Paul McCartney (85 page)

The final run-through was watched by all four McCartney children, 21-year-old Mary in her new capacity as her mother’s assistant at MPL. ‘They just seemed a very ordinary family, if you forgot they’d just flown in by private jet,’ Russell Miller remembers. ‘The boy, James, had a basketball with him and kept looking around the cathedral as if assessing its potential for a game.’

A block of VIP seats had been set aside for Paul’s Liverpool relations. His favourite aunt, Gin, had died in 1987, so the clan matriarch was now Auntie Joan, wife of his dad’s whispering brother Joe, who’d helped care for him and Michael in the first shock of their mother’s death when it seemed doubtful that Gentleman Jim could ever recover.

Paul’s real affection for these elderly and frail survivors was what most impressed Miller. ‘They may not look much, there are no stunners among them,’ Paul said, ‘but by God they’ve got something–common sense in the truest sense of the word. I’ve met lots of people, I’ve met Harold Wilson and Maggie Thatcher and most of the mayors in America, but I’ve never met anyone as fascinating, as interesting or as wise as my Liverpool family.’

The premiere of the Liverpool Oratorio on 28 June was also an opportunity to publicise the Liverpool Institute for Performing Arts. Margaret Thatcher had resigned as prime minister in 1990 and under her less bellicose, more culturally-aware successor, John Major, there were prospects of government funding for LIPA.

Before the recital, Paul gave Major’s Inner Cities Minister Michael Portillo a guided tour of the Inny building to show what huge renovation it needed. In one of the derelict classrooms, he mentioned the Spanish song ‘Tres conejos en un árbol’ which he’d learned there as a small boy and now put into the oratorio. (Portillo, whose father was born near Madrid, came back in disconcertingly fluent Spanish.) As a further gift to the media, he said he himself might take a LIPA course ‘and finally get some letters after my name’.

The audience of 2500 in the cathedral that evening was believed to be the largest congregation in its history. As Carl Davis lifted his baton, the massed television lamps and recording equipment caused a power overload and every light in the place went out. But after a few moments, as if through divine intervention, perhaps by an angel named Mary, they came on again.

At the end, there was a ten-minute standing ovation. Paul joined Davis on the podium and they hoisted each other’s arms aloft like boxing champs. The biggest challenge in his solo career had brought its most successful collaboration. He’d even ceded a share of the glory: the posters outside read ‘Paul McCartney’s Liverpool Oratorio by Paul McCartney and Carl Davis’.

The classical music critics who provided the bulk of the reviews were almost as sniffy about Davis’s background in populist TV and film as about Paul’s in pop. The Guardian called their work ‘lacklustre and embarrassing’; The Times said the oratorio had some ‘sweet tunes, but the churchy choral passages and laboured orchestral interludes made Brahms’s Requiem sound like a hotbed of syncopation’.

Five months later, it received its American premiere at New York’s Carnegie Hall–where the Beatles had famously appeared in 1964–with Barbara Bonney taking Kiri Te Kanawa’s role and the Liverpool Cathedral choristers replaced by the Boys Choir of Harlem. The New York Times’s reviewer Edward Rothstein was little more impressed than his British colleagues, calling it ‘a primitive assemblage of material gussied up through some clever scoring’, and noting how ‘the kind of musical and emotional simplicity that make a pop hit can sound barren in the concert hall’. Complimenting and admonishing Paul in the same breath, Rothstein quoted the reply of the great classical composer Arnold Schoenberg during the 1930s when he was asked for composition lessons by George Gershwin. ‘But why do you want to be an Arnold Schoenberg? You’re such a good Gershwin already.’

As so often with Paul’s pop releases, bad reviews had no effect: the two-disc live recording made all 25 of America’s most important classical music charts and even appeared in some pop ones. Professional and amateur orchestras around the world instantly put their own versions into rehearsal, creating EMI’s first surge in sheet music sales since the early Sixties.

He may have failed to become an Arnold Schoenberg and had to settle for being a modern Gershwin–but he had given his birthplace something precious beyond price. It was there in the oratorio’s second movement like an audible turning of the tide, when the cathedral choristers sang the Inny’s Latin motto, ‘Non Nobis Solum Sed Toti Mundo Nati’, then its English translation with six extra words.

‘Not for ourselves alone but for the whole world were we born,’ chorused the boyish trebles with–yes–pride. ‘And we were born in Liverpool.’

