Paul McCartney (23 page)

The Shadows apart, members of beat-groups in 1963 were an uninteresting lot whose most devout fans could seldom tell one from another. So after the Beatles’ initial breakthrough, it took some time for ‘the cute one’s’ identity to become generally known.

Even on their first album, Please Please Me, which topped the UK chart in May and remained there 30 weeks, many listeners were at first unable to distinguish between its four different singing voices. Of those, the highest, lightest one was most suggestive of energy and joie de vivre: its rousing ‘One two three faw!’ intro to ‘I Saw Her Standing There’; its suppleness and sibilance on ‘A Taste of Honey’; the harmonic lift it gave the self-pitying ‘Misery’; its obvious joy in supplying the ‘Bop-shoo-wop’ backup vocals to ‘Boys’.

Not until the third single, ‘From Me to You’–like ‘Please Please Me’, a UK number one–was much made of the fact that it had been written by two band members, John Lennon and Paul McCartney. Most British pop musicians until then had used faux-American pseudonyms, so the two unusual genuine surnames struck a pleasingly unpretentious note.

Otherwise, what little was known about the four of them came from trade papers like the New Musical Express, whose ‘Life Lines’ feature subjected current hit-makers to a standard questionnaire. When the Beatles’ ‘Life Lines’ appeared on 15 February, Paul gave his weight as 11 stone 4 pounds, his ‘instruments played’ as bass guitar, drums, piano and banjo, his hobbies as ‘girls, songwriting, sleeping’, his favourite singers as Ben E. King, Little Richard, Chuck Jackson and Larry Williams (same as John’s), his favourite food as chicken Maryland, his favourite drink as milk, his favourite clothes as ‘good suits, suede’, his favourite composers as Goffin and King, his tastes in music as ‘r&b, modern jazz’, his ‘professional ambition’ as ‘to popularise our sound’ and his personal one ‘to have my picture in The Dandy’ (the comic book he’d read throughout his childhood).

Most of the Beatles’ first broadcast interviews were on radio rather than television, notably with Brian Matthew, the host of two BBC live music shows, Saturday Club and Easy Beat. In an era when the cut-crystal ‘BBC accent’ still dictated elocutionary standards, the deep, curdled Liverpudlian of John, George and Ringo (heavily put on in middle-class John’s case) came as rather a shock as well as making them sound much older than they were.

Paul had all the Scouse wit and plain-spokenness of the others but without John’s sarcasm or George’s dourness; he was always amusing, totally open (or so it seemed) and unfailingly polite, however asinine the question. And when the TV interviews began, he proved to be a natural. The camera loved that heart-shaped face between the Beatle fringe and the deep shirt-collar; those enormous, wide-set, button-deep eyes; that delicate mouth, slackened into what might have been called a pout if all its utterances weren’t so down-to-earth and self-deprecating.

To begin with, before the full scale of his discovery became apparent, Brian Epstein remained based in Liverpool, with only a small office in London’s West End. The Beatles would pay brief visits to the capital, usually to appear on the BBC, often returning that same day to rejoin whichever tour they happened to be on, occasionally staying overnight at some mid-priced hotel in the Bloomsbury area. It was to be their last taste of anonymity as they gazed into the windows of guitar-shops along Charing Cross Road, bought elastic-sided, Cuban-heeled boots (soon to be known as ‘Beatle boots’) at theatrical shoemakers Anello and Davide, or ogled the first girls in Vidal Sassoon’s new ‘geometric’ bob and skirts ending an audacious inch or so above the knee.

NEMS Enterprises’ London office, above a porno bookshop in Monmouth Street, Seven Dials, was set up principally for the Beatles’ first full-time press officer, Tony Barrow. Twenty-seven-year-old Barrow was a Merseyside-born freelance journalist already settled in London, working for the Decca organisation as a writer of album liner-notes and contributing a record column to the Liverpool Echo which had given the Beatles several valuable early plugs. After a brief period when the band’s press representative was Andrew Loog Oldham (who went on to discover the Rolling Stones), Barrow joined NEMS in May 1963.

When he first met the Beatles, in a West End pub, three of them were rather reserved and suspicious (John demanding bluntly, ‘If you’re not Jewish and not queer, why are you working for Brian?’) but the fourth was ‘Mr Geniality’. Barrow had brought his wife along, and Paul solicitously asked the couple what they’d like to drink, then took everyone else’s bar order–a flourish only slightly marred by leaving Brian to settle the outsize bill.

