All these foreign concerts were triumphs. Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Holland and Australia had fallen to the Beatles, to paraphrase Brian Epstein. Only Paris held out, but France would fall. Two and a half years earlier, Brian had been the manager of a provincial record shop. Now he saw himself as the Napoleon of Pop, and his next campaign would be his biggest: the Beatles’ invasion of the United States.
CONQUERING HEROES
Before going back to the USA there were two British premières for A Hard Day’s Night, the first at the Pavilion in London on 6 July 1964, Jim McCartney bringing a delegation of ‘relies’ down from Liverpool to support ‘our Paul’. The film opened with the resounding first chord of the theme song – CHUNNNNG! – sending John, George and Ringo running helter-skelter towards a train station, pursued by their fans and the press. The lads meet Paul, dressed in disguise, and board a train where they bump into some schoolgirls (one of whom, a pretty young model named Patricia ‘Pattie’ Boyd, became George’s girlfriend, later his wife). The subsequent plot was simply the process of the Beatles coming to London to perform on a TV show, which gave them an excuse to perform their songs. Over and above the musical sequences, which were excellent, the Beatles came across as likeable and natural lads with aspects of a comedy troupe, almost cartoonish in appearance, while the picture itself was clean and sharp. As the credits rolled, you wanted more.
Afterwards everybody repaired in a celebratory mood to the Dorchester Hotel where Paul introduced his father to Princess Margaret, a hitherto unimaginable situation for the Liverpool cotton merchant. At the end of a long meal, with the ‘relies’ lounging around the table, full to bursting, Paul presented Dad with another surprise: a picture of a racehorse. ‘Thank you, son. It’s very nice,’ said Jim, who was to celebrate his 62nd birthday the following day. ‘It’s a horse,’ Paul told his old man, with the exasperation of youth.
‘I can see that, son.’
‘It’s not just a painting … I’ve bought you a bloody horse.’ Jim McCartney then came into possession of Drake’s Drum, a £1,000 gelding. The affection between father and son represented by this gift is a contrast to John Lennon’s unhappy relationship with his father, the ne’er-do-well Freddie Lennon, who’d made himself known to his son recently after years of estrangement, only to be greeted with icy indifference. Later John slammed a door in his father’s face.
Still, the McCartney family was not without their disagreements. At 22, Paul found himself an exceedingly rich young man in a family who’d never had much. Though careful with his money, Paul felt compelled to share his good fortune around. He handed out gifts, notably Dad’s racehorse, and helped family members financially. Brother Mike told Paul he couldn’t support himself on the bits of money he was earning as a member of Scaffold; at least he couldn’t live the way Paul was. ‘Sometimes my brother is rather slow in catching on but when eventually he does, he soon makes up for it,’ Mike would write in his memoirs. ‘On seeing the impossible situation I was in, being a Beatle brother with very little personal money … he arranged for me to receive a weekly tax-free “covenant” of ten pounds from his accountant till I was on my feet.’ Several other family members became financially dependent on Paul, who helped them buy houses, and in some cases put them on what became known as the McCartney Pension, so they never had to work again. This didn’t necessarily engender harmony.
These were mostly problems for the future, however. Four days after the London première of A Hard Day’s Night, Paul and his fellow Beatles returned home for the northern première of their picture at the Liverpool Odeon. There was a holiday feeling on Merseyside on Friday 10 July as the Beatles’ British Eagle Airways plane touched down at Liverpool Airport, where 1,500 people had gathered to greet them. The boys were driven in triumph into Liverpool City Centre, via Speke, where Paul had lived, his old neighbours standing at the kerb waving. ‘Me mum, me dad, me auntie, me uncle, all the family, everybody was there,’ recalls resident Frank Foy, who had typically been given the day off school for the occasion. Like many children, Frank wore a plastic Beatles wig, which became uncomfortably hot in the sunshine. The Beatles entered the Town Hall on Dale Street to a fanfare of ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’, played by the Liverpool Police Band. Ringo danced up the stairs in joy. They stepped out onto the balcony to a rapturous reception from 20,000 of their people. There had been many high points recently – number one records, playing for the Queen Mother, the Ed Sullivan Show, mobbed in London, Amsterdam, New York and Melbourne – but this was home. The boys beamed with pride.
Yet down among the crowd, trampled underfoot in Dale Street and blowing down the back alleys, were pieces of paper that threatened to blacken the name of James Paul McCartney. Just months after a Mail reporter confronted Paul with the story of a German barmaid who claimed to have borne his child, a Liverpool man had papered Liverpool with fliers claiming Paul had got his ‘niece’ pregnant. The girl in question was a typist named Anita Cochrane, who claims she met Paul just prior to her 16th birthday in 1961, going to see the Beatles play the Tower Ballroom on Friday 1 December that year.
‘It was my sixteenth birthday that day,’ Anita told the Daily Mail in 1997. (In fact, her 16th birthday was the next day, one of two factual inconsistencies in her story.) Anita claims she and Paul went to bed that night, and that she slept with him twice more over the ensuing 16 months. ‘We used to go back to John Lennon’s flat in Gambier Terrace …’ she told the Mail. (Here is the second problem with Anita’s story: John didn’t live at Gambier Terrace at this stage.) When Anita found herself pregnant, in the summer of 1963, she decided that Paul had to be the father and told her family as much. ‘When my mum and grandmother found out I was pregnant, I thought I’d write to Paul and tell him what had happened. I was that sure the baby was his.’ When Anita didn’t receive a reply, her mother Violet went to see Jim McCartney, who said his Paul didn’t know her Anita. On 10 February 1964, Anita gave birth at Billinge Hospital, Merseyside, to a boy named Philip Paul. No father’s name was entered on the birth certificate. Anita’s family then took her to a lawyer, who contacted NEMS.
In truth neither Paul nor Brian Epstein had the slightest idea whether this typist, or the German barmaid, had a genuine claim. The boys had been such libertines, especially in Hamburg, that it wouldn’t have been surprising if they had fathered some illegitimate children. While Paul did not, and never would, accept the paternity claims of the barmaid or the typist, the decision was made to pay off any such claimants for the sake of expediency. ‘Brian Epstein, on behalf of the Beatles, took the stance that, unless they were talking vast sums, it was better to buy off people who were threatening to expose small things about the Beatles, and that included paternity [claims],’ explains Tony Barrow.
I think Brian was particularly sensitive about sex, because of his own sexuality, and at all costs wanted to avoid intrusion upon his own private life, because what he was at the time was not just gay, but doing illegal things.* And I think he realised that anything about him would brush off on the boys … The policy was pay ’em off, get rid of them, move on.
Anita Cochrane claims to have been offered two pounds ten shillings ($3.82) a week by NEMS: ‘The solicitor put in a request for more money and we got this offer of a one-off payment of £5,000 ($7,650). That was more than a house in those days.’ An agreement was drawn up, dated 23 April 1964, on the basis that Anita wouldn’t go public. But her ‘uncle’ (actually her mother’s boyfriend) took issue with what had happened and distributed leaflets around Liverpool describing Paul as a ‘cad’. Epstein heard about this the morning of the Liverpool première. Leaflets had been left at the Press Club in Bold Street. ‘They were [also] given out in Castle Street, round the Town Hall, saying Paul give a girl a baby in Waterloo, and I think it named her,’ recalls Anita’s brother, Ian, who believed the story. A poem parodying ‘All My Loving’ was sent to newspapers:
My name is Philip Paul Cochrane, I’m just a little boy …