She’d had 20 lovers in two years. Now Linda was out to snare Paul McCartney

She’d had 20 lovers in two years. Now Linda was out to snare Paul McCartney - no matter who stood in her way

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz...#ixzz0wko0TS5J

Even in her youth, Linda Eastman was never a true beauty. A tall, strawberry blonde, she had a long face that could appear handsome one moment and plain the next.

What she did have, though, was a full figure and a flirtatious manner that men found hard to resist. Indeed, over a period of just two years, while working as a freelance photographer, she notched up approximately 20 lovers - most of whom were household names.

Her preference was for the rock stars she frequently persuaded to pose, including Mick Jagger, Tim Buckley and Jim Morrison - and she wasn't averse to a handsome Hollywood actor.

Danny Fields, who bought her pictures for a teen magazine he edited called Datebook, recalls going to interview Warren Beatty with Linda in tow.

'She was taking pictures like a little kitty-cat, on the rug or on the sofa. All you could hear was the click of the shutter. And the next day she said: "Guess who I spent the night with?" '

It's because of this period in her life - 1966-68 - that Linda came to be tagged a groupie. Or, as a former friend put it, 'a groping groupie who was into photographing stars with little or no film in her camera'.

However much she may have enjoyed her fleeting romances, though, she was also a single mother on the look-out for something more permanent.

What she really wanted was a rich, groovy guy who could look after her and her small daughter, Heather, the legacy of a failed marriage. And her number one target, it turned out, was a Beatle.

She liked the look of the baby-faced one. Indeed, even before she'd met any of The Beatles, she told Nat Weiss, the American business partner of The Beatles' manager Brian Epstein, that she was going to marry Paul McCartney

It seemed highly unlikely. After all, Linda lived in near-obscurity in new York while Paul - already world-famous - lived in London with his beautiful, redhaired girlfriend, the actress Jane Asher.

Yet Weiss had a premonition that the determined American would one day land her Beatle . . .

Everyone in the band's entourage liked Jane Asher. She'd met Paul in April 1963 when she reviewed a Beatles concert at the Royal Albert Hall in London.
At the time, Jane was at least as famous as The Beatles. Still two weeks shy of her 17th birthday, she'd been acting since the age of five and appeared regularly on the TV show Juke Box Jury.

The Beatles immediately clustered around her, kidding, flirting, and asking i f she'd marry them.

Later, Jane joined them at a private party in a Chelsea flat, where the boys proceeded to pop pills and drink all the wine. Embarrassingly, John Lennon was in one of his lethal moods and made some crude sexual remarks to the young actress.

But Paul rescued her from his boorish mate, taking her into the bedroom, where they talked about what sort of food they liked. So began the most significant romance of his life to date. Even as a teenager, Jane was more interested in Beethoven than The Beatles.

Home was a tall, 18th-century house in Wimpole Street, where she lived with her siblings; her aristocratic mother, Margaret, a professional oboeist; and her father, Richard, head of the psychiatric department at the Central Middlesex Hospital.

In short, the Ashers were an upper-middle-class family with sophisticated interests - a world apart from Paul's working-class Liverpool background.

Sitting at their elegant dining-room table, he began to receive the education he'd missed out on at college by becoming a pop star - though there was also, some say, an element of social- climbing involved.

That year, after turning 21 and seeing the latest Beatles single, She Loves You, shoot straight to number one, Paul took Jane off to Greece with The Beatles drummer Ringo Starr and his Liverpool girlfriend, Maureen Cox.

For Jane, of course, a trip to Greece had to involve culture, so they all 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.

Back home, Britain was soon to be in the grip of Beatlemania. The hardcore fans who tracked Paul everywhere quickly discovered that he'd moved into a boxroom at the top of the Ashers' home - and stood sentry at their front door.

To help Paul avoid them, Dr Asher worked out an arrangement with his neighbours: the Beatle would climb out of his bedroom window, four storeys above the street, climb back into the apartment of a retired colonel next door, and exit the building
courtesy of the people in the basement flat, whose back door opened on to a mews.
Life with the Ashers suited Paul so well that he lodged there for the next three years, long after he had become a millionaire and the other Beatles had bought big country
houses.

But he found it impossible to resist all the temptations on offer. The following year, while The Beatles were on tour in America, he met a beautiful 19-year-old actress
called Peggy Lipton at a party in Beverly Hills.

After summoning her to where he was staying that night, he played her some tunes on a piano.
‘The next thing I knew we were on our way upstairs. He took me in his arms and kissed me,’ Peggy recalls.
‘I took a shower to slow things down and when I came out wrapped in a towel, he caressed me and let the towel fall to the floor.’
There was one more encounter, but he seems subsequently to have put her out of his mind. Instead, he took Jane shopping for a house on his return. They chose a £40,000
property in St John’s Wood — which is still his London base.
While renovations were being made to the house, Paul celebrated Jane’s birthday by giving her a diamond pendant. But he still had a roving eye.
Again, during a break in The Beatles second US tour, he slept with Peggy. Nor was she his only slip.

