Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (26 page)

Four days later Paul flew to the USA to visit Jane Asher, taking with him a tape of rough mixes of the new songs. Accompanied by Mal Evans, he stopped off in San Francisco first, where he decided to check out the local music scene. Jefferson Airplane were working on songs for their new LP
Surrealistic Pillow
at the Fillmore theatre when Mal announced that Paul wanted to say hello. ‘We were sitting there playing at the old Fillmore, in comes this guy Mal, suit and tie, and we’re all hippied out,’ recalls Marty Balin, who’d last seen the Beatles as a member of the audience at Candlestick Park, subsequently becoming one of the leading lights of the San Francisco music scene. ‘“Master Paul McCartney would like to meet with you.” Just like that. “Oh well, send him in!” We didn’t know if this guy was real or a joke. So he went out and in comes Paul.’ Part of Paul’s reason for visiting San Francisco was to check out the psychedelic scene, which had started here, spreading across the States to England. It was in the Bay Area that bands such as Jefferson Airplane and the Grateful Dead first used LSD, and other mind-altering substances, the drugs cooked up by their friends and dispensed freely at concerts. Wild new music, fashions and art resulted. To Balin’s eyes, the visiting Paul McCartney looked very square. The musicians showed Paul around the trippy Haight-Ashbury district - he took pictures - then invited him back to their house. ‘Well, what’s new with the Beatles?’ Balin asked. In reply, Paul took a tape from his pocket and played ‘A Day in the Life’. Not so square. ‘Holy Christ! This is amazing. I totally, literally did not know what to say, except “Fuckin’ great!” I just couldn’t believe it …’ Having reduced his American friend to a jibbering wreck, Paul replaced the tape nonchalantly in his pocket and sauntered on his way.

Paul and Jane were reunited in Denver, where the Bristol Old Vic company was currently on tour, Paul arriving in time to help Jane celebrate her 21st birthday. They spent the next few days together in the Rockies, walking in countryside thick with snow. Paul then left, allowing Jane to complete her tour, travelling with Mal in Frank Sinatra’s private jet to LA where he met Brian Wilson, who was so overwhelmed by the
Sgt. Pepper
tape that he abandoned the new Beach Boys album
Smile
. Paul then flew home, coming up with a new movie idea as he travelled back across the Atlantic. Having looked for a suitable film for the band for months, Paul had the idea of getting the boys into a charabanc-of the type that traditionally took working-class Liverpudlians on day-trip holidays to the seaside, little jaunts described in advance as ‘mystery tours’, but which almost invariably turned out to be a run up to Blackpool - and make a film of the Beatles’ own Magical Mystery Tour, ‘a crazy roly-poly Sixties’ film’ as Paul would describe it. He jotted the concept down in the form of a pie chart on the plane.

LINDA EASTMAN

Paul returned to England at a time when the forces of law and order were starting to crack down on the drug culture, with one officer in particular, Detective Sergeant Norman Pilcher of Scotland Yard, targeting pop stars and their associates. In February 1967, police raided Keith Richards’s country home, Redlands, in Sussex, where the Rolling Stone was hosting a weekend LSD party. Detectives found Marianne Faithfull, who’d left John Dunbar for Mick Jagger, naked and wrapped in a fur rug. She’d just taken a bath, having come down from an Acid trip, and didn’t have a change of clothes. Jagger was charged with possession of speed (having said Marianne’s pills were his), Richards with allowing his home to be used for the smoking of marijuana, and Fraser with possession of heroin. Marianne wasn’t charged.

While the Redlands trio awaited trial, DS Pilcher raided Brian Jones’s London flat, busting him and his friend Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, the extravagantly named son of the French painter Balthus. Brian and Prince Stash, as he was known for short, were taken down to Kensington Police Station in a blaze of publicity and charged with possession of cocaine and cannabis, Jones charged additionally with possession of cocaine and methedrine.
²⁶
They went from the police station to the new high-rise Hilton Hotel on Park Lane, where the Stones’ new American manager Allen Klein was staying, but the hotel management made it clear that Jones and de Rola were not welcome, which is when Prince Stash took a call from Paul McCartney, whom he knew slightly.

