Paul McCartney (78 page)

Those LA sessions, so musically productive, were awkward on a personal level. For Jackson’s producer, Quincy Jones, was married to the actress Peggy Lipton, a former girlfriend of Paul’s whom he’d unceremoniously ditched, along with several others, when he met Linda. To show there were no hard feelings, Jones proposed the four of them should have dinner. It was a rather sticky encounter nonetheless, hardly helped by Paul’s insistence on calling Peggy ‘Mrs Jones’.

The success of MPL’s music publishing arm had not lessened Paul’s wish for it to be equally significant in film production, as was shown in its recent name-change to MPL Communications. And the autumn of 1982 brought a seemingly perfect way to make that happen.

The company had already put out two highly successful documentaries about Wings tours, Wings Over America and Rockshow. But simply having cameras pointed at him, though never unwelcome, wasn’t enough for Paul. He wanted to make ‘real’ movies and be involved at every level in a creative process which had always fascinated him. He’d tried it once, with the Beatles’ Magical Mystery Tour, and engineered a monumental flop–but he was older and wiser now and MPL wasn’t Apple.

He’d always wanted to make a film based on the Band on the Run album and in 1974 had asked the great science fiction writer Isaac Azimov to develop a ‘sci-fi movie musical’ in which a rock band discovered they were being impersonated by extraterrestrials, but nothing ever came of it. Ten years later, he still felt the idea had potential, so commissioned the Liverpool playwright Willy Russell, author of John, Paul, George, Ringo… and Bert to come up with a different story and write a full script. Suddenly cooling on the project–exactly why, Russell never discovered–he sent an appeal for new scripts around the film companies that were his Soho neighbours, but found nothing else that caught his fancy.

Then one day, stuck in traffic in the back of his chauffeured limo, he’d started jotting down a script of his own. Its hero was a rock star bearing a strong resemblance to himself–named Paul in fact–whose career was thrown into crisis when someone stole the only tapes of his latest recording session. Real-life Paul had suffered that very misfortune while making Band on the Run in Nigeria. But whereas he’d simply re-recorded the pilfered tapes from memory, he launched his alter ego on a quest to recover them.

Its title came from a news item that Broad Street station, a Victorian railway terminus in the City of London, was scheduled for closure and redevelopment as offices. For pun-loving Paul, the location echoed one of his father’s favourite old songs, George M. Cohan’s ‘Give My Regards to Broadway’. So, in a spirit of John Betjeman-esque nostalgia–though he’d barely been aware of the station hitherto–he titled his script Give My Regards to Broad Street.

Among his wide circle of powerful friends outside music was the producer David Puttnam, whose Chariots of Fire had won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1981. In his search for film projects, he’d become accustomed to bouncing ideas off Puttnam; so much so that the producer was starting to feel a bit like a squash court. One thing Puttnam had impressed on him above all was that making a movie wasn’t like making an album, which could be stopped and re-started as the mood took him, but would demand at least two years of solid commitment.

Give My Regards to Broad Street thus started out as a less demanding vehicle, a one-hour TV film that would be part whodunnit, part documentary and part musical, showcasing present and past songs by Paul with A-list session musicians including Eric Stewart. As such, it did not call for a movie director but a television one who, because of the subject matter, had best be British. On Puttnam’s recommendation, Paul chose 40-year-old Peter Webb, then considered Britain’s top director of TV commercials but ripe to move into features like Alan Parker and Hugh Hudson before him.

Shooting began at Elstree Studios, in a convivial atmosphere of old friends and colleagues meeting up again, with plenty of in-jokes to savour. George had declined to take part but Ringo joined the backing musicians while his wife Barbara played a journalist; George Martin was musical director and also appeared as himself, as did engineer Geoff Emerick. The Australian actor Bryan Brown was cast as on-screen Paul’s manager, Steve, acting very much like real Paul’s real-life Australian manager, Steve Shrimpton.

The main object, Paul announced, was for everyone to have fun and, to begin with, he seemed to be having plenty himself. He relished the role of leading man which, unlike that of lead rock musician, meant relays of people titivating him each time he had to perform. ‘If someone wants to come and brush my hair, I must admit I like it,’ he told Melvyn Bragg, whose TV arts programme, The South Bank Show, was following the shoot. He also enjoyed working with George Martin to compose incidental music for a whole film rather than just bits of them as he had previously.

