Paul McCartney (96 page)

Yet he’d never had any idea when he wrote a song that he was producing poetry. The qualities extolled by Ginsberg, Rowling and so many others had just happened when–to quote another fine poet, Michael Horovitz–‘the craft and hard graft of writing non-stop for gigs, broadcasts and recording left hardly a wasted syllable’.

Now, with Blackbird Singing, here he was being self-consciously ‘poetical’. And for almost every reviewer, inevitably steeped in Beatle knowledge, there was no comparison with the unknowing bard who’d created the perfect 1950s street-scene in ‘Penny Lane’, the mini-drama in ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and the cosy psychedelic carnival of ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’.

While the lyrics were re-praised to the skies, the poems were taken to task for slackness, triteness and laboured aphorisms like ‘Sadness isn’t sadness/ It’s happiness in a black jacket’. Horovitz was almost the only friendly voice, welcoming ‘a profoundly innocent and vastly enjoyable toybox of a book’ with echoes of John Betjeman, Philip Larkin and Robert Browning, and calling the verse epic written to accompany Standing Stone (but never performed) ‘a remarkable feat of historical imagination’.

What none could deny was the power and often naked heartbreak of the pieces inspired by Linda, most written during her illness or in the aftermath of her death. One in particular, ‘To Be Said’, was like ‘Yesterday’ revisited; no longer a young man’s passing angst but a mature one’s dark night of the soul:

My love is alive, my love is dead,

I hear her voice inside my head.

There’s a lot to remember, a lot to forget.

There’s a lot to be said, there’s nothing to be said.

‘Hey, that’s pretty good. Is it one of yours?’

In these last months before the world changed for ever, Paul proclaimed his commitment to Heather by taking her anti-landmine campaign international. For those who remembered the early Seventies, and another ex-Beatle pushed into political awareness by a forceful woman, there began to be a touch of John and Yoko about them.

America at that time had the world’s fourth largest stock of landmines but, under President George W. Bush, still refused to implement a ban. In April 2001, Paul’s name secured them a meeting with Bush’s Secretary of State, Colin Powell, the first African-American in that post and a former five-star general with direct knowledge of the foul devices. Powell could not commit his country to dispensing with them, but agreed that the State Department would make a contribution to Adopt-A-Landmine (which allowed him to boast to Harper’s Magazine that ‘Paul is a bud of mine’).

This new life of diplomacy and speech-making was interrupted by grim news about George. Two and a half years after being pronounced clear of throat cancer, he’d gone to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota for a check-up and been told he had a malignant tumour in one lung. Having received treatment for that, and supposedly made a good recovery, he had been diagnosed with a brain tumour.

His last contact with Paul had been over The Beatles Anthology book and had brought yet another spell of froideur between them. According to his friend Neil Innes, George had wanted the book to be leather-bound, offending Paul by his seeming forgetfulness of Linda’s animal rights crusade.

But all such petty conflicts were forgotten now. From Milan, where he was promoting the Wingspan CD, Paul immediately flew with Heather to the Swiss clinic at which George was to undergo yet further treatment. Ringo also arrived, staying as long as possible before returning to Boston, where his daughter, Lee, was fighting the same form of cancer.

For any British painter, professional or amateur, the ultimate accolade is to have a picture in the Royal Academy of Arts’ Summer Exhibition at Burlington House in London’s Piccadilly. In 2001 the show was curated by Peter Blake, the chin-bearded doyen of Sixties pop art, whose most famous work was the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. A 1991 abstract by Paul, Chocolate Sunset, appeared alongside heavyweight names like Tracey Emin and Bridget Riley and other brush-wielding musicians like Ronnie Wood, Ian Dury and Holly Johnson from Frankie Goes to Hollywood.

While admitting Paul was a friend, Blake denied choosing Chocolate Sunset merely to get publicity for the show. ‘He has got tremendous integrity as an artist… and I have hung it out of respect for him as a painter.’ But the waspish art critic Brian Sewell attacked ‘an infuriating tendency among clapped-out old pop stars to become artists… They usually produce unmitigated garbage, and should stick to what they were doing.’

On 14 June, Paul was back at Heather’s side to host a gala fund-raiser for Adopt-A-Minefield in Los Angeles, the highlight of which was a duet by himself and Paul Simon. To publicise the event–henceforward an annual one–he did a lengthy live interview on CNN’s Larry King Live, with Heather joining him for the last segment.

