Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (51 page)

PAUL McCARTNEY’S
ANNUS HORRIBILIS

A major Japanese tour was scheduled to begin in January 1980, with tentative plans for more shows around the world if it went well. A return to the US was certainly overdue. Yet none of this was to be, the year becoming instead Paul’s
annus horribilis
. It started badly when Paul was criticised as mean by Liverpool councillors for only giving £5,000 ($7,650) to the Royal Court Theatre during his recent trip to Merseyside, a small matter, but the first in what became 12 months of almost unremitting bad publicity for McCartney, who now flew to New York with Linda in advance of the Japanese tour.

The McCartneys booked into the Stanhope Hotel, just across Central Park from the Dakota, Paul calling John Lennon’s private number to ask if he could come over. Yoko took the call, telling Paul it wasn’t convenient, which was a slap in the face. Paul then told Yoko that he and Linda were
en route
to Tokyo, where they would be staying in the presidential suite at the Okura Hotel, which seemed to offend the Lennons because it was the suite they used when
they
were in Tokyo. Guitarist Laurence Juber joined the McCartneys at the Stanhope and, after a couple of days, during which time they socialised with other friends, including the model Twiggy, the party flew on to Tokyo, where Wings were due to start their tour at the Budokan on 21 January.

Paul hadn’t played Japan since the Beatles visited in 1966. He had tried to get a visa to take Wings to Japan, but had been denied permission because of his and Denny Laine’s drug convictions. ‘I was looking forward to working Japan because five years earlier we were supposed to have gone there and we got our visas revoked,’ explains Laine. ‘He’d been busted in the past, and I’d been busted [for marijuana], or at least Jo Jo had and I’d taken the rap for it.’ The problems of drug use and associated crimes were not yet as pronounced in Japan as in Western countries, and the authorities were naturally keen to discourage any growth in the drug culture. As a result, foreigners with drug convictions were usually precluded from entering Japan for seven years. With Paul having been busted most recently in Scotland in 1973, and Linda in LA in 1975, on top of Laine’s conviction, the Eastmans had to work hard to get visas for the band in 1980, and it was made abundantly clear that the authorities wouldn’t tolerate any drug use on the tour. MPL staffer Alan Crowder reminded the tour party before departure to be extra careful. Everybody knew it was in their interest to heed Alan’s warning. In the first place, nobody wanted to end up in a Japanese jail; and, second, they didn’t want to miss out on what was set to be the most lucrative Wings tour yet, with everybody finally on a good wage. Even the guys in the horn section were, to their joy, getting $1,000 a night (£653) for the gig, and the longer the tour went on the richer they would get. ‘We knew that this was something that everybody had to be very responsible about,’ says Laurence Juber, adding with a hollow laugh: ‘or nearly everybody.’

Denny Laine and Steve Holley flew to Japan from London, arriving at Narita Airport ahead of the McCartneys on Wednesday 16 January 1980, travelling first class on TWA. The band members had all been furnished with multiple-use, first-class tickets good for any TWA flight anywhere in the world for 12 months. Recalls Steve Holley:

I remember Denny saying, ‘This happened before and probably what will happen is if the Japanese tour goes well he’ll say something like, “Take a vacation anywhere you want for a couple of weeks and we’ll regroup for rehearsals in Australia.” or whatever, which will hopefully turn into another world tour.’ So in the back of my mind I’m thinking I’m embarking on the beginning of a journey of a lifetime.

Holley and Laine were processed through immigration before the McCartneys arrived, the officials taking five hours to deal with Laine because of his drug history. Then they went and waited on the tour bus for Paul.

When Paul’s flight landed at Narita Airport, his party was also processed slowly through customs and immigration. ‘There was a lot of time spent with bureaucrats dealing with paperwork,’ remembers Laurence Juber, who was standing next to Paul as they walked through the customs hall. The McCartneys had a lot of luggage and a customs man was opening bags seemingly at random, ‘not pulling
everything
out,’ says Juber.

But he opened one of the suitcases and patted something, and then he got a quizzical look on his face, and he reached inside and pulled out a bag of marijuana. At that point Paul kind of turns white, and alarms started going off, and people came out from behind hidden doors and escorted him back, and me too. Because I was with him. And Linda and the kids as well. They took him off into a room and started questioning him.

