By Celia Brayfield
British Cosmopolitan
January 1973
They were late.
The scene was Paul's press agent's house. The cast-- the usual bunch of hangers out; three thinly disguised groupies, a press agent, and me. Correction: four thinly disguised groupies and the press agent. In the kitchen, a heap of freshly squeezed orange halves bled onto the worktop, their juice chilled in the fridge. Upstairs, the bedroom had been tidied, decorated with fresh flowers, a bowl of fruit, new posters. A virgin bottle of scotch, and stood to hand -- normal courtesies and normal life, but in the world of pop music, about equivalent to Mary Magdalene's precious pot of ointment.
They were still late.
Gloom descended when the only Beatle record in the house turned out to be a John Lennon. Every time the phone rang, it galvanized the room like an electric shock. By way of conversation, I mentioned that I'd never actually met a Beatle before, as previous interviews had always miscarried when the hallowed one failed to show up. Tact has never been one of my outstanding qualities. I had butterflies in my stomach-- ironed ones with ski boots on.
Every time a car passed in the mews outside, our collective gaze whipped toward the front door, whipped away as we remembered to be cool, roamed the room in feigned indifference.
A taxi was ticking over outside, someone paid the driver, it drove off. A sharp rap of knuckles on the kitchen window jolted us out of our seat. I leapt forward like a puppet yanked on a string, recollected my cool, carefully, adopted a natural pose, as if I didn't know who was outside the door -- and there they were, two small, slim people holding hands in the doorway, furiously cracking jokes because they were as nervous as we were.
But what do you say to a Beatle? In some ways, I'd known this man intimately all my adult life. I spent every penny I had on hearing his voice, plastered my bedroom and my school desk with his photograph, hitchhiked 300 miles in a snowstorm just to see him, read every printed word ever written about him. He'd made me cry, laugh, leave my parents' home, grow up. He'd been there when I first fell in love, first went to a dance, first broke my heart, first earned a paypacket. I knew the way his left eyelid drooped, the way his hair grew, the sort of jokes he was making. But of course, as a person, I didn't know him at all. It was as if the Mona Lisa had stepped out of her frame and was shaking hands and apologizing for her Italian accent.
Of course, we got over it. Upstairs in the immaculate interview room, he clowned around with my tape recorder and admired my spotted platform shoes. I admired his studded blue jean jacket with "Wild Tiger" written on the back, and Linda poured out the orange juice, and it was all right. He seemed like a nice guy really-- a bit of a raving egotist, but aren't we all? The trouble isn't talking to him, it's getting him to stop talking to you, and answering Linda's questions for her. She managed to slip in the odd couple of sentences in her low, dry voice, but a lot of the time, obviously used to being overpowered in public, she just narrowed up her eyes and patiently gazed into the middle distance.
She's no raving beauty, this renegade society chick who finally pinned down the last bachelor Beatle and completed the fission that Yoko Ono had begun. Before her Paul had been a lost child, the friends of his prolonged adolescence drifting away, the magic bubble of the Beatles finally bursting around him. The enormous pressure of his situation -- almost unique, only three other men in the world could share the experience-- would have crushed a weaker personality, but Paul, with Linda, pulled through, pulled himself together, calmed down, and metamorphosed from a flower child to a family man.
They met in a London club of dazzling corniness called the Bag o' Nails.
Paul: "Yeah, we met down at the Bag, luv. Met down at the Bag when Georgie Fame was playing one night, and I went down with a guy who used to work for us, and Linda was over on an assignment. I spotted her..."
Linda: "... and he's been regretting it ever since..."
Paul: "...and I just thought, 'Great chick'."
Linda: "... cool blonde chick..."
Paul: "...yeah, I just likeD the look of her, you know. That's how it always is, isn't it, when you meet, you just like the look of them, really. And we just got on very well. Then we, like, didn't see each other for a while. Then the next time we met, we got on well again, kind of thing. And we just took it from there. We met at the Bag first, then we met in New York, then we met in Los Angeles. (Oh yes, we're real jet setters) You know, then we met in London, then we stayed together. But I just thought she looked good. What were you wearing? I can't remember. Was it that yellow blouse?..."
Linda: "A black and white striped blouse."
Paul: "There, you see. I can't even remember. "
They're coming up for their fourth wedding anniversary this spring, and New Year's Eve is another anniversary for them. 31 December 1970 was the date Paul started legal proceedings to finally break up the Beatles. The time Paul and Linda met was crucial for him. Immediately after John had first said, "I want a divorce", and they had all had to face the possibility of a split seriously for the first time. For Paul, it wasn't just a professional end of the road and a personal breakup with good, old friends --it was something of a failure too, because since the death of their manager, Brian Epstein, Paul had taken charge of the group, a responsibility that he just wasn't ready for.
