That year, 1995, found me back at the Dakota for a third time. Yoko by now had a permanent man friend, an amiable antiques dealer named Sam Havadtoy, and, at sixty-two, looked better than ever, though she had taken to chain-smoking thin, dark cigarettes. My ostensible purpose was to interview her about the album she had just made in partnership with Sean, now aged nineteen. But during our talk, by looks more than words, she made it clear that the reconciliation with Paul had been for the sake of business only, and that there was still bitterness between them.
Our conversation also touched on the subject of Kyoko, the daughter Yoko had lost at eight years old, and who had lost her as traumatically as John had lost Julia and Julian had John. After Kyoko’s father, Tony Cox, absconded from Houston with her in 1972, the two had completely vanished. All John and Yoko’s subsequent efforts to trace them had been in vain. Whatever her private feelings, the subject seemed to be a closed book with Yoko, although after John’s death she continued to place newspaper advertisements each year on Kyoko’s birthday, appealing to her to get in touch. “Basically,” Yoko told me with a bleakly expressionless look, “we’re not in contact at all.”
Two years later, in November 1997, Kyoko finally contacted her mother by telephone from Denver, Colorado. Now thirty-three and married to a devout Christian, she had given birth to her first child, a daughter, only a few days before. As she was to explain later, “I didn’t think it right to become a mother without at least letting my mother know I’m alive and well.”
Kyoko’s history in the intervening years had been a bizarre one. While she and her father were moving around the world as fugitives, Tony Cox had abandoned fundamentalist Christianity and joined an extreme doomsday sect known as The Walk. Kyoko had been submerged in the cult and taught that her mother and John Lennon were “the personification of evil.”
It was to be no dramatic, sobbing mother-daughter reunion. For a year after her initial contact Kyoko kept her distance, speaking to Yoko only in phone calls initiated by her. By 1998, they had built up sufficient rapport for a face-to-face meeting. Not for three years more did Yoko get to meet her granddaughter, Emi—a name accidentally reminiscent of the Beatles’ original record company. Photographs of the occasion showed Kyoko to be a cozy, uncomplicated-looking woman, and Emi a pretty and secure-looking child. The entranced Yoko reportedly indicated to friends that Emi would become joint heir to the Lennon fortune, along with Sean.
Not all visitors from the past were quite so welcome. In 2000, the world heard again from John’s killer, Mark David Chapman, serving twenty years to life in Attica. Kept largely in isolation for fear of revenge attacks by fellow inmates, Chapman had received a nonstop torrent of letters that he never answered but nonetheless filed meticulously in his cell. Although most came from Beatles fans wishing him in Hell, a good proportion were from would-be celebrity stalkers saying they were “fans” of his, or women professing romantic interest and asking if they could visit him.
Having served the minimum of his sentence, Chapman was now eligible for parole. For an unreal moment, the possibility arose of his being back on the streets again at around the twentieth anniversary of John’s death. His application was denied, however, after a press furor and a victim-impact statement from Yoko saying that she, Sean, and Julian would all fear for their lives if he were set free.
My most recent meeting with Yoko, in March 2003, brought this book to a full circle more neatly than I could ever have imagined. It was by that time four years since Paul McCartney’s old family home, 20 Forthlin Road, Allerton, had been acquired by the National Trust, restored to its character during Paul’s boyhood, and opened to the public as a site of historical interest. But for some reason, no such sanctification had been given to Mendips, the mock-Tudor villa on Menlove Avenue where John was brought up by his aunt Mimi. Though a magnet for Lennon pilgrims from all over the world, it remained in private ownership until 2002, when the death of its longtime owner finally brought it onto the real estate market. Various plans for the house were mooted, including one to turn it into a hotel with John’s old bedroom forming part of the honeymoon suite. The idea so horrified Yoko that she bought Mendips for £150,000 and presented it to the National Trust. She also paid the £75,000 cost of its restoration and made an endowment to cover its operating costs and maintain a permanent live-in custodian.
