Paul McCartney (73 page)

The only time he’d even been in such a situation before was as an 18-year-old in Hamburg, when he and Pete Best had been briefly banged up for allegedly trying to burn down a porno cinema with a lighted condom. This was an infinitely worse experience: all alone, denied any contact with Linda and the children, racked by a blinding headache and by fears absent from his earlier, brief incarceration at St Pauli’s police station. He didn’t sleep a wink but spent all night sitting on the floor with his back against the wall, terrified of being raped.

Linda was similarly in torment, besieged by ravenous media at the Okura with no idea what was going on or where it would end. For the sake of Heather, Mary, Stella and little James–who kept asking ‘Where’s Daddy?’–she did her best to put on a brave face. ‘It’s really very silly,’ she told one TV camera. ‘People are so different over here. They take [grass] so very seriously. Paul is now in some kind of detention place and I haven’t been allowed to see him. As soon as they get someone nice like Paul, they seem to make a field-day of it. I’ll never come back to Japan again. This is my first visit and my last.’

Secretly, haunted by memories of Japanese prisoner-of-war movies, she was afraid he might be subjected to torture. At this moment when he needed her protection like never before, she was unable to give it.

The immediate question for MPL in its chief’s absence was whether to abort the tour–but that decision proved to have been taken already. ‘When we’d come in from the airport, we’d seen posters for our concerts about every 50 yards,’ Steve Holley remembers. ‘Next morning, there wasn’t one anywhere, and all Wings music had disappeared from the radio.’

They could all only watch the TV news reports that second day as Paul was delivered to the Tokyo police’s Narcotics Control Department by three tough-looking plain-clothes officers, handcuffed and with a rope around his neck–‘like a dog’, as he later said. Despite having already made a full confession and apology, he was subjected to six more hours’ interrogation led by the drug squad’s renowned chief investigator, Koyoshi Kobayashi.

‘I had to go through my life story… school, father’s name, income,’ he would recall. ‘They would say, highly curious, “You are MBE?” And I would say “Yeah”, hoping that would carry weight. And it sort of did. Then they said, even more curious, “You live at Queen’s palace?” I said, “Well no, not actually… well yes, quite near.” I was hoping they’d let me off if I lived near the Queen’s house. They said, “You smoke marijuana?” I said, “Hardly.” They said, “Makes you hear music better?” I thought “God, I wonder if that’s a trap…”’

When the interrogators had finished, he was allowed a brief meeting with Linda, then remanded back to custody at Metro Police Headquarters. As his escort brought him out by a rear door, they were surrounded by around 200 young women, weeping hysterically and calling his name–the Japanese difficulty with the letter ‘l’ somehow lending it extra anguish: ‘Paur! Paur!’ The melee became so uncontrollable that riot police had to be called. ‘It was like Beatlemania,’ he would remember. ‘Only instead of going to a gig, I was going to a cell.’

By now, his lawyer and brother-in-law John Eastman had hurried from New York and his new manager Steve Shrimpton from London to organise his defence and shield Linda and the children from the media storm at the Okura. An English-speaking Tokyo lawyer, Tasuku Matsuo, was engaged to represent him at the interrogations and whatever might follow.

So far, his only visitor had been Donald Warren-Knott, an official from Tokyo’s British Embassy, which happened to be located next door to his custody block. Warren-Knott found him calm and in reasonable spirits, though full of anxiety about Linda and the children. He said he was being well-treated and didn’t seek any special privileges beyond asking for a vegetarian diet including some fruit, which Warren-Knott duly requested on his behalf. His jailers agreed to supply apples and oranges but not bananas because of the risk of an unwary guard slipping on one of the skins.

The next day, 18 January, he was brought to the District Prosecutor’s office for yet further interrogation, hustled in by a back door because weeping, ‘Paur’-ing fans were blocking the front. Under Japan’s draconian anti-drug laws, he learned, he faced a possible seven years’ imprisonment with hard labour in a penal system widely criticised for human rights violations. And no one yet could give him any firm assurances that it wouldn’t happen. ‘I was looking at bringing the kids up in Japan,’ he would later admit.

