Paul McCartney (35 page)

So now, when ‘She’s Leaving Home’ was mapped out to Paul’s satisfaction, he asked George Martin to be at Abbey Road the next day to score the arrangement he’d worked out in his head. Martin was already booked for a session with Cilla Black and offered an alternative slot but Paul couldn’t wait, so hired another musical director, Mike Leander. Breaking a matchless producer/artiste partnership for a single track, and snubbing that most invaluable as well as courteous of producers, meant nothing when he had the bit between his teeth.

Later, John would bitterly criticise the direction Paul’s songs began to take on Sgt. Pepper. But at the time, far from lodging any objection, he provided a supporting vocal that hugely enhanced their atmosphere, swelling the plaintive ‘Bye-bye’ in ‘She’s Leaving Home’, blissfully complicit with every cosy bourgeois image in ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’, its ‘cottage in the Isle of Wight’, its gardening, infant-dandling, Sunday driving and fireside sweater-knitting. On ‘Lovely Rita’, his trance-like counterpoint became the nearest the album had to a leitmotif, reinforcing the impression that a concept really was being pursued and a continuous story told.

Nor would its stunning climax, ‘A Day in the Life’, have been fully realised without an infusion of McCartney mundanity. John’s epic, self-disgusted self-portrait was lacking a middle eight, so Paul supplied it with an unused song-fragment from his bottom drawer, about oversleeping and running for a bus. That little interlude of energy and positivity, amid its monumental inertia and melancholy, proved the song’s finishing touch of genius.

Despite the size of John’s LSD habit, he never let it interfere with work at Abbey Road, not even on this ‘acid album’, as he’d taken to calling it. ‘There was only one time when I ever saw him incapacitated,’ George Martin recalled, ‘and at the time, of course, I had no idea why. I just thought he was looking a bit peculiar and sent him up to the roof for a breath of fresh air. After that, I left Paul to look after him.’

To be sure, kindly, caring nurse Mary McCartney seemed reborn in her son that night. Paul took John back to Cavendish, stayed up all night with him and, to keep him company, took acid for the first time since sampling it with Tara Browne. Tara had since died tragically, crashing his Lotus Elan sports car at more than 100mph while apparently on an acid trip and finding a posthumous niche in ‘A Day in the Life’ as ‘the lucky man… who blew his mind out in a car’.

Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band took five months to make, as against the single day needed for the Beatles’ first album, and cost a jaw-dropping £25,000 as against Please Please Me’s £400. They were having such a good time that they stretched it out still further with costly but pointless sonic flourishes indicative of how Paul’s taste for experimental music had entered the group mind. Not content with the thunderous chord that ended side two, they spent eight hours creating a chorus of gibberish to go on the record’s playout groove, the usually silent bit where the playing-needle lifted off. Their final demand of EMI’s sound-effect archives, after circus crowds, fairground carousels, crowing roosters, alarm clocks and fox-hunts in full cry, was a note at 20,000 hertz frequency that would be audible only to dogs.

The concept was always clear, at least, for what would become the most famous album cover of all time. While recording was still going on, Paul made a series of pen-and-ink sketches of the Beatles in Victorian military uniforms, holding brass band instruments and standing in front of a wall covered with images of their collective cultural heroes. Himself he depicted with an E-flat bass tuba like the one played by his grandfather, Joseph McCartney, in the band at Cope’s tobacco works.

To art direct the cover, he brought in his gallery-owner friend Robert Fraser–just then awaiting trial for heroin possession after being busted along with Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones. Fraser in turn engaged Peter Blake, to develop Paul’s rough sketch. With his then wife, Jann Haworth, Blake in effect built a stage set with the Beatles as psychedelic bandsmen, holding brass band instruments and standing around a bass drum bearing their alter egos’ name. Subtract the psychedelia and they could have been Jim McCartney’s Jim Mac Jazz Band 30 years earlier.

The collage of pop art icons ranged from Bob Dylan and Marlon Brando to Karl Marx, Mahatma Gandhi, Laurel and Hardy, Aleister Crowley and W.C. Fields. They were largely chosen by Blake, who crossed out Paul’s nomination of Brigitte Bardot, the dream of his and John’s teenage wanking sessions, and substituted a waxwork of the British ‘blonde bombshell’ Diana Dors.