He told his cousin, Mike Robbins, that in the U.S. girls had been laid on by the film studios. ‘He said to me: “Have you ever tried four in the bed?” I said: “Four in a bed?”

He said: “Yes.” Three gorgeous blondes and him.’ To which Mike could only exclaim:
‘Gor blimey!’

It was 1965, and The Beatles were soaring, with five U.S. number ones — the fourth of which was Paul’s Yesterday, the most successful Beatles song of all.
In a few short years, he had become one of the most famous people in the Western
world — as recognisable as the Queen.
Meanwhile, Jane was growing up. When they’d first met, she happily allowed Paul to decide what they did, where they holidayed, even what clothes she wore.

Now, however, almost three years had passed, and she was no longer quite as biddable.

After Christmas, she went into a Bristol Old Vic production of The Happiest Days Of Your Life, which kept her down in the West Country.
During this period, she and Paul had a row and separated briefly, before patching things up.
Even though his own mother had worked as a midwife, he didn’t want Jane to have a career — ‘I wanted her to give up work completely,’ he confessed later. ‘I know now I was just being silly.’

And so he found himself in London on his own, where he started seeing an attractive nanny, Maggie McGivern, who claims they had a three-year affair behind Jane’s back.
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 Old English sheepdog.

While Jane was away, Paul and Maggie even slipped over to Europe for illicit holidays.

‘They saw each other on and off for quite a few years,’ says his friend, the writer Barry Miles, confirming that Maggie was ‘only one of many’.
By 1966, Paul was being drawn into a moneyed, druggy, fast-paced set of aristocrats, bohemians and beautiful girls.
Now reunited and living together in St John’s Wood, Paul and Jane became increasingly aware of their differences. Paul liked to go clubbing, often bringing a gang of musicians and other bohemians back home late at night. Jane didn’t like clubs.
She’d only ever had a polite interest in pop, and wasn’t into drugs. And she had her own circle of theatrical friends who didn’t mesh with Paul’s crowd.
On Friday, January 13, 1967, she flew to the United States with the Bristol Old Vic for a four-and-a-half-month tour. Paul was not at Heathrow to see her off.
Even if he’d liked his own company, there was no way he was going to spend all that time alone.
He was going to have his mates round, pick girls up, drink, take drugs, leave his clothes where he dropped them and the dishes unwashed.
Two pals moved in to keep him company — the artist Dudley Edwards and Prince Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, the playboy son of the French painter Balthus.

continued...

Stash — as he was known — had just been charged with possession of cocaine and cannabis, along with his friend, the Rolling Stone Brian Jones.
In St John’s Wood, the three young men entertained what Stash describes as harems of girls, while Beatles fans camped outside, periodically bursting in through the
gates ‘sort of like cattle breaking through a fence’.

Then, one night in May 1967, Paul, Dudley and Stash drove over to the Bag o’Nails, one of London’s trendy clubs. It was packed with people, many of whom Paul knew, including Peter Brown who worked for The Beatles.
It was Peter who introduced Paul to an American photographer called Linda Eastman, who was in town shooting pictures of musicians.
When Dudley came back from the bar, he found Paul and Linda engrossed in conversation. Dudley paired up with the singer Lulu, and Paul asked everybody back to his place.
Half an hour later, Linda found herself inside the home of one of the world’s most eligible bachelors. Memories are hazy about whether she slept with him that night.

Stash and Dudley say it didn’t seem important at the time. ‘You just think, it’s yet another girl, and yet another night,’ says Dudley.
In fact, Paul was powerfully attracted to Lin, as he called her. He liked blondes. He liked the fact that, as a single mother, she was clearly maternal. And he was pleased that — like Jane — she was from a wealthy background.
The daughter of a New York lawyer, Linda was considered the black sheep of her family, partly because she hadn’t done well at school.

She’d started chasing pop stars while still in her teens; then after becoming pregnant, she’d married an anthropologist called Melville See Jr in 1962.
The marriage was not a success: Mel was an academic and Linda hardly ever opened a book. They broke up two years later. So Linda took their daughter, Heather, back
to New York, divorcing Mel the following year.
And now she was in London, hoping to take pictures of The Beatles for a book called Rock And Other Four Letter Words

A few days after meeting Paul, Linda showed up at the Belgravia home of Beatles manager Brian Epstein for the press launch of their new album, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band.
It was noted that she made a beeline for Paul, crouching at his feet by the fireplace and looking up into his face.

