Fab

by Howard Sounes

  These were mostly problems for the future, however. Four days after the London première of A Hard Day’s Night, Paul and his fellow Beatles returned home for the northern première of their picture at the Liverpool Odeon. There was a holiday feeling on Merseyside on Friday 10 July as the Beatles’ British Eagle Airways plane touched down at Liverpool Airport, where 1,500 people had gathered to greet them. The boys were driven in triumph into Liverpool City Centre, via Speke, where Paul had lived, his old neighbours standing at the kerb waving. ‘Me mum, me dad, me auntie, me uncle, all the family, everybody was there,’ recalls resident Frank Foy, who had typically been given the day off school for the occasion. Like many children, Frank wore a plastic Beatles wig, which became uncomfortably hot in the sunshine. The Beatles entered the Town Hall on Dale Street to a fanfare of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, played by the Liverpool Police Band. Ringo danced up the stairs in joy. They stepped out onto the balcony to a rapturous reception from 20,000 of their people. There had been many high points recently - number one records, playing for the Queen Mother, the Ed Sullivan Show, mobbed in London, Amsterdam, New York and Melbourne - but this was home. The boys beamed with pride.

  Yet down among the crowd, trampled underfoot in Dale Street and blowing down the back alleys, were pieces of paper that threatened to blacken the name of James Paul McCartney. Just months after a Mail reporter confronted Paul with the story of a German barmaid who claimed to have borne his child, a Liverpool man had papered Liverpool with fliers claiming Paul had got his ‘niece’ pregnant. The girl in question was a typist named Anita Cochrane, who claims she met Paul just prior to her 16th birthday in 1961, going to see the Beatles play the Tower Ballroom on Friday 1 December that year.

  ‘It was my sixteenth birthday that day,’ Anita told the Daily Mail in 1997. (In fact, her 16th birthday was the next day, one of two factual inconsistencies in her story.) Anita claims she and Paul went to bed that night, and that she slept with him twice more over the ensuing 16 months. ‘We used to go back to John Lennon’s flat in Gambier Terrace …’ she told the Mail. (Here is the second problem with Anita’s story: John didn’t live at Gambier Terrace at this stage.) When Anita found herself pregnant, in the summer of 1963, she decided that Paul had to be the father and told her family as much. ‘When my mum and grandmother found out I was pregnant, I thought I’d write to Paul and tell him what had happened. I was that sure the baby was his.’ When Anita didn’t receive a reply, her mother Violet went to see Jim McCartney, who said his Paul didn’t know her Anita. On 10 February 1964, Anita gave birth at Billinge Hospital, Merseyside, to a boy named Philip Paul. No father’s name was entered on the birth certificate. Anita’s family then took her to a lawyer, who contacted NEMS.

  In truth neither Paul nor Brian Epstein had the slightest idea whether this typist, or the German barmaid, had a genuine claim. The boys had been such libertines, especially in Hamburg, that it wouldn’t have been surprising if they had fathered some illegitimate children. While Paul did not, and never would, accept the paternity claims of the barmaid or the typist, the decision was made to pay off any such claimants for the sake of expediency. ‘Brian Epstein, on behalf of the Beatles, took the stance that, unless they were talking vast sums, it was better to buy off people who were threatening to expose small things about the Beatles, and that included paternity [claims],’ explains Tony Barrow.

  I think Brian was particularly sensitive about sex, because of his own sexuality, and at all costs wanted to avoid intrusion upon his own private life, because what he was at the time was not just gay, but doing illegal things.13 And I think he realised that anything about him would brush off on the boys … The policy was pay ’em off, get rid of them, move on.

  Anita Cochrane claims to have been offered two pounds ten shillings ($3.82) a week by NEMS: ‘The solicitor put in a request for more money and we got this offer of a one-off payment of £5,000 ($7,650). That was more than a house in those days.’ An agreement was drawn up, dated 23 April 1964, on the basis that Anita wouldn’t go public. But her ‘uncle’ (actually her mother’s boyfriend) took issue with what had happened and distributed leaflets around Liverpool describing Paul as a ‘cad’. Epstein heard about this the morning of the Liverpool première. Leaflets had been left at the Press Club in Bold Street. ‘They were [also] given out in Castle Street, round the Town Hall, saying Paul give a girl a baby in Waterloo, and I think it named her,’ recalls Anita’s brother, Ian, who believed the story. A poem parodying ‘All My Loving’ was sent to newspapers:My name is Philip Paul Cochrane, I’m just a little boy …

