Has Paul ever told the real story of hearing about John's death...? | Page 3 | Fab Forum | The Beatles Bible

Ron Nasty said
Good to see you, @Little Piggy Dragonguy.

Why it interests me is because John is often criticised for presenting a distorted version of the reality but Paul does just the same with little, if any, criticism. This is just one of the more questionable, along with if Here, There And Everywhere  was praised by John during the filming of Help !, for which there’s lots of proof it wasn’t written until around May-July of the following year, and his story about The Beatles refusing to go to America until they had a #1 there, despite the fact that their February 1964 visit was arranged before Capitol had agreed to release I Want To Hold Your Hand  – their booked Sullivan shows being one of the arguments used to persuade Capitol to get behind them.

I also think it’s interesting from the point of view that Yoko said he was one of her first two calls after John’s death was confirmed.

By denying that call happened, and that he heard from his manager while Linda was on the school run, throws Yoko’s account of what she did into question, which I think matters.

  

Paul’s version makes sense to me.  John died 11:30-ish PM NY Time.  NY is 5 hours behind London.  So that was already around 4:30 am UK time.  I doubt Yoko was calling him from the hospital right that second. I really do, someone dies the first you do isn’t running to pay phone to make a transatlantic call and probably not insisting the hospital let you use their non-pay phones to make a transatlantic call. There would be things to be dealt with at the hospital, even if she was able to leave fairly quickly, maybe the police would have asked a few brief questions or at least spoken to her about arranging to get her witness statement at a later time.  Plus just the sheer horror of having seen her husband killed.

So it makes sense to me that Paul would have gotten an early morning call from his manager telling him John had died as opposed “in the middle of the night”.  It was already the early morning hours UK time when John died and I would imagine it was at least another couple hours before Yoko was making any phone calls to Paul.   Maybe Linda wasn’t actually on the school run, depending on what time school started(I remember leaving for school pretty early in middle and high school in the US, there were definitely times we were out of the house by 6:30), I don’t know but it would be very easy for his manager to have been informed by someone who had heard the news and given Paul a call before Yoko did under those circumstances I think.