The collage terrified EMI’s lawyers, who believed those among its members who were still alive would sue for unauthorised use of their likenesses. The company’s chairman, Sir Joseph Lockwood, personally went round to Paul’s house to urge that the collage be dropped. Paul protested that ‘They’ll love it’, but to no avail: EMI insisted that permissions were obtained from as many as possible and that the Beatles undertook to pay the costs of any legal trouble. Sir Joseph also insisted Gandhi be removed, so as not to imperil sales in the Indian subcontinent.

Another innovation, one they would have cause to regret, was that Lennon and McCartney’s lyrics would be printed in full on the back cover. EMI were initially reluctant, fearing it would cut across sales of the songs in sheet music form, still then an important market. They also jibbed at the further expense of giving away cardboard moustaches and sergeants’ chevrons with every album, and wanted to increase profit margins by manufacturing the cover from the cheapest possible cardboard. In each case, it was Paul who went to the company bean-counters and persuaded them not to compromise the quality that had gone into Sgt. Pepper at every other level–an argument one cannot imagine anybody winning today.

In the run-up to the album’s release, Jane was in America with the Bristol Old Vic company and Paul, reverting as usual to a bachelor life, had two male friends staying with him at Cavendish and sharing his nightly clubbing. One was a young furniture designer named Dudley Edwards who, having decorated Paul’s piano with psychedelic thunderflashes, was now painting little figures all over the William Morris wallpaper in his dining-room. The other was Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola, otherwise known as ‘Stash’, a son of the French painter Balthus, who’d lately been busted along with Rolling Stone Brian Jones and consequently couldn’t find a hotel in London that would take him.

On 17 May, with Jane still away, Paul was at the Bag O’Nails club, that favourite popstar hangout, with Dudley Edwards and Stash to watch a set by Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. There he bumped into the Animals, who were showing London to a friend just in from New York, a 25-year-old freelance photographer named Linda Eastman.

By a strange coincidence, Linda’s true family name was also that of the Beatles’ manager. Her father, Lee Eastman, had been born Leopold Epstein but had reinvented himself during his ascent from poor Russian-Jewish immigrant in the Bronx to high-level Manhattan lawyer. Her mother, Louise, was one of the Lindners, a prominent Jewish family from Cleveland, Ohio, who owned an old-established women’s clothes store in the city.

Linda, born in September 1941–nine months before Paul–was the second of the couple’s four children. Under matrilineal law, she, her older brother John, and sisters Laura and Louise automatically took their mother’s religion. But for Leopold-turned-Lee, it was too redolent of childhood poverty and obscurity and, with Louise senior’s acquiescence, he excluded all Jewish observances and customs from their home. The children thus grew up as typical New York WASPS (White Anglo-Saxon Protestants), a disguise assisted in Linda’s case by a rangy build and long pale-blonde hair.

Lee had many clients from the entertainment and art worlds, among them bandleader Tommy Dorsey, songwriters Harold Arlen and Jack Lawrence and painters Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko. In 1947, Lawrence composed a ballad entitled ‘Linda’, dedicated to his attorney’s six-year-old daughter, which was sung by Buddy Clarke with the Ray Noble orchestra and became a national hit.

Linda enjoyed a privileged upbringing, divided between the large family home in Scarsdale, Westchester, a beach house in East Hampton, Long Island and, later, a spacious apartment on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue. But her relationship with the self-made, dynamic Lee–an alpha male before the term existed–was often difficult. ‘I was always a dreamer who liked just looking out of windows,’ she would recall. ‘My teachers told my parents I’d be watching the butterflies instead of looking at my books.’ She was passionate about animals, especially horses, and would always say she only ever came properly alive on horseback.

After graduating from Scarsdale High School, she met Joseph Melville See, always known as ‘Mel’, a Princeton graduate whose mixture of scholarliness, athleticism and Hemingway-esque good looks impressed even her hypercritical father. When See received an offer to do postgraduate work in geology and cultural anthropology at the University of Arizona in Tucson, his birthplace, Linda went with him to study art history at the same university.

In 1962, her mother Louise was aboard an American Airlines plane, bound for Los Angeles, that crashed into the sea shortly after take-off from Idlewild, later JFK, airport, killing all its 87 passengers and eight crew. The tragedy precipitated Linda’s marriage to Mel See and in 1963 she gave birth to a daughter, Heather.

