Man on the Run

by Tom Doyle

  But however much Paul felt as if he was outside himself, looking in, this was really happening.

  When it was all over and done with, no one could ever work out why such a stupid thing had been allowed to occur. There were those who said it revealed the superstar bubble that McCartney floated around in. Paul, on some level, felt he was above the law, a hangover from the Beatles’ sense of diplomatic immunity. ‘I think of my kind of drug involvement as harmless,’ he later said, ‘so I walked straight into Japan after a fourteen-hour flight, thinking, It’s not that bad. Most people taking that kind of thing into the country would give it to the roadies. That just shows that I wasn’t really thinking about it. I was taking my opinion of it instead of the legal opinion.’

  Maybe his rebellious side told him he could get away with it. Even if he was caught, he was likely thinking, his power could effectively snuff any legal difficulties, just as it had done in the past. ‘I’m still not quite sure how it all happened, to tell you the truth,’ he offers now.

  This time around, though, his fame and wealth couldn’t protect him. In order to secure the visa, McCartney had signed an affidavit declaring that he no longer smoked marijuana. The Minister of Justice had rubber-stamped the application and approved the visit. Now the singer seemed to be making a fool of Japanese law. In losing face, the authorities decided that an example had to be made of McCartney. He was arrested and handcuffed, and filmed leaving the airport amid a scrum of police and reporters. Outside the fans were screaming, like it was Beatlemania all over again. ‘But instead of going to a gig,’ says Paul, ‘I was going to a cell.’

  McCartney was taken to Kojimachi police station in central Tokyo and questioned for an hour. ‘I made a confession,’ he says, ‘and apologised for breaking Japanese law.’ The promoter, Seijiro Udo, issued a statement saying a decision about the shows would be made imminently. Some phone calls having been made, the announcement followed, saying the tour was off. One hundred thousand tickets had been sold, making for a possible loss of 100 million yen, or nearly £200,000.

  Denny Laine and Steve Holley, who had flown in first class from London on TWA with the crew and management an hour earlier, were parked on a bus outside the airport, wondering what was causing the delay. Alan Crowder came to tell them there had been a ‘slight problem’ with the McCartneys’ flight. After a period of waiting, the band were driven to the Okura Hotel. Exhausted after the eighteen-hour trip, the drummer went to bed and was woken by a call from Linda, telling him that Paul had been arrested. ‘I actually thought she was just playing a trick on us,’ he says. Emerging from the lift downstairs in the lobby, Holley was met with the sight of a mob of journalists. He spotted the crew in the bar, sitting with their heads down, looking dejected. ‘I went, Oh no.’

  Meanwhile, Howie Casey and the rest of the brass section were sitting in a room at the Okura, drinking wine and smoking cigars, in celebration of the fact that they’d had their wages raised to $1,000 a gig for the Japanese tour. ‘So we’re mid-cigar and half a bottle of wine gone,’ says the saxophonist, ‘and Alan comes in and says, “Have you heard the news? Paul’s been arrested.” We’re going, “Fuck off, Alan, don’t take the piss.” And of course, it was true.’ Casey and the others were baffled at the risk McCartney had taken, everyone having been quietly advised prior to the trip that marijuana could be freely bought through contacts at the US Army bases in the country. ‘They could have got it no problem,’ he points out.

  Holley says the band were quickly made to feel as if they were persona non grata in the country. To fox the press, the tour party faked their exit from the hotel, making a big show of leaving via the front door before nipping around the back to a waiting van that would take them to the train station and on to Kyoto, where they could sit out the fuss.

  Transferred after questioning to the Metropolitan Jail, and stripped of his personal effects, including his wedding ring, Paul was now prisoner number 22. He was appointed a public defender, Tasuku Matsuo, who soberly informed him that two Japanese men had recently been sentenced to three years after being caught with only half the amount of marijuana found in McCartney’s suitcase. The truth was that he could be facing anything up to seven years in prison.

  Linda was at the Okura, with the kids, waiting for news. ‘It’s a strain,’ she told reporters. ‘I wouldn’t mind if we knew what was happening and knew he was getting out.’ Sick with worry, sinister fantasies began to creep into her mind about what was now happening to her husband. ‘I was thinking they might be torturing him.’

