Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Daddy grew rich by shrewd representation of high-earning show business clients including bandleader Tommy Dorsey, songwriters such as Harold ‘Over the Rainbow’ Arlen, as well as a who’s who of abstract expressionist painters from Willem de Kooning to Mark Rothko. The Eastmans collected museum-quality modern art, which they hung in their mansion home in Scarsdale, Westchester, within commuting distance of Manhattan, later acquiring a duplex on Park Avenue. They also owned a beach house on Lily Pond Lane, East Hampton, a favourite place for the New York rich to take summer vacations. When Linda was four, one of Daddy’s songwriter clients, Jack Lawrence, wrote a song for her entitled ‘Linda’. It went to number one. Jan & Dean brought the song back to the charts in 1963, just before Beatlemania swept the States.

  Although hers was a privileged upbringing, Linda had a difficult relationship with her father, a severe man who was quick to criticise. Lee had ambitions for his kids, especially John, who eventually took over the family firm, Eastman & Eastman, marrying a woman whose grandfather was a co-founder of Merrill Lynch. Sister Louise married a man whose family came over with the founding fathers. Thus the Eastmans assimilated into the WASP Establishment. Linda didn’t fit the pattern. ‘She was considered the black sheep of the family, the embarrassment of the family for a long time, because she wasn’t scholarly like her siblings,’ says stepbrother Philip. Linda was not academic, or intellectual. Rather, she had a dreamy interest in nature and animals, especially dogs and horses. As Paul later observed, Linda seemed to regard all animals as Disney creatures. As a girl she would collect injured birds and small animals and try to nurse them in her bedroom. Linda’s school grades were low. Lee mocked and patronised his daughter, making a girl who was not academically inclined feel awkward and stupid. As she became a teenager, she added rock ’n’ roll to her unsuitable interests, and started chasing pop stars, zeroing in first on the Young Rascals. Small world that it is, the Rascals were managed by Beatles promoter Sid Bernstein, who recalls the teenaged Linda trailing his band around New York. ‘She became one of my favourite kids that followed the Rascals. I let her come up to a recording session.’

  One of Linda’s beaus was Melville See Jr, known as Mel. Born in Albany, New York, in 1938, making him three years older than Linda, Mel’s parents were living in Scarsdale when they met. A stocky, sandy-haired man with a thick beard-he modelled himself on Ernest Hemingway - Mel was a geology student. After graduating from Princeton, he moved to Tucson to take a masters degree at the University of Arizona (UAZ), where he developed a passion for anthropology. After dropping out of Sarah Lawrence College, Linda followed Mel to Tucson, enrolling at UAZ to major in Art History. She was living here in March 1962 when her mother died in a plane crash en route to visit brother John in California. Three months later Linda married Mel, and six months after that, on 30 December 1962, their only child, Heather Louise, was born.

  Linda loved Arizona. She was never happier than when horse-riding among the saguaro cacti that give the desert landscape around Tucson the look of a cowboy film. She also started to take photographs, which became a lifelong interest. Marriage was not a success, though. Mel was an academic with corresponding intellectual interests. Linda hardly ever opened a book. She felt she’d been hasty to have a child with a man who now bored her. ‘It wasn’t that she didn’t have a tremendous amount of affection for her daughter, but I heard her remark more than once, “Why did this happen to me?”’ recalls Arizona friend Jonathan Kress. In 1964 Mel was offered a job in Africa. Linda refused to go with him, so he went alone. Linda took Heather back to New York, divorcing Mel the following year.

  When her mother died, Linda came into a little money, as well as inheriting valuable artwork and stock, and was able to rent a nice apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan, at East 83rd and Lexington, getting a job as an editorial assistant at Town & Country magazine. Her work involved opening the post. One day an invitation came in for a press reception for the Rolling Stones. The function was to be on a boat, the Sea Panther, which was going to cruise the Hudson River. Linda grabbed the invite and her camera. ‘I was the only photographer they allowed on the yacht. I just kept clicking away with the camera, and they enjoyed it and I enjoyed it, and suddenly I found that taking pictures was a great way to live and a great way to work.’

