Let’s hear it for McLean.” Eager to discuss money matters, Taylor called Warners head Joe Smith one day. Taylor was distraught, and Smith said he should go to Smith’s house and wait for him. There, Taylor and Smith’s wife sat waiting for Smith to come home, Taylor barely saying a word for nearly a half hour. “My wife can make a conversation with a wall, but he sat there and said nothing,” Smith recalled. “She finally called me and said, ‘Get home!’”

  The sense that Taylor had been damaged by drugs or mental instability only added to his mystique. When a reporter interviewed college students about Taylor’s appeal, one answered, astutely, “The fact that he was in a mental hospital colors people emotionally before they even hear the songs. They all feel sorry for him. The girls, especially.” By then, even Taylor understood that playing up his flaws wasn’t such a bad idea. “I feel fine just to know you’re around,” he began plucking and crooning at Berkeley. At first it sounded like a love song, but soon the crowd started realizing what was happening. Wait, what is this song? Then Taylor hit the chorus: “Things go better with Coke,” he sang, and the audience whooped at both the not-very-veiled drug reference and Taylor semi-mocking a corporate ad jingle.

  “Yeah!” yelled a man in the crowd, with evident approval.

  Whether he wanted it to or not, Taylor’s life was growing more complicated by the day. He was still attached in some way to Margaret Corey, but he was also spending time in the Laurel Canyon cottage of Toni Stern, a native Californian and friend of King’s. Stern joined him during the East Coast leg of his tour, even meeting his family in Boston. Stern brought along her dog, who often ate his way through the wooden storage racks in the airplanes.

  Driving along the Sunset Strip in Hollywood, Monte Hellman looked up at one of the ubiquitous, towering billboards advertising new albums and was instantly drawn to the face on it. Hellman had never heard of James Taylor before, but the handsome face looking down at him was all that the director needed to see. At twenty-eight, the frizzy-haired Hellman was already a veteran of Roger Corman productions (Beast from Haunted Cave) and surrealistic westerns starring Jack Nicholson (Ride in the Whirlwind, The Shooting). He was considering directing a script for Two-Lane Blacktop, about two car-racing hustlers making their way across the country, and the man on the billboard had the perfect face for the role of the unnamed Driver.

  When Asher received a call from Hellman’s casting director that Hellman was interested in his client, he was torn. Asher heard Hellman was a reputable, up-and-coming director, but Taylor had never acted, and Asher, despite a background that included working as a child actor in London, knew little about dealing with the film business. Asher reached out to Mike Medavoy, an agent who represented the new breed of antiestablishment directors, including Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, and John Milius. By coincidence, Hellman was also one of Medavoy’s clients. Before long, Taylor was taking a meeting with Hellman in the director’s Los Angeles office. Hellman sensed Taylor was “up for the adventure” of making a film. Hellman wanted realism, not slick actors, and Medavoy was also sold on Taylor. “James had an amazing presence,” said Medavoy. “It was the presence of a guy people wanted to hug. Very likable and warm. That’s rare.”

  By then, Hellman had already hired novelist Rudy Wurlitzer to rewrite scriptwriter Will Corry’s screenplay. Wurlitzer, who’d published the cult novel Nog, rewrote the part of the Driver. Although he had no inkling Taylor was up for the part, Wurlitzer sketched out a character who could have passed for him. The working script described the Driver as “age 23 . . . his face is lean and angular. There is a perplexed and detached look in his eyes. His movements are graceful and yet tense, nervous.” Without meaning to, Wurlitzer had carved out Taylor’s next career move.

  In early April, Hellman shot Taylor’s screen test on a sunny day at a house in Los Angeles. Taylor had shown up with a mustache, which Hellman had him shave off as part of the test. Alternately staring down the camera or looking away as if too shy to respond, Taylor—in a V-neck T-shirt, his hair in a shag cut like that on Sweet Baby James—exuded a blend of irritation and amusement. More than one person, including the cautious Wurlitzer, thought he was stoned on one substance or other. “It was very awkward,” Wurlitzer remembered. “He was very uncomfortable. It was very disorienting. Drugs will do that to you. You go in and out of various levels of focus.”

