by Tom Doyle
When Paul first came here at the tail-end of 1967 – equally the Beatles’ annus mirabilis and annus horribilis (the marvel of Sgt. Pepper, the paralysing shock of Brian Epstein’s death, the trials of Magical Mystery Tour and the sense that nothing would ever be the same again) – he’d tried to make High Park habitable on a characteristically thrifty level.
He’d dispatched Beatles gofer Alistair Taylor into Campbeltown, from where he’d returned with a second-hand Formica table and chairs, an electric stove and a couple of beds. The pair fashioned a sofa out of a pile of Sharpe’s Express wooden potato boxes, with an old mattress found in the barn folded over the makeshift frame.
After his split from Asher, Paul first went back there with Linda in November 1968. The eldest daughter of the moneyed New York Eastman family had immediately fallen in love with the place and the idea of roughing it in this remoteness – no hot water, mice and rats in the walls and all – but had suggested to Paul that they do the place up a bit. It was a notion that hadn’t even occurred to the airy McCartney.
She encouraged him to pour a cement floor in the kitchen, replacing the wooden planks laid over the bare earth. He began making a table to replace the flimsy Formica one. He scaled a ladder and climbed on to the roof to fix its hole, Linda soundtracking his handiwork by spinning the newly released Tighten Up reggae compilation LPs.
If you had walked through the door of the farmhouse in the latter months of 1969, according to Paul, you’d have seen ‘nappies, bottles, musical instruments, me and Lin, like a couple of hippies . . . it wasn’t sort of dirty, but it wasn’t clean.’
High Park wasn’t entirely cut off from civilisation, though it certainly had that feel. Linda in particular romanticised this notion, imagining that the McCartneys were living in another era, as if they were pioneers in this isolated place. She loved the fact that they were, as she fancifully saw it, ‘at the end of nowhere’.
As the months passed, Paul and Linda grew into their rural personas. At Christmas, he bought her twelve pheasants; she bought him a tractor, which he used to plough a vegetable patch where they grew parsnips, turnips, potatoes, green beans, runner beans and spinach.
Their acreage was home to around 150 to 200 sheep, which Paul learned to clip using hand-shears before the fleeces were sold to the Wool Marketing Board. Already leaning towards vegetarianism, they would baulk at the notion of killing their lambs, although they were forced to send some off to market if the numbers grew too high. They tried to separate the ewes from the rams, but sometimes one of the male sheep would enthusiastically spring over the fence. In time, they had six horses, including their retired racer Drake’s Drum, bought for Paul’s father Jim and a former winner at Aintree, alongside Honor (Paul’s), Cinnamon (Linda’s) and three ponies, Sugarfoot, Cookie and Coconut.
Revving up a generator, Paul put together an ad hoc four-track recording facility in High Park’s rickety lean-to, which he named Rude Studio. It was in here, gently encouraged by Linda, that his songwriting slowly began to return to him, as he effectively used music as therapy to alleviate his depression. ‘She eased me out of it,’ he remembers, ‘and just said, “Hey, y’know, you don’t want to get too crazy.”’
Paul would shy away from admitting that there was a strong autobiographical element to some of these new compositions, but his protestations rang hollow. The lyric of ‘Man We Was Lonely’ spoke of how his and Linda’s self-imposed exile was not as idyllic as it outwardly seemed, that their spirits had been low, but how, under the comfort blanket of domesticity, their positivity was returning.
‘Every Night’, a song he’d first begun messing around with during the Let It Be sessions, was more confessional still – its singer painting a grim picture of a routine involving getting wasted and struggling to drag himself out of bed. The chorus, as was increasingly becoming a McCartney trait, pledged his devotion to Linda. As a song, it was a deceptively breezy affair. While elsewhere Lennon was screaming his pain, it was typical of McCartney to mask his with melody. Only if you listened closely would you really be able to detect the songwriter’s anguish.
As Paul seemed to stabilise, the McCartneys settled into a daily routine, riding their horses across the land or taking sheepdog Martha for long walks. They drove into Campbeltown in their Land Rover, which they’d nicknamed Helen Wheels, the Beatle becoming a regular sight wandering around in his wellies and sheepskin-lined brown leather jacket. In the evening, he would light the fire while Linda cooked, before stepping into Rude to work on songs. At night, they would cuddle up, get stoned and watch TV. ‘We were not cut off from the world,’ said Linda. ‘We were never hermits.’
