Helen Brown reviews Philip Norman's doorstop biography of the Beatles' 'great manipulator'When Philip Norman published his first book on the Beatles in 1981, his line was that John Lennon had been "three quarters" of the band, dismissing Paul McCartney as the "great manipulator". McCartney consoled himself by swapping the vowels in Shout!, the title of Norman's book, for something earthier.At the time, Norman said he wasn't really anti-Paul. He had just been trying "to show the real human being behind the charming, smiley facade". Now, 35 years later, he discloses that his youthful obsession with McCartney clouded his judgment in Shout!. "All those years I'd spent wishing to be him had left me feeling ... that I needed to get my own back."The thaw began in 2003. While working on his vast biography of Lennon, Norman received a call: "Ullo ... It's Paul here. Yeah, I bet you never thought you'd hear from me, did you?"Although McCartney refused to give him an interview - "It'd look as if I was rewarding you for writing bad stuff about me" - he did send Norman material in writing, and eventually gave him "tacit approval" to write this vast book about him, too.story_article_left1Norman has concentrated on McCartney's later life, devoting more than 400 pages to the post-Beatles years. Unfortunately, most of those pages contain as much meat as a Linda McCartney sausage.There's a lot of contract haggling, but after the fiery fights of the Fab Four, the squabbling within Wings is a tepid tale.Lennon's jibes about his work being "Muzak to my ears" had cut McCartney to the quick, but he never gave such weight to the opinions of his Wingsmen, paying them shockingly low wages. In the same period, McCartney sent a private jet for his dog, installed underfloor heating for his horses and spent $60,000 repairing the upholstery in his Rolls-Royce after he left the window open overnight and the chickens got in.McCartney's three marriages have already been picked clean by the press and Norman gives little original insight. There's nothing new here on McCartney's disastrous union with Heather Mills or his far happier marriage to Nancy Shevell.Norman reveals that Linda McCartney had to borrow cash for ingredients from the co-author of her cookbooks because Paul was so stingy. Some say Norman has "rehabilitated" Linda, but most of us already knew she was a good egg.Surprisingly, Norman's real trumps come in the well-worn story of McCartney's early life. His doe-eyed charm had sucked in the girls from the start: knee-tremblers against walls with Quarrymen groupies led to wilder encounters in Hamburg.In interviews, McCartney's early girlfriends tell Norman how he asked them to dress up - like Brigitte Bardot - and describe his way with their mums. Apparently, he sweet-talked the mother of one of his girlfriends into combing his leg hair, assuring her that it helped him to relax after gigs.McCartney appears to have been unfaithful to every girlfriend before Linda.The most revealing anecdotes come from Maggie McGivern, nanny to Marianne Faithfull's son, who started seeing McCartney when he was still living with Jane Asher.The night before he married Linda, he showed up at McGivern's Chelsea apartment "scruffy, unshaven and in a terrible state - he couldn't even talk" and held her in silence for an hour before vanishing from her life.It's an enigmatic sliver of a story that lingers, like one of McCartney's melodies, long after you've finished this rather bloated book. 'Paul McCartney' by Philip Norman, Orion (R375)..