One of Barrow’s first pieces of advice to Brian, echoing George Martin’s early instinct, was to rename the band ‘Paul McCartney and the Beatles’. For Paul then seemed their driving force, a workaholic and perfectionist, whereas John was chronically laid-back, not to say lazy. Barrow later discovered that when they’d signed their management contract, Paul had told Brian that if the Beatles didn’t work out, he was determined to become a star on his own.

In addition, as Barrow discovered, he had ‘a natural flair for public relations’ and in his tireless promotion of the band was a ‘one-man Barnum & Bailey Beatle’. The Monmouth Street office also being the mailing address of the Beatles’ national fan club, it was soon receiving two to three thousand letters per day requesting autographs and signed photos. Paul motivated the other three to carry out this irksome duty with cheerfulness; the poky office, in fact, possessed a romantic appeal for him, having previously been occupied by his easy-listening keyboard favourite, Joe ‘Mr Piano’ Henderson.

To the pop trade press, he was an interviewer’s dream: no matter how many stood in line, he seemed to make a special effort for each one, and remembered the journalist’s name on their next encounter weeks, months, even years ahead. Though these were days long before paparazzi, photographers could still pop up at inconvenient moments. Barrow remembers one early morning when the four were leaving their London hotel, gummy-eyed and hung-over, and a camera-flash waylaid them in the lobby. The others would have hustled straight through, but Paul rallied them to their duty, even setting up the photographer’s shot: ‘Come on, lads, pick up a case or something. Let’s all be walking towards the door.’

Over the next six years, Barrow would realise that the inexhaustible geniality Paul showed the world was not always replicated in private, especially not to employees whom he found wanting. But the professional PR man had to acknowledge him ‘a self-taught expert in an art we used to call gamesmanship, which was all about staying one step ahead of the competition’.

In disputes within the Beatles (i.e. with John) he would use subtlety and diplomacy to get his way, whereas John simply shouted. As a result, he always seemed to Barrow the one dictating the band’s musical policy. ‘[And] unlike John (and Brian), Paul did not seem to have any half-concealed demons to deal with.’

He did have an unconcealed demon to deal with, however; one that was to put Tony Barrow’s PR skills to an early test. On 8 April, John’s wife, Cynthia, gave birth to a boy, John Charles Julian–always to be known as Julian–at Sefton General Hospital, Liverpool. The event went totally unnoticed by the national press, even though scores of local fans had got wind of it and staked out the hospital.

Two weeks later, with the Please Please Me album still topping the UK charts, the Beatles were allowed a brief holiday before starting their third nationwide tour in four months. Paul and George went to stay with their Hamburg friend Klaus Voormann at Klaus’s family’s house on Tenerife while John, instead of returning home to his wife and newborn son, jetted off on a ten-day trip to Spain alone with Brian Epstein.

That Spanish holiday has passed into legend as the moment when Brian finally declared his infatuation with John, and John, perhaps, reciprocated. Years later, he told a close friend he’d had sex, of some sort, with Brian, ‘once to see what it was like, the second time to make sure I didn’t like it’.

According to Bill Harry–Mersey Beat’s founder/editor who knew them both equally well–Brian was simply following Tony Barrow’s advice, in spirit if not actual name. ‘He wanted to change [the Beatles] from John’s group into Paul’s group,’ Harry says. ‘So he took John away to Spain so that they could have some privacy while he explained the whole thing to him.’

Paul, for his part, has always viewed the holiday as evidence of John’s ‘gamesmanship’. ‘John was a smart cookie. Brian was gay, and John saw his opportunity to impress on Mr Epstein who was boss of the group… He wanted Brian to know whom he should listen to.’

Once again, an uninquisitive popular press remained totally unaware of a story which nowadays would have splashed as ‘SECRETLY WED BEATLE JOHN LEAVES WIFE AND NEW BABY FOR SPANISH TRYST WITH GAY MANAGER’. And once again in a John-centric episode, Paul might have been expected to take his accustomed ‘back seat’ with relief. But this time, he couldn’t.

The eighteenth of June was his twenty-first birthday, an event which could be properly celebrated only in Liverpool. Encapsulating the two sides of his nature, there was a select cocktail party for him at the home of Brian Epstein’s parents, then a traditional knees-up for his mates and wide family circle. To evade the fans now permanently besieging 20 Forthlin Road, this was held at the home of his Auntie Gin in Dinas Lane, Huyton, where a marquee had been erected in the back garden. All three of his fellow Beatles were present, along with fellow musicians like Gerry Marsden and Billy J. Kramer and new celebrity pals like Hank B. Marvin and Bruce Welch from the Shadows, who were currently appearing in a summer show at Blackpool.

