Paul McCartney (50 page)

‘Go on, cry! You’ll be in the paper’

On 11 March 1969, Apple’s press office issued a brief announcement that Paul McCartney was to marry Linda Eastman in a civil ceremony at Marylebone Register Office the next day. They had decided on it only a week earlier and chosen the quickest, simplest way–although Paul was still enough of a traditionalist to contact Linda’s father and formally ‘ask for her hand’.

Even after the date was set, Linda continued to have serious doubts about trying matrimony a second time. Their relationship in those early days, Paul would remember, was ‘very up and down’, sometimes ‘crazy’; and on the wedding-eve they had a furious row and almost called it off.

Paul spent the day in the studio with George and Jackie Lomax, working on a single to follow Lomax’s surprisingly unsuccessful ‘Sour Milk Sea’. When the session ended late that night, he did not return to Cavendish but turned up at the Chelsea apartment of his long-time secret girlfriend Maggie McGivern; the first she’d seen of him since Linda’s arrival.

‘There was no car, no cab, so he must have walked,’ Maggie recalls. ‘He was scruffy, unshaven and in a terrible state–he couldn’t even talk, just held on to me. I was trying to ask what was wrong but not to make a noise because my teenage brother was staying with me and was asleep in the same room. After about an hour, he just left. I looked out of the window and saw him walking down the street, somehow knowing I’d never see him again.’

The scenes outside Marylebone Register Office next day were like nothing seen in London since mid-season Beatlemania. Heavy rain made a fitting accompaniment to the hundreds of young women weeping with the desolation of those bereaved–or, rather, jilted. Press photographers went round snapping the most lachrymose specimens and urging the dry-eyed, ‘Go on, cry! You’ll be in the paper.’

Paul, in a dark suit, pink shirt and yellow tie, looked oddly youthful beside Linda, who wore a fitted coat of egg-yolk yellow and, in some photo-ops, cuddled a tabby kitten. The bride was four months pregnant (a fact already known to the Cavendish Avenue pickets from the chemist’s prescriptions they’d seen arriving at the house). Six-year-old Heather attended her as bridesmaid.

None of the other Beatles was present, as Paul had been on all their wedding days. Ringo was filming The Magic Christian with Peter Sellers and John had taken Yoko to meet his Aunt Mimi for the very first time. George was working in the recording studio but had promised to come to the reception with Pattie. Their absence ‘didn’t seem important’, Paul would remember. ‘It was mainly just the two of us.’

Peter Brown and Mal Evans acted as witnesses and the best man was Mike McCartney, who had to travel by rail from the north where he was touring with the Scaffold. Mike’s train developed problems and he arrived at nearby Euston station an hour late thinking he’d missed the ceremony, but Paul had insisted on waiting for him. ‘We just sort of giggled our way through it,’ his older brother would remember. ‘All that “I promise” stuff… Linda was breaking up.’

Afterwards came a (totally serious) service of blessing at St John’s Wood Parish Church, next to Lord’s cricket ground, and a further photo session at Cavendish, where Paul performed the ancient ritual of carrying his bride over the threshold. Then, friends and musician cronies were invited to a reception at the Ritz hotel in Piccadilly. The Harrisons arrived late following a police raid on their home in which a sniffer dog named Yogi (after the cartoon bear, not the Indian mystic) had discovered 57 grams of cannabis.

At the Ritz, the newly-weds were interviewed together by Independent Television News. Paul gave his usual good value, answering the banal questions with earnest politeness in between larking around with Heather to stop her from feeling left out. But Linda made little attempt to win over the several million viewers for whom this would be their first sight and sound of her:

Q: What prompted [your decision to marry]?

PAUL: Just, you know, we decided to do it instead of talking about it.

Q: Linda, how do you feel about it? You’re obviously terribly happy. How are you feeling this morning?

LINDA (barely audible): Very happy. Unquote.

When they returned home that evening, there was still a large crowd outside Cavendish, its mood now decidedly uglier. Linda was greeted with boos, catcalls and spittle and after a wad of burning newspaper was pushed through the letterbox, the police had to be called. Paul came to the front gate to appeal to reason–a tactic that had always worked in the past, but signally failed now. ‘Look girls,’ he almost pleaded, ‘I had to get married sometime.’ The comforting fiction could therefore circulate that he was doing it somehow against his will.

