Paul McCartney (43 page)

He involved himself in the minutiae of every department, from vetting the press releases that went out from Taylor’s office (frequently correcting their spelling and grammar) to designing the office Christmas card. ‘I can remember a meeting with him about whether there should be paper towels or cloth ones in the bathrooms,’ Chris O’Dell says.

With junior female staff, secretaries and receptionists, he was unfailingly polite and appreciative. Once, after O’Dell had organised something quite routine for him, he sent her a large bunch of flowers. But middle-rank executives grew accustomed to the bollockings he could deliver without slackening his smile, and his way of emphasising points with jocular, but still not quite pleasant, pokes of a forefinger. ‘That McCartney is so charming,’ one was heard confiding to a colleague. ‘He calls me a cunt, you know. He told me I was more clever with words than he was, and then he tells me I should take a vacation and then he pokes me in the ribs and starts pulling all those cute chipmunk faces he’s got, and then you can’t help but like him.’

The one executive not to feel the constant pressure of Paul’s interest was Denis O’Dell at Apple Films. It seemed as if the critical mauling given to Magical Mystery Tour had killed his interest in the medium that used to fascinate him.

In 1968, the only film released under the Apple emblem was Yellow Submarine, the cartoon fantasy inspired by Paul’s Revolver track, which Brian Epstein had authorised shortly before his death. The Beatles’ cartoon figures were voiced by actors and they took little interest in the production: their only involvement was a handful of consciously substandard songs (including Paul’s ‘All Together Now’) and a brief on-screen appearance in the flesh with the closing credits. For all their apathy, Yellow Submarine turned out to be a pop art masterpiece which gave a boost to British animation after decades of Disney-dominance and massively influenced a future TV comedy classic, Monty Python’s Flying Circus.

Nothing came of the film idea Denis O’Dell had brought out to India so excitedly: the Beatles in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. At the Maharishi’s ashram, it had been provisionally agreed that Paul would play the hobbit Frodo Baggins, John the slithery humanoid Gollum, George the wizard Gandalf and Ringo Frodo’s sidekick, Sam. ‘John told me he could write a double album to go with it,’ O’Dell remembers.

To direct, O’Dell approached the great Stanley Kubrick, then fresh from what many consider his supreme cinematic achievement, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Even the reclusive Kubrick was not proof against an opportunity to meet the Beatles: he had lunch with John and Paul, was comprehensively charmed, but could see no way of making the picture. Without Paul’s shoulder behind it, the project lapsed: not for three decades would others turn Tolkien’s books into a multi-billion-dollar movie franchise.

Latterly, there had been an approach from the French director Jean-Luc Godard, a figure revered by John since his student days and Paul since his pretend-student ones. In the combustible political climate of early 1968, Godard embarked on a film about revolution and urban mayhem, part feature, part documentary, to be shot in London and include footage of the Beatles in the recording studio.

Denis O’Dell read the script, was much impressed, then passed it over to Paul. ‘Jean-Luc Godard and the Beatles–an amazing combination! I thought Paul would love it and get the others on board in about five minutes.’

A few days later, he called at O’Dell’s house in Pimlico, beside the Thames. ‘He had tea and a big piece of cake. Then he brought out the Godard script and said it was a “no” because George didn’t want to do it. When I tried to persuade him, he just threw the script into the river.

‘So Godard used the Rolling Stones instead, and from then on I never had another serious conversation with Paul about films.’

‘You have found her, now go and get her’

The journalists of all nations who flocked to the Beatles’ apple-carpeted ashram on Savile Row never suspected that the sacred foursome had now become five. Nor, for some little time, did Paul, George and Ringo.

After meeting John in 1966 at the Indica gallery, Yoko Ono had not returned home to New York, but settled in London and become a bit-player in its teeming pop cultural pageant. She appeared in the newspapers now and then for attention-grabbing stunts, not yet recognised as ‘performance art’, such as wrapping the stone lions in Trafalgar Square in white canvas, and making a film named Bottoms which was indeed entirely composed of disembodied, naked arses.

The few press pictures of her showed a diminutive Japanese woman in all-over shapeless black whose unsmiling face, half-hidden by untamed black hair, belied the apparent pointlessness and absurdity of her projects. Her art also embraced sculpture, film-making, poetry and music, all in forms very different from their normal ones, and similarly designed to challenge and provoke. At 35, she was eight years older than John, and looked every bit of it. No one further from the instantly accessible, super-chic, sunshiny Beatles could be imagined.

