Sometimes, when a portrait of a person is the same across a variety of sources over a length of time, that’s because the portrait is accurate.
Fred Goodman can phumpher all he wants, but we know who Allen Klein was. He was a great accountant, a consummate bully, and a terrible, terrible businessman — worse by far than Brian Epstein ever was. Brian Epstein took four nameless Liverpool musicians and helped them become the most successful group in the history of show business. Along the way, he mismanaged the t-shirt concessions. But Seltaeb is a disaster only because everything else was a triumph on an unimaginable scale. Which Epstein helped create in innumerable ways — not least making sure those twin tigers, John and Paul, were both well-fed and taken care of. This is Management 101.
Klein, on the other hand, not only hastened the breakup of the group, he did much to make it irreparable. What does it say about Klein that his biggest clients kept leaving his management? Why did people who were (it seems) benefitting from his genius for forensic accounting (which is a skill, for sure), want to get the hell away from him? They all said he was a crook. So Fred Goodman, armed with Klein’s own files, is attempting to convince us otherwise? The guy had one trick — going over the accounts, and bullying big corporations — but every other aspect of his “management” seems to have been disastrously poor. Not because he wasn’t smooth or well-bred, but because he killed the goddamn golden goose! So he came up with the idea of turning “Get Back” into “Let It Be.” Better that he’d kept Paul happy and making Beatle records for one more year, two more years, five more years! Look at what John, Paul, George, and Ringo created from 1970-73; the amount of money Klein cost himself, simply by disrespecting Paul at every turn, and being an asshole towards the Eastmans, has to be in the $100s of millions. And why? Because John, in his junkie paranoia and shitty self-image, wanted to stick it to Paul. Insane.
Allen Klein’s actions are simply not those of a manager wanting to keep the Beatles together, so the question that must be asked is this: did Klein believe that he could make more money being the manager of John, George and Ringo separately — plus the manager of whatever entity they might form without Paul? There is a certain business cunning to this, even though it turned out to be utterly wrongheaded. It fits with his behavior, and his take-the-money-and-run style with his clients.
Rather than bending over backwards to rehabilitate Allen Klein, Beatles fans (and historians) need to start judging the man on the effects of his moves. Yes, he squeezed more money out of EMI, but what good is that if you split the group? The Beatles were, and probably are, the most profitable franchise in the history of popular culture. A merely competent manager would’ve done anything — anything — to keep them together and putting out music as The Beatles. Only a fundamentally unethical person who was too clever by half would attempt to control them by (mis)identifying the leader, and feeding his neuroses; and not for nothing was Klein’s greatest supporter that other person who attempted to control the Beatles via John, Yoko Ono.
You don’t control the Beatles; Brian realized that. You enable them to do what they do, and reap the benefits. That’s how everybody makes the most money, and in the end, that’s what being a good businessman is about. Right? Right.