  In spite of all her lovin’ we got no thanks from him,

  It seems he loved my mother, just long enough to sin …

  Brian Epstein asked Derek Taylor to break the news to Paul. ‘He shrugged with astonishing nonchalance, said “OK” and that was that,’ Taylor later wrote. The trip to Liverpool went ahead and the press - in love with the Beatles, and wary of unsubstantiated, defamatory allegations - didn’t touch the story, while Anita’s ‘uncle’ was warned by the police he could face charges if he wasn’t careful. Like the German claim, however, this tale had a long way to run.

  NORTH COUNTRY BOYS

  Paul returned to North America with the Beatles in August 1964 to give a series of concerts in the USA and Canada, starting at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, an indoor livestock pavilion. Something strange had happened in America since their first visit. The Beatles were now not only screamed at by their fans, but a focus for nutcases and extremists. ‘Beatle worship is idolatry,’ read a placard wielded by a picket of the ultra-religious at the San Francisco show. The boys moved on to play under equally trying circumstances in Las Vegas and Vancouver, where Republican Canadians, who wanted to sever the nation’s constitutional links with Britain, protested against the Beatles as emissaries of the Queen. Even more alarmingly, Ringo received death threats in Quebec from anti-Semites who mistook him for a Jew. For their concerts at the Montral Forum, Ritchie had a bodyguard sitting beside him on stage. What with the screaming fans, the inadequate sound systems, and now the fear that there might even be assassins in the audience, the Beatles’ brief set got shorter by the night. They rushed through their shows, wanting them over with as soon as possible.

  It was the sound quality that bothered George Martin most when he came out to record the boys playing the Hollywood Bowl on 23 August for a live LP. The producer found the challenge of getting a decent recording insuperable. ‘It was like putting a microphone at the end of a 747 jet - just a continual screaming sound.’14 The following afternoon the boss of Capitol Records, Alan Livingston, completely uninterested in the Beatles just recently, hosted a garden party in their honour at his Beverly Hills home. Wherever the band went these days, hotel managers, record executives and mayors wanted to meet them and introduce their family members, especially their children, and Livingston was no different. He sat the lads under a tree in his garden so friends and associates could parade their daughters down the line, each Beatle expected to say a word to the girls, who were too young to raise more than a polite smile from the musicians, until a rather more mature young lady thrust herself forward.

  ‘My God, you’re beautiful,’ remarked Paul, as he took her hand.

  ‘You’re not so bad yourself,’ replied Peggy Lipton.

  At 19, Peggy was an actress under contract to Universal Studios, more or less unknown, though she later achieved celebrity in the TV show Mod Squad. Like many American teens, Peggy was enamoured of the Beatles, and had papered her bedroom walls with their pictures. Unlike most of her contemporaries, Peggy also had the chutzpah and contacts to engineer a meeting with her idols, her sights set firmly on Paul, whose name she had screamed at the Las Vegas Convention Center the previous week. After the show Peggy and a girlfriend inveigled themselves into a party the boys were due to attend. ‘I affected the schoolgirl nymphomaniac look,’ Peggy recalled in her autobiography, Breathing Out. Unfortunately, the Beatles didn’t show. Alan Living
ston’s garden party was Peggy’s second attempt to meet Paul, and this time she managed to speak to him and slip her phone number to a member of his entourage. Peggy was summoned that evening to the Bel Air house where the Beatles were staying.

  I arrived almost sick to my stomach with butterflies. I had lost my virginity only six months earlier and I’d been thinking about Paul day-in, day-out for a year. He greeted me sweetly and checked me out with a quick once-over. He liked what he saw. We sat downstairs. He played the piano. The next thing I knew we were on our way upstairs [where] he took me in his arms and kissed me … I took a shower to slow things down and when I came out wrapped in a towel, he caressed me in front of the window and let the towel fall to the floor. This to me was an utterly romantic gesture. Paul was a romantic.

  Afterwards Peggy left the house feeling cheap. She returned the next day, though, clear evidence of Paul’s unfaithfulness to Jane Asher, who remained his steady girlfriend in London.