"We've all of us grown up in a way that hasn't turned into a manly way -- it's a childish way," he explained, "that's why we made mistakes."
The financial chaos reigning in the Apple organization has come to light, as had the contractual straitjacket the Fab Four had innocently signed themselves into after Epstein's death in 1967. "The Beatle way of life was like a young kid entering the big world, entering with friends and conquering it totally. And that was fantastic. An incredible experience. So when the idea came that we should break up, I don't think any of us wanted to accept it. It was the end of the legend, even in our own minds. Marilyn Monroe gets to believe, eventually that she's Marilyn Monroe. And you can't be as tied together as we were for so long a period of time, unless you all live in the same house. From then onward, it was to be a question of living your own life, which was the first real turn on for me in a long time and this coincided with my meeting Linda. So early in 1970, I phoned John, and I told him I was leaving the Beatles, too. He said, 'Good! That makes two of us who have accepted it mentally.'"
Soon after this, the management of the Beatles became the prize in a straight fight between Allen Klein and John Eastman, Linda's lawyer brother. John Eastman offended the other three, notably John Lennon, by being patronizing, and that was that. Because the Beatles were still bonded together in law, the only way Paul could break himself off from the others legally was by suing them. So he did. And when it was all over, Paul and Linda took themselves away to their farm in Scotland to grow vegetables and ride horses and make babies and live for the first time in years as far as Paul was concerned, like human beings.
They are absolutely a couple, though Paul is definitely a good, old-fashioned, dominant male. No old lady of his would be announcing that women was the nigger word of the world. The "we" he used to use to start a sentence when he was the "ambassador of the Beatles", he still uses, but now meaning him and his family. Paul and Linda, seem to have completely absorbed each other's backgrounds and interests, quite a feat considering the cultural gap between Linda's wealthy New York relations and Paul's rambling, rowdy Liverpool clan.
Linda wasn't wearing a wedding ring where wedding rings usually get worn. Instead, she was wearing the present Paul had given her for her last, 30th, birthday (she's one year older than he is) -- a huge heart-shaped emerald and an antique ribbon and bow setting, studded with sizable diamonds. With little tokens of affection like that around simple gold bands are understandably rather unnecessary. Linda is getting to like jewelry, especially diamonds.
"I love emeralds, I must say, but I never used to have a favorite stone before. I thought it's ridiculous, all the fuss about diamonds. But they're beautiful, lovely --I can see now why diamonds are a girl's best friend. We're not into the big ones, though. We're not Dick and Liz.
Paul: "Just give me 20 years, love. I think they're great, Dick and Liz..."
Linda: "We'd like them to invite us to Switzerland."
Paul: "Yeah, put that in. We'd like an invite."
Linda doesn't look the diamond type at all. She was wearing a pastel sweater pulled down over a shapeless flowered skirt and sagging suede boots over bare, unshaven legs. The part of America she talked most fondly of was Arizona, and she looks like a real child of the desert -- spare, bony face, sandy blonde hair, thick blonde eyebrows, which she doesn't pluck, and long blonde eyelashes without mascara, eyes the color of faded Levi's. She has a cowboy's laconic line in small talk too-- I asked her about her first marriage, and she thought for a moment, narrowing eyes fixed on an invisible horizon, then replied simply, "It was boring."
Poetic vows of undying devotion aren't their style either. "I've got a great wife," said Paul, "I love her today more than the day I married her." They admitted they rowed occasionally, but generally "we get on quite well." Liverpool humor consists mainly of really deadpan understatement, which is no help to fluid self-expression.
You can feel the good vibrations, but asking them why they love or how or for how long is like questioning the sunrise or the tides. They're silly questions as far as they're concerned. When I asked them what it was that bound them together, Linda just snapped, "I'm French and he's Norwegian", and that was the end of it. The rest of the story is on the McCartney LP, the first one they made together.
For some former Beatles fans, however, the McCartneys are carrying togetherness too far. Last year, Paul went as far back to his personal square one as it was possible for him to go. He got together a new group, Wings, from scratch, and went out on a concert tour in Europe. It's not difficult to see why he took this step. As a musician and composer, he has always been drawn to simple, melodic songs ("Yesterday,"" Michelle") and to the raw rockers of his musical roots. He responds to simple music, human interchanges, gut reactions. He's anti-intellectual and for him, music is fun, not orgasmic, mental mathematics. He dies the human side, which you don't see much of if you're eternally cloistered in recording studios in the small hours of the morning.
