Chapter Text
Normally there were two armchairs on the show setup, next to the host’s desk, but tonight the set manager had swapped them out for a small love-seat type couch. That’s what the two of them headed for when they stepped out of the wings and onto the stage, hand in hand. There was a welcoming barrage of applause, and they responded graciously with their free hands, Paul’s left and his right. The small band, squared away on the other side of the stage, played a jazz-infused version of “Get Back” to accompany the fan fare, and it all went on longer than was probably intended, simply due to everyone’s enthusiasm.
It was much different from all the press events they used to deal with in the early days, all four of them faced with microphones and cameras and recording devices, assaulted with too many questions to hear, let alone answer. They’d gotten used to that, sure, but it was hardly something they looked forward to. Since disbanding, they’d all been more intentional about the interviews they gave. There were no more mass press events, no more volleys of irrelevant queries thrown at them. They’d made a point to give interviews less often and to only one outlet at a time, be it magazine or television, and to have them scheduled with reasonably advanced notice. And there was always a predetermined list of topics.
Tonight though, they were making something of an exception, having agreed to a slightly spontaneous talk show appearance to discuss their most recent projects, including Paul’s successful publication of “The Lyrics” and the upcoming release of the “Get Back” documentary. The host had asked if they’d be alright talking a short bit about the incident, too. It was that time of year, after all. They’d agreed to a few questions, rubbing each other’s hands reassuringly in the pre-show briefing. It would be alright.
The interview started with a lighter topic anyway, giving them time to ease into everything. When the audience calmed down enough for the host to give them a proper welcome to the show, the two of them responded warmly with thanks and reciprocation. They chatted over the basic introduction questions — how America is compared to England this time of year, holiday spirit, general sentiments about the year coming to a close — before breaking into the heart of the interview.
“Now Paul, you said in the previews for the book that this is something of a memoir, sort of. Your songs are the journals that you look back on when you want to remember the past. What was that process like for you, for both of you?”
“I think it was really therapeutic, in a way, to be honest,” Paul said, turning to meet John’s eyes, warm behind his glasses. “Really sitting down and taking an honest look at everything we wrote and thinking about what was happening at the time on a personal level was unexpectedly meaningful to both of us. Instead of vaguely recalling that ‘oh yeah, we wrote that in 1966 when we weren’t on tour’, you remember ‘I wrote it outside in the garden before John woke up one morning, a few days after we started the very beginning of the process to have our first child.’ It’s things like that, wonderful things you hadn’t realized you’d forgotten, that come back to you.”
An audible ‘aww’ passed through the audience. John squeezed Paul’s hand a bit tighter, running his thumb over his husband’s knuckles.
“You’re a real sap underneath, aren’t you?”
“I think the world is well aware of that by now,” Paul chuckled, squeezing back.
It was so easy for them to get lost like this, just resting in their shared moment and the comfort that the two of them were there, together. It happened rather often at home, especially when they were doing some chores in the kitchen or herb garden. More often than not, they found themselves curled up on the sofa or sitting on the garden bench, listening to the radio or the birds — and each other’s heartbeats.
But they had the awareness to pull themselves back into the interview, sharing a few more stories from “The Lyrics” as a bit of a tease for the book. Both of them enjoyed making their interviews a bit more conversational as well, and the host and audience seemed interested in their sometimes meandering tales.
“This one’s not in the book,” Paul brought up after a few songs had been discussed, “just because it’s not the most musically or lyrically interesting to me in terms of storytelling, but George used to tease me incessantly about ‘I’ve Just Seen a Face’ because to the four of us, it was so obviously about John, y’know, what with how we met. Love at first sight.”
“Was it like that for you two?” The host asked, smiling along with Paul’s good nature. “Love at first sight?”
They had never talked much about their deeply personal relationship details to the press or public, especially the beginning of it, but with a mutual nod, Paul gave a brief yet informative answer to the question.
“Not love, exactly, because neither of us were really at a point where we knew our sexualities fully, but we were definitely infatuated, I think. Interested, certainly,” Paul smiled at the memory. “John up there singing ‘Come and Go With Me’; it was like fate, sort of. He was so confident, even though he wasn’t playing or singing much of it correctly, that I’d have gone anywhere with him, really.”
“Well I remember myself playing a lot better than that,” John joked, causing a ruffle of laughs from the audience. “But that’s pretty spot on, y’know. I saw Paul in the crowd right away, bright white coat and carnation. And then afterwards he played some damned— now hang on, I’ve just swore,” John interrupted himself, and the audience laughed with approval. Paul rolled his eyes, squeezing John’s hand again. “Was I supposed to say darned? Can you go over audio bits on air?”
