Beatles (62 page)

Paul’s decision was so impulsive that he set off without any Portuguese currency, though he brought some bottles of whisky on the plane with him, as a present for me. In Faro airport, which was almost deserted, he eventually found some official and gave him £50 in English money, asking him to change it into escudos. Then he forgot all about it. He suddenly noticed a taxi, which, luckily, happened to be there, jumped in and gave our address. On their arrival, I paid off the driver.

It turned out to be a very jolly arrival. Our two children, Caitlin and Jake, got up, hearing all the noise. Caitlin was charmed to see that a little girl of her own age, called Heather, had come to stay. My wife and I, though, were rather confused by this blonde American girl called Linda. We had never heard of her. When we left England, Jane Asher was the girl in Paul’s life, and we got on with her very well. Was this Linda a one-night stand or was his relationship with Jane Asher finished?

It took us a while to find out the answers, as they slept in late next morning, despite the arrival at lunchtime of the local press. I couldn’t work out how they could possibly know Paul had arrived. We were in a very remote part of the Algarve and it was the dead of winter. I discovered later that rumours started when the official at the airport, to whom Paul had given £50 in notes, told everybody next morning about this strange English bloke with long hair who had arrived in the middle of the night and was giving money away.

The day after, the Lisbon press arrived – the big shots from the capital – and Paul agreed to hold a little press conference on the beach. Then he asked them not to reveal his address and to leave him alone, as he was on holiday, which they all did. For days afterwards, tradesmen and hoteliers from Lagos, the local town, kept on arriving with presents, baskets of fruit and food, invitations to parties and restaurants. I had never actually witnessed this effect on people before, though in John’s house I had seen him ripping open parcels, looking for free things. It was strange to see it happening in a remote country, the most backward in Western Europe. Fame has its own reward. Those who have get showered with more.

Linda was, naturally, rather wary of us. I suppose she realized we had been friendly with Jane and would perhaps be critical of her. She also wanted to get Paul to herself, as it was the first stages in their romance, while Paul was keen on long, late-night talks and philosophical discussions. Paul always likes talking and explaining and giving his views.

At first, it seemed to us that Linda was very much a yes-girl, who was overdoing her adoration of Paul, clinging on to him all the time, hanging on his every word. We couldn’t see it lasting. We couldn’t see what she was giving Paul. At times, during the ten days or so they stayed with us, there were some frosty moments.

We often went off on expeditions together, in one big party. Caitlin usually travelled with Paul and Linda and Heather, in a car they hired. We learned later that Caitlin was being allowed
to take the wheel, much to our horror, sitting on Paul’s knee. That started the first of several little clashes over the upbringing of children. Another time, Jake started playing with a huge carving knife, so I grabbed it off him. Paul said that was not the way to train them. They should discover danger for themselves. It was how they learned. I said that as parents you had to look ahead, anticipate the results of actions that children could not see, otherwise they might end up with fingers missing. Heh ho. Such trivial little arguments, though, at the time, we discussed them for hours.

Paul was very good with the children, and with others who came to the house, and made a point of being friends, letting them do things and express themselves. I suppose our two did seem a bit house-trained and restrained. Heather had had rather a disturbed childhood so far, so we gathered, passed across the Atlantic between Linda and her father, and had been allowed to run fairly wild, at least that’s how it seemed to our rather staid and conservative eyes.

One day we went up into the mountains at Monchique. We parked the car in the village and we were walking down a hill track when Paul spotted a man with a donkey coming up. He persuaded him to let Caitlin and Heather have little rides, lifting them up in turn on to the donkey’s back. Caitlin had had a ride, and been lifted down by Paul, when the donkey suddenly stepped backwards – straight on to her foot. The screams were appalling. When we tore off her sock and shoe, we could see her foot was badly damaged and that the nail of her big toe was off.

