Not long before Paul McCartney married his first wife, he was suggesting a wedding to someone else: John Lennon’s ex-wife, Cynthia. Lennon had recently ended their marriage, and Cynthia was left reeling. McCartney was also going through a break up at the time, and he visited her. She said that McCartney jokingly suggested marriage to her and that his visit actually improved her mood.
Cynthia Lennon said she was left reeling from her divorce
In 1968, Lennon ended his marriage to Cynthia after over a decade together. She was left stunned and upset.
“For the next few weeks, I lived like a hermit at Kenwood, concentrating on my son,” she wrote in her book John. “I went to meetings with lawyers and came home drained and sad, but apart from that I barely went out. John’s clothes were still in our wardrobe and I hated lying alone in our bed. I cried myself to sleep most nights, then woke in the early hours and lay awake, trying to understand what had gone so wrong.”
Her mother and friend came to live with her for the time, but otherwise she felt extremely isolated. Lennon, it seemed, had told the rest of The Beatles to steer clear of her.
“I lost a lot of weight, unable to face eating,” she wrote. “Mum and Dot were there, keeping an eye on me, and I was grateful not to be alone. But apart from them I saw or heard from hardly another soul. It seemed that John had cut me off not just from him but from the whole Beatles family.”
Paul McCartney jokingly suggested that they get married
McCartney was the only person to visit her during this time, and she was extremely grateful for it.
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“The only person who came to see me was Paul,” Cynthia wrote. “He arrived one sunny afternoon, bearing a red rose, and said, ‘I’m so sorry, Cyn. I don’t know what’s come over him. This isn’t right.’”
They spent the afternoon together and McCartney even jokingly suggested marriage. His longtime girlfriend had recently ended their relationship, so he and Cynthia were able to commiserate over heartbreak.
“[Paul] joked about us getting married — ‘How about it, Cyn?’ — and I was grateful to him for cheering me up and caring enough to come,” she wrote. “He was the only member of the Beatles family who’d had the courage to defy John — who had apparently made it quite clear that he expected everyone to follow his lead in cutting me off.”
Paul McCartney met the woman he married soon after this
Not long after he visited Cynthia and suggested marriage, McCartney met Linda Eastman, the woman he ended up marrying.
“He drove off, promising to keep in touch, but a month or two later he got together with American photographer Linda Eastman and his life began a new phase,” Cynthia wrote. “It was many years before we met again.”
McCartney married Linda in 1969, and they remained together until her death in 1998.