  Hellman tried to warm Taylor up, asking him about Martha’s Vineyard and how many people lived there in the winter and summer. As if barely tolerating the questions being thrown at him, Taylor curtly replied he liked his place on the Vineyard because the nearest neighbor was “a quarter mile away.”

  At one point, Hellman mentioned the Beatles, wondering whether “Helter Skelter” was a parody of hard rock or the real thing.

  Taylor managed a shrug. “The Beatles aren’t, anymore.”

  “I just heard that,” Hellman replied.

  “Unfortunately,” Taylor said, with a typically understated combination of sadness and irritation.

  CHAPTER 6

  On the first day of March, the Beatles returned, more or less, to The Ed Sullivan Show. Six years before, their first appearance on television’s most insanely eclectic variety series had been viewed by seventy-three million people—a colossal number then and later—and transformed the culture and a generation. Now, for one of his recurring thematic shows, Sullivan decided to dedicate a full hour to their music.

  This time, though, there would be no actual Beatles present. Instead, viewers witnessed an oddball, largely non-rock parade of entertainers interpreting their songs: Dionne Warwick sang “We Can Work It Out,” Peggy Lee crooned “Something,” ballet star Edward Villella leapt to “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds.” The lounge-lizard duo of Steve Lawrence and Eydie Gorme, two of Allen Klein’s first clients, popped up as well. The show was a testament to the ways in which the Beatles, and rock itself, had become mainstream culture. But the Beatles themselves appeared only on film, performing “Two of Us” and “Let It Be” in a preview of their in-the-works movie, now retitled Let It Be. Even on their own show, they were a spectral presence.

  No one seemed to notice, and to most of the world beyond the Apple Corps building on Savile Row, Beatle business continued as usual. In February, Klein had announced the imminent arrival of two movies: Let It Be and another called The Long and Winding Road, which he described as a documentary about their travels and escapades over the previous two years. With dreams of a financial windfall no doubt dancing in his brain, he confidently announced both would arrive in spring. By the penultimate day of spring, ads for “Let It Be,” their new single, were spotted in the States and the U.K. The Beatles were on their way back.

  The Sullivan show even coincided with the release of a new Beatles album—but it too felt half-hearted, perhaps even quarter-hearted. Hey Jude was entirely given over to songs and singles that hadn’t made it onto previous Beatle albums, like the title hit and “The Ballad of John and Yoko.” Originally titled The Beatles Again, it had been spearheaded by Klein, who was eager to ship as much new Beatle product to stores as possible after he’d renegotiated their contract with EMI the previous fall. For a grab bag, the album was still exceptional—any record that contained both “Paperback Writer” and “Lady Madonna” couldn’t be anything but. Yet even the cover photo, taken the previous August at Lennon’s Tittenhurst estate, was dated. Dan Richter, Lennon and Ono’s friend,
had accidentally walked in on the shoot and was surprised not only by their presence but their mood; they all seemed glum and morose.

  Shortly after the Sullivan telecast, the Chicago chapter of the Beatle fan club—125 diehards, mostly women—congregated in a room at the Executive House Hotel on the Chicago River. They traded souvenirs and made contests out of remembering the dates of Brian Epstein’s death and the premiere of Help!

  As hard as everyone tried to revive the spirit of 1964, the general mood was less than festive. One club member pulled out a photo of Lennon and Ono in their prisoner-of-war haircuts, which led to gaping, eye-rolling, and arguments. The original Beatlemaniacs, the ones who’d first watched them on Sullivan, dismissed Ono, while the new fans at the meeting, the twelve-year-olds, were more accepting of her quirks. As the meeting wound down, the club’s secretary, twenty-four-year-old Vikki Paradiso, called off plans for any further gatherings. Across the ocean, Beatle Book, a monthly London fanzine, announced it would be shutting down; circulation had plunged from 330,000 copies an issue to a mere 26,000.

