After attending Brian Epstein’s dinner party to celebrate the completion of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the Beatles' bassist hit the town with some buddies. McCartney headed to Soho’s Bag O’Nails club, where he was a regular with his own table. That night, May 15, 1967, Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames were playing.
A little before McCartney showed up, a young photographer by the name of Linda Eastman had been taken to the Bag O’Nails by some of her friends, members of British rockers the Animals.
The band had finished and [Linda and the Animals] got up to either leave or go for a drink or something, and she passed our table,” McCartney told Barry Miles in Paul McCartney: Many Years From Now. “I was near the edge and stood up just as she was passing, blocking her exit. And so I said, ‘Oh, sorry. Hi. How are you? How’re you doing?’ I introduced myself, and said, ‘We’re going on to another club after this, would you like to join us?’ That was my big pulling line! Well, I’d never used it before, of course, but it worked this time! It was a fairly slim chance but it worked.”That was the first time we ever met – and then we met on and off, because I would see her if I went to New York or if she was in London.
In May 1968 Linda turned up at a press conference being given by Paul and John at a New York hotel.
‘I managed to slip him my phone number,’ she recalled later. ‘He rang me up and told me they were leaving that evening, but he’d like it if I was able to travel out to the airport with him and John. So I went out in their limousine, sandwiched between Paul and John.’
Having received Paul’s message, she’d taken the first available flight from New York to LA. ‘So immediately, Paul got me to clear away all the birds, and just locked himself in the room with her,’ says Bramwell.
Paul and Linda spent the day together on a motor boat, drinking champagne, eating bacon sandwiches, getting stoned and canoodling.