Shout! (66 page)

Margo Stevens, the girl from Cleethorpes, was just beginning her second year of standing outside 7 Cavendish Avenue. She preferred to begin her vigil late at night, when the picket was thinning or absent altogether. She would arrive at about 10:00
P.M
., always with some gift for Paul—fruit or a miniature bottle of whisky—on the off chance of handing it to him as he came home late from the studios or a club. She had been standing there so long, Paul vaguely recognized her now. She knew how to open the security gates by kicking them, and had done so once for him when he could not find his key. Lately, on the recommendation of his housekeeper, Rosie, he had even trusted her to take Martha the sheepdog for walks on Hampstead Heath.

“It was a summer day: We were all standing there as usual,” Margo says. “Jane was on tour with a play, and Paul brought home this American girl, Francie Schwartz. He waved to us as they drove in. Later on,
another car turned onto Cavendish Avenue—it was Jane. She’d come back to London earlier than she was supposed to. We did our best to warn Paul. Someone went to the intercom, buzzed it, and yelled, ‘Look out! Jane’s coming!’ Paul didn’t believe it. ‘Ah, pull the other one,’ he said.

“Jane went into the house. A bit later on she came storming out again and drove away. Later still, a big estate car drew up. It was Jane’s mother. She went inside and started bringing out all kinds of things that were obviously Jane’s—cooking pots and big cushions and pictures.

“We all thought after that they must have finished with each other for good. But the next day, a whole crowd of us were in Hyde Park. Who did we run into but Paul and Jane. They were walking along, holding hands and eating ice lollies.”

Early in 1967, Jane went on tour in America again with the Bristol Old Vic company. Apart from Paul’s visit, to celebrate her twenty-first birthday, they were separated for almost five months. When Jane returned, she found Paul deeply involved in the creation of
Sgt. Pepper
and in LSD. She herself would have nothing to do with acid, and said so bluntly. Paul could not convince her of what she was missing.

Brian Epstein’s death was a heavy blow to Jane. She, too, found comfort in the Maharishi: She went with Paul to Rishikesh and felt the experience to have been rewarding. With LSD banished, their understanding returned. Paul, at long last, made ready to commit himself. They announced their engagement at a McCartney family party on Christmas Day, 1967.

The following June, they were back up north for the wedding of Paul’s younger brother, Michael. Jane opened in a new play that month and Paul, as usual, attended the opening night. All between them seemed normal until mid-July, when
Yellow Submarine
received its gala premiere. Paul arrived alone at the cinema and at the party that followed. Two days later, on a television talk show, Jane was asked a casual question about their wedding plans. She replied that Paul had broken off the engagement and they had parted.

“Hey Jude,” the song that brought such comfort to Cynthia Lennon, was Paul’s expression of his own deep personal unhappiness. The words, for once, were not facile and neat; it was a song written honestly, in pain. It moved even John as no song of Paul’s ever had before. “Hey Jude, don’t be afraid, you were made to / go out and get her,” seemed to John to be a
message of encouragement for Yoko and him. “I took it very personally,” he admitted. ‘Ah, it’s me!’ I said when Paul played it. ‘No,’ he said, ’it’s
me
.’ I said, ‘Check. We’re both going through the same bit.’”

The news that the most adorable and adored Beatle was now on the market again sent a seismic wave of excitement through the young womanhood of the Western world. Paul clearly could have his pick of anyone he wanted, and in a million hairdressers’ shops and club powder rooms debate raged furiously as to which breathtakingly beautiful starlet or model would be the lucky one. In the event, his choice was to be almost as surprising as John’s had been.

A year or so earlier, an American photographer named Linda Eastman had called at Brian Epstein’s office to show her portfolio of rock star portraits in hopes of getting work from the Epstein stable. She was a coltishly built New Yorker with rather unkempt blonde hair and a dour, unsmiling face. Peter Brown, who dealt with her, knew her already as a regular backstage at American rock venues like New York’s Fillmore East. “She was just an ordinary girl, like so many you saw around then. She’d arrived in London, saying she wanted to photograph the Beatles. I let her in on the
Sgt. Pepper
session, which was a big thing, because only fourteen photographers were allowed from the whole world’s press.”

Brown next met Linda one night when he was with Paul McCartney and some other rock figures at the Bag O’ Nails Club. He introduced Paul to Linda and, as he remembers, “That was it. The two of them just went off together.”

