John L. Eastman, a lawyer for musicians and artists whose representation of famous clients like Paul McCartney, Billy Joel and Willem de Kooning made him a force in the entertainment world, and who played a key part in a power struggle over the control of the Beatles’ business in the last days of the band, died on Aug. 10 in East Hampton, N.Y. He was 83.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his son Lee, a partner in their longstanding family firm, Eastman & Eastman in Manhattan.
Mr. Eastman and his father, who was also named Lee, worked with a long roster of big-name clients over the years, including Andrew Lloyd Webber, David Bowie, Elton John and the estates of Tennessee Williams and the painter Francis Bacon. But of all of them, the lawyers were most closely associated with Mr. McCartney, whom Mr. Eastman represented for more than 50 years.
Their connection was both professional and personal. Mr. Eastman was the brother of Linda McCartney, Mr. McCartney’s first wife, and Lee was her father.
The Eastmans became involved in the fight over the Beatles’ business empire in early 1969. Mr. McCartney had hired the Eastmans, father and son, to be his representatives and tried to persuade his three bandmates to put them in charge of the group’s affairs. Despite their enormous success, the Beatles were then on the brink of insolvency.
But John Lennon and the other Beatles had selected another New Yorker to manage the group: Allen Klein, who had worked with Sam Cooke and the Rolling Stones. Mr. Klein had a reputation as a ferocious negotiator and, as Mick Jagger once described him, a “gangster figure” — the opposite of the refined Eastmans, whose townhouse office in Manhattan was lined with museum-quality paintings by de Kooning and others.
The conflict between Mr. Klein and the Eastmans, and the disagreement within the group over those men, would consume the Beatles for years to come, even after their official breakup in 1970.
To break Mr. Klein’s grip over the band, and to secure Mr. McCartney’s independence, Mr. Eastman masterminded a lawsuit, filed in London on Dec. 31, 1970, to dissolve the Beatles’ partnership agreement. As part of their preparations for the case, Mr. Eastman suggested that his brother-in-law wear a suit and tie to court. Mr. McCartney half-complied: He appeared in a suit, but no tie.
The other Beatles responded to the lawsuit in frustration. “I still cannot understand why Paul acted as he did,” George Harrison said in an affidavit. In March 1971, the judge ruled in Mr. McCartney’s favor, appointing a receiver for the Beatles’ business interests until the dissolution of their partnership could be negotiated, which came several years later.
Early in their work with Mr. McCartney, the Eastmans helped him set up what would become MPL Communications, his entertainment company. It owns many valuable copyrights, including the music publishing rights to songs by Buddy Holly, Fats Waller and Carl Perkins and from hit Broadway shows like “Annie” and “Grease.”
With the Eastmans’ guidance, Mr. McCartney also acquired ownership of all of his recordings and songwriting rights since the breakup of the Beatles. Lee Eastman died in 1991, and Linda McCartney died in 1998.
In 2017, Mr. Eastman steered a lawsuit by Mr. McCartney against Sony/ATV, the music publisher (now known as Sony Music Publishing), to regain his share of the United States copyrights in Beatles songs that he wrote with Mr. Lennon, citing an amendment to federal law that allows creators to recapture those rights after set periods. The case was settled; the terms were not disclosed, but Mr. McCartney has been registering the American ownership of those rights under MPL.
“John was a great man,” Mr. McCartney wrote on Twitter last week, along with a photo of him with Mr. Eastman in yoga poses. “Not only did he help me massively in my business dealings as my lawyer but as a friend he was hard to beat.”
John Lindner…
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