“Not usually, unless we have advanced notice of what you’re going to say,” the host chuckled. “That word isn't a big issue, though. There are certainly worse things you could say!”
“Could we plan that out? I can say a worse one in five seconds and then someone can edit it out—”
“John!” Paul sighed with exasperation. “There are more interesting things to talk about than your foul mouth.”
“You know what this foul mouth can do, though,” John waggled his eyebrows. The studio crowd practically howled with amusement and even the host, who was probably supposed to be policing against comments of a lewd nature, couldn’t help himself.
Paul felt himself flush hotter and tried not to swear himself. Still, under his scarlet mask, he couldn’t deny the feelings of affection: he’d been with this man for 60 years and was more than grateful for every bit of his humor and wit.
When the audience calmed down a bit, the host steered the conversation back to John’s self-interrupted comment about meeting Paul.
“I guess I was gonna say that Paul was incredibly talented with that guitar, much better than I was, and I knew that. I also knew I would be an idiot to let another band have him. And I thought he was pretty cool, too. Slicked up hair and those dam— darn eyebrows. I dug him from the start.”
“Well that’s more broadcast appropriate,” the host praised. “I remember you saying, Paul, sometime in the ‘70s, I think, that all the non-formulaic love songs you wrote were for one person. You only confirmed it was John quite a bit later, and neither of you elaborated on it very much. Does the book speak to any of that?”
“In parts, certainly, because really, it is true: almost every love song I’ve written with intent has been for John. And I think that’s reciprocated in most respects,” Paul added, glancing at John with a wink.
“Don’t push your luck,” John threw back, eyes dancing.
“But there are also some songs that came more from a place of formula, ones that weren’t exactly about our relationship in any specific way. And there are a few, in the book and not, that are about real relationships I had, just not romantic ones, obviously.”
“So you mean you weren’t in love with your dog?” John jumped on the last point, eyes still shining.
“He’s jealous because I got a dog when he left for his movie Spain,” Paul confided.
“This was Martha, your sheepdog, wasn’t it?” The host asked with enthusiasm. He was being professional, of course, but he was also undeniably interested in his guests. It wasn’t every night that he got to interview the most famous songwriting duo in history, and one of the most famous couples, too.
“It was,” Paul smiled. “John left to film with Dick Lester in Spain at the end of August—”
“What year was this?” The host asked, a bit embarrassed to interrupt.
“When was it, love?” Paul turned to John.
“1966, wasn’t it? Because Jules was born in April of ‘67.”
“And then everyone thought the band broke up because no one saw either of us for a month.”
“Wouldn’t that be fun? The Beatles broke up because Julian Lennon needed a bedtime story.”
“He’ll be embarrassed you said that, y’know,” Paul laughed.
“Reckon he’s watching?” John looked at the various cameras around the stage and behind the audience.
“Wouldn’t be the first time,” Paul mused warmly. He remembered he and John coming home late at night after a television interview, only to find young Julian still awake, eagerly telling them that he’d seen them on the channels. Even as an adult, Julian liked to watch his parents on talk shows. It was comforting to him, in a way. A reminder of his childhood. “But back to Martha, wasn’t it?”
“Unfortunately,” John groused.
“Well John went off to Spain in August of ‘66 and really, this was the first time we’d been apart for any significant amount of time in our relationship. We knew we could call and write letters, but even before he left I was dreading it. He noticed how glum I was so he suggested I get a pet of some kind when he left, just to have someone else around. So I went out to the country and picked a sheepdog puppy and brought her back to our house. And that was Martha.”
“So you’re telling me it was John’s idea that you get a dog? It seems like you have yourself to blame then, John,” the host joked.
“Don’t I know it. She smelled like a rug and rather looked like one, too,” John complained. He relented after a soft trickle of laughter from the audience. “But all in all, it was perfect, really. I could tell from our letters and phone calls that he was feeling better, and she was a good animal, y’know. Really protective of Paul and the kids and good to have on the farm.”
“She was special, wasn’t she?” Paul found John’s eyes, and they smiled at each other, hands still clasped.
“She was one of a kind,” John agreed.
“Don’t you still one of her descendents as one of your dogs?” The host asked.
“We have two right now, actually. One of her children, Arrow, is on the cover of one of my albums,” Paul elaborated, “and we bred her and kept one puppy from that litter and so on down the line. Currently we have two girls: Elvie, and then her daughter Dundee.”
“One of the grandkids named her,” John explained when the host reacted with a confused expression. “Paul always rejects my name ideas.”
“You have free range over naming the cats,” Paul reminded. “Besides, I don’t want to be walking down the street calling after a dog named ‘Knickers’.”
