Paul McCartney (53 page)

Early in September, Klein sensed the Consortium might be swinging back his way and, to his credit, brought John Eastman over from New York so that Paul’s interests would be properly represented. But on the 19th, as the Beatles prematurely celebrated victory–with yet another office wrangle, this time about who should sit on Northern’s board of directors–they heard that the vital block of shares had been sold to ATV after all.

In another small rapprochement, John and Paul agreed they wanted no part of a Northern Songs headed by Lew Grade. Keeping their minority stake would have maintained their connection with their own work, perhaps even encouraged them to mount a further takeover bid at some later date. Instead, they let Klein broker a deal to sell Grade their combined holding for £3.5 million.

They would continue to receive royalties from their songs: a dividend on a scale unimaginable in 1969. But that prodigious body of work, from ‘Please Please Me’, ‘Can’t Buy Me Love’ and ‘Help!’ to ‘Penny Lane’, ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’, ‘All You Need Is Love’ and ‘Hey Jude’–the bottled joy and optimism of a whole decade–was now owned by others.

A week earlier, John and the first incarnation of the Plastic Ono Band–Yoko, Eric Clapton, bassist Klaus Voormann and drummer Alan White–had made a surprise appearance at a one-day rock ‘n’ roll festival in Toronto. Their set was barely rehearsed and shambolic, but it cured John of a paralysing superstition. For years, he’d believed himself incapable of going onstage with any musicians not named Paul, George and Ringo. In his euphoria, he told Ray Connolly of the London Evening Standard that he was quitting the Beatles–but made Connolly promise not to use the story for the present. On the flight home, he also told Allen Klein.

For Klein, this was appalling news. Just days earlier, he had finalised a deal that was to have wiped away the failings over NEMS and Northern Songs and established him, even with Paul, as the saviour the Beatles had sought. He had negotiated a new contract with their American record label, Capitol, under which their per-unit royalty would rise from 17.5 per cent of wholesale price to an unheard-of 25 per cent. Their part was to guarantee two albums and three singles per year for the next six years.

When other top bands had lost important members–Brian Jones of the Rolling Stones, John Sebastian of the Lovin’ Spoonful, Paul Jones of Manfred Mann, Graham Nash of the Hollies–they’d simply found replacements and carried on. But there could never be any question of replacing John: if he walked, it was the end of the Capitol contract–and of the Beatles.

On 20 September, the day after the loss of Northern Songs, they met at 3 Savile Row to sign the Capitol contract. Only Klein and Yoko knew of John’s decision. Klein had asked him to say nothing until after the contract was safely signed, and he had agreed. It was an occasion with somewhat less of the usual tension between the two opposing factions. Klein had represented Paul along with the other three in the Capitol negotiations and, after his people had gone over every syllable of the contract, he admitted being impressed by the new royalty rate. ‘If you’re screwing us, I can’t see that you are,’ he told Klein.

The meeting began somewhat like a family therapy session, with John grumbling about the way Paul had bossed the band since Brian Epstein’s death, his tireless productivity, his ‘hogging’ of space on albums and his ‘granny music’ like ‘Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da’ and ‘Maxwell’s Silver Hammer’. George was also dragged in, in the character of neglected child. The quality of ‘Something’ and ‘Here Comes the Sun’ on Abbey Road had finally given John some respect for ‘that bloody kid’, and he now seemed to be blaming Paul for the years George had spent in Lennon and McCartney’s shadow.

Paul might have countered that on the Beatles’ current international hit single, ‘Come Together/Something’, the glory all belonged to John and George while he himself was nowhere in evidence. Most of John’s grievances were wholly unreasonable, the consequence of his own insecurity and chronic laziness. Even so, Paul’s replies were low-key, conciliatory, once even a little sad as he questioned whether their professional life really had become such unmitigated hell. ‘When we get into a studio, even on a bad day, I’m still playing bass, Ringo’s still drumming… we’re still there, you know.’

Still, the fact that John had turned up to sign a six-year contract seemed to indicate he saw some future for the four of them. Under this misapprehension Paul began talking about a possible return to live shows, reviving his former idea of incognito appearances in small clubs. ‘You don’t understand,’ John broke in. ‘I’m leaving. I want a divorce, like my divorce from Cynthia.’

