Paul McCartney and John Lennon worked together closely for years. When The Beatles broke up, though, their friendship deteriorated. Lennon and McCartney fought often over business affairs and they could hardly have a conversation without shouting at each other. Lennon began to screen McCartney’s calls, which the latter found very hurtful.
John Lennon would screen Paul McCartney’s calls
Throughout the 1970s, McCartney reached out to Lennon in an effort to rebuild their relationship. This was made difficult by the fact that Lennon rarely believed it was actually his bandmate on the other end of the phone. He made McCartney answer security screening questions before he agreed to talk to him.
“Paul told me that when he called up John, he’d get through to the answering service,” art dealer Robert Fraser, who was a friend of the band, said in the book All You Need Is Love: The Beatles in Their Own Words by Peter Brown and Steven Gaines. “‘Mr. Lennon’s not available.’ He said, ‘Then the message came back. “Ask Paul what’s the name of the teacher in fifth grade.”’ It’s quite funny.”
Gaines said that while he understood why Lennon wanted to screen the calls, McCartney felt hurt by it.
“Well, probably a thousand people have called John and said, ‘It’s Paul.’ Although I think Paul was hurt by it,” he said. “If it was part of John’s sense of humor, nobody else understood that. If Paul did, I think he’d still have to be embarrassed by it, because it was Paul’s business too.”
Paul McCartney said many of his phone calls with John Lennon devolved into angry fights
When McCartney did manage to get a hold of Lennon, their conversations tended to end poorly.
“I would ring him when I went to New York and he would say, ‘Yeah, what d’you want?’ ‘I just thought we might meet?’ ‘Yeah, what the f*** d’you want, man?’ I used actually to have some very frightening phone calls,” McCartney said, per the book Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now by Barry Miles. “Thank God they’re not in my life anymore. I went through a period when I would be so nervous to ring him and so insecure in myself that I actually felt like I was in the wrong. It was all very acrimonious and bitter.”
McCartney eventually realized that as long as they didn’t talk about business, their conversations were far friendlier.
He didn’t want his former bandmate dropping by his apartment either
Lennon made it difficult for McCartney to get in contact with him. He also wanted his former bandmate to stop dropping by his apartment unannounced. Gaines said Lennon made this point to McCartney in a “very b****y” way.
“That was a period when Paul just kept turning up at our door with a guitar,” Lennon said in the book All We Are Saying: The Last Major Interview With John Lennon and Yoko Ono by David Sheff. “I would let him in, but finally I said to him, ‘Please call before you come over. It’s not 1956, and turning up at the door isn’t the same anymore. You know, just give me a ring.’ He was upset by that, but I didn’t mean it badly. I just meant that I was taking care of a baby all day, and some guy turns up at the door.”
Still, Lennon and McCartney were on relatively friendly terms before Lennon’s death in 1980.