That afternoon, he was questioned by district judge Haruo Matsumoto, who then granted the prosecutor’s application to keep him behind bars for up to ten further days’ investigation. Now transferred from police custody to that of the Justice Department, he was taken to central Tokyo’s grim nineteenth-century Kosuge Prison. There he was to spend a week in company with some of Japan’s most hardened criminals, and be treated little differently.

Meanwhile, his case had aroused shock and disbelief around the world, with politicians and public figures of all sorts expressing concern on his behalf and calling on the Japanese government to take things no further. While Donald Warren-Knott from the British Embassy was discussing the case with investigator Kobayashi in the latter’s office, a phone call came through from Washington DC. It was Senator Edward Kennedy, last surviving brother of President John F. Kennedy; he’d heard Wings were scheduled to tour America the following summer and was concerned Paul might not be at liberty to take part.

George sent a message from himself and his wife, Olivia: ‘Thinking of you. Keep your spirits high.’ But the other two former Beatles expressed neither support nor sympathy for a friend who had always shared their drugs travails: Ringo merely observed cagily that Paul had been ‘unlucky’ while John made no comment.

There was also much hilarity over the size of the marijuana-stash. American chat show king Johnny Carson quipped that after Paul landed at Narita, his suitcase had remained in a holding pattern for another four hours. Less amusingly, a deranged Beatles fan named Kenneth Lambert–a species later to become horribly familiar–turned up at Miami airport announcing he meant to fly to Tokyo and ‘free Paul’, despite having neither a plane ticket nor money. During an altercation with airline staff, Lambert pulled out a toy gun and a police officer shot him dead.

To begin with, Paul found conditions at the Kosuge Prison ‘barbaric’. He was allotted a cell measuring only 10 feet by 14, with just a thin mat to sleep on. Normally hyper-fastidious about his wardrobe and personal hygiene, he still wore the same green suit he had on when he was arrested.

The day began at 6 a.m. with roll-call, when history’s most successful songwriter sat cross-legged on the floor among his fellow inmates, replying to his prison-number, 22, with a ritual shout of ‘Hai!’ The double estate-owner and employer of multiple domestics then had to clean his tiny domain, using a miniature dustpan and reed brush pushed through a hole in the door, and fold up his sleeping-mat.

Inspection was followed by breakfast, a bowl of seaweed-and-onion soup (‘not the greatest thing in the morning if you’re used to cornflakes’). Lunch was soybean soup and bread and supper a bowl of rice with dessert of an apple or orange, if he was lucky, but no banana. He was in virtual solitary confinement, allowed neither books nor writing materials. Lights-out was at 8 p.m.

The routine was broken by further trips to the prosecutor’s office, with mobs of shrieking girls at both ends. At the prison-gate, 19-year-old Minako Shitega was one of many holding a personal vigil for, as she put it, ‘the greatest fellow ever to live on earth’. A petition for his release was organised outside the Budokan Hall, where the Beatles had played in 1966 and Wings were to have given their main shows.

Such an ordeal could have broken a far more physically robust man. Paul’s salvation was the competitiveness that the other ex-Beatles knew so well, allied to the practicality of a one-time badge-accumulating Boy Scout. ‘After a few days, I became like Steve McQueen in The Great Escape,’ he would remember. ‘My natural survival instinct and sense of humour started to kick in. [I thought] “Right, I’m going to be the first up when the light goes on, the first with his room cleaned, the first who gets to wash and do his teeth.”’

Similarly, he was undaunted by the fact that almost no one around him spoke a word of English and he no word of Japanese beyond ‘Sayonara’ and ‘Konnichiwa’ (hello). He communicated with the tenants of neighbouring cells by shouting out Japanese brand-names: ‘Toyota!’, ‘Kawasaki!’, ‘Datsun!’, and that of Britain’s prime export cigarette, ‘John Player Special!’ They responded ‘Johnnie Walker!’, the name of the Scotch whisky they most fantasised about, and the ice was broken.

The inmates socialised only for a short period each morning when they smoked their daily two-cigarette ration sitting around a tin can, into which they tapped their ash. Here Paul learned to put faces and names to his fellow inmates’ numbers, for instance his next-door neighbour, a Marxist student, also on a drugs charge, who spoke some English.

