Last Year's Echo, Chapter 6-D
Nov. 27th, 2017 07:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
yes_2dayIn this Chapter, the Beatles round out '64 with all sorts of crazy happenings, and our memoirist John Lennon admits that he is starting to go off the rails with all the Beatlemania craziness.
Hope you enjoy.
WARNINGS: This is slash fiction, and it isn't for everyone. If this is not your thing, do not read! Also - this is FICTIONAL. I take liberties by "quoting" from a John Lennon interview of actress Peggy Lipton that never happened. My apologies to Peggy if she should learn of this. IT IS FICTION EVERYONE!!! I also quoted from her book,, but point out that it is 'fair use', and I have received no financial reward for quoting a few paragraphs from her book. BTW, I recommend you all read her book. She's a ripping good writer!
I hope you enjoy.
Chapter 6D
On Sunday afternoon, before the Hollywood Bowl show on Sunday night, we went to a party thrown by Capital Music executives at the home of its then President. We were only supposed to be there about 90 minutes, and sit for about 30 minutes on a line of chairs while all the children of the visitors and young guests milled past. In the end we were sitting there for almost 90 minutes, and were forced to stay another 30 minutes after that. It was kind of weird, and I felt strange and awkward about it, of course. My paranoia was working overtime. I hated being treated like a commodity, but this is what “talent” is in Hollywood. It is a product, which is packaged, bought and sold. The attitude there is - if you don’t like the process, you’re in the wrong business. No part of me wanted any part of this. Hollywood had never been my dream. I had always aimed for the image of the hard-rocking, hard-living artist, living on the outside and poking holes in society’s pretensions. How had I ended up sitting there like a trained chimpanzee?
But I did what I was told, although with a certain lack of enthusiasm and perhaps a little too much irony, I like to think. One of the people streaming through the assembly line that day was a beautiful young actress named Peggy Lipton. She would later go on to be an American television star, and then spend many years married to Quincy Jones. She wrote about her experience at the meet and greet, and I’ve always thought she did a remarkable job of sizing us up, and seeing us – and the whole event - for what we really were. She has graciously permitted me to reprint it here:
“The Fab Four under a tree. They looked cute. Just like the photos I had strewn across the walls of my bedroom. But I knew they weren't the cuddly mop tops they were pretending to be. You knew that when you got up close. John's twisted smile, for one thing, suggested a lot of strange thoughts could be going on in his head. Ringo, sporting a huge grin, seemed utterly bemused and nonchalant about it all. George was wiry and agile, adjusting his body to shake as many of the little hands as he could. I watched Paul. It felt like he was doing a sort of music-hall soft shoe routine for the crowd.
“He was being a showman, a carny, the nice one who could engage the multitudes. I didn't know if I'd be able to talk when my turn came. What was there to say? My mind went completely blank. Okay, so John greeted me first, then George took my hand. I hardly remember them. Paul was the one I was watching and my heart was pounding too loud, sounding like thunder in my ears. ‘Look, Peggy,’ I said, trying to get a grip on myself. ‘He's being really sweet with these kids.’ I was admiring that while he was looking down and patting them on the head. All of a sudden I felt him looking at me and it was a totally different look. It was filled with promise and sexuality and I was stunned.
"’Hello,’ I said, and he shook my hand and looked at me. ‘My god, you're beautiful,’ he said.
"’You're not so bad yourself,’ I replied, like an idiot. A year in the planning and that was all I could come up with? My knees under the pink silk skirt buckled. I was madly in love with Paul McCartney, or should I say even more madly in love-knowing full well that disaster lay ahead. How could it be otherwise? Every woman wanted Paul.”
Peggy was right. Paul is the one who carried the weight of these glad-handing events. I have so many memories of staring at him while he was doing this, and asking myself, “Who is this person?” I had spent years with him, slept with him, cried with him, fought with him, laughed with him, had sex with him – everything! And I didn’t know anything about this persona who could pop up out of nowhere and “engage the multitudes.” Where did he come from? And why did he irritate me so much?
