Danny Fields

LINDA MCCARTNEY "THE BIOGRAPHY"

CONTENTS:
Acknowledgements
Preface
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Epilogue

Danny Fields has been a constant presence on the

pop-culture scene since 1966, the year he met the future Linda
McCartney. Fields has worked in both the music and magazine industry
and has long been on the nominating committee of the Rock and Roll
Hall of Fame. His close relationship with Linda McCartney continued
until her death in April 1998.

Acknowledgements
Thank you to ...
Everyone whose name is in this book, my very greatest
thanks, of course; it would be redundant to name you all.
To Mara Hennessey, my partner in this project, without
whose work it could never have been done. I will not name all her
contributions, in all the realms of the printed and spoken word,
because you'll wonder where the author has been all this time, as
well you might have done already.
To these wonderful people who were so smart and helpful:
Brian Belovitch, Christine Berardo, Bonnie Bordins, Susan Lee Cohen,
Wallace Collins, Esq., Gail Colson, Raul Correa, Mark Dillon, Mark
Duran, Josh Feigenbaum, Holly George-Warren, Eric Greenberg, Laura
Gross, Bill Hennessey, Matt Hurwitz, Sydney Kaufman, Fran Lebowitz,
Virginia Lohle, Donald Lyons, Liz McKenna, Dennis McNally, Joe
McNeely, Legs McNeil, Belinda Marcell, Maria from Melody Maker,
Kevin Mazur, Caroline North, Steve Paul, Diana Rico, Jerry Rothberg,
Alan Samson, Philip Shelly, Sarah Spurgin-Witte, Ames Sweet, Mim
Udovitch, Liz Van Lear, Karla Waples, Judy Weil, Deane Zimmerman,
Howard Zimmerman.
To Paul McCartney, without whose 'green light' no one
would have touched this thing. And I do hope Linda is smiling, with
what ironic sense one will never know. To Heather, Mary and James,
and to the people at MPL and Eastman & Eastman. Just for being there
all these years.

Preface
I wish I didn't have to write this book. I wish Linda
was still here, working on her myriad projects, inspiring people and
making .them feel so much better for her presence, saving the lives
of animals, being the wonderful friend that she was and - this most
of all, because it mattered most to her - being the great wife and
best friend of one of the most talented men of our century, and
mother to their four children.
The public went through a series of mood swings with
Linda - she was hated and loved, admired and reviled, able to get
her messages across and wildly misunderstood. If you knew her, you
adored her; of that there was no question (well, there were some
battle royals with a few old friends when she appeared to have
abandoned them on the occasion of her marriage to Beatle Paul
McCartney in 1969; we'll go into that later). But it is safe to say
that when she died in the spring of 1998, there was not a negative
opinion to be heard. She had managed to win everyone round and,
unless you were a meat-packer or a furrier, she wasn't even vaguely
controversial at the time of her passing. In fact, she was beloved.
Her friends always thought she deserved to be beloved, and finally
the rest of the world agreed. Was it too late, or is it never too
late? I think it never is, and convincing you of that is my task
here.
In the time allotted, I could not produce an ultimate
'biography', down to the last detail and event of her life, plus
long exegeses on her work. There is still room for that to be done.
Nor did I want to come up with a hagiography -I happen to think she
was kind of a modern saint, but that's a conclusion one must be left
to draw after all the information is presented, and all the
information might not lead everyone to the same judgment. Be that as
it may.
Linda McCartney, when she was Linda Eastman, came of age
in the 1960s, as did most of us who were young enough to change and
old enough to understand that it was still possible to do so. Those
were very different times, with different values. Lots of them, of
course, were fuelled by rock and roll, especially by the Beatles,
the Stones and Dylan. We really thought we were radical when it came
to politics, art, sex and mind-altering chemicals. Today, if I were
the guardian of someone who is now the age I was then, I would be
extremely concerned if he or she went so close to the edge in some
of those areas as we did, as I did, as Linda did. 'Experiment' was
not just a noun or verb back then, it was a command. We were pretty
wild, we were different people; 'That wasn't me.' Yes, it was, but
hey, it was a phase, albeit the most spectacular one in our
lifetimes; those who didn't rein it in when all the signs pointed to
the end of this wonderfully extended adolescence and the return of
reality did not present a pretty picture - if they survived at all.
I rather thought Linda's picture, in particular, grew more beautiful
as the years went by. Some people merely moved beyond the delirium;
she triumphed - in a partnership that amazed the world by its
intensity and duration, and on her own as well. I think it is a
story worth telling.

Chapter 1
'I once went out on a date, to some kind of pub, and I remember
thinking, "This is so boring," and just sort of walking out and
going home.'
Linda McCartney
On the first Friday of summer in 1966, the SS Sea
Panther set sail from a marina on New York's Hudson River shore. On
board was a little gathering that would change some people's lives,
and a good deal more, for the rest of the century. Linda McCartney
(then Linda Eastman) had her mid-twenties epiphany that day. And
because it's the day I met her (though I was stranded on the
riverbank), I think of myself as having had a whopper of a time as
well. So I feel conscience-free, perhaps entitled to use the first
person in the telling of this story.
The event itself was 'ultra' by definition - a press
meet-and-greet with the Rolling Stones, aboard a yacht that went up
and down the harbour for about two hours. Among the people invited
were those of us who thought ourselves (here was the proof!) clearly
A-list in the very tiny, alas, bunch that was known as the 'rock
press'. Well, out of fourteen of us, twelve were invited - to make
it look exclusive.
The Rolling Stones!
I cannot tell you how important that group was to a lot
of us back then. I know there were not many bands to choose from, or
many different 'formats' either, but the Stones were It. They were
fierce, they were glamorous, they confirmed that behind the sublime
glow the Beatles had sent us from England, there was a raging fire.
Not 'behind' - 'along with' is better. They were number one in the
charts that week with 'Paint It Black', an astonishing song for a
Billboard chart-topper, if you think of it. After a two-week reign,
they were chased back to third place (Sinatra's 'Strangers in the
Night' was number two) by the Beatles' 'Paperback Writer', which was
written by Paul McCartney about John Lennon.
The press contingent included two women who worked at
Town and Country magazine, a glossy periodical for the very rich, or
for those who wanted to know more about the very rich than they
could find out anywhere else. Not merely about the very rich, but
the very rich who were also hanging in there as members of America's
pathetically frayed WASP class. To the world's shock, the June issue
of Town and Country showed a David Bailey photograph of the Rolling
Stones on the front cover (still quite the absolute opposite of
everything the magazine stood for, but such was the coming power of
the rock and roll juggernaut) with young socialite Alexandra Chase
in an evening gown. Brian Jones was smoking a cigarette. It was all
quite revolutionary. The staff members of T&C on board the Sea
Panther were Christina Berlin and Linda Eastman.
Linda was not at all a Town and Country kind of girl.
Born and raised in affluence, the second-born child and oldest
daughter of a distinguished upper-middle-class Jewish family, she
was a loner and a rebel who cared far more for horses (she was a
champion rider) and photography (pictures of horses, for the most
part) than about the social hierarchy celebrated in the magazine.
Separated after a brief marriage, she was the mother of a
three-and-a-half-year-old daughter and, in her blue gaberdine shirt,
loafers, T-shirt and no make-up, looked vividly out of place in an
office where hair could be weighed by the ton, false eyelashes by
the kilo and face paint by the gallon. She was a natural woman in a
workforce where artifice was the style. But she was very bright,
well-mannered, had taken a typing course at her father's insistence
and spoke with a nasal, lockjaw monotone that many aspiring
debutantes spent years cultivating. She did her simple editorial
assistant job well, and was encouraged to go to the Stones boat ride
with Christina - actually, they were the only two at the magazine
who wanted to go at all.
A whole book could be written about Christina Berlin,
Linda's best and only buddy at work. She's the daughter of the late
Richard and Honey Berlin, he having been the president of the Hearst
Corporation (which published Town and Country, making Christina the
boss's daughter), and was William 'Rosebud' Randolph Hearst's
choice, after he had looked exactingly at all his own sons, to take
over the company when he was gone. Not actually blue-blood by birth,
Richard and Honey learned very fast, lived in the 'best' building on
Fifth Avenue and counted among their closest friends the Duke and
Duchess of Windsor and J. Edgar Hoover. In other words, the Berlins
were hardly lefties, and their three daughters rebelled, if not
politically, then in every other way.
The oldest Berlin daughter, Brigid, was Andy Warhol's
best friend and confidante for many years, a star of the
earth-shaking movie Chelsea Girls and a ferocious and brilliant
woman, now doing theatre pieces so exclusive that you need a
password to get in. Brigid has boasted of spiking her parents' punch
with amphetamine, of which she had once been rather fond herself,
and watching the Duchess and J. Edgar, once it hit, dancing on her
family's dining-room table. She also spiked, literally, the buttocks
of anyone within ten feet of her with a magical meth mixture,
earning herself the alternative name, Brigid Polk.
Christina, a few years after this narrative begins,
engineered the defection of her lover, Mikhail Baryshnikov, the
world's greatest male ballet dancer, from the Soviet Union to the
West. We're not bringing any boring people into this story.
Christina had been the only genuine teenager in the VIP
press area -courtesy of her father - when the Beatles arrived at JFK
(then Idlewild) airport for their first visit to America in 1964. To
explain her presence, her father's staff said she was a reporter for
the New York Daily Mirror, a tabloid in the Hearst empire. She rode
to the airport with Murray the K, the self-styled 'Fifth Beatle',
and behaved herself so well ('I didn't faint at the sight of them')
that she was in the Hearst entourage when the Stones arrived in New
York for the first time - she was introduced to the band as 'the
president of your first American fan club' and was instantly noted
by Mick Jagger as Someone To Remember. And just the right person on
the SS Sea Panther that June morning to introduce him to the blonde
fox with the Pentax.
So, this was the crowd into which Linda Eastman, single
mother and reluctant apprentice at a magazine edited for nobody she
could ever want to know, was beginning to drift - the Stones and
their people, the Berlin girls, the Warhols (however tangentially,
and Linda never liked them much anyhow), the avant-garde rock press
(well, the legendary reporter Lillian Roxon, who would become
Linda's best friend and bitterest enemy, and me). Perhaps 'drift'
was not quite what Linda was doing; she was paddling away from the
life she had been living, with no particular immediate goal, but
with explosive enthusiasm once she saw how much fun New York, the
whole world, in 1966, could be.
Oh, 1966. I have to recycle those lines of Wordsworth
from The Prelude: it's useful when talking about the glorious
early-late 60s:
Bliss was it in that time to be alive,
But to be young was very Heaven!
That was extravagantly true in the world of rock and
roll - the 'British Invasion' was still in full force, and getting
better all the time, while America was coming up with true gems of
its own: the Byrds, Jefferson Airplane, the Velvet Underground, the
Pet Sounds Beach Boys, the Grateful Dead, Blonde on Blonde Dylan,
the Mamas and Papas, Buffalo Springfield, the Doors. Every month
there was an album that changed your life, that sounded like nothing
you'd ever heard before. And those of us who were thrilled with the
music soon discovered that happily there was no real 'rock and roll'
scene already in place, that it was waiting to be invented and that
you could just put yourself at the centre of it and say your name.
Whatever other skills you might also have, like knowing which
buttons to press on a handsome 35mm camera, counted for even more
points. And Linda happened to be poised to introduce herself into
this exciting new world at that very moment.
She was very beautiful, with natural strawberry-blonde
hair, classic features, perfect skin and the fullness of figure that
men have always become excited about, no matter that the fashion
press at the time was pushing the flat-chested, bony, brittle little
bodies of Edie Sedgwick and Twiggy. Linda's bearing was classy, her
smile atomic, her accent and her taste impeccable. That afternoon,
her Pentax loaded, she shot half-a-dozen rolls of the group being
honoured; her pictures, to this day, are perhaps the best of the
Stones ever taken, certainly the best candid shots and probably the
most famous photos of the band at the height of their youthful
sexiness.
What's more, while photographing Mick, and unbeknownst
to anybody else on board except Christina, who watched the two of
them mouth flirty little messages to each other, Linda Eastman
accepted Mick Jagger's offer to meet her early the next week at the
trendiest party in town, given by photographer Jerry Schatzberg
(Stones in drag, 'Have You Seen Your Mother', etc.) in honour of
Baby Jane Holzer (an ex-Warhol girl of the year and an ex-Mick
flame) and the Rolling Stones, at Schatzberg's loft on lower Park
Avenue. Mick asked Linda if she were going to be there, and although
she was going with a date, David Dalton, her editor at Hullaballoo
magazine and occasional boyfriend, she didn't tell Mick that, just
that she'd see him at the party. As far as she was concerned, she
now had a date with Mick Jagger for that party, and David was very
nice, a gentleman (and a passionate Stones fan); he'd understand
when the time came to tell him.
 So Linda got her first fabulous photographs and her
first fabulous 'date' on that one day. It was one of the very few
dates of any kind she'd had since leaving her husband and moving
back to New York with her baby daughter. 'My father would have liked
me to have married a commuter, drink martinis in the evening. He
always wanted for me what everyone, I suppose, wants for his
daughter,' Linda told me some years later. 'Singles' bars were
happening, but I never even went to one. I once went out on a date,
to some kind of pub, and I remember thinking, "This is so boring,"
and just sort of walking out and going home. My mind, my karma I
suppose, was different from what it was supposed to be.' Though she
was to make motherhood her first priority, always, Linda was able
that day to leave a life that was creatively and sexually
non-existent, leave it happily behind her. She entered the history
books with all flags flying.
But, before we get Linda dressed up for her first date
with a true star, please allow me to introduce myself, as a witness
to Linda's life, a friend and perhaps a minor player.
I grew up in New York City too, the wrong part as it
happens (Queens), but Linda reminded me of the girls I dated when I
was a teenager: Manhattan girls from families richer than mine;
strong, smart girls who always looked good and knew how to enter and
leave restaurants. That sounds superficial, but it stands for a lot.
When I met Linda, it was several years after I stopped dating girls
at all, but I knew she was going to be a Best Friend. We had the
same taste in music, art and guys. What more is there to bond about?

Her father had graduated from Harvard Law School, from

which I had dropped out after one year. I moved back to New York, to
Greenwich Village; a series of weird jobs selling books and putting
out magazines about liquor stores (no kidding) got me a job at
Datebook, a 'teen' magazine that by 1966 was buying exclusive
Beatles stuff from England and seeing its circulation rise
dramatically. The publisher needed someone closer to what was
happening, and I faked my way into the position of managing editor.
I knew nothing about rock music or the bands or anything, but after
a few months of hanging out and listening to the latest albums, I
was as qualified as anyone who wasn't actually a practising musician
to be in the hot centre of the scene. I would slide notes under
dressing-room doors and get interviews with bands like the Byrds,
the Rascals, the Mamas and Papas, groups with number one records.
'Faked', I think, is the operative word. The Beatles and the Stones
I'd never met; they were Up There, and I was Not.
Until the invitation came from Betsey Doster, who worked
for Allen Klein (ironies will become apparent later in this story),
to come aboard the Sea Panther to meet the Rolling Stones. I could
bring a photographer.
So I hired someone recommended by the publisher, and the
jerk got to my office the morning of the boat ride with plenty of
cameras but no film. We were late hi departing and it's a long ride
from Washington Square, where Datebook's little office was, to the
79th Street Boat Basin, from which the Stones' boat would be
leaving. 'No matter,' he said. 'We'll stop in Herald Square and get
some film.' This guy was clearly a foreigner. You don't 'stop' in
Herald Square and jump out to buy film; it's traffic hell - you
circle the block at one mile an hour. Anyhow, we got to the dock
just as the boat was pulling away. I fired the goddamn photographer
on the spot and decided, if I wanted to keep my brand-new job in
rock and roll publishing, that I'd better wait for the Sea Panther
to come back, attack a disembarking photographer and offer him/her
whatever it took to get some pictures of life on the river with the
Rolling Stones.
What luck! There was chic and devastatingly clever
Christina Berlin, youngest sister of my dear friend Brigid, getting
off the boat with a gorgeous, happy girl wearing a Pentax. (And a
skirt and matching top, but I only noticed the Pentax.)
'Christina, I MUST meet your friend,' I said cheerily.
'It looks like she's got some pictures.'
'Sure, Danny, this is Linda Eastman. She works with me
at Town and Country. We both hate it there, I'm sure you'll like
each other.'
'Nice to meet you, Linda. So listen,' I went on, 'got
any pix to sell?'
Well, Hullaballoo had the pick of the pack {T&C had
already done all the Rolling Stones coverage it was ever about to
do; Linda was moonlighting with her first freelance assignment from
Hullaballoo, a genuine rock magazine), but she promised she'd show
me what it didn't want.
Great. I was covered.
By the way, some accounts of this auspicious day say
that Linda was the only photographer on the boat. We know this is
not true; there were, first of all, 'official' photographers hired
by the Stones' management office. You don't stage an event this
glamorous without some tried and true professional photographers,
1940s movie variety. These pro-bozos barely knew who the Stones
were, and you can tell that from then- pictures, which were sent out
by the Stones organization. They were so dry and formal, almost
nobody used them. They make Linda's pictures look all the more
wonderful. The Stones, as seen in photographs by efficient older men
in brown suits and white shirts, look thoroughly bored, as if they
wished they were doing something else; in Linda's pictures, and in
all Linda's work, the subjects are playing right into her lens,
being cute, arrogant, beautiful, sexy, graceful, sensitive or all
the above.
Photo sessions are among the most despised things that
musicians are required to do. They are one step less repulsive than
meeting the staff of local radio stations. But working with Linda
was fun: there was portraitist-subject content, and everyone
understood what was going on. 'She took my favourite pictures of me'
is something said to me often by people who had posed for Linda.
Back at Datebook, I was making some mischief that would
have national implications, and which resulted in pitting the
Beatles against America's ever-vigilant fringe-right religious
extremists, including such enchanting fellowships as the Ku Klux
Klan.
As managing editor of a magazine for teenagers, I was
eager to stand out from the pack. The publisher wanted us to emulate
the formula of the incredibly successful 16 magazine, the most
widely circulated fan magazine ever, with newsstand sales of a
million and a half copies and a readership of close to four million
teenage girls. 16, under the inspired direction of its
editor-in-chief and inventor, the great Gloria Stavers, was (even
though Gloria was the lover of Lenny Bruce and adored dangerous men)
cuddly and innocent. In 16, no one ever got laid; the readers were
pre-sexual (they wouldn't be today at that age) and there was
certainly no politics unless smuggled in under the disguise of a
poetic obituary for Bobby Kennedy et al. Typical 16 cover lines
(these from the October '66 issue) were 'beatles explode - those
nasty lies we hate! 50 freaky new pics'; or, about members of Paul
Revere and the Raiders (although never about 'Paul' himself): Fang -
'come home with me and meet my folks!' or Mark - 'the lonely years
i'll never forget'. Despite what my publisher wanted, in my
responsible new position, I was not about to follow that mushy line
(by sociological, aesthetic and/or commercial standards, 16 was the
most brilliant magazine of its era and for its audience, but what
did I know?). Besides, you couldn't just rise up out of nowhere and
compete with Gloria on her own turf. She ruled.
For example, Brian Epstein, the manager of the Beatles,
introduced his new American group, the Cyrkle, to the American media
at a crowded press conference in a mid-town hotel. Very crowded -
this was the man who controlled the Beatles (one thought) and, if I
haven't yet made it clear, although my friends loved the Stones, the
Beatles were alone atop the mountain of Fame Heaven on this planet.
Being in the same room as Brian Epstein, even for the most cynical
reporters, was an enormous thrill and an Important Thing to cover.
Anyhow, Brian paraded the Cyrkle in front of the podium and answered
a few questions, including, 'Mr Epstein, are you a millionaire?',
which came most aggressively from Lillian Roxon. This was my first
encounter with Australian journalism (i.e. the form of reportage
that now dominates the world) in action. When the audience left,
Gloria entered. She and the Cyrkle were ushered into a smaller room
for her exclusive pix and '40 things you never knew'. She was
getting solo time with Brian and the group; it was inconceivable
that any other entertainment magazine editor would merit this
acknowledgment of her power.
Another Gloria story, this one tied in to the boat ride
that began this chapter. As I watched weeping while the boat I'd
missed sailed out into the river, a limousine pulled up and Gloria
got out. She didn't say 'Hello' - I was too inconsequential for that
- only 'Shit!' as she realized that the press event had put to sea
without her. A man came up to us and offered, for twenty dollars, to
ferry us out to the Sea Panther in his motorboat. I didn't have this
great amount of cash on me, so I turned to Gloria and said (the
first words I ever spoke to her; we would eventually become the
closest of friends, as would she and Linda), 'Hey Gloria! Want to
split it ten and ten and catch up to the boat?'
'Fuck 'em,' she said, not to me but to the vanishing
yacht. 'The Stones aren't worth ten dollars.' She got into her car,
and sped away.
I told this story when I was being interviewed for the
1992 BBC documentary about Linda McCartney, the excellent Behind the
Lens. The me-and-Gloria moment wasn't really a story about Linda,
but it made the final cut and was aired in the UK nearly un-bleeped;
I knew Paul must have loved Gloria's line about the Stones, and
that's why it stayed in the programme.
As I was saying, it was time, I thought, to jump past
all this teeny-bopper nonsense and put Datebook on the map as a
magazine that reflected the rebellious wisdom-mongering that
characterized our generation. We'd opened our minds with drugs that
the older, boring, warring age group could not even comprehend; we
were collectively the new improved rhythm section of the universe.
Certainly its conscience, as Bob Dylan had demonstrated. Style was
being reinvented in swinging London, stoned California and cool New
York - it was up to you to mix the ingredients and give names to the
new flavours of life. And we were so gorgeous. Girls were always
supposed to be gorgeous, but now so were boys. You had to go to bed
with everyone - you didn't really know someone until you'd got
through the slurping and penetrating part of it, which was not a
fate worse than death. What sex you were or what your old tastes and
customs had been hardly mattered. We were free to do everything that
had ever been forbidden - well, everything that was vic-timless. And
I was free to make some trouble on the cover of a magazine for
fourteen-year-old kids. I convinced the owner that it was a good
idea, but my time of employment at Datebook was so short that I'd
been fired long before my contribution to culture hit the
newsstands.
You see, Datebook had bought the American rights to a
series of interviews the Beatles had done in England with Maureen
Cleave for the London Evening Standard, published in March 1966, in
which the boys caused a politely shocked little buzz, though not a
lot more, much to the group's satisfaction. They were trying to move
away from the 'adorable mop-top' phase as fast as their eight legs
would carry them. The Beatles were, by this time and particularly in
the UK, so exalted that the royal family was running a tired second
to the loftiness of the Fab Four. They could do, say, wear, write
anything, and command the attention of the nation. So with Ms Cleave
they pulled no punches. At least Paul and John didn't.
They were long interviews, and buried deep within them
were such titbits as Paul saying (about America), 'It's a lousy
country where anyone who is black is a dirty nigger.' And it was of
course the same series of interviews in which John opined, 'We're
more popular than Jesus now; I don't know what will go first - rock
and roll or Christianity.'
Yummy! Such good quotes deserved better than the tiny
typeface they were accorded in London. They ought to be on the front
cover of a magazine. Especially the September Datebook, with a cover
that featured a big, kissy, colour photograph of Paul McCartney.
So we came up with the idea of a 'shout-out' issue, and
I used the most incendiary quotes (i.e. the two in the last
paragraph) on the cover (along with Timothy Leary's already tiresome
'Turn on, tune in, drop out!') and as the headlines of two separate
stories, one about Paul and one about John. Both were essentially
Maureen Cleave's interviews. Nothing substantive was changed, either
on the cover or inside, nor were the quotes 'taken out of context',
as it was later claimed, when trouble arose. Not at all. They'd just
been pulled from the body of the interview, enlarged and placed
elsewhere. They're called 'pull-quotes' in magazine-land, and of
course they're commonly used. To say something was used 'out of
context' implies that the meaning was changed by lifting the quotes
from what came before and after. But the meaning had not been
changed - John did say, 'We're more popular than Jesus now,' and he
meant it, and it was true.
There follows a quote from the very handy reference
book, Rock Movers and Shakers, where careers are outlined in careful
chronological order, from the section devoted to 'The Beatles',
sub-section '1966', entry for 31 July of that year: '2 days after US
Datebook magazine publishes Lennon's interview with Maureen Cleave,
citizens of Birmingham, AL, publicly burn Beatles' records and
memorabilia, amidst general anger in the Southern states.'
The furore spread through America's Bible belt and
hopped the Atlantic to South Africa, where the national broadcasting
company banned all Beatles' music from that enlightened country's
airwaves. In America, though, with the religious right aroused, the
controversy had far more profound consequences for the group, then
on the eve of their fourth American tour.
In Memphis, outside the Mid-South Coliseum, where the
Beatles were to perform on 19 August, a spokesperson for the Ku Klux
Klan, in full hooded drag, told a television reporter that 'the
Beatles had made a statement in all the newspapers that they're
getting more better than Jesus'. He boasted, 'We're gonna try and
stop it [the concert] any terror way we can, but it's gonna stop.'
They didn't stop it, but they assembled 8,000 pro-Jesus supporters
for an extremely ugly rally outside the venue. The Beatles were
seriously rattled.
A month earlier, they had barely got out of Manila
alive, after First Lady Imelda Marcos announced that the Beatles had
insulted her, and hence all Filipinos, by not showing up at a garden
party she gave in their honour at the presidential palace. But that
was a Third World country, and this was America. Wasn't the South,
and Memphis in particular, the birthplace of rock and roll? Maybe,
but for the Beatles, the South was now a cradle of hatred. Death
threats started pouring in, and touring had become not merely no
fun, but catastrophically scary. After playing San Francisco on 29
August, the Beatles decided they never wanted to perform publicly
again, and they never did.
I can't exactly claim that our little attempt to beef up
poor Datebook magazine led directly to that decision, but it was one
of the last nails in the coffin, so to speak. Over thirty years
later, in an interview for the Beatles Anthology television series,
talking about coming off the road once and for all, George Harrison
said, 'I think the most important thing was the safety aspect... It
was just becoming too difficult on the nervous system.' And the
first time I met Paul, after he married my friend Linda, I told him
that it was me who had put those quotes on a magazine cover in the
summer of '66. 'Ah, so you're the one,' he said.
(Postscript to this frenzied time in America's cultural
history: they may or may not have been bigger than Jesus, but
Somebody Up There was clearly rooting for the Beatles - the morning
after a 'Beatles Bonfire' sponsored by radio station KLUE in
Longview, Texas, a lightning bolt hit the station's transmitting
tower, melting its equipment, knocking out the news director and
leaving Longview KLUE-less until the damage was repaired.)
The Beatles, Jesus, Linda, Datebook, Mick, Imelda,
Memphis and the Hudson River on a day in June - what a summer! They
don't have summers any more like they did in the still
incomprehensible 60s, when it was all about great rock and roll
groups, nice drugs, people who made and wore silly clothes, believed
a new era was at hand, slept with everyone else under thirty and
danced and dreamed to music such as had never been heard, before or
since.
Let's get off that cloud and watch Linda create a
remarkable new life for herself. 'In that short hour and a half on
that boat she was happier than I'd ever seen her,' Christina Berlin
recalls. 'Everything started working for her, from that moment. I
knew that she could pursue photography, and that she'd be very good.
She read people very well, these people related to Linda and that
made for great pictures. She had talent, looks and the personality
to deal with rock stars. She'd been in the dumps before this, and it
certainly wasn't where she wanted to be. Linda was just waiting for
something to happen.'
 Well, it happened that day. A brilliant career as a
photographer of rock stars had begun. Her pictures of the Rolling
Stones were so good that Linda Eastman was soon one of the most
celebrated photographers in the exploding universe of rock and roll.
Two of the most exciting and liberating years of her life were now
ahead of her; she and her work were recognized, admired, sought
after. She produced some of the most memorable images of that era,
and she travelled from New York to London to LA, assembling a
portfolio that, in the year 1999, is the core of a show called
'Linda McCartney's Sixties: Portrait of an Era', exhibited at dozens
of distinguished American museums, attracting big and eager
audiences who had either seen Jimi Hendrix or wish they had, but are
now getting the chance at least to see - once again - 'My favourite
pictures of me'.
The boredom of life behind a desk at Town and Country
was at last behind her. Ironically, the relentless pressure from her
father to do something worthwhile grew more severe when he learned
that her new career centred on the world of rock and roll. 'He's
always telling me it's going to get me in trouble, it's going to be
gone overnight, and I'll be back being an office intern,' Linda
would complain to me after a bout with Dad. 'I was miserable staying
where I was, and that state of mind was worse to me than the
possibility that this would all be over tomorrow, which of course I
never believed. I love what I'm doing, but my family sure isn't
making it easy for me to be who I want to be. Too bad.' She told
another writer, 'I said to my father I wanted to quit my job and
become a photographer and he shot me a look like, "If you do, you're
finished." And I said, "C'est la vie."'
Linda's family would shift radically from their
disapproving mode when her new career brought her, two years later,
into a relationship and then marriage with Paul McCartney, no doubt
the world's most eligible bachelor. 'Linda suddenly became their
favourite child,' says Nat Weiss, Brian Epstein's American partner
and a close friend of Linda's since her first forays as a
photographer.
The marriage of Paul and Linda would make history, and
lasted until death did them part. But let's stay in 1966 for a
while. There's a big party coming up.

Chapter 2
'The problem with shooting groups was the groups. They were
obnoxious, excruciatingly self-conscious teenage brats. It was a
bloody pain in the neck. But with the Lovely Linda, all this
changed. . . Now their eyes were pinned on her.'
David Dalton, writer, photographer
Boys, men, dating, heart throbs, conquests, artifice,
fashion, flirting - these were really not part of Linda Eastman's
life. Horses were more important to her than boys for all her
youthful years, then she was married at twenty, separated and a
mother at twenty-one. She did not have a lot of girlfriends; girls
and Linda had not much to talk about. She loved rock and roll and
crawling around damp, dark, little ravines in the country near her
house where the lilies of the valley grew.
'I'd lived in Arizona, and I loved Arizona. But I had a
husband I was separated from, and a baby to support. So I moved back
to New York. I used to think it was scary. I remember the first time
I drove into the city, right after I got my licence. All that
traffic, those buildings. Oh! Scared me to death.'
Linda's father, Lee (for Leopold) Eastman, a rich and
brilliant lawyer famous for his rich and brilliant clients, would
not support her when she came back east in 1964 after her brief,
failed marriage (although, no one was going to starve, certainly not
an infant granddaughter). Dad, still living in the town where Linda
had grown up - Scarsdale, New York - now with his second wife
Monique (Linda's mother Louise died in a plane crash in 1962), made
patrician paternal noises: 'Get a job. Get an apartment. School
didn't work for you. Marriage didn't work for you. No time for
experimenting now, you have to make it work. Start looking.'
Lee Eastman was a universe of a guy. If you didn't know
after fifteen seconds that his thoughts at any moment were leaping
ahead of yours, your mind was second rate and your physical presence
went into a kind of atrophy. He was an A-list guy - not socially, as
on dinner-party lists, but with A-list brains, ambition, talent, a
360-degree lens built into his sensory mode. It was a shoulders-back
occasion when he asked one to stay around a little longer. But I
think he no longer had patience with Linda's lovely shoulders. He
strongly suggested that she move thirty miles south, to New York
City, and find an apartment and a job.
Luckily, there would be no argument about where this
apartment was going to be. It's not as if there's a choice. 'Our
crowd' (i.e. the Eastmans, younger and older) simply settle in the
Upper East Side, where the doorman is the most crucial person in
your catalogue of 'people who make life a little easier'. The stores
sell extraordinary quantities of $500 dresses for five-year-old
girls who will outgrow them well before the age of six; there are
tangelos and minneolas (and sandwiches to go) at the two or three
fruit stores on a single block. There are hardware stores that
specialize in the screws and sprays favoured by women who carry
$6,000 handbags and have more at home. There are hotels where people
live for $40,000 a month, dermatologists who can always find $425
worth of unsavoury work to do in half an hour. These are today's
prices, but only the figures are different from those of the 60s,
not the quality of life. You find the finest dogs, magazines from
the fashionable new cities on the Caspian Sea, and restaurants where
either you are welcomed, and go a lot, or you are not welcome, and
never go back. There are alternative doctors who find and treat
parts of your body you never knew existed. Dealers deliver, of
course, bearing beautiful inlaid mahogany cases with drugs graded by
the colour of their vials; they might forgo an instant sale and tell
you to wait a few days, if you can, because something is coming that
T know you'll love'. There are reading clubs conducted by polymaths
who put you through a season with The Golden Bowl, a sort of boot
camp for stunning matrons of a certain age with pretensions.
EVERYONE is smoking . . . cigarettes! One would think this was the
vanguard of quitters, but it's really action-central for the
I-don't-give-a-shitters.
Girls like Linda, with good backgrounds and no money,
just assume this is where they're going to live - and, guess what,
they somehow find apartments and become the alternative population
of the neighbourhood. The further east you go, the fewer luxury
dermatologists you find (but lots and lots of shrinks), and the
streets aren't quite as clean as they were just a few hundred feet
closer to Central Park. I wonder why that is. In 1992 Linda recalled:

I didn't have any money, and I didn't know how you did
it, but I knew I was going to find a place for me and Heather on
the Upper East Side. Maybe if I'd known the city better when I
first started looking, I'd have gone downtown.
I had one hundred eighty bucks to spend on an
apartment in the most expensive neighbourhood of the most
expensive city in the world, but, you know me; I never thought
normal.
I had the nerve to start looking in the 60s - nothing.
The 70s -nothing. My chances were lousy. Then on 83rd Street I saw
this doorman and asked about the building, and he told me about a
woman on the tenth floor who was moving. She was in my situation,
a mother and a child. It was an L-shaped room, and she had put in
a little thin wall, so it became my tiny, tiny one-bedroom
apartment, $180 a month [today an apartment like this would cost
at least $2,000 a month]. I was scared, you know, I'd never lived
in a city. I got my furniture from the Salvation Army on the West
Side. Nice! I was leaving Heather with my stepmother in Scarsdale
while I went on this quest. . .
Look, I liked rock and roll in the 50s, and nobody's
parents anywhere could deal with that, certainly not my father and
Monique. We were supposed to do well at school; he graduated from
Harvard Law School. I can understand why you may have the same
mouth and colouring as your parents, and hopefully the graces and
curiosity that make them civilized, if they are, because you're
surrounded by that. But I never understood how you were supposed
to inherit their professional or religious or sociological
preferences. Those are supposed to come from the world you live
in, they're not in your genes.
That's the best thing you can do as a parent, and
we've tried so hard; nice is best, then happiest, then comes
fulfilled and good-looking and talented or even just ordinary, but
nice is best, and I believe that may be the one thing, and SHOULD
be the one thing, that you can pass on to your kids. It's
certainly the one thing you must be above all. Even if all you can
do is stick the both of you in an L-shaped room on East 83rd
Street, come home exhausted, pay the sitter and be a Mommy until
you pass out. But there's no place in that whole situation where
'nice' doesn't fit in.
Of course, that's Linda McCartney in 1992 talking about
Linda Eastman in 1966. But I believe that her deepest values never
changed, and although she was dismayed by her father's disapproval,
she was in awe of him - he was her ideal of a 'cool' man then and
always.
Linda had studied photography at a local arts centre in
Arizona with a teacher named Hazel Archer, but most of her pictures
had been of horses. She became fascinated with the art of taking
photographs, and acquired a fine appreciation and knowledge of the
work of the American greats, like Dorothea Lange, Ansel Adams and
Walker Evans. Living in New York, she spent lunchtimes at the
photography exhibitions in the Museum of Modern Art, and was
familiar, not surprisingly, with the European painting galleries at
the Metropolitan Museum of Art, just a few blocks from her
apartment.
 I remember a Sunday in the mid-1980s when she, Paul and
the kids were staying at Stanhope Hotel, near the museum. My
room-mate Michael and I had breakfast with them in their suite and
then went over to the Met for a VIP visit, an hour before it was
opened to the public. I said something about wanting to see my
favourite really old masters and Linda gave me precise directions:
'Go through there and turn left there ..." I recognized her
familiarity with those galleries and her love of the paintings
hanging there - it was that of someone who'd been alone in New York
City and knew her way around the town's great treasure troves. She
obviously visited the Metropolitan Museum frequently, but that was
in the years before I knew her. Because when we were 'best friends'
we talked about rock and roll, subways and our other best friends -
never about Van Eyck and co. It occurred to me that she'd probably
been glad to say goodbye, for a while, to the fifteenth Century when
she started her own life as an artist, which she really was, just
about from the start.
The day in late 1965 that she met David Dalton in the
lobby of the Hearst Building, where they both worked, but at
separate magazines, was a crucial one. British, well-born, handsome
and very, very smart, David had a 'shit job', like Linda's, at
Harper's Bazaar, a fashion magazine for women who lived near golf
courses in the suburbs of Houston.
'I absolutely hated it, it was horrible, I couldn't get
up in the morning,' Dalton recalls - which could have been Linda
talking, or me, or any of lots of people who didn't know what to
make of their lives in the early and mid-60s.
What could you do to be part of what was interesting?
And make a living at it? Play an instrument, which I couldn't,
work in a boutique, which I wouldn't. I hadn't thought of being a
photographer, but someone told me to just get a single-lens
reflex, learn about f-stops and shutter speeds, focus, and press a
button. So I got a Pentax, and started photographing groups
whenever and wherever I could. Because classic languages, and
painting, which I'd studied, went out the window when the English
bands started happening. Rock and roll had become the real focus
of my life.
So there I was, with my camera, waiting for the
elevator to hell, when this beautiful blonde girl, also carrying a
Pentax, started asking me questions about photography. She wanted
to know everything. 'If I don't learn to do something well,' she
said sort of sadly, 'then what's to become of me?' She bemoaned
the pointlessness of her life, but with tremendous energy. She was
Sleeping Beauty . . . just around the corner the blazing path of
pop life awaited! I identified with her yearnings, plus I was a
boy and she was definitely a girl one noticed.
'Linda was educated, smart and hungry,' David Dalton
wrote in Gadfly magazine, shortly after her death.
But she was sleeping a lot, snacking on Ritz crackers
and hors d'oeuvres from the deli and was in a fog of low level
depression.
I was going that night to Steve Paul's club the Scene,
where Atlantic Records was having a party for the Rascals, for
'Good Lovin',' which had gone to #1. I'd convinced someone in the
Atlantic publicity department to let me shoot the 'trade shots,'
you know, the group and Ahmet Ertegun, the dapper and inscrutable
president of the company, all posing for 'Billboard,' that kind of
stuff. So I asked Linda to come with me, and she was bursting with
 enthusiasm. A rock and roll group, the coolest club in town, and
I'd be using a strobe light, and thereby unlocking one of the
mysteries of the universe, for this incredibly excited, energetic
girl, who had never taken pictures with anything but natural
light.
She met me at the club in the early evening, record
company party time, and that's when it struck me how different she
was from the other denizens of that sprawling basement on 46th
Street off Eighth Avenue. She was dressed in a striped
long-sleeved t-shirt and an A-line skirt down to the knees.
Nighttime fashion in New York's hip boites then was mini-skirts,
silver foil sheaths, pop art, net stockings, heels, jewelry, much
makeup, and carefully crafted hair.
Linda looked every inch a WASP (even though she
wasn't), and she dressed with the studied bad taste that elite
WASPS aspire to. They had whole stores devoted to this strange
phenomenon: Peck & Peck, Best & Co., B. Altaian. It was a bizarre
cult of exclusive dowdiness. Vassar girls dressed like this, rock
and roll girls didn't. For a while, she was using the wonderful
name of Linda See - it was the name of her ex-husband, an
anthropologist in Arizona to whom she'd been briefly married, and
from whom she'd been recently divorced. He was the father of
Heather, born in 1962.
Linda's divorce from Mel See wasn't finalized until June
1965, exactly three years after they were married, although they had
stayed together ftjronly about twelve months.
In the beginning of 1966, Linda stopped using her
ex-husband's name and became again Linda Eastman. 'I once heard
someone make fun of that name [See] - they thought I called myself
that because I wanted to be a photographer, like Mr Dose the
druggist and Miss Stitch the seamstress from Happy Families or
something. I hated anyone thinking I would be so cute as to do that,
so I went back to Eastman. No one had believed that See was a real
name anyhow, and it had been mine for such a short time, I thought
it was best to ditch it.'
Back at the Scene with the Rascals, Linda was almost
more excited about the strobe attachment than about being so close
to the 'big time'. By the end of the evening, she had convinced
David to let her try it a few times. Once having mastered electronic
illumination, she tucked it away and used it very rarely. She liked
a soft natural light, and it became part of her modus operandi as a
photographer not to set off flashes when capturing a subject. If the
focus and composition hadn't been perfect, her portraits might have
been a bit flat, but they were the opposite. Shades of grey jumped
off the page, colours were either elegantly cool or very intense,
but, most of all, people turned themselves beautiful, still,
arrogant, innocent, just for her camera.
A few weeks later David Dalton, now having associated
himself with the start-up rock magazine Hullaballoo, was moving into
the music business for real. 'My speciality was setting up rock
tableaux, with groups like the Shangri-Las, with little stories
going on in the frame ("Is she really going out with him?" being
whispered by three girls in the background, while Mary Weiss stood
in front, as though they were really performing "Leader of the
Pack"). Guy groups were harder to manipulate, and quite a few from
England seemed to me to be real working-class wise-asses. Like the
Animals, to whose shoot on the Hudson piers I'd invited Linda.'
The Rascals had been OK, but they were a mostly
Italian-American rock band from New Jersey. The Animals were from
Newcastle, not exactly members of the British nobility, and as
wise-ass as they came. Their music was gritty and soulful,, and
Linda was a great fan. We were all fans of 'We Gotta Get out of This
Place', which was a signature song of its time and, what's more, the
group had been adopted by a very hip, very decadent New York crowd.
There were parties in their honour in penthouses where you wouldn't
think they could get past the doorman, and in sleazy hotels on West
45th Street where sailors, prostitutes and black-sheep offspring of
some of America's richest families lived in places like the
unbelievable Hotel America, sex and drug centre of the then
interesting Times Square area. (Oh, Linda never went near any of
that, but she did like to hear about it.)
Dalton continues with the story of him, Linda and the
Animals down on the docks.
I found a very thick length of rope used for tying up
ocean liners, and made a knot at one end. I had the Animals
straining to burst through the circle of rope. Not a profound
metaphor, but graphic.
The image was just OK, but when I looked through the
lens, it was fantastic. I mean the way those Zen Cockney masters
like David Bailey and Michael Cooper did it. Then I worked it out.
It was Linda. She had figuratively magnetized the group and it had
done wonders for the composition. Streams of energy poured back
and forth between the feral animals and Princess Linda. After I'd
shot the picture, Linda asked if she could take some informal
pictures of Eric Burdon and the boys. While she was snapping some
very tightly framed pictures of Eric, he turned to me and confided
a passionate interest in photography. Funny y that he'd never
mentioned it before.
The problem with shooting groups was the groups. They
were obnoxious, excruciatingly self-conscious teenage brats. It
was a bloody pain in the neck. But with the Lovely Linda, all this
changed. Photographing a yobby group like Tommy James and the
Shondells was usually full of problems. Now their eyes were pinned
on her.
So were Dalton's, by the way, and he and Linda were soon
going out together - he was absolutely the first cool man she'd
dated since she left her husband. It wasn't love - they were, in
many ways, too similar to really excite each other - but why not? It
was easier to be a couple in those days than it was not to. 'My
mother adored Linda,' he says, 'and of course that was one reason to
be suspicious of her as a girlfriend.'
For some arcane political reasons, Hullaballoo was not
invited to the Stones boat ride, and Dalton needed pictures badly
for his magazine. Thank God for Linda. As I've noted, although she
was officially carrying a camera as a representative of Town and
Country, she was actually shooting for Hullaballoo, and I was to get
the rejects for Datebook.
As we know, Linda accepted an invitation to meet Mick
Jagger at Jerry Schatzberg's party, although her date for the party
was David, fortunately, and always, a most courteous and easygoing
guy. When Dalton, . the day after the boat ride, saw her pictures,
he was awed. 'It was astounding! They looked like real photographs,
whereas mine had always looked like the out-takes. She had a sense
of framing the thing. I don't know why this was. I went to art
school, I studied all this shit! But she intuitively had it. You
have to work in nano-seconds in photography, you can't sort of think
about something, because by the time you've thought of it, it's
gone. With me, it was always an act of luck or fate, but she had an
instinctive sense about it and she loved doing it. She was so food,
and the guys totally behaved. Her work was by far better than
anything I'd ever done with a camera, even though I was "teaching"
Linda about photography.' Dalton immediately gave Linda carte
blanche to present herself anywhere as 'a photographer from
Hullaballoo magazine'.
Christina Berlin has been around magazines, newspapers
and photographers all her life. 'When I saw her pictures of the
Stones the next day, they were unbelievable,' she says. They were
terrific; they were better than any pictures of the Stones I'd ever
seen. I said: "Linda!!!" She was excited too, she was jazzed about
it. Because she knew she got them. When we left that boat she knew
she had a lot, she knew she had pictures.'
The Rolling Stones had not all been jumping for joy at
this chance to meet the press and have their pictures taken in such
a lovely, nautical setting. Charlie Watts thought this was the
silliest thing he'd ever been asked to do, tried to pretend he
wasn't even there and was impossible to communicate with. Bill was,
er, pleasant. But it was Brian and Keith with whom the two women
hung out, as one would expect. And between Linda and Mick, there was
something going on.
All the girls, now women, who hated Linda for marrying
Paul McCartney, would hate her all the more (if they'd also been
fans of Mick Jagger back then - well, there must have been a few of
them) if they'd seen the instant fit they made that day. Bear in
mind, Mick has seduced hundreds, at least, of girls by now; there's
no one he can't have (you can add a lot of boys, gay and straight,
to that realm of possibilities). Habitues of New York's hotter
nightspots (and no doubt London's and LA's as well) were likely to
know quite a few girls who'd had sex with Mick Jagger. The size,
shape, feel, taste and smell of every part of his body, and what he
did with those, was practically public knowledge. Brian Jones was in
that league as well. In fact, you had to turn over rocks to find
people who had not had affairs (if something that takes place in a
phone booth in under eight minutes can be described as an affair)
with Brian Jones.
Linda was so eager to escape from, among other things,
the New York courtship rituals and the guys she was 'supposed' to be
hooking up with. An attractive young woman in the 1960s with the
time and energy to look for sex and/or companionship (you didn't
even need much time and energy; it was the 60s) could find it/them
easily, certainly in the major metropolitan areas. If you didn't
mind being asphyxiated by certain colognes (what was it then?
Canoe), waiting until he folded his pants and being a good listener
when he started babbling about soybean futures after he came, you
were going to get some. But Linda hated that stuff. 'Ewww, boys who
use Mennen and Old Spice! Why would boys want to smell floral and
powdery? That's what I like about San Francisco, I don't think they
even sell that stuff out there.' She couldn't handle the dating
game, she preferred real frogs to the kind that she got fixed up
with AND she was the mother of a girl who was barely three and a
half when I met her. Not only do maternal duties take most of your
time that's left after work, but somehow men do not whistle at young
mums and their drooling darlings. What ordinary bachelor wants to
get involved with a family?
Still, I am told women have strange longings within
them, that they certainly don't hate ALL men and that they rather
like being made love to when the weather outside is frightful. And
there are mirrors. Linda knew she was sexy - she just didn't know
how to make it work for her. Until along came the boys in the bands.