Yoko had fascinated John at their first meeting but–after an initial, clumsy seduction attempt–he made no move to get to know her further for the next two years. Both of them were married, Yoko to her second husband, the American film-maker Tony Cox, and the thought of the potential scandal scared this supposedly most reckless, unconventional Beatle witless.

Instead, through the eras of Sgt. Pepper, the Maharishi and setting up Apple, Yoko had remained tantalisingly in John’s peripheral vision. Next to his bed, he kept a copy of her book, Grapefruit, a collection of what she called ‘instructional poems’ and meant to be obeyed as literally as notes in a musical score,
e.g.
‘Steal a moon on the water with a bucket’ or ‘Draw a map to get lost’.

When she put together an exhibition called the Half a Wind Show–comprising halves of domestic objects like a table, a chair and a bed–she asked and received funding from John, though he was still too timid to let his name appear as co-sponsor. During his Indian retreat, she sent him a stream of postcards with cryptic messages like ‘Look for me, I’m a cloud in the sky’, which Tony Bramwell would relay to him at Rishikesh in plain brown envelopes so that his wife, Cynthia, wouldn’t see them.

They had finally got together in May 1968, fittingly just after John’s Apple-promotion trip to New York with Paul–and Paul’s rediscovery of Linda Eastman. While Cynthia was away on holiday, he invited Yoko to his faux-Tudor mansion in Surrey. Cynthia returned home to find the two of them there together and a pair of Japanese slippers outside her bedroom-door.

John’s experience with Yoko, in fact, had been exactly Paul’s with Linda: after years with a never quite satisfactory or sympathetic partner, he finally ‘clicked’. A decade later, that epiphany would still be fresh in his mind. ‘My God [I thought] this is different from anything before. This is more than a hit record. It’s more than gold. It’s more than anything.’

He immediately left Cynthia and their five-year-old son, Julian, and Yoko left her husband, Tony Cox, and daughter, Kyoko. Following the protocol of Liverpudlian ‘best mates’, Paul was first to hear about it from John: the intention was less to put him in the picture than to warn him off, in case he had any designs on Yoko.

Not for John and Yoko the discretion Paul had always exercised over his amours; from the beginning, theirs was a performance art partnership as much as a romance. They announced both at the same moment by ceremonially burying two acorns near Coventry Cathedral, one facing west and one east to symbolise their respective cultures. Yoko immediately replaced Cynthia at John’s public appearances, like the opening of Apple’s new bespoke tailoring shop in Chelsea and the first night of a play based on his comic drawings and writing, The John Lennon Play: In His Own Write, at the National Theatre.

John had always fantasised about what he naively termed ‘exotic Orientals’ and Yoko, despite her fondness for shapeless black and seeming abhorrence of hairdressers, did possess a powerful sexual magnetism. But she had other, more potent attractions. She was a ‘real’ artist, a species he had always revered and secretly yearned to join. Perhaps the greatest aphrodisiac for him was her fearlessness: she simply did not give a shit what people thought of her work or of her. The life she’d made for herself was the antithesis of John’s controlled, constricted, compulsorily smiley Beatle existence, and it electrified him with envy and longing.

At Yoko’s prompting, he put aside the little cartoons that had filled two bestselling books, and began seeking recognition as a conceptual artist in the same challenging mode. Apple’s arrival in Savile Row coincided with his first exhibition, at the nearby Robert Fraser Gallery; titled ‘You Are Here’, it featured an array of charity collection-boxes, a rusty bicycle and the release over London of hundreds of white balloons saying ‘You are here’. Although Yoko was the show’s driving force, John might never have met London’s most adventurous gallery-owner in the first place but for Paul.

The full implications of the new partnership didn’t become clear until the Beatles finally got down to work on their next album. More than a year had passed since the release of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and a huge amount of Lennon-McCartney material had built up, largely thanks to their stay in India. It was therefore decided to use the novel double disc format already pioneered by Bob Dylan’s Blonde on Blonde and Frank Zappa’s Freak Out!, which would accommodate around 30 tracks compared to the usual 12-15.

