Paul McCartney (42 page)

She did so, sitting between Paul and John with her camera-bag on her lap. After a few moments alone together in the Pan Am first-class lounge, and a couple more quick pictures, Paul’s flight was called and Linda returned in the limo with Neil Aspinall and Nat Weiss.

Having turned acquaintanceship into romance, Apple brought it to fruition a month later. On 20 June, Paul flew to Los Angeles for the sales convention of the Capitol record label which, like EMI in Britain, was to manufacture and distribute Apple’s records. During a brief stopover at JFK, he phoned the number Linda had given him to ask if she’d meet up with him in LA.

She wasn’t at home, so he had to leave a message with her answering-service–the laborious precursor to voicemail–then travelled on, unsure whether she’d even receive the invitation, let alone accept it. He was staying at the Beverly Hills Hotel, whose premier guests occupy luxurious poolside bungalows set among groves of jasmine and orange blossom. This time, John and even the omnipresent roadies Mal and Neil had been left behind; the only others on the trip were Tony Bramwell, now deputy head of Apple Films, and Paul’s old Liverpool friend Ivan Vaughan, principal of the still-germinating Apple school.

Bramwell’s memoir Magical Mystery Tours: My Life with the Beatles gives a rollicking account of the initial 24 hours in their shared bungalow, literally inundated with gorgeous young women competing for Paul’s attention. At that stage, the front runner seemed to be Winona Williams, a spectacular African-American model who’d previously dated Jimi Hendrix and would later move on to David Bowie. But when the night’s partying was over and a day’s work lay ahead, Bramwell noted, Paul cleared every female from the place ‘like sweeping away the ashes with a broom’.

He spent the following day conscientiously with Bramwell and Ron Kass at the Capitol convention, announcing the manufacturing and distribution deal with Apple and charming executives. When he returned to the bungalow, he found it once again full of females, Linda now among them. Rather than return his phone call in the expectation of being bought a plane ticket, she had paid her own way. To ensure her welcome, she’d brought along a drawstring bag full of the pot she smoked along with all her rock-star subjects. ‘She was waiting for [Paul] radiantly, totally spaced out,’ Bramwell writes. ‘She had a joint in her hand and a beatific smile on her face.’

Suddenly, all the other, more obvious beauties crowding the bungalow, ringing its phones or stalking through the orange and jasmine groves became a severe embarrassment. ‘Like a poacher caught with a string of salmon,’ Bramwell continues, ‘Paul pretended they were not his catch. “They’re all with Tony and Ivan,” he said.’ Vaughan, the ultra-respectable married schoolteacher, must have found this a specially surreal moment.

‘Then Paul detached himself from the circus surrounding him and took Linda aside. As I looked across the room, I suddenly saw something happen. Right before my eyes, they fell in love. It was like the thunderbolt the Sicilians speak of, the coup de foudre the French speak of in hushed tones, that once-in-a-lifetime feeling.’ Or, to use his own term, he finally ‘clicked’.

Later, at LA’s famous star hangout the Whisky à Go-Go, he and Linda sat in a secluded corner booth with Bramwell and Vaughan forming a hedge against inquisitive eyes. Coincidentally, the next booth was occupied by Eric Burdon of the Animals, Linda’s first-ever photographic conquest, and Georgie Fame, who’d been playing London’s Bag O’Nails club the night she met Paul there. After a ritual hour or so in the celebrity darkness, he took her back to the bungalow, leaving his two co-occupants to party on tactfully until dawn.

The next morning, Bramwell received instructions to refuse all social invitations, even one to a ‘toga party’, twentieth-century Hollywood’s version of a Roman orgy. Winona Williams quickly realised the score and withdrew with dignity but, alas, was not the only one to believe she had a special pass to Paul. There was also Peggy Lipton, an 18-year-old model and TV actress he’d been seeing in America for the past couple of years–even been photographed with hand-in-hand. Knowing nothing of the developments with Linda, she called up Tony Bramwell repeatedly, asking when she and Paul would be getting together.

For most of that day, he remained in seclusion with Linda and her little drawstring bag of pot. Finally, the hundreds of fans outside among the jasmine and orange blossom recalled him to his duty; he emerged, bare-chested, with his guitar, sat on the bungalow steps and played them a just-written song, ‘Blackbird’.

