Paul McCartney (82 page)

The only offer came from the new Bloomsbury imprint at number 2 Soho Square, next door to MPL (which, coincidentally, had just published a picture book about John with a foreword by Yoko). ‘I don’t think even Bloomsbury thought it would sell,’ Cox recalls. ‘I suspect the intention was to get an in with Paul, so that at some later stage they could set up an authorised biography of him.’ The deal was done through MPL Communications, with Linda and Cox splitting the proceeds 50–50. ‘At MPL, it wasn’t taken very seriously either. It was just seen as a little side project for Linda.’

Throughout 1988, Cox made regular trips to Peasmarsh to choose the recipes with Linda. He was then living in Hampstead, north London; early on the appointed days, a chauffeur-driven car would collect him, then make a huge detour to the East End to pick up Paul’s cleaning-lady before heading for Sussex. ‘Yes, he could have found any number of cleaning-ladies around Peasmarsh, but he happened to like that one. It was my first taste of the Paul way of doing things.’

Compiling the recipes proved a laborious process, for Linda was an instinctive cook who never bothered to measure things out. And, conscious of the critics who’d be lying in wait for her, Cox insisted on testing each one several times over to ensure it would work for anyone, and enlisted a celebrity panel including Ringo and Twiggy to try it out for themselves.

Nor were the dishes she made for Paul and the children shining examples of healthy eating. ‘She used tons of butter and double cream, and seemed never to have heard of cholesterol. A lot of the meat substitutes she used came from America and were often kosher; there was some terrible stuff called Bolono, non-meat Bologna sausage. I tried to tone it down by only putting two pints of cream into a cheese omelette where she would have used three. But still having to eat all that dairy so many times every day left my stomach in such a state that I could only stand plain boiled rice afterwards. In the end, it made me become a vegan.’

Linda felt no great compulsion to complete the book, often saying, ‘Let’s not bother to work today. Let’s just sit out in the garden and have a cup of tea.’ But Cox was a hard-up freelance for whom it represented his one potential source of income. Constrained from ordering Paul McCartney’s wife to shape up, especially in her own kitchen, he thought of a neat psychological ruse to achieve the same effect.

Paul’s former fiancée, Jane Asher–now married to cartoonist Gerald Scarfe–had also recently entered the cookery field with a bestselling book about cake-making. Cox would bring along a copy of Jane Asher’s Party Cakes and casually flip it open whenever Linda’s attention started wandering. The thought of Paul’s old flame being a cookbook ahead never failed to concentrate her mind.

For Paul, the priority in 1988 was making an album to erase the disappointing performance of Press to Play. But before work even began, he scored a surprise hit in the last territory he expected.

Auditioning possible musicians at the Hog Hill studio during the previous summer, he’d started with the usual work-out of old rock ‘n’ roll numbers, like ‘That’s All Right Mama’, ‘No Other Baby’ and ‘Twenty Flight Rock’, his audition-piece for John and the Quarrymen in 1957, all of which sounded so good that he decided he had an album right there. His new manager, Richard Ogden, that experienced record company boss, successfully argued it would be too much like John’s Rock ‘n’ Roll, released 13 years earlier, and he should go for a polished studio album instead.

To mollify him, Ogden had the idea of issuing the rock ‘n’ roll tapes as a bootleg dressed up to look like an illegal import from Communist Russia. When EMI and MPL’s lawyers objected, Ogden licensed the album to a real Russian label, Melodiya, which released it under the title CHOBA B CCCP (Back in the USSR) after Paul’s Beach Boys pastiche on the Beatles’ White Album.

The Soviet Union, under its final president, Mikhail Gorbachev, had relaxed many of its old restrictions, but pop music remained in short supply, especially from such a name as this. CHOBA B CCCP sold half a million and became the Communist record industry’s most successful export of all time. When Paul did a phone-in for his Russian fans on BBC radio’s World Service, he received five times more calls than the prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, in a similar programme a few weeks earlier.

