Paul McCartney (36 page)

Soon afterwards, the Rolling Stones came to town to publicise their latest album, Aftermath, under the direction of their new American manager, Allen Klein. After 14 Manhattan hotels had turned the Stones away, fearing sex-and-drug orgies, Klein billeted them aboard a yacht, the Sea Panther, moored in the Hudson River, and invited the nation’s media to interview them during a short cruise.

Normally, a publication like Town and Country would never have made the Sea Panther’s guest-list. But the magazine had recently published a flattering cover picture of the Stones by David Bailey, so was persona grata with the Allen Klein organisation. During her daily mail-opening duty, Linda came upon the invitation, pocketed it and went to the reception, camera in hand, posing as T&C’s official photographer.

So many reporters turned up to talk to the Stones that there wasn’t space for the yacht to carry photographers too. But Linda managed to talk her way on board, and so had the band all to herself for the whole cruise. As a rule notoriously disobliging at photocalls, they did whatever she asked, sprawling around in louche attitudes with wide-apart legs and thrusting crotches. Afterwards, the reporters on board besieged her for pictures to accompany their articles, and she got a spread of her own in Datebook–the same magazine whose reprinting of John Lennon’s ‘more popular than Jesus’ remarks had poisoned the Beatles’ final US tour.

Her mentor David Dalton (who hadn’t been asked to the Sea Panther reception) caught up with her at the Stones’ after-cruise party, for which celebrities like Andy Warhol, Tom Wolfe and Baby Jane Holzer had likewise clamoured for invitations. ‘Mick’s just asked me for my phone number,’ Linda told him. ‘What should I do?’ It was, Dalton recalls, ‘a purely rhetorical question’.

On the strength of her Rolling Stones exclusive, she quit her job at Town and Country and turned freelance. She herself admitted she was ‘too lazy’ to bother overmuch about composition or even learn to use a light meter. But she possessed a superabundance of the photographer’s most essential skill, the ability to gain access. At photocalls for new-in-town bands or singers, she had only to kneel in front of the media pack with what David Dalton called her ‘leonine gawkiness’ and the most ungracious and unco-operative became hers to command.

She became house photographer for New York’s main rock venue, the Fillmore East, swelling her portfolio with the Doors, the Mamas and Papas, Simon and Garfunkel, Cream and Frank Zappa. Her detractors–of whom there were many, and would be many, many more–regarded her as a rarified form of groupie. After Mick Jagger, she had brief affairs or one-night stands with several more of her subjects (something considered quite normal for male photographers), among them the Doors’ legendary singer and satyr Jim Morrison and the Hollywood star Warren Beatty, at that time a sexual icon as potent as any in rock.

She attended Beatty’s press conference with a female colleague named Blair Sabol, who later recalled its outcome with vitriolic disgruntlement: ‘I remember how impressed I was with her come-on talents as she sat in front of him in a mini-skirt and her legs in full wide-angle split for at least six rolls of Ektachrome. Warren ended up ushering me out of his Delmonico suite within 30 minutes and kept Linda for two days.’

In hindsight, she seems more like a genuine free spirit, already emancipated in most of the ways that the nascent feminist movement had only just begun to demand. She was also a busy and successful professional whose work appeared across a range of prestigious magazines from Life to Rolling Stone. No one who knew her then could have dreamed she would one day become a spectacular symbol of monogamy and domesticity–and give up cooking meat loaf for ever.

Despite having covered the Beatles’ 1966 American tour and knowing several friends of theirs, Linda had never met any of them before she arrived in London in May 1967. Nor was she on a specifically Beatle-related assignment. She had been commissioned to take the pictures for a book entitled Rock and Other Four Letter Words, to be written by the music journalist J. Marks, and the first name on her British hit-list was Steve Winwood of Traffic.

Her share of the publishers’ advance was only $1000 and, to her father’s horror, she’d used almost all of it for her return air-fare. But Lee Eastman would later have to admit no money was ever better spent.

She had reunited with her first-ever photographic conquest, the Animals, and was with them at the Bag O’Nails club when Paul walked in, accompanied by Dudley Edwards and Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola. The leonine gawkiness seemed to be doing its usual stuff when he asked her to accompany his party to another club, the Speakeasy. Once there, however, he seemed more interested in a new single the deejay was playing, Procol Harum’s ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, and debating what its enigmatic lyrics might mean. Later, as limos were dropping everyone off, Linda briefly saw the interior of Cavendish and, she would recall, was ‘impressed by all the Magrittes on the walls’.

