I didn’t know what to do after Brian’s death. His brother Clive Epstein asked me to stay on as general manager of NEMS Enterprises. It was exactly what I didn’t want to do. I was so upset by Brian’s death and I knew that the Beatles were never going to be the same without him, so I had decided the best thing for me to do would be to get out and get another job. But Clive and Queenie appealed to me to stay on as general manager until things were sorted out. NEMS was still going. I was one of the longest-serving employees and I was happy to do anything which would help to keep Brian’s legacy intact. But this was a desperately unhappy time. Robert Stigwood and Vic Lewis were the two who were likeliest to run things and I didn’t want to support either of them. The atmosphere in the office was depressing. There was so much sniping and in-fighting that it was very a unpleasant place to work. The Beatles seemed lost without Brian. He had taken so many of the important decisions for them. And the vultures were already circling the business.
Before he died, Brian had been planning a merger with Robert Stigwood, an up-and-coming pop entrepreneur and manager of the Bee Gees. But they had only had initial talks and Brian hadn’t told the Beatles anything at all about any possible link up with Stigwood. There were loads of aggressive businessmen around trying to tell Brian that he should have done better deals for the Beatles. The American Allen Klein made a huge fuss about getting a vastly increased royalty deal for the Rolling Stones.
Brian was not at his old familiar best for a long time before he died. The Beatles’ decision to stop touring took away a huge part of his life and he did take his eye off the ball. But Brian never wanted to be the richest guy in the world. His great ambition was to give the Beatles to the world. And he had succeeded in that way beyond even his own vivid imagination.
I felt totally lost without Brian. Some of the other figures seemed motivated by money and they seemed to want to spend their time wheeling and double-dealing. Stigwood asked me very soon after Brian died if I would come to work for him. He seemed to think the Bee Gees were going to go places and he wasn’t wrong.
In fact, the first place Maurice Gibb and I went to was a sleazy strip club. He had a very striking convertible, burgundy-coloured Rolls Royce at the time. We had been drinking in DMs, a pub just on the fringes of Soho that was used by a lot of pop people. The car was just parked down the side of the pub, just outside a tatty little strip club. It caught Maurice’s eye and he said to me, ‘Do you know, Al, I have never been in a strip club.’ I used to go to Raymond’s Revue Bar in those days and I thought I was a very sophisticated man about town. And I knew what was coming next. Maurice grinned in embarrassment, gestured at this seedy strip joint, and said, ‘Should we go in?’ We couldn’t resist it and we went past the dozing bouncer and into this dim and dank den of iniquity. As strip clubs go it would have struggled to be even third-rate. We got a couple of drinks at the bar and turned to the tiny stage to watch a rather elderly stripper going through her routine. It was about as erotic as a visit to an abattoir and, like a couple of naughty schoolboys, I’m afraid we got the giggles. When you really shouldn’t be laughing, it’s always so much harder to stop and we found ourselves shaking with mirth. We could see that some of the more muscle-bound assistants were not taking too kindly to us laughing at the main attraction so we got to our feet and chortled our way back to Maurice’s magnificent motor.
He was a smashing bloke and I would love to have had a role in managing the Bee Gees, but I felt a strong pull of loyalty to NEMS and Clive Epstein. Clive had almost none of Brian’s flair or charisma, but he was still a hell of a nice bloke. He wanted me to stay, so I stayed – it was as simple as that.
Eventually, Stigwood met the Beatles and they weren’t keen on him taking over control from Brian. They didn’t know much about him. They said if he ever managed them, they would just play ‘God Save the Queen’ until he released them from any contract.
Then, in December, I got a phone call. John Lennon’s unmistakable voice came on the line.
‘Hello, Alistair. You’re looking a bit pissed off at NEMS recently.’
‘Yes, John, I am. All the endless in-fighting is really getting to me and nothing is the same without Brian around.’
‘Well, why don’t you come over and be general manager of Apple,’ he said.
My heart leapt. John asked me when I could start and I said, ‘Tomorrow.’
Lennon laughed and said, ‘When you said you were pissed off, I didn’t know you were that pissed off. Welcome aboard, mate.’
We had started to set up Apple before Brian died. In fact, Brian was on the original executive board along with the accountant and the solicitor, Neil Aspinall, the boys and myself. It really started as a way to spend the boys’ massive money mountain and somehow to minimise their tax bill. But Brian was never greatly interested by it. They were paying 19s 6d in the pound in income tax at the time and Apple was a way to reduce this to something like 16s. The boys’ idea, if that is not too strong a word, was that business should be fun, not just a load of boring guys in boring suits poring over boring figures. They wanted to find exciting, new, original thinkers to give them the platform to develop new products and ideas. Some of the philosophy behind the whole thing was distinctly wacky. Remember, the boys were experimenting with lots of drugs at this time so they weren’t always desperately rational. But at heart it was a great idea.
I was delighted to be involved with the Beatles so closely again. And a stylish flat in Montagu Place, just across from Jimi Hendrix’s old flat where John and Yoko were later busted, was part of the salary and I was the new general manager of Apple. I prepared myself for a brave new world of building up the Beatles’ business without Brian. If only Apple hadn’t been such an unmitigated disaster area, it would have been the ultimate dream job.
One of the first big ideas was to set up a chain of card shops selling birthday and Christmas cards and cards for every occasion. In business terms, this has been proved a successful idea many times since, but the boys thought it was just about the most boring concept in the world. I became the link between the boys’ brainwaves and the real world and sometimes it seemed to be a huge gap to bridge.
The boys decided they’d have people they liked around them, so I was ordered to find the telephone number for Derek Taylor, the colourful former Press officer who was now happily installed in California and heavily involved with the Byrds and the Beach Boys. They crowded into my office to make the call like a group of kids organising a party. It was the middle of the night in Los Angeles but the boys didn’t care about boring details like that. Once Derek was roused and brought blearily to the telephone, the Beatles took the receiver in turn to sweet-talk Derek into coming back into the fold.
Then Paul persuaded me to undertake a modelling career. It only lasted for one job but it was certainly fun. His idea was for adverts in the New Musical Express saying ‘This man has talent’ with the picture of a very straight, suit-wearing, bowler-hatted businessman who had allegedly just broken into the music business. Paul wanted to encourage even the most conventional of creatures into throwing off the shackles of everyday life and plunging into the unknown with the assistance of this wonderful organisation called Apple. Naturally, the straightest guy Paul knew was ‘the man with the shiny shoes’ – yours truly. So I was sent out to buy a bowler and Paul rigged me up as a sort of one-man band for his advertising campaign.
The photo-session was hilarious. There I was, strapped into the one-man band kit, with a great heavy drum on my back complete with cymbal, guitar, mouth organ, the lot. I sat precariously perched on a stool with all the clutter any singing accountant might have lying around the house – euphonium, French horn, trumpet, violin bow, manuscript paper, copies of the Writers’ and Artists’ Year Book and The Stage, and a cheap recorder all ready to record my music for posterity.
It did occasionally cross my mind that Paul was taking the mickey, but that was nothing new and I didn’t really mind. We tried quite a few poses with me sitting there looking creative and feeling like a prune, but Paul said that they were no good.
‘It’s no good if you’re not really singing. Sing us something. Anything you like,’ he enthused.
The only time I ever sing is in the bath and I couldn’t even think of what to sing. I settled on ‘When Irish Eyes Are Smiling’ and just belted it out trying not to die of embarrassment. The photographer clicked away happily.
