178: Influential Women, Part 3–Jane Asher

Of all the people in the Beatles’ inner circle, Jane Asher is perhaps the most mysterious.

Not because she’s reclusive–far from it, in fact. Jane Asher has spent lots of time on stage and on screens large and small from the time she was a  child. But other than newspaper and magazine articles, and maybe a few video clips which survive from the 1960s, there isn’t a lot of first-hand knowledge about her relationship with Paul McCartney.

For about five years she was his girlfriend, and she had a front-row view of the beginnings of Beatlemania, the madness of touring, the changes in the band’s sound, the death of Brian Epstein, the psychedelic period, even the visit to India. But she finds it insulting when people ask her about those days. And even though she’s written several books, both fiction and non-fiction, none of them are about The Beatles. She may be the only person who’s had prolonged contact with the band who hasn’t written a book about it.

But Paul McCartney, tunesmith that he is, wrote several songs about Jane Asher. In later years, he’d mostly concede only that they were songs of a personal nature rather than saying something like “It’s about Jane,” possibly as a means of respecting both her and his late wife Linda, but a pretty straight line can be drawn between some of the events in their respective lives and the subject matter of his songs.

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