#he didnt love yoko and he certainly didnt love her enough to tell her in so much as a video call where he was going or what he was doing

[howaboutalittlehelpneos]

Sadfunny part is he very much did ask to get manhandled into a different dimension. That mf walked into that dimensional transporter after 13 yr old Ceo is like "Dont do anything" and he didnt even leave behind a note.

Real and true, he doesn't even Talk to his wife when he finally comes back and only focuses on Yuya, like. Hello. Your hot wife is right there. Can you at least look at her.

[amoralto]

so paul always says now that hes grateful he and john reconciled before john's death, but ive always sort of wondered if they really did or if paul was saying that more as a coping mechanism. i mean, obviously we'll never know what happened in private, but based on what they were saying about each other in the press in 1980 they didnt seem so reconciled as paul claims. also, whenever paul refers to they getting along, he always uses the same "making bread phone call" ex.. as if its the only one

There are a variety of things I could bring up in the answering of this, but I think part of your question hinges upon your own definition of reconciliation, specific to John and Paul’s relationship, and how their actions square up within it. If it can only be adjudged reconciliation by an unequivocal reestablishment of their songwriting partnership, then they were never reconciled. If it can only be adjudged reconciliation if there was a singularly defined watershed moment of unadorned emotional clarity from whence they never ever said a remotely negative thing about each other in the press again ever, then they were certainly never reconciled. So how and where does one measure it? The least I can argue is that while John and Paul consciously uncoupled, they were never really emotionally estranged or emotionally uninvolved; they never even managed to go without communicating with each other for a third as long as that other ardently involved partnership, Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, did. And it would be inimical to dismiss the depth and involvement of their relationship and the strength of their emotional ties to each other based on whatever ugly sentiments that were communicated and disproportionately amplified in public, especially when said sentiments are actually a glaring demonstration of how much they were not Over Each Other.

… They were never indifferent about each other, is what I’m saying. Half of what I say is meaningless, but I say it just to reach you.

(Well, John probably did perceive Paul’s no-comment-trucking-right-along manner of dealing with things as blissfully unconcerned indifference to and in comparison to his own markedly ostentatious divorce pangs, but that’s another issue for another time.) 

(More under the cut because this response got interminable.) 

Anyway, I think what you’re really getting at is whether Paul himself knows and/or sincerely believes they were on good terms at the point of John’s death, or wanted and willed himself to believe they were, and I would say that it’s a measure of both. John’s death left him grief-stricken and reeling and calling every exchange he’d had with John, spoken and unspoken, into question, and this was after his emotional security (with John and with himself) had already been significantly unseated by the Beatles’ break-up. (I’ve always found it striking that in Many Years From Now he describes much of his life as “filled with guilt and the knowledge that you’re probably not right”; indeed, one could reasonably read some of his more candid interview responses as basically him convincing himself or rationalising to himself out loud.) Even if their exchanges in John’s last years were entirely sunny and tension-free, I don’t think anything short of Unadorned Emotional Clarity (as previously phrased) between them matured over years of concentrated effort and growth and honest communication of each other’s most vulnerable feelings would have prevented Paul from feeling that doubt. Even if the doubt was ultimately unfounded. I think the doubt, tempered over time and reflection, became regret - not a questioning of the bond between them, but how he and John conveyed its importance to each other: If I never did it / I was only waiting / For a better moment / That didn’t come. From Dan Rather’s 48 Hours interview with Paul: 

PAUL: Late at night, or when you’re feeling good, or… I don’t know, you think, oh, it’d be great to – I hope I tell her ‘I love her’ enough, and all that. And then come the morning and you’ve got to get off to the office, and you say [in a hurry], “Goodbye, love you!” And life’s like that. And there’s never enough time – if you like your parents, for instance – to tell them, god, you know, just what you meant to me.

You always think, well, I’m saving it up. I’ll tell them one day. And what happens with a lot of people, with someone like John for instance, getting back to that subject – he died. I was lucky, the last few wee– uh, months that he was alive, we’d manage to get our relationship back on track and we were talking, and we were having real good conversations, really nice and friendly. But George actually… didn’t, I don’t think, got his relationship right. I think they were arguing right until the end, which I’m sure is a source of great sadness to him. And I’m sure, you know, in the feeling of this song, that George was always planning to tell John he loved him. But time ran out. And so that’s what the song is about, you know. There never could be a better moment than this one. Now. Take this moment to say… I love you. [laughs] It isn’t quite the same.

‘This One’ may apply perfectly well to George’s feelings towards John too, I suppose, but. Well. #projecting onto George (Other quotes from Paul about ‘This One’ here and here.)