Aside from anything, to playfully distract Paul from his troubles, there were the children to look after: the newborn Mary, and Linda’s child from her first marriage, shy Heather, only six. For the kids, High Park was a cross between a playground and a junkyard. As soon as she began to walk Mary was free to toddle outside through its abandoned gypsy-encampment-like clutter of scrap wood, sheets of corrugated iron and teetering log piles (noting incredulously as an adult that she’d effectively been brought up in a ‘lumber yard’).
It was a messy scene but, for McCartney, one filled with increasingly frequent spells of happiness. Nevertheless, in a corner of his mind, knowing that there was a Beatles-shaped storm brewing back down in London, Paul was still filled with unease.
It didn’t help that everyone was arguing about whether or not he was dead.
The rumour had first circulated amongst the bloodshot-eyed student populace of Drake University in Iowa, around the same time as McCartney had first holed up in Scotland. The signs were all there if you cared to dig ‘deep’ enough, to stop just rolling joints on the covers of Beatles albums and decipher the hidden messages in the artwork and between the grooves. They listened to Lennon’s daft murmur of ‘cranberry sauce’ in the fade-out of ‘Strawberry Fields Forever’ and imagined it to be ‘I buried Paul’. They would spin The White Album backwards with an index finger and convince themselves that a voice could be heard saying, ‘Turn me on, dead man’.
In many ways, The Beatles had brought this upon themselves. In their touring absence and with their increasingly cryptic music, they had laid playful clues and red herrings – with the opening lines of ‘Rain’ played backwards at the end of the song; with the garbled, wonked-out voices locked in the play-out groove of side two of Sgt. Pepper; with Lennon’s head-game assertion in ‘Glass Onion’ that the walrus was Paul.
‘We’d done them for fun, just for something to do,’ says Paul, in admitting the Beatles’ surprise that their penchant for japery was taken so seriously. ‘Then everyone analysed them and we thought, Ah. We were completely oblivious to all those other “hidden” messages.’
That was until the clue-heads began to air their tangential theories. The sixteenth of September 1969 saw the first piece, in the Drake University student paper, under the tantalising headline ‘Is Paul McCartney Dead?’ A week later, the Northern Star, the campus inky of the University of Illinois, went one better: ‘Clues Hint At Possible Beatle Death’.
A student identifying himself only as Tom called Detroit DJ Russ Gibb to inform him of the rumours. Listening in, a college writer named Fred LaBour decided to turn prankster, taking it upon himself to ‘kill’ McCartney, adding arm upon leg to the growing myth. Two days later, the Michigan Daily printed his fabricated revelations under the more contentious banner: ‘McCartney Dead: New Evidence Brought To Light’. Then the rumour spread countrywide when Roby Yonge, on his networked show from WABC in New York, discussed the theories on air in the small hours, when the stoned were at their most receptive.
It all made sense to the herbally enhanced mind, of course, and somehow an elaborate back-story began to emerge. Instead of, as the real tale went, having suffered a chipped tooth and badly cut lip in a moped accident in Liverpool in December 1965 (Paul had been ‘looking at the moon’, hit a rock and gone flying over the handlebars), McCartney ha
d in fact stormed off from a Beatles session at Abbey Road on 9 November 1966 in a huff, following an argument with the other Beatles, and crashed his Aston Martin, decapitating himself. The panicked band had subsequently replaced him with a doppelgänger, the winner of a secret Paul McCartney lookalike competition, a Scotsman named William Campbell, who was then given plastic surgery to render him identical.
There were other clues, apparently. The palm of a hand held above McCartney’s head on the cover of Sgt. Pepper was a mystical sign of death (it wasn’t). Paul was barefoot in the ‘funeral procession’ zebra-crossing cover shot of Abbey Road to indicate that he was a corpse (the duller truth being that it had been a hot August day, he was wearing sandals and he’d slipped them off). The licence plate of the white Volkswagen Beetle in the background of the image that ended 28IF was symbolically stating the age McCartney would have been had he survived the rumoured accident (in fact, photographer Iain Macmillan had attempted to have the car towed out of shot). The word ‘walrus’ was Greek for corpse (it isn’t). The ‘one and one and one is three’ that Lennon sang about in ‘Come Together’ was referring to the surviving Beatles (rather than being just a throwaway line in a surreal, pinballing lyric). Paul is facing away from the camera on the back cover of Sgt. Pepper because it is in fact William Campbell, hiding his surgical scars (although that didn’t explain why he is shown facing forwards on the front cover). And on and on and on it fantastically went.