The one social engagement he was loath to break was an invitation from the theatre director Mike Nichols to sail to Catalina Island in Nichols’s yacht. Also aboard would be Dustin Hoffman, the lauded young star of Nichols’s recent film-directorial debut, The Graduate, which Paul had hugely admired. He wanted Linda invited, too, but felt queasy about revealing their secret just yet; Nichols and Hoffman, therefore, were led to believe she was merely shadowing him for a photographic assignment.

Unfortunately, Peggy Lipton learned of the trip and met the party at the hotel entrance, still convinced she was Paul’s preferred escort. ‘I had to tell her in the nicest possible way that it was a private party, while Linda stood quietly to one side, pretending she wasn’t with us,’ writes Tony Bramwell. ‘Peggy was very upset and got very argumentative… We drove off fast, leaving [her] standing on the hotel-steps in tears.’

That evening found Paul and Linda sharing another ride to an airport before flying off in different directions, he back to London, she to New York. ‘[They] were like Siamese twins,’ writes Bramwell, ‘holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes.’

As they awaited their respective flights at LAX, a security alert was announced and squads of armed officers began searching departing passengers’ hand luggage. According to Bramwell, the remains of Linda’s pot supply were in a vanity case, which she’d put under her seat. As the searchers approached, she gave the case a surreptitious backward kick, sending it sliding across the floor and under a neighbouring row of empty seats, where–because unattended luggage as yet caused no alarm–it lay completely unnoticed.

Twelve years later, as man and wife at Tokyo airport, they wouldn’t be so lucky.

In July 1968, Apple Corps moved its headquarters to 3 Savile Row, the select Mayfair street traditionally devoted to London’s bespoke tailoring trade. Number three was a classic plain-fronted Georgian townhouse, five storeys high, fronted by iron railings, with a flight of stone steps up to its entrance. Ironically, it had formerly been the headquarters of Jack Hylton, the bandleader-turned-impresario who, three years earlier, had blocked Paul’s attempt to become his neighbour in Regent’s Park.

The building was purchased outright for half a million pounds–a bargain even then–and refurbished to the highest standard, its interior repainted white, its corridors, stairs and reception area carpeted in apple green. The senior executives were allowed to choose the décor and furnishings of their elegant panelled offices. On the second floor was a kitchen, staffed by two debutantes warranted to cook to cordon bleu standard. The grandest front ground-floor room was provided with a ten-foot oak conference table with a gold-bordered leather top, and four carefully unmatched but equally costly and comfortable armchairs. Here, the idea was John, Paul, George and Ringo would direct their great business project in the ultimate manifestation of the group mind.

Although Regent Street and the West End were only yards away, security in the modern sense was completely absent. It consisted of a single doorman in a dove-grey tailcoat, with orders to let in only authorised visitors (a task in which he would prove sadly deficient) and control the cluster of fans at the bottom of the steps. Some were foreign tourists but most were the young women to be found stationed patiently outside Beatle recording studios and homes at all hours and in all weathers. From now on, they had a nickname, coined by George at one of his least charming moments–Apple Scruffs.

Three Savile Row was primarily to be the home of Apple Records, with everything the label needed housed under its 200-year-old roof. Peter Asher’s A&R department settled in on the top floor while work began on converting the basement into a recording studio. John’s electronics ‘guru’, Magic Alex Mardas, was commissioned to design and install facilities, including a 72-track recording-desk, which would make Abbey Road look like something from the Stone Age.

Asher remembers the hard work Paul put into setting up Apple Records and the genuine idealism he brought to the project. ‘For months beforehand, he had plans and charts spread out at his house. His idea was to completely change the rules under which record companies had operated. For all the time the Beatles had been making records, their idea of a record company boss had been Sir Joseph Lockwood [the chairman of EMI]. Paul wanted to create a label that totally believed in the people it signed and did everything possible to encourage and develop them. “Artiste-friendly” was what it came to be called. And in the future, every company would be like that.’

Paul had announced the label’s raison d’être with a large display advertisement–conceived, art-directed and written by himself–which appeared in the New Musical Express and other leading trade publications the previous April. It showed his aide Alistair Taylor playing a guitar and singing with a bass drum on his back and a pile of brass band instruments round his feet, under the headline ‘This man has talent’.