David Dalton remembers bringing Linda to Schatzberg's

party at his Studio/residence on Park Avenue South. At one point she
came up to him and said, 'Mick Jagger wants my phone number. What
should I do?'
'I suppose she was pretending, for my benefit, that this
was the first time Jagger had come on to her,' Dalton says. 'I told
her, "Sure". I was much more impressed than jealous - my respect for
the Stones was almost religious. If Mick Jagger had chosen my date
from that whole crowd to flirt with, it was like an honour.'
�MIKE AND ME - PHOTOGRAPHED AND WRITTEN BY LINDA
EASTMAN', published in the March 1967 issue of Hullaballoo, has to
be taken for the quasi-fiction that it is, although it is clearly an
important artefact in the history of Linda's we and career, and a
milestone in the history of rock and roll fan magazines. In the
story, Linda runs into a 'distracted, uptight' Mick Jagger at the
party; he tells her, 'I have to get out of here.' He then suggests
that �we all' go back to the hotel, although we never find out who
that 'we' included. They talk about music and Mick's life, call a
radio station to request something by Otis Redding - which, don't
you know, turns out to be �Satisfaction', an 'ironical little
coincidence'. After a while, Mick gets very tired and Linda decides,
'I'd better say goodnight and let Mick get his beauty sleep. I
thanked him and he promised to look me up the next time he was in
New York.' Linda leaves the hotel, taking note of the groupies still
waiting outside for a glimpse of 'the fabulous Rolling Stones'. The
end.
Linda certainly didn't write it; writing was simply not
something that she did, at least back then. But she and a couple of
hundred thousand women who were then teenage fans of the Rolling
Stones sure do remember 'mick and me'. It was the ultimate fantasy;
by taking his picture you know him well enough to talk to him at a
party, well enough to go back to his hotel room with him, where he
pours out to you the story of his life. Linda remembered that story
too, it kind of haunted her. She remembered it well enough to
insist, 'I did not write that damn thing!' when I asked her about it
many years later. I said 'Didn't you write it?'
'No.' I said.
The first person to know of Mick's interest in Linda was
naturally Chrissie Berlin. As soon as they got off the boat, Linda
revealed, 'I think Mick really likes me. I have a kind of date to
meet him at Jerry Schatzberg's party. Can you babysit for Heather?'
Recalls Christina, who is now going to narrate the
wonderful and revealing story we might call 'Linda Goes to Her First
Big-time Rock Party',
I was absolutely agog that he found her so attractive.
I mean, here I am with three-inch eyelashes, falls [hairpieces],
make-up, mini-dress, not the most gorgeous person in the world,
but I made an effort - and here's Linda, El Slobbo, and Mick
absolutely went bananas over her. You know, she was a very sexual
woman, sort of like Simone Signoret or something like that. She
didn't give a damn, and after the fling with Mick she developed
ways of letting men know that she found them attractive. 'I think
he likes me' was always her way of saying there was a mutual
 attraction. Anyhow, of course I was glad to babysit. That way I'd
get all the dope.
So four days later I went to her apartment, and there
was the ubiquitous chefs salad in the fridge for me - American
cheese, iceberg lettuce and packaged ham, along with Heather's
bottles.
I made her change clothes. I said, 'Linda, look, you
natural is one thing, slob is another - you don't have to get up
like you're going to the prom but, for God's sake, you've got a
date with Mick Jagger.' She was in a skirt and a white blouse, no
bra, no make-up. I said, 'Do you have any make-up? I mean ANY
makeup??' She said that she thought she did have a little bit
somewhere, and went into this messy bathroom and started rummaging
around.
She couldn't find the mascara, and it was such a tiny
New York bathroom, with one of those lightbulbs on a clip that you
light your basement with clipped on to a towel rack. I had some
mascara and blusher, and I told her only the bare rudiments were
necessary, just a little something. I made her put on a bra, and
we found a decent black dress in her closet, and I made her .put
some earrings on. She was fighting me all the way, but I kept
saying, 'Trust me, you'll thank me, if not for yourself then for
everyone else at the party. My God, you're still representing Town
and Country, you know, so please.' So she did, and she went out.
She left around eight o'clock. I fed Heather, I
watched television, I was determined to stay up until she got
home. I was dying to know what had happened. And around five in
the morning, a dishevelled Linda walks in, with this little secret
smile on her face. She said it had been great, and thanks a lot,
and that she was absolutely exhausted. She was pretty cool about
it, she wasn't one of those people who'd go into extraordinary
descriptions of what it was like. She made it pretty clear that it
was private.
I understood Linda. She was totally devoted to her
daughter, and at the same time had no sex life at all after her
marriage ended. Then she got on this very heady trip. Everything
was working for her, the photography, the men, the whole thing. It
was ego-building, and that was so much what she needed then, to
feel productive and desirable, free to live a whole new kind of
life.
We can giggle about earrings and bras, but what was in
progress was one of the most remarkable make-overs, professional
and personal, of the times - and these were times when make-overs
were happening with felicitous frequency (cf. the Beatles
themselves, Bob Dylan, Janis, all the people who came from
nowheres-ville and propelled themselves to the very pinnacle of
the culture).
Said Linda about that watershed week: 'That is when my
life really began - when there was no father or husband watching
over me. Photography saved me. It was like, wow, there is life
after death. I became, at last, a really free spirit.'

Chapter 3
'My father... was a very, very bright man... [my mother] was
attentive and charming - everybody loved her.'
Linda McCartney
In 1 March 1962, shortly after ten o'clock in the
morning, American Airlines flight number 1, leaving New York
International Airport (now JFK) bound for Los Angeles, went into a
roll at 1,500 feet and plunged into Jamaica Bay, exploding on
contact with the water about fifty feet from the shore. All
ninety-five people aboard died in the crash, including Louise Sara
Lindner Eastman, fifty years of age, the wife of Lee V. Eastman, a
prominent New York entertainment lawyer, and mother of four
children, John, Linda, Laura and Louise Jr. She had been going to
visit her son John, a student at Stanford. Mr and Mrs Eastman always
took separate flights when travelling to the same destination, so
that if there were an accident one parent would be spared to look
after the children. Which is what happened on that day. Horribly,
her husband was waiting at the airport for a later flight when his
wife's plane went down.
An investigation determined that the use of an improper
tool at the factory caused the wiring in the rudder of the Boeing
707 to short-circuit, sending it into an unwanted full deployment on
take-off. The pilot was making a left turn and could not recover
control of the craft when it flipped and began to fall nose-down
into the bay. No scheduled non-stop flight between New York and LA,
arguably the most important air route in the continental United
States (hence flight number 1), had ever crashed before March 1962,
nor has any since. At the time, it was the worst single airliner
disaster in America's history.
Louise Eastman, born in Cleveland on 9 November 1911,
was the only child of Max and Stella Dryfoos Lindner, Linda
McCartney's maternal grandparents, who'd been married the year
before. Both came from prominent German-Jewish Ohio families who
arrived in the Midwest well before the Eastern European Jews began
settling there at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the
twentieth centuries. There were 3,500 Jews, the vast majority of
them German, in Cleveland in 1880, less than three per cent of the
city's population; by 1920 the Jewish population of Cleveland, then
a city of 800,000, was over 75,000. Between the Jews of Middle
European and Eastern European ancestry there was almost no social
contact, and very little inter-marriage.
The older settlers, usually rich manufacturers, had
their own clubs and their own houses of worship, the most prominent
of which was known simply as 'the Temple', where Linda's
grandparents were married. 'They were a major part of the Cleveland
Jewish community,' notes Arlene Rich, a Cleveland genealogist.
'Linda McCartney's family tree is a who's who of Jewish Cleveland.'
The Temple's approach to Judaism presents a remarkable
parallel with Linda's own attitude towards religion and her
ancestry. It is said of the Temple in The Universal Jewish
Encyclopedia that it is a bastion of 'liberal Reform Judaism . . .
one of the first to have women on the board of trustees . . .
services on Sunday took the place of the traditional Sabbath [i.e.
Friday evening-Saturday morning] service . . . more than a place of
worship [but] the center of all communal life'.
Now, here is the transcript of a conversation I had with
Linda in 1992, twenty-six years after we'd met.
DF: Do you feel totally removed from your one-half
Jewishness now?
 LM: I'm all Jewish.
DF: Your mother was Jewish? I thought your mother was
a WASP.
LM: No, my parents were both Jews. I think my mother's
people were Alsatian.
DF: / can't believe that all these years I've been
imagining your mother as this horsey, WASPy type.
LM: She was WASPy, but she was Jewish. You know,
Danny, you're much more into all this than I am. I could never get
into all that stuff, I'm very not into religion.
DF: Did your parents observe any Jewish holidays or
anything like that?
LM: / think they tried to have something for Passover
once, and we all made fun of it, and we all hated it. I've always
hated religion. It's the most guilt-ridden, horrible thing. 'My
God is better than yours, and I'm going to fight you and kill you
because of your religion.' I think it's just a sick idea. You know
how people are colour-blind when it comes to other people - I
mean, hopefully they are. Well, I'm religious-blind.
Linda's mother summered at Bar Harbor, Maine (if one had
to pick the sociological polar opposite of the Catskill Mountains,
New York's �Jewish Alps', it would be Bar Harbor, Maine), and
graduated from Smith College, one of the 'Seven Sisters' schools of
higher learning for daughters of the American aristocracy, in 1933.
She became engaged to �Leopold Vail Epstein, son of Mr. and Mrs.
Louis Epstein of New York', according to an announcement on the
society page of the New York Times: 'Cleveland, Dec. 25 - Mr. and
Mrs. Max J. Lindner of this city have announced the engagement of
their daughter, Miss Louise Dryfoos Lindner, to Leopold Vail
Epstein, son of Mr. and Mrs. Louis Epstein of New York. Miss Lindner
attended the Laurel Country Day School and graduated in 1933 from
Smith College. Mr. Epstein, who is practicing in New York, studied
at Harvard University and was graduated from law school there in
1933.'
Louise and Leopold were married at the bride's home
early in 1937. Two and a half years later, when their first child,
John, was born, something had changed: 'A son was born to Mr. and
Mrs. Leopold Vail Eastman of 12 East 88th Street on July 10 at
Doctors Hospital', it said in the Times. Well, if 'Eastman' was an
Americanization of 'Epstein', whence came the story, that persists
to this day, that Linda was the heiress to the immense Eastman Kodak
film and camera fortune? It happened that rumours linking Linda to
the Eastman family of Rochester, New York, just sprang up around her
when she began her career as a professional photographer - you know,
film, cameras, Kodak film, Kodak photographer, Eastman Kodak, it
made a nice kind of sense. 'I tried to exploit the rumours to become
a photographer,' Linda told a British paper after marrying Paul in
1969, when the truth had to come out. 'But I'm no relation
whatsoever.'
'Exploit' is a gentle way of putting it. 'She told me
her ancestor was George Eastman,' recalls Chet Helms, one of the
pioneers of the San Francisco mid-60s rock scene via his Family Dog
organization. 'It was in 1967, and she was doing the pictures for a
book that came to be called Rock and Other Four Letter Words that J.
Marks was writing.' Helms and Linda became close friends and were in
touch from time to time over the next three decades; she never said
why she had told him she was Rochester Eastman, and he never asked.
It had been, they both knew, a fib.
 It turned out to be a fib that's been very hard to
shake. Informal surveys have convinced me that most people think, to
this day, that Linda was an Eastman descendant; it makes a good
story, and it's easier to despise the girl who married Paul if she
turns out to be a debutante, as well as a bachelor-snatcher.
'Once I went to some club in Hollywood; I remember Alice
Cooper was there and Mickey Dolenz,' Linda told me on the phone from
East Hampton in the early 1990s, 'and this guy I'd never met was at
the table where we sat, and when we were introduced he said, "Oh,
and are you one of the Kodak Eastmans?" I said, "Oh the press has
said that, and it's not true." He said, "I'm so glad you said that,
because I am a member of that family, and I've hated you for years,
thinking you were going around saying that you're one of us." He was
so pleased that I told him | was so sick of that story.'
In truth, she had gone around for a few months saying
that most casually, although not to anyone in New York, where her
real family was known. Anyhow, be wary of trying to exploit rumours;
there's a reason they get started in the first place, and if you
help them along they will take on an endless life of their own, as
Linda learned.
Lee Eastman, ne Epstein, came from a very different
background from that of Louise Lindner. He was the son of Louis and
Stella Epstein (note that Linda's maternal and paternal grandmothers
were both named Stella), immigrants from Russia. They met at Ellis
Island while being processed for entry into the United States.
Leopold Epstein was born in New York City on 10 January 1910 and
grew up in the Bronx. Unlike his wife-to-be, he did not have the
advantage of private elementary or high schools and spent his
undergraduate years at City College, known affectionately as CCNY,
where tuition was free, standards were high and most of the students
were the bright but penniless children of Eastern European
immigrants. Academically, it was, in its heyday in the 1930s, one of
the best-rated colleges in America. One had to do very well indeed
in high school to be admitted. Today, alas, the school is struggling
to recover from a disastrous decline in its reputation as a result
of a 1970s decision to admit any graduate of a New York City high
school. Unfortunately, many of these graduates were pushed out of
their high schools just to make room for younger students and
entered CCNY barely literate. An influx of Asians has put some of
the sparkle back into the institution, but the cauldron of intellect
that CCNY used to be is but a memory, particular to its time and
place in New York history. CCNY was not worthy of mention, as we
have seen, in the engagement announcement cited above. But from CCNY
Leopold Epstein went on to Harvard Law School, where in terms of
social and financial standing he was very much an outsider, yet, in
terms of intelligence and ambition, probably equal to anyone in his
class. And even if they had gone to a free college, it was OK for
Harvard Law School boys to date girls from Smith - it was OK for
Harvard Law School boys to do just about anything they wanted, and
it still is.
'My father married up,' Linda told me. 'He was a very,
very bright man. From a wonderful peasant background and yet so
astute, so smart.'
Class mobility is not an irrelevant factor in the life
of Linda and her family: Paul McCartney's mother, for example,
anxious about the perceived gentility of her children, insisted that
he and his brother speak English 'properly', dropping the heavily
accented Scouse dialect of Liverpool, which betrayed at once one's
lower-class and Irish-immigrant status. 'We were upper-lower class,'
Paul once told me. Emphasis on the 'upper'. And Linda's father
'married up'. So, of course, did Paul, although some of his
Liverpool relatives hardly thought that marrying an American Jewish
divorcee was a step towards heaven - not that he cared. More about
that later.
Distinctions relating to birth are surprisingly powerful
among the Jewish elite, like the Lindners of Cleveland, who
traditionally married within their crowd. An heiress from a great
New York German-Jewish banking family once fell in love with the
heir of an immensely rich Russian-Jewish family, whose wealth was
not of impeccable origin. (This was many years ago, when the
fortunes at stake really were big time.) Her mother objected
strongly to the match. 'But, Mother,' pleaded the heiress, 'they're
worth a billion dollars, and we only have two hundred million.'
'I don't care,' retorted Mother. 'They're trash. You are
expected to do better than that.'
The Lindners, on the other hand, were a warm and
welcoming family, no doubt eager to bring in some new blood, in the
person of brilliant, handsome Leopold Epstein from the Bronx. That
borough of first- and second-generation immigrants, however, was not
where the newlyweds could be expected to set up housekeeping. So
their first home was established on 88th Street between Fifth and
Madison Avenues, in a handsome red-brick apartment building just a
few steps from Central Park, in a neighbourhood whose elegance
cannot be questioned. But although there is hardly a prettier place
to live in Manhattan, Louise was not really a city person, having
been raised in the lush and leafy neighbourhood of Cleveland Heights
(with those summers on the coast of Maine). And there was a young
child, and plans for more, so a move to the suburbs was clearly
desirable.
Scarsdale, New York, is twenty-eight miles north of the
city. It tries hard to be quiet and discreet, with its beautiful,
winding, wooded lanes and fine large houses, but it has never
succeeded, because it just screams money and always has. It is
certainly not garish, nor is it at all the 'best' address in the
suburban counties surrounding New York City, but for better or worse
it is famous for simply being ... Scarsdale. THE quintessential
wealthy suburb. Like 'Beverly Hills', 'Scarsdale' needs no
explanation - it is very rich, and although it is thought of as a
Jewish town, the population is pretty evenly made up of WASPs, Jews
and Catholics. The Eastmans lived in the Murray Hill area of
Scarsdale, perhaps the most upscale part of this already upscale
town, at 4 Dolma Road, in a sprawling stucco Spanish-style mansion
with a tiled roof. It was at this house that the Eastman family was
living when Linda Louise Eastman was born on 24 September 1941.
(There is something a bit peculiar - perhaps it's a
Cleveland thing - about the proliferation of the name 'Louise' in
Linda's family. It was her mother's name, her own middle name and
the name of her youngest sister, as in Louise Jr., rare for a female
child in any Western culture. Jewish parents generally name their
children after a deceased relative, even if it means using only the
first initial - Morris might become Marc - and not after a living
person, which is considered bad luck. Oddly as well, the two
daughters born to Linda after her mother's death are named Mary,
after Paul's mother, and Stella, after both of Linda's grandmothers.
One would have thought there would be a Louise, or any name with the
initial �L�.)
 Two more sisters, Laura and Louise Jr., were born over
the next seven years; the family thrived. Lee Eastman was
specializing in show-business law and his clients included the very
successful bandleaders Sammy Kaye and Tommy Dorsey, composer Harold
Arlen and painters like Willem de Kooning. Music and the visual arts
played a large part in the life of Linda's parents. Lee Eastman, not
unnaturally, amassed a fine collection from the painters he
represented (canvases were a welcome sudstitute for bills owed), and
after his wife's death he endowed the Louise L. Eastman Memorial
Lectureship in Art at Smith College. Friends of Louise donated a
sculpture by the English artist Henry Moore to the college's Museum
of Art. 'I was brought up all through my life with art. I was a
lover of art,' Linda has said.
The Eastmans socialized with their distinguished
clients, so Linda grew up surrounded by talented people - and was
not unnoticed by them: songwriter Jack Lawrence ('Tenderly', etc.),
a client of Linda's father, wrote the song 'Linda' for her in 1944,
and in 1946, with the great Buddy Clark on vocals, it was a huge
hit.
'When Linda was forty-five, I was trying to think what I
could get someone who's forty-five years old,' Paul remembers. 'So I
thought, aha! a 45 record. I went into the studio and recorded
"Linda", and then "Happy Birthday Linda". I had it pressed, with a
label and a sleeve, everything.
'When the original recording became a hit, someone
decided to do a television segment of Linda and Jack. This was very
early on in the TV era. She was five years old, this showbiz wife of
mine. She was at it way before I was. They put her up on a piano
while Jack Lawrence sang, and the piano was so hot because of the TV
lights, it burned her bum. And she cried. I think she felt guilty
about that, and she never cried in front of a camera again.'
(Indeed, 1946 was very early in television history; it
was virtually the first year that people had TV sets in their homes,
and total numbers were minuscule -just one dozen in Washington, DC,
for example.)
Paul also bought the publishing rights to the song and
had new sheet music printed, showing the grown-up Linda and Linda at
seven sitting on a piano holding the original sheet music, with Jack
Lawrence at the keyboard. She was not crying, having by then had two
years to develop her professionalism.
Linda showed me the newly minted sheet music for the
song in 1992, saying: 'Look at me then! I didn't realize I was such
a cute kid. You never feel that you're wonderful or beautiful when
you're young, you know what I mean?'
'God, I loved that song, it was my favourite!' I told
Linda at the time, and even sang a few lines: '"When I go to sleep,
I never count sheep, I count all the charms about Linda ..." My
grandmother had it on a 78 -you know, the records that shattered if
you dropped them. I knew all the words, and my cousin and I would do
little performances of it when the family was all together��
Linda interrupted me: 'Isn't it funny that we should be
friends, and that was your favourite song? Danny, can I have a
transcript of this tape? Because this moment is a memory.' And we
sang the rest of the song together. It is a memory indeed.
From her early childhood on, Linda was an outdoors
person, who formed a close alliance with her brother John, two years
her senior, for the purpose of exploring the woods and streams near
their house. Frogs and snakes were the objects of their fascination.
John recalled in a eulogy at the New York memorial for his sister,
'We got our only spanking for scaring our parents by coming home way
too late, each vainly trying to take the blame for the other when
there was no blame: neither of us could tell the time.'
'Scarsdale was country when I was a kid,' Linda told
Fame magazine. �It was farm country. Everyone thinks I'm this
spoiled Westchester girl, but I'm not. I'm a country lover and a
nature lover.'
Her younger sister Laura, when she was old and sturdy
enough, played pony to Linda's commanding rider, as they searched
the damper and darker crevasses of the woods for lilies of the
valley, Linda's favourite flower for the rest of her life.
Horses became an early passion, and by the time she was
a teenager Linda was a champion rider. Her sister Louise, at Linda's
memorial in New York in June 1998, spoke about Linda's room at home.
'It was painted a beautiful pale blue, with the entire moulding at
the ceiling hanging with ribbons won at horse shows. Most of them
were blue for first prize, but there were quite a few reds, greens
and yellows, but the best were the huge multi-coloured ones for the
Best of Show. She was very proud of these, and so was I.'
On the other hand, there was no boasting of equine
achievements outside the family. A friend from high school, looking
through the yearbook of Linda's class, 1959, was puzzled by the very
few extra-curricular activities and club memberships mentioned next
to Linda's picture. On being told Linda was probably riding when the
other kids were doing things related to the school, her friend was
surprised. 'She never told anybody about it. I guess she just went
and did it, and earned medals as well. It's typical of Linda that
she never really sought the approval of her peers - or her teachers.
She wasn't a good student, didn't like to read or study. I remember
an English teacher who used to pick on her for not keeping up with
the classwork. It upset her - and she was rarely upset.'
Linda's father assumed that she was at least keeping up
with her studies, and was especially pleased that she had asked for
and received permission to stay out late two nights a week so that
she could go to the local library when it had extended hours. A
chance conversation with the librarian ('You must know my daughter
Linda very well.' Blank stare) put Dad on the pursuit of the truth -
instead of the library, Linda was at a hang-out where kids listened
to the hot new sounds of the Kingston Trio and the Everly Brothers.
Music, not books. Late at night, Linda acted out the old teenage
ritual of putting her head under the pillow with a portable radio
tuned to the glories of rock and roll.
The teenage Linda Eastman was a natural
strawberry-blonde, plump ('chunky', said a high-school classmate),
pleasant looking and dressed like every other girl in town. Wealth
equalled simplicity: Shetland sweaters, Weejun loafers, plaid kilts
with huge safety pins and button-down Oxford shirts. The Brooks
Brothers natural look dominated, whether or not you actually shopped
there; the Shetland/plaid/herringbone/button-down style was the
standard among upper-middle-class youth (and their parents) in the
1950s. It was called 'tweedy'. The designer Ralph Lauren became a
billionaire in bringing back this look a few years ago - perhaps not
incidentally, he and his wife were among Paul and Linda's closest
friends in the 80s and 90s.
Hair back then in Scarsdale was simple, clean, brushed
back and worn with a headband. None of the girls wore make-up. The
idea, if there was an idea behind it all, was to look as if you went
to a British boarding school. Adornment was out - big hair, as on
the popular TV show American Bandstand - was unimaginable.
Gail Smith, who still lives in Scarsdale, remembers her
classmate at Scarsdale High School.
There was nothing bad and nothing incredible or
earth-shaking about her. She loved to sing. I remember our senior
breakfast in the school cafeteria - there was a microphone and
good piano player, and I recall thinking, 'Isn't that something!
Linda's gonna get up and sing again.' But I can't recall where
that 'again' comes from - she must have performed at some other
event. She wasn't especially good, but she wasn't bad, and she
obviously loved singing and had the self-confidence to get up and
do it. Kids in those days were very supportive of each other. No
one would have been mean or made fun of her for not being an
exceptionally good singer. They just thought it was great that she
got up and sang at all. She was an easygoing, sweet girl,
well-liked, not a belle-of-the-ball type, but nice. She always had
a smile on her face.
Gail's husband Joel, who was a year ahead of Linda,
remembers offering her rides as she walked to and from school. 'She
was a very attractive, very nice girl.'
The Eastman family spent summers in the 1940s and early
50s in the ,town of Wellfleet, about twenty miles from the tip of
Cape Cod. Itself a Yankee enclave, Wellfleet was just south of the
more artistic towns of .Truro and Provincetown, where the Eastmans
visited such eminent modern artists as Franz Kline.
�We'd pack our station wagon to the limit, with dogs and
all our summer belongings hanging out of the car,' Louise Jr.
recounted at her sister's memorial. 'My mother would pack dozens of
egg salad sandwiches for the trip.
�Wellfleet was a wonderfully easygoing place. It was a
fairly wild landscape, almost primitive. Our house was always full
of sand and there were lovely beach parties. It was a completely
different life than what we were used to, and I think that its
spirit rubbed off on all of us. Linda would make the best spaghetti
sauce ever, and blueberry pie, and we would have outrageously noisy
games of hearts. My father would promote wild family discussions,
and I confess we all became rather loud and opinionated. Somehow
these summers prepared the way for a less than conventional life, a
quality that Linda never forgot.'
The Eastman house was a magnet for Cape Cod's Upper
Bohemia, with Louise Sr. the most gracious and elegant of hostesses.
'She cared for people,' Linda said. 'I'm not a people person like
she was. She was attentive and charming - everybody loved her. She
was vivacious in an understated way, she could scope a roomful of
people and know what everybody wanted and needed. I envied that
about her, I just never felt comfortable in gatherings. My sister
Laura is more like her, I think.'
For those who knew Linda later in her life, it is
interesting that she felt that way about herself, because she
certainly was a 'people' person. Perhaps not in the sense of
handling crowds in one's living room, or maintaining a salon, but in
a one-to-one situation Linda McCartney was unmatchable. 'Sit down...
are you comfortable ... it is so wonderful to see you ... would you
like anything to eat or drink? ... oh don't worry about that.. . you
look great. . . we've missed you, haven't we, Paul?' In the mid-50s,
the Eastmans forsook Wellfleet for East Hampton. One hundred miles
from New York, this beautiful seventeenth-century town near the
eastern end of Long Island was being discovered by artists (the
great abstract expressionist painter Jackson Pollock worked from his
studio there until his death in 1956) and a few savvy New Yorkers.
It was indeed a well-kept secret, at first glance an area of potato
farms, bays and beaches and, nestled in the dunes, the great estates
of ancient blue-blood families who didn't want to be involved in the
heady social whirl of Southampton, that famous, exclusive resort to
the west.
Of course, East Hampton was a hotbed of quiet
anti-Semitism, because, after all, people went there to get away
from New York, and getting away from New York meant getting away
from the Jews. Still, some very openly Jewish families from Brooklyn
and Queens were attracted to East Hampton, with enough of them
moving in to build a temple in which to worship. Other Jews who were
neither practising their religion nor very proud of it, such as Lee
Eastman, were made uncomfortable by the influx of their more pious
brethren, fearing it would stir up the latent anti-Semitism of the
area, which it did. East Hampton became two towns; many think it
still is. 'The Jews go to the restaurants, the gentiles go to the
clubs. That's the way it's always been and always will be,' says a
long-time (Jewish) resident. But it now appears as if there's a
third town in there somewhere - Linda's brother John was voted into
the hitherto extremely 'restricted' Maidstone Club; he is one of a
very select number of Jews in the club, but never fear that he and
his family don't fit in. His wife Jody is gentile, tall, blonde and
elegant; John looks like Robert Redford, incredibly handsome in a
way that Jews think only Christians can be; and their children might
be any kids at the most exclusive, upper-class schools such as
Groton or Foxcroft.
This whole subject, which as you have seen did not
interest Linda in the least, has several interesting aspects. Her
mother was very active in the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies,
and was quite accustomed to being both Jewish and elite her entire
life. It was indeed possible to be both, and quite impossible for
Louise Sr. to be anything else. And here's an irony: Paul McCartney,
upon the birth of his first grandchild, Arthur, in April 1999, a
year after Linda died, said to several friends at different times,
'He's a very clever little lad. His mother is Jewish and his father
is Christian, so he chose to be born between Passover and Easter.'
How, this is astonishing and quite lovely. Mary, Paul
and Linda's daughter and the mother of little Arthur, is of course
one-half Jewish. ; Paul doesn't say 'hair, he says, 'His mother is
Jewish'. We now have Paul being more upfront about Linda's religion
than Linda ever was. No one had ever heard him describe his children
as 'Jewish' before - Chrissie Hynde thinks that now that Linda is
gone, Paul is cherishing everything about her even more than he did
during all their years together. Including her religion of birth,
which she cared about not at all.
East Hampton is certainly a bit of paradise, and was
very important to trhe senior Eastmans, to John and his family and
to Linda and Paul. For many years the McCartneys spent a few weeks
there every summer, renting a different house each time but never
far from Linda's father and brother, who both had (John still has)
sprawling houses on Lily Pond Lane. Bob Dylan once lived on that
street, and current residents of the neighbourhood include Calvin
Klein, Martha Stewart and Steven Spielberg. On the south side of
Lily Pond, which is beachfront, houses sell for $15 million; the
Eastmans have always been on the north side of the street, but that
is still not exactly a disgrace.
Frequently over the years Linda would say to me, 'We're
coming to East Hampton for a while, will you be near there?' And I
would respond, 'Maybe, but are you coming into the city?' and the
answer was almost always, 'No,' as in 'What city?' They would come
to New York every summer without setting foot in the city itself.
From JFK, which is near the western end of Long Island, in the
borough of Queens, a car would whisk them eastwards to the Eastmans
of East Hampton. When they left, they just did it the other way
around, and never ventured into Manhattan unless there was business
to be done. In 1989, when the McCartneys rehearsed for their
forthcoming tour at Broadway's Lyceum Theater, they would leave the
theatre every night in a limousine which took them to the heliport
on the river; from there a helicopter flew them to tiny East Hampton
airport, where a car would be waiting to take them home. In the
morning, they'd commute into the city the same way. That was after
they finally stopped renting and bought a house in East Hampton,
north of the Montauk Highway (equivalent to the wrong side of the
tracks, but what did they care?), invisible from the road, on a
hillside above the town.
So, that's East Hampton for now, an important place for
Linda for nearly forty-five years.
In 1959, kids of Linda's generation and social class
were expected to go to college; in fact it was an obsession to get
into a 'good' school of higher learning, and Scarsdale High placed
its graduates at the country's most prestigious institutions. But
for Linda, a future in the halls of academe was very nearly
preposterous. She loved horses, nature, art, rock and roll, 'bombing
around' (driving) her mother's powder-blue Ford convertible with the
top down and Alan Freed on the radio, and being alone. At her
parents' frequent parties, she preferred to hang out in the kitchen
with the hired help; she really didn't have much to talk about with
the guests.
But one had to go to college; there was no alternative
for a seventeen-year-old girl from a distinguished family. Linda
chose the University of Arizona in Tucson; it was fairly easy to get
accepted there, considering her quite unremarkable high-school
grades, it was far from the pressures of home and, perhaps most
important, it was deep in the horseriding country of the American
southwest.
Naturally, the horses in the Tucson area took up more
time than her studies, and Linda, without a great deal of reluctance
(although her parents were certainly not pleased), dropped out of
school well before even choosing a major. Her father refused to
support her if she wasn't in school, and Linda faced one of the
great crises of her life up to that time. She knew she had to start
earning her own way. 'All right, I'll be a dental assistant, I said
to myself,' Linda recalled. 'But I went for one interview, and
thought, "Oh my God, no way!"'
She was considering alternative ways of getting by in
Arizona, when in March 1962 her mother was killed, and of course she
had to return home to Scarsdale.
'I had never really connected with my mother,' Linda
told Zoe Heller for an article that appeared in Vanity Fair in
October 1992. 'But for my father, it was a disaster. My parents had
been very much in love. When de Kooning wrote to my father after the
death, he described the relationship as a 25-year love affair.'
The family was shattered, and friends were called in to
help with Linda's younger sisters, Louise, then twelve, and Laura,
fifteen. Of course Linda should have stayed to mend the wreckage of
what had , been an ideal family. Instead, she returned to Arizona.
�It was a kind of escapism,' she said to Heller. 'I was
very immature. I just escaped.' Linda went back to Arizona and her
boyfriend, a geology student named Mel See. She became pregnant
within weeks of her return and married Mel on 18 June 1962. Their
daughter, Heather, was born on 31 December, but by the end of 1964,
when her husband suggested that the family go to Africa, Linda told
him to go alone and the couple separated. In 1963, Lee Eastman had
been remarried, to Monique Schless Sprayregen, a wealthy New York
widow and the mother of three sons, and in 1965 Linda and her baby
moved back to the home of her father and his new family.

