Paul McCartney (75 page)

In the spring of 1980, with John’s fortieth birthday looming, he ended his retirement as abruptly as he’d begun it. His competitiveness with Paul had proved too strong, especially after Wings’ live version of ‘Coming Up’ spent three weeks at number one on the Billboard chart that April.

The result was a John–Yoko album, named Double Fantasy after his favourite freesia blooms, half consisting of newly-written Lennon songs and half Yoko tracks with his accompaniment. Made in double-quick time, it was offered to record companies for $22.5 million, the same advance Paul had been paid by CBS. Ahead of it, on 24 October, came John’s first single for five years, aptly entitled ‘(Just Like) Starting Over’. In contrast with his former angry agitprop, it was a mild love song pastiching the early Sixties American pop that had nourished the Beatles before he and Paul found their combined voice.

The album that followed a month later offered a full portrait of this new John Lennon, seemingly purged of his old demons and obsessions, happy in his new-found domesticity and at ease with himself. Its themes were the very ones for which he used to deride Paul–home, family love. Indeed, ‘Woman’, dedicated to Yoko, and ‘Beautiful Boy’, dedicated to Sean, were hymns to marital and parental joy that Paul could hardly have matched.

An intensive round of media interviews dispelled the recent rumours of a Howard Hughes-style hermit who’d gone totally bald and eroded the septum of his nose with cocaine. John was in better physical shape than in his whole life, slim and suntanned, and still as funny and bluntly honest as ever. Beside him at every minute still sat Yoko, proclaiming the longevity of a relationship the whole world had once spat on.

Significantly, too, he had ceased to be in denial about his Beatle years. For a long interview with Playboy magazine, he went through most of the Lennon–McCartney catalogue, identifying which songs were his and which Paul’s and where and to what extent they’d collaborated. A bit of denial remained, however. ‘I don’t follow Wings,’ he told an interviewer from Newsweek. ‘I don’t give a shit what Wings are doing.’

He was full of an optimism and positivity no one recalled in glum, apostle-bearded Sixties John, and looking forward to testing the old adage ‘life begins at 40’. Yoko’s astrologers having forecast 1981 would be a good year, he was planning a return to Britain to see his Aunt Mimi and take Sean to Liverpool, sailing up the Mersey on the liner QE2.

The last time Paul spoke to him was by phone just before Double Fantasy came out, when his house-husband duties were still uppermost. ‘Oh God, I’m like Aunt Mimi, padding around in me dressing-gown,’ he’d joked. ‘This housewife wants a career.’

They’d ended the conversation on good terms, something for which Paul was always to be grateful. ‘It could easily have been one of the other calls when we blew up at each other and slammed the phone down.’

Early on the morning of 9 December, Steve Shrimpton phoned him at Peasmarsh with the news that John had been shot outside the Dakota at around midnight New York time and had died soon afterwards at Roosevelt Hospital. Linda happened to be out, driving Mary and Stella to school, so Paul was alone in the house. When she returned, she found him standing in the front drive. ‘I could tell by looking at him there was something absolutely wrong,’ she would recall. ‘I’d never seen him like that before. Desperate, you know… tears.’

His first reaction was to telephone his brother Michael, whose forthcoming book, Thank U Very Much, included Mike’s photos of John at 20 Forthlin Road, writing songs with Paul in their facing armchairs, secure enough even to wear his hated horn-rimmed glasses. Mike, always closer to John in temperament than ‘our kid’, was equally devastated.

Paul that day was scheduled to be at George Martin’s AIR studios in London, to record a track called ‘Rainclouds’ with Paddy Moloney from the Chieftains. Several top session musicians had been booked, including Denny Laine, and Moloney was flying over specially from Dublin; after discussing it with Linda, he decided not to cancel the session.

The story led every TV and radio news bulletin in Britain, as all over the world. John’s killer, 25-year-old Mark David Chapman, was a Beatles fan for whom he had signed an album some hours earlier. When he and Yoko returned home from a late-night recording session, the waiting Chapman had pumped five shots from a handgun into his back, then leaned against the wall to wait for the police, nonchalantly reading a copy of J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.

