Paul McCartney Said Staying With His Former Girlfriend Jane Asher and Her Family Was Like Living in a Novel
Paul McCartney said staying with his former girlfriend Jane Asher and her family in the early days of The Beatles was like living in a novel. Living with the Ashers in their posh London home was an enlightening experience for Paul. It opened his eyes to how a well-rounded, classy, hard-working family operated.
Paul McCartney and Jane Asher met in 1963, and they bonded over their love of theater
By 1963, The Beatles had recently released their single “Please Please Me.” Meanwhile, a 17-year-old Asher had accumulated a few acting credits and was a panelist on the BBC’s Juke Box Jury. Asher met The Beatles at the Royal Albert Hall and interviewed them for the Radio Times.
According to Express, Paul said he and the group fancied the actor, but he eventually started dating her. In The Lyrics: 1956 to the Present, Paul wrote, “as far as the gossip columns were concerned, Jane and I were what they would call an ‘item.'”
Paul and Asher shared a love of literature and theatre and it “might have explained a good deal why I was drawn to her in the first place,” he said. However, their relationship wasn’t always private.
Being two of the most famous people in the U.K., paparazzi followed their every move wanting photographs. They went a little overboard one night when Paul and Asher were out at the theater.
While Paul showed Asher the more intense sides of showbusiness, she showed the singer-songwriter something priceless: a loving family home.
Paul said staying with Asher, and her family was like living in a novel
In The Lyrics, Paul wrote that when he started seeing Asher, The Beatles’ manager Brian Epstein arranged for them to live in London. He got them an apartment in the posh neighborhood of Mayfair. Paul said London was an exciting place to be at the time. However, he felt the apartment “had no soul.” His bandmates hadn’t left him the best room.
Paul claims Ashers’ parents must have heard him complaining about the living arrangements and offered him the attic room of their posh Wimpole Street home instead.
“This gesture was in the long tradition of giving a garret room to a starving artist,” he wrote. “So, I had a little room up at the top, next to Jane’s brother Peter‘s room.”
Paul loved living at the Ashers’. He said it was a real eye-opening experience because he’d never been around classy people. He wrote, “The family knew all about art and culture and society, whereas I’d never known anyone who knew about going for auditions, or had an agent.
“It was really nice staying in that house. Lots of books to read, art on the walls, interesting conversations; and Margaret was a music teacher. It was at least a home, and I’d sorely missed that since I’d come down from Liverpool and since my mum had died six or seven years before.”
Asher’s father was a doctor and her mother was a music teacher. Margaret Asher “mothered” Paul, and they bonded over music.
“I’d never seen a family quite like this,” Paul wrote. He was used to working-class Liverpudlians, but this was classy London. Paul recalled that all the Ashers had diaries “that stretched from eight in the morning to six or seven at night-jam-packed.
“There was not a second that wasn’t accounted for. Jane would go off to her agent, then read for a play, then meet someone for lunch, then have a vocal coach teaching her a Norfolk accent for her next thing. So I was quite infatuated with all this. It was like a story, like a novel I was living in.”
Paul wrote many songs in the Ashers’ home
Once Paul moved into the Asher residence, his girlfriend’s parents put a piano in his attic room. There was also one in the basement, where Margaret used to take students.
Sometimes, John Lennon came to visit, and the songwriting partners would write their hits, both on the piano at the same time or “eyeball to eyeball on our guitars.”
Soon, Paul wanted to tell Asher he loved her, which inspired “And I Love Her.” He wrote it in his room at the Ashers’. What the Ashers gave Paul extended farther than just a room to stay. They showed him a true family, whether they were posh or not. It was perfect for Paul, and nurtured his creative mind.