  She was eventually allowed into the prison to see Paul, on the other side of a metal grille, having been told that she couldn’t bring the kids. Her husband didn’t tell her that he could be looking at a seven-year sentence. ‘If I’d known what Paul was really facing,’ she said, ‘I’d have fallen apart.’ At the same time, her father Lee Eastman in New York, apparently furious, said his son-in-law was in ‘a hell of a mess’ and dispatched John Eastman to Japan.

  Stuck in his cell, McCartney was quietly terrified: ‘It was scary for the first couple of days, I must say. I felt worse for what I’d landed the family in. If I’d just been some single guy, I’d have sort of thought, You’re a total nutter and you deserve to get nicked. But it was more the impact it would have on them that was really doing my head in. And also, unless you’re an old lag, you don’t know the scene. So it takes you a few days to sort of see what’s going on.’

  The first night, he couldn’t sleep, and a blinding headache set in. His biggest fear was being raped. ‘So,’ he says, ‘I slept with my back to the wall.’

  Each morning, the lights in his eight-by-four-foot cell would come on at dawn. McCartney, as he had been instructed to, would then roll up his tatami mat, designed for the Japanese stature and so too short for him. He then had to sit cross-legged and wait for cell inspection. Throughout this process, he still felt oddly detached. ‘I kept thinking I was watching a war film. They shouted out “22” in Japanese and I had to shout back, “Hai”.’ Pushed through the door was a breakfast of three bread rolls with miso soup, which in the future he would never be able to face again. Supper was a bowl of rice. The lights went out at eight.

  On the second day, with Matsuo at his side, Paul was interrogated in English for six hours by the police at Kojimachi. He insisted that the marijuana had been for his personal use and he continued to take a pro-dope stance, arguing that it was less toxic than alcohol. ‘I tried to tell them ciggies were worse,’ he says. ‘They wouldn’t listen, of course, because many of the police there chain-smoke.’ The line of questioning often seemed bizarre to him. ‘They wanted to know everything. I had to go through my whole life story – school, father’s name, income, even my medal from the Queen.’

  As he attempted to leave the station, around 200 fans chanting ‘Free Paul’ blocked the exit. The police pulled McCartney back into the building. Officials were still refusing to say whether he would be deported or face trial. In the press, one well-known Japanese music journalist, Ichiro Fukuda, was damning of the singer, saying, ‘For a man like McCartney to violate the law means he has no respect for Japan.’ There was even a media ban imposed that prohibited the playing of any of his records. But encouragingly, perhaps, the Minister of Justice made a statement saying Paul ‘had not legally landed when he was seized’.

  On the third day, prosecutors asked the Tokyo District Court to allow them a further ten days to question McCartney. It was clear that they were determined to continue to take a tough line, particularly in light of the fact that the news had made front pages the world over, effectively becoming an international incident. When Paul put in a request to be allowed a guitar in his cell, it was flatly denied.

  He was visited by the British consul, Donald Warren-Knott. They talked for fifteen minutes, the UK official apparently cheerful, but ultimately powerless. An official statement was put out by the press office at the detention centre: ‘He slept well in jail, but he is concerned about his wife L
inda and four children.’

  ‘Linda wasn’t going to go back to England,’ Paul points out. ‘I was looking at the kids being brought up in Japan.’

  On the other side of the world, several days after McCartney had been jailed, a clearly distressed 29-year-old fan named Kenneth Lambert arrived at Miami International Airport, walked up to one of the desks and hysterically demanded a ticket to Japan in order to, as he put it, ‘free Paul’. Being unable to produce either any money or ID, he began arguing wildly with the airline clerk, before pulling a genuine-looking toy gun from his pocket. A policeman shot him dead on the spot.

  Across the country, Laurence Juber landed in Los Angeles and exited the airport to find bootleggers hawking unofficial T-shirts commemorating Wings’ tour of Japan, with the word ‘cancelled’ slashed across them. ‘It was a big deal,’ he points out. The band had lingered on in the Far East until 19 January, three days after Paul’s arrest, only leaving, slightly dazed, when it became clear that there was no chance of the tour being rescheduled.

