Though he still refrained from trying LSD, Paul did get laid in Los Angeles, according to starlet Peggy Lipton, his squeeze from his last trip to the coast. Paul invited her over to the house for dinner, to John’s amusement, as the actress recalls: ‘I got the idea that he thought Paul was an idiot to take a girl so seriously he’d actually invite her to dinner, when all he really needed to do was fuck her after dinner.’ Again, the chief point of interest is that Paul was prepared to cheat on Jane, whom he was still with. He’d just given her a diamond pendant for her 19th birthday, and was planning to move into Cavendish with her when the decorators were finished. Considering what was on offer to the Beatles, it would of course have been amazing had Paul remained faithful on the road, and it seems he was far from that. On his return from America, Paul confided to his Uncle Mike how wild he had been out west. ‘He said to me, “Have you ever tried four in the bed?” when they came back from America and [the girls] were laid on by the studios. I said, “Four in a bed?” He said, “Yes.” Three gorgeous blondes and him.’ To which Uncle Mike could only exclaim: ‘Gor blimey!’
This was also the week the Beatles met Elvis Presley at his house in Bel Air. Expectations for the meeting were high. Elvis had been Paul’s number one musical hero as a boy, likewise John, though both had a low opinion of the work Presley had done after being drafted into the army. The Elvis the boys were about to meet was now 30 years old and settled into an undemanding life of routine and mediocrity, acting in a seemingly endless series of jukebox movies, the likes of Paradise, Hawaiian Style, which he’d just finished shooting. In this, as in everything he did professionally, Elvis was the pawn of his manager, Colonel Tom Parker, who exploited his artist without a care for the music that originally entertained and inspired so many people. In many ways Elvis was an example of how not to conduct a career.
When the boys entered Elvis’s home on North Perugia Way, the King was watching a mute TV, simultaneously playing electric bass to a record on the jukebox. The Memphis Mafia were gathered around him, the Beatles bringing their own gang of cronies. On this occasion the gang included Neil, Mal, Tony Barrow and NME journalist Chris Hutchins, who’d helped arrange the meeting. Brian and the Colonel were also present, ‘watching over their stars like parents’, as Hutchins observed. After some desultory conversation, the boys picked up instruments and played along with Presley, Paul sitting on the sofa next to his hero. He wasn’t overwhelmed. Indeed, he joked that Brian might be able to find El a job playing bass in one of his Mersey Beat bands. They also talked of cars and touring, exchanging horror stories. ‘We’ve had some crazy experiences,’ Paul told Presley. ‘One fellow rushed on stage and pulled the leads out of the amplifiers and said to me, “One move and you’re dead.”’ The King concurred that it could be real scary out there. As they left the house after what was a relatively short and stilted meeting, John Lennon quoted from the movie Whistle Down the Wind, in which Alan Bates’s fugitive character is mistaken briefly for Jesus Christ by a gang of children. ‘That wasn’t Jesus,’ he told the lads, ‘that was just a fella.’ In later years Paul put the best perspective on the summit, saying: ‘It was one of the great meetings of my life.’ It was Elvis after all, the man who had inspired them, his career in decline as theirs was ascendant. ‘I only met him that once, and then I think the success of our career started to push him out a little; which we were very sad about … He was our greatest idol, but the styles were changing in favour of us.’
Elvis’s highest-placed single in the Billboard chart that year was ‘Crying in the Chapel’, which reached number three in May 1965. The Beatles scored five US number ones in the same year, the fourth of which was Paul’s ‘Yesterday’. Never released in Britain as a single, but put out by Capitol in the USA, ‘Yesterday’ spent four weeks at the top of the chart that autumn. Over the years it would become the most successful Beatles song of all, the first to receive five million airplays in America and counting.
* Because the British albums were released – with the notable exception of Let it Be – as the Beatles intended, this book deals with the band’s LPs under the British titles.
* Harold Wilson, a Labour MP representing a Liverpool constituency, had become Prime Minister in October 1964, promising to reforge Britain in ‘the white heat [of] the scientific revolution’.
* The current Madison Square Garden, built in 1968, holds 20,000.
* Sweating ‘cobs’ (cobwebs) being a phrase that seems to derive from the patterns of sweat that streak the faces of pit workers, and one Paul would use in his excellent 2007 song ‘That Was Me’.
SUMMONED TO THE PALACE
In a few short years Paul McCartney had become one of the most famous people in the Western World, the Beatles as recognisable as the President of the United States, the Queen of England, and the biggest stars of sport and film. The Beatles were moreover a living cartoon, followed daily by the public as avidly as they read the comic strips in the newspapers. The lads were a source of entertainment not only to people in Britain and North America, but throughout Western Europe, in Asia, South America, even behind the Iron Curtain, where Beatles records were banned, along with other forms of degenerate Western culture, but traded avidly on the black market. The Beatles were not the first global pop icons, Elvis had that honour, but even Elvis hadn’t been fêted so lavishly so far and so wide. It had all happened in the blink of an eye.
At home perhaps only the Queen was more famous, and in 1965 the boys became the first pop stars to be honoured by Her Majesty as Members of the Order of the British Empire, another way in which the Beatles broke new ground. In the future Her Majesty would bestow chivalric awards on numerous rock and pop stars, in recognition of the export income they earned, for their charitable works and to mark their popularity. When the fab four received their MBEs on 26 October 1965, they were the first pop stars to be invited into Buckingham Palace in this way and, just as it is hard now to comprehend how famous the Beatles were all those years ago, it is difficult to comprehend the fuss caused by the Queen’s decision to bestow the award upon the band, albeit that it was the lowest class available in the circumstances, a lesser honour than the humble OBE and a full five ranks below a knighthood. Some old soldiers sent their hard-won military medals back in disgust (even though the military system is separate), while a large crowd of over-excited schoolgirls gathered outside the Palace to shriek the Beatles through the iron gates, the clash of pop and pageantry broadcast on TV as national news.
While many onlookers didn’t think the Beatles deserved to be honoured for essentially having fun and getting rich, others saw the pragmatic sense in what was at root a political gesture orchestrated by the nation’s publicity-conscious Prime Minister. Harold Wilson saw correctly that the Beatles were good for Britain. As McCartney himself says, ‘most people seemed to feel that we were a great export and ambassadors for Britain. At least people were taking notice of Britain; cars like Minis and Jaguars, and British clothes were selling … in some ways we’d become super salesmen for Britain.’ George expressed this same thought more cynically, as was his way: ‘After all we did for Great Britain, selling all that corduroy and making it swing, they gave us that bloody old [medal].’ John sent his MBE back in 1969, ‘in protest against Britain’s involvement in the Nigeria-Biafra thing* … and against “Cold Turkey” slipping down the charts’. Ritchie also became disenchanted with the Royal Family, stating in 2004, after Paul had got his knighthood but he had been passed over: ‘I’m really not into Her Majesty any more, I’m afraid.’
After smoking a cigarette in the toilets of Buckingham Palace