Peggy was also right about another thing. Paul made sure Neil slipped her a ticket and a backstage pass for our show that night, and after the show, she came back to the house for the unwinding party. They disappeared into a bedroom. The rest of us all went to a nightclub and met Jayne Mansfield and other celebrities. (That was the night that a photographer suddenly showed up while we were in a booth with Mansfield. She was touching George up on one side, and me up on the other. When it was clear we’d been set up for a publicity stunt, George got up and threw the contents of his glass in the face of the photographer. I was extremely proud of George that night.)
In any case, for the next four years Paul and Peggy would see each other whenever he was in Los Angeles. In the end, she lost out to Linda Eastman. But when you look at the two women, it is quite remarkable how much they resemble each other. Paul certainly had a type! While researching this book, I called her and invited her over to our L.A. house for lunch on our pool patio, to interview her. Forty years later she was still as beautiful and lithe as I remembered her, with sprightly eyes and a mischievous smile. I questioned her about her relationship with Paul, and she very honestly answered my questions. But the main thrust of what she had to say was this: (and I quote verbatim from the recording I made):
“Paul was the most beautiful man I ever knew, inside and out. His body of course, and face, and his voice – oh my God! I have tried to explain to my friends why I hung on so long never getting attached to another man – for four whole years! Most of my twenties! - when I barely ever saw him and he clearly didn’t feel the same way about me that I felt about him. But somehow, when he was with you, he made you feel like you were the only person in the entire universe. He was by far, hands down, no contest, and without question the best lover I ever had. Most men who think they are hot studs are into jutting and strutting. They’re into being overpowering and a little rough and dominating. When they make love to you, they try too hard and they come on too strong, poking and prodding at you as if you would find that the least bit pleasurable.
“Paul – at least with me – was every bit as overpowering, but he did it with – his hands, his voice, his intense sensuality. That is the word I was looking for. He is the most sensual man I’ve ever been with. He loves how things look, sound, smell, taste and feel in a way that is so deeply integrated into his physical body that it is as if his physical body becomes an instrument and embodiment of his six senses. Nothing is too weird or funky for him. So open to feeling and learning new things, and to experiment. Anything goes! If someone said to me – someone who could make it stick, that is – that I could have any and all the lovers I wanted for as long as I wanted, or, I could have only one whole day having sex with Paul McCartney, there is no doubt in my mind for one second what I would do. Paul, here I come! Even at my age – and you can tell him for me!” (Yeah, right, like that’s gonna happen.)
I’m embarrassed to admit that while she was explaining this to me, I became aroused. I know – boy do I know – exactly what she means! She couldn’t have had a more sympathetic audience.
Peggy’s bliss that night was at my expense. I managed not to tell her that when I met her. (As Paul would say, “That would be rude.”) But that night in 1964 I was beside myself. The Hollywood Bowl was a major event marker in our career, and I had expected to spend the night with him, basking in our
success. Instead, I was relegated to our bedroom alone, and the earnest but ultimately unsuccessful efforts of a very lovely young woman to get a rise out of me through a blowjob.
The next day, for Paul, there was hell to pay. No jealous wife could ever torture her husband more than I could torture Paul when I was jealous and on the warpath. I was pissy and bitchy to him all morning. When the photographer for Life Magazine came around to take some pictures of us around the house we rented, Paul had still been in bed with Peggy. I marched in through a sliding glass door that opened on to the patio, and said, “Paul get up; its time to go to work!” Peggy looked a bit embarrassed, but I wasn’t interested in her. I was glaring at Paul. “Now! Get up now!” I waited for him to get up. He was stark naked, and I didn’t offer him any help in collecting some clothes. He finally said, “John, do you mind?” Poor Peggy was hiding under the sheets. “Can you give us our privacy?” The glare I gave him said this: “Oh, you just wait. You are SO going to get it!” I grudgingly turned around, and walked out. I waited just outside the sliding door saying “tick tock, tick tock” over and over until he came out. He had thrown on some tight silver slacks and a tight white t-shirt and even though it was obvious he had just awakened, he looked so sexy I almost forgot to be mad. When it came time to pretend to push him in the pool, I very nearly did! Thankfully, eventually the photographer went away, and so did Peggy. I cornered Paul in our bedroom and demanded to know why he “deserted me”. He looked at me as if I had gone crackers.
