Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (31 page)

As they flew home from New York, Paul and John were in fact both on the cusp of making momentous changes in their personal lives. Paul was falling in love with Linda Eastman, but hadn’t yet decided to break with Jane Asher, whom he had been with for four years, and was engaged to marry. When he arrived home, the couple carried on as normal, for now. Just as Jane had stood by Paul during these manic Beatles years, Cynthia Lennon had been John’s rock. Yet John’s eyes were also on someone new.

There are striking similarities between Linda Eastman and Yoko Ono, two strong women who now stride into the Beatles story, elbowing aside the loyal, sweet-natured Englishwomen John and Paul had been with for so long, and taking their places as consorts. Yoko was eight years older than Linda, considerably older than all four members of the Beatles, with a complex background. Born in Japan in 1933, Yoko came to America as a girl, was educated in the USA and made the United States her permanent home, becoming almost as American as Linda herself, though Yoko never relinquished Japanese nationality. Like Linda’s father, Yoko’s daddy was a man of wealth, a financier who managed the Bank of Tokyo in New York after the war. The Ono family lived in Scarsdale, the same upstate town Linda grew up in. Even more remarkably, Linda and Yoko both attended, then dropped out of, Sarah Lawrence College. Both women then drifted into bohemian New York City, to the disapproval of their parents. As Linda became a Manhattan press photographer, with friends on the arts scene, Yoko became a conceptual artist in the city’s Fluxus movement (artists who staged happenings, concerts and other free-form events). So Linda and Yoko were still swimming in the same pool. Furthermore, both were now divorcees with young daughters. Yoko married first a Japanese composer named Toshi Ichiyanagi; second, American film-maker Tony Cox, with whom she had a child, Kyoko, eight months younger than Linda’s daughter Heather See.

In 1966 Yoko came to London and, like Linda, made a beeline for the Beatles, specifically Paul, coming to Cavendish Avenue to ask McCartney to donate Beatles sheet music as a birthday gift for her composer friend John Cage. Paul referred Yoko to John Lennon, whom she first met at the Indica Gallery in November when she staged an art show,
Unfinished Paintings and Objects
. The work consisted of absurdist and humorous works in the tradition of Marcel Duchamp, including
Ladder Piece.
John gamely climbed a ladder to peer through a magnifying glass at a sign on the ceiling. It read ‘YES’. John laughed. He was also amused by an apple Yoko had on sale for the mad price of £200. ‘I thought, “Fuck, I can make that. I can put an apple on a stand. I want more.”’ Yoko sent John an enigmatic little book she’d written entitled
Grapefruit
, in which were printed such gnomic sentences as ‘Listen to the sound of the Earth turning’. John, with his weakness for twaddle, invited Yoko to lunch at Kenwood, after which she deluged him with invitations to her events, one of which he was persuaded to finance. John invited Yoko in return to a Beatles session, and made a clumsy initial pass, which she rebuffed. But when John went to Rishikesh, Yoko wrote to him regularly. Cynthia Lennon became sick of Yoko’s missives and what she saw as the woman’s ‘determined pursuit’ of her husband. Poor Cyn still loved John.

After India, Cynthia wanted to go to New York with John and Paul, but John wouldn’t allow it, so she went instead on holiday to Greece with a group of friends including Pattie Harrison and Magic Alex, leaving four-year-old Julian with a babysitter. When John returned home from New York, and found he had Kenwood to himself briefly, he lost no time in asking Yoko over. So it was that Cynthia came home to find her husband and his Japanese lover sitting in bathrobes in her sunroom, having been up all night making music and making love. Shocked and confused, Cynthia blurted out that she was going for lunch. Would anybody like to join her? John and Yoko declined. ‘The stupidity of that question has haunted me ever since,’ says Cynthia, who fled by taxi.

A Beatle had fallen in love with a strong-minded divorcee of moneyed American background, not a classical beauty, but a tough, worldly woman who would make a formidable life partner. That describes John Lennon and Yoko Ono as it does Paul McCartney and Linda Eastman. Two men who had been like brothers since school days were falling for almost identical women.

Born in 1942, Paul (left) around the age of seven, with his mother Mary and younger brother Michael, born in 1944.

In the mid-1950s the McCartneys moved to 20 Forthlin Road in the Liverpool suburb of Allerton, a council or ‘corpy’ house where the family was very happy until Paul’s mother fell ill with cancer.

Paul was nine when he posed for this school picture. He remains recognisable as the confident, happy child he was at Joseph Williams Primary School in Liverpool.

John Lennon (centre) aged 16 with his school skiffle band, the Quarry Men, playing at St Peter’s Church Fête, Woolton, on 6 July 1957, the day he met Paul McCartney.

This fascinating 1959 picture shows Paul and John as teenagers performing together at the Casbah, a youth club set up by Liverpool housewife Mona Best in the basement of her home. Her son Pete became the Beatles’ drummer.

In 1960 the Beatles went to Hamburg, Germany, where they met new friends including Astrid Kirchherr, who took this iconic photograph of the band’s first line-up. Left to right are Pete Best, George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney and Stuart Sutcliffe.

The Beatles playing the Cavern, Liverpool, February 1961, between their first and second trip to Hamburg.

Although he had a girlfriend at home, Paul spent much of his time in Hamburg with German barmaid Ruth Lallemann.