Producer (29 page)

I learned later that in order to give the restaurant a nightclub vibe, Kevin had agreed to let Ralph’s people change the entire
place around, which included moving a huge, extremely fragile, and very expensive Lalique table in the dining room that had
held large arrangements of flowers for the past fifteen years. It was dismantled under Kevin’s watchful eye, which involved
removing and saving close to a hundred delicate screws that held the table together. All in secret.

“We were up late into the night,” recalls Kevin, “moving things out of the restaurant. I held my breath when they moved the
table. Then early the next morning, the designers arrived to begin their preparations. When locals looked in to see what was
going on, we just told them we were doing a birthday party for someone who lived in town—which was true. Being
a Brit, I loved the Beatles as much as anyone and it was totally exciting for me.

“Then, on the afternoon of the event, security escalated and keeping the secret was getting harder and harder,” he recalls.
“Paul’s band needed to rehearse and to do a sound check at four thirty, and I had loads of staff members scurrying around,
preparing to serve dinner and entertain a large group of people by seven p.m. I had kept them all in the dark about the entertainment
and they were amazed when I gave the directive, ‘Okay, everybody out.’ They couldn’t believe I was sending them out in the
midst of setting up, but I had to.

“When my staff left, I pulled the blinds, closed the curtains, and Paul and his band stepped in to do a sound check. I heard
later that people in the street figured they were hearing a Paul McCartney impersonator, and they walked on by. No one imagined
that, in their little town just outside of San Diego, one of the Beatles and his band were rehearsing to entertain at a private
party.”

I got excited when my friends began arriving at the restaurant. It was so good to see everyone, especially Larry and Katie,
who had agreed to share the emcee duties. After sipping champagne and greeting our guests, Ralph headed up on stage to get
everyone’s attention. At that precise moment, Kennedy, the husband of Sara, one of my college roommates, who was a real rock
and roll fan, suddenly said, “That’s Paul McCartney’s guitar.”

“Yeah, right. Like Paul McCartney is about to play for this private party!” Sara told her husband as Paul and the band members
were sneaking down the back alley and entering the restaurant by the service door.

“You know,” Ralph told the crowd, “we were going to do a
little R&B tonight. But I decided it would be better to have a little rock and roll. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen…”

Ralph jumped down off the stage and, suddenly, everyone began to scream, men and women alike. Paul McCartney was in the house
and he jumped onstage wearing a bright red T-shirt. He smiled (at me!) and picked up his guitar. Then he opened his mouth
and sang, “You say good-bye and I say hello. I don’t know why…”

I did not believe what I was seeing and hearing. It wasn’t possible. I had a flashback to the fifth grade in 1963, in Dubuque,
Iowa, when I gave up my bedroom to my grandmother one winter. I was relegated to a tiny room in our house that was the size
of the width of a double bed. It was the year the Beatles came to America, and there were magazines entirely devoted to them
that cost 35 cents at the grocery store. Since Paul and Ringo were my favorites, I bought a bunch of magazines, tore their
pictures out, and wallpapered the entire room with photos of my two most adored Beatles. I recently found all of those photos
that had graced my walls when I was young and I gave them to my teenage daughter to put on her wall.

Now, Paul McCartney was standing on the stage, in person, amid our screams of joy and shock. And not only was he playing his
famous guitar. He was dedicating his songs to me on my birthday. I was in shock, wondering for an instant if this was actually
a tribute band. But I knew it was unmistakably Paul when he looked directly at me and said, “Hey, Wendy baby!”

If I still had any doubts, there was Heather, glowing, in a pair of jeans and a white top, rocking out to her husband’s music.
We found out later that she was pregnant but only Paul and she knew at the time. To add to the excitement, Paul’s
entire band backed him up as he went through a playlist that would bring the totally shocked guests to their knees.

How can I describe the faces of my friends as they rocked out to the live music of Paul McCartney? As I danced to the music,
I thought I had some pretty good moves. I smiled when I thought about how embarrassed Walker got every time I danced. I didn’t
care. The entire room stood up and danced, singing along with Paul for almost two hours. What if I had said no to the party?
I would never know what I had missed. Now, all of us in that room had experienced something that would bond us together forever.

When Paul finished his rendition of “Hello, Goodbye,” he went on to the next song. By the time he was finished, the playlist,
believe it or not, had gone as follows:

Hello, Goodbye

Coming Up

Let Me Roll It

Your Loving Flame

Live and Let Die

Freedom

Blackbird

We Can Work It Out

Here Today

Eleanor Rigby

Calico Skies

Here, There and Everywhere

Michelle

Back in the U.S.S.R.

She’s Leaving Home

Maybe I’m Amazed

Lady Madonna

Let It Be

Yesterday

Birthday

Hey Jude

I Saw Her Standing There

We all knew the words, we all sang along, and each of us had our personal experience of what the song had meant to us in the
past. The entire evening felt elevated as if we had traveled to some magical sphere in the past where everything was exactly
as we had left it.

As the decibel levels of the music escalated, however, so did the screaming, and Kevin got a call from the local sheriff’s
office. He had warned them about the party, that there might be some noise, but they had not expected it to be so loud or
for it to go on for so long. The sheriff asked Kevin, “Can you just tone it down? People are complaining.”

But when Kevin told him it was Paul McCartney, the sheriff backed off completely. The mention of the Beatle’s name was enough
for the police and it was apparently enough for the neighbors, too. When they were told who was there, instead of complaining
further, they all came out into the street to listen.

Back inside, when Paul began to play the chords of “You Say It’s Your Birthday,” all eyes turned to me as he called me up
to the stage. He continued to play, directing his famous lyrics to me, and when he pulled me in for a dance, I understood
the meaning of the expression, “Now I can die happy.” When it was over, Paul reached out to me, hugged me in front of everyone,
and whispered in my ear, “Hey, baby, happy birthday.”
Paul McCartney just called me “baby,”
I thought to myself.
Nobody has a better life than I do.

When the night was nearly over, Kevin was approached by a
security guard. “We have a problem,” the guard told Kevin. “In the last hour, television and radio trucks are parked in the
street and a huge crowd has gathered outside. The networks are setting up cameras and we have to keep Paul away from all this.”

Kevin was ready with a solution. “Tell the people out there that the concert is about to end. Keep the red carpet out front
for a while and assure them that Paul will walk down that carpet in fifteen to twenty minutes. Tell them everyone will get
their shot.”

In the next moment, in a move reminiscent of the Beatles’ movie
A Hard Day’s Night
, when they spent so much energy ducking their fans, Paul, Heather, and company snuck out the back alley and into a waiting
car that shuttled them all away. They left a load of disappointed people out front who eventually wandered home and went to
bed.

The next day, I held a luncheon for my out-of-town guests and everyone was still shocked and amazed. A call came in on my
cell phone shortly after noon from a CNN reporter. “This is really weird, Wendy,” he said, “but there’s a rumor circulating
that Paul McCartney played live music at your private birthday party last night. Is it true?”

“How on earth did you find out?” I asked.

The man at the other end of the phone laughed. “How could we miss it? It’s an international story. It’s on the wires.”

It was true. Reports of the party had shown up in local newspapers in larger cities, and were as far reaching as London and
Reykjavik. Eventually, my birthday party was covered in
Rolling Stone
and
People
magazine. Now everyone in the world knew I was fifty. But I also got some irate calls from friends. “How could you have Paul
McCartney playing at your party and not invite me?”

I passed the buck to Ralph, since he had kept it a secret.
I saw the wisdom in that. If he had told me, I probably would have invited so many people from all over the country, they
would never have fit into the restaurant. But I have friends who are still taking me to task for leaving them out. And as
fate would have it, it was the gift that kept on giving, since Paul and I were destined to meet again, some years later, in
August 2007.

It started with a call from Larry right after breakfast one morning. “Wendy,” he said, “you need to call David Saltz right
away. He has a great idea for us to go to Vegas. Promise you’ll call. He said it’s huge.”

I’m glad Larry didn’t see me roll my eyes. I considered Vegas to be very ho-hum, and I couldn’t imagine what on earth would
make us go there. But there it was again. What seemed like an ordinary and mundane request would become another extraordinary
day in my life. When I called David Saltz, a highly successful music producer and friend, as a courtesy to Larry, was I ever
excited when he said, “The Beatles are celebrating the one-year anniversary of their hit Cirque du Soleil show
Love
. If you’re interested, I can get you an exclusive interview with Paul, Ringo, Yoko, and Olivia Harrison before the show.”

“You have to be kidding,” I said.

“I’m dead serious, but you have to set it up right now,” he said.

Were we interested? What do you think? I hung up and started the wheels rolling. Within ten days, we were in Vegas, ready
to do an interview before
Love
started. Just before our show began, I walked into the green room, where Paul and I spotted each other. He gave me a hug
and we were both commiserating about our divorces when someone walked in behind us and said in a very familiar voice, “Hey,
bloke.” It was Ringo.

Paul smiled at him and said, “Ringo, I’d like you to meet my friend Wendy.”

My friend Wendy.
As I shook hands with my other favorite Beatle, I flashed back to my little room that had been wallpapered floor to ceiling
with photos of these two rock stars. If someone had told me back then that, one day, Beatle Paul would call me a friend and
introduce me to Ringo, I would have said, “Yeah, right!”

EXTRAORDINARY THINGS HAPPEN WHEN YOU LEAST EXPECT THEM

When I was onstage dancing with Paul McCartney, my childhood idol, I was that little kid again, buying 35-cent magazines and
pasting pictures on my wall. I could never have predicted that, much later in my life, I would dance with Paul McCartney on
the extraordinary evening when I turned fifty.

I walked into Amaya’s room recently to find that she had removed the pretty pictures and objects of art with which I had decorated
her room. In their place, she had plastered the walls of her room with pictures of her favorite rock stars. Just like I had
done.

I looked from poster to poster, wondering, Which of these idols will she end up meeting someday when she is older? The truth
was that she already had met one of them, since he’s a neighbor and friend. Tom DeLonge, our rock star friend from the group
Blink-182 and Angels & Airwaves, is Amaya’s version of Paul McCartney. He is my daughter’s inspiration for her love of music.
So, if
my life went full circle from pictures on the wall to meeting Paul, why couldn’t hers go the same way?

I have to say, I’m grateful that both of my children have a great passion in their lives. For Amaya, it’s music, and her vibrant
walls tell the story. Walker, on the other hand, is passionate about his dreams, which he turns into amazing stories after
he wakes up. I have roused him in the morning, only to have him say, “Please come back in five minutes so I can finish my
dream.” When I come back, he gets out of bed, starts pacing, and says, “Just listen to this before I forget it.” Then he tells
me an intricate and amazing story with a beginning, a middle, and an end, each with its individual and fascinating plot. He
is now writing chapter 13 of his book of dreams.

The thing is, you never know what’s coming down the path. All you can do is go about your life and when things seem dull and
mundane, never give up hope. Since nothing ever stays the same, if things are predictable today, something spectacular is
bound to be on its way. The key is in remaining open, having a great attitude, and believing that miraculous things are just
around the corner. Because they are.