Although she was not in London in pursuit of Beatles, professionally speaking, it clearly made sense to show her portfolio to her almost-namesake Brian Epstein. Brian being otherwise engaged, she was seen by his assistant, Peter Brown, just then deep in arrangements for the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band on 1 June. The Beatles were to do just one photocall for a dozen hand-picked photographers at Brian’s house in Chapel Street, Belgravia. Impressed by Linda’s work and even more by her connections, Brown added her to the list.

She turned up with her usual ‘exclusive dowdy’ look–striped blazer, too-long skirt, blonde hair not over-scrupulously brushed. The other photographers were hardened Fleet Street and agency men, experienced pushers and elbowers, not to mention unregenerate misogynists. Yet Linda, as always, won special access, lining the Beatles up in front of a marble fireplace with a copy of the album, then getting John to shake Paul’s hand with a simultaneous jokey thumbs-up sign. A rival took some shots of her photographing Paul on his own, kneeling in front of him as he lounged in an armchair, and in an intimate huddle by the fireplace, staring deep into his eyes.

Afterwards, she took the initiative, charming his top-secret home phone number out of someone and calling the next evening–a Friday. However, she found he’d gone off to spend the weekend with his father in Cheshire, leaving Prince Stanislaus Klossowski de Rola alone at Cavendish. ‘Stash’ invited her over nonetheless. At that stage, there was no question of her being Paul’s girlfriend, so his temporary lodger did not feel out of order.

A couple of days later, she returned to New York without having seen him again, and there the matter seemed to end.

‘An irresponsible idiot’

The stupendous success of the album he had conceived, and done most to bring to fruition, ought to have brought Paul some sense of security at last. Instead, it was to usher in an era of upheaval and uncertainty that would destabilise even his carefully measured career path and have a catastrophic effect on his relationship with John.

In Britain, Sgt. Pepper sold a quarter of a million copies in its first week and stayed at number one in the album charts for more than six months, including over the Christmas holiday; in America, it spent 15 weeks at the top of Billboard’s Hot Hundred. Over the following decades, it would sell 32 million, make repeated returns to the charts and be cited time and again in newspaper and magazine polls as the most influential album of all time.

The heyday of mass album sales, between the late 1960s and early 1980s, would see other artistes shift more units, more quickly. But none would ever catch the zeitgeist more perfectly than the Beatles’ blend of nostalgia, mysticism and faux naivety, nor cast so instant a spell over all races, ages, classes and intellects. At one end of the spectrum, the great drama critic Kenneth Tynan called it ‘a decisive moment in the history of Western Civilization’; at the other, small children jigged up and down to it, wearing the paper moustaches and sergeants’ stripes given away with every record. Untold numbers of the Sixties’ young would always remember exactly where and in what circumstances they first heard it and how, more than anything else in that lucky decade, it seemed to transfigure and transform their lives.

As every rave reviewer agreed, it put the Beatles far ahead of even their strongest competitors. And the very strongest of those had to agree. During Paul’s pre-release trip to America, he’d paid a social call on Brian Wilson, the Beach Boys’ harmonic genius, who was currently at work on a new album called Smile, promising an even greater challenge to Lennon and McCartney than Pet Sounds. When Paul played an advance pressing of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ to Wilson and his wife, the couple both burst into tears. So dented was the fragile Beach Boy’s self-belief that he abandoned work on Smile soon afterwards; its disconnected fragments stayed on the shelf until finally being edited together and released in 2004.

Similar admiration came from the Beatles’ musical peers across the board. In June 1967, London’s most talked-about live performer was Jimi Hendrix, a beautiful young black man dressed like a gipsy Mad Hatter, whose blend of guitar virtuosity and blatantly sexual showmanship left Britain’s native rock talents gaping. Three days after the album’s release, Hendrix appeared at the Saville theatre in Shaftesbury Avenue, a venue lately acquired by Brian Epstein and partly used for Sunday-night rock concerts. The three-man Jimi Hendrix Experience’s set opened with an acid-rock version of the formerly cosy Sgt. Pepper theme-song. Paul watched the performance, afterwards calling it ‘one of the great honours of my career’.

