Paul McCartney (26 page)

‘People often ask me, “How did Peter and Gordon get all those Beatles songs?”’ Peter Asher says. ‘It tends to be forgotten that in those days John and Paul were thinking of their future in terms of songwriting as much as performing. After “World Without Love” was a hit, they looked in the songwriters’ manual, where it said “If you write a hit, for God’s sake don’t let anyone else write the follow-up.” So then Paul came up with “Nobody I Know”.’

Peter’s new star status brought still more pop people into the Ashers’ classical home. For a while, he dated the Jamaican singer Millie Small who, as plain Millie, scored a worldwide hit in 1964 with ‘My Boy Lollipop’. The ever-surprising Richard Asher not only approved of their relationship but hoped Peter might marry Millie and so extinguish ‘the family gene’ that had given him his flamingly red-headed children.

Paul’s cover among West End surgeons and urologists was eventually blown and fans formed a round-the-clock picket outside 57 Wimpole Street. He was deeply embarrassed that such a distinguished couple as Richard and Margaret Asher should run the risk of being mobbed whenever they left or entered their home. But the whole family took the squealing siege in stride. Jane might have stayed coldly aloof, if not shown open resentment, towards these deranged young women from all over the world who treated her boyfriend as their collective property. Yet she always took the trouble to be nice, even though envious kicks or yanks of her hair soon became an occupational hazard.

The nuisance intensified during the spring of 1965, when the Beatles were filming Help! Paul’s fans wrote messages on the surrounding street signs, defaced Dr Asher’s brass nameplate and, in their hunger for souvenirs, even managed to break off one of the two ornamental pineapples from the iron railings flanking the front steps. Instead of exploding with fury, as many a paterfamilias would have done, Jane’s father gleefully rose to another DIY challenge, taking a cast of the remaining pineapple, then melting down various household utensils (many of them in crucial daily use) to fashion a new one.

The ever-inventive doctor also found a way for Paul to exit the house unseen that had echoes of prison-camp dramas in the Second World War. The next-door house, number 56, was also a residential property whose upper floors were occupied by an elderly retired military man. Donning his nocturnal blue boiler suit, Dr Asher climbed through the window of Paul’s attic room and discovered a narrow parapet on which it was possible to inch along to his neighbour’s top-floor windows. An arrangement was made with the bemused but obliging old military man whereby, if necessary, Paul would make the rather perilous journey along the connecting parapet, climb through number 56’s open window, then exit from the rear via a house in Browning Mews, whose occupants also had to be brought into the Colditz-like plot. From there, it was just a couple of streets to the home of the Beatles’ chauffeur, Alf Bicknell, in Devonshire Close.

The Browning Mews house belonged to a young married couple, who asked no recompense for having Paul make his way through their home at all hours. However, one day he noticed they didn’t own a refrigerator, so he had one delivered to them.

The moment of falling for Jane is marked by a new tenderness and specificity in Paul’s music. There’s the naturalistic catch of breath in ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’; the unnamed presence in ‘Here, There and Everywhere’–perhaps the most charming of all Beatles ballads–‘changing my life with a wave of her hand’; above all, the unqualified ‘And I Love Her’:

A love like ours, will never die

As long as I

Have you near me.

He couldn’t wait to show Jane off to his home city, as soon as his Beatle work schedule–and her packed engagement diary–permitted. They arrived at 20 Forthlin Road late at night, after Mike McCartney had gone to bed. Paul couldn’t wait for him to get dressed, but brought Jane upstairs to meet him while he was still in his pyjamas. Mike, too, instantly fell for her–as, needless to say, did ‘Gentleman Jim’. And the starched-aproned ghost of Mary seemed to smile down on this more-than-fulfilment of all her hopes.

Nor could Paul resist taking Jane to meet the Caldwells at the house their rock ‘n’ rolling son had renamed ‘Stormsville’. Vi Caldwell’s riotous ménage had now been further enlivened by Rory’s pet monkey, which had fallen in love with Vi’s husband and, like a Beatles fan in miniature, showed its hostility to her by dropping dinner-plates on her head.

‘Violent Vi’ bore Paul no ill will for already having found a successor to Iris. But she was determined he shouldn’t still behave as he used to when he’d rely on his angel looks to get round people–smoking their cigarettes without ever buying his own–and she’d told him, only half-jokingly, ‘You’ve got no heart, Paul.’

