Paul McCartney (65 page)

Litchfield had run some of Linda’s rock star photographs in The Image but had never made a film before. ‘Paul said that was OK because the documentary wasn’t meant for anyone but him, Linda and the band,’ he recalls. ‘The Image was just about to go bust, so it saved my life.’

As new to the world of rock-megastardom as to that of film-making, Litchfield went to see Paul’s manager, Brian Brolly, at McCartney Productions’ one-room office in Greek Street, Soho. There, among other things, he learned what being Paul’s manager entailed nowadays. ‘While I was sitting there, Brian was being torn off a terrible strip on the phone by Linda. He’d had to order some mayonnaise to be sent to her at the house, and had got the wrong size. While she was going on at him, he said to me, “You’d better listen to this, to give you an idea what to expect,” and switched on the speakerphone.’

Litchfield also received a briefing from Paul’s chief roadie and factotum, Alan Crowder, in what amounted to a set of commandments wrought by long experience: ‘If Paul says he’ll be somewhere at nine in the morning, he won’t turn up until two in the afternoon… Any woman you introduce to him who promises she won’t come on to him is lying…’

Litchfield’s home-cum-office was in St John’s Wood, and he became a frequent visitor to Cavendish to discuss the Wings-in-rehearsal documentary. ‘The first time Paul took me there, his housekeeper, Rose, greeted him with the words “That fucking bitch has been in my kitchen again.” It turned out she often talked about Linda that way, though they were good friends, and Paul seemed quite used to it. “Why don’t you go and watch TV with the kids,” he said to me, “while I sort this out.” I think he liked having a ballsy person like Rose around when most people were so reverential to him.’

Filming was to take place entirely at Abbey Road, where Paul had booked a studio around the clock. Despite his huge standing there, and the money he was spending, Litchfield remembers, he still had to obey the same rules and regulations as in the days with ‘headmaster’ George Martin. ‘The canteen closed at five in the afternoon–and there were no extensions. Linda wasn’t even allowed into its kitchen to prepare anything for the band.’

Although not destined to be released or broadcast, the documentary was given a title, One Hand Clapping, and included a voice-over by Paul. In it he confessed that what he really enjoyed was playing every instrument himself, as on the McCartney album, ‘just like an old professor in a laboratory’. Still, he dutifully pushed Wings’ new members’ charter: ‘My ideal is to get a steady group… with enough looseness so that any of us at any time can go off and do what he wants to do.’

Jimmy McCulloch continued to be a problem, feuding with Geoff Britton and sniping at Linda, his mood swings fuelled now by more than alcohol and grass. ‘Two Italian girls were always coming to see him and slipping him envelopes,’ Litchfield recalls. ‘And what was inside was harder than cocaine.’

Wings’ filmed run-through of ‘Live and Let Die’ was augmented by the London Symphony Orchestra in full evening dress–an echo of the famous ‘Day in the Life’, similarly never meant to be broadcast. Also on hand were a cohort of top session musicians including saxophonist Howie Casey, whom Paul had known since they were in rival Liverpool bands on Hamburg’s Reeperbahn. Times had changed, however, since they played all night to gangsters and strippers, fuelled by foamy oceans of beer. When Casey was asked what he’d like to drink, he replied ‘A beer’ and was served with just the one bottle.

‘Paul didn’t do his vocal until late in the day, after I’d had a few gins, and I couldn’t stop myself bursting out laughing,’ David Litchfield remembers. ‘He stopped and said, “Is there something funny?” I said, “I’m sorry, but you look just like Shirley Bassey.” She’d sung a James Bond song before [‘Goldfinger’] and Paul had got all the moves. He didn’t laugh and I realised I’d gone too far.

‘There was a cello solo, which the LSO musician kept getting wrong. I realised why: it was ten to five and after five he’d be on overtime. Finally, Paul went to this bloke and said, “To help you, I’ll sing it for you.” Then he sang the whole cello solo, using the names of the chords as words, so that the bloke couldn’t help but get it right. It was a brilliant piece of musicianship and at the end the whole orchestra stood up and applauded him.’

As John and Paul started communicating again, so their once-implacable business differences gradually melted away. By the end of 1974 they seemed to have nothing left to quarrel about.