The immediate question was whether the band should sign a contract they now had little chance of honouring. Klein favoured going ahead and John Eastman, for Paul, did not object. ‘We signed in a bit of a daze,’ Paul was to remember, ‘not really knowing why we’d done it.’

Paul and Klein briefly became allies, together persuading John to continue to keep his defection under wraps. The object wasn’t only to prevent alarm-bells ringing at Capitol. Abbey Road was about to be released and–according to the wisdom of 1969–the thought of a dying band might put people off it.

Although John managed to keep his vow of silence, he couldn’t hide his increasing detachment from the others. For him, the band had become ‘they’ rather than ‘we’, and represented things he no longer wanted any part of. ‘The Beatles can go on appealing to a wide audience,’ he told one interviewer in this objective vein, ‘as long as they make nice albums like Abbey Road with nice little folk songs like “Maxwell’s Silver Hammer”[!] for the grannies to dig.’ During a later radio appearance, he made a scathing reference to ‘The Beatles, so-called’.

Most significant was his absorption in a different music ensemble, one of them his wife and four of them perspex towers. In October, he reassembled the Plastic Ono Band–this time with Ringo on drums–to record ‘Cold Turkey’, his searing recreation of his and Yoko’s recent struggle to get off heroin. Uninvolved though Paul had been, either in the heroin or the recording, it should have carried the Lennon–McCartney credit, but bore John’s name only.

Paul, on his side, was worn down by ‘days of arguing about money, arguing with the other Beatles, so [that] something that had once been full of artistic freedom had become a nightmare’. Even on the most resiliently youthful of the four, it was all taking a physical as well as mental toll. ‘I swear I got my first grey hairs…’ he was to recall. ‘I looked in the mirror and thought, “I can see you! You’re all coming now. Welcome.”’

London, too, was starting to get him down as the former man-about-town and culture-vulture had not dreamed it ever could. The hostility of his fans towards Linda, far from wearing off as he’d expected, seemed to grow more virulent. The front wall of Cavendish was repeatedly daubed with graffiti hate-messages. One hot afternoon, as Linda returned home alone, a member of the front gate pickets pushed an iced chocolate dessert into her face. A moment later, a furious Paul rushed out and demanded, ‘Who just threw a choc-ice at Linda?’ ‘Actually,’ the assailant corrected him pedantically, ‘it was a chocolate mousse.’

The pickets had long been able to get into the house while he was out, but hitherto had always crept about as respectfully as if it were a holy shrine, disturbing nothing, carrying off only flowers out of vases or sheets of toilet paper as souvenirs. Their most prized trophy had been a pair of Paul’s trousers which a group of fans took turns to wear, shortening or lengthening them according to the size of the wearer.

Now there were regular thefts of clothes, Linda’s photographic prints, even money. Rather than involve the police, Paul decided to catch the thief or thieves red-handed. He and Linda made an ostentatious exit from the house, then stopped their limo a little way down the road, crept back on foot into their opposite neighbour’s front garden and mounted surveillance from behind the hedge.

Unfortunately, it was the moment chosen by one of the most honest and respectful picketers to nudge open Cavendish’s ineffectual security gate and leave a bunch of flowers outside the front door. To her horror, the object of her adoration suddenly pounced on her, shouting ‘It’s you! It’s you!’, and began to shake her. Seeing the flowers and realising his mistake, he stopped shaking and instead began remorsefully stroking her hair.

That 20 September confrontation with John was the final straw for Paul. He decided, in his word, to ‘boycott’ Apple and seek refuge with Linda in their remote Scottish Highland hideaway. ‘We took the kids, we took the dogs, we took everything we had, a guitar on top and a potty for the baby.’

All at once, the most public Beatle, the band’s formerly tireless ambassador and PR, became the Invisible Man. In that era of communications limited to the telephone, telegrams and letters, it truly was possible for someone to vanish into a remote part of the country and remain incommunicado indefinitely. None but his family and closest Apple associates knew about the Kintyre Peninsula and High Park Farm, and even they heard little or nothing from him and had no idea how long he intended to be there. The fans, who normally possessed almost psychic knowledge of his whereabouts, had to confess themselves utterly baffled.