One can now therefore belatedly examine every detail of the genteel home that that professed working-class hero never got completely out of his system. Here is the “morning room” with its defunct servants’ bells where Mimi first put him as a baby, tying him into an armchair with a scarf. Here is the rather chilly formal dining room, the comfortable front lounge, the half-timbered hallway with its Spode and Coal-port china plates, the glass front porch to which Mimi banished him for so many hours of solitary guitar practice. Here is the sub-baronial staircase to the seven-by-ten-foot room, with its red-quilted bed and pinups of Elvis and Brigitte Bardot, where he read alone for hours or drafted the first eccentrically spelled versions of songs and stories that one day would captivate the world.
Virtually everything is authentic. Family members to whom Mimi left furniture or ornaments in her will have been contacted by the Trust and persuaded to lend their bequests in perpetuity. Replicas have been needed mainly for the items that, in the last months of his life, John nostalgically asked Mimi to send to him in New York—for instance, an antique wall clock inscribed “George Toogood, Woolton Tavern” that belonged to his beloved uncle George. To replace it, Yoko commissioned a custom-made exact copy. When this did not quite meet her standards, another clock was made from scratch. The front door is also a replica, the original having been bought some years ago by a Lennon fanatic in Japan.
Our meeting took place when Yoko came from New York to perform the official opening of the house under its National Trust blue plaque, and show around a group of children from John’s first school, Dovedale Primary. After previous conversations at the great white Dakota apartment and under Studio One’s trompe l’oeil clouds, it felt ineffably strange now to be facing her in a couple of Deco armchairs in Mimi’s old front lounge.
She had recently turned seventy, but looked a good twenty years younger, with her cropped, lightened hair, chic black trouser suit, and trendy thick-soled boots. In Vanity Fair magazine some weeks earlier the social commentator Dominick Dunne, covering the latest court hearing in the Fred Seaman saga, had gone so far as to call her “a dish.” A far cry indeed from racist taunts of “Chink!” and “Yellow!” and yellow roses offered to her with thorns turned uppermost.
Naturally uppermost in Yoko’s mind was the current war in Iraq—the long-delayed outcome of 9/11 and George W. Bush’s King Lear threats—and how fiercely John would have hated and opposed it. She had responded, just as he would have done, with giant billboards in London and New York saying IMAGINE PEACE. There was also a sense of déjà vu, or déjà entendu, in the way some radio stations were currently banning “Imagine” from their playlists for fear of subverting the Anglo-American war effort. But nothing could stop John’s voice from getting through—even at a Paul McCartney show. During his Paris concert the following night Paul was to be temporarily nonplussed by a spontaneous audience chorus of “Give Peace a Chance.”
Even the spartan little bedroom upstairs, Yoko felt, could be another Lennon message to posterity. “A lot of young people might feel they can’t do much on their own because they don’t have a big enough room. But I’d like to say to them: ‘John only had that small room, but it nurtured him enough to go out and change the world. Maybe you can do the same.’” A few weeks later she was to have her first ever American hit with a dance version of “Walking on Thin Ice”—the song on the tape that fell from John’s hands as Chapman’s bullets struck him. Almost his last words, indeed, had been to predict it would do well.
I once asked Yoko what most reminded her of John, apart from his picture or his voice on record. She replied that she thought of him every
time she put on a loose-fitting shirt or T-shirt. This she always did as he had shown her, tucking it tight inside the belt, then raising both arms at once to make it billow out in symmetrical folds around the waist.
Love was ever made of such commonplace detail. Even for John and Yoko.
TWENTY-ONE
“THE FREAKS WAS RIGHT WHEN THEY SAID YOU WAS DEAD”
The blandly indifferent smile that Paul McCartney turned on the breakup was merely camouflage for someone who hated showing weakness, betraying real emotion, or admitting the world was other than the happy-go-lucky, sunshiney place he portrayed in his music. Whatever he might pretend, it was a far more devastating moment for Paul than for any of the others.
He who for years had known nothing but golden success now seemed to be staring at comprehensive failure on every front. He had failed to make a success of Apple, failed to carry through his choice of a new manager for the Beatles, failed in all his efforts to steer the band past the fatal shoals of John’s indifference, failed to keep control of his own music, failed above all in his lifelong vocation as Mister Nice Guy. The three individuals who were once closer than family to him had ganged up against him, outvoted, isolated, and sidelined him, and were now ranged against him in implacable hostility.
