The Love You Make (17 page)

To make matters worse, the jealousy and thinly veiled dislike between Cynthia and Aunt Mimi was exacerbated by the baby. Now it wasn’t only John they quarreled over, it was the raising of Julian. In some ways Mimi saw Julian as belonging as much to
her
as to Cynthia, and having reared John, she had a lot of opinions about his son. The baby turned out to be what Cynthia called “a crier.” In fact, he howled ferociously every hour of the day and night, and there didn’t seem to be anything Cynthia could do to make him stop. Of course, Mimi blamed every second of the child’s unhappiness on Cynthia’s mishandling of him. Sometimes Cynthia would get so exasperated with the howling she would just push the baby out to the farthest corner of the walled-in garden and let him cry his heart out—much to Mimi’s grating dismay. Yet when it came to her baby, Cynthia was a formidable opponent, and in her own quiet way she began to defy Aunt Mimi at every turn.

To add a lighted match to this combustible brew, Lillian Powell, encouraged by Cynthia’s letters and clippings describing John’s success, decided to return to Liverpool and move into Mendips with her. It was decided that Lillian Powell’s arrival was the perfect excuse for Cynthia and the baby to move out of Aunt Mimi’s without offending Mimi or John. Unfortunately, there was nowhere for Cynthia and her mother to move; the family house in Hoylake was still rented to tenants for several more months. Ideally, they would have stayed on at Mendips, but the three women and one crying child wouldn’t have lasted a fortnight. Very quickly Cynthia and her mother found themselves living in a seedy bedsitter for which they paid £5 a week. It never dawned on her that John was earning hundreds of thousands of pounds at the time and could have afforded better accommodations for his wife and child. Cynthia never thought of asking him for more money—and he never offered any.

One of the few times Cynthia saw John that spring was at Paul McCartney’s twenty-first birthday party. Paul’s family house on Forthlin Road also had recently been put under surveillance by Beatles fans, and in order to avoid them the party was being held at Paul’s Auntie Gin’s house across the Mersey in Birkenhead. More than just a birthday celebration for Paul, the afternoon garden affair had turned into a wild celebration of the Beatles’ success. It was a spirited, happy occasion, where old friends were reunited, and all the NEMS groups entertained for each other. Cynthia was ecstatic at being brought as John’s date and was having the best time she had in months. As the hours passed, the guests got drunker and the celebrating more frenzied and rowdy. Suddenly, at the other end of the garden from where Cynthia was sitting, there was a great commotion. John, in a mad rage and obviously very drunk, was pummeling Bob Wooler, the Cavern disc jockey who had been so instrumental in the Beatles’ earlier bookings. It took three men to pull John off, but not before he managed to break three of Wooler’s ribs and send him to the hospital.

This fistfight brought the party to a sudden halt. Cynthia, trembling and on the brink of tears, approached John timidly; if he was in a bad mood, she knew he would consider her a handy punching bag.

“I broke his bloody ribs for him,” John told her, wiping his lips with the back of his hand.

“What did he do?” Cynthia asked.

“He called me bloody queer,” John said. “He said that Brian and I were queer.”

Bob Wooler sued John Lennon for damages, and the incident threatened to mushroom into an impending scandal. Brian was very anxious not to publicize his vacation to Spain with John or John’s fistfight at Paul’s party. He had Rex Makin settle the suit quietly out of court for £200, quite a generous sum of money in Liverpool in those days. It was not the end of the conjecture about Brian and John, either, and Cynthia, in her £5 bedsitter, sat and wondered herself.

While John Lennon’s marriage
had no romance, Paul McCartney’s life was filled with it. Since Paul had become famous in Liverpool, he had been having a romance a night. Generally acclaimed to be the “cutest” member of the group, he also was the most available. His already healthy ego exploded as though it had been detonated by twenty tons of TNT. Of the four Beatles it was Paul who never tired of having his photo taken, and Paul who volunteered to do interviews. It was Paul who wooed the girls with sly smiles and encouraged them to run after his car, shouting at them from the rear window, “Run, girls, run!” It was Paul who devised various disguises of hats and fake moustaches and took them on tour with him so he could wander about the crowds of girls waiting outside the stage entrances and eavesdrop on what they were saying about him.

