On 11 March 1969, Apple’s press office issued a brief announcement that Paul McCartney was to marry Linda Eastman in a civil ceremony at Marylebone Register Office the next day. They had decided on it only a week earlier and chosen the quickest, simplest way–although Paul was still enough of a traditionalist to contact Linda’s father and formally ‘ask for her hand’.
Even after the date was set, Linda continued to have serious doubts about trying matrimony a second time. Their relationship in those early days, Paul would remember, was ‘very up and down’, sometimes ‘crazy’; and on the wedding-eve they had a furious row and almost called it off.
Paul spent the day in the studio with George and Jackie Lomax, working on a single to follow Lomax’s surprisingly unsuccessful ‘Sour Milk Sea’. When the session ended late that night, he did not return to Cavendish but turned up at the Chelsea apartment of his long-time secret girlfriend Maggie McGivern; the first she’d seen of him since Linda’s arrival.
‘There was no car, no cab, so he must have walked,’ Maggie recalls. ‘He was scruffy, unshaven and in a terrible state–he couldn’t even talk, just held on to me. I was trying to ask what was wrong but not to make a noise because my teenage brother was staying with me and was asleep in the same room. After about an hour, he just left. I looked out of the window and saw him walking down the street, somehow knowing I’d never see him again.’
The scenes outside Marylebone Register Office next day were like nothing seen in London since mid-season Beatlemania. Heavy rain made a fitting accompaniment to the hundreds of young women weeping with the desolation of those bereaved–or, rather, jilted. Press photographers went round snapping the most lachrymose specimens and urging the dry-eyed, ‘Go on, cry! You’ll be in the paper.’
Paul, in a dark suit, pink shirt and yellow tie, looked oddly youthful beside Linda, who wore a fitted coat of egg-yolk yellow and, in some photo-ops, cuddled a tabby kitten. The bride was four months pregnant (a fact already known to the Cavendish Avenue pickets from the chemist’s prescriptions they’d seen arriving at the house). Six-year-old Heather attended her as bridesmaid.
None of the other Beatles was present, as Paul had been on all their wedding days. Ringo was filming The Magic Christian with Peter Sellers and John had taken Yoko to meet his Aunt Mimi for the very first time. George was working in the recording studio but had promised to come to the reception with Pattie. Their absence ‘didn’t seem important’, Paul would remember. ‘It was mainly just the two of us.’
Peter Brown and Mal Evans acted as witnesses and the best man was Mike McCartney, who had to travel by rail from the north where he was touring with the Scaffold. Mike’s train developed problems and he arrived at nearby Euston station an hour late thinking he’d missed the ceremony, but Paul had insisted on waiting for him. ‘We just sort of giggled our way through it,’ his older brother would remember. ‘All that “I promise” stuff… Linda was breaking up.’
Afterwards came a (totally serious) service of blessing at St John’s Wood Parish Church, next to Lord’s cricket ground, and a further photo session at Cavendish, where Paul performed the ancient ritual of carrying his bride over the threshold. Then, friends and musician cronies were invited to a reception at the Ritz hotel in Piccadilly. The Harrisons arrived late following a police raid on their home in which a sniffer dog named Yogi (after the cartoon bear, not the Indian mystic) had discovered 57 grams of cannabis.
At the Ritz, the newly-weds were interviewed together by Independent Television News. Paul gave his usual good value, answering the banal questions with earnest politeness in between larking around with Heather to stop her from feeling left out. But Linda made little attempt to win over the several million viewers for whom this would be their first sight and sound of her:
Q: What prompted [your decision to marry]?
PAUL: Just, you know, we decided to do it instead of talking about it.
Q: Linda, how do you feel about it? You’re obviously terribly happy. How are you feeling this morning?
LINDA (barely audible): Very happy. Unquote.
When they returned home that evening, there was still a large crowd outside Cavendish, its mood now decidedly uglier. Linda was greeted with boos, catcalls and spittle and after a wad of burning newspaper was pushed through the letterbox, the police had to be called. Paul came to the front gate to appeal to reason–a tactic that had always worked in the past, but signally failed now. ‘Look girls,’ he almost pleaded, ‘I had to get married sometime.’ The comforting fiction could therefore circulate that he was doing it somehow against his will.
The first that Maggie McGivern knew of the wedding was a news bill in Chelsea’s King’s Road. In shock, she found her way to 48 Cheyne Walk where Marianne Faithfull, for whom she used to work as a nanny, now lived with Mick Jagger. ‘Marianne couldn’t believe it when I told her and when Mick heard, he went, “Wha-a-at?” He said he’d had a fling with Linda in New York during the great power blackout of 1965.’
