Christopher Sandford:Mal Evans noticed a subtle change in McCartney. 'He suddenly went from "Jane this, Jane that" to "our Linda" and her "lovely little kid."' When Asher came home Paul bought her five dozen roses, exhilarated once again at having not been caught.
Geoffrey Giuliano:Upon McCartney's return to London, Linda attempted to maintain her grip on the often impressionable Beatle through a veritable barrage of late-night phone calls and steamy love letters. In the end, however, the sex-mad McCartney resumed his old ways, pairing off with both Francie Schwartz and London dolly bird Molly Migivern (Maggie McGivern) for yet more off-the-record close encounters.
Danny Fields:One month after Paul and Linda parted in Los Angeles after their idyll in Beverly Hills, he on his way to London, she to New York, Jane Asher, on a BBC talk show, announced that her engagement to Paul had ended. 'She was just totally devoted to her career, and Paul wanted a proper home life,' Nat Weiss relates. 'He'd been on top of the world for five years and done enough swinging for a lifetime.' There would be one more live-in girlfriend in Paul's life, the dazzling American adventuress Francie Schwartz, who was in residence in Cavendish Avenue (along with John and Yoko) for most of the summer of '68, before Linda took her place at Paul's side once and for all.
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Francie, twenty-three at the time and an American would-be screenwriter, was one of many hopeful non-mainstream artists who heard Paul's and John's description of Apple as a refuge for creativity that was not fully appreciated by the general public. As might have been expected - as should have been expected - Apple's London office became a repository of unsolicited and un-listened-to cassettes, which John would shovel into cartons for disposal, and its front doorstep became populated not only by the slightly cuckoo Beatles fans who had always gathered there (the 'Apple Scruffs'), but by dozens of people with 'projects' they felt only the Beatles would appreciate. It became Derek Taylor's unhappy job to shoo them all away periodically, so that the people who worked there could come and go without having to battle an encampment of weirdos. But Francie was more savvy. She arrived in London from New York, where she'd been writing advertising copy, in early April. She carried with her a 'treatment' for a movie about a street musician she'd met in front of Carnegie Hall who wanted to be a concert violinist, sure that the story would appeal to the Beatles. She frequented the London rock clubs and managed to make a bunch of new friends, including a receptionist at Apple, who got her through the front door one day early in May. Lo and behold, Paul was in the reception area. Francie gave him her picture and told him she could be reached via a trendy hair salon where another of her new friends was employed. While having her hair done there the next day, a note from Paul arrived with his phone number. Etc. etc. - a month or so of cat and mouse, and Francie found herself a de facto resident at Paul's house. Jane's clothes were still there, Francie recalls, but Jane was then on tour with the Old Vic company. John and Yoko were living there as well. It is not true that Jane walked in on Francie and Paul making love: this we know. Of other details we cannot be sure - Paul does not even mention Francie in his semi-official biography by Barry Miles, and Francie's account of the affair in her own delightful book, Body Count, and the conversations I had with her leave some uncertainty as to the exact dates of events concerning the Loves of Paul.