  As part of their deal, all of the members of Wings had been given a round-the-world first-class air ticket allowing them unlimited stops en route back to London. Denny Laine flew to the MIDEM music industry conference in Cannes to cut a deal for a solo album. This annoyed McCartney, riled by the thought that his guitarist was sunning himself in the French Riviera, while he was locked in his cell, facing a highly uncertain future. A slightly aimless Steve Holley travelled to Australia to visit family. ‘I thought, Well I’ll go there and I’ll hang out and I’ll see what happens,’ he says. ‘I just didn’t really know what to do. It wasn’t clear.’

  Back inside the Metropolitan Jail, as letters and telegrams flooded in, Paul felt his spirits begin to lift. ‘Well, I’d seen Bridge on the River Kwai,’ he says. ‘I knew what you had to do when you were a prisoner of war. You had to laugh a lot and keep cheery, ’cause that’s all you had. So I did a lot of that.’ One of his jailers, Yasuji Ariga, was quoted as saying, ‘He is very polite and has made a good impression on the guards.’

  On 22 January, Linda visited her husband for the second time, taking him some sci-fi novels, a cheese sandwich and some fruit, and staying for half an hour. ‘He looks incredibly well,’ she said, upon leaving. ‘He was managing to smile and crack jokes. In fact, he was laughing so much he even got me laughing, and, believe me, I haven’t been able to do much laughing during the last week.’

  As the days passed, and he realised that the jail wasn’t quite as dangerous as he’d imagined it might be, McCartney began banging on the walls and communicating with other prisoners, who would shout back vaguely British references: ‘Maggie Thatcher!’, ‘Bell’s whisky!’ He responded by making ‘the worst jokes in the world . . . but they helped to relieve the tension’. He began a dialogue with the prisoner next door, who could speak a bit of English and who, similarly, was inside for smuggling dope. ‘I became quite matey with the chap,’ he says. ‘We sang and laughed together as if we had been mates for ages.’

  He was allowed two cigarettes a day, smoked outside during the daily exercise period. Given the option of a private bath, he decided to show solidarity by agreeing to wash in the communal bath with his fellow inmates. ‘I wasn’t shy,’ he says. ‘You’re not as proud in jail. It knocks it all out of you.’ As grinning guards looked on, he sang the prison work song ‘Take This Hammer’ and the perky 1920s hit ‘When The Red, Red Robin (Comes Bob, Bob, Bobbin’ Along)’. ‘Their favourite, though, was “Yesterday”,’ he points out.

  Naked among a group of convicts, here he found himself finally performing in Japan, if not in a way he might ever have imagined.

  He initiated a game that he called See Who Can Touch The Ceiling, knowing that, at five feet ten inches, ‘with my great western height’, it was no contest. One of the larger, more imposing prisoners, tattooed with the image of a samurai warrior all over his back and talking through another who could interpret, asked McCartney why he was in the prison. When he replied, ‘Marijuana’, the heavy looked at him with a frown and indicated through the other that he was sure to get seven years. ‘He was just trying to frighten me,’ Paul reckons. ‘I said, “No, no, no . . . ten.” And they were all over on the floor in a heap, laughing at that.’

  Elsewhere, the other three former Beatles reacted to Paul’s imprisonment in different ways. George and his new wife Olivia sent a telegram saying: ‘Thinking of you all with love. Keep your spirits high. Nice to have you back home again soon.’ Cornered by reporters in the south of France, Ringo sounded simultaneously judgemental and sympathetic, telling them, ‘It’s the risk you take when you’re involved with drugs. He’s just been unlucky.’

  John, meanwhile, told his photographer friend Bob Gruen that Paul couldn’t have predicted, as an ex-Beatle, that he would have had his bag properly searched. Like everyone else, though, Lennon was wondering, ‘Why would he carry pot when he finally was allowed in?’ His personal assistant Fred Seaman later claimed that John sent him to fetch all the newspapers so that he could pore over all the reports, and would sit watching TV for hours trying to catch every bulletin detailing McCartney’s progress.

  ‘You know, it serves Paul right,’ he told Seaman. ‘Paul wanted to show the world that he’s still a bit of bad boy.’ At the same time, without knowing it, he agreed with McCartney’s assessment that on some level he’d knowingly invited trouble. ‘I think subconsciously,’ said Lennon, ‘he wanted to get busted.’

