Fab

by Howard Sounes

  Nothing happened between them until after Mike’s wedding, when Jane had gone back to the Bristol Old Vic. With Jane out of the way, Paul came over to Francie’s Chelsea flat, with Martha the dog, and jumped into bed. ‘The sheepdog followed us into the bedroom to watch,’ Francie wrote in her candid memoir, Body Count. She called Paul Mr Plump, for reasons unexplained. Likewise, he called her Clancy. It was clear to Clancy that, despite being engaged to be married, and putting on such a good show at his brother’s wedding, Mr Plump and his fiancée were not getting along. Paul seemed to think Jane had a boyfriend in Bristol, and rather than try and win her back he chose to get even with her, allowing Francie to move into Cavendish with him while Jane was away, also getting his new girlfriend a job in the Apple press office. He even invited Francie along to EMI recording sessions - surely a touch of tit for tat. While John and Yoko worked together on ‘Revolution 9’ in Studio Three at Abbey Road, Paul took Francie next door to watch him record ‘Blackbird’ in Studio Two. A greater contrast to ‘Revolution 9’ is hard to imagine than this pretty, guitar-picking tune, the melody based on a Bach bourrée, while the lyric, recorded shortly after the assassination of Dr Martin Luther King Jr, was meant as a metaphor for the American Civil Rights struggle. ‘As is often the case with my things, a veiling took place, so, rather than say “Black woman living in Little Rock” and be very specific, she became a bird, became symbolic …’

  Paul then left Francie and the difficult White Album sessions to go on a business trip to Los Angeles with Apple staff men Ron Kass and Tony Bramwell, plus his school friend Ivan Vaughan. The threesome flew to LA via New York where, in the transit lounge at JFK, Paul called and left a message with Linda Eastman’s answering service, saying he was on his way to the West Coast and could be reached at the Beverly Hills Hotel. Arriving in LA several hours later, Paul checked into the pink hotel on Sunset Boulevard, taking Bungalow Number Five, which was favoured by Howard Hughes, then hit the clubs. Word soon got around that Paul was in town. ‘He pulled a few slappers [and] by the time we got back to the Beverly Hills Hotel there was queues around the block of girls trying to get in,’ says Bramwell.

  The next day, after fooling about by the pool with the girls he’d met, Paul went to see Capitol Records chief Alan Livingston, then came back to change before his next engagement. ‘And there was Linda!’ recalls Bramwell. ‘Sitting on the doorstep.’ Having received Paul’s message, Linda had taken the first available flight from New York to LA. ‘So immediately Paul got me to clear away all the birds, and just locked himself in the room with her.’ That night Paul attended to the main bit of business he had come to California for, which was making a personal appearance at a Capitol Records sales convention, screening a promotional movie about Apple, and telling the executives that future Beatles records would appear under the Apple label (though the band still remained tied to EMI). Having played the businessman, Paul returned to Linda at the Beverly Hills Hotel.

  At this stage another girlfriend showed up. One of the local calls Paul had made when he arrived in Los Angeles was to actress Peggy Lipton, his bedfellow on two previous trips to LA. Seemingly, he was ringing around to see who was available. Despite the fact Peggy was now living with the record producer Lou Adler, she hopped in her car and sped over to the Beverly Hills Hotel, where she found a number of young women already waiting outside Bungalow Five. Measles told Peggy that Paul was sleeping - it was 4 o’clock in the morning - and that when he got up they were going out on a boat with the film director Mike Nichols. Peggy decided to wait. When Paul emerged from his room at 8:00 a.m., Peggy figured she was on for the boat trip. ‘As I gathered my things, preparing to join him, I spotted a woman coming out of the bedroom in Paul’s bungalow,’ Peggy later wrote. ‘Apparently, she had shown up before I arrived, and Paul, in his altered state, had forgotten I was on the way.’ Peggy watched tearfully as Paul and Linda Eastman ran for a limousine that took them to the harbour. This was the end of Peggy and Paul.