Chapter 4
'The 1960s were the age of erotic labour. . . It was a time when
your erotic energies would be central to your work; wherever your
erotic instincts led you, that's where you would try to put your
work.'
Richard Goldstein
It was the best of times, it was the best of times.
It was some West Coast musician - several take credit
for the thought, although it is probably attributable to Jack
Cassady of Jefferson Airplane - who said that if you can remember
the 1960s, then you weren't there. That is, we were so high all the
time that there's a blackout riding on the back of that decade in
our minds. Add to that possibility the reality that those of us who
were young thirty-five years ago are now beginning to experience
certain annoying lapses of memory, whether or not drugs were a part
of our lives back then.
Or, the memories are there, but they don't quite agree
with others' memories of the same events - this is the Rashomon
phenomenon: there is no history, there is no memory, there is no
truth. One can certainly begin to feel that way after soliciting
recollections of the places and the times from perfectly
intelligent, rational witnesses, who may have done a few drugs now
and then but are sure of what they know; or from perfectly
intelligent, rational witnesses who confess to getting things mixed
up occasionally.
'Who was there? I think you were there. You weren't? You
couldn't possibly have been in New York in June 1968? I could swear
you were there. I remember you standing by the window of our hotel
room, I remember it perfectly, I remember what you were wearing and
who you were talking to. No? Well, maybe you weren't there, but I
remember who else was there ..."
Still, I trust the people I talked to for this book.
They were smart then, and if they're still around, they're even
smarter. They may have problems with some recollections, but the
picture is there, others can fill in some of the missing pieces, and
the difference between two accounts of the same event is usually
just one of emphasis and perception. One remembers what makes one
feel good and what makes one look good, it is to be hoped, for the
opposite can be very painful.
There are some things we'll never know - the witnesses
are gone, and many things were never that important anyhow. But if
we don't remember exactly what we were doing all the time, we
remember who we were, who our friends were and why they were our
friends. Besides, we taped each other's phone calls all the time, it
was the thing to do, so the past is not lost, just elusive.
What is most pertinent to this story, when it comes to
the telling of the past, is that Linda was a most extraordinary
person, all her early life indeed, but especially after she burst
into the world of international rock and roll celebrity in 1966.
People usually remember Linda well, their encounters with her, their
perception of her in the many roles she played, their one-to-one
relationships with her (if they had any), and they also usually
remember liking her and what she did and said and who she was.
Because she was fairly famous very quickly, and
enormously famous within a few years and for the rest of her life.
People retain memories of their moments with very famous people;
it's one of the last things you ever forget. And when the person is
gone, and there will be no more new memories, the old ones are
dusted off, packaged well and stored away. The unfortunate and
embarrassing opposite is when someone famous whom you once knew no
longer remembers you - though you will never forget them, and never
stop boasting of your acquaintance with celebrities. That's a fact
of the pecking order of fame; you can't let it get you down.
I worked for Cream when they first came to perform in
America in early 1967; Brian Epstein was a friend of mine and, in
partnership with Robert Stigwood, he managed them, so they hired me
as their press agent for their three weeks in New York. I couldn't
get them any press, I couldn't get them arrested. Eric Clapton may
have been God in London, but he was no divinity here, except to one
beautiful slim blonde whose name I forget. After Brian introduced
the group at a (breakfast) press conference for the band at Max's
Kansas City restaurant, guaranteeing a full house of journalists,
there was nothing more to be done, no further interest. So Ginger
Baker and I sort of bonded, as unlikely a pair of buddies as there
ever has been, but we seemed so odd to each other -and I was after
all being paid to keep an eye on the band - that we were soon
comfortable just hanging out, watching television, having dinner
together at Max's and late-night drinks at the bar of his hotel.
Ginger Baker and I were Really Friends; as weird as it sounds, we
were. Plus I was with the whole group at the theatre where they were
performing, always in their dressing room, and at their recording
sessions with Felix Pappalardi at the Atlantic studios on West 60th
Street, from which came 'Strange Brew', originally titled 'Brain
Soup'. And I never forgot what it was like hanging out with Ginger,
who could?
Well, twenty years later he was back in town, some party
at the Hard Rock in his honour, and I really looked forward to a hug
and a giggle and remembering those nights when I showed him around
New York, where he'd never been before, when Eric and Jack had gone
off somewhere and it was just me and Ginger. And guess what, he
didn't remember me at all. I wasn't really surprised. Hey, what a
life he's had, the people he's met along the way, the travelling
he's done. I'm sure there was a 'me' in every city Cream went to,
and they were a supergroup and I was me; why should he remember? If
I were to forget him, I'd have handed in my credentials as a
'witness to history' a long time ago. There are people who remember
me whom I don't remember: 'You heard our band in Boston and you
wrote us a nice letter with good advice, and you said you really
liked our music . . .', and I have no idea who this person is, and I
say, 'Oh yeah, well, it's good to see you again.' Ginger Baker was
past pretending such things. (I told this anecdote to Paul, who of
course knew the awkward phenomenon perhaps as well as anyone on the
planet: 'Oh, they come over and say, "I tuned your bass in France",'
he said. '"Don't you remember? We were real mates, we used to sit
around, you told me about your mother and father . . ."')
As I said, it's the Fame Pecking Order. So Linda Eastman
McCartney is well remembered by anyone whose life she touched. And
the 60s are well remembered too, albeit through a purple haze.
From mid-1966 until late 1968, when she moved in with
Paul for good, Linda was getting around. I once read an interview
with Goldie Hawn, who is of course one half of a great showbusiness
couple, where she said, 'Before I settled down with Kurt, I was
doing some canoodling around. Why not? But then we settled down.'
Canoodling, I like that word. It means, to me, checking
things out, experimenting with relationships, seeing where they
lead. And I think when you're canoodling, it's a big part of your
life and a lot of energy goes into it, because after all, in modern
terms among modern people, it is the search for a mate. How great
when the search ends well - it must mean that the searching was
conducted well, because no great romance is ever luck.
'The 1960s,' says Richard Goldstein, executive editor of
the Village Voice and probably the first journalist ever to have a
regular column on rock in any publication, 'were the age of erotic
labour, to use a phrase out of Marcuse. It was a time when your
erotic energies would be central to your work; wherever your erotic
instincts led you, that's where you would try to put your work. And
that's what you would try to do -integrate your sex life with your
work, if you could.'
Well, if your work was photographing rock stars, if you
were a beautiful girl and if you dated some of them from time to
time, this Marcusian effort got you labelled a 'groupie', and let's
face it, Linda got called a groupie and we have to deal with that.
What is/was a groupie, and what did it mean to be one?
It is not spilling any beans to record that Linda
Eastman was romantically linked with (she preferred to say 'dated')
some of the most successful, handsome and talented young men in the
world. Whatever you might have heard, there were probably no more
than twenty such 'linkages' in the two and half years before she
settled down into unblemished monogamy with Paul, the number of
whose dalliances, by his own admission, is much, much higher.
The Beatles were higher in other ways too, according to
photographer Bob Gruen, who became a close friend of John and Yoko
Ono Lennon after they moved to New York. (Gruen took the famous
picture of John, arms crossed in a New York City T-shirt, with the
skyline in the background.) As Gruen recently said,
The Beatles had them lined up. Twenty-year-olds,
thirty-year-olds, sixteen-year-olds, you name it. It was funny
learning about it later from John, but the Beatles had access to
more women than anybody knew. When their public persona was 'I
Wanna Hold Your Hand', and they were clean-cut, clean hair, nice
guys, they would go out to clubs and people would just put things
in their pockets. 'Take this joint, take this pill, take this
tinfoil' - all kinds of things. The four would go back to the
hotel, they had a mortar and pestle, and they'd open up the
capsules, put the pills in, open up the tinfoils, pour it in,
grind the thing and put a spoonful in their coffee the next
 morning. And that's how they would go out and be the Beatles for
another day. This was a time when everyone was on acid, but this
was way beyond that. And the girls everywhere - they were fucking
their brains out.
Well, our little behind-the-scenes crowd, the writers,
the publicists, the photographers, me, Linda - we were virgins
compared to the bands, and the other bands were virgins compared to
the Beatles, and none of us were virgins.
I don't think anyone was keeping tabs on Linda, except
perhaps the late Lillian Roxon, the great Australian journalist who
became her confidante and closest friend. But twenty or so guys is
about right, the rest of Linda's friends have figured out. Linda
herself sometimes, in moments of exercising her newly found bravado,
added people to the list who didn't belong there. The thing is, they
weren't just guys, they were stars. There was no one in her life
whom anyone we knew would ever have been embarrassed to have been
seen with. One can't say that about oneself, and I wonder who can.
She indeed knew what was being said about her far and
wide, she always did. Groupie? 'I don't care what I'm called, I
really don't,' she told me. 'The way I define the word, I wasn't a
groupie. There were girls around who were classic groupies; they
were very glamorous and often pretty fabulous, I thought. But I did
hang out with groups. If that makes me a groupie, so be it. If
people have to pin a single word of description on me, there are
certainly others I'd prefer, but still, when you know who you really
are, how can you let that get to you?'
She was more succinct with the beautiful model Bebe
Buell, a girl who went out with rock stars and was sought after by
them. She once said to Linda, 'Oh, people are calling me a groupie,
and I'm not one of those girls who hangs around hotel hallways and I
don't want to be called that.'
Linda answered, 'They call me that too. I know who I am.
I don't give a shit.'
Nat Weiss, Brian Epstein's American partner, said of
Linda,
She certainly stood out way above all the other girls
who were around the scene. Way above. She was very bright, she was
a good mother, I never saw her drunk, I never had any question
about the fact that she was a solid person. She had no attitude,
she was always very friendly and very intelligent. She was ten
cuts above any of the girls who went out with musicians. God
knows, I saw thousands of them in that whole scene, and she
certainly stood out, she was like no one else. And I have no doubt
that from the moment she met Paul, she was in love with him, and
compared to any other guy she knew, Paul stood out more and more.
She was obsessed with him. And from what he said to me when they
first met and became acquainted, he was convinced - but I don't
know if he admitted this to himself right away, he wanted to make
sure - that she was the one.
'Everybody got called a groupie,' Richard Goldstein
remembers.
I guess you were a wife, or an 'old lady', or a
groupie. Linda was certainly not the kind of person I would see
hanging around the Who, for instance; those blank, shrieking girls
who offered up lots of decadent sex with musicians, any musicians.
They were truly tramps and sluts, or whatever words people use to
describe those girls. But there were also very classy groupies,
there were some women rock critics who were groupies, and Linda
 was probably the classiest of all them. And they all got called
groupies; what does that mean? Linda's attitude towards men was
supportive and sophisticated. She exuded a feeling of wealth and
status and sophistication. Also, she had this aura of intense
empathy .. . intense empathy. I still remember that quality about
her.
There's a word in science fiction that people use
today called 'Empath'. I would say that describes her pretty well.
These are people who connect with other people in an intense way,
an unusual way, and therefore are very compelling. It's a
charisma; you make the other person feel that somebody with a lot
of magnetism and strength is interested in you. And for rock
stars, that was very unusual and something they yearned for,
because it's a very nomadic life, one of tremendous tension and
dislocation and craziness.
So somebody like Linda had the quality of appearing
like an anchor in many ways, yet worldly, and not aggressive or
brassy. She was very warm, she didn't have that kind of brittle
quality that a lot of people on the scene had in those days. It
was a time of intense brittleness. If you think of the Warhol
crowd, you can get a sense of how brittle people aspired to be in
those days, and she was not like that at all, not at all.
Extremely receptive, very friendly. She worked with me a lot when
I went to do interviews, and she really didn't have any reason to
do that, because she was already more well known than I was. It
was part of her niceness.
From my interview with Linda and Paul, 1992:
DF: Linda, you never did like the Warhol crowd, did
you?
LM: That was your scene much more than mine. I never
hung out with those people at Max's Kansas City. The drugs, the
amphetamines made me uncomfortable. Mainly, I had a daughter, I
had to be home at night, I had to be careful.
DF: You were the straightest girl in rock and roll.
PM: Straight, but funky!
Straight she may have been, but Linda's confidence in
her ability to attract men grew astronomically after just a few
months of photographing groups and celebrities; her pictures were
attracting the attention of magazine editors all over town.
I once had an assignment to interview Warren Beatty at
his hotel suite, and I told Linda to come along and get the shots.
As he and I talked, she moved around the room taking pictures of
him, noiseless as a panther in the night. After about half an hour,
she caught my eye and made a 'Cut! Finished!' gesture, drawing her
index finger across her throat, very broadcast industry, very cool.
I said, 'Oh, excuse me Warren, my photographer is done, but I wonder
if I can have a few more minutes with you?'
'Oh, sure,' he replied. 'I'll see her to the door, I'll
be right back.'
He was right back. 'Your photographer is so
professional,' he gushed. 'I hardly knew she was here.'
'Yeah, Linda is great,' I agreed. 'And the pictures will
be fabulous.'
The next day, I called her to ask how she thought it had
gone. 'Oh, I've got the contacts back already and I love them,' she
answered. 'And Warren is terrific. We had the greatest dinner, and
we talked for hours.'
'You what?' I exclaimed, naively, since I should have
been able to put two and two together, or one and one together as it
were, by that time.
'Well, he asked me to dinner when he walked me to the
door. He's so nice, don't you think?'
'Very smart, and a perfect gentleman,' I told her, 'and
he liked you too.'
'I know,' said Linda.
From Linda's Linda McCartney - Sixties: 'I used to go to
a club a lot called Ondine's, which was a very small club on the
Upper East Side of New York . . . the Doors [were] there for two
weeks, and I had my camera and I started taking the pictures that
are in my book of Jim Morrison singing . . . [it] was all just me
about a foot away from him, before he had released "Light My Fire,"
and before they were discovered. The Doors, because we were friends,
we'd go out to dinner. I'd tell them about a restaurant, or we'd
walk around town and my apartment became a bit of a hang-out. It was
in a residential area and I'll tell you, my neighbors would look at
me like "What is this?! And she has a daughter and she's walking
around with all those long-haired guys, my goodness."'
The neighbours, I certainly think, had no cause to be
concerned about the quality of Linda's mothering. When any of her
children were young (say, the years between Heather's birth at the
end of 1962 until James was in his mid-teens in the early 1990s),
being a mother was her very first priority, as anyone and everyone
who knew the family will testify to.
Still, in 1966 Linda did, every once in a while, tend to
her own needs, and it is not to be expected that the accounts of
these episodes would turn up in a promotion for her book of
photographs. For example, Jim Morrison, the object of every girl's
desire during the short time he was in the public eye as a great
beauty (1966-68) and before he became a pudgy drunk, was a bit more
than just a friend.
'She really wanted to meet Jim,' recalls Elektra's
senior vice-president at the time, Steve Harris, who was very close
to the group. 'They were playing at Ondine's late in 1966, just
before the release of their first album, and he was the hottest
thing in town. The girls who "knew" were dropping dead at his feet.'

Linda called Steve and arranged to meet him at the club,

a disco on the Upper East Side, before the show. They smoked some
hash under the 59th Street Bridge, the band played, Linda took her
pictures and Steve took Linda into the dressing room to meet the
band. 'Jim paid her no attention that night,' says Harris. 'But we
went back the next night, and after the show I saw Linda and Jim
walking out of the club together. She turned to wave and smile at
me, and I said to Jim, "Don't forget there's an interview at the
office tomorrow." He grunted an OK, and never turned up for the
interview.
'He called me the next afternoon, and all he said was,
"Oh, man which took about half a minute to come out. I lectured him
about missing interviews, and he said nothing more. I mean, he'd
said nothing to begin with except that "Oh man."'
Morrison was more alert that night at Ondine's, and
described a scene at Linda's apartment remembered with not a little
amusement. There was a woman there who left as soon as Linda got
home, obviously a babysitter, and Linda and Jim were getting snuggly
on her living room roll-away when the door to the bedroom opened.
'Suddenly there was this little kid standing there,'
Morrison told Harris. 'So the chick [he meant Linda - he was such a
gentleman] looks at her and says, "You OK?" The kid says nothing,
just sort of nods her head "Yeah", and the chick says, "Mommy is
busy dear, go back to bed, I'll come and see you in a little bit." I
dig that chick. She's smart. She was taking pictures during the
show. She says she's a photographer.'
I myself went to work for Elektra Records several months
later as the director of the newly invented Publicity Department; I
was therefore the press agent for the Doors. Morrison and I came to
loathe each other intensely over the next few years, which story is
well documented elsewhere. But I must say, three of my favourite
women, who were also three of the most extraordinary people I've
ever known - Linda, Gloria Stavers and Nico - were all convinced
that he was, at the very least, a wonderful guy. Nevertheless,
Gloria and Nico had horror stories about him, although Linda never
did, probably because he was in and out of her life fairly quickly,
fortunately for her.
In all of Linda's photographs of people and/or animals,
i.e. sentient beings, there are several things happening that make
the images so good. The technical aspects - like lighting and
composition - are just there, intuitively conquered from the start.
When Linda and I were putting together the book Linda's Pictures in
the mid-70s, I'd see, much more often than not, contact sheets
without a single picture badly lit or out of focus. They weren't all
wonderful, or we'd have had nervous breakdowns choosing between
them, but they were all proficient, and there were usually several
that were wonderful indeed. In work that comes out of a studio, it
is not exceptional to see every shot well done, technically at
least; lighting is controlled, the camera is on a tripod. But Linda
worked with a hand-held camera when she did portraits, and with
available light. So her achievement on that level was pretty
unusual, most impressive.
But there are other things going on in her work that
lift it to another level. One is timing - she knew just when to trip
the shutter. Another is the affection she obviously felt for her
subjects. She was a person full of love; I heard that from nearly
everyone I spoke to who had known her (I certainly never heard the
opposite, in case you're wondering why I said 'nearly': some people,
a few, just never brought it up). You felt it coming from her, it
was quite extraordinary. And people returned the compliment to her
lens, they wanted to look their best, to show off what they liked
about themselves for this person who was taking their picture; it
was instinctive on both sides, which is why you see this
'personality' (what is the word? 'Soul'? No, we stick with
'personality', oxymoronic though it may be) in her pictures of
animals. They knew what she felt for them, and they somehow knew how
to pose for her. Is this silly, sentimental? So be it.
Sam Andrew, guitarist with Big Brother and the Holding
Company, Janis Joplin's wonderful band until they were fired by her
new big-time manager, Albert Grossman, in 1968 (Sam did join her new
group for a while the next year), remembers her as
a wonderful person. She did real non-rock and roll
things, she brought me a heater for my room at the Chelsea Hotel,
and no one did things like that. It was really caring, on the
creature comfort level. Jewish-mother kind of thing, although I
never thought of her being Jewish back then. She was blonde and
preppy. Anyhow, I didn't know what Jewish was until I read Lenny
Bruce, you know, I was West Coast, father in the air force. So we
 became friends, and everyone thought we were having this thing.
There's some book out now by Alice Eccles and she says that Linda
and I went off into the night after a concert at the Fillmore
East, and the band was supposed to rehearse but I just ran off,
boom, missed the rehearsal and left Janis all alone, so she wound
up at Ratner's, haranguing the waiters or something. This is not
true, and how can you believe someone who thinks that a band is
about to rehearse after a concert? No band is gonna do that, that
just doesn't happen. And you know Janis was not so left-alone as
in the legends. She always had to carry on about something, even
if she had wall-to-wall boyfriends, which she very often did.
Asked what he thought of the g-word, Sam replies,
If anything I was more of a groupie than she was. I
would not use that word about Linda. Oh, I'm not gay or anything,
as far as I know, but I always put more value on looks. Linda was
never trading on people's fame, or leaving the real person out of
the equation, which is what real groupies did. But Linda was far
away from that.
When I heard she married Paul, I thought, 'Wow! He
could have any woman in the world,' and Linda was like family to
me. Linda! And then I was really happy for him and for her. I
thought after all that it made perfect sense, that Paul was really
levelheaded. I'm not surprised they stayed together. She sent me a
telegram after they got married. 'You better believe it,' she said.

Linda's incredible career, within a few months, had

brought her close to most of the giants of 1960s rock and roll. She
was photographing practically everyone in the pantheon of the new
musical culture. And it's not only how well her instincts served her
that amazes us when we look at her photographs from that time, but
how good, how prescient her musical tastes were. Whether they've
made it into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, as by far most of her
favourites have, or if they're merely ever more interesting as time
goes by (like Blue Cheer, Jackson Browne, Tim Buckley), Linda picked
the best.
Jimi Hendrix, while we're on the subject, awed Linda.
She never needed to be told to listen to what he was doing because
it was going to change the way musicians played and audiences
listened - she'd tell you. It has always been rumoured that there
was more to their relationship than mutual admiration, and great
admiration it was, but that was it. 'Jimi's girls' were known to all
of New York for their gaudy glamour: Linda Eastman was very much not
one of them.
'She was just fascinated with his persona, his drive,
his magnetism, his ability to mesmerize crowds; he was a very
powerful figure, with a lot of mystery about him,' remarks Eddie
Kramer, Jimi's record producer and biographer. 'She was so different
from the girls Jimi was famous for dating. Linda was educated, an
intellectual in comparison with the other women he found so
fascinating. Completely different, completely different, but he
liked Linda for who she was. I don't think he would have had her
around for one second had she not been so talented, if her pictures
were not that good. Linda, I always thought, was a woman obviously
in charge of her own destiny to a large degree, which women in those
days were not.'
Linda recalled that Hendrix would visit her at home, and
together they'd scrutinize and mark up the black and white contact
sheets of the pictures she took of him. 'With the colour slides,'
she said, 'we'd sit on the floor and hold them up to the window,
because I didn't have a light-board. The ones he liked he'd chuck
into his briefcase - he carried a briefcase with him like a
businessman. So Jimi had all my great colour shots of him in that
briefcase, and I don't know what happened to them, because I never
saw them again after he died. They must have gone with him, and that
was sort of sad for me.'
'When you think of the historical perspective,' adds
Kramer, 'it's interesting, isn't it, that it was Paul McCartney who
got Jimi on the bill at the Monterey Pop Festival?' (Although
Hendrix had performed in America, especially in clubs in New York,
as Jimmy James and the Blue Flames, it was in England, with the Jimi
Hendrix Experience, that he first astonished crowds and fellow
musicians; the Experience made its American debut at the historic
Monterey Festival in northern California, in June 1967.) Kramer
notes, 'That was a very important deal. Paul called the promoters
and said, "You have to put this guy in the show." Paul was a huge
Hendrix fan. I have no way of knowing if Linda was directly talking
to Paul about Jimi at that time, but it's a fascinating connection.'

Each of these relationships - friendship, fling, or

not-quite-definable -retained its own resonance with Linda, I think,
for the rest of her life. Not so much as men-I-have-been-with, but
much more as a sentimental evocation of a few years that she had
loved, cherished the memory of and abandoned with a fond farewell
when the time came. It wasn't required, for Linda to romanticize the
memories of these guys, that they had actually 'dated' - it would
have been enough to have been a friend, to have loved someone's
music, to have been at a fantastic concert or recording session, or
to have captured the beauty of these people with her camera.
Tim Buckley, the brilliant singer/songwriter who died of
a heroin overdose at the age of twenty-eight in 1975, was a boy with
whom she had a very brief fling, but whose memory she cherished,
almost inordinately, long after the short time they spent together
in 1967. I was his publicist at Elektra Records, a close friend and
a great fan, and I set up a Central Park photo shoot with Linda and
Timmy. Linda loved to work in Central Park, and took many of her
best pictures in New York's huge, famous mid-town oasis. The
subject(s) could be isolated from the noise and action of the city,
obviously, and the backgrounds were beautiful and almost infinite in
number. This shoot resulted in dozens of exquisite, fantastically
composed photographs, with Timmy looking his most fragile and
angelic (he was, at the same time, a tough little devil), and the
afternoon ended with Timmy and Linda going back to her apartment for
ham sandwiches and an iceberg lettuce salad. Whatever. They were
together only a very few more times; his budding drug habit scared
Linda, and she preferred to remember the innocent Timmy rather than
the one who was getting himself into a lot of trouble.
After he died, she often brought up his name when the
two of us talked about the people we had known together, frequently
when Paul was there, rather enjoying our reminiscences. 'Oh, Tim
Buckley! He was wonderful! It's so terrible what happened to him. He
was so sweet. What a beautiful voice. Paul, you always liked his
music. I wish I could find his records.'
Me: 'But Linda, I sent you the CD re-releases a couple
of months ago, I sent them to your office in London.'
'Oh dear, well, I must have them somewhere then. But you
could send them again, and make sure you write that they're to be
sent right to me.'
Me: 'I did, darling, but I'll do it again.'
'He was very special, wasn't he?'
'Yes, Linda, he was.'
On a Saturday afternoon in 1978, Paul and Linda
McCartney walked into a cheesy (so to speak) pizzeria on Christopher
Street around the corner from my apartment, where Paul handed a
dollar bill to the boy behind the counter and asked him for change
for the telephone. 'I suppose you want to call Danny Fields,' said
the pizza boy to the superstar.
'How the hell did you know that?' a clearly taken aback
Paul asked.
'Oh, I live with him,' answered the handsome strapping
youth, the late Vance Buck (to whom Elton John's 1992 album The One
was dedicated). 'Come on, he's not home, but I'll take you up to the
apartment and you can wait for him.'
I got back only after they'd left, to find a note from
them: 'Your friend let us in, we waited, we'll talk to you later',
and propped up next to the stereo turntable were Tim Buckley's first
and second albums. That's what they listened to while they waited.
Myself, I can never find what I'm looking for among my vinyl or CD
albums - there are thousands of them, they're not in any order and I
don't particularly care. How they (no doubt Linda, not they) located
those two records, I will never be able to figure out.
One night in the spring of 1991, record producer Hal
Lindner was putting together a (long overdue) tribute to Tim Buckley
at a church in Brooklyn Heights renowned for its rather avant-garde
events. Scheduled to appear in New York for the first time, singing
two of his father's songs, was Jeff Scott Buckley, Tim's son. Tim
had bolted from Los Angeles to New York while his wife was pregnant
with Jeff; father and son had been together only twice in Jeff's
lifetime, and only once when Jeff was old enough to know that this
was indeed his father. I had never met Jeff, nor to my knowledge had
anyone who had hung out with Tim Buckley in his New York days. Linda
and Paul were in town, and I asked her if she wanted to come to this
tribute to her beloved Tim and meet his son.
'I can't make it,' she replied, 'but I'd love to send
him a note. I don't know if he knows Tim and I were friends, but I'd
just like to tell him how great I thought his father was.' A few
hours later a messenger delivered an envelope to me; in it was a
note from Linda to Jeff. I dashed backstage after the show (if
indeed it's called 'backstage' at a church; I never know) and
introduced myself to young Jeff - an astonishingly beautiful and
talented replica of his late father, by the way.
'Linda McCartney asked me to give you this note. She was
a friend of your father's, and has always been a huge fan of his
music'
'I know that they knew each other, I know it very well,'
he said. 'My favourite picture of my father is one that she took,
and I keep it with me all the time. It's the one where he's sitting
on a step with his feet like this, all pigeon-toed. Please tell her
that I can't ever thank her enough for that picture.'
Jeffs own career started to take off soon after that.
Linda followed it closely in the press, and would ask me about him
whenever we spoke. Then she called to say that she and Paul would be
in New York to do Saturday Night Live, and could I bring Jeff up to
their dressing room, as they were both so eager to meet him?
I relayed this summons to him (it was always more in the
nature of a summons than an invitation when one was invited into the
actual Presence), and he was terrified. 'What will I talk about? I'm
just not ready to meet them, I don't know if I'll ever be ready,
what should I wear?' etc.
Jeff and I were whisked into the McCartney dressing room
at 30 Rockefeller Plaza; they both stood up to meet him - Paul
greeted Jeff with the famous charm that outshines anyone else's that
I have ever known, and Linda hugged him. 'We're so happy that you're
doing so well,' she began, and they continued to make such a loving
fuss over him that I soon began to feel de trop. One is not supposed
to leave until one is signalled to do so (which indeed I have been,
from time to time), but I never thought of myself as one of those
ones, so I said, 'Well, Jeff, I'm going to be off, I'm sure you'll
be OK.'
He looked at me as if he weren't so sure at all, but
Linda saw that and intervened. 'Of course he will. You take care of
yourself.' Bye guys!
Months later, it was reliably reported to me that Paul
and one of his children (probably Stella, but I won't put my arm in
the fire on that) actually went to the Roseland Ballroom to see Jeff
Buckley perform. Paul almost never goes to concerts, it's like the
President taking a scheduled airlines flight. And to see Linda's
friend's son? Even though he was one of the shining talents of the
1990s - this still blows my mind. Only a 60s cliche will do.
Alone at the house I take on Fire Island each spring and
summer, fifty miles and a world away from New York City, pottering
in my garden on a dreary Friday afternoon, I had a call from Linda,
who was home in England. As always, she didn't bother saying 'Hello'
or identifying herself, she just started talking.
'I heard that Jeff Buckley drowned in the Mississippi
River,' she said at once. 'What do you know?'
'Nothing, of course I would have heard something, it's a
ridiculous rumour.' I was getting upset and angry - I mean, friends
have died in weird ways - and I kind of barked at her: 'Anyhow, how
could you know? You're sitting there on your hilltop in the middle
of nowhere, how could you know? I'm sure it's not true.'
'Check on it, will you?' Linda insisted. 'And get back
to me right away.'
Of course it was true; it had happened the day before. A
slightly inebriated Jeff Buckley, aged thirty-one, went swimming
with a friend on a river beach, fully clothed, and a wave took him
away. His body was recovered on the Memphis waterfront a few days
later. And Linda knew about it before any of Jeffs own friends in
New York, where he had lived.
Refusing to believe that Linda was actually psychic, I
tried to trace the source of her information. When I asked her how
she knew that Jeff had drowned, she said she had heard it from 'a
friend at MTV in New York'. More probing revealed that she had heard
the story either from a high-profile record producer, or from his
girlfriend, who worked at MTV. The news was so devastating that
Linda couldn't quite recall; the 'girlfriend at MTV", it turned out,
was an old friend of mine, and so I told her I hadn't realized that
her guy was close to Linda McCartney, close enough to transmit death
rumours to. 'He's not,' she replied. 'But I'll ask him.' She called
back: 'He knows nothing about this, he promises. It must be someone
else.'
But it wasn't 'someone else'. Linda had given me the
producer's name. Now, she'd be evasive from time to time, but never
did she lie. This whole episode remains an unsolved mystery; I'll
attribute it to ... I don't know, the power of love, perhaps
instinct. And maybe I was wrong to think that Linda wasn't psychic,
however that gift might manifest itself. Those Buckley men were
strange angels, father and son, after all.
I think one of the most charming stories about Linda's
'gorgeous guys' comes from Bob Weir, in 1968 a drop-dead beauty and
lead guitarist of San Francisco's still struggling Grateful Dead. In
a recent conversation, he told me,
First of all, I remember her face. Just her face. I
remember her, yes. She pinned me right away, she wouldn't avert
her gaze. I was the one who met her at the door at the Ashbury
Street house when she came to photograph the band. Our manager had
told us that Linda Eastman was coming by, that she was the Eastman
Kodak heiress and a big-time photographer, a really good
photographer.
The word was that she was so pretty and so rich that
someone was going to make a play for her eventually and take the
prize. She took a lot of pictures of me that day, and then we were
going to come back the next day, because some guys couldn't be
there. But that night I was getting all kinds of heat from the
band, they were convinced that she was the Linda Eastman of
Eastman Kodak, and that since she took all these pictures of me
she must have liked me, so the guys were pressuring me to hook up
with her. 'Do it for your fellow band members,' they were saying.
She was rich and we weren't; I suppose they wanted the band to
marry into all this money. We were really broke.
Their reasoning was, here was this attractive young
single lady and we sort of had the same background, my family was
well-to-do, so the guys thought it was a perfect match. They
weren't kidding. I'd just left home the year before to go be a
starving artist and I was pleased with what was happening, but the
other guys had been starving for a little longer and it wasn't so
much fun. They were actually trying to force-feed me to her, and
it got a little uncomfortable for me and for her, you know how
guys can be when they've got this plan. So I just went up into the
attic and hid. It was getting a little embarrassing, and I guess
she was kind of feeling it too. As if she were going to buy us
equipment or something. The guys hammered each other all the time,
and it was my turn. We couldn't afford a TV, so if we weren't on
each other's cases we had nothing else to do. It was a way to keep
ourselves amused.
There was nothing romantic going on between me and
Linda that day she was first there. I was nineteen, and maybe
there was a little flirtation going on, but that's all. We talked
about the quality of light - I'd never had a substantial
conversation with a photographer before, and she was obviously way
into it. I found it interesting to hear her talk about light and
shadows and colours, and then we walked around the Panhandle [of
Golden Gate Park] and just looked around. It was a whole new
experience for me, to start looking at things through a visually
oriented person's eyes.
But there was definitely something that she had about
her. She was maybe the only photographer that the guys could ever
sit still for, for more than two or three minutes. When she was
looking at you, it seemed as if she was staring into the window of
your soul, she was looking around in there. I'm not sure about the
other guys, but I certainly felt it. She was an old friend, even
 though we'd just met. There's probably less than half a dozen
people like that in your whole lifetime. I'm a total believer in
reincarnation, and I would be real surprised if Linda and I hadn't
put in some time together in the past. There was that little flash
of recognition. An old friend that you've just met, you know?
Shortly after the Grateful Dead photo shoot Linda went
to London to be with Paul, and when Bob Weir heard the news of their
marriage in March 1969 his first reaction was, 'Atta girl!'
They never met again.
I guess that's what Paul was ready for, after six
years of candy being thrown at him. Obviously, they had to have
had a very strong relationship to weather everything they must
have gone through, being so famous, the object of every girl's
fantasies, it's gotta put a strain on things. But they did it.
After she died Paul said he loved her completely from
the moment they met. And I understood how he could have felt that
way. I had the feeling that if she'd been sowing her wild oats,
she was done with that by that time she came to San Francisco. I
talked about this with Jerry [Garcia], and we had both heard that
bomb ticking. She was ready for something real, something big. And
it doesn't get bigger than what actually happened after that.