  Lee Eastman was unimpressed by his daughter’s new avocation, taking pictures of ‘longhairs’. Linda seemed to bounce from one dumb thing to another. ‘My father used to say, “If you want to be a photographer, go and work for a professional. Get trained.” Well, I never had the patience for that. I had to trust my feelings. Besides I’m too lazy.’ Photographing celebrities requires access, above all, and Linda’s talent was her ability to flirt and make friends. One of her first contacts was Danny Fields, editor of the teen magazine Datebook. It was he who caused the ‘bigger than Jesus’ fuss in 1966 by reprinting John Lennon’s interview with Maureen Cleave. Danny met Linda at the dockside after the Rolling Stones’ cruise, having literally missed the boat, and asked Linda if he could buy some of her pictures for his magazine. ‘She sent me [pictures] of Brian Jones sitting there with his legs open - these were the sexiest pictures I’d ever seen! ’ exclaims Fields, who became Linda’s lifelong friend and ultimately her biographer. ‘I never saw anyone get pictures of boys with their legs spread open … that’s what happens when she’s on the other side of the camera. Boys do that for her. They do peacock dances.’ Linda also got a date with Mick Jagger off the back of the boat trip.

  Over the following two years Linda notched up approximately twenty lovers, most of whom were famous, including singers Tim Buckley and Jim Morrison. One time, Danny and Linda went to interview Warren Beatty. ‘She was taking pictures like a little kitty-cat, on the rug or on the sofa. All you could hear was the click of the shutter and the next day she said, “Guess who I spent the night with? ”’ It is because of this period in her life that Linda came to be tagged a groupie - a pejorative and one might think sexist term. After all, why shouldn’t a single woman sleep with the handsome and famous men she met? Yet Linda didn’t seem to date any ordinary boyfriends in New York in 1966-8. It became apparent that, apart from having fun, she was looking for a rich, groovy guy who could look after her and Heather. One of the people Linda knew in New York at this time was Brian Epstein’s partner Nat Weiss, who remembers Linda telling him, even before she met Paul, that she had her sights set ultimately on McCartney. ‘She said she was going to marry him.’

  A couple of months after photographing the Stones in New York, Linda was commissioned to come to England to take pictures for a book, Rock and Other Four Letter Words. She photographed a number of bands, including Traffic and the Animals, and naturally wanted to photograph the Beatles. Linda’s entrée was Brian’s assistant Peter Brown. ‘I used to go to New York, and hang out with a bunch of gay guys that I knew, and she was in that circle,’ recalls Brown. ‘When she came to London she called me up with her portfolio.’ Now here she was at the Bag o’ Nails. ‘She was with a girlfriend, and I introduced [her to Paul].’ Before she knew what was happening Linda was inside Cavendish looking at Paul’s Magrittes. Art was something she knew about. That and the fact she had lost her mother early helped create a connection with Paul, who, importantly, also fancied Linda. He liked blondes. That Linda came from money was also attractive, as was the fact she was a motherly woman, actually a single mother.

  The next day Linda showed up at the NEMS office. Peter Brown recalls owning up to having taken one of the pictures from her portfolio for himself.

  I said, ‘I have to confess I’ve stolen one from the portfolio. I assume you have lots of copies.’ And she said, ‘The one of Brian [Jones]?’ And I said, ‘How would you know which one I would go for? ’ She said, ‘Oh I guessed’ … that was why I let her come to the Sgt. Pepper photo session, which was a great professional breach on my part.

  Brian Epstein was hosting a function at his new home in Belgravia to launch Sgt. Pepper. The Bea
tles would be there, together with journalists and photographers and a few select disc jockeys, including Jimmy Savile. Linda, normally no clothes-horse, dressed very carefully for the occasion, wearing a skirt and a trendy striped blazer. Her hair was immaculate. Indeed, she seems to have taken more care with her appearance than her equipment, forgetting to put any colour film in her camera bag (she had to borrow some from another photographer). Here was Paul again, this time with the other Beatles. All four together in a room was overpowering, like encountering the entire Royal Family. Linda joined in the photo shoot, getting one good shot of John shaking Paul’s hand in an exaggeratedly congratulatory way, throwing his head back in sarcastic laughter. In the few minutes she had before the photographers were ejected, Linda made a beeline for Paul, crouching at his feet by the fireplace, looking up into his face. He regarded her in return with mild interest, chin on hand, as if not sure what to make of her, a moment captured for posterity by one of the other photographers.

