FEBRUARY 1968.
The Beatles travel to India.
Barry Miles: The period after Brian's death was one of confusion and uncertainty. The Maharishi could offer not only solace but a refuge and perhaps a solution. George had become more and more interested in Hinduism and was now a firm believer in the notion of a cycle of karma and rebirth. It was he and John who were perhaps most keen on the idea and devised the plan of the Beatles all going to India for further meditation practice at the Maharishi's ashram in the foothills of the Himalayas. Paul was enthusiastic and Ringo went along for the ride.
PAUL: John and George were going to Rishikesh with the idea that this might be some huge spiritual lift-off and they might never come back if Maharishi told them some really amazing thing. Well, being a little bit pragmatic, I thought in my own mind, I'l| give it a month, then if I really really like it, I'll come back and organise to go out there for good, but I won't go on this "I may never come back" thing, I won't burn my bridges. That's very me, to not want to do that. I just see it as being practical, and I think it is.
Barry Miles: The sceptical expression on Jane's face in photographs taken as she and Paul listen to the Maharishil's lectures suggests that she may have been dubious about the whole venture.
After a number of delays caused because the filming and editing of Magical Mystery Tour took far longer than they had expected, the Beatles were finally able to make enough time to go to India. Their roadie Mal Evans went out first in order to organise transport for John and George. Their excess luggage cost £200. George and Patti, Patti's sister Jenny, John and Cynthia took the flight to Delhi the next day, arriving on 16 February 1968. Mal met them at the airport with Mia Farrow, who had flown to India with the Maharishi from New York three weeks earlier and had already elected to become part of the Beatles' entourage. Mal had organised three ancient, battered taxis for the 150-mile drive from Delhi to Rishikesh. Paul and Jane, Ringo and Maureen arrived at 8.15 on the morning of the 19th after an overnight flight, attracting much more press attention. A film crew was on hand as they stepped from the plane after the exhausting twenty-hour flight, jet-lagged from the five time zones. Mal Evans and Raghvendra from the ashram placed garlands of red and yellow flowers around their necks in the traditional token of greeting. Ringo's arm was hurting from the required shots, so their first move was to find a hospital. Their driver lost his way and finished up in a dead end in the middle of a field, followed by a whole convoy of press cars. One of them came to the rescue and took them to the hospital. Paul and Jane took one car and Ringo and Maureen another.
PAUL: There was an Indian driver and Raghvendra from the camp in front and me and Jane Asher in the back and it was long and it was dusty and it was not a very good car and it was one of those journeys, but great and exciting. I remember these Indian guys talking in what was obviously an Indian language and I was starting to doze off in the car in the back because once you were two hours into the journey the tourism had worn off a little. It was fascinating seeing naked holy men and the kind of things you just don't see unless it's late-night Soho, and the ones you tend to see in Soho tend to be covered in shit and very drunk. I slipped into sleep, a fitful back-of-the-car sort of sleep. It was quite bumpy, and the guys were chattering away, but in my twilight zone of sleeping it sounded like they were talking Liverpool. If you listened closely, it so nearly slid into it. There was like a little segue into very fast colloquial Liverpool. And I was thinking, Uh, where the fuck am I? What? Oh, it's Bengali, and I would just drop off again. "Yabba yabba, are yet coming" oot then, lad?"" It was a strange little twilight experience. It was a long journey.
Barry Miles: Rishikesh is about 150 miles north-east of Delhi, halfway to Tibet. On the way they passed through Hardiwar, one of the seven sacred cities of the Hindus, filled with temples and ashrams, monkeys and sacred cows, and from there into the foothills of the Himalayas to an area studded with Hindu pilgrim centres. The Academy of Transcendental Meditation occupied a guarded compound on a flat ledge, 150 feet up the side of a mountain above the fast-flowing Ganges, full to overflowing from the rainy season, which had just ended. There were wonderful views out over the sacred river to the small town of Rishikesh on the opposite bank and to the plains beyond. The centre was reached by a modern suspension bridge built across the river, which had a big sign, "no camels or elephants", but the students tended to use the open ferryboat that ploughed back and forth across the muddy river. The ashram was surrounded on the other three sides by jungle-covered mountains filled with howling monkeys, peacocks and brightly coloured parrots.
The students lived in six solidly built stone cottages set in groups along an unsurfaced road. Each bungalow contained five self-contained rooms furnished with two four-poster beds, a dressing table and chairs, new rugs on the floor and walls and modern bathroom facilities with hot and cold running water, though sometimes the water supply broke down. Surrounding the buildings were flowering shrubs and plants, tended by an old gardener. It was simple, clean and very peaceful. The ashram had a staff of about forty people, including a construction crew, a printing works, cooks and cleaning staff.
