Paul McCartney (77 page)

Despite all the land and real estate they owned in the area, the McCartneys’ personal lifestyle remained as unpretentious and unobtrusive as ever. Their younger daughters, Mary and Stella, both attended local state schools, first Peasmarsh C of E (Church of England) primary, then following Heather to Thomas Peacocke, the large comprehensive in Rye. As Stella would later acknowledge, it was the best possible antidote to being the children of a mega-celebrity. ‘You didn’t boast about stuff, otherwise you’d get beaten up. It was healthy to see how most people in the world lived.’

One morning when Paul took the girls to school, he found the teachers on strike and picketing the front gate. They explained their grievances to him, expecting sympathy from someone with such well-publicised northern working-class roots. Instead, he snapped, ‘My teachers never went on strike. You’ll get no sympathy from me.’ An amateur paparazzo took a photograph of him striding off across the playground in evident displeasure; the following week, it appeared on the front page of the Times Educational Supplement.

Thirteen-year-old Mary had inherited the dark, aquiline Irish beauty of her namesake, the mother Paul lost when he was 14. He’d told her about her grandmother’s career as a nurse and midwife, and saw in her some of that same caring spirit which had been cut off so tragically early. Mary decided to become a nurse in her turn, until a tonsillectomy operation showed what horrendously hard work it was; after that, her interest moved to the camera her mother never stopped pointing and clicking, whatever else was going on.

But 11-year-old ‘Stell’, small, fair, and angel-faced, never had any doubt where she was headed. As a toddler, she would watch old Technicolor Hollywood movies, fascinated by the wardrobes of the female stars, especially when they had a tomboy look, like Doris Day’s buckskins and army cap in Calamity Jane. Unknown to her parents, she’d sit for hours inside their shared walk-in clothes closet, gazing at both the ‘his’ and ‘hers’ racks. As a result, both Linda’s thrown-together preppy look and Paul’s carefully-calculated dapperness would one day contribute to groundbreaking couture.

Stella had a directness and sassiness that gentle Mary lacked. She resented it, for instance, that everyone she met knew everything about her mother and father, yet would have been horrified at any invasion of their own parents’ privacy. ‘And who are your mum and dad?’ she always wanted to ask.

Heather, now 19, had passed a confusing adolescence, half in the hippy-organic atmosphere of home, half in the punky clamour of her comprehensive school, and was–she would later recall–‘the most clumsy, chaotic teenager’. As Paul’s adopted daughter, she had never been made to feel any less loved and valued than his biological ones, to both of whom she was extremely close, as she was to her five-year-old brother, James.

Former Apple stalwart Tony Bramwell had observed the family from the inside since Paul brought Heather from America, and knew of the problems in adjusting to her new life that had largely brought about the move to Sussex. Bramwell recalls that while never showing her overt favouritism, Linda always kept her ‘sort of separate’ from the others as if in special need of protection and nurturing.

For a time, she seemed set on following in her mother’s footsteps: she took a photography course at the London College of Printing and in 1981 won an award for her portrait of American drummer Steve Gadd during the Tug of War sessions on Montserrat. Then, deciding she couldn’t compete with Linda, she took up printing at the Photographers Workshop in Covent Garden, winning an award as Young Black and White Printer of the Year with a study of the waterfall at Peasmarsh.

All three of Paul’s daughters shared his and Linda’s strict vegetarianism, now developing into an interest in the growing animal rights movement. All shared their mother’s passion for horses and had become accomplished riders, though inevitably there were occasional spills. Heather suffered a particularly bad fall and had to be rushed to the Royal East Sussex Hospital, where she was found to have a broken arm and collarbone. A grim-faced Paul later told journalists that the family had been ‘struck down by bad luck’ but refused to go into detail about the accident.

Awkwardly for the McCartneys, riding in the Peasmarsh area was inextricably bound up with fox hunting. The East Sussex and Romney Marsh Hunt was a regular winter spectacle, pursuing its quarry over neighbouring fields in a swirl of red coats, braying horns and yelping hounds. In recent years, the hunt had been disrupted by saboteurs from animal rights groups, using increasingly extreme tactics. Paul and Linda abhorred hunting but, as they had to live here, did not publicly align themselves with the ‘sabs’.

