Contractor's first job: renovating Paul McCartney's Tucson ranch

Paul and Linda McCartney bought the long-vacant two-story ranch house and 151 acres of arid solitude on East Redington Road in 1979. The frenetic world that demanded so much of them was far, far away.

Few knew of their home’s existence. Shrouded in desert glory, their four children grew up here, visiting in the spring and fall months until 56-year-old Linda Louise McCartney lost her battle with breast cancer here under a velvet, starry night in the spring of 1998.

Paul McCartney’s connection with Tucson was through his wife, the former Linda Eastman. She attended the University of Arizona, where she began her prolific photography career. Linda was enamored with the desert beauty and tranquility.

Former Tucsonan Tom Tompkins, who now lives in Colorado, knows more about the Redington Road ranch house than perhaps the McCartneys. Tompkins was the remodeling contractor McCartney hired to restore the old house. Interestingly, the Pima County records on the property owners are still officially sealed to the public.

This is Tom Tompkins’ story.

It was 1982 when Paul’s Tucson attorney S. Leonard Scheff drove me out to the edge of the Tucson valley. This would be my first look at renovating the old adobe and pole-frame ranch house that had belonged to the Ellinwoods, a pioneering Tucson newspaper family. (The Ellinwoods owned the Arizona Daily Star for 40 years.)

Up to the Y where Redington Road veered from Tanque Verde, the attorney pounded me on the need for security. I would have to keep every worker in the dark while I staged the remodeling project.

When attorney Scheff, who is now retired, turned onto Redington Road, he suddenly gushed, “I can’t keep a secret like this! The job is for Paul McCartney!” (Scheff had been the attorney for Linda McCartney’s Tucson divorce in June 1965.)

The secret was safe with me.

Paul visited when I started remodeling the ranch house. I remember how he loved the weathered door on the west side of the house. The sun, wind, and rain had eroded furrows a quarter-inch deep in the wood.

The same weekend Paul visited, the well-meaning caretaker belt sanded the door. Paul was a little upset, while everyone around him was hugely upset for Paul. The style we were striving for was Early Cowboy. What one architect had envisioned as a $2 million-dollar Swiss chalet came in at $125,000, according to my good faith estimate, and we kept the job under the budget.

We made the back porch rail out of galvanized pipes embedded in concrete and all-put-together with elbows and tees. Bunkhouse treatment went best with the old ranch.

Paul made a point of meeting with me, not to discuss the job, but to talk about life. The attorney told me Paul’s father had been a working man and that Paul admired people who did things with their hands. Paul was as relaxed as I was nervous when he approached me in the front yard fenced with Oleander.

I asked Paul if he had trouble with people invading his privacy. He thought for a minute, and then he said, “Well, there is one man who lives up the road which shows up sometimes. But he needs love — like everyone.”

There was a problem with one person in the job’s chain of command who was supposed to get the building permit — and hadn’t. Paul was returning – with Linda and the family – in early March when the smell of the cactus flower was on the breeze. We still had trenches saw cut in the floors for new plumbing by mid-February, and most of the walls were torn open for new electrical, none of which could be covered without a building inspection.

This was my first job after getting my general contractor’s license. While Tucson was the wild west and people often did things without permits, I was loathe to try to get the new electrical service connected without a green tag. Everything would devolve from that failure, and I would be banned from the business. I needed sleep, but couldn’t.

It wasn’t Paul doing it to me, but it is what happens when you work for the rich and famous. Overwhelmed with indignation, I complained to the attorney. And he responded, “The hammer’s gonna fall.” We felt the yank all down the chain. But by the time we could call for an inspection, Paul was already on his way. The cacti were in full bloom.

Paul offered a suggestion: “Why don’t we rent a house in the neighborhood?”

Houses on Redington Road were a half-mile apart in 1983. I was invited to the rental house for a meeting that never materialized. Just as I walked through the front door, Paul’s four-year-old son took a trampoline bounce off the couch and landed on a glass coffee table – thankfully with safety glass an inch-and-a-half thick. The nanny looked too jetlagged to give the boy one more shocked look. The kids ran circles around her.

Linda McCartney imperiously wagged her pointer finger up and down in my direction. “Hey, Jerry, Jim, Carl, whatever your name is” – her playful self-parody expanded my consciousness — “they called and said the meeting’s off.” I was relieved. I liked Linda and wanted to bounce on the couch and laugh.

I had never met such a high-energy family. Paul and Linda were getting ready to take their Jeep to the supermarket. One supermarket sighting and all the security I enforced with my crew would be blown.

The link in the chain that was responsible for picking the light fixtures never did. To get the final inspection passed, we put cheap porcelain bulb holders with oversized light bulbs on every electrical box in the house – which was genuinely Early Cowboy.

A year later, I returned to the job site to match a kind of paisley stucco texture in the kitchen that the plaster crew had never mastered, and I realized nobody had bothered to change out the light fixtures. Paul was pleased with my job and was pleased with simplicity – for which I’ve always respected him.

I later heard from Paul’s attorney that somebody down the road went past the no-trespassing signs at the locked gate right up to Paul’s front door and knocked.

Paul said, “I wish you would not just come to my door like this. Did you see the signs?”

“I just want to rap about sound systems,” the guy replied.

“No, I think you should want to go.”

“Not compare notes?”

“Well, look, I’m just very busy getting my family moved in. You don’t seem like a bad fellow, but you do understand, don’t you?”

At this point in the telling, I felt the stranger must have exhausted Paul’s patience.

Then Paul brightened and said,” You know, they wired speakers in every room, and now — I have my console here — I need to hook it all up. Can you help?”

“Oh, man, I’d love to.”

“Come on inside,” Paul graciously replied.