The previous year had officially terminated their contract with Northern Songs, the last remaining thing–apart from their past–that yoked them together. Each now controlled the publishing rights in his solo output although, gallingly, their joint Beatles oeuvre belonged to others.

Apple continued as a company still owned by all four ex-Beatles but reduced from a Georgian mansion to a single office run by Neil Aspinall, their faithful one-time roadie. Aspinall was said to be mainly occupied in amassing film footage for a marathon documentary looking back over their career. There was no inkling yet of their phenomenal future afterlife, still less of the golden windfalls to come simply from their company’s name.

Above all, the issue that had divided Paul and John most bitterly and turned Paul into an outcast inside the Beatles–damaging him more than the others knew or ever would know–had worked itself out, to his complete vindication. On 2 November 1974, John, George and Ringo filed suit against Allen Klein for ‘misrepresentation’, a charge of special gravity where a manager was concerned. Klein immediately countersued, claiming allegedly unpaid fees, commissions and expenses totalling around $19 million.

John by now had wearied of his lost weekend in LA and returned to New York, although he hadn’t yet found the nerve to attempt a reconciliation with Yoko. Unknown to all but a few musician friends, he and May Pang were living in a small apartment on East 52nd Street. Paul and Linda were among those let into the secret and allowed to call on him there.

It was two years since John’s last live performance. He was convinced he’d built up too much stage-fright ever to do another one, especially without Yoko, and had firmly resisted all attempts to coax him back on the boards. His resolve weakened, however, with his fifth solo album, Walls and Bridges, one of whose tracks, ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’, featured harmonies by his friend and devoted fan Elton John. When it was released as a single, Elton made him promise that if it made number one, they would perform it onstage together.

In late November, to John’s amazement, ‘Whatever Gets You Thru the Night’ went to the top of both the Billboard and Cashbox charts, giving him the only American solo number one single he would have in his lifetime. True to his word, though with huge misgivings, he agreed to make a guest appearance during Elton’s concert at Madison Square Garden on the 28th, Thanksgiving night.

This selflessly generous gesture by Elton showed what a vast reservoir of affection still remained for Beatle John–and not only John. As their third and climactic duet, he announced ‘a number by an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul. This one I never sang. It’s an old Beatle number and we just about know it.’ It was ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, which had kicked off Beatlemania with that old estranged fiancé’s rousing cry of ‘One, two, three, faw!’ and it brought the house down. Thus their reconciliation was made public.

Yoko attended the show escorted by a new companion of her own, Paul’s former session-guitarist David Spinozza (who might easily have ended up in Wings). Backstage, she and John almost fell into each other’s arms and he began to woo her afresh, following the conditions she’d laid out to Paul–asking her on dates, sending her flowers. By early 1975, they would be back together again.

In December, the legal process Paul had set in motion in the British High Court nearly four years earlier finally reached an end with the legal dissolution of the Beatles’ business partnership. This necessitated a reunion of sorts in New York, where the papers had to be signed. There was a sad symmetry in the city which had given them their greatest and happiest triumph, in 1964, now becoming the last stop in their divorce exactly ten years later.

George was in town at the end of an American tour to promote his latest album, Dark Horse, supported by his musical guru Ravi Shankar and a sitar ensemble as well as a backup band. The album-title was an ironic allusion to his years of being overshadowed by John and Paul and his latter emergence as a surprise winner. Actually, it was becoming clear that whatever talent George possessed had largely rubbed off them and, without their stimulus, was already fading fast. His tour had been derided for its poor presentation and long, preachy mystical interludes: ‘Transcendental Mediocrity’, Rolling Stone called it.

There was much else currently on George’s mind: his wife, Pattie, had run off with his best friend, Eric Clapton, and his globally-revered single, ‘My Sweet Lord’, stood accused of plagiarising ‘He’s So Fine’, a 1963 hit for a black female group, the Chiffons. Yet he still seethed over Paul’s treatment of him in the recording studio, and lost no chance to hit back when asked if the Beatles could ever conceivably reunite. ‘I’d join a band with John any day,’ he told one interviewer, ‘but I couldn’t join a band with Paul McCartney.’