The McCartneys’ famous bumper servings of booze were, unfortunately, to lead to disaster. During the evening, Bob Wooler, the Cavern’s notoriously sharp-tongued deejay, began teasing John about his Spanish ‘honeymoon’ with Brian. John by that time had drunk so much that his usual whipcrack repartee failed him; instead–with a fury that could equally have pointed to the barb’s inaccuracy or accuracy–he began raining punches viciously on Wooler’s head and body.

This was a story that undoubtedly would get into the newspapers, so Tony Barrow skilfully limited the damage by feeding it to a friendly showbiz columnist, the Sunday Mirror’s Don Short, dressed up as a remorseful confession: ‘Guitarist John Lennon, leader of the Beatles pop group, said last night, “Why did I have to go and punch my best friend?… I can only hope [Bob] realises that I was too far gone to know what I was doing.”’ Wooler’s silence was secured by an apologetic telegram from John (not a syllable of which he meant) and an ex gratia payment of £200.

Just then, as it happened, Paul was also in a spot of bother: four days before his twenty-first, he’d been pulled over in Wallasey for speeding. It being his third offence in a year, the police took him to court, where Beatlemania proved in short supply; he was banned from driving for 12 months, fined £25 and told by the presiding magistrate, Alderman W.O. Halstead, ‘It’s time you were taught a lesson.’ Fortunately, the case wasn’t reported outside Liverpool.

In August, with ‘She Loves You’ yeah-yeah-ing out of every transistor radio, he received his first press coverage in his own right. The New Musical Express published ‘Close-Up on Paul McCartney–a Beatle’, filed by its Beatles correspondent Alan Smith from the roof of London’s Washington Hotel, where they were doing a photo-shoot. Smith summed him up as ‘courteous but cheerful with it’ and quoted some slightly double-edged chaff from the others:

How do the rest of the Beatles get on with Paul? ‘Oh, fine,’ they laughed as we leaned against a chimney-stack. ‘He hasn’t changed a bit, you know. He’s just the same old big-’ead we all got to know and love.’ ‘Funny habits?’ said John. ‘I’ll say! Did you know he sleeps with his eyes open? We’ve actually watched him dozing there with the whites of his eyes showing.’

Actually, that had been John’s frequent condition in Hamburg, when the amphetamines racketing around his body literally wouldn’t allow his eyes to shut. But with Paul, it suggested unsleeping ambition.

On 22 November, the day of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination in Dallas, Parlophone released the band’s second album, With the Beatles. Advance orders of half a million put it instantly at the top of the UK album charts, so finally ending the seven-month reign there of Please Please Me. It would eventually sell one million copies, more than any album previously released in Britain except the cast recording of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s South Pacific.

With the Beatles brought a radical change of image, illustrating the vastly altered demographic of those who were now with them. On the Please Please Me album cover, four cheery, unabashedly working-class lads had grinned down a stairwell at EMI’s Manchester Square headquarters, with Paul’s good looks barely noticeable. Now they were shown as solemn, polo-necked faces half in shadow against a plain black background, less like pop musicians than a quartet of Parisian art students. It was an ambience which suited none of them better than Paul, that one-time art student manqué. The shadow seeping into the lit half of his face gave it an extra delicacy, pressing a groove above his top lip, sculpting a dimple in his chin, while his eyes gazed forth, as round and fathomlessly soulful as a bush-baby’s.

The album featured seven Lennon–McCartney compositions, one by George Harrison (‘Don’t Bother Me’) and six soul or R&B covers. On 10 of the 14 tracks John predominated, with Paul’s harmonies acting as a kind of yeast, raising his partner’s hardest, dourest vocal lead into the realm of good humour and fun. But two of his own three tracks were stand-outs: ‘All My Loving’ and ‘Till There Was You’. All the rave reviews commented on the surprise of finding a Peggy Lee song cheek-by-jowl with Chuck Berry and Smokey Robinson, and praised Paul’s interpretation set off by George’s Latin-flavoured acoustic guitar.

Movie cameras are commonly said to ‘love’ certain personalities, but the relationship occurs less in the colder medium of television. How much the 1960s black and white TV camera loved Paul became increasingly obvious in the artier studio set-ups–heavily influenced by With the Beatles–that directors began to essay. It made his bushy head seem three-dimensional while the others’ remained flat, put an extra twinkle in his eye and glow on his skin, etched every contour of the baby-face including the firm chin that most still cameras overlooked. Even when dutifully background-vocalling John, eyes demurely downcast over his bass fretboard, he stole every show.