Paul McCartney (27 page)

He never envisaged spending his retirement anywhere but at 20 Forthlin Road, the tiny council house behind the police academy where he’d brought up his two boys–even though nowadays the police were now more usually out front, controlling mobs of hysterical young women.

Like all the other Beatles’ families, Jim and Paul’s brother Mike, who still lived with him, were unfailingly nice to the fans who besieged their home and deluged it with letters and gifts from all over the world. If the besiegers came from very far away, or looked specially weather-blown or forlorn, Jim would invite them inside and let them make a cup of tea in the tiny kitchen lined with Mike’s pictures of John taking the battered tin kettle off the gas, or the master of the house himself, loading Paul’s undies into the washing-machine.

But by 1964, the crowd situation at Forthlin Road was such that Paul could no longer come home, as he still liked to do. So he set about finding a new house for Jim in more secluded surroundings, which he himself could use as a base in the north-west whenever he needed one.

To any traditional Liverpudlian, the retirement dream was to move ‘over the water’–i.e. the Mersey–to the leafy purlieus of Cheshire’s Wirral peninsula. Paul found the ideal location in Heswall, a village at the Wirral’s westerly tip, which he’d first got to know when the Quarrymen used to play at the Women’s Institute hall. For the then sizeable sum of £8750, he bought his father a four-bedroom detached house with spectacular views across the River Dee to Wales.

The house had a name, ‘Rembrandt’, and was mock-Tudor in style–both features recalling John’s childhood home in Woolton, which Paul used to consider so ‘posh’. Though provided with only one bathroom, it had half an acre of garden, including good-sized greenhouses, where Jim could indulge the lifelong passion hitherto confined to little squares of grass behind council houses.

Paul paid for the house’s renovation and for central heating and fitted carpets to be installed. As Jim’s stepdaughter, Ruth McCartney, recalls, ‘It was the first time he’d ever lived in a place where the carpet touched the walls.’

‘Rembrandt’ was also to be a home for Mike McCartney, who by now had also come into pop music albeit by a more roundabout route than the older brother he always called ‘our kid’. After a period as a trainee ladies’ hairdresser, Mike became an organiser of Merseyside’s first arts festival, in 1962, and also took part in a sketch with the Liverpool poets Roger McGough and John Gorman. As a result, the three formed a vocal trio, specialising in old music-hall songs and children’s playground chants and named, with Scouse gallows-humour, the Scaffold.

To avoid any accusation of piggybacking on ‘our kid’, Mike adopted the surname McGear–‘gear’ in Liverpool slang being a noun for fashionable clothes or an adjective meaning cool. While the Scaffold were getting established, he received what he preferred to call a weekly covenant of £10 from Paul.

Jim himself could draw on a bank account held jointly with Paul, which at that time received a substantial part of his son’s Beatle earnings. Having such wealth at his disposal went to Jim’s head in only one respect: he became a wildly extravagant tipper. At the little tea room in Heswall, he would leave £1 extra on a bill for less than £2. On car journeys to and from Liverpool via the Mersey Tunnel, he’d even tip the man in the tollbooth.

In the eight years since Mary’s death, what with the combined pressures of cotton and raising two sons, Jim had never shown any interest in women outside his circle of supportive sisters. His one innocent flirtation was with the Beatles’ fan club organiser, Frieda Kelly, who called him ‘Uncle Jim’ and whom he’d take to Liverpool’s Basnett oyster bar–a favourite haunt of Brian’s–to teach her to appreciate wines and French cheeses she’d previously regarded as just ‘smelly’.

After moving across the water, Jim seemed set on remaining a confirmed bachelor, with his sisters Millie and Gin still coming once a week to clean the house for him as they had since Mary’s death. The only difference now was that he could send them home in a taxi.

He’d barely settled into ‘Rembrandt’, however, when romance struck him as suddenly as it first had with Mary in his mother’s air-raid shelter. Through his niece, Bett Robbins, he met Angela Williams, a tiny 35-year-old in a modish beehive coiffure and spectacles with flyaway frames. Born in Hoylake, Angie had grown up in Norris Green (coincidentally where Jim met Mary) and had chummed up with Bett at a Butlin’s holiday camp when they both entered a Holiday Princess beauty contest. Now she was recently widowed, with a four-year-old daughter named Ruth, living in a tiny flat on the Kirkby industrial estate and working for the Pure Chemical company.

