Paul McCartney (46 page)

For now, John could still be indulgent to those who gleaned hidden messages and prophecies from his lyrics. ‘Glass Onion’ referred back to ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and then ‘I Am the Walrus’, supposedly offering a key to that most impenetrable of his nonsense verses: ‘Well, here’s a clue for you all… the Walrus was Paul’. Later, after it had taken on the darkest of interpretations, he would protest that he’d merely wanted to ‘say something nice to Paul’ after their recent stresses while signalling in the gentlest way possible that their partnership was moving to a close.

In fact, ‘Glass Onion’ was almost all about Paul–and in an unequivocally positive way. Three McCartney songs were mentioned by name: ‘The Fool on the Hill’ (with Paul adding a sliver of his original recorder-solo), ‘Lady Madonna’ and ‘Fixing a Hole’. There was even a reference to the Cast Iron Shore, the metal-strewn Mersey beach near the McCartneys’ old home in Speke where he was robbed of his wristwatch as a ten-year-old.

Even at the best of times, John had never been lavish in his praise of Paul’s work, so to receive a tribute from him on this scale, at this particular moment, was extraordinary. All the more so in view of the mud-slinging with which he would follow it.

Paul’s personal retinue at Apple all liked Linda from the beginning and recognised her beneficial effect on him. ‘I thought she was lovely,’ Tony Bramwell says. ‘And she tidied him up a bit. Since Jane went, no one had been looking after him. I don’t know what his housekeeper was doing. The house had turned into a bachelor dump. Martha [the sheepdog] was crapping all over the floor and nobody bothered to clear it up.’

Other areas of his life were less easily tidied. During Linda’s first days at Cavendish, there was a stream of phone calls from unidentified women who knew nothing about her arrival. One was Maggie McGivern, who hadn’t heard from Paul since their Sardinian holiday, when he’d seemed on the verge of proposing to her. ‘I rang up one day–one of only two times I ever did–and an American voice answered that must have been Linda,’ Maggie remembers. ‘Paul grabbed the phone away from her and we talked for a while. But he didn’t explain anything, just said, “I don’t know what the scene is.”’

As Linda was already known to the other Beatles, Paul’s introduction of her into their inner circle caused none of the shock waves John had with Yoko. ‘She just stayed in the background and let Paul get on with what he had to do,’ Bramwell says. ‘She’d usually be taking photographs, but she did it so quietly that people hardly seemed to notice.’ She didn’t attempt to publish any of these intimate studies, despite having magazine contacts in New York who were begging for them. Every so often, her friend Danny Fields, the editor of Datebook, would receive a postcard from her bearing the single word ‘Wow!’

Nevertheless, her presence brought a new tension to the directors’ quarters at 3 Savile Row. Despite both being from New York, and each having a small daughter, she and Yoko found little common ground. And although John had seemed to like her well enough in their previous encounters, he now visibly cooled towards her, mistaking her understated manner for impoliteness, even hostility, to Yoko.

Yoko had grown up in one of Japan’s four wealthiest families, with 30 domestic servants who entered her presence on their knees and exited on their knees backwards. Even the doting John once said of her that she viewed all men ‘as assistants’. At the office, he expected her commands to be executed as promptly as his own, and remained fiercely watchful for any sign of less than total enthusiasm and dedication on the part of the doer. Linda, by contrast, was always politeness itself to Paul’s employees and seemed embarrassed to ask even the smallest service of them. ‘She’d never send the office-boy out to buy her Tampax like the Japanese one,’ Tony Bramwell says.

Mal Evans drove her around, and fellow American Chris O’Dell, from the A&R department, was on call to help her make the major cultural adjustment of settling in London. Chris had grown up in Tucson, Arizona, where Linda had lived during her marriage to Mel See, and the two women soon became good friends. ‘She asked for very little,’ Chris recalls. ‘Just things like the name of a good shop where she could order camera equipment.’

In mid-October, Paul accompanied Linda to New York to bring her six-year-old daughter, Heather, back to live with them at Cavendish. Linda prepared the ground by telling Heather about Paul on the phone–not as a Beatle but ‘this guy I really like’–then putting him on to introduce himself. As so often, he was nowhere near as chirpily self-assured as he seemed. ‘[I was thinking] “Oh my God, if she hates me, this could be very very difficult,”’ he recalled, ‘So I was slightly over-friendly probably. I said, “Will you marry me?” She said, “I can’t, you’re too old”… but that broke the ice and I said, “Oh, yes, of course. I forgot that. Well, maybe I should marry your mummy.”’