Linda Eastman did not belong, as many supposed, to the Eastman family whose enormous wealth derived from Kodak photographic film and Eastman color film stock. Her father, Lee, a New York lawyer, had taken the surname to replace one more directly announcing his Jewish immigrant antecedents. But for this gentrification, Paul’s future wife as well as his late manager would have borne the surname of Epstein.

Lee Eastman had built up a highly successful New York practice, specializing in music copyright and also representing several of America’s leading painters. His wife, Louise, was independently wealthy through her family connection with department stores owned by her family, the Linders. Linda and her brother, John, grew up in the affluent environment of a house in Scarsdale and a Park Avenue apartment. Linda became accustomed to mixing with the stars whom her father represented,
among them the songwriter Hoagy Carmichael and the cowboy action-hero Hopalong Cassidy.

Louise Eastman died in an air crash when Linda was eighteen. Resisting all opportunities to exploit her father’s social connections, she married a geologist named John See, moved with him to Colorado, and gave birth to a daughter, Heather. The marriage quickly failed, however, and Linda returned to New York with her baby daughter, by now determined to make her name as a photographer. She got a job with
Town and Country
magazine, Manhattan’s equivalent of the
Tatler
, and became a familiar face backstage at the Fillmore East and at photo calls for pop bands flying in from Europe. Her abilities as a photographer were not rated very highly; she was known, rather, as a rock chick who used her camera to get on close—sometimes very close—terms with male pinups such as Mick Jagger, Stevie Winwood, and Warren Beatty.

She did not see Paul between the
Sgt. Pepper
session and May 1968, when he came with John to New York to inaugurate Apple. Linda was at the launch party with her journalist friend Lilian Roxon. On Lilian’s advice, she slipped Paul her telephone number. They met at Nat Weiss’s New York flat and afterward in Los Angeles. Paul returned to London, but a few weeks later telephoned Linda and asked her to come and join him.

He brought her home to Cavendish Avenue in his Mini-Cooper late one summer night. Margo Stevens was on watch by the gates, as always. “A few of us were there. We had the feeling something was going to happen. Paul didn’t take the Mini inside the way he usually did—he parked it on the road and he and Linda walked right past us. They went inside and we stood there, watching different lights in the house go on and off.

“In the end, the light went on in the Mad Room, at the top of the house, where he kept all his music stuff and his toys. Paul opened the window and called out to us, ‘Are you still down there?’ ‘Yes,’ we said. He must have been really happy that night. He sat on the windowsill with his acoustic guitar and sang ‘Blackbird’ to us as we stood down there in the dark.”

Linda was certainly a startling change from the carefully backcombed and immaculate Jane. Hers was the New York preppy style, still so unknown in Swinging Britain that it seemed like no style at all—shapeless dresses below the knee, flat-heeled tennis shoes, even ankle socks. Nor was she nice, the way Jane always had been, to the girls who
eternally monitored Paul’s comings and goings from Cavendish Avenue and the Apple offices. “We could tell that she viewed us as a threat,” Margo remembers. “Every time they appeared together Linda would cling to Paul’s arm as much as to say,
‘I’ve
got him now.’ None of us could understand what he saw in her.”

For all her seeming unkemptness, Linda had an irresistible appeal to the social-climbing Paul—the aura of Manhattan’s aristocracy that, in its way, is as rarified and exclusive as London’s. She was certainly beautiful, with her finely-chiseled cheekbones and straw-blonde hair, though she always seemed utterly unconcerned about her appearance. Most important, she idolized and deferred to Paul as Jane had always firmly refused to do. Clinging to his arm, she would gaze up at him with awe and say what an honor it would be to bear his children.

Her daughter, Heather, helped to cement the bond between them. Paul had always adored children. His final parting with Jane arose from their disagreement over when to start a family. After meeting Heather, an insecure, rather lonely six-year-old, he insisted she be brought to live at Cavendish Avenue. He delighted in playing with her, reading stories and drawing cartoons for her, and singing her to sleep at night.

Linda, meanwhile, was bringing about changes in Paul that Margo and the other girls viewed with deep resentment. They knew, from their illicit journeys round the house, how fastidious he had formerly been. “He used to shave every day, he always wore fresh clothes, and he smelled delicious. Rosie, the housekeeper, told us he insisted on having clean sheets on his bed every night.

