Actress Jane Asher called off her engagement to Sir Paul McCartney in the most high-profile way possible – by announcing it on live TV.
The end of their five-year relationship in 1968 broke the Beatle’s heart but time seems to be a great healer.
So much so, that part of his new exhibition, Paul McCartney Photographs 1963-64: Eyes of the Storm, is dedicated to her and her family.
The wall of intimate photographs, called At Home with the Ashers, includes three black and white shots of Jane, now 77, including two of her looking wistfully at the camera.
The exhibit notes that “with Jane as inspiration… the results are more intimate and considered than other photographs he took at the time.”
Sir Paul’s photography has been scrutinised by his family – wife Nancy and children Mary, Stella and James – as well as the likes of Foo Fighters star Dave Grohl, John Lennon’s son Julian and Rolling Stone, Ronnie Wood.
They attended a private viewing of the show at London’s National Gallery, which runs until October.
The exhibition that charts the beginnings of Beatlemania also tells how the couple met at a concert broadcast from the Royal Albert Hall in April 1963. Paul was only 21 at the time and Jane just 17.
A few months later The Beatles moved from Liverpool to London. Towards the end of that year, McCartney was invited to stay in the Ashers’ home in Westminster.
It became a home-from-home, enabling him to step away from the rollercoaster of life with The Beatles.
Sir Paul, 81, himself notes: “The Asher family put me up in a garret flat on the top floor, and I think this self-portrait in the mirror was taken in that room. The Ashers’ was full of interesting people and conversations, and was a very good place to write.”
Sir Paul stayed for three years and fell in love with her parents, particularly Jane’s music professor mum Margaret, who had pianos in both the attic and the basement.
I Want to Hold Your Hand, And I Love Her and We Can Work It Out were all written there. He said previously: “I loved it [at Wimpole Street] because it was such a family. Margaret and I got on very well. She sort of mothered me. It was what I’d been used to before my mum died, when I was 14, though I’d never seen a family like this. The only people I’d seen were working-class Liverpool. This was classy London: all of them had diaries that stretched from eight in the morning to six or seven at night.”
But as his career took off, so too did his opportunities with other women.
One day after Paul had moved out of Wimpole Street, Jane reportedly found him in bed with an American woman, Francie Schwartz. Jane walked out and sent her mother to collect her belongings. She later announced their engagement was over to chat-show host Simon Dee.
She said on TV: “I haven’t broken it off, but it is broken off, finished. I know it sounds corny, but we still see each other and love each other, but it hasn’t worked out. Perhaps we’ll be childhood sweethearts and meet again when we’re about 70.”
The exhibition includes a 1964 photo of bandmate George Harrison, and a girl in a yellow bikini whose head is cut off. Sir Paul said it reminded him of a “fling” he enjoyed.
He said: “In these pictures there are great little moments of remembrance.”
He recalled taking out a girl named Diane out in an open-top MG sports car on a star-lit evening in Florida.
“It was all a little bit perfect. It was all very platonic and very much a holiday fling.
“There’s a kind of youthful innocence about that period, and seeing a lot of these photos brings it back.”
Macca went on to marry Linda Eastman and Heather Mills. He is now married to Nancy McCartney. Jane married artist Gerard Scarfe in 1981.
