Paul McCartney (81 page)

Paul approached him as a devoted fan and the inheritor of an equally bizarre address in Peasmarsh, Starvecrow Lane. Linda, of course, knew little about the Goon Show, but was won over by a sign in the Milligan kitchen reading ‘Vegetarians are nice to meat’.

They became regular visitors to ‘The Blind Architect’, whose cluttered interior displayed gifts from other, equally admiring Beatles–a ‘Love and Peace’ banner from George, a book on trauma therapy autographed by John and Yoko. Paul enjoyed playing a rare Broadwood grand piano, dating from 1883, which Milligan had rescued from a London building-site. Soon he had a standing invitation to let himself into the house and use the Broadwood if the Milligans were away or even just sleeping late.

After Milligan’s death, his effects were found to include a handwritten poem by Paul dedicated to ‘The Poet of Dumbwoman’s Lane’. With it was a caricature subtitled ‘the Nutters of Starvecrow Lane’, a male and a fair-haired female both giving self-identifying thumbs-up signs:

The voice of the poet of Dumbwoman’s Lane

Can be heard across vallies [sic] of sugar-burned cane

And nostrils that sleep through the wildest of nights

Will be twitching to gain aromatic delights…

The welcome could be less warm if Milligan was in one of his frequent depressed moods or absorbed in composing some new piece of Goonery. One morning, he answered an unexpected ring at his front door to find Paul accompanied by George and Ringo, who were visiting Peasmarsh and both equally keen to pay their respects.

‘Not today, I’m busy,’ he said, shutting the door in their faces.

No longer did Paul regard his Beatle years as a war zone from which he’d only just escaped with his life and never wanted to think about again. These days, he would recall them in any detail an interviewer liked, even exploit them in the perpetual struggle to keep himself at the top of the charts.

Writing the title song for Spies Like Us, a Hollywood film comedy co-starring Dan Aykroyd and Chevy Chase–which made number seven in America–might seem to have given little scope for this. Yet its video was like Trivial Pursuit for advanced Beatlemaniacs, with a nod to Wings.

Paul was shown arriving at Abbey Road studios on a bicycle, disguised by a hooded duffel-coat, bifocals and a droopy ginger moustache; then arriving all over again by taxi, wearing a trilby hat and a moustache now horizontal and black. Clips from the movie barely interrupted a sequence of him alone in a studio playing drums as well as guitar, just as on ‘The Ballad of John and Yoko’. The closing shot pastiched both the Abbey Road and Band on the Run album covers, with Aykroyd, Chase and Paul on the famous zebra crossing like escapees caught in a prison searchlight.

Reconciled to his Beatle past he might be, but reconciliation with his fellow participants was still apt to falter. Since he had taken the lead in the British High Court, they had all sued each other so often that litigation no longer seemed a noteworthy event. ‘George phoned me the other day and said, “I’m suing you,”’ Ringo told a chat show host around this time. ‘I told him, “OK, but I still love you.”’

In January 1988, the Beatles were to be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in only the third such ceremony ever held. Paul had accepted an invitation to the event at New York’s Waldorf Astoria hotel and had rounded up George and Ringo to appear alongside him. But it had since emerged that under his new Capitol/EMI contract, he would receive an extra one per cent from Beatles backlist sales. As a result, he was being sued jointly by the two of them and Yoko. His response was to issue a statement that he’d be boycotting the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame investiture: ‘After 20 years, the Beatles and I still have some business differences which I had hoped would be settled by now. Unfortunately, they haven’t been, so I would feel like a complete hypocrite, waving and smiling with them at a fake reunion.’

The induction ceremony was performed by Mick Jagger, and watched by most of the great names from the Anglo-American rock fraternity who had the Beatles to thank for their careers. An unusually forthright and heartfelt Jagger confessed how Lennon and McCartney had motivated Keith Richards and himself to try songwriting one long-ago afternoon in Soho by casually knocking off the Rolling Stones’ breakthrough single, ‘I Wanna Be Your Man’.

George, Ringo and Yoko were joined onstage by John’s two sons, 25-year-old Julian–now a recording artiste engineered to sound uncannily like his father–and 13-year-old Sean. After a few woozy words from Ringo, George made a formal acceptance speech giving no hint of the litigation hovering in the background: ‘It’s unfortunate Paul’s not here because he’s the one who had the speech in his pocket. Well, we all know why John can’t be here and I’m sure he would be and it’s hard to stand here supposedly representing the Beatles. It’s what’s left, I’m afraid. But we all loved him so much and we all love Paul very much.’

