Paul McCartney (80 page)

Yoko was also turning the charm on ATV’s new boss, with no obvious purpose other than perhaps to disrupt Paul’s dealings with him. She invited Holmes à Court and his wife, Janet, to the Dakota and gave them a guided tour, ending at the white piano on which John had played ‘Imagine’. So moved was Janet Holmes à Court that she arranged for ATV to make Yoko a gift of the song’s copyright.

Those 1983 manoeuvrings came to nothing, however: Holmes à Court was committed to halting Lord Grade’s previous asset-stripping and in any case Paul still wasn’t interested in buying the whole of ATV Music, only the Northern Songs company inside it.

By 1985, Holmes à Court had been unable to reverse Associated Communications Corporation’s losses and was regretting his involvement in the British music industry with its culture of small exertion and vast expense accounts. To shore up ACC, he had no choice but to follow Grade’s example and put its one reliably profitable (through Lennon and McCartney) division ATV Music up for auction yet again.

Initially, there were three main prospective bidders: EMI’s publishing arm, EMI Music; the Swedish producer Stig Anderson, whose records with Abba had outsold the Beatles during the Seventies; and the Japanese pop mogul Shoo Kasauno. But Paul was widely expected to weigh in alongside them, possibly in an alliance with his new best friend Michael Jackson.

His little lecture to Jackson on the joys of owning song-copyrights could not have been better–or worse–timed. Soon after Jackson’s visit to Peasmarsh, the Thriller album (on which Paul had appeared) made him stupendously rich, with around $100 million to play with. At Columbia, the record company he and Paul then shared, he’d been strongly advised to invest his new wealth in publishing and was now doing so under the guidance of its president, Walter Yetnikoff (last seen signing Paul for $22.5 million, plus the Guys and Dolls catalogue as a welcome-aboard gift).

When Jackson heard ATV Music was up for sale again, he instructed his lawyers to go after it, but not–he later insisted–before contacting Paul and Yoko in turn to check that neither was in the running. Yoko allegedly replied that for her to pursue Northern Songs would create too many issues with the former Beatles, while John Eastman said it promised to be ‘too pricey’ for Paul. Jackson would also claim to have personally forewarned Paul of his intentions.

In the end, the King of Pop was the only bidder for pop’s Crown Jewels. The thought of the Thriller millions made Holmes à Court continually raise the price and at one point Jackson backed away, allowing another would-be buyer briefly to enter the frame: none other than that former Apple loiterer Richard Branson. The deal was eventually done with Jackson for $47.5 million. By then, Northern Songs’ catalogue was light two titles–not just ‘Imagine’ but also one of Paul’s undisputed masterpieces. Holmes à Court kept back ‘Penny Lane’ because his daughter’s name was Penny.

To Paul, all this felt like a betrayal by someone he’d considered a friend, although Columbia’s president Walter Yentikoff, who’d been as close to the transaction as anyone, maintained that Jackson had acted squarely and above board with him throughout. ‘Paul had the resources to buy back the songs,’ Yentikoff commented later. ‘He simply chose not to.’

But in time he saw the funny side of having his good advice rebound on him so monumentally. He’d tell the story with a spot-on impersonation of Jackson’s child-falsetto, saying, ‘I love your songs, Paul’ on one day and on the next, ‘I bought your songs, Paul.’

His dissatisfaction with Columbia had been simmering for some time before his record company seemed to side with Michael Jackson against him, and with the Press to Play album he returned to the Beatles’ old home, Capitol/EMI.

After Eric Stewart’s departure, a starrier-than-ever throng of sidemen had been invited to Hog Hill Mill, among them Pete Townshend, Phil Collins, Split Enz’s keyboard-player Eddie Rayner and Carlos Alomar, the Puerto Rican guitarist–producer best-known for his work with David Bowie, who spent a week as the McCartneys’ house guest. Alomar would later recall being welcomed by Paul with ‘a nice big spliff’ but then spending bucolic times together, flying kites or drinking warm draught beer at village pubs. All in all, he thought, Paul’s lifestyle seemed less like that of an international megastar than a local farmer.

Press to Play was released in August 1986, its cover a silvery black and white portrait of Paul and Linda like a still from a 1940s film noir. It reached number eight in Britain but failed to make the American Top 20 and, at fewer than a million copies, was the poorest-selling McCartney solo album to date.

