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The group had started its own recording and production company, Apple Records, which was also meant to serve as a kind of Ford Foundation for the counterculture. The place attracted all sorts of daytrippers, rip-off artists and weirdos. "People were robbing us and living off us," Lennon comments. "Eighteen or 20 thousand pounds a week was rolling out of Apple and nobody was doing anything about it."
Not for want of trying. McCartney had met Linda Eastman in London in 1967. A year later he was living with her in London, and he looked to her father and brother, Lee and John, fashionable, tough-minded New York show-business lawyers, for advice on Apple's chaotic affairs. Lennon, in the meantime, had met up with Allen Klein, a free-swinging wheeler-dealer who once sent out Christmas cards with this greeting: "Yea though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, because I'm the biggest bastard in the valley."
Klein and the Eastmans did not get along. "It was a choice," John recalled recently, "between the in-laws and the outlaws." John, George and Ringo went with Klein; McCartney, now married, stuck close to his new family. To extricate himself Paul would have to sue not only Klein but the rest of the Beatles, and in 1971 he did. "It all came down to that—I had to fight my own pals," McCartney recalls. "Of course, by that time, they didn't look like such pals. I was having dreams, amazing dreams about Klein, running around after me with some hypodermic needle, like a crazy dentist."
Doubts, recriminations, bitterness. "You rarely get artists who are good businessmen as well," comments James Taylor, whose first album was issued by Apple and lost in the prevailing madness. "The Beatles were artists." It is not over yet. Klein is still suing Apple Corps Ltd. for all manner of unclaimed commissions. This legal furor to date has cost the Beatles £ 7 million in royalties.
The emotional cost is not so easily calculated. Lennon and McCartney both retreated, Paul seeking the shelter of quiet, closely restricted family life while John exorcised all his demons in public. Apart, they reveled in the sort of vocational excesses they had once checked in each other. Lennon collaborated with his wife, Yoko Ono, on a series of noisome avant-garde records, then switched to abrasive social protest on subjects as various as the Attica killings and the oppression of women. McCartney wrote about the undemanding pleasures of farm life and domestic bliss, going so far as to record a version of Mary Had a Little Lamb four years ago.
"Looking at it purely bluntly," McCartney reflects now, choosing the words carefully, "there was sort of a dip for me and my writing. There were a couple of years when I had sort of an illness. I was a little dry. Now I'm not ill any more. I feel I'm doin' fine." Shoring up his defenses, drawing his family tight around him, McCartney hymned Linda endlessly. "You want to know about his family life, you can hear it in his music," says