As with George, there are endless contradictions. For a clever and supposedly devious person, he has been very silly to get caught four times in the last ten years or so for soft drug offences. Walking into a Japanese airport carrying £1,000 of marijuana was utterly daft. For a supposedly concerned father, getting caught taking drugs at all, even soft ones, is hard to reconcile.
He has let his hair start to go grey, yet watch him when a photographer arrives, and he pulls in his stomach. His selfconsciousness extends to his physical body as well. He often moans at what people write about him, yet he gives interviews. He should know the consequences, after all these years. He is upset by the mad rush to buy and sell Beatle memorabilia, yet he himself has bid at Sotheby’s. (He wanted a postcard that he had sent to John, but someone else outbid him.) Both he and George have, in fact, contributed to the present craze for Beatle artefacts, by putting out more material, such as Paul’s book of drawings and George’s book containing the originals of his songs.
Oh, what a complicated man he is, what convolutions, what self-justifications, what fears, how vulnerable he is. How could we, in the 1960s, have taken Paul for a simple, lovable soul, or accepted George as a quiet little boy? In the end, I think both of them are much harder to explain and understand than John. He was so much up front, to the point of brutality, quick to reveal himself and his opinions. Paul and George have so many layers. They both get upset when outsiders think they know them, when they are described in black-and-white terms, which of course is never completely true of any of us.
Not long after John’s death, I had some strange conversations with Paul. He seemed so upset by so many things, not least of all John’s death. This was in May 1981, and I jotted down in a diary some of the things he told me.
John’s death had grown into a sort of cult, with instant books already appearing, and the papers were still full of it. Many people, in praising John, were at the same time putting down Paul, or so it appeared. He felt he had already been criticized in a book just out written by Philip Norman, formerly a colleague of mine on the Sunday Times. I had helped him, and let him see all my files, telling him things like Mimi’s phone number, when he had come to talk to me, saying he was writing a book about the 1960s as a whole. I didn’t know then it was going to be a Beatles biography. None of the Beatles had in fact given him any interviews for his book, which was subtitled ‘The True Story of the Beatles’.
Paul rang me on 3 May 1981, and went on for over an hour, all about how hurt he was. He had already been moaning at length to my wife, as I was out walking on Hampstead Heath when he first rang. He said he was fed up with all these people going on about him and John and getting it all wrong. Only he knew the truth. It wasn’t anything like the things being said.
Paul criticized me, for having gone on some TV news programme after John’s death. In my tribute to him, I said that John was more the hard man, with the cutting edge, while Paul was softer and more melodic.
But what had really got him upset that day was an interview with Yoko, in which Yoko was quoted as saying that Paul had hurt John more than any other person. Paul thought they were some of the cruellest words he had ever read.
‘No one ever goes on about the times John hurt me,’ said Paul. ‘When he called my music Muzak. People keep on saying I hurt him, but where’s the examples, when did I do it? No one ever says. It’s just always the same, blaming me. Could I have hurt John more than anyone in the world? More than the person who ran down Julia in his car?’
‘We were always in competition. I wrote “Penny Lane”, so he wrote “Strawberry Fields”. That was how it was. But that was in compositions. I can’t understand why Yoko is saying this. The last time I spoke to her she was great. She told me she and John had just been playing one of my albums and had cried.’
So why don’t you ring her up, I suggested, and find out if she really made that remark?
‘I’m not ringing her up on that. It’s too trivial. It’s not the time. I wouldn’t just ring up on that.’
What did you think then might have hurt John?
‘There’s only one incident I can think of that John has mentioned publicly. It was when I went off with Ringo and did “Why Don’t We Do It In The Road”. It wasn’t a deliberate thing. John and George were tied up finishing something and me and Ringo were free, just hanging around, so I said to Ringo let’s go and do this.
‘I did hear him some time later singing it. He liked the song and I suppose he’d wanted to do it with me. It was a very John sort of song anyway. That’s why he liked it, I suppose. It was very John, the idea of it, not me. I wrote it as a ricochet off John.
‘Perhaps I have hurt people by default. I never realized at the time John would mind. At Ringo’s wedding [the previous week] Neil happened to say to me that Mimi was upset I’d never contacted her after John’s death. I’d never even thought of it. I don’t know Mimi. I probably haven’t seen her for about 20 years, since Menlove Avenue. I was just the little kid that hung around with John. We didn’t get into her house.
‘Anyway, I rang her up, in case she really was upset, and apologized for not ringing, saying I hadn’t got her phone number, and she was terrific and we had a good chat. We discussed Philip Norman’s book and she didn’t like it either. She said I should write and complain. I told her I’d been writing letters constantly, but I’d torn them all up. She said I should do something about it, to stop this sort of thing.
‘“In an earthquake you get many different versions of what happened by all the people that saw it. And they’re all true.” That’s what I wrote in one letter. But how can you get the full story from someone who wasn’t there? But I tore that up as well.
‘Nobody knows how much I helped John. Me and Linda went to California and talked him out of his so-called lost weekend, when he was full of drugs. We told him to go back to Yoko and not long after he did. I went all the way to LA to see the bastard. He never gave me an inch, but he took so many yards and feet.
‘He always suspected me. He accused me of scheming to buy over Northern Songs without telling him. I was thinking of something to invest in, and Peter Brown said what about Northern Songs, invest in yourself, so I bought a few shares, about 1,000 I think. John went mad, suspecting some plot. Then he bought some. He was always thinking I was cunning and devious. That’s my reputation, someone’s who’s charming, but a clever lad.
‘It happened the other day at Ringo’s wedding. I was saying to Cilla [Black] that I liked Bobby [her husband]. That’s all I said. Bobby’s a nice bloke. Ah, but what do you really think, Paul? You don’t mean that, do you, you’re getting at something? I was being absolutely straight. But she couldn’t believe it. No one ever does. They think I’m calculating all the time.
‘I do stand back at times, unlike John. I look ahead. I’m careful. John would go for the free guitar and just accept it straight away, in a mad rush. I would stand back and think, but what’s this bloke really after, what will it mean? I was always the one that told Klein to put money away for tax.
‘I don’t like being the careful one. I’d rather be immediate like John. He was all action. John was always the loudest in any crowd. He had the loudest voice. He was the cock who crowed the loudest. Me and George used to call him the cockerel in the studio. I was never out to screw him, never. He could be a manoeuvring swine, which no one ever realized. Now, since his death, he’s become Martin Luther Lennon. But that really wasn’t him either. He wasn’t some sort of holy saint. He was still really a debunker.