“Deserted you? Don’t you think that’s a little dramatic? I spent some time with a girl! What’s wrong with that? I’ve always done it.”
My mouth froze wide open and I digested what he said. Yes, this was true. Paul always had done this. What had I done before when this happened? A horrible thought was born in my brain. In the past, I never said anything. I just pretended like it didn’t matter, as if I was fine with it. I just sucked up the pain, and went on. In fact, I had almost convinced myself that his female musical chair sex partners didn’t bother me at all. The only jealous theatrics I expressed to him in the past involved his one truly serious girlfriend, Jane Asher. But I’d never bothered to throw a fit for any of the rest of them, I guess because I knew they would be a one night’s stand, or at most a 2 or 3 night’s stand. So why suddenly now was I so defiantly jealous? All of this ran through my mind in a few short seconds, and Paul was still standing there waiting for my answer.
I shut my mouth and sat down on the bed, and my head fell into my hands. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. I’m all out of sorts. I needed you last night.” I was skirting the issue again, because I didn’t want to know where a showdown on that issue would lead. So I told him a half-truth – after all, it was true that I did feel out of sorts, and I had needed him that night. Paul’s whole aspect softened. He sat down next to me on the bed and said,
“Well, we have a few hours before the show…” He had that wicked grin that I knew so well. So, this nagging problem, this “poison pill”, was shoved back on the shelf for the time being. After the show that night, he wisely came home quite docilely with me, although I wondered the whole time if he was thinking about Peggy Lipton. These random jealous thoughts kept intruding, even when I had him all to myself. This was starting to be a real problem.
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For a really big change, Brian gave us a whole day off for goofing off – so August 25th we didn’t have to work, and we didn’t have to travel. We hung around the house most of the time, playing pool or swimming. For some reason there were no girls. If it had been a hotel room we would have had hordes of the sketchy sort of groupie girls who hung around in places where rock group road managers hung out. (I have no idea where those places are, by the way, and I never asked. I asked Paul if he knew, and he didn’t either! From our perspective the women just materialized in our rooms out of nowhere.)
I do believe there were the usual procurers in the hangers on around the house who were willing to fetch them for us, but it was as if the four of us felt – living in someone’s home – that it would be wildly inappropriate and not quite right. I had the sense – and it was probably my paranoia – that the A&R types from Capital Records who were loitering around Paul and George, ready to take instructions having (no doubt) heard about their womanizing ways. But, for whatever reason, they both turned the opportunity down, and hung out with the rest of us, playing pool, swimming, watching telly, and Paul even climbed into bed relatively early with me that night. Maybe my words after the Peggy Lipton episode – however obscure – had gotten through to him, I wondered?
The next morning when I woke up, Paul was sleeping like an angel next to me. He was such a maddeningly complex person. An onion, which you could go on peeling, layer after layer, forever, and never get to the end. You never knew exactly where you stood with him. I sighed, acknowledging to myself that this was probably the exact reason I was in love with him. Someone simple and easy to figure out would be of no interest to me.
It was on the plane leaving L.A. and heading for our next gig when I started writing a lyric I would not finish or record for another year, on the Rubber Soul album. I had been very worried about showing it to Paul, because I felt he would know immediately what it was about, and I would feel naked and vulnerable. I wasn’t sure I wanted him having that much power over me. I had seen how it was for the women who were in love with him. The sacrifices they made without being asked; the hopes and dreams they held on to long after a rational person would say it was time to move on.
Would that be me? Is that how it would end? I was haunted by it. When I first started the affair three years earlier, I had never pictured it growing and developing the way it did. I had convinced myself it was a sexual infatuation, and that matters of the heart and emotional entanglement would not happen with a bloke, the way they would with a girl. I certainly didn’t know then that I would be the one emotionally entangled, and Paul would be the one believing we still had the laissez-faire, when-the-spirit-moves-me kind of relationship.