The shock of John’s death in such a manner recalled the assassination of President John F. Kennedy 17 years earlier–but on a far more personal level. Millions in many lands and languages mourned the loss of one whom they felt they’d known like a friend and whose wayward, often exasperating behaviour was far outweighed by his humanity, honesty and wit. The world was suddenly poorer not only in music but laughter. Grief-stricken mass vigils were held outside the Dakota, around St George’s Hall in Liverpool and in many other places. Special memorial issues of newspapers and magazines were rushed into production and instantly sold out.

At AIR studios, Paul, George Martin and the other musicians went through 9 December ‘like robots’, Paul later would recall, as they finished off a track for the Rupert Bear film ironically called ‘We All Stand Together’. Rupert inevitably awoke memories of his and John’s 1950s childhood, when the world had seemed so safe and assassination was something that happened only to be-medalled potentates in countries far away.

During the afternoon, Paul received a phone call from Yoko which he took in private, returning with tears in his eyes. ‘John was really fond of you,’ she had told him. He later recalled how the songwriting mechanism in his mind kept replaying the same phrase for Mark David Chapman–‘the jerk of all jerks’. There was a stomach-churning moment when he and Denny Laine were gazing numbly through the window at passing traffic and saw a van from a company named Lennon’s Furnishings.

AIR studios were on Oxford Street, then in the throes of pre-Christmas shopping fever. When Paul emerged, it was through the front entrance, straight into a thicket of TV cameras. There was no time, as he usually did in moments of tragedy, to ‘put a shell around me’. The familiar puckish face was gaunt and waxy, as if all his cuteness had been siphoned away. Yet his reflex was still to pause and answer television news’s perennial, asinine query of ‘How do you feel?’

‘It’s terrible news,’ he answered. ‘We’re all very shocked.’ Although nothing else needed to be said, he stayed for further laboured questions, answering briefly between chews of gum. Who had told him the news? ‘A friend of mine.’ What had he been doing at AIR? ‘Just listening to some stuff.’ On such a day, why hadn’t he stayed home? ‘I didn’t feel like it.’ When the questioner finally dried, he added, ‘It’s a drag, isn’t it? OK, cheers,’ then ducked into his waiting car.

The remark made headlines for its apparent flippancy, indifference even. Paul excused himself as being ‘no good at public grief’, rightly pointing out that neither George nor Ringo ‘came up with any big comment either’. George said he had been awoken by the news, then gone back to sleep, ‘and when I woke up it was still true’, adding the mechanical cliché ‘I’m shocked and stunned.’ Ringo, who’d been in Barbados, said nothing but did something, immediately chartering a private plane and flying to New York accompanied by his soon-to-be wife, Barbara Bach, to condole with Yoko.

Paul, usually so good at soundbites, beat himself up over the faux-pas more than anyone imagined. He’d been doing the same since he was 14, over his first response to his mother’s death; while his father and brother were engulfed in tears, he’d pragmatically asked how they would get by without her midwife’s salary. Then, at least, the unguarded words had been said only once; now they were endlessly repeated on news bulletins and front pages. As he would later observe, ‘You can’t take the print back and say, “Look, let me just rub that in shit and pee on it and then cry over it for three weeks, then you’ll see what I meant when I said… it was a drag.”’ Later, back at Peasmarsh, there certainly was no flippancy. ‘We just sat looking at the news on the telly and we sat with all the kids, just crying all evening.’

An irreproachably-worded public statement via MPL soon followed: ‘I can’t take it in at the moment. John will be remembered for his unique contribution to art, music and world peace.’ Paul seemed back in control, though that impression could not have been more misleading. On 10 December, there happened to be a pheasant shoot in the woods around Peasmarsh. The sound of guns going off so spooked him that Linda had to ask the shooting party to move away. ‘For months afterwards,’ he would recall, ‘any mention of the word “gun”, “rifle”, “pistol” just shocked me, sent a wave of reverberation through me like a little echo of [Chapman’s] pistol-shot.’

John’s Aunt Mimi, now living in a bungalow he had bought her in Poole, Dorset, first heard the news on her radio. Neil Aspinall subsequently telephoned her, but none of the surviving ex-Beatles did. Paul might have been expected to be first in line even though in the old days Mimi hadn’t been that nice to him, calling him John’s ‘little friend’ and considering him forever socially tarnished for once having lived in the blue-collar suburb of Speke.