Linda, who had various cameo–though non-speaking–roles, was on hand every day in her role of shield and people-filter. But her vigilance could slip. At the musician auditions, sax-player Mel Collins brought along his wife, the former Maggie McGivern, once the most secret of all Paul’s clandestine girlfriends, who hadn’t seen him since he turned up on her doorstep, seemingly distraught, on the night before his wedding.

Maggie had kept in touch with Neil Aspinall, hence this invitation. Thanks to her presence, Mel Collins became the only auditionee whom Paul invited to lunch. ‘There were only the three of us and Cubby Broccoli [producer of the Bond films],’ she remembers. ‘Paul and I just talked and talked. Afterwards, Mel said to me, “it was just like you were coming home”. I saw Paul’s son, James, and his brother, Mike, but Linda didn’t appear until we were leaving.’ She feels it may not have been just coincidence that Mel subsequently didn’t get into the film.

The only person conspicuously not having fun was the film’s director, Peter Webb, to whom every day seemed to bring a fresh, dismaying revelation. The first was that he had to film Paul’s script, which covered only 22 pages (one page usually equals a minute of screen-time) and which, because it was Paul, had gone through none of the customary rewriting, rethinking and re-rewriting. Still more dismaying was the discovery that, while totally at ease as his real self in front of still or television cameras, Paul was oddly stiff and self-conscious when acting the part of himself–and he was the centre of virtually every scene.

As he later admitted, he felt the role of jivey rock star ‘Paul’, for whom life held nothing worse than missing tapes, was really too young for him. One day, watching George Martin give a flawless portrayal of George Martin, he realised he was now six years older than Martin had been when the Beatles first came to Abbey Road and they used to consider him so elderly.

While a director normally enjoys total autonomy on the set, Webb felt his function become more like a record producer in the ‘enabling’ George Martin style; there simply to listen to what Paul wanted, then make it happen. Nonetheless, with an impressive professional supporting cast, a bunch of excellent musicians and a top-drawer crew and technical team, Webb felt he had the ingredients for a memorable hour of television.

But then, with shooting well under way, everything changed. Lee Eastman took the project to Harvey Weinstein, the American rock-promoter-turned-movie mogul whose Miramax company had distributed MPL’s Rockshow documentary. Without reading the script, Weinstein took it to 20th Century Fox, still the most prestigious of the old-time Hollywood studios, whose executives (without reading the script) scented a Beatle screen musical to rival A Hard Day’s Night. Fox added £4.4 million in funding to MPL’s original £500,000 and scheduled Give My Regards to Broad Street as a virtually guaranteed box-office smash in 1984. Despite never having directed a big-budget film, Peter Webb was kept in post, feeling that ‘the carpet had been pulled from under my feet’.

Filming continued into 1983, by now absorbing so much of Paul’s attention (as David Puttnam had warned) that he had no time to record the new album he would have expected to release later in the year. Instead, a selection of leftovers from Tug of War came out under the title Pipes of Peace, topped off by ‘Say Say Say’ and ‘The Man’, his two duets with Michael Jackson. The title track–with its resonance of John–was accompanied by a video recreating the First World War’s famous Christmas truce. A British and a German soldier were shown emerging from their trenches and crossing a shell-blasted No Man’s Land to shake hands, both of them played by Paul in different moustaches.

In April and May, the memoirs of Jo Jo Laine, who had split from Denny the previous year, were serialised by the tabloid Sunday People in excerpts headlined ‘My Galaxy of Rock Star Lovers’, ‘Lust at First Sight’ and, climactically, ‘Inside the Strange World of Paul McCartney’.

Jo Jo’s relations with Linda in the Wings era had always been difficult–by her account, because Paul always fancied her. Although not suggesting he had been among her galaxy of rock star lovers, she waxed eloquent on the McCartneys’ rustic lifestyle and fondness for dope. Linda came across as a controlling hausfrau and Paul as a bit of a wimp who ‘enjoys Big Mama… running the show’.

There were some things from which Linda couldn’t protect him. ‘He was giving me a lift one day and told me to move a sack of letters from the front passenger seat to the back,’ David Litchfield remembers. ‘“Go ahead and read one,”’ he said, “they’re all the same.” Every one was from a woman, claiming he’d slept with her in the past and she’d had a child by him.

