Several women have attested to affairs with the star during his time with Jane, and when he came to work on his authorised biography in the 1990s, Paul admitted: ‘I had a girlfriend and I would go with other girls, it was a perfectly open relationship.’ A true open relationship would mean Paul and Jane were both free to see other people, but it seems the relationship was more open on his side than hers. Certainly Jane had more reason to be insecure about what Paul was up to. He was a member of the most famous group in the world, the best-looking Beatle to many eyes, and one of only two bachelor Beatles left. Girls threw themselves at him. ‘You’d go down a club and half the girls on the dance floor would all immediately manoeuvre their partners so they were dancing right in front of Paul, and they would let their dresses ride up and everything. It was astonishing,’ comments the writer Barry Miles, who became a friend at this time. ‘All he would have had to do was say, you know, “Let’s go” and off. The boyfriend would have been left standing!’
Miles was an enthusiast for American beat literature, who wanted to open an alternative London bookshop. One of his friends was the art critic John Dunbar, who was married to singer Marianne Faithfull (who in turn had a hit with ‘Yesterday’) and wanted to open an art gallery. With investment from their friend Peter Asher, who was coining it now as a pop star, Miles and Dunbar opened an art gallery cum book store named Indica (after the cannabis plant) at 6 Mason’s Yard, Piccadilly, between a gentleman’s toilet and the Scotch of St James nightclub. Miles’s bookshop was on the ground floor, Dunbar’s art gallery in the basement. Paul became friendly with the two young men via Peter Asher and started hanging out at Indica. Having completed Rubber Soul, and conducted a few concerts in December 1965, the last British shows the Beatles played as it turned out, Paul had the luxury of taking the first three months of 1966 as a holiday, part of which he and Jane, now reconciled, spent helping get Indica ready for its opening, painting the walls and putting up shelves. ‘I remember once he and Jane arrived and there were about 50 people following them,’ recalls Miles, who became both Paul’s pal and cultural guide. ‘It was very hard for him. He hated that really. He loved going on buses and generally being part of the city, behaving like a normal [person].’
Paul had an interest in literature and often quoted, or misquoted, Shakespeare, but he didn’t have the time or inclination to read seriously. The books at Indica – modern poetry and literary fiction mostly – were therefore only of peripheral interest. Although he wasn’t a great reader, Paul did have a voracious appetite for meeting new people and imbibing their ideas, and Miles and his friends were instrumental in expanding his cultural horizons. ‘Through us he met all the art people, people like [the art dealer] Robert Fraser,’ recalls Miles. ‘He got to meet David Hockney [and] Claes Oldenburg, [when] he was over for his first show. He met Richard Hamilton through Robert Fraser.’ Fraser was a hip young art dealer who accompanied Paul on a shopping spree to Paris, where he acquired two works by René Magritte. Paul later bought a third Magritte, a picture of an apple entitled Le Jeu de mourre that inspired the Beatles’ record label. These were judicious purchases, relatively cheap in 1966 at two or three thousand pounds each, forming the basis of an extensive art collection. With Fraser’s advice, Paul also commissioned art, hiring Peter Blake to paint a pop art variation on Landseer’s Monarch of the Glen, which he hung over the fireplace at Cavendish. An Eduardo Paolozzi sculpture, Solo, a reminder of Paolozzi’s student Stuart Sutcliffe, was given pride of place in the upstairs music room.
Although he wasn’t a great reader, through Miles Paul met the American writers Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs and became interested in the ‘cut-up’ technique of assembling stories from random newspaper clippings, a method popularised by Burroughs which later found its way into Beatles’ lyrics. Another writer who caught Paul’s imagination was the nineteenth-century French dramatist Alfred Jarry, a celebrated production of whose play Ubu Roi, with sets by David Hockney, Paul saw at London’s Royal Court. One of Jarry’s ideas was a quasi-science he named pataphysics, ‘the science of imaginary solution’, which later cropped up on the Abbey Road album. The inquisitive Miles also squired Paul to musical performances by avant-garde composers such as Luciano Berio, who presented an electronic piece in London in February 1966. Paul was furious when the press came to photograph him at the concert, spoiling the ambience. ‘All you do is destroy things! Why don’t you think of people, why don’t you create things?’ he raged at the snappers. Thankfully, there was no press present when Miles took Paul to see fellow avant-garde composer Cornelius Cardew, a follower of John Cage, who ‘played’ the piano by tapping the legs of the instrument or reaching inside and plucking its strings, anything but touching the keyboard. From attending oddball events like this Paul became generally aware of and interested in modern composers and their experiments, using atonality, collage, repetition, curious instrumentation and new technology to create, among other works, music made up of spliced tape recordings and tape loops. Inspired, Paul started to make tapes of his own at Cavendish Avenue.
London’s avant-garde set were also a hedonistic bunch of people, and part of the pleasure of hanging out with his hip new friends was that Paul could smoke pot with them discreetly and get laid. Visiting the Dunbars in Lennox Gardens, Paul struck up a relationship with their attractive nanny, Maggie McGivern, who claims to have conducted a three-year affair with Paul behind Jane’s back. ‘Our relationship was a secret from day one.’ She says they met surreptitiously in auction rooms, where Paul was buying antique furniture for his new house, and in Regent’s Park where he walked his new pet, Martha, an Old English Sheepdog. When Jane was away from home, Maggie further says that she and Paul slipped over to Europe for illicit holidays. ‘They saw each other on and off for quite a few years,’ says Miles, noting that Maggie was ‘only one of many’.
Another aspect of Paul’s new London set was connections with the aristocracy. Marianne Faithfull was the daughter of a baroness, and the London scene was as thick with the scions of famous families as it was with the sons and daughters of the working-class. One posh mate was Tara Browne, son of Lord Oranmore, head of the Guinness brewing family, who was due to inherit a fortune when he turned 25. Until then, Tara was living recklessly on credit. Having left Eton, he married at 18, had a couple of kids, then abandoned them, more interested in running his Chelsea boutiques and roaring up and down the King’s Road in his hand-painted sports car. As 1965 segued into ’66, Paul found himself more and more in this moneyed, druggy, fast-paced world of aristocrats, bohemians, writers, artists and beautiful girls, which is to say he was having a wonderful time. The sun seemed to shine every day during the summer of 1966; English music and youth style was applauded; the England soccer team won the World Cup; and the Beatles’ Revolver was the soundtrack album of the season.
REVOLVER
In these exciting, one might say revolutionary times, Paul must have looked back on the first few years of the Beatles’ existence as a distant, far less interesting age when he and the rest of the group were just learning their trade. Paul certainly seems to have placed a low value on the Beatles’ early songs, judging by the fact that he signed away his rights to their first 56 tunes in the spring of 1966 for a modest one-off payment.
As we have seen, John and Paul had assigned the copyright of their compositions to Northern Songs, a company owned by them in partnership with Brian Epstein and Dick James. They had recently extended the agreement so all their compositions until 1973 would be held in this company. Royalty income from the initial 56 Lennon-McCartney songs, registered between 1963 and 1964, was paid to the boys via another company they’d formed with Brian named Lenmac Enterprises, a combination of John and Paul’s surnames. In April 1966, John, Paul and Brian agreed to sell Lenmac to the now-public Northern Songs for £365,000 ($558,450) of the shareholders’ money, Paul apparently judging it wise to take the cash before these early songs – numbers such as ‘She Loves You’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ – became as obscure as skiffle tunes. From the start, the boys all felt, in common with most people in show business, that their type of music was ephemeral, and that they should look ahead to a longer-term