"I think you can get into music very critically, very analytically and stuff," he said, "but it really all just comes down to if it feels right. You can have the worst piece of music ever, but it gets you on your feet, it sounds nice. I like that. Music to get drunk to. I'd rather have that side of it, where everyone just sings some really dumb, simple song but enjoys themselves doing it, rather than working for five weeks on a brilliant masterpiece and then never enjoying it.
"I think that's in the recent past, I thought it was uncool to write something a bit slushy, a bit straightforward, but I don't really bother with that now -- I like writing just kind of songy songs that the milkman can whistle. I just like to hear my music around, like, if you're going down the road to hear it come out of a boutique or something.
"And anyway, I'm just a bass player/ singer/ songwriter, and apart from a band, the only other way I could do what I do successfully that I could see, would be a kind of Andy Williams type of thing, which wouldn't really be it, would it?"
So Wings was fairly predictable, if for some people, retrograde step. What was not so predictable was that Linda, who had never played a musical instrument before she met Paul for the unfortunately very obvious reason that she just isn't very gifted that way, sings and plays piano in the band, a fact which immediately put their audience's hackles up and led a few unkind souls to suggest the whole thing was some bizarre kind of tax evasion. I asked Paul how he came to include Linda in the lineup.
"I don't know," he kidded, "I must have been crazy." "It was a crazy idea," put in Linda seriously, "especially when I never played music before. I'm learning now, it's not hard. I get better every day. I can really play piano now. No, I don't practice. I just fool around. I could do a whole thing where I took lessons every day..." but she doesn't. Paul explained further:
"We're not really too serious about the actual playing, because music, I think, only has to have feel. I think it came through the records, really. After I did the Beatles, I did a couple of records on my own, and just needed a couple of harmonies, and Linda knew the harmonies, so she sang them with me. She's also not as dumb as we're making her out to be, you know, she can sing. But actually, one day, I just said to her, 'I'm going to teach you how to write if I have to strap you to the piano bench', because I like to collaborate on songs. If I have to go into another room and write, it's like doing homework. If I can have Linda working with me, then it becomes a game. It's fun. "
Wings is, in many ways, a rather strangely put-together group. Most bands tend to come into being by a process of spontaneous combustion -a group of musicians get on together, like each other's stuff, have nothing else on at the time, and that's that. But the Beatles were in a class of their own, cut off by their success from the mainstream of musical life. Paul, like The Rolling Stones when they had to find Mick Taylor after Brian Jones's death, was in the incongruous position of not quite knowing who to ask to play with him. So Paul drew his musicians from all over, even auditioning (not a very cool procedure) for the drummer. He had ended up with a crew of strangers. And so he needs Linda there, a familiar face, a source of unquestioning loyalty, a friend.
"I'm just not one of those people that goes on stage on his own. I always drag someone with me. I find it easier to do things with people. The first stage performance I ever made was at a holiday camp where I was called out of the audience by my uncle, who was running the talent show. I was 11. I just happened to have my guitar with me, but when I was called out of the audience, I immediately collared my brother and took him with me. He didn't do anything. He just stood there and I sang "Long
Tall Sally." And ever since that time, I've never gone on stage alone. Now I get that support from Linda."
The testing time for Wings is undoubtedly a strain for Paul, as if he didn't have enough strains already, but they don't see it breaking their marriage up. Far from it.
"Linda and I, as a married couple, have really become closer because of all these problems. Let's not talk about pressures. We always say we've got pressures, and I feel like some old gaffer from 1930 or something. We've had all the pressure of the Beatles breakup, and the fact that everyone feels that everything we've done on our own isn't as good as the four together. But what we're doing now is putting all that behind us, although the contracts and the business thing still rumbles on. It's all in some kind of incredible mess with Allen Klein actually in control of the Beatles' wealth, such as it is, because most of it's been whittled down to absolutely nothing by various people in the past. But we're just pushing it to one side now and getting on with our work."
Paul probably doesn't realize it, or won't admit it to himself that Linda is a great source of strength to him, but he will admit that one of the first things that attracted him to her was something he had always honed in on-- class. 'Class,' whispered their friends, was what Paul had always gone for in Jane Asher, the beautiful red-haired actress who was his constant companion in London through all the years of the Beatles' zenith. Jane came from a fairly well off and distinguished family, but rumor had it that Paul's lack of class sometimes got on her nerves --little new rich boobs, like taking her to Paris for dinner on her birthday, when it was said she would rather have had a real present. She was also too independent, too protective of her own identity, to link herself permanently with such a Hollywood sign of a personality. And she could have been smart there; she's had noticeably better parts since her romance with Paul fizzled out.