During one particularly violent confrontation, the huntsman, Tony Percy–the official in charge of the 140 foxhounds–was attacked with a pickaxe-handle and pulled off his horse, suffering a back injury that ended his riding career. Percy later opened the Old House Saddlery in Peasmarsh High Street, selling high-class riding tack made by in-house craftsman Keith Lovejoy. The McCartneys–whose animal rights stance did not yet outlaw leather–became frequent customers. Percy’s daughter, Natalie, then aged 12, recalls Linda ordering a bridle of Havana leather with cut-out diamond shapes for Paul.

To Natalie, he was a deity to whom she seldom spoke directly but who was unfailingly benign. Her best friend, Lucy, lived beside Hog Hill and the girls would often creep up to the mill and eavesdrop on the sounds coming from its studio, whose guest musicians could be anyone from Eric Clapton to Roger Daltrey of the Who. One day, as she was riding along School Lane to a horse-show, Paul suddenly appeared behind her at the wheel of a blue Mercedes so wide that it barely fitted the lane. He didn’t try to pass or show any sign of impatience, but slowed down to her horse’s pace, switching on his hazard lights to warn other traffic, in effect watching over her until she reached her turning.

While Linda’s commitment to her children was absolute, protecting Paul always remained her primary concern–if not from physical harm, then from being taken advantage of. ‘People were always trying to do that,’ his designer friend David Litchfield remembers. ‘Often the very last people in the world that you’d expect.

‘One time, their Lamborghini had been brought back to MPL after having something minor done to it. Paul wouldn’t accept it until Linda checked it out. We heard a lot of shouting in reception and found her giving the delivery guy hell. She’d discovered that while it was at the garage, someone had nicked its new tyres and put four half-worn ones in their place.

‘I said to Paul later, “If anyone tried to hurt you, Linda would tear his ears off, wouldn’t she?” He laughed and said, “Yeah, you’re right.”’

‘About as close as you can get to a non-movie’

Paul turned 40 in June 1982. The sombre milestone was marked by two major lifestyle changes: he gave up smoking (tobacco, that’s to say) and took up painting.

He was always the most actively artistic Beatle–for a long time much more so than John–using his flair for drawing and design in numerous ways, from sketching the band’s earliest stage-suits to conceiving the covers for Sgt. Pepper, Abbey Road and every Wings album. But his view of painting remained as it had been back when John was the art student and he just a cartoon-drawing schoolboy: he thought it something one couldn’t do without having gone to college.

That lingering superstition was dispelled by meeting America’s greatest modern painter, Willem de Kooning, the Eastman family’s friend and East Hampton neighbour. ‘Bill’ was the most unpretentious of men, working in just a pair of old shorts in his huge, airy studio. Unlike most abstract painters, he didn’t at all mind being questioned about the ‘meaning’ of his works, and seldom gave very complicated answers. One day, Paul plucked up the courage to ask what a certain purple silhouette might represent.

De Kooning peered at it, then replied, ‘I dunno. Looks like a couch, huh?’

Then came a summer when the McCartneys rented a house of their own on Long Island and found its owners had removed all the pictures, leaving walls dotted with unsightly hooks. To conceal them, Paul bought some oil paints and dashed off a set of largely monochrome canvases. Having never used oils, he didn’t realise how long they took to dry; when the rental ended two weeks later, his canvases were still wet and he had to have a special case made to transport them home.

Willem de Kooning gave the spur to his painting that Buddy Holly and Elvis once had to his music. He bought his paint and brushes at the same art-store de Kooning used and set up his easel on a porch looking towards de Kooning’s house. Like all who take up the pastime, he found it hugely relaxing and refreshing, though the workaholic never let up: replicating de Kooning’s expansive brush-strokes, he turned out abstracts and landscapes almost as quickly as he wrote songs. One night while Linda was watching television, he started a portrait of her which taught him that skin wasn’t just one colour, as he’d always thought, but demanded many shades of pink, blue, red and black.

For Linda–who turned 40 nine months before Paul–1982 brought the first serious attention as a photographer she had received outside America. A selection of her work over the past decade and a half, simply entitled Photographs, was published in a lavish coffee-table book and formed a travelling exhibition which opened in Liverpool, then moved to London, Jarrow, West Germany and Australia.

