Paul McCartney: The Polished Beatle (article from 1968)

 

Paul McCartney:  The Polished Beatle

By Ray Connolly

Ireland's Saturday Night

March 2, 1968

    He lives behind a 10-foot-high wall and gates controlled by electronic impulses from the house. There's a gas lamp with an electric bulb in the front garden. 

    "Living here is a necessity because it's handy but quiet," says Paul McCartney. but at the same time, it makes him dangerously vulnerable. The day after Brian Epstein's death, the house was besieged with onlookers. When he finally went out to ask them to go away, copies of newspapers with Epstein's picture on them were thrust into his hands. "Sign your autograph here, Paul over the picture," he was asked. And when he answers the telephone (he has two separate lines and has the numbers changed frequently)/  It can be in any one of the bewildering variety of voices until he discovers the identity of the caller. 

    McCartney is the urban Beatle, the polished one, the obvious culture chaser. ("But don't call me a cultural Pied Piper. I'm not.")

     "I've always been the spokesman for the group, to a certain extent," he says. "That's my job, chatting up the press and all that. And if the other three were to go freaky looking and wear ridiculous things, I'd be the one to stay unfreaky, just to reassure everyone."

     The house is an enormous gray cube built in 1830, a marriage of Beardsley originals, surrealist apples or fish, and videotape machines. There's a chrome Paolozzi piece called Solo, which looks like a bedhead. "I didn't use to like sculpture, but this is groovy."( It's a robot, a mantle piece, and an altar, if you like).

 Pictures of the family, of the horse he bought for his father, Drake's drum, winning at Aintree, a druid's certificate, which he found in a junk shop, and a Disc award. Most of his gold records are climbing his father's staircase like bluebirds at the family home in Cheshire. 

    Then there's his music, a celeste in the living room, various sitars and guitars, and a little studio at the top of the house, and a deck chair painted piano. 

    There's a dazzling Cape, Kennedy kitchen, a sweeping last supper dining room at the front, and a flap in the living room French windows where his cats can come in off the garden and tread muddy little mitten marks all over the milk chocolate carpets. He's fond of his cats and, while talking, lets them sit in his lap, licking his hands with that curious, rasping rhythm that cats have, and watches impressively while they claw all hell out of his green velvet Victorian three piece suite.

     The living room is big and dark and the color which is generous and diverse in the extreme, is confined mainly to the trappings and ornaments giving the impression of a color negative superimposed on a black and white picture.

     There's a gigantic Sgt. Pepper badge sellotaped to one wall, a pouffe, which looks like a psychedelic hovercraft and a lace tablecloth. Yes, a tablecloth. The slight edge of working class culture is carefully preserved.

     I told him, it was just five years since the start of Beatlemania since they had their first number one record. Please Pease Me. "Is it that long? How do you know?  That's nice." He said in his singsong, Liverpudlian  which success upgraded and made fashionable.

     "For a moment, there are lots of things that have happened which I've regretted, but nothing in the long run."  He speaks solely and with extreme care, and you get the impression that he's watching himself, guarding against the unintentional image-shattering slips of the tongue.

     "The morning after Magical Mystery Tour was shown, I regretted that we hadn't done it in a more professional way, but a week later, I realized that we'd done what was intended to do, make a practice film."

    "It was like getting a bash in the face. You know, next time. It annoys some people that we always jump in the deep end without knowing what we really want, but that's the way I like to do things."

     "There's one thing I used to regret and feel guilty about. When Ringo joined us, I used to act all the time with him because I'd been in the business a bit longer and felt superior. I was a know-it-all. I've been in the sixth form and thought I'd read a bit. You know, it began putting him off me and me off me."

     "You see, I went through a big part of my life without realizing that I had any faults. I used to think, 'How lucky I am,' and 'I can't remember anything going wrong,' although I must have done.  Then, about two years ago, I said to myself, 'Come on, Paul, you're not all that great'. 

    The conceit which that sentence seemed to imply is not, I think, intentional. Anyone who has seen any of the Beatles at any social function will understand how they might imagine that they are that great.  The screaming may have stopped, but the admiration and the obsequious grinning, ingratiating faces are always there.

    To many people outside their small circle of friends, to be recognized by a Beatle makes it good to be alive. To be spoken to by one is very heaven.

    "When we first started, we were 18 and wanted to get rich, and if there was a possibility of getting rich by singing, we were willing to forget everything. Well, let's face it, that's what Swinging London is really about.

    "But now we don't have to do things for ourselves so much anymore. Instead of trying to amass money for the sake of it, we're setting up a business concern, rather like a Western communism. A lot of people think that it is just a shop, but we want to make it a complete business organization on the lines of ICI, not just for us, but for the general good. Apple could be a social and cultural environment as well as a business environment."

     Apple is, at the moment, a group of companies concerned with shops, music, publishing, electronics, and filmmaking, headed by all four Beatles. Apple plans to make a series of films with Margot Fonteyne next year. 

    Says Paul, "We've got all the money we need. I've got the house and the cars and all the things that money can buy. So now we want to start directing this money into a business, not as a charity. No one likes charity. It makes them wince. Too sickly. We want to get something going where the underwriters will get a decent share of the profits, not two pounds a week, while we make a million. We had to do it for ourselves. When Brian died, we had to take a look at what we consisted of and who owned bits of us. 

    "And then we got the idea of not only doing it for ourselves but for everyone. Now we're really looking for someone like Brian, not in the managerial sense, but someone we could respect and be able to listen to and take advice from. We meet lots of people who are good at business, but they're not necessarily nice people. Still, every big company has the sort of person we want. The trouble is, they all have good jobs already."