Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (38 page)

On the evening of Tuesday 11 March 1969, Paul called his brother Mike, on tour with the Scaffold in Birmingham, inviting him to be best man at his wedding the next day. Paul had bought the ring and booked Marylebone Register Office, a short drive from Cavendish Avenue. All Mike had to do was show up for 10:00 a.m.
And don’t be late!

News that Paul and Linda were to marry wasn’t altogether surprising. They had been a couple now for seven months, had known each other longer, and Lin was four months pregnant with Paul’s baby. At the same time, theirs wasn’t an entirely harmonious courtship. ‘We had a row the day before we got married - and nearly called off the wedding,’ Paul later revealed. ‘I’d characterise our relationship as rather volatile.’

Paul had come a long way from his days as a pin-up, yet many girls still harboured an adolescent dream that they would be the one he chose to marry, and when diehard fans found out he was getting married to somebody else they almost lost their reason. One such fan was a hairdresser named Jill, who was shampooing a client in Birmingham when news came over the radio that Paul was getting married in London later that morning. Jill put down her shampoo bottle, grabbed her coat and hurried to New Street station, where she caught the first train to the capital, intent on getting to Paul before he made his mistake.

Rain was falling as Jill arrived at Marylebone Register Office, a splendid Victorian edifice flanked by stone lions. A mob of 300 fans were milling about the entrance, with press photographers and reporters standing on the steps of the building. A limousine was at the kerb, and uniformed police were trying to keep order as traffic swished past on the busy Marylebone Road. Many of the girls present were super-fans like Jill, females in their late teens or early twenties who’d never outgrown their crush on Paul. The real hardcore fans - the girls who spent much of their time standing outside the Apple building - had been named the Apple Scruffs by George Harrison. The Scruffs also kept watch outside the EMI Studios on Abbey Road and the Beatles’ homes, mostly Paul’s house because he was the one in London. Among these Scruffs was American Carol Bedford, who later wrote a fascinating memoir about her experiences, explaining that she’d first screamed at the Beatles when they came through her home state of Texas in 1964. As soon as she left school, Carol came to England to join the girls who waited for the band outside their various addresses, along with Italian Lucy, who was obsessed with George; Chris who loved Paul; Sue, known as Sue-John, because of her obsession with Lennon; and Margo, a babysitter, who often brought her young charge, whom she called Bam Bam, to wait with her outside Paul’s house. When the girls became really annoying, Paul would call the police, but as time passed he learned to live with the Scruffs, striking up friendly relationships with the regulars, whom he termed the ‘Eyes and Ears of the World’, in recognition of the fact that they knew what the Beatles were doing before anybody else. He sometimes entrusted the girls to take Martha to the park.

True to their reputation as the Eyes and Ears of the World, the Scruffs found out the night before the wedding that Paul was getting married, and started sending up such a lamentation outside 7 Cavendish Avenue that Paul had to come out and give them a talking to: ‘You know I had to get married some time.’ Now the dread morning had come, the Scruffs were standing outside the register office in the rain singing a mournful medley of Beatles songs. It was enough to drive you crackers. Belatedly, Mike McCartney pulled up in a car, his train having broken down, and ran into the building to find Paul, Lin, Heather, Mal Evans, Peter Brown and Don Short of the
Daily Mirror
waiting impatiently. ‘Where the bloody hell have you been, you’re an hour late!’ said Paul, who was dressed in a grey suit and yellow tie. Lin wore a yellow coat. There was no sign of John and Yoko, the Harrisons or the Starkeys. George was at Savile Row, while John and Yoko were being driven to Poole in Dorset to visit Aunt Mimi, whom John had moved to the seaside after the attentions of fans had driven her out of Mendips. He heard about Paul’s nuptials on the car radio.