If Jim was initially dismayed by the 27-year age gap between them, it never bothered Angie for a moment. ‘The first time I went to the house and saw Jim standing at the front door,’ she says, ‘I knew I was going to marry him.’ She was attractive, warm, lively and–the clincher for Jim–an accomplished pianist. On only her fourth or fifth visit to ‘Rembrandt’, he came up behind her while she was playing and put his hands on her shoulders. ‘He said, “I want to ask you something,”’ she recalls. ‘Before he could go on, I said, “The answer’s yes.”’

The terms of the proposal indicated how the changing times had affected even ‘Gentleman Jim’. Angie was offered the choice of becoming his resident housekeeper, living with him or marrying him. For the sake of her daughter, Ruth, she said it had better be marriage.

Jim went straight off to telephone Paul, whom Angie hadn’t yet met but with whom, it became clear, he had already discussed the matter. ‘I heard him say, “Yes, she is… yes, I have… yes, we are.” Then he put me on to speak to Paul, who said, “Well, you sound very nice.”’

Paul at the time was in London, but dropped everything and drove straight up to Cheshire in his Aston Martin. Following already established routine, his father opened the garage doors so he could drive in and enter the house through the kitchen, so avoiding any fans lurking around the front gate. Angie’s daughter, Ruth, recalls being got out of bed and brought downstairs in her pyjamas to meet her future stepbrother. By then, the Beatles’ faces were familiar even to four-year-olds. ‘I remember the first thing I said to him–“my cousin’s got you on the wallpaper in her Wendy house!”’

Always good with children, Paul sat her on his knee and took trouble to get acquainted with her. ‘I’d had an operation to have a kidney removed not long before, so I lifted up my pyjama-jacket and showed him the scar. He told me Ringo had a big scar on his tummy [from childhood peritonitis] but not as good a one as mine.’

Next day, Angie summoned her elderly mother, Edie, to stay with her at ‘Rembrandt’ as a chaperone until the wedding. Paul had to drive back to London, so Edie–totally undaunted by his celebrity–offered to make him cheese sandwiches and a flask of tea for the journey. In Jim’s unfamiliar fridge she found what she took to be cheese but in fact was a block of marzipan. ‘A couple of hours after Paul left, we got a phone call from him somewhere in the Midlands,’ Angie recalls. ‘He was laughing over his marzipan sandwiches.’

Jim and Angie were married on 24 November, at a tiny chapel in Carrog, North Wales. TV commitments for the Beatles kept Paul in London and Mike was on tour with the Scaffold. The village gravedigger acted as Jim’s best man, and the minister’s wife as both matron-of-honour and organist. Paul’s congratulatory telegram read ‘Wishing you long life and happiness and lots of marzipan butties.’

Becoming stepmother to a deceased wife’s sons can be full of problems but with Paul and Michael Angie seemed to avoid them all. The more likely source of tension was Michael, who returned from his Scaffold tour to the fait accompli of a new wife sharing ‘Rembrandt’ with his father and himself. However, both brothers were equally glad Jim had found such a vivacious companion for what might otherwise have been a lonely retirement. And Mike and Angie soon became as close as any real mother and son.

Paul seemed thrilled with this new extension to his family, so much so that at Christmas he invited Jim to bring Angie and Ruth down to London, stay in an hotel and join him for Christmas lunch with Jane’s family at 57 Wimpole Street. To Angie and Ruth, the Ashers’ home was ‘like a dream’ with its enormous Christmas tree and gold-wrapped presents. Also there for the festivities were Peter and Gordon and Peter Asher’s latest girlfriend Betsy Doster, a publicist for the American group Sam the Sham and the Pharaohs. The McCartneys were made to feel thoroughly at home, Jim getting on especially well with Jane’s father, who–primed by Paul–gave him the perfect gift of an Oxford English Dictionary.

On Boxing Day, Paul had a special treat for Ruth alone. Picking her up from the hotel in his Aston Martin, he took her to Kensington to meet a wide-smiling woman with a mass of curly hair whom he introduced as ‘Alma’. She was Alma Cogan, Britain’s biggest singing star of the pre-rock ‘n’ roll Fifties, known as ‘the girl with the laugh in her voice’ and for a gaggle of novelty numbers like ‘20 Tiny Fingers’ and ‘Never Do a Tango with an Eskimo’. Now in professional eclipse, she remained a hugely popular figure inside show business, and one of the most legendarily hospitable. All four Beatles–and Brian–were regular visitors to the mansion flat where she lived with her mother and kept open house literally around the clock for A-list celebrities up to Frank Sinatra, Cary Grant and Sammy Davis Jr.

