“It was the same when he was asked to write a sketch for Oh! Calcutta! [a soft porn stage show compiled by drama critic Kenneth Tynan]. ‘What am I going to write?’ John kept saying. I said, ‘Write that thing you told me about when you were a boy and you used to masturbate.’ He and his friends all used to masturbate, shouting out the names of sexy actresses—then suddenly John or one of them would shout, ‘Frank Sinatra!’ So he made that the sketch and it was marvelous.”
The obsessive jealousy with which John used to guard Cynthia from other men was now passed on to Yoko. “Jealous! My God! He wrote a song, ‘Jealous Guy,’ that said it all,” Yoko remembers now. “After we got together, he made me write out a list of all the men I’d slept with before we met. I started to do it quite casually—then I realized how serious it was to John. He didn’t even like me knowing the Japanese language because that was a part of my mind that shut him out. He wouldn’t let me read any Japanese books or newspapers.”
Despite her seemingly unquenchable self-belief, Yoko had her insecurities, too. “When I met John I was self-conscious about my appearance. I thought my legs were the wrong shape, and I used to try to cover my face with my hair. He told me, ‘No, you’re beautiful, your legs are perfect, tie your hair back and let people see your face.’”
At other times, the compliments seemed more backhanded, although he seriously wanted to convey to Yoko he’d met no one with her toughness and audacity since the Teds at Garston’s Blood Baths. “I used to tell him, ‘I think you’re a closet fag, you know.’ Because he often said, ‘Do you know why I like you? Because you look like a man in drag. You’re like a mate.’”
In June 1968, their first collaboration went on public show. It was a sculpture consisting of two acorns, one labeled “John by Yoko Ono,” the other “Yoko by John Lennon, Sometime in May 1968.” The acorns, symbolizing peace and simplicity, were to be buried as an event at the National Sculpture Exhibition in the grounds of Coventry Cathedral.
John and Yoko, both dressed in white, drove to Coventry in John’s white Rolls, accompanied by their newly appointed art adviser, Anthony Fawcett. Outside the cathedral they were met by a canon, who informed them that objects could not be buried in consecrated ground and that, in any case, acorns were “not sculpture.” Yoko flew into an impressive rage, demanding that leading British sculptors be instantly telephoned to vouch for her artistic integrity. Someone actually got through to Henry Moore’s house, but he was out. As a compromise, the acorns were buried on unhallowed ground, under an iron garden seat. Within a week, they had been dug up and taken by Beatles fans as souvenirs. Two more acorns were buried; a security firm mounted twenty-four-hour guard on the seat that marked the spot.
On July 18, a stage adaptation of John’s book In His Own Write opened at the London Old Vic theater. The play had been heavily censored by the lord chamberlain’s office for its blasphemous reference to “Almighty Griff” and disrespect to such world statesmen as “Pregnant De Gaulle” and “Sir Alice Doubtless-Whom.” Fleet Street, by now perceiving a still racier story, were out in force in the summer downpour. When John arrived with Yoko and Neil Aspinall, he was surrounded by press raincoats and challenging cries of “Where’s your wife?”
The girls who stood outside Abbey Road studios—and now also outside 3 Savile Row—made no secret of their instant hatred of Yoko. “Every time we saw her, we shouted awful things,” Margo says. “‘Yellow!’ ‘Chink!’ Subtle things like that. We all felt so sorry for Cynthia. Once, outside Abbey Road, we’d got this bunch of yellow roses to give Yoko. We handed them to her thorns first. Yoko took them and backed all the way down the stairs, thanking us. She hadn’t realized they were meant to be an insult. Nor did John. He turned back and said, ‘Well, it’s about time someone did something decent to her.’”
In July, John’s first art exhibition opened in London, at the fashionable Robert Fraser Gallery. Its title, inspired by the hackneyed message on British street maps, was “You Are Here”: It acknowledged its motive force with a dedication “To Yoko from John with love.” It began with the release of 360 white balloons into the sky above Mayfair. Each balloon bore the printed message: “You are here. Please write to John Lennon, c/o the Robert Fraser Gallery.”