At the end of the session, Paul and I walked out into Soho and I was still flexing my shoulders to try to get the circulation back after having the drum strapped on to me. And I’d forgotten I was still wearing the bowler hat until Paul snatched it off my head, threw it into the middle of the road, and started jumping on it. ‘I’ve always wanted to do that,’ he said, and we both fell about.
There are loads of magical memories from my time with the Beatles and that is one of my favourites. It would never have occurred to me to jump on a bowler in the road, but the pleasure it gave Paul makes me smile even today.
When we’d stopped giggling, he took me round to tailor Dougie Millings, the guy who made the Beatles’ suits, and told me to choose any cloth I fancied. He then designed a suit for me, told Dougie to take the measurements, to finish it as quickly as possible and charge it to his account. That can’t be bad, I thought, a brand-new suit in exchange for a few minutes dressed as a one-man band.
Mind you, when I saw the ad all over the back page of the New Musical Express my jaw dropped. Paul had gone into full creative overdrive when he had composed the copy for the advert and had written that I’d had talent and now I was driving a Bentley thanks to my musical genius. I wish.
Apple was a truly bizarre place to work. Alex Mardas was one of the most amazing people. He was definitely way ahead of his time. He designed a telephone you could use without touching. You just spoke the number into it and it rang up whoever you wanted. I know they’re around now, but in 1967 this was remarkable stuff. Then he turned polystyrene ceiling tiles into a really effective loudspeaker and even an electric spoon that you could leave stirring while you got on with preparing the rest of the meal. Alex was unbelievable.
But the Beatles were always better at getting rid of money than anything else. George was always a keen car enthusiast and he began the rush to buy a Mercedes. He really wanted a Rolls-Royce but he soon lost interest when the snooty salesman told him there was a 14-month waiting list. George tried Mercedes instead and received an instant lesson in German efficiency. He fell in love at first sight with the huge new Mercedes 600 model. It had power everything – brakes, steering, windows, seats, air-conditioning. It was more expensive than the Rolls and George wanted one in black. There was just a five-day wait while Mercedes specially contoured the driver’s seat to fit George’s back. It was delivered to Kinfauns, his fabulous home near Esher, within a week.
Like anyone with a new car, George wanted to show it off. He rang Ringo who was mightily impressed. Within another six days, he had one, too. Then John saw the two cars parked together and he decided it was time he joined the club. I don’t think Mercedes could believe their luck. Paul decided to buck the trend and stuck with his Aston Martin DB6 and his sweet little custom-built Mini. It was the only Mini I ever knew with its own record player!
The Beatles all loved to buy, buy, buy. With George it was houses that were always taking his fancy. He alerted me one day that we were going to look at a mansion in Kent. I said, ‘You can’t go in person first time, George. The price will go through the roof. Or the locals will organise a petition to keep you out.’
‘We won’t be recognised. Pick you up at ten tomorrow. Just organise the appointment, please, Alistair.’ And the phone went dead.
The following morning, just as I was waiting for George, I was irritated to get the message. A young woman was asking for me in reception. I went down to quickly get rid of whoever it was. Standing in the lobby with her back to me was a young woman in a very expensive but somewhat severe twin-set topped off by a pillbox hat. She looked the very epitome of respectability and squareness – until she turned towards me and I saw it was Patti Harrison, dressed evidently for an investiture. ‘Meet your wife for the day, Alistair,’ she smiled. ‘Now come and meet James, the chauffeur.’
Outside the front door, standing conspicuously on the double yellow lines was the enormous Mercedes 600 limousine which George had recently bought. At the wheel, staring dutifully straight ahead was our liveried chauffeur complete with peaked cap. Patti opened the door and I held it while she climbed in. He’s not much of a chauffeur, I thought. Aren’t they supposed to hold the doors open for us? Then the driver turned round and I was confronted by George’s beaming face. ‘Where to, wack?’ he said. Not a trace of the famous Beatles hair was to be seen. It must have taken him hours to pin it under his cap.
We swept off to a very expensive section of the Kent countryside where it turned out a magnificent pile owned by a stockbroker was for sale. His very county wife sprang to show newlywed Mr and Mr Alistair Taylor round the property and the chauffeur stayed at the wheel.
Patti and I tried to behave like a happy couple and talked enthusiastically about what we would like to do to the house. But we had some awkward moments. As we toured the expansive garden and approached the tennis court the houseowner said, ‘Do you play tennis?’
Patti said, ‘No.’ I said, ‘Yes,’ but I supposed she would understand that we don’t have to do everything together. In the end, it was a lovely house and I thought we got away with our little charade rather well. Right up until the moment we were leaving when the house’s elegant occupant said, ‘Are you sure Mr Harrison wouldn’t like to see the house as well.’
The Beatles were never boring to be with but sometimes they were pretty dangerous. One of John Lennon’s personal crusades was to persuade me to turn on, tune in and drop out to acid.
There was a little pub round the corner from the early Apple offices. Before we moved to Savile Row, our first offices were temporary ones in Wigmore Street. At that time John used to come round and would want to go for lunch. He had just discovered the mind-expanding excitement of acid. And with the enthusiasm of the recent convert, he wanted to show me how fantastic it was. John knew I was straight. I had never smoked a joint. I had never taken acid. In the pub, the onslaught started. John and Derek Taylor had decided it would be a good idea if I went on an acid trip. They kept saying, ‘Al, it’s mind-blowing. It’s incredible. You’ve never experienced anything like this in your life before.’
I said I did not want to know. Call me a coward if you like, but I didn’t think a doped-up popstar was going to be the most reliable minder if anything went wrong inside my brain. If I decided I could fly from the top of a high building, I’m sure John would have been the one urging me to take off. I’d heard about people pretending they can fly. I never touched pot or speed. He and Derek spent weeks trying to get me to go on an acid trip. John kept saying, ‘Come on, Al. We’ll be with you. We’ll look after you.’ Finally, they gave up.
We had some very snobby neighbours in Savile Row and the boys used to love to wind them up. Whenever we had a new piece of music to listen to, which was pretty often given our business, they always made sure the windows were wide open and the volume was turned right up. We would get telephone calls from our frightfully upper-crust neighbours demanding, ‘I say, could you turn that awful racket down,’ and the Beatles would roar with laughter.
We had enjoyed such a good working relationship with the police that one of the few times I rebelled against the lads was during a rooftop concert when they insisted on secretly filming the boys in blue. I thought that was wrong and I still do. The boys loved defying authority. It was a natural inborn instinct to stand up for yourself. They were forever being told what they had to do, and standing up and saying, ‘Fuck off. We don’t have to do anything you say. It’s our lives to do what we want with.’ But generally they would go along with it. They decided not to film overtly but covertly instead. They put a booth in reception to secretly film the police’s reaction and I didn’t like this. I tried to protest that in spite of what they might think about coppers, we owed them a lot for their help over the past years. But they wouldn’t listen to me, as usual. This was just before the rooftop concert and I watched that from the post-box on the corner. I didn’t want to be part of any plan to take the mickey out of the police. I thought it was wrong.
Magical Mystery Tour might not have gone down in pop music history as one of the Beatles’ great successes but it was one of the happiest episodes. Paul rang me one day and asked me to come round to Cavendish Avenue. He said, ‘I’ve had this idea. Do they still do mystery tours on buses.’
