Heart to Heart
By Alan Freeman
Rave Monthly
September 1964
Loyalty. It's a word you don't hear too much of in show business, and when you do, nine times out of 10, it's used by some star who has come up the hard way.
Loyalty isn't just about remembering to send a birthday card or a good-luck telegram the night the show opens. It's something a lot deeper than that. Pop-pickers, loyalty is the bond that welds the lives of people together in such a way that if one of them goes, it's unthinkable for anyone to try to take its place.
Remember that miserable fortnight when Ringo Starr lay ill? Well, I can tell you now that if Ringo's illness had been permanent, The Beatles would have broken up. The most phenomenal partnership in the history of stardom would have just integrated for all time. The stunning thought was no accident. It was a deliberate pact on the part of the Beatles themselves, and it has been kept secret from the whole world until Paul McCartney disclosed it to me in our latest heart-to-heart talk.
"If anything happens to one of us, we wouldn't go on," Paul told me, as he was standing beside me in the kitchen of my London flat while I fixed some scrambled eggs, Paul's favorite meal for a very late breakfast.
I nearly upset the pan as I looked at him. "It's true," Paul said. "When Ringo was ill, we didn't want to do the tour of Holland and Australia. 'It'd be a drag without him,' we thought. If it hadn't been just a temporary illness, then that would have been it; all would have been packed in.
"If one of us dropped out, the group would break up. We definitely wouldn't perform as three Beatles. I hate that idea. It'd be well -- like the son of somebody famous, trying to get by on his father's name."
I ladled out the food. "But I thought Jimmy Nickel did a good job for those 12 days," I said. "Oh, sure." Paul said, "We got along all right. Jimmy was fine, but he wasn't Ringo, and it was Ringo we missed."
We took our plates out on the roof garden, and while a couple of cockney sparrows hopped hopefully along us, Paul ate the eggs and told me the rest. Manager Brian Epstein intervened at the last moments in an effort to get John, Paul, and George to change their mind about abandoning the tour. "He argued with us for more than an hour, pleading that 1000s of Dutch and Australian fans had already bought tickets, and it would be cruel to disappoint them. It was this plea of Brian's that finally brought us around." Their loyalty to their sick mate had, for once, conflicted with their loyalty to the fans, but only for once.
I knew Paul wasn't kidding. An extraordinary pact for four stars with the world to lose. "No", said Paul. "We're dead normal, it's just that we're all mates." As often as I had met him and the other Beatles in the past, I felt humbled. This was loyalty on a grand scale. And if you didn't know Paul McCartney, you might suspect he was some weird kind of idealist. But one glance down at the famous zippered boots reassured me that both his feet were resting very firmly on the ground. And make no mistake about it, pop-pickers, that's where they're likely to stay.
The Big Time has turned many a nice kid into a big head, but I'll bet anyone my entire disc collection that it'll never happen with this Beatle, not with this very practical Paul and the world's best known group; he remained a distinct and fascinating individual with his own crisply definite attitude.
I had met the Beatles many times before, but too often, there was a rush and glare of the studio or the theater, the shouts of producers and call boys to wreck our chances of a quiet chat. Out here on the roof with London snorting and rumbling away beneath us, I had talked a few weeks before to George Harrison. From him, I had learned the uncanny details of the Beatles' astounding lives. Now the opportunity had come to hear another side of it from Paul.
The Beatles' chauffeur, Bill Corbett, had driven him over to my place for a bite and a long, quiet natter. As soon as he dropped Paul at the entrance, Bill Corbett headed back into town on an errand to pick up a couple of dozen shirts and casuals, which were being specially made up from Paul's drawings. Between them, Paul and John Lennon are the creative side of the group. And apart from songwriting, one of Paul's big interests is designing gear for himself and the others. He has been painting since he was 12. In fact, he won his school's art prize. As you'd expect from a Beatle, his preference was for action painting.