  Paul and Linda spent the day together on Mike Nichols’s motorboat, the Quest, drinking champagne, eating bacon sandwiches and canoodling like love birds. ‘They were absolutely inseparable. It was like instant,’ notes Bramwell. ‘She was perfect for him: motherly …’ (Tony figured Paul had been looking for a mother substitute) ‘… big-breasted, and she had a je ne sais quoi.’ Like Paul, Linda was also a dedicated pot-head. She’d brought a bag of grass with her, which they dipped into, becoming closer as they got stoned, really close in the way John and Yoko were. ‘We were all conscious of - and somewhat amazed by - the depth of feeling Paul obviously had for Linda,’ adds Bramwell, noting that when they checked out of the Beverly Hills Hotel the next day Paul and Linda were ‘like Siamese twins, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes all the way to the airport’.

  Paul was flying to London, Linda to New York. Before her domestic flight, Linda waited with her lover in the international VIP lounge at LAX. The couple were startled by the sudden arrival of FBI agents. ‘We’re investigating a bomb scare on the flight to London; do you know anybody who might want to blow up the plane? ’ an agent asked McCartney.

  ‘It might be a Rolling Stones fan,’ Paul joked. More likely a jealous boyfriend or husband. The Beatles always left a trail of cuckolds behind them. The FBI wanted to search their luggage, at which point Linda had the foresight to kick her bag, in which she had her marijuana, under a chair, then sauntered off to the domestic terminal to catch her own flight at the end of what she would later refer to nostalgically as their first ‘dirty weekend’ together.

  When McCartney got home to Cavendish Avenue, he continued his affair with Francie Schwartz, who didn’t rate him as a lover. Opining that Paul was basically lonely without Jane, whom he hadn’t told about Francie, she wrote in her memoirs:He had his hang-ups, and I think he felt sometimes that he wasn’t manly enough. His body was sweet, and beautiful … one could be happy if one didn’t demand too much, or even want too much. The relationship had begun on the “save me” lament, not on a rush of sexual flashes … He hadn’t formally dumped Jane and so at first I was a secret. I stayed in the house for weeks, cleaning, reading, calling the dope dealer. I was to score for my old man. You’d think he could have taken care of it, but he didn’t.

  When Jane telephoned from Bristol ‘he would get very uptight, very awkward and phony’. Apart from the sheepdog Martha, there was now a puppy in the house, Eddie, whom Paul had bought for Jane, plus five cats, the beginning of what became a menagerie of domestic animals, few of which seemed house-trained. ‘I was constantly cleaning up shit.’

  While his domestic life descended into farce, Paul retained enough discipline to go into the EMI studios and Apple office most days, working on the new band album and diverse Apple projects. He liked to be busy. One side-project was creating a theme tune for a television series named Thingumybob. Having dreamt up the tune, Paul decided it needed a brass band, so he called upon the Black Dyke Mills Band, the most famous band of its kind in the world, originally comprised of employees of a Yorkshire worsted mill. The band’s conductor, Geoffrey Brand, came into Apple to see Paul, whom he found sitting under a Liverpool Institute school photo. Paul pointed out the little boys who were George Harrison, Neil Aspinall, brother Mike McCartney and himself. This trip down memory lane was interrupted by the telephone ringing. ‘As soon as he started to talk the phone rang and it was someone from New York who’d been waiting to get to him for days and so he said, “I have to talk to this chap,” and we started off again,’ recalls Brand, ‘and then it was somebody from Tokyo, you know.’ Finally, Paul silenced the calls, picked up a guitar and played the tune to Thingumybob , humming it as well. Brand made a note on manuscript paper. Paul told him to take the little bit he’d demonstrated and extend it to fill three minutes as a score for the Black Dyke Mills Band. Apple would probably put it out as a record, which meant he needed a B-side. ‘I’ll tell you what, and this is going to be a hit, we’re doing a film called Yellow Sub
marine,’ Paul told the conductor. ‘Do an arrangement for “Yellow Submarine” as well. We’ll put that on the back.’