I had no idea but I was prepared to find out. Paul had this happy memory from somewhere of getting on a coach and paying five bob and being taken off who knows where. At Paul’s request, I took Lesley down to the seaside for a week to investigate whether they still existed. Paul’s idea for MMT was to have a coach trip complete with courier saying, ‘If you look out to your left you will see such and such a castle and so on.’ Paul thought this would be a great starting point for something magical then to happen. ‘And we will be the four magicians creating all this.’
I thought it was a fantastic idea, I genuinely loved it. So Lesley and I went off to Eastbourne. I loved the place and always used it as my bolt-hole. If ever life got a bit too hectic, Lesley and I would go off for a few days to the Queen’s Hotel in Eastbourne and it was the one place I never gave Brian the number.
This time it was a Sunday and, just our luck, the rain was bucketing down. I happened to glance out of the window at a fairly empty car park and in pulled this gaudily coloured bus. It was bright and packed with people and it looked elderly with a sort of faded style, just as Paul had described to me. It was citrus yellow and hideous blue. I just dropped my knife and fork and shouted, ‘I’ve found it.’ Lesley knew what I meant and sighed as I went running out into the pouring rain and jumped straight on the bus. ‘Do you hire this bus out?’ I blurted to the astonished driver. ‘Yes,’ he said as if he was speaking to someone so stupid he didn’t know what function buses had in the scheme of things. I was so excited I ignored the sarcasm and got a card with the operator’s name, address and telephone number. The coach was owned by a firm called Fox’s of Hayes.
The following day, I rushed back to London with the good news for Paul and we hired the bus. At that stage, this was just one of those mad McCartney schemes. He hadn’t even told the other boys what he was planning.
This was the period when the Beatles spent a great deal of time stoned on acid so there wasn’t that much sensible communication going on. But Paul won over the others. His idea was that we would have genuine old-age pensioners and underprivileged children on board. Paul had also recruited Ivor Cutler and Nat Jackley. And I had been meeting and auditioning people, such as an accordionist. The idea was for Paul and the others simply to slope off with a skeleton camera crew and record the action as it happened. Hotel stops were booked. Then the others all started throwing ideas in and the whole thing got out of hand. If you watch it at the beginning, our bus from Fox’s of Hayes has all these psychedelic coloured panels stuck on it but towards the end some of them had disappeared. This was because they blew off as we were hurtling round the countryside.
One night they were down in Newquay and I got a phone call from Neil Aspinall. They desperately needed a Mae West life-jacket for a sketch to be recorded tomorrow. I was in the West End and they were right on the coast, yet it became my job to find this particular piece of nautical equipment. That was one of the penalties of being Mr Fixit. I legged it round to Albemarle Street where I knew there was a sailing shop. But then I had the problem of how to get down to Newquay. I called the chauffeur and decided to take this life-jacket down in person. It’s a long journey, even in the back of a limousine. But when I arrived I marched proudly into the lounge of the hotel pleased with myself for delivering this vital costume only to be told by John, ‘No, Al. We don’t want the old Mae West any more. We’ve gone off that idea. But it’s great to see you. Have a drink.’
That was fairly typical Beatle behaviour. One minute something would be required instantly and it was incredibly important that it was provided. The next minute, they would lose interest and be panicking about something completely different. ‘Take it back with you tomorrow,’ laughed John.
A lot of it was filmed at West Morley airbase. The final scene, with ‘Your Mother Should Know’, had the Beatles resplendent in wonderful white suits and top hats and tails with a whole mass of people in this hangar going up a big white staircase. The boys kept their outfits a secret because they wanted to surprise everyone and they certainly did that. It was breathtaking. Paul was mad about Busby Berkeley at the time so we had the whole of the Peggy Spencer Formation Dancing Team. We invited all the people from miles around and thousands came. The idea was that the four boys appeared for one last time in the Magical Mystery Tour bus with a great crowd following them like the Pied Piper of Hamlin. There were grannies and women with babes in arms and gangs of Teddy boys, all sorts had arrived. We were just setting up this big finale when suddenly there was a power cut and every light in the place went out. It was Sunday afternoon. We needed another generator and we got one just in time, just as the crowd were losing interest and starting to drift away. We were just ready when suddenly every light went out again. More people left and by the end there were about 25 of us trying to make ourselves look like the sort of crowd you usually see at Wembley. If you look very carefully you can see me, Cynthia, little Julian, Big Mal, Neil and a few others desperately trying to make ourselves look like a crowd.
It was a fun time filming Magical Mystery Tour. Paul wanted another scene in a strip club with the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah Band, so I persuaded Paul Raymond to let us use his Review Bar early in the morning. We had a young lady ready to perform and things were just getting going when two gentlemen from the technicians’ union arrived to stop us filming without union permission. They said we should have a crew of 32 and we only had about three guys. They were very unhappy. ‘We will black this and it will never be shown if you carry on without the proper manning levels,’ he said. The union sent the cost spiralling by thousands of pounds as we had to pay all these people we did not want and did not use. Paul was very angry.
It was so much fun but the BBC showed it in black-and-white which was very strange because the whole point of the thing was the colour. I just don’t know why they haven’t shown it again. Afterwards, I was instructed by the boys to organise a party for everyone who had anything to do with it. That turned out to be quite a do. It was at the Royal Lancaster Hotel in Bayswater Road and, as it was heading towards Christmas, they decided to turn it into the Christmas party for all the Apple employees. That meant more work. Then John rang.
‘Al,’ he said. ‘We’re making it fancy dress.’
Great, I thought. I hope that’s the end of the instructions. The invitation list seemed to get longer and longer. Freddie Lennon arrived, and was pissed out of his head before very long. He went up on the stage and fell flat on his face, which just about brought the house down.
I sat on Paul’s table with Jane and her parents. A couple of weeks later, Paul rushed into the office having seen a ‘fantastic group’. Evidently, they were called the Peake Family and they played fairy music. ‘Al, it’s incredible. See if you can find a record.’ I found that they went into every eisteddfod and folk music concert around and had a really big reputation. They won every contest they entered. They would, in fact, be passing through London on the night of the party, so I asked the leader, who happened to be the grandfather of the family, to bring the group to the party. He agreed and I went and met him and set it all up. The Bonzo Dogs played and then I went on stage and received a massive barracking. I said, ‘Please could you be quiet now because we’re going to have some fairy music.’
I heard Paul go, ‘Oh my God.’
They were fantastic. The old man played Uillian pipes which are different from bagpipes because you press a pad on your knee and they make this wonderful haunting sound. John Lennon went mad about the sound and I had to get him a set of pipes afterwards. There was a seven-year waiting list but with a bit of bribery and corruption I managed to get a set for him in about three months. ‘I’ll learn how to play them, Al,’ he said. ‘Don’t you worry.’
I thought Magical Mystery Tour was great, and years ahead of its time. Unfortunately, the critics thought exactly the opposite. There were also an awful lot of private jokes that baffled the public.
Perhaps my proudest claim to fame from all my years with the Beatles is that I am the co-writer of the number-one hit Lennon and McCartney song, ‘Hello, Goodbye’ – even though I never get any credit for it.
Shortly after he split from Jane, I was up at Paul’s house one night and there were just the two of us. He’d call me up for a chat and we would hit the scotch and Coke together. Not too hard, you understand, just hard enough to make us relax a little. We never got drunk, just mellow. I was idly marvelling at his gift for song-writing and he was dismissive. Paul said, ‘Have you ever thought about writing a song? There is really nothing to it. It’s dead easy, anyone can do it. Look, let’s write a song together.’ He marched me into the dining room where he had a wonderful old hand-carved wooden harmonium. It was a little organ and you had to pump to get the air into it with big pedals. He lifted the lid of this ancient instrument and said, ‘Right, you get on that end and I’ll be on this end.’