Her sister, Sandra Caron, remembers how at Alma’s gatherings Paul took the chance to meet every big star he could and learn what they could teach him. ‘One time, he and George were in the kitchen and I went in and told them Noël Coward was in the next room. “Who’s he?” George said. I said he was only one of the most famous playwrights and wits of the century. When I went into the sitting-room later, Paul was sitting at Noël Coward’s feet.’

In those days, it was taken for granted that Angie looked after Jim and ran the house although, from long habit, he still did a large share of the cooking. Paul made them an annual allowance of £7000, from which Angie received £60 per week for housekeeping. Detailed accounts had to be kept and submitted to Paul’s office of everything she spent (‘Piano-tuner £3, TV aerial £7, Ruth dress £4’), right down to face-flannels and sweets.

Jim had never previously been able to afford a car, so had never learned to drive, and said it was too late now. Angie therefore became his chauffeur in the small car Paul provided, diligently noting down every gallon of petrol bought and every toll paid through the Mersey Tunnel on Jim’s weekly trips into Liverpool to pay his bookmaker’s account.

She also did her best to rein in his chronic overtipping. Early in 1965, they went on a belated honeymoon to the Bahamas where (for tax reasons) the Beatles were filming the climactic scenes of Help! One night at an open-air restaurant, a group of musicians came to the newly-weds’ table and serenaded them with ‘Yellow Bird’. Jim’s tip was so munificent that for the rest of their stay the musicians pursued them with recitals of ‘Yellow Bird’, even following Angie to the toilet and playing it outside.

At home, he was forever distributing cash among his large family circle in Liverpool, who needed something or other but didn’t like to ask Paul directly for it. He even tipped his doctor in Heswall £300 every Christmas. ‘One year, this doctor said he wanted to buy a colour TV and so could he please have double the amount,’ Angie recalls. ‘So Jim just gave it to him.’

As Paul McCartney’s stepmother, Angie had to get used to groups of excited figures waiting at the end of the drive at all hours of the day and night and in all weathers, nocturnal voices and scufflings in the garden and torchlight shining inquisitively up at her bedroom window. From time to time, the press would have to be let into the house, the furniture drastically rearranged to accommodate TV cameras and lights and endless relays of tea and refreshments served by her. Once, while she was in the kitchen, preparing yet another laden tray, an amorous hack sidled up and propositioned her.

Though ‘Rembrandt’ had been intended as a secret hideaway, fanmail for Paul soon began pouring through the letterbox. Among the piles stacked on the living-room table, Angie noticed several from the same person, with postmarks showing that the sender was getting nearer and nearer. Finally, one night, the Liverpool dock police contacted Jim to say they were holding a young woman who’d arrived as a stowaway on a freighter and claimed to have been ‘invited to Paul McCartney’s house’. Paul, who happened to be there, spoke to the stowaway, who, with typical McCartney hospitality, was then invited for tea and afterwards put up at an hotel in Liverpool until she could arrange her passage home.

It might well have caused tension with Paul and Mike when their father decided to adopt Angie’s little daughter, Ruth, becoming ‘Daddy’ to her after half a lifetime of being ‘Dad’ to them. But both brothers saw it as a further happy sign of Jim going against the grain of retirement: growing younger rather than older. To Ruth, he appeared much as he had to them for all those years at 20 Forthlin Road–a quiet, methodical figure who never appeared at breakfast without a collar and tie, yet whose ‘bubbling, underground sense of fun’ ensured that in any tongue-pulling contest he always triumphed. Like Paul and Mike before her, Ruth would be sent to Chambers’ dictionary to check the spelling of any arcane word in his crossword puzzle; like them, she learned his treasury of Scouse wisdom: ‘Do it now’; ‘The two most important “-ations” in life are “toler-” and “moder-”’; ‘There’s no hair on a seagull’s chest’; ‘Put it there if it weighs a ton’.

Paul always devoted time to Ruth on his visits, playing games with her in the garden, or showing her books about his favourite contemporary artists. It delighted him when she treated the surreal fantasies of Salvador Dalí as quite normal, remarking casually, ‘Oh, look… a soft watch.’

Though never quite as close to his stepmother as Mike was, he liked Angie for her good humour and tireless hospitality to any friends he brought home; at whatever hour of the day or night, ‘Ange’ would go and put the kettle on. Her love of music and abilities as a pianist created a further bond, and her worship of Frank Sinatra became a family joke. Some time later, during a solo visit to America, Paul was offered a short-haul ride on Sinatra’s private plane, not realising that Sinatra himself would also be aboard. During the trip, he couldn’t help blurting out, ‘Wait till my stepmother hears I’ve met you.’