  In Apple’s Press Office, tucked away on the third floor of the Savile Row building, the newspaper clippings were beginning to pile up. When Richard DiLello was hired in the spring of 1968, the twenty-three-year-old American—who’d landed the job after meeting press department head Derek Taylor in Los Angeles, much like his coworker Chris O’Dell—was told to wade through the stacks of periodicals with articles on the Beatles. For a salary of ten pounds a week, DiLello cut them out and sorted them into piles: negative articles in one stack, positive in another, Apple Corps articles over there. When the frizzy-haired, freakflag-flying DiLello wasn’t slogging through those stacks, he’d roll joints for Taylor or make one of his weekly hash runs for the office.

  New clippings arrived every day, but by now, no one was tending to them, and stacks began to sit uncollected in forlorn piles around the four desks in the office. Calls from the media kept coming in: What were John and Yoko up to now? Was the band available for a photo shoot? Taylor would gamely set up chats when he could, but few in the office knew what the individuals in the band were doing. Every so often, DiLello would look up from his desk and see a thickset, turtlenecked man with a dark pompadour of hair, staring at him as if he were an alien. The man’s colleagues—men who always seemed to be sporting brown suits with brown shoes—would be trailing right behind him. Like O’Dell and anyone else still gainfully employed at Apple, DiLello was plenty aware that the man everyone simply called “Klein” was in the house.

  At thirty-eight, roughly a decade older than any of the Beatles, Allen Klein was a man of voracious appetites, whether he was wolfing down a steak at his desk or going after a record company that had failed to pay royalties to one of his clients. Around Apple, everyone knew he’d managed Sam Cooke, was now handling the Rolling Stones, and was financially entangled with the Who, the Animals, and the Kinks. They also knew McCartney didn’t like him very much and that the others did. And they knew that, at any moment, they could all lose their jobs.

  Had they known he’d spent nearly five years in an orphanage after his mother died (his father couldn’t handle raising a son alone until he remarried), they would have known Klein always felt he had something to prove to himself and the world. He hated being known as an “orphan” and saw himself instead as both underdog and their champion. After college and a stint in the Army, Klein, born in Newark, New Jersey, had first worked as an accountant for small businesses in the New York City area—a paint store here, a health club there. When his college friend Don Kirshner, who’d started as a songwriter but moved into the far more lucrative business of song publishing, asked him to audit a client’s record company, Klein was off and running—or, rather, barking. By scouring the receipts of labels, Klein was able to find unclaimed sums of money for pop acts like Cooke and Bobby Darin. Klein then set his sights on the British Invasion bands. Eric Burdon, lead singer of the Animals, was walking down the street in New York when a man with a swirl of dark hair stuck his head out of a limo. “I’ll give you seventeen thousand dollars for your rights to the Animals catalog right now!” he yelled, holding a pen in his thumb and index finger. The traffic was moving so slowly that Burdon could have easily signed right there and then, but he kept on walking; he’d heard about Klein.

  After Cooke was shot to death in 1964, Klein moved on to manage other acts—luring the Rolling Stones away from Andrew Loog Oldham—and negotiate record or publishing contracts for the Kinks, the Who, and the Dave Clark Five. Kirshner instilled in Klein the idea that the key to wealth in the music business was owning song copyrights, and Klein, a quick study, understood. In the fall of 1968, after purchasing the Stones’ catalog, he went hunting for an even bigger prize.

  Beginning with his days as a clerk at the Essex County News in New Jersey, Klein wasn’t just savvy with numbers; he knew how to ingratiate himself with musicians using a combination of tough talk (the record companies were the Man!), an intimate knowledge of pop songs, and ego massaging. When he set up a meeting with Lennon and Ono at a London hotel in January 1969, the first of many steps in his plan to work his way into the Beatles’ fold, Klein ordered their favorite macrobiotic food and impressed Lennon by knowing precisely which Beatles songs he’d written and sung. Klein sensed how important it was for Lennon to differentiate himself from the others, especially now that he and Ono had become the butt of jokes and hostility. In one of his frequent snap decisions, Lennon knew Klein was his man. Wanting to maintain their own lifestyles, Harrison and Starr went along with the idea of Klein handling their business affairs. McCartney wasn’t so sure and preferred Linda’s father Lee Eastman (and his son John) to handle their money. Nonetheless, the other three signed a three-year contract with Klein on May 8, 1969.