I think I was on the treble end and he was on the bass end. We both had to pedal like mad to get it going.
‘Come and sit at the other end of the harmonium. You hit any note you like on the keyboard. Just hit it with both hands as you feel like and I’ll do the same. Now whenever I shout out a word, you shout the opposite. That’s all and I’ll make up a tune. You watch, it’ll make music.’
‘Fire away,’ I said nervously, feeling like someone suddenly asked to be co-pilot of an airliner. We got this rhythm going, just banging away on the keys. I think I had had just enough scotch and Coke to give me the confidence to join in.
‘Black,’ he started.
‘White,’ I replied.
‘Yes.’
‘No.’
‘Good.’
‘Bad.’
‘Hello.’
‘Goodbye.’
And so it went on for about five minutes until we ran out of pairs of opposites and went to freshen the drinks. A day or so later, Paul arrived in the office with a demo tape of ‘Hello, Goodbye’. He said, ‘Here’s our new single.’ I don’t know whether it was already going round in his head or if he really did dream it up that night. A bit of both, I suspect. So those were the seeds of a Beatles number one, written, I will always believe, by Taylor and McCartney.
Another night I was walking with Paul from Abbey Road at around 3.00am after a long session. We were looking forward to a much-needed scotch and Coke at Paul’s house. Two girl fans followed at a respectful distance. High up on the wall at the corner of Cavendish Avenue was an ancient lamp that looks like an old gas light. Paul stopped there and took hold of the acoustic guitar which hung round his neck by a piece of frayed string. He said, ‘I’ve just written a new song. Would you like to hear it?’ He took his guitar and positioned himself in the small cone of light from the lamp and sang this haunting song about a blackbird with a broken wing. It was a lovely still night and just listening to my talented friend singing this beautiful song made me glad to be alive. The two young fans stood back, eternally grateful that their long vigil had brought them such an entertaining reward. Later Paul played me the demo of ‘Blackbird’ and I was terribly disappointed that he had used all sorts of gimmicky production effects which for me spoiled the simplicity of the song he had sung that night. A second demo even had twittering bird noises added. Paul never could resist filling in any quiet holes in a song.
But at least John Lennon never sent me to prison, which was something Paul McCartney managed in the autumn of 1968. His song ‘Ob-la-di, Ob-la-da’ inspired Paul to call me up and say, ‘I want you to get down to Brixton Prison with £800 in cash and give it to a bloke in there called Scott.’
Evidently, Scott was in prison for running up arrears over his wife’s maintenance or some such civil debt, and more significantly, when not banged up he ran a band called the Obladi-Oblada band and he reckoned Paul had seen the flyposters and taken the name Obladi-Oblada off that. Apparently, he had got through to Paul about this strange, perceived injustice and Paul had said, ‘OK, I didn’t, but what are you after?’ And Scott had replied that if Paul paid off his maintenance debts he would forget about the whole thing. So Muggins here, Mr Fixit, had to get £800 from nowhere on a Saturday morning and into Brixton nick. It was another case of over to you, you’re Mr Fixit.
I called on a resourceful guy called Dennis O’Dell who worked for Apple as a film producer. He had done Magical Mystery Tour for us and he seemed the sort of street-wise individual who could lay his hands on a large amount of cash at short notice. He said, ‘Bloody hell, I’ll call you back.’ When he did, he sent me to this second-hand car dealer in east London. ‘Don’t ask any questions, I’ll sort out the repayment,’ was Dennis’s only advice. I expected the Kray Twins, but the guy I met wasn’t that easy-going. He was a huge bloke with cauliflower ears and a bent nose. I just said ‘Thank you’ and off I went to Brixton Prison. There had just been a high-profile escape using a helicopter and all the security had been improved, which meant the nearest the taxi could take me was to some bollards 100 yards from the gate. I had to run through pouring rain and bang on the door to be let into the prison. After an interminable wait, I managed to pay, got the receipt and came out for another soaking on the way home. Working for the Beatles was definitely not all glamour.
If there was one Beatles romance that I thought would really last it was the love affair between Paul and Jane Asher. They did seem very much in love. I thought they were made for each other. Jane was just the most adorable woman you could expect to meet. She was bright and funny and incredibly attractive. I thought she was a wonderful match for Paul. And I think he thought so, too. She was well educated and very successful in her own right.
When it ended, it was awful. Jane came home to find Paul with Francie Schwartz, a groupie from New York. It was terrible for Jane. Francie was not just in the house but in the bed she shared with Paul. Jane was in a state of shock and her relationship with Paul ended there and then. There were fans waiting at the gate as usual and they tried to warn Paul that Jane was approaching. But Paul thought they were joking. He couldn’t resist another woman.
Jane’s mother came down later to remove all of Jane’s belongings. I remember she also took all the household things that were Jane’s. There was a set of pans she was particularly attached to. Paul stayed discreetly well out of the way.
Paul was absolutely devastated. Jane’s departure shattered him. I have never quite been sure if it was because he really loved Jane or because he was so shocked that she had the nerve to turn down Paul McCartney. And let’s not forget, they were engaged by now. She wasn’t just his girlfriend, she was definitely going to be his wife. Afterwards, he had a succession of one-night stands, although often the relationship did not even last that long.
It’s the only time I ever saw him totally distraught and lost for words. Normally he was so flip and cool and permanently full of confidence in himself. It was then that I realised how close we had become because I was the shoulder he cried on. We spent weeks together after the end of his love affair with Jane. It completely threw him. He pleaded with Jane to forgive him but she was implacable. She didn’t want to know. She is a very strong and highly principled lady. I think she was deeply in love with Paul. And it wasn’t just the Beatle stuff; she wasn’t interested in fame or money. She loved Paul for himself. She loved his humour and his energy and she believed in him.
Paul literally cried on my shoulder. We hit the bottle together. Hard. He always seemed to feel lonely at night and the phone would go and Paul would say, ‘Al, get a cab and come on up to Cavendish.’ I didn’t mind because he was a friend in pain. Yes, he was my boss in a way, I suppose, in that he was one of Brian’s most important acts. But I thought the world of Paul. He was like the younger brother I’d never had. He was talented, charming and often very kind. I had watched his love for Jane grow from early infatuation into a deep and passionate love affair.
Paul told me how much he had learned from Jane and her talented family. He wasn’t a yobbo before he met Jane, I’m not saying that. But he was relatively unsophisticated. Jane introduced him to fine wines, art, films and all aspects of culture. Jane’s mother taught the oboe at the Royal College of Music. This was a whole new world for Paul and he loved it. He absorbed it like a sponge. Of course, being a bright bloke he was a very fast learner but I’ve always thought that a lot of Paul’s taste comes from Jane. She taught him what good taste was.
That’s why he found it so shocking when she dumped him. He went completely off the rails. He couldn’t believe what he’d done and he couldn’t have said that to any of the other three Beatles. Sure, musically they had become almost like one person and they were rock solid then in anything that threatened the Beatles. But individually they never liked to accept weakness. Paul would have hated John to think that he was upset about a woman, even if she was Jane Asher.