Typically, it would be years before Paul revealed what an effect all this had on even his seemingly boundless confidence and self-esteem. In 2001, during a television interview with his daughter, Mary, he finally admitted having felt that with the Beatles’ disintegration “I’d lost the framework for my whole working life…I just didn’t know what to do. I started staying up all night and staying in bed all day. I stopped shaving, I started drinking Scotch and I sort of went crazy…Looking back, I guess I nearly had a breakdown.”
What pulled him through was the new family life he had established with Linda, their new baby daughter, Mary, and Linda’s seven-year-old daughter, Heather, whom he had always treated as his own. For months the four of them remained virtually dug in at the farm near Campbeltown, Argyllshire, that Paul had bought in 1966 while he was still with Jane Asher. The unspoiled mountain country around the tract of water known as the Mull of Kintyre was the farthest possible extreme from the urban pressures and strife of the previous six years. Paul had no doubt that it saved his soul and, maybe, his sanity.
The received wisdom for years afterward was that, in the sniping between Paul and John, both on and off their respective solo albums, Linda played only a passive, involuntary role. While understandably prompting Paul to loosen all lingering matrimonial ties with the Beatles, she was thought to have stayed firmly apart from the spats between him on one side and John and Yoko on the other. However, a long handwritten letter from John, sent from Tittenhurst Park in 1970, reveals Linda to have been in the very thick of the feud. Pointedly addressed to “Dear Paul and Linda,” it is a reply to a previous missive written by the couple in tandem, and is just as vitriolic toward her as toward him. “I was reading your letter and wondering what cranky, middle-aged Beatles fan wrote it…. I kept looking at the last page to find out…. What the hell—it’s Linda!”
The letter ends on an almost schizophrenic note, signing off “in spite of it all, love to you both,” then adding a furious P.S. and a line of dots and exclamation marks at the further slight John perceives in their letter not having been addressed jointly to him and Yoko.
To begin with, Paul’s solo output showed little sign of missing John. The McCartney album and its 1971 successor, Ram (also billed as a “partnership” with Linda), each contained work as good as any he’d ever done inside the Beatles. In March 1971, he reached number two in the U.K. singles chart with “Another Day,” a narrative song about a lovelorn spinster (“Every day she takes a morning bath, she wets her hair”) evoking both “Eleanor Rigby” and “She’s Leaving Home.” The following August, he had his first American solo number one with “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey,” a novelty number with some of the same northern music-hall atmosphere as Sgt. Pepper.
But having solo hits in the intervals of family and agricultural life was never going to be enough for Paul McCartney. As his spirits revived, so did his burning need to reestablish contact with the live audiences whose adulation he had been denied during his last four years as a Beatle. He had worked as unselfishly as he knew how to hold the Beatles together, and it hadn’t worked. Very well then, he’d show them there could be life after the Beatles onstage as well as off, that a world-beating combo could exist that did not also feature John, George, and Ringo.
In 1971, he announced he had formed a new band with the Moody Blues’ former guitarist Denny Laine, drummer Danny Seiwell, and Linda on keyboards and vocals. Its name—consciously evoking some thankfully liberated blackbird or butterfly—would be Wings.
Today, such a step by a musician only a hundredth as big as Paul was in 1971 would compel instant, comprehensive media attention. But the media back then remained still overwhelmingly obsessed by the Beatles—in particular by the notion that their differences were reparable and that, sooner or later, they would get back together. The idea of Paul McCartney in any other band was one that most music journalists found impossible to take seriously. The PR man he employed to drum up stories about Wings, rather than about recent Beatles history, found few takers up and down Fleet Street. It was as though he were starting all over again from the bottom.
Paul’s response was one of extraordinary courage or hubris, depending on your point of view. If they wanted him to start at the bottom again, then he’d do it. But not just at the bottom represented by third-rate TV shows and concert venues. He’d go right down to the bottom the Beatles had got to know so intimately ten years before when they were still playing for small change, nurtured only by chips, beer, and impossible dreams.