Joe Jevans, the registrar, did his work and Paul and Linda signed the marriage certificate, Mike and Mal countersigning as witnesses. Then they stepped outside to find that the sun was shining in their honour. The girls reacted to the appearance of bride and groom with a mixture of cheers and wails of despair, press photographers mobbing the couple for pictures. Fans surged forward at the same time, causing a quick-witted policeman to gather Heather up in his arms and stride ahead of Paul, who shouted that Linda and the kid were with him. Then he saw Margo with Bam Bam. ‘Is he all right, Margo?’ Paul asked, concerned for the baby in the crush. Finally, the wedding party was bundled into the waiting limousine, which took them back up to St John’s Wood for a blessing at the local church, then press pictures at Cavendish (Paul carried Lin over the threshold, obligingly, for the
Daily Mirror
). Later there was a reception at the Ritz Hotel. George and Pattie Harrison showed up late, explaining that DS Pilcher had chosen this of all days to raid their house in Esher, recovering a small amount of cannabis resin. George was incensed by the intrusion, exacerbated by the press, who had hopped over his garden wall to take pictures of the raid. Paraphrasing Scripture, he reminded the hacks with righteous indignation that foxes have holes, birds the sanctuary of nests, but Beatles seemingly had nowhere private to lay their heads.
³⁶
He and Pattie would later plead guilty to possession and receive a fine.

What with George being busted and Paul getting married, the press had two major Beatles stories on the same day. Paul got the good press on the front page, George the bad press inside. By marrying Paul, Linda also became a public figure that day, as she would remain for the rest of her life. Her relationship with the British media was complex from the start. As noted, Fleet Street always liked Paul, but journalists never warmed to his wife. Almost everybody interviewed for this book who knew Linda personally spoke well of her, yet people in the media who met her over the years, myself included, found Linda a gauche, abrasive woman lacking charm. Paul would explain this by saying Lin was shy. Members of the family maintain she never wanted to be in the public eye. Yet that was the life she chose, and the couple manipulated and exploited the press from the start. In her first interview as Mrs McCartney, Linda told Don Short that she wanted to scotch the rumour she was connected to the Eastman-Kodak firm, as
The Times
had reported that morning. ‘I don’t know how that mistake came about except through the name and the fact that I am a photographer …’ Linda’s friend Danny Fields says the truth is that Linda started the rumour herself to impress people she wanted to photograph. Now she was married to a Beatle she had a better way to impress the world.

When he saw that Paul had married Linda, John decided to marry Yoko. On his way to see Aunt Mimi, John told his chauffeur to take them to Portsmouth and book him and Yoko onto a ship; they’d get the captain to marry them. John figured that would be quieter and more dignified than the way Paul had behaved, playing up to the press as he had in London. When a shipboard wedding proved logistically impossible, John and Yoko flew to Paris, thence to the British dependency of Gibraltar, where a British subject could be married instantly. They did so on 20 March 1969.

Having gone to such lengths to avoid the press, John and Yoko then made sure they garnered maximum publicity for themselves by staging the first of their so-called bed-ins during a honeymoon in Amsterdam. This was a conceptual happening with a positive if infantile message: at a time of international political tension it was better to go to bed and think peaceful thoughts than make war. In practice it involved John and Yoko tucking themselves up in the Amsterdam Hilton under signs that read BED PEACE and HAIR PEACE, the latter a reference to their own extreme hirsuteness - John was now wearing a full beard, with hair down to his shoulders; Yoko’s grew halfway down her back - as well as being a Lennon pun (hair piece). When they’d arranged themselves, Derek Taylor invited the press in to photograph and interview the couple. Paul and Linda watched news coverage of this wacky event on television from their honeymoon suite in New York. It looked for all the world like John and Yoko were trying to upstage them, and in the months and years to come this rivalry became a pronounced feature of their lives, with John and Yoko pitted relentlessly against Paul and Linda. It was true, as Paul always said, in reference to an old song the Beatles once performed as part of their stage show, that wedding bells broke up the old gang.

14

CREATIVE DIFFERENCES

YOU NEVER GIVE ME YOUR MONEY

Returning to London from his honeymoon in the spring of 1969, Paul saw Apple on the brink of disaster. In recent months there had been discussions about bringing in a manager to sort out the financial and administrative mess at Savile Row. Paul suggested his new American in-laws, the Eastmans, for the job. When that was rejected by the other Beatles as nepotism, he floated the idea that they might hire Lord Beeching, the peer charged with rationalising the nation’s railways. Beeching recommended swingeing closures of railway lines and stations. Fed up with the excess at Apple, Paul apparently wanted Beeching-style cuts here, too. This send-for-Beeching suggestion didn’t go down well. Grumbled Peter Brown:

I mean it was just ludicrous. Beeching knew
nothing
about this business. Just because Beeching could fix the railways didn’t mean to say he could fix Apple, but that was all part of Paul’s stupidity - ‘We’ve got to get somebody who is important, because you and Neil, you came with us, how good can you be?’