(Anyway, I think it’s more than fair to say that both John and Paul were spectacularly incapable of talking about their feelings for each other with each other in an explicit and undeniable way. But we could always sing.)

As for the bread-baking story, it is merely one in an arsenal of Paul’s rinse-and-repeat anecdotes for the ages; it is a vetted and unambiguous little yarn which is positive and, perhaps most importantly, prevents further enquiry. It is quick and quaint, and that is very much to Paul’s liking, considering how many interviews he’s scheduled to do on a daily basis and how much of his life he is necessarily comfortable with broaching in public. That this is the anecdote he has decided on to trot out from interview to interview is in no way evidentiary of an absence of any other phone calls, conversations, and/or interactions in general with John up to his death. 

Paul actually has, in interviews past, spoken of the contents of other calls he and John had, and been honest about their fickleness and the fact that it was just as likely to end badly as it was to end well. But at not just the end of the day, but in the every day, why waste words when you can concentrate on the memories fond rather than the memories unfavourable? Which, as most people would be able to attest, is not at all unusual for anyone who’s lost a loved one, and which for Paul is certainly not an outlook maintained exclusively for his history with John. He’s always accentuated the positive. 

And for all that he can at times be an inarticulate emotional disaster traipsing the canyons of his mind in Freudian slippers, Paul has by and large been practiced and reticent in public, whether by actively evading discussion of the not necessarily unhappier but certainly heavier times in his life, or by self-consciously blunting any imbued emotional weight with the words he chooses. An obvious example is when he recounts one of the first things Yoko told him after John died. He opted for a benign “fond of” throughout 1982, like in his April/May Music Express interview:

I talked to Yoko the day after John was killed and the first thing she said was, ‘John was really fond of you, you know.’ It was almost as if she sensed that I was wondering whether he had… whether the relationship had snapped. I believe it was always there. I believe he really was fond of me, as she said. We were really the best of mates. It was really ace.

Or his May 3rd Newsweek interview:

I’ve talked to Yoko since then, and she’s said to me, ‘You know, he really was quite fond of you.’ I think we were pretty close. But, sometimes, with brothers, you argue. They can be the most intense arguments, too.

In Paul’s October 19th 1984 CBC interview he’s unwound enough to say “love”, which I suspect is what Yoko really told him:

And I know that when he died that was one of the great things Yoko did for me, was that she took me aside and said, “You know, he did love you.” She was gracious enough to do that for me. So that was great.

But then in Paul and Linda’s December 1984 Playboy interview, there’s actually an indicated hesitant pause before he settles for “really liked”: 

PLAYBOY: Once you began to understand Yoko, Paul, did you two talk about John?PAUL: Yes. We did. In fact, after he died, the thing that helped me the most, really, was talking to Yoko about it. She volunteered the information that he had… really liked me.

And as a further example of what Paul chooses to tell and what he chooses to withhold, in a 1989 BBC radio interview he mentions something else Yoko told him after John died - imbued with emotional weight, no less - which I can’t recall him ever mentioning in any other interview:

And I heard, in fact, little bits from Yoko, who was kind of nice enough after he’d died to sort of clue me in on that. Realising, perhaps, that those w– would be the kind of things that would hang me up, forever. “Did he, or didn’t he… hate what I did?” And she said some very nice things. She told me once that he’d sat her down with one of my albums, and they’d be sat down, and he’d be having a bit of a cry about it, and he’d be saying, “Ah… you know, I – I like him, really.”

In any case, it’s Paul’s prerogative to keep himself to himself. I am very certain there are many things, both good and bad, that he keeps close to his chest and that the general public will not be privy to for a long time, if at all. (He is large, he contains multitudes, etc.) 

As for John’s side of things re: negative comments made about Paul to the press in 1980, I touched upon them briefly in a previous ask. To end off, Dave Sholin’s account of the car ride he shared with John and Yoko after the conclusion of his interview with them, a few hours before John was killed: 

‘So John is saying, “Well, our car isn’t here. You’re going to the airport, would you mind giving us a ride?” I said, “Hop on in.” And on the way, I ask him about his relationship with Paul McCartney. He says, “Well, he’s like a brother. I love him. Families – we certainly have our ups and downs and our quarrels. But at the end of the day, when it’s all said and done, I would do anything for him, I think he would do anything for me.” And we said our goodbyes and dropped John and Yoko off at the studio.’ 

And from Dave Sholin’s interview with John: John talking about ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’ and meeting Paul for the first time (and in an instance of sweet and charming misremembering, claiming that he asked Paul right there and then to join him).