That weekend, she tried calling him at home and got Stash on the line instead. He told her Paul was in Liverpool. Unfazed, Linda said she wanted to come over anyway.
So she did — and promptly fell into bed with Stash. It was a bizarre weekend. While
Stash and Linda were rolling around together, Paul phoned to tell his lodger to move out. So Stash took Linda to stay with the musician Graham Nash.
And soon their affair was common knowledge in London’s rock community. ‘I was teased extensively by Roger Daltrey and [Jimi] Hendrix and so on, because, you
know, Linda had gone around,’ says Stash, ungallantly.
‘But . . . you’ve got to put these things in context: everybody had very open relationships, and it wasn’t cool to be jealous.’
Yet when Linda flew back to New York shortly afterwards, her conversation was not about Stash, but Paul McCartney. Once again, she informed Nat Weiss, who was on
the same flight, that she was going to marry the Beatle.
Soon after Linda’s departure, Jane returned from her U.S. tour. She threw an all-weekend party with Paul to celebrate the release of Sgt. Pepper, then hopped on a
plane with him for a break in *Scotland, where he’d bought a farm as a holiday home. The romance was very much back on.
As for Jane, she clearly decided to give her lover another chance, trying her best to fit in with Paul’s hippie friends and put up with the drug-taking.

That Christmas, he gave her a diamond ring and asked her to marry him. Her lover, it seemed, was now definitely off the market.
Not, however, as far as Linda was concerned. Five months later, in May 1968, she turned up at a press conference being given by Paul and John at a New York hotel.

‘I managed to slip him my phone number,’ she recalled later. ‘He rang me up and told me they were leaving that evening, but he’d like it if I was able to travel out to the airport with him and John. So I went out in their limousine, sandwiched between Paul and John.’

Nat Weiss, who was also in the car, realised this was part of Linda’s
relentless campaign to land her Beatle. ‘But I don’t think he’d made his mind up about Linda at that point,’ he says.

In fact, when he returned to the UK, Paul still seemed committed to Jane. ‘They could not have been more lovey-dovey,’ The Beatles PR, Tony Barrow, remembers.
Yet as soon as Jane went back to the Old Vic, Paul took another woman to bed. Francie Schwartz was a plain, 24-year-old New Yorker with prematurely grey hair who’d bought a ticket to London in the hope of interesting The Beatles’ company, Apple, in a film script.
But Paul clearly found her pretty enough: he flirted with her outrageously
when they met at Apple, and jumped into bed with her after calling round at her Chelsea flat.

Before long, they had silly nicknames for each other — she called him Mr Plump and he called her Clancy — and he even allowed her to move into the St John’s Wood house while Jane was away. ‘I stayed in the house for weeks, cleaning, reading, calling the dope dealer,’ says Francie.

But Paul was soon off on another trip, this time to LA. Stopping off in New York, en route to the West Coast, he left a message with Linda’s answering service, saying he could be reached at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
He went clubbing in LA that night and came home to find girls outside his hotel bungalow queuing round the block. The next day, Paul came back between business engagements to change his clothes.
‘And there was Linda!’ recalls Tony Bramwell, who worked for The Beatles at the time. ‘Sitting on the doorstep.’

Having received Paul’s message, she’d taken the first available flight from New York to LA. ‘So immediately, Paul got me to clear away all the birds, and just locked himself in the room with her,’ says Bramwell.

Paul and Linda spent the day together on a motor boat, drinking champagne, eating bacon sandwiches, getting stoned and canoodling.
Like the Beatle, she was a pothead — she’d even brought a bag of grass with her. When they checked out the next day, says Bramwell, they were ‘like Siamese twins, holding hands and gazing into each other’s eyes all the way to the airport’.
Back in London, Paul simply picked up where he’d left off with Francie Schwartz. There was a wild element to their love-making, she claims. Sometimes, he’d grab her and pull her into the bath with him; they even made love in the open on Primrose Hill.

Once, Paul took her to a new club, then stopped on the way home to make love to another girlfriend. Francie had the humiliation of waiting for Mr Plump downstairs.

They were in bed together one morning when there was a knock at the bedroom door.
‘Who is it?’ he asked.

‘Jane,’ replied his fiancée, who’d just returned to London to appear in a play.
Paul leapt out of bed, threw on some clothes and led Jane out into the garden. When he spotted Francie at an open window, he yelled at her to get back inside.
But Jane had had enough. Within hours, her mother arrived to box up her belongings.

For his part, Paul seemed surprised when Jane announced during a TV chat show that their relationship was ‘finished’. But he gave Francie her marching orders, anyway.

At last, the way was clear for Linda — but not until she’d slept with yet another rock star.

Extracted from FAB: AN INTIMATE LIFE OF PAUL McCARTNEY by Howard Sounes, published by HarperCollins on August 25 at £20. © Howard Sounes 2010. To order a copy at £18 (p&p free), call 0845 155 0720.

Well, you know, true or not, it's kinda hard to shock us by talking about Linda's many lovers while also describing Paul's sex orgies.