Chapter 5
'In those days you could be on the make, have a wonderful time, and
be gentle and peaceful and silly. I was just delighted that we were
all being so nice.'
Derek Taylor
The courtship of Paul McCartney and Linda Eastman was
(almost) as extraordinary as their marriage. It lasted, by one
reckoning, almost eighteen months - that's the amount of time
between their first meeting and the day Linda moved in with Paul for
good; they were married over four months later, which stretches the
time to nearly two years between the first "Hello" and the only "I
do" that either of them would ever say again.
It was like a Jane Austen novel: hero and heroine, both
of them fabulous (the degrees of perfection are varied), meet and
are instantly in love, although one or both of them may not know it
at the very first. Several hundred pages and many, many
complications later, the smoke clears away, they become aware of the
obvious it's-always-been-you and get married, with presumably
nothing now to keep them from living happily ever after.
Alas for the true story of the courtship, Linda told
friends before she even met Paul that she wanted to marry a Beatle,
preferably John but he was married (this was no obstacle for Yoko
Ono), so then Paul. She did not mean to be taken totally seriously;
she left no doubt that it was wishful thinking, although perhaps
within the realm of possibility after all. Now, Linda's friends
tended to be rather prominent people, usually journalists or rock
stars, and the story has since been told around the world in
countless different versions that she set her sights on Paul
McCartney very early on, pursued (virtually to the point of
stalking) him, and got the prize she was after. I've always thought
it odd that Paul McCartney, the world's most wanted bachelor in the
late 1960s, seems to have had no choice in the matter. Linda, with
all her virtues, was not a sorceress; Paul must have wanted her to
be his wife, unless you believe that he is/was a guy whose arm is
easily twisted, which plainly isn't the case.
Linda's announcement of her plan to marry Beatle Paul
was an anecdote repeated at - of all places - her memorial ceremony
in London, by - of all people - Pete Townshend. He told me,
When Paul asked me to speak at the memorial, I told
him that I was gonna tell the 'I'm gonna marry one of the Beatles'
story, because I'm the one she said it to originally, and I'm
responsible for starting the whole thing. It became a terrible
story, completely distorted, and you see it was just a joke, and I
wanted people to get it right.
Paul was very emphatic about this. He said, 'Pete, if
this is your story then it's wrong.'
I said to him, 'Well, it's not my story. It's just
that we were kidding around, and then she said that, and then you
see what happens, that she ended up with you, and it looks like
she set out to get you.' And he said, 'It's the other way around.
I pursued her.'
Pete's speech at the memorial did, as he predicted it
would, make some people uncomfortable. Because even if you insist
that something was originally just a joke, if it becomes true it
seems in retrospect not to have been a joke after all. I think it's
quite simple in reality: they pursued each other, and each was
successful.
But first Pete's story. The setting is New York's
Navarro Hotel, at the time of the Who's first performances in
America in the early spring of 1967, at Murray the K's Easter show
at the RKO 58th Street Theater. Linda and I had met Pete together
several months earlier when he was in New York on business and found
himself alone and angry at a grand lunch in honour of Herman's
Hermits. (Ironically, the story of how Linda and I met Pete was told
in my own speech at Linda's New York memorial.) When the three of us
had a backstage reunion, Linda caught the eye of the Who's manager,
Chris Stamp, brother of Terence Stamp the actor, and even better
looking; Linda and Chris became an item. Fast forward about a week
into the 'item', and Pete's story begins:
Linda and Chris came up to my hotel room, with people
coming in and out, and Linda and I found ourselves together. I
made some comment like, 'You're really lucky!' She asked, 'Why?' I
answered, 'Because you've got the best-looking man in London.' And
she said, 'Oh, really?' I think I said something like, 'You know,
I'd like to shag him myself,' because I just adored him, and I was
always so proud of being with him, proud of how beautiful he was,
and when he was with me he just gave me his undivided attention.
I guess I wanted to say something controversial, and
maybe I thought Linda was being a bit blase about Chris, so I
added, 'After him, you could have almost anybody in the world.'
And she said, 'Oh well, maybe I'll marry one of the Beatles.' I
asked, 'Which one?' and she answered, 'John Lennon?' So I told
her, 'He's married,' and she said, 'Paul McCartney?', and that's
how it went.
So that's the tale that evolved into the story of Linda
the Huntress. No wonder it angers Paul, for many reasons. It's
rather disrespectful of her memory to portray her as a woman
spending two years in a well-focused campaign to snag the Cute
Beatle; it can't do Paul's ego any good to hear that people think of
him as a prize snared by a wily American divorcee; and, above all,
it's not true. It is true that she said what Pete says she said; she
said it as well to her friend Lillian Roxon, again making fun of
herself. But it was without doubt a two-way street. Bear in mind,
when she first spoke of marrying Paul, she hadn't yet met him. When
she did, she fell genuinely in love, and so did he. It just took a
while for things to really happen.
As Beatles press officer Derek Taylor said to me in
London in 1987 when talking about the twentieth anniversary of
Sergeant Pepper, 'In those days you could be on the make, have a
wonderful time, and be gentle and peaceful and silly. I was just
delighted that we were all being so nice.'
The chronology will show that it was Linda's fantasy
that became Linda's real wish; and that it was Linda whom Paul
wanted from the start. In fact, the first time he proposed marriage,
she turned him down - but we're jumping ahead.
Linda's first trip to London as a professional
photographer was in May 1967. Her closest friends at that time, in
the higher echelons of British rock and roll, were the Animals, whom
she'd photographed, with David Dalton as her mentor, about a year
earlier.
She had also met Brian Epstein, the manager of the
Beatles and, some say, much more than that. He had been in New York
many times in the early part of that year, mostly on Beatles
business but also trying to get singer/songwriter Eric Andersen for
a management deal. One of the most talented young men around at the
tune, Eric suffered, as did so many other talented guys, because of
the enormous shadow cast by Bob Dylan. Dylan was clearly 'in a class
by himself, but he was not the only person hanging around MacDougal
Street in Greenwich Village with a guitar and a suitcase full of
songs. Joni Mitchell was another, along with the late great Phil
Ochs, and of course Andersen, who was also the most gorgeous boy in
New York, or certainly in the top ten. It was noted in Harper's
magazine that 'At the age of 23, he is one of the mainsprings of the
folk world. Tall, thin, with cheekbones like Rudolph Nureyev (the
ballet dancer), he is what everyone who is eighteen in the Village
wants to look like." Andersen wrote great songs, such as 'Thirsty
Boots' and 'Violets of Dawn', had his first album released on the
Vanguard label in 1965, had even made a cameo appearance in an early
Andy Warhol movie, and Brian was in love with him.
I have to admit it was me - along with one of New York's
towering intellectuals, who shall remain nameless - who chased Eric
down Bleecker Street one day and into the Cafe Figaro and asked the
question, to which there was only one answer, 'Would you like to be
in an Andy Warhol movie?' We brought Eric up to Andy's factory, and
he was no less thrilled to be there than Andy was thrilled to have
someone in his studio who had actually made a record album. The
movie was called Space. It was the first film where Andy actually
panned the camera, i.e. swivelled it on its tripod, thanks to the
advice of Paul Morrissey, then paying his first visit to the
factory, where he eventually became the director of some of Warhol's
most brilliant movies - and a very good friend of Linda and Paul
McCartney. These were very early times.
Epstein, among the most impressive gentlemen I've ever
known, knew me because of his friendship with a hunky young hustler
named Richard Luger, who was 'staying' at my loft with his
girlfriend, Patti D'Arbanville, now a successful actress. Richard
was a very hot boy and Brian had something of a crush on him - this
was in March 1967. Several times, at about three or four in the
morning, a limousine would pull up outside my shabby building on
West 20th Street and it would be Brian, looking for Richard. A few
times, when Richard wasn't there, Brian would ask if he might come
up and 'chat' for a while, which we did, far into the night... or
until it became clear that Richard wasn't going to be back.
Acting the proper John, Brian took Richard to Acapulco
for a week, to stay at a villa he'd rented. When he came to my
apartment to pick Richard up and take him to the airport, he told me
he'd forgotten to bring any records with him; was there something he
could borrow, maybe just one, and then he'd get some more in Mexico?
I gave him The Velvet Underground and Nico, the 'banana' album,
which had just been released, and said, 'This is the greatest music
you will ever hear.' (I was a Velvet groupie, truth be known, and
have never revised that opinion to this day.) A few days after they
returned, I ran into Brian at Max's Kansas City and he said,
'Goddamn you,' with a most inscrutable smile.
'Why?' I asked.
'That fucking album you gave me - I couldn't get any
other records at all down there, so it's the only one we had, and it
was on the turntable twenty-four hours a day the whole time we were
there. It's made a hole in my brain.'
I told him I was glad he'd been exposed to some decent
music at last (what a wag I was!), and he responded by saying, 'Mmm
. . . yes,' and would I like a ride up to Ondine's in his car.
Bingo! Lou Reed, chief songwriter of the Velvet
Underground himself, was in Max's at the time, so I ran over and
told him to drop everything, for I was going to introduce him to
Brian Epstein who was 'crazy' about the VU's debut album and maybe
could be their manager. Lou was reluctant, I was insistent. The
three of us got into the back of Brian's limo, Brian on the left, me
in the middle, Lou on the right. Brian and Lou were looking out of
the left and right windows, respectively, and sullenly, while I
gushed: 'Brian's been listening to your record, Lou! He adores it!'
Lou grunted, 'Oh?'
'Brian,' I said, 'didn't you LOVE the Velvet Underground
album?'
Brian mumbled, 'Most interesting.'
There was silence for the rest of the ride uptown, two
miles which seemed to last a lifetime. When we got to Ondine's, Lou
jumped out and announced he was taking a taxi back to Max's.
Matchmaking is my middle name, always has been, always will be.
Much speculation has gone down the pike on the subject
of the Beatles' awareness of Brian's gayness. It was not much of a
secret in the early days of the band in Liverpool, although the
subject in general was but dimly comprehended by that city's very
conservative working- and lower-middle-class Irish population,
whence the Beatles came. Nor was Brian's religious background
comprehended all that well, either. 'Rich Jewish Liverpool', is
Paul's description of Brian Epstein's ancestry. The gay thing can
hardly have mattered much to the Beatles, after all the time they
spent in the Reeperbahn area of Hamburg, the gay centre of Germany's
gay capital. Meanwhile, we must deal with the ongoing speculation
about Brian and John Lennon: did they or didn't they? Nat Weiss
says, 'No, and Brian told me everything.'
Paul, on the other hand, does not totally write off the
story that Brian and John had a brief weekend-long affair in
Barcelona. 'We'd always known Brian was gay,' Paul told me. 'I'd
always credited the gay thing as a great entree. We were very lucky,
I think, that Brian had such an entree in London showbiz, New York
showbiz, any showbiz.'
A good time here to revisit a conversation I had with
Paul and Linda in the garden of their modest hillside home near East
Hampton, on Long Island.
Paul and I have been talking about Brian. Linda
rejoins us with fresh drinks, starts to turn away.
L: Oh!
P: It's me, I'm your husband, sit down.
D: Yeah, sit down, we're talking about the movie The
Hours and Times, in which the John Lennon and Brian Epstein
characters spend a weekend in Spain in 1963. And the premise is
that Brian is in love with John and that they have sex. That's
implied, it's not on screen or anything.
P: Well, I'm sure Brian was in love with John, I'm
sure that's absolutely right. I mean, everyone was in love with
John; John was lovable, John was a very lovable guy. [According to
Nat Weiss, 'There is no question in my mind that the Beatles
happened because Brian fell in love with John. I mean, that was a
motivating force for the whole thing.']
D: That's not exactly what this is about.
P: (to Linda) Hey, this is supposed to be your
interview.
L: Carry on.
P: But this is relevant in a way. OK, Brian was a
lovable guy. And John was sort of more, you know, very middle
class, and Brian was middle class, and they could relate to each
other.
D: As opposed to working class - John, I mean?
P: Yeah, as opposed to working class. So they would
kind of know about this, what's expected of them, a little above
people, a little superior. Then Brian invited him to come away to
Spain. A couple of the guys whom we knew were sort of gay, with a
bit of money, were going to Spain. I think the rest of us were a
little peeved not to be invited, because somebody was getting a
free holiday here.
D: Did you think John was going to have a gay sexual
experience, or might have?
P: No, no, no, it didn't occur to us. And to this day
I don't know. Now the gay bit, you tell me what you 've heard,
because I don't know anything.
D: It doesn't matter what I've heard. I want to know
now, if you think it's possible that something happened between
John and Brian?
P: It's more than possible, it's more than possible,
but, as I've said, 'Come on, this is the fucking Beatles, everyone
wants to imagine everything.' I never got any clue of anything but
total hetero. If I saw John doing something, it would be ass
bobbing up and down, fucking some chick. There were no real clues
whatsoever of John's possible gay encounter with Brian. There were
other clues, there were what straight people might call sexual
deviancies. I wouldn't call them that. I'd call it a bit of a lad
on the loose. You've got to remember, we all got out of home, we
got out on the loose, we got into the Reeperbahn, we got into
London, it was all kind of there, and all possible.
Why all this Brian Epstein stuff? As Paul said, 'This is
relevant.' Brian died in the August of the year this chapter talks
about, 1967. From that point on, it seems as if the Beatles were in
freefall towards an inevitable dissolution.
Also, Brian was always more visible in New York than any
of the Beatles ever were, if they were at all, except looking down
from hotel windows or walking through Central Park with thousands of
fans in tow. In a 1998 BBC documentary The Brian Epstein Story:
Tomorrow Never Knows, Paul was the only surviving Beatle to be
interviewed. His take on Brian was upbeat, almost adulatory; Brian's
friends have said that no matter what Paul and Brian may have gone
through, and there certainly were ups and downs, Paul came through
for Brian on this show in a big way. 'Without Brian, there would
have been no Beatles,' he concludes.
Besides, while some claim to know what happened in
Barcelona, Paul leaves it deliberately ambiguous. It is also
interesting to me, on a very personal level, that Linda was about to
excuse herself from the conversation Paul and I were having about
Brian's sexuality, when Paul told her to 'sit down'.
So, back to Brian and Eric Andersen, about two months
after we left them above. Also enamoured of Eric's talent and beauty
was a prominent publicist named John Kurland, who had very important
clients, was no fool and was locked in a struggle with Brian over
Eric's future that was the sensation of New York's gossiping crowd.
It was very catty, and great fun to watch these gay Titans battle it
out for the artistic and professional control of a boy who could not
have been more straight, more sweet, or more baffled by what was
going on around him. To have the Beatles' manager wanting to guide
your career was overwhelming in 1967, when the group was at the
height of their importance, when they were indeed in that overworked
'class by themselves" of all the entertainers in the world. To have
him fighting for you was beyond dreaming about. (From Lillian
Roxon's Rock Encyclopedia: 'Beatle manager Brian Epstein was all set
to sign him [Andersen] just before Epstein died in 1967.')
Eric, not unaware that he was the 'boy Brian Epstein
wanted to manage', dropped in at Steve Paul's Scene from time to
time and basked in the attention he didn't quite get in the Village,
even though he'd headlined at Town Hall and was, according to The
Encyclopedia of Folk, Country & Western Music, 'one of the foremost
candidates for Dylan's folk mantle'. It was at the Scene one night
that Brian invited a select little crowd, including Eric and me,
back to his palatial suite at the Waldorf Towers, got us stoned on
the best grass anyone had ever had and played 'A Day in the Life',
from the as yet unreleased, most anticipated album in the history of
recorded music, Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I think
none of us had ever felt so 'in' as we did at that moment. And it
was astonishing to hear that track, calculated as it was to amaze
and the most ambitious production in the short history of rock -
'ambitious' becomes, perhaps, 'pretentious' with the passage of
time, but I'm not a music critic, and I promise no more of that.
Brian knew Linda Eastman - I had introduced her to him
with glowing reviews, mentioning in particular her photographs of
the Rolling Stones. He had seen the famous 'crotch shot' of Brian
Jones and was delighted to be meeting the photographer. 'Oh, I can
show you a really good print of that,' Linda volunteered, and Brian
said he was most eager to see that picture and any others that were
'so interesting'. Linda was planning a trip to London at the time
and Brian told her to get in touch with his personal assistant,
Peter Brown, when she was there, to arrange a meeting. She was going
to England to take photographs for the forthcoming book Rock and
Other Four Letter Words, photographs by Linda Eastman, text by J.
Marks.
'You got me that job,' Linda reminded me in the summer
of 1992, remembering Marks as not one of her favourite people. 'And
I thought I was getting $10,000 for it, which was great, but it
turned out that it was only $1,000. Still, I spent it all on
travelling. I bought tickets to London and to the West Coast. My
father advised me not to do it. I said, "Dad, I've got to do it.
Don't tell me not to." I mainly wanted to get pictures of Stevie
Winwood, and perhaps even the Beatles. My father said, "Don't go to
England!" I said, "I've absolutely got to go," and he was very
unhappy about it.' Linda was soon off on a journey that was going to
have more significance for her than any other in her life.
Paul McCartney, in May 1967, was the most glamorous
young man in London, perhaps the world. There are currently 177
books about the Beatles, and twenty-three about Paul alone which
provide ample descriptions of his lofty status at the time.
Publicly, he was 'going steady' with actress Jane Asher, with whose
utterly fabulous upper-middle-class London family he'd lived since
1963 and who was now in residence at his town house on Cavendish
Avenue, in the St John's Wood area of London, a prosperous
neighbourhood but by no means Mayfair or Belgravia. Although Paul
and Jane would announce their engagement at Christmas, in May Jane
was in a play that was touring America and Paul was on the town. On
the night of 15 May, he was at a trendy Soho club called the Bag
O'Nails, where his friends Georgie Fame and the Blue Flames were
performing.
Linda Eastman was with the Animals in another booth.
Paul claims she caught his attention right then and there, and it
was her smile that did it. It most definitely wasn't what she was
wearing, because whatever that was, it was probably not in fashion;
but Linda always looked good, and was so unfashionable that she
appeared to be making an anti-fashion statement at any given moment.
When Linda got up to visit the loo, Paul blocked her way, introduced
himself and asked, 'And who are you?' He was one month short of his
twenty-fifth birthday; she was going to be twenty-six in September.
He invited Linda to go with him and his friends to another nearby
club, the Speakeasy.
After the Speakeasy, Paul suggested that the little
crowd, which included the singer Lulu and an artist friend of
Paul's, Dudley Edwards, go back to his home to 'see the Magrittes'.
Linda was enthusiastic. Paul had never met a girl in 'the clubs' who
had ever heard of Magritte. 'They were very interested in each
other,' Lulu recalls. Linda left Paul's home while the little
gathering was still in progress, no doubt a shrewd move.
A few days later, on 19 May, there was a press
conference at Brian's house in Belgravia to celebrate the release of
Sergeant Pepper. It was limited to the A+ press list of London, and
Linda knew about it and wanted to go. Peter Brown, in The Love You
Make, co-written with Steven Gaines, claims he'd been deluged for
weeks by people wanting to attend. Peter says that, in return for
one of Linda's pictures of Brian Jones (very sought after, those
pictures were), he invited her to this most recherche event of the
season.
Photographs show Linda at the party looking very proper,
nicely dressed in a striped jacket and medium-short skirt, wearing
false eyelashes. Her friends at home would have fainted at the
thought. Linda got her pictures of the Beatles and, what's more, got
some quality time with Paul, chatting with him while he sat down to
take a break from the madness. They didn't meet again until four
days short of a year later.
Flying back to New York the next week, after Linda had
spent some time photographing Stevie Winwood and his band, Traffic,
she found herself sitting next to Nat Weiss, who knew Linda (and her
family). 'She told me then that she was in love with Paul,' Nat
recalls. 'She said, "I've got to meet him again, I want to marry
him." Well, lots of girls wanted to marry Paul; get in line. But I
sensed this as a defining moment for her, she was in love, no doubt
about it.'
Linda called me the day she got off the plane, to tell
me essentially what she'd been telling Nat Weiss, over and over he
says, on the seven-hour transatlantic flight. 'I met the Beatles,
and I got great pictures,' she began, establishing her
professionalism, which was hardly necessary. I knew something else
was coming. 'Listen,' she said, 'Paul McCartney is so wonderful, I
really am in love with him.'
'In love? After how long?' I was sceptical about the
depth of this emotion.
'You sound like you don't believe me. I don't know why
I'm telling you this if you won't believe me,' she complained.
'How much time did you spend with him?'
'Maybe an hour or so altogether. That's between the
night we met and the Sergeant Pepper press conference at Brian's.
And we were never alone. You have to believe me, when did I ever say
I was in love?'
She had a point there. She never had said exactly that
before. It was always, 'He's so
cool/sweei/smart/talented/groovy/good-looking [pick one or more].
And I think he really likes me.'
That was always the kicker: 'I think he really likes
me,' as if she were still, every time, trying to convince herself
that she was a desirable woman. Lillian Roxon used to do a great
imitation of Linda saying that, and we'd laugh, but it was kind of
sad in a way. Come to think of it, she never had been in love.
'Darling, I believe you. You have said you wanted to
marry him before this.'
That wasn't real, Linda insisted, but now it was real. I
asked her what she was going to do about it.
'Well, what can I do? Camp out on his doorstep? I don't
have his phone number and I don't even know how he feels. I guess I
can't do anything for now.'
Wow - no 'He really likes me.' This time was truly
different. So was acknowledging that she was unable to do anything
... for now. Actually, it took a year before she 'did' something; by
then she had reason to be encouraged. Between May 1967 and May 1968,
Paul McCartney called Linda about four times. He must have really
liked her.
And that was despite the announcement of his engagement
to Jane Asher at Christmas (rather a big surprise to the London
crowd, as the Paul-Jane affair had clearly not been doing so well in
the last few months); oddly, although Linda's friends expected her
to be crushed by the news, she wasn't. Something was giving her
reason to believe that Paul's engagement to his long-time girlfriend
was not really something to worry about. What confidence she had.
To repeat, Paul and Linda did not see each other again
for a year, nor did she initiate any contacts between them. So much
for the theory that she ran him down and eventually trapped her man.
 The remainder of 1967 saw Linda working hard at
photography and motherhood. Celebrity portraits were her strong
point and, as she said, 'It paid the rent.' New York was where Linda
lived, but she was not crazy about the rock stars in residence. 'New
York had no music scene group-wise,' she recalled. 'It had the
Vagrants, the Blues Project, the Young Rascals. New York was where I
did most of my work, so the great thing for me was when the English
bands and the California bands came to town. They often didn't know
many people in New York City, so it got to be hang-out time while I
was getting the pictures. You know, just hanging out, sitting in a
hotel room, dropping acid, looking at the television or going out
and taking pictures and wandering, whatever one does.'
Quite remarkably, Linda did not go to the Monterey Pop
Festival that June, certainly a fertile place for meeting old
friends (Jimi Hendrix, the Who) and making new ones (Big Brother and
the Holding Company with Janis Joplin, etc.). The reason she missed
this watershed event in rock history is very simple, according to
Linda: 'I didn't have the money to go there. If someone had rung me
and said, "We'd like to pay you to go to Monterey," I would have
gone.'
More work started coming in from magazines like Life and
Mademoiselle and money ceased to be an overwhelming problem. In
1992, she reflected,
You know, I was getting to the point where I had to
get an agent. Remember, I didn't have an agent, I didn't have an
assistant, I didn't have anything. I did it all myself on public
transport. I guess that's what I'd still be doing if I hadn't
married Paul. Taking pictures, but always on an art level, on a
satisfying level. Satisfying to me. I'd always have my own
integrity. I wouldn't, I think, have taken any advertising or done
stuff I didn't believe in. I'd only take pictures I believed in.
I'd be making a very good living, still having a
pretty funky life, hanging out. I would have had my own horse,
which is my favourite thing. I never would have lived in the city
- but I don't know, I'd have to have lived somewhere I could work.
It's hypothetical, isn't it?
Actually, not so hypothetical, except for the part about
having to make a living. For Linda got to live her funky life,
albeit on a very high plane, she got to take pictures on a most
satisfying level and she certainly got her horse(s).
Because the next year, 1968, saw the stalled romance
between Paul and Linda pick up momentum and indeed flower into the
love of a lifetime for the two of them.

Chapter 6
'When you look back now to the beginnings of it all, Linda was made
for Paul.'
Nat Weiss, attorney and partner of Brian Epstein
At the start of 1968, Linda Eastman was wondering if she
would see Paul McCartney again . . . well, she was trying to figure
out how she could see Paul again.
Since 1966 Paul had been living with his fiancee, Jane
Asher, in his London town house, which was by now a residence that
had become precisely what the master of the house seems to have
wanted. It is easy to surmise that Jane had some problems,
therefore, with messiness, curious guests and drugs, especially LSD,
which can make a houseful of even moderate London lunatics seem more
like a goat meadow than a home. But she endured, though she must
have felt that when she had said 'Yes', it was an unrealistic deal
she had entered into. Jane had been in the public eye since 1963, at
the age of seventeen, when she was a regular on the television show
Juke Box Jury. By 1968 she was deter-mined to be a serious actress,
had joined a theatrical touring company and was away from London
much of the time. Occasionally, Paul would hook into Jane's
schedule, as he had done the previous summer, renting half the floor
of an elegant San Francisco hotel for the two of them, and then a
house in Denver, Colorado. In February 1968, the Beatles went to
India to sit at the feet of the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, a twinkling
guru they had discovered the year before, and Paul brought Jane;
they fled after five weeks, unimpressed.
Jane really wanted her career, and since her work would
keep her on the road for long stretches of time, domesticity could
not be her priority. As for Paul, the less cosy with home-cooking
his life became, the more he wanted someone to come home to,
reliably, all the time. Knowing that, it's hard to find logical
thinking behind the Christmas engagement announcement. There had
been speculation that Paul suggested marriage to 'make an honest
woman' of Jane, and when that was no longer required the ties were
severed. I've always thought that theory farfetched. More likely, it
was probably easier to arrange a way of remaining together rather
than dealing with a split up, which would be big news, generating
huge amounts of annoying and unwanted publicity for the two of them.
And so they kept the pretence going. That included the pretence of
Paul's being faithful to Jane. He could be one half of London's most
glamorous couple when the occasion was suitably glamorous, and
bedding wenches elsewhere when the urge was upon him - Jane didn't
have to know about it. Why give that up to have a pot of stew always
on the stove, and besides, who was going to make it?
In New York, Linda's career was on fire. She never
entered the Fillmore East except via the stage door. A many-times
converted theatre 'in the Second Avenue', as Henry James put it
(please, don't laugh; James had lived in ancient Rye, the nearest
town to what would one day be Linda and Paul's vast Sussex farm, and
she was proud of living near the Master's old residence, pointing it
out to visitors - whether she ever read anything of his is another
question), the Fillmore East was New York's palace of rock and roll
from 1968 to 1971. It was a golden age of rock history and Bill
Graham was booking the acts most creatively, lining up the music
like a great DJ would line up his show. Linda had a permanent 'all
access' pass signed by Mr Graham, having taken the photographs for
the opening night poster; the bill on that auspicious occasion was
Big Brother, Tim Buckley and B.B. King. Linda also enjoyed sitting
in the audience like any other rock and roll fan. I remember the
night we went to see Blue Cheer, whose album was great fun but who
were dismissed by the critical establishment as too simplistic, or
something like that. Well, they were terrific, and it was like any
wonderful discovery: a thrill and a joy. I shouted to Linda (their
volume level was famous), 'I love this band. This is a great band!
Everyone's taste sucks but ours.'
She responded, 'Me too! Me too! I love them, they're
great.' Linda had impeccable taste, especially when it was the same
as mine.
Ah, 1968 - measured by body blows, I'd rank it as the
most amazing year of the second half of the century just ended.
Three fabulous guys got shot, Andy Warhol, Martin Luther King Jr.
and Bobby Kennedy (and with that assassination went the future of
the American presidency); the cutest students at Harvard, Columbia
and the Sorbonne rioted; the North Vietnamese launched the Tet
Offensive; Lyndon Johnson abdicated; Prague had its 'Spring'; the
Chicago Democratic convention brought joy to the world along with
Richard Nixon; the Beatles gave you their White Album; the Rolling
Stones had Beggars Banquet; Yoko Ono made a comeback - and Linda
Eastman and Paul McCartney became de facto man and wife, although
the legalities would have to wait a few months into the following
year.
At the beginning of 1968, Linda was a successful and
popular photographer: young, rich and handsome, with little to vex
or distress her -except that she was scorned by her father because
of the life she chose to live, had a five-year-old daughter she was
raising rather uncertainly by herself and, in spite of her ability
to attract the most impressive young men known to the world, had
fallen perhaps hopelessly in love with Beatle Paul. Linda was
wistful about her situation, but not one to complain.
Three women knew her best, and were her closest friends
and confidantes - Lillian Roxon, Blair Sabol and Robin Richmond. All
were formidable media dominatrices and easily among what Pete
Townshend calls the 'thirty or so possible people' in New York at
that time. Sabol, volatile and fiery in print, wrote a fashion
column for the Village Voice in which she took no prisoners - years
later she would skewer Linda in an article that rattled the
foundations and standards of celebrity journalism.
Volatile and fiery in person, Roxon was the New York
correspondent for Australia's most important daily, the Sydney
Morning Herald, a regular columnist for the New York Daily News, the
author of the ground-breaking Rock Encyclopedia, about ten years
older than the rest of us, beloved, hilarious and occasionally
exasperating. She would become, publicly and privately, Linda's most
outspoken detractor by the time of her death in 1973. In 1968, Linda
and Lillian were so close that people suspected Something; Roxon
boasted of her bisexu-ality and probably had a bit of a crush on
Linda, but she was in fact Mother Confessor and there was absolutely
nothing physical between the two women. Lillian knew more about
Linda's romantic escapades than any other single person, and
probably more than all of Linda's friends put together; Linda told
her everything, and Lillian repeated some of it, only some, to
others in our little crowd when it suited her to do so. Lillian and
Linda broke each other's hearts - but we're not yet there.
Robin Richmond was a junior editor at Life magazine -
cultivated, well-bred, smart, eager and attractive. A few years
younger than Linda, she was the girl friend with whom Linda spent
the most time, in those heady days when Linda's career and
reputation were booming. At Life, Richmond had become the local
expert on the exotic new worlds of rock and roll, hippiedom and
other alternative lifestyles - it was a photogenic, revolutionary,
exploitable new world and the establishment media couldn't get
enough of it. If Robin plugged Life magazine into this youthful
universe, then it was Linda who was Robin's tour guide.
Linda popped into Robin's office almost every day, and
they'd go to lunch, preferably at the Palm Court of the then
(pre-Ivana Trump) aristocratic Plaza Hotel. 'We had to wear skirts,
and for Linda that was a big deal,' Richmond, now living in New
Mexico, recalls. 'The first time we went there, we were turned away,
because she was wearing some synthetic V-necks in hot pink or hot
lime, and blue jeans, with a Gucci bag full of cameras.' Chefs salad
(presumably more elaborate than Linda's famous home-made
'There's-a-chef s-salad-for-you-in-the-fridge' of iceberg lettuce,
diced ham and American cheese) was the girls' standard lunch, and
the talk was about magazines, photographs, records, concerts and
bands.
'We'd go to the Scene after it closed and there were
those sixties "jams", usually Jimi Hendrix, Jimmy Page, Mike
Bloomfield, or we'd go to the Cafe Au Go Go after it closed, or to a
Country Joe recording session, and Linda knew everybody, she was a
VIP in that world.' In that world, perhaps, but not in the world of
Lee Eastman and his wife, Monique, whose homes on Park Avenue and in
East Hampton Linda and Heather, with Robin in tow, would visit
often.
'She adored her father so much; she was in awe of his
intelligence, his success, his confidence,' says Richmond.
But it was very hard for Linda, because he was cold to
her and disapproved of what she was doing, very obviously. He'd
make snide remarks', and it was all about innuendo: 'What a great
job Robin has! Life magazine!' If there was an opportunity for him
to come in sideways, to make a comment of implied disapproval in
front of me, he'd never miss the chance. I don't think Linda spent
a lot of time, except in my company, with her father and
stepmother. It was very uncomfortable for her. It's ironic,
because a large part of Linda's attractiveness was her air of
complete independence and confidence. She might have been dying on
the inside because of her father's loathing of the way she lived,
but she never showed it.
We were really close for only about a year and a half,
but it was a wonderful friendship. It was an adventure being with
her, she had an uplifting quality. I never saw her slugging around
depressed because some guy she'd gone out with was in town and
didn't call her. She was never 'Poor me!', never. It was always,
'Let's take a walk, or let's go to a recording session or
whatever,' she was just ready to seize the moment. You can see it
all in her pictures - that's why all those people have those
extra-great smiles on their faces. She had such an incredible,
engaging quality about her. For Linda there was no agenda, no
artifice, no contrivance, no manipulation, it was just having fun,
it was a game, it was fun. And all the time she was reinventing
herself, from the inside out, to be the person she really was.
Without even putting on lipstick, because she didn't need it.
Well, to me she was Miss Rock and Roll, impeccable hi
everything she did, if you can excuse iceberg lettuce as the
vegetable course, always. She was not devastated by Paul's betrothal
to Jane, but appeared to be riding it out, as though it were not in
any way a major impediment to her hopes and dreams. In fact, she was
so unrattled, it was as if she knew something that no one else knew,
but of course she didn't. When Lillian Roxon gingerly mentioned the
subject, Linda commented that, well, it was something to do with
Paul and Jane and was not of much concern to her. 'I love him, and
I'm pretty sure he's not serious about being engaged. Anyhow,
they're not right for each other.' Pretty good intuitive analysis of
the news coming from London, especially since Linda had never met
Jane, and hadn't seen or talked to Paul since the previous May.
Lillian worried that Linda might be headed for a fall - on the other
hand, she was so impressed with her friend's determination that she
told me if she had to bet on the outcome, she'd put her money on
Linda's ultimate victory: 'I'll even lay odds, darling.'
The advent of Paul and John's Utopian concept called
Apple gave Linda Eastman, in a most roundabout way, the chance she
wanted and needed to get Paul's attention, and to present herself -
without ever saying just that - as the only suitable answer to his
long-range needs.
Paul McCartney and John Lennon were so enthusiastic
about Apple, and its potential to advance art, science, music and
retail fashion merchandising, that they planned to announce its
inception as guests of Johnny Carson on his indisputably number one
late-night talk show. Their appearance was booked for 15 May, and
they flew to New York on the 12th. They tried to sneak into the
United States as quietly as possible, but some DJ got hold of their
schedule and there was the usual airport nightmare. No hotel wanted
to put up with the security and crowd-control problems that the
presence of the two big Beatles would involve, and Paul and John
were not wild about the idea of being imprisoned in one. The
solution was to stash them away in Nat Weiss' luxurious two-bedroom
apartment on East 73rd Street and hope that their presence could be
kept a secret. Weiss himself arranged to stay at the St Regis,
planning to be at his apartment during the day. Before leaving his
home in the hands of the Beatles, Weiss replaced his elderly
housekeeper because a) he felt that it would all be too much for
her, and b) John Lennon had expressed the wish that whoever was
cleaning the place be young and attractive. She was; John was happy,
and took her frequently to bed. As it happened, the boys were also
tidy. 'Lennon really surprised me - he was very neat, he would fold
all his towels. I've never forgotten that,' Nat told me. 'Paul too,
but that was sort of thing you would expect from him.'
One person who knew the Big Secret of the Beatles' New
York hideaway was Nat's friend Linda Eastman. Recalling their flight
together from London to New York a year earlier, after Linda had met
Paul for the first time and couldn't stop talking about him, Nat
told Linda that Paul was coming to town and, lo and behold, was
going to stay at his own apartment. Not surprisingly, she begged Nat
to be allowed to visit and he ran the request past Paul, who
approved. And so, during the week Paul and John were in New York,
the only two women ever in Nat's apartment were the saucy maid, and
Linda. In fact, no other outsiders were permitted in at all, except
veteran journalist Al Aronowitz, whom John was impressed by. The
routine was that Linda arrived early in the afternoon and stayed
until the evening, chatting away with Paul. When she left to go home
and be a good mum, Weiss would take Paul and John out to dinner, or
to a club to hear music. It was just the three of them; Linda and
Paul did not see each other in the evenings, and they did not make
love on 73rd Street. In retrospect, that week in 1968 was the
defining moment - albeit a week-long moment - of their relationship.

The attempt to keep quiet the fact that the Beatles were
in town failed within two days of their ensconcement at Nat's
apartment. So many, dedicated and relentless were the fans that the
news about the two's whereabouts was soon known; after all, it
needed only one spotting of Paul and John to set in motion a tracing
routine that led to the high-rise where they were staying on the
fifteenth floor. Soon the secrecy aspect of their visit was a joke.
Thousands of screaming and fainting girls lined the area
around the building where Weiss lived, creating a major nuisance in
what was ordinarily a quiet, expensive residential neighbourhood.
Famous people lived in the area quite anonymously, but no one was as
famous as the Beatles, and their followers were not known for
mature, discreet behaviour.
'The doormen were getting blow-jobs from teenage girls
who wanted to get upstairs,' Weiss recalls. 'The people in the
building across the street were hanging out their windows to see
what was happening down there; there were so many people in
wheelchairs it looked like the shrine at Lourdes. Of course not all
of the kids in wheelchairs needed to be in them, but they hoped the
Beatles would take pity on them and invite them up. I didn't think
it would escalate to that.'
Most unhappy about the hysteria raging all about were
the other residents in Nat's building, and the building manager, who
wrote him a letter that he has framed and hanging on the wall of his
study. It says, 'Dear Mr Weiss, Two clients of yours, the Beatles
John Lennon and Paul McCartney, stayed at your apartment. These are
not run-of-the-mill guests. Crowds of unruly girls have disrupted
life in the neighborhood, and certainly in this building. If any
such future visits are contemplated by the Beatles or any other
clients of yours, we need to be notified one week in advance so that
we can review the situation. Yours truly, etc. etc'
It was deemed wise to let slip Paul and John's departure
date so that the fans would know when it was time to go home, but
this was a two-edged sword: on the one hand, the crowd was indeed
gone by the next day, yet on the other, the day they left the
frenzied crowd was the biggest it had been, since this was the last
chance to See The Beatles until who knew when. Decoy limousines were
hired, and Paul and John managed to get out in time to catch their
plane back to London. Riding to the airport with them was only one
person who was not a part of their organization, Linda Eastman.
Paul and John had come to New York mainly to tout the
advent of Apple on the Johnny Carson Show, and although the
magnificently witty Derek Taylor, Apple's press officer, had come
with them to oversee a bunch of telephone interviews on the subject,
the Carson appearance was far and away the most important event on
their official agenda. Ironically, the night they were scheduled to
appear, the king of late-night, Johnny Carson, was not hosting his
own show and the Beatles were doomed to face one of the great
mediocrities in the history of broadcasting, someone named Joe
Garagiola, remembered by few and missed by fewer. He was once a
baseball player, as if that qualified him to sit in for the coolest
guy on the air. Paul and John (privately) let it be known that they
thought themselves incredibly insulted by Carson's absence, and had
to work extra hard at summoning forth their reserves of charm in
order to hide their true feelings. Making things even more difficult
was the presence of Tallulah Bankhead, the heavy-drinking,
flamboyant baritone American actress, who kept telling John and Paul
how beautiful they were. It was obvious watching the show that the
host had little knowledge of who his British guests were, or what
they really did; he behaved as if some neighbour's daughter had
fainted upon hearing of the night's line-up and that he would be
chatting with people who were Very Big, as Big as anyone he'd ever
interviewed. In his clumsy, embarrassing way, Joe was actually
rather decent.
 Paul and John (who had sent his wife, Cynthia, a
telegram from Nat's saying he wanted a divorce; Yoko Ono was looming
large in his life at the time) arrived back in London on 20 May, and
with George and Ringo, who were just back from the Cannes Film
Festival, they began work on what was to be the Beatles' White
Album. John and Yoko did some recordings of their own as well, which
would later be on their Two Virgins LP. On the 21st, Paul and Jane
lunched with Andy Williams (no kidding) and went to his concert at
the Royal Albert Hall - it was the kind of thing they did so well
together, and also the kind of thing they would not be doing very
much more of as the summer wore on.
The glamorous couple also went up north on 8 June, where
Paul was the best man at the wedding of his brother Mike McGear,
who'd changed his last name earlier in the decade so as not to
appear to be riding on his brother's reputation. When I told Linda
in 1991 that I'd recently interviewed her brother-in-law, I
concluded from her reaction that Paul and Mike had fallen out, and
they remain, at the time of writing, estranged.
On the day Paul and John flew out of JFK, Linda rode
back from the airport with Nat Weiss, her first time alone with him
since they'd flown from London to New York in adjacent seats after
the Sergeant Pepper press conference at Brian Epstein's almost
exactly a year earlier. Once again, and even more so than before,
Weiss was impressed with the intensity of Linda's feelings for Paul.
'She kept going on about how much she loved him, and wanted to know
if Paul had said anything about her. Actually, Paul took me aside at
the airport and asked me if Linda really owned a horse in Arizona. I
told him I didn't know,' says Weiss, who wonders to this day why he
wanted to know that, of all things. 'So I told her he obviously
thought she was good company, or she wouldn't have been in my
apartment in the first place, and she seemed sort of satisfied with
that but insisted on knowing if there was anything else. There was
nothing else, but of course his asking her to accompany him to the
airport was very significant, very significant. When you look back
now to the beginnings of it all, Linda was made for Paul.'
Linda told her friends that she felt 'something was
happening' between her and Paul, but she didn't know where it would
go, could only hope that it went in her direction, and meanwhile
would continue being a mother, taking pictures, going to the
Fillmore, dealing with the unspoken scorn of her father and lunching
at the Plaza with Robin Richmond. Whatever would happen would
happen.
Paul's very public appearances with Jane Asher after
he'd returned to London in May had been interpreted by some as a
sign that their 'engagement' was still in place, but his actions in
late June 1968 seem to indicate that he had given up on the affair.
On the 20th he flew to Los Angeles, ostensibly to make a
presentation of a short film about the Apple project to the Capitol
Records' executives gathered there for a mini-convention. Two days
into his stay, he phoned Linda in New York and asked her to join him
there at the Beverly Hills Hotel.
The Beverly Hills Hotel, built in 1912 and massively
done over in the early 90s, is a giant pink lodge sort of a
building, just west of Los Angeles proper, tucked into twelve
florally abundant acres in what was a desert not so long ago, before
they brought the water in. (The look is "non-manicured,"' gushes the
press packet for the hostelry, 'but don't be fooled: It takes as
much upkeep as the fabulous faces and buff bodies of the Hotel's
famous guests.') It is the 'Hotel California', and much more, a
perennial player in the entertainment industry and a love-nest in a
league of its own. Warren Beatty and Leslie Caron, Jennifer Jones
and Norton Simon, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor and the John Ono
Lennons famously diddled here.
Many of the lustier moments, about which so much has
been written, took place in one of the bungalows tucked away in an
eastern corner of the grounds. They're as close to being 'bungalows'
as the marble palaces of Newport are 'cottages', but allow the very
rich their attempts at understatement. About twenty discreet little
houses, each with four or five opulent rooms, the bungalows have
their own driveway from the street that borders the hotel grounds on
the east, a driveway usually lined with the limousines of those with
access to a great deal of money to spend on accommodation. Of course
your little house has full hotel services - the help comes in
through a back door, bringing food and flowers, or whatever else
can't be delivered by wire. Celebrities have every reason to adore
the bungalows of the Beverly Hills Hotel, because one can reach
one's private nest without going through the main lobby; for a
Beatle in 1968, this combination of luxury, efficiency and complete
privacy was certainly ideal. Bungalow five, the most legendary of
all the cottages (the preferred love-nest of Elizabeth Taylor and
Richard Burton, Marilyn Monroe and Yves Montand, etc.), with four
bedrooms -these days it is available for $4,000 a night - was Paul
McCartney's home-away-from-home that June.
'The only time I ever, ever saw Linda display any
anxiety was the night before she left for Los Angeles,' Robin
Richmond says. 'She was remarkably, girlishly, coy and shy and
nervous.' Paul had left a message with her answering service (this
was before machines; some people use human answering devices to this
day, but not many), something like, 'Tell Miss Eastman that Paul
called and said, "Why don't you come and join me at the Beverly
Hills Hotel for a few days?"' Linda found someone to stay with
Heather, bought a ticket and was off to LA the morning after she
picked up the rather cryptic message. Was she supposed just to go to
the hotel? Get a room for herself somewhere? Tell him she was
coming? She decided it was best just to go, and appear. The details
would fill themselves in.
Linda was headed for some kind of romantic showdown.
She'd never been summoned anywhere by a man to join him, except
perhaps at a recording studio or hotel in New York, certainly never
across the continent: this was not for a photo shoot either, and
besides, this time Linda was in love with the man who invited her.
Tony Bramwell, a member of Paul's staff at the time,
wrote a story about the Beverly Hills meeting in a story published
in the Daily Mail, a year after Linda's death. The headline promised
a revelation about the 'extraordinary moment when rock's greatest
love affair really began'. I have no argument with either premise -
that it 'really' began there, and that it was rock's greatest love
affair, because it was. Paul and Linda would tell people throughout
the years that It first happened there, and if one were ever with
them in the vicinity of the great pink palace on Sunset Boulevard,
they would point to it and get all giggly and cuddly.
It didn't take long at all for Linda to phone Lillian
Roxon when she returned to New York to tell her that she and Paul
had entered into (hopefully, she said) a true sexual relationship.
Lillian quickly made sure the whole town knew about it as well, but
Linda didn't mind. When I called her to say, 'I hear you finally
scored, congratulations,' she replied simply, 'I really am in love
with him, you know; it's not like anyone else, it's kind of like the
first time.'
Bramwell tells the story with everything but a thousand
stringed instruments rising in the background, and when he says, 'I
could sense that this [meeting at the BHH] meant far more than
Paul's other encounters. They just gazed at each other looking
astonished,' I could not be happier, because although not an
eyewitness to this particular history, I believe it 100 per cent.
'What are you going to do now?' I asked Linda when she
confirmed Lillian's hot news.
'I suppose it's up to him, isn't it?' she said.
I told her that I thought she was being unusually modest
about her own powers, but she was deferential as I'd never heard her
before: 'I said it was up to him. I will not call him . . . but we
talked about music a lot. Maybe I'll send him some records, he told
me he'd like to hear what I liked. Can you get me some advance
pressings?'
'Hey,' I said, all eager to please, 'can you send him
some things that I like?'
'Only if I like them too.'
'Linda! What's up?' I remember imploring her. This was
big, need I say. This was deep-sea fishing, even for Linda Eastman,
and I was convinced she was in love, after all the flirtations we'd
lived through together. Linda always preferred being the conquered
rather than the conqueror, but I'd seen her moving towards a target
by any means necessary, when the prize was juicy enough. Not this
time. Paul was no passive southern California crypto-epicene
songwriter - he was Beatle Paul, a northern Englishman very
conscious of who should do what and with whom. Women were by his
side at his pleasure - and, perhaps not so incidentally in the light
of future events, the women hanging out with him during that trip to
California, before Linda arrived, were said by some friends to be
rather more trashy than aristocratic. Why begrudge anything to the
man who had everything? But as anyone can tell you who's possessed
concubines by the thousands, of either sex or both, even that gets
boring and leaves you wanting something . .. more.
One month after Paul and Linda parted in Los Angeles
after their idyll in Beverly Hills, he on his way to London, she to
New York, Jane Asher, on a BBC talk show, announced that her
engagement to Paul had ended. 'She was just totally devoted to her
career, and Paul wanted a proper home life,' Nat Weiss relates.
'He'd been on top of the world for five years and done enough
swinging for a lifetime.'
There would be one more live-in girlfriend in Paul's
life, the dazzling American adventuress Francie Schwartz, who was in
residence in Cavendish Avenue (along with John and Yoko) for most of
the summer of '68, before Linda took her place at Paul's side once
and for all.
Francie, twenty-three at the time and an American
would-be screenwriter, was one of many hopeful non-mainstream
artists who heard Paul's and John's description of Apple as a refuge
for creativity that was not fully appreciated by the general public.
As might have been expected - as should have been expected - Apple's
London office became a repository of unsolicited and un-listened-to
cassettes, which John would shovel into cartons for disposal, and
its front doorstep became populated not only by the slightly cuckoo
Beatles fans who had always gathered there (the 'Apple Scruffs'),
but by dozens of people with 'projects' they felt only the Beatles
would appreciate. It became Derek Taylor's unhappy job to shoo them
all away periodically, so that the people who worked there could
come and go without having to battle an encampment of weirdos.
But Francie was more savvy. She arrived in London from
New York, where she'd been writing advertising copy, in early April.
She carried with her a 'treatment' for a movie about a street
musician she'd met in front of Carnegie Hall who wanted to be a
concert violinist, sure that the story would appeal to the Beatles.
She frequented the London rock clubs and managed to make
a bunch of new friends, including a receptionist at Apple, who got
her through the front door one day early in May. Lo and behold, Paul
was in the reception area. Francie gave him her picture and told him
she could be reached via a trendy hair salon where another of her
new friends was employed. While having her hair done there the next
day, a note from Paul arrived with his phone number. Etc. etc. - a
month or so of cat and mouse, and Francie found herself a de facto
resident at Paul's house. Jane's clothes were still there, Francie
recalls, but Jane was then on tour with the Old Vic company. John
and Yoko were living there as well. It is not true that Jane walked
in on Francie and Paul making love: this we know. Of other details
we cannot be sure - Paul does not even mention Francie in his
semi-official biography by Barry Miles, and Francie's account of the
affair in her own delightful book, Body Count, and the conversations
I had with her leave some uncertainty as to the exact dates of
events concerning the Loves of Paul. What makes sense is that Paul
and Jane have effectively called it quits by mid-June; Paul goes to
California, where he sends for Linda and they become lovers; Paul
returns to his house, which Jane has vacated and where the lovely
young couple John and Yoko are living; he is lonely; Francie is
attractive and available; she and Paul sleep together a few times;
and pretty soon he doesn't seem to object if she sticks around the
day after and the day after and so on. Francie is not in a great
hurry to leave either, although it is no bed of roses from the point
of view of a woman who has been jilted by the man she refers to as
the great love of her life. 'Oh, he gave me great jobs to do, like
cutting the matted fur on the back of Martha, the sheepdog, that had
shit balls in it. "Well, would you take care of Martha please?" He
never bothered to send her out to a groomer. When Paul was out,
which was often, John and Yoko and I would just sit around and talk
and watch TV; one night we made opium cookies which made us sleepy,
so we went to bed. You know, this was the extent of the
"heroin-related drug activity" of John Lennon in 1968, no matter
what anyone says. The heaviest thing he was into was LSD; John told
me he would drop acid tabs like M&Ms.'
Francie went to recording sessions (although she did not
participate, as did Yoko), worked at Apple part-time, sat in Paul's
Aston Martin waiting for Paul to finish his visit with another
woman, scored drugs for the household and prepared her American
version of Liverpool junk food, beans on toast.
'More often than not,' she writes in her book, 'I would
just be falling asleep around two in the morning when John and Yoko
and Paul would crash in, show films, or play tapes from the session.
If he wasn't in a good mood, he'd drink hideous Scotch-Coke
combinations, throw food at the dogs and cats, drop his clothes in a
path from the door to the bed, and ignore me completely ...
Sometimes we'd go to a club, have a good time, then zip home for the
ephemeral thing we substituted for love-making.'
 This fairy-tale romance lasted until late in August.
One morning I woke up and everything had changed. I
went downstairs, the carpets had just been shampooed and I
remember them being damp, very damp. Paul had this horrible look
on his face. Totally out of the blue, he asked me when I was
leaving. I stuck around for a little bit, and I went into the
kitchen in tears and called my mother. He came up behind me and
put his arms around me and told me not to cry. And then he said,
'I'm going out for a while, make dinner will you.'
The next morning, I called the accountant and asked
him for just enough money for a coach seat to New York. I packed
my shit and Paul was pretending to be asleep. He was really awake
and he didn't say anything. He just looked at me as if he was
embarrassed, and I got the hell out of there.
Francie never saw Paul again. By the time he asked her
to leave, he had already called Linda and invited her to come to
London.

Chapter 7
'Back then, there were a handful of people who had influence and
fun. A handful of people, and the people who shagged them.'
Pete Townshend
Before leaving for Los Angeles in August 1968 to work on
a major photo shoot for Mademoiselle magazine, probably the most
lucrative assignment she'd ever had, Linda had a phone call from
Paul inviting her to stay with him in London. (The excellent
biography of Paul by Barry Miles, Many Years from Now, quotes Linda
as saying the call came in late September, but it was in August; we
know that on 18 September the Beatles were recording 'Birthday' for
the White Album at Abbey Road, and Linda was there, on back-up
vocals.) It was so much what she'd wanted, if indeed it signified
that he wanted something serious, that she couldn't quite believe
that he wasn't perhaps toying with her. So she checked it out with
her close friends, who sensed that she was going through some kind
of anguish - a condition she'd not been known to suffer from ever
before.
Linda and I had dinner at a nice, long-since-gone
restaurant on Sunset Boulevard one night, after she'd spent a
memorable afternoon photographing Aretha Franklin in a little park
in Beverly Hills. She spoke of that experience in a videotaped
promotion for her landmark book of photographs, Linda McCartney -
Sixties:
Aretha was in tears [when Linda arrived at her hotel
room]. Her husband, who was her manager, really 'done her wrong,'
and he'd left. She had all the band and everybody on her back for
money, and she was sort of sipping vodka the whole afternoon, she
was so upset. I got a few black and white shots of her while we
talked. Such a nice person. I guess because there was no one else
there, she was talking to me and Andrea, the Mademoiselle editor,
just talking heart-to-heart. Then she got past that, and got rid
of the busy-stuff she had to do, and they put a wig on her and
makeup and this white satin dress, and we went outside and you can
see the contrast in my book. Aretha for Mademoiselle and Aretha
just, really, for me. I thought she was such a great person, it
 was an emotional thing for me.
After recounting the Aretha session while we dawdled
over drinks, Linda became silent, nervous and fidgety. She looked
down at the table, and then right into my eyes.
'Paul asked me to come to London,' she announced.
I said, 'Great!'
'But do you think he says that to lots of girls so that
he's never without one? He didn't say anything specific, just to
come over and call him when I get there. What if he wasn't serious?'