“We heard from Rosie how different Linda was. We hardly recognized Paul once she’d got hold of him. He started to put on weight—and he got so scruffy. I’ll swear he didn’t wash his hair for three weeks at a time. He never shaved, never wore anything but this old navy overcoat. He could go on the bus down to Apple, and no one would recognize him. Some of us thought we saw him in Oxford Street one day. We followed this real tramp in a navy overcoat all the way down Oxford Street, thinking he was Paul.”

In May, the Beatles had met at Abbey Road to begin their first album for release on their Apple label. John and Paul between them had a backlog of some thirty songs, mostly written during their stay in India. George had been earnestly composing; even Ringo had a tune of his own to
offer. With so much material in hand it was decided to use a format common enough in classical recording but unprecedented in pop. The collection would appear as two LP discs packed into a single dual-envelope sleeve. Not even
Sgt. Pepper
started in such an atmosphere of energy and abundance.

Things began to go wrong on the very first day, when John Lennon walked into Studio One, his arm protectively encircling a small, frizzy-haired figure, dressed all in white. He had not, it seemed, grown tired of Yoko Ono. He was, if anything, more obsessed by her. As before, Yoko showed no awareness of studio protocol. She settled herself among the Beatles, cutting herself and John off from the other three by the neck of his guitar. His hair center-parted like hers, his eyes aslant behind pebble glasses, he was even starting to look a little Japanese.

They whispered together, constantly and secretively, all through the session. Most unbelievably, when John took off his headphones, laid aside his guitar, and went off to use the men’s lavatory, Yoko still trotted at his heels. “That wasn’t me pursuing John, the way everyone thought,” she says now. “That was John’s terrible insecurity. He made me go out to the men’s room with him. He was afraid that if I stayed in the studio with all those other guys, I might go off and have an affair with one of them.”

The awkwardness deepened as John and Paul strummed over to each other the finished songs they proposed the Beatles should record. This interchange, so often the flashpoint for brilliance, now produced only noncommittal nods. To Paul, John’s new music seemed harsh, unmelodious, and deliberately provocative. John, for his part, found Paul’s new songs cloyingly sweet and bland. For the first time, Lennon and McCartney saw no bridge between them.

The album that resulted was, therefore, not the work of a group. It was the work of soloists: of separate egos, arguing for prominence. Paul and John each recorded his own songs in his own way, without advice or criticism from the other. George—apart from his own individual sessions—withdrew into a resigned neutrality. Ringo, in his acoustic hutch, bent his drumsticks as far as possible with the ever-changing currents. Sometimes, Ringo did not even bother to turn up.

From John came music equally full of resentment and defiance and lingering terror of opening his mouth too wide. “Sexy Sadie” was a
satire on Maharishi Mahesh Yogi (“What have you done? You made a fool of everyone?’) but heavily camouflaged for fear that the holy man might still be able to put some kind of transcendental hex on him. “Revolution” was a chant in sympathy for the student protests now breaking out all over the world, yet of two minds whether the composer himself was quite ready to take to the barricades. “Happiness Is a Warm Gun,” inspired by an American firearms magazine, swiped in the approximate direction of the Vietnam holocaust. “Glass Onion” satirized overearnest Beatles fans with cross-references to earlier lyrics, even a false clue: “The Walrus was Paul.” The straightforward rock pieces, like “Yer Blues,” were one-dimensional and charmless, the playing turgid, the singing harsh and somehow vindictive. Nowhere was his conversion more evident than in the track called “Revolution 9,” a formless length of electronic noise interspersed with vocal gibberish, which Paul—and everyone else—tried unavailingly to cut from the finished album.

Paul’s tracks were neat, polished, tuneful and, in their way, as unbalanced and incomplete: “Martha My Dear,” a song for his sheepdog; “Rocky Raccoon,” an unfinished Western doodle; “Honey Pie,” a glutinous twenties pastiche. In each, somehow, the most noticeable element was John’s missing “middle eight.” Only in “Blackbird,” briefly and beautifully, did Paul’s gift succeed in editing itself. “Back in the USSR,” too, was totally successful, a Chuck Berry–style rocker with Beach Boy harmonies that briefly restored the old familiar grin to John’s face. In that, as in a few more songs to come, their matchless combination somehow survived in an individual effort. Paul could have written John’s song “Julia.” It was his memorial, ten years too late, to the mother whose laughter gave the timbre to his own. But Julia in the song bore a second name: “Ocean Child.”