Oh, please...

Linda slept around a lot before marrying Paul. SO WHAT? If she were a guy, nobody would be making a fuss about it.

And as for Paul having loads of affairs behind Jane's back... oh, I had nooooo idea about that, LOL

Originally Posted by hibgal

Well, you know, true or not, it's kinda hard to shock us by talking about Linda's many lovers while also describing Paul's sex orgies.

Quite true hibgal, why is this being dredged up again?????? Most of us know Paul and Linda's history

See here for the next highly anticipated chapter!

Strangers said she was abrasive and gauche, but as Paul McCartney sank into whisky-soaked oblivion, only Linda knew how to save him

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/ar...#ixzz0wrkk4adK

Like that Johnny Mathis song, "It's not for me to say...." Linda lived in a world where she came in contact with a lot of high profile people. Paul did too as he was a high profile person. Linda was a good person and she had some interesting life experiences and glimpsed behind the curtain of the Rock & Roll life.

It is a good thing they found each other as they were soulmates; were blessed with their children and built a good life together.

Gosh, that makes her sound awful -- like Paul was just this fat, juicy fly who wandered into her web. : /

I loved this comment on the "how Linda dragged Paul out of his depression" installment: "The author seems to have written all the characters as duplicitous, lascivious, fame-hungry Shakespearean villians."

You know, we gotta admire Paul for being so cool about Linda's "past".

Even today, we see loads of man who can't stand a woman who has as much experience as they have.

Originally Posted by maribeatlecrazy

You know, we gotta admire Paul for being so cool about Linda's "past".

And vice versa!

Obviously, this matter was dredged up again in the Daily Mail just to sell this paperback writer's book. But he's a pretty shoddy writer, imo...

But it does remind us that Linda was initially a very controversial choice for Paul as far as the public was concerned. It actually took me a long time to grow to like her. (Whereas with Yoko it was the other way 'round...)

Originally Posted by Maia 66

But it does remind us that Linda was initially a very controversial choice for Paul as far as the public was concerned.

So what? I'll never understand what anyone besides the couple themselves has to do with whom they marry. To drag it up again years after Linda's death is more than a little tasteless. And why shouldn't Paul accept Linda's past? Compared to his own she's almost an innocent!

Originally Posted by hibgal

So what? I'll never understand what anyone besides the couple themselves has to do with whom they marry. To drag it up again years after Linda's death is more than a little tasteless. And why shouldn't Paul accept Linda's past? Compared to his own she's almost an innocent!

I agree Hibgal, but being tasteless is something so many B-linkers seem to do best.

Originally Posted by hibgal

So what? I'll never understand what anyone besides the couple themselves has to do with whom they marry. To drag it up again years after Linda's death is more than a little tasteless. And why shouldn't Paul accept Linda's past? Compared to his own she's almost an innocent!

I don't give a ^@** who Paul marries... unless it's my sister or something. That's not what I meant at all. I was commenting on public opinion. I think we're allowed to discuss those sorts of things in a Beatles forum, aren't we?

And darkhorse... check your PMs.

Originally Posted by Maia 66

I don't give a ^@** who Paul marries... unless it's my sister or something. That's not what I meant at all. I was commenting on public opinion.

Well, so was I! I don't see why 'the public' should hold an opinion one way or the other. It's nothing to do with them.

I think we're allowed to discuss those sorts of things in a Beatles forum, aren't we?

Oh sure. Don't get your knickers in a twist over nothing. Wait till I post something truly controversial.

It gives me a very nasty feeling to see this being said about Linda and I have not even read the whole bit. I find it tasteless.

Originally Posted by FPSHOT

It gives me a very nasty feeling to see this being said about Linda and I have not even read the whole bit. I find it tasteless.

Me too!
I'm convinced Paul loved her for the right reasons, as she loved Paul.
If she hadn't passed away they would still be together imo.
It doesn't matter how many lovers you had. If you meet Mr or Mrs Right...you will just know that and hey, what's wrong with an experienced lover...

Originally Posted by taxgirl

Me too!
I'm convinced Paul loved her for the right reasons, as she loved Paul.
If she hadn't passed away they would still be together imo.
It doesn't matter how many lovers you had. If you meet Mr or Mrs Right...you will just know that and hey, what's wrong with an experienced lover...

These are words that go together well... although women may think in "lovers", Rotterdam guys think in "women" or "girls" you loved..and met (think of the crush thread lol)

People's pasts make them what they are and neither Paul nor Linda was ever particularly secretive about the fact that they "got around" before they found each other. So...big deal?

Originally Posted by AeolianCadence

And vice versa!

Yes, sure! I didn't mean to say Paul was a saint or anything like that. I just mentioned Linda's case because it's much more dificult to find men who accept a woman like Linda than the other way round.