As the unfavourable stories about his new wife piled up, Paul, that media-handler par excellence, took a personal hand in trying to secure her a better press. At his request, Derek Taylor arranged for Linda to be interviewed by the Beatles’ favourite pop correspondent, Don Short of the Daily Mirror. Although Short’s interview with Linda was the softest imaginable, her shyness and unease were painfully obvious. She was giving it, she said, only to rebut the story that had followed her from New York (and lately appeared in The Times as fact): that she was one of the Kodak Eastmans. ‘I don’t know how that mistake came about, except through the name and the fact that I’m a photographer.’ It hardly mattered any more; her surname now was bigger than any mere American brand except, perhaps, Coca-Cola.
Paul’s father hadn’t yet met Linda, but was unable to do so at the wedding. In recent years, Jim McCartney had suffered increasingly from arthritis, and the condition was now so severe that a journey from the north-west down to London would have been too great an ordeal for him. Instead, Paul took Linda and Heather to stay with Jim and his wife, Angie, in Cheshire before flying off for a three-week honeymoon in America.
Jim, in fact, had two debilitating forms of the complaint, osteoarthritis and rheumatoid arthritis, which mainly attacked his knees and ankles and which a series of remedies–from calcium to gold–barely alleviated. Semi-invalid as he’d become, ‘Rembrandt’, the dream home in Heswall that Paul had bought him, was now full of inconveniences, especially the long staircase from the front hall up to the bedrooms. As this had too many turns to accommodate a conventional stairlift, Paul proposed installing a hotel-style Otis elevator on the outside of the house. But Jim would not hear of such expense and simply moved his and Angie’s room down to the ground floor.
As Angie McCartney recalls, they were both nervous about meeting Linda. ‘We were expecting this very exotic person from America, who we wouldn’t have anything in common with and wouldn’t understand us. That ended for me as soon as Linda walked into the kitchen and I realised how much she loved cooking. Jim took to her immediately as well. He was just so happy to see Paul become a happy family man at last.’
To complete the bonding, Heather and Angie’s nine-year-old daughter, Ruth, instantly became friends. ‘There was three years between them and they were completely different characters,’ Angie recalls. ‘Ruth was mad about dancing and Heather was mad about animals. But they’d spend hours in Ruth’s bedroom, dressing up and doing girlie things.’ Jim had adopted Ruth when he married Angie; Paul now hoped to do the same with Heather.
His aunts, uncles and cousins across the water in Liverpool naturally wanted to meet Linda, too, and he dutifully took her around them all. But there was no big McCartney clan-gathering, as in the old days when he and his father would take turns at the piano. ‘We all had too many concerns about Jim’s health,’ Angie says. ‘So it wasn’t party time.’
Whenever Paul visited, he and Jim had always had long heart-to-heart talks while pacing to and fro over the back lawn. Now, with Jim’s mobility reduced, they spent their private time together in the little lower garden which caught the most sun and where Paul–that ever-versatile handyman–had built a flight of stone steps. ‘Jim would sit in a deck-chair, with Paul beside him, both smoking their ciggies,’ Angie recalls. ‘I know he talked to his dad about the problems he was going through at Apple, but none of it was ever mentioned to the rest of us.’
The onward journey to stay with Linda’s family in New York ran into an unforeseen hitch. At Manchester Airport, Paul discovered he’d forgotten his passport; a phone call had to be made to Peter Brown at Apple, and a minion deputed to drive up from London with the missing document. The world had moved on since 1967, when he’d made his ‘Fool on the Hill’ film and charmed his way to the Côte d’Azur and back without a passport.
Eight days after Paul’s wedding, in the copycat spirit that had always characterised their relationship, John married Yoko on the Rock of Gibraltar. She, too, was a reluctant bride, and had accepted him as her third husband only on condition that their wedding wouldn’t be ‘a media circus like the McCartneys’.
Instead, after the quietest of ceremonies in a sleepy British colony, the Lennons turned their honeymoon into a media circus that made the recent scenes outside Marylebone Register Office seem positively Garbo-esque. In a luxury suite at Amsterdam’s Hilton hotel, they staged what they called ‘a commercial for peace’, spending a week side-by-side in a kingsize bed, voicing anti-war sentiments to non-stop relays of international media, most of whom had expected to witness them having sex. Such was the storm of ridicule they unleashed that the new Mrs Paul McCartney quite vanished from sight.