When they reconvened in Abbey Road’s Studio 2, John had Yoko with him. A woman entering a monastery or some antediluvian Oxbridge college would hardly have caused greater shock. ‘Northern blokes just didn’t take their wives and girlfriends to work,’ says Tony Bramwell. ‘Right from the start, the rule had always been “no women in the studio”. Pattie might drop by occasionally to pick up George or Maureen to meet Ringo if they were going on to a club somewhere, but that was it.’

Fully aware of the enormity, John implied it was just a one-off visit, because Yoko had been depressed and needed cheering up. ‘I had no idea what he’d told the others,’ she would remember. ‘I couldn’t understand why they kept asking me if I was feeling better.’ It being unthinkable for Lennon to enjoy a privilege that McCartney didn’t, Jane Asher soon afterwards found herself invited to her first Beatles recording session in five years with Paul. As his relationship with Jane began to peter out, he took to bringing along Francie Schwartz, the New Yorker working in Apple’s press office who’d recently caught his eye.

A studio snapshot shows Francie sitting on the floor, watching him sing and play a new song he’d written after visiting his father and stepmother, Angie, in Cheshire. Angie’s mother, Edie–she who had once innocently made ‘marzipan butties’ for Paul instead of cheese–was staying at the house after an illness. Edie was finding it hard to sleep at night, she told him, but found solace in the song of a blackbird outside her window which seemed unaware that the day was over. Paul tape-recorded the sound and, within a few minutes, had a song to go with it.

His recent transfiguring encounter with Linda Eastman in LA did not stop him beginning an affair with Francie Schwartz, and after things ended with Jane he asked Francie to move into Cavendish with him, again not bothering to keep it a secret from his colleagues at Apple. Peter Asher’s secretary, Chris O’Dell, took over Francie’s old flat in Chelsea.

He was also still seeing his undemanding ‘secret’ girlfriend, Maggie McGivern. ‘One day while we were out in his car, he suddenly got an inspiration for a song and needed a piano to try it out,’ she recalls. ‘So we stopped by Alma Cogan’s flat in Kensington. Alma had died by then [of cancer in 1966] but her sister, Sandra, knew Paul, too, and was very welcoming. That was how I became the first person ever to hear “The Long and Winding Road”.’

Yoko, meanwhile, proved to be no mere day tripper to Abbey Road. She came in with John every evening and sat beside him on a stool for every minute. When he wanted to talk about something he was singing or playing, it was no longer to Paul or George Martin that he turned first, but to her. They never separated for a moment; even when John visited the men’s toilet Yoko would follow him, not just to the door but all the way inside.

It has gone down in history as the ultimate example of her pushiness and determination that no one else should have a moment alone with him. According to Yoko, she was merely indulging his almost pathological jealousy and possessiveness. ‘He made me go into the toilet with him. He was afraid that if I stayed in the studio by myself even for a few minutes, Paul or one of the other Beatles might make a move on me.’

Unbeknown to the others, John had decided she should become a fifth Beatle; something in which Yoko saw nothing strange whatsoever. Although she knew nothing about pop music–claiming never even to have heard of the Beatles before first meeting John–she didn’t hesitate to offer criticisms of the tracks they were working on and to pontificate about their place in contemporary culture. Thinking her just another passing Lennon fad, the other three were extraordinarily tolerant, refraining from even the faintest Scouse sarkiness to her face. It grated with Paul that when speaking of the band, she called them ‘Beatles’ without a definite article: ‘Beatles mean this’ or ‘Beatles should do that’. ‘It’s the Beatles actually, love,’ he longed to say but never did.

Recording and mixing took five months, almost as long as Sgt. Pepper but in very different conditions. George Martin had tired of being a grossly underpaid and undervalued EMI employee and left to set up his own independent studio. Working now as a hired-in freelance, he was no longer on tap whenever Paul, in particular, felt the creative urge.

As time passed, it had increasingly seemed to Martin that he was no longer working with a group mind but with three soloists, each with a different and competitive agenda. Once Yoko had broken into the magic circle, others soon followed. To play on his (suddenly) impressive song ‘While My Guitar Gently Weeps’, George passed over the Beatles’ two highly competent alternative lead guitarists and brought in his friend, Eric Clapton. Time was spent on an inferior Lennon track entitled ‘What’s the New Mary Jane?’, half-written (so John later claimed) by Magic Alex Mardas. Of the double album’s eventual 30 tracks, only 16 would feature all four Beatles together.