‘Everyone wanted to be the icing on the cake. No one wanted to be the cake’

On 30 July 1991, Linda’s father, Lee Eastman, died of a stroke, aged 81. As his New York Times obituary noted, he had effectively created MPL and in 20 years as Paul’s lawyer and business adviser had brought huge assets into the company through his knowledge of music publishing. To be sure, his combination of toughness and taste would have made him an excellent manager for the Beatles; one in whose hands their partnership might never have ended in the messy, anticlimactic way it did.

Cheated of that prize by Allen Klein, he still hadn’t done badly from a client-list which included other major music names like David Bowie, Billy Joel and Andrew Lloyd-Webber as well as ‘Bill’ de Kooning and most of America’s highest-priced modern painters. He left an estate valued at $300 million with a $30 million art collection containing works by Picasso, de Kooning, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell, and a Rolls-Royce presented to him by his appreciative son-in-law.

Although a tragedy for his second wife, Monique, his four children and three stepchildren, Lee’s passing had no repercussions on Paul’s legal or business affairs. Long in poor health, he had turned over the family law firm to Linda’s brother John, to whom Paul had been close since they’d joined forces to break up the Beatles’ partnership in 1971. John Eastman remains his lawyer to this day, paying unstinted tribute to ‘a great client who always listens to advice and realises when it makes sense’.

Paul and Linda flew to Long Island for Lee’s funeral despite the fact that Hurricane Bob was currently devastating America’s eastern seaboard. By the time it reached East Hampton, the hurricane had spent much of its force, but still gave the family’s mourning a Shakespearian atmosphere with high winds, driving rain and frequent power-cuts, when even the Hamptons’ super-rich were forced to live by candlelight and cook on open wood fires.

Paul, as usual, rather enjoyed roughing it and, while the electricity was out, wrote several songs on acoustic guitar. One of them, inspired by the dramatic meteorology, he named ‘Calico Skies’ and put away in his huge bottom drawer. It showed that at 49 he hadn’t lost the madrigal simplicity and sweetness that created ‘Blackbird’ when he was 25.

Linda’s share of her father’s estate made her now an extremely wealthy woman. And an even greater fortune was about to come her way, bringing with it a thaw in any remaining public chill towards her.

The surprise runaway success of Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking had transformed her status at MPL, turning what had been patronisingly viewed as her ‘little side project’ into a potentially major growth area for the company. After the book topped the UK bestsellers list, Peter Cox, Linda’s co-author and nutritionist, was summoned by Paul and asked to set up and run a ‘food company’ to package her vegetarian recipes and put them into the shops.

Cox spent several months compiling a feasibility study based on food retail methods all over the world. ‘In the end, I told Paul there were only two ways that a food-producing company could work,’ he recalls. ‘Either it had to be very small and niche, like cheese-or honey-makers, or some huge organisation like Nestlé. The only other alternative was to franchise the McCartney name, which he was very much against. “I’ve never done that,” he told me, “and I never will.”’

Initially, Cox had enjoyed his immersion in the rock-star world where pizzas were flown in from New York on Concorde, but now he was glad of a chance to escape from it. Besides, the tension he felt from Paul over his collaboration with Linda was bringing out the Macca side at its worst. ‘One day when I had to speak to him about something, he kept me waiting for hours while he just messed around in the studio. When he came out, he was very high, and said something extremely sarcastic to me. I snapped back what right did he have to treat people like that because he was Paul McCartney? It brought him up short because as a rule, nobody ever talked back to him. And later, he did apologise.’

Cox’s contract for Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking had been a straight 50–50 split with Linda, but now he had to agree to a not-very-generous buy-out of his share. ‘It wasn’t a pleasant experience, dealing with people at MPL who’d previously seemed to be my friends but were now putting me under serious pressure.’ He’d also been credited as co-author in the UK edition, but on a visit to America he chanced on a copy of the new US one and saw that his name had been removed.

After Cox’s departure, various ideas for marketing Linda’s food were discussed, from building it its own factory to buying the Cranks chain of vegetarian restaurant/takeaways as a ready-made outlet. In the end, the deal negotiated by Richard Ogden was a franchise such as Paul had initially ruled out: Linda’s recipes would be sold as ready-to-eat frozen meals by Ross-Young’s, a division of the United Biscuits corporation and the UK’s third-largest producer of frozen foods. By a happy coincidence UB’s newly-appointed chief executive, Eric Nicoli, also happened to be a non-executive director of Paul’s record company, EMI.