But Paul, as he freely admits, was still hung up a bit on the savior faire of the haute monde, more so after Epstein's death when he discovered how hard it was to run a business and how financially naive many of the Beatle contracts were. But if Paul dug Linda's social aura, she certainly didn't. She found the atmosphere of her family's mansion in Scarsdale (the posh New York suburb) oppressive, and was happiest chatting with the black servants in the kitchen. "Nothing was ever mentioned," she said, "sex was never talked about. You knew it went on, but no one ever told you about it." "She made up for that", put in. Paul dryly, "she does all right now." "Pop music," she went on, "was just so low. So I was always a bit of a loner. If I'd listened to my parents through my whole life, I wouldn't have done half the things I've done. I was just never into that way of life."
"I was sort of aspiring up to that sort of thing," says Paul.
"And I was trying to get away from it," said Linda.
"And you met in the middle?" I suggested.
"Well, yes," said Paul, "I suppose you could say that we met in the middle."
Linda, after her divorce, lived with her daughter Heather in New York, and made a name for herself as a photographer, working for Life, Mademoiselle, and other magazines, doing album covers and publicity shots for groups. But Scarsdale had left its mark -- you could take Amy Vanderbilt's Complete Book of Etiquette in hand and never fault her if she has been telling the Beatle wives how to manage their servants, it's because she knows. A friend of hers once said, "Paul was very infatuated with this image of a girl on a horse, a father with a huge art collection and a Park Avenue apartment."
One thing Linda certainly did have was some amazingly bitchy girl friends, and she is generally famed as having pursued Paul with single-minded groupie determination. But it seems only a little likely, even though she used to turn up at Paul's elbow at an amazing variety of places. One must remember that girls in various states of adoration and ecstasy had flung themselves at Paul every day of his life for 10 years and remember, too, that he's an old fashioned boy who likes to make the first move. If he was chased, he certainly isn't aware of it to this day.
So now they're just a little old married couple, but still with their newlywed passion. They have three daughters: Heather, who is 10, Linda's daughter from her first marriage, Mary, age three, and Stella, the baby. When they're working, they live in London behind the high, blank walls of Paul's big house in St John's Wood. Heather goes to the school nearby and the two little ones go around with their parents. The baby lying on a blanket on recording studio floors, if necessary. They go out round the discotheques, Linda wears her jewelry, they see their friends, John and Yoko, if they're in town, old mates from the Apple days. They visit Paul's family in Liverpool, or Linda's relatives stop by to see her in London.
In the school holidays, though, they put the children and the baby gear in the back of the Land Rover and head north to their farm in Scotland, "the only place we can be natural in an unnatural world." The farm is a two-room, tin-roofed crofter's cottage in Inverness-shire, right up in the highlands near Campbelltown and although it's tiny, it's also impregnable. Their 60 acres are sandwiched between mountains and marshland, with the only approaches on rough cart tracks past two farms with watchdogs. The local people protect them fiercely. The only reporter who ever got through was an intrepid young lady from Life who scrambled through the bogs one Sunday morning to ask for a quote on the rumor current in America that Paul was dead and being impersonated by a double. He threw a bucket at her in a fury, apologized, assured her that he was alive, and drove her back to her car.
They enjoy caring for their small flock of sheep, herding them like cowboys on their horses (Linda taught Paul to ride). "Up in Scotland, it's kind of very real life," said Paul, "very much like reality, obviously not civilized reality, but to me, it's life and death. If you have 100 sheep, one of them is bound to die sometime, but that's the way it is. You learn it's up to each individual to look after himself. You keep getting surprises. We had a little lamb that had broken a leg, so I brought him in, put a splint on his leg, taped it up. The vet had given me some stuff, penicillin or something, and showed me how to give an injection. But the little thing just threw a terrible wobbler and got a terrible look in his eyes. And I thought, 'Jesus Christ, what's in this bloody syringe?' Because there were all the signs that it was going to die, we left it with its mother, thinking all we could do was cross fingers and hope. And when we came back in the evening, there it was jumping about, and you should see it now, a great big ram, a raver." He heaved and snorted and imitated a great big ram, then raved fondly on about the horses and how Linda's was faster than his, and he didn't like that too much.
Someone once asked him why he had taken the legal initiative, thrown the first writ, and driven the first nail in the Beatles' professional coffin. He cited personal and musical differences, and then said, "most of all, because I have a better time with my family."
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