Paul McCartney (56 page)

Years later, when the baby peeping from inside his coat was a grown woman, he would confess to her how parting from the Beatles left him feeling ‘very insecure, very paranoid, very out of work, very useless… I nearly had a breakdown, I suppose… [from] the hurt of it all and the disappointment… the sorrow of losing that great band… those great friends’. The poor reviews for his solo album debut fuelled a conviction–aged 27–that ‘I’d outlived my usefulness’.

He recalled how, taking refuge in Scotland once again, he developed ‘all the classic symptoms of the unemployed, the redundant man’, too depressed to get up in the mornings, no longer troubling to shave or change clothes. He began to chain-smoke, both legal and illegal cigarettes, and turned to whisky–his father’s favourite tipple–reaching for the bottle as soon as he awoke.

The dreams that once had given him ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Let It Be’ became haunted by Allen Klein in the guise of a demonic dentist, trying to plunge a hypodermic into him; as his song ‘Every Night’ on McCartney had revealed, he would lie in bed shaking uncontrollably, his head too heavy to raise from the pillow. Hard drugs also began to beckon. He would recall how ‘a friend’ (gallery-owner and smack-addict Robert Fraser) had told him. ‘“You’ll be all right. You wrote ‘Yesterday’, so you’ll always be able to pay for your heroin,” and for half a second I almost listened.’

It was, in any case, a tense time for Linda, with two young children to care for in the primitive conditions of High Park Farm. Having known Paul only as an all-powerful, all-conquering pop god, she found the change in him–as she later admitted–‘scary beyond belief’. ‘I was impossible… I don’t know how anyone could have lived with me,’ he would recall. ‘I was on the scrap-heap in my own eyes… it was a barrelling, empty feeling that just rolled across my soul.’

Yet through the darkest of these days, Linda remained imperturbably calm and unshakably supportive, never hinting at the anxiety she felt, merely telling him in her laid-back hippy way not to let it all make him too crazy. Unlike John, he did not turn himself over to some modish therapist, but toughed it out, ‘hiding in the Scottish mists’, his only medications ‘home, family and love’. ‘She just sort of eased me out of it,’ he would remember with lifelong gratitude.

Aside from Linda and the children, and the miraculous peace of Kintyre’s hills and lochs, his main therapy was the DIY for which he’d always had so surprising an aptitude. Clad in his favourite indigo velvet trousers and rubber boots, he single-handedly tackled High Park Farm’s most urgent needs, laying a new concrete floor in the kitchen and scaling a ladder to plug the ever-recurring holes in the roof.

Linda had become an expert horsewoman during her years in Arizona. The last time Paul had sat on a horse, not very comfortably, was for the ‘Penny Lane’ video in 1967, but now he began to learn how in earnest, rediscovering the love of horses he’d felt as a small boy, watching the stately police mounts exercise in the field behind 20 Forthlin Road. Soon he was skilled enough to join Linda in cowboy-style control of the sheep, both their own and their neighbours’, which covered the surrounding hills. ‘Paul’s a great rider,’ Linda said in a rare radio interview. ‘We round up the sheep on the horses and cook ’em ourselves.’ Vegetarianism was still some way off yet.

Back in London, however, hard realities needed to be faced; the kind Paul had avoided for most of his adult life. No longer was he surrounded by an organisation dedicated to shielding him and smoothing his path, with minions at his beck and call around the clock. ‘It was just Paul, Linda and me,’ John Eastman says. Against the combined forces of Apple and ABKCO, ‘I only had the sweat of my brow. I was terrified that my client was going to get pulled under.

‘Paul said John wanted a meeting, so late one night we went along to see him and Klein, who was staying in the Harlequin Suite at the Dorchester. When we walked in, the place was full of their lawyers–but there were just three of us and I knew we were going to get slaughtered. Playing for time, I went into the bathroom, where I noticed this big blue glass jar full of suppositories. I took it out into the suite and said, “Who do these belong to?” “Oh, they’re mine,” Klein said. “Allen,” I said, “I always thought you were a perfect asshole”–and we got out of there as fast as the Road Runner.’

The gold-spinning youth who’d been a millionaire at 23 was even starting to have money worries. Under the Beatles’ ten-year partnership agreement, binding until 1977, all proceeds from projects by individual band members automatically went into the communal coffers. Klein had refused Eastman’s repeated request for Paul to have a separate income stream: his earnings from McCartney were thus locked away as securely as his Beatle ones, and he and Linda were having to live on her savings.

Right at the beginning, John Eastman says, he’d told Klein that Paul would be happy to walk away from the Beatles with his 25 per cent of their fortune. ‘Klein agreed to that, but afterwards I could never pin him down to talk about it any further.’

Now Paul wrote to John, pleading that they should ‘let each other out of the trap’. John’s response was a postcard of Yoko and himself, with a hand-drawn bubble saying ‘How and why?’ ‘How? By dissolving our partnership,’ Paul wrote back. ‘Why? Because there is no partnership.’ John replied that if George and Ringo were also in favour, he’d think about it, but there the correspondence ended.

When it was clear that no informal settlement could be reached, John Eastman and his wife, Jodie, went to stay with Paul and Linda in Scotland, and Eastman set out the legal options. Paul wanted to sue Allen Klein, but as his brother-in-law pointed out, Klein had not been party to any of the Apple agreements which were tying him down. The only viable course, Eastman said, was a lawsuit to dissolve the partnership. ‘I told him it had to be in the British High Court, framed as Paul McCartney versus John Lennon, George Harrison and Ringo Starr. It was a terrible step for him to take against people he’d been friends with since he was a kid.’

He took a few days to think it over while his lawyer made doubly sure there was no alternative. ‘A week later, I went back and he asked me if it really was the only way,’ Eastman recalls. ‘I said, “Yes–or you lose everything.”

‘“Okay,” he said, “pull the trigger.” And from then on, he never wavered.’

‘It was almost as if I was committing an unholy act’

Paul’s legal action was launched on New Year’s Eve 1970, in the Chancery division of the High Court in London. A writ issued in his name against the other three Beatles and Apple Corps sought ‘a declaration that the partnership business carried on by the plaintiff and the defendants under the name of the Beatles and Co., and constituted by a deed of partnership dated 19 April, 1967, ought to be dissolved and that accordingly the same be dissolved’.

In an accompanying personal affidavit, Paul said he’d been ‘driven to make this application because (a) the Beatles have long since ceased to perform as a group, (b) the defendants have sought to impose on me a manager who is unacceptable to me, (c) my artistic freedom is liable to be interfered with as long as the partnership continues and (d) no partnership accounts have been prepared since the Deed of Partnership was entered into’.

His writ further sought the appointment of an official receiver–a measure normally adopted in bankruptcy cases–to take charge of the Beatles’ finances pending a final resolution of the case. The implication, therefore, was that Apple was insolvent and Allen Klein unfit to handle the Beatles’ finances. ‘It was the only way to get the money out of Klein’s hands,’ John Eastman says. ‘Dissolving the partnership, I knew, would be pretty straightforward, but getting a receiver in a case like that was a very rare and extreme measure. At the beginning, no British lawyer I approached would take the case.’

Eastman rose to the challenge, feeling more than his brother-in-law’s finances to be at stake. ‘I knew that if I failed, it would be the end of my career… this preppy journeyman lawyer from New York had been seen off by the British establishment. So I set out to get us the imprimatur of the British establishment.’

Though Paul’s resources at this point were anything but bottomless, Eastman persuaded one of the City of London’s most powerful and exclusive merchant banks, N.M. Rothschild, to act as his bankers in the case. ‘They agreed to do it on the basis of £1.5 million in loan stock Paul held that wasn’t due to mature for five years.’ With that unbeatable imprimatur, Eastman began to assemble a legal team headed by a newly-qualified Queen’s Counsel, or ‘silk’, named David Hirst, a libel specialist who’d never taken on a commercial brief before.

The six months the case took to prepare seemed to confirm that the Beatles’ creative partnership was no more. In that time, each of the others released an album under his own name which seemed as much a declaration of independence as McCartney had been–but enjoyed notably greater critical success.

September had brought Ringo’s second solo album, Beaucoups of Blues, actually a collection of country songs which one American critic ranked with Bob Dylan’s Nashville Skyline. In November came George’s monumental triple-disc All Things Must Pass, marrying Indian mysticism with cool mainstream rock, which, like its single, ‘My Sweet Lord’, became a global, multifaith hit.

‘All things must pass’ might have been a comment on the transience of earthly fame, even a thankful farewell to the ordeals of Beatledom, but actually had an earthier connotation. George himself compared it to recovering from constipation after years of having his songs clog up inside him while Lennon and McCartney’s enjoyed perpetual motion.

Then, in December, came John Lennon/Plastic Ono Band–produced by Phil Spector with not a mushy violin to be heard–in which John employed the techniques of his recent Primal Therapy to howl out his childhood insecurities, his final repudiation of the middle-class world into which he’d been born and his absolute commitment to Yoko. The track simply called ‘God’, which listed all that he now rejected and detested, provided yet further ammunition to John Eastman’s legal team. ‘I don’t believe in Beatles…’ he sang, almost retching on the name (and omitting its definite article as Yoko so much annoyed Paul by doing).

Not content with that, he gave a marathon interview to Rolling Stone, excoriating his former life as a Beatle and the others for their treatment of Yoko, the first instalment of which appeared just as Paul’s High Court action was launched. Time magazine combined the two stories under a headline echoing Wagner’s epic opera about the twilight of the gods: ‘Beatledammerung’. Compared with the spleen he vented throughout the rest of the interview, John’s references to Paul were strangely muted. His belated verdict on the McCartney album adopted the tone of a master sadly watching a former pupil go astray: ‘I was surprised it was so poor… I expected just a little more because if Paul and I are sort of disagreeing and I feel weak, I think he must feel strong… Not that we’ve had much physical disagreement.’

According to John, the errant pupil’s best hope was that the Plastic Ono Band’s album would ‘scare him into doing something decent and then he’ll scare me into doing something decent… I think he’s capable of great work’. After all the complaints about digs at Yoko, Linda came in for one over her family snapshots on the McCartney cover–an idea John said had been copied from Yoko and himself. ‘They do exactly what I do, a year or so later… They’re imitators, you know.’

Paul did not respond to the interview, publicly or privately, but Linda wrote John a protest letter on behalf of them both. He replied with six handwritten pages, pointedly addressed to ‘Linda and Paul’, saying that his remarks had been mild compared to the ‘shit you and the rest of my kind, unselfish friends laid on Yoko and me’, and railing against what he called Linda’s ‘petty little perversion of a mind’ and the ‘petty shit from your insane family [Lee and John Eastman]… In spite of it all’, he concluded, ‘love to you both from us two’, then added an angry PS because Linda’s letter hadn’t been addressed jointly to Yoko and him.

Calmly resolute though Paul seemed on the outside, he felt a permanent knot of anxiety in his stomach at the thought of the legal machinery he’d set in motion. ‘Not only were the Beatles, that fabbest of groups and those nicest of people, breaking up but the other three Beatles, those truest of friends of mine, were now my enemies overnight,’ he would remember. ‘I’d grown up in this group, they were my school, my family, my life… I was just trying to… keep it low-key but I couldn’t. It was either that or letting Klein have the whole thing.’

To shut out the anxiety as much as possible, he’d begun work on a new album with which he was determined to win the unqualified praise McCartney had been denied. This one was to see Linda credited jointly with him: she had collaborated on around half the tracks and was to sing harmonies throughout.

Responding to the criticisms of McCartney as too rough and home-obsessed, he decided to begin the recording in New York, using the best session musicians the city could provide. Rather than fly, he and Linda crossed the Atlantic on Cunard’s new liner, the QE2, taking Mary and Heather with them. Throughout their five-day crossing, Paul was never seen without dark glasses–a sure way of attracting notice he might otherwise have avoided in the crowded seaborne hotel. It earned him what was supposed to be a withering rebuke from a female table-neighbour in the swanky Columbia Restaurant.

‘Elizabeth Taylor’s on this boat and she doesn’t wear them,’ the woman said.

‘I’m not Elizabeth Taylor,’ Paul pointed out.

In New York, he and Linda advertised for session musicians without giving their names or the nature of the work. Six-foot-two Denny Seiwell, one of the city’s top drummers, answered a call to make ‘a demo’ at an address on the West Side. ‘It was at this brownstone house that looked as if it was about to be demolished,’ Seiwell remembers. ‘I went down into the basement, thinking I was going to get mugged at any moment, and there was Paul McCartney.’

Seiwell got the gig, along with guitarist David Spinozza (who’d later also appear on John’s Mind Games album), and the sessions duly took place at the Columbia and A&R recording studios, with supernumeraries that would include the New York Philharmonic Orchestra. Nobody would be able to say this one sounded like Paul had made it in his living-room.