Part 3
PAUL: Just time, healing things. The shock of losing the Beatles as a band. . .. One of the main shocks was that I wouldn't have a band. I remember John's reaction was that, too. You know, "How am I going to get my songs out now?"
PLAYBOY: And Wings was the first step to recovery?
PAUL: Yeah. The answer to losing your job is, "Well, let's try to get another job." It's not a very satisfactory answer, but it's the only answer you've got. So we just started off thinking, We'll take any job; we'll do anything just to get going, to do something.
LINDA: Considering that you asked me to be in the group, you really were willing to take anything.
PLAYBOY: Did you want to be in the group, Linda?
LINDA: Again, I didn't think about it. I never planned to be a photographer, either. I always thought I could do anything I liked doing. I'm not the type of person who thinks of the consequences beforehand.
PAUL: Which was a saving grace, really, because if she had thought about what would happen
LINDA: It would have made me too afraid.
PAUL: Anyway, it worked out fine, and eventually, bit by bit, we managed to put songs together. Those are the songs that some people thought were not as good as my earlier stuff, or too commercial. I know people from time to time used to say that, but my attitude was, "Sorry, folks, it's about the best I can do right now. Sorry! You know, this is me trying to do it. I'm trying to do it honestly and genuinely; if some of it's not working to your taste, what can I say?" But it helped us claw our way back.
PLAYBOY: What do you think of the Wings material, looking back on it? Is it music you're proud of?
PAUL: I used to think that all my Wings stuff was second-rate stuff, but I began to meet younger kids, not kids from my Beatle generation, who would seriously say, "No, wait a minute; can't have you say that about your work. We really love this song or that song."
LINDA: A lot of people come up to Paul and say, "Oh, my favorite song is such and such"--and it's one of the more recent ones.
PAUL: Yeah, there'll be people who mention My Love or Band on the Run, and for us that's a big thing. Or Mull of Kintyre or Ebony and Ivory. No matter what I may think about them--I can view them cynically, even ruthlessly--even I have to admit there definitely was something there with some of the Wings songs. In fact, the more I bother looking at it again, the more I discover what I was trying to do. I think there'll be a lot of that Wings stuff sort of rediscovered in years to come.
PLAYBOY: Some of the criticism of the Wings material undoubtedly stemmed from the fact that you had Linda in the band. How did you react to the criticism of her?
PAUL: Well, we laid ourselves open to that kind of criticism. But it was out of complete innocence that I got Wings together and naively said, "Come on, Lin, do you want to be in it?" I showed her middle C, told her I'd teach her a few chords and have a few laughs. It was very much in that vein. But then people began to say, "My God! He's got his wife up there onstage--he's got to be kidding!" And so forth. I think she came to handle it amazingly well. She has fabulous showbiz instincts, and by the time it came to the 1976 tour of the States, she was handling an audience better than any of us. But looking back on it, I can understand the criticism. It was as if we were putting her up there to top the Beatles or something. There was never any thought of that. If we were doing it again, we just might be more thoughtful. But I'm proud of her; I really threw her in the deep end.
Paul is called away.
PLAYBOY: Linda, what was the Wings period really like for Paul?
LINDA: I think Paul felt very frustrated. He wanted it to work with Wings, but we just picked the wrong people. He needed the best to work with, but he had to carry almost all the weight.
PLAYBOY: Former members of Wings have written some pretty nasty stuff about both of you--in particular, that Paul was dictatorial to work with.
LINDA: It's part of the same problem. Paul is such a good musician, and none of the Wings were good enough to play with him--including me, for sure. They were good, not great. But on this film Give My Regards to Broad Street , he's had a chance to work with the best. As for all the other stuff that's been written about the two of us, so much of it is rubbish. Former Wings guitar player Denny Laine wrote two articles: One said I led Paul around totally, the other that Paul totally dominated me. I thought Denny came off badly. I could see some girlfriend or an ex-chauffeur writing such rubbish, but a musician?
PLAYBOY: He was less then charitable about your musical contributions to the group.
LINDA: Look, this acting-and-singing thing is not--I'm not really a talent in those fields. I was just telling Paul again that I don't quite know how I had the nerve to join him, looking back on it now. I mean, how do you go out with Beethoven and say, "Sure, I'll sing harmong with you" when you've never sung a note? Or "Sure I'll play piano with you" when you've nev er played? It was mad. But I'm . . . enthusiastic about things. Isn't it funny? People write that I'm cold and pushy. I hop I'm not, but I have that kind of face--I don't smile a lot. The truth is, I'm an old softy. I don't say to a kid, "No, you mustn't do that!" I'm the person who puts her arm around him. I'm easy. I go along with things. I think my problem is that I Married Paul and to this day, nobody knows what or who I am. I don't even know what or who I am. Being married to Paul makes me a personality, I guess, but if I weren't, I would have meandered through life. I quite like meandering. I'm curious and I like to try things I haven't tried before, like music. I was that way before I married Paul. I get excited about a stained glass I've never seen before, or a great sunset--very physically excited!