'How can you take a chance that he's not serious? You
love him. What can you lose? At the worst, you'll find out you're
one of many -which I don't think, because no one is that callous -
it'll cost you a plane ticket, and you'll get enough pictures while
you're there to pay for the trip. On the other hand, if he's
serious, Linda ... well, if he's serious you'd better find out. Just
go.' It was one of my finer lectures.
'Hmm ..." she replied. 'Maybe I should go.' As if she
really needed convincing.
The next day Linda and I drove out to Malibu, where she
was shooting Judy Collins on the beach. I worked for Judy's record
company, Elektra, and she was a good friend as well. Linda and she
were particularly close because after they'd met for a shoot I'd set
up over a year earlier, they'd bonded, as single working mothers in
the music business and as artists. When I spoke to Judy for this
book, I recalled that August when Linda had told me of Paul's
invitation.
'She told me about it too,' Judy said. 'And she was
nervous about it, because "he's always got all these groupies around
him". Well, I told her that was to be expected, but I knew she could
deal with it. She could deal with just about anything.'
Of course, in the light of subsequent events, I was
always amused to recall Linda's need of reassurance at that very
critical moment in her life. I don't think she would have been
talked out of it, anyhow, nor do I think anyone tried. If she had
not gone ... But there was no 'if about it then, and I'm sure Paul
would have continued to court her; given his insistence on having
the world know that he, Paul, pursued her, Linda, and not the other
way around, they were going to come together no matter what.
I don't recall how that day ended. Linda and I went back
to New York separately, and after she spent a few weeks in New York
getting Heather started at her first school and making all necessary
arrangements for her, Linda flew to London in mid-September. I
didn't see her again for over a year, until she called me one night
in early 1970 to tell me that she and her husband were in town and
wanted to drop over. It was as if we'd had dinner two nights ago.
One got used to that over the years.
Little did Linda know, as she packed her bags at the end
of the summer of 1968 for what was going to be an extremely
auspicious journey, that in Cavendish Avenue in London Paul
McCartney was trying to figure out how to evict yet another
international player before his true love arrived. Happily for all
involved, this was in no way a romantic or even sexual companion
living under his roof, but none other than Nico, the decadent,
beautiful and tragic chanteuse.
Born in Germany before the start of the Second World
War, Nico had been a model, a minor movie star (as in Fellini's La
Dolce Vita, 1959), the lover of Lou Reed, Jim Morrison, Jackson
Browne, Brian Jones and Iggy Pop, and an Andy Warhol 'superstar'.
Worshipfully nicknamed 'the Moon Goddess', she was a singer and
songwriter of an importance that remains mysterious and unfathomed
to this day, and a terrifying seductress of men. Her friends knew
her as one of the sweetest people around, while all the cute and
talented boys who fell in love with her were scared, very scared.
She was divine, a major pain in the ass, and very collectable. Paul
certainly knew that, via his flirtation with the avant-garde of the
mid-60s, his excellent taste and perhaps through Brian Epstein, who,
if you recall, had taken to Acapulco early in the year he died one
hustler and one album - The Velvet Underground andNico, the 'banana'
album that's on every music buffs Top Ten Of All Time list. Nico had
lived in London, and naturally travelled in the most elite circles.
Linda knew her as well - they had many friends in common, among them
Paul Morrissey, the brilliant director of many of Warhol's early
movies such as Trash and Heat, and a classy indie film-maker to this
day.
Paul Morrissey and Paul McCartney had known each other
since 1967, when the Warhol crowd passed through London after the
Cannes Film Festival and gathered at the apartment of the late
Robert Fraser, a great art dealer who was very close to Paul
McCartney and had invited him over to meet the famous New York
artist. Paul brought with him the advance layouts of the Sergeant
Pepper album cover, about which Andy could only say - to Fraser
after Paul had left - that he didn't see his own picture on it, and
that was his opinion of it, period.
Morrissey was, to his infinite credit, Nico's main
protector (actually her manager, but that's too impersonal a
definition of their relationship) when it came to dealing with the
real world. In September 1968, he had just arrived in London with
Warhol when Paul McCartney called him at his hotel and said, to
Morrissey's astonishment, 'Hello, it's Paul. Listen, I have a favour
to ask of you. Could you come over to my house?'
'I didn't know what he wanted, until he said it was
about Nico. I knew she was in London, but not until that moment did
I have any idea that she was staying at Paul McCartney's house,'
Morrissey remembers. 'So I went over there, and he showed me the
house, and then he said, "You know I have Nico here, I invited her
to stay here about two weeks ago; she had no money and I just
thought it was for a few days, and she had nowhere else to go. I
like her and she's very nice, but I have to ask her to leave and I
don't know how to do this, and I thought since you're here, and
you're her manager, maybe you could do that.��
Although not in love with her, Paul seems to have been
slightly scared of Nico, like all the other young men in her life.
Let's say 'shy with', rather than 'scared of. Linda and Paul and I
were once looking at her photograph of Nico and me (my favourite
photograph of me, by the way, taken in London in the early 1970s),
and Paul commented, 'It's just beautiful, it nails you there at the
period.'
'That's the magic of photography,' I said. 'Guys were so
afraid of Nico, you know.'
Replied Paul, 'I wasn't afraid of her at all.'
Morrissey recalls,
Paul was very polite, and I said, 'Oh yeah sure,'
because I knew Nico could be something of a burden, and then he
told me that a journalist was coming over from New York to
interview him and he didn't have any extra bedrooms. So I asked
 him who the journalist was, because maybe I knew who it was, and
he answered, 'Oh, do you know Linda Eastman?' and I said that I
knew her very well and, 'Yes, she's great.' I was supposed to
understand that Linda was coming to do some in-depth story and
needed to be there for a few days. And it made sense to me that he
was giving this girl a place to stay, like he did for Nico, and I
just thought it was a nice thing for him to do. I knew that there
was nothing romantic between him and Nico, or she would have told
me before this, or would have made some reference to it. She would
have called me from anywhere in the world if that had been what
was happening.
But later, when Linda and Paul got married, I tried to
think of that time he mentioned that a 'journalist' was coming,
and I said to myself, 'Oh, he did have this glint in his eye when
he told me who it was.' Then, I remember very vividly, flying into
London from Paris on the day after I had read about their wedding,
and I was walking around Bond Street looking at stores and art
galleries, and I didn't even know where the Apple headquarters
was, but I was on that street and they came right out of the Apple
building, and they walked over to me and called, 'Oh, hello, hi,
how are you?' I said, 'Congratulations!' and I thought, 'Isn't
this funny, they got married yesterday but they're not on a
honeymoon, they're at the office?'
Morrissey had known Linda since the Rolling Stones boat
ride. 'Andy [Warhol] was really envious of the Rolling Stones
because they were on the cover of Town and Country, and Brigid's and
Christina's father was the president of the company, and he'd always
want to know why he wasn't in Town and Country if the Rolling Stones
were. We'd met Linda at the magazine office once, and on the boat
Andy said to her, "Ooh, I didn't know you were a photographer," and
she said, "I think I am, now, but don't tell anyone that I'm really
not."'
New York was a much smaller town in the mid-60s -
everybody knew everybody else, more or less, and there were very few
places on the circuit of social and artistic acceptability: the
Scene, Ondine's, a few other discos and restaurants and, most of
all, Max's Kansas City.
'Linda's story is almost like a George Eliot novel, all
about circles of people in one village,' Pete Townshend said to me.
I know somebody reading your book will have difficulty
with this unless they can put themselves in their own village.
There are the principal characters, and they're around from the
beginning until the end. When I first got to New York, I thought,
'Oh, there are so many people!' But really, back then, there were
a handful of people who had influence and fun. A handful of
people, and the people who shagged them.
When you guys adopted me in 1967,1 felt like I'd been
slipped from one place to another. From the London village to the
New York village. And one of a handful of people again, with Linda
very much one of them. She was sure of who she was, and she knew
which village she came from, and it was not the village of the
general populace. I don't mean to say that she was any kind of
snob or anything like that, but I knew that about myself too. And
so who could Linda marry? Someone in her own village,
metaphorically. Or in the equivalent of her own village in a
different country. Paul. It just seems OK. She had to end up with
Paul by the end of the novel.
Linda moved into Paul's house, but not into the spare
bedroom, and the honeymoon really began there and then, in the final
days of the summer of 1968.
The Beatles were having severe problems then, with Yoko
Ono apparently having driven a wedge between Paul McCartney and the
most important person in his life, John Lennon. And between John and
the other Beatles as well.
'She was in the studio with them all the time, I mean in
the recording studio, not in the control room, with the Beatles, the
BeatlesY says Nat Weiss, remembering the year the group was headed
in the direction of full disintegration. 'George ended up yelling at
her, "Why don't you get the fuck off my amps?", something like that.
I went to the taping session of "Hey Jude" for the David Frost show
[4 September 1968], and she was ordering people around right and
left. She felt her own power right there and then.'
Francie Schwartz has memories of Yoko that are kinder
than most other people's (and memories of Paul that are less fond).
But her account of the Big Rupture between Paul and John is probably
quite accurate in its essentials. It was told many times by John
himself.
It was in August, and I was living with Paul on
Cavendish Avenue. John and Yoko were staying there too, in the
living room. Paul never opened his fan mail, I opened the fan mail
for him, but he didn't give a shit about the mail. John and Yoko
definitely gave a shit about their mail, and everything addressed
to John and/or Yoko came to the house.
Paul was upstairs, and there was a note on the mantle,
addressed to John and Yoko, typewritten. It was not postmarked so
it was suspicious immediately. The two of them opened it up and
showed it to me. It said, 'You and your Jap tart think you're hot
shit.'
We were appalled, I mean, what can you say? It was
unsigned, just the one sentence, typed. Then Paul bopped into the
living room. He was wearing suit trousers and suspenders, barefoot
with no shirt, his hands in his pockets. 'Oh, I just did that for
a lark,' he said. As far as I'm concerned, that was the moment
when John looked at Paul as if to say, 'Do I know you?' It was
over, it was completely and totally over at that moment. They may
have been able to work together, but it was never the same.
It's convenient to say the 'end' of the Beatles was a
certainty when in April 1970 Paul McCartney announced publicly, in a
press kit included in his first solo album, McCartney, that he was
no longer working with the group but would be a solo artist from
then on. (This is discussed later. However, it wasn't until November
that Paul filed a lawsuit against the other Beatles, asking that the
band be dissolved; the case was not decided until January 1975 when
it was ruled that the Beatles no longer existed.)
However, hi January 1970, did John and Yoko jump the gun
on Paul when they put out their own press release referring to 1970
as 'Year One'? Legally and financially, the Beatles' battles dragged
on interminably; they certainly were in full swing many years after
John's death in 1980, which itself could be the year the Beatles
finally, irrevocably, were finished. Yet even without John, or with
John making a posthumous contribution, there have been and continue
to be 'Beatles' projects. For some fans, it was over when the
Beatles played their last concert in August 1966; for others, any
attempt to say the Beatles could ever be over is a sort of
sacrilege. It would be like, er, claiming that Jesus was over when
he was nailed to the cross. Some would agree, some would not; some
things just don't seem to be conclusively ended no matter what
happens in the physical universe - the end of which would not
necessarily mean the end of Jesus or the Beatles. Just ask a fan of
either. It's easier to count the angels dancing on the head of a
pin.
But Linda and Yoko will forever be known as 'the women
who broke up the Beatles'. As if there were a need to blame
something that might never have happened, had already happened, or
would have happened anyhow on two women who did nothing worse than
love their men, each in her own fashion. It's interesting that no
man was ever held responsible for this ephemeral event. Actually,
I'd say the responsibility lay with that judge, whatever his name
is, who made the dissolution of the Beatles a legal reality in 1975
- it makes as much sense as any other theory.
Still, the two halves of one of the century's great
songwriting teams, and the engineers who drove the flashiest and
most gorgeous locomotive of modern culture, were an unstable entity
perhaps from the start - not the start of the Beatles, but of their
success, which is and has been beyond the reach of any phenomenon
that's come since. Oh, maybe I take that back, maybe it's an
overstatement. One supposes the movies of Steven Spielberg have made
more money; Bob Dylan has most powerfully rattled the rafters of
lyric-writing; Barbra Streisand has elevated the standards of
diva-dom; Andy Warhol and Jasper Johns created the first paintings
of the twenty-first century; Mrs Thatcher changed the sexual
possibilities of political dominance for all tune; the Kennedys
invented political glamour (only to see it evaporate); Diana showed
us that fairy tales can come true; Jerry Seinfeld single-handedly
forever lowered the standard of comedy established by Lenny Bruce,
Jack Benny, Lucille Ball et al. and was the biggest phenomenon in
television history; Bill Gates became the richest man who ever
lived; and Oprah Winfrey is now the first black woman billionairess
- wow! What competition - but have the Beatles really any
competition? This writer (a Stones guy) thinks not, and so the
Destroyers of the Wondergroup deserve very close and special
attention, as long as there are those (and there always will be) who
believe that Linda and Yoko were indeed just that.
Because Yoko Ono was, from the moment of her irruption
into the 'art world', an amazing, perplexing, deep, powerful and
mysterious presence, much print and analysis have been devoted to
her, and she deserves every inch of column space she's received. She
demanded and commanded the spotlight at every moment that was
opportune, and was forever hard at work to make those moments
plentiful. Before, during and after the times that John Lennon was
by her side.
'John was a bully. John was a complete bully,' says Nat
Weiss. 'If he could intimidate you, he would just do it for the
purpose of intimidating you. But his weakness was that he liked to
be dominated. And that was the basis of his relationship with Yoko.'

Whatever one might say about Paul McCartney, even

knowing the Beatles as well as Weiss did, it would not be that Paul
liked (or likes) to be dominated. The idea is mind-boggling. If Yoko
was a dominating person, and the shoe does seem to fit, then she was
quite the opposite of Linda, who shrank from the glare of tungsten
and carbide, yet was no less a force in possessing and exhibiting a
supreme intensity that in many ways reinformed the meanings of love,
caring, parenting, partnership, activism and personal artistic
potential and realization. For her, humans were judged on merit
alone, not because of the attributes with which they'd been born -
she was truly the most colour-blind and class-blind person I've ever
known - and animals were not judged ever, at all.
From Chrissie Hynde's rhyming eulogy, at Linda
McCartney's New York memorial, 21 June 1998:
Linda McCartney was a pal and an ally
She wasn't an avant-garde intellectual bully
And she sure wasn 't here for the fame or the money.

She didn't cry 'Peace!' in a room full of furs

She thought animals' skins were theirs, and not hers.

There is no intention here of doing a Yoko vs. Linda,

which would be dumb and sexist, for starters. In fact, I'm going to
try to bring Yoko into this story only insofar as her and Linda's
paths cross, and I am aware of the naivete of that intention. I
don't know Yoko, nor do I really know much about her. Some people
for whom I have enormous respect think she is wonderfully
delightful, charitable and admirable; from a distance, that has not
been my own impression, but I bow to those who are in a better
position to have a well-informed opinion. It's clear to anyone,
however, that she relishes attention, much as Linda, certainly until
the last fifteen years of her life, shied away from it. I've watched
Linda and Paul being 'attacked' by photographers during many of the
times I've been with them, and their way of dealing with the
flashing strobes was always so very different - he moving into and
towards the light, she backing away from it, ever so subtly, but
enough to give the impression that she was a cold person and he was
a warm one. Warm is an act for Paul, for which I give him a lifetime
Academy Award - he is a master, he wrote the book. Really, Linda was
much warmer than Paul, if you knew her. He was publicly as charming
a person ever to wear the mantle of talent and fame, and Linda was
contrastingly shy, a quality mistaken for aloofness and arrogance.
But in 1968 Linda Eastman and Yoko Ono, later portrayed
in the media as a reincarnation of St Francis on the one hand, and a
retro-incarnation of the Evil Queen of Outer Space on the other,
were indistinguishable, simply the Vile Villainesses 'who broke up
the Beatles'.
'THE TWO WOMEN WHO BROKE UP THE BEATLES', by Julie
Goldman, was the headline of a story (well, it's been in some form
or another the headline of many stories, but that's the one I'm
looking at now) in McCall's magazine, July 1971. Egregiously full of
errors (Christina Berlin becomes Christina Paolizzi, a
naked-nipple-thrusting 'socialite' of the 60s, for whom fifteen
minutes of fame would have been far too much for her mind to handle)
and insensitive locutions like 'two American college-girl divorcees,
a Jewish princess and a Japanese princess', the story has a telling
take on some prevalent sentiments, and sometimes even hits the
bull's-eye: 'The breakup of the Beatles was very marital, like a
divorce . . . The old theme, love versus friendship. As usual, love
won. And what could have done this but love?' And who could argue
with that?
When Linda died in 1998, it was not at all difficult for
people who had known her and Paul to find countless factors in the
lives and personalities of both of them that 'proved' they were made
for each other. They were each other's best friends, they understood
each other's needs, their musical tastes were in synch, they were
wonderful parents who loved their children more than anything else,
they preferred domestic simplicity to glamour, they were monogamous,
thrifty, loved animals, nature and horseriding, etc., etc. And yes,
at the end of thirty years they were as one, and it certainly should
be hoped that that was the case, or it would not have been the
spectacularly successful marriage that it was.
But in 1968 they had not had a life together, shared no
parenting responsibilities and actually didn't know each.other very
well. There was physical attraction, certainly, and sexual
compatibility, it would seem, but Linda and Paul both knew that it
would be a bad idea to elevate lust, satisfying though it was, to
the basis of a long and agreeable relationship, one that would be
fulfilling for them and scrutinized very closely by the rest of the
world.
It was clear to Paul by this point that Yoko had become
by far the most important person in John Lennon's life; even were
she to somehow vaporize, John would not come running back to Paul
after that unfortunate disappearance. Besides, no simple act of God
was a match for her powers, or her hold on John. There were other
notable tensions within the Beatles organization, and Paul, as much
as he wanted to keep it going, must have realized that the show's
run was ending. Most important, John was simply headed in another
direction, which was not very Fab Four, to say the least (can anyone
picture Paul and Linda posing naked for an album cover as John and
Yoko did for Two Virgins in November 1968?), and the partnership
that had been the creative centre of the Beatles was shattered, far
beyond the ability of all the king's horses and all the king's men
to repair, not to mention beyond Paul's.
And then there was Linda, and everything was right about
her. She was beautiful but never gaudy, not spoiled and not
materialistic (i.e. would not squander Paul's money), extremely
talented as a photographer and acknowledged as such (very important,
this; John had taken up with someone whom he considered, and who
certainly considered herself, an 'artist' and Paul could do no
less). Moving along, Linda came from a very good family well beyond
the social class into which Paul was born (ditto Yoko and John
again, although the Jane Asher affair had given Paul a heady taste
of the delights of being upper-middle, rather than upper-lower,
class), and Paul liked the idea that although Linda's mother had
been born into wealth, Linda's father - the great authority figure
in her life - was a self-made man, just as Paul was, and someone he
could deal with as such. Linda had great taste in rock and roll, and
an expert's knowledge of the music business. She was born into the
world of contemporary art; for someone who had just discovered
modern art via Magritte, a surrealist, it must have been very heady
indeed for Paul to have a girlfriend who had grown up with the great
abstract expressionists of the New York school as members of her
extended family. Paul and Linda had both lost their mothers in
tragic circumstances, and Linda was a mother herself, impeccably
devoted to her young daughter. She was loving, affectionate, warm,
patient and comforting. She could cook, and was never happier than
when in the kitchen; the traditional northern Englishman in Paul,
always a large part of who he is and how he sees himself, was
delighted with that maternal 'Eat! Eat!' quality of hers. And he
loved her.
Picking up the story, we find Linda moving in with Paul,
and the two of them discovering that they did indeed like each other
as much as they had hoped they would. After the career-driven Jane
Asher and the volatile Francie Schwartz (and the example of the
woman John chose, who, aside from her formidable intelligence, must
have represented to Paul a living specimen of everything he did not
want in a woman), and after hundreds of one-nighters, Linda just
fitted right in. Paul could bring her to the recording studio
without upsetting any Apple carts, so to speak, or he could have her
reliably waiting for him at home, tending to the pets and the pots
(and the pot), a proper and consoling shoulder to cry on after a day
at work.
Linda is happy, and of course wanting it to last. There
are big troubles ahead, but those waters don't come to a rolling
boil until the very end of the year and the beginning of 1969;
Linda's biggest problems now are the press, who are beginning to
wonder who she is (neither she nor Paul nor Derek Taylor have any
intention of dealing with the media until it becomes absolutely
unavoidable), the Apple Scruffs (those ultra-fans who camp out on
Paul's doorstep and know everything about what's going on inside;
they do not like this American divorcee and consider her an
interloper, as opposed mainly to Jane, who was a proper English
celebrity), and, most urgent of all, her separation from Heather,
who has just begun school and is old enough to be very curious about
where Mummy is and what she's doing.
Linda calls Heather every night from London when she and
Paul are comfy in bed, when it's early evening in New York. Linda
explains to Heather that she's far away with someone she likes very
much, his name is Paul and he's one of the Beatles (which means
nothing to the child), and often hands the phone to Paul and tells
him to say hello to her daughter, whom he's never met. From all
points of view, this is brilliant; not cunning, but brilliant. Linda
is being a good mother (she was always incapable of being anything
but that), Heather is learning about the man who is soon going to be
a vital part of her own life, Paul is getting to know Heather and at
the same time he is seeing Linda in action as a loving mother.
He admitted to Barry Miles that his first conversation
with Heather was nervous-making: 'I got on the phone thinking, "Oh
my God, if she hates me this could be very difficult"... I said,
"Will you marry me?" and she said, "I can't, you're too old!" and I
said, "Well, maybe I should marry your Mummy, that'd be good."'
The cosiness of it all is a wee bit treacly, to be sure,
but it surely must have contrasted splendidly, for Paul, with the
daily, mounting tensions in the recording studio; Ringo 'quits' the
band in a huff (to return in a week, but Ringo was not supposed to
have tantrums - that was George's speciality, apparently), and
Yoko-John and Paul are not a happy combination. Was Linda cunning?
Did she use Heather? Well, of course, and why not? Did Paul know
what she was doing? Of course. Was he flattered, amused, comforted
and encouraged? Again, of course, and no one could be as comforting
and encouraging as Linda. Jane could not have been, for all her
intelligence, elegance and class - her career was at the top of her
agenda and she has become a great celebrity in Britain, but as
Philip Norman observes in the Beatles' biography Shout, Jane would
not pamper Paul, and Paul liked that stuff. Linda liked doing it.
Someone who knew Linda very well from the late 1980s
until her death once said to me, 'She must have been brought up with
a lot of love, because she was such a loving person. She had to have
learned that early in her life.' My response: 'Wrong!'
I think she was not expressively and warmly loved when
she was a child, although I don't doubt that her parents loved all
their children very much. Linda was not close to her mother, after
all. As we have noted, at family parties, where Mrs Eastman could
work a roomful of brilliant people with incredible ease and aplomb -
'the Auntie Mame of Scarsdale' is how a friend of the family
described her - Linda would hang out in the kitchen with the hired
help. She worshipped her father, but she was afraid of him always,
and he was always (until you-know-what happened) a bit dismayed with
his restless, independent daughter, her mediocre school grades and
disgraceful career. And that's my theory: Linda was so eager to give
what she never got, what she thought every child, family member,
friend and animal deserved: a whole lot of loving. She didn't learn
it by watching other people, she learned it by knowing, absolutely
and instinctively, what the other person/creature needed most of all
at any given time.
When Linda was gone from New York for a few weeks that
September, I remember saying to Lillian Roxon, 'Wow, don't you think
it's odd that we haven't heard from Linda in such a long time?'
'Not at all,' Lillian twinkled, in her wise and sly way,
'she's going to marry him, you know.'
'How can you know that?' I demanded. 'You haven't talked
to her or heard from her either.'
'Mark my words,' she said.
Early in October, they went back to New York to fetch
Heather and to meet Linda's father, the formidable Lee Eastman, and
her brother John. A very bold and significant move, that, on Linda's
part, and a juggling act starring the most important people in her
life. The risks, the high stakes, are obvious, yet she wasn't
worried. She was certain (and Linda's certainty was a force like the
wind) that her daughter, father and brother would be impressed by
the boy she was bringing home, the only boy she'd ever brought home
- and she knew the boy would be impressed by the blood she came
from, and her smart, sad, beautiful child. This was the test of her
lifetime, and she aced it. Not to say she wasn't a little nervous,
didn't have a bit of stage fright, like Paul says he had when Linda
handed him the phone and told him to say hello to Heather. But she
told Paul she hoped he would like her family, and he told her he was
sure he would. So was she.
Linda's self-confidence served her well at this critical
time. She was the luckiest girl in the world - by the end of the
coming winter, she would also be the most hated.

Chapter 8
'Those first few days in Paul's house, I lived in fear of going
outside.'
Linda McCartney
What Linda and Paul did that October in 1968 is rather
amazing.
At Paul's house in London, Linda is in love, but missing
and feeling guilty about Heather. Paul does not want to see her torn
between himself and her daughter, so he suggests that they go to New
York together. He doesn't want it known that he's there.
'It was his idea,' Linda told me. 'I wasn't totally sure
we could carry it off, but he was. He said he wanted to meet
Heather, and to know about how I lived and where I lived. My God! He
wanted to see New York. He really had never seen New York. He'd been
there about six times, but always as a Beatle. Which meant as a
prisoner. We figured it could be a disaster if he were recognized,
and how could we make sure it would not get uncomfortable, so we did
the disguise thing. He loved fooling people into thinking he was not
him, that he was an ordinary bloke. Everyone in the world wanted to
be him, and he wanted to be ordinary. For a few weeks. I still can't
believe the press didn't find out -that's why I didn't call you
guys.
'It's not as if I thought I couldn't trust you, but my
friends all worked for magazines or newspapers, you know, and Paul
just didn't want...'
'Oh Linda, I understand, yes sure, we would have
betrayed you in a minute! Why should you have trusted us? You did
the right thing.'
'Well, you know, it was all his idea.'
'Mmm . . .'
'How is Lillian?'
'She's not smiling wildly, but she's fine. Will you call
her?'
'I don't think so, but send her my love. You'll explain,
won't you? This is Paul's idea. I suppose he's right.'
That was the essence of the last conversation Linda and
I had for well over a year. I called her, she didn't call me. She
and Paul had been spotted strolling around New York, and her friends
(hence the entire world?) knew they were in town together and that
there was a reason she'd clammed up, but I couldn't resist poking
around there. I was dying to tell her that Lillian was sure she was
going to marry him, and Lillian was always right. I just said that I
hoped it would all work out in whatever way she wanted it to, and
see ya later.
'It was a dump, she dumped all her friends,' Blair Sabol
said to me. And she did, and the consequences were very bad.
Linda took Paul hunting for anonymous fashions at the
best thrift shops in her neighbourhood, and on 125th Street as well,
an exotic destination, all things considered. They decided on a
frankly hobo-ish old army uniform and a grubby, badly fitting
herringbone overcoat. He had a beard, didn't shave and told Miles,'.
. . it wasn't a couple of very rich people walking round New York,
it was more the kind of people you'd want to avoid ... we were very
free consequently.'
Linda said that Paul was recognized a few times, and if
people started following them they'd find a handy subway station and
escape. But it never became public knowledge, it wasn't in 'the
columns', or anything that would bring the nuts and the press out in
great numbers.
They did the whole 'on the town' routine, the Battery
and Chinatown and Times Square, movies and neighbourhood
restaurants, museums, the park, not much that was glaringly upscale
(except the Metropolitan Opera, where they walked out on La Boheme)
or trendy. I've read in accounts put together long after 1968 that
they went to Ondine's, which was described as extremely 'hip', but
it hadn't been a place one went to for quite a while, and one would
think they would have avoided any place where they were likely to
run into people Linda knew, especially famous ones. Although Paul
did phone Bob Dylan (I do hope you're chortling mildly at this
concept) and he and Linda took a subway to Greenwich Village, where
Dylan owned a big beautiful house on MacDougal Street, and Linda
took some pictures of Bob and his wife at the time, Sara, and their
baby Jessie.
It was on this carefree trip that Paul impulsively
proposed marriage to Linda for the first time, inspired by a
storefront Buddhist temple that advertised quickie weddings (it
would not have been a legal marriage according to New York State
law), and Linda, claiming that her first marriage had given her a
negative feeling for the institution of wedlock, refused. Quite
obviously, she knew she would be asked again. I rather think it was
not the memory of her first marriage, which ended quite amicably,
but the impulsiveness of the proposal that elicited Linda's emphatic
'no'. She wanted it thought out very carefully. This was not to be a
relationship jumped into on a giddy walk in Lower Manhattan.
They had dinner at Linda's father's apartment on Park
Avenue, which was a cordial event - I don't imagine it was a riot of
laughs, but quite friendly. Paul must have been impressed with Lee's
and Monique's duplex apartment (she sold it five years after Lee
died, for four and a half million dollars), their art collection and
their style. Not to mention Lee's amazing mind and wit. At no time
did Lee ask Paul if he was prepared to support his daughter in the
style to which she had been accustomed. He did communicate to his
daughter that this young man was probably not as bad as the rest of
the people in 'that world' she belonged to.
Very importantly, Paul was impressed by Lee's knowledge
of the music business, and music publishing businesses, especially
the legalities involved. Legal issues were coming into Paul's life
with some frequency in those days, and he naturally must have
anticipated that things might become very complicated back there
with the boys in London. Which they certainly did.
Music publishing was extremely intriguing to Paul,
because the Lennon-McCartney team had been if not exactly swindled,
then soft-talked out of the publishing of all the Beatles songs
several years before, and the songwriting partners were never able
to totally accept the fact they did not own the copyrights on the
songs they had written. Lee had done well with song publishing
himself, and in time he would guide Paul's acquisition of an immense
catalogue, worth many hundreds of millions of dollars. Meanwhile, he
was a good person to know and a prospective father-in-law into the
bargain.
The most delicate and central matter to be resolved in
the course of these two weeks was how Paul and Heather would get
along together. In fact, they became great friends. Linda contrived
some professional obligations that would take her away from her tiny
apartment on the tenth floor of 140 East 83rd Street, leaving Paul
and five-year-old Heather alone together. He cooked for her and they
played games. He loved her, he loved New York, he loved Linda; on 31
October they all flew back to London, and a new life began for the
three of them.
One supposes that there no longer exists any grouping of
nutty fans quite like the Apple Scruffs, an amorphous collection of
obsessed teenage girls, who inhabited - literally - the pavements
around the Beatles' homes and their recording studio in Abbey Road.
The composition of the group varied, and its ranks were often
swelled by visiting fans and other hangers-on. The Scruffs tagged
the name of their number one Beatle on to their own - becoming Peggy
Paul or June John, for example - and they stayed at their posts in
shifts, in all kinds of weather, waiting for just a glimpse of their
particular favourite. A wave and a smile from a Beatle were extra
treats; they had a newsletter, knew each other well, exchanged
information on comings and goings and worked in relays so that
nobody went in or came out, or took up residence, without the
Scruffs knowing all about it. It all seemed quite innocent. The
Beatles got to know some of the Scruffs by sight, and there were
more of them devoted to Paul - the cutest, the bachelor and the most
accessible since he had a well-known address in London that was not
far from the Abbey Road studios - than to all the others put
together. Had the put-down 'Get a life!' been in usage in the 1960s,
it could have been addressed nowhere more appropriately than to this
adorable, star-struck little bunch of busybodies.
For anyone to think that all these fanatics would be
content just standing there would be to severely underestimate the
mentality that drove them. Paul had a part-time housekeeper who was
friendly and helpful to Paul's most dedicated followers - certainly
she didn't have to sign a legal document that guaranteed she would
tell nothing to anybody of what she knew was going on in Paul's
life, as all of his employees must do today. There have been
countless scenes in British films and television shows in which two
'lady's maids', or the equivalent, from different households, find
themselves together and reveal all that they know about their
mistresses; they serve the dual function of narrators and of
characters who move the plot forward by putting information into
circulation that their employers might have wanted kept behind
closed doors. Paul's housekeeper appears to have been very much in
the tradition of those indiscreet servants, enjoying a chat about
the goings on of the Master within. Had the Scruffs been satisfied
with that, they could have been kept at bay, but not all of them
were.
Once Paul began to treat them as little members of his
own organization, by letting one of them walk his dog, Martha, for
example, there were those who gladly took the inch and started going
for the mile. They found a vantage point from behind the house where
they could see him sitting on the lavatory by standing on an
overturned flower pot, told him about it, and even showed him how it
was done when he expressed amused disbelief. More disturbingly, they
found ways to get past the security system, an electric gate with an
intercom, and by late 1968 they were sneaking into Paul's house when
no one was home (who would know that better than they?) and taking
little souvenirs.
They also gave themselves the privilege of approving or
disapproving of Paul's live-in companions; they adored Jane Asher
because she was a British celebrity with just the right amount of
upper-middle-class hauteur to elicit their respect and deference -
and they thought she was 'just right' for Paul, as did the London
press and almost everyone else who had given up on becoming his wife
or long-time companion themselves. They were a bit wary of Francie
Schwartz, but not hostile � she was a 'wild' but ebullient American
with a good sense of humour, and they kind of knew she wouldn't be
around for a very long time. But they detested Linda, and terrified
her.
They hated the way she dressed - it was as if she just
threw something on, anything. Jane was a TV star, always immaculate
and gorgeously groomed, as if for an important appearance on daytime
television or a glamorous first-night in the West End. Linda was,
let's face it, not gorgeously groomed. As she said in her own song,
the light came from within, and it certainly was not visible to the
Apple Scruffs. Mainly, they hated the fact that Paul appeared to be
so happy with her. They wanted him to be happy, but not happy enough
to dispense with their adoration. This time, he seemed to need
nothing else but that 'arrogant American bitch'. Linda was not
'charming' with strangers, that was just not her. Paul was the
charming one when they were together in public, while she always
seemed as if she wanted to get away, with him. In any case, the
Scruffs decided that they were going to hate her, and they had more
than a few resources with which to demonstrate their aversion.
They shouted epithets at her, even when she was with
Paul. They booed and hissed. He would say, 'Now there, girls, behave
properly!' and smile and tell Linda it was nothing to worry about,
that it was quite meaningless. But she had just given up her life in
America and had moved into a new home in England with her child;
this was virtually her first encounter with the natives, and it was
very unsettling.
They would swarm around her when she went outside alone,
calling her names, telling her to go back to America, trying to trip
her so that she'd fall in the street. This is not harmless. Then she
wouldn't leave the house on foot any more, so it was arranged that a
car would pick her up within the gates, but once it was on the
street, assorted Scruffs chased it, surrounded it and pounded on the
roof with their fists, screaming words of hatred.
She'd return to the house and find revolting graffiti on
the street wall in foot-high letters. When they broke into the house
and stole her photographs and negatives, it was too much. What's
more, Linda worried about Heather's safety and about the effect on
her of this swarm of evil insects, for that is the way she saw them,
and certainly she had done nothing to deserve this.
'Those first few days in Paul's house, I lived in fear
of going outside,' she told me, a good while later. 'I thought of
Paul telling me how the Beatles used to be prisoners in their hotels
when they toured, because there were thousands of people out there
who loved them so much that it was dangerous to be among them.
Believe me, a dozen people who hate you and wait for you has to be
just as bad. I was a prisoner in Paul's house. Heather was five, how
could I explain this to her? "Oh, it's OK, they'd hate anyone who
lived here with Paul." Please, you can't expect a child to know what
that's about. Hate? It's a new life for her, and I have to tell her
about hate, about why these people hate Mummy. It was very, very
difficult.'
On 5 November Paul, Linda and Heather left London for
Paul's farm in Scotland. Linda always preferred the country to the
city - New Yorker though she was, the city was a place to get away
from and the country was home. More than restorative, it was her
natural habitat for her whole life.
By the middle of November they were back in London, with
Linda feeling better about things. There was that farm up there, you
just had to get in a car and you'd be there. I had a picture
postcard from her with a two-word message: 'Very well.' It was one
of those postcards they used to give on aeroplanes to first-class
passengers. The 'PanAm' (now defunct) logo was stamped on the back,
and on the front was a picture of the Taj Mahal, a memorial built by
a great ruler for his beloved wife in the seventeenth century. It's
funny how things come together, if you wait long enough.
Hunter Davies was the author of the first and only
'official' biography of the Beatles, commissioned in early 1968 and
published by the end of that year. He was on holiday with his wife,
the novelist Margaret Forster, at a rented house on the beach in
Portugal when, very late on a night in mid-December, Paul, Linda and
Heather appeared at his front door, 'banging and shouting'. The trip
was a whim and had required the hiring of a private plane; Paul had
taken advantage of an open invitation, offered to all of the Beatles
via postcards and unlikely (so the Davies family thought) ever to be
accepted.
Davies, who had become friendly with Jane Asher while
doing his book, wrote in a 1985 Postscript that appeared in a
subsequent edition that it seemed to him and his wife that Linda was
'overdoing her adoration for Paul, clinging on to him . . . hanging
on his every word. We couldn't see it lasting. We couldn't see what
she was giving Paul.'
She was giving him what he very much wanted: love and
priority.
This was not a woman about to announce to the world that
she would rather be known as an actress than as Paul McCartney's
girlfriend, as Jane Asher had done. Paul wanted the woman in his
life to want, above all, to please him and give him a family. Linda
not only came already equipped with a daughter but was one month
pregnant that December. Ironically, very close to the day on which
Linda became pregnant with the first child conceived by her and
Paul, Yoko Ono miscarried the first child conceived by her and John
Lennon.
Paul called Linda's father from Portugal, requesting his
daughter's hand in marriage, and then he proposed, or, rather, they
set a definite date, because since October the couple had been
acting as if they planned to be married someday. It was Christmas
1968, one year after he and Jane Asher had become engaged.
'Everything was going well for us, for the three of us,
at the beginning,' Linda said to me twenty years later
Paul and Heather were becoming really close, and that
was so important to me. And Paul and I loved each other. He told
me he fell in love with me the first time we met, and that was so
sweet of him to say, whether or not it was true. What really
mattered so much to me was that he always would tell me that he
was falling more and more in love with me as time went on. I mean,
as the years went on, he would say that.
I was aware that I wasn't liked outside our home. At
least the other Beatles had Yoko to compare me to, so I didn't
come off all that badly with them. But some of those girls on the
sidewalk! They told the housekeeper that I was acting as if I were
jealous of them, that I clung to Paul to keep him to myself. I was
scared of them. They really wished me harm. Some of them stole
whole carousels of my colour slides. Some of them tried to
physically hurt me - on the day we were married one girl pushed a
flaming newspaper through the front door. Did they want us all to
be burned alive? There was nothing I could do about the way they
felt, but they made me feel awful, just the idea of them always
lurking out there, plotting their next break-in or whatever.
Well, that was for starters. The people at Apple
didn't like me because of the way I dressed, because I was
American, divorced and - you know, Danny, I was unsure of myself
in Paul's London world, and it came off like arrogance.
The papers knew nothing about me except that I was a
photographer, divorced, American. They picked up that story about
me being the Eastman Kodak heiress; so that's how I got spoiled
and snotty, they figured out. It all fitted in for them. Paul was
being asked about me all the time, and he said great things about
 my photographs, that he was with me and that he was very happy
about it, but all they wanted to know was if we were getting
married, and he kept denying there were any plans for that, or
else they really would have come after me.
As far as 'hanging on every word' -1 did, I still do,
I've been doing it for almost twenty-five years. His 'every word'
happens to be brilliant, because he is. Or, he's telling me
something or asking me something - am I supposed to not pay
attention? You see, I couldn't do anything right. I wasn't going
to change myself; anyhow, I don't know how I could, and I was
confident at least that Paul wanted me to be who I was. No beauty
make-overs; could you imagine me 'mod'? Well, it was rough, but
there was always one person in England who was there for me, and
it was enough.
A few people in New York received Christmas cards that
year, and in January Linda sent me a postcard with a wire-haired
terrier on the front and another cryptic message: 'Very very very.'
I guessed I was supposed to fill in something positive, like 'much
in love', or simply 'happy', or maybe not, maybe that was it, just a
postcard with no deep meaning connecting two friends across the
Atlantic Ocean. She couldn't very well have said 'Wish you were
here', which could be read as an SOS, and she certainly wouldn't
have wanted to imply that anything was less than fine. Linda never
complained, she would never lay her own problems on her friends. She
thought to do that was unspeakably selfish and, worse, pessimistic.
Everything was going to be OK, somehow; or, if it was bad, it could
be handled.
Linda's friends in New York were seething. Mainly,
Lillian Roxon was seething, and Blair Sabol to a lesser extent, but
Lillian was widely loved and never reluctant to express anger or
disappointment; when she was hurt - uh oh, watch out. And Linda had
really hurt her, especially with one postcard which was probably
playful (I must say, Linda did not have a great sense of
playfulness) but had the effect of pushing Lillian over the edge.
Her anger at Linda for not having called since September (they used
to be on the phone at least four or five times a day) turned to fury
at this one: 'Keep your mouth shut.' Just those four words.
'How dare she? What the fuck does she mean? Keep my
mouth shut about what? Does she think I'd stoop to her level of
behaviour? She's run off with the most famous man in the world and
now her friends are no longer useful, out with the garbage? She was
just waiting to drop us all when something better came along! That
little bitch!' Etc., etc.
It was more distressing for Linda's other friends in New
York to see Lillian so upset than it was to have been 'dropped', if
that indeed is what it was, by Linda. Lillian carried this wound,
amplified it, went public with her scorn and never relented before
her death in 1973.
Linda carried with her, for the rest of her life,
profound regret.
It's the one thing I'm sorriest about in the whole
world, that Lillian and I never made up. When I went to England, I
was in this whirlwind. And people say that I 'cut them off. I can
see now how they'd feel that way. But at the time, I had just gone
from being this photographer in New York into a whole different
world.
You can't know how hard it was. I was suddenly in the
middle of a situation where the Beatles were breaking up, Paul was
 really upset, there was a whole business and legal thing happening
which took everyone's energy and I hated it. I thought it was
going to be all peace and love and music, and it was wartime.
Plus, everyone hated me, those horrible groupies always in front
of the house, calling me names, spitting at me. It was a terrible
time; I didn't know what to expect, but not that, not that. Paul
was so romantic, and I was wondering what I had to do to make it
last, and we were trying so hard to understand each other. This
whole thing was going on, it took up my life. I didn't write, I
didn't communicate, I was living what was going on in front of me.
I thought about getting in touch . .. isn't it ridiculous that I
didn't communicate with you guys? I didn't call you, I didn't
speak to you. I'm so sorry about it, about Lillian. I'm so sad.
I'm so sad about it, really. God, I loved her, she must have
thought I totally un-friended her. I didn't keep our friendship
up. It was sad, I tell you. But I didn't know she was going to
die! If she hadn't died, I'm sure we would have gotten together
again, been friends again.
It was certainly a very sad business; I guess Linda and
Lillian have made up by now. But what was it really all about? Why
did Linda ignore her best friends back home for over a year?
(Especially when she had to know that we were dying to know what was
going on. It was kind of embarrassing to be asked, 'So, what do you
hear from your friend Linda who married Beatle Paul?' and have to
answer, 'Well, not much.') It was very confusing - the Linda we
knew, the Linda we thought we knew, would not do that, she would not
'drop' us all merely because she'd made the match of the century.
When she resurfaced in 1970, it was as if (as has been noted
elsewhere) nothing had been wrong, there had been no lapse, we were
just picking up where we left off. Has it been a year and a half? My
my, time flies.
Well, it can't always have been terrible. There were
certainly blissful interludes. That trip to Portugal doesn't sound
like such a nightmare, for example. Except that, with their host and
hostess trying to figure out what Paul saw in her, wondering who
this new girl was who had taken Jane's place in his life, Linda had
to be uncomfortable under their judging scrutiny.
Then again, when it's all wine and roses, what do you
do? 'Excuse me Paul, I've got to call all my friends and tell them
what fun we're having here on the beach.' No, that doesn't work. Or,
to tell her friends that it wasn't all peachy, that it was very
difficult, that it was not at all what they thought, or what she had
thought it would be - that would be complaining and, as I have said,
Linda didn't complain.
I can only speculate that there was another reason
besides the 'whirlwind' one: early in 1969, Linda's father and
brother were hired by Apple to advise the Beatles on legal matters.
As the group split further apart, it was John, George and Ringo in
one camp, Paul and the Eastmans in the other. It is all so very
complicated, and thoroughly described in virtually every book about
the Beatles. But I strongly suspect that Lee Eastman told Linda not
to talk to her friends in New York while all this was going on. We
were all in one way or another connected to the media, and Lee might
surely have suspected that once we had Linda on the phone, we'd be
digging for news. So it was safer just not to speak to anyone
outside the family, especially friends who might want to pry. When
it was all settled, Linda could pick up where she left off... which
is what happened. However, this is pure speculation, and no one has
ever told me that Linda was so advised. If I were Lee Eastman,
though, I would have told Linda not to talk to me, or Lillian, or
Blair, or Robin. It was harsh, but it seems all this time later as
if it would have been excellent advice.
On 11 March 1969, Derek Taylor stopped denying the
rumours and wrote a short press release from the Apple offices
announcing that Paul McCartney and Linda Eastman would be married
the next day, at the Marylebone Registry Office in London. Paul was
in the recording studio that day, while Linda was taking care of the
paperwork. That night, he managed to find a jeweller who'd just
closed his shop, but would open it up so that Paul could buy a
wedding ring for £12.
Why such a modest venue? They had wanted a quiet
wedding, they said later. Obviously, this event was going to be
anything but quiet. On a cold rainy day, with Paul in a grey suit
and yellow tie and Linda in a pale yellow coat over a beige dress,
the couple (with Heather) entered the registry office through the
rear door, went through the necessary ritual, and emerged to find
thousands of screaming, chanting, singing, hysterical girls - and,
naturally, dozens of representatives from the world's press. The
fans were not happy; Heather had to be rescued from the crush by a
policeman. Back at Paul's house, where the couple went before going
through a ceremony at St John's Wood church, the crowd had become
nasty; kicking, swarming and actually trying to burn Paul's house
down. Police had to come and disperse the angry fans before their
little display of jealousy and frustration turned into a riot.
'Just write that the bride wore a big smile,' Linda told
Ray Connolly of the Daily Mail outside the registry office.
The wedding was front-page news all over the world, and
the thousands of disappointed fans in London had millions of
counterparts elsewhere. Girls wore the black of mourning for weeks
afterwards, and, like an answering move in a chess game, John and
Yoko were married in Gibraltar eight days later; the adorable
mop-top stage of the Beatles existence was no more by the middle of
March 1969.
The newlyweds left soon after to visit Paul's father in
Liverpool, and from Manchester they flew to New York for three weeks
to be with Linda's family and to wrap up the loose odds and ends of
her life at her $180-a-month apartment on East 83rd Street.
'She married me, and this is something you mustn't do,'
Paul said, sitting alongside Linda for the filming of the BBC
documentary, Behind the Lens.
You're going to have a lot of criticism, whoever you
are. People said, 'Who does she think she is?' Oh, she thinks
she's my wife, that's all. I said that maybe we should go on a
talk show and sort of explain who I've married, and show them that
you're a nice person, you know, because I think they think you're
a pushy American broad ... In fact, you're the dead opposite of
that, so maybe we should have gone on a chat show, but we just
thought, 'No.' You know, what can I do? Go on to justify ourselves
to the whole bloody world? Sod 'em. We ended up just thinking if
they don't find out about us, then they don't find out about us,
big deal. We'll know, our kids will know, our friends will know.
If our image goes elsewhere, then too bad.
I suppose I can find it within me to forgive Linda for
not sitting down and writing me a long and chatty letter. She had
just moved from one country to another, was setting up a new family
in a new home with a new Daddy for Heather, was now married to the
erstwhile catch of the decade, whose child she was carrying, and was
instantly notorious, misread and widely loathed, because she ruined
a fantasy that had become an obsession with vast numbers of young
women. Who did she think she was? And, as she was starting to
realize with great dismay, she was right on time to witness her new
husband live and suffer through the worst crisis of his adult life,
as the Beatles flew apart. It was to be one of the most public and
gripping split-ups in the history of showbusiness unpleasantness.