  That weekend Paul went home to Liverpool. Linda phoned Cavendish while he was away and spoke to Paul’s houseguest Prince Stash. ‘I said, “Paul’s in Liverpool.” She said, “But what are you doing?” I said, “I’m watching a movie,” and she said, “I want to come over.”’ So Linda came to Cavendish Avenue and fell into bed with Stash, who didn’t think he was betraying Paul, because he didn’t see Paul and Linda as serious. ‘He didn’t take her to Liverpool, for instance.’ Still, there was a strange vibe at the house that weekend. While Prince Stash and Linda were rolling around together, Paul telephoned and asked Stash to move out until he got back, not because of Linda, says Stash, but because Paul had heard people were coming over and helping themselves to his drugs. In particular, Stash’s friend Brian Jones, now a hopeless junkie, was dipping into Paul’s supply of legal pharmaceutical cocaine, which, according to Prince Stash, the Beatle kept at the time in a jar on the mantelpiece, as several of their friends did. Brian had promised but failed to replace what he had taken from the coke jar, and now Paul wanted everybody out. So Stash and Linda went to stay with the musician Graham Nash.

  Stash’s affair with Linda became common knowledge in London’s rock community. ‘I was teased extensively by Roger Daltrey and Hendrix and so on, because, you know, Linda had gone around,’ says Stash, ungallantly.

  She was not a groupie, she was somebody who loved love … In modern days, people say, “Oh, what an ungrateful bastard, he sleeps with his friend’s girlfriend!” But that’s not at all the way it was. You’ve got to put these things in context - everybody had very open relationships, and it wasn’t cool to be jealous.

  Yet when Linda flew back to New York her conversation was not about Prince Stash, but Paul McCartney. She returned home on the same flight as Nat Weiss, who recalls that she told him again that she was going to marry the Beatle. She seemed so determined he didn’t doubt her.

  10

  HELLO, GOODBYE

  THE WANDERER RETURNS

  Having searched long and hard for a new movie project, the Beatles now committed to two films, both of which originated with Paul. His airplane doodle about the group going on a charabanc ride had been sanctioned by the others, who promptly recorded an introductory song similar to ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’, with fairground huckster introduction - ‘Roll up! Roll up!’ - and brass fanfare. Fun though it is, ‘Magical Mystery Tour’ lacks the charm and polish of its forerunner - a criticism that can be levelled at the whole project - though the Beatles would record some very good songs for Magical Mystery Tour, not least Paul’s ‘The Fool on the Hill’.

  The second movie was an animated feature based on Paul’s children’s song ‘Yellow Submarine’. Starting in 1965, an animated children’s TV series, The Beatles, had been running on American television, and syndicated internationally, each half-hour episode based on a Beatles song. The series proved popular with children, but not the band because the American producer, Al Brodax, used American actors to voice their characters. ‘I couldn’t have them sounding like themselves because the American kids would not understand them,’ reasons Brodax, who now had the idea of spinning a feature-length movie out of ‘Yellow Submarine’. It would complete the Beatles’ three-picture deal with United Artists, while requiring them to do little work. ‘They wanted to go to India,’ remembers Brodax. ‘I said, “You go to India. I’ll do the picture.” That’s how I got the deal, really.’

  The agreement was reached in May 1967, Brodax arranging to have the animation done in London by TV Cartoons (TVC), the same company that made The Beatles series. It was TVC executives John Coates and George Dunning who had the inspired idea of hiring German poster artist Heinz Edelmann to create a Pop Art look for the film, which was rush-produced on an 11-month schedule for release in 1968, when it was hailed as a masterpiece. Interestingly, Paul didn’t like it. Although McCartney has gone out of his way in recent years to make the public aware that he was the Beatle most in tune with modern art in the 1960s, in his authorised biography Paul McCartney: Many Years from Now, and elsewhere, the star singularly failed to appreciate the Pop Art aesthetic of Yellow Submarine. ‘He thought that a modern-day animation feature would [look like] a Disney production,’ says TVC boss John Coates, who didn’t warm to McCartney. Paul was also unhappy at being characterised as John’s number two in the picture, as he had been in the cartoon series; and he didn’t like the voice the film-makers gave him. Though the Beatles were voiced by British actors in the film, McCartney considered the Liverpudlian accents too broad. ‘He was always worried about what impression everyone was making. That seemed to be one of his hang-ups,’ says Coates. ‘He seemed so wrapped up in himself.’ As far as making a contribution to this film, the Beatles were contracted to record three new tunes, palming the film-makers off with their leftovers to a degree, though Paul’s ‘All Together Now’ was another attractive children’s song.

  At the end of May, Brian Epstein threw a weekend house party at his new country retreat in Sussex, to which all four Beatles were invited. Epstein had a grand piano brought down from London so Paul could play. But Paul didn’t show. ‘Why couldn’t he have come?’ Brian asked his staff. The answer was that Jane Asher was due back from the USA and Paul had to get the house ready. ‘He could have tried,’ Brian whined. ‘This was so important to me.’