  A recording date for Thingumybob was arranged at the Victoria Hall, Saltaire, on Sunday 30 June 1968. Geoffrey Brand checked into the Victoria Hotel in nearby Bradford for the session, and Paul asked him to book an extra room. ‘Paul came down to breakfast on the Sunday morning with his dog,’ recalls the conductor. ‘Martha sat next to Paul at the breakfast table and Paul ordered two cooked breakfasts, one of which he ate and the other he fed to Martha.’ To get the sound he wanted on the recording Paul had the brass band perform outside the Victoria Hall, drawing a crowd of children whom he amused by playing a trumpet. When a cornet player asked to check a note, Paul said, ‘It’s no use asking me, I can’t read music.’ Paul was at his best at times like this, allowing ordinary people to share in and enjoy his celebrity, whilst his decision to make a record with a brass band, in the middle of the White Album sessions, showed how rooted he remained in northern working-class culture.

  Back in London, the Beatles were seriously getting on each others’ nerves. When he finished ‘Revolution 9’, John asked Paul’s opinion of the record, which is without doubt the most radical piece of music the Beatles ever released: an uncompromising musical collage, without coherent tune or intelligible lyric. ‘Not bad,’ replied Paul unenthusiastically.

  ‘Not bad?’ snapped Lennon. ‘You have no idea what you’re talking about … This is the direction the Beatles should be going in from now on!’

  Just as John had taken an inordinate amount of time on the various versions of ‘Revolution’, Paul was now driving everybody spare with ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, not one of his best works, and one that John only reluctantly played along with, complaining that it was ‘granny music shit’. When, after several days’ work, Paul announced that he wanted to start all over again, Lennon walked out of the studio, reappearing at the top of the stairs screaming: ‘I AM FUCKING STONED!’ He descended, ranting that he fucking knew how the fucking song should fucking well go, sat at the piano and bashed out the now-familiar intro. Still Paul wasn’t satisfied, and he decided, when Ritchie was out of the studio, to re-record the drums, which didn’t do anything for Ritchie’s ego. He was already feeling left out. George Harrison wasn’t much happier, and the EMI staff felt demoralised working for bickering, demanding Beatles. Geoff Emerick woke up one morning and realised that, far from being a joy, as it had been, working as the Beatles’ engineer was making him depressed. A few nights before, he’d been in the studio very late when the band came back from a club, intending to play through the night, as they liked to do, expecting EMI staff simply to be on hand to accommodate them. Rather than face the Beatles, Emerick hid behind a cupboard.

  Now the usually unflappable George Martin got into an argument with Paul over ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’, as Emerick recalls in his memoir Here, There and Everywhere. ‘Paul, can you try rephrasing the last line of each verse?’ Martin asked from the lofty control room.

  ‘If you think you can do it any better, why don’t you fucking come down here and sing it yourself?’ Paul retorted.

  Gentleman George finally lost his temper. ‘Then bloody sing it again!’ he shouted down at McCartney. ‘I give up. I just don’t know any better how to help you.’

  The next day Emerick resigned as the Beatles’ engineer, refusing to work one more day with them. He was replaced by Ken Scott. George Martin went on three weeks’ holiday, leaving his young assistant Chris Thomas to deal with the impossible bastards, as the great producer sometimes called the Beatles under his breath.32 On the first day after George’s departure, Paul walked into the studio and asked Thomas abruptly what he was doing there, as though nobody had told him Martin was going away. ‘George told me to come down, didn’t you know?’ Thomas asked.

  ‘Oh well, if you want to produce us, fine, and if you don’t, we’ll just tell you to fuck off,’ McCartney replied unpleasantly. Then he strode out. Despite this unpromising start, Chris Thomas stuck with the sessions and made an important contribution to the album, forging a good enough relationship with Paul to work with him deep into his solo career.

  The pressure was starting to tell on Paul, who let his frustrations out at Cavendish. ‘If he wasn’t in a good mood, he’d drink hideous Scotch- Coke combinations, throw food at the dogs and cats, drop his clothes in a path to the bed, and ignore me completely,’ Francie Schwartz would write, further claiming that there was a wild, rough-house element to their love-making. Sometimes Paul would grab Francie and pull her into the bath with him; they made love in the open at night on Primrose Hill; and she went down on Paul while he was driving around London, possibly the inspiration for Paul’s ‘Why Don’t We Do It in the Road?’ One night, Paul took Francie to a new club, Revolution, then stopped on the way home to pay a house call on another girlfriend, possibly Maggie McGivern, who says she was still seeing Paul at this time. Francie suffered the humiliation of waiting for Mr Plump while he did what he had to do. ‘When he returned, about 15 minutes later, I was burning. “Why did you do that? Why the hell couldn’t you take me home first? ” “I don’t know,” he answered, and I could tell he was a little sick inside about it, too.’