Packing Wings and their virgin equipment into a single van, he headed north up the M1, determined to break them in by playing the same kind of small halls and clubs where the Beatles had originally honed their craft. It was done somewhat in the chaotic spirit of a modern Magical Mystery Tour, with no firmly planned route or set itinerary of gigs (but also, no doubt, a highly professional appreciation of its ultimate publicity value). One day, for instance, Paul saw a sign to Nottingham University and on a whim told his driver to go there. When they reached the university campus, a roadie was dispatched to find the secretary of the students’ union. “I’ve got Paul McCartney and his new band outside,” the roadie said. “Would you like them to play for you tonight?” It would have taken an iron-willed secretary to reply, “No thanks, I think we’ll stick with our scheduled lecture on the place of the potato in Irish folklore.”
Linda’s inclusion in the Wings lineup had provoked universal disbelief and derision. To the residual millions of Beatle-Paul worshippers, it seemed yet further proof of her baleful influence and grim determination to advance herself by clinging tight to his coattails. Despite Paul’s lavish tributes to her as a creative muse, she had so far been detectable only in the faint feminine coo that now shadowed his lead vocal—a “deified Scouse with unmusical spouse,” as one British magazine called them.
Yet there she was with Paul onstage, filling the place once occupied by John Lennon, her blonde hair now cut in a modish seventies sheaf, dressed in gaudy glam-rock shirts and waistcoats, but still not smiling very much, even when waving puffy sleeves above her head to encourage audiences to clap along. In some Wings songs she took the vocal, closely backed by Paul; in others she played an elementary keyboard solo he had obviously taught her that was only a step or two on from “Chopsticks.” Halfway through the show, he would introduce her in homely Liverpool style as “Our Lin,” though to applause never more than polite.
In fact, as Linda later admitted, it was all Paul’s idea that she should join Wings, mainly so that they wouldn’t be separated when the band went out on tour. She said she never felt comfortable onstage and would always much rather have stayed at home with her children and animals. She did it only because it mean
t so much to Paul.
Despite its huge success and cozy family image, Wings was never to be a happy or stable band. As if in reaction to the old democracy of the Beatles, Paul proved an iron-fisted autocrat. A succession of talented musicians flocked to his banner, but soon left again, frustrated by his dominating ways and refusal to share the limelight with anyone but “Our Lin” and her Chopsticks solo. Even the talented and crucial Denny Laine was given no percentage of the band’s earnings, simply receiving a wage of just seventy pounds per week (though Paul later raised this to seventy thousand pounds per year and paid off Laine’s outstanding income tax). “It was inevitable,” a former Wings associate comments. “You had a leader who was a multi-instrumentalist, a perfectionist—and a former Beatle. Other than John, George, and Ringo, he wasn’t going to regard anyone else as nearly in his league.”
On record, too, Wings had a bumpy takeoff. For their debut single Paul chose to air his Hibernian Catholic roots in an overt political statement whose title, “Give Ireland back to the Irish,” could hardly have been worse timed. When the record appeared in 1972 the so-called Provisional IRA were escalating their campaign of sectarian murder in Northern Ireland and were soon to extend indiscriminate mass murder to the British mainland. The simplistic sentiments of “Give Ireland back to the Irish” seemed all too much in tune with hooded thugs now bombing and knee-capping in the name of Republicanism. Like John Lennon with “I Am The Walrus” five years earlier, Paul found himself banned by the BBC and so deprived of any significant airplay within the U.K.
His heavy-handedly ironic response was to make Wings’ follow-up single a song no one on earth could accuse of being politically controversial. This was the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb,” in a setting that he had originally devised to sing to his daughter, Mary, while he put her to bed. “La-La” ran its chorus—then, by way of a change, “La-la”. When Wings premiered the single on American television, there were sarcastic comments even from the talk-show hosts who introduced them. “Once upon a time, Paul McCartney recorded songs like ‘Eleanor Rigby’ and ‘Hey Jude.’ Now here he is with his new group and ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’”