From The Daily Mail, 7/1/06

 

DID PAUL SLEEP WITH YOKO?

 

He boasted of bedding ‘500 or 600’ girls. And John Lennon accused him of trying to sleep with BOTH his wives. Here, in the first extract from a new biography, is the truth about McCartney the sexual gladiator.

 

By Christopher Sandford

 

 

One spring afternoon in 1989, Paul McCartney was on his way to be interviewed on Terry Wogan’s TV chat show when he was accosted by an attractive, well dressed blonde in her mid-20s. She rushed at him out of a crowd as he left the offices of his music business, McCartney Productions Ltd, in London’s Soho Square. “Why don’t you acknowledge me?” she screamed. “Why don’t you acknowledge me?”

 

Security guards quickly hustled the woman in one direction and escorted Paul, visibly shaken, in the other. A few moments later, his car set off towards Oxford Street; his racing-driver friend Jackie Stewart might not have been disappointed by the speed with which it took the corner.

 

The whole distressing episode was over as suddenly as it had started, and the woman was never identified. It is impossible to be sure of her reasons for approaching the star, then aged 46, or to know whether they were ever founded in anything other than fantasy.

 

Perhaps, though, the incident offered a glimpse – however ambiguous – of the complicated legacy of McCartney’s days as one of pop’s most potent sex symbols.

 

Today, this ever-youthful man – still one of the world’s greatest musicians – is renowned for his fidelity; his famous determination to spend every night of married life with his adored first wife, Linda, and current devotion to his second spouse, Heather Mills.

 

Yet, from his mid teens on, for at least a decade he was an ardent ladies man whose sexual exploits left the other Beatles – including John Lennon – in the shade. Not for nothing did Lennon teasingly call McCartney a ‘sexual gladiator’.

 

At the height of The Beatles’ success, he was besieged by female admirers that the group’s roadie, Mal Evans recalled arranging a shift system on his behalf.

 

Evans also remembered the inevitable moment when, owing to sheer weight of numbers, one girl on her way in met another one on her way out.

 

McCartney tolerated this administrative lapse with composure. “He laughed and told them both to leg it upstairs and wait for him,” Evans explains. “He did.”

 

Paul had discovered sex early. By the time he was 16 he was skipping school in Liverpool to write songs with Lennon, he was already exploring the delights of romance with local girls such as Julie Arthur, the niece of comedian Ted Ray.

 

His lovers during this period have since yielded up vivid details of his activities, agreeing that he was striking in his directness, virility and at times robust technique, as well as in his smooth patter, which often focused on music and his latest compositions.

 

Forty-five years on, one young companion would recall how “he sat me down in the front room and lovingly told me how the word were his experience and the music was his soul. Anything to get my knickers down!”

 

As well as talent and charisma, McCartney had impeccably lucky timing. As Lennon put it, the advent of the Pill had ushered in “a whole new phenomen… the chick wanting to get laid as quickly and often as possible.”

 

After Julie Arthur there were Celia, Val and Layla – and finally a pretty, softly-spoken girl called Dorothy Rhone. Her name was shortened to Dot by Paul further asked that she bleach her hair and adopt short skirts and fishnet stockings in tribute to his favourite actress, Bridgette Bardot.

 

The formation of The Beatles with Lennon, George Harrison and Lennon’s friend, Stuart Sutcliffe would broaden his horizons still further.

 

Soon after his 18^th birthday in June 1960, the group stumbled down an ill-smelling flight of stairs into the Kaiserkeller Club in the notorious Reeperbahn district of Hamburg – the vice capital of Europe.

 

Fuelled by an inexhaustible supply of beer and drugs, the young musicians began to loose their native shyness.

 

McCartney had allegedly learned the trick of getting high by extracting and swallowing the Benzedrine strip from a certain inhaler, and all the band – bar drummer Pete Best, soon to be replaced by Ringo Starr – enjoyed a diet of amphetamines. As George Harrison would recall; “We were frothing at the mouth.”

