Fab: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney (52 page)

I think they all realised very shortly, on the basis of their advice from the Japanese lawyer, and the presiding magistrate and so on, that provided there was a full confession and a full admittance of guilt the [Japanese] would like to get rid of Mr McCartney and the Wings group, [and] please don’t come back again [for] seven years. I think they wanted to tidy it up, as was feasible under Japanese law.

So it was that after nine nights in a Tokyo cell Paul was taken under escort to the airport and put on a flight to Amsterdam, reunited with his family in the airliner’s cabin, and thereby deported from Japan. The McCartneys disembarked in Holland, where Paul spoke briefly to the press, still arguing that marijuana should be decriminalised. ‘I have been in jail for ten days, but I didn’t go crazy because I wasn’t able to have marijuana. I can take it or leave it.’ Paul and his family were then flown by private plane to Lydd Airport in England, finally driven down the familiar country lanes to their house in the Sussex woods. Seldom had Paul felt so glad to be home as he did when he stepped inside his own front door and found himself surrounded by his things again, greeted by their dogs, the horses whinnying hello from the nearby stables. It was the end of a draining, expensive and embarrassing experience, one that had damaged Paul’s image. Blip Parker, headmaster of the Liverpool Institute, made public his personal regret that Paul had let his fans down, so soon after treating the schoolboys to a show: ‘It is hard enough nowadays trying to keep youngsters away from drugs without having people they look up to involved in something like this,’ Parker told the
Daily Telegraph
. Paul’s young cousins also looked at Uncle Paul askance. ‘You take drugs, don’t you?’ one asked, the next time Paul was on Merseyside. Paul found himself struggling to explain.

‘IT’S A DRAG’

Because of the phenomenal international success of the Beatles, and the success Paul had continued to enjoy since the fab four split up, together with the way he conducted himself, for the most part, Paul McCartney had come to hold a special position in British public life. In an era when rock stars were typically excessive and often vulgar in their behaviour, Paul McCartney MBE was an intelligent, polite, civilised family man, whose devotion to Linda and their children was plain to see. He was a phenomenal earner for Great Britain, a cultural ambassador, and figurehead for the nation’s recording industry. Lee Eastman was right in foreseeing that his son-in-law would one day be knighted. Ultimately, Paul might even be granted a peerage in recognition of the status he enjoyed. Yet McCartney had also got himself into a remarkable amount of trouble.

Twice Macca had been banged up in a police cell, twice deported from a foreign land. He had been refused visas, been convicted of drug possession in a UK court, fined for drugs in Sweden, and narrowly escaped a prison sentence in Japan. Taken together, this was a record that put Paul in the rackety company of such bad boys of rock as Keith Richards. The Bambi Kino incident aside, Paul’s basic problem was that he liked to smoke grass and was too pig-headed to moderate his behaviour. The Japanese bust didn’t change him. He came out of the experience with the same cocky attitude. He never explained, let alone apologised to his band members for the inconvenience he had caused them in Japan, showing the lads instead a prison diary he wrote and had privately printed.
Japanese Jailbird
by Paul McCartney didn’t reveal a man chastened. ‘There wasn’t a great deal of soul-searching involved,’ says Laurence Juber, who read the little book. ‘It was more of a narrative of his experience in jail.’ And a couple of months later, when Paul’s new solo album appeared in the shops, he appeared to make fun of the Japanese. The cover of
McCartney II
featured a grainy image of Paul by Linda in the style of a prison mug shot, while inside the album were photos of Paul pulling faces in impersonation of Japanese officials, with an instrumental track titled ‘Frozen Jap’.

These puerile details aside,
McCartney II
was an improvement on recent Wings albums. Paul sounded contemporary again on synthesiser-based songs such as ‘Coming Up’ and ‘Temporary Secretary’, a witty, sexy number about asking Mr Marks for a secretary to sit on his knee (at a time when Alfred Marks was a well-known temping agency). ‘On the Way’ had an attractive wistfulness, while a lovely melody underpinned ‘Waterfall’, the lyrics of which appear to refer to the family home of that name in Sussex. The song can be read as Paul’s advice to his children not to play in the waterfall at the head of the deep-cut stream in the forest, across which the young McCartneys had no doubt tried to leap. The warning in the song about not getting into strangers’ cars seems to express another parental fear, that of the kids being kidnapped. Other good songs included ‘Bogey Music’, written for a proposed film of Raymond Briggs’s children’s book,
Fungus the Bogeyman
. A generally strong album, with less filler than one had become used to,
McCartney II
was a deserved UK number one.