One day, he sang his songs into a tape recorder (borrowed from the man next door). In his neatest handwriting he wrote an explanatory note (giving his name and address) and, remembering to enclose a picture of himself, sent the tape, letter and photograph to apple music, 94 Baker Street, London W.1. If you were thinking of doing the same thing yourself, do it now. This man now owns a Bentley.

In years to come, nationwide appeals from TV pop talent shows would produce competent–often gifted–candidates by the thousand. But in 1968, pop stardom wasn’t yet a career for which most British boys and girls seemed to spend their whole adolescence rehearsing. The wording of Paul’s invitation implicitly limited it to males, and merely asking for tapes, rather than holding live auditions, virtually guaranteed the main response would come from the solitary, the sad and the delusional. Sacks full of cassette tapes, lyric-sheets, letters and photographs poured in to 94 Baker Street and kept coming after Apple moved to Wigmore Street, then Savile Row. Peter Asher received the job of sifting through them, helped by a couple of secretaries. ‘In the whole lot, we found nothing,’ he is still incredulous to recall. ‘Nothing.’

Talent had to find its way to the label by more roundabout means. Asher’s first discovery was a lanky North Carolinan teenager named James Taylor, lately with a New York band named the Flying Machine whose leader, Danny Kortchmar, used to back Peter and Gordon on their American tours. Taylor was a solo singer/songwriter–a genre that had become all but extinct since the Beatles’ rise–with the quiet, yearning style of some long-haired young monk. After hearing a selection of his early work, including ‘Knocking Round the Zoo’ and ‘Something’s Wrong’, Paul and George gave Asher carte blanche to make an album with him at Trident Studios in Soho. There, a few weeks later, he recorded his classic ‘Carolina in My Mind’, with Paul on bass.

Another major find came through the unlikely medium of Opportunity Knocks, then British TV’s only talent show, whose contestants were traditionally incurable amateurs, achingly devoid of originality or charisma. But in May 1968, the audience’s vote (registered on a device called a ‘Clapometer’) was overwhelmingly for Mary Hopkin from Pontardawe, South Wales, an 18-year-old with shoulder-length hair and no smidgen of sexuality, who strummed a guitar and sang in a soprano as clear and unnuanced as a choirboy’s.

A fellow member of Swinging London’s elite, the model Twiggy, saw her in the show’s finals and recommended her to Paul. A few days later, she received a telegram asking her to phone Apple, and was put through to ‘a bloke with a Liverpool accent’ she didn’t immediately recognise as Paul himself. He sent a car to bring her to London to audition, with her mother as chaperone, and afterwards took the two of them for lunch at an Angus Steak House (a tactful choice, for a posh restaurant might have intimidated them). The last thing on his mind when he devised his ‘one-man band’ advertisement had been a folk-singing Welsh madonna. ‘But he instinctively knew what Mary should record as her debut single,’ Peter Asher says. ‘To me, it was a bit of real genius.’

‘Those Were the Days’ was an old Russian ballad which had been given its English title and lyrics by the American novelist and folk singer Gene Raskin. Paul had seen Raskin and his wife, Francesca, perform the song at London’s Blue Angel club somewhere around 1965, and thought it might suit Donovan or the Moody Blues. Now he presented it to Mary Hopkin in an arrangement counterpointing her sweet soprano with vaguely louche, vodka-flavoured instrumentation. True to his ‘do everything’ philosophy, he not only produced her recording session but also played acoustic guitar on it.

John, George and Ringo were all impressed by their new Mayfair mansion, and had various personal projects and interests among its multifarious activities. But they tended to come in separately and hang out in the offices of their favourite executives, Neil Aspinall or Peter Brown. The ground-floor salon, where they were to have directed operations around that ten-foot leather-topped table, remained permanently empty.

Paul, however, acted as resident managing director in addition to talent scout, producer and session-musician. He kept office hours, arriving each day around 10.30 and staying until 6 p.m. or later. Often, he didn’t bother with his chauffeur-driven limo or stable of traffic warden-proof cars, but simply took a bus in from St John’s Wood.

An already indispensable member of Apple’s staff was Peter Asher’s secretary, Chris O’Dell (no relation to Apple Films’ head, Denis O’Dell), a tranquil, ringletty-haired 20-year-old whom press officer Derek Taylor had met in California. ‘Paul had real management skills,’ she recalls. ‘He cared about his employees and what they thought. He had a suggestion box installed in the office. Or you could talk directly to him, and he’d always listen.’