We were miles from anywhere, on an empty hillside track. Paul decided at once to set off running, up the hill towards the village of Monchique. He eventually managed to flag down a car and came back for us. Paul and I then took Caitlin to the local little cottage hospital in Monchique, where they cleaned up the foot and gave her a tetanus injection, just in case. To cheer her up, for being a brave little girl, Paul bought a purple shawl in the village. When we all met up with Linda and my wife again, Heather burst into tears when she saw Caitlin had
been given a present. So Paul bought her a shawl, just to keep things fair.

We did in the end get to know and understand Linda better, after some uneasy times. I suppose it was a difficult stage for her, not yet being sure of Paul, having somehow to compete. Being stuck with us, at that time, was probably the last thing she wanted.

I was, of course, completely wrong. Linda proved to be much more relaxed and friendly on our subsequent meetings, and her marriage to Paul has been a great success. They have the little rows we all have, on the usual trivial bringing-up-children and other family topics, but after 16 years, since they married in 1969, they appear pretty secure.

Linda has given Paul the moral support he always needed. John had, of course, been critical during his relationship with Paul, and often very cruel. Jane Asher had been very much her own woman, with her own career. Linda has been prepared to devote all her energies and emotions to Paul and their family and, if necessary, to his work, if that was what he felt he needed.

When I got back to England in 1969, I still kept in touch, going round to Paul’s, to Abbey Road and the new Apple offices. I found that the empires, both the old one and the new one, were crumbling. During his stay in Portugal, I had lots of talks with Paul about the Beatles and learned about various disagreements they had during the making of the
Double White
album. Paul himself was still busy composing, so I presumed the albums at least would go on. I remember one tune he played to me in Portugal, which he had written on the lavatory (he rarely went there without his guitar) and was called ‘There You Go Eddie’. Just a short verse, and I don’t think he ever completed it. He discovered that my first Christian name is Edward, something I’ve always kept quiet.

In London, it was soon clear that the music making was now a secondary concern. Apple was in chaos, and so were their financial and business affairs, and they were quarrelling amongst themselves, about each other, and about what to do next.

I had never imagined that the end of the Beatles, whenever it happened, would simply come in a welter of legal tangles, financial quibbling, trivial personality clashes, slanging matches, ridiculous recriminations, juvenile insults and silly squabbles. In the end, alas, they finished the way many show-business partnerships have ended – in pathos. Gilbert and Sullivan, Britain’s other great songwriting partnership, finally descended to rows and sulks. How sad that Lennon and McCartney ended their joint days as just another pair of run-of-the-mill, archetypal, bickering ex-partners. Their rise has to be called phenomenal, as I hope the book showed, but the end was really rather sordid.

As sordid tales go, they don’t even have the virtue of being worth retelling for the dirt. They became highly complicated and utterly confusing. Basically, they revolved round who owned whom and what, and for almost a decade they kept lawyers in high fees and newspaper libraries deep in reports of the latest court case. These legal rows were thought by many observers at the time to be the reason for the Beatles splitting. They were a result not a cause, though the personality clashes which ensued for a while were real enough. So what caused the split?

The Beatles themselves were not much help in giving exact reasons. At one time, they had contradictory theories – Paul was being blamed by the others for causing the split while he in turn blamed them. They even argued about who actually left the Beatles first. My theory, arrived at with the benefit of hindsight, was that the split had been happening for a long time. Rereading the book makes this abundantly clear, though I can’t say I realized it at the time. If there was one simple reason why they split up when they did, it was not the argument over who should run their affairs, but the arrival into John’s life of Yoko Ono. That’s my explanation anyway.

The Beatles started to break up as Beatles as far back as 1966, when they gave up touring and stopped living communal lives. With living apart so much, the Lennon–McCartney numbers, however successful, became something of a fraud. They were no longer
joint
numbers in the way they’d been in the old days,
knocked out together in the back of a van. It was very easy for the fans to recognize a Lennon song or a McCartney song, despite them getting equal credit. As the descriptions of
Sergeant Pepper
showed, they were, by now, each coming to the studio with almost every number worked out – at least in their heads.

