In the early 1960s, Paul McCartney began dating Iris Caldwell, a former girlfriend of George Harrison. Harrison had dated Caldwell briefly as a young teenager, so her relationship with McCartney was more mature and serious. Still, the couple fought often and broke up regularly. Every time they split, Caldwell could count on Harrison to come knocking on her door to ask her out.
George Harrison was interested in Paul McCartney’s girlfriend
In the two years McCartney and Caldwell dated, they got into many arguments. She found his desire to always be the center of attention exhausting, particularly because he often followed John Lennon’s lead.
“One night we’d gone to this coffee bar in Birkenhead called The Cubic Club because everything was cube-shaped — the tables, the seats,” Caldwell said, per the book Paul McCartney: The Life by Philip Norman. “Paul’s showing-off got on my nerves so much that I picked up the sugar bowl — the sugar was the one thing there not in cubes — and emptied it over his head.”
Fights like these would lead to temporary breakups. Whenever they split, Harrison took the opportunity to ask Caldwell to revisit their youthful romance.
“We were always having rows and breaking up,” she said. “And whenever we did, George would be round the next day, asking me to go out with him again.”
Did Paul McCartney write any songs about Iris Caldwell?
Caldwell and McCartney dated in the years that The Beatles began their ascent to fame. In this time, he wrote hundreds of songs, and she said that many people ask if any are about her. She said that he never wrote anything about her.
“People have always thought Paul wrote ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ about me because I was ‘just seventeen’ when he asked me out,” she said. “But in the two years we were together, he always used to say he couldn’t write a song about me, because the only thing that rhymed with ‘Iris’ was ‘virus.’”
Paul McCartney’s girlfriend turned George Harrison down, but he later pursued Ringo Starr’s wife
Many years after Harrison’s unsuccessful pursuit of Caldwell, he began an affair with former bandmate Ringo Starr’s wife, Maureen Starkey. Harrison’s wife, Pattie Boyd, began to suspect the affair, but he denied it, even when she had all but caught them in bed together.
“I stood outside banging on the door and saying to George, ‘What are you doing? Maureen’s in there, isn’t she? I know she is,’ but he laughed,” she wrote in her book Wonderful Tonight. “He was supposed to be in the studio and everyone was waiting for him. Eventually he opened the door and said, ‘Oh, she’s just a bit tired so she’s lying down.’”
Eventually, though, Harrison admitted to it while at a dinner party at Starr’s house. Starkey had accidentally pulled a pack of the cigarettes Harrison smoked out of a drawer.
“We sat there in silence, and then George turned to Ringo and said, ‘You know, Ringo, I’m in love with your wife,’” friend Chris O’Dell recalled in the book Ringo: With a Little Help by Michael Seth Starr. “I think all five hearts in that kitchen stopped beating for a few seconds. The room was completely still, no sudden gasps, no deep breaths, no fingers tapping or throats clearing. Absolute silence.”
The admission resulted in the end of both Harrison and Starr’s marriages.
