When John Lennon and Paul McCartney Took Their Last Photo Together
Four years after the Beatles split, he public feuding between Paul McCartney and John Lennon had reached a detente. They resumed their friendship, tentatively, in late March. That led directly to the last-ever pictures taken of them together, on April 1, 1974.
A few days before, McCartney and wife Linda had stopped by Burbank Studios in Los Angeles, where Lennon was producing Harry Nilsson’s Pussy Cats. It was a coke-fueled jam session, with Stevie Wonder, Bobby Keys, Jesse Ed Davis and everybody else in the studio joining in the fun, even if the music they made, which can be heard on bootleg records, was underwhelming.
Still, it was the only time the two former Beatles recorded music together after their breakup.
On April 1, the McCartneys stopped by a Santa Monica beach house Lennon was renting during his drunken, 18-month "Lost Weekend" period while separated from Yoko Ono. Two pictures – which you can see right here – were taken and then later published by May Pang, Lennon's girlfriend at the time, in her 2008 book Instamatic Karma: Photographs of John Lennon.
One features Lennon and McCartney sitting on a couch and chatting; another shows the two of them standing about a foot apart, with Nilsson in the foreground and Linda’s back to the camera. A third shot was taken by Keith Moon’s assistant Dougal Butler, and includes Moon talking to McCartney while Lennon looks off in the distance.
That beach house, at 625 Palisades Beach Road, has a history of its own: The 6,400-square foot, five-bedroom house was built in 1936 by movie mogul Louis B. Mayer and was later bought by Rat Pack member Peter Lawford. Reportedly, it's where John F. Kennedy, whose sister Patricia was Lawford’s wife, and Marilyn Monroe had their affair. The house was last sold in 1978 for $862,000; its worth was more recently estimated at $7.6 million.
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