He shirked the duty, however, explaining later that he wouldn’t have known what to say. But in years to come, he would more than make up for it. ‘Paul is the only one of them who stays in touch,’ Mimi told an interviewer shortly before her own death in 1991. ‘He always asks how I am and do I need anything.’

As for Yoko, her worst enemy couldn’t have wished on her the horror of seeing John shot down in front of her. And with that, the resentment and ridicule that had pursued her from the Sixties disappeared; there was only sympathy, heightened by the tragedy of her son, Sean, who’d been robbed of a doting dad aged only five.

Likewise, it was assumed the other ex-Beatles must have put any old resentments aside and be rallying round her in their common grief. However, when asked a few weeks later how supportive they had been, she pointedly answered ‘No comment’, which was unfair on both Ringo in the short term and Paul in the longer one.

Prior to John’s death, Paul had been on not at all bad terms with Yoko but in the aftermath he made a conscious effort to get to know her better. He discovered a woman even more adept than himself at donning a protective shell, who initially bristled at his overtures saying she didn’t want to be treated like ‘the widow of the year’. ‘At first, I felt rebuffed and thought “Oh well, great, sod you then,”’ he would recall. ‘But then I thought, she’s had the tragedy of a lifetime here and I’m being crazy and insensitive to say “well if you’re not going to be nice to me, I’m not going to be nice to you”.’

The ice cracked, at least a little, one day when he and Linda were visiting the Dakota apartment and Yoko offered them something to eat. They settled on caviar, which she and John used to gorge by the Fortnum & Mason potful at the Apple house. When a tin of it arrived from the kitchen, all but a tiny morsel had been scoffed by her employees. Then she offered wine but when her only bottle was sent for, that too had been almost emptied by the staff. ‘We were all just hysterical,’ Paul remembered. ‘And the relief was indescribable.’

It meant a huge amount to him to hear from Yoko that despite their conflicts, John had always liked him and, more importantly, had admired his songs and often replayed them. In the Beatles, there had seldom been time to pass judgement on each other’s work before the world went crazy over it, and John had been particularly sparing with praise. ‘If you ever got a speck of it, a crumb of it, you were quite grateful.’

Back in the era when Stu Sutcliffe was still a Beatle, they’d loved messing around with seances and Ouija-boards and agreed the first one to die would try to get a message to the others. Stu had been first, but no message had come. Now with John, Paul kept an ear half-cocked to the afterlife for years.

In truth, the world would never recover from John Lennon’s death. Aside from the senseless eradication of one unique, irreplaceable talent, it ushered in an era when psychopathic nerds in the Mark David Chapman mould increasingly turned to murder–and then mass-murder–for their Andy Warhol-prescribed ‘15 minutes of fame’. Certainly, no one in John’s personal orbit ever fully recovered. ‘It put everyone in a daze for the rest of their life,’ Linda was to observe. ‘It’ll never make sense.’

From here on, Paul would have to live with a perception of his and John’s character that seemed unalterable–Lennon the avant-garde, the experimenter and risk-taker, McCartney the tuneful, the sentimental, the safe. He’d learn to be philosophical about all the times he’d taken a back seat to John or seen John given credit for something he’d initiated, like getting into musique concrète or reading Tibetan religious books or growing a moustache.

He came to realise he’d ‘always quite enjoyed being second’ in the context of a completely different group; when he’d go out with other people on horseback, the lead rider always had to cope with the tricky job of opening gates for the others. ‘Whoever’s second, which is damned close to first, just waltzes through and has an easy life. But you’re still up with number one. Number one still needs you as his companion.’

In time, to friends like the designer David Litchfield–usually when he was drunk–he could even joke that in the contest they’d always waged, John’s death had been a final act of oneupmanship. ‘He died a legend and I’m going to die an old man. Typical John!’

‘Give me back my babies, Lew’

In the Eighties, Paul would cease to be known solely by the Christian name that occupied an immovable place after ‘John’ and before ‘George and Ringo’. He also regained the schoolboy nickname of Maca, that very Liverpudlian abbreviation of McCartney he’d once shared with his brother, only now given exclusivity by a double ‘c’. But whereas ‘Paul’ had a sigh of female adoration built into it, ‘Macca’ would mainly be used by males and suggest a more nuanced view.