A State Department dinner in 2010, a closed door meeting in Cleveland, and a Hamptons fundraiser where seats started at $10,000.
The first time Hillary Clinton and Paul McCartney were in the same room, she was Secretary of State and there was no campaign to speak of. It was December 2010, and she was hosting a dinner in his honor.
They met on three occasions across the next six years. Two of those came during her run for president. The last one put McCartney on a stage in Jimmy Buffett’s backyard, singing for donors who had paid at least $10,000 to get in.
He never once used the word endorsement. Neither did her campaign.
| Date | What happened | Where |
|---|---|---|
| December 4, 2010 | Clinton hosts a dinner for the Kennedy Center Honorees | U.S. State Department, Washington |
| August 17, 2016 | Private meeting before a McCartney concert | Quicken Loans Arena, Cleveland |
| August 30, 2016 | McCartney performs at a Clinton fundraiser | North Haven, New York |
Table of Contents
A dinner at the State Department, six days after WikiLeaks
On the evening of Saturday, December 4, 2010, Clinton hosted the traditional State Department dinner for that year’s Kennedy Center Honorees. McCartney was one of five, alongside Merle Haggard, Jerry Herman, Bill T. Jones and Oprah Winfrey. Julia Roberts, Steven Tyler, Angela Lansbury and Sidney Poitier were among the guests.
The timing was awkward for the host. WikiLeaks had begun publishing roughly a quarter million State Department cables six days earlier. Clinton told the room she was writing a cable about the party itself, and that they would probably find it online soon enough.
She also said the Beatles had put her through what she described as several waves of teen girl hysteria when she was young.
McCartney came with Nancy Shevell, then his girlfriend. They married the following October. His son James was there too.
One detail worth separating out. McCartney had already been to Washington once that year, in June, to collect the Library of Congress Gershwin Prize and play the White House East Room. That event belonged to the Obamas. So did the Kennedy Center gala the night after Clinton’s dinner. The dinner was hers.
Cleveland, and a photo captioned “She’s With Me”
Nearly six years later, on Wednesday, August 17, 2016, Clinton was working Cleveland. She had a rally scheduled at a local high school and a fundraiser after it. Somewhere in between, her motorcade pulled up at Quicken Loans Arena, where McCartney was due to play the first of two nights on his One on One tour.
A Clinton aide told CNN the two spoke privately for about half an hour. Shevell, by then his wife, sat in. They talked about the election, the Rio Olympics and their families.
No cameras were in the room. Afterward, McCartney posted a picture of the two of them on Twitter with three words underneath it: “She’s With Me.”
Her campaign slogan was “I’m With Her.” The joke wrote itself, and plenty of people read it as a declaration. The Washington Post noted around the same time that Clinton has said she found solace in Beatles records as a college student, which may be the simplest explanation for why she carved half an hour out of a campaign day to sit with him.
The Hamptons fundraiser, and what a ticket actually cost
Thirteen days later, on Tuesday, August 30, McCartney turned up again, this time to work. Buffett hosted at his home in North Haven, next door to Sag Harbor. It was the ninth and final fundraiser in a three day swing through the Hamptons, with proceeds going to the Hillary Victory Fund.
Roughly 200 guests attended. Several music outlets reported tickets at $25,000, but that figure does not hold up. The Washington Post and the East Hampton Star, which previewed the event locally, both put the entry price at $10,000, with a $100,000 tier that came with premium seating and a private reception with Clinton.
McCartney played about 75 minutes. He opened with “Jet,” the Wings song, and worked through “Can’t Buy Me Love” and “Lady Madonna.” Bon Jovi and Buffett joined him to close on “Hey Jude.” Buffett had already done an hour of his own, “Margaritaville” and “Cheeseburger in Paradise” among them.
At one point McCartney told the crowd this was the first time he had ever paid to hear himself sing.
He danced with Clinton during one of Buffett’s numbers. Bill Clinton was there. The Post reported that night that the event looked likely to clear $2 million. CNN’s Dan Merica later put the final figure at $3.7 million.
So was it an endorsement or not
McCartney could not have voted for her. He is a British citizen.
He was not voting at home either. In its 2018 profile of him, The Ringer reported that McCartney had stayed publicly undecided on the Brexit referendum that same year and, when it came, did not cast a ballot. The same piece described Clinton’s campaign as cagey about whether the photo and the fundraiser added up to an official endorsement.
That is the whole of it. A man who declined to say which way he leaned on the biggest vote of his own country’s recent history flew to Cleveland, sat with the Democratic nominee for half an hour, then played her fundraiser two weeks later and danced with her.
Clinton lost the election seventy days after that night in North Haven. There is no public record of the two of them meeting since. Ten years on, three words under a photograph remain the closest either one came to saying it out loud.