The room service was first-class and there was even a masseuse on hand. There were no bugs but there were flies.
A path led from the row of cottages down towards the Ganges, past the lecture hall to the two dining rooms. While the Beatles were there, a swimming pool was under construction next to the lecture building. Beyond the kitchens there was a heated dining room for use if the weather was bad, but they normally took their meals in a glass-walled dining room, open to the sky, near the cliff over the river. There they were sheltered from the sun by a canopy of leaves from creepers trained across a wooden trellis and were often joined at their meals by monkeys, which roamed around the tables and made off with the toast. They sat on benches at a long communal table, covered with plastic tablecloths held down by jars of jam and bowls of fruit. Breakfast was served from 7 a.m. until 11 a.m.: porridge, puffed wheat or corn flakes, fruit juice, tea or coffee, toast, marmalade or jam, brought by young Indian servants.
PAUL: The idea was you'd all wake up at a certain time and you'd all go for breakfast. You'd sit outside all together and chat about this and that, have a bit of breakfast, a communal thing.
Barry Miles: Breakfast was followed by meditation practice, with no rules or timetable. Lunch and dinner both consisted of soup followed by a vegetarian main dish. John and George were already vegetarians so for them the diet was nothing strange. Paul liked the Indian cuisine but the spices were too strong for Jane. Ringo had spent long periods in hospital with peritonitis as a child and found the food much too hot for his taste. Mal Evans assembled a stock of eggs so that he could cook Ringo fried, boiled, poached or scrambled eggs, and Ringo himself had resourcefully brought along a suitcase of baked beans, just in case. The local water was safe to drink as it came cold and fresh from a mountain spring. At first they boiled it to be on the safe side. The Maharishi never ate with his students, preferring to stay in his bungalow. They had enrolled in a teachers' course in Transcendental Meditation (TM), designed to give the student enough information to pass the method on to others.
Among the students were some famous people: Donovan, Gypsy Dave, Mia Farrow, Mike Love, flutist Paul Horn, journalist Lewis H. Lapham, filmmaker Paul Saltzman, socialite Nancy Cooke de Herrera, actors Tom Simcox, Jerry Stovin and some photographers interested in finding out what the Beatles were up to.
Barry Miles: There were ninety- minute lectures at 3.30 and 8.30 with students describing their meditation experiences and the Maharishi answering their questions. Most of the time was taken up by meditation itself. Because they arrived late, the Beatles were three weeks behind the other students, and Paul and Ringo four days behind John and George, so the Maharishi gave them extra tuition and lectures in the afternoons. These took place in the open air, sometimes on chairs on the grass and other times on the flat sun roof of his bungalow. If it was a cool day, they would go to his bungalow and sit on cushions. They were actually a very nice crowd. During their first week there, John and Cynthia, George and Patti had thrown themselves wholly into meditation, so by the time Paul, Jane, Ringo and Maureen arrived, they were ready to let off steam a bit.
Lewis Lapham: [...] Ringo and Paul didn't talk as much about the meditation. Yes, they had results with it. No, it wasn't a put-on, but their attitude implied that it was George's thing, and if he wanted to go to India, okay, fine, everybody went to India. Ringo missed his children and his nine cats, and he figured that he could assume the lotus position just as successfully in Liverpool. Maureen hated the flies — to the point that if there was only one fly in the room she would know exactly where it was, how it got there, and why it must be destroyed. She and Ringo had consulted the Maharishi on the subject, but the Maharishi told them that for people traveling in the realm of pure consciousness, flies no longer matter very much. 'Yes,' Ringo said, 'but that doesn't zap the flies, does it?' McCartney objected to the Maharishi's excessive adulation of the band and all its works ('the bit about being the sons of God and the saviors of mankind'), nor did he much care for the abstractions that sustained the yogi's grandiose metaphysics. 'I get a bit lost in the upper reaches of it,' he said. He also wished that the Maharishi would avoid talking to the Beatles about subjects that he, McCartney, knew something about. He found the Maharishi's support of the draft laws disillusioning; his girlfriend, Jane Asher, often wondered aloud what it would be like to see the moonlight on the Taj Mahal. Talking to Paul was easier than talking to George or to Ringo — his accent not as strong, more willing to exchange meaningless pleasantries, still fond of smoking cigarettes, his sense of humor affable and tolerant.