Beatle death-rumours were nothing new. Paul had already been the subject of a good many, started by people trying to make money from newspapers or simply discover where he lived. A telephone-caller to his office would say he’d been killed in Manchester or Glasgow, hoping to be told he was alive and well at home in St John’s Wood. Now, after his disappearance had lasted several weeks and still no explanation was forthcoming, a student newspaper at Drake University, Iowa, published a spoof report that he was dead.

Long before the age of the Internet or Twitter, the story went viral. The Drake students’ spoof was taken seriously, first by radio stations across the Midwest, then by fan-mags and scandal sheets, then television and the serious press, along the way acquiring a fully-developed storyline. It was that Paul had died in a road accident in 1966 but for the sake of the Beatles’ career his death had been hushed up and a double in the person of an actor named William Campbell hired to take his place.

The story was pounced on by analysts and interpreters of Beatles lyrics–always at their most obsessive in America–who hadn’t had anything really to get their teeth into since Sgt. Pepper. Now it was said that Paul’s bandmates, seemingly racked with guilt over his death, had scattered concealed references to it through their musical output ever since.

The hunt for and dissemination of these so-called ‘clues’ kept the rumour on the boil for almost two months. In ‘Revolution 9’, an unidentified voice supposedly intoned ‘Turn me on, dead man’. In the last section of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’, John was said to sing ‘I buried Paul’, though he himself always maintained the words were ‘cranberry sauce’. On the Sgt. Pepper album cover, the blue-uniformed Paul figure allegedly confessed its own bogusness with an armband lettered OPD, for ‘Officially Pronounced Dead’ (actually OPP, for Ontario Provincial Police). So it also had in the Magical Mystery Tour film by wearing a black carnation while the other Beatles wore red ones.

Attention focused most of all on the Abbey Road album cover, which had never been intended to mean anything whatsoever. Now the four ill-matched figures marching over the crossing were recast as a funeral procession, with white-clad, bewhiskered John as the priest, Ringo in his formal black suit as the mortician, blue-denimed George as the gravedigger and Paul’s bare feet symbolising his role as the deceased. A car parked in the background was said to add the clinching detail: a Volkswagen ‘Beetle’, part of whose number plate read 28 IF, or Paul’s age if he had lived until the autumn of 1969 (though actually he would still have been 27).

By November, there was an inundation of ‘Paul is dead’ singles (‘Brother Paul’ by Billy Shears and the All-Americans, ‘Saint Paul’ by Terry Knight, ‘So Long Paul’ by Werbley Finster aka José Feliciano, ‘We’re All Paul Bearers’ by Zacherias and his Tree People) and Apple’s press office was having to deny the rumour dozens of times a day to media organisations all over the world. A few managed to get through to Jim McCartney in Cheshire, who did the same. But as no one was willing to say where Paul was at present, the necrophilic fever refused to abate.

Finally, America’s Life magazine did what had occurred to no British publication, ferreting out the existence of High Park Farm and dispatching a writer and photographer there. They arrived early one morning, while Paul was still in bed. At first, he was furious at the intrusion, and flung a bucketful of kitchen slops at them. Then, realising this had been caught on camera, the PR man in him took over: he agreed to an interview on condition the slop-throwing shot was ‘killed’. Life’s 7 November cover showed him, tousled and unshaven, holding baby Mary, with Linda beside him and six-year-old Heather gripping a shepherd’s crook. ‘Paul is still with us,’ said the cover line.

Quoting Mark Twain, he joked that ‘the rumours of my death have been greatly exaggerated… Perhaps the rumour started because I haven’t been in the press much lately. I have done enough press for a lifetime, and I don’t have anything to say these days. I am happy to be with my family and I will work when I work. I was switched on for ten years and I never switched off. Now I am switching off whenever I can. I would rather be a little less famous these days.’

Buried in the diplomatic soufflé-speak was a momentous statement which at the time went completely unnoticed: ‘The Beatle thing is over. It has been exploded…’

As the Sixties ran out, the spotlight switched back to John–and stayed there. On 25 November, he returned his MBE decoration to the Queen as a protest against the British government’s support of America in the Vietnam War, its failure to alleviate the current famine in Biafra and (undercutting all seriousness) the fact that ‘Cold Turkey’ was slipping down the UK charts. This perceived slight against Paul’s ‘pretty nice girl’ caused almost as much of an outcry as giving the Beatles MBEs had four years earlier.