‘My mum said that Jane could come in,’ Iris remembers, ‘but she sent Paul off to English’s, our local shop, to get 20 cigarettes out of their machine. And when he came back, she was furious because he hadn’t bought another 20 to give to her.’

At the same time, he was a Beatle, adored by millions of young women, many only too willing to turn adoration into positive action. To resist the temptation to be unfaithful to Jane that daily–hourly–came his way would have needed the superhuman self-control of some medieval saint.

Sex had always been pressingly on offer, whether on the Reeperbahn or outside the Cavern, when roadie Neil Aspinall and his hulking deputy, Mal Evans, would bring in willing females along with the takeaway fish and chips or chicken. After Brian arrived and the world touring began, it became part of room service. Among the Beatles’ welcoming delegation at airports across America would usually be four high-priced, prepaid hookers to console them for being unable to set foot outside their hotels.

Not that it ever needed to be a commercial transaction, especially not for Paul. In any room he entered, he knew he could have his pick of the most beautiful young women there. During early Beatlemania, he would often act as a judge at bathing-beauty contests–as yet unchallenged by feminism–whose winners might then receive an extra prize along with a crown, a sash and a bouquet of roses.

Pop musicians with wives or steady girlfriends observed an unwritten rule that ‘sex on tour doesn’t count’, but for Paul it was more often a matter of keeping count. To his cousin, Mike Robbins, he once described a four-in-a-bed session in which he’d been the only male. The holiday camps where Robbins once worked used to be saturated in sex, but even he had to admit Butlin’s had nothing on this.

The Beatles’ on-the-road sexual activities were well-known to the large media contingent who travelled with them, at close quarters that today seem extraordinary. But no newspaper or TV reporter would have dreamed of dishing the dirt on the sacred Fab Four, any more than of delving into their murky Hamburg past. The media were as complicit in preserving the illusion as White House correspondents during the presidency of John F. Kennedy.

The same rule also held good when, as inevitably happened, figures from their past began to pop up, seeking a share of their supposedly unlimited wealth either for having contributed to their success or suffered wrongs at their hands. In this second category, the most potentially ruinous were from the ranks of young women they’d carelessly had sex with when they were nobodies.

Two of the earliest such claims involved Paul, threatening to unravel all the positive PR he had worked so hard to create. They came at the worst possible moment, both at the start of his idyllic relationship with Jane and the apogee of the Beatles’ triumph as ambassadors for Britain and Liverpool.

The first was by a former Reeperbahn club waitress named Erika Hubers, who’d allegedly dated Paul throughout the Beatles’ intermittent spells in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962. In January 1964, she came forward, claiming he was the father of her 14-month-old daughter, Bettina.

The story reached the London Daily Mail early in February, during the band’s all-conquering first trip to America. The Mail’s New York bureau chief, David English, joined their media-packed train journey to Washington DC and, in a quiet moment, put the allegation to Paul. No clarification was forthcoming, however, and the Mail decided not to risk running the story.

Less easily suppressed was the case of Liverpudlian Anita Cochrane, a hardcore Beatles fan since their earliest days at the Cavern. Anita claimed to have had casual sex with Paul twice when she was 16 and still a virgin, and, as a result, to have given birth to a son in February 1964–again while the band were conquering America. According to Anita, when she was four months pregnant she and her mother had visited Jim McCartney, telling him she was not seeking marriage or to damage Paul’s public image, only some financial provision for the child. Jim, she said, had been ‘really nice’, given them ‘a nice cup of tea’, but told them ‘Paul says he doesn’t know you’.

They’d then gone to Brian Epstein, who was long familiar with such allegations against his ‘boys’ and had a policy of buying them off without trying to establish their truth or otherwise. Brian initially offered Anita the equivalent of £2.50 per week maintenance, then upped it to £5. When her lawyer threatened to call for blood-tests, Brian proposed a one-off payment of £5000 in exchange for signing a document promising ‘not to make any allegations or statements to any person under any circumstances that or to the effect that Paul McCartney is the father of said child’. He seemed to regard Anita’s claim as something more than the usual opportunism, for he visited her personally at her grandmother’s house to make the offer. The money was then deducted from Paul’s payments through NEMS.

Anita duly signed, but some of her family were outraged by the size of the settlement–and not bound by the same confidentiality agreement that she was. In July 1964, following the London premiere of A Hard Day’s Night, the Beatles made an almost royal return to Liverpool, driving in via Speke–Paul’s childhood home–to a civic reception by the Lord Mayor for them and their families. Afterwards, they appeared on the Town Hall balcony, waving to a cheering crowd estimated at 200,000.