With the Beatles’ usual uncanny timing, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band appeared just as the hippy culture that had been growing in Britain and America turned into a visible and vociferous mass movement. The so-called ‘flower children’ with their creed of universal love and peace might have been expected to loathe any evocation of trumpety Victorian NCOs. Yet by some strange alchemy, Lennon and McCartney’s cheery vaudeville show became absorbed into the hippies’ manifesto for social, spiritual and sexual revolution–would indeed become the very touchstone for what they were proprietorially (but over-optimistically) billing as ‘the Summer of Love’.

Ironically, musicians who’d given up live performance because they couldn’t stand the hysteria now found themselves unleashing hysteria which made old-fashioned Beatlemania seem rational by comparison. For in the eyes of their hippy devotees, the Beatles were no longer just a band but a four-headed deity whose every song was invested with the power of Holy Writ.

John and Paul had always liked burying private jokes in their lyrics: initially bits of schoolboy smut, then underhand references to drugs. But on Sgt. Pepper, these were underhand no longer. John’s ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, a song drenched in acid-trip visions, formed the acronym ‘LSD’–though he protested it was the innocent title of a painting his son, Julian, had done at school. ‘With a Little Help from My Friends’, a roughly equal John–Paul collaboration, spoke of getting ‘high’ and seemed a direct allusion to pushing and to acid’s community spirit. In ‘A Day in the Life’, the long, wheedling chorus of ‘I’d love to turn you o-o-on’ was barefaced mischief, also with Paul’s connivance, resulting in the first-ever banning of a Beatles track by the BBC.

But there was more; much more. The unprecedented printing of the lyrics on the album cover allowed them to be endlessly pored over and, in their readers’ over-stimulated or beclouded minds, to yield up more hidden meanings than the Dead Sea Scrolls.

‘A Day in the Life’ on its own became a verbal archaeological site, what with the man who ‘blew his mind out in a car’ (Paul’s friend and first acid-partner, Tara Browne), the ‘4,000 [needle?] holes in Blackburn, Lancashire’, the ‘smoke’ Paul had on the top deck of his bus and the ‘dream’ that resulted. The chaotic orchestral passages, conducted by Paul, which John wanted to be ‘a sound like the end of the world’, were said to represent an addict’s first ‘rush’, when the drug hits the system.

The Paul-originated Pepper songs were generally free of suspect subtexts, but that didn’t stop people finding them. In ‘She’s Leaving Home’, the ‘man from the motor trade’ with whom the runaway elopes was–and still is–thought to be fellow Liverpudlian Terry Doran, who co-owned a car-dealership with Brian Epstein, though Paul has always insisted he’s pure fiction ‘like the sea captain in “Yellow Submarine”’. ‘Fixing a Hole’ was taken as a metaphor for injecting heroin rather than DIY on a farm in the Scottish Highlands.

The hunt for hidden signs and meanings even extended to the brief jabber of speeded-up talk that had been put on the album’s playout groove as a nod to Paul’s interest in experimental music. One day in Cavendish Avenue, he was accosted by two boys who informed him that if the electronic gabble was played in reverse, it seemed to be saying ‘Fuck me like a superman’. He invited the pair into his house, checked out their story on his own copy of Sgt. Pepper and was forced to admit they were right, although neither he nor any of his bandmates had been aware of it.

In Britain and America, hippies were most visible en masse at open-air rock concerts, now known as festivals or happenings and larger than had ever been known before. Their sanctification of Sgt. Pepper led to the first of many attempts to get the Beatles to play live again. Between 16 and 18 June, a giant festival was held in Monterey, California, co-organised by their former press officer, Derek Taylor, whose Anglo-American, multiracial roster–including Jefferson Airplane, The Who, Janis Joplin, Otis Redding and Ravi Shankar–almost all performed for free.

John Phillips of the Mamas and Papas flew to London to ask Paul if the Beatles would headline the festival. Paul himself was not averse but knew John and George would never agree, so suggested that Phillips should ask Jimi Hendrix instead. The result was Hendrix’s breakthrough from cult club act to international superstar.

Hippies might be preparing to celebrate the Summer of Love, but Britain’s law-enforcement agencies had other ideas. For months, there had been growing national unease about the spread of drug-use among young people, seemingly with the open encouragement of their favourite music stars. The police had been yearning to take reprisals on such figures but had been held back by their inexperience in spotting the various drugs–and also the fact that LSD was too new to fall within the scope of the UK’s antiquated anti-drug laws. But at the end of 1966, it had finally been made illegal, untying the law’s hands at last.