When he showed up one day at lunch to say that he'd had a dream about being trapped in a leaking submarine of indeterminate color, it was Anneliese Braun who provided the interpretation. She clapped her hands in the enthusiastic way of a child seeing its first snowfall. 'How very nice,'x she said, wondering if McCartney appreciated the great truth with which he had been blessed. Paul smiled and said he didn't think he quite got all of it. 'Why it's the perfect meditation dream,' Anneliese said. The voyage in the submarine represented the descent into pure consciousness in the vehicle of the mantra; the leaks represented anxiety, and the surfacing of the submarine in a London street signified a happy return to society and one’s fellow men (like Ulysses coming back to Penelope), which was the purpose of all good meditation. The other people at the table applauded, and Geoffrey drew a comparison to the paintings of Hieronymous Bosch."
Paul Saltzman: As I spent time with the Beatles, Paul was the most overtly warm and friendly. Jane Asher was the warmest, most emotionally open of any of the ‘famous folks’ who spent parts of each day sitting outside at the table overlooking the Ganges and the town of Rishikesh, far below. She had been an actress from the age of 6, and while actors and actresses can be notorious for their inflated egos, she had a grounded humility that shone forth. [...] Jane and Paul were openly tactile and affectionate.
Barry Miles: The fact that the Beatles were at the ashram was of course well known to the world press two Fleet Street reporters had accompanied John and George over on the flight but there was really very little for them to report. The Beatles gave them a few photo opportunities and then retreated beyond the guarded gates of the compound.
On 25 February, a birthday party was held in George Harrison's honour, attended by the various guests of Maharishi's ashram, including the Beatles and their wives.
Barry Miles: It was an extremely productive period for all the Beatles and between them they wrote more than forty songs while they were there, more than enough to justify the trip by any standards.
Ringo and Maureen were the first to leave. When they broke the news to the Maharishi just before lunch one morning, the Maharishi was quite shocked. "He first suggested that perhaps we should go off somewhere and then come back," Ringo said, "but we wanted to come home. It was like a hundred reasons which formed into one thing." They hated the food and missed their children and left promising to send the rest of the Beatles a care package of cine film.
Here, a letter Paul and Jane sent from India to Ringo and Mo:
Barry Miles: Despite the occasional similarity to school or camp, there were some truly magical moments. One night there was a torchlight procession down to the River Ganges, where they piled into two boats. Mia Farrow, Donovan, Mike Love, the Maharishi, all the Beatles and their wives and girlfriends made their way slowly upstream, then the engines were cut and the boats allowed to drift downstream under a clear, starry sky. Mike Love produced a set of pipes, Paul picked up his guitar and everyone sang.
[...]
Paul Horn and Patti Harrison shared a birthday (he was some fourteen years older), and the occasion was celebrated with a party. Paul gave him an Indian kurta, a long cotton shirt, which Paul had painted with the words "Paul" on the front, with some stars and dots, and "Jai Guru Dev" "Long live Guru Dev", the Maharishi's own guru on the back. The Maharishi arrived and chanted the appropriate prayers, then the company sang "Happy Birthday" and the party began. George played a couple of ragas on his sitar and followed this with a rendering of "God Save the Queen" accompanied by Paul playing the tambour, a bass drone instrument that Donovan had bought that morning. The evening ended with a conjurer and fireworks.
PAUL: One day Maharishi needed to get to New Delhi and back for something, so someone suggested a helicopter. When it arrived we all trooped down, a bouncing line of devotees, coming down a narrow dusty track to the Ganges, singing, being delightful. Very like the Hare Krishnas, marvellous, chatting away.
Barry Miles: Paul left on 26 March with Jane, thoroughly satisfied with the experience.
Tony Bramwell: One evening I was peeling a mango when Paul and Jane turned up in a battered taxi with Mia Farrow and her younger sister, Prudence. The girls, whose glamorous mother, Maureen O'Sullivan, had started out playing Jane to Johnny Weissmuller's Tarzan, were angry and tearful and wanted to leave.
Cynthia: Unfortunately Maureen and Ringo stayed only for a short time, Maureen just couldn't stand the flies and insects, or the food. Ringo's stomach was weak from many operations as a child. Paul and Jane stayed longer but I felt that because they had missed the early stages of the course, and the growing feelings of friendship that we had all gained, they were very much on the fringe of activities.
