by Wendy Walker
My life has continually been filled with rewards beyond anything I could imagine. And they usually happened when I least expected it. Take Jerry Lewis, for example. I was in Washington DC, on the set of Larry King Live. We had booked Jerry Lewis, circa 1994, on the show and I was excited since I had grown up laughing at his jokes and antics. I think the reason I get so excited when I meet comedians is that my dream job would be getting hired as a cast member on Saturday Night Live. But for some reason, Lorne Michaels and Marci Klein haven’t called.
When I stepped onto the set, a little weak in the knees, Larry and Jerry were already standing there together, talking. I caught my breath and instructed myself to stay cool, when Larry told Jerry, “Hey, I’d like you to meet Wendy, my producer.”
I stuck out my hand to shake his, and said quite loudly, “Hi, I’m Jerry Lewis.”
He looked at me and said, “You are, darling?”
I turned bright pink and walked away. After all, this was not a president or someone who has just won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was the Nutty Professor. And I was acting like a schoolgirl. And then years later, it happened all over again, this time with another comedian. It started with an unusual call from Larry. “Wendy,” he said in a grave voice, “I’m really upset about our director. There are some issues here that I don’t want to discuss on the phone. I need to see you tomorrow, on the set.”
That’s weird, I thought. Larry usually says what’s on his mind right away. When I showed up midmorning the next day at the bureau, Larry grabbed my hand and said, “Let’s find a quiet place to talk. How about the green room?”
There was no one in there so we sat down to talk. But in the next moment, the door opened and in walked Jim Carrey. Larry and my staff had surprised me, and I was embarrassed and thrilled at the same time when Larry said, “Thanks for coming in, Jim. This is my producer, Wendy, and she really loves you.”
My face got redder by the second as Jim Carrey flashed his white teeth and gathered me up for a hug. When I realized he was in on the surprise, too, I was completely mortified. Here I was, the mother of two children, having a majorly cuckoo moment with Jim Carrey. My staff and Larry had done this for me, since they knew that Jim Carrey was my dream guest and my comic mentor. And now, they were about to tape a show. What a gift!
And then there was the state dinner under the George H. W. Bush administration to which I was invited in August of 2002. I really liked this president but I thought I was much too low on the totem pole to be invited to a state dinner. When the invitation arrived, I accepted, of course, and I brought an escort. When I walked into the East Room where the dinner would be held, the only people I knew were the camera crews and the Secret Service agents. They all waved and nodded at me, I waved back, and I went to get my table assignment. I’d expected to be delegated to the back of the room, right next to the kitchen, but that was not the case.
This particular state dinner was being given for Poland’s president, Lech Walesa, so many famous Polish Americans were there. I found my friend Jim Miklaszewski, a man of Polish American descent, who was at NBC. He had the seating arrangements in front of him and he said something to me like, “Lucky you, Wendy, you’re at the president’s table.”
I stopped a moment and said, “Excuse me, but there has to be a mistake. My last name is Walker and I think they must have mixed me up with the Walkers in the president’s family. You know, George Herbert Walker Bush.”
“No, you’re at the president’s table,” Mik said. “There’s no mistake. Go sit down.”
It turned out that the president liked having an eclectic mix of people around him, and we had a great time eating and bantering. I remember chatting with TV host Pat Sajak, some famous football player wearing one of those huge Super Bowl rings, and the president of Coca-Cola, who turned out to be a very interesting man. I’m sure he was impressed when I told him that Diet Coke was my drink of choice.
And still, with all these unexpected and amazing rewards, nothing compares with the day I turned fifty. Joining the half-century club is a landmark in anyone’s life, even though it’s often something we would rather ignore. I thought I might forget about my fiftieth, but you know what they say about the best-laid plans. In fact, not only was it impossible for me to ignore crossing over the half-century mark. It turned out that my fiftieth birthday became a story in newspapers all over the world.
The upside? There’s nothing like having your fiftieth become your fifteen minutes of fame! Just when life feels mundane or boring, there is nothing like a surprise boost from somewhere unexpected.
The downside? I can never lie about my age.
When my fiftieth birthday rolled around, I’d have been satisfied to go out for a quiet dinner with my family and friends and have done with it. After all, fifty is a daunting age and most women do not welcome it with open arms. But my husband told me he wanted to throw me a party at a local restaurant, and I could invite some people who were close to me. It sounded okay, and since my family and friends wanted to help me celebrate a landmark birthday, I went along with it.
I made out my guest list, which included my family, some local friends, people from Washington, and a few others from out of town with whom I felt particularly close. I ended up with about a hundred people, a conservative number considering how many people Ralph and I knew. But I wasn’t into making a big deal out of this birthday. And I didn’t know how many friends I was going to disappoint when my birthday party became an international story and they hadn’t been invited.
My husband always did things in a big way, that was his style, so I expected he would go over the top when he told me he wanted to hire some entertainment. Since he knew I loved soul music, I figured he would hire someone like James Brown or the Temptations. I kept asking him who was doing the music, but he said it was a secret. Apparently, he didn’t tell anyone else, either, because I tried to pry the information out of a friend or two, but no one knew whom he had booked.
