Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney. Howard Sounes

was Jane Asher’s less than enthusiastic verdict of the concert until the Beatles bounded on stage. ‘Now these I could scream for,’ she remarked, and duly did so for the Radio Times’ photographer, showing herself a good sport. When the Beatles met Jane backstage, they clustered around this pretty celebrity, kidding and flirting, asking – as they typically asked their female fans (even though Lennon was already married with a child, Julian, born the previous month, a fact Brian was keeping from the press) – if she would marry them. Pretty though she was, Jane looked different to what Paul had imagined. Although he had seen her many times on TV and in the papers, these were monochrome media in 1963, leading him to assume that Jane was blonde. In real life, Miss Asher was a spectacular redhead.

      After the show the Beatles, Shane Fenton and Jane adjourned to the Chelsea apartment of journalist Chris Hutchins, where the boys popped pills and drank up all the wine in the flat. ‘John, who could be waspish at the best of times, was in a lethal mood without the required amount of alcohol to dampen the effect of the uppers,’ Hutchins recalls in his memoir, Mr Confidential. Falling into a contrary mood, John invited Jane to tell him and his friends how she masturbated. ‘Go on, love,’ he said. ‘Tell us how girls play with themselves. We know what we do, tell us what you do.’ Other crude and embarrassing sexual remarks followed. Paul rescued Jane from his boorish friend, taking her into the bedroom where they talked of less provocative matters, such as the food they enjoyed. Like her mother, Jane was an excellent cook. ‘It appears you’re a nice girl,’ Paul concluded, having realised that a person he perceived initially as a ‘rave London bird’ was a well-brought-up young woman of whom his mother would have approved. So began the most significant romance of Paul’s young life to date.

      Paul’s new girlfriend was almost four years his junior, having been born in 1946 to Margaret and Richard Asher. Mrs Asher, to whom Jane owed her red hair, was a member of the aristocratic Eliot family, whose seat, Port Eliot, is a stately home at St Germans, Cornwall. The Earl of St Germans was her uncle, the poet TS Eliot a distant American cousin. Margaret Asher was a professional musician, an oboist who had taught George Martin at the Guildhall School of Music. (The story of Paul’s life is filled with similar, almost Dickensian coincidences.) Jane’s father was an equally interesting person: head of the psychiatric department at the Central Middlesex Hospital, an expert on blood diseases, published writer and shrink whose clients had included the Arabian adventurer T.E. Lawrence. Like Lawrence, Dr Asher was an eccentric and depressive. Shortly after Paul and Jane got together, the doc went missing for a time, causing such consternation that the story made the daily newspapers. He ultimately took his own life.

      Jane was one of three children, with a younger sister, Claire, and an older brother named Peter: three personable, carrot-top kids who’d all been encouraged by their parents to go into show business from an early age. Jane’s acting career had been the most notable, but Claire Asher had also made a name for herself as a regular actress in the radio drama Mrs Dale’s Diary; while Peter Asher appeared on stage, screen and radio, and had recently formed a singing duo with his school friend Gordon Waller. The whole family was musical, Jane playing the classical guitar and Claire the violin. The Ashers often performed en famille at home in Wimpole Street, ‘the most august of London streets’, as Virginia Woolf observes in Flush, her book about a literary romance a few doors up. For 50 Wimpole Street was the former home of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, who famously eloped with fellow poet Robert Browning in 1846.

      The Ashers lived at 57 Wimpole Street, a tall eighteenth-century town-house with a basement music room in which Mrs Asher gave music lessons, a first-floor, book-lined drawing room in which Dr Asher kept a grand piano and, adjacent to that, his consulting room; the bedrooms were arranged on the upper floors. All day, Ashers young and old dashed up and down the stairs and across the checker-pattern threshold, to pursue their interests outside the home, gathering in the evening for one of Mrs Asher’s gourmet meals, and conversation, after which it was often out again to the theatre or concerts. Everything was wonderfully close at hand, with the Wigmore Hall, for example, where Jane started to take Paul to hear classical music, just around the corner. Jane was more interested in Beethoven than the Beatles when she met Paul; a cultured girl who read Honoré Balzac in bed.