The only notable single from it was ‘Press’, described by the Los Angeles Times as ‘one of the most playful, positive songs about the joy of sex ever written’. The video showed Paul at his most endearing; white-trousered and feathery-haired, riding a London Tube train among a crowd of unsuspecting real-life passengers–a situation with which he was anyway quite familiar–charming astonished females of all ages, tipping buskers in the sympathetic spirit of one essentially in the same game, at one point even giving directions to a lost tourist, before disappearing up the long, lamp-lined escalator at St John’s Wood station.

Paul-ness also permeated MPL’s next film release, a documentary about his teenage idol Buddy Holly, intended to counteract Hollywood’s risible 1978 biopic starring Gary Busey. This first serious investigation of Holly’s brief life was a quality product with contributions from everyone of significance to it: his older brothers, Larry and Travis, his fellow Crickets Jerry Allison and Joe B. Mauldin, his widow, Maria Elena, his close friends Don and Phil Everly and guitarist Tommy Allsup, who’d almost taken the same charter flight that killed him.

Holly’s influence on the early Beatles was commemorated by a few bars from their version of ‘That’ll Be the Day’ on the 1958 home recording Paul had bought from John Duff Lowe. But he himself appeared only in the–completely convincing–role of still-faithful fan, seated with a guitar on a bale of straw in one of his barns, replicating the magical Holly hiccups that had first got John and him started.

He now had another new manager, the last he would ever employ. On the recommendation of his lawyer/brother-in-law John Eastman, he’d hired 37-year-old Richard Ogden, formerly British head of Polydor, the German record label on which the Beatles had first recorded.

Ogden took over at a moment when Paul’s reputation had been eroded by flops like Give My Regards to Broad Street and Press to Play and a new generation of British solo singers like Phil Collins and George Michael were cornering the international market. His advice to his new boss was not to bank on stored-up Beatles and Wings goodwill but to get out and promote himself with interviews and photocalls as aggressively as any of those young rivals.

Paul agreed, with the stipulation that he must own the rights to all photographs taken of him. This soon proved unworkable: during a promotional visit to Spain he landed at Barcelona airport to find around 5000 people, including dozens of photographers, blocking his way to his limo and virtually no security to shield him. As he struggled through the crowd, one man kept hitting him on the back of the head with an acoustic guitar, and saying, ‘Sign my guitar, Paul.’ Afterwards, Richard Ogden prepared himself to be fired, but instead found Paul glowing with exhilaration.

With no new product at hand, Ogden persuaded EMI to issue a compilation album, Paul McCartney: All the Best, a thumbs-up of a title, featuring tracks with and without Wings back to 1970, including ‘Mull of Kintyre’, ‘Say Say Say’ with Michael Jackson and Rupert Bear’s ‘Frog Song’. Released in late 1987, it peaked at number two in Britain, denied the top spot by George Michael’s Faith, and eventually went double platinum. It would have sold more had Lee Eastman not initially blocked its release in America, maintaining that compilation albums signified that a performer’s career was over.

Ogden had been hired to manage Linda alongside Paul, specifically the photography career she pursued in an on-off fashion. In this he felt slightly redundant since she already had a first-class photography agent in Robbie Montgomery, a London-based New Yorker who represented many of Britain’s leading photographers including David Bailey and Clive Arrowsmith. Montgomery worked hard to get her assignments on their level, but was often thwarted by her reluctance to stray far from Peasmarsh and her animals.

Yet when her passion for animal rights or the environment was stirred, she could produce an image every bit as eye-catching as her studies of Jimi Hendrix and Jim Morrison in the old days. She contributed to an illustrated book from the Council for the Preservation of Rural England, along with Bailey, Don McCullin and Lord Snowdon, and to Lynx, the campaign against the use of animal fur in haute couture. Lynx employed visual shock tactics which for a time all but wiped out the British fur trade. Linda’s poster was a prime example, headlined ‘Rich Bitch, Poor Bitch’ and juxtaposing a fur-clad model with the mangled body of a fox.

Robbie Montgomery’s greatest coup was to secure her an exhibition at the Royal Photographic Society’s prestigious gallery in Bath. To publicise its opening, Montgomery hired a young PR man named John Gibb with whom she’d worked on the Council for the Preservation of Rural England book and who now came up with a stunt worthy of the Sixties and Sgt. Pepper. Beside the M4 motorway between London and the West Country lies the enormous Queen Mother Reservoir whose grass embankment is plainly visible to passing traffic. On this Gibb proposed spelling out ‘Linda McCartney’ in flowers, with an arrow pointing westward towards Bath.