Paul and John were both still on honeymoon when, without warning, the final piece of the world Brian Epstein had constructed around them crumbled away. Northern Songs, the company which had published their music since 1963, became the target of a hostile takeover bid.
Northern Songs was the creation of Dick James, the dance-band crooner turned music publisher into whose lap the Beatles had fallen just before the release of ‘Please Please Me’. Presciently recognising the potential of Lennon and McCartney’s songwriting, James had set up a company solely to handle their publishing rights, of which 50 per cent was owned by him and his business partner, Charles Silver, 20 per cent each by John and Paul and 10 per cent by Brian. So rich and extensive did the catalogue soon become that in 1965 Northern Songs became the first music publishers ever floated as a public company on the London Stock Exchange. After the flotation James and Silver held 37.5 per cent and John and Paul now only 15 per cent each but the balance of power remained with them as Brian’s company, NEMS, held 7.5 per cent and George and Ringo together a token 1.6 per cent.
James had the good sense never to try to influence what Lennon and McCartney wrote, although Northern Songs always earned most, through cover versions and sheet music, from tuneful McCartney compositions like ‘Michelle’ and ‘Yesterday’. To John and Paul, he was a joke figure with his bald head, desperate sideburns and cheesy Tin Pan Alley bonhomie, but they understood that Brian had found them a publisher as different from the norm as George Martin, who believed in quality and was essentially honest.
However, as time passed a familiar syndrome had set in. A deal that had seemed so bountiful to impressionable boys in 1963 looked somewhat different after six years as the entertainers of the century. And James had undeniably grown wealthy on their backs, not only as managing director and a major shareholder in Northern Songs but also through his separate organisation, Dick James Music, which handled the catalogues of numerous other successful young songwriters and now even had its own independent record label.
After Brian’s death, one of John and Paul’s first ‘self-management’ initiatives had been to seek a new deal from Northern Songs. They were not overly polite about it, suggesting that their meeting with James should be filmed like some police interrogation. James had declined to revise the existing arrangements and since then relations between the two sides had been chilly.
In any case, James also bore the responsibility of heading a public company and safeguarding the interests of its shareholders. To begin with, Beatlemania had kept Northern’s stock at a perpetual high. But latterly, as John’s behaviour had become more and more erratic–and especially since he’d teamed up with Yoko–it had begun to fluctuate alarmingly, to the severe detriment of Dick James’s nerves.
The Two Virgins album cover followed by the Amsterdam Bed-In finally proved too much for James and his associate, Charles Silver, and on 28 March they sold their 37.5 per cent of Northern Songs to Associated Television for just under £2 million. At the same moment, ATV’s chairman, Lew Grade, announced he was seeking overall control of the company and was prepared to spend up to £9 million to acquire it.
Neither John nor Paul received any prior warning of the sale from Dick James. To add insult to injury, the organisation now intent on gobbling up their catalogue had nothing to do with the pop business but was the commercial TV franchise holder for the Midland region, best-known for a cheapo teatime soap called Crossroads. Grade himself was the archetype of the cigar-chewing showbiz moguls who’d spent the last decade denigrating pop music as just a passing fad. The Beatles’ competing advisers, Allen Klein and Lee and John Eastman–now Paul’s father- and brother-in-law–were thus forced back into alliance, to prevent ATV from taking over Northern Songs by increasing John and Paul’s own stake to beyond 50 per cent.
As Northern was a public company, some of the requisite extra shares could be bought up piecemeal from private investors. But a crucial block belonged to a City investment group known only as ‘the Consortium’, and amounted to around 14 per cent–exactly what each side needed to gain control. The Consortium by no means regarded the Beatles as automatic heirs to the company, for all that they were its raison d’être, and intended to consider both bids on equal terms.
Meanwhile, John had returned from his trans-European nuptial odyssey with a new song which temporarily drove everything else from his mind. Titled ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, it was a piece of musical reportage chronicling the search for a wedding-venue that had first taken the couple to Southampton and Paris, their eventual nuptials in Gibraltar, their Amsterdam Bed-In and subsequent trip to Vienna, where they’d given a press conference with bags over their heads. It was clever, witty and self-mocking: in fact, everything that people thought John Lennon had forgotten how to be.
His proposal to make it the Beatles’ next single–so confirming Yoko’s election to the band–looked like yet another guaranteed source of dissent. However, both George and Ringo happened to be out of London when he was ready to record it. And, despite their recent battles over the management question, he still instinctively turned to Paul to bring it to fruition. On 14 April, they completed it together at Cavendish, then went round to Abbey Road and recorded it on their own with George Martin, assisted by Geoff Emerick, the gifted engineer whom their bickering had driven away from the White Album.