In among Paul’s shirts the customs official had found a clear plastic bag containing just under eight ounces of marijuana, worth about £1,000 ($1,530). Having made this discovery the Japanese went through all the luggage again, even taking musical instruments apart in case there were more drugs hidden inside. There weren’t. Laurence, Linda and the kids were allowed to leave.

Tired of waiting for Paul, Laine and Holley had gone ahead to the Okura, where they checked into their rooms expecting to meet Paul, Lin and Laurence later in the hotel restaurant. Steve took a nap, woken by the bedside telephone. It was Linda calling to say that Paul had been arrested at the airport for possession.

I thought she was joking. I said, ‘Yeah, good one. I’ll see you down in the restaurant,’ and my wife and I went downstairs. As soon as the elevator doors opened on the main floor, and the press greeted us with a million flashbulbs, I realised that something had happened.

As almost the whole world now knew, Paul had been taken in handcuffs from Narita Airport to Kojimachi Police Station, where he was locked in a cell for the second time in his life (his first experience behind bars being in Hamburg in 1960 after the Bambi Kino fire). And of course it wasn’t the first time he’d been fingered for drugs. It was, though, the most serious. Paul’s tour managers hired an English-speaking Japanese lawyer and contacted Eastman & Eastman in New York. Lee Eastman threw a fit. ‘When Paul got busted in Tokyo for pot - I was around - my father was
furious
. Furious! He went nuts. He was ballistic,’ recalls Philip Sprayregen, who explains that his stepfather’s rage was partly due to his fear that the bust would jeopardise Paul’s chance of a knighthood. ‘He said, “My God, my daughter could have been a [lady], and he blew it!” He was very upset because he thought his daughter would be Lady Linda [sic].’
⁵⁰
John Eastman was despatched to Tokyo to try and rescue his brother-in-law. Less reassuringly, Kenneth Lambert, a deranged American, tried to set off from Miami Airport on a self-appointed mission of mercy. When he started waving a gun about at Miami, demanding to be flown to Paul’s side, Lambert was shot dead by cops. Meanwhile, Paul went to sleep in his Tokyo cell with his back against the wall, fearing he might be raped.

Things always look brighter in the morning, and so it was in the land of the rising sun when Paul woke to news that he had a visitor. McCartney was shown into an interview room, partitioned by a glass screen, on the other side of which stood the reassuringly urbane figure of Britain’s consul to Japan, Donald Warren-Knott, whose embassy was located next door. The Warren-Knotts had been getting ready for bed the previous evening when they received a courtesy call from the police to inform them that a distinguished British citizen, Mr
Pori Macatnee
, as the Japanese tend to pronounce his name, had been taken into custody. The consul was told that marijuana had been found in amongst Mr Macatnee’s shirts, and he’d admitted the drugs were his, saying they’d been packed accidentally. Now the star and the consul met. ‘He sat down, I sat down, and we began to talk - to my pleasant surprise he was very relaxed,’ says Warren-Knott, who’d feared that such a celebrity might try and demand special treatment, which would have been a mistake.

Nothing of the sort. He took it quite calmly. Yes, OK, he knew the packet had been found. Yes, it was his. And it shouldn’t have been there. I didn’t press too closely, because it’s not my business to enquire into those sort of details. I suspect - personal view - that a package was slipped in while they were packing. I don’t know whether he fully intended to use it while he was in Japan. If he did, he’d be very foolish, given the circumstances of his previous arrests.

Paul said the Japanese were treating him well, and he was reassured to hear that his family were safe at the hotel, with his brother-in-law on his way from the States. He would wait to see what happened. Paul had one request. ‘He said he was a vegetarian and he would be grateful if we could give any help in making sure that he did get a reasonably vegetarian diet, including fruit.’ Apples, oranges, pears, and bananas would all be acceptable. The consul said he would ask the guards.

It was clear that the tour couldn’t go ahead. The shows were cancelled and Wings’ equipment was shipped back to the UK. The musicians were told to go home, or anywhere they liked on their round-the-world tickets. Despite the prospect of a free holiday, and the fact that they were all paid what they would have got had the Japanese shows gone ahead, the band members were upset. Says Denny Laine, who flew to France:

I wasn’t cross with him, but I was disappointed, I must say. It meant now we wouldn’t be able to go to Japan and tour, we wouldn’t be able to go a lot of places and tour, because once you get busted it’s hard to get visas and stuff, so it was all that kind of thing. It was a let-down.

