Was John gay? A question mark has been set against his sexuality. As noted, Pauline Sutcliffe has suggested John had a love affair of sorts with her brother, Stuart; while John’s school friend Pete Shotton has affirmed that John told him he’d had sexual contact with Brian Epstein in Spain. Shotton says John told him Brian had made a pass at him on holiday, John’s response being to drop his trousers and invite his manager to ‘stick it up me fucking arse then’. Brian said this wasn’t quite what he had in mind, so John masturbated him. This is only relevant in as much as what stock Paul McCartney puts in such stories about his best friend and, on balance, he rejects suggestions John was homosexual, not least because he and John spent countless nights together in hotels on the road, ‘and there was never any hint that he was gay’. Certainly the suggestion has never been made about McCartney himself.
SHE LOVES YOU
John behaved loutishly at Paul’s 21st, but considering the pressure the Beatles were under it is hardly surprising they let off steam occasionally. The next day the boys had to be back in London to appear on BBC radio, and hardly a day passed during the months ahead without a radio or television broadcast, personal appearance, recording session or concert. They worked like dogs and as they did so the Beatles refined their image. Paul was instrumental in this as in so many of the changes the band went through. Just before Christmas the Beatles visited Dougie Millings, a Soho tailor who dressed many celebrities, and McCartney worked with him on designs for new stage suits. ‘Between my father and Paul McCartney, they started sketching, and the idea of the round-neck suit came into being,’ comments Gordon Millings. This was a twist on a Pierre Cardin design, a distinctive suit with braided edges, bell cuffs and pearl buttons. Worn over shirt and tie, the suits were very light, suitable for stage work, and became an important part of the Beatles’ look.
Some of the gigs the Beatles were performing during their now rapid rise to the top assume greater significance in retrospect, such as when they played the Plaza Ballroom, Old Hill, on Friday 5 July 1963, on a bill with Denny and the Diplomats. The front man, genial brummie Denny Laine, helped Paul form Wings in the 1970s. Then, in early August, the Beatles played their last show at the Cavern, two and a half years after they first got up on the stage that Paul’s Uncle Harry had built. Their following had grown considerably during that time, boys and girls queuing down Mathew Street to get into the club for their last appearances.* ‘To see people like that, with their hur like that, it was looking at Martians, like looking at something from another planet,’ recalls schoolboy fan Willy Russell, who became a notable playwright and associate of Paul’s in later years. ‘You just knew the world had changed.’ As ever, though, it was the girls who were most affected by the Beatles, and there was a sense of bereavement after they played their final show at the club. ‘The best time really to me was the Beatles before they became famous,’ says Frieda Kelly, Cavern-goer turned NEMS employee, where she was now mailing signed photos of the boys to fans across the UK, thus working, ironically, to distance the boys from original fans like herself. ‘We wanted them to become famous, but as soon as they became famous you knew you’d lost them, lost the good side of them, the close contact.’
John and Paul wrote their next hit on the road, inspired by a Bobby Rydell number, ‘Forget Him’. Paul: ‘I’d planned an “answering” song where a couple of us would sing “She loves you …” and the other one answers, “Yeah, yeah.” We decided that that was a crumby idea as it was, but at least then we had the idea for a song called “She Loves You”.’ The single had the energy, directness and undercurrent of sex that characterises the Beatles’ early hits, the lyric referring to a triangular relationship in which a young man is telling a male friend about a girl who loves him. The refrain was banal – ‘Yeah! Yeah! Yeah!’ – but John and Paul’s harmonising was irresistible. George Martin was initially doubtful about the song ending on a sixth, an interval in the harmony, which sounded like a musical cliché to his experienced ears.
I loved it but when they ended the phrase on a sixth, as they do with the harmonies, it was a bit like Glenn Miller, and I said [to myself], I wonder if they are doing the right thing here. ‘Isn’t this a bit unhip, laddeys?’ They looked at me as though I was mad. And Paul said, ‘It’s great! It’s great!’ I said, ‘I’ve heard it so many times before.’ He said, ‘We haven’t, and nobody else our age has either!’ So they stuck with it.
Paul was right. Released at the end of August, ‘She Loves You’ went directly to number one.
As their fourth single rode high in the charts the Beatles grabbed another quick holiday, Paul and Jane travelling to Greece with Ritchie and his Liverpool girlfriend, Maureen Cox. Around the same time, John finally took Cynthia on honeymoon, to Paris. Photographs from the Greek vacation show Paul and Jane, and Ritchie and Mo, behaving much as any young couple abroad might, having a laugh, getting sunburnt, snogging in the back seat of a tour coach wearing silly Greek hats. With Jane, a trip to Greece had to involve culture, so after they booked into the Acropole Palace in Athens the foursome trooped up to the Parthenon. ‘I remember going around the Parthenon three times – I think to keep Jane happy – and it was really tiring,’ grumbled Ringo.
When they returned to the UK, the Beatles started to live in London full time, all four men initially sharing a flat in Green St, Mayfair,* within walking distance of the night clubs, restaurants and pubs of Soho and the West End. Jane Asher’s house in Wimpole Street and the EMI studios were a short cab ride away. Paul soon got to know his way around Central London, often walking and using the bus and underground. If he avoided places where fans knew to congregate, and kept moving, he found that he could get about without limousines or bodyguards, though he had access to a chauffeur-driven car when he needed it.
One of the addresses Paul visited regularly was Brian’s new office in Monmouth Street, Covent Garden. NEMS Enterprises had grown like Topsy in the wake of the Beatles’ breakthrough as Brian signed up a roster of other Liverpool artists that included Gerry and the Pacemakers, Cilla Black and Billy J. Kramer, plus lesser names such as Tommy Quickly, a young telephone engineer who’d caught the impresario’s eye. Rather like Larry Parnes, Epstein sometimes picked his boy clients by their looks. Still, he achieved a remarkable success rate. When Gerry and the Pacemakers released the Beatles’ reject ‘How Do You Do It?’ in March 1963, it went to number one, as did the Pacemakers’ next two singles. Brian was also in the fortunate position of being able to offer Lennon-McCartney compositions to his artists, some of whom (Cilla and Kramer notably) recorded them with George Martin for Parlophone, which was a neat arrangement. Black, Kramer and Quickly all released Lennon-McCartney songs in 1963, Kramer achieving number one with ‘Bad to Me’. Paul was delighted. ‘John and I were a songwriting team and what songwriting teams did in those days was wrote for everyone – unless you couldn’t come up with something, or wanted to keep a song for yourself and it was a bit too good to give away,’ he later told Mark Lewisohn. ‘John and I would get together, “Oh, we gotta write one for Billy J., OK” [sings “Bad to Me”] … we just knocked them out.’ Perhaps the most interesting of these Lennon and McCartney song gifts was to a new band named the Rolling Stones.
After picking up an award at the Variety Club of Great Britain luncheon at the Savoy Hotel on 10 September 1963, John and Paul found themselves mooching around the music shops on Charing Cross Road. As they did so they bumped into Andrew Loog Oldham, a young hustler who’d worked briefly in the PR department at NEMS before meeting a bunch of youthful blues aficionados who went by the name of the