 

They were also attracting their first serious groupies. Much like Liverpool, Hamburg was – in Stuart Sutcliffe’s phrase – “ancient, raw, open all hours.”

 

Leaving the stage at 2am, McCartney would find his way home to the groups bleak lodgings behind an X-rated cinema and sleep fitfully with one or more of his local fans in a dingy room, using tattered Union Jack as his only bedding.

 

The ‘sex gladiator’ was also a diplomat. All the time he was in Hamburg, he kept up a steady stream of affectionate postcards home, assuring his sweetheart Dot Rhone that he was ‘doing fine’.

 

In the ten years ahead he would bed ‘500 or 600 birds’, and came close to disaster on more than one occasion when women accused him of siring children.

 

In April 1962, for example, soon after the tragic death of Stuart Sutcliffe, McCartney began a brief relationship with a young blonde named Erika Heubers, a waitress in a Rheeperbahn nightclub.

 

A friend there remembers her saying, “Paul and I were truly in love… I gave him my heart.” The fact that the affair lasted only a week in no way diminished its intensity for her.

 

Nor its significance: in December that year she gave birth to a baby girl, Bettina, and claimed Paul was the father.

 

He vehemently denied it, but three years later settled a suit in the German courts by paying £2700 towards the child’s welfare, while not admitting paternity.

 

His supposed daughter would resurface in April 1983, requesting a monthly maintenance cheque to augment her earnings as a fuse-stuffer in a Hamburg fireworks factory.

 

Bettina then made a vain attempt to launch herself as a singer, and was subsequently pictured in a girlie magazine wearing only a pair of black leather gloves and wielding a clear plastic guitar. She went on to lose two further maintenance hearings against McCartney, who waived his right to claim costs from her.

 

All of which might have seemed far-fetched to anyone who encountered the doe-eyed McCartney in his youth.

 

To Lennon, he was “cute, and didn’t know it,” a born performer who was also a ‘thruster’ and an ‘operator’ behind the scenes. To his family, he was a slightly prim young man who was scrupulously polite to his aunts.

 

But when Paul was on stage, he was an entirely different beast. His act ran the gamut from the smoochy to the downright sexual.

 

Back in Liverpool, his father Jim occasionally popped into the Cavern Club to see him in action and proudly noted ‘the birds were starting to go potty’. Some were already making their way to Forthlin Road, where they left lipstick messages on the front door.

 

By April 1963, the momentum was unstoppable – a recording deal with EMI; a triumphant second single, Please Please Me – and they were performing not at the Cavern but the Royal Albert Hall, with a non-stop barrage of bras and undies sailing over the footlights.

 

Milling around the backstage was an attractive, flame-haired 17-year-old actress named Jane Asher. McCartney spent some time with her that night at The Beatles’ hotel, and soon they were officially an item.

 

“We’d never met anyone like her,” Lennon recalled fondly. Despite her youth, Asher seemed to have been everywhere and done everything.

 

Encouraged by her arty mother, she’d first enrolled with a theatrical agency aged seven and had since graced several British films and starred in the West End, as well as – the ultimate accolade – guesting on Juke Box Jury. She was the ‘It Girl’ of the moment; in Lennon’s view, she was “smart, dead sexy and fun.”

 

John’s first wife, Cynthia adds that McCartney “fell like a ton of bricks for Jane. The first time I was introduced to her, she was sitting on Paul’s knee. He was obviously proud as a peacock. She was a great prize.”

 

Asher’s mother, Margaret was a vivacious music teacher – her pupils had included The Beatles’ producer, George Martin – and her father, Richard, was a world-renowned doctor, specialising in blood and mental diseases.

 

Soon Paul was spending much of his time at their house in London’s Wimpole Street.

 

In October 1963, when he and Jane arrived back at Heathrow late one evening after a holiday together in Greece, Mrs Asher made the broad-minded suggestion that he spend the night at their place. He gladly accepted.