The work was an eclectic mix ranging from her mid-Sixties studies of rock icons like Jim Morrison and Jimi Hendrix and snapshots of the Beatles making the White Album–including some touching ones of John and Yoko–through numerous portraits of Paul and the children to Bill de Kooning, her beloved Appaloosa stallion, Lucky Strike, and sheep. Her toddler son James appeared, unnamed, urinating on London’s Thames Embankment rather like the Manneken Pis statue in Brussels.

The book received respectful coverage and the exhibition drew crowds wherever it went. The plaudit that meant most to Linda came from the great French photographer, 88-year-old Jacques-Henri Lartigue. A shot of a little Scottish boy running across wasteland so impressed Lartigue that, without knowing who the photographer was, he requested a copy to pin up in his Paris studio.

Linda did a full round of interviews–her first without Paul at her side–from BBC radio’s Woman’s Hour to Channel 4’s The Tube, sounding more relaxed and forthcoming than she ever had before. In every one she insisted she had no ambition other than to be with her family and friends. ‘I like truth,’ she told The Tube’s Paula Yates. ‘I like being ordinary.’

Wings were already becoming a distant memory. ‘Ebony and Ivory’, Paul’s duet with Stevie Wonder, released in April 1982, spent seven weeks at number one on the Billboard singles chart–his twenty-eighth song to be logged there–en route to a Novello award as International Hit of the Year. Tug of War, the album on which it appeared, was number one in both the US and the UK and sold massively all over the world, particularly in Japan.

Another ebony-and-ivory duet was on its way–this time with a colour-contrast rather less pronounced. On Christmas Day 1980 at Peasmarsh, he had received a surprise transatlantic phone call. ‘Hi, Paul,’ said a fragile falsetto voice. ‘It’s Michael Jackson. Do you wanna make some hits?’

By now, the former child singer in Motown’s ‘black Beatles’ had more than fulfilled that long managerial fantasy of an act rivalling the real ones. With his corkscrew curls, Sgt. Pepper-ish scarlet jacket, single white glove and magic feet, Jackson was the most original, insanely successful presence in pop since fringed hair and violin basses. He was a huge admirer of the real Beatles, especially Paul, who had contributed a song named ‘Girlfriend’ to his first solo album, Off the Wall. As their respective record-labels, CBS and Epic, had the same parent company, there were no contractual difficulties in their teaming up.

They began work together in London in the autumn of 1981. Jackson had already begun the course of plastic surgery that would increasingly seem more like self-mutilation; a condition called vitiligo had drained the pigmentation from his skin, making him look strangely raceless as well as sexless.

A showbusiness pro since the age of six, he had been denied any normal childhood and consequently was a child manqué, obsessed by J.M. Barrie’s story of Peter Pan, ‘the little boy who never grew up’, and only really happy in the company of the very young. Though in the early Eighties this did not excite much comment, it would increasingly overshadow his short, sad life.

A top-secret session had been booked at George Martin’s AIR Studios to develop a McCartney/Jackson co-composition called ‘Say Say Say’. No one else was allowed to be present but Linda and little James McCartney, with whom Jackson played on the floor like a fellow five-year-old.

The collaboration went so well that Paul invited him down to Peasmarsh to see another side of growing up in the rock business. He was wistfully envious of Mary and Stella’s idyllic world of pets and horses, though he declined an invitation to go on a ride with them, explaining, ‘I’m not allowed to get dirty.’ To Paul he confided that he now identified with Peter Pan so closely, he even shared Peter’s ability to fly.

Despite all his years in the business, Jackson seemed strangely naive about its financial workings, so one evening over dinner–as he later recalled–his host showed him ‘a little book with MPL printed on the cover… It contained a full list of all the songs Paul owned–and he’d been buying rights to songs for a long time. I had never given the idea of buying songs any thought before.’

‘This is the way to make big money,’ Paul explained, a little like the teacher he’d so nearly become. ‘Every time someone records one of the songs, I get paid. Every time someone plays one of the songs on the radio, I get paid. And the other important thing is to make some really good videos.’ He would later wish the lesson hadn’t sunk in quite so well.

In April 1982, he rejoined Jackson in Los Angeles to complete ‘Say Say Say’ and record two more duets, ‘The Man’ and ‘The Girl Is Mine’, featuring the pair in the implausible role of rival suitors, complete with some twee dialogue between them. The three tracks were then shared, ‘Say Say Say’ and ‘The Man’ going to Paul and ‘The Girl Is Mine’ appearing on Jackson’s Thriller, the most successful album of all time with 65 million ultimately sold.