As I sat on the plane, I came up with the guts of the song, sitting next to its subject, trying to understand for myself the meaning of these new feelings I was experiencing. At one point Paul leaned over and wanted to see what I was writing. Foolishly, I hid it from him. Paul smiled and winked at me, thinking I was writing some kind of love letter to some woman. He always projected on to me his extreme horniness about women.
Its Only Love
I get high when I see you go by
My oh my
When you sigh, my, my inside just flies,
Butterflies
Why am I so shy when I'm beside you?
It's only love and that is all
Why should I feel the way I do?
It's only love, and that is all,
But it's so hard loving you
Is it right that you and I should fight
Ev'ry night
Just the sight of you makes nighttime bright
Very bright
Haven't I the right to make it up love?
It's only love and that is all
Why should I feel the way I do?
It's only love, and that is all
But it's so hard loving you
Yes it's so hard loving you.
Loving you.
(Years later, during the period of time when Paul and I were estranged in the ‘70s, I claimed to hate this song because it was too rhyme-y, corny and insincere. I said it was a ‘filler’ song with no real meaning, and that it embarrassed me. I was really saying I hated this song to a reporter because I wanted it to get back to Paul. He had known the song was about him, so by putting it down in public in this way I was taking another merciless dig at him.)
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The next significant stop on our tour was also our last, New York’s Forest Hills Tennis Stadium. We again stayed at the Plaza Hotel, and we again did the Ed Sullivan Show one night. After the show, there was a huge party in the hotel restaurant, and we all attended. I met Joan Baez there. She clearly was very interested in me. It was quite flattering, but I was a little intimidated by her. Despite all my strutting and bragging, I was actually kind of afraid of strong women. I thought I wouldn’t perform up to their expectations and it would be humiliating. Still, as the night progressed, it was clear to me what she wanted, and I wanted it too, but only if it wasn’t on with Paul that night. I wasn’t ready to leave the party, because I was still blowing off steam. She got up, handed me the key to her room, and left with a very suggestive smile on her face. This was a quandary. I looked around the restaurant until I saw Paul in a corner in deep conversation with a stunning blond. I recognized Paul in his mating mode, and sighed heavily. I clearly wasn’t getting any of that tonight, so Joan Baez it was!
Years later, a fan said to me, “I know you had sex with Joan Baez.” I honestly responded, “No, I didn’t.” The fan was indignant. “Well, she said you slept with her!” I laughed. “I did sleep with her,” I pointed out reasonably, “but I was exhausted, so we didn’t have sex.” It is so weird to have complete strangers arguing with me about my own life. You have no idea.
The Stadium show was going to be a strange one. We’d never actually played a sports stadium before. It was a ridiculous idea, really, given the state of our amplifiers. The amplifiers the Beatles used in the Forest Hills Stadium – even if turned “up to eleven” –were no more powerful than the average teenage boy’s bedroom amp today.
In addition, we were outside, and blasting the music in to the stands. They tried to set it up like an amphitheater but this was no purpose-built Hollywood Bowl like structure. It was a makeshift stage pointed at a section of a tennis court seating stand. Paul and I discussed these problems on the way to the sound check and rehearsal. Paul was especially dubious, understanding sound engineering at a higher level than I did. “One thing’s for sure,” he said, “we’re not going to hear each other, especially when they all start screaming.”
We had come up with ways to at least hear each other when harmonizing. People wondered why we got up so close to each other at the mikes – thinking maybe we were indecently close or something. (Well, we were, but that’s not why we were up so close to each other at the mikes.) That was the only way we could hear each other and try to stay in harmony.
And Paul often had to – as he put it – “dumb down” his bass when the ambient sound got really unbearable. He would revert back to your basic rock ’n roll “Thump! Thump! Thump!” in order to keep us in time. There were times that George and I couldn’t hear the drums even though we were standing only four or five feet away, so Paul’s bass was essential in keeping us in time. On such occasions he moved to the middle position on the stage so we both could hear him. This was something, by the way, that spoiled me and I didn’t even know it. Paul had taken on responsibility for providing the timing for the band, and he never stopped thinking and worrying about it, and he did whatever he had to in order to keep the rest of us in time. I think it must have been stressful to have to do this while also smiling, talking to the crowd, singing, and harmonizing.