To reach the exhibition one had to walk through a display of charity street collection boxes in the shapes of pandas, puppets, and disabled children. The only other items were a circular piece of white canvas, lettered “You are here” and John’s hat lying on the floor, its upturned brim inscribed: “For the artist. Thank You.” When some art students sarcastically contributed a rusty bicycle, John immediately put that on show also.
The critics were scornful. They said what was to be many times repeated: that if John had not been a Beatle, he would not have dared put such rubbish on show. In this, at least, the critics erred. So long as he was a Beatle, he never dared do anything.
Many people who picked up the white balloons responded to John’s invitation to write to him. Their letters, for the most part, combined racial slurs against Yoko with advice concerning the sanctity of wedlock. “I suppose I’ve spoiled me image,” John said. “People want me to stay in their own bag. They want me to be lovable, but I was never that. Even at school I was just ‘Lennon.’”
Cynthia, meanwhile, had found herself ruthlessly cauterized from his life. Magic Alex was deputed to travel to Italy, where Cyn, her mother, and Julian were staying, and announce that John intended to divorce her. “Alex was waiting for me one night when I got back to the hotel. He told me John was going to take Julian off me and send me back to my mother in Hoylake.
“When I got back to England, I tried to have a meeting with him and discuss things. The only way I could get in touch with John was to make an appointment with him through Peter Brown at Apple. And when I finally did meet him, Yoko was there. He insisted she should stay while we were talking.”
John, at the outset, intended to divorce Cynthia for adultery supposedly committed in Italy. Despite his own countless infidelities, he was still mortified—as he told his aunt Mimi—that Cynthia should have slept with someone else. The petition was dropped when it became clear that Yoko had become pregnant. Cynthia sued for adultery, and was granted a decree nisi in November 1968.
A few weeks earlier, as Cyn was alone and helplessly contemplating the future, Paul had paid her a surprise visit. With him he brought a song he had written on his way in the car—it was for Julian, he said, although the title was “Hey Jude.” He gave Cynthia a single red rose, then said, in the old carefree Liverpool way, “Well, how about it, Cyn? How about you and me getting married now?” She was moved that Paul should think of her, and grateful for his gesture of friendship and encouragement.
Sometimes, in a surge of ecstasy, the girls on watch outside 7 Cavendish Avenue would approach the black security gates and buzz the intercom. As a rule, the voice that answered would belong to Jane Asher, Paul’s longtime girlfriend. The voice was serious but tolerant and always polite. So Jane was, too, on the hundreds of occasions when she answered the front door. The girls appreciated that civility and patience. Far from resenting Jane, they felt their angelic Beatle was in deserving hands. They were Jane’s admirers in a small way, as well as Paul’s. They grew their hair long like hers, washing it only in Breck shampoo, because that was the brand Jane advertised on television, pressing it out straight on their mother’s ironing boards.
Everyone close to Paul liked Jane and acknowledged her beneficial influence. For, in her clear-voiced way, she was as down-to-earth as any Liverpool girl. Alone of almost the entire female race she refused to pamper and worship Paul. If Jane disagreed or disapproved, she said so. She could curb his ego, his use of charm as a weapon—rather as John curbed the syrup in his music—and yet do it in a way that commanded respect and a maturing love.
That the relationship had lasted five years was due principally to Jane’s skill in avoiding the worst of the Beatles madness, and her insistence on following her
own successful film and stage career. When Paul and she met, it was with the freshness and appreciativeness of new lovers. Paul’s farm, near Campbeltown, Argyllshire, was their usual retreat. Paul had done the painting and decorating, even threw together some rudimentary furniture. There, in the uncurious hills, they walked and rode; they talked and read by lamplight and washed in the kitchen sink, and Jane cooked appetizing vegetarian dishes. Each time they left she would pack the leftovers thriftily away in plastic bags.
For Paul, it was the best of two highly pleasurable worlds. His life with Jane provided domesticity, and the refinement and social standing he craved. In her absence, his life reverted to that of Britain’s most hotly pursued bachelor. His casual affairs were conducted with such diplomacy and discretion that Jane never suspected anything. So it might have continued but for a theater tour that ended prematurely, and a witness who suddenly found herself with a legitimate reason to press Paul’s intercom.