Working in the new way was fine, as long as they were still mates and nobody was getting fed up or wanting to move off in a completely different direction, but petty rows did begin, based on boredom as much as anything else. In 1968 Ringo walked out on the Beatles double album. He said he was fed up being their drummer. Watching him so many times in the studio over the years, it was a pretty fed up-making process. On stage, he was equally involved and important and had his own little special bits to do and acquired his own faithful following amongst the fans. In the studio, he was often virtually ignored. John and Paul would break off sometimes for hours at a time, working on an arrangement or the words or the mixing. There was often no need for Ringo to be there at all – his contribution could be dubbed on at any time. However, he only walked out for a day and was persuaded to come back.

During
Let It Be
, it was George who left, after an argument with the others. He always had a part to play, though not as much as John and Paul, bringing in his own songs, which he did most painstakingly. During the Indian phase, he was also influencing the nature of the others’ compositions. George had always been the least in love with being a Beatle and was the first to put equal energy into other interests, such as religion and Indian music. He in turn was persuaded to come back.

Paul was really the mainstay of the group in these later years, from about 1967 until 1969, keeping them going as composers, pushing them into new ideas, such as
Magical Mystery Tour
. He had many ideas for films and for expanding the Apple organization. He loved being a Beatle and didn’t want it to change. While in Portugal in 1968, he was still full of plans to get them all performing in public again. He wasn’t thinking of touring. That had gone stale for them all. He missed appearing in public
– playing complete songs for a change, all together, in front of a live audience, trying to recapture some of the fun they had had in the early days. George was all against this. The others weren’t very keen either. Paul, at the time, had high hopes of persuading them.

John, meanwhile, was letting Paul get on with directing most Beatle activities, unable to think of anything better to do. He was pretty bored being a Beatle, but he couldn’t actually think of anything else he wanted to do with his life. It was obvious during the time I spent at his home (see
Chapter 31
), where he would sit for days dreaming, saying nothing, that he was utterly bored. His marriage had become a habit. Cynthia, as she was the first to admit, was never really on John’s wavelength. She very honestly revealed in the book that but for her becoming pregnant, John would never have married her. (This remark was almost chucked out of
Chapter 31
, because of pressure from family and business friends.) She knew he’d always loved the Beatles more than her, but they’d been through so much together. John couldn’t think of how else he’d like to live his life. Nothing better had turned up.

Then along came Yoko. At last he had found a kindred spirit, if of a very unusual kind. John was immediately sparked into life. He was away on a new plane, realizing at once that Paul, who until then had been his buddy, his soul mate, was in many ways as conventional as Cynthia. Together, John and Yoko discovered new and all-consuming aims. The rest of the Beatles didn’t matter any more. When Paul came up with an idea for, say, a live TV show, John wasn’t really interested.

Yoko moved into John’s life and into his work – sitting with him during the final Beatle sessions. The others weren’t exactly thrilled at her influence over John or her continual presence in the studio. George and Ringo had become bored anyway, and this took the remaining fun out of it. John and Yoko’s own fun was moving in new and different directions. Making music as Beatles finally finished in 1969.
Let It Be
came out in 1970, but it had been recorded almost a year before.

Around the same time as John was moving into a new, exciting life with Yoko, Paul met Linda. She came along at the right time for Paul, just as John was moving off, and encouraged Paul not to feel inferior, to be his own man, he could do anything if he tried. She took him over, without in any way becoming a rival. When the arguments started over Apple, both John and Paul were supported by their new mates.

The Beatles’ financial and business affairs had been in some confusion since Brian Epstein’s death – though it was his death that revealed the confusions rather than caused them. The creation of Apple had made things even more complicated. Someone was needed to straighten things out and organize their business lives. Allen Klein, an American accountant, was brought in by John and Yoko, with the backing of George and Ringo. Paul never liked him, and instead wanted his affairs to be handled by Lee Eastman, an eminent New York lawyer, who also happened to be Linda’s dad. The others thought Paul was just trying to introduce his in-laws, which greatly upset Paul. He maintained they should have known him better than that. To break free from Apple, Paul realized he couldn’t sue Klein. He had to sue John, George and Ringo.