48 THENEWYORKER,OCTOBER18, 2021
to show Paul and not to show anybody
else. That’s how I felt about it. And on
top of that, the people that cut it, cut it
as ‘Paul is God’ and we’re just lying around
there.... There was some shots of Yoko
and me that had been just chopped out
of the film for no other reason than the
people were oriented towards Engelbert
Humperdinck.” Lennon was so dis
affected that when Wenner asked him
if he would do it all over again he said,
“If I could be a fuckin’ fisherman, I would!”
That period was intensely painful
for McCartney, but he had to laugh
when I read him that last line. “John
talked a lot of bullshit,” he said.
A
s a showman, McCartney likes to
“please the average punter,” playing
the hits and playing them precisely as
recorded. But in the first few years after
the breakup of the Beatles he avoided
the songs he’d written with Lennon. You
didn’t get “Day Tripper”; you got “Mary
Had a Little Lamb.” You didn’t get “Ticket
to Ride”; you got “Hi, Hi, Hi.” No matter.
He sold tickets. He sold records. Mixed
in with the music, however, were gestures
of mockery––or, in Liverpudlian terms,
taking the piss. Long before the hiphop
disstrack era, McCartney put out “Too
Many People,” a song from the “Ram”
album that scowled at Lennon: “You took
your lucky break and broke it in two.”
Not long afterward, Lennon lambasted
McCartney on the “Imagine” album in
a far more scathing song
called “How Do You Sleep?”
“The only thing you done
was yesterday,” he sang at his
old friend. “The sound you
make is Muzak to my ears.”
Lennon’s son Sean told me
that his father eventually
came to recognize that he
was as upset with himself
as he was with his friend.
“Those were crabby mo
ments, but people made too big a deal of
it,” he added. “It didn’t reach the level of
Tupac telling Biggie Smalls that he’d slept
with his wife” in “Hit ’Em Up.”
With time, relations improved, and
McCartney, who guards his sunny pub
lic image carefully, allowed that neither
man was his cartoon image. “I could be
a total prick, and he could be a softie,”
as he put it to me. There were phone
calls between the two and some visits
to the Dakota, where Lennon and Ono
had an apartment. When Lennon sep
arated from Ono, in 1973, and went on
an eighteen month bender with May
Pang, the couple’s assistant—Beatles
Studies scholars refer to this as the “lost
weekend” period—McCartney went to
Los Angeles to see his friend, and en
couraged him to go home. They even
played some music in a studio with Ste
vie Wonder and Harry Nilsson. Here
and there, rumors spread of a Beatles
reunion. Starr told me a story about a
promoter who offered them a fortune
to play a concert but also mentioned
an opening act that would feature a
man wrestling a shark. “We called each
other and said no,” Starr said. “We were
taking our own roads now.” By the
late seventies, Lennon and McCartney
talked from time to time about domes
tic matters—raising children and bak
ing bread. When Lorne Michaels, the
producer of “Saturday Night Live,”
went on the air in 1976 and jokingly of
fered the Beatles three thousand dol
lars to come on the show, McCartney
happened to be visiting Lennon at the
Dakota and they were watching the
program. They were tempted to go to
the studio, at Rockefeller Center. “It
was only a few blocks away,” McCartney
told me, “but we couldn’t be bothered,
so we didn’t do it.”
Then, on December 8, 1980, Lennon
was murdered. Four months later, Philip
Norman published “Shout!,”
a best selling biography of
the band built around the
idea that Lennon was “three
quarters of the Beatles” and
McCartney little more than
a cloying songwriter and a
great manipulator. And Ono
did not relent, remarking
that Lennon had told her
that McCartney had hurt
him more than any other
person had. McCartney was hamstrung;
how could he respond? Lennon was now
a martyr. People gathered outside the
Dakota to sing “Imagine” and leave be
hind flowers or a burning candle.
McCartney kept his counsel for a
while. Otherwise, he told me, “I’d be
walking on a dead man’s grave.” But
in May, 1981, he called Hunter Davies,
who had once published an authorized
Beatles biography, and unloaded aboutLennon and Ono: “No one ever goes
on about the times John hurt me. When
he called my music Muzak. People keep
on saying I hurt him, but where’s the
examples, when did I do it?” McCartney
went on like this for more than an hour.
“I don’t like being the careful one,”
he said. “I’d rather be immediate like
John. He was all action.... He could be
a maneuvering swine, which no one ever
realized. Now since the death he’s be
come Martin Luther Lennon.” Then,
there was the issue of who wrote what:
“I saw somewhere that he says he helped
on ‘Eleanor Rigby.’ Yeah. About half a
line. He also forgot completely that I
wrote the tune for ‘In My Life.’ That was
my tune. But perhaps he just made a
mistake on that.”
He wavered for years, savoring his
partnership with Lennon and declaring
his love and his sense of loss, but also
relitigating old resentments, to the point
of challenging the order of their trade
mark: “LennonMcCartney.” (Indeed,
in “The Lyrics” McCartney has the credit
lines for “his” Beatles songs read “Paul
McCartney and John Lennon.”) It was
a struggle for reputation, for the narra
tive of their lives together and apart.
And yet, even in his rant to Davies, Mc
Cartney made plain that he could see
the absurdity of it all: “People said to me
when he said those things on his record
about me, you must hate him, but I didn’t.
I don’t. We were once having a right
slagging session and I remember how
he took off his granny glasses. I can still
see him. He put them down and said,
‘It’s only me, Paul.’ Then he put them
back on again and we continued slag
ging.... That phrase keeps coming back
to me all the time. ‘It’s only me.’”F
or years, McCartney thought about
writing a memoir but, he told me,
it seemed like “too much work.” Instead,
he authorized an old friend, Barry Miles,
to write a biography, which appeared in
1997 as “Paul McCartney: Many Years
from Now.” Miles took pains to counter
the notion of McCartney as a soapy bal
ladeer and, by inference, of Lennon as
the group’s sole intellectual and artistic
radical. The book provides accounts of
McCartney hanging out with William
Burroughs, Harold Pinter, Kenneth
Tynan, and Michelangelo Antonioni;
discussing the war in Vietnam with Ber