‘How’s George doing with the cancer?’ King asked.

‘He’s good, he’s excellent,’ Paul replied. ‘I saw him just a couple of weeks ago.’ A statement from George himself two days later said he was ‘feeling fine… active and feeling very well’.

Driving Rain was not scheduled for release until autumn, which left several months free for Paul to complete his third major piece of classical music. It was another oratorio, quasi-religious in tone but steeped in memories of Linda.

Back in 1997, the President of Magdalen College, Oxford, Anthony Smith, had invited him to write something for the opening of the college’s new auditorium. Linda had persuaded him to accept the commission despite his virtual abandonment of work by that stage in her illness. They’d visited Oxford together and been won over by Smith, formerly a distinguished BBC television producer who’d worked with Mike McCartney’s group, the Scaffold.

Linda’s death had put the musical project in abeyance, but Paul’s connection to Magdalen remained. During his mourning period, Smith invited him to the college’s November All Souls feast, where the usual exotically carnivorous menu was replaced by a vegetarian one in his honour. At the dons’ High Table, he was amused to meet Ancient History tutor Mark Pobjoy, whose father had been John’s headmaster at Quarry Bank School–and a notably more sympathetic one than his own at the Inny.

In 2001, he’d returned to the piece, disregarding Smith’s request for something evoking seasons of the academic year, instead using it as therapy, as he later admitted, ‘to write my sadness out’. Indeed, that came across so strongly that one woman who heard an early version burst into tears despite knowing nothing about its background.

On 18 June, his fifty-ninth birthday, he was granted the heraldic coat of arms to which every British knight is entitled. The crest he chose for himself depicted a medieval helmet surmounted by a Liver Bird, Liverpool’s ancient mascot, clutching a guitar in its claws. Beneath was a Latin motto he’d seen in New York’s Church of St Ignatius Loyola, above a picture of Jesus: ‘Ecce Cor Meum’ or ‘Behold My Heart’.

This now became the title of his oratorio for Magdalen College. ‘At one point, he said he wanted the whole thing to be in Latin,’ Anthony Smith recalls, ‘so our college Latinist translated the libretto. Then he decided to use only part of the translation.’

On visits to Oxford, he and Heather would stay at Smith’s house in the college precincts, which had a comfortable guest-suite for its many visiting VIPs. ‘The students were very cool, and left him alone. He could go into the bar on his own, buy a drink and sit down, and nobody bothered him for autographs.’

Smith was ‘astonished’ by the way Heather treated Paul. ‘She behaved as if she rather than he was the celebrity. And she was very highly opinionated about everything, including his music, which she had no inhibitions about criticising in a roomful of music professors who admired it. He didn’t seem to mind, or his good manners prevented him from showing it.

‘One night at dinner in the Senior Common Room we had a German tutor who was rather an attractive young woman and there was some eye-contact between Paul and her. Heather kept glaring at him and there was a row about it afterwards in their suite. The next morning when Paul came down to breakfast, he said she’d gone. She was needed in London by people she looked after in her charity work–or that was the story.’

On 20 July, they were in Liverpool for LIPA’s graduation ceremony, which this year significantly introduced awards to disabled students. There were also ‘Companion’ awards for Joan Armatrading, Benny Gallagher and the Sex Pistols’ former manager, Malcolm McLaren. As had become tradition, Paul presented each graduate with a ceremonial pin, then joined them all in a group photograph.

Afterwards, he drove Heather to the exclusive Sharrow Bay Hotel at Ullswater in the Lake District where, two evenings later, he dropped onto one knee and proposed to her with the diamond and sapphire ring he’d bought in Jaipur the previous January.

Five days later, they faced the media outside Paul’s now rather left-behind London house in Cavendish Avenue. He professed to have felt nervous about proposing and Heather said she’d been ‘gobsmacked’. All they knew about the wedding as yet was that it would be ‘sometime next year’. Heather said she didn’t plan on using the title Lady McCartney (‘I’m not into all that pretence’) and refused photographers’ requests to kiss her betrothed. ‘We don’t kiss to order. It’s spontaneous.’

‘How are your family taking the news?’ one reporter shouted to Paul.