 

Number 57 Wimpole Street was a long way from the Speke council estate where McCartney grew up. A five-storey Georgian house, it had bookcases full of first editions, fine paintings and an airy, stone flagged kitchen where meals were served day or night to a brilliant array of distinguished guests.

 

McCartney would soon pronounce it a ‘cool scene’ and, on and off, he lived there for the next three years. Above the door to his room in the attic there was a hand drawn sign saying, ‘Paul’s Place’.

 

Beatles fans soon obtained the house’s phone number – Dr Asher needed to keep it public because of his medical practice – and Jane would find herself taking 20 or 30 calls a day from giggling girls, to whom she was heroically polite.

 

There were generally a dozen fans at the front door, though Paul sometimes made his escape by climbing out of his attic room, shinning along the parapet to the roof next door, knocking on the neighbour’s window and going down in his lift to the adjoining mews, where The Beatles’ chauffeur would pick him up.

 

The Ashers always remembered the wet night when Lennon came over and he and Paul politely asked to borrow the music room in the basement, where Mrs Asher gave oboe lessons.

 

The two sat side by side at the piano and before asking the family if they fancied hearing a ‘wee tune’. It was called I Want To Hold Your Hand and became The Beatles’ fifth single.

 

Despite his relationship with Jane, numerous other girls continued to appear on McCartney’s arm when he was on tour, notably on tumultuous trips to France and America.

 

When The Beatles arrived in Miami, for example, a girl in a polka-dot bikini immediately attached herself to Paul at the airport and rarely left his side for the following week.

 

Mal Evans acted as a kind of turnstile against the non-stop, all female siege at his hotel room, but another enterprising local girl, Lucy Gentry, queue-jumped by coiling up under the room-service trolley.

 

Upon emerging she shrewdly announced to McCartney that she loved all his songs and that whatever transpired over the next few hours would have no strings attached.

 

The evening allegedly ended with her, McCartney and the girl in the polka-dot bikini lying in a king-size bed, each one with a glass of champagne, looking down on the ocean. “Can’t Buy Me Love?” mused Paul. “You kidding? It should have been Can Buy Me Love, actually.”

 

Soon, he was again busy defending his name from a woman claiming to have borne his child. In late 1963, Anita Cochrane, a 19-year-old from Liverpool, took to sending maintenance claims on behalf of her son, whom she called Philip Paul.

 

The following spring, Beatles manager Brian Epstein allegedly made a ‘full and final’ settlement of the affair, involving a small payment and, again, no admission of liability.

 

This seems not to have satisfied the girl’s uncle, who rather spoiled the premier of The Beatles film A Hard Day’s Night by parading up and down the street, distributing leaflets accusing Paul of being a delinquent father. Mal Evans was delegated to quietly remove him.

 

Others saw the Cochrane affair less as a paternity suit than a warning sign for Jane Asher. To them, this was the same Paul who slept with dozens of women while on tour and told those who asked what his ‘chick’ thought: “I don’t care what she thinks. We’re not married.”

 

For those who really knew The Beatles, McCartney’s reputation for sexual athleticism was as strong as his reputation for professionalism, drive and business acumen.

 

“You could be fooled by the fact that he was the big, money-making machine,” said comedian Frankie Howerd, who shot a few scenes on The Beatles’ film Help! “Underneath all that, he was just a guy. And a very horny one, too.”

 

John Lennon even complained that Paul seemed to be coming on a bit strong to his wife Cynthia. Behind the charm, Lennon noted, was a ‘randy sod’. [sic]

 

Cynthia herself would characterise McCartney as the ‘town bull’, while to Judy Flanders, a young blonde who dallied wit him in America, he was ‘one cool customer… champagne and roses at night, a pat on the ass in the morning’.

 

What struck some observers was how he seemed to love the whole Jane Asher set-up, with its heady mix of good conversation and free food, more than he loved Jane herself.