Chapter 9
'I am just an ordinary person and want to live in peace.'
Paul McCartney, explaining to a Life magazine reporter that he was
not dead.
When Linda married Paul, she brought to him not only the
prodigious emotional strength that would help pull him through a
very hard time, but also her family, corporately known as the law
firm of Eastman & Eastman (that is, her father and her brother). As
Linda guided her new husband through the devastated landscape of his
old career as a member of the Beatles and into a tremendously
successful new one as a solo artist, her family took control of his
legal and financial position and made him the richest musician in
the history of the world. What Paul McCartney would have become
without men (and a woman) named Epstein no one can ever know; with
his talent and intelligence he was not destined to be a loser. But
with the guidance of Brian Epstein, without whom Paul readily
acknowledges there would have been no Beatles, he was one half (or
one quarter, if you will) of a creative force which no history of
the twentieth century can ignore; and in the good care of Lee (ne
Epstein), John and Linda Eastman, he survived and he thrived once
the Beatles were, indeed, history.
She hated 'business', she always said, but Linda was
plunged into a maelstrom of such activity in 1969 when she married
Paul, and it was coming at her from all directions. Not only was her
new husband preoccupied on about half-a-dozen separate fronts
(management; publishing; Apple; John and Yoko; John, George and
Ringo, etc.) with the excruciating break-up of the Beatles, but now
her father and brother had jumped into the fray as well.
It hadn't taken long for Lee Eastman to reverse his
position on the subject of his daughter's involvement with the
degenerate world of rock and roll when he found himself with a
Beatle in the family. Clearly, as a very successful player in the
lucrative field of song publishing, Lee could see the possibilities
of a connection with this celebrated songwriter - part of a team or
not, Paul had written 'Yesterday' and 'Michelle' by himself, and
those two songs alone had earned millions of dollars, although they
did not all flow into Paul's pocket by any means. As Lee saw it,
they should have done, and he no doubt saw an opportunity to make
certain that in the future anything Paul wrote would enrich the
ex-Beatle, Lee's daughter, Lee's grandchildren, Lee himself and his
son John. He did indeed accomplish all that.
The concept of music publishing is confusing, and
although I wish it could be explained in twenty-five words or less,
it can't, so bear with me. Everything will be much simpler if the
process is even vaguely understood: the 'copyright' (literally, the
right to make and sell copies) automatically belongs entirely to the
writer, and it exists the moment a song is written or recorded on
tape. Simultaneously, the writer owns the related 'publishing'
rights. Music publishing, as a practical matter, consists of getting
exposure for the song (having other people record it, or getting it
on a movie soundtrack, etc.) and collection of the money thereby
earned; even when the song is played on the radio, on a jukebox or
in an elevator, there is money to be collected. When you record your
own song, and the recordings are sold, the manufacturer of the
record is required by law to pay money to the owner of the
copyright. This might be you, the writer, or you might have sold the
copyrights and attendant publishing, in which case someone else gets
the money.
Although it's only pennies a time, if 100 other people
record that song (as with 'Yesterday', which has been recorded far
more than 100 times) and it's played on the radio millions of times
(it's all kept track of), huge amounts of money can be generated.
In 1962, the very young and naive John Lennon and Paul
McCartney agreed to the formation of a company to be called Northern
Songs, which would own all the songs they had written and would
write until 1973. Northern Songs was to be a division of Dick James'
own publishing company. The ownership of Northern Songs was then
split. Dick James got half of Northern Songs, John and Paul got
twenty per cent each, and Brian Epstein ten per cent. Then (at a
later date) George and Ringo were given less than two per cent each
out of Paul and John's share. So the great bulk of Beatles'
copyrights was not owned by John and Paul, who wrote the songs, and
it came to rankle them greatly. John's widow and Paul continue to be
rankled to this day.
When Lee Eastman suggested to Paul that his publishing
affairs might be handled far more skilfully than they had been, that
is, handled by Lee, Paul gladly agreed, appointing Eastman & Eastman
(still the name of the company, although Lee died in 1991) to
administer all his publishing henceforth. Copyrights (i.e.
publishing) have to be 'administered', that is, registered, kept
track of, accounted for, supervised, money collected from, etc., and
whoever administers the publishing gets a standard (and very nice)
ten per cent of the income. 'I guess Paul figured it's all in the
family, Paul trusted his own family, and the company is impeccably
reputable by any standards,' says Nat Weiss.
With the advice of his father-in-law and brother-in-law,
Paul McCartney as we speak is close to being a billionaire (or
beyond; does it really matter at this point?) via the publishing he
now owns, which includes - besides most of his own solo work - all
the songs written by Buddy Holly, Hoagy Carmichael ('Stardust'), the
scores of A Chorus Line, Annie, Grease and on and on. His is the
largest independently owned publishing company in existence. The
majority share of the Lennon-McCartney catalogue of song copyrights,
as a publishing entity known as Northern Songs, slipped through the
hands of Paul and of John's widow when it came on the market in the
1980s, and is now owned by Michael Jackson, the performer, in
partnership with Sony.
So, Linda may have hated business ('Give me a lump of
bread and a bit of lettuce in the garden, and forget the rest,' she
told Playboy in 1984), but she was the daughter, sister and wife of
very shrewd businessmen, and did not object to them becoming
immensely rich as a team, although she was not much interested in
the details. Linda was not one to forget how disapproving Lee
Eastman had been of her for a very long time, but she was quick
(always, throughout their life together, with Paul's permission) to
forgive. So she was delighted to see her father and Paul bonding,
financially, legally and, to some extent, socially. 'We're giving my
dad a Rolls-Royce for his birthday!' Linda told me one year in the
late 1970s, thrilled that everything was continuing to go so
swimmingly between her husband and her father.
For the Eastmans had been involved not only with Paul's
extensive and complicated publishing enterprises, but with his legal
situation visa-vis the Beatles as they were falling apart. Lee had
moved swiftly in February 1969, convincing Paul to have Eastman &
Eastman hired as legal counsel to Apple, the Beatles' own, extremely
troubled company. The urgency was because, thanks to Yoko's
influence, the Beatles were now involved with an enticingly
sharp-talking accountant named Allen Klein as their business
manager, and Klein was a player guaranteed to horrify the
distinguished Eastman clan. The war between Paul on one side, with
Yoko/John and the other Beatles in opposition, escalated explosively
with the intervention of two New York parties, each from a very
different side of the music business tracks.
Nat Weiss (whose account of anything relating to the
Beatles is both penetrating and hilarious) recalls,
In early '69, Yoko called Allen Klein because Mick
Jagger told her that Klein had gotten the Stones a much better
recording deal than the Beatles had. Besides affirming what Jagger
had told Yoko, Klein also said that he could help her with her
movies, and that was the motivating thing - I mean, she wasn't
interested in Beatle royalties. She told Lennon about the
royalties, and he called me up about this and said, 'Oh, it's
going to be a good thing, getting involved with Klein,' and this
was very difficult for me because Brian [Epstein] had hated Allen
Klein. He was an alley cat. But I went to see him since John asked
me to.
I went to his office and there he was, eating
spaghetti, and he waved a paper and said, 'You see!' and he showed
me the signatures of three Beatles. I said, 'I don't see four.'
Then he asked me for Brian Epstein's papers. I said, 'No. If you
want anything, sue me. I'd rather burn them.'
I didn't want to get that involved, it was Brian's
thing and I could never get any emotional satisfaction out of it.
And Neil Aspinall was there, he'd been the Beatles' road manager
from the start and he would give his life for any one of those
guys. But Allen Klein came in, fired this one, fired that one,
tried to fire Neil Aspinall, ripped up Paul's song 'The Long and
Winding Road', stuck in a female chorus, and then Paul, on the
advice of Lee, sued the Beatles.
George came in to see me, and I said, 'How can you
sign with him?' and George said, 'Well, he can do certain things.'
I said, 'Mussolini made the trains run on time but he destroyed a
country; this man is no good.' It ended up that he ripped off
George as well as everyone else, and George had to sue him, and he
went to jail for some things he did anyhow.
Paul had been outvoted so that Klein was hired as
business manager. Paul had to break up the Beatles at that point,
he had to break it up to sue. I never would have imagined it would
end that way.
Paul probably wanted to keep the Beatles together, and
he couldn't; I think Yoko wanted to separate John from the
 Beatles, and George didn't know what was happening, and Ringo - as
Brian said, 'The great thing about Ringo is that he's the least
talented, and never uptight about it.'
Actually, it was not until late 1970 that Paul filed the
lawsuit against the other Beatles; the chaos, dating from the advent
of Klein vs. The Eastmans, took nearly two years to reach that
point. It was 1970 that was really the awful year, when Linda and
Paul exiled themselves to Scotland and Paul nearly went to pieces,
but for Linda's presence. The previous year, in comparison, at least
the first three quarters of it, was not that bad and saw some
remarkably redeeming events, like the making of Abbey Road, the
Beatles' farewell masterpiece before the split, and the birth of
Mary McCartney in August.
Nothing in Linda's life had prepared her for the
downside of her relationship with Paul; despised and envied
worldwide, Linda now found herself with her Prince Charming losing
confidence in himself and sinking into a deep depression. The
head-over-heels, somewhat bewildered bride had become the strong one
in the relationship. It was a situation she never could have
foreseen (unlike Yoko, who started off strong and only got
stronger), but then again, she didn't think much about the future
until it became the present, and although it was a staggeringly
difficult time for her, she was ready to deal with it. There were
reserves of determination within her, and a still embryonic ability
to inspire others, that no one, least of all Linda herself, ever
knew existed until they were needed.
Imagine the irony in this picture. Lovely, talented,
buoyant Linda Eastman wins the biggest prize of all, and finds that
the fairy tale is not at all rosy. Every woman on earth dreams of
how wonderful it must be to be married to Beatle Paul . . . and the
reality is that the man, your husband and the father of your kids,
is spiralling downwards from within.
'I was very scared,' she told me. 'I didn't want to give
up, but it was a mess, it was unreal, and I had to handle this all
by myself. There was no choice. I had to try. We had two children,
we'd just been married a year, and my husband didn't want to get out
of bed. He was drinking too much. He would tell me he felt useless.
I knew he was torturing himself, blaming himself for the break-up,
and I was sure that he could get beyond it, but if he didn't believe
in himself, what could I do? I could only try, that's all I could
do. Let me tell you, my hands were full.'
As Paul told Joan Goodman in the Playboy interview: 'I
was impossible, I don't know how anyone could have lived with me.
For the first time in my life, I was on the scrap heap, in my own
eyes ... I'd never experienced it before. It was bad on Linda. Let's
say I wouldn't have liked to live with me. So I don't know how Linda
stuck it out.'
It's odd how the external and internal aspects of a life
lived in the glare (or perhaps the shadow) of extreme fame come
together, align themselves, contradict each other, propel actuality.

In the autumn of 1969, on the one hand, the Beatles as a

happy, creative, life-enhancing foursome are dying as a productive
unit; on the other, Abbey Road is released, an album produced a few
months earlier at Paul's insistence that the group members give up
their separate pursuits and come together once again to go into the
studio with producer George Martin, to do what they always did best,
and very likely for the last time. To their fans (and to this day,
perhaps), the Beatles never sounded so strong, and therefore the
rumours 'couldn't be true" that they were in the process of
dissolution. Paul, as a singer and songwriter, was as strong and
vital as he had ever been on 'Carry That Weight' and 'You Never Give
Me Your Money'.
But of course the rumours were true; in September, John
told Paul that he was leaving the group, that the 'divorce' of the
Beatles was at hand. Paul was in a hideous frame of mind, made even
worse by an extracted promise not to reveal what was happening to
the group because Klein was negotiating a new recording contract for
the Beatles; there would be a lot of money upon signing, but there
would be no contract at all if the record company knew the truth.
With Linda, Heather and Mary, Paul got the hell out of London and
headed for his farm in Scotland, at 'the end of nowhere', as Linda
would always describe its location, most approvingly.
Helplessly at first, Linda watched her husband virtually
dying on the inside, mirroring the death of his band. (Thanks to
Linda, in another sense, he had already 'died' as a viable bachelor,
and she knew very well that millions of girls wished that she was
dead, or at least that she'd never been born.) It was very grim.
Exactly what the frightened little family needed at that
moment was the news, a front-page story all over the world, that
Paul was literally dead. It was a self-perpetuating hoax of a
magnitude no one had ever before seen; dozens of 'clues' were
discovered that 'proved' the real Paul McCartney had died in a
horrible automobile accident in 1966, and that the person now
assuming his identity was an impostor, 'is paul dead?' seemed to be
the most discussed and debated question in the world in the autumn
of 1969. Paul's response: 'I'm dead, am I? Why does nobody ever tell
me anything?' But that wasn't good enough. The story kept gathering
momentum as an army of Beatles scholars searched for, and found,
evidence of Paul's death in nearly everything the band had done
since the fatal crash. (This external ill wind for Paul and Linda,
blew some good nevertheless, as the sales of Beatles' recordings
spiked worldwide, making the Lads, and all who had a piece of them,
a little bit richer yet.)
In their exasperation at the depressing story that
wouldn't go away, Paul and Linda agreed to cooperate with a crew
from Life magazine, which had appeared at the farm no one was
supposed to be able to find, and with their two daughters posed for
the beautiful cover photograph that appeared on the issue dated 7
November. Along with the photographs was an interview, in which
Paul, with Linda at his side, revealed that his future was not as a
Beatle, but as a husband and father. 'I am happy to be with my
family, and I will work when I work,' he told Life's Dorothy Bacon.
'The Beatle thing is over. It has been exploded, partly by what we
have done and partly by other people . . . 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.'
Linda and the children were now the most important
people in his life, and that was never to change.
In the pictures, Paul is intense, patriarchal, with his
family gathered around him in an empty and hilly windswept
landscape. He is anything but playful or moppety. Linda, in a plain
dress, unadorned, natural and very beautiful, looks as if she were
born in these hills. In spite of the undertones of Marie-Antoinette
and her ladies-in-waiting playing at being milkmaids, the overriding
impression is one of a pioneer couple with their young daughters,
about to farm for sustenance the land they're standing on.
High Park Farm is about fifteen miles from the southern
tip of the Kintyre peninsula, off the western coast of Scotland, a
600-mile drive from London. Getting there by car requires travelling
to the north end of Kintyre, where one connects with the only road
joining the peninsula to the Scottish mainland, and then south in
the direction of Campbeltown, the nearest centre of civilization to
the McCartney property. The most celebrated previous inhabitants of
the area had been Robert Louis Stevenson, the enormously popular
author who gave us Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and
Robert the Bruce, who led the Scots to freedom from England in the
fourteenth century. There hasn't been much development around
Campbeltown since.
Paul had bought the property with its tiny decrepit
farmhouse and tiny decrepit outbuildings at the height of
Beatlemania, and Linda had loved it since their first trip there in
November 1968, mice in the walls and all. She persuaded him to make
some improvements, like pouring a cement floor with his very own
hands; rustically inclined though she was, Linda preferred something
more solid than planks thrown on the dirt under her feet - and the
children's - as she cooked and scrubbed.
Drummer Denny Seiwell, who played on the New York
sessions for Ram (Paul's second solo album), was summoned to the
farm in 1971 - he knew not why at the time - and remembers clearly
what is was like getting there from America.
You flew to that weird airport in Scotland, and Pan Am
[after checking out the legitimacy of Seiwell's presence] had us
driven down to Campbeltown in a van. It was a five-hour trek, and
we were dropped off at a local rent-a-car, checked into a typical
little Scottish hotel, and set out to find the farm, which was in
the middle of nowhere.
We asked some of the villagers how to get to High Park
Farm, and they said things like, 'Well, laddie, ye take the wee
car ...' and I'm thinking, 'What the hell are they talking about?'
We finally found the right road, and they had said that we'd come
to a farmhouse, which was on the edge of the McCartney property,
but after that there was no real road to their house. Well, the
sun was setting in the black hills of Scotland and we beeped the
horn and this old guy came out, and we said, 'How do you find
Paul's farm?' and his answer was nearly unintelligible, but he
opened this old wooden gate and there were these boulders
everywhere. We ruined the car. We ruined about three rental cars;
they wouldn't rent us any more cars in this village. Finally we
got to the farm. Two bedrooms in the 'main house', a kitchen, the
kids, the horses, the sheep. Linda cooked up a dinner that was to
die for, real simple stuff, and what we [Seiwell and his wife,
Monique] saw was nothing but straight, straight love between her
and Paul.
'It was the most beautiful land you've ever seen,' Linda
told Barry Miles. 'To me, it was the first feeling I'd ever had of
civilization dropped away. I felt like it was in another era ... so
different from all the hotels and limousines and the music
business.'
This observation of Linda's covers a lot of ground, for
as one can tell by not having to read it with much analysis, the
Life magazine interview shows Paul's attitude towards the Beatles,
the press and his entire career up to that point carrying a
surprising amount of, for him, actual belligerence. It is now clear
in retrospect that it was the business of music that was bringing
him so low - what had once brought him (in spite of a few scary
moments, like escaping the thugs of Imelda) joy, success and
accomplishment, with a ride to the moon thrown in as a bonus, was
now a source of profound misery.
'Bad things were happening in the business then, in
1969,' Linda said to me in that discussion I had with her and Paul
in the summer of 1992.
'To whom?' I asked.
'To everybody,' she answered. 'Everybody. There was a
sourness. There were parasites moving in, there was friction.
Everybody started getting hugely successful, and with success came
craziness, and any beautiful glow attracts a lot of ugly creatures.'

'There's only so long a good mood can last,' Paul added.

'Oh, there were so many fucked-up things in 1969,' I

observed. 'The Nixon administration came to power.'
'And there was repression,' said Paul, having distanced
himself enough from that time to include, and very astutely, the
unattractive political situation facing the 'groovy youthquake' of
the mid-60s.
'Kennedy!' exclaimed Linda, who was not what one might
define as a scholar of contemporary history.
'No darling,' I said. 'We're talking about later than
that. We're way past Kennedy, we're talking about the Nixon crowd.'
'Try and stay with us, Linda,' Paul chided her, very
lovingly, a bit exasperated, but so affectionate - very Paul and
Linda, that, I always thought - like Burns and Allen: 'Say
"Goodnight", Grade.' If you got in there, it really was a comedy
team, as were, say, the Beatles themselves.
We talked that afternoon about the grandiosity of 1968
that had turned to dust in our hands as the decade ended. 'I thought
I could decide right there that this would turn into that, no doubt
about it, and I still don't know how I could have been so sure about
anything,' I said.
'We [Linda and Paul, presumably] get the same sort of
feeling,' he replied. 'You don't know. We all got liberated at the
beginning of it, then we got certain bad habits, drugs and stuff set
in, and we couldn't all put it into a nice little system that would
take us thirty or forty years into the future. It was just too wild
for that, anyone who tried to organize it went out the window, so it
just had to run its little thing, its vitality, like a firework.
There was kind of a Roman Empire winding up, and then the Beatles
broke up, and that kind of gave the signal. Rock and roll lost its
vitality ... for the time being, then it spat back with punk and
everything and it was all fine again.
'But we did feel a winding up, didn't we? And I always
say, the reason why the 60s keep coming back is that there has been
nothing better in the interim.'
'Oh, remember flower-power?' Linda put in. 'I never went
to a love-in, I guess it's too late now ... Oh! look at that
chipmunk, look at that! Over there, that's really life, not Life
magazine.'
If Linda McCartney didn't have a way with words, she had
a way with feelings.
'I didn't spend half enough time with Linda as I would
have liked to,' Pete Townshend told me about a year after she'd
died.
I really came to know Paul so much better and to love
him and to accept him in a way that I don't think I would have
done had he had a more traditional kind of showbiz marriage.
She showed the world a new way of doing it, of doing
marriage, like rock and roll showed the world that there was a new
kind of music, and it wasn't going to go away. She was there when
people had to make decisions about it. Decided that there was
something wrong with the world that said it will only last for
another couple of years, and then we'll be back to Sarah Vaughan
and Frank Sinatra.
But she believed, she knew, that this was not going to
go away. This world that we've created is not going to go away,
and we can even do it the way they used to. We can be real
Americans. We can have a really happy family without going to
church on Sundays. We can smoke the occasional joint. We can be
good people with good happy children.
I think that Paul was growing into a feeling of
dignity as an artist, as a pop artist, and Linda was essential to
it. It was a loss in so many ways when Linda died, but you have to
realize it was a loss to pop music too. This is a new business
we're in. We're the first people to get old in it.
At her memorial, I said that her presence in Paul's
life felt like my property, like their marriage was something that
belonged to me. They showed us a way of doing it that was
legitimate for us, they created a whole new world around their
marriage, the sheer time they were together, and they reinforced
all those things I believe in: the Stones, the Beatles, Paul and
Linda, they'll all live with me through my lifetime.
An excellent witness to the newlywed Linda and Paul is
Ruth McCartney, Paul's stepsister. Paul's father, Jim, who lost
Paul's mother in 1956, was remarried in 1964 to Angie Stopworth
Williams. Her husband of three years had been killed in a car
accident in 1962, leaving her with a two-year-old daughter, Ruth.
Such was the frenzy of Beatlemania in '64 that Paul's father and his
new bride couldn't get married in Liverpool, but had to take a taxi
to a village in northern Wales for the ceremony; on the way, they
pressed the taxi driver into service as the best man. Jim and Angie
honeymooned the following January in the Bahamas, where the Beatles
were making Help!, and with Ruth they lived at Rembrandt, the house
that Paul had bought for his father.
A few days after Linda and Heather moved into Paul's
London house, he took them up to Liverpool to meet the family. 'I
think they had jetlag, they both kind of seemed like fish out of
water,' Ruth recalled about her first meeting with Linda and Heather
in November 1968. 'I was three years older than Heather, and she
wasn't allowed to do a bunch of stuff that I could - when you're
nine, and someone else is six, you can stay up till seven-thirty,
but they've got to be in bed at five, so it's a pain in the ass. I'd
spent three years earning all these privileges, and then you've got
to back down to pretend to be six, but I'd grin and bear it.'
Raised in a traditional, working-class Liverpool
Catholic environment, much as Paul was, little Ruth was constantly
being astonished at the difference between Linda's and Heather's
relationship, and that between herself and her own mother, Angie
McCartney.
'We'd had the single mother and daughter thing, but it
was totally different,' Ruth said.
 I had never been exposed to any Americans before. The
whole idea of marrying an American really shocked my Aunt Millie,
who said, 'You know, she seems like a perfectly nice girl, but she
is an American, and on top of that she's Jewish.' My Dad would
say, 'What the hell difference does that make?', and Aunt Millie
said, 'It's just a culture thing, love. I mean, he might as well
have married a black thing.' But Aunt Millie had by far the most
closed mind in the whole family, I'm happy to say.
Some of the differences in the way Heather and I were
being raised surprised me. If Heather didn't finish her supper or
was naughty, Linda would say, 'Go to your room!' And I was like,
'What is that about?' Because in England you were never sent to
your room. You were made to rake the leaves or wash the car, not
just, 'Go to your room and sit there.' My mother and Paul's father
and Paul thought it was very strange. I remember being nine and
thinking, 'Boy, being sent to my room would be a treat! I've got a
nice big bed and teddy bears and books.' I just couldn't figure
out how that was punishment.
There were all these different little ways, and my Dad
would kind of throw Paul a glance, and Paul would give him that
look -'Don't ask me! Don't get me involved!' You know, a
Linda-is-doing-what-she-needs-to-do kind of look. But everything
seemed odd to us about the way they did things - it's just that by
the standards of old-fashioned Liverpool working-class Irish
Catholic families, to be dragging around a kid in a ballet dress
and Wellington boots and taking her to a film festival in France
was a very strange thing. Also, when my Mum had to discipline me
she never did it in front of visitors; she'd call me into the
kitchen with some excuse, and then she'd fix me with a look and
tell me what I'd done wrong. In English working-class circles, you
never castigated a child in front of anybody. But Linda would do
it all the time: 'Heather, don't be a pain! Go to your room!' We'd
think, 'Oh poor child, she's being humiliated,' but I know that
was never Linda's intention. She was a very caring mother, and she
and Paul obviously had a very good relationship. She got her head
together and did very well in business, so it turned out OK.
Linda encouraged Paul to adopt a let's-hit-the-road,
spur-of-the-moment way of living, and Paul was happy to go along
with it; it was therapeutic after being a Beatle all those years and
good for him to be moving around without schedules, obligations,
screaming crowds, and John, George and Ringo to deal with. Besides,
one could easily hire a private plane to take the family to Portugal
on a whim, for example -and the freedom to 'Just go!' certainly
suited Linda's temperament as well. Things would not be quite that
simple forever, but in '69 and '70, if an adventure were at hand,
they grabbed the moment.
Ruth recalls, 'They'd turn up in Liverpool and Heather
would be in these muddy boots, and she'd say, "Have you got any
shoes?" They'd be mowing the lawn or something in Scotland and the
cold, rainy fog would blow in, and they'd say, "Oh, the hell with
this! Let's jump in the Rolls-Royce and drive six hours and visit my
Dad!" That's the way it went. If they didn't have the time or the
inclination to pack, what's the problem? They could just go to
Tiffany's or J.C. Penny and get what they needed when they got
there.'
Alas, the spontaneous jaunts were, in truth, not very
joyful, because Paul - as we noted earlier in this chapter - was a
mess, and Linda was frightened. She rescued him, and their marriage,
not only by being there, but by convincing her husband that he might
try making some music: 'It's worked for you before, you know,' she
told him.

Chapter 10
'I've always had the feeling that Paul pushed her into becoming a
musician, maybe to bring her closer to him, I don t know.'
Leslie Fradkin
Looking back at those long months of depression and
creative paralysis, Paul said, 'It was Linda who made me realize
what . A a complete fool I was.' Between (and during) those awful
periods of anxiety about the state of her husband and her household,
Linda came up with the most simple and obvious reading of her
partner's situation - it was about work. Work for Paul had always
involved the Beatles, now there were no Beatles to work with, and
hence no work; the consequence was a gaping vacuum at the centre of
his universe.
It had never been a secret that although Lennon and
McCartney were a team, many of the best Beatles songs were the
product of one or the other of them. But whichever one of them did
not do the major amount of creative work on any given song was
always there to criticize, encourage, make suggestions, shut up,
sing or play along with on the recording, split the royalties, no
matter - he was there. Now for Paul John was no longer there, and
the natural crisis of confidence that one expects to arise from this
sundering of so close a partnership had escalated and spilled over
into the emotional picture. The cook of the house was now called
upon to help rebuild it, and fortunately she found herself up to the
task.
Linda had borne the burden of Paul's very wobbly
condition all by herself. There were no girlfriends either in
England, Scotland or America with whom she could share her problems,
and the farm in Scotland and the besieged fortress (the fans were
always there, booing and hissing the wife of their idol) in
Cavendish Avenue were metaphors for her isolation. Even if she had
retained chatty relationships with her friends in New York, it would
have been unimaginable for her to get on the phone to the Manhattan
yentahood and bitch and moan about her husband's wretchedness. When
you're newly married to one of the world's most famous people it
would be indiscreet and rather tacky to tell people that he hasn't
been out of bed in two days, that happily-ever-after has taken an
unexpected downward and very steep turn, and so on. Besides, as I
noted earlier, I suspect - only suspect - that Linda was advised by
her father and brother, as well as by Paul, that it might not be a
bad idea if she sort of avoided speaking to her nearest and dearest
friends in New York while the legal madness with the Beatles was
raging. Nor can I picture her saying, 'Gee Dad, Paul is really in a
bad way.' She had to figure out how to deal with things quite alone.

