The day after, the Lisbon press arrived — the big shots from the capital — and Paul agreed to hold a little press conference on the beach. Then he asked them not to reveal his address and to leave him alone, as he was on holiday, which they all did. For days afterwards, tradesmen and hoteliers from Lagos, the local town, kept on arriving with presents, baskets of fruit and food, invitations to parties and restaurants. I had never actually witnessed this effect on people before, though in John’s house I had seen him ripping open parcels, looking for free things. It was strange to see it happening in a remote country, the most backward in Western Europe. Fame has its own reward. Those who have get showered with more.
Linda was, naturally, rather wary of us. I suppose she realized we had been friendly with Jane and would perhaps be critical of her. She also wanted to get Paul to herself, as it was the first stages in their romance, while Paul was keen on long, late-night talks and philosophical discussions. Paul always likes talking and explaining and giving his views.
At first, it seemed to us that Linda was very much a yes-girl, who was overdoing her adoration of Paul, clinging on to him all the time, hanging on his every word. We couldn’t see it lasting. We couldn’t see what she was giving Paul. At times, during the ten days or so they stayed with us, there were some frosty moments.
We often went off on expeditions together, in one big party. Caitlin usually travelled with Paul and Linda and Heather, in a car they hired. We learned later that Caitlin was being allowed to take the wheel, much to our horror, sitting on Paul’s knee. That started the first of several little clashes over the upbringing of children. Another time, Jake started playing with a huge carving knife, so I grabbed it off him. Paul said that was not the way to train them. They should discover danger for themselves. It was how they learned. I said that as parents you had to look ahead, anticipate the results of actions that children could not see, otherwise they might end up with fingers missing. Heh ho. Such trivial little arguments, though, at the time, we discussed them for hours.
Paul was very good with the children, and with others who came to the house, and made a point of being friends, letting them do things and express themselves. I suppose our two did seem a bit house-trained and restrained. Heather had had rather a disturbed childhood so far, so we gathered, passed across the Atlantic between Linda and her father, and had been allowed to run fairly wild, at least that’s how it seemed to our rather staid and conservative eyes.
One day we went up into the mountains at Monchique. We parked the car in the village and we were walking down a hill track when Paul spotted a man with a donkey coming up. He persuaded him to let Caitlin and Heather have little rides, lifting them up in turn on to the donkey’s back. Caitlin had had a ride, and been lifted down by Paul, when the donkey suddenly stepped backwards — straight on to her foot. The screams were appalling. When we tore off her sock and shoe, we could see her foot was badly damaged and that the nail of her big toe was off.
We were miles from anywhere, on an empty hillside track. Paul decided at once to set off running, up the hill towards the village of Monchique. He eventually managed to flag down a car and came back for us. Paul and I then took Caitlin to the local little cottage hospital in Monchique, where they cleaned up the foot and gave her a tetanus injection, just in case. To cheer her up, for being a brave little girl, Paul bought a purple shawl in the village. When we all met up with Linda and my wife again, Heather burst into tears when she saw Caitlin had been given a present. So Paul bought her a shawl, just to keep things fair.
We did in the end get to know and understand Linda better, after some uneasy times. I suppose it was a difficult stage for her, not yet being sure of Paul, having somehow to compete. Being stuck with us, at that time, was probably the last thing she wanted.
I was, of course, completely wrong. Linda proved to be much more relaxed and friendly on our subsequent meetings, and her marriage to Paul has been a great success. They have the little rows we all have, on the usual trivial bringing-up-children and other family topics, but after 16 years, since they married in 1969, they appear pretty secure.
Linda has given Paul the moral support he always needed. John had, of course, been critical during his relationship with Paul, and often very cruel. Jane Asher had been very much her own woman, with her own career. Linda has been prepared to devote all her energies and emotions to Paul and their family and, if necessary, to his work, if that was what he felt he needed.
When I got back to England in 1969, I still kept in touch, going round to Paul’s, to Abbey Road and the new Apple offices. I found that the empires, both the old one and the new one, were crumbling. During his stay in Portugal, I had lots of talks with Paul about the Beatles and learned about various disagreements they had during the making of the Double White album. Paul himself was still busy composing, so I presumed the albums at least would go on. I remember one tune he played to me in Portugal, which he had written on the lavatory (he rarely went there without his guitar) and was called ‘There You Go Eddie’. Just a short verse, and I don’t think he ever completed it. He discovered that my first Christian name is Edward, something I’ve always kept quiet.
In London, it was soon clear that the music making was now a secondary concern. Apple was in chaos, and so were their financial and business affairs, and they were quarrelling amongst themselves, about each other, and about what to do next.
I had never imagined that the end of the Beatles, whenever it happened, would simply come in a welter of legal tangles, financial quibbling, trivial personality clashes, slanging matches, ridiculous recriminations, juvenile insults and silly squabbles. In the end, alas, they finished the way many show-business partnerships have ended — in pathos. Gilbert and Sullivan, Britain’s other great songwriting partnership, finally descended to rows and sulks. How sad that Lennon and McCartney ended their joint days as just another pair of run-of-the-mill, archetypal, bickering ex-partners. Their rise has to be called phenomenal, as I hope the book showed, but the end was really rather sordid.
As sordid tales go, they don’t even have the virtue of being worth retelling for the dirt. They became highly complicated and utterly confusing. Basically, they revolved round who owned whom and what, and for almost a decade they kept lawyers in high fees and newspaper libraries deep in reports of the latest court case. These legal rows were thought by many observers at the time to be the reason for the Beatles splitting. They were a result not a cause, though the personality clashes which ensued for a while were real enough. So what caused the split?
The Beatles themselves were not much help in giving exact reasons. At one time, they had contradictory theories — Paul was being blamed by the others for causing the split while he in turn blamed them. They even argued about who actually left the Beatles first. My theory, arrived at with the benefit of hindsight, was that the split had been happening for a long time. Rereading the book makes this abundantly clear, though I can’t say I realized it at the time. If there was one simple reason why they split up when they did, it was not the argument over who should run their affairs, but the arrival into John’s life of Yoko Ono. That’s my explanation anyway.
The Beatles started to break up as Beatles as far back as 1966, when they gave up touring and stopped living communal lives. With living apart so much, the Lennon — McCartney numbers, however successful, became something of a fraud. They were no longer joint numbers in the way they’d been in the old days, knocked out together in the back of a van. It was very easy for the fans to recognize a Lennon song or a McCartney song, despite them getting equal credit. As the descriptions of Sergeant Pepper showed, they were, by now, each coming to the studio with almost every number worked out — at least in their heads.