The first that Maggie McGivern knew of the wedding was a news bill in Chelsea’s King’s Road. In shock, she found her way to 48 Cheyne Walk where Marianne Faithfull, for whom she used to work as a nanny, now lived with Mick Jagger. ‘Marianne couldn’t believe it when I told her and when Mick heard, he went, “Wha-a-at?” He said he’d had a fling with Linda in New York during the great power blackout of 1965.’

As the unfavourable stories about his new wife piled up, Paul, that media-handler par excellence, took a personal hand in trying to secure her a better press. At his request, Derek Taylor arranged for Linda to be interviewed by the Beatles’ favourite pop correspondent, Don Short of the Daily Mirror. Although Short’s interview with Linda was the softest imaginable, her shyness and unease were painfully obvious. She was giving it, she said, only to rebut the story that had followed her from New York (and lately appeared in The Times as fact): that she was one of the Kodak Eastmans. ‘I don’t know how that mistake came about, except through the name and the fact that I’m a photographer.’ It hardly mattered any more; her surname now was bigger than any mere American brand except, perhaps, Coca-Cola.

Paul’s father hadn’t yet met Linda, but was unable to do so at the wedding. In recent years, Jim McCartney had suffered increasingly from arthritis, and the condition was now so severe that a journey from the north-west down to London would have been too great an ordeal for him. Instead, Paul took Linda and Heather to stay with Jim and his wife, Angie, in Cheshire before flying off for a three-week honeymoon in America.

Jim, in fact, had two debilitating forms of the complaint, osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, which mainly attacked his knees and ankles and which a series of remedies–from calcium to gold–barely alleviated. Semi-invalid as he’d become, ‘Rembrandt’, the dream home in Heswall that Paul had bought him, was now full of inconveniences, especially the long staircase from the front hall up to the bedrooms. As this had too many turns to accommodate a conventional stairlift, Paul proposed installing a hotel-style Otis elevator on the outside of the house. But Jim would not hear of such expense and simply moved his and Angie’s room down to the ground floor.

As Angie McCartney recalls, they were both nervous about meeting Linda. ‘We were expecting this very exotic person from America, who we wouldn’t have anything in common with and wouldn’t understand us. That ended for me as soon as Linda walked into the kitchen and I realised how much she loved cooking. Jim took to her immediately as well. He was just so happy to see Paul become a happy family man at last.’

To complete the bonding, Heather and Angie’s nine-year-old daughter, Ruth, instantly became friends. ‘There was three years between them and they were completely different characters,’ Angie recalls. ‘Ruth was mad about dancing and Heather was mad about animals. But they’d spend hours in Ruth’s bedroom, dressing up and doing girlie things.’ Jim had adopted Ruth when he married Angie; Paul now hoped to do the same with Heather.

His aunts, uncles and cousins across the water in Liverpool naturally wanted to meet Linda, too, and he dutifully took her around them all. But there was no big McCartney clan-gathering, as in the old days when he and his father would take turns at the piano. ‘We all had too many concerns about Jim’s health,’ Angie says. ‘So it wasn’t party time.’

Whenever Paul visited, he and Jim had always had long heart-to-heart talks while pacing to and fro over the back lawn. Now, with Jim’s mobility reduced, they spent their private time together in the little lower garden which caught the most sun and where Paul–that ever-versatile handyman–had built a flight of stone steps. ‘Jim would sit in a deck-chair, with Paul beside him, both smoking their ciggies,’ Angie recalls. ‘I know he talked to his dad about the problems he was going through at Apple, but none of it was ever mentioned to the rest of us.’

The onward journey to stay with Linda’s family in New York ran into an unforeseen hitch. At Manchester Airport, Paul discovered he’d forgotten his passport; a phone call had to be made to Peter Brown at Apple, and a minion deputed to drive up from London with the missing document. The world had moved on since 1967, when he’d made his ‘Fool on the Hill’ film and charmed his way to the Côte d’Azur and back without a passport.

Eight days after Paul’s wedding, in the copycat spirit that had always characterised their relationship, John married Yoko on the Rock of Gibraltar. She, too, was a reluctant bride, and had accepted him as her third husband only on condition that their wedding wouldn’t be ‘a media circus like the McCartneys’.