Prince Stash explained to Paul that he and Brian couldn’t stay at the Hilton, and couldn’t go back to Brian’s flat because of the press. Brian had other places he could go, but Stash, a foreigner, didn’t know what to do. ‘I’m sending my car and driver right now. You’re packing your bags and moving into my house, and if they want to bust you again they’ll have to bust me as well,’ Paul said. So Prince Stash joined Paul and Dudley at Cavendish Avenue, running movies on Paul’s 16mm projector, taking drugs and entertaining what Stash describes as
harems
of girls, including an Eskimo named Iggy, while Beatles fans camped outside, periodically bursting in through the gates ‘like sort of cattle breaking through a fence’. They’d steal Paul’s laundry and empty his ashtrays - ‘Did he smoke this?’ - before being ejected.

One night in May 1967 Paul, Dudley and Stash got into Paul’s Radford Mini and drove to the Bag o’ Nails, a trendy club behind Liberty’s department store. In years gone by the club had a seedy reputation, a place to meet working girls in an area frequented by prostitutes, but it was now a premier hangout. The Beatles patronised the Bag o’ Nails partly because it stayed open late, going there after recording in the studio to get a drink and a steak sandwich, chat to friends and listen to live music. Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames were on stage when Paul, Dudley and Prince Stash walked in that spring evening. The club was already full of people Paul knew, including Tony Bramwell and Peter Brown from NEMS. Peter introduced Paul to an attractive young American photographer named Linda Eastman, who was in town shooting pictures of musicians for a book. When Dudley came back from the bar, he found Paul and Linda engrossed in conversation.

Paul suggested they all go round to the Speakeasy where Procol Harum were performing their trippy new song ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’, Paul hearing it there for the first time. Dudley paired up with the singer Lulu and Paul asked everybody back to his place. Half an hour later Linda found herself inside the mansion home of one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. Cavendish was not the biggest house in London, but it was a handsome residence with exquisite details that attracted the sharp eye. As Linda remarked: ‘I was impressed to see his Magrittes.’ Memories are hazy as to whether Linda stayed that night. Prince Stash and Dudley can’t recall. It didn’t seem important at the time. ‘You just think, it’s yet another girl, and yet another night. I didn’t know if it was going to be just another one night stand,’ says Dudley, ‘although he did seem to like her a lot.’

Linda, who becomes one of the most important characters in our story, was born on 24 September 1941 in New York City, the second child of the wealthy Lee and Louise Eastman. She had an older brother, John, and two younger sisters, Laura and Louise. Dad had worked his way up from a poor immigrant background in the Bronx - where he was born Leopold Epstein in 1910, son of Russian-Jewish parents - via Harvard Law School, to establishing his own law firm. He married well, to Louise Lindner, daughter of a prominent Jewish family from Cleveland. Louise attended synagogue and was proud of being Jewish, but Lee decided it would be better for the children if they adopted gentile ways. Shortly before their first child was born, the Epsteins changed their surname to Eastman; there was no connection with the photographic firm Eastman Kodak, as is often suggested, the name being chosen simply to seem less Jewish. ‘Lee’s famous expression was, “Think Yiddish, look British,”’ says his stepson Philip Sprayregen. ‘If someone asked him flat out if he was Jewish, he would admit that he was, but he would never volunteer that information, and I would say that he was probably glad when people thought otherwise.’ Judaism played little part in Linda’s young life and she grew to be a tall strawberry blonde, as if inhabiting the WASP name Daddy had chosen. She was never a true beauty. Hers was a long face that could appear handsome or plain, but Linda possessed a good, full figure, and a flirtatious manner that attracted men.

Daddy grew rich by shrewd representation of high-earning show business clients including bandleader Tommy Dorsey, songwriters such as Harold ‘Over the Rainbow’ Arlen, as well as a who’s who of abstract expressionist painters from Willem de Kooning to Mark Rothko. The Eastmans collected museum-quality modern art, which they hung in their mansion home in Scarsdale, Westchester, within commuting distance of Manhattan, later acquiring a duplex on Park Avenue. They also owned a beach house on Lily Pond Lane, East Hampton, a favourite place for the New York rich to take summer vacations. When Linda was four, one of Daddy’s songwriter clients, Jack Lawrence, wrote a song for her entitled ‘Linda’. It went to number one. Jan & Dean brought the song back to the charts in 1963, just before Beatlemania swept the States.