Bob Spitz: In Peter Brown's estimation, "Paul and Jane were much too sophisticated for [the Maharishi's] mystical gibberish." Paul was obviously never as committed to TM in the way that John and George were, never one to expect "some huge spiritual lift-off."
PAUL: Being fairly practical, I had set a period for staying in Rishikesh. …I thought, ‘Wait a minute, I’ll go for a month. Even if it’s incredible I’ll still come back after a month.’ If it turned out to be something we really had to go back for, I would have gone back. But at the end of my month I was quite happy to leave. I thought, ‘This will do me. If I want to get into it heavily, I can do it anywhere.’ That’s one of the nice things about meditation – you don’t have to go to church to do it. By saying I was only going to be chere a month, I had to risk that the others would say that I wasn't into it.
[...]
I came back after four or five weeks knowing that was like my allotted period, thinking, No, well, no, I won't go out and become a monk but it was really very interesting and I will continue to meditate and certainly feel it was a very rewarding experience.
After a brief stop in Iran; Paul, Jane and Neil Aspinall flew back to London.
They landed at London airport on 27 March and addressed a few words to the journalists there...
Q: Well you look very happy. Do you feel better after five weeks of meditation?
Paul McCartney: Yes, yes, I feel a lot better, except for the flight, you know. That's quite long. I'm a bit shattered, but the meditation is great! You sit down, you relax, and then you repeat a sound to yourself. It sounds daft, but it's just a system of relaxation, and that's all it is. There's nothing more to it. We meditated for about five hours a day in all. Two hours in the morning and maybe three hours in the evening, and then, for the rest of the time, we slept, ate, sunbathed and had fun.
Q: Jane, did you go for a holiday or did you go to meditate as well?
Jane Asher: Oh, to meditate.
Q: And what effect did it have on you? This, I presume, is your first big meditation experience?
Jane Asher: Yes. I think it calms you down. It's hard to tell because it was so different, you know, the life out there. It'd be easy to tell now that I'm back, or when we're doing ordinary things, to see just what it does.
Hunter Davies: Their long stay in India with Maharishi in the spring of 1968 proved an ideal environment for writing songs – and not Indian ones either. The strange, foreign environment of Hamburg produced from within themselves a Liverpool sound. (Marshall McLuhan, who fancies himself as a Beatle expert, says this proves his theory that when a new environment goes round an old environment, the old one becomes an art form). India had a similar effect, at least with Paul, making him go back to his boyhood influences, like Hollywood musicals and westerns. Anyway, when they came back, both John and Paul had written about six or seven songs each, enough for a new LP. [...] Paul came back and played his songs, with Jane singing a la-la accompaniment, to all the friends who dropped in, especially when they were going to launch into some saga of the things that had gone wrong when he’d been away. ‘No, no, don’t tell me, listen to this instead.’ Then he began a song about Rocky Racoon checking into his room and finding only a Gideon Bible. At the rhyming of ‘Bible’ with ‘rival’ he gave an apologetic grimace. He’d also written a song about junk in a junkyard. He paused in the middle of singing a line about ‘broken hearted jubilee mug’ to say wasn’t ‘jubilee’ a lovely word to sing. Then he had a song about a girl sitting in the distance with a red umbrella. It had few words but lots of la-las. He enjoyed most of all singing to everyone a mock folksy-American song about it being great to be back in the USSR. He put on a Beach Boy voice for the chorus. Mike, his brother, said why didn’t they get the Beach Boys themselves to sing the chorus, but Paul said no. Although Paul still obviously had many gaps to fill in the songs, in singing them to others he was not looking for suggestions, the way John might do, or even to show off. He was just sharing the enjoyment he was having in beginning some new songs, before he’d finished and forgotten them for ever.
PAUL: Looking back I feel that the Maharishi experience was worthwhile. For me, then, it was the sixties, I'd been doing a bunch of drugs, I wasn't in love with anyone, I hadn't settled down. I think maybe I was looking for something to fill some sort of hole. I remember at the time feeling a little bit empty. I don't know whether it was spiritual or what, it was probably just staying up all night and doing too many drugs. I was probably just physically tired. The whole meditation experience was very good and I still use the mantra. I don't really practise it massively but it's always in the back of my mind if I ever want to. [...] Looking at it now, from a nineties perspective, there was probably a lot of therapy needed for a lot of the people there. We were all looking for something. Obviously you don't go to Rishikesh if you're not looking for something. It's a long schlep otherwise.
Paul and Jane spent a few weeks in Scotland, before returning to their respective jobs.
Paul focused his energy on Apple and Jane on the theatre, starting rehearsals for a new play called "Summer", directed by Robert Kidd.