  Cavendish was in a heck of a state, having served as a bachelor pad for Paul and his mates for the past four and a half months. In the hours before Jane’s return, on Monday 29 May, Paul dashed about cleaning, and herding waifs and strays out the door. Nico and Prince Stash had finally left, but Dudley Edwards was still painting the wallpaper. Paul hinted that it was time for Dudley to move on, too. Pausing to shave off his moustache, Paul drove to Heathrow, arriving at the airport in time to meet Jane making her way out of arrivals, a pack of pressmen closing in on the couple as they reunited. Reporters asked when they planned to marry. ‘Not now,’ replied Jane, travel-weary and nervous about meeting a lover who had been like a stranger to her for months, their Rocky Mountains tryst notwithstanding. After posing for a quick photo, Paul drove Jane home, which was the cue for the last house guest to leave. ‘When Jane came back I think I was probably in the way,’ says Dudley Edwards. ‘Paul told me that Ringo actually wanted a mural painted in his place, and so I straight away went over to Weybridge to stay with Ringo.’27

  Three days later, on 1 June 1967, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band was officially released, acclaimed by press and public as a triumph, enjoyed as a popular work of art, and taken seriously by critics. Composer Ned Rorem told Time that Paul’s ‘She’s Leaving Home’ was as good as any of Schubert’s songs. Sir Joseph Lockwood, chairman of EMI, hoped the company would sell seven million copies of the album. ‘I’m sure everyone will want one …’ He was right. Sgt. Pepper went straight to number one, in Britain and America, selling more than 11 million copies in the United States alone. Moreover, Pepper has become recognised as the key transition record from pop to the more self-co
nsciously serious form of rock music, perhaps the most significant album in the history of rock. A considerable amount of the credit goes to Paul. Pepper had been his idea, he contributed the largest number of songs, and he oversaw the packaging. The successful release of the LP was therefore a personal triumph, perhaps the high point of his career. Even John conceded in later years, when he usually spoke about Paul with scorn, that ‘Pepper was a peak all right’, the last time he worked properly in partnership with Macca, ‘especially on “A Day in the Life”’.

  To celebrate the release, Paul and Jane threw a party at Cavendish Avenue that lasted all weekend. Sunday evening they went to the Saville Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue - a building Brian was leasing - and saw Jimi Hendrix perform ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’ as part of his act. Paul was thrilled to hear a significant fellow artist already covering the material.

  IN THE HIGHLANDS

  Paul and Jane then packed their bags, grabbed Martha the sheepdog, and hopped on a plane to Scotland, where Paul had recently bought a holiday home, one that was to become very important in his life. The house was on the Kintyre peninsula, a finger of land trailing in the seas off western Scotland, the Firth of Forth on one side, the Atlantic Ocean on the other. The Mull of Kintyre, which Paul later made famous in song, is the headland at the southern end of this peninsula. Just short of the mull lies the ‘wee toon’ of Campbeltown, home to 6,000 people, many of whom work in fishing, boat-building and on the small farms that dot the hill country. Paul had bought one of these farms, or steadings as they are known, as his holiday home.

  The principal attraction of High Park Farm was its remoteness, and thereby the privacy it afforded a man who, while he enjoyed his fame, sometimes felt the need to get away from it all. High Park is only ten minutes’ drive from Campbeltown, but Campbeltown itself is one of the remotest towns in the United Kingdom, 500 miles from London, the last 138 miles of road, from Glasgow, through wild and mostly empty country. Even if Paul broke his journey by stopping off to see Dad at Rembrandt, it was a seven-hour drive from Merseyside. Paul and Jane made the journey by car the first time they came up to High Park. As they headed into the Highlands they entered a seemingly more ancient land, the long and winding road leading past lochs reflecting snow-capped mountains, which gave Paul an idea. ‘ [I] was in Scotland, there was a road sort of stretching off up into the hills, you could see it go for miles, and I thought [of], “The Long and Winding Road.”’ The final leg of the journey was south along the A83, beside long, empty Atlantic-facing beaches, into Campbeltown and thereby the end of the road. People don’t come to Campbeltown en route, because there is nowhere to go from here, unless you get on a boat, so every visitor is noticed, especially a Beatle and an actress in a sports car. But once local people got over the surprise of seeing Paul about the place he found that they treated him much the same as anybody else and were in fact quietly protective of his privacy, helping make Kintyre an ideal retreat.