We would sit up at Cavendish Avenue until 3.00am and he would talk about what a prat he had been. ‘I had everything and I threw it away,’ he would say. ‘Jane wasn’t just my woman, she was my closest friend. I’ve told her everything inside me. She knows what makes me tick down to things that happened as a kid. I went right through all the stuff about my mother dying and how I dealt with that. With Jane, I could just relax completely and be myself and that seemed to be what she wanted. With the other women, I’m a fucking millionaire rock star who just happens to be about as shallow as a puddle.’
Other times he would just turn up late at night at my house. It would be midnight or 1.00am and Lesley and I would have long gone to bed. The doorbell would go and there would be Paul. ‘Has Lesley got the kettle on?’ he’d ask cheerfully, and I would know that I’d be up half the night going through how wonderful life had been with Jane. And he would put his arms round me and cry. Paul was never ashamed about crying. Afterwards, he’d try and crack a joke about it. ‘I thought Jane was the drama queen, but it’s me,’ and he’d laugh weakly.
One night at Cavendish, Paul and I sat and drank scotch and Coke for so long that the first light of dawn started to appear as we were still putting the world to rights.
‘Come on, Al,’ said Paul. ‘I need some fresh air. Let’s take Martha for a walk.’
We were pretty relaxed but we weren’t drunk. Martha leapt up from the rug by the fire and Paul and I piled into the DB6 and he drove us the half mile or so to the foot of Primrose Hill. We left the car outside London Zoo and went through the fence up the hill. It was very muddy at the bottom and Paul looked at my footwear and laughed, ‘So much for the man with the shiny shoes.’
We enjoyed the spectacular view in the first light of dawn. There was a real freshness in the air as Martha hurtled off in all directions in search of sheep or, better still, bones, and Paul and I enjoyed a few stolen moments of the day before the rest of London woke up. At 5.00am there was so little traffic noise that we could hear some early morning noises from the occupants of the zoo. It was chilly in the breeze that rustled the kites stuck up in the trees. Paul and I kept strolling around enjoying the experience and keeping warm.
‘Look at that dawn,’ said Paul in a whisper. ‘How anybody can say that there is no such thing as God, or some power bigger than us. If you stand and look at that sky, you know there must be more to life than we can comprehend …’ We were totally absorbed in the sights and sounds of the universe in front of us, as if we were the only men in an abandoned city.
Then, suddenly behind us, a stranger appeared. He was a middle-aged man, very respectably dressed in a belted raincoat and he appeared to have come out of nowhere. One second Paul and I were alone, straining to see which direction Martha would come bounding back from, and the next, this man was there. He said, ‘Good morning,’ politely. ‘My name is John.’
Paul said, ‘Good morning. Mine’s Paul. This is Alistair and that’s Martha the dog,’ as our four-legged friend returned swiftly.
John said, ‘It’s lovely to meet you. Isn’t this wonderful?’ and he walked away.
Paul and I looked at each other and I said, ‘God, that was peculiar.’ I looked round and there was no sign of the man. The stranger had completely disappeared from the top of the hill as if he had just vanished into thin air. There was nowhere for him to go, yet he had just evaporated. Paul and I both felt pretty spooked by this experience. We both thought something special had happened. We sat down rather shakily on the seat and Paul said, ‘What the hell do you make of that? That’s weird. He was here, wasn’t he? We did speak to him?’
‘Sure. He was here only seconds ago,’ I said.
‘Let’s go home,’ muttered Paul.
Back at Cavendish, we spent the rest of the morning talking about what we had seen and heard and felt. It sounds just like any acid tripper’s fantasy to say they had a religious experience on Primrose Hill just before the morning rush hour, but neither of us had taken anything like that. Scotch and Coke was the only thing we had touched all night. We both felt afterwards that we had been through some sort of mystical experience, yet we didn’t care to name, even to each other, what or who we had seen on that hilltop for those few brief seconds.
Paul tried to immerse himself in work. And then after some months he said, ‘Do you know any birds?’ I knew a young girl who worked in a bar and I asked her if she’d like to meet Paul McCartney. She certainly did and we went over to Cavendish Avenue together. But Paul just wanted to talk and he wasn’t interested in sex that night. I put her in a taxi home before I left. Paul just wanted some natural contact with someone female. He wanted a woman to talk to.
Months later, Paul rolled up outside our flat in Montagu Place on a Sunday morning in his two-seater Aston Martin.
‘Come on, we’re off to look at a house,’ said Paul. But he already had Francie Schwartz and Martha as passengers. I said there was no room but Paul insisted and Lesley and I somehow got in and we all squeezed up and with him at the wheel we headed off for Kent. When we reached the grounds, Francie and Paul disappeared for about 20 minutes. We had to draw our own conclusions about what they were up to, but I’m pretty sure they weren’t playing Scrabble.
The tour of the house itself was pretty uneventful, but on the way back down a dual carriageway, Paul suddenly slammed on the anchors and we screeched to a halt. He yelled, ‘Did you see that?’ as he executed an alarming U-turn. ‘There’s a village called Bean down here according to that signpost. We’ve got to go there. Then I can say I’ve been to Bean.’
Well, he’s the imaginative songwriter; I just wanted to get home. But when we got there we could see that the most exciting thing about Bean was its name. It was the dullest village on earth. But it had a big pub and the doors were just opening. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ said Paul, so we all trooped in.
There was no one else there, but the expression on the landlady’s face said that she was well aware of who had just walked in. Before you could say ‘Gin and tonic’ her whole family was standing in a line behind the bar. They were clearly in awe and they were even more delighted when Paul decided to have a bash on a drum kit. Paul always fancied himself as a drummer so he did a quick solo and we finished our drinks and left with the landlady’s mouth still wide open. They were fun times. Paul loved to blast in and out of people’s lives in double-quick time. Whatever he said about the agonies of Beatlemania, Paul never really stopped loving the fame.
That appears critical and it’s not really meant to, because he could also be refreshingly down to earth. Once, Lesley’s mother and stepfather were staying with us for a few days. The doorbell went at 10.00pm and there was Paul with his usual question, ‘Has Lesley got the kettle on?’ Paul came in and my in-laws just sat there as Paul casually walked in and said, ‘Hey-up, how are you?’ I introduced them. For a moment, my in-laws froze in the presence of a living legend. He just flopped down and joined us. Afterwards they said, ‘But he’s normal, he’s just like us.’
It was a treasured moment and no one can take that away from me. Another came very late at night at Abbey Road. It was around 2–3.00am and I was very tired. The boys had taken a break and I went looking for Paul to see if there was anything else he needed before I went home. I found him on his own in Studio 1, sitting at the big white grand piano and picking out this melody virtually with one finger. At first I just heard a few notes but I was instantly enraptured and, as Paul looked up, I said, ‘Hey fella, that’s great, what is it?’
Paul said, ‘It’s just an idea I’ve been playing around with.’
I stood and listened and it just got to me. I said, ‘You must work on that melody line. I know someone who would absolutely love it.’
‘Who’s that?’ said Paul, only half-listening.
‘Lesley,’ I said. ‘She loves those pure and simple haunting lines.’
He smiled and carried on picking it out. There was a guy behind the control panel who had just been taping a demo for a song Paul had written for Marianne Faithfull that she never recorded. Paul raised his voice and called up to the guy, ‘Have you any tape left?’
‘Yeah,’ came the reply.