They spent ten days in New York, staying at Linda’s tiny Upper East Side apartment, which proved not much more than a single room with a fold-down bed. Paul had grown a beard–of surprising blackness and bushiness–from the shelter of which he saw Manhattan for the very first time, walking, taking yellow cabs, even riding the Subway, rather than cowering deep inside a limo with his fellow Beatles as faces flattened against the windows and bodies spreadeagled themselves across the roof.

He paid his first-ever visits to Chinatown and Little Italy, checked out music venues like the Fillmore East and Max’s Kansas City, even finally made it to black music’s most famous venue, the Apollo Theater in the then no-go area of Harlem. He went to Greenwich Village to visit Bob Dylan, who still lived there, and Linda photographed them together with Dylan’s wife, Sara, and baby son, Jesse. But most of the time, it was just Linda and himself, being left miraculously alone. The occasional eye pieced together the delicate features beneath the piratical whiskers and widened in disbelief, but there was not one single mindless scream nor scuffle of pursuing feet.

In New York, their usual roles were reversed, Paul usually having time on his hands while Linda followed a busy routine centred on Heather. ‘It was one of the things that impressed me about her–she seriously looked after her daughter,’ he later recalled. ‘It all seemed very organised… in a slightly dishevelled way.’ For the first time, he became aware of a quality in Linda he could only define as ‘womanliness’, something on a profounder level than the dolly-bird prettiness on which he’d always feasted; something whose only other incarnation in his whole life had been his mother.

One day, while strolling along Mott Street in Chinatown, they saw a Buddhist temple advertising weddings. Paul grabbed Linda’s arm and half-jokingly suggested they go in and get married there and then. ‘I really didn’t want to,’ Linda later recalled. ‘I was so newly not married again, so I went, “No, no, no.” And we kept walking, and it was like it was never said.’

Towards the end of the visit, Linda introduced him to her father, Lee Eastman, the Manhattan entertainment lawyer who, by the strangest coincidence, had been born Leopold Epstein. Now 58 and married to a second wife, Monique, Eastman remained very much the alpha male whose disapproval of Linda’s bohemian ways wasn’t much mitigated by the celebrity boyfriend she’d now landed. He went out of his way not to show deference to Paul, ignoring the subject of the Beatles and, instead, making provocative remarks about Britain’s ‘sinking’ economic state. Paul remained smilingly unruffled, and once Eastman realised he couldn’t be bullied or needled, the two got on well.

So, having gone to New York with his girlfriend, Paul returned to Cavendish with a family. His first act was to suggest they should visit the remote Scottish farm he’d originally bought for Jane and hadn’t visited since their break-up. As he later admitted, he thought the Kintyre peninsula would have little appeal to a WASP-y New York photojournalist. ‘I said, “I know you won’t like it… but let’s just go up there.”’

Actually, Linda was more a child of nature than she’d ever been of skyscrapers and yellow cabs. She instantly fell as much in love as Paul first had with Kintyre’s wildness and remoteness, the looming mountains and white-duned bays, the Pictish standing stones and thousand-year-old springs, the eternal, inviolable silence. ‘It was like nothing I’d ever lived in before,’ she would recall. ‘The most beautiful land you have ever seen… way at the end of nowhere.’

During that brief visit, an 18-year-old local freelance journalist named Freddy Gillies saw them together and realised he had a world scoop. Paul allowed Gillies to interview and photograph them–using Linda’s own Nikon camera–but on condition he wouldn’t sell the story to the national and international press. So it went no further than the Scottish Daily Express.

High Park Farm had never been a luxurious habitation and now seemed to Linda ‘not much more than a building-site… a three-room house, with rats in the wall and no hot water’. Yet on that first camping-out visit together, she said something that resolved any lingering doubts Paul may have had about commitment and monogamy:

‘I could make a nice home here.’