‘“Some of them are really impressive,” Paul said. ‘“They come with lawyers’ letters and exact details of when and where, and I start racking my brains and thinking to myself ‘Maybe I did once have sex with her’.”’

Often such allegations were what a later era would term ‘historical’. In 1983, Erika Hubers went before a Berlin judge, claiming that Paul had fathered her daughter, Bettina, during the Beatles’ visits to Hamburg in the early 1960s. The former Reeperbahn waitress had first made the allegation in 1964 in the midst of the band’s first American tour. But the British press, fearful of damaging the nation’s darlings at their moment of supreme triumph, had refused to touch the story.

Resurfacing in an age increasingly hungry for celebrity sex-scandals, Hubers claimed £1.75 million on behalf of the now-adult Bettina and herself. Paul denied the allegation but the Berlin judge found it sufficiently plausible to order him to take a blood test. When the result exonerated him, Hubers alleged that he’d used a standin and he was ordered to retake it, meantime paying Bettina maintenance of £175 per month. The second test also proving in his favour, he magnanimously saved Hubers from financial ruin by settling her legal costs.

Nearer home, Liverpudlian Anita Cochrane openly claimed that her 19-year-old son, Philip, had been fathered by Paul, whom she’d first met at the Cavern when she was 16 and still a virgin. That charge, too, had first surfaced in 1964, as the Beatles basked in their carefully-constructed image of cuddly moptops. Anita herself had accepted a once-and-for-all pay-off from Brian Epstein and sought nothing further from Paul, but her outraged relatives had taken to the streets, handing out leaflets about ‘Paul the cad’ to crowds at the Beatles’ civic welcome home by the Lord Mayor.

The Anita Cochrane story was finally revealed in 1983 by Peter Brown, that formerly loyal and discreet Beatles aide, in a memoir entitled The Love You Make–a quotation from Paul’s finale to the Abbey Road album. Paul made no public response, any more than he had to Jo Jo Laine’s Sunday People extravaganza. Privately, he was outraged and ceremonially burned a copy of Brown’s book while Linda took photographs.

George Orwell’s chilling postwar novel of the same name had made 1984 a year to dread. But its arrival found Britain suffering none of the post-nuclear totalitarian horrors Orwell had predicted: no Communist-style police state, no cowed, impoverished populace and (with neither mobile phones nor e-mail yet) no uncontrolled, indiscriminate mass surveillance.

Instead, under Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government, there was rampant capitalism, wholesale privatisation of publicly-owned utilities and a war against trade unions culminating in the brutal suppression of a miners’ strike. There was much of the same frivolity and hedonism against a grim background as in the Sixties; there was bisexual pop music, postmodernist architecture, breakfast-time television, alternative comedy, outsize shoulder pads for women and a vogue among both sexes and all ages for the same virulent shade of jade green.

In 1984, too, the renaissance in British films sparked by David Puttnam’s Chariots of Fire reached new heights with David Lean’s A Passage to India, Hugh Hudson’s Greystoke, Neil Jordan’s The Company of Wolves, Puttnam’s own The Killing Fields and A Private Function, co-produced by none other than George Harrison–but not, alas, with Paul McCartney’s Give My Regards to Broad Street.

The year started badly enough for Paul. In January, he and Linda were in Barbados, enjoying a quiet evening with Eric Stewart, Stewart’s wife Gloria and some pot, when a squad of police burst in. Although cannabis was technically illegal on the island, it was widely used and sold openly on the beach in front of the McCartneys’ rented villa, so they had considered themselves quite safe. It turned out that one of their temporary domestics had snitched on them, forcing the law to act.

The next day, they appeared in court in nearby Holetown and were fined $100 each. Their holiday ruined, they flew home at once, landing at Heathrow, then switching to a private plane. When their baggage appeared from the Barbados flight, one of Linda’s suitcases was missing. It had been intercepted and opened and a tiny amount of weed–less than .02 of an ounce–had been found. A large media contingent was present, so once again Paul found himself being busted on TV, though this time, at least, no prison cell awaited him.

‘Can we get one thing straight?’ he said, now very much Macca. ‘This substance, cannabis, is a lot less harmful than rum punch, whisky, nicotine or glue, all of which are perfectly legal.’ Would he be using it again, someone asked. ‘No, never again.’