In December 1970, John Lennon sat across from Jann Wenner, founder of Rolling Stone, and said things he had never said publicly before. The interview, later published as a book titled Lennon Remembers, was an act of bridge-burning—Lennon spoke about the band as though lancing an abscess. Among other things, he described the moment he realized he wanted to be done with The Beatles: the desire for a “divorce,” voiced to his bandmates back in the autumn of 1969. But what looked like an ending turned out to be only the beginning of a drawn-out legal, financial, and deeply personal war that dragged on into the mid-seventies.
27 August 1967 saw the death of Brian Epstein—the man who had handled The Beatles’ affairs from the very beginning. He was thirty-two. The cause was an accidental overdose of sleeping pills, and the group learned of his death in Bangor, at a seminar led by Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. Lennon later recalled that his first thought was not grief—but that now everything would fall apart. Epstein was not a flawless manager: the contract he signed with EMI in 1962 was unfavorable, and merchandising deals in America cost the group millions. But he performed a role no contract could spell out—he was the buffer between four men with growing differences, the person all four of them ultimately trusted.
After his death, The Beatles tried to manage themselves. The result was Apple Corps—a company conceived as a utopian experiment: a record label, a publishing house, a boutique, electronics, film. The idea was beautiful: rock musicians building their own machine instead of serving a corporate one. In practice, Apple became a hole money poured into. By 1968, the company was spending more than it earned, the staff had ballooned, and there were no controls. In that same interview with Wenner, Lennon described the situation bluntly: if it had gone on like that, they would all have been bankrupt within six months. Each of the four understood that they needed a professional manager. The question of exactly who split the group down the middle.
On 26 January 1969, Lennon met Allen Klein—a New York businessman with a reputation as a hard-nosed negotiator. Klein had already worked with the Rolling Stones and Sam Cooke; he knew how to wring terms out of record companies that artists would not have dared dream of. He was loud, forceful, utterly self-assured—and Lennon, by his own admission, saw a kindred spirit in him: a working-class man unafraid of corporations.
McCartney wanted something else. Not long before, he had begun a relationship with Linda Eastman—later McCartney—and her father Lee Eastman, along with her brother John Eastman, were New York lawyers specializing in the entertainment industry. McCartney wanted specialists: lawyers who would sort out Apple’s contracts and finances without trying to become the fifth Beatle. To Lennon, McCartney’s choice looked like nepotism; to McCartney, Lennon’s looked like an adventure.
George Harrison and Ringo Starr sided with Klein. Harrison, who had spent years feeling like the junior partner in the Lennon–McCartney empire, saw in Klein a man who would work for the group as a whole, not for one of its songwriters. Starr, a peacemaker by nature, backed Klein too—partly because Lennon and Harrison had already made up their minds, and Ringo preferred not to deepen the split. On 8 May 1969, three of the four signed a management contract with Klein. The Eastmans were pushed out of Apple’s affairs. McCartney found himself in the minority—one against three—and that ratio would haunt him for the next several years.
What gets me about this story is this: both camps had rational arguments. Klein really did secure a renegotiation of The Beatles’ EMI royalties—the terms of the new contract were significantly better than the old ones. The Eastmans, for their part, proposed a more cautious strategy that might have spared the group its later legal battles with Klein himself. But by the spring of 1969, the question of who would manage the money had stopped being a business matter—it had become a litmus test of loyalty.
20 September 1969—a date not everyone knows, though it was, in essence, the day The Beatles broke up. At a business meeting, Lennon told the others he wanted a “divorce.” The word was exact: not a break, not a pause, but a divorce—a legal, creative, final rupture. Klein and the others persuaded him not to make a public announcement: a new contract with Capitol Records was at stake, and news of Lennon’s departure would have wrecked their negotiating position. Lennon agreed to keep quiet.
The silence lasted seven months. On 10 April 1970, McCartney got ahead of Lennon—he sent the press a self-interview packaged with his debut solo album McCartney, in which, asked directly about the group’s future, he replied that he had no plans to work with The Beatles. The public reaction was instant and unequivocal: Paul McCartney had killed The Beatles. Lennon was furious. He had wanted to leave himself, but McCartney got the gesture of rupture, turning the promotion of his solo album into the band’s funeral. In his interview with Wenner a few months later, Lennon insisted that he had been the first to leave, that McCartney had merely seized the moment for his own promotion.
The truth, as usual, lies somewhere between the two versions. Lennon really was the first to say the word “divorce”—but privately, in a room with four people and a manager. McCartney was the first to say it to the world. Both believed their own act was the real one, and the other’s was just a gesture.
After McCartney’s April announcement, the group’s legal reality remained unchanged: the Beatles partnership, set up back in Epstein’s day, still existed. Income from the music, from Apple, from licensing—it all went into a common pot managed by Klein. McCartney could not get his share, could not control his own songs within the catalog, could not leave the partnership without the others’ consent. And there was no consent.