It was the afternoon of the party, February 22, 2003, the day before my actual birthday, when my curiosity got the better of me. The center of town is one small block, so I went out to do a random errand and “casually” drove past the restaurant Delicias, where the party was being held. I expected it to be relatively quiet, but I was surprised to see several huge production trucks parked outside. I stopped my car in front of the restaurant to stare at the activity, when a woman in a security uniform walked toward me and stood by my open window. “Who are you,” she said, “and what are you doing here?”
I smiled and told her, “I’m Wendy. This is my party.”
“You need to go away right now,” she said. “You really have to leave.”
I did as I was told and I went home to get ready for the party. I picked out a white leather skirt and gold boots, trying to look kind of wild and crazy, but Ralph took one look at me and said, “No, that’s not the right look for tonight.”
Without hesitation, I changed into a black leather skirt and top. “How’s this?” I asked him.
“Yeah, that’s better,” he said in a serious tone.
At about 7 p.m., when I arrived at the restaurant and went in, they had done a terrific job of turning the place into a nightclub atmosphere with low lighting and an open bar. I went to compliment my husband and wondered why he was so revved up. But as I proceeded to greet my friends and family who were arriving, little did I know the saga of what had been going on behind my back.
Ralph had contacted Kevin Mabbutt, owner of Delicias, a few weeks earlier, to see if he could rent out the restaurant for the party. We had been frequenting Kevin’s restaurant for years; it was one of our favorite spots. We knew Kevin’s family and he was happy to help Ralph out.
“Ralph said he was booking blues singer B. B. King,” says Kevin. “He wondered if I could handle a hundred fifty to two hundred guests. I said okay, happy he had gone with my intimate restaurant instead of a much larger one, but when I found out who he ended up booking, I was stunn
ed. It was the next day when he called to tell me that he had passed on B. B. King because he had landed a much more famous and charismatic performer—Paul McCartney himself.”
Ralph and I had met Paul and his girlfriend Heather Mills (they weren’t married yet) when they appeared on Larry’s show to talk about her foundation for the eradication of land mines. I was thrilled beyond belief to meet them and so was Ralph whom I brought with me.
When the interview was over, Paul and Heather were leaving the set when Paul said to Ralph, “I’m really glad we got to promote our land mine foundation. But if you’re serious about putting your money where your mouth is, why don’t you buy a table at our land mine dinner?”
Paul had mistaken Ralph for a CNN executive, but Ralph didn’t miss a beat. “How much is a table?” he asked.
“Fifty thousand,” said Paul as Ralph whipped out his checkbook and wrote out a check, right then and there, for $50,000. When Paul and Heather realized later that Ralph was my husband, not a CNN executive, they apologized for soliciting us for a donation. But we were happy to donate and we ended up chairing the dinner the very next year, of which we were very proud. Our name—the Whitworths—was next to the Annenbergs, both of us having given $50,000. That was funny.
Now it was about a year later and my fiftieth birthday had nearly arrived when Ralph got Paul’s number from my staff. He called him directly and said, “I have a proposition for you. It’s Wendy’s birthday in a few weeks. If you come to our town and play for her private party, I’ll write you a million-dollar check for your foundation.”
Heather was thrilled, she was all for it, and according to her, it took Paul a moment to agree. He shied away from doing private concerts because of the security nightmare they inevitably caused. Besides, he didn’t have to do private parties, but he eventually said, “Okay, Ralph, I’ll do this for you and Wendy. We’re about to go on tour and my band and I need some practice.” The last time Paul had agreed to do a private party was back in the sixties, but now, he was determined to help Heather raise money for her charity so he considered it a trade.
“Paul’s security people arrived a few days later,” says Kevin, “to look over my restaurant and ask questions. When they were about to leave, they told me that if even one person found out about this beforehand, they would have to call the whole thing off. They would have no choice because they would never be able to handle the throngs that would arrive if they knew what was going on. This only escalated the immense pressure we were under. Now we had to do all of our planning, from the look of the interior, to the hors d’oeuvres, the food and beverages, and the sound system, without letting anyone know who was performing—not my wife or my staff.”
I learned later that in order to give the restaurant a nightclub vibe, Kevin had agreed to let Ralph’s people change the entire place around, which included moving a huge, extremely fragile, and very expensive Lalique table in the dining room that had held large arrangements of flowers for the past fifteen years. It was dismantled under Kevin’s watchful eye, which involved removing and saving close to a hundred delicate screws that held the table together. All in secret.
“We were up late into the night,” recalls Kevin, “moving things out of the restaurant. I held my breath when they moved the table. Then early the next morning, the designers arrived to begin their preparations. When locals looked in to see what was going on, we just told them we were doing a birthday party for someone who lived in town—which was true. Being a Brit, I loved the Beatles as much as anyone and it was totally exciting for me.
“Then, on the afternoon of the event, security escalated and keeping the secret was getting harder and harder,” he recalls. “Paul’s band needed to rehearse and to do a sound check at four thirty, and I had loads of staff members scurrying around, preparing to serve dinner and entertain a large group of people by seven p.m. I had kept them all in the dark about the entertainment and they were amazed when I gave the directive, ‘Okay, everybody out.’ They couldn’t believe I was sending them out in the midst of setting up, but I had to.