‘Roll it,’ said Paul. And he began to play this fabulous song. I was totally transfixed. It was a very early version of ‘The Long and Winding Road’ and in terms of lyrics he hadn’t got an awful lot further than the title, but when he started playing it I knew Lesley would love it. He filled in the lyrics with lots of la-la-las but it didn’t matter. When he got to the end I stood and applauded. I said, ‘That’s beautiful, mate.’ And I meant it; at moments like that, I had the best job in the world. I couldn’t carry a tune in a bucket but thanks to Brian’s advice and long experience I was starting to spot the real winners early on. And I’ve still never heard a song that makes the little hairs on the back on my neck stand up like ‘The Long and Winding Road’. He checked with the sound engineer that we had got that and then said, ‘Great. Now you get home, mate.’
The very next day, I was sitting at my desk arguing with a hotel manager who seemed unreasonably angry because his garden had been trampled upon by Beatles fans, when Paul arrived. He was wearing his long brown overcoat that he’d bought from Oxfam and he just went into his pocket and brought out this one-sided, white-labelled acetate which he handed to me. He just said, ‘There you go, Al. That’s for Lesley.’ And he took out of his other pocket a 6in length of tape and asked for a pair of scissors. He said, ‘This is the tape I got from EMI last night.’ And he cut it up in front of me. He said, ‘There you go, that is now the only copy in the world and it is not for you, it’s for Lesley. I think we owe her a lot.’
We treasured that because I think it is one of those very rare occasions when one of the Beatles has been captured actually writing the songs. And do you know, I still prefer it to the finished version.
They were just four fun guys. They were four perfectly normal Liverpool guys who wanted to enjoy the experience of fame.
Cynthia Lennon is always seen as the typical Beatles’ victim. But I have to say she never seemed like a victim to me. She was a funny, attractive lady who certainly put up with a lot of ill-treatment both mental and physical from John. But she was no bimbo. Cynthia was beautiful and intelligent in her own right.
The marriage ended badly for her in May 1968 when John installed this strange little Japanese woman in the house while she was away on holiday. Cynthia returned to find Yoko in her house with her husband. Yoko was even wearing her bath robe. The marriage ended virtually there and then and Cyn has been seen as the most tragic Beatle woman ever since.
It was never an easy marriage. John slept with hundreds of different women before, during and after his time with Cynthia. He had not wanted to get married in the first place but had gone along with it when Cynthia announced she was pregnant. During their time together, I often visited them at Kenwood, John’s luxurious house in Weybridge, and it was a much more equal relationship than is ever portrayed in any of the numerous biographies. Certainly, Cynthia liked her sleep and used to go to bed early, which left John to go off into London and behave like any self-respecting rock star would.
But Cynthia was nothing like the clinging wifey that people who have never met the couple seem to imagine. And John was nothing like the rakish, thoughtless, faithless husband. Towards the end of the marriage, John began to suspect that Cynthia was being unfaithful. And like many adulterers he was absolutely frantic with rage at the thought of another man making love to his own wife. But because he was out all the time, and out of his mind much of the rest of the time, it was very hard for him to check up on what Cynthia was up to.
That is why he used his friend ‘Magic’ Alex Mardas to follow her. I don’t think that Cynthia was unfaithful to John before he humiliatingly ended the marriage by moving Yoko into their home, but I know that John thought she was.
John quizzed me on a trip to Italy taken by Cynthia earlier in 1968. I hadn’t arranged it, which was unusual but not unprecedented. Occasionally, one or other of the Beatles or their wives would take off on a trip they had organised themselves. But John thought Cynthia was being deliberately secretive about this Italian trip. He wouldn’t tell me why he wanted to know, but he wanted to find out every detail of every conversation I’d had with Cynthia over the recent past. And such details were not the normal subject of John’s interest. He was consumed by jealousy. He might not have loved Cynthia as passionately or as exclusively as he once had, but he sure as hell was not prepared to put up with her loving someone else. He had Alex spying on her and I think it was this obsessive jealousy that sparked him into bringing Yoko in and kicking Cynthia out.
Yoko received a lot of vilification because she broke one of the Beatles’ unwritten rules. When they were working at Abbey Road, nobody went on the floor with them. Everyone kept out of the studio, even Brian and Neil, and certainly Jane, Maureen, Patti, whoever. We kept back when they were working. Unless they wanted us to hit something or bang something, which certainly happened from time to time. And suddenly this little Japanese lady is sitting at John’s feet. You could almost see the other three shrinking backwards and thinking, Excuse me, we never do this.
That became one of the real reasons for the break-up. It was well on the cards before then, but it needed a final shove to force the boys into splitting and Yoko provided it. John knew what he was doing when he included Yoko in the inner circle of four. He was challenging the established order and saying that, of course, none of the other Beatles should bring a partner into the studio but John Lennon was different. He did not have to abide by anyone’s rules. She actually took a bed into the studio at one point and the faces of the other three boys were a picture. If Brian had lived, he would have brought some order to this but he had sadly gone.
John was a bit of a lost soul until he met Yoko. If you looked at her and then at sexy Cynthia, you couldn’t see why any man would exchange a beautiful, warm-hearted blonde who was the mother of his son for an oddball Japanese woman with more hang-ups than a psychiatric clinic. But she challenged John mentally. He told me once that she made him feel more alive than any person he’d ever met. I think because everyone treated her like a threat or a joke, he became extra defensive and she became more important to him than the Beatles.
When they decided to get married, I organised the flights. I flew over in the private jet to Paris and we parked up away from the main terminals. It was a beautiful misty morning and I saw John and Yoko, both in white, running towards the plane to meet me. I had laid on the champagne as always and they seemed so carefree and in love with each other that they ran over. We sat on the plane drinking champagne and I remember thinking that perhaps life was not so bad. It’s a magical memory for me because they seemed so much in love.
In those days, there was a restriction on how much money you could take out of the country. I had smuggled some extra money for them wrapped in Lesley’s tights down inside my trousers in a stocking. I think it was £500. I forgot all about the money in the emotion of the moment. I got off the plane and was waving goodbye. The jet started up, a little Hawker-Siddeley 125, a beautiful little machine, and I suddenly went, ‘Oh my God, I’ve still got the money!’ I had to stop the plane.
* * *
Paul’s ability as a songwriter always mesmerised me. John could never be serious long enough to explain his creative processes. He said, ‘It just happens,’ as if he thought it was such a fragile talent that it might even disappear on too much examination.
But Paul was more open. I remember once sitting in Abbey Road’s studio 2 with Mary Hopkin and Anne Nightingale. The boys were there recording but they had stopped for a break and Paul had come over to where we were sitting by the piano. He sat down on the piano stool and we all chatted for a few minutes. The conversation turned to composing and Paul asked Mary, who had just recorded ‘Those Were the Days’ for Apple, ‘Do you write songs?’
‘Well,’ said Mary nervously, ‘the music is all right but I have trouble with the lyrics.’
‘Oh but lyrics are dead easy. Lyrics are all around you,’ said Paul. ‘Let me show you.’
Paul turned to the piano and lifted the lid, inviting Mary to sit beside him. He played us the first song he had ever written, which was a three-chord number, then he showed how he had progressed to five chords and beyond that. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘Let’s write a song here and now. Let’s think of a story – anything at all. Suppose there is a guy who waits every morning at the bus stop and there’s this gorgeous girl who always stands next to him in the queue. But he is dead shy. He can’t bring himself to talk to her, so he feels very frustrated.’