It wasn’t of course a Wings album, and Wings was now all but defunct. Denny Laine badly needed income to pay his back taxes. Unable to tour with Wings, he went out on the road that summer with Steve Holley. This small tour did little to alleviate Denny’s problems. It looked like he would have to start living abroad as a tax exile. Paul, whose own financial affairs had been run with exemplary efficiency since he left the Beatles, had no such problems, and stayed in London, working with George Martin on ‘We All Stand Together’ and other songs intended for the long-planned
Rupert the Bear
movie. Paul had commissioned a succession of artists to create drawings for this picture over the past few years, but none had yet captured the snug family life depicted by Alfred Bestall in the
Rupert
stories Paul had grown up with, and remembered with particular fondness from the
Rupert
annuals published at Christmas. Bestall’s ursine characters were the image of a contented, traditional British family of the day, ‘mother baking, always rolling out something, father always reading the newspaper,’ as Paul described the world of Rupert, relating the bear’s family to the McCartney idyll at Forthlin Road before Mum died. ‘It’s a fantasy from the past. Very secure and cosy, which I think is nice.’ The film project only began to take shape when Paul met animator Geoff Dunbar, who shared his vision for a Rupert film. ‘I remember he asked me to write one paragraph of how I saw Rupert, and I said, “Well, it should stay in the 1940s, you shouldn’t change it, every endeavour should be made to keep it sacrosanct to Alfred Bestall’s world,”’ says Dunbar, who thereby became Paul’s collaborator on this and other animation projects.

Just as Paul took comfort in the Rupert project after his Tokyo humiliation, it was soothing to work again with George Martin and Ritchie. In July, Paul went to the South of France to contribute to Ringo’s
Stop and Smell the Roses
album, bringing Laurence Juber and Howie Casey with him, also Howie’s fiancée Sheila McKinlay, who had sung on the same bill as the Beatles in the Sixties. Sheila would sing backing vocals on Ritchie’s new album. A couple of months later, Howie and Sheila married, which leads to a nice story showing how generous Paul can be, despite his reputation for being tight with a buck. Around this time Howie asked Paul if he could help him and Sheila buy a house. McCartney agreed to lend the Caseys £10,000 ($15,300). A couple of years later, Paul Winn from MPL rang Howie to point out that he hadn’t repaid any of the loan. Howie said that he was broke. The only way he could repay Paul was to sell the house. McCartney then called Howie personally and told him to consider the loan a gift. ‘He said, “Look, it’s a wedding present.” Thank you very much!’

In the autumn of 1980, Paul gathered Wings together to rehearse again after a long lay-off, playing in a barn belonging to a friend in Tenterden, a small town near Peasmarsh. Wings then went into a local studio to work on a compilation album for CBS, which was still counting the cost of the failure of
Back to the Egg
. CBS wanted a Wings greatest hits album to recoup some of the millions they had advanced Paul. The star suggested instead that he revisit his archive of Wings demos and finish off songs that had not quite made it onto previous albums, releasing these, together with a selection of Wings hits, as a double album titled
Hot Hitz and Kold Kutz
. One of the songs that emerged from this process was the single ‘Goodnight Tonight’, which made number five in the US. CBS didn’t share Paul’s enthusiasm for the
Hot Hitz and Kold Kutz
album, however, which was never released.

Paul segued from this aborted project into making what would become his new studio album,
Tug of War
. George Martin had agreed to produce, the plan being to make the record at George’s AIR studio in London and his new AIR facility on the Caribbean island of Montserrat. The album proved the death knell for Wings. ‘So what happens then is we do a bunch of rehearsals for
Tug of War
and the material just didn’t necessarily lend itself to Wings,’ says Laurence Juber. ‘Paul called one day and said, you know, “George is going to produce this and he doesn’t want to do it as a Wings album, so thanks but we don’t need you right now … “At that point I saw that the writing was on the wall.’ Paul was breaking Wings up, though Denny Laine stayed with him for a little while yet.