“When my staff left, I pulled the blinds, closed the curtains, and Paul and his band stepped in to do a sound check. I heard later that people in the street figured they were hearing a Paul McCartney impersonator, and they walked on by. No one imagined that, in their little town just outside of San Diego, one of the Beatles and his band were rehearsing to entertain at a private party.”
I got excited when my friends began arriving at the restaurant. It was so good to see everyone, especially Larry and Katie, who had agreed to share the emcee duties. After sipping champagne and greeting our guests, Ralph headed up on stage to get everyone’s attention. At that precise moment, Kennedy, the husband of Sara, one of my college roommates, who was a real rock and roll fan, suddenly said, “That’s Paul McCartney’s guitar.”
“Yeah, right. Like Paul McCartney is about to play for this private party!” Sara told her husband as Paul and the band members were sneaking down the back alley and entering the restaurant by the service door.
“You know,” Ralph told the crowd, “we were going to do a little R&B tonight. But I decided it would be better to have a little rock and roll. So without further ado, ladies and gentlemen…”
Ralph jumped down off the stage and, suddenly, everyone began to scream, men and women alike. Paul McCartney was in the house and he jumped onstage wearing a bright red T-shirt. He smiled (at me!) and picked up his guitar. Then he opened his mouth and sang, “You say good-bye and I say hello. I don’t know why…”
I did not believe what I was seeing and hearing. It wasn’t possible. I had a flashback to the fifth grade in 1963, in Dubuque, Iowa, when I gave up my bedroom to my grandmother one winter. I was relegated to a tiny room in our house that was the size of the width of a double bed. It was the year the Beatles came to America, and there were magazines entirely devoted to them that cost 35 cents at the grocery store. Since Paul and Ringo were my favorites, I bought a bunch of magazines, tore their pictures out, and wallpapered the entire room with photos of my two most adored Beatles. I recently found all of those photos that had graced my walls when I was young and I gave them to my teenage daughter to put on her wall.
Now, Paul McCartney was standing on the stage, in person, amid our screams of joy and shock. And not only was he playing his famous guitar. He was dedicating his songs to me on my birthday. I was in shock, wondering for an instant if this was actually a tribute band. But I knew it was unmistakably Paul when he looked directly at me and said, “Hey, Wendy baby!”
If I still had any doubts, there was Heather, glowing, in a pair of jeans and a white top, rocking out to her husband’s music. We found out later that she was pregnant but only Paul and she knew at the time. To add to the excitement, Paul’s entire band backed him up as he went through a playlist that would bring the totally shocked guests to their knees.
How can I describe the faces of my friends as they rocked out to the live music of Paul McCartney? As I danced to the music, I thought I had some pretty good moves. I smiled when I thought about how embarrassed Walker got every time I danced. I didn’t care. The entire room stood up and danced, singing along with Paul for almost two hours. What if I had said no to the party? I would never know what I had missed. Now, all of us in that room had experienced something that would bond us together forever.
When Paul finished his rendition of “Hello, Goodbye,” he went on to the next song. By the time he was finished, the playlist, believe it or not, had gone as follows:
Hello, Goodbye
Coming Up
Let Me Roll It
Your Loving Flame
Live and Let Die
Freedom
Blackbird
We Can Work It Out
Here Today
Eleanor Rigby
Calico Skies
Here, There and Everywhere
Michelle
Back in the U.S.S.R.
She’s Leaving Home
&
nbsp; Maybe I’m Amazed
Lady Madonna
Let It Be
Yesterday
Birthday
Hey Jude
I Saw Her Standing There
We all knew the words, we all sang along, and each of us had our personal experience of what the song had meant to us in the past. The entire evening felt elevated as if we had traveled to some magical sphere in the past where everything was exactly as we had left it.
As the decibel levels of the music escalated, however, so did the screaming, and Kevin got a call from the local sheriff’s office. He had warned them about the party, that there might be some noise, but they had not expected it to be so loud or for it to go on for so long. The sheriff asked Kevin, “Can you just tone it down? People are complaining.”
But when Kevin told him it was Paul McCartney, the sheriff backed off completely. The mention of the Beatle’s name was enough for the police and it was apparently enough for the neighbors, too. When they were told who was there, instead of complaining further, they all came out into the street to listen.
Back inside, when Paul began to play the chords of “You Say It’s Your Birthday,” all eyes turned to me as he called me up to the stage. He continued to play, directing his famous lyrics to me, and when he pulled me in for a dance, I understood the meaning of the expression, “Now I can die happy.” When it was over, Paul reached out to me, hugged me in front of everyone, and whispered in my ear, “Hey, baby, happy birthday.” Paul McCartney just called me “baby,” I thought to myself. Nobody has a better life than I do.
When the night was nearly over, Kevin was approached by a security guard. “We have a problem,” the guard told Kevin. “In the last hour, television and radio trucks are parked in the street and a huge crowd has gathered outside. The networks are setting up cameras and we have to keep Paul away from all this.”