To Paul, the song was about everything that spelt disaster for the Beatles, while its chorus of ‘Christ, you know it ain’t easy’, and references to John’s being ‘crucified’, threatened to drag them into another more-popular-than-Jesus furore. Yet he gave it his all, playing bass, drums, piano and maracas, adding his sweet top-line harmony to ‘bag’, ‘drag’ and ‘crucify me’. The two hadn’t played as a duo since appearing as the Nerk Twins at Paul’s cousin’s pub, and they joked around as if the intervening years and mobs and millions had never been. ‘Go a bit slower, Ringo,’ John quipped as Paul laid down his drum-part. ‘Okay, George,’ came the answer.
‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’, credited to Lennon and McCartney, became the Beatles’ eighteenth and last UK number one single. In America, where it reached number eight, a picture cover showed the band as a quintet, with Yoko in rock ‘n’ roll black leather and blue denim. But by then, a second ‘Bed-In for Peace’, this time in Montreal, Canada, had shown beyond any doubt what the next verse would be.
So important was the battle with ATV for control of Northern Songs that Lee Eastman flew to London to take over the lead from his son. Coincidentally, the same moment to cross the Atlantic was chosen by Allen Klein’s long-standing notoriety in New York.
On 13 April, the Sunday Times’s famous Insight investigative team published the first detailed survey of Klein’s business methods to appear in the British press. Headlined ‘The Toughest Wheeler-Dealer in the Pop Jungle’, it examined his alleged shady share-dealing over the Cameo-Parkway record label, the many and varied litigants currently ranged against his ABKCO company and his mounting problems with the Internal Revenue Service. The juiciest revelation concerned his most famous exploit as a scourge of record companies and miracle-worker for his clients–the $1.25 million advance he had secured for the Rolling Stones from Decca Records in 1965. According to Insight, that mythic sum had never found its way into the Stones’ pockets, but gone straight into their manager’s.
Lee Eastman thus arrived at this first face-to-face meeting with the Beatles and Klein primed with new ammunition against his rival. But Klein struck first. He had discovered that Lee came from a Jewish immigrant background as humble as his own and had started life with the surname of Epstein, the same as the manager whom the band were having such a hard job to replace. This might have seemed a recommendation, but was held up by Klein as evidence that Lee was ‘a phoney’.
The usually calm, measured celebrity lawyer lost his cool–though not because of the Epstein taunt, his son John believes. ‘I wasn’t there, but I know my dad would never have been bothered by something like that. It was more likely because Klein was criticising me behind my back.’ The meeting ended with Lee shouting at Klein while John threw petrol on the flames by addressing him as ‘Mister Epstein’ and Paul looked on in an embarrassment that can only be guessed at.
Paradoxically, there was no disagreement between the rival advisers on how to save Northern Songs from takeover by Lew Grade. The Beatles would offer £2 million to the investment group known as the Consortium for the crucial 14 per cent shareholding that would give them control, so turning the public company back into a private one. The money was to be borrowed from a merchant bank, Henry Ansbacher & Co., on collateral provided by Apple shares, plus John’s entire holding of 644,000 shares in Northern Songs.
But this last detail caused an even worse scene at a second meeting with Lee Eastman, on 18 April. Klein suggested that Paul, too, should put up his Northern shares as collateral for the bank loan, but Lee told him not to think of it. Klein then revealed that Paul had recently substantially increased his holding without telling any of his fellow Beatles. At this, their aide Peter Brown later recalled, John ‘flew into a rage’ and seemed about to attack Paul physically.
Lee’s visit to London, as he himself recognised, had been a disaster. Afterwards, he received a letter signed by John, George and Ringo, terminating his appointment as the band’s general counsel–but acknowledging that Eastman & Eastman in the person of John Eastman would continue to represent Paul alone. Again, Paul’s embarrassment can only be guessed.
Those recent boardroom scenes might have been expected to kill off any remaining creative spark between Lennon and McCartney. But on both of them, as ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’ had shown, music acted as a kind of healing amnesia. On 30 April, they were back in the studio together, finishing off ‘You Know My Name (Look Up the Number)’, a comedy track that had been hanging around since 1967. It had no commercial potential whatsoever, and went nowhere beyond repeating the title in a series of funny voices, yet they still devoted hours to it, singing into a single microphone, coughing, spluttering and doing Goon Show accents, for all the world like the teenage pals and co-conspirators of long ago in Liverpool. Paul would later remember it as his favourite Beatles session of all.
