Paul McCartney (31 page)

Paul’s brief to the Adamses was the strangest they’d ever received, or ever would again; he said he wanted the kind of house where a smell of cabbage floated up from the basement. It clearly was his most elemental idea of comfort and security, deriving as much from the Asher household as from his old home in Allerton. He meant to spend only £5000 on the work–a mighty enough sum compared with redecorating ‘Forthlin’ with odds and ends of wallpaper and carpet all those years ago–but in the end paid £20,000.

Once installed, he gave a series of elaborate lunches and dinners to show off his new home to his fellow Beatles, Brian, George Martin, friends and relations. None was surprised to find it the same mixture of ultra-trendiness and ultra-tradition as Paul himself. Expensive finds from the Kensington and Chelsea antique-markets mingled with domestic fixtures to be found in humbler homes throughout the north. In the dining-room, an outsize clock, which had once hung outside the Army & Navy Stores in Victoria, loomed over a polished dining-table with an antique lace cloth. (‘Very working-class posh’, commented one metropolitan visitor.)

The living-room, where afternoon teas of home-made cakes and scones were served, had a coke-burning open fire with a brass coal-scuttle and coal-tongs in its grate. Outside, on the garden terrace, stood a human-size White Rabbit, Mad Hatter and other characters from Alice in Wonderland: a house-warming gift from his brother, Michael. To complement the pagoda-shaped red Victorian postbox that stood near the front gate, a wrought-iron street-lamp from the same era was installed in the front drive.

In fact, the house had no basement from which cosy cabbage-smells could waft to its upper storeys. But, as if in memory of 57 Wimpole Street, Paul’s music room was in the former servants’ quarters on the top floor, overlooking the front drive and the new black security gate–beyond which, from day one of his occupancy, a cluster of young women mounted guard around the clock.

All the very latest domestic technology was also there, including a colour television set and a prototype video-recorder, a gift from the BBC. In mid-Sixties Britain, electronic gadgetry still belonged to the realm of James Bond and in real life tended to be chronically unreliable. So it proved with many of the 007-style marvels Paul showed off to visitors. His bedroom curtains were supposed to open and close by remote control but seldom did, while his automated home cinema screen jammed so often it was quicker to unroll it laboriously by hand. His expensive stereo system continually broke down and knobs always seemed to be dropping off his professional Brenell tape-decks.

To complete the family atmosphere of his bachelor domain, he acquired four cats: one named Thisbe–after the character in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream–the others, Jesus, Mary and Joseph. Fortunately, this mild bit of sacrilege never reached the Beatles’ American public; otherwise he might have felt some of the godly wrath John was soon to suffer.

He also acquired an Old English sheepdog puppy named Martha. The breed had become a minor style icon thanks to the perfectly-groomed specimen featured in glossy advertisements for Dulux paints in the chic Sunday newspaper colour supplements. Consciously or not, Martha was a further backward nod to the Peter Pan world of 57 Wimpole Street: in Barrie’s story, when the Darling children fly with Peter to Neverland, their shaggy dog-cum-nursemaid, Nana, goes with them.

Paul claimed he’d wanted a dog throughout his childhood but had been denied one because his family’s house was too small (though plenty were always to be seen and heard in the police training school over the garden fence). When he introduced Martha to his ex-girlfriend Iris Caldwell, Iris was surprised by his devotion to the admittedly adorable puppy. She had no memory of him liking dogs; indeed, recalled his always being ‘rather uncomfortable’ around the Caldwells’ boisterous family mutt, Toby.

In those same Sunday colour supplements one could read how, if traditional domestic servants might have no place in the egalitarian Sixties, wealthy young bachelors often employed a live-in married couple, usually Spanish, the husband combining the roles of butler and chauffeur, the wife cooking and keeping house. Paul started out at 7 Cavendish Avenue with just such a couple, albeit Irish rather than Spanish and with the reassuring Liverpool-echoey name of Kelly. When he hired them, he gave warning that his household would be anything but a conventional one, and defined their main role as just ‘to fit in’.

He soon discovered the drawback in having domestic servants, as noted by writers like Harold Nicolson back in the Victorian country house era: there are always people standing around, eavesdropping on your conversations, obliging you to shut the toilet door (all the more irksome if you’re fond of sitting there, playing guitar) and generally behave as if you’re in an hotel rather than at home. Mr Kelly, evidently seeing himself as Jeeves to Paul’s Bertie Wooster, would ceremonially lay out his young master’s clothes for the day ahead until firmly dissuaded. Pop star pals who stayed overnight, and expected to be left comatose until after noon, would instead be briskly roused by Mr Kelly with early morning tea. On the big dining-room table, he placed a display of silverware whose highly-polished formality was too much even for Paul; to annoy them, he’d take out the ornate silver cruet and put a cheap plastic one in its place.