According to Brown, Paul had a habit of pontificating about matters he didn’t understand. ‘One of the things I personally used to get irritated with is just, if you know him, and you work with him, he is opinionated about everything, including things he knows nothing about.’ And Paul’s lectures were rarely short.

Also, the four Beatles were now pulling in different directions. ‘For seven years there was this little unit of a jolly band just trooping around doing things,’ says Tony Bramwell nostalgically. ‘After Brian died it was a big change - John was going through his madness, George was going through his Indian stuff, [but] Paul was [still] pretty responsible about it. He hadn’t overdosed on acid, and he hadn’t ruined his life.’ Paul had tried to lead the band after Brian’s death, and the others had let him do so to a degree, with the result that much of what had been set up at Apple was in fact Paul’s idea. As Peter Brown notes:

It was only later when John came back out of his haze of LSD and heroin, or whatever else he was on, with Yoko, and wanted to be more proactive in what we were doing [that he would say], ‘Why are we doing this? Why is this like it is?’ ‘It’s because this is what we put in place when you were out of your mind … It happened because Neil and I put it together with Paul’s approval …’

Now John was more involved in the business, and he and Paul were at odds, which made for a miserable atmosphere at Savile Row. Bramwell again:

You just don’t know how horrible it was at Apple in that period. It was like being in the middle of a gigantic divorce … On one phone you’d have John asking you to do this, on the other phone you’d have Paul asking you to do [something else]. By then George and Ringo had washed their hands of it, [but] John and Paul were ‘Can you do this, but don’t tell any of the others?’ … John is like ‘Can you make a film of my cock?’ And Paul is like, ‘Do a big billboard in Trafalgar Square.’ It was just like being in a divorce.

As in any divorce, the correspondents had their antagonistic representatives. At the start of February 1969 John sent his man, Allen Klein, into Apple to conduct an audit. At the same time Paul persuaded the band to hire his father-in-law’s law firm as general counsel, with the result that Linda’s lawyer brother John Eastman started going through the Beatles’ paperwork. Inevitably Klein and Eastman clashed, Eastman’s Ivy League manner rubbing orphanage boy Klein up the wrong way. A crisis came when the Beatles had to deal with the issue of the Epstein family wanting to sell Nemperor Holdings Ltd (a new name for the rump of NEMS Enterprises). Clive Epstein had been care-taking the firm since his brother’s demise, and didn’t have much enthusiasm for the business. The Eastmans urged the Beatles to buy Nemperor from the Epsteins, using an advance on EMI royalties, a deal Clive and his mother were inclined to accept. But Klein was against it, saying at a meeting at the Dorchester Hotel that the deal was an expensive ‘piece of crap’, and John Eastman a ‘shithead’, according to Peter Brown, who notes that Paul and his brother-in-law then left the room in a huff. With the enemy out of the way, Klein dripped poisonous words into the ears of John, George and Ringo, saying that if he managed the group there would be a more equitable balance of power, and they would all have more money. The alternative was to let themselves be run by Paul and his in-laws. Lennon, Harrison and Starkey were easily persuaded.

Lee Eastman flew into London to support his son and son-in-law, a second meeting being convened in Peter Brown’s office at Apple. Proceedings got off to a roaring start when Klein informed everybody that Lee Eastman wasn’t the man they thought he was, but a Jew named Leopold Epstein. Klein wasn’t making an anti-Semitic remark - he was himself Jewish - but seeking to show that Eastman was a phony. ‘Klein had done some research on Lee Eastman and had turned up the information that his name had [been changed from] Epstein,’ recalls Brown. ‘Klein had also armed John with this intelligence, and throughout the meeting the two of them referred to the Eastmans as “Epstein”.’ Lee could put up with that, but when Klein began interrupting him and swearing, the lawyer lost his temper, bawled Klein out, then stormed from the meeting, taking Paul with him. This was becoming a habit. John Eastman then wrote to the Epsteins, a letter that apparently recommended they should have a meeting to discuss ‘the propriety of the negotiations surrounding the nine-year agreement between EMI and the Beatles and [NEMS/Nemperor] ’. According to Brown, the tone of the letter infuriated the Epsteins, who reacted by selling Nemperor to a City investment firm, Triumph. Apple responded by asking EMI to pay Beatles royalties directly to them, with the sad result that Brian’s family ended up suing the Beatles.

On top of this, Dick James sold his share of Northern Songs to Sir Lew Grade’s Associated Television Corporation (ATV). Sir Lew had been after Northern Songs for years and James, ignored and increasingly scorned by the Beatles, agreed a deal with his partner, Charles Silver, to sell their shares to Sir Lew, adding to a stake he already owned. The mogul now went shopping for additional shares to gain control of the company. Apple resisted this takeover, urging minority shareholders to sell to them instead of ATV, coming up with a counter-bid, underwritten by Lennon and Klein. Unwilling to get involved in any business deal with Klein, Paul withheld his support, partly as a result of which the counter-bid failed and Sir Lew acquired an additional 15 per cent of Northern Songs, thereby gaining control of all the songs John and Paul had written since 1962, plus the songs they would write under contract until 1973.

As calamity followed calamity, the Beatles continued to argue over who should lead them forward, pitching Paul and the Eastmans against John, George and Ritchie, who wanted Allen Klein. The row boiled over on Friday 9 May 1969, when the group was working with Glyn Johns at the Olympic Sound Studio in south-west London. John, George and Ringo cornered Paul, telling him they’d all signed with Klein and needed Paul’s signature there and then to complete the deal. Paul prevaricated, arguing that the 20 per cent commission Klein wanted was too high. ‘He’ll take 15 per cent,’ he told his partners, reminding them: ‘We’re a big act!’ He certainly didn’t see the need to sign anything immediately. The others insisted Paul had to sign now because Klein was on his way back to New York for a meeting with his board. The meeting was scheduled for the next day. ‘I said, “It’s Friday night. He doesn’t work on a Saturday, and anyway Allen Klein is a law unto himself. He hasn’t got a board he has to report to’,” Paul recalled. “‘You’re not going to push me into this.”’ Klein, who had been on his way to the airport, was so enraged when he heard Paul was refusing to cooperate that he turned around and came to the studio. ‘[Klein] had this incredible row with Paul in the studio with me in the control room,’ remembers Glyn Johns. ‘I turned all the mikes off, because it was none of my business, but they were shouting so loudly at each other I could hear their conversation through the glass.’ Around this time Paul recorded a track at Olympic named, appropriately, ‘My Dark Hour’, with musician Steve Miller, who recalls that Paul worked off some of his frustration playing drums on the song: ‘[He] really beat the hell out of those drums.’

Although Paul had not signed with Klein (he never did), the other three Beatles now out-voted McCartney, hiring the American accountant, who instigated a reign of terror at Apple. Many of the pampered denizens of Savile Row were sent, figuratively speaking, to the guillotine. While this caused anguish, the office
was
over-staffed, Apple employees living royally on the Beatles’ money. Derek Taylor’s press office was particularly profligate. As mentioned, Taylor believed Paul was the sender of anonymous postcards the PR man received at home, some weird and ‘some outright nasty ones’ as Taylor recalled, with stamps torn in half and cryptic messages, one of which, addressed to Derek’s wife, read: ‘Tell your boy to obey the schoolmasters.’ Derek was in no doubt these were from Paul, though the star didn’t admit sending them. By Taylor’s account, Apple staff feared the Beatle. Returning to their desks from a long lunch, the message they most dreaded was ‘Paul called’. One day McCartney organised a staff meeting, to complain about the extravagant way Apple employees were conducting themselves at the Beatles’ expense, telling them bluntly, ‘Don’t forget, you’re not very good, any of you, you know that, don’t you?’