Press Photo Date: May 31,1968 - JANE TAKES BREAK FROM CLASSICS.
British actress Jane Asher, girlfriend of Beatle Paul McCartney, is to play her first starring role on London's West End stage. The part she has chosen could give her a new image. "It's a break from the classic roles she said, "and l'm nervous. But I can't wait to do it." Her new play, "Summer" by Romain Weingarten has a cast of four. Jane is the only girl. It is set in the garden of a big country house where the girl teaches her simple minded brother the facts of life. The other two characters are cats- Half Cherry and Lord Garlic- played by men. Said Jane: "Played badly it could dissolve into whimsy, but we hope to make it very funny, sad, and exciting."
Howard Sounes: When Paul went on American television asking the public to send Apple their ideas, Francie Schwartz was one of those viewers who took the star at his word. A 24-year-old advertising agency worker from New York, Francie bought a plane ticket to London and presented herself at the Apple office with a movie script she wanted produced. She persuaded Tony Bramwell to let her see Paul. 'l only introduced them because she had this strange film idea which I thought would appeal to him, recalls Bramwell. t wasn't actually that difficult to meet Paul in this way. Unlike his fellow Beatles, Paul came into the Apple office most days, and made the time to listen to at least some of the new ideas that came in. Anybody who was personable and persistent had a chance of having a word with the star. It helped if you were an attractive young woman. In fact, Francie was a rather plain woman, with prematurely grey hair. Yet Paul found her pretty enough. "Am l impressing you now, with my feet up on this big desk?" he asked, as they flirted in his office.
Francie: It dawned on me that he was more interested in flirting with me than in the movie. I had to make up my mind. Which would I rather do, have the picture produced, or be with him? I had no time to think it out. He seemed to have a plan all his own. He said apologetically that he had a date with his solicitor, and would I like him to drop me off at a nice place for lunch. We walked on the street alone together for the first time, and the sun could not block out the way people stared. As if we were in a glass cage, and couldn't see them. We got into a cab, and he immediately started talking about acid. How he hated losing control. While he rapped, I glanced out to see a crippled chick, all broken and bent over, and he stopped. "What are you looking at?" I said, "It's the same everywhere isn't it?" "Yes," he replied, seeming pleased with this new mutuality of awareness and went on, "I want a complete itinerary for you, I want to know where I can reach you at all times, twenty-four hours a day." He smiled the cosmic smile. I called his secretary after lunch and she put me right through, saying Paul was expecting my call. "Hi, I'm sorry I can't see you any more today, but I've got these terrible meetin's. And I have to go away tomorrow. Wil you be all right till I get back." "Sure, I'll be all right." Then I thought what the hell did he mean by that? Was he testing me to see if l'd ask for bread? Then he used a favorite expression of mine, "I'll see you later." When a man says that, I usually want to scream. It always means tragedy, or at least a lot of waiting.
On 11 May, John and Paul flew to New York to launch Apple in the United States.
Danny Fields: The advent of Paul and John's Utopian concept called Apple gave Linda Eastman, in a most roundabout way, the chance she wanted and needed to get Paul's attention, and to present herself - without ever saying just that - as the only suitable answer to his long-range needs. Paul McCartney and John Lennon were so enthusiastic about Apple, and its potential to advance art, science, music and retail fashion merchandising, that they planned to announce its inception as guests of Johnny Carson on his indisputably number one late-night talk show. Their appearance was booked for 15 May, and they flew to New York on the 12th. They tried to sneak into the United States as quietly as possible, but some DJ got hold of their schedule and there was the usual airport nightmare. No hotel wanted to put up with the security and crowd-control problems that the presence of the two big Beatles would involve, and Paul and John were not wild about the idea of being imprisoned in one. The solution was to stash them away in Nat Weiss' luxurious two-bedroom apartment on East 73rd Street and hope that their presence could be kept a secret.
One person who knew the Big Secret of the Beatles' New York hideaway was Nat's friend Linda Eastman. Recalling their flight together from London to New York a year earlier, after Linda had met Paul for the first time and couldn't stop talking about him, Nat told Linda that Paul was coming to town and, lo and behold, was going to stay at his own apartment. Not surprisingly, she begged Nat to be allowed to visit and he ran the request past Paul, who approved. And so, during the week Paul and John were in New York, the only two women ever in Nat's apartment were the saucy maid, and Linda. The routine was that Linda arrived early in the afternoon and stayed until the evening, chatting away with Paul. When she left to go home and be a good mum, Weiss would take Paul and John out to dinner, or to a club to hear music. It was just the three of them; Linda and Paul did not see each other in the evenings, and they did not make love on 73rd Street. In retrospect, that week in 1968 was the defining moment - albeit a week-long moment - of their relationship.