At 46, he was keener than ever to find younger collaborators to keep abreast of modern trends and reinvigorate him in the recording studio. And in 34-year-old Elvis Costello, he found the most promising yet. This one and only pretender to The King’s Christian name–confusingly arrayed in Buddy Holly glasses and playing a solid-body guitar–was one of Punk Rock’s more worthwhile survivors. Paul had first met him in 1982, when they both had albums engineered by Geoff Emerick, and formed a high opinion of his songwriting abilities. They’d also coincided at Live Aid, where Costello performed a solo version of ‘All You Need Is Love’, cheekily introducing it as ‘an old northern English folk song’.

In the summer of 1988, he came to Hog Hill to work with Paul on the album that would become Flowers in the Dirt. Linda was equally pleased to see him since he’d converted to vegetarianism largely due to her assurance that it wouldn’t be ‘like joining a weird society’.

There was first an intensive songwriting session, just Costello and Paul in a room above the studio, with two acoustic guitars, an electric piano and a large notebook. The two guitars, the notebook–above all, the figure in horn-rimmed specs on a facing seat and ‘the great sarcastic quality in his voice’–gave Paul a sense not of déjà-vu so much as reincarnation. ‘I would sing a line and [Elvis] would come up with some witty, acerbic foil to it,’ he later recalled. ‘I said, “My God, that was my and John’s whole style.” I’d write some romantic line and John would write the acid put-down.’

As a rule, Paul’s collaborators were overawed by his fame and terrified of challenging him, a state of affairs he resolutely refused to acknowledge. But Costello told him things straight as only John ever had before. Indeed, told him very much what John always used to: that he should spend less time on being a PR man and more on his music. ‘There’s no denying that he has a way of sort of defending himself by charming and smiling and thumbs-up and all that bit,’ Costello would later observe perceptively. ‘I said once I thought he should step from behind that.’

Egalitarianism had its limits, however. Having co-written an album’s worth of songs with Elvis Costello and given Costello his head as producer, Paul decided against releasing it. Instead, he decided to make a completely different album under his name alone, to be called Flowers in the Dirt.

As studio musicians, he could easily have called back the Wings line-up he’d suspended in 1980. But, deciding to start from scratch yet again, he asked Richard Ogden if he ‘knew anyone’. Ogden immediately thought of lead guitarist Hamish Stuart, formerly of the Average White Band, who could also play bass and sing and was tough and worldly-wise enough to handle the politics of sharing a stage with Paul and Linda.

Stuart now lived in Los Angeles, so was not fully up to speed concerning the McCartneys’ strict stance on animal rights. When Ogden met him at Heathrow airport, he was wearing a fur coat, leather trousers and snakeskin boots. Hasty re-outfitting had to take place before he could be delivered to Hog Hill Mill. Stuart recommended his friend, guitarist Robbie McIntosh, formerly of the Pretenders, who in turn recommended keyboard-player Paul ‘Wix’ Wickens. Drummer Chris Whitten had been hired for the rock ‘n’ roll sessions and kept on the payroll since,

Paul at this time was still embroiled in litigation with George, Ringo and Yoko over his extra one per cent from EMI on Beatles back royalties. Paradoxically, he was soon to be responsible for enriching each of them, as well as himself, by some $6.5 million.

Since 1981, the world’s fastest-growing computer company had been allowed to use the same name as the Beatles’ Apple organisation on condition that their equipment featured no music or entertainment content. But in 1988, Apple Computers launched the Musical Digital Interface, a microchip which enabled PCs to create, record and store music. The result was a lawsuit from Apple Corps which took up 116 days in the High Court in London–and featured the playing of ‘Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds’ on an Apple computer (one up to John, if he’d only known)–then moved to the Court of Appeal and the European Court in Brussels before being settled out of court for around $26.5 million.

And all because in 1967 Paul had loved a Magritte painting of a pristine green apple and borrowed it to name and brand the Beatles’ short-lived Garden of Eden.

On days when no chauffeur-driven car was available to collect Peter Cox from Hampstead, he went to Sussex by train to work on Linda’s ‘little side project’ of a vegetarian cookery book. At Rye station, he’d usually be met by the Peasmarsh Land Rover which, like some American bomber in the Cold War, remained operational virtually around the clock. ‘Fans of Paul’s, especially Japanese ones, were continually turning up in the district, then getting hopelessly lost. The Land Rover would gather them up, take them to the station and put them on the right train back to London.’