Selling the idea to Linda was not easy, since any mass-market frozen food producer would be heavily reliant on the inhumane livestock and poultry farming methods she so abhorred. She insisted on paying a personal visit to Ross-Young’s factory in Grimsby, Lincolnshire, and gave the green light only after assurances that production of her ready meals would be completely segregated from that of meat-based ones. Those would be processed and packaged by day and her recipes during the night, using stringently cleansed and purified machinery and surfaces.

Linda McCartney vegetarian frozen food was launched in 1991, initially consisting of six items: lasagne, Ploughman’s Pasties, beefless burgers, Italian-style toppers (sauces), Golden Nuggets and Ploughman’s Pie. There was a lavish reception at London’s Savoy Hotel where music journalists mingled incongruously with VIPs from the grocery trade to sample Linda’s creations and hear Paul testify to having himself cooked her Golden Nuggets with mash. Boxed sets were also sent to those of his northern relatives, like Mike and Bett Robbins, who still remained stubbornly carnivorous.

The range went straight into Sainsbury’s, one of Britain’s largest supermarket chains, and was as instant a hit as Beatles records had once been. Within a year, it was bringing more money into MPL than did music.

Linda was infinitely more passionate about the frozen meals bearing her name than she ever had been about playing in Wings or even photography. She fronted the television ads herself, this time attracting no criticisms for her performance. Though others had to be trusted to prepare her recipes, she acted as a one-woman quality control, paying incognito visits to supermarkets to check that they were being displayed properly and hadn’t passed their sell-by date. When meat-free sausages were added to the range, Carla Lane reported that one of her friends found them ‘a bit greasy’. Linda got straight on the phone to Ross-Young’s senior management, demanding the sausages be removed from sale immediately, which they were.

The most serious slip-up was never explained, but thought to be deliberate sabotage by a Ross-Young’s employee, possibly with a lingering grudge against the Woman Who Married Paul. A large batch of shepherd’s pies containing lamb were put into Linda McCartney purple boxes instead of their rightful green ones and sent out into the world without further checking. The subsequent mass recall was more suggestive of the motor trade than the freezer cabinet.

Paul’s fiftieth birthday in July 1992 found him in uniquely good shape for a rock star of his vintage. His face still kept its boyish heart-shape, his smile its impish exuberance–ever reinforced by two upraised thumbs–his brown eyes their puppy-soulfulness, his voice its lightness and purity. His hair remained as abundant as when he was a teenager, albeit now winged with grey above the ears. For the moment, he decided to let it be.

The continuing autobiography of his songs was now to take more tangible form. A few months earlier he had agreed to authorise a biography of himself, written by Barry Miles who had given him his entrée to avant-garde art and music in the mid-1960s. From the Indica gallery and International Times, Miles had gone on to author a string of books, from anthologies of popstar quotes (including by the Beatles and John Lennon) to a critically-acclaimed life of Allen Ginsberg.

Paul was not the first top-echelon rock star to take this step, normally associated with royalty, politicians or major figures in literature or the theatre. In the early 1980s, Mick Jagger had received £1 million for his life story from the illustrious house of Weidenfeld & Nicolson, but then come up with so little interesting information that the book was aborted and Jagger had to repay the whole advance. An official McCartney biography would therefore be starting a new genre.

Despite the hopes of the Bloomsbury imprint, Linda’s publisher and MPL’s next-door neighbour, the book was signed in the UK by Secker & Warburg, a division of the Random House group. Paul at first wanted it to deal solely with his ‘London years’, from the onset of Beatlemania to the end of Apple, but Miles persuaded him to include his childhood and to continue the story after the Beatles’ break-up, though it was still not to be a detailed chronology of his life with Linda or of Wings.

Biographers normally rely heavily on written sources like letters and diaries. But even with someone of Paul’s literacy, popstar life had left little time for correspondence bar the odd picture postcard or letter home to his dad from Hamburg. This dictated the form of the book, which was to be based on extensive interviews with its subject and include lengthy direct quotations, making it as much autobiography as biography. Images of his childhood were in equally short supply; the fans who’d got inside Cavendish over the years had stolen most of his family photographs including almost every one of his mother.