  After shows in Denver and Cincinnati the Beatles returned to New York, where they booked into the Hotel Delmonico, the manager of the Plaza being unwilling to accommodate them after the mayhem of their first visit. The Beatles were to play two shows at Forest Hills tennis stadium. The second night they met Bob Dylan.

  The meeting and subsequent relationship between the American musician and the Beatles is significant. Along with Elvis Presley, Dylan and the Beatles form the great triumvirate of rock, interconnected on different levels. Like the Beatles, Dylan was a young man in his twenties from a provincial, working-class, northern town, in his case Hibbing, Minnesota, where he was a high school rock ’n’ roller before he discovered folk music, sharing Paul’s passions for Buddy Holly, Little Richard and Elvis. Dylan’s musical path diverged when he discovered the folk troubadour Woody Guthrie and joined the New York-based folk revival whereby emphasis was put on reconnecting with the roots of American vernacular music, singing songs with a strong narrative, often a moral or otherwise instructive story, framed with poetic language. Dylan was a folk star before the Beatles found fame, his début album released on CBS when the boys were still playing Merseyside dance halls with Pete Best. By the time CBS released Dylan’s second album, the Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, Dylan and the Beatles were both stars, though of a different order. Girls screamed at the Beatles. Dylan’s audiences listened to him in respectful silence, as to a poet with important things to say. ‘He was proud of that,’ notes Bob’s journalist friend Al Aronowitz, who also knew the Beatles and helped effect their historic meeting.

  Dylan and the Beatles were also singer-songwriters, at a time when few artists wrote and performed their own material, extremely fecund writers who were rapidly creating fat song books with ample material for themselves and other artists to perform. As Brian Epstein bestowed Lennon & McCartney songs on acts he managed, Dylan’s manager Albert Grossman gave Bob’s compositions to his own stable of artists, notably ‘Blowin’ in the Wind’ to Peter, Paul and Mary, who had a big hit with it in 1963. Initially suspicious of folk music, Paul had been very impressed by The Freewheelin’; hard on the boot-heels of which came The Times They Are A-Changin’, then Another Side of Bob Dylan, albums that featured lyrics more sophisticated than anything John and Paul had so far written. At the same time the Beatles had something Dylan didn’t have, and wanted, which was chart success. For all these reasons, Bob and the Beatles were curious about one another. A summit meeting had been on the cards for some time when John Lennon asked their mutual friend Al Aronowitz to set it up.

  Bob drove down from his digs in Woodstock for the occasion, with his roadie Victor Maymudes, a tall, saturnine hipster who rarely left Dylan’s side. They picked up Aronowitz at home in New Jersey en route to the Delmonico in Manhattan, where Big Mal Evans escorted the Americans up to the Beatles’ suite. In an anteroom, a number of celebrities were waiting to be admitted to the presence, including Peter, Paul and Mary. Dylan was ushered past them, Aronowitz making the introductions, ‘a proud and happy shadchen, a Jewish matchmaker’, as he wrote. Drinks were poured. The Beatles offered Bobby and his friends pills, which they’d been guzzling since Hamburg days. Aronowitz suggested they smoke dope, he and Bob assuming - having misheard the phrase ‘I can’t hide’ in ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ as ‘I get high’ - that the Beatles were fellow pot-heads. As it turned out, the Beatles hadn’t smoked pot before - at least not good pot, as Victor Maymudes was careful to qualify: ‘They actually had smoked pot before, but they hadn’t smoked good pot. They didn’t know the power of pot.’ Dylan himself rolled the first joint, which was given to John, who handed it to Ritchie, who proceeded to smoke it like a cigarette, not passing it around. More joints were rolled so every Beatle had his own herbal ciggie, with another for their normally strait-laced manager.

  A few hours earlier Brian had ticked off Derek Taylor in his usual tight-ass way for drinking Courvoisier cognac in the hotel. ‘You’ll pay for that bottle, Derek. That is to go on your bill.’ Under the influence of dope, Brian was transformed into a totally different person, reeling around the Beatles’ suite like a happy child. He said he felt like he was on the ceiling and, pointing at his refection in a mirror, repeatedly said: ‘Jew!’ The others thought this and everything else hilarious and profound. ‘I remember [Paul] saying that he was thinking for the first time,’ said Aronowitz. ‘He told Mal Evans to follow him around and write down everything he said.’ Mal couldn’t find a piece of paper, so Paul noted down his revelations. The next day when he read his notes he saw that he’d written, ‘There are seven levels.’