Paul picked out a tune and started to set the lyrics of the situation to it. We sat in silence, fearful of breaking the spell. ‘Now one night in the darkness,’ Paul went on, ‘he goes out to post a letter at the letter box on the corner. Just as he is putting his hand up to the opening, the girl appears from the other side and does the same thing.’ More lyrics and a stronger, more confident tune emerged. ‘They both jump back in surprise, but they are both startled into talking to each other, which is a good job as she’s as shy as he is. They fall in love and live happily ever after.’ By this time the song was virtually all there. There was a story and a melody and you could hum it. Paul went off to join the boys for a drink and Mary, Anne and I were left looking after him in amazement.
The boys all took an interest in Mary. One day, Mal Evans arrived carrying a shiny new guitar case. George had thought it was important for her to have a new guitar so he’d bought her a £400 Martinez guitar on a whim and sent it round. Mary was very moved. The only trouble was that the guitar was shiny as well and we had to put talcum powder on it when she appeared on television to stop the lights from reflecting so brightly.
But of all the boys, Paul had, and still has, the personality to charm the birds out of the trees if he wanted to use it. Paul has an amazing ability to make other people feel important. He has immense charisma and if he looks into your eyes and talks to you it’s a remarkable experience. I believe his song writing ability is a gift. I don’t believe he was a genius like John, but when he demonstrated his talent it was breath-taking.
Francie Schwartz didn’t last very long, and a bewildering sequence of women processed through his life at that time. But Paul could be a very demanding boss. One weekend in the middle of a frantic recording session, Paul decided that he had to have a sunshine break. ‘Get the jet and get me some sunshine,’ demanded Paul. ‘You decide where we go. There’s my cousin and his girlfriend and me. Oh and I met this fabulous woman at the Peacock Club the other night. I want to bring her.’ Only he couldn’t recall either her name or her address. He just knew that she was a waitress at the Peacock. ‘I want her to come. Find her.’
I found the club which was by then shut, but mercifully there was a guy there who knew which girl had caught Paul’s eye – a Maggie McGivern – and he gave me her address. So I ended up walking to a flat in Chelsea where the young lady lived. I rang the doorbell and a woman’s head poked out of a window far above me.
‘What?’ said a hungover voice.
‘I wonder if you’d like to come away for the weekend with Paul McCartney to Sardinia,’ I shouted up, hoping that not too many of Fleet Street’s finest were within earshot. I’d decided on Sardinia while on my way to the flat.
‘Who are you?’ she shouted back. Fortunately, I managed to persuade her to come down and examine my credentials and she was then quick to accept the Beatle’s offer.
I’d arranged flights from Luton in the private jet. In the car to the airport, Paul turned to me and asked where he was going.
‘Sardinia,’ I said. ‘You’ll love it.’
As they got on the plane, Paul said, ‘Come on, Al. Come with us just for the ride. You can wait while they service the plane in Sardinia and come back with it in the morning. Then you can come back in it and pick us up on Monday. Come on, you know you’ll enjoy it.’
I decided that a few hours in the sunshine sounded quite appealing so I made a quick call to Lesley and hopped on board.
After an hour or so of airborne champagne, the pilot let us know he was about to land but then we were all treated to a shock as the plane started to bank sharply and go round in what felt terrifyingly like ever decreasing circles. When the glasses started to slide off the tables I decided it was time to talk to the pilot. That is one of the advantages of hiring a private jet – you can go and ask the driver what is happening. The disadvantage is that sometimes you’re better off not knowing.
The plane began its fifth circuit and I undid my seat belt and staggered down the gangway to the cabin. There I found the co-pilot looking down at the ground through the window beneath him. I tapped him on the shoulder and he removed his headset to talk to me. He explained angrily, ‘The bloody Italians have forgotten to put the landing lights on. We can’t see the bloody airstrip. You look out of the other side and see if you can spot it.’
Now I’m not normally a nervous flyer. But peering into the darkness of a mountainous island looking for somewhere to land does tend to concentrate your mind a little. At last the lights came miraculously into view and the pilot straightened the plane out and set us gently down on the tarmac. It was 4.00am and I was just happy to be alive.
A little later, having packed off Mr McCartney, his latest lady and assorted guests off in taxis, I was sitting dozing as the sun came up. The co-pilot tapped me on the shoulder and said, ‘Come on, I’ll show you why we didn’t want to risk coming in without the landing lights on.’ He took me round the aircraft hangar and there were two very large, very rugged mountains. ‘We had to fly between those,’ said the co-pilot. ‘There’s only about 60ft either side of the wingspan. It’s a little to dangerous to risk without the lights on.’
Paul was more or less over Jane by then I think. He tried for a time to get back with her but messages were politely returned unopened and his calls weren’t answered. The whole sorry finale to the Jane affair changed Paul McCartney in my opinion. For a few years, he had had just about everything he could ever have wanted. Jane was the first woman to reject him and he did not like the experience. Paul was a little harder, a little more cynical afterwards.
Linda Eastman set out to get Paul. Since her tragic death I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on my relationship with her. I can’t deny that she made Paul a wonderful wife, to whom he was clearly absolutely devoted, and she was a fantastic mother to their children. She cared for Paul like no-one else, I have to be honest and say that we did not see eye-to-eye at all They met in the Bag O’ Nails pub on an evening when the entertainment was being supplied by Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames. I remember him talking about a female photographer with really long and elegant fingers and he was smitten. Linda came with Heather, her daughter by a previous marriage. She was a charming kid and I used to bounce her on my knee many a time in those early days of their relationship. But I think Linda resented anyone who had been close to Paul, particularly during his period with Jane. It was very obvious at the start that Paul and I had a rapport that she could not quite come to terms with. She never stopped smiling but sometimes there was a glint in her eyes that I did not like. Paul and I had so many shared experiences that it was bound to be difficult for her. I tried to minimise it. I was genuinely happy to see Paul in another sensible relationship, and it also meant a lot less maudlin late-night drinking sessions that ended up going over the same old ground – Jane.
One of the first things Linda did at Cavendish when she managed to move in was to have the entire ground floor redecorated. Jane had decorated Cavendish Avenue in exquisite taste. Linda, however, wanted to remove every last trace of Jane from Paul’s life. She didn’t want to hear her name. She didn’t want to see pictures Paul and Jane had chosen remaining around the place. It was like a new regime taking over and wanting to wipe the slate a completely clean. So in five days, the first thing I had to organise was the redecoration of the ground floor.
It was 4.00pm when the call came from Paul. Since Linda had appeared on the scene, our late-night chats had, not surprisingly, been terminated. But there seemed to be a change in Paul’s whole demeanour at this time. He seemed cooler and as careful with his words and his warmth as he had always been with his money. I’d hardly seen the inside of Cavendish Avenue in weeks, so I was happy to answer the call. I had just arranged for Paul and Linda to go off on a five-day mini holiday and I knew they had to leave for the airport at 7.00pm so I knew I wasn’t in for a long session. Paul answered the door himself and immediately said, ‘Right, Alistair. I would like the whole of the ground floor of the house decorated by the time we come back.’
I was shocked and asked if he knew how long it would take to get a good decorator even if he was prepared to wait. But the way Paul had delivered his instructions left me in no doubt that he was serious and not inclined to discuss the matter. Behind him stood Linda with a small, cold smile on her face. And it was an expression which I was to see again.
