It’s weird how much Jane Asher has vanished from the Beatles narrative. She wrote herself out, of course, and good for her - but several generations of fan and professional Beatle storytellers have done the same. Post-breakup, John-centric narratives sidelined Paul and therefore Jane. Paul edits her out of his story. I think Tumblr lowkey sees Paul/Jane as a notp, and tends to park her in Bristol. More recent journalists don’t pay her much attention, particularly since her fame/career is British rather than international.
So it’s strange to go back to 1960s sources, where Jane is by far the most visible Beatlemania-era partner. And she took up space! Leaving her out means there’s a big piece of the jigsaw missing.
Pete Townshend remembers Jane as “well-bred, polite and astonishingly pretty; behind the demure exterior simmered a strong personality, making her the equal of her famous beau.” Which is pretty much how everyone describes her. When Paul, Jane, Ringo and Maureen went on holiday to Greece in 1963, Ringo said, “I remember we walked around the Parthenon three times, probably to please Jane”.
You can see that assertiveness in interviews. Here she is, telling Michael Braun in 1963 that Paul was an idiot to encourage her to hide away in a Paris hotel, rather than going out sightseeing (plus frank commentary on his personality flaws): “‘That’s typical of Paul,’ she remarked. ‘It’s so silly of me to stay at the hotel. It’s just that he’s so insecure. For instance, he keeps saying he’s not interested in the future, but he must be because he says it so often. The trouble is, he wants the fans’ adulation and mine too. He’s so selfish; it’s his biggest fault. He can’t see that my feelings for him are real and that the fans’ are fantasy.’”
This is the period when the Beatles were hiding John’s marriage from fans, and smuggling Pattie and Cynthia out of hotels in maids’ uniforms and laundry baskets. Jane: not putting up with this shit.
I’d guess that some of Jane’s confidence came from class privilege and a successful career (though Pattie had those too). Unlike Pattie, Jane had a very supportive family background, particularly her mother. Which made me think of George, who also had a very supportive mum, and of Paul’s fond description of George taking no shit, refusing to do things he didn’t want to do. (It was from the Carpool Karaoke filming - I’ll add the link if I can find it.) He does seem to admire people who can cut to the point without getting tangled up in verbal or emotional knots. And, given how conflict-avoidant he could be, it’s striking that he had a long-term relationship with someone who spoke her mind this much and this bluntly. It makes me wonder about Paul’s various argument songs with Jane: what did she think of them? Because I am 100% certain that she told him.
Here she is, photographed by Dezo Hoffman in 1963:
It’s a photograph that shows her as one of the gang, in on the joke with the glasses, relaxed and casually dressed. It reminds me of George Martin’s account of coming round to get them to record in Paris, and finding Jane pouring out tea. She’s hanging out with them, not waiting on the sidelines.
Refusing to give up her career is probably the best-known thing about Jane - but from a 21st-century perspective, it’s easy to overlook how unusual she was for doing it. This isn’t just about Paul, or the sexist pop world, or the “Northern men” stereotypes usually invoked here. I recently saw a 1960s documentary asking a group of successful young women how they saw work, sex, and relationships - including journalist Maureen Cleave, actress Sarah Miles, ballerina Moira Shearer. It was very clear that second wave feminism hadn't happened yet. Most of them said they expected to stop working when they marry, to prioritise their husbands’ careers and wishes, to marry men who would take the lead and make most of the decisions. But Jane wasn’t doing any of that. Again, she credited her family for it, telling Hunter Davies: “I've been brought up to be always doing something.” (At 80, she is still working.)
Other rock star wives and girlfriends seem to have found her slightly intimidating. Maureen called her “such an intelligent person” but noted: “Paul is such an assertive fellow (you know) he knows what he wants and Jane is that way too.” In her second book, mentioning Jane prompts Marianne Faithfull to consider all the ways she downplayed her own career to accommodate Mick Jagger. Pattie remembered Jane as “the girlfriend with whom I felt most at home,” since they were both posh Londoners, “but because we both had heavy work commitments she was also the one I saw least.” (Incidentally, Jane wasn’t too busy to become good friends with Cilla Black, one of the few women in this circle who emphatically prioritised her own career.)
Pattie told Hunter Davies that the four Beatles “all belong to each other… It used to hurt me at first, as I slowly began to learn there was a part I could never be part of. Cyn talked to me about it.” According to Tony Barrow, Jane wasn’t having that: “She said that Paul acted differently towards her when he was with the boys: ‘I don’t want to be part of a gang. I want to feel that it’s the two of us going through life together.’”
I have mixed feelings about those two quotes! Jane’s is a valid thing to want from a long-term romantic partner, but realistically, it’s very very difficult to do that when he’s a Beatle. Pattie’s “they all belong to each other” reminds me of the four Beatles saying how glad they were they had each other, that only four people in the world had this experience. Once they’d gone through that, they did all belong to each other. So it’s complicated, and they both have a point. But after reading Pattie, Cynthia, even Marianne’s accounts of making themselves smaller, holding their tongues, it’s a joy to see Jane refusing to let Beatledom govern her life.
She took up space. She stuck to her guns. As Davies puts it, “Paul and Jane have more time together, on their own, than probably the other Beatle couples. They do get away together, to places like their Scottish home, thanks to Jane.”
That presents it as Jane’s doing, but I suspect Paul valued it, too. He both loved and pulled back from the four-headed monster of the Beatles: he didn’t want to live in the stockbroker belt, he thought the Beatle Island in Greece would be a nightmare. Where John was often eager to merge identities, Paul feared losing himself. He wanted closeness to John and the other Beatles, he wanted the group to go on forever, but he also wanted space. I think Jane helped him take it.
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