  One morning, Paul and Francie were in bed together at Cavendish when there was a knock at the bedroom door. ‘Who is it?’ asked Paul, for there were always friends floating around the house.

  ‘Jane,’ replied his fiancée, who had returned to London to appear in a play.

  Paul leapt out of bed, put on some clothes, and led Jane downstairs and into the garden. Francie came to the window to watch them. Paul yelled at Francie to get back inside. Then Jane left. A little later, Margaret Asher came to Cavendish and boxed up her daughter’s belongings, leaving a note for Paul. The boy she had given a home to when he came down from Liverpool, fed and looked after as a mother would, had let her daughter down.

  A couple of days after this the Beatles attended the London première of the Yellow Submarine film, which had turned out better than expected. Although the Beatles had little to do with the project, Heinz Edelmann and the TVC animators had captured the character of the band, their style and wit, as well as the feel of swinging London in exuberant Pop Art images that were attractive and amusing. The film was capped by a brief personal appearance by the boys introducing the final number, Paul’s ‘All Together Now’, which proved a perfect ending. The première audience laughed and clapped and sang along, endorsing Yellow Submarine as an instant classic.

  Beatles partners accompanied the boys to the Yellow Submarine première, including Yoko Ono, but there was no sign of Jane Asher on the red carpet. The reason emerged a few days later when, on Saturday 21 July, the actress appeared on Simon Dee’s BBC television show and told the presenter her engagement was off. ‘Did you break it off?’ Dee asked.

  ‘I haven’t broken it off, but it’s finished,’ Jane replied firmly, which was all she had to say on the matter, then and ever more.

  The announcement caught almost everybody by surprise. ‘It just seemed such a mistake!’ laments Jann Haworth. ‘What little I knew of them, it looked right, and they were really cut out to be together, and it seemed a real shame.’ Taking a more masculine view, Tony Bramwell figured Paul simply got caught out. ‘He was caught with his pants down with the horrible Francie. Brrr,’ he shudders at the memory of the American, whom he did not like. ‘She was horrible.’ For his part, Paul seemed surprised by Jane’s public announcement, which made him look foolish. He and Francie drove to Rembrandt, where he was obliged to face the press before retreating inside Dad’s house in what his girlfriend terms ‘a poisonous mood’.

  Having vacated Kenwood in favour of Cynthia and Julian, John and Yoko moved into Cavendish with Paul and Francie. By Francie’s account, she, John and Yoko got into the habit of watching TV in the evening while they ate opium cookies. Meanwhile, Paul continued to race between home, office, recording studio and night clubs, attending to band business and
Apple projects. One morning, when John was going through his mail at Cavendish, he found a postcard addressed to him with the message, ‘You and your Jap tart think you’re hot shit.’ Paul admitted he’d sent the card for a joke. He had a strange habit of sending anonymous postcards, another of his victims being Derek Taylor, who ran the Apple press office with more profligacy than Paul liked. The card to John and Yoko may have been meant as a joke, but it made for an awkward atmosphere in the house. ‘It was embarrassing. The three of us swivelled around, staring at him. You could feel the pain in John,’ Schwartz wrote of the moment Paul admitted to sending it. Not long afterwards, John and Yoko moved out of the house and into Ritchie’s flat in Montagu Square, both drifting into heavier drug use, ultimately heroin, which further altered John’s mood and appearance. Behind his pebbled spectacles, Lennon’s face paled and seemingly attenuated, making his bony nose more prominent. The chameleon Beatle started to resemble Yoko’s twin brother.

  At this stage, Francie was given her marching orders from Cavendish. Her relationship with Paul had never been smooth. Friends recall McCartney throwing her out at least once before the final split, literally throwing her bag out the door on one occasion. Finally, she gave up and booked a ticket home to the United States. ‘Don’t cry. I’m a cunt,’ McCartney told her, in their not-so-romantic farewell. At least one member of the Beatles organisation believes Paul used Francie as an excuse to end his relationship with Jane.