Instead, after the quietest of ceremonies in a sleepy British colony, the Lennons turned their honeymoon into a media circus that made the recent scenes outside Marylebone Register Office seem positively Garbo-esque. In a luxury suite at Amsterdam’s Hilton hotel, they staged what they called ‘a commercial for peace’, spending a week side-by-side in a kingsize bed, voicing anti-war sentiments to non-stop relays of international media, most of whom had expected to witness them having sex. Such was the storm of ridicule they unleashed that the new Mrs Paul McCartney quite vanished from sight.

Paul and John were both still on honeymoon when, without warning, the final piece of the world Brian Epstein had constructed around them crumbled away. Northern Songs, the company which had published their music since 1963, became the target of a hostile takeover bid.

Northern Songs was the creation of Dick James, the dance-band crooner turned music publisher into whose lap the Beatles had fallen just before the release of ‘Please Please Me’. Presciently recognising the potential of Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting, James had set up a company solely to handle their publishing rights, of which 50 per cent was owned by him and his business partner, Charles Silver, 20 per cent each by John and Paul and 10 per cent by Brian. So rich and extensive did the catalogue soon become that in 1965 Northern Songs became the first music publishers ever floated as a public company on the London Stock Exchange. After the flotation James and Silver held 37.5 per cent and John and Paul now only 15 per cent each but the balance of power remained with them as Brian’s company, NEMS, held 7.5 per cent and George and Ringo together a token 1.6 per cent.

James had the good sense never to try to influence what Lennon and McCartney wrote, although Northern Songs always earned most, through cover versions and sheet music, from tuneful McCartney compositions like ‘Michelle’ and ‘Yesterday’. To John and Paul, he was a joke figure with his bald head, desperate sideburns and cheesy Tin Pan Alley bonhomie, but they understood that Brian had found them a publisher as different from the norm as George Martin, who believed in quality and was essentially honest.

However, as time passed a familiar syndrome had set in. A deal that had seemed so bountiful to impressionable boys in 1963 looked somewhat different after six years as the entertainers of the century. And James had undeniably grown wealthy on their backs, not only as managing director and a major shareholder in Northern Songs but also through his separate organisation, Dick James Music, which handled the catalogues of numerous other successful young songwriters and now even had its own independent record label.

After Brian’s death, one of John and Paul’s first ‘self-management’ initiatives had been to seek a new deal from Northern Songs. They were not overly polite about it, suggesting that their meeting with James should be filmed like some police interrogation. James had declined to revise the existing arrangements and since then relations between the two sides had been chilly.

In any case, James also bore the responsibility of heading a public company and safeguarding the interests of its shareholders. To begin with, Beatlemania had kept Northern’s stock at a perpetual high. But latterly, as John’s behaviour had become more and more erratic–and especially since he’d teamed up with Yoko–it had begun to fluctuate alarmingly, to the severe detriment of Dick James’s nerves.

The Two Virgins album cover followed by the Amsterdam Bed-In finally proved too much for James and his associate, Charles Silver, and on 28 March they sold their 37.5 per cent of Northern Songs to Associated Television for just under £2 million. At the same moment, ATV’s chairman, Lew Grade, announced he was seeking overall control of the company and was prepared to spend up to £9 million to acquire it.

Neither John nor Paul received any prior warning of the sale from Dick James. To add insult to injury, the organisation now intent on gobbling up their catalogue had nothing to do with the pop business but was the commercial TV franchise holder for the Midland region, best-known for a cheapo teatime soap called Crossroads. Grade himself was the archetype of the cigar-chewing showbiz moguls who’d spent the last decade denigrating pop music as just a passing fad. The Beatles’ competing advisers, Allen Klein and Lee and John Eastman–now Paul’s father-and brother-in-law–were thus forced back into alliance, to prevent ATV from taking over Northern Songs by increasing John and Paul’s own stake to beyond 50 per cent.

As Northern was a public company, some of the requisite extra shares could be bought up piecemeal from private investors. But a crucial block belonged to a City investment group known only as ‘the Consortium’, and amounted to around 14 per cent–exactly what each side needed to gain control. The Consortium by no means regarded the Beatles as automatic heirs to the company, for all that they were its raison d’être, and intended to consider both bids on equal terms.