Outside the studio, as before, rapprochement melted away. Having seen off Lee Eastman, Allen Klein was ready to claim his prize and he now drafted a three-year management agreement beween the Beatles and his company, ABKCO Industries. This would give him 20 per cent of their earnings, as opposed to Brian’s 25 per cent (and Colonel Tom Parker’s 50 per cent of Elvis Presley). Record royalties were excluded unless he negotiated a higher rate, in which case he would receive only a percentage of the increase.
The agreement assumed the Beatles would stay together, putting out singles and albums on the cycle they had been locked into since 1963. That they might fall apart at the very moment he won them was something Klein didn’t allow himself to think. In those days, no one imagined that the break-up of a band might not necessarily be the end of it.
On 9 May, the Beatles met at Olympic Studios in Barnes. The ostensible reason was to talk to producer Glyn Johns about the formless mass of tapes, recorded the previous January, which Johns had been tasked with moulding into an album called Get Back. But that discussion did not progress far.
John, George and Ringo had already signed Klein’s management agreement and wanted Paul to follow suit there and then. He did not refuse outright, but said they ought to negotiate further, perhaps offering a lower commission than 20 per cent (just as, years earlier, they’d tried to beat Brian down from 25 to 20). The others said there was no time: Klein was flying back to New York that night to have the agreement ratified by his board at ABKCO.
Paul alone recognised this as a ploy to rush them. Klein’s company consisted solely of Klein and his wife, Betty (as could be read from its initials), and had no ‘board’. He further pointed out that, today being Friday, nothing further was likely to happen with the agreement until after the weekend. The others told him in unison to ‘fuck off’, then did so themselves.
Glyn Johns at the time was producing an album for the American Steve Miller Band, whose leader Paul knew and liked. After John, George and Ringo’s exit, he found Miller working alone on a track and volunteered to sit in on drums–a providential way of giving vent to his feelings–for which he’d later be credited, under his Silver Beatles alias of ‘Paul Ramon’. The song’s title, for him, was to prove only too fitting: ‘My Dark Hour’.
In mid-June, George Martin received a surprise phone call from Paul. It wasn’t the bad news about the Beatles that Martin expected, however, but a plea for further healing amnesia.
Six months after the band had finished recording their Get Back album, Paul said, there still were no plans for its release. Glyn Johns had put together a 16-song version, leaving in all their false starts, fluffs and ad-libs–‘us with our trousers down’, as John called it–which all four were unanimous in rejecting. But, far from terminally sickening them of albums, it had made them want to go back into the studio to make a whole new one from scratch. And they wanted Martin to work with them, as Paul put it, ‘the way we used to do it’.
Martin had no wish to return to the fraught atmosphere of Twickenham Studios the previous January, and of the White Album before that. ‘If the album’s going to be the way it used to be,’ he replied with a touch of his old schoolmasterly sternness, ‘then all of you have got to be the way you used to be’–meaning hard-working, focused, good-humoured; above all, friends with each other. Paul promised that they would be. And, incredibly enough, they were.
On the sunny morning of 8 August, the four met in Abbey Road, that tree-lined north London boulevard whose name had long been usurped by their recording studio and now would be all over again by the album nearing completion. They were there to pose for a cover picture sketched out in advance by Paul: in that department, at least, his views still carried weight.
A few metres south of EMI’s studios was a black and white pedestrian crossing to the junction with Grove Road. Photographer Iain Macmillan positioned a small stepladder in the middle of Abbey Road and from that slight elevation took several shots of the Beatles walking over the crossing in single file, both from right to left and left to right.
Every one showed them in the same order: John first, then Ringo, Paul and George, in a military ‘quick march’ in which only Paul was out of step. His dress was similarly nonconformist–a double-breasted dark blue pinstripe suit just like the ones his father used to wear to work at Liverpool Cotton Exchange throughout the Forties and Fifties. Undercutting this period formality were an open-necked shirt, a cigarette, thongy sandals without socks and–in some shots, including the one chosen for the album cover–bare feet.
The image could hardly have been more mundane. Yet in years to come, any other band aspiring to greatness would replicate that four-figure tableau marching over similar broad black and white bars. And each day in Abbey Road, there wouldn’t be a moment when the crossing was without a quartet of pilgrims strung across it, risking the highly dangerous traffic to be photographed à la Beatles–one of them barefoot and carefully out of step with his companions.