‘All right,’ he replied tersely, and didn’t enlarge on the subject. ‘We’d better be getting off now. Thank you very much.’

On 10 September, he was with Heather in New York as she received an award from Redbook magazine for her landmines campaign, in a ceremony attended by Hillary Clinton and the Duchess of York. Afterwards, he made one of the little off-the-cuff speeches for which he was becoming known.

Next morning, when a pair of hijacked airliners ploughed into the World Trade Center, the couple were aboard a scheduled flight at JFK Airport on the point of leaving for London. Through their window they could actually see the two silver towers, each with its obscene frond of grey smoke.

Only after they’d been evacuated from the plane and returned to Amagansett did the full horror become clear. The hundreds of market traders, office workers and restaurant staff, trapped on upper floors without hope of rescue. The last, heartbreaking voicemail messages to wives, husbands, parents and children. The decision of many to jump from eightieth-or ninetieth-floor windows, some hand-in-hand, rather than face the inferno within. The inconceivably rapid collapse of each tower in turn; the twin summits of the city’s mythic skyline reduced in minutes to plunging dust.

Paul had more reason than most to love New York. It was where The Ed Sullivan Show had taken the Beatles into the stratosphere in 1964. And it had given him Linda.

Along with the victims inside the twin towers, 414 emergency workers, firefighters, police officers and paramedics had been buried by their fall, many while performing acts of extraordinary bravery. According to Heather, it was she who first suggested Paul should do a benefit concert for the bereaved families. He was initially reluctant, fearing he might be accused of opportunism to publicise his Driving Rain album.

When JFK reopened, Heather returned to London to fulfil a charity commitment, leaving him to ponder the totalitarian terrorism that had been born on that gloriously sunny September morning. As usual, words and chords came unbidden, and within minutes he had a song in the simple, anthemic style of which John had been such a master, expressing solidarity with New York and defiance of its barbaric ill-wishers. It was called simply ‘Freedom’. Once he had that, he knew he must do the concert.

His first call was to the film producer Harvey Weinstein, who had remained a good friend despite the unhappy experience of Give My Regards to Broad Street. Weinstein proved to be already putting together such an event with the cable TV channel VH1. It was agreed that Paul would participate as co-organiser and headliner.

Other major rock names had felt similarly moved to do something. On 21 September, the main television networks joined forces to broadcast America–A Tribute to Heroes, a fund-raising telethon featuring, among others, Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young and Billy Joel. Then on 2 October, Radio City Music Hall staged Come Together, originally planned to mark what would have been John’s sixty-first birthday, with appearances by Cyndi Lauper, Billy Preston and Alanis Morissette and a setlist heavy with Lennon–McCartney songs. This now became a 9/11 benefit, in the words of emcee Kevin Spacey, ‘to keep John’s memory alive and help rebuild the city’. Wherever he was, he must have been chortling to have got in before Paul.

When the Concert for New York City finally took place at Madison Square Garden on 20 October, the trauma had still barely abated. Beforehand, Paul tried to visit the mass grave now known as Ground Zero but even he was prevented from approaching it, though he could smell the smoke, melted office-partitions and death from several streets away.

The show was an immense parade of top music acts, headed by other Brits who’d found fortune in the Big Apple: David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Keith Richards, Eric Clapton, the Who. There were also appearances by Hollywood heavyweights Robert De Niro, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jim Carrey; and from television stars, top athletes and public figures like former president Bill Clinton and Mayor Rudy Giuliani, whose inspirational conduct on the awful day had contrasted so markedly with that of incumbent President George W. Bush.

Many among the 18,000 present were relatives or colleagues of the lost rescue workers and police. Paul and Heather had personally handed out tickets at fire stations and precinct houses. But the atmosphere was deliberately not funereal; there were even jokes about Osama bin Laden, the head of the al-Qaeda terrorist group, who had masterminded the atrocity. Paul had been especially keen on that element, instancing Liverpool during the Blitz of the Second World War and ‘how they dealt with it–with humour and with music’.

He himself took the stage wearing a New York Fire Department T-shirt to perform ‘Freedom’ (which Heather would claim to have ‘arranged a little bit’). Though every performer tried to match a song to the occasion, ‘Let It Be’ was the only possible finale, giving a comfort and sense of communality that had never been needed so much. In their hour of darkness, he truly seemed a light that shone on them.