Sound check was depressing. Paul looked like he had been run through with a sword. His face was white, and he was shaking his head almost imperceptibly, as if to say, ‘this can’t be true, this can’t be true.’ He spent an extra hour sitting and talking to the sound engineers on how to amplify the sound outward, while retaining some ambient noise so we could hear ourselves. The rest of us were frolicking around on the tennis courts, pretending to be jumping the nets and larking about – just like we did in the field in Hard Day’s Night.
We were wearing shiny new black sharks-tooth suits for the Forest Hills Performance. The four of us looked like glow-in- the-dark incandescent apparitions in all the blue and pink lights.
But before the show, as we were getting dressed to go, legions of fans turned up on Fifth Avenue underneath our balconies and serenaded us with the ubiquitous American Beatles love song:
“We love you Beatles
Oh yes we do
We love you Beatles
And we’ll be true
When you’re not near us
We’re blue!
Oh, Beatles, we love you!”
Paul and I were in our bedroom, primping in the mirrors, when we heard the singing. We looked curiously at each other, and went out on to the balcony. The entire street up and down for five blocks on either side were filled with Beatles fans holding signs and singing to us! We looked at each other in wonder and then started waving and shouting down at them. Ringo and George had come out on their adjacent balcony and were doing the same. It was a very joyous moment for me – how can you be blue in the face of so much uncomplicated, undemanding love?
While the sound problems we experienced at the Forest Hills Stadium were as bad as we feared, the whole ambience was warm and lovely. Paul later said to me that it felt to him like we were “being bathed in love.” We should have hated it, and we should have been stressed out, but we weren’t! Paul helped in this regard by standing by me thumping on his bass whenever I was singing, and then moving to stand next to George and thumping away on his bass when George was playing a riff. George – not usually free with his praise – said to me quietly in the ambulance we were taken away from the stadium in (don’t ask) – “Paul Fucking McCartney saved my Fucking Arse tonight.”
He Saved My Fucking Arse later that night, too! But only after a pot adventure with Bob Dylan.
After our Forest Hills Stadium show, we had a crazy ambulance ride back to our hotel. We had invited all the celebrities who had asked back to our suite for an after-show party. And boy did they show up! There were thousands of them, seemingly.
In this kind of environment, it would be easy for us to always be at each other’s throats. But we weren’t. I don’t mean that we wouldn’t get into arguments and spats (and I’m talking about the four of us, as opposed to the John/Paul dynamic); I’m only saying that when it happened, we all would rally together and patch things up again as soon as possible. We definitely had each other’s backs, and while the four Beatles could be critical of one another in our tight little circle, no one else was allowed to say such things to one of us, or all four of us would gang up on the transgressor and freeze him out.
I’ve discussed this phenomenon with war veterans, and they invariably say that this was what soldiers refer to as “foxhole buddy syndrome”. When you’re in the foxhole and the enemy is shooting at you and chaos is reigning, the only way the soldiers survive is to band together and be a united front, covering for each other, lying for each other, protecting each other. It wouldn’t matter if, once behind the lines in a safe zone, this guy really hated that other guy; once they were at the front again, the petty problems just fall away. And that was what it was like for the Beatles during the Beatlemania years.
This probably explains the night all four of us first tried marijuana. I’ve read in the Beatles biographies that of course we’d had marijuana back in the Hamburg clubs. Of course? And where the fuck were we supposed to get our hands on pot? I never saw anyone, not one musician or anyone else, doing pot until 1964. We first saw it (or recognized it; perhaps someone had been high around us before, and we didn’t notice) when we met Bob Dylan.
