By the time The Beatles broke up, John Lennon and Paul McCartney were on decidedly bad terms. McCartney said that every phone call he had with Lennon devolved into shouting matches, and they spoke poorly about each other to the press. According to friend of the band, Hunter Davies, the relationship between Lennon and McCartney began to fall apart after Lennon met Yoko Ono. He felt far more connected to her than he did to his bandmate.
John Lennon and Paul McCartney’s relationship grew more distant
In the latter half of the 1960s, Lennon grew increasingly disinterested in The Beatles and his marriage to Cynthia Lennon. Davies, who spent time at Lennon’s home during this time, said Lennon was utterly listless.
“He was pretty bored being a Beatle, but he couldn’t actually think of anything else he wanted to do with his life,” Davies wrote in the book The Beatles. “It was obvious during the time I spent at his home, where he would sit for days dreaming, saying nothing, that he was utterly bored.”
When he met Ono, however, his entire life changed.
“Then along came Yoko,” Davies wrote. “At last he had found a kindred spirit, if of a very unusual kind. John was immediately sparked into life.”
He connected so powerfully with Ono that even the shine of his most important relationships dulled. Davies believed that Lennon once viewed McCartney as a soul mate. This changed.
“He was away on a new plane, realizing at once that Paul, who until then had been his buddy, his soul mate, was in many ways as conventional as Cynthia,” Davies wrote. “Together, John and Yoko discovered new and all-consuming aims. The rest of the Beatles didn’t matter any more. When Paul came up with an idea for, say, a live TV show, John wasn’t really interested.”
By 1969, Lennon told his bandmates that he wanted to leave the group.
John Lennon once saw Paul McCartney as one of his closest confidantes
In the early 1960s, McCartney and Lennon were much closer. While Lennon had many friends, Cynthia believed he was only really close to herself, McCartney, and former Beatle Stuart Sutcliffe during this time.
“Paul was one of the three people John was closest to,” Cynthia wrote in her book John. “Although he had plenty of cronies, he only really let his guard down with Paul, me, and Stuart Sutcliffe.”
He saw another former Beatle as a soulmate
Sutcliffe was only a member of The Beatles for a short time, but he was an extremely close friend of Lennon’s. Sutcliffe’s sudden death in 1962 deeply shook Lennon.
“John went into hysterics,” Kirchherr said, per The New Yorker. “We couldn’t make out . . . whether he was laughing or crying because he did everything at once. I remember him sitting on a bench, huddled over, and he was shaking, rocking backward and forward.”
Ono said that “there was not a period in our lives” when Lennon did not speak often of Sutcliffe. He thought they were “soulmates.”