The signing of the papers dissolving the partnership was set for 19 December at the Plaza Hotel, where the Beatles had laughingly holed up before conquering the continent on The Ed Sullivan Show. Now there weren’t screaming, heaving crowds to be faced; just stacks of documents more suited to some armistice ceremony after a world war.

At the appointed time, only Paul, George and Ringo had turned up. John was known to be at the Dakota Building, just across Central Park, but there was a lengthy wait, then a gofor brought word that he wouldn’t be coming; Yoko’s astrologer had advised against it. Instead, he sent a balloon with a message saying ‘Listen to this balloon’. He would sign a few days later while visiting Disney World in Florida; by his lights, a fitting enough conclusion.

The deed three-quarters done, Paul and Linda went to Madison Square Garden to see George wind up his Dark Horse tour. Both disguised themselves with Afro wigs and Paul wore a false moustache. He was recognised nonetheless, setting off a fresh rumour that the Beatles could be getting back together…

‘Man, if I was Paul McCartney, I’d buy the road’

During the first years of his marriage to Linda, Paul’s life had struck a seemingly perfect balance between his farm in the Scottish wilds and his London home in St John’s Wood, with culture and sophistication near at hand whenever he needed a restorative draught of one or the other, and Abbey Road studios just around the corner. But with Wings’ accelerating success, and the resultant touring and recording schedule, it was no longer as easy as it once had been to bury himself in Kintyre for weeks, even months on end. At the same time, 7 Cavendish Avenue was starting to feel the strain of the household he now headed.

Thanks to Linda, that former elegant bachelor establishment had taken on the look of an urban farm. The back garden contained rabbits, ducks and chickens with a cockerel whose crowing, not confined to sunrise, could be heard by Test Match crowds at nearby Lord’s cricket ground. Beside the geodesic glass meditation temple, with the circular bed that had once belonged to Groucho Marx, stretched a large vegetable-patch. The old stabling at the bottom had been restored to accommodate four horses, for Sunday-morning rides up to Primrose Hill and Hampstead.

The McCartneys’ animals were allowed the same free rein as their children. One night when Paul accidentally left a window of his Rolls-Royce open, some chickens gained entry and did £6000-worth of damage. ‘And there was a duck named Quacky that used to be allowed in the house,’ David Litchfield remembers. ‘It used to sit on the sofa with the kids.’

In addition, a pack of dogs created a constant uproar like the one he’d grown up with from the police dog training school over his garden fence. Martha the Old English sheepdog had been joined by Jet the black Labrador commemorated on Band on the Run, a yellow Labrador named Poppy and a Dalmatian named Lucky. When Martha, rather late in life, found romance in Scotland and gave birth to a litter of mongrel puppies, Linda insisted on keeping them all.

The incessant barking endeared Paul even less to other Cavendish Avenue residents than the eternal traffic of fans to his front gate. One of his neighbours, a Mrs Griswold, went so far as to complain to the Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals that the dogs were left alone in the house when he and Linda went away. However, an RSPCA investigation found that Paul’s housekeeper, Rose Martin, was always there and regularly employed some of the better-behaved fan-pickets to walk the dogs on Hampstead Heath.

The episode underlined his need of a weekend bolt-hole from London where he, Linda and the children could enjoy the same freedom and privacy they did in Scotland without having to trek all the way up there. So in June 1973, he had paid £42,000 for a property named Waterfall Cottage in Peasmarsh, East Sussex.

The location could hardly have been more suitable. Situated three miles to the north-west of Rye and close to the Sussex–Kent border, Peasmarsh was a postcard-perfect village dominated by the Norman church of St Peter and St Paul (a fortuitous combination of Paul’s name and that of the Merseyside church where he and John first met). True to the Rye area’s strong literary heritage, it had once been home to the Very Reverend H.G. Liddell whose daughter, Alice, inspired Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.

Waterfall Cottage was situated just outside the village, at the end of a long unmarked track called Starvecrow Lane. The house itself was a modest two-bedroom affair dating only from the 1930s with a circular shape recalling the oast houses, or hop-drying kilns, to be found throughout neighbouring Kent. But with it came approximately 100 acres of woodland mapped with ancient names like Four Acre Wood, Dinglesden Wood, Sluts Wood and Waterfall Wood, in which could be found the stream tumbling over perpendicular rocks that gave the property its name.