PLAYBOY: Why do you think you have the reputation you do? You share that with Yoko Ono--somehow being the cause of the Beatles' breakup.
LINDA: If only I'd known that you have to explain things to people! When I married Paul, I knew I'd never had these problems . . . except maybe when I was at school . . . but then it was all right because you just listened to the radio and you'd forget it. But God knows, people got on my back, and for things I wasn't really doing. But I'm just not the type who'll get up and explain herself. It'll just go down that I'm that woman. . . . People I used to know say I'm a snob now--you know, "She didn't speak to me." And people say--as they did on Good Morning America once--that if I weren't married to Paul McCartney, I wouldn't be a photographer. Well, maybe I wouldn't be a famous photographer, but I'd be a photographer. I'd make a living. . . . All those things get to you, but I can handle it. . . . I can just wipe it out. I don't dwell on what people say about me. I actually dwell more on what people say about Paul, for some reason. Maybe it's because he can't handle it.
PLAYBOY: How do you handle it when a book portrays you as a groupie and describes intimate scenes of Paul's escapades and John's so-called homosexual encounter with Beatles manager Brain Epstein? That was what Peter Brown, who ran Apple the Beatles' record company , wrote about in The Love You Make.
LINDA: (Pauses) He was a friend. He was the one who introduced Paul and me. A man I trusted. When I was going to the hospital to have Stella, I handed him my baby, Mary, to hold. I wouldn't trust my baby to anyone but a friend. Now it's like he doesn't exist. And his book--well, it doesn't matter what he wrote, because he betrayed a trust. We decided not ot read it, but we heard things. We put the copy he sent us in the fire and I photographed it as it burned, page by page. As to what he wrote about Paul or about John's experiences, ask Paul himself. He's coming back.
Paul rejoins the conversation.
PLAYBOY: We were talking about what Peter Brown wrote in his book. PAUL: Yeah, he told us he was going to write about the music of the Sixties, not a book about the Beatles. I took him into my house, something we don't do; we had lunch, showed him the kids, showed him around our village. I actually thought he was a friend. so to find out that he isn't is no big deal. But I--I mean, I hear he said John Lennon had a gay thing with Brian Epstein when they went to Spain together once. That's been rumored for years. I mean, was he in the room with them? It's probably just wishful thinking on his part. But I'll tell you what's naughty about it--that John's not here to answer it, and neither is Brian. All that stuff that's written about us, I just hope that people who've sort of heard of our music, vaguely, know what the Beatles, or the ex-Beatles, were--and it wasn't what's been written. I mean, John's time and effort were, in the main, spent on pretty honorable stuff. As for the other side, well, nobody's perfect, nobody's Jesus. And look what they did to him.
PLAYBOY: John apparently coped with the craziness of that period by experimenting with heroin. Did you know anything about that?
PAUL: No, not at the time. It's strange; that was all in private. LINDA: I don't think we really knew what they were up to.
PAUL: We certainly never saw them on heroin. Never, ever.
LINDA: It must have been when Yoko was around.
PAUL: Yeah. My theory is that John and Yoko were so much in love that they began adding wildness to ordinary love, going for it in a big way. From what they told us--from what we found out--it did include crazy things like heroin. It appeared to include everything and anything. I mean, if the dare was to go naked, they would go naked. If the dare was to try heroin--nothing was too much. To think of yourself as Jesus Christ was not blasphemous, it was all just larger than life. All sorts of stuff was going on. Everybody was talking about expanding your mind.
PLAYBOY: And you never took heroin yourself?
PAUL: No.
PLAYBOY: But, to say the least, you're no stranger to other drugs?