"I did some great big things," he said. "I'll get these six-foot rolls of paper and kneel down on the floor and blow the paint all over them. After an hour of that, you get all dizzy and funny, and you feel 'Yeah, man, I'm going high, baby.'"
Who'd ever imagined Paul McCartney as a school master? But he almost was. With an A-level in English and 5 O-levels, he was on the brink of going on to Teachers Training College when he made a slight mistake. "I should have been getting ready for this exam", Paul told me, "but I couldn't. I was on a tour in Scotland with Johnny Gentle. It was ridiculous."
Paul got into trouble. He was invited to pay his Headmaster an awkward visit. Instead, he vanished and wrote a letter from Hamburg saying he had resigned from school. "I said, 'Dear Sir, I've got a great job in Germany, and I'm earning 15 pounds.' We were playing for this bloke who owned a club in a broken-down old cinema. He put us in the cinema in a terrible old room right next to the toilets, where they used to keep old reels and rubbish."
One by one, the embryo Beatles were deported or otherwise returned from Germany. In the case of George Harrison, it was because he was too young. Pete Best and Paul were supposed to be looking for jobs in Liverpool, but Paul didn't look further than the piano in his parlor. He wrote his first song, "I Lost My Little Girl."
"Had you lost a girl?" I asked him. He laughed, "No, I used to just make them up. I mean, you don't have to have murder experience if you want to write a murder play. It's the same with songs. There was nothing personal about "World Without Love" either. I just imagined this fellow sitting there shouting about a world without love."
Oddly enough, Paul's imagination never extended to his own future. "I never remember wanting to be anything. I never had any ambitions like driving a train. I suppose one of the things that formed my character was never being under the thumb of authority. My mum died when I was 14, and my dad was a big influence. He was a great believer in moderation. 'Never overdo it,' he'd say. 'Have a drink, but don't be an alcoholic. Have a cigarette, but don't be a cancer case.'"
We amble inside the flat. Paul sat down and lit a filter tip. "Setting a bad example to the teenagers of England," he grinned. "There must be 50 million lads about who smoke, drink, and go out with girls. If Joe Boggs and the three of his mates went out and got stoned, all anybody would say the next morning was, 'Did you have a good time last night?' But if it came out that last night, the Beatles went crackers, drank and fell about in a club somewhere, the papers and the public would say, 'Good grief. Terrible, terrible.'
"The one thing I dislike about being popular, and I hate all the words like popular, star, famous, is that people think you're untouchable. Some blokes I know from Liverpool I used to be the best of mates with, somehow come up now and say, 'How are you? ' And seem to act very carefully, almost as if they're embarrassed."
I told him, I know the feeling from time to time. Pop-pickers, you hear people pitying The Beatles, as if they were prisoners in some kind of golden traveling jail, all herded together in chains of glory. I asked Paul how four performers could manage for so long in such close, crowded contact without getting on each other's nerves. He said, "Because we're each other's mates, and always have been. I'm not going to tell you we're Goody Goodies about these things. Occasionally, we do have arguments. It's normal.
"Maybe something goes wrong, and three of us will turn on the other, or maybe there's a mess up, and we're all turn on Mal, our road man, but it never goes on for long. Five minutes is the most. Then we're all cool off and it's fine again. I suppose we're all sensible enough to realize that.
"These little rows are sort of safety devices." But a much more important safety valve, Paul told me, is laughter. This is really the thing that prevents the Beatles' boilers from bursting when the strain gets to be too much. "It can start with anything, even with some joke that's absolutely terrible, crummy," said Paul, "like one time Ringo was trying to drink his coffee, and every time he got it near his mouth, he'd get the laughs again and spill it all over the place. Then John or somebody would say a line, and we'd get real crazy laughing. Then we mightn't laugh at a thing for hours afterwards."
I began to feel faintly guilty about asking Paul questions. Questions translated from every language under the sun have been their unending torment since the Beatles first began to knock the world on its heels. But Paul, taking it easy and lying back on the big sofa, talked on comfortably.