While Paul revolutionised his life thus secretly, John and Yoko continued to live theirs in banner headlines. On 18 October, while borrowing Ringo’s flat in Montagu Square, they were raided by the police and charged with possessing 219 grains of cannabis. Though John maintained the drug had been planted on him by the arresting officer, he pleaded guilty and took sole responsibility (thus saving Yoko from possible deportation) and was fined £150 with £20 costs. So ended the golden age when Beatles had been considered untouchable by Scotland Yard’s drugs squad; from here on, they would be busted just as gleefully as anyone else–with John by no means the record-holder.

The fact that Yoko was five months pregnant did not inhibit outraged fans from viciously jostling her and pulling her hair as the couple emerged from court together. Subsequently–perhaps a direct result of the stress she had suffered–her pregnancy developed complications and on 21 November, the day before the White Album’s release, she suffered a miscarriage at Queen Charlotte’s Hospital in London. Refusing to leave her for a moment, John donned pyjamas and climbed into the next bed; when it was needed for another patient, he slept on the floor.

He had already presented Apple Records with an album by the two of them, instructing that it should be packaged and promoted no less lavishly than the White Album. Titled Unfinished Music No. 1: Two Virgins, it contained the experimental tapes they’d made during their first night together the previous May–a project so absorbing, according to John, that they didn’t get around to having sex until sunrise.

He also supplied an image for the front cover that was as different as it could be from Richard Hamilton’s chaste white-out. Taken by John himself on a time-lapse camera, it showed the two alleged virgins full-frontally nude with an arm wrapped around each other. A back cover picture, taken by the same method, was a reprise of Yoko’s Bottoms film, with the pair looking coyly over their shoulders.

It was all a horrendous clash with the record label Paul had built up so carefully with Ron Kass and Peter Asher; from the Black Dyke Mills Band to surreal electronic wailing, from sweet, virginal Mary Hopkin to exposed nipples and unabashed pubic hair. However, matters quickly moved beyond a row between Paul and John. EMI, who manufactured and distributed Apple’s records, wanted nothing to do with visuals which, in 1968, could have brought a prosecution for disseminating pornography. The company’s chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, personally pleaded with John to choose a different image. ‘Why not put Paul on the cover… he’s much prettier,’ the covertly gay Lockwood suggested. ‘Or a statue from one of the parks.’

In the end, an untidy compromise was reached: Two Virgins came out on the Apple label but EMI’s role was confined to manufacturing the record. Its distribution in the UK was handled by the Who’s Track record company and in America by an obscure agency named Tetragrammaton. When it reached the stores, the John–Yoko cover was inside a plain brown paper wrapper, an ironic nod to pornography’s traditional camouflage. The album sold only a minuscule quantity but, as expected, unleashed a fresh wave of angry disappointment in John and mystification at his choice of nude playmate.

With all this John-and-Yoko scandal to feast on, the media were slow to pick up on Paul’s new girlfriend. But the fans who haunted Paul’s front gate knew all about Linda, or thought they did, and already hated her every bit as much as they did Yoko. In his case, in fact, even greater offence was taken that, with all the world’s beautiful women at his disposal, he should have picked one so very far from conventional prettiness, whose blonde hair usually looked as if it could do with a good brushing and whose clothes were so determinedly unfashionable, not to say dowdy. And Linda’s shyness was interpreted as aloofness, mixed with smug exultation at her undeserved prize.

John had always been recognised as an uncontrollable maverick, but being a Paul fan involved a strong feeling of proprietorship. Like so many tut-tutting aunts, the gate pickets now observed the change from his former dandified, fastidious self; the bushy black beard, the perceptible weight-gain, the baggy tweed overcoat he seemed to wear all the time.

To the fans, it signified how ‘she’ had got her hooks into him; what it actually signified was that he was happy.

His personal life thus replenished and stabilised, he now turned his attention to replenishing and stabilising the Beatles after their ordeal with the White Album. That they were already beyond help by any quick fixes never crossed his mind. Despite having been entirely studio-based for more than two years, they had never officially announced they’d given up live shows, and thus were still considered the world’s premier concert attraction. For every rock festival that came along, they were the dream headliners; in the music press, a week seldom passed without some fresh speculation about when and where they would retake the stage.

Paul, of course, had never really given up live shows: as the Bedfordshire village of Harrold knew, he was ready to perform for any size of audience anytime, anywhere. And he now believed all their problems as a band would disappear if they descended from their four-seat Olympus and started performing to real people again.