By November, the story had made it to the pages of Rolling Stone, albeit in a piece with an eyebrow-raised, slightly mocking tone. Nevertheless, Beatles publicist Derek Taylor soon found himself having to fend off calls from reporters the world over. And still the rumour persisted, not least when Dr Henry Truby of Miami University studied three pre- and post-1966 recordings of McCartney singing and rather vaguely stated he couldn’t conclude that they were in fact the work of the same person.
But even for its chief propagator, the whole affair was getting out of hand. Fred LaBour was invited to appear on TV in California in a mock trial where he presented evidence to back up his claims. Before the recording, however, he confessed to the show’s host, lawyer F. Lee Bailey, that he had made the whole thing up. It was too late, pointed out Bailey. They would have to go with it, to air the legend.
Finally, Paul issued a statement through the Beatles’ press office. ‘I’m alive and well,’ he said. ‘But if I were dead I would be the last to know.’
Of course, maddeningly, it was such a ridiculous myth that it was almost impossible to disprove. It hinged on McCartney somehow managing to prove that he was who he said he was. But even if he underwent and passed a fingerprint test, the naysayers could crow that it was all down to forgery and conspiracy.
Given McCartney’s distinctive voice, features and physical demeanour, the Paul Is Dead fiction was of course absurd. In London, even his long-time barber was forced to respond to a New York radio reporter’s probing by saying that the last time he’d cut Paul’s hair, a flaw in his parting had still been there.
In the end, it came down to one simple, rumour-puncturing poser – if this imposter William Campbell had managed not only to win the McCartney lookalike competition, had gone under the plastic surgeon’s knife, had learned to sing like Paul and written songs of the calibre of ‘She’s Leaving Home’ and ‘Hey Jude’, why would he or any of the other Beatles leave a trail of clues to blow his cover?
More tickled than annoyed, and mindful of Mark Twain’s famous quote, after the publication of an erroneous obituary, about the rumours of his death being greatly exaggerated, McCartney was aware that there might be a positive, publicity-friendly angle to all of this. It couldn’t do the just-released Abbey Road any harm, and in the end the rumpus sent its sales rocketing skywards, making it the biggest-selling Beatles album in the US since Sgt. Pepper.
Nevertheless, dying, as McCartney now jokes, ‘wasn’t easy . . . it took a lot out of me.’
It also drew the unwanted attentions of the press directly to the door of High Park. The first journalist to make the long and difficult journey from London to Scotland and out to the Argyll peninsula was dogged Daily Express pop scribe Judith Simons, who in the past had interviewed The Beatles on many occasions.
The trek was clearly more arduous and involved than the writer had expected, since she showed up at night, in the dark, timorously knocking on the door of the farmhouse. Paul, considering Simons ‘a little sweetheart’, wasn’t particularly irritated by her intrusion, instead being quietly impressed by her tenacity and bravery.
‘She was totally scared shitless of being in the middle of this place,’ he says. ‘I mean, there were no lights on the road.’ Still, he remained vague and nonplussed when Simons started firing what he viewed as wholly trivial questions at him. ‘She was just asking me about some story. I’m saying, “What can I tell you?”’
In truth, Paul had stopped doing interviews because he still felt far too exposed and emotionally raw. There was one question he dreaded above all others: ‘Are you happy?’ In his precariously balanced state, it would almost make him burst into tears.
Nevertheless, as time went on, his patience was beginning to fray, resulting in eruptions of other emotions entirely. When a pair from the London offices of the US magazine Life – writer Dorothy Bacon and photographer Terence Spencer – flew to Scotland, schlepping all the way to High Park to get a reaction about the death rumours, McCartney’s anger boiled over.