Still, the feeling of an angel-faced elephant in the room was inescapable. George thanked the Rock and Roll Hall of fame by quoting the ‘Paul’ song that had kicked off Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band: ‘It’s wonderful to be here… it’s certainly a thrill’. And the silver-clad Yoko, who spoke next, didn’t bother with diplomacy. ‘I wish John was here,’ she began. ‘He would have been here, you know. He would have come.’

The evening ended with a superstar jam of nearLive Aid dimensions featuring, among others, Jagger, Bob Dylan, Elton John, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, the Beach Boys, Little Richard, Billy Joel and Mary Wilson of the Supremes. Included in the ten-song set were Dylan’s ‘All Along the Watchtower’, the Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’, the Beach Boys’ ‘Barbara Ann’ and the Supremes’ ‘Stop! In The Name of Love’. But the show-stopper was Paul’s ‘I Saw Her Standing There’, with Jagger, Joel and Springsteen sharing the vocal.

The stage was so crowded with guitarists and stand-up vocalists that Elton John at the piano could scarcely be seen. As he pounded away in obscurity, Elton’s thoughts must have gone back to his Thanksgiving concert at Madison Square Garden in 1974, when John had sung ‘I Saw Her Standing There’ in caustic tribute to ‘an old estranged fiancé of mine called Paul’.

Now he was estranged again, and here again was ‘Well, my heart went boom as I crossed that room’–naturally known by heart by three of the world’s greatest performers–as potent, as joyous, as ever.

‘You’re such a lovely audience’

Linda had always been too wrapped up in Paul, her family and her animals to have many outside friends, particularly female ones. But during the late Eighties, she acquired two who would bring great changes into her rather isolated life: the television comedy writer Carla Lane and Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders.

Hynde was one of rock’s most distinctive talents, combining as she did the macho swagger of her male bandmates with the sultriest singing voice since Marlene Dietrich. Like Linda, she was an American living with a British pop legend–in her case, Ray Davies of the Kinks. And like Linda, she was a vegetarian and a passionate believer in animal rights who had yet to find an outlet. In 1987, she invited some like-minded women friends to her London flat to discuss what collective action they might take. The group included Linda and Carla Lane, who had never previously met although they lived only a few miles from each other in Sussex.

Liverpool-born Lane had written a string of hugely successful BBC comedy series often deploying the scabrous wit of her home city. Her first, The Liver Birds, portrayed the flat-sharing life of two girls who might have been plucked from a lunch-time queue outside the Cavern. Her latest, Bread, the saga of an unruly Liverpool Catholic family named the Boswells, had a weekly audience running into millions.

At the Chrissie Hynde meeting, she didn’t recognise Linda or even particularly notice her until their hostess knelt on the floor in front of them, explaining how much the animal kingdom needed their protection. With the Pretenders’ vocalist in full flight in that smoke-and-honey voice, everyone listened raptly–except Linda. ‘You are talking about animals and their plight,’ she broke in, ‘but I see you are wearing a leather skirt.’

From that moment, she and Carla Lane–in Lane’s words–were ‘friendship-struck… We were like identical twins [dedicated] to trying to make the animal people in the country break out and lead the world in animal rights.’

The success of Lane’s television work had allowed her to settle near Haywards Heath, only 36 miles from Peasmarsh, where she owned a sixteenth-century house named Broadhurst Manor and a 25-acre estate which she’d converted into an animal sanctuary. The house itself was so huge and rambling that she didn’t know exactly how many rooms it contained. One day, she opened what she thought was a cupboard and found a passageway to nine more she’d never known were there, one of them 45 feet long.

Linda became a frequent visitor to Broadhurst Manor, where Lane ran an animal-rescue service called Animaline, pledged never to turn away any creature in need. The two women were somewhat alike with their blonde hair and hippy-floaty manner, though Lane was five years older as well as a head taller.

Peasmarsh soon turned into an overspill area for Animaline’s rescuees, either maltreated domestic pets or injured wild creatures needing to be nursed back to health, then released. Often, the liberating was done by the duo in person, using Linda’s bright pink Mini (which reminded Lane of ‘a sweet’) or, for larger passengers such as deer, a horsebox or closed truck from Peasmarsh. Using Lane’s verbal skills and Linda’s painfully acquired keyboard ones, they also decided to have a shot at some animal-rights protest songs.

