Paul Needs Love to Stay a Star

 

Paul needs Love to Stay a Star

By Alasdair Buchan

Sunday Mirror

May 23, 1976

    After 15 years of music, Paul McCartney knows better than most how to cope with the pressure of a two-month tour of the United States. At the end of each grueling two-and-a-half-hour concert, he and Linda relax in their dressing room, sipping whiskey and coke and chatting to friends. After a while, they may drop into the press hospitality room with patience and professionalism, they fend off the same Beatles questions they've been answering for seven years, then a quick drive in a hired Cadillac on a Police Motorcycle escort to the airport and onto the privacy of one of the three houses they have rented in the States for the tour.

    Not for them nightly parties and hotel rooms until dawn and bleary lunchtime breakfast, which suits Linda well.  "Our job is playing music and recording," she says, "but I don't believe that means you have to live the part every hour of the day. The reason so many groups split up is that they try too hard to live up to the role others decide they should play."

     Getting away from it all is easier for Paul and Linda, thanks to their healthy bank balance. They own a home in St John's Wood, London, and a farm in Campbelltown, Scotland. There are Picasso and Magritte paintings on their walls, gifts from Linda's father, who was a lawyer, to both artists and was paid in paintings rather than dollars. But the McCartney lifestyle is not opulent.

     In London, Linda spends her time looking after a collection of pets and attending her vegetable plot. There are dogs, chickens, ducks, and a goose in the back garden. Linda's sponge cake made with goose eggs, is a family favorite. 

    "I love cooking," she says, "But I hate cleaning up. I get my daughter Heather to do that." Heather is Linda's 13-year-old from her first marriage. 

    Linda sings her first solo, "Cook of the House," on Wings, a new album; the chorus runs: "No matter where I serve my guests, they seem to like the kitchen best."  In a sense, the McCartneys regard all their activities as an extension of family life

    . A witty and pleasant bonhomie stemming from the relaxed confidence of Paul and Linda surrounds Wings, a big touring company; the McCartney children, Heather, Mary, six, and Stella, four, go along with their nanny-cum- auntie Rose, a Cockney whose refreshing earthliness would shock Christopher Robbin's Alice.

     Then there's a manager, his assistant, a road manager, an accountant, a wardrobe girl, two Greyhound bus loads of sound and tech technicians, a stage designer, two press officers, a tour photographer, and a bodyguard. 

    Paul and Linda also like to relax with friends who are not directly involved in making music. While I was with Wings, I felt I was part of the family rather than an observer. One gets the impression that Linda tries to lighten the public burden her husband endures as an ex-Beatle. 

    "A lot of people think you can knock a good star like Paul McCartney, and he'll still go on writing good stuff," she says. "People don't realize that at times, you almost have to put a star on a pedestal and say, 'hey, that's great. Well done'. People can criticize so much that they take the inspiration out of an artist," Linda says.

     "George Best was a victim of critics. What he really needed was someone to put an arm around him and say, 'Hey, love, what's wrong?'  You need someone to say 'you're a good guy. We love you'. But no one did. "

    Similar pressure in the music world, or the desire to avoid them, makes social life difficult for the McCartneys. "Most of the time, we visit other people's homes, or they come around to us," says Linda. They like the idea of popping down to the local for a pint, but they never do because of their famous faces. "We haven't figured out the answer to that one yet,"says Linda. 

    "I remember Eric Morecambe says he likes to go in and have a drink, but people keep digging him in the ribs with their spectacles on sideways, that he's got to smile, even if all he feels like doing is melting into the background after a hard day's work."

     But despite the built in defenses, Paul and Linda are generous and expansive with friends. The party they threw for close friends on the Queen Mary in California cost 40,000 pounds. Stars like Bob Dylan, Ringo Starr and Dean Martin came along. 

    Every day, the band gets presents of some kind, Wings, silver pennants, satin embroidered Wings, jackets, hand-dyed Wings T-shirts. 

    The presence you feel springs from Linda's desire to share her beautiful and comfortable life with her friends; the ease you feel in their company is a measure of the successful compromise Linda McCartney has made between her own quiet, gentle character and the raucous, often unbending pressures of her public life. When I left Linda and Paul in Houston, Texas, she kissed me and handed me a note saying, thanks for being so a part of us, and thanks to you, Linda.