I asked Linda, once this unhappy era could be looked at

as history, what she would have done if she could have foreseen the
turmoil that would envelop her household during the first year of
her marriage to Paul. 'Would I have gone to London? Would I have
married him? Is that what you mean? Well, no one looks forward to
being confused. Yes, of course I would have married Paul, because
it's all turned out to be so fantastic. We survived all that, you
know? I can't say I would have handled it differently, except maybe
there was a better way to shield Heather from what was going on. But
I really wanted her to have a full-time father, and look, she got
the best. Still, I might have thought more about how to make it
easier for her. My God, if I had trouble dealing with all those
changes in my life, think what it was like for her.'
Linda's daughter had been taken out of her first school
in New York just weeks after enrolling, and was hastily moved to
London at the end of October 1968, when she was five years old. She
was placed in a new school near Paul's house in London, walking
distance if the mob outside wasn't too threatening on any particular
day. As Paul told Barry Miles, 'She didn't have an easy time because
she was American and the kids made fun of her.' Heather made few
friends at that school, and the farm in Scotland was one of the
earth's lonelier places to begin with. Then, in the spring of 1969,
Linda and Paul took Heather away from her classes for a trip to the
south of France, and that was indeed to be a pattern with the
McCartney family for the rest of Linda's life: the family travelled
together, wherever and whenever. It was less disruptive for the
younger children, because at least they had their older siblings for
playmates, but at the beginning it was a very lonely time for little
Heather. 'She's a very friendly person,' said Paul, which was and is
true, but it's not much good being friendly when there is no one to
be friends with.
Having on her hands a sad little child, a sad big
husband, an infant and a world that loathed her, Linda became
relentless with Paul, trying to convince him that he was a great
songwriter and that he had to do something besides making the odd
masculine repair to the farm buildings and worrying about the slow
death of the Beatles. And so he roused himself from his torpor,
renting small studios or working alone at Abbey Road on his first
solo album, McCartney. The first song he wrote for it was 'The
Lovely Linda'.
When the album came out in the spring of 1970, it
included as an insert a 'self-interview' by Paul, somewhat
circuitous on most points, but most definite when it came to
answering the question 'Do you foresee a time when Lennon-McCartney
become an active songwriting partnership again?': 'No.' Well, John
was supposed to say that first, according to an agreement the
partnership had arrived at the previous October, but Paul jumped the
gun and John was furious, accusing him of perpetrating a publicity
stunt designed to promote the solo album. John told Rolling Stone
that he, John, had quit the Beatles months ago, but the break-up was
supposed to be a secret.
'It's madness when you think of it - who got to tell
first,' Linda told Playboy. In any case, it was Paul's own
announcement (as was the Life magazine statement the previous
autumn, but people wrote that off as being induced by the stress of
having to deny that he was 'dead'), and now the world knew that the
catastrophe of the Beatles break-up was real. Since it was Paul
who'd broken the news, Linda now led the cast of 'the women who
broke up the beatles', and the scorn heaped upon her by the press
and the fans was even worse than it had been at the time of the
wedding a year earlier.
It must seem very odd for anyone under forty to read
that people could regard the break-up of a rock group as such a
significant event, because there is certainly no band today, nor has
there been any perhaps since this all happened, capable of making
such a gigantic impact simply by affirming that they now no longer
exist. It is unlikely that there ever will be such a band again,
simply (well, not so simple at all) because music, the music
business, audiences and the culture have changed so much in the past
thirty years. One potent reminder about the vast popularity of the
Beatles is the fact that early in 1964 they held the top five
positions on the Billboard singles chart. The five biggest records
in America, the five with the biggest sales and the most airplay,
were by the Beatles. It was unprecedented and almost certainly will
never happen again; occasionally, an artist will have two records in
the top five, and that is a major event in the music industry. All
five? Inconceivable now.
Also, there was much going on about 'the end of the
sixties', symbolized in the public mind and the media (for lack of
something more specific than the general rot that was setting in) by
the Altamont festival in northern California - ironically, one of
the greatest performances ever by the Rolling Stones, but newsworthy
because a deranged homeless person was stabbed to death by a Hell's
Angel. Big deal, you may say now, but this was a very serious blow
to the 'peace and love' generation and its image. Soon, the stars
themselves would start dying, but not with the fabulous timing of
the unlucky drifter in a bizarre green suit who got himself killed
in December 1969. Flower-power was expiring quickly, and although
the Beatles, much to their credit, never came near that wretched
phrase themselves, they were the ultimate carriers of the Universal
Love message - literally, in fact, because in June 1967 they wrote
and sang a song that was part of the first live broadcast to be
aired around the world thanks to the brand-new satellite technology;
it was titled 'All You Need Is Love' and it was Great Britain's
contribution to a multinational telecast called Our World, seen by a
record 400 million people.
In these times when nothing nice is Really Big, except
things that are horrible, it is poignant to recall an era when there
was an attempt to make 'nice' dominant. Of course that failed to
happen, and the end of the Beatles was the main clue that it never
would. And if you were one of the two women blamed for that ending
(and, what's more, the nicer, younger, more vulnerable of the two by
far), it was a very heavy thing.
Effectively, Paul McCartney's career as a solo musician
began in 1970 with the release of McCartney, which went to number
one in the US album charts and reached number two in the UK. The
acceptance by the public of Paul alone was therapeutic at the very
least, and he has never stopped giving Linda the credit for pulling
him out of his desolate slump.
Linda McCartney's career as a musician - which was
destined to bring down on her even more abuse than had ever before
been slung in her direction - began with Paul's next solo effort,
Ram.
The writing of six of the twelve songs on that album is
credited to Paul; the other six are credited to Paul and Linda. Now
is the time to recall our little publishing lesson in the previous
chapter. The majority shareholder in Northern Songs, which
publishes, i.e. owns (a large percentage of) the copyrights of any
and all songs written by Paul McCartney (and John Lennon, together
or separately) until 1973, is in 1971 a giant conglomerate called
ATV. Well, if Paul wrote a song, ATV would collect their percentage
of the copyright (publishing) on every record sold; however, if he
co-wrote a song with anyone not bound by the Northern Songs
contract, as Linda certainly wasn't, then she owned half the
copyright and ATV did not get their piece of her piece.
ATV sued Paul for $1 million for trying to put something
over on them; their feeling was that Paul could perhaps have
co-written a song with David Crosby or Keith Richards, for example,
and then things could be politely worked out. But the lawsuit was
based on the perceived impossibility of Linda having made any
musical contribution to the work of Paul. So, the first cackles of
incredulity she had to bear in the long, long process of becoming
Paul's musical partner - whether or not that eventually happened is
still argued far and wide - came very publicly and loudly, from the
company that controlled his own publishing. ATV's lawsuit claimed,
in effect, that the songwriter Paul McCartney, of all people, whose
copyrights ATV owned a large percentage of, had a) tried to cheat
them, and b) insulted their intelligence by asserting that his wife,
of all people, could have anything to do with creating music.
Paul defended the songwriting credits by insisting that
Linda had indeed collaborated, if only to the point of making
suggestions and offering opinions, but the suit was withdrawn when
Paul agreed to do a TV special for ATV, which in turn agreed that
Linda was entitled to collect whatever money was due to her. With no
small amount of irony, Paul noted that the only money coming into
their household was from Linda's share of the copyrights on Ram,
because all his other income was being held up by lawsuits.
Linda's status as a songwriter, the suspicions of ATV
notwithstanding, is affirmed by Jimmy Webb in his excellent 1998
book, Tunesmith -Inside the Art of Songwriting. Webb, no slouch at
generating hits, wrote such remarkable songs as 'McArthur Park',
'Wichita Lineman', 'Up Up and Away', 'Galveston' and 'By the Time I
Get to Phoenix'. He ends the book with a dedication: '. . . to the
memory of the songwriters who have left us during the writing of
this book'. There follows a list that includes Sammy Cahn, Cab
Calloway, Kurt Cobain, John Denver, Henry Mancini, Laura Nyro, Jule
Styne, Jeff Buckley, Irving Caesar, Carl Wilson, Tammy Wynette,
Jerry Garcia . . . and Linda McCartney. What a great honour, what
vindication, and how much it must please her husband to see that
among the posthumous tributes to have come her way.
A much more contributory and active role for Linda in
Paul's musical endeavours was being planned by early 1971, when the
family was in New York for the recording of Ram; she was to start
going really and truly professional by singing back-up on other
people's albums - no kidding.
Musician Leslie Fradkin was working on his first solo
album at the time and enlisted the help of his friend, the much
sought-after studio drummer Denny Seiwell, who was then working with
Paul, to come over when he had some time and help with overdubs and
such. Seiwell walked into Fradkin's studio, and said, 'I have a bass
player for you.'
'You can park your gear over there,' Fradkin said to the
bassist. 'I'll be with you in a minute.'
He didn't look anything like what I remembered, he had
aviator glasses on and his hair was slicked back, and then I
realized who it was, but I didn't pass out, I was preoccupied with
getting my own thing done. So he introduced me to Linda, and said,
'Well, she can help out too, she can sing.'
My attitude then was, and it's always been, that if he
 says it's OK, then it's OK. I never felt that she should have
nothing to do with his music. I knew that she'd sung on 'Another
Day' [a true duet featuring Paul and Linda, it went to number one
on the British charts], and I knew that she'd done bits and pieces
on his first album that they did at home or something.
She had a little trouble with pitch, I vaguely recall.
But I thought if she wants to sing, that's fine. The record sounds
very good, by the way. Paul seemed anxious about her confidence,
and he encouraged her a lot. I've always had the feeling that Paul
pushed her into becoming a musician, maybe to bring her closer to
him, I don't know, but it was definitely something coming from
him, not from her. He was very much the instigator. She was like,
'OK, I'll give it a try, but I'm kind of scared, I don't really
want to do this.'
I think history shows that she grew as a musician and
got better and better, and as time went on she actually became, I
think, quite good. That thing Howard Stern did I thought was
terribly unfair, it was horrible to do that.
'That thing' was a cruel prank played on Linda that,
alas, everyone knows about. For years, it was the first thing that
came into people's minds when they heard her name.
First you must know that every microphone on a stage
goes into a different channel and is mixed at a 'soundboard', a huge
blinking console that always seems to be set up right in front of
your fine orchestra seats. The person operating the device hears
everything on stage one microphone at a time, and then mixes the
sounds to produce what the audience hears.
During a rehearsal of 'Hey Jude' sometime in the
mid-1970s, as the band was playing the famous (and endless) 'nah nah
nah na-na-na nah' coda, the guys at the mixing board, chortling over
Linda's contribution, made a tape of it. It was not exactly
vocalizing such as Janis Joplin or Aretha might have done, but few
singers on earth sound good when their vocals are played back or
listened to a cappella. In fact, even the best sound pretty awful,
even comical, when you take away all the instrumental backing.
But Linda McCartney was a target waiting to be hit, and
here was the ammunition. The tape of her isolated voice circulated
around the world, and every raucous macho morning jock couldn't wait
to play the mortifying morsel. It's still around; as recently as a
year before Linda died, it went on to the Internet and got a whole
new life.
'I've been in recording studios where everyone was
listening to that and laughing their heads off,' said Pete
Townshend. 'I would fucking bang the table and say, "Just stop! Just
stop!"'
'All those things get to you,' Linda told Playboy's Joan
Goodman, 'but I can handle it. I can just wipe it out, I don't dwell
on what people say about me. I actually dwell more on what people
say about Paul, for some reason. Maybe it's because he can't handle
it.'
'Of course I've known about that tape,' Linda said to me
in the late 1980s. 'I'm used to people laughing at me. It just rolls
off my back now. It didn't always, but now it does.'
When she married Paul, all the girls hated Linda. When
she participated in her husband's musical work, especially when she
appeared with him on stage, all the guys hated her, because this was
a Beatle, and how dare she?
In 1971 Paul decided to put together a band with himself
and Linda as the core members. He claims he got the name 'Wings'
when he was praying for Linda in the course of the very difficult
birth of their daughter, Stella, in September of that year.
'Paul wanted, I think, to recapture the innocence of
when bands just used to get together to bang around in the garage,'
says Leslie Fradkin. 'The public relations mistake he made is that
he was already well past the point where the critics would accept
that from him, but conceptually he had a wonderful idea.'
The untrained singing of Linda and her keyboard playing
were no doubt important elements in the 'innocence' that Paul was
looking for. It was the innocence of beginning. And Linda's voice
was, in a sense, a 'found object', like the instruments the Beatles
would find in the closets and cabinets of the Abbey Road studios,
and then use on their recordings.
Pete Townshend had high praise: 'I know that there was
something about Wings' sound which had a particular kind of quality
to it that definitely came from the way that she sang. I've heard
people on the inside of Wings boldly state that Paul used to come in
and replace all her vocals. And I know that that's bollocks. I know
it's bollocks, I know it's nonsense. 'Cause you can hear her. You
can hear her voice. You know the human voice is the hardest to
imitate. And you know she's in there, she's part of that sound and
she's part of the character of it. I think when you're a composer,
you work with the elements that are around you that are part of your
human palette.'
There were eight configurations of Wings between August
1971 and January 1980. Only Linda and Paul McCartney and guitarist
Denny Laine were in the group, and on every recording, for the
entire time. The group(s) played for millions of people around the
world and sold millions of records; if you add up all the people
they played for, and all the records they sold, it was more than the
Beatles.
The story of Wings is a book in itself; there follows a
listing of some critical dates and recordings to which you can refer
if necessary - the personnel changes have been omitted. You need
only know that the two superb and articulate musicians who
contributed to the current book are drummer Denny Seiwell, who
played with Paul and Linda during the Ram sessions in early 1971,
was part of the original Wings line-up and left the group in August
1973; and Laurence Juber, guitarist, a member of Wings from early in
1978 until January 1980, when the group effectively ceased to exist
after Paul was arrested for marijuana possession in Japan, spending
over a week in jail and ruining a very lucrative and long-awaited
series of concert dates. Both Seiwell and Juber are now living in
Los Angeles and thriving.
So, in a nutshell (and with great indebtedness to Rock
Movers and Shakers, by Dafydd Rees and Luke Crampton, Billboard
Books, 1991):
By late 1971 Wings have been formed, after the release of two solo
albums, McCartney and Ram. The group's first album, released in
November, is Wings Wildlife.
In early 1972 the band embark on a 'minimal' tour of British
universities, with two vans, three children, two dogs and various
musicians.
July 1972 sees the kickoff of a major European tour, in
Chateauvillon, France.
The album Red Rose Speedway is released in May 1973 and goes to
number one in America and number five in the UK. Also that month,
 the TV special James Paul McCartney airs on the BBC. In '73, there
are three major hit singles: 'Hi Hi Hi', 'My Love' and 'Live and
Let Die'.
August '73: Wings record the phenomenally successful LP Band on
the Run in Lagos, Nigeria.
In 1974, with Band high in the charts around the world, Paul
McCartney finally gets a US visa - which has been held up by pot
busts in the past few years - and Wings go to Nashville to record,
where Paul also produces Peggy Lee's Let's Love.
Venus and Mars in 1975 makes number one in the UK and the US; the
single 'Listen to What the Man Said' is number one in America,
number six in the UK. Wings go on a thirteen-month tour.
Wings at the Speed of Sound goes to number one in the US and
number two in the UK in 1976. 'Silly Love Songs' tops the US
singles charts, reaches number two in the UK. The 'Wings over
America' tour begins in May, with Paul making his first appearance
in the US, in Fort Worth, Texas, since the Beatles' last concert
in San Francisco ten years earlier. A UNESCO benefit in Venice to
help save the sinking city is such a massive event that the city
sinks even further. In December, the world tour ends in London.
Wings over America, the album, makes number one in the US and
number eight in the UK in 1977. 'Maybe I'm Amazed' is in the top
ten in the US, only number twenty-eight in the UK; but 'Mull of
Kintyre', released in September, becomes the biggest selling
British single of all time, yet bombs in America. The album London
Town is recorded on a fleet of yachts in the Virgin Islands, to be
released in 1978.
Later in 1978, Wings' Greatest Hits is number five in America,
number twenty-eight in Great Britain. In 1979 Paul's song 'Haven't
We Met Somewhere Before' is turned down for the movie Heaven Can
Wait, but makes it into Rock and Roll High School, performed by
the Ramones, who named themselves after Paul's first stage name
(with the Silver Beatles in 1960), Paul Ramon.
Shortly after getting an award for being the most successful
composer in history, having sold 100 million singles and as many
albums, Paul is arrested in Tokyo in January 1980 for bringing a
bag of marijuana into Japan in his suitcase. His nine days in jail
mean the end of the Japanese tour, and Wings fall apart.
The preceding has been disgracefully compressed but it's
just there to give a Wings perspective/retrospective, as it were. We
are by no means finished with that eventful decade. In fact, let's
go back to the pre-Wings years, as Ram was being recorded in New
York, as recalled by drummer Denny Seiwell. As always, Linda and the
children were there during the sessions - Heather was eight and Mary
was about eighteen months old.
'Linda made tea during the recording of Ram,' Seiwell
recalls. 'Mary was tiny and jumping all over; there was a playpen
for her in the control room of the recording studio. It was the
first time I ever had a cup of English tea. I thought, "I can get
used to this." Anything Linda did, she really did well.'
It was at that time, early in 1971, that Linda called me
- it was the first time I'd heard her voice since she had left for
London in September 1968.
'Hi, it's Linda. We're in town. Can we come over? Paul
would love to meet you.'
'Sure.'
'7 West 20th Street, right?'
'Right.'
 'We'll be right over.'
Nothing about 'I missed you', or 'I suppose you're
wondering . . .', or anything to indicate that an unusually long
period had gone by for two friends who used to talk every day. Linda
was now operating on MST, McCartney Standard Time, and she would for
the rest of her life. In their own minds, and in their lives, the
McCartneys were the Greenwich Meridian. As the Queen is the Fountain
of Honour, they were the Fountain of Events - this royal metaphor
will be heard many times in this story, and from many sources.
Linda wanted her 'new' husband and her old friend to
like each other, and there was no problem with that from where I
sat; there is no one more charming than Paul, and of course it was
exciting to meet him, and great to see Linda again. Except for a
certain deference towards her husband in her manner, which was
certainly to be expected, she hadn't changed a bit. She took control
of the situation, because she had to, and Paul offered the
obligatory - and he offered it most graciously - 'Linda has told me
a lot about you. I'm glad we're getting to meet each other.'
One thing about meeting people who are very famous is
that you cannot ask them very much about themselves; they have to do
virtually all the asking. Otherwise, it's as if you were conducting
an interview, and it just doesn't feel right. Besides feeling that
it would have been a bit rude to ask a Beatle, 'So, what are you
doing these days?', I didn't really want to work very hard at this
whole renaissance. That was up to them. She'd turned her back, had
found greener pastures, was now trying to re-establish something
that once was, God bless her. I still loved her, and there was as
always a little protective feeling towards Linda; I wanted to see
what she'd brought home, so to speak. And I wanted the Beatle to
perform, in my living room, to please his wife by pleasing me. I
thought I was entitled to that, and besides, we were all too smart
and grown-up for anything to go wrong; we were all going to make
sure that everything was hunky-dory.
I was working in a dead-end publicity job at Atlantic
Records then, and was glad to chatter all about the Rolling Stones,
David Crosby, Steven Stills. (Crosby had been a great friend of the
Beatles; Stills had been a great friend of Linda's) and my beloved
Stooges, whom I was managing on the side. It was very music
business, and then it turned into Linda asking me about all our
mutual friends; it was instantly clear that I was the only one of
the old crowd she had contacted in the course of re-emerging into
New York rock and roll society.
Steve Paul, the owner of the Scene, was discussed, as
was the crowd at Max's Kansas City, the Fillmore, the Chelsea, etc.
We shared our devastation at the deaths of Janis and Jimi the
previous autumn (Janis' close friend and biographer, Myra Friedman,
would have appreciated hearing from Linda at the time Janis OD'd in
LA; it was known that Paul and Linda had been in New York when it
happened, but there was not a word of sympathy offered - the
Fountain of Events syndrome starting to take shape), and of course
Lillian's name soon came up.
Where I had once described our mutual friend as 'not
smiling wildly' at Linda's neglect, this time I just said, 'She's
pissed.'
'Uh oh,' Linda acknowledged, but I knew she would do
nothing about it. She was afraid to confront a pissed-off Lillian
Roxon, as was everybody else. I told her she should call, but she
never did. (Naturally, I told Lillian all about it as soon as they
left. 'They must have a new record coming out,' she said most
disdainfully. 'They need all her friends in the press back on their
side. I'm not surprised they called you.' Meaning I was a pussy? I
didn't pursue it. Lillian was sliding into deep detestation of her
erstwhile best friend.)
Paul was staying out of the sentimental reminiscences,
but when I remarked to Linda, 'Gosh, I miss your pictures, I wish
there could be a book of them,' he came vividly to stage front.
'That's just what I've been saying!' he said. 'Her
pictures are great! There should be a book, more than one,
definitely!'
'Well it would be beautiful,' I replied. Linda asked me
if I would work on such a project with her, and I said sure.
The whole mood of the little get together had changed.
If they were asking me to line up support for a forthcoming album or
musical project of any kind, they were being so subtle that I didn't
notice it. What Paul wanted was the rehabilitation of Linda in the
public mind, as a photographer worthy of having her name on a book
of her work, and he was really, really into the idea. It occurred to
me right then that he thought the world should know that he had
married a person who was remarkably talented, an artist in her own
right. John Lennon had married a woman who was an artist in her own
mind, and his; Paul was convinced that he had done just as well in
picking a creative mate, probably better. I thought, 'Way to go!' It
was a very good moment. And it was all about Linda. Paul loved her
and wanted her to shine. He was proud of her, proud of the choice he
had made, proud of the partnership that his fans and all the press
had questioned the validity of from the very beginning. They were
wrong; he was right; he had done very well, if they only knew ... It
was my great pleasure to be an instrument in the campaign to prove
that Linda McCartney was no groupie, no dizzy debutante, no
destroyer of groups - that she was instead an incredibly smart,
loving person with an astonishing gift for photography. Her pictures
would speak for themselves, and the contempt would start to lift and
vanish.
How optimistic we were, and how long the fight was going
to take. Because Paul wasn't going to be happy with just a book (or
books) of Photographs from a beautiful woman who was a perfect wife
and mother - he had to put her in his new band and so subject her to
a whole new round of ridicule. In the long run, he was right: she
rose to the challenge. In the shorter run, Linda would suffer
greatly.

Chapter 11
'People would write her really nasty letters; they'd send her turds
in the mail.'
Laurence Juber
As a Beatle, Paul had always been the member of the
group most eager to perform in public. For him, there was nothing as
life- enhancing as those waves of love pouring over the footlights;
for the other group members, there was nothing as tedious, scary, or
boring. Now there was no one on his side of the footlights to
complain, and on a roll from his new-found confidence as a solo
songwriter and patriarch of a growing family - aspects of his
'revival' that owe a very great deal to Linda - it was time to put
on a show. The 'empty barn' of the old MGM musicals became a series
of provincial British universities, where Wings, in.early 1972,
would arrive unannounced and offer to play that night for an
astonished crowd of students.
Musicians, children and pets travelled in one van;
roadies and equipment in another. It was all rather charming, there
were no reporters watching and, although physically strenuous, it
was rather a jolly little outing. 'I'm enjoying these one-night
appearances,' Linda told a reporter for Melody Maker in 1972, one
week into the tour. 'It's like a touring holiday! And the children
love it too. We gave our elder child the choice of school or coming
with us, and she chose the latter. Her teacher in London doesn't
mind a bit. I mean, this is an education in itself, isn't it?'
(Incidentally, the same article ends with a description
of Linda as the 'brilliant New York photographer who first met Paul
on a Beatles American tour'. Where did they get that? This is Melody
Maker, the most prestigious of England's music weeklies; surely it
should have known better. Linda may have seen Paul from a great
distance when the Beatles played at Shea Stadium in New York City in
1966, but she certainly didn't meet him until 1967. As the wise man
said, 'There is no memory, there is no history, there is no truth .
. . but we do the best we can.')
If Paul wanted to pretend he was starting all over with
a baby band, and that the past ten years hadn't changed him a bit,
well why not? Being so famous, he was entitled to do anything he
wanted as a performer, even pretending that he was not famous at
all. There was no one to tell him that he couldn't 'go home again',
and in fact no one tells Paul McCartney what he can and can't do
when it comes to being an entertainer; Linda could, but certainly no
mere mortal on the payroll - and, anyhow, she knew this new band was
essential for her husband's continuing rehabilitation as a musician,
and that her presence was very much needed in this project.
'Linda was absolutely his support mechanism. There was a
lot of ugly stuff going on in the background about the Beatles just
then, and he really wanted her around. Paul and Linda would talk
about it among themselves, but never in front of the group. That was
"the other band", and now we're here. And he wanted her not just
around, but in the band, onstage,' recalls Denny Seiwell.
'Paul had said when he was putting this university tour
together that "We'll just have Linda play keyboards for a while."
Well, I thought that was a novel idea; I hadn't known she played the
piano. As it turned out, she had little knowledge of the keyboard,
and Paul would just teach her her parts. And she would just try and
stay with us.'
Linda's reluctance to be part of Paul's performing band
was very real, but so was his insistence that she be up there. It
would not have been her first choice as an activity by any means.
She was never comfortable in front of a crowd, which certainly
showed, and, as she told me many years later, 'I'd just as soon have
stayed on the farm with the horses and kids, but Paul wanted me
there, so ..." If she felt that she was being forced to do something
she didn't really want to do, she was professional enough never to
show her feelings on that matter to others in the organization. As
far as anyone could see, as far as her behaviour would indicate, she
was very much involved in the band. If it was going to be that way,
she was going to make the most of it, as awfully difficult as it
was. Any complaining would have been directly and only to Paul, with
no witnesses; there were times when it was obvious they'd just had
an argument, but it was, without fail, all kept in the family. And
in interviews, she made it quite clear that being a performer was
not the thing she wanted most in the world to do, but she did it -
next question?
'Everyone respected her musical opinions, because Paul
respected them so much; they had the same likes and dislikes in
music,' says Denny Seiwell. 'So if Linda said something, and Paul
was smiling, you knew that he was OK with that. She never said
anything that was out of line, and she had a lot of good ideas, even
though she couldn't pull it off musically or vocally at the
beginning. Years later, she'd progressed and she'd become familiar
with all of her parts and what she could actually contribute. I
think she was pretty comfortable at the end. On the record that was
just released [Linda's posthumous 'solo' album, Wide Prairie], her
vocals are pretty damn strong. She didn't care what she sounded
like, she was singing from the heart, and that was cool.'
The Linda-haters were sure that she had forced herself
into the band, as they had been sure that she had forced herself on
Paul in the first place - both of which opinions are so
disrespectful of Paul that one wonders if these people were really
his fans. It was noted earlier that the idea of anyone 'snagging'
Paul as a husband while he wasn't looking was absurd, and so was the
concept that he, the consummate perfectionist, would allow any
unwanted or unattractive element in the sound emanating from his
band.
Said Laurence Juber,
She enjoyed that she got to work with Paul. It was
tough for her, because she had an awful lot of responsibilities,
and when I joined the band [early in 1978] James was just a few
months old. The children were always her priority, always. It was
very tough. She'd be up early dealing with the kids and Paul got
to sleep late, even though they went to bed at the same time. She
had her hands full, and maybe he could have gotten up a half hour
earlier and helped her out a little more, but he was a really good
dad, always talking about something to do with the kids.
I did pick up a certain amount of frustration from
Linda at the way she had been treated by the public, the way that
people had taken out a lot of anger on her. People would write her
really nasty letters; they'd send her turds in the mail.
As a musician, she clearly didn't have the training,
but she had good instincts. She'd been around, and she knew what
the criteria were for being successful in the music business. I
liked her, I trusted her instincts. I mean, she was a great
person. And that band, it wasn't just Paul, it was a family unit.
I couldn't imagine Wings without her, I don't think the band would
have existed as a band without Linda. She was very much the
anchor.
Some guys think they're busy being rock and roll
stars, and the family doesn't exist when they're performing or in
the studio. Paul wasn't working like that, he was working from the
point of view of being a partner with Linda in this marriage, in
raising their kids. The band didn't intrude on the family, and the
family didn't intrude on the band. It was a great balance, they
figured out a very synergistic way of working. Linda became a bit
of a mentor for me in terms of my perception of a strong,
intelligent, talented woman being a mother and collaborating with
her husband. I learned a lot from her that gave me some sense of
 what is possible in that kind of relationship.
I never saw the two of them argue. I'd certainly see
them angry on occasion, usually when they heard something that
Yoko had said about them. Or something to do with business that he
would get riled about, and she'd follow his lead.
And that she always did. There was always a party line.
It was Paul's opinion plus her input, but it became the party line,
the opinion, the last word. I think I am not the first person to
deem Paul autocratic, which is not a moral judgment or an ethical
one. He is simply autocratic. He is The Don. There are those on the
payroll of his company, MPL; those who work for him at times; those
who work with him not directly under his authority; those who
collaborate with him occasionally on various projects; those who
have worked with him and hope to do it again; those who have and do
not hope to again; and those who simply hope to, who are terrified
of incurring the displeasure of Paul McCartney. It is not pretty to
be on the receiving end of that, which would be true simply because
of his immense intelligence, but add to that his fame, his talent
and his wealth, and he makes the 900-pound gorilla who can sit
wherever he wants look puny by comparison. And nothing that concerns
him gets past him without his approval.
His disapproval, manifested as a one-to-one thing, is
reserved for those who are on his agenda Right Now, and it leaves
strong people shaken. It is a very powerful and upsetting thing when
Paul tells you he is displeased with what you have done, or what you
have in mind; you will never forget that moment, if you've never
experienced it before; the people on his staff have to become
accustomed to his wrath. It comes and goes, and it is, after all, a
privilege to work for him. They get used to it and remain extremely
loyal. They love him, they suffer for him, they know he depends on
them, and of course it is valuable for him to know that his 'people'
are top-notch, can hold up and are going to stick around, which they
are, which they do. He is well-served; I would say that of all the
very famous people I've known, he is better served by a greater
number of very smart and skilled retainers than any other. He has
learned the importance of an impeccable organization totally under
his control.
And Linda, of course, was so much a part of the ruling
mechanism that it was, as Laurence Juber says Wings were,
inconceivable without her. Let's not go too far with this
comparison, but it works for a certain distance: think of the
support the Queen gets from Philip, her husband, father of her
children, very much a player in the business he married into -
essential, in fact, to her ability to reign. The children, in both
families, are at the front of all priorities by far (although, due
in part to personality and in part to the inherent difference in the
roles played by Mother and Father, Linda's children were fond of her
without qualification); the one partner is far more visible, and
must be seen to be a beloved public figure, while the other survives
without mass adoration, requiring at all times, however, the
complete loyalty and cooperation of the first. They fight, of
course, but when no one is watching. On the other hand, there has
never been a question of marital infidelity in the McCartney
alliance, and there certainly have been questions in that other one
- as I said, one can't take this all that far.
The 'royal' thing about Paul and Linda began occurring
to me when I spent time with them in London in 1974, working on the
book Linda's Pictures. Requests and suggestions were not floated by
Linda (I had never seen this before from her), but 'issued'. Their
comings and goings were occasions, their opinions were
pronouncements - people seemed to walk backwards in their presence,
if not literally then very nearly so. Their house was given over to
the children, who drew on the walls and furniture (but not on the
Magrittes and the de Koonings) as if they, the children, were the
most important generation dwelling here - a very royal attitude.
Come the summer, Linda told me, parents, kids and Martha, the giant
sheepdog, would all pile into a green Rolls-Royce convertible and
drive to the farm in Scotland - you knew that, as informal and
proletarian as this journey was, they would not find the farmhouse
dilapidated and inhabited by squirrels, that it somehow got taken
care of in their absence and that they had to do little more than
call ahead in order to find it habitable. I thought that was at
least aristocratic, if not necessarily royal.
Once, in the mid-70s, they phoned me at my strange
apartment in what is now fashionable Tribeca, but was then a dingy
commercial neighbourhood deserted at night, and said they were
coming over. Great, always great to see them. We sat on the floor,
smoked some 'spliffs' (they had been spending time in Jamaica) and
marvelled at my view of the Woolworth Building; when it came time to
leave, they asked to borrow money for the cab fare so that they
could get back uptown.
'Er, of course. Ten dollars? Did you lose a wallet or
something?'
'No, we just don't bother carrying money in New York,'
Linda replied, as I counted out ten singles. 'We just tell the cab
driver who we are, and then we sign autographs for him and he says
we should forget what's on the meter. That's what usually happens.
This time, it was someone who didn't know who we were and he didn't
know where he was going, and we were afraid we'd have a problem.
Sure enough, he wanted money.'
'Money? My my! What did you do?'
'Well,' she said, quite vexed at the memory, 'I had some
coins in my purse. I'm not even sure what country they were from, so
we told him it was a lot of money in New Zealand or something, and
he'd better take it, because that's all we had. But now we're afraid
we'll get another one like that, so we'd better have some cash in
case it happens on the way home.'
'You could lean into the cab and point to yourselves and
see if he gets excited, Linda,' I suggested, still reeling from this
anecdote. 'But no problem.' I thought that was extremely royal.
I must say I can see Paul and the Eastmans getting red
with fury right now, because there was a time when I was truly broke
and Linda helped me out, saying, when I tried to thank her, 'Let's
just not talk about that, it's OK, let's not talk about it.' But it
is nonetheless, as anyone who socializes above his or her economic
station will verify, expensive to have very rich friends, or could
be. I don't mean the taxi fare - it's all the Why don't you come to
London and visit?' and 'Come and see us next week in East Hampton,
don't you have a house there this summer?' On the other hand, it is
so petty to complain that people who don't carry cash might not be
thinking a great deal about it at all times. I take it all back.
Actually, I'm guilt-stricken for even bringing this up,
but they are good stories. Rich friends are a two-edged sword, so to
speak. One of the why-don't-you-come-to-London? questions was in
response to my moaning that I had heard the National Gallery was
having a once-in-a-lifetime show of the paintings of Poussin, who is
one of my top ten painters of all time, and I said to Linda, 'I just
can't, I can't afford the time or the money.' A few days later, by
FedEx or one of those things, I got from London the catalogue of the
show, with a note from her assistant saying that 'Linda thought you
might want to have this', which was so incredibly sweet and
thoughtful that the whole gesture just shines in my memory. It's the
kind of thing you would want to do for a friend, but if you don't
have an assistant whom you can call and command to do it, then it
doesn't get done. So it's wonderful, absolutely wonderful, to have
rich friends.
You see, I think it depends on whether something is your
idea or theirs. For example, I was in London and on the phone to
Linda despairing that the limited run of Dame Edna Everage (the
comedian Barry Humphries) in a West End theatre was sold out. 'Can
you help me get a ticket?' I begged. She told me to call her back in
one hour. When I did, I was told that a ticket would be at the box
office in my name and that I should send a cheque for the amount of
the seat (with no broker's fee, which I'm sure in retrospect there
was) to the McCartney office. That was fair.
The utterly gracious Linda.
But she could be severe, dismissive businesswoman who
had power and used it, not always making niceties her priority.
Denny Seiwell recalls first coming to Scotland at Paul's
request (the ruined rental car story from a previous chapter). He
was joined there by his wife Monique and guitarist Hugh McCracken
and his 'lady' Holly. After fiddling around for a day at the farm
McCracken and Seiwell were asked to come back the next day, but
'Leave your wives at home, would you?' suggested Linda, 'home' being
a typically Scottish 'no frills' hotel in Campbeltown. The
McCrackens were having no part of this peremptory attitude and soon
left for New York. The Seiwells stayed on, taking up residence at a
nearby farm. 'She just didn't want to worry about having other
people around,' Seiwell surmises. And she saw no reason why she had
to. If anyone had told her it was perhaps a bit rude to summarily
dismiss two women who had travelled thousands of miles with their
men to be there, and couldn't exactly spend the afternoon at a
matinee while the guys played their instruments, Linda would have
been shocked at the accusation: rock and roll was men's business,
everyone was there to take care of business, and that was that.
There was no time for anything extraneous.
People who have worked with the McCartneys are very
aware that there's an 'us' and 'them' dynamic always in play. I
recall a story about a woman who was invited to a garden party at
Buckingham Palace and asked someone on the staff what she should
wear. 'The Queen does not notice what people wear,' she was told.
The problems in Wings were never about what people were
wearing, but how much credit they were getting, how much dignity
they had and what they were being paid. 'On the one hand he talked,
talked, talked family,' says a musician who was with the band for a
while. 'On the other hand, there was no family here, it was, "Here's
the Pop, and here's the kids." There was lots of business stuff that
wasn't getting addressed and wasn't taken care of, and it was
causing a lot of frustration and resentment in the band.'
In other words, the musicians weren't getting paid what
they felt they deserved (try $175 a week, which was nothing even in
the early 1970s or about three or four times that amount in today's
money), and the situation exploded on the eve of the group's
departure for Lagos, Nigeria, in August 1973, where they were going
to record Band on the Run. Seiwell and guitarist Henry McCullough,
who'd been with them since the university tour, simply quit, in a
bitter argument about money. Linda and Paul, with only Denny Laine
from the band, went on to Africa and made the record without them.
And were lucky to get away from Lagos alive. Invincible
the McCartneys often felt themselves to be, but they were certainly
foolish to go walking alone at night in an unfamiliar Third World
city, carrying cameras and wearing expensive watches. Sure enough, a
car that was slowly following them contained not the usual batch of
McCartney fans on an innocent stalking mission, but five youths who
set upon the terrified couple, brandishing knives. 'He's Beatle
Paul! Don't kill us, please!' Linda screamed to the attackers, more
vicious even than the Apple Scruffs; the thugs settled for not
killing them, as we all know, but took everything of value they had,
after waving their knives at the jugular veins of our adventurous
recording artists. As the legend goes, they were not killed because
they were white, and the robbers knew that white people could not
identify black people in a police line-up. Muggers whose victims can
point to them with certainty are summarily shot in this most
populous of all countries in the African continent. Anyhow, Wings,
short of members though they were, made a great album, which just
goes to show . . . something or other.
Those who have been dismissed from the McCartneys'
presence, particularly in the wake of a confrontation about money,
recall that 'Thanks for nothing, see you never' was Linda's way of
saying goodbye to people who indicated they were less than grateful
for the opportunity to be in a band with Paul. Whether or not she
and Paul agreed or disagreed about the complaints they heard, they
responded as one. 'Thanks for nothing, see you never.' In fact,
there were attempts at patching things up over the years, and a
major reconciliation backstage in Anaheim, California, between the
McCartneys and the Seiwells in 1993. 'It was genuine, they were
great, the kids hadn't seen Monique in years, and it was really
nice,' Denny smiles, happy that it ended - for he and Monique never
saw Linda again - the way it did. 'I really thought that between the
four of us, Paul and Linda, Monique and I, there was a great bond,
and there had been so much left unsaid and undone that really needed
to be addressed, and just never got addressed.'
The European tour that began in France in the summer of
1972 was a big-time thing, very much in contrast to the 'Surprise!
We're here!' tour of universities earlier that year. The shows were
promoted in advance, advertised and now subject to reviews in the
press, both British and local. Reporters for major periodicals had
had a hard - if not impossible -time trying to get to any of the
stops when Wings were playing colleges; sometimes the band members
themselves had not known where they would be playing in the next few
days. But now the knives were being sharpened for the arrival of
Paul McCartney's new band; and indeed the eyes and ears of the world
were focused on the group, travelling the highways of Europe in a
double-decker flower-power-painted bus that reached speeds of 35
mph. And when the distance between shows was too much to drive,
there were private jets and a fleet of limousines waiting. Local
castles, run as guest houses by down-and-out European nobles, were
preferred to ordinary hotels, and haunted castles were most
desirable because they so delighted Heather, now nine years old.
Having to play in British school cafeterias with barely
any lighting and a very modest sound-system was one thing for Linda;
now she was part of a major concert tour, and she was petrified.
'She actually cried on my shoulder the night before we left for
France,' Seiwell recalls. 'It was one of the few times that she and
I really shared a moment, we were the two Americans and that was
kind of a bond. All of us were nervous, but she was terrified.
Obviously, the European press was going to compare whatever they saw
and heard to the Beatles. Uh-oh. Linda was actually hoping that she
could pull it off, but it was scary for her.'
'I didn't want to let Paul down, I didn't want to let
the band down,' Linda told me over tea one morning in London two
years later. 'I knew they'd say I couldn't play or sing, and all the
who-does-she-think-she-is? stuff, and they'd be right. But I was
always hoping that I wasn't going to be the headline, or the part of
the review that everyone would remember because it would be so
funny. Ha ha, let's think of new ways to say how terrible she is. It
was too much to hope that I'd be ignored, like I deserved. Or maybe
they'd just put their opinion of me in a separate little box on
another page. Yeah, right.'
Some unattractive comments were made by Linda in the
1984 Playboy interview and one cannot ignore them, wish them away,
or pretend that they are professional, because they're not. I find
them rather shocking to this day. Paul is called away from the
interview, and Joan Goodman asks Linda what the Wings period was
really like for Paul. She answers that 'Paul felt very frustrated.
He wanted it to work with Wings, but we just picked the wrong
people. He needed the best to work with, but he had to carry all the
weight.'
The interviewer then asks if Paul was as dictatorial as
some accounts by musicians who worked with him make him out to be.
'It's part of the same problem,' Linda explains. 'Paul is such a
good musician, and none of the Wings were good enough to play with
him, including me, for sure. They were good, not great.'
Well, trying to excuse Linda for her patronising
attitude towards her erstwhile fellow band members, perhaps one can
say that it was only four years since Wings ended and the hurts were
still raw. That's lame, though; musicians (or any artists or any
anythings) do not speak of other musicians who worked for them as
'good, not great', not for publication, anyhow. It was not necessary
for Linda to make any excuses about the Wings oeuvre - it was after
all supervised completely and quite thoroughly by Paul, with some
advice from his wife. And one wonders if this was the 'party line';
Paul could not, would not say that about colleagues (whom he had
hired), but perhaps he didn't mind it being said. Speculation - and
still, not one of Linda's finest moments.
Though not savagely butchered, literally, in Lagos in
the summer of 1973, Linda and Paul could not have been unaware that
they had been sliced to pieces most mercilessly earlier that year,
when the fearsome journalist Lillian Roxon reviewed their television
special, James Paul McCartney, in New York's Daily News. Her cuts
were the unkindest of all - until Linda's other best friend, Blair
Sabol, let fly again in 1975. This wretched falling out among
girlfriends was a real tragedy of jealousy, abandonment, betrayal
and plain old misunderstanding, played out on a very public level.
People who had once loved Linda for all the right reasons now did
not hesitate to humiliate her as only they could.
Chapter 12
'I can tell you right now, she didn 't marry a millionaire Beatle to
end up in a Liverpool saloon singing "Pack up Your Troubles in Your
Old Kit Bag" with middle-aged women called Mildred.'
Lillian Roxon, reviewing the McCartneys' TV special
Lillian Roxon had been Linda's closest friend from
mid-1966 until Linda left for London in September '68. A member of
the radical Sydney bohemian crowd known as the 'Push' before she
moved to New York (and the person to whom The Female Eunuch, by the
fabulously famous feminist philosopher Germaine Greer, was
dedicated), Lillian had been described by a friend named Craig
McGregor as 'mistress of the put-down and the send-up, the come-on
and the come-uppance, the double-faced about-turn and the
uncompromising insult'. But as the New York correspondent for the
Sydney Morning Herald, most of what she wrote was, to paraphrase:
'Australia's leading entymologist, Dr -----, and his lovely wife
Peggy were in New York recently, where they spent an evening at the
theater and then mingled with the likes of Andy Warhol and the
Kennedy family at Max's Kansas City, this city's most exciting
"underground" hangout.' And, as a columnist for the New York Daily
News, where she covered the pop music scene, she was unfailingly
generous; she was neither a critic nor a gossip-monger, and worked
hard at keeping her powerful contacts satisfied with what she wrote.
Friends who could read between Lillian's lines could always find
some Tabasco sauce in the white rice, but her articles generally
concerned whose record was coming out, whose concert was in the near
or distant future and what some star had said to her. The
uncompromising insults came forth plentifully, but usually over the
phone talking to a friend about someone else, or in person; when
verbal weaponry wasn't sufficient, she'd just hit someone who'd
behaved poorly over the head with her pocketbook.
Soon after Linda and Paul were married, Lillian wrote a
glowing story about her in Woman's Day which emphasized her
wonderful and classy qualities, told from the point of view of an
intimate, appreciative friend - which indeed she had been. But after
feeling neglected, that is, being neglected by Linda for a few years
(and no doubt under pressure from her agents and editors to do an
update about her great friend), Lillian grew increasingly bitter and
unyielding.
Her support for Linda, apart from her friendship and
affection, had been extremely important in settling the question of
Linda's 'acceptability' with already established professional
journalists, particularly women, when Linda first burst radiantly on
to the scene in the summer of 1966. Linda had no problem with men,
straight or otherwise. Women, on the other hand, were not jumping on
her glowing little bandwagon so quickly; it could have been said
that she was just another pretty face, that she used men, that she
slept around, that her main talent was her seductiveness - all those
things could have been said, whatever their merit, were it not for
the very powerful mantle of Lillian's protection. Although a teeny
bit prone to flying off the handle, and to some (usually
justifiable) vindictiveness, Lillian was a paragon of
professionalism; she was a regular contributor to two of the world's
largest daily newspapers, was a few years older than most of us, and
had been filing columns and articles well before many of us,
certainly Linda and me, had arrived with rock's big bang in the
mid-60s. Her judgments were severe, and she did not tolerate
frivolity when it came to work - not that she minded people getting
laid as often as they could, as long as it didn't interfere with
their jobs, and as long as they told Lillian all about it. So when
Lillian said, often literally, to those who were sceptical of Linda
Eastman's sudden leap on to the A-list of rock insiders, 'You leave
this woman alone! She is a fabulous photographer, totally
professional and very bright, and she deserves to be successful,'
potential critics, for the most part, backed off. Linda's enemies
became Lillian's enemies, and who needed that? Besides, Lillian was
not merely fearsome, but truly adored; she was great fun, knew
everything and everyone, and had the world's biggest heart, which
went along - sometimes nicely, sometimes not - with the world's
longest memory.
In the spring of '73, the shit hit the fan when Lillian
wrote a review of the television special James Paul McCartney that
was the meanest piece she had ever written for public consumption in
her New York years. It was headlined 'AN UNDISTINGUISHED MCCARTNEY
SPECIAL'.
Did you see them in that pub scene . . . Paul as
congenial and friendly as all get-out. .. Linda positively
catatonic with horror at having to mingle with ordinary people.
I can tell you right now, she didn't marry a
millionaire Beatle to end up in a Liverpool saloon singing 'Pack
up Your Troubles in Your Old Kit Bag' with middle-aged women
called Mildred. TV special or not, she didn't crack a smile once
in that scene except for a little novocained grimace after, I
suspect, Paul had given her a good hard shove in the ribs . . .
Take away Linda's ringlets, her picture hats, her tambourine (very
Major Barbara) and what are we left with? Sweaty, pudgy,
slack-mouthed Paul McCartney trying to get across what essentially
turned out to be little more than bland easy-listening.
Not a soul I talked to afterwards could remember the
names of most of the songs in James Paul McCartney, but they
certainly had names for Linda's varied hair arrangements - her
Stevie Wonder multi-braid, her Los Angeles groupie Moulin Rouge
topknot, her modified Bette Midler 40s page-boy, and her quite
unforgettable David Bowie split-level crewcut. . .
Paul revealed himself to be little more than an
incredibly generous husband and a great piano player - when he
could get the keyboard away from Linda . .. 'You are my sunshine',
sang the people who gave the Beatles their original vitality, and
Linda sat, her teeth relentlessly clamped in a Scarsdale lockjaw:
I could have wept. . . Linda comes across as an incredibly cold
and arrogant figure coming to life only when the TV cameras are
focused right on her. She is a great beauty and someone should
forget about Paul, and make a movie with her. She is obviously
dying to become a star, you can tell. . .
Talk about shoot to cripple! 'Sweaty, pudgy,
slack-mouthed'? 'Forget about Paul'? Critics had certainly been less
than amazed by much of Paul's work after the Beatles, and the TV
special didn't fare very well with the British press either, but
Beatle Paul, the Cute Beatle, had never before been described as
having lost his looks. Nor had it ever been written that his wife
now had the star quality he'd lost - sarcastic as this was.
Linda knew how dangerous Lillian could be if she felt
slighted, and I suspect that in four years she'd had time to get
ready for the inevitable explosion, although no one is ever quite
ready for such a vicious barrage from a former best friend in
America's largest circulation newspaper. You may talk about such
stuff rolling off your back, but if you don't walk like a duck or
talk like a duck or look like a duck, you are not a duck. Still, the
worst of it was what was said about Paul. I don't know what he said
to his wife about what Lillian had written, but it can't have been
very jolly. If Paul 'can't handle' criticism, as Linda said in the
Playboy interview, his reaction to this review was quite likely
terrifying to behold.
Lillian Roxon died suddenly four months after this
article appeared; she was only in her early forties. I'd been
talking to journalist Lisa Robinson, Lillian's closest friend, and
she told me that she thought it odd that she hadn't heard from
Lillian even once that particular day. 'She must be dead, then,' I
said, seriously. Lisa asked her husband Richard Robinson and their
friend Danny Goldberg to check Lillian's apartment, where they found
her - she had died of an asthma attack the night before, only hours
after she walked home the few blocks from Max's Kansas City, where
we'd all been watching a new band perform.
Lisa always said that Lillian's Rock Encyclopedia had
killed her. Before desktop computers existed, and before rock
'scholarship' was even remotely organized, Lillian had undertaken a
chore that would have been daunting for a team of workers. The floor
of her tiny apartment had been covered with stacks of notes that
made her living room impassable by foot ('You're stepping on the
Beach Boys!' she'd scream). She was torn between thoroughness and
schedules, torn to the point of being tormented, and her fragile
health just gave out. Lillian would have been pleased with her very
prominent obituaries, and the turnout at her memorial, which
included music industry moguls and the elite of entertainment
journalism. 4jfe without her was going to be unimaginable; like a
mother's love, Lillian's could never be replaced.
If the book killed her, Linda had wounded her deeply and
had known what she'd done; but I don't believe that even when
Lillian was hating her so vocally and visibly that she had ever
stopped loving the woman who had been to her like a younger sister,
a daughter, and in fact a best friend.
Linda called me about Lillian just after Wings returned
from Lagos, and she was genuinely shattered. She said something
about there having been no need to be so mean to Paul, but nothing
about Lillian having been so mean to her. And to the end of Linda's
life, as was noted before, she would tell me that her greatest
regret was not having made up with Lillian. Well, a phone call would
have been a move in the right direction, but Linda never made one to
her. There could have been letters and flowers and the use as a
go-between of less adamant mutual friends, like me, but there were
none of the above. Linda told me that she would ask Paul from time
to time if he thought an overture was advisable, and although she
never said that he was against it, I gathered he did not encourage
it either. He is very much a once-bitten-twice-shy kind of person,
and he had every reason to be shy of an old and influential friend
of his wife's, who knew her before he did, who was a journalist, who
was estranged from her and who had written for millions to read that
Paul should give up his own career and concentrate on Linda's
potential instead.
If Lillian ever had any regrets about what she'd said
and written about Linda, she never told anybody about them. But I
know she would have melted, eventually, if her old friend had ever
really reached out to her.
 Betrayals, for large amounts of money, of very famous
people like Princess Diana, Prince Charles, Joan Crawford and Bill
Clinton by those who loved, depended on, or served them are
sensational enough, depending on what they reveal of course, but not
remarkable as events. It is very rare, on the other hand, to be
betrayed by someone who was an intimate friend before you married
into fame; if the betrayal is done in the course of writing a weekly
column, and therefore not especially lucrative, it is very odd.
Lillian's review of the JPM TV special at least appeared in the form
of legitimate critical opinion that fell easily within her purview
as a rock writer. She had to write primarily about a show, and
therefore about Paul and the music, much as her nails were sharpened
for Linda. Lillian was out for revenge, but she had a professional
responsibility to make her blood-letting take the form of a
critique.
Blair Sabol, writing in New York's 'alternative'
journal, the Village Voice, was free to do as she pleased. Sabol was
ostensibly writing about 'fashion', but it was for her savage wit
that people tuned in; she was always much more fun detesting
something than approving of it, and there was very little she
approved of. She hadn't approved of the way in which Linda Eastman
abandoned her very close friends in New York in 1968, for one thing,
and when Linda suddenly popped up in Blair's life seven years later
in Los Angeles, Sabol wrote a merciless story that was a landmark in
the history of celebrity journalism.
Trailed on the front of the Voice issue of 14 April
1975, the story filled a two-page spread and was headlined 'linda -
who does she think she is? mrs paul mccartney?' 'At the time it was
an incredibly famous piece,' says Sabol, now living in Arizona. 'And
it unsettled me, it really unsettled me. I have been guilt-ridden
from that day about that piece. In today's world, there would be no
such articles. It wouldn't pass the censors, it wouldn't pass the
lawyers, it wouldn't pass a lot of things.' What did Blair Sabol do
that was so awful? Well, she chopped poor Linda to pieces on every
level - as a photographer, as a mother, as a musician, as a friend,
and only incidentally as a person expected to display some taste
when it came to what she wore.
The story begins with a phone call from Linda. 'Now, you
must understand,' Blair wrote, 'the last time I knew Linda was in
her groping groupie days . .. [she] was into photographing stars
with little or no film in her camera . . . her pictures turned out
to be mediocre to poor, but we became fast friends ..." And then
Sabol is off and running.
She chastises Linda for her 'disappearing act'; her
'affected Liverpudlian accent when Paul is around'; her 'nerve to
get up and perform onstage with Paul'; and pitilessly for her
new-found musical abilities: 'Linda then requested that I watch her
[in a recording studio] as she played or dabbled at the celesta. She
sat down, struck two notes, jumped up and was on to the moog. She
hit four moog moans and went on to a guitar. She didn't complete one
riff on one instrument. . .' Paul busies himself in the control
booth, 'not paying too much attention to Linda's childish auditions.
Obviously, McCartney takes his music seriously while Linda is just
along for the ride .. . [she] decided to become part of his act, if
only to talk to him about something ... Somehow from the tone in her
voice that afternoon, I wouldn't have put it past Linda to secretly
believe that she is really better than Paul.'
The entire second (and hilarious to this day) part of
Sabol's story is about the party Linda and Paul gave aboard the
Queen Mary, docked at Long Beach Harbor, to celebrate the end of the
recording sessions for Venus and Mars. At the celebration, and
skewered by Sabol's pen, were Dean Martin ('who sat at the table
next to Linda and Paul and kept booze-bellowing, "Who the hell is
giving this party? Do I know these people?"'), Rod Stewart, Tony
Curtis, George Harrison ('with his new-artichoke haircut you really
notice his lousy teeth'), Bob Dylan, Cher, the Jackson Five, Joni
Mitchell, etc. The piece ends as the McCartneys are the last people
to leave the ship: 'Linda was carrying a yellow and red carnation
centerpiece. Which just goes to show . . . You can take the girl out
of the bar mitzvah, but you can't take the bar mitzvah out of the
girl.'
The story was a sensation, the ultimate in
Linda-bashing, the ultimate in fame-bashing. It was a watershed;
things had gone too far. Celebrities and their press agents and
managers were very careful after that appeared; so were editors and
writers. 'You write/print anything we don't like, and you'll never
get near my client again. You'll never get near any of my clients.
And I'll warn everybody else to stay away from you and every paper
and magazine you write for.' If you think about it, there are very
few stories about famous people that are truly mean; by far most of
them are 'puff pieces', designed to make everybody look good - or
else. That is one legacy of Blair Sabol's article about her former
close friend. 'Now it's all blow-job,' says Sabol.
Her thoughts about Linda today are far more measured,
and she admits that she was getting even for the dumping of the New
York crowd and striking a blow for Lillian, who had died two years
earlier, still suffering from Linda's rejection. 'The form of
journalism that I did in that piece is kharmically hideous,' Sabol
says now. 'There was, more recently, another woman who was a good
friend of mine who was a very public figure, and someone close to me
keeps saying, "You knew her! Why don't you speak up?" And I thought,
"Oh, there's that piece, that famous piece that haunts me, it haunts
me." Even though, when it came out, so many people said, "Oh! That
was so true."'
It wasn't true, not most of it, not by any means. It
was, as Blair says today, chock-full of daggers disguised as facts.
If you were prepared to hate Linda, because you had once loved her
and she had left you in the dust, there is no doubt that Linda
herself gave you enough rope with which to hang her. She did get
that accent down, but so what? When you relocate, you start talking
like 'them', whether it's speaking another language or a different
version of your own. Big deal. And Linda was learning to play those
keyboards, and we know she wasn't all that good, but she was trying,
and probably trying to give her old friend living examples of 'Look!
This is what I've been doing!', even if only to cover the
awkwardness of the reunion. As for her clothes, my God, we always
knew she was not a Friend of Fashion - and Blair knew it better than
anyone.
But did she think herself more talented than her
husband? Never -that was gratuitous. Did she decide to 'become part
of his act'? We know better by now that it was Paul's idea; as Pete
Townshend said to me, 'What was going on there was bigger than some
girl sitting on a stage playing a keyboard, because you know Paul
made her do it; he's admitted that to me, he made her do it.'
Now, the basic fault-finding premise of the Voice story
was that an old friend with a history of star-struck dizziness
married an extremely famous and talented musician and tried to
pretend she was his partner in art as well as life; but that premise
is a leap that was not justifiable then, and certainly is not now. A
leap to 'Who-does-she-think-she-is?' In fact, Linda knew very well
who she was, but she had some trouble communicating it, to friends,
to audiences, to the press, to the world, in a manner that would not
invite scorn and derision. It is, after all, a tragic situation when
love and total giving - even sacrifice - invite scepticism and
laughter, and you are not equipped to deflect the oncoming arrows in
mid-air, because it is just not a thing you do very well.
Intellectually, verbally, Linda was no match for Lillian Roxon and
Blair Sabol; she could not respond in kind, nor would it have been
appropriate for her even to attempt it. Of course, neither of them
would have been among Linda's closest friends if she had been
deficient in IQ points; her intelligence shone in places other than
in the acid-green glow of vitriol.
A moderately contrite Blair Sabol, like so many others,
regrets that she took the Linda she knew rather too lightly.
You know, I certainly would have loved to have
connected with her in my old age and to have seen where she went.
I watched Linda through the press and wondered, definitely
wondered, how she did this one and that one. How difficult it
really must have been for her. People don't know that. I see it
now, but I didn't then. Forget celebrity, it's incredible what she
did. What's more, she and Paul did have this amazing thing about
privacy, and they accomplished it. You have to work at it, but you
can do it.
That woman had an awful lot to do, she really did. And
she had to 'create' a world for herself that had little to do with
people like Lillian who had been really supportive of her. Linda
did something to all of us, and I don't know what it was that made
us take the high road like that. Something. I can't remember to
this day what it was, but it was something. I don't know. When she
called, the call that triggered that story, I asked her what the
hell happened. And she was very, 'La-dee-dah, you know, shit
happens,' and people said to me, 'You're just jealous!', and it
wasn't that. Maybe it was because we felt like poor relatives. I
kept saying, 'She'll call.' When I heard it was you that she
called, I said, 'Good! Now she'll break that thing.' But she
didn't, she couldn't.
Now, I can't imagine Linda coming back to us after she
married him. Once you've crossed that river, into that level of
fame, it is levelling. It is not what people think it is, and the
only thing you can do, and I have respected Linda for this, is go
off on your own and make a new world. What is amazing is that the
two of them were each other's best friend. How that happened is
certainly to be commended.
It is a story of development. It's not as if she
started off fabulous and ended up a crone. It's the opposite. We
were sort of left shocked by her, it seemed like a bad state of
affairs in terms of etiquette. But my sadness is I didn't know her
in the end. I came to respect her from a great distance. She was
so tough, I thought. She had really grown into something other
than the person I'd known.
Linda grew even faster, in some respects, than Blair
probably realized - by the time Wings were on their first American
tour, in 1976, Linda had come a very long way from the frightened
weeping amateur she'd been on the eve of the group's first European
concerts. Ben Fong-Torres, one of Rolling Stone's most respected
writers, was sent to cover the show in Detroit, and after referring
several times to the slagging she'd been taking ('McCartney and his
wife and band have weathered six years of criticism and
misunderstanding . . .; Paul says he ignores criticism . . .; Linda
has long been abused, written off. . .'), the writer approaches her
('she is, you can understand, very defensive') at a sound check and
asks her about 'the criticism that has already built over her
celebration of her place in the kitchen [as in the song "Cook of the
House"]'.
Linda replies: 'My answer is always, "Fuck off." . . .
People don't have to buy it, don't have to listen to it. It's like
having parents on your back, this criticizing.' Very telling - Linda
has put the current situation into a context she can equate with her
life before her marriage to Paul. 'You have criticism in school,'
she continues. 'When you get out of school, you want to be free.
This is a great band, and this is great fun, and that's all we care
about.'
Denny Laine offers: 'We're pretty good critics of
ourselves. We don't need all these bums coming along and telling us,
"Hey, man .. ."'
The writer's back is up. He accuses them of being
insular, 'with no room for sounding boards and outside opinions'. Of
course that's his position; he's a rock journalist and he expects to
have input. He wants, as we have all done, to have the world think
that performers tremble at the words of the critics and reporters,
and indeed many do. But the artists believe, for some odd reason,
that it is they who are making the music. It is a never-ending
battle.
'We always know what's wrong,' Linda tells Ben. Spoken
like a true musician. Defensive, yes, as he has pointed out earlier
in the story. But she's now strong enough to defend herself and her
band, in effect telling the critical community exactly how she feels
about them, at long last: 'Fuck off.'
Our heroine is now so much more confident than she had
been when Paul first insisted that she become part of his new band.
Even if she's not, she's acting that way. She's talking back to
Rolling Stone; her first photograph used on a Rolling Stone cover,
by the way, was of Eric Clapton. It is said that Clapton was
extremely shaken when he read a bad review of his work by Jon
Landau, in guess which publication?
Life in the visible spectrum, as Linda learned in the
first half of the 1970s, involved not just a rehashing, so to speak,
of private scores for all the world to see, but the playing out of
political retributions, directed at Paul and simmering since 1967,
and now affecting her most directly.
When the Beatles discovered minor and major psychedelic
drugs, they were eager to share with the world their enthusiasm for
what seemed to them spiritually and aesthetically enhancing
substances that were harmless as well. In newspaper ads and
interviews and, many thought, in their music, they 'came out' for
drugs. For many fans and for many more of their fans' parents, they
stopped being adorable at that point; for police and government
organizations, who took the menace of marijuana much more seriously
than they ever did the dangers of guns, disease, nationalism,
starvation and warfare, the Beatles were now a big problem. Here
were the world's most adored arbiters of everything groovy and cool
now loudly advocating the Main Menace to the Rule of God's Law and
the Governance of Men on Earth - pot. People are still going to jail
for addling their own minds with drugs, and this was over thirty
years ago. The authorities were not amused. John and Yoko, George
and Patti had already been busted, in their homes or in the homes of
friends in England, of all places, and now it was Paul's and Linda's
turn, except they got popped in Sweden in the summer of 1972. These
advanced cultures still have some archaic laws on the books, after
all.
Linda had been enjoying her smoke since she began to
hang out with musicians in 1966; she and Paul discovered it to be
one of their great shared pleasures when they were first courting
each other, and there was no reason to stop just because they were
working and raising a family and on the road, all at the same time.
It was just something they did, discreetly, never in front of
strangers and absolutely with no guilt. Linda did no other drugs;
Paul had dabbled in wilder pastures, but came safely home to grass
and a wee bit of Scotch whisky every now and then.
Paul and Linda's first drug arrest was in Sweden late in
July (and again back at the farm in Scotland in September, and again
at the farm the following March). The bright idea the McCartneys had
of receiving their daily allotment of pot via mail from England went
awry when someone at their Swedish hotel thought a particular
envelope addressed to Denny Seiwell was carrying seven ounces of
some peculiarly crunchy stuff that didn't smell like cornflakes. The
police waited at the theatre where Wings were playing in the city of
Goteborg and, when the band were finished, invited them to the local
police station, where they spent a few hours in a holding cell and
then agreed to pay a fine of a few thousand dollars to have the
charges dropped.
The press in England went wild with the story -
'mccartney fine after police raid concert' - but the McCartneys
sought to turn it to some sort of dubious advantage. They continued
to tour in Sweden, Paul calling the incident a 'big bother almost
about nothing', but Linda felt inclined to tell the News of the
World that the affair would be 'good publicity for the group'.
In another interview, in the Daily Mail, Paul took the
offensive. This story was headlined 'WHY I SMOKE POT - BY PAUL' and
was accompanied by a photograph of the couple, looking rather
haggard, leaving the police headquarters in Goteborg. 'You can tell
everyone,' ran Paul's lead quote, 'that we're not changing our lives
for anyone . . . We told the police in Sweden the truth. We smoke
grass and we like it... At the end of the day, most people go home
and have a stiff whisky. They feel they need it. Well, we play a gig
and we're exhausted and we're elated and Linda and I prefer to put
our kids to bed, sit down together and smoke a joint.'
McCartney went on to explain that neither he nor Linda
'have gone further than grass' and, rather too ingenuously, compared
the general disapproval of their recreational drug of choice to his
father's reaction to the 'drainpipe trousers' he wore as a kid in
Liverpool. 'In time things will change,' he predicted, ingenuously
again, 'and all this will seem a fuss about nothing.'
But Linda was in a proselytizing mood when she picked up
the chat with the Mail's Anthea Disney:
Every time we appear in public and people see that we
are smoking hash or pot it'll make things just a bit easier for an
ordinary person next time. I'd love to be one of the reasons for
people changing their minds about soft drugs.
Paul always says that a man who drinks beer doesn't
 necessarily become an alcoholic. Right. I'll say that weed does
not lead to heroin, necessarily.
If I found one of my kids on heroin I wouldn't be
shocked. I would say to her that I think it's damaging and stupid
and likely to kill her. And I'd try to persuade her to come off
it. But people must lead their own lives. They must make up their
own minds. And I know that Paul and I like weed. To us it's just
like nothing, and when other people share that point of view, I'll
be happy.
The interview ended with Paul expressing regret that
they would now most likely be watched very closely on the rest of
their European tour, so they would do without it, and without, he
implied, experiencing severe withdrawal. 'We're just easy people who
like to smoke if we can, but now that's out of the question, and I'm
sorry.'
Not entirely out of the question. There would be several
more busts during the 70s, and Paul's farm in Scotland was raided by
a local posse who found marijuana plants growing in his greenhouse.
There was a capture coming into Heathrow airport, a raid and bust in
Barbados, and in 1975 the police stopped Paul's and Linda's car in
Los Angeles and found two joints in her bag. She told Blair Sabol,
'it happens to everybody and it's time-consuming with the lawyers,
but we'll get it taken care of.
The Japanese detention of nine days in 1980 was not
quite so casual. 'I was so frightened for Paul I can't even describe
it,' Linda told Playboy in 1984. 'Your imagination takes off. I
didn't know what they would be doing to him. And for what? A bit of
nothing. I don't think pot is a sin, but I didn't want us to be a
martyr for it.' In the same interview, Paul made a 'most-dangerous'
drug list and placed pot very near the bottom, below Librium, Valium
and Scotch. 'That doesn't mean I've turned around and advocated
marijuana. I haven't. I'm really only saying this is true for me. I
can take pot or leave it. I was nine days without it and there
wasn't a hint of withdrawal, nothing.'
Backtracking on the advocacy front since 1972? Perhaps,
but only to be expected. If the police forces of the world got their
jollies from busting Paul and Linda time and time and time again,
simply because they could, then something is very nasty. Here, if I
may get political, is a new definition of the concept of 'victimless
crime', which surely the McCartneys believed applied to the
consumption of pot. Yes, it was naive to think, as they did, that
being among the most famous people in the world was an
inconsequential condition; it is not - if you are a billionaire and
you boast of paying no taxes, then some jerk will think he can get
away with it too, and if you believe cheating on taxes is a crime
(albeit a trivial one), then the billionaire has encouraged the jerk
to behave like a criminal. Although for every jerk that gets caught
cheating, thousands won't. And there are tens of millions of people
who smoke pot, who have never been arrested and never will be; there
will also be those who do get busted and can't just phone their
lawyers and get on the Concorde, but, for now, that's too bad.
Still, the McCartneys were victims. Not that they are
exempt from moral judgment, or aesthetic judgment. But pot-smoking
judgment? It was like that guy in Les Miserables who keeps chasing
poor Jean Valjean for years and years for stealing a loaf of bread.
'We couldn't say publicly how really stupid we thought
it was, we found that out,' Linda said to me a few years before she
died. 'When you say that, it makes things worse. They want to show
you they're not stupid, and so it starts all over again. We had to
say it was just a nuisance, but it was worse than that. We were
being targeted all the time. Maybe we were asking for it. Maybe we
were a bit stupid. But we're not criminals.'
When the grand spectrum of the McCartneys' legal
problems vis-a-vis cannabis is considered, it seems as if they were
being treated not so much as 'criminals' (with the big exceptions of
the denial to Paul of a US visa for two years, and the Japanese
experience), but as almost-crimi-nals, or would-be criminals, which
allowed the authorities to flex some muscle and show who's boss
without looking completely ridiculous - a doomed effort. In Los
Angeles, after the 'time-consuming' 1975 vehicle bust, Linda (since
the joints were in her bag) was sentenced to attend six sessions of
drug counselling, which must have been hilarious. 'You should have
brought a tape recorder,' I told her backstage at Madison Square
Garden in 1976. 'I leave it to you to think of things like that,'
she answered, on the edge of being amused, but not quite.
In 1977, while recording London Town with Wings on a
flotilla of boats docked in Watermelon Bay, a remote lagoon in the
US Virgin Islands, the McCartneys threw a noisy little night-time
party for their entourage; well into the festivities, the revellers
were amazed and amused to see their floating soiree invaded by a
boat full of park rangers, who obviously knew whose vessels they
were boarding. After explaining that they were there just to ask the
crowd to 'keep it down', they went on a little snooping expedition
and gathered, horrified, near an ashtray which held a few tiny,
nearly consumed marijuana cigarettes.
The next day, a letter was delivered to Mr and Mrs
McCartney, on National Park Service stationery, stating that the
agents had noticed 'illegal' material on the premises, advising that
laws were apparently being broken and warning that if the rangers
were to come back and find more such substances, the people in
charge of the boating party would be subject to arrest,
Paul and Linda arranged a little tableau featuring the
letter, some rolling paper and some unsmoked joints, and had the
still life photographed by Henry Diltz, who'd been hired to document
the recording sessions. 'Musicians all smoke grass,' remarks Diltz,
remembering the carefully laid-out shot. 'It goes with the
territory. I can't believe those people were surprised to find that
out - they probably just wanted a story to tell the folks at home.'