Cavendish saw the genesis of an art collection that was to be as eclectic as it was extensive. One of Indica gallery’s first exhibitions was by the Greek sculptor Takis Vassilakis, whose angular metal shapes were embellished by flashing lights. Paul immediately bought a Takis, consisting of a long, spindly rod topped by a green light, and a matching, but shorter, rod topped by a red one. Seeing a resemblance to the singing duo that included Jane’s diminutive, carrot-haired brother, he nicknamed it ‘Peter and Gordon’.

At Indica’s bookshop–where the wrapping-paper he’d designed was in daily use–he’d left a standing order that anything interesting which came in should automatically be sent to him, and also to the other Beatles in their suburban retreats. It wasn’t long before John, that omnivorous reader, came up from Weybridge in his pot-fumed Rolls-Royce to check out the bookshop for himself. On his first visit, Miles steered him towards The Psychedelic Experience, Dr Timothy Leary’s reworking of The Tibetan Book of the Dead, whose introduction commands ‘When in doubt turn off your mind, relax and float downstream…’ Waving away the McCartney wrapping-paper, John lay down on the couch in the centre of the shop and read the book from cover to cover.

Thereafter, he took to hanging out with John Dunbar, than whom few were better acquainted with the substance prescribed by Dr Leary for ‘floating downstream’. Yet Paul still held out against trying LSD, the more so because Jane was vehemently against it. ‘Socially speaking, Paul and I and the two Johns sort of went our separate ways,’ Miles remembers. ‘While they took acid together, we’d go with Jane and my wife, Sue, to interesting foreign films at the Academy cinema.’

But the greatest influence on Paul, as a connoisseur and collector, was the art dealer Robert Fraser, whom he met, fortuitously, at around the time of moving to Cavendish. Fraser was then London’s foremost champion of the genre recently dubbed pop art, exhibiting Americans like Andy Warhol and Jim Dine, and Britons like Peter Blake, Richard Hamilton and Bridget Riley at his Duke Street gallery, despite an ever-present risk of police prosecution for ‘indecency’.

Twenty-nine-year-old Fraser was himself a perfect picture of the Sixties’ collapsing class and sexual barriers: the scion of an ancient Scottish clan, an old Etonian and former colonial army officer who dressed in immaculate brass-buttoned blazers, yet was openly gay, he revelled in the company of louche pop stars (he was already an intimate friend of the Rolling Stones) and took drugs on a scale of which even the louchest popstars didn’t yet dream.

Paul would later call Robert Fraser the most important person he ever met after he became famous–even including Bob Dylan. It was from Fraser that he first learned of René Magritte, the Belgian surrealist who did not outrage but seduced the eye through images of bowler-hatted men with green apples for faces, and street-lamps shining among dark trees, with summer-blue sky overhead. Several Magrittes duly appeared at Cavendish, as did a work specially commissioned from Peter Blake. Paul had a sentimental weakness for ‘The Monarch of the Glen’, Sir Edwin Landseer’s study of a Scottish stag, expressing all the pride and bombast of the Victorian era, which had adorned many Liverpool parlour walls during his boyhood. Blake agreed (for who could tell Paul McCartney no?) to reproduce the monarch with an ironic pop art twist.

Fraser seemed to know everyone and his parties at his Duke Street flat always teemed with celebrities. At one, Paul met the Italian director Michelangelo Antonioni, who was currently shooting Blow-Up, the best film ever to be made about Swinging London, with David Hemmings and Vanessa Redgrave. Another night, Fraser visited Cavendish with Andy Warhol to give Paul a private showing of Warhol’s new film, Empire. It proved to be a continuous shot of the Empire State building lasting eight hours, five minutes. Paul was bored to distraction but politely concealed the fact, helped by a good supply of mind-dulling pot.

Fraser’s circle included several members of the aristocracy, who, Paul noted, were the greediest consumers of serious drugs, acid and even heroin, and the most insistent that he should try them, too: literal peer-pressure. Fraser himself was a heroin-addict and gave it its usual sell: how it didn’t cloud the senses like pot, but sharpened them to a preternatural degree, and could be controlled if it were not injected but merely taken in tablet form or sniffed. Heroin was only a problem, he said, when one couldn’t pay for it. In the end, Paul tried a sniff, but it did nothing for him and Fraser agreed never to offer it to him again.