If the Land Rover wasn’t available, Cox had to take a taxi–no easy task since most of the drivers had been terrified by reports of the ferocious security at ‘Paulditz’ and refused to go near the place, no matter what proof of being a bona fide visitor he showed them. ‘One guy who did agree to take me wanted to let me off at the beginning of the road up to the front gate, where there was this field full of the most beautiful wild flowers. When I told him I wanted to go right to the house, he said, “What about all the machine-guns?” Ironically on that particular day, there was nobody at the front gate.’

The lax security was all the more surprising given Paul and Linda’s chequered career as drugs-bustees. But, as Cox discovered, neither of them ever smoked dope around the house, because of the children, although Paul did so liberally in the recording studio. ‘Next to the phone, they had a list of contact numbers for all the local police, so it didn’t seem as if they were expecting any trouble from that quarter.’

While Cox worked with Linda in the kitchen, Paul was usually at Hog Hill with his new band, making Flowers in the Dirt. ‘I preferred it when he wasn’t around,’ Cox recalls. ‘When he walked into a room, he had the most powerful charisma of anyone I’d ever known. At those moments, all work came to a stop and everything centred on him.’

Friendly and blokeish though he seemed, Cox always sensed ‘this question mark, as if he was always thinking “I am Paul McCartney, you want something from me and I am going to find out what it is.” He once said to me, “If I gave you a million pounds, would you eat a hamburger?” I said “No” and he said “You’re lying”. I thought, what does that say about him–that he thinks everyone has a price?

‘I once saw him give Linda a Cartier watch that had cost £20,000. But she never seemed to have any money for day-to-day expenses. She’d often ask me, the impoverished hack, to lend her a fiver or a tenner.’

Where cost never mattered was in gratifying some passing whim of Paul’s. ‘Once he decided he fancied a kind of pizza you could only get from a particular place in New York, so he had one flown over on Concorde. The odd thing was that, although we were in a kitchen, with unusual amounts of food lying around everywhere because of the book, I never once saw Paul eat. And other people he worked with every day said the same.’

Another time, when Sussex was shrouded in thick fog, he told his staff to charter a helicopter to fly him to London. ‘MPL found a pilot who’d flown helicopters in the Falklands War but even he said it would be crazy to go up in conditions as bad as that. Because it was Paul McCartney, the guy agreed to take him but for safety’s sake never flew higher than about 40 feet; they went all the way just skimming over the tops of hedges.’

Among all the people Paul dealt with every day, professionally and personally, Cox can recall only two who weren’t putty in his hands. One was George Martin, with whom he’d worked since 1962 and on whose musical wisdom he still relied. ‘George knew just how to handle Paul, just like he had the Beatles. With both those things on his CV, he could have sorted out the Middle East, no problem.’

Somebody else who’d always known how to handle Paul was his youngest daughter, Stella, now 17 and, says Cox, ‘a focused girl who always knew where she was going. She was the one of his kids who was most like him and the only one who stood up to him. Once, he was giving her a bollocking because she’d overspent her allowance. “Do you think I’m made of money?” he said. To which the answer was “Well, yes, actually, Paul.”’

Relationships between celebrity authors and their editorial ‘ghosts’ can easily turn sour, but Cox grew fond of Linda–even a little concerned about her. ‘She really was the most generous person you could ever want to meet. When my wife Peggy and I needed a holiday, Linda lent us the farm in Kintyre for three weeks. We lived on potatoes and a specially potent brand of local Scotch because that was all there was. The water out of the taps came from a thousand-year-old spring; it was amazing, but full of little wriggling creatures.’

His concern came from a feeling that the McCartneys’ marriage was going through a difficult patch. While Linda was totally content with life at Peasmarsh with her horses and animal waifs, Paul often complained of feeling isolated and of missing the London life that used to keep his ‘cultural antenna’ vibrating.

Cox began to suspect that he himself might be part of the problem; that Paul resented Linda giving undivided attention to the cookbook that could have been spent on him, even felt insecure about the hours she spent closeted with her co-author. Sometimes when Cox arrived, she wouldn’t be in the kitchen but out in the front drive, in tears. Once or twice when the Land Rover met him at Rye station, he was told she couldn’t work on the book that day, but no explanation was given.

The tension only surfaced when Paul decided to tour again. For whereas he’d once been unable to face life on the road without Linda, he now seemed rather ambivalent about having her along.