you can’t stand to look at each other.”
Only in May 1970, with the release of Michael
Lindsay-Hogg ’s documentary film Let It Be, which
chronicled the making of the album of the same name,
did fans see for themselves the true state of the storied
union before its demise. In scenes from a disintegrat-
ing marriage full of tension and bickering, McCartney
starred as the alternately overbearing and passive-
aggressive father figure, with John and Yoko as codepen-
dent costars, withdrawn from the action into their own
love cocoon. An exasperated Harrison walked out after
a tiff with McCartney. He soon returned, as Ringo had
after quitting in the middle of The White Album sessions
the year before. When he changed his mind and rejoined
the band, Ringo’s mates, like chastised spouses, greeted
him with flowers that they heaped upon his drum kit.
Money matters, the scourge of many a marriage, also
beset the Beatles. Their utopian enterprise Apple Corps
had hemorrhaged so much money that at one point
Lennon told reporters the Beatles would be broke in
six months. Enter Allen Klein, a New York City ac-
countant and music-business heavy, who had worked
miracles for artists ranging from Steve Lawrence and
Eydie Gormé to the Rolling Stones by pressuring record
conglomerates to turn “funny paper”—promised but
undelivered royalties and other back payments—into
cash money and more generous contracts.
Surprisingly it had been McCartney who first sug-
gested that Klein look into the Beatles’ finances. But
when first John, then George and Ringo, tapped Klein
to manage the band, McCartney broke with the Bea-
tles’ long-standing majority-rule tradition and insisted
that his own in-laws, Linda’s father, Lee, and brother
John Eastman handle their affairs. The dispute con-
tinued even after the breakup, as the Beatles remained
a legal entity that did not dissolve when the marriage
partners pronounced it so. “That was the irreconcilable
difference between us,” McCartney told Life in 1971,
explaining why he did the once unthinkable on Dec. 31,
1970, when he sued John, George and Ringo, his erst-
while best mates forever, in order to dissolve their legal
partnership. A few years later the others themselves
split from Klein, and before long, personal rancor dissi-
THE LAST DAYS
72
‘THE BEATLES IS OVER,
BUT JOHN, PAUL, GEORGE
AND RINGO—I STILL LOVE
THOSE GUYS! BECAUSE
THEY’LL ALWAYS BE
THOSE PEOPLE WHO
WERE THAT PART OF
MY LIFE’
—JOHN LENNON, 1980
