The complexity of their characters has been portrayed too simplistically in Paul’s view: Lennon as the tough guy, McCartney as the romantic. “On the surface I think John was more rock n’ roll, but when you scratched that surface the truth of it was that we were all very similar people who showed various sides of ourselves. And it was all to do with how secure your upbringing was. Mine was pretty secure, until I lost my mum. But before that, it was very secure. There were always lots of babies being thrust on me, so when Linda and I finally had a baby it was no worry for me.” He vividly remembers an episode at John and Yoko’s home in New York. “Linda and I went to visit and John and Yoko wouldn’t even let us touch Sean! We said: we’ve had kids, we’re alright, I won’t drop him. I didn’t come from that syndrome where you think they’re like glass when you hold them. I jiggled them and relaxed.”
That incident, and a conversation that followed which explained John’s attitude, brought home to Paul their different backgrounds. “Linda said, as American women do: ‘whenever our family had company, I pretty much had to go to bed.’ Yoko said: ‘when we had company we had to go to bed, too.’ John said: ‘We didn’t even have company.’ And I said: ‘Well, we did and we never had to go to bed. Mind you, it was always Uncle Joe, Auntie Joan, Auntie Gin and other relatives. But we never had to go to bed.’ And I think that meant quite a lot to John.” It underlines, to Paul, the solitariness of John’s youth and the barrier he erected. The healthy partnership and comaraderie that evolved from Paul and John’s competitive streak was only one step away from sibling rivalry. It now transpires that one of John’s earliest hurts conflicted by Paul was McCartney’s solo writing of the music for the Hayley Mills film The Family Way, in 1966. “I was told recently by Yoko that one of the things that hurt John over the years was me going off and doing The Family Way,” Paul says. [Paul had been approached by a third party via George Martin]. “I thought this was a great opportunity. We were all free to do stuff outside The Beatles and we’d each done various little things.” When he mentioned it to John, Paul said, ”he would have had his suit of armour on and said ‘no I don’t mind.’ However, my reasoning would be that at exactly the same time he went off to make a film. He wrote his books. It was in the spirit of all that. But what I didn’t realize was that this was the first time one of us had done it on songs. John would write a book and I was supposed to not be jealous, which I wasn’t. He acted in a film. But I didn’t realize he made a distinction between all those solo things and actually writing music because this was the first time one of us had done it in film scoring.”
McCartney, Yesterday and Today, Ray Coleman
In Their Own Words 