After having dumped his childhood sweetheart, Dot Rohne, Paul took up with Rory Storm’s sister, Iris Caldwell, for a short time. Like Rory, she was tall and blond and effervescent, but the relationship soon palled with the availability of so many dollie birds after Paul’s tail.
⁴
Paul indulged himself like a starving man at a feast yet somehow never managed to fulfill his appetite. Such were the spoils of fame. Yet for Paul, no matter how many girls he duly dated and bedded, there seemed to be something missing in each of them. They were not “nice” girls, not the kind of girl he could take home to his mother, Mary, if she were alive. For although every northern man likes whores, in the center of his predominantly Irish-Catholic, middle-class heart, what he wants most is a nice girl to settle down with and raise his children.

On May 9, 1963, shortly after Paul returned from his vacation in the Canary Islands with George and Ringo, he met such a girl. She was only seventeen years old, as pure as she was beautiful. Her name was Jane Asher, and she was a titian-haired, green-eyed gem. Already an accomplished actress, she had made her film debut at the age of five as a deaf mute in
Mandy.
After numerous stage roles in the West End, she became the youngest actress to play the part of Wendy in
Peter Pan
on the English stage and subsequently starred as the ingenue in the Walt Disney film production of
The Prince and the Pauper.
At the time Paul met her at a concert of pop groups at the Royal Albert Hall, she was a frequent panelist on the TV show “Juke Box Jury,” and Paul had seen her several times. She was at the concert as the celebrity teen reporter for the BBC radio program “Radio Times,” and they were introduced in between acts when the Beatles were asked to pose for a photograph with her.

Later, after the show, she joined the group at the Royal Court Hotel on Sloane Square for sandwiches and coffee. After, they went to the flat of a
New Musical Express
journalist off the Kings Road. Although they all fancied Jane more or less, and George Harrison monopolized most of the conversation, it was moon-eyed Paul at whom she smiled the most. When it became obvious later in the evening that Paul was swooning over her, the others left on the pretext of getting dinner to give Paul some time alone with her. Much to their surprise, when they returned to the flat two hours later, Paul and Jane were still sitting in the same place, engrossed in a conversation about, of all things, favorite foods. Paul had never made a move toward her.

It would be accurate to say that Paul fell in love with the whole idea of Jane Asher as much as the girl herself. She was a girl of breeding and innocence, a girl heretofore unavailable to a Liverpool lad the likes of Paul McCartney. She was, first of all, a bona fide virgin. Born on April 5, 1946, she still lived with her family in a grand, five-story town house on Wimpole Street in London. Her father was Dr. Richard Asher, a respected psychiatrist and consultant in blood and mental diseases at the Central Middlesex Hospital. Her mother, Margaret, was a professional musician and a one-time professor of music at the London School of Music, where, coincidentally, she taught oboe to George Martin. Jane’s younger brother Peter was a Cambridge graduate and a promising musician and songwriter. He would shortly form a singing duo, Peter and Gordon, and with a McCartney composition called “World Without Love,” he would hit the top of the record charts alongside the Beatles. Jane also had a younger sister, Clare, as pretty as she.

From the start, there was no doubt in Paul’s mind that this was the perfect tableau into which he wanted to step. The Ashers as a clan were unlike any family he had ever met in Liverpool. Paul was invited to join in frank, often exciting family discussions around the dinner table, and it wasn’t uncommon to spend an evening at home with them just talking. Dr. Asher, Paul found to his delight, was a brilliant storyteller, and Paul looked forward to spending time with him. A bit intimidated by this group at first, Paul started to read for knowledge for the first time in his life. Jane supplied direction with books and tickets to the ballet and theater. He soaked it up like a sponge, gratefully, happily, settling into this new life with Jane. “I don’t want to sound like Jonathan Miller going on,” he told the
Evening Standard
in an interview, “but I’m trying to crowd everything in. I vaguely mind anyone knowing anything I don’t know. I’m trying to cram everything in, all the things that I’ve missed. People are saying things and painting things and writing things and composing things that are great, and I want to know …” He took to quoting poetry in conversation, often incorrectly, but no one bothered to correct him. They could see he was a young man in love.