  Dylan and the Beatles bonded that night, Bob later taking the boys on a tour of New York. In turn, the Beatles entertained Dylan when he came to England. Both influenced the other. Dylan began to set his poetic songs to rock ’n’ roll music, partly because of the success of the Beatles, thus ‘going electric’, which was a turning point in his career. Conversely, Dylan’s influence was heard in the Beatles’ lyrics, which became more story-based and at the same time lyrical and mysterious in Dylanesque style. Lennon and McCartney’s debt to the American was deep. ‘At the time they all loved Bob,’ noted Victor Maymudes, pointing out, however, that his boss could be a difficult guy to love: a fast-living, egocentric loner who could be cold, even cruel, to those around him. The Beatles weren’t immune from Dylan’s sharp tongue. ‘Bob was out of his mind in those years. I remember him screaming at Paul: “No one writes like me!”’ There was an elemental truth to this. Try though he might, Paul would never equal Dylan’s consistent ability to write lyrics that are poetic and seem to contain original insight into what it is to be a human being. Dylan at his best is profound. McCartney at his best is a brilliant tunesmith. In time he also became a great showman. But he is a mediocre lyricist for the most part, which makes him seem less important.

  Still, that first night together in New York had been an uproarious, hilarious evening, a truly historic meeting: the night Dylan and his friends turned the Beatles on to pot. They were all pot-heads forthwith, Paul becoming a habitual grass smoker, which would get him into a lot of trouble.

  7

  YESTERDAY

  HOME SWEET HOME

  When Paul and the boys returned to England after their 1964 North American tour John went back to his new home, Kenwood, a 27-room mansion on the St George’s Hill estate at Weybridge in Surrey, a private gated community built around a golf course. Ritchie and George, who weren’t earning as much from publishing (Starr hadn’t yet written any songs), remained for the time being in London, sharing a new flat in Knightsbridge, though they too would soon buy country homes. Although a fortune was piling up in his account at Coutts, the private bank patronised by the Royal Family, Paul felt no urgent need to splurge on a country mansion like John, who had a wife and child to look after, and when he did buy property McCartney always occupied less ostentatious houses.

  At this stage, London life was the thing, and when Paul wasn’t on the road it gave him a cosy feeling to be part of the Asher family
at Wimpole Street. Jane’s brother Peter was an increasingly good friend. Peter and Gordon Waller were enjoying a surprisingly successful pop career on the strength of songs given to them by Paul, including a pot-boiler entitled ‘A World Without Love’. It wasn’t deemed good enough for the Beatles, and had even been rejected by Billy J. Kramer, but Jane’s brother took it to number one in Britain and the USA in the autumn of 1963, the first of three hits Peter and Gordon scored with Paul’s cast-offs.

  When he did decide to buy property, Paul looked first for a house for Dad. The Beatles’ original home addresses were all well known to fans, and Jim McCartney had become used to girls knocking on his door asking to see inside 20 Forthlin Road. ‘I’d usually ask the ones who’d come a long way if they’d like some tea,’ Jim would say. ‘When they said yes, I’d say there’s the kitchen. They’d go in and start screaming and shouting because they’d recognise the kitchen from photographs.’ Patient though he was, Jim had just about had enough of this carry-on and, at 62, he was ready to stop work. So Paul put Dad on the ‘McCartney Pension’, retiring the very first McCartney Pensioner to a detached house on the Wirral.

  For working-class Liverpudlians like the McCartneys, the Wirral peninsula represented a better, gentler way of life where professional people lived in larger, often detached homes in a semi-rural setting. For £8,750 ($13,387), Paul bought such a home for Dad, a five-bedroom property named Rembrandt in the village of Gayton. The house was mock-Tudor in style, with views across the River Dee to Wales. It would primarily be a home for Jim and Mike McCartney, but also a Merseyside base for Paul when he was up north, and indeed it is a house he still uses. ‘He says it’s his best house, best memories,’ a member of McCartney’s domestic staff confides, pointing out what a big social shift it was for the family to move across from Liverpool in 1964. ‘It was like coming abroad, he said, when they moved over here.’