“Don’t want to compose a ballad for ‘Knickers My Dear’?” John asked innocently.
“You can, and we can publish a separate book for it,” Paul assured.
Laughter followed, and another chorus of ‘aww’ when John raised Paul’s hand to place a kiss on it.
“On a related note, one of your more expressively romantic songs in the book, Paul,” the host gently directed the conversation, “is ‘Two of Us’. Now this was written during the Let It Be or Get Back sessions, and the new documentary will supposedly let us see you basically build it from a few notes to a full composition. Did you remember that process, or was it another sort of happy surprise for you to discover when you wrote the book or watched the early documentary screening?”
“I remembered writing the lyrics for it and why I was writing it,” Paul began, “but the journey of it happening and getting to the final point was all a bit muddled, tell the truth. We weren’t out yet, of course, and we were what, less than a month into having two kids, weren’t we?”
“Yeah, Heather had just been born literally two days before. We thought she’d be born just at the end of the original timeline for the documentary, but she was early, and it’s not like you can just push a baby back in, can you?” John chuckled. “And of course so few people knew the real situation with Julian, too. Even some of the people we were close to at EMI and Apple thought the story we told the media was true. We just couldn’t risk that many people knowing.”
The host nodded along, with the audience listening politely as well. It was rare that any of the Beatles were this personal about their family dynamic. When Julian was born, few people knew he existed, nor that John Lennon had been expecting a child, until John gave a press conference a month later. The story he told was false of course, but no one outside the situation had any reason to doubt its authenticity. It was perfectly plausible that John had been in a private relationship with a woman and that she’d fallen pregnant but that by the time the baby was born, she was no longer capable of being a mother, leaving John to raise his son alone.
Eventually, when the social atmosphere was different, John and Paul gave a short statement about the extremely private surrogacy process that allowed them to become parents, but many of the details were still within the family.
“We couldn’t tell anyone about Heather until the documentary was over, really, except for George and Ringo. And George Martin and Mal, I think, too,” John continued. “But we had to be responsible parents at the same time. That was why I was late so often in the morning, because I was taking care of the kids, with help from my aunt, and allowing Paul to go to the studio and play the part of the workaholic.”
“Not that that wasn’t accurate to me,” Paul cut in with a laugh.
“No, but it was killing you not to have that time with her,” John reminded softly. “I couldn’t get you to put her down when we came home in the evening.”
“That must have been really hard for both of you, not being able to talk about your relationship and your family, especially when it had been openly accepted in the smaller studio setting you were used to at Abbey Road,” the host said, sympathy genuine in his eyes.
“It was hard, yeah,” Paul reflected. “Because really, everyone we worked with at Abbey Road knew to some degree at least that John and I, and then George and Ringo, were in a relationship. And with the four of us, there was so much joy in being able to share our lives so freely because for so long we hadn’t been able to.
“Not having that freedom in those sessions was one of the biggest things that made it so stressful, but of course on the outside, people just thought we were all at each other’s throats. In reality, I don’t think we could have made it through those first two weeks at Twickenham without each other; even if we couldn’t talk about everything going on, we knew we were there, we knew we were together in it.”
“There were a lot of evenings when we left together, too, sort of, to go back to Kenwood, where Paul and I were living at the time, to be around each other like we were used to,” John took over. “I remember some of those nights really well, and they’re some of my favorite memories of that time. We played Monopoly like we used to on tour and George would cook for us, saint that he is, and Ringo would get out his little video recorder and film little bits of it. It was lovely, really.”
“If we’re bringing up everything nice about it,” Paul added, “I’ll just say it was nice to be able to show affection to you. And not even a kiss necessarily. The ability to be near the person you love, and to modestly show others that you love them, is a wonderful thing. I’m sure many people know that it hurts, physically, to not be able to do that. So just coming home, where it was known and accepted that I was romantically with John and could behave naturally around him, was really freeing.”
The host nodded somberly, listening with empathy. When John made a joke about snogging Paul in the bathroom at EMI on one of their lunch breaks, the time seemed right for another question:
“Now I have to ask, just on a small level, and please feel free to gloss over this if you want to, but did anything get through into the documentary footage that suggested you two were more than just bandmates?”
Wide grins broke across their faces, and the two men turned to look at each other. A marvelous secret flitted between them, a small box of treasures they’d never shared. The world would be able to see it in just a few weeks, with the release of the documentary, but it was their story to tell whenever they wanted to. It always had been.
“What do you think, Paulie?” John asked, eyebrows raised. “Should we tell them?”
“I think so.” Paul nodded. “I want to share it from us first, y’know?”
“Yeah, alright,” John returned the smile. “Shall I?”
“Take it away, Johnny.”