Everywhere I go I hear it said

Paul McCartney backstage in Philadelphia, 1966.

When a pair from the London offices of the US magazine Life—writer Dorothy Bacon and photographer Terence Spencer—flew to Scotland, schlepping all the way to High Park to get a reaction about the death rumors, McCartney’s anger boiled over.

It was a Sunday morning in late October and Paul, unsurprisingly, was still in bed. The Life duo had cannily assumed that this would be a good time to catch the McCartneys at home and that their journey was less likely to be hindered by interfering local farmers. Intrepidly, they hoofed up to High Park from the main road, trudging across the field for close to an hour.

Arriving at the door of the farmhouse, Bacon knocked. Paul, having got up as soon as he realized what was going on outside, jerked the door open, a bucket of slop from the McCartneys’ rudimentary kitchen in one hand. He was unshaven, his hair an early Beatles mop top grown out and gone pinappleishly unkempt. His face was beet red with fury. Spencer raised his camera to take a shot.

“I threw the bucket at him,” Paul says. “It was nearly the cover of Life.”

The bucket flew past the photographer’s head, but Spencer had got the shot and Paul knew it. Enraged, he stepped forward and punched the snapper on the shoulder. Having covered six wars and experienced nothing in the way of physical violence until faced with a raging Beatle, the startled Spencer said to Bacon, “I think we’ve run out of our hospitality.” The pair turned tail and quickly marched away.

Alone, calming down, Paul reflected on what had just happened. He’d utterly lost his cool, and now the photographer definitely had a shot of him looking furious and demented. Ever the PR man, Paul realized he had to try to mend the situation if the shot wasn’t to appear on the cover of Life and in the world’s papers thereafter, making him look like a lunatic.

Bacon and Spencer, meanwhile, were shaken but happy enough: they had pictorial proof that McCartney was still alive.

As they made their way back down the farm track, the McCartneys’ Land Rover, with Paul, Linda, and the kids inside, pulled up behind them. Spencer was initially afraid, saying to Bacon, “For God’s sake, be careful, because that man is mad.”

But it was an altogether more amiable and contrite Paul who emerged from the Land Rover, apologizing, proffering a handshake, and offering, in return for the roll of film containing the offending snap, to give a short interview and, albeit still reluctantly, to have his photograph taken with the family.

“We agreed to pose on the Land Rover,” he remembers. “But I was definitely not in posing mode.”

A slightly haunted-looking image of the McCartneys made the cover of Life dated November 7, 1969, along with the accompanying splash “The Case of the ‘Missing’ Beatle: Paul Is Still with Us.” In the shot, one of two that would illustrate the piece, Paul appears bed-headed and morning rough, his left arm curled protectively around a wind-blown Linda, his right cradling baby Mary, as in front of him, Heather, perhaps sensing her parents’ hostility toward these unannounced visitors, wields a walking stick like a club. In the second, the family is arranged on the front bumper of the Land Rover, Paul trying to appear upbeat, raising his hand in an open, friendly gesture as Linda nuzzles his neck.

In the interview, he addressed the Paul Is Dead rumors. “It is all bloody stupid,” he said. “Perhaps the rumor started because I haven’t been much in the press lately. I don’t have anything to say these days. I am happy to be with my family and I will work when I  work. I was switched on for ten years and I never switched off. Now I am switching off whenever I can. I would rather be a little less famous these days.

“The people who are making up these rumors should look to themselves a little more,” he went on. “They should worry about themselves instead of worrying whether I am dead or not.

“I would rather do what I began doing, which is making music. But the Beatle thing is over. It has been exploded, partly by what we have done, and partly by other people

“What I have to say is all in the music,” he concluded. “If I want to say anything, I write a song. Can you spread it around that I am just an ordinary person and want to live in peace? We have to go now. We have two children at home.”

Upon publication, the piece appeared to lay to rest the ghosts of the Paul Is Dead furor, although in some heads the doubts and conspiracies rumble on to this day.

One crucial point that was completely missed, however: the fact that Paul had let slip that “the Beatle thing is over.” Life had in fact got the world exclusive that the former Fabs had secretly imploded. But, amid all the fuss, no one even noticed.