Margo Stevens, the girl from Cleethorpes, was just beginning her second year of standing outside 7 Cavendish Avenue. She preferred to begin her vigil late at night, when the picket was thinning or absent altogether. She would arrive at about 10:00 P.M., always with some gift for Paul—fruit or a miniature bottle of whisky—on the off chance of handing it to him as he came home late from the studios or a club. She had been standing there so long, Paul vaguely recognized her now. She knew how to open the security gates by kicking them, and had done so once for him when he could not find his key. Lately, on the recommendation of his housekeeper, Rosie, he had even trusted her to take Martha the sheepdog for walks on Hampstead Heath.
“It was a summer day: We were all standing there as usual,” Margo says. “Jane was on tour with a play, and Paul brought home this American girl, Francie Schwartz. He waved to us as they drove in. Later on, another car turned onto Cavendish Avenue—it was Jane. She’d come back to London earlier than she was supposed to. We did our best to warn Paul. Someone went to the intercom, buzzed it, and yelled, ‘Look out! Jane’s coming!’ Paul didn’t believe it. ‘Ah, pull the other one,’ he said.
“Jane went into the house. A bit later on she came storming out again and drove away. Later still, a big estate car drew up. It was Jane’s mother. She went inside and started bringing out all kinds of things that were obviously Jane’s—cooking pots and big cushions and pictures.
“We all thought after that they must have finished with each other for good. But the next day, a whole crowd of us were in Hyde Park. Who did we run into but Paul and Jane. They were walking along, holding hands and eating ice lollies.”
Early in 1967, Jane went on tour in America again with the Bristol Old Vic company. Apart from Paul’s visit, to celebrate her twenty-first birthday, they were separated for almost five months. When Jane returned, she found Paul deeply involved in the creation of Sgt. Pepper and in LSD. She herself would have nothing to do with acid, and said so bluntly. Paul could not convince her of what she was missing.
Brian Epstein’s death was a heavy blow to Jane. She, too, found comfort in the Maharishi: She went with Paul to Rishikesh and felt the experience to have been rewarding. With LSD banished, their understanding returned. Paul, at long last, made ready to commit himself. They announced their engagement at a McCartney family party on Christmas Day, 1967.
The following June, they were back up north for the wedding of Paul’s younger brother, Michael. Jane opened in a new play that month and Paul, as usual, attended the opening night. All between them seemed normal until mid-July, when Yellow Submarine received its gala premiere. Paul arrived alone at the cinema and at the party that followed. Two days later, on a television talk show, Jane was asked a casual question about their wedding plans. She replied that Paul had broken off the engagement and they had parted.
“Hey Jude,” the song that brought such comfort to Cynthia Lennon, was Paul’s expression of his own deep personal unhappiness. The words, for once, were not facile and neat; it was a song written honestly, in pain. It moved even John as no song of Paul’s ever had before. “Hey Jude, don’t be afraid, you were made to / go out and get her,” seemed to John to be a message of encouragement for Yoko and him. “I took it very personally,” he admitted. ‘Ah, it’s me!’ I said when Paul played it. ‘No,’ he said, ’it’s me.’ I said, ‘Check. We’re both going through the same bit.’”
The news that the most adorable and adored Beatle was now on the market again sent a seismic wave of excitement through the young womanhood of the Western world. Paul clearly could have his pick of anyone he wanted, and in a million hairdressers’ shops and club powder rooms debate raged furiously as to which breathtakingly beautiful starlet or model would be the lucky one. In the event, his choice was to be almost as surprising as John’s had been.
A year or so earlier, an American photographer named Linda Eastman had called at Brian Epstein’s office to show her portfolio of rock star portraits in hopes of getting work from the Epstein stable. She was a coltishly built New Yorker with rather unkempt blonde hair and a dour, unsmiling face. Peter Brown, who dealt with her, knew her already as a regular backstage at American rock venues like New York’s Fillmore East. “She was just an ordinary girl, like so many you saw around then. She’d arrived in London, saying she wanted to photograph the Beatles. I let her in on the Sgt. Pepper session, which was a big thing, because only fourteen photographers were allowed from the whole world’s press.”