Laine later discovered that Paul was angry with him for leaving Tokyo. ‘He was a bit upset because we left early, but we were told by his office to leave, because security people were watching us all the time.’

There was much debate within the tour party as to how and why Paul had got himself in this mess. Steve Holley wondered, as others have, whether Paul
meant
to get busted: ‘He may not have wanted to go and do that tour in the first place … [that’s] my guess.’ Although Paul had shown signs of weariness with Wings, this surely cannot be true. Paul enjoyed performing and was, in any case, somebody who could be relied upon to fulfil his commitments. Denny Laine dismisses as ‘ridiculous’ the notion Paul would get arrested deliberately. Howie Casey believes that Paul may have taken the rap for Linda, who’d been careless before with drugs. Some reports stated the marijuana was found in Lin’s make-up bag, but the British consul recalls being told the drugs were with Paul’s shirts. Later came the absurd conspiracy theory that Yoko Ono spitefully tipped off her contacts in Tokyo that the McCartneys had drugs with them, because Paul and Linda intended to use what she and John considered their hotel suite. Perhaps the most likely explanation is that Paul had taken a chance. ‘I believe it was just something he thought he could get away with,’ says Laine.

There was consternation in the penthouse suite of the Okura Hotel when Linda McCartney was informed that, if tried and found guilty of possession, her husband could face a prison sentence. She and the kids were virtual prisoners themselves, unable to go downstairs for fear of the press, scared to turn on the TV in case they saw distressing coverage of the case. The children were upset. ‘The only one unaware of the situation was little Dee Dee,’ Linda said, using the family name for toddler James McCartney, and even Dee Dee kept asking where Daddy was.

Over at Kojimachi, Daddy was getting used to prison life. He was obliged to sleep on the floor on a thin mattress, Japanese-style; rising at six a.m. with other prisoners, sitting cross-legged while he was interrogated; given half an hour to exercise and - until his fruit was delivered - eating a bowl of rice for supper. Sitting on the floor, watched by Japanese men in uniform, Paul felt like a character in a POW movie. He picked pieces of plaster off the wall and used the flakes to tally his days inside, almost starting to enjoy the experience. By the specks of plaster on the floor Paul calculated that his incarceration had exceeded a week. He was starting to smell. The police said he could have a bath, in private if he wished. Paul chose instead to bathe with his fellow detainees, a tough-looking crew whom he charmed by leading them in a bath-time sing-along, including a rendition of ‘Yellow Submarine’. Donald Warren-Knott popped in regularly to ask if Paul was OK, also asking the guards if they had been able to supply Mr McCartney’s vegetarian diet, with apples and oranges and so on. Yes, they nodded. And bananas? The mention of bananas was met by silence. ‘My questions had been embarrassing. I couldn’t think why. This was a very Japanese response to embarrassing questions. A sort of shutter comes down while they try to work out just what they are going to say, but they are obviously embarrassed. So why bananas?’ It turned out that regulations forbade detainees from having bananas. ‘It seems remarkably silly, but I was told that a man might peel his banana, throw the skin on the floor and a prison officer might slip and fall!’ When the consul relayed this information to Paul, he roared with laughter. ‘He promised that he wouldn’t demand bananas. They were perfectly free never to give him a banana.’

When Linda was given permission to see her husband for half an hour, she took him a welcome cheese sandwich. Although they tried to joke about the situation, this was the longest period Paul and Lin had ever been apart; virtually the only time they had slept apart in their 10-year marriage, and it was not certain what the outcome of this situation would be. The offence was serious. After John Eastman arrived in town and started talking with the local lawyer and the presiding magistrate, it became clear that the Japanese didn’t want a trial any more than Paul did. The authorities were primarily concerned that the local promoters, and the Japanese people who’d bought tickets for Wings’ concerts, wouldn’t be out of pocket. Refunds were swiftly arranged. ‘With that little financial problem out of the way, they wanted to get rid of him as quickly as possible,’ comments Donald Warren-Knott, who sat in on the legal conferences.