Around this time an unwelcome ghost from the past emerged in the form of Erika Hübers (
née
Wohlers), the Hamburg barmaid who had claimed back in the Sixties to have given birth to Paul’s child. Although Paul had never admitted paternity, a lump sum had been paid by Brian Epstein to Erika plus maintenance for her child, Bettina, until she was 18, on the basis the family wouldn’t go public. Bettina was due to turn 18 on 19 December 1980. A couple of weeks before her birthday, the
Sunday People
newspaper splashed with ‘I AM BEATLE PAUL’S SECRET CHILD’, naming Erika and Bettina for the first time. Looking at the published picture of Erika - a plain, heavy-set burger-bar worker - it was hard to believe Paul had ever had a fling with her, while Erika’s contention that her daughter looked like the star stretched credulity. The girl had already started cashing in on her supposed link with McCartney by singing in clubs as ‘Bettina McCartney, the daughter of a Beatle’. Now she seemed to see a chance for a big pay day. Paul didn’t comment, but the matter refused to go away, adding to what had been a difficult year all round. It was about to get worse.

Another echo of the past came from across the Atlantic in the form of John Lennon’s new studio album,
Double Fantasy
, his first for five years, and a solid collection of simple, muscular rock songs as far as his half of the record went. (Yoko had an equal number of tracks, and hers were less impressive.) The first single, the rockabilly-influenced ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’, was released in October 1980, and did reasonable business. It was still bumping along in the lower reaches of the charts when Paul began work on
Tug of War
at AIR in London that December. Once again, John’s distinctive voice was on the car radio as Paul was driven up to town from the Sussex farm each day by John Hammel, punching through the years with lyrics that had an emotional weight and a sense of personal honesty - qualities too often lacking in Paul’s work. That didn’t necessarily translate into sensational sales.
Double Fantasy
sold modestly in the run-up to Christmas, and received some negative reviews. Still, Paul knew there was good work here. It was the first time for years that John had made a real effort with his music, challenging Paul as he used to.

McCartney was at home at Waterfall on the morning of Tuesday 9 December 1980 when the telephone rang. It was his manager Stephen Shrimpton calling to inform him that John had been shot dead in New York, gunned down overnight outside the Dakota building by a man who’d previously asked for his autograph. Neil Aspinall had been on the telephone disseminating the news, it being his unenviable task to inform 74-year-old Aunt Mimi that she would never see her nephew again. Neil always got the dirty jobs. Paul was in the house alone when he took the call; Linda was out doing the school run. When he saw Lin’s car coming back up the drive Paul walked outside to meet her. ‘I could tell by looking at him that there was something absolutely wrong. I’d never seen him like that before. Desperate, you know, tears …’

Paul had a session booked at AIR in London, with Paddy Moloney of the Chieftains flying in from Ireland to play on a track. Denny Laine was also going to be in the studio. George Martin telephoned Waterfall to ask Paul if he wanted to cancel. He said he would rather come in to work. With the press gathering outside his gates, the London studio looked like a convenient bolthole.
⁵¹

Paul arrived at AIR at the same time as his record plugger Joe Reddington. As the men walked through the lobby to the lift, a journalist tried to follow them in and had to be ejected before they could ascend to the fifth-floor recording studio. Paul then attempted to do a day’s work. ‘He was just very, very quiet, and upset, as we all were,’ recalls Denny Laine. ‘He said to me, “I’m never going to fall out with anybody again in my life,” which is impossible to do, but that’s the way he felt. I knew he felt that maybe they didn’t make up like they should have done, so therefore he felt a bit guilty …’ As the musicians stood looking out of the window, they saw a furniture van below on Oxford Street with the name Lennon’s on the side, a type of van neither man had seen in London before. ‘We looked at each other and went, “Uh-ho! That was an omen.”’

The phone rang. Joe Reddington picked up. ‘Can I speak to Paul McCartney?’ asked a woman.

‘He’s busy at the moment. Who’s calling?’

‘It’s Yoko.’ Joe knew instinctively it really was John’s widow, rather than a hoax. He told everybody to clear the room. ‘And [Paul] took the call. I just closed the door and he was crying - he’d lost his best friend.’