We met Bob Dylan and a group of his friends in our suite at the after party. Paul and I had already fallen deeply in love with his music, and had been listening intently to his albums and finding ourselves more and more influenced by him. When he arrived with his entourage, they were all stoned, and this time we figured out what they were taking, because they actually had the “funny cigarettes” with them, and were passing them around. He urged us to “turn on and tune out”, and since it was someone we practically idolized at this point, we agreed.
I didn’t feel pot for the longest time; it had to build up in my system before it affected me. And George got into it, asking all kinds of questions about it. Ringo was suspicious, but not wanting to be left out, he took a few tokes. He swears he felt nothing from it, and didn’t try it again for a long time. Oddly, and very surprising to me, Paul was the one who dug it the most. He stayed up toking with Bob, getting sillier and sillier, and I had to finally go to our bedroom alone and crash.
Pot first made me outrageously hungry, and then made me very sleepy. On the other hand, it woke Paul up while dulling his anxieties, which I have come to believe were ever-present for him (which in turn explains his love of pot- it was a kind of tranquilizer for him). Anyway, I was dead asleep and suddenly Paul was shaking me awake. It took me several seconds just to focus, and Paul was leaning over me with a piece of paper in his hands. This is what I recorded in my journal:
John: What?
Paul: [With an expression of complacency in what he had found out to be true] I’ve discovered the secrets of the universe!
John: What are you on about?
Paul: I’ve written them down here. [Waving the piece of paper.] It’s the secrets of the universe.
John: Christ, Paul, you’ve really gone ‘round the bend this time.
Paul: I’m also extremely randy.
John: Well, you came to the right place!
(I just remembered; pot made him very horny, too, and not just horny but horny to the nth degree, which is why I encouraged him to smoke it often and in great amounts. I’m sure that was why Linda was always pushing it on him, too.)
In the morning, Paul grabbed his piece of paper that held the “secrets of the universe” from the bedside table, and all he had written down there was “there are seven levels.” He handed it over to me without a word, and then I read it. Soon, the two of us were rolling around in the bed laughing hysterically, until we had to hold our stomachs it hurt so much.
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We returned to England from our U.S.A. tour feeling jubilant about our many brilliant experiences and successes. I think Paul, Ringo, and to a lesser extent George, had no concerns about fame or its attendant issues at this time. Only I – the inveterate depressive – was deeply worried about it. Mostly, the future I worried about was my personal future with Paul. Everything else was sort of a distant second. My distant second worries had to do with the feelings I had experienced sitting in a row like a trained chimp at a Hollywood party meeting rich people’s children (is that why I had become a rock star?); I also worried how we couldn’t even play together with any real precision or confidence anymore, because everyone screamed all the way through our performances, and we couldn’t hear ourselves sing or play. I worried that we would lose our chops. Finally, I believed that Brian was spreading us too thin.
The proof was in the next month’s schedule. We got home around the first of September, and the very next night the four of us had to be dressed in tuxes and appearing at the Royal Command Performance for Princess Margaret and Lord Snowden, who were the patrons of some charity or other. The Beatles were to headline. We stood in the receiving line before the show in our tuxes, and greeted the couple. Princess Margaret had beautiful milky white skin – it was literally translucent. I quite fancied her. Lord Snowden was groomed to within an inch of his life, and was extremely elegant and European. Of course, everyone knew he was a sex addict, and some of his adventures had been bisexual. The gossip was everywhere but in the press. And no one would dare to say anything about it out loud or in public.
I should have seen it coming, but I honestly didn’t. When the Princess and Lord Snowden were introduced to us, I noticed he was not looking at me. His eyes were totally on Paul, and he could not rip them away. Even as his words mouthed senseless nothings to me, his eyes were totally on Paul, who was flirting (I’m sorry, but he was) with Princess Margaret, and she was loving it! Suddenly I felt like a fourth wheel. Maybe I should leave and let the three of them go at it!
Strangely enough, a few months later we were performing at another Royal Command Performance, this for the Queen and the Duke of Edinburgh. This was a much less interesting lineup, I must say. I’d much prefer to hang out with Maggie and Tony circa 1964, rather than Liz and Phil.