 

Things We Said Today, a tune he wrote for her, may have sounded on the surface like yet another big, brown-eyed ballad. But to insiders it was Paul taking stock (‘You say you will love me/If I have to go’) and predicting the worst. “Jane was very naïve,” says a friend.

 

When the band returned from tours, McCartney seemingly told his girlfriend that he’d behaved himself immaculately – and Jane did, by and large, buy this line. Evan as gossip about all the groupies and love children began to surface, says a friend, “she thought the sun rose and set on him”.

 

A more serious problem, by far, was Asher’s blunt refusal to give up her job as an actress.

 

Paul liked fixed routine and having his ‘old lady’ there to cook and clean for him.

 

Jane wanted what she’d had since the age of 12 – the chance to perform for her public. McCartney, however, was candid about his aversion to following her around in provincial rep. “The only thing I get from the theatre,” he announced, “is a sore arse.”

 

They broke up several times only to patch things back together. Paul was up at his father’s house on the Wirral one sunny weekend, strumming a guitar under the beeches in the back garden, when he hit on a catchy verse/chorus that quickly became We Can Work It Out.

 

Though the original lyrics are rather darker than the title suggests, Jane’s reaction was, by all accounts, effusive delight.

 

“No, I’m not Paul’s wife,” she told the Press. “But yes, we’re going to get married.”

 

By October 1965, McCartney had been living in the Asher’s upstairs box room for two years, rent free, though he had arranged to have the outside of the house painted for them.

 

When he finally bought a property of his own, a three-storey Regency house at Cavendish Avenue in St John’s Wood, just east of the Abbey Road recording studios, Jane joined him there.

 

The place cost Paul £40,000 to buy and £20,000 to decorate, with a Victorian coaching lamp in the drive, bedsheets that were changed daily and two oil paintings by Magritte on the walls.

 

Over the years, various other musicians, artists and poets came to the house to be entertained, to tea and a smoke, often joining McCartney around his psychedelic-painted piano.

 

Paul later remarked that he’d ‘turned Mick Jagger on to pot’ on such an occasion. “Which is funny, because you’d thought it would be the other way round.”

 

Paul spent much of the summer of 1966 at his new London home, squiring a prodigious number of actresses and models.

 

A businessman calling by appointment recalled meeting a young brunette dressed in what appeared to be a swimsuit, “sitting demurely on a chair in the hallway like a job applicant.”

 

That same summer, McCartney also purchased High Park Farm, set in 180 acres of rolling hills on a remote stretch of western Scotland.

 

Run-down and sparsely furnished, the place was an escape from the pressures of Beatlemania.

 

It was also a ‘total knocking-shop’ says one guest, a minor and notably unstuffy royal, who remembers she excited Paul’s interest by going about braless.

 

In London, McCartney remained a fixture at all-hours clubs like the Ad Lib and the UFO, where, a patron recalls, “he went through the Young Things like a knife through butter.”

 

Paul’s taste in women ignored all considerations of age and appearance, and also spanned the class structure.

 

There were debs and domestics, dolly birds and shop girls and one ‘fantastic bit’ whom he wanted to take on holiday, only he couldn’t for the life of him remember either her name or address.

 

Alistair Taylor, the band’s long suffering Mr Fixit, eventually tracked her down. Her name was Maggie McGivern, a model, and she and McCartney enjoyed a passionate liaison.

 

Fellow rock star, Bill Wyman noted the Beatle’s wandering eye when he and his partner Astrid Lundstrom, met Paul at a London nightspot. After a while Wyman realised that “Paul was playing footsie with Astrid.”

 

“Later, as we sat talking in the car near her flat we saw McCartney arrive. He spotted us and drove around and around her flat until he finally gave up and left.”

 

Left for the time being, apparently. “What did Wyman expect?” asks a mutual friend. “Paul was the most charming man, kind of irresistible, Bill was resistible.”