      Paul was welcomed into this stimulating home, which was akin to his Liverpool family in that the Ashers were another clever, energetic musical clan, but obviously socially a world apart. Paul’s home life was the epitome of the northern working-class; the Ashers were an upper-middle-class London family with aristocratic connections and sophisticated interests. Sitting at their dining table, Paul began to receive the education he might have had at college, if he had turned his back on pop music. It was a world he was intellectually equal to. Paul had, after all, attended one of the best grammar schools in England. Mum would have been proud to have seen her son welcomed into this fine London home, while noticing that Paul was starting to sound different. Her son never had a strong Scouse accent, not like George Harrison, and he never lost his Liverpool twang entirely, but there was a refinement in his speech from the time he met the Ashers, teenage slang words – such as ‘soft’ (stupid) and ‘gear’ (great) – appearing less frequently in his conversation. There was, some say, an element of social-climbing in Paul’s relationship with the Ashers. ‘He felt it was important to be in the centre of things,’ says the Beatles’ PR man Tony Barrow. ‘And that’s where Jane Asher came in, to a great extent, being not just the girlfriend, but somebody who could lift him up that social ladder … He felt that she would be helpful to him and useful to him in progressing his march up through London society … there was nothing to achieve in the way of Liverpool society.’

      In a deeper sense Liverpool would always be home, though, and when he turned 21 in June 1963 Paul celebrated his coming of age on Merseyside. Four days prior to his birthday, driving himself back from a Beatles’ gig in New Brighton, Paul was stopped by the police for speeding. He was subsequently fined and disqualified from driving for 12 months in what was the third speeding conviction that year for a young man in a hurry. On the morning of his birthday, Tuesday 18 June, the Epsteins hosted a drinks party for Paul and Jane – suddenly very much a couple – at their house in Queens Drive, followed by a bigger, livelier party in the evening at Aunt Ginny’s in Huyton, the party held here partly in order to avoid the fans who had started to find their way to Forthlin Road, and because Ginny and Harry had a big enough garden for a marquee. Paul’s many relatives were invited, as were his fellow Beatles, NEMS staff and other musicians, including various Mersey Beat bands and brother Mike McCartney’s new group, the Scaffold.

      Having left school, Paul’s lanky kid brother Mike had started work as a ladies’ hairdresser in Liverpool, then formed a Beyond the Fringe-style comedy troupe, the Scaffold, with mates John Gorman and Roger McGough, the trio landing a TV contract in 1963 simultaneous with the Beatles’ rise to fame. When Mike, now a tall, toothy 19-year-old, went into show business he took a stage name, Mike McGear, a play on the trendy teen term ‘gear’ (good). So long as he remained Mike McGear, Paul was relaxed about his kid brother’s aspirations, and supportive. When Mike dropped the McGear mask and became a McCartney in public life, as he sometimes did, friends and associates noted a degree of tension between the brothers, though Paul never spoke about it in public. ‘I think he probably got pissed off occasionally because Mike would be McCartney, occasionally, rather than McGear,’ says Tony ‘Measles’ Bramwell, who became a Beatles roadie in 1963. ‘Mike McGear was [one thing]; Mike McCartney was his brother and should not be [in show business].’

      The Scaffold performed at Paul’s 21st birthday party. John Lennon, in an obnoxious mood, heckled the trio, then swung a punch at fellow guest Cavern MC Bob Wooler, who had apparently teased John about a recent holiday he’d taken with Brian Epstein. Everybody knew Brian held a torch for John, so there was some surprise when, in late April 1963, John chose to leave Cynthia and baby Julian at home and go off to Torremolinos with Brian (while Paul and George spent a few days with Klaus Voormann at his parents’ holiday home on Tenerife). On John’s return, friends sniggered about Brian and John’s ‘honeymoon’, a reference to the fact that John hadn’t seen fit to give Cynthia a honeymoon yet. It is this wisecrack that Wooler supposedly used to John’s face at the party. In another version of the story, Wooler, who was gay, propositioned John. ‘Bob Wooler fancied John, and made a pass at him at Paul McCartney’s