Brown next met Linda one night when he was with Paul McCartney and some other rock figures at the Bag O’ Nails Club. He introduced Paul to Linda and, as he remembers, “That was it. The two of them just went off together.”
Linda Eastman did not belong, as many supposed, to the Eastman family whose enormous wealth derived from Kodak photographic film and Eastman color film stock. Her father, Lee, a New York lawyer, had taken the surname to replace one more directly announcing his Jewish immigrant antecedents. But for this gentrification, Paul’s future wife as well as his late manager would have borne the surname of Epstein.
Lee Eastman had built up a highly successful New York practice, specializing in music copyright and also representing several of America’s leading painters. His wife, Louise, was independently wealthy through her family connection with department stores owned by her family, the Linders. Linda and her brother, John, grew up in the affluent environment of a house in Scarsdale and a Park Avenue apartment. Linda became accustomed to mixing with the stars whom her father represented, among them the songwriter Hoagy Carmichael and the cowboy action-hero Hopalong Cassidy.
Louise Eastman died in an air crash when Linda was eighteen. Resisting all opportunities to exploit her father’s social connections, she married a geologist named John See, moved with him to Colorado, and gave birth to a daughter, Heather. The marriage quickly failed, however, and Linda returned to New York with her baby daughter, by now determined to make her name as a photographer. She got a job with Town and Country magazine, Manhattan’s equivalent of the Tatler, and became a familiar face backstage at the Fillmore East and at photo calls for pop bands flying in from Europe. Her abilities as a photographer were not rated very highly; she was known, rather, as a rock chick who used her camera to get on close—sometimes very close—terms with male pinups such as Mick Jagger, Stevie Winwood, and Warren Beatty.
She did not see Paul between the Sgt. Pepper session and May 1968, when he came with John to New York to inaugurate Apple. Linda was at the launch party with her journalist friend Lilian Roxon. On Lilian’s advice, she slipped Paul her telephone number. They met at Nat Weiss’s New York flat and afterward in Los Angeles. Paul returned to London, but a few weeks later telephoned Linda and asked her to come and join him.
He brought her home to Cavendish Avenue in his Mini-Cooper late one summer night. Margo Stevens was on watch by the gates, as always. “A few of us were there. We had the feeling something was going to happen. Paul didn’t take the Mini inside the way he usually did—he parked it on the road and he and Linda wal
ked right past us. They went inside and we stood there, watching different lights in the house go on and off.
“In the end, the light went on in the Mad Room, at the top of the house, where he kept all his music stuff and his toys. Paul opened the window and called out to us, ‘Are you still down there?’ ‘Yes,’ we said. He must have been really happy that night. He sat on the windowsill with his acoustic guitar and sang ‘Blackbird’ to us as we stood down there in the dark.”
Linda was certainly a startling change from the carefully backcombed and immaculate Jane. Hers was the New York preppy style, still so unknown in Swinging Britain that it seemed like no style at all—shapeless dresses below the knee, flat-heeled tennis shoes, even ankle socks. Nor was she nice, the way Jane always had been, to the girls who eternally monitored Paul’s comings and goings from Cavendish Avenue and the Apple offices. “We could tell that she viewed us as a threat,” Margo remembers. “Every time they appeared together Linda would cling to Paul’s arm as much as to say, ‘I’ve got him now.’ None of us could understand what he saw in her.”
For all her seeming unkemptness, Linda had an irresistible appeal to the social-climbing Paul—the aura of Manhattan’s aristocracy that, in its way, is as rarified and exclusive as London’s. She was certainly beautiful, with her finely-chiseled cheekbones and straw-blonde hair, though she always seemed utterly unconcerned about her appearance. Most important, she idolized and deferred to Paul as Jane had always firmly refused to do. Clinging to his arm, she would gaze up at him with awe and say what an honor it would be to bear his children.
Her daughter, Heather, helped to cement the bond between them. Paul had always adored children. His final parting with Jane arose from their disagreement over when to start a family. After meeting Heather, an insecure, rather lonely six-year-old, he insisted she be brought to live at Cavendish Avenue. He delighted in playing with her, reading stories and drawing cartoons for her, and singing her to sleep at night.