As Brian looked proudly on, he learned that leaflets were being circulated among the crowd, denouncing Paul as ‘a cad’ for his alleged mistreatment of Anita Cochrane. A poem had also been circulated to local newspapers, written by her uncle as if in the voice of the baby she’d named Philip Paul, and referencing one of the alleged father’s sunniest love songs: ‘In spite of all her lovin’, she got no thanks from him/ It seems he loved my mother just long enough to sin/ Besides his lust, she took his money to compensate a lie/ But Mr Paul McCartney, Dad, you make mother cry.’

Helped by his brother, Clive, Brian quietly put a stop to the leaflet-distribution and suppressed the poem. Neither Anita nor Erika Hubers had even dented the protective shield thrown around the Beatles by their manager. Alas, it was not to last for ever.

‘Long life and happiness and lots of marzipan butties’

For 61 years, Jim McCartney’s birthday had been marked by nothing more extravagant than a family tea-party, a cake with candles in petal-shaped holders, perhaps a little extra flutter on his beloved ‘nags’ if the Liverpool Echo’s racing tipster named a specially hot prospect.

But Jim’s sixty-second–or, anyway, its eve–found him at the royal film premiere of A Hard Day’s Night at the plushy London Pavilion cinema. He enjoyed the film hugely, even though its script unwittingly rubbed raw the heartbreak he and his sons had suffered eight years earlier. In the opening sequence, aboard the train, Alun Owen’s script had John asking Paul why he’d been given the job of looking after his troublesome grandfather, played by Wilfrid Brambell. ‘My mother asked me to,’ he had to reply.

After the show there was a glittering reception at the Dorchester hotel, attended by Princess Margaret and her husband, Lord Snowdon, a royal couple as glamorous and popular in 1964 as William and Kate would be 50 years later. Jim was offered the chance to be presented to them but, with typical reticence, decided he’d rather not as he wouldn’t know what to say.

As midnight signalled the official start of his birthday, Paul handed him a brown paper parcel which he unwrapped to reveal an oil painting of a racehorse. ‘I said, “Very nice,”’ he later recalled, ‘but I’m thinking “What do I want with a picture of a horse?” Paul said, “It’s not just a picture… I’ve bought the bloody horse. It’s yours and it’s running at Chester on Saturday.”’

The horse was a gelding of impressive lineage named Drake’s Drum. Paul had paid £1050 (£15,000 by today’s values) for it and placed it with a leading Yorkshire trainer, Lieut. Col. Wilfred Lyde. The following Saturday, Jim and his two sons watched it run its first race at Chester–and finish second.

This very public display of Paul’s affection for his father had a particular–and uncomfortable–resonance for John Lennon. For it happened that, actually during the filming of A Hard Day’s Night, John had been reunited with his own father, Alfred Lennon, whom he hadn’t seen since he was aged six. Alf, now known as Freddie and long out of the Merchant Navy, was leading a semi-itinerant life as an hotel kitchen-worker when colleagues pointed out that one of the Beatles had his surname.

In reality, despite his present lowly employment, Freddie was not the incorrigible wastrel his son had been brought up to believe. Nor had he simply absconded without a qualm just after the Second World War, leaving toddler John to be passed like a parcel around the family, ending up with his controlling Aunt Mimi. But Mimi’s myth-making was too strong for John ever to feel easy in his long-lost father’s company, or banish the suspicion that Freddie’s only motive for resurfacing was a cut of the Beatles’ riches.

By contrast, since Paul became famous Jim had never demanded anything in recompense for all his years of selfless single-parenthood. Drake’s Drum therefore wasn’t just a casual demonstration of a young millionaire’s new wealth; it was payback beyond anything his dad would ever have asked, or dreamed.

A further sixty-second birthday present from Paul (which, Jim would always say, meant even more) was the leisure to enjoy his new life as a racehorse-owner to the full. Nineteen sixty-four had found him still employed by A. Hannay & Co., the cotton brokers he’d joined as a 14-year-old during the Great War, and at a weekly wage still hovering at only around £10. Now Paul said he should stop work three years before official retirement age, and he’d provide for him for the rest of his life. Attached though Jim was to the Cotton Exchange and Liverpool’s dwindling commercial heart, he needed no persuasion.