 

On September 1, 1966, the whole sexual politics of The Beatles was transformed by the arrival in Britain of a small 33-year-old woman dressed in black and surrounded by a collection of clay dolls and abstract tinfoil sculptures.

 

Her name was Yoko Ono.

 

Not long afterwards, she turned up at McCartney’s home in Cavendish Avenue, talked her way inside, and asked Paul is he had any spare manuscripts of Beatles lyrics ‘or other stuff’ that she could present to her friend, the musician John Cage.

 

Paul turned her down. Instead, he suggested, she might like to try his old friend and partner, John Lennon.

 

And that was that – according to the conventional story.

 

But Yoko, by at least one account, made quite an impression at Cavendish Avenue.

 

According to this source, a man familiar with the day-to-day lives of The Beatles in 1966, Paul’s gift when he and Yoko went upstairs was of a more select kind than some second hand lyrics sheet.

 

“Down she came, closely followed by Himself with an ear-splitting grin on his face, giving a wink. It all fitted. People will tell you that they’re incompatible. Not then they weren’t.”

 

McCartney, it is remembered, was particularly courteous towards his guest at the front door. “They stood there up close, and she took his arm. He was hugging her.” Paul also reportedly showered enormous praise on Yoko’s portfolio.

 

When Yoko met John, and began the decade’s most spectacular love affair, Lennon made no secret of his feelings.

 

“He warned me off her,” Paul would recall. “Sort of said, ‘Look, no, no,’ cause he knew I was a bit of a ladies man – I liked the girls, no doubt about that.”

 

Some three years later, during the making of Abbey Road, Lennon installed a bed in the studio so Yoko, recuperating from a car crash, could survey proceedings.

 

Yoko would later tell Paul that, if, for any reason, he seemed to be standing too close to her bed, all hell would break loose when he got her home.

 

Lennon, she said, he was ‘very paranoid’ like that.

 

Bearded and barely recognisable as the fresh-faced singer of his early days, McCartney was now spending more and more time in the company of men like Keith Richards and Jimi Hendrix, and developing a modest cocaine habit.

 

Creatively he remained remarkably productive, rising early after a hard night’s partying to write songs for the Sergeant Pepper’s album. When he felt tired, he snorted himself awake with more coke.

 

Thirty-five years later, Paul remembered how he made Sergeant Pepper on ‘coke, and maybe some grass to level it out.’

 

At the time, his indulgences also included occasional uppers and copious draughts of scotch.

 

He has also said he took heroin, just the once, with his art and drug-dealing acquaintance, ‘Groovy Bob’ Fraser.

 

And then came the encounter that changed his life.

 

In May 1967, while Paul was relaxing in the Bag O’Nails club in Soho, listening to Procol Harum’s A Whiter Shade Of Pale, a good looking blonde photographer on a short, fringed skirt walked by and gave him the eye. Her name was Linda Eastman.

 

Four days later, Linda was at Brian Epstein’s home in Belgravia for a Sergeant Pepper launch party. Her pictures from that night would acquire near-iconic status.

 

Legend insists that McCartney invited her back to his place with the line, “Come up and see my Magritte’s.”

 

Happily for him, Jane Asher was away touring America. Over the next few days, Paul and Linda seemed to exactly what he later called it: a match ‘made in Heaven’.

 

Witnessing them together, John Lennon noted, was a bit like hanging out with a Valentine’s card.

 

Linda was 25 and already divorced with a three-year-old child, Heather.

 

A veteran of clubs like the Fillmore and Warhol’s Factory, she knew ‘everyone’ in New York, as well as being smart, hip and thin as a cigarette.

 

Her high school yearbook had described her as having a ‘yen for men’ and she had been linked romantically with a variety of rock stars including Jimi Hendrix. Stephen Stills, Steve Winwood, Jim Morrison, Eric Burdon and Tim Buckley.

 

According to Bill Wyman, she also spent the night with Mick Jagger after photographing the Rolling Stones on a boat cruising New York harbour. Disobliging rock insiders would even refer to her as ‘Queen of the Groupies.’