Paul loved the idea and, as always when Paul loved an idea, money was no object. Gibb and a team armed with 25,000 flowers worked all night to create Linda’s outsize byline, miraculously unobserved by police cars or highway maintenance gangs. Next morning, rush-hour traffic on the M4 came to a standstill as drivers of every kind of vehicle stopped to view the display. ‘People even arrived on buses to look at it,’ Gibb recalls. ‘Finally, the police told me I’d be arrested if I didn’t get it covered up.’

There was somewhat less spousal support, however, when Linda decided to write an autobiography. It was to be called Mac the Wife and ghosted by Lesley-Ann Jones, a young journalist who had interviewed her, sympathetically, for the Daily Mail. They met again when Linda visited Great Ormond Street Hospital to open a new wing for terminally ill children and Jones was sent to cover the event despite being heavily pregnant. Spotting her and realising her delicate condition, Linda beckoned her out of the media scrum and they went around the new wing together.

The autobiography was contracted to a British publisher, Arlington Books, and Jones began interviewing Linda at Peasmarsh, often taking her baby daughter, Mia, along with her. However, Paul seemed hostile to the project for the light it promised to shed on his marriage. Once, she recalls, ‘he thumped the table and said, “There’s only one effing star in this family!”’ Soon afterwards, the project was cancelled.

From the late Eighties, many of Linda’s pictures featured the terrain which originally inspired her to take up photography. Paul had further enlarged his enormous property portfolio by buying an estate near Tucson, Arizona, where she’d lived with her first husband, Joseph Melville See, fallen under the spell of the seminal photojournalist Hazel Larsen Archer and appeared in the Arizona Daily Star with her very meaty recipe for meat loaf.

This fourth McCartney home was located in Pima County, about 45 miles north-east of Tucson in the foothills of the Rincon Mountains; a classic Wild West landscape of mesquite bushes and giant cacti where rattlesnakes, gophers and scorpions lurked and coyotes howled after dark. It comprised 150 acres of private desert and a modest stone house which Paul had repainted in 1930s-ish pink and turquoise but otherwise did little to alter. Backing onto it was the Tanque Verde dude ranch–i.e. for city dwellers seeking a taste of frontier life–whose stabling Linda could use for her horses.

Mel See had never left Arizona, and now lived in the Tucson Mountains, a few miles to the west. He had not remarried but in 1985 had entered into a ‘permanent engagement’ with a former beautician named Beverly Wilk, a divorcee like himself, who shared his passion for geology, archaeology, architecture and collecting ethnic art.

Since he had allowed Paul to adopt his daughter, Heather, contact between them had been rare, and it did not greatly increase after the McCartneys acquired their Tanque Verde property. ‘We visited them a couple of times and Paul once came to our house,’ Beverly recalls. ‘Heather still hardly knew her father, and there wasn’t a lot of warmth toward Mel from Linda. I got the feeling she would have liked it if he disappeared.’

Paul had never socialised much with his neighbours around Peasmarsh, preferring to entertain consignments of friends from London and overseas or of his Liverpool relatives. But that changed in 1987 when Spike Milligan came to live in the nearby village of Udimore.

Back before rock ‘n’ roll, Milligan’s lunatic Goon Show on BBC radio, co-starring Peter Sellers and Harry Secombe, had given a generation of British schoolboys their first heady sniff of anarchy. The Goons were a bond between Paul and John as strong as Elvis or Buddy Holly and were at the heart of the Beatles’ early stage act. Part of the band’s great luck was meeting George Martin, who had once made comedy albums with the Goons and so instantly recognised their musical equivalent.

Since the end of the Goon Show in 1960, Paul had followed Milligan’s solo career as a playwright, poet and children’s author with equal admiration. Indeed, it was a Milligan pensée–‘black notes, white notes/ and you need the two to make harmony, folks’–that triggered the only really successful ‘big-issue’ McCartney song, ‘Ebony and Ivory’.

Now nearing 70, Milligan–like Paul–had fled London to escape bothersome fans and found refuge with his third wife, Shelagh, in an Udimore byway called Dumbwoman’s Lane. Rural life had not quenched his misanthropic comic spirit: he proclaimed his 1960s-built home to be ‘the ugliest house in the world’ and had changed its name from Carpenter’s Meadow to The Blind Architect.