It was a Sunday morning in late October and Paul, unsurprisingly, was still in bed. The Life duo had cannily assumed that it was a good time to catch the McCartneys at home and that their journey was less likely to be hindered by interfering local farmers. Intrepidly, they hoofed up to High Park from the main road, trudging across the fields for close to an hour.
Arriving at the door of the farmhouse, Bacon knocked. Paul, having got up as soon as he realised what was going on outside, jerked the door open, a bucket of slop from the McCartneys’ rudimentary kitchen in one hand. He was unshaven, his hair an early Beatle-ish mop-top grown out and gone pineappleishly unkempt. His face was beetroot with fury. Spencer raised his camera to take a shot.
‘I threw the bucket at him,’ Paul says. ‘It was nearly the cover of Life.’
The bucket flew past the photographer’s head, but Spencer had got the shot and Paul knew it. Enraged, he stepped forward and punched the snapper on the shoulder. Having covered six wars and experienced nothing in the way of physical violence until faced with a raging Beatle, the startled Spencer turned to Bacon, saying, ‘I think we’ve run out of our hospitality.’ The pair turned tail and quickly marched away.
Alone, calming down, Paul reflected on what had just happened. He’d utterly lost his cool, and now the photographer definitely had the shot of him looking furious and demented. Ever the PR man, Paul realised he had to try to mend the situation if the shot wasn’t to appear on the cover of Life and in the world’s papers thereafter, making him look like a lunatic.
Bacon and Spencer, meanwhile, were shaken but happy enough: they had pictorial proof that McCartney was still alive.
As they made their way back down the farm track, the McCartneys’ Land Rover, with Paul, Linda and the kids inside, pulled up behind them. Spencer was initially afraid, saying to Bacon, ‘For God’s sake, be careful, because that man is mad.’
But it was an altogether more amiable and contrite Paul who emerged from the Land Rover, apologising, proffering a handshake and offering, in return for the roll of film containing the offending snap, to give a short interview and, albeit still reluctantly, to have his photograph taken with the family.
‘We agreed to pose on the Land Rover,’ he remembers. ‘But I was definitely not in posing mode.’
A slightly haunted-looking image of the McCartneys made the cover of Life dated 7 November 1969, along with the accompanying splash ‘The Case Of The “Missing” Beatle: Paul Is Still With Us’. In the shot, one of two that would illustrate the piece, Paul ap
pears bed-headed and morning rough, his left arm curled protectively around a wind-blown Linda, his right cradling baby Mary, as in front of him, Heather, perhaps sensing her parents’ hostility towards these unannounced visitors, wields a walking-stick like a club. In the second, the family are arranged on the front bumper of the Land Rover, Paul trying to appear upbeat, raising his hand in a friendly, open gesture as Linda nuzzles his neck.
In the interview, he addressed the Paul Is Dead rumours. ‘It is all bloody stupid,’ he said. ‘Perhaps the rumour started because I haven’t been much in the press lately. I don’t have anything to say these days. I am happy to be with my family and I will work when I work. I was switched on for ten years and I never switched off. Now I am switching off whenever I can. I would rather be a little less famous these days.
‘The people who are making up these rumours should look to themselves a little more,’ he went on. ‘They should worry about themselves instead of worrying whether I am dead or not.
‘I would rather do what I began doing, which is making music. But the Beatle thing is over. It has been exploded, partly by what we have done, and partly by other people.
‘What I have to say is all in the music,’ he concluded. ‘If I want to say anything, I write a song. Can you spread it around that I am just an ordinary person and want to live in peace? We have to go now. We have two children at home.’
Upon publication, the piece appeared to lay to rest the ghosts of the Paul Is Dead furore, although in some heads the doubts and conspiracies rumble on to this day.
One crucial point was completely missed, however: the fact that Paul had let slip that ‘the Beatle thing is over’. Life had in fact got the world exclusive that the former Fabs had secretly imploded. But, amid all the fuss, no one even noticed.
In private, The Beatles had fallen out and fallen apart, prompting McCartney’s state of panic and depression. As if to spotlight the emotional distance and physical remove of the four former friends, each was filmed separately with their respective partners for the promotional clip for ‘Something’, Apple MD Neil Aspinall having travelled to High Park to shoot the jokey, smoochy segments featuring Paul and Linda.