Chapter 13
'The McCartneys drinking tea on the afterdeck. The young girls
playing cards, and Heather playing her punk rock album . . . We all
jump overboard to swim.'
Henry Diltz, photographer
The armada docked in Watermelon Bay in the Virgin
Islands for the recording sessions of London Town was a unique
set-up for making an album, perhaps as elaborate, expensive and
sybaritic as any that has ever been organized.
Linda, five months pregnant with James, was the only
woman in the company; once again, the musicians had been told to
leave their wives and girlfriends at home. A main boat, the Samala,
contained living quarters for the crew and musicians, and a dining
room that seated thirty. Linda, Paul and their daughters stayed
aboard a big trimaran, with a large living room off the main deck
and sleeping quarters downstairs. The third boat was a cabin cruiser
in which a recording studio had been installed. Transportation
between the vessels was provided by motorized rubber dinghies.
'No one wore shoes the whole time,' remembers
photographer Henry Diltz.
They'd spend three or four hours in the morning
recording, then come over to the big boat for lunch, then Linda
and Paul would go back to their boat for a while, then return to
the big boat for an afternoon of diving and swimming. They'd go
back to shower and change, and then return for dinner, which was
always great fun. Good food, lots of wine, lots of laughing.
Everybody was totally friendly, but of course the
McCartneys definitely called all the shots - 'The McCartneys
want to do this ..." or 'Linda needs that..." It was their show.
They wanted me to document all this, that's why I was there.
When I got back to Los Angeles, Linda called and said, 'Would
you put together a little scrapbook for us, your favourite
shots?' And I did, and it was beautiful, pictures of them with
the kids, throwing the kids in the water, some recording stuff,
like memories of paradise.
Diltz's notes from the London Town sessions contain the
following entries. 24 May: 'Dinner is steak and kidney pie with lots
of wine.' 25 May: 'Photograph morm'ng session on the Fair Carol.
Paul singing and playing acoustic on "Don't Let It Bring You Down".'
26 May: 'The McCartneys drinking tea on the afterdeck. The young
girls playing cards, and Heather playing her punk rock album, The
Damned. We all jump overboard to swim.' 27 May: 'Linda shouts over
from the Wanderlust (their boat) to invite me over. We talk, while
Stella draws on our hands with a ball-point pen. I take a few
pictures of the family.'
Also in 1977, Linda wrote and recorded her first song,
'Seaside Woman', performed by the fictional Suzy and Red Stripes.
'It's reggae,' she said. 'I was so in love with reggae music when I
heard the Wailers that I wrote a reggae song.' Made into an animated
short by artist Oscar Brill, the film won the Golden Palm for Best
Short at the Cannes Film Festival in 1980. The song is on Linda's
posthumous album, Wide Prairie, and the animation can be seen and
heard on the promotional video that accompanied its release.
Ironically, some found the cartoon racist, since its main character,
the 'seaside woman', is black (of course) and sashays through the
short in native Caribbean costume, which the McCartneys always found
spectacular during their many visits to the islands. It has been
said that she depicts a 'stereotype'. This is so crazy; Linda was
the most colour-blind person I have ever known. In her view of life
on earth, a beggar, a saint, a king and a frog were totally equal in
ultimate worth; the idea that she judged humans by the colour of
their skins, or that she had what are called 'preconceived notions'
about one race or another is like saying that she loved brown
puppies more than spotted ones. It is preposterous; Linda never
understood what was meant by the accusation, and you would feel
foolish trying to explain it to her. She was simply beyond that; it
was to be left to people with visions narrower than hers to
criticize her for doing something she thought, and rightly so, was
as lovely as she could make it be.
Work had begun on London Town at Abbey Road back in
February 1977. After the sessions in the sun, recording continued in
London; the album was finished in January 1978. By most standards,
this was spending a luxurious amount of time making an album.
The stated reason for forming Wings, just to be back in
a real band and on the road again, was ridiculous from the outset,
and increasingly, as the 70s went on, ever more distant from
reality. It was, at the beginning, Paul and Linda and the musicians
they hired, and although the pretence of a democratic little band of
wandering minstrels was floated as an ideal, it was of course one
man, surrounded by those who were, except for his wife and children,
employed by him.
No group of equal partners, like the Beatles, for
example, would ever record aboard a fleet anchored in tropical
waters. It is such a costly project that the idea would surely be
vetoed by other members of the partnership, management, the record
company which as a rule fronts the money for the making of an album,
and/or the accountants. But Paul could do whatever he wanted - Wings
were selling records and tickets by the millions, the publishing
company was booming, so he could simply think, 'Wouldn't it be nice
if . . .', and 'if was brought to him to have the wish completed.
And brought to Linda and the kids, who were very much part of the
'Wouldn't it be nice' syndrome; let everything be fabulous,
meticulous, simple, stylish, beautiful and fun.
How do you not spoil your children, while allowing them
to take for Ranted being whisked out of school at their parents'
whim, having at their disposal private aeroplanes, boats,
limousines, bodyguards, mansions and estates (owned or rented), and
a name that's known to nearly everyone in the world? That question
is at the heart of Linda's (and Paul's) story, and has been asked by
everybody as though it were a great mystery which no one can figure
out. Because look at them now - four strong, well-balanced, polite,
affectionate, bright, talented and ambitious children. How did she
do it? Nobody can ever know for sure; though I guess she did it by
being strict (but not too strict), righteous (but not
self-righteous), smart, loving, organized, intuitive, caring and
extremely hard-working. Linda worked hard on a lot of things, but on
nothing so hard as her family. That's how she did it - no list of
commandments, no book and no ideal model family on a TV series will
teach anyone the secret. It's built-in. Paul knew that when he met
Linda and her daughter Heather; he knew she could be the mother of
their children. Many people who knew Linda (some rich and famous
themselves) and came to know the whole family, walked away
wondering: 'How did she do it?' All I know is that it didn't just
happen to happen. Linda's task as a mother involved not only giving
huge amounts of love, but working against many factors that are
often blamed for spoiling - if not ruining - the offspring of the
privileged middle classes: fame, wealth, isolation from reality and
the absence of close friends of one's own age. Linda's and Paul's
children were by necessity each other's best friends because they
were so often on the road with their parents, yet somehow it worked.

'The kids never got to rely on school chums being their

little friends, having them to tea and all that,' says Paul's
stepsister Ruth, now aged forty. 'That's why the kids are so strong
together. Paul and Linda worked at it in a way that had never been
done in our family. They worked at it by saying that love is
reinforced by always being around your kids, taking them to dinner,
taking them on holiday, taking them on tour. They had places in
London, Scotland, Sussex and Long Island, then the ranch in Arizona,
and they'd go to the Caribbean in the winter. They would troop en
masse everywhere. They were good parents, they just wanted to take
the kids wherever they went, and their attitude was, "Well, it's our
marriage, it's our family, they're our kids; time will prove us
right and they'll all grow up normal - which they did."'
It even evolved into something that is almost never seen
except in reruns of television series from the 1950s - children and
parents were absolutely, genuinely close friends. It was a domestic
arrangement that caused the jaws of visitors to drop. Paul might be
seen answering the phone and having a little chat with the caller,
before saying to Mary, on her way out of the house carrying a tennis
racket, that it was her date for that night and could he be half an
hour late? 'Tell him it's OK,' Mary would answer and Paul would
relay the message: 'It's OK with her. See you later!' Meanwhile,
Linda was having a massage in a room down the hall, and famous
comedians and songwriters toured the garden with Stella.
Still, one could be sure that Paul knew exactly who it
was on the phone, and probably even if the suitor's intentions were
honourable, because it was never as casual as it seemed in that
household. Linda and Paul were fiercely protective parents without
being smothering - it was a delicate road to walk, but the evidence
is that it was done well.
Linda Stein, who rented a small house on Paul
Morrissey's ocean-front estate in Montauk, near the very tip of Long
Island, knew the family well and was glad to see James and his
surfing friends pull up in her driveway nearly every day that the
McCartney family was in residence in nearby East Hampton. Whereas
the westernmost hundred miles of the Long Island coast consist of
wide sandy beaches and waves that expend most of their energy on
offshore sandbars before breaking, the eastern end at Montauk end is
rocky, dominated by huge cliffs and battered by waves fresh out of
the north Atlantic. Hence it is great for surfing, or at least much
better than the beaches a few miles to the west. Unfailingly polite,
James would ask Stein for her permission to use her beach for
surfing, and of course she said it was fine. But unfailingly
vigilant herself, and aware of the incident when James went surfing
off the coast near Rye, East Sussex, and was missing for several
hours before being rescued by the Dover Coastguard, while his
distraught parents were near to hysteria on the beach, Linda Stein
would periodically check the beach below her cottage to make sure
all was well. One late summer afternoon in 1993, when the light was
starting to fade, She figured the boys should have been out of the
ocean long since, so she started down the steep path to the shore,
where James and his buddies were in fact packing up as if to call it
a day.
'When he saw me,' recalls Stein, 'he knew that I had
come down to tell him it was way past the time to get out of the
water, and he came up to me and said, very seriously and very
softly, so that his friends wouldn't overhear him, "You won't tell
my mother about this, will you?" He was genuinely worried about what
her reaction would be. I told him I wouldn't snitch, but that I had
been concerned as well. "Oh thanks," he said. "Because she'd be
furious."'
The book project that Linda, Paul and I had talked about
at my apartment in 1971 didn't get going until the spring of 1974,
when I was summoned to London to spend two weeks picking out
photographs with Linda. There was always a reason why it had to be
'delayed for a while', all of them quite legitimate; in any case, I
wasn't holding my breath until all was ready. Stella was born in
1971, as were Wings; the first tours of the new group took up most
of 1972; 1973 was spent making the TV special in London and Band on
the Run in Nigeria; then they had to put Wings back together because
only one musician, Denny Laine, was still in the band. I was slotted
in for a time period between rehearsals of the new Wings line-up and
the group's trip to Nashville in June 1974.
To get my fee, $500,1 was called to the office of
Linda's father, whom I had known by sight but had never met before.
It was as if I were at a job interview; I stood the whole time while
Lee Eastman scrutinized me and flung questions at me - 'So, what do
you think you can contribute to this book?', 'How much time do you
expect to be actually working in London?' and similar scary queries.
I hadn't known I was expected to pass muster with the old man before
getting my cheque, which he handed to me, somewhat sceptically, at
the end of our meeting. In retrospect, it wasn't so much as if he
doubted me, but as if he thought this whole idea was sort of
nonsensical; in other words, who would want to see pictures taken by
his daughter, how could these photographs of rock and roll scum
deserve being put into a book, why should they have to hire people
to pay for this? - and incidentally, that it's a good thing these
people don't require first-class air tickets (because I certainly
didn't get one).
In London, though, my reception was at least first
class. My hosts, thrilled I'm sure that Band on the Run had just
gone to number one in the American charts, had rented a beautifully
furnished apartment for me overlooking Regents Park in a nice art
deco building, which was to double as my home and our workplace.
Cartons of double-size contact sheets and carousels of slides filled
a small spare room, where Linda and I met every day and picked out
our favourite shots. As with the work of all good photographers, the
eye goes right to the best shot or shots on any contact sheet, and
we almost always agreed on which ones we wanted to see blown up.
After all, the routine of our early professional relationship had
consisted of me meeting her at her lab, Modern Age, looking over the
freshly developed rolls of film, choosing our favourites and leaving
the marked-up contact sheets with the negatives to be enlarged. It
was (it is) always exciting to see what came out of a photo session,
and this time around in London it was great looking at the stuff
from the early years again and remembering the circumstances of the
shoot. Linda forgot nothing: 'It looked like it was going to rain,
so we...'; 'They were so nice, I didn't expect them to be, but we
really got along, only they were actually worried about going into
Central Park . . .'; 'This was in San Francisco, it was the same day
I met. . .'; 'You were there for this one; remember that hotel where
they were staying, all the prostitutes in the lobby in pink satin
hotpants . . .'; and always lingering a little longer over pictures
of Jimi, Jim, Janis, Brian and the others who had died in the
intervening years.
Linda had been thoughtful enough to provide some
creative bachelors with whom I could socialize after hours, and two
of my closest friends from New York, Craig and Allison Karpel, were
in London then, so it was not all work and no play for me. With
Linda, though, it was all work. There were no dinner parties or gala
evenings at the theatre; the one time I saw the McCartneys after
dark was when they came over to the flat where I was staying to look
at slides. The book's art director was there, and in three hours we
went through twenty-six boxes of slides, each holding 100 pictures.
Stella and Mary amused themselves briefly by drawing with pens and
markers and demanding a great deal of attention, most of which was
supplied by Paul. Linda was raptly looking at the pictures and, as
if by prearrangement, left the parenting up to him. Amazingly, his
attention to the work at hand was not distracted by his rambunctious
two- and four-year-olds, who had the run of the room. He knew every
picture, and often commented on the circumstances of their creation
himself. It was Paul who organized the finding of the kids' shoes as
they prepared to leave. 'Get your shoes on, you too mate, get your
shoes on, where's your shoes?'
As she was going, Linda gave me my assignment: 'You're
going to look at stuff tonight. I'd like to finish off the colour.
So look at as much as you can tonight, and we'll meet tomorrow
morning.' I remember thinking she was speaking to me as one speaks
to an employee; but then again, I was an employee. I was being paid
$500 to work on a book of her pictures; she was the boss - there was
no need for her to hedge with, 'Oh, I wonder if you'd do me a favour
and . . .' She was even faintly dictatorial; I liked that, after I
got over the shock of it. It was professional and without
flourishes. Linda had become very to-the-point since I'd first known
her; one might expect that being in partnership with a celebrated
autocrat would have made her a bit timid, but it was the other way
around. She was learning from Paul how to get what you want from the
people who are doing things for you; if the relationship is a
friendly one, that part of it can wait until business is taken care
of. By 1974, then, as I reckoned it, Linda had become one of the
great, tough working women of her generation.
Linda's Pictures was published in 1976 by Alfred A.
Knopf, for a list price of $25. The cover of this very heavy
coffee-table book carries the famous picture of a bearded Paul with
Mary, as an infant, tucked inside his jacket. It's the last plate in
the book as well, and on the cover of Paul's first solo album,
McCartney. About two thirds of the 150 or so shots are by Linda
Eastman - those were the ones we chose together. The rest are hubby
and kids and landscapes by Linda McCartney. I was mentioned in
Linda's introduction as a friend who had once called her up from
Elektra Records and said, 'Do you want to photograph Jackson
Browne?' Ah well, I guess I didn't do that much work on it after
all: about $500 worth, plus airfare and a nice apartment in London
for a couple of weeks. No complaints.
Shortly after I left London, Linda and Paul were off to
Nashville to record, but Linda was more excited about getting back
to England later in the summer, piling the kids and Martha the
sheepdog into the Rolls-Royce convertible, and driving up to the
farm in Scotland for a month of isolation. But as their touring and
recording schedules became more crowded (as did the Rolls-Royce with
three growing children), it was not awfully convenient to drive 600
miles to be in the country, so in the summer of 1975 the McCartneys
bought a cottage in Sussex, near the ancient town of Rye. The little
place, named the Round House for its shape, was lovely and only a
couple of hours from London by rail or car, but it was, like the
Rolls, a bit cramped. It had two bedrooms, one for Linda and Paul,
one for the four kids. 'It meant we were a close family, literally,'
Paul told Chrissie Hynde. 'There was no getting away from each
other.'
In 1978, they bought the farm next to their Sussex
property, tore down the house that was there and replaced it with a
substantial, although by no means palatial, house that Paul designed
himself. Linda was very enthusiastic about a real house in the
country at long last, and she described to me some mechanism,
invented of course by Paul, that controlled a camera which took one
picture a day of the building of the new home. When you flipped
through the photographs, you had a time-lapse movie of the whole
process.
'It's a very comfortable house that has five bedrooms,'
Paul told Chrissie. 'One bedroom for each of the kids, and one for
us, Linda and me. It has limited space, but that's how I wanted it,
and that's how Linda wanted it too. Because we always hated stories
of people living in these huge stately homes with the children
rattling around in the East Wing, and you never see them. We
designed something for our lifestyle and for our reasonably simple
tastes compared to some other people in our position. It was
specially designed to be comfortable, and it is. People come into
our house and say, "Ooh, this house feels lovely," or, This is
comfortable." That, to us, was what was important.'
There were stables and a saddle house where the cats
lived, an old windmill twenty minutes by car where Paul installed a
recording studio and his own office, another old farm building used
by Heather as her pottery studio, and lanes, paths, meadows, hills
and a cast of animals and birds right out of Bambi. It was very
beautiful, and on a clear day you could see the coast of France
beyond the Channel. Linda and I were walking from the main house to
Heather's studio one day, past a stand of giant trees hundreds of
years old, and I was plainly in awe at the loveliness of it all. 'I
was lent all this for a little while,' she said, looking up and
around, and then at me, 'and I have to take good care of it so I can
give it back just the way it is.'
With increasing success (i.e. big record sales, and the
thriving publishing business, which was masterminded by Linda's
father and brother in New York), the showbusiness team of Linda and
Paul McCartney was seen as having truly pulled it off. The rest of
the world, even the other members of Wings, were reluctant, in
various degrees, to admit that it had worked as Paul had wanted it
to, but he knew it had, and she knew he knew. The recovery from the
disastrous Beatles dissolution was complete. Linda had told him,
wanting and willing it to be true, that the future was all there and
theirs, and was all that mattered; Paul had believed her to the
extent of metaphorically grabbing her hand and saying, 'Let's go
then.' And off they had gone.
The huge Wings world tour that began with smaller dates
in the UK late in 1975 and finished at Wembley at the end of 1976,
was one of the most extensive and expensive tours in the history of
live concerts, playing to well over two million people. It was a
mammoth (for its time) production, featuring one of the first laser
shows (to 'Live and Let Die') audiences had ever seen, and
encompassed the 'Wings over America' segment which began in May
1976.
I had not seen Paul McCartney live in concert in twenty
years. In 1964 I had gone to Carnegie Hall in February for the night
of delirious screaming that came with the arrival of Beatlemania in
New York, as a rich friend had bought four box seats through his
scalper at $150 per ticket - about $900 each today, not so bad for
such an historic event. My friend had also taken his entourage to
the Forest Hills Tennis Stadium show that summer. As events, the two
concerts were most memorable, I although one could not hear a single
note. In any case, I was more a fan of the Beatles' hair-dos than of
their music, so both shows were a visual treat and I got to be there
at the Birth Of It All, in New York, at least.
When I went to Madison Square Garden in 1976, I did not
expect to be rocked by Paul McCartney. I was wrong about that; it
was one of the strongest shows I have ever seen. Also, I was
terrified for poor Linda. I could not imagine her whooping it up in
front of 20,000 people, and I was right for that, partly. She could
not (did not even try to) whoop it up very much, but neither was she
hideously out of place. A bit out of place, but not hideously. My
friend was a one-to-one kind of person, not a one-to-20,000, and she
just never looked to me as if she were born to frolic in a
spotlight. But it was not embarrassing. I had her in my binoculars
for long enough to ascertain that she wasn't going to make a fool of
herself; her eyes were on Paul and her fingers on the keyboard, and
her voice blended in ever so nicely.
He travels fastest who travels alone, they say, so I had
asked for one backstage pass, and at the end of the show I dumped my
companion and headed for the dressing rooms. 'Backstage' at the
Garden has many levels of accessibility, as does any large venue.
The first thing you see when you get there is hundreds of people
milling around one big area, all trying to figure out how to get to
a more exclusive spot. Hallways leading off the central holding-pen
are blocked by security guards, and then the individual dressing
rooms are protected by another set of large, powerful-looking men,
of whom it will do you no good to ask any favours (or even
information).They are under strict orders to respond only to their
own bosses. At a concert starring a celebrity as big as, well, as
big as anyone big enough to headline an arena, the innermost
sanctums are reachable, as a rule, only with the OK of the innermost
aides of the star. No laminated pass, even if marked 'Performer' or
'All Access', the two most desirable of all laminates, will get you
into the star's dressing room, especially not Paul and Linda
McCartneys'.
If you really are expected, and/or welcome into the
Presence, the thing is to stand there looking as if there is nothing
that you want, and someone will find you. After all, that's one of
the things the closest and most trusted staff members are paid to do
- find those who 'belong' and bring them swiftly inside. The trusted
ones will have mastered the process of whisking VIP guests past the
security guards without saying, �He s OK', which is very tacky. The
guard is expected to stand aside and let the staff member walk right
past with anyone they might be escorting; body language tells the
guard, 'I have this person (or these people) with me, and they are
my responsibility.' Of course, if you're a groupie kind of guy, you
will probably recognize the man at the door and smile warmly; there
are very few security companies in the rock and roll universe (in
America, anyway), and their top people will be in the most important
places. It's good to be known by them as someone who might
frequently and legitimately appear in the tightest security areas;
they can be helpful at times, and they also tend to be among the
nicest and least attitudinal of all the people who serve the music
industry. Thus I was eventually delivered into the innermost
dressing room, a large enclosure with cinder-block walls, benches
and a vast showering chamber at one end - obviously, when the
occasion demanded, the locker room of hockey jocks or basketball
players.
A few members of Linda's New York-based family were
leaving, and I was alone with her and Paul. I stayed about half an
hour, telling them how great it was (it is nice not to have to lie
to performers after a show; then again, it's easy to lie when people
really don't want to hear the truth), answering the usual questