Shout! (83 page)

John Lennon has gone down in history as the band’s most reckless drug user; in fact, Paul in the post-Beatles years would be busted more times, and more spectacularly, than John ever was. It happened twice in 1972 for cannabis possession—first in Sweden, then on the McCartneys’ Scottish farm. Another bust came in 1984 while they were vacationing in Barbados; the following day, when they and their children arrived back at Heathrow Airport, further cannabis was found in Linda’s luggage.

But worst by far was the Tokyo bust of January 1980, an episode almost suggesting that the new Macca-Paul was bent on a subconscious course of hara-kiri. In the whole addle-brained history of pop stars and forbidden substances, it’s hard to find anyone else who has acted so stupidly or paid so scary a price.

His reputation at that moment, ironically, was at an all-time high. A month earlier, he had organized a series of London concerts, headlined by Wings, to aid refugees in Kampuchea, formerly Cambodia—a gesture of altruism still comparatively rare among pop superstars that in effect prepared the ground for Bob Geldof and Live Aid four years later. Hence that breathless moment of almost Beatles reunion, with George and Ringo reportedly willing to appear onstage with Paul if it would send more milk and penicillin to the Kampuchean refugees, but John flatly deflating the whole idea and remaining firm even against pleas from the UN’s secretary-general.

Wings then departed on a world tour, of which the high point was to be their first-ever performances in Japan. Despite Paul’s huge fan base there, he had been repeatedly denied a Japanese visa as a result of his 1972 drug busts. Now, thanks to intense diplomatic and entrepreneurial lobbying, not to mention his current high standing with the UN, he was to be allowed in at last.

The celebratory atmosphere of the visit was to be short-lived. When Paul arrived at Tokyo airport, customs officers found 219 grams of marijuana in a toiletries bag placed on
top
of the clothes in his suitcase. He was arrested, charged with possession—an offense carrying a maximum seven-year sentence—and then thrown into prison. Only after nine days of further intense diplomatic activity did the authorities release and instantly deport him.

He arrived back in Britain more chastened than his public had ever seen him, pale, hollow-eyed, and visibly shaken by prison conditions that he compared, with a ghost of his old flippancy, to
The Bridge on the River Kwai
. About the offense itself he said nothing, so adding further fuel to a rumor that the marijuana had actually belonged to Linda and that he’d taken the rap for her, just as Mick Jagger had for Marianne Faithfull in the famous “Mars bar” bust of 1967.

The other members of Wings were understandably outraged at the worldwide notoriety their leader had brought down on their heads. After Paul, the band’s main instrumental linchpin had been Denny Laine, an insouciant character who always seemed able to ride the Macca bossiness and egotism. But now even Laine had had enough and quit the band without notice—so making its breakup inevitable—afterward writing a song, “Japanese Tears,” that attacked Paul in terms almost as bitter as John’s “How Do You Sleep?”

After this traumatic and demeaning episode there would be no more glimpses of the real McCartney for a long time to come. Even the shock of John’s murder, eight months later, produced no public sign of the devastation that he was suffering. “Yeah, it’s a drag, isn’t it?” he said to the besieging media pack as off-handedly as if it were something no more serious than a record slipping out of the Top Ten.

Words often come out wrongly at moments of anguish. No one could possibly blame him for not producing a polished sound bite to express what a huge part of his life Mark David Chapman’s bullets had blown away. Just the same, there was something vital missing from his public response, just as there was from George Harrison’s. The people whose greatest gift next to music had been the gift of the gab, who had always known just the right thing to say at any given moment, now astonished the grieving world with their gaucherie and gracelessness. More tellingly, neither appeared to think the tragedy sufficiently important to rearrange their lives for. Of the three remaining ex-Beatles, only Ringo immediately dropped everything and flew to New York as a public gesture of support for John’s family.

From here on, Paul would seem intent on proving he didn’t need Wings any more than he had the Beatles. And so his public seemed to reassure him. In 1989 and again in 1993, he undertook world tours, accompanied by Linda and an unnamed backing band, and dispensing with most of Wings’ flashy glam-rock effects. Both tours combined
brought him an ecstatic audience numbering around 2,500,000; on a single night in Rio de Janeiro during the first, he played to a crowd of 184,000.

No one better symbolized the dawning era of brotherhood and cooperation among rock stars—or was more adept at turning it to his personal advantage. During the early eighties, he recorded duets with two major black performers, in each of which he managed to express deference and respect to his covocalist while at the same time shamelessly hogging the mike. With the former Motown prodigy Stevie Wonder in 1982 he recorded “Ebony and Ivory,” a plea for racial harmony with rhymes (“piano keyboard” and “Oh, Lord” for instance) that one would hardly have expected from the writer of “Eleanor Rigby.” With Michael Jackson—soon to be as big to the eighties as the Beatles had been to the sixties—he recorded “The Girl Is Mine” (1982) and “Say Say Say” (1983).

Since the Family Way and Black Dyke Mills Band days people had been urging him to try his hand at writing classical music. In the early nineties, seemingly with no new pop worlds left to conquer, he decided the time had come. He may have had no formal training in classical theory or scoring—but he was Paul McCartney. The result was
Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio
, drawing on recognizably the same childhood echoes as had “Penny Lane” and “Eleanor Rigby.” It received its world premiere at Liverpool’s Anglican cathedral in 1991, performed by a full symphony orchestra and chorus conducted by Carl Davis, who shared composing credit with Paul. Dame Kiri Te Kanawa headed a solo quartet that included Sally Burgess, Jerry Hadley, and Willard White. Though deserving no epithet much stronger than “pleasant,” the
Liverpool Oratorio
was received with as much critical rapture as a long-lost work by Bach or Handel: It went on to play in London at the Royal Festival Hall and in New York at Carnegie Hall, and in other venues.

Not everything he touched, however, was to turn instantly to the gold of million-selling records. In 1984, MPL had moved into feature films with
Give My Regards to Broad Street
, a nine-million-dollar project inspired by the imminent closure of London’s Broad Street railway station. As the lamely punning title (on
Give My Regards to Broadway
) suggested, it was Paul’s pet project; like
The Magical Mystery Tour
seventeen years earlier, it revealed his fatal tendency not to think things through properly but believe he could just wing it on McCartney Pied-Piper
magic. He himself was said to have largely written the script, which concerned a famous pop star’s picaresque quest for some lost demo tapes, but was above all a device for putting Paul McCartney, soft-focused to mid-sixties youth and prettiness, in the dead center of almost every frame. As in
Mystery Tour
, various accomplished actors and performers wandered in and out of shot, obviously wondering what the hell it was all about but still tickled beyond measure to be working in Beatle Heaven.

The subsequent reviews made
Magical Mystery Tour
seem like a smash hit by comparison and brought Paul his first public ridicule on British TV’s
Spitting Image
puppet show. As a big-eyed Macca figure sat in a restaurant, his waiter announced “Your turkey, Sir!” and dumped a film can labeled
Give My Regards to Broad Street
onto his plate.

More successful MPL film projects were an animated feature about Rupert Bear and a television documentary on the Beatles’ old idol Buddy Holly, released in 1985 and including the first ever intimate glimpses of Holly from his family, his fellow musicians, and his widow, Maria-Elena. Yet here again, Macca could not bear to stay off-camera: As well as introducing the film, he made several incidental appearances, including a lengthy—and poorly prepared—soliloquy on Holly’s compositional methods. It was noticeable, too, that he chose not to be filmed in his own home but in the deliberately neutral setting of a hay barn. Even when talking of the music closest to his heart, he could not “open the door and let ’em in.”

Supremely successful though he was on so many fronts, there remained one glaring gap among his myriad possessions, acquisitions, and holdings. This ultimate creative control freak might have the satisfaction of controlling everything from Buddy Holly’s songbook to
Grease
and
I Love Lucy
. Yet, ironically, he did not control his own earliest work, the songs he had written for the Beatles under the democratically unspecific “Lennon–McCartney” byline. “I Saw Her Standing There,” “Love of the Loved,” “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” “Do You Want to Know a Secret,” “Eight Days a Week,” and all the dozens more of John and Paul’s perfect primitive paintings still belonged to Northern Songs, the publishing company Dick James had sold from under their feet at the height of the Apple crisis in 1969.

Northern’s original buyers, Lew Grade’s ATV network, had in turn sold the company on to the Australian mogul Robert Holmes à Court.
In 1985, it unexpectedly came on to the market again. Swallowing his ill-feeling toward Yoko, Paul contacted her and persuaded her of the wisdom of their making a joint bid. But while the two and their lawyers argued over strategy, Northern was snapped up in a $47.5 million deal—by none other than the eighties wunderkind Michael Jackson.

Even the canny Macca was stunned by the speed and duplicity with which his former recording partner, and supposed good friend, engineered the coup. He was later to give his own wry account of it, perfectly mimicking “Jacko’s” childlike lisp. “Michael asked me one day how you went about buying a song catalog, and I gave him all kinds of advice. The next time I saw him, he said, ‘I’m gonna buy
your
songs, Paul.’”

All of the former Beatles had attracted criticism for their seeming indifference to Liverpool’s desperate economic plight during the recession-hit seventies and early eighties. With his well-founded reputation for being careful, to put it no stronger, Paul had always seemed the least likely benefactor of his home city or his alma mater, Liverpool Institute High School. During the late seventies his former English teacher, Dusty Durband, wrote to ask his support in a school reconstruction appeal. Mr. Durband was disappointed—and annoyed—to receive a cheque back for just one thousand pounds.

A radical change of mind came in the mid-nineties after it was reported that Liverpool Institute, already closed for some years, now faced actual demolition. Paul became the moving spirit in the old high school’s thirteen-million-pound transformation into the Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts (LIPA for short), a project that, perhaps more than any other, was to symbolize the city’s economic revival and regenerated self-belief. It was opened by the Queen in 1996, with an unfamiliarly dark-suited Macca beside her. Not since 1964 had any Beatle made so triumphant a homecoming.

By this point, it seemed that the McCartney name automatically shed magic in whatever context it occurred. In 1995, Paul’s younger daughter, Stella, graduated from St. Martin’s School of Art and began an ascent in the couture world destined to be as meteoric as her father’s in the musical one. Even more to Paul’s satisfaction, Linda had at long last achieved recognition in her own right by skillfully blending her dietary principles with her prowess as “Cook of the House.” The Linda McCartney range of vegetarian frozen foods with accompanying recipes, launched in
1991, now adorned major supermarkets throughout both the U.K. and America.

In the Queen’s birthday honors of 1997 Paul became the third British pop singer to receive a knighthood (after the saintly Cliff Richard and Live Aid’s organizer Bob Geldof). The award came in the dying days of John Major’s sleaze-ridden and clapped-out Tory government, and could be seen as a desperate bid for popularity by playing the well-worn Harold Wilson card; even so, none could deny Paul had long been in line for some public recognition more substantial than his 1965 MBE. Significantly, his checkered history of drug busts and brief Japanese incarceration seem never to have been an issue when 10 Downing Street consulted with Buckingham Palace about the award.

Becoming Sir Paul was just one of the honors now showering on him thicker than jelly beans at an old-time Beatles Christmas show. His family home, the modest council house on Forthlin Road, Allerton, was acquired by the National Trust and opened to the public, creating a historic shrine of the little front room where John and he used to huddle with their guitars and Buddy Holly records after cutting school. He was invited to join leading politicians and diplomats as a weekend guest at Highgrove, the Prince of Wales’s country seat. He even had a variety of rose named after him.

The whole rose-tinted idyll came crashing around his ears when Linda was diagnosed with breast cancer.

The disease is never other than cruel and arbitrary in its toll on women often still in the prime of life. And in this case, like so many others—and so much else in the Beatles’ story—history was horribly repeating itself. Breast cancer had also struck down the other essential woman in Paul’s life, his mother Mary, when he was only fourteen. Ironically, on Linda’s public appearances with Paul she looked smilier and more vibrant than her hypercritical public had ever seen her before. Only the close cropping of the former luxuriant blonde hair gave a clue to the ordeal she was suffering.

Linda’s greatest solace in those grim and increasingly less optimistic months was the explosive success of her daughter Stella in the fashion world. In 1997, just two years after graduating from St. Martin’s School of Art, Stella joined the Parisian couture house of Chloé as chief designer in succession to Karl Lagerfeld. She was already becoming
an international celebrity in her own right, with her peaky Paul face, her plunging necklines, and her penchant for walking hand-in-hand with female rather than male escorts. She designed clothes with a rummage-sale raggedyiness no sane woman would ever wear but which flew into the glossy fashion mags as instantaneously as her father had once burned up the Top Ten. At her first Paris show—arguably the most highly publicized since Yves St. Laurent’s debut in the pre-swinging sixties—Linda and Paul were among the host of rock and movie celebrities cheering her from the catwalk side.