"There's one question I've given up thinking about," he said. "It's no good, and that is 'what's going to happen if it all finishes one day'. We're not stupid. We know it can't last forever, but it doesn't seem to be any good worrying about it these days. We just say, 'leave it till the situation comes up.' And I'll tell you this, though, Alan, the fellows, all of us, have grown up together. We all knew each other very well indeed. We've found out that being together, being thrown into strange situations together, like, say, the wicked nightlife of Hamburg, we could have all gone potty. But like I said, we're all dead, normal, we're reasonable, middling.
"We can always work it out between us, what's right and what's wrong. We used to read about groups and hear about them. You know, the' so-and-sos are splitting up, and this guitarist is being replaced by somebody else'. And 'did you know that this other group isn't really friendly and that they hate each other's guts?' We'd hear all this, and then we'd suddenly realize that we'd always been real mates, but we've always had this best friends thing, and it's been good, particularly when things have been lousy, when our nerves have been on edge, and we could have really, have got really ratty. There's always been that to keep us up.
"With John and me on a song, if I come up with some lines which I know aren't really good, and I'm just hoping to fool him, I know I won't. 'I Saw Her Standing There' was the best example of it. I thought of the idea driving home from a concert in Southport, I think. I had, 'She was just 17, and then a beauty queen.' I knew this was rubbish, that I'd put it down just because it rhymed. When I showed it to John, he screamed with laughter, and he said, 'You're joking about that line, aren't you?' And I realized that, in fact, I was, and so we changed it.
"So you see, this business of knowing each other works with things like that. We find out each other's faults, and it's easy for us to discuss work songs policy. That's why I'm sure that if anything happens to one of us, we wouldn't go on."
But pop-pickers, I have a feeling that that day is a long way off. 20 years ago, people were saying, "Well, we shan't hear any more of Frank Sinatra", but we still do, and Sophie Tucker, at 76, we still hear from her.
Paul nodded. "That's it. We just don't know. The only future plans I have are to leave and see." I asked Paul whether, while filming A Hard Day's Night, they were asked to perform any differently from their usual public shows. "The worst thing about the film", he said, "was that all of us felt we could have been better. We were put into a picture, and we weren't actors, and we had to try and do it. It was a completely new medium for us. We had lines to say. Whereas we never done anything with a script. Nobody has ever written jokes for us to put in an act, even at the Palladium; John and I would make up any stuff we needed. But in the film, all we could get in was a few ad-libs.
"I hope the next film will be a bit better. We're supposed to do something early next year." There was a knock at my door. Paul sat up and grinned a welcome to Bill, the chauffeur, as he came in, carrying a pile of boxes. "I got the shirts, Paul", he said. "Let's see them!" Paul said, eagerly, tearing off the string, as if he was opening a birthday present. He took out one shirt after another. All very sharp, a white one with a black velvet collar, a few in deep reds and blues with the latest big buttons. Three open-weave, casual, tailored in sackcloth and silk.
"Want to try one on?" Paul said. In five minutes, the flat was like Carnaby Street on a Saturday morning as we tried on Paul's designs. Listen, a certain Brian Epstein knows a little about clothes. If anything ever splits the Beatles, he and Paul would make a number one living in the rag trade. Paul's a keen eye for price, too. What he paid to have that gear made up would make some big clothing names blink. It was less than half what you'd expect to shell out at a good shop
. Paul winked. "I get two Hungarians down the West End to make all my stuff. A little upstairs place only a few of us know it. "And me!" said big Bill, grinning back. He looked at his watch. "Paul..."
"I know," said, Paul, changing back into street clothes. "Sorry, Alan, it's been great. Thanks for the eggs."
I went downstairs with them and watched the big car purr out of the forecourt where it was taking Paul McCartney, I don't know, but for certain, it was leaving one by the name of Freeman, who realizes, as he goes on, that there are some really tremendous individuals in the world today, and if only one has the luck to meet them,
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