Derek survived the terror, protected as he was by his friend George Harrison, but many others went. Alex Mardas was given the chop, as was Apple Electronics. The Beatles finally got rid of ‘Measles’. Denis O’Dell, head of Apple Films, left. Zapple was shut, leaving Barry Miles stranded in New York where he was recording a spoken-word LP with Allen Ginsberg. ‘We’d done two tracks, and suddenly the recording studio said, “We’ve been told that’s the end of it.” I said, “What? It’s news to me.” I tried of course to call the Beatles. No way. You know. They just mysteriously disappear.’ It fell to Peter Brown to tell Alistair Taylor that his employment with the Beatles was also over. Alistair was one of the original gang who’d come down from Liverpool with the boys, part of the ‘family’, and he took his sacking badly, breaking down in tears. He tried to call Paul. ‘But Paul refused to come to the phone,’ Taylor later told Bob Spitz. ‘Nothing in my life ever hurt as much as that.’ Another Apple employee who’d been close to Paul was Peter Asher who, despite Paul’s split with Jane, had been running Apple Records with Ron Kass, who was now fired. Reading the writing on the wall, Peter quit. The Ashers were mourning a shocking death at the time. Jane and Peter’s father had been found dead in the coal cellar of their Wimpole Street house on 2 May. The coroner found that Dr Asher, always an eccentric character, had killed himself with an overdose of barbiturates.

THEIR LAST AND GREATEST ALBUM

Paul and Lin took Heather on holiday to Corfu in May, then returned home to continue the Apple battle. The McCartneys invited Ritchie and Mo Starkey to dinner at Cavendish in the hope of talking the drummer round. Such an invitation was a treat; Linda was a superb cook. In the days before she turned vegetarian she did wonders with a chicken. After giving the Starkeys a feed, the McCartneys tried to persuade Ritchie to join them in the fight against Klein. When the drummer demurred, saying Klein didn’t seem that bad to him, Linda started crying. ‘They’ve got you, too!’ she sobbed, as though Ritchie had been taken over by zombies.

John Ono Lennon, as he was now known, having changed his middle name from Winston, was also beyond reason. He and Yoko were in a world of their own, looking and behaving like members of a religious cult. Doped up and dressed in white, they floated about London conducting bizarre happenings that were part art events, part sincere peace campaigning and also clearly a grab for attention. One of their nuttiest ideas was that Apple should send an acorn to every world leader to plant for peace. Apple Staff were despatched to the royal parks to gather the acorns, only to find that it was the wrong time of year. The squirrels had already eaten their stores. Then John and Yoko flew to Canada to conduct their second bed-in for peace, at the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal, demonstrating in the process that, despite his whacked-out appearance, John still possessed a genius for music-making. He made a compelling
in situ
recording of ‘Give Peace a Chance’. With overdubbed drums by Ringo, the song was released on 4 July as a single, not by the Beatles, but by a new entity, the Plastic Ono Band, a clear indication that John wanted out of the Beatles.

It therefore came as a considerable surprise to George Martin when Paul telephoned to say that the Beatles wanted to make one more album with their old producer. With no sign of the recently recorded
Let It Be
tapes being released, and with John so strange, distant and unpleasant recently, Martin had assumed his working days with the boys were over.

My immediate response was, ‘Only if you let me produce it the way we used to.’ [Paul] said, ‘We will, we want to.’ ‘John included?’ ‘Yes, honestly.’ So I said, ‘Well, if you really want to, let’s do it. Let’s get together again.’ It was a very happy record. I guess it was happy because everybody thought it was going to be the last.

Geoff Emerick would again be their engineer. Having had the courage to walk out on the Beatles during the
White Album
sessions, when they had behaved so badly, the engineer had won the musicians’ respect and trust. They rewarded Geoff with a job at Apple, and he would work with Paul on various projects for years to come.

So the old team was reunited in Studio Two at EMI seven years after the Beatles started their recording career with George Martin in this same lofty room. Remarkably, the boys’ last hurrah would prove for many listeners to be their best LP. In common with the
White Album
, the record that would be named
Abbey Road
had a variety of music, ranging from loose, blues-based rock ’n’ roll to sophisticated song suites, yet it was assembled more selectively, creating one immaculate disc that can be played endlessly without sounding stale.