  To his credit, Klein renegotiated Brian Epstein’s contract with EMI, hoisting the Beatles’ royalty rate from 17.5 percent to 25. As always, Klein would make out exceptionally well himself: ABKCO, his company, would net 20 percent of their royalties and 25 percent of merchandise sales—both higher percentages than usual—and according to the deal, Capitol would send all payments to Apple by way of ABKCO from September 1969 through April 1972. He also began trimming Apple’s fat, doing the dirty work the Beatles themselves had no stomach for. (McCartney’s interest in chairing meetings and overseeing business details had gone the way of his clean-shaven face, and his desire to remain popular meant he didn’t want to fire anyone.) Numerous employees, including label head Ron Kass, were canned; Asher, having heard plenty about Klein, resigned. For DiLello, among others, the message was abundantly clear. “This was no longer an idealistic hippie dream, saving the world and giving people the chance to do whatever they want to do under the auspices of the Beatles,” he said. “This was now, ‘Okay, it’s all about money and turning this into a real business.’ They all had very lavish lifestyles. Jetting around the world for peace—someone had to pay for all that.”

  From the start, Peter Brown—who cultivated the air of a refined British gentleman from his neatly trimmed beard to his tasteful suits—had a visceral dislike for the far less suave Klein. Brown was also offended by Klein’s assertions that Apple was in poor financial shape and saw them as Klein’s calculated way of winning over the band. Within months, he and Klein were barely on speaking terms. Brown’s job description remained the same, but Klein’s accountant began badgering him with questions. “I wasn’t happy at all, but I didn’t want it to appear that Klein had pushed me out,” Brown recalled. He stayed on, but when Brown and Neil Aspinall weren’t reelected to the board of shareholders that year, probably thanks to Klein, Brown knew his Apple days were numbered.

  As another one of his early projects, Klein also lit a fire under Get Back, the movie of their recording sessions they’d filmed over a year before. After A Hard Day’s Night, Help!, and Yellow Submarine, the Beatles owed United Artists one more feature, so Klein made a revamped deal for a release and a soundtrack album, both now called Let It
Be. Although engineer Glyn John had taken a first crack at making sense of the tapes and even sequenced a finished album, Klein ultimately went with Phil Spector.

  Spector seemed an odd choice to oversee this particular project. His Wall of Sound was now out of vogue (as proven by the chart flop of what he saw as his masterpiece, Ike and Tina Turner’s “River Deep—Mountain High” in 1966), and it also seemed the antithesis of the very idea of the consciously under-produced Get Back sessions. Still, he and Klein were natural cohorts: both sons of European immigrants, both rooted in the New York area (Spector was born in the Bronx, where Klein later worked). ABKCO also had a “financial participation” in hits Spector had cowritten, like “Be My Baby” and “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feelin’.” When the two would meet up in recording studios, they’d unintentionally look and sound like a Noo Yawk comedy duo; Lennon and Klaus Voormann would be beside themselves with laughter.

  When asked why he’d hired Spector to work with the Beatles, Klein was typically blunt. “Wouldn’t you want the number-one director to direct the number-one actor?” he told the New York Post. Klein was so confident in the unfinished Let It Be album that he ordered EMI to press up three million copies.

  By spring, Klein had far stickier Beatle matters to sort out. McCartney’s own album was no longer a secret, especially when he made it known he wanted it out fast, on April 17. Klein knew releasing it at the same time as a new Beatles album (and Starr’s now completed Sentimental Journey record) could potentially dilute the sales of each. In his particular way, Klein went about solving the problem. After discussions with Harrison, Lennon, and Starr, he sent a letter on March 20 to Ken East, the managing director of EMI Music, which distributed Apple, asking to delay the release of McCartney’s album. The only person he didn’t bother to inform about his decision was McCartney.