Eventually Paul and Jane’s romance was discovered by the press when a photographer took a photo of them as they left the Prince of Wales Theater after seeing Neil Simon’s
Never Too Late.
The question that followed them around for the next five years was, “Will they get married?” It was asked almost everywhere they went. “Just say I smiled when you asked me that,” Paul told a reporter enigmatically. Years later Paul himself couldn’t quite believe that he had courted her for such a long time without bedding her, but he did. At the end of each evening he either went back to a hotel room or caught the last flight out of Heathrow for Liverpool. One night, when he missed his flight, Mrs. Asher graciously offered the guest room to Paul, just a flight of stairs away from where Jane slept. It was, after all, foolish of him to rent hotel rooms in London all the time. Paul moved in with his clothing and guitar and stayed for two years, with all the blessings the household offered.

 

 

Love also found Ringo Starr. Ringo was the most bewildered of all with the Beatles’ sudden success. Although outgoing, he was shy and suspicious of strangers. He never considered himself especially attractive and now fast city women were throwing themselves at his feet. Although he loved women as well as the next northern man, he didn’t feel comfortable on the nightly round of conquests, pulling a bird at a nightclub. Most of his free time was still spent in Liverpool, where he stayed at his mother’s little house in the Dingle. For a long time, while he was in the Rory Storm group, he had gone out with a girl named Geraldine. He had even asked her to marry him and gave her an engagement ring, but she returned it after the engagement was broken off, and Elsie Greaves still has the ring to this day. While he was dating Geraldine he had noticed a small, chirpy girl named Maureen Cox, who went out with Rory Storm’s guitarist Johnny “Guitar.” But Maureen was somebody else’s girl at the time, and he didn’t even speak to her until three weeks after he joined the Beatles. She was an assistant hairdresser at a second-floor beauty salon near the Cotton Exchange called Ashley Du Pre’s. He noticed her standing in a crowd of girls in front of the Cavern Club one lunchtime as he drove up in his new car, a used blue and cream Ford Zodiac, not unlike Brian Epstein’s car. Maureen remembers the moment vividly and to this day remembers the car’s license plate number, NWM 466. Ringo parked the car out front and on his way into the club he smiled shyly at her. He asked if she was coming to the show the next night, and Maureen said she was. She had big, dark, sad eyes, and she was barely sixteen years old. Ringo asked if she wanted to go out after the show, and Maureen said that would be difficult; the show didn’t end until after eleven P.M. and she had a standing rule with her parents to be on the front doorstep of their house by ten minutes to midnight.

Therefore it was arranged that their first date be in the afternoon. Ringo made plans to pick her up at the beauty parlor when her shift was over. Maureen was so nervous that morning the other girls sent her out to do some shopping to keep her mind off the forthcoming date. Ringo arrived while she was gone and self-consciously took a seat in the reception area, while the ladies waiting to get their bouffants combed cooed and giggled over him. When Maureen returned to Ashley Du Pre’s and began to climb the flight of steps up to the second floor, she immediately spotted Ringo’s black, ankle-high boots through the glass door to the salon. “Oh, my God,” she whispered to herself as she went up the steps, “this is really going to happen …”

The first date went extremely well. The two discovered they were a perfect match for each other. He was simple and uneducated, she was a sweet, giggly thing with not much to say, as mousey as he was homely. She had been educated for the previous five years at a convent school, which she left to become a manicurist’s assistant. She had been a fan of the Beatles even from her Rory Storm days, and just looking into Ringo’s eyes gave her palpitations. That first date they kept busy; they went to the park, then to hear singer Frank Ifield, then to the cinema for a double feature, then to the Pink Parrot, a popular bar, for drinks, and finally to Allan Williams’ Blue Angel club for a last dance. Exhausted from the full day of activity, Ringo returned Maureen to her parents’ house at exactly ten minutes to midnight. She saw him exclusively after that, and at least to Maureen’s knowledge he saw no other girl. The affair, she had to admit, had its drawbacks. Ringo was often out of town, and when he was in Liverpool the Beatles show didn’t end until very late. For the first six months of their relationship they never spent more than an hour together at night.

The other girls in the Beatles’ loyal coterie of fans at the Cavern saw Maureen as an interloper, but she was tenacious and cunning as far as her “Ritchie” was concerned. As for the relationship progressing past the dating stage into something more serious, Maureen didn’t even entertain such notions. Marrying a Beatle was a Liverpool taboo. Part of their attraction was their availability. Still, she had hope; perhaps one day when she was seventeen or eighteen things would change. Once, when she heard a rumor that John Lennon was secretly married, she asked Ringo about it. “If he is,” Ringo said, “we don’t want to talk about it.”