Paul: I've never wanted to be seen talking about marijuana for publication. Why? Because I've got four kids and it looks like I'm advocating it. I'm not. But after this last bust in Barbados, with people saying, "Naughty boy, shouldn't do that!" as a 42-year-old man, I feel I now have the right to reply. If anyone had told me in the Sixties that 20 years later we'd still be talking about whether pot was worse than this or that, I'd have said, "Oh, come off it, boys." If you start the most-dangerous list with heroin or morphine--we know there's no way out of that; you've got to be suicidal to get into that in any form--then I think marijuana comes toward the bottom of the list. Cocaine is above marijuana in harmfulness. I used to do coke mincing his words , but it got too fashionable, to fashionable, darling, amongst the record execs. I couldn't handle all that, being in the bogs bathrooms with all those creeps! And I do genuinely believe that Librium and Valium would both be above marijuana. For me, pot is milder than Scotch. That doesn't mean I've turned around and advocated marijuana. I haven't. I'm really only saying this is true for me. I mean, in Barbados, where I was on holiday, I was in a room miles away from anyone. It never interfered with anyone. No one was watching me except one manservant at the place. I also want to say that there are things that marijuana is more harmful than: air, for instance. I advocate air every day. Water, orange juice--I'd advocate that and a good vegetarian diet any day of the week. But as I say, in print, you're put in a corner; they make you sound like the bloody high priest of pot. It's stupid, you know. I can take pot or leave it. I got busted in Japan for it. I was nine days without it and there wasn't a hint of withdrawal, nothing.
PLAYBOY: You haven't discussed your imprisonment in Japan for pot possession. What was it like?
PAUL: It was hell. But I only remember the good bits. Like a bad holiday. The thing is, my arrest was on every bloody TV set. The other prisoners all knew who I was and asked me to sing. I didn't have any instruments, but the world's press would have loved to have had cameras rolling as I was going drums with hands . Well, I'd seen Bridge on the River Kwai; I knew what you had to do when you were a prisoner of war! You had to laugh a lot and keep cheery and keep yourself up, 'cause that's all you had. So I did a lot of that.
PLAYBOY: Didn't you write a 20,000-word account of your stay in prison?
PAUL: After it, yeah. I wrote it in case anybody ever asked, "What was that like?" because, like I say, all the good bits have surfaced. But if I think hard, I can remember that the first thing I expected was rape. That was my big fear. Right? Wouldn't that be yours? So I slept with me back to the wall. I didn't know what was going to happen, you know? Japanese accent "Hello, is you friendly jailer. I'd like a favor, please." "No! Not even for a bowl of rice!" I slept for about a week in the green suit I was arrested in; I didn't know you could ask for fresh clothes.
PLAYBOY: What was that period like for you, Linda?
LINDA: Total misery. The kids and I were in a Japanese hotel, not knowing what was going to happen. I was so frightened for Paul I can't even describe it. Your imagination takes off. I didn't know that they would be doing to him. And for what? A bit of nothing. Marijuana isn't like bombs or murder or the Mafia. I don't think pot is a sin, but I didn't want us to be a martyr for it.
PLAYBOY: Your legal problems with pot are one thing, but the legal affairs surrounding Apple, to wind up the Beatles' financial affairs, are in another dimension. Will your former business ever be settled?
LINDA: What do you want? It's only been 15 years. Laughter
PAUL: To most clear-minded people, it's obvious we should have settled the Beatles' affairs by now--for our own sanity. But there have been many stumbling blocks over the years. There was the occasion when John came to a meeting and asked for a 1,000,000 pounds loan. That made us stumble! Everyone went, "Say what?!" and jaws dropped and the meeting was canceled. Then there was the time when we had all arrived for the big dissolution meeting in the Plaza Hotel in New York. There were green-baize tables--like the Geneva Conference it was--with millions of documents laid out for us to sign. George had just come off tour, I'd flown in specially from England, Ringo had flown in specially, too, I think, and. . . John wouldn't show up! He wouldn't come from across the park! George got on the phone, yelled, "Take those fucking shades off and come over here, you!" John still wouldn't come over. He had a balloon delivered with a sign saying, LISTEN TO THIS BALLOON. It was all quite far out.
LINDA: The numbers weren't right, the planets weren't right, and John wasn't coming. Well! And it's never happened since. It's never happened. He said he was not coming and that was it. Had we known there was some guy flipping cards on his bed to help him make his decision, we would have all gone over there. George blew his top, but it didn't change anything. It's beyond words. It's mind-boggling.
PAUL: There were many stumbling blocks, and to keep the record straight, it wasn't always John and Yoko. Obviously, they accused my side of doing plenty of stumbling, too. We've all accused one another of various business things; we tend to be pretty paranoid by now, as you can imagine. There's a lot of money involved.
PLAYBOY: With all these stories about numbers and cards, you seem to be saying it's Yoko who has kept this from being settled.