Peter Brown: One night when Paul told her how fond he was of children, Linda produced her daughter Heather, then six years old. Paul happily babysat for the child while her mother went off to photograph a rock act at the Fillmore.
Linda: Even though I visited England in between times, I didn’t see Paul again until he came to New York with John in May 1968 for a press conference at the Americana Hotel. It was here that they announced the formation of Apple. […] I was amazed at the mediocre questions they were asked that day. “When are you getting your hair cut?”, “What does the badge mean that you’re wearing?” No one seemed remotely interested in the creative of business side of their new venture. It was just the same old Beatle questions. Paul was very nervous about it all, and all the pictures I took capture their bemusement and the inane level of the questions. It was at the Apple press conference that my relationship with Paul was rekindled. I managed to slip him my phone number.
(The story of Danny Fields, contradicts this entire account).
On 15 May, accompanied by Linda, Nat Weiss drove John, Paul and "Magic" Alex to the airport for their flight back to London.
Danny Fields: It was deemed wise to let slip Paul and John's departure date so that the fans would know when it was time to go home, but this was a two-edged sword: on the one hand, the crowd was indeed gone by the next day, yet on the other, the day they left the frenzied crowd was the biggest it had been, since this was the last chance to See The Beatles until who knew when. Decoy limousines were hired, and Paul and John managed to get out in time to catch their plane back to London. Riding to the airport with them was only one person who was not a part of their organization, Linda Eastman.
Linda: I took a bunch of pictures; one of John was used for the cover of Eye magazine but the light was not good in the PanAm waiting room. Anyway, we got to know each other in a car ride a bit; I'm sitting in the middle with my camera bag in between John and Paul. Who knows what was going on?
Howard Sounes: Nat Weiss was also in the car. To his mind, this was all part of Linda's relentless campaign to make Paul her husband.
"Linda's been after him for the longest time. An unstoppable event, [but) I don't think he'd made his mind up about Linda at that point."
Barry Miles: Paul flew off to London and Linda returned to Manhattan in the limo with Nat Weiss and Neil Aspinall.
Howard Sounes: As they flew home from New York, Paul and John were in fact both on the cusp of making momentous changes in their personal lives. Paul was falling in love with Linda Eastman, but hadn't yet decided to break with Jane Asher, whom he had been with for four years, and was engaged to marry. When he arrived home, the couple carried on as normal, for now.
Danny Fields: On the day Paul and John flew out of JFK, Linda rode back from the airport with Nat Weiss, her first time alone with him since they'd flown from London to New York in adjacent seats after the Sergeant Pepper press conference at Brian Epstein's almost exactly a year earlier. Once again, and even more so than before, Weiss was impressed with the intensity of Linda's feelings for Paul. "She kept going on about how much she loved him, and wanted to know if Paul had said anything about her. Actually, Paul took me aside at the airport and asked me if Linda really owned a horse in Arizona. I told him I didn't know," says Weiss, who wonders to this day why he wanted to know that, of all things. "So I told her he obviously thought she was good company, or she wouldn't have been in my apartment in the first place, and she seemed sort of satisfied with that but insisted on knowing if there was anything else. There was nothing else, but of course his asking her to accompany him to the airport was very significant, very significant. When you look back now to the beginnings of it all, Linda was made for Paul." Linda told her friends that she felt 'something was happening' between her and Paul, but she didn't know where it would go, could only hope that it went in her direction, and meanwhile would continue being a mother, taking pictures, going to the Fillmore, dealing with the unspoken scorn of her father and lunching at the Plaza with Robin Richmond. Whatever would happen would happen.
Peter Brown: When Paul returned to London later that week, Linda sent him a huge blow-up of himself, lips pursed, on top of which she had superimposed a photo of Heather kissing him.
Sources: Anthology / A Twist Of Lennon by Cynthia Lennon / The Beatles: The Authorised Biography by Hunter Davies / The Beatles in India. ㅡ From the book "With The Beatles" by Lewis Lapham / Many Years From Now by Barry Miles / Interview with Paul Saltzman (Beatlology Magazine, 2001 Edition) / Body Count by Francie Schwartz / Fab: An Intimate Life Of Paul McCartney by Howard Sounes /