 

McCartney, however, cast a spell over her like no other.

 

“It was John who interested me at first,” she recalled. “He was my hero. But when I met him, the fascination faded fast and it was Paul I liked.”

 

Even as the two of them were growing closer, Paul’s romance with Jane Asher continued.

 

That December, secluded in their dank, unheated Scottish manse, he and Jane phoned the Ashers to announce their engagement. By the following spring, however, neither party would give a wedding date.

 

Other distractions were accumulating. In June 1968, a pert 24-year-old named Francie Schwartz beat a path to The Beatles’ office and told McCartney that she wanted to ‘make a movie.’

 

Twenty-four hours later a motorcycle messenger arrived at her flat bearing a letter on company stationary: ‘Come, call, do something constructive.’ It was signed, “With love, Paul.”

 

She could forget about the film, he promptly announced, but he could definitely us a friend at Cavendish Avenue while Jane was out of town, pursuing her career. Schwartz was in residence throughout the summer and she attended several Beatles recording sessions.

 

Meanwhile, McCartney flew to Los Angeles to attend a recording convention and – according to an aide who accompanied him – bedded down on an industrial scale, enjoying his own ‘Black and White Minstrel show’ with a Swedish supermodel and the African-American actress Winona Williams, who later went out with David Bowie.

 

Despite this formidable competition, Linda Eastman flew in, at her own expense, to join him. The next morning, Paul and Linda were strolling through the lobby of the Beverly Hills Hotel when Winona Williams bumped into them.

 

“What’s the deal here?” Williams asked, looking at Linda. McCartney apparently replied, “I’ve just been informed that I’m going to have a baby.”

 

In fact, it would be 14 months before Linda gave birth to their first child. But back in London Mal Evans noticed a subtle change in McCartney. “He suddenly went from ‘Jane this, Jane that’ to ‘our Linda’ and ‘her lovely little kid’.”

 

When he was reunited with Asher, Paul bought her a dozen roses exhilarated once again not to have been caught out. A month later, however, Asher came home unexpectedly and finally ‘confronted Paul about various issues’. These apparently included his being in bed with Francie Schwartz.

 

Later that morning, Margaret Asher appeared at Cavendish Avenue and swiftly removed all her daughters’ clothes and personal effects. That Saturday Paul tuned into BBC TV’s Dee Time chat show to hear Jane reveal her engagement was off.

 

Although McCartney did not find the break-up especially traumatic, he had clearly enjoyed being looked after in the sense of having his then-favourite steaks cooked for him, his shoes polished and a new shirt laid out whenever he wanted it.

 

In Jane’s absence there was a tendency for unwashed dishes to pile up in the sink and for discarded clothes and tapes to be strewn across the floor.

 

Accompanied by Mal Evans, he also began drinking heavily, sinking a bottle of scotch a night, chased by the best Peruvian marijuana.

 

Linda came to his rescue. In September, she flew in to spend a month at Cavendish Avenue and was shocked to find hordes of young girls outside, and only a lump of cheese and a bottle of sour milk within.

 

She received a warm welcome from Paul but not from others.

 

The Apple Scruffs – as The Beatles’ groupies were called, after the group’s Apple record label – had tolerated, even liked, Jane Asher, but would never quite warm to the pushy New York divorcee with the young child back home.

 

A night or two later graffiti appeared, not for the last time, on the black metal gates to the house, ‘Get lost Linda, you slut.”

 

By mid-morning the last two words had been erased by an unknown fan, who still agreed with the main thesis. “All very sad,” said Paul. “People preferred Jane Asher. She fitted. Linda didn’t fit.”

 

McCartney saw things differently. At the end of 1968, Linda told him she was pregnant – no mistake, this time – and later that week, he asked her to marry him.

 

It was the start of a contented and, so it seems, impeccably loyal union. The sex gladiator had left the arena.