Arizona, with its wide-open spaces and opportunities for horse-riding, suited Linda perfectly, and its awesome scenery prompted her to enrol on a photography course at Tucson Art Center. There she had the good luck to meet Hazel Larsen Archer, a famous name in the largely male-dominated photography world of the 1940s and 1950s, now confined to a wheelchair but as vigorous and unorthodox as ever. Leisurely Linda was galvanised by Archer’s advice to forget theory but simply ‘borrow a camera, buy a roll of film and get out and take photographs’. Her earliest subjects were landscapes in the Walker Evans style, the Arizona prairies and mountains she had come to love.

Then some students from Britain’s Royal Academy of Dramatic Art happened to pass through Tucson on a Shakespeare tour of the US and were entertained by the university’s English faculty. Linda became friendly with several of the company and offered to do publicity head-shots of them for nothing. As a result, the first pictures she had published appeared some time later in the British actors’ directory, Spotlight.

At that stage, she seemed content with her role as a wife and mother, known only by her husband’s Christian and surname. She became locally celebrated for her prowess as a cook, though with no sign of the vegetarianism she would one day preach so fervently. In 1965, the cookery page of the Arizona Daily Star ran a picture of ‘Mrs Joseph Melville See’ preparing her favourite recipe, meat loaf with cucumber mousse (‘3 pounds of meat loaf mix, veal, beef or pork…’), wearing a vaguely cowgirl-looking outfit and watched by two-year-old Heather.

Unfortunately, Mel See regarded himself as an explorer/adventurer in the Victorian tradition, at liberty to take field trips to faraway places whenever he chose while his cowgirlie wife stayed home, caring for their child and making meat loaf. One such trip involved Mel’s spending almost a year in Africa. Linda refused to accompany him and when he returned, he found she’d taken Heather back to New York and begun divorce proceedings.

With a young child to support, and unwilling to exist on handouts from her family, she had to find a career in short order. Her choice was photojournalism, a profession then at its apotheosis in the pages of mass-circulation glossy magazines like Life and Look. Her father urged her to study photography ‘properly’–just as, thousands of miles away at about the same time, Jim McCartney was giving Paul the same advice concerning the piano–but Linda was no more receptive than he. In truth, becoming a photographer no longer required the training and technical dexterity it once had. With one of the modern single-lens reflex cameras, a Japanese Pentax or Nikon, all you really had to do was line up the image in the viewfinder and press a button.

She found a tiny apartment on Manhattan’s Upper East Side and a job with Town and Country, a staid publication mainly read by WASPs rich enough to own homes in both localities. Linda worked on the reception desk, opening mail and making coffee, and had no visible ambitions to become anything more. Among her colleagues, she was said to be a descendant of George Eastman, inventor of the Eastman-Kodak photographic process, and as such the heiress to millions. Though Linda may not herself have originated the myth, she never went out of her way to deny it.

Another cause of friction with her father was her dislike of the Town and Country social set and preference for rock music clubs in the downtown quarter that was still considered dangerous and disreputable. But in one respect, she was as conventional as Lee Eastman could wish. However rackety her New York life might seem, her daughter Heather was scrupulously well cared for and always had a nanny looking after her while Mama was out on the town.

One night in 1966 at a club called The Scene on West 46th Street, she met a young photographer named David Dalton who was there covering a record company junket. Dalton specialised in rock singers and bands, not merely popping off a few shots in usual paparazzi style but posing his subjects in unusual locations and hanging out with them as friends. He later remembered ‘a tall girl with long blonde hair [who] began asking me a lot of questions. Did I do this for a living? How does one get into this? Is it hard to learn?… She was dressed in a striped long-sleeved T-shirt and an A-line skirt down to the knees… this in the very heart of the Sixties [among] mini-skirts… silver-foil sheaths… Op Art… She dressed with the studied bad taste elite WASPs aspired to. It was a bizarre cult of exclusive dowdiness.’

The next day, Dalton was booked to photograph the Animals–currently America’s favourite Brit band after the Beatles–against the gritty backdrop of New York’s shipping piers. He invited Linda to come along, thinking she’d be merely an awestruck spectator. Instead, the band paid far more attention to her than to him and she ended up doing an intimate one-to-one shoot with lead singer Eric Burdon.