Although hers was a privileged upbringing, Linda had a difficult relationship with her father, a severe man who was quick to criticise. Lee had ambitions for his kids, especially John, who eventually took over the family firm, Eastman & Eastman, marrying a woman whose grandfather was a co-founder of Merrill Lynch. Sister Louise married a man whose family came over with the founding fathers. Thus the Eastmans assimilated into the WASP Establishment. Linda didn’t fit the pattern. ‘She was considered the black sheep of the family, the embarrassment of the family for a long time, because she wasn’t scholarly like her siblings,’ says stepbrother Philip. Linda was not academic, or intellectual. Rather, she had a dreamy interest in nature and animals, especially dogs and horses. As Paul later observed, Linda seemed to regard all animals as Disney creatures. As a girl she would collect injured birds and small animals and try to nurse them in her bedroom. Linda’s school grades were low. Lee mocked and patronised his daughter, making a girl who was not academically inclined feel awkward and stupid. As she became a teenager, she added rock ’n’ roll to her unsuitable interests, and started chasing pop stars, zeroing in first on the Young Rascals. Small world that it is, the Rascals were managed by Beatles promoter Sid Bernstein, who recalls the teenaged Linda trailing his band around New York. ‘She became one of my favourite kids that followed the Rascals. I let her come up to a recording session.’

One of Linda’s beaus was Melville See Jr, known as Mel. Born in Albany, New York, in 1938, making him three years older than Linda, Mel’s parents were living in Scarsdale when they met. A stocky, sandy-haired man with a thick beard-he modelled himself on Ernest Hemingway - Mel was a geology student. After graduating from Princeton, he moved to Tucson to take a masters degree at the University of Arizona (UAZ), where he developed a passion for anthropology. After dropping out of Sarah Lawrence College, Linda followed Mel to Tucson, enrolling at UAZ to major in Art History. She was living here in March 1962 when her mother died in a plane crash
en route
to visit brother John in California. Three months later Linda married Mel, and six months after that, on 30 December 1962, their only child, Heather Louise, was born.

Linda loved Arizona. She was never happier than when horse-riding among the saguaro cacti that give the desert landscape around Tucson the look of a cowboy film. She also started to take photographs, which became a lifelong interest. Marriage was not a success, though. Mel was an academic with corresponding intellectual interests. Linda hardly ever opened a book. She felt she’d been hasty to have a child with a man who now bored her. ‘It wasn’t that she didn’t have a tremendous amount of affection for her daughter, but I heard her remark more than once, “Why did this happen to me?”’ recalls Arizona friend Jonathan Kress. In 1964 Mel was offered a job in Africa. Linda refused to go with him, so he went alone. Linda took Heather back to New York, divorcing Mel the following year.

When her mother died, Linda came into a little money, as well as inheriting valuable artwork and stock, and was able to rent a nice apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, at East 83rd and Lexington, getting a job as an editorial assistant at
Town & Country
magazine. Her work involved opening the post. One day an invitation came in for a press reception for the Rolling Stones. The function was to be on a boat, the
Sea Panther
, which was going to cruise the Hudson River. Linda grabbed the invite and her camera. ‘I was the only photographer they allowed on the yacht. I just kept clicking away with the camera, and they enjoyed it and I enjoyed it, and suddenly I found that taking pictures was a great way to live and a great way to work.’

Lee Eastman was unimpressed by his daughter’s new avocation, taking pictures of ‘longhairs’. Linda seemed to bounce from one dumb thing to another. ‘My father used to say, “If you want to be a photographer, go and work for a professional. Get trained.” Well, I never had the patience for that. I had to trust my feelings. Besides I’m too lazy.’ Photographing celebrities requires access, above all, and Linda’s talent was her ability to flirt and make friends. One of her first contacts was Danny Fields, editor of the teen magazine
Datebook
. It was he who caused the ‘bigger than Jesus’ fuss in 1966 by reprinting John Lennon’s interview with Maureen Cleave. Danny met Linda at the dockside after the Rolling Stones’ cruise, having literally missed the boat, and asked Linda if he could buy some of her pictures for his magazine. ‘She sent me [pictures] of Brian Jones sitting there with his legs open - these were the sexiest pictures I’d ever seen! ’ exclaims Fields, who became Linda’s lifelong friend and ultimately her biographer. ‘I never saw anyone get pictures of boys with their legs spread open … that’s what happens when she’s on the other side of the camera. Boys do that for her. They do peacock dances.’ Linda also got a date with Mick Jagger off the back of the boat trip.