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Paul McCartney and John Lennon had a fraught relationship after The Beatles broke up, but they eventually got back on friendly terms as the years passed. Still, McCartney admitted that their relationship wasn’t perfect. He said that Lennon became extremely jealous toward the end of his life. An element of jealousy had always existed in their relationship, but not to this degree.

A black and white picture of John Lennon and Paul McCartney sitting in front of microphones at a press conference.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney | Don Paulsen/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images

Paul McCartney and John Lennon repaired their relationship 

After The Beatles broke up, McCartney sued the band in order to wrest control from their manager, Allen Klein. This caused the inner disagreements between band members to boil over publicly, particularly between Lennon and McCartney. 

As the 1970s wore on, the relationship between McCartney and Lennon became less acrimonious. McCartney spoke to Lennon about returning to Yoko Ono during their period of separation, and he visited Lennon during his “lost weekend” phase. McCartney said that his last conversation with Lennon was completely friendly and mundane.

“I was baking bread and got quite good at it,” he said on The Howard Stern Show. “So when I heard John was doing it, it was great. We could just talk about something so ordinary.”

McCartney was grateful that they were able to be friendly with each other again.

“It was really nice, and I was so glad that we got back to that relationship that we always had,” he said. “We’d lived in each other’s pockets for so long that it was great to get back to that.”

Paul McCartney said John Lennon became extremely jealous

A certain degree of tension still existed between McCartney and Lennon, despite the friendliness of their relationship. They had spent years competing with each other, trying to write bigger, more successful songs, and it was difficult to erase this. McCartney also said that Lennon seemed to be jealous of everything, even something as simple as spending time with his son.

“He became so jealous in the end,” McCartney said in the book The Beatles: The Authorized Biography by Hunter Davies. “You know he wouldn’t let me even touch his baby. He got really crazy with jealousy at times. I suppose I’ve inherited some of that .…”

McCartney didn’t elaborate on the reasoning behind Lennon’s jealousy and perhaps he didn’t know. It was just another complex personality trait in his longtime friend. 

Their relationship was always characterized by a degree of jealousy

Even while working together in The Beatles, Lennon and McCartney were extremely competitive. When Paul Simon first met the pair, he could hardly believe how competitive they were.

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“You have no idea how competitive John Lennon was around Paul McCartney,” he said, per the book Paul Simon: The Life by Robert Hilburn. “When I first met them, I felt like someone had taken all the oxygen out of the room. I almost couldn’t breathe, they were so competitive, and that’s what made them so great. They wouldn’t settle for just good.”

After the band broke up and they were no longer working together, their competitive spirits remained. There was also jealousy involved in their drives to one-up one another. Whenever one of them had a hit, the other would feel motivated to write a better song. Lennon may have grown jealous of McCartney outside of music, but jealousy had always existed between them.

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