#Yoko thinking she’s in the clear after he leaves Cynthia and Julian

[thewalrusespublicist]

Thinking once again about Yoko’s ‘if he was a woman he would be a great threat’ line. Oh Yoko hun, he was the twist villain all along wasn’t he?

[no-reply95]

Hi! In one of your latest posts (about J/P shares) you mention in the tags a 'tart' issue you also find fascinating--since I never heard of this, could you please elaborate? I like reading analyses like that. Thank you!

Hi anon, thanks for the ask :)

Yes I did mention that I find the "Jap tart" incident similarly fascinating to the issue of Paul's purchase of 1,000 Northern Songs shares, in that I feel that their importance may be overblown by Beatles authorship as a way of explaining the anger John directed at Paul in the immediate aftermath of the breakup announcement in 1970.

There's only one source for the "J*p tart" incident and that's Francie Schwartz, who worked at Apple in 1968 and was in a relationship with Paul in the spring/summer of 1968. Francie was staying at Cavendish with Paul when he decided to let John and Yoko stay with him, while they were sorting out somewhere to live after leaving Julian and Cynthia to stay at Kenwood. Francie's account of the incident is outlined below:

“John obviously loved Paul enough to let him run wild if it would help ease the tension Paul was creating in the studio and at home. Yoko could see it too. But Paul was treating them like shit too. He even sent them a hate letter once, unsigned, typed. I brought it in with the morning mail. Paul put most of his fan mail in a big basket and let it sit for weeks, but John and Yoko opened every piece. When they got to the anonymous note, they looked puzzled, looking at each other with genuine pain in their eyes. ‘You and your Jap tart think you’re hot shit’, it said. John put it on the mantle, and in the afternoon, Paul hopped in, prancing much the same self-conscious way he did when we met. ‘Oh I just did that for a lark…’ he said in his most sugar-coated accent. It was embarrassing. The three of us swivelled around, staring at him. You could see the pain in John. Yoko simply rose above it, feeling only sympathy for John. I was sad to see the Lennons go, even though it took the pressure off of Paul.”

Francie Schwartz, Body Count, 1972

So if we assume that Francie's account is accurate and Paul did write a racist note to John and Yoko while they were staying with him, that would be a big deal and a clear example of the Beatles (in this case Paul) being racist towards John and Yoko and making it impossible for John to stay in the band, how could he if his supposed best friend and songwriting partner is being racist towards the love of his life? But apparently that's exactly what happened. We don't know if Paul apologised, if the incident was ever addressed between John, Yoko and Paul or anything at all, aside from what Francie said, because this incident has never been publicly discussed by John, Yoko or Paul.

Similarly to the Northern Songs shares discrepancy, the J*p tart incident is usually mentioned as one of the big flashpoints in John and Paul's relationship in the latter years of the Beatles but it's never explored beyond that. If we're meant to believe that these were such huge issues for John that seriously damaged the closeness of his relationship to Paul, then why did John never mention the J*p tart incident, and in the over 50 years since this incident was supposed to have taken place, Yoko has also never mentioned it. When Yoko was being interviewed by Phillip Norman for his John Lennon The Life book, he asked her directly why she and John left Cavendish and this incident wasn't mentioned. So I think that, if this incident happened, it didn't happen the way Francie described it, otherwise I can't believe that John, in the state that he was in when he sat for the Lennon Remembers interview with Rolling Stone, or in any of the correspondence he sent to Paul in 1971, didn't mention this incident as one of the prime examples of the crap he and Yoko had to put up with from the Beatles and to show that they were the victims of racism from "their beast friends" and had no choice but to get out of that toxic environment.

I think, irrespective of whether the J*p tart incident happened at all, it is indicative of the way the authorship is more focused on flashpoints of tension, rather than on the underlying issues where we actually do have evidence, from the principles, of these issues' significance. Take Eleanor Rigby for instance. I think the issue surrounding the writing of Eleanor Rigby is fascinating on so many levels, not just because of the fact it's one of only two majorly disputed Lennon/McCartney songs (along with In My Life which I discussed in another post here) but because of the underlying issues highlighted in that incident. John was upset that Paul, rather than coming directly to him for help on the lyrics, had introduced it in front of George, Ringo, Pete Shotten, Mal Evans and Neil Aspinall and everyone was chipping in with suggestions, except for John. Paul's insensitivity toward the exclusivity of the Lennon/McCartney partnership came up repeatedly during the Beatle years (Yesterday, Eleanor Rigby, The Family Way, Magical Mystery Tour, Why Don't We Do It In The Road etc.) and is something John mentioned as hurtful during the 1980 Playboy interview, almost a decade and a half after the fact.

I think the authorship needs to stop focusing all their attention on shiny objects like the Northern Songs share issue and the J*p tart incident, not because we should ignore them, but because I think these one-off incidents, that evidently John and Yoko themselves could barely remember a few short years later, don't actually get to the heart of why the Lennon/McCartney relationship, and the Beatles along with it, unravelled. I think issues like the writing of Eleanor Rigby are closer to the heart of the issues between John and Paul so, again, the fact that John himself chose to publicly express his hurt over Paul's insensitivity regarding Eleanor Rigby, Magical Mystery Tour, Why Don't We Do It In The Road etc. tells me that those were the issues that John was holding on to long after the breakup, so those should be the issues we should really be focusing on if we want to get closer to the truth of what really happened between John and Paul.