LINDA: I don't know abot that. It is true she settled with Klein for 5,000,000. It wasn't her money, really. Each Beatle gave a share, Paul included, and he never wanted that man as manager in the first place. Five or six million! When you think that they were pulling bloody cards to see what they would do! If only we had known what they were doing back there! We tried reason and reason didn't exist. All I know is, with all the advisors and lawyers and parasites, we're putting a lot of kids through prep school and buying a lot of swimming pools. And all Paul has been saying all this time is, "Divide it four ways, please." Instead of it staying in one kitty, where only the lawyers make money, divide it four ways and let's get on with life! I said to Paul I wouldn't mind if we didn't get anything, as long as it gets divided, just to get rid of the aggro. Just so the lawyers will stop making money. I don't care if we don't get any. But I hate being the fool.
PLAYBOY: Fortunately for you, most of your income comes not from Apple but, actually, from your music-publishing company, right?
PAUL: That and my recording. About equal. The music publishing I own is fabulous recording. About equal. The music publishing I own is fabulous. Beautiful. I owe it all to Linda's dad Lee Eastman and her brother John. Linda's dad is a great business brain. He said originally, "If you are going to invest, do it in something you know. If you invest in building computers or something, you can lose a fortune. Wouldn't you rather be in music? Stay in music." I said, "Yeah, I'd much rather do that." So he asked me what kind of music I liked. And the first name I said was Buddy Holly. Lee got on to the man who owned Buddy Holly's stuff and bought that for me. So I was into publishing now. The strange thing is, we never owned our own publishing; it was always getting bought and sold. Someone else owns Yesterday, not me. So it is a kind of compensation, really, for that. Lee found this company called Edwin H. Morris, in New York, which owned everything, including the kitchen sink--it's just the most wonderful company ever. It has some of the best music ever written, songs that my dad would play, like Tenderly, After You've Gone, Stormy Weather. And our luck! There's a thing in the business they call "Eastman luck," or maybe a little McCartney luck thrown in, too, but we just suddenly got very, very lucky. There was a show that needed investors and Lee said, "Do you want to let the show run or should we can it? We have the power to can it." I said, "No, keep it going--it's an artistic venture, we don't want to can that." It was Annie. It was at a small theater before it got to Broadway, a little show, and we published the music. A Chorus Line happened, too, and we published that. La Cage aux Folles has happened since, and that's been lunatic, insane. Many, many more. Grease, too. John Travolta was looking for something to do, and we owned the publishing rights to that.
PLAYBOY: It had nothing to do with your understanding of popular music?
PAUL: A bit. I was vibing it heavily. And very in love with it, and that helps. Anyway, now it's become the largest independently owned publishing company, so it's a big dip.
PLAYBOY: It's also made you one of the richest men in the world, hasn't it?
LINDA: There aren't all those millions that you read about in the paper. How much Paul earns is one of those constant topics in the gossip columns, and it's all exaggerated.
PLAYBOY: The figure we've heard most often is that you're worth about 500,000,000.
PAUL: And the other one is that I earn 20,000,000 a year.
LINDA: Can you imagine the taxes you'd have to pay on that?
PAUL: The money stories actually arose because some fellow somewhere wrote a book called World Paychecks: Who Makes What, Where and Why--a rubbishy book from which the newspapers quoted a reference to me. That is the entire source this wealth has come from.
LINDA: And it doubles every time you look at the paper.
PAUL: It's all based on that one published item, and it actually isn't true. I didn't earn that much in record royalties. You've only got to look at my sales in 1980 to figure that one out. In the here-and-now stage, the figure is wildly exaggerated.
Linda: That's it. That's all you need to say.
PLAYBOY: All right, but when you say "in the here-and-now stage," you seem to be hedging; does that mean that iths possible you might be earning that much in the future?
PAUL: No, I'm not talking figures. Where I come from, you don't really talk about how much you're earning. Those things are private. Like a lot of people, my dad never told my mum how much he was earning. I'm certainly not going to tell the world. I'm doing well.
PLAYBOY: Does Linda Know?
PAUL: Linda knows.
LINDA: I'm not really interested. I want to have enough to live on, and if I can help a few other people, that's what I care about.
PLAYBOY: One other rumor: Is it true, as published, that you are the single largest depositor in the Chase Manhattan Bank in New York?
PAUL, LINDA: We don't even use Chase Manhattan Bank!
PLAYBOY: Whatever else you say, people have always felt you are commercially minded, that you are motivated by money--
PAUL: No, it isn't money. It's doing well. I saw that Meryl Streep said, "I just want to do my job well." And really, that's all I'm ever trying to do. I still like writing songs. It still gives me a thrill. If I had been asked at 15 why I wrote, I would have answered, "Money." But after a while, you realize that's not really your driving motive. When you get the money, you still need to keep going; you don't stop. There has to be something else. I think it's the freedom to do what you want and to live your dreams.