When he finally gave in and took LSD, it was not with another Beatle but a young aristo, the Hon. Tara Browne. Tara’s father was the Irish peer Lord Oranmore and Browne; his mother was Oonagh Guinness, heiress to the Guinness brewing fortune, whose family the British have always considered close to royal. To this most blessed member of Swinging London’s elite Paul was ‘the most intelligent man I’ve ever met’.

That first acid trip with Tara seems to have been an extremely mild one. Paul later remembered only that they took it in the toilet, sprinkled on some blotting-paper, and stayed up all night afterwards; that he felt ‘quite spacey’ and everything seemed ‘more sensitive’. Like the heroin-sniff, he regarded it as a one-off experiment and spoke little about it afterwards, although Iris Caldwell now thinks she caught a reference during one of his conventional trips back to Merseyside. ‘He said, “I was combing my hair and suddenly my mind went onto a different plane.”’ At the time, Iris was baffled, though not as much as her mother, ‘Violent Vi’, who once used to comb Paul’s legs–and had always been famous for getting the wrong end of the stick.

‘What did he say?’ queried Vi. ‘He was combing his hair on a plane?’

His main object in buying Cavendish was that he and Jane should live together there. Even at this mid-point in the so-called ‘permissive’ era, few responsible British parents would have welcomed such a move by their 20-year-old daughter. But Sir Richard and Margaret Asher viewed Paul as a surrogate son who showed every sign of turning into a son-in-law. He remained on close terms with Margaret especially, regarding it as a huge compliment when she used ‘Yesterday’ as an exercise for her recorder pupils. Among her colleagues at the Guildhall School of Music, she had lately found him a (male) piano-teacher, so that he could finally do as his father had always urged and learn to play ‘properly’.

In any case, so far as the unintrusive Sixties media were concerned, Paul occupied his impressive new property quite alone. Soon after moving in, he gave an interview to BBC radio’s Brian Matthew in the soufflé-speak he had now perfected, seemingly spontaneous and fulsome but actually revealing nothing. Jane wasn’t even mentioned.

MATTHEW: Right, let’s get onto a, if we can, a kind of domestic level, Paul. The other three boys, all being married, need or choose to have largeish houses. What about you for a pad. What’s your ideal? You’ve recently bought a house, haven’t you?

PAUL: I’ve bought a house. Yeah, I love it. I love houses. I always have. I always like going to visit people and seeing their houses and things, because it’s always the character of houses that gets me. You go into a small house, and it’s that kind of character–it’s still great. You go into a big house and it’s completely different and they are things on their own anyway. I like that.

MATTHEW: What sort of house have you bought?

PAUL: Um, a big one. ’Cos I like big houses. And it’s an old one because I like old houses.

MATTHEW: And it’s in town, is it? Or near?

PAUL: It’s near.

Jane seemed in every way his perfect partner with her Pre-Raphaelite beauty, her natural poise, charm and lack of actressy airs and graces–in short, her total dissimilarity from all his fellow Beatles’ chosen consorts. Even the eternal female pickets on their doorstep, once so vocally and even physically hostile to Jane, had been won over by her unfailing niceness and tolerance. Many, indeed, now copied her clothes and grew their hair to similar shoulder-length, pressing it with a warm iron on an ironing-board before setting out on another day or night of Paul-stalking.

She seemed equally at ease wherever life as a Beatle’s girlfriend took her. When they visited racehorse-trainer Wilfred Lyde to buy Drake’s Drum for Jim McCartney, she charmed the beefy racecourse types they met (not least by, at one point, innocently wandering into the jockeys’ changing-room). They stayed overnight with Lyde and his wife, who later remembered them as the most gracious and unassuming of guests. Not until after their departure did Beatlemania break out, the Lydes’ domestic staff rushing into their room and cutting their bedclothes into souvenir strips.

Jane also brought out a serious side of Paul, until now suppressed by his Beatle duty to be chirpily non-committal on all subjects. It’s generally forgotten that throughout those so-envied Sixties, Western Europe lived under permanent threat of mutually-annihilating nuclear war with Soviet Russia. America’s ‘anti-communist’ war in Vietnam was also increasingly inflaming Britain’s young people, even though–unlike in American foreign invasions of the early twenty-first century–the British government firmly withheld any support.