Paul took me on a hurried tour of the lovely house, which looked exceptionally stylish thanks to the eye for elegance of Miss Jane Asher. Paul had a paint colour chart and I took careful notes as we went. Everything had been planned down to the last lick of paint and the last roll of wallpaper. The carpet in the huge drawing room was pulled up to reveal beautiful woodwork and Paul said, ‘I want that polished and restored, but not to look like your ordinary G-Plan.’ I knew exactly what he meant, but it was like receiving instructions from an impatient drill sergeant rather than a polite request from a man who had become a close friend. I had a feeling in the pit of my stomach, which told me I was not going to be nearly so close to James Paul McCartney for a while. Linda had decreed that the Indian restaurant flock wallpaper in the dining room was to go. The kitchen was to be stripped and the original wood exposed and varnished. The paintwork was all to be renewed and so on and so on until my head was reeling with all the details.
In the end, Paul tried to soften the changes with a flash of the famous smile that has charmed the world. He said, ‘Now then, mate, when we get back I want it to be all done, and I don’t want to see as much as a paintbrush in the house.’
The expression on my face betrayed my incredulity. I tried to suggest as much as I dared that he was asking the impossible, but he was not in the mood for negotiation. ‘You can do it, Al. Never mind the cost. Just get it done.’ I was dismissed.
As I left the house, I knew that our relationship had changed. My friend had turned back into my boss and I decided that, if that was the case, then I was going to be the most efficient employee imaginable. It was a formidable task.
Fortunately, a friend called John Lyndon put me on to a firm called Taverner’s who were luckily based just down the road in St John’s Wood. Ian Taverner listened to my request in deafening silence, right up until the moment when I said all this had to be completed in five days. Then he burst out laughing. ‘It’s absolutely impossible in the time you want,’ he eventually recovered enough to say. ‘Five weeks would be a better bet.’ I pleaded that I really only had five days and begged him at least to meet me in the house and look at the job. He agreed to take a look at 8.00am the next morning, and after a sleepless night I showed Mr Taverner the scale of the job.
He said, ‘What a great challenge. I’d love to have a crack at it.’ I breathed a big sigh of relief but just to make sure he drew up detailed time sheets to organise the workload. It meant working through the nights with decorators operating a shift system but he reckoned he could definitely do it. And Ian Taverner was as good as his word. They didn’t just decorate the rooms, they restored them. Every hairline crack in the plaster and woodwork was made good with filler, every trace of the old wallpaper was stripped off using a wonderful steam machine. Every surface was rubbed down and carefully prepared before it even saw a paint brush. On the fourth day, they even asked my permission to carry on up the stairs to the first floor, just to round off the job. And Paul’s wooden floor shone like marble thanks to some superb workmanship. As the deadline approached, I was still nervous but at the appointed time, just six hours before Paul and Linda were due back, I went up to the house to find the foreman just leaving after completing his last checks. Inside, everything looked immaculate and there was only the very faintest whiff of paint in the air.
Paul seemed very perky when I saw him again so I put down his brusque manner before he’d left to pressure of work. He had certainly been in need of a holiday. He was delighted with the work and even Linda almost managed a thank-you.
I went up to the house with Ian Taverner’s bill, which was actually for an awful lot less than I’d feared. Not that it mattered. Paul had told me not to worry about the cost. I showed the bill to Paul. He was sitting with Linda on the big sofa in front of the fire. Paul looked at it for a few seconds and said, ‘Great. Get the cheque off to them, Alistair.’ I relaxed for the first time in five days and was just about to put the bill back in my briefcase when Linda reached for it. I gave it to her. Well, she is Paul’s girlfriend, I thought. She looked at it hard for about a minute and then accused Ian Taverner of overcharging Paul. Not only that, she looked at me as if I was something she had just stepped in and said, ‘And how much are you making out of the deal?’
I was totally shocked. I could not trust myself to speak. My whole body seemed to go cold and shake with rage and my mouth was too dry to utter a word. I couldn’t believe what she had just said. I just stood up, closed my briefcase and left the room. I can’t ever remember feeling more angry or upset. Paul came after me and tried to act as peacemaker but in the heat of the moment I just didn’t want to know.
‘Linda’s only looking out for me, Al,’ he said. ‘She’s American. She doesn’t know how far back we go. I’m sorry. Come back in and let’s make friends.’
I didn’t stop walking. I think in my mind I was walking out of my job as well as Paul’s house. I was just so shocked that after all this time I could be accused of dishonesty by this hard-faced star-chaser from the United States. Paul was still speaking as I walked out of the house but I couldn’t stop. If I had stayed there any longer I would have smacked him in the mouth. Or better still, her. That was the end of the intimate friendship between Paul and me and, as the car took me slowly back to the office, I thought I had better start looking for another job. I was just so angry because I had never even considered taking one penny that didn’t belong to me. Paul, John, George and Ringo had my absolute loyalty and in years of spending millions of pounds on their hotels and flights and homes and countless other things, I had never taken anything for myself. Brian had inspired that sort of loyalty in people. He certainly did in me.
The following morning, Paul came into the office and tried to smooth things over. I smiled and said, ‘Forget it,’ but I knew I never could. Linda seemed worried about anyone who had been close to Paul. She saw them as a threat to her position. There may have been more singularly manipulative people around than Linda Eastman, but I’ve never met them. She might well have loved Paul but she sure as hell hated anyone who got in her way. I’d been his buddy through some of his recent unhappiness, so I’m pretty sure I was pretty high up on her hit-list. It only occurred to me much later that she didn’t care in the least about the cost of painting a house. She just wanted to push away anyone who was close to precious Paul.
In the crazy Apple days, none of the relationships we’d had in the early ’60s were the same. With Brian gone and the boys struggling to see their future through an increasingly drug-induced haze, the abilities of even the famed Mr Fixit seemed to be in less and less demand.
Paul did try to stay close and he did still need a reliable fixer. He turned to me some months later when he wanted to organise a facelift for his beloved Aston Martin DB6. Paul loved to drive James Bond’s car. It was a fabulous motor and he came to me grumbling that he had been ripped off by his garage after the latest service. Paul said, ‘They call it a full service but nobody thinks to clean out the ashtrays.’ I knew what he meant. That was a typical McCartney way of asking why the garage didn’t restore the car to its pristine showroom condition – and ashtrays included.
I took the bait. ‘Next time it needs a service let me organise it,’ I sparked up. ‘And I’ll bring it back to you with more than the ashtrays clean.’ What a big mouth. Soon afterwards Paul presented me with his car and he said, ‘Get me a service done, then, Al. But not only that, I want it resprayed. Get some colour cards and I’ll pick the shade. You get it done, fully serviced and resprayed and I want it to come back as if it has just been driven out of the showroom.’
The garage came up trumps. They seemed delighted to work on such a marvellous machine and the mechanic who delivered the gleaming finished product back to Cavendish Avenue was beaming with pride at the result. Paul and I duly inspected the car. And they had done a wonderful job. Fourteen coats of British Racing Green looked a treat and there was not a speck of dust in the ashtrays. Paul walked round it for ages lost in amazement and eventually eased himself into the driver’s seat absolutely thrilled. He looked like a kid at Christmas and I beamed back in all my reflected glory.
The bill was reasonable and Paul smiled his approval. But Linda strode out of the house to join us and my heart sank. A sense of déjà vu hit me like a flying housebrick. She snatched the bill from Paul, looked me straight in the eyes and asked, ‘How much of this is going in your pocket?’ This time Paul simply shrugged and looked away. I said, ‘I’ll see you then, Paul,’ and walked away. There wasn’t anything I could think of to say to her that wouldn’t have made the situation about a million times worse.
Linda had no time for me. In my naïve and forgiving way, I don’t think it was because of any innate character defect, but simply because I was part of the old guard and I was much, much too close to Paul.