  By 24 January the details in the Japanese press were being exaggerated, with one claiming that the marijuana McCartney had been caught with was worth £700,000, or just under £100,000 an ounce. In truth, Customs representatives had estimated that the 219 grammes they had confiscated from the singer had a street value of 600,000 yen, or just over £1,000. At the hotel, Linda was asked by a journalist how long she planned to stay in the country. She firmly told them, ‘I’m prepared to stay in Japan for as long as it takes.’

  It didn’t take long. The next day, the charges were suddenly dropped – the result of the pressure put on the authorities by Eastman and Matsuo, added to the fact that Paul was contrite and obviously not a drug smuggler. Moreover, the whole messy affair was becoming an embarrassment to the Japanese, who clearly couldn’t decide how to deal with the problem and wanted it swiftly resolved. Technically, they decided that, because McCartney’s visa was taken away from him the minute he was arrested, he was now an illegal alien who should be deported. The statement from the Japanese police read: ‘Charges were not brought against Mr McCartney because he had brought in the marijuana solely for his own use and already he has been punished enough’. After ten days in a cell, Paul was released. ‘We were so lucky,’ said Matsuo.

  At the airport, booked on the first available flight out of the country, which happened to be the 12.30 p.m. Japan Airlines to Amsterdam, a sheepish if jocular Paul grabbed a guitar and serenaded the press with a brief snatch of ‘Yesterday’, the song carrying a very different resonance in the circumstances. The day before, Paul’s troubles had been all too evident. Now, his mood was one of acute relief.

  On the plane, Paul was tearfully reunited with Linda and the kids. Booked on the same flight, however, was a pack of opportunistic journalists, and in the air the couple were continually hassled for quotes. ‘I’ll never come back to Japan again,’ Linda promised. ‘It’s my first trip and my last.’

  Paul was depressed about the fact that when his belongings were returned to him, his wedding ring was missing. ‘That made me very, very low,’ he admitted. In its place he now wore a curled paper-clip, saying, ‘It’s the sort of gesture that Linda and I will look back on rather romantically.’

  Clearly emotional, he said to the Daily Express, ‘This is the longest I’ve ever been away from my family in ten years. I don’t want a separation like it again.’ He told another reporter, ‘I’ve been a fool. What I did was incredibly dumb. I was really scared, thinking I might be imprisoned for so long and now I have made my min
d up never to touch the stuff again. From now on, all I’m going to smoke is straightforward fags and no more pot.’

  It was a long, exhausting flight, with a stop to refuel in Anchorage, Alaska. After finally touching down in the Netherlands, the McCartneys were flown by private jet to Lydd Airport in Kent. From there they were driven home, disappearing up the driveway of their Sussex estate.

  Even in jail, Paul had still been thinking about work. ‘In the clink I had time to think,’ he said. Further marking the distance he felt from Wings, he resolved to finish the tapes he’d recorded alone the previous summer and release them as the solo LP McCartney II.

  At the same time, in an act of catharsis, he wrote a private memoir he called Japanese Jailbird, penned in longhand over ten days and stretching to 20,000 words. ‘I wrote it all down,’ he said. ‘I sort of thought, God, this is like writing an essay for school. I can’t do it. I’m frightened of the piece of paper. But I knew I had to write it down to remember the incident. I forced myself to write it.’ Ultimately he decided against publishing it, reasoning that it would only drag this unfortunate episode in his life back into the public mind. Instead he bought a printer and produced one paperback-sized copy that he could fit into his pocket.

  The next time Laurence Juber saw McCartney, he says, the singer was ‘a little chagrined . . . but also, kind of, “Well, that was an interesting experience.”’ The whole sorry matter had also proved costly. In the final tally, McCartney lost nearly half a million pounds: £200,000 to refund the promoter, who had threatened to sue, with an additional £100,000 in legal bills, plus the living costs of the stranded family, band and crew, which totalled around £10,000 a day.

  In the 26 January edition of The Sun, a headline quote from McCartney declared ‘I’ll Never Smoke Pot Again’. From here on in, he would certainly change his tune in terms of his public advocacy of marijuana use.