The denouement was, that for weeks afterwards Paul was deluged, at the studio and at the Ashers’ home where he was living, with flowers and notes from Lord Snowden. His approach was that he wanted to take some “photographs” of Paul for a gentlemen’s fashion magazine. I remember sitting in the studio one day, working out some chords with Paul, when Mal came up to him with another humongous flower arrangement – there were at least 50 red roses in perfect bloom from “Lord Snowden.” It must have cost a small fortune. (“Based on my taxes, I’d say he can afford it,” sniped George.) I remember Paul’s utter bewilderment at receiving such embarrassingly lush and suggestive flowers from a man. He turned to me and asked me shyly, “Why is he doing this, do you imagine? Do you suppose he thinks I’m a bird?” I laughed and told him Snowden knew very well that Paul wasn’t a bird, and that was the point.
Brian Epstein finally ordered Paul to do a photo session with Lord Snowden if only to stop the constant phone calls and lightly veiled demands coming from Kensington Palace on a weekly basis. Paul looked like a lamb to the slaughter. “He said he is going to ‘dress me’, John. I hope he doesn’t mean that literally.” I asked him if he wanted me to go along and protect his virtue. Paul said, “You can laugh, John. He isn’t after you.”
In the end, Paul took Mal Evans to the shoot, and Mal stood protectively next to Paul whenever he was not in front of the camera, with his arms crossed and his eyes glaring. Snowden may have tried to make a move, but Paul never noticed it, and he got out of the photo session virtue intact. Some weeks later, Brian called me into his office. He was giddy with delight and just brimming with a kind of girlish excitement.
“For Christ sake, Brian, what is wrong with you?”
“I just got the proofs from Lord Snowden. Oh my God! He makes Paul look like a young Earl. The way he had him costumed – he is absolutely gorgeous! I had to share them with someone, and I thought you would appreciate them!” The two of us sat there staring at these beautiful photographs and salivating over them like a pair of teenaged girls. We were pathetic. But only two of them were ever published, because Paul said he felt awkward being photographed when none of the rest of us was there. So Brian chose two of the less obviously “older gay man’s young beautiful lover” shots.
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1964 had been a crazy year. Just when we thought it couldn’t get any better, weirder, scarier, funnier, or lovelier, it got more so. For me, I felt as though I had finished a marathon, or one of those dance contests where you dance ‘til you drop. I was still standing, but just barely.
Professionally, we could not have been in a more positive place. We were on the top of our game and everything was still going up. And personally – well, the rumblings of concern I dealt with in 1964 were still just faint glimpses of a darker future and then they were gone. Paul and I had weathered over 200 gigs, we’d travelled over 300,000 miles in planes, trains and automobiles, we had taken America by storm, played the Hollywood Bowl, written 32 songs and made a box office movie smash which was also a critical success. We rounded out the end of 1964 with a UK and European tour throughout October and most of November, and finished with the annual Christmas shows, including a Royal Command Performance for the Queen of England. It had been quite a ride.
Paul and I were honored one night in December for our songwriting, and we didn’t bring dates. As Paul said, “we wrote all those songs alone together, we should celebrate them alone together.” So it was an official date. The photograph of us taken that evening showed Paul and me seated at our table, and leaning in towards each other. What it didn’t show was my hand on his thigh under the table.
So, 1964 came to a close. It started out with me being euphoric over the number one hit of “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” and it ended up with me questioning whether I really wanted this success for which I had been striving. There were so many things to worry about: my relationship with Paul – it had begun to dawn on me that I wanted it to be forever, and he didn’t; the direction the Beatles were taking – I had no desire to be a performing chimpanzee; the intensity of our schedule, with Brian not giving us enough time off; and the relentless pressure from the record company, the fans, and the critics to keep churning out the successful songs and records. It was beginning to overwhelm me, and the future seemed uncertain to me. But Paul was certain about the course we were on - it had come to me, little by little, that the two of us didn’t necessarily have the same ultimate goals in mind, and this filled me with insecurity and fear.
The next year – 1965 – would see me dealing with this insecurity and fear, with chaos and relentless pressure pushing the Beatles further and faster than any pop group had gone before.