On 31 December 1970, McCartney filed suit in the High Court of London, demanding the dissolution of the partnership and the appointment of an independent receiver for the group’s finances. He was taking on Lennon, Harrison, and Starr all at once. The case was painful: Apple’s financial details surfaced in court, along with accusations against Klein and testimony about how decisions were made within the group. On 12 March 1971, Justice Blanchard Stamp ruled in McCartney’s favor and appointed an outside receiver over The Beatles’ assets. Formally, McCartney had won. In practice, he became the man who sued his own band. Public opinion, already turned against him after April 1970, hardened even further.
The partnership’s final legal dissolution came only in 1974—more than four years after Lennon first said “divorce,” and five years after the group had effectively stopped working together. Formally, the firm “The Beatles & Co” was dissolved by High Court order on 9 January 1975. The bureaucratic machine ground through what had once been four lads from Liverpool with a methodical indifference to music.
When people cannot come to terms face-to-face, they begin speaking through intermediaries. For musicians, the intermediary is an album. In May 1971, McCartney released RAM, featuring the song “Too Many People”—a track whose lyrics could, if one wished, be read as commentary on the situation with Lennon. The line about people “preaching practices” was vague enough for McCartney to deny a direct jab, and transparent enough for Lennon to take it personally.
The answer came in September that same year. “How Do You Sleep?”, from the album Imagine, was a direct blow: Lennon sang that the only worthwhile thing McCartney had done was “Yesterday,” and everything else was Muzak. Especially venomous was the line that “Those freaks was right when they said you was dead”—a reference to the “Paul is dead” urban legend. Harrison played guitar on the track, turning the song from a personal attack into a collective statement. Playing on it, he later recalled, was “nervous, as usual,” but the feud had nothing to do with it: on the contrary, he liked being on John’s side for once, rather than in the firing line.
These songs were not the cause of the breakup. The group no longer existed. They were shards flung out by the explosion, and every shard carried the force of grievances that had been building for years. Lennon later admitted that he wrote “How Do You Sleep?” in anger, and that the song was unfair. But the record had already been pressed.
While Lennon recorded angry tracks in New York studios, McCartney was going through what was probably the worst period of his life. After the group broke up, he left with Linda and the children for a farm in Kintyre, Scotland—a place without a telephone, without a studio, without any of the usual infrastructure. Later, in interviews over the years, McCartney described that time with an openness unusual for him: he said he could not get out of bed, that he drank too much, that he saw no point in going on working. Linda, he said, practically pulled him out of that state.
I do not want to impose a retrospective diagnosis here—McCartney himself never used clinical terms, and it is not for me to do so on his behalf. But the picture he paints speaks for itself: a man who, from the age of twenty, had been part of the most successful group in history, discovering at thirty that the group was gone, that his former friends saw him as a traitor, that the press called him a destroyer, and that court was the only way to regain control of his own money. The farm in Kintyre was both refuge and trap. His way out began with music: the album McCartney, recorded almost entirely alone, was savaged by critics, but the recording process itself—playing all the instruments, tinkering with a four-track recorder—became a kind of self-therapy. Later came Wings, touring, a new career, but McCartney carried the scar of 1970 for a long time.
Allen Klein’s story is a separate plot with no heroes in it. He really did get The Beatles better terms from EMI. He really did bring some order to Apple’s finances, which under its previous management had been losing money at an alarming rate. But by 1973, relations between Klein and his clients had deteriorated so badly that in March 1973, Lennon, Harrison, and Starr—the very three who had chosen him over McCartney four years earlier—fired him.
The dismissal was not peaceful. It was followed by a lawsuit from the former clients against their former manager: the claims concerned the financial terms under which Klein had handled the group’s affairs, and the sums he had received in commissions. Klein, in turn, filed counterclaims. McCartney, who had warned of this scenario back in 1969, had every right to say, “I told you so”—and as far as I know, he never said those words publicly at the time. Roughly speaking, he won that round by staying silent.
A caveat: accusations made by either side in court cases are accusations, not established facts of anyone’s personal financial ruin. Lennon, Harrison, and Starr were dissatisfied with how Klein handled their money, but to claim that he “stripped the Beatles bare” would be a distortion. The financial claims were specific, connected to the size of commissions and how they were calculated, not to the disappearance of an entire fortune.
It is commonly believed that after The Beatles broke up, Lennon and McCartney became enemies forever. That is not true. The bitter conflict of 1970–1971—lawsuits, answer songs, public accusations—gradually lost its edge. By the mid-seventies, when the partnership’s legal dissolution had finally been completed, the two began cautiously rebuilding personal contact. Lennon said McCartney came to visit him in New York several times, that they watched television together, that they even picked up guitars once—though nothing recorded ever came of those home jams.
Those visits were not a return to the friendship of 1963. Too much had been said, too much signed, too much litigated. But two men who had lived through a public war on that scale still sat in the same room and talked—without cameras and without interviews.
A Beatles reunion never happened. Lennon was murdered in December 1980, and the question of whether the group might ever have stepped onstage together again remained unanswered. But the paradox of this story is that the breakup announced in 1969 and formalized in 1974 never became final in human terms. Lennon and McCartney’s last phone conversation, Paul recalled, was ordinary, domestic, about nothing—they talked about children and baking bread.