Carla Lane had always regarded herself as the most hardcore animal-lover and non-meat-eater, but Linda easily surpassed her. At Peasmarsh, even the livestock were kept on a vegetarian diet, every animal was spared neutering and allowed to die of old age, huge veterinary bills were incurred to succour ailing cows, ducks or chickens, and the most unlikely candidates became beloved fixtures. Among them was a bullock which Paul had found wandering in the lane, bought from the farmer who’d been about to send it to market and christened Ferdinand.

Paul was all for this new friendship of Linda’s. He had loved The Liver Birds–originally the name of Merseyside’s first all-female rock band–and was a huge fan of Bread with its matriarchal Nellie Boswell and her shiftless, finagling brood, so different from any Liverpool relatives he’d ever known. He welcomed Lane as ‘our Carla’, made a donation to her animal sanctuary and sent a consignment of straw for its inhabitants. She even persuaded him to make a guest appearance in Bread with Linda, playing themselves, in October 1988. The episode showed Linda setting up an animal shelter near the Boswell home and Paul arriving to collect her as she took tea with Nellie, who of course totally failed to recognise him. ‘Has your chap got a job?’ she asked. ‘Yes, sort of,’ Linda replied.

If Carla Lane was a soulmate for Linda, Peter Cox–whom she likewise met through Chrissie Hynde–opened the way to a new career that was to transform her public persona. Cox was a former advertising man who’d become chief executive of the Vegetarian Society, then gone on to publish Why You Don’t Need Meat, an exposé of the livestock industry which put him onto every TV and radio talk show and became a national bestseller. Chrissie felt he was someone the McCartneys urgently needed to meet, so took him along on one of her regular visits to Peasmarsh.

‘When the Land Rover brought us from Rye station, Paul and Linda met us on horseback,’ he recalls. ‘I thought I’d never seen such an amazingly beautiful couple. Then Paul jumped down off his horse and said, “’Ere, you’re Peter Cox! I saw you on the Wogan [TV] show, talking about your book. I’ve got to get your autograph.”’

As was often his way, he immediately treated Cox like the most intimate friend, suggesting they take a walk around the garden on their own. ‘He talked about John a lot–but the strange thing was that it was in the present tense, “John says this” or “John thinks that”. At one point, he asked me, “Have you ever thought what power the Beatles could have had if we’d been evil… if we’d gone over to the dark side?” Hearing something like that after only knowing him for about five minutes sort of freaked me out.’

In Britain, the Eighties had brought a steep rise in vegetarianism, boosted by health concerns over red meat and revulsion at the factory farming methods Cox had exposed. Vegetarian staples like tofu and beansprouts and meat substitutes like Quorn, once available only from health food shops, were now routinely stocked by supermarkets. Yet, as far as Cox knew, there was not a single cookbook aimed at what had become a mass market. ‘Thousands of families included a vegetarian, usually one of the kids, who always had to be given special food. I couldn’t see why there shouldn’t be a vegetarian cookbook with dishes the whole family would enjoy.’

Over the years, Linda had evolved a vegetarian cuisine all her own, mostly meatless facsimiles of the traditional British dishes Paul preferred. One of her earliest creations was a ‘bird’ made of pasta so that he’d still have something to carve at the Christmas dinner-table. ‘She did what I’d call truck-driver food,’ Cox recalls. ‘Sausage-and-mash and shepherd’s pie that no one would ever know were vegetarian.’ That was her one weakness for her friend Carla Lane, who saw no point in condemning meat, then eating facsimiles of it.

Cox felt that Linda’s recipes were ideal to fill the gap in the publishing market, and suggested she should produce a cookbook with his help. At first, she was reluctant to put her head above the parapet again after all the insults she’d received with Wings. He persuaded her by stressing the value of such a book to the animal rights cause. ‘“If it makes any money,” she told me, “I want it all to go to the animals.”’

Despite the McCartney name and Cox’s recent bestseller, all the main London publishers turned down the project. ‘I went to see one woman who was supposedly a legend in the industry–and who always wore white gloves to the office. She told me a vegetarian cookbook couldn’t possibly sell unless it had some chicken in it.’