The long and winding road

FAB: An Intimate Life of Paul McCartney

Airport authorities found a bag of grass concealed in a shirt in his suitcase and he worried he was facing a long stretch. He went unwashed for days. Finally in the tub, with other prisoners, he led a rousing rendition of Yellow Submarine and was released days later. He shrugged off the episode.

While a humorous image, the drugs bust shows how reckless McCartney could be with narcotics and his bandmates. It has been suggested McCartney orchestrated his arrest to get out of another tour with Wings.

Though the band had enjoyed success, the music was skin-crawling — due partly to Paul’s daily pot smoking. Howard Sounes’ admirable biography of McCartney shows the former Beatle to be tight-arsed, ignorant, arrogant, friendless, flawed and unforgiving.

This is by no means a hatchet job — McCartney’s best moments get due credit. But Sounes’ account of Macca is an eye-opener and page-turner. It could become the bible for Macca’s fans.

Some 220 people who know him were interviewed by Sounes. McCartney’s lack of cooperation here is a plus — this is not another stage-managed effort.

The public knows Macca as the smiling, thumbs-up, happy-go-lucky musician. Behind closed doors, colleagues were confronted by a different beast who poked them in the chest and asked “who the fuck do you think you are?” or “when did you last write a number one single?” He was known to send anonymous postcards threatening colleagues, which he later admitted.

His anger and resentment was most notable after the Beatles split. Stoned daily, he didn’t have a John Lennon to rein him in. He was an ex-Beatle and everyone who worked for him was either in awe or too intimidated to tell him when his new material was horrendous and shouldn’t be released.

But his treatment of women, bandmates and colleagues was always appalling. Full of himself from an early age (he wrote When I’m Sixty Four at the age of 15), McCartney set out for Hamburg at 18, engaged and an expectant father. He had several affairs, mostly with barmaids, one of whom alleged he fathered her child –— a claim that dogged him throughout his career.

A control freak, he alienated most people with whom he came into contact, except for his own immediate family who naturally loved him to bits.

Aunt Ginny was shocked when her world-famous nephew admitted to newspapers, in 1967, to having experimented with LSD. Horrified, she rushed from Liverpool to London to confront Paul.

She later returned to Paul’s other relatives, back on Merseyside, for a family meeting to deliver a report on the showdown. Aunt Ginny told them not to worry, everything was fine. She reached into her purse, asked had anyone ever seen one of these before, as she dangled in her hand a joint Paul had rolled for her. The family got stoned around the kitchen table and laughed and laughed and laughed.

The well-known and worn-out story of The Beatles, and the ’60s, is given another run here, but Sounes gives great account of Paul’s personal story.

While seemingly hellbent on climbing the social ladder to join Britain’s elite, he simultaneously existed drunk or stoned, while enjoying countless affairs.

One unfortunate ‘girlfriend’ was made wait outside a house in Paul’s car, while the singer visited another ‘girlfriend’ for a 15-minute quickie.

But he knew true love, and the loss of both John Lennon and Linda Eastman under tragic circumstances haunted McCartney. He lost his two best friends, arguably the only real friends he had. Paul never ‘looked at’ another woman once he got together with Linda.

So, perhaps Heather Mills was karma for McCartney’s earlier days. She was a fellow manipulator and turned out to be quite the master. So much so that you end up feeling sorry for lovable, gullible McCartney, and the author revises your feelings toward the legend all over again.

By far the best account of McCartney. Love him or hate him. Or, maybe, even both.