Four cells away dwelt a huge man doing time for murder whose tattooed back identified him as a yakuza or Japanese mafioso. Through an interpreter, this terrifying individual asked Paul what he was in for, then held up seven fingers to indicate his likely sentence. ‘No, ten,’ Paul replied, making the yakuza roar with laughter. Later, he heard a shout from the yakuza’s cell of ‘Yesterday, please’, a request with which it was clearly wise to comply. Their guard shouted for silence but didn’t enforce it as he was listening, too, and instinctively responding even to this small audience, Paul acappella-ed three more songs.

He became quite the life and soul of those smoke-wreathed gatherings around the tin can, introducing the others to a game the Beatles used to play during their own spells of confinement in hotel-rooms or at Abbey Road. It was called Touching the Highest Place on the Wall because everyone in turn jumped up and tried to touch the highest place on the wall. Since Paul towered above his slightly-built competitors, he usually won.

As time passed, the harsh regime softened somewhat: his request for a guitar met with firm refusal but members of his entourage were allowed to bring him clean clothes, hot food and blankets. His fear of rape receded, so much so that when offered a bath in private he elected to use the communal showers. There he led a sing-song of old standards his father had loved, like ‘When the Red Red Robin Comes Bob-Bob-Bobbin’ Along’.

After so many years of limitless power and free will–and the stresses, both external and self-inflicted, that went with them–he found himself almost relishing the bleak simplicity, solitude and utter powerlessness of his prison life. ‘Suddenly,’ he would remember, ‘I didn’t have to do the job any more.’ Far from a penance, it came as a relief to lose all the myriad trappings of being Paul McCartney–even his very name–and revert to his status long, long ago when he’d first known John and George, as ‘just one of the lads’.

Among his musicians initial shock and sympathy were giving way to resentment. Laurence Juber and Steve Holley weren’t alone in expecting a share of the tour profits: the horn section, including Paul’s old Liverpool colleague Howie Casey, had each stood to make around $1000 per day in Japan, many times more than they’d ever previously earned on the road.

They had also counted on further lucrative work from the American tour in the summer. But after this new (and worst-of-all) drug offence, who could doubt that Paul’s US visa would be withdrawn yet again? Nor could anyone understand why he’d bothered to bring grass to Japan in the first place. Before the troupe left home, they’d been told it would be easily available via American military bases.

All the band had also been questioned by the police–as had Linda–and were now under 24-hour surveillance. To forestall any further trouble they took a trip to Kyoto, hoping that in their absence the problem would be resolved and the tour still able to happen. However, Paul’s defence team thought it wisest for them to leave the country, which they did on 21 January. Holley and Juber had been provided with first-class round-the-world air tickets, allowing them to go anywhere they liked; Holley opted to visit family in Australia while Juber returned to Los Angeles.

On his sixth day in the Kosuge, Paul was finally permitted a half-hour visit from Linda, although not the children. She brought him a cheese sandwich and some sci-fi paperbacks, and they conversed through a metal grille with guards looking on to ensure there was no physical contact. Linda was surprised, and not best pleased, by how institutionalised he’d become.

By now it was clear that despite the ferocious pretrial routine he was being put through, the Japanese government did not want the embarrassment of actually bringing him to court. Representations from the British Foreign Office through Donald Warren-Knott also played their part and on Paul’s ninth day of captivity, all proceedings against him were dropped. The reasons cited were that he’d made a full confession, had shown ‘repentance’ and, by his time in custody, had already suffered ‘social punishment’. He was therefore to be released and immediately deported.

If oddly redemptive spiritually, the episode cost him dear financially. The aborted tour’s Japanese promoters, Udo Music, had to be compensated to the tune of around £184,000 for reimbursing 100,000 disappointed ticket-holders and the advertising and promotion costs. And keeping his family and retinue at the Hotel Okura while he was in his prison cell brought a bill for around £10,000 per day.

Regaining his freedom almost ‘with a sigh’ like Byron’s Prisoner of Chillon, he signed autographs for his former guards, then was given back the personal effects he’d had to check in on his arrival. One thing was missing, presumably stolen–his wedding ring. There being no time to make a complaint, he begged a paper-clip from the prison office to wear in its place.

He was driven straight to Narita airport to be put on the first available flight, a Japan Airlines one to Amsterdam. Linda and the children were already on the plane. Before boarding, as some recompense for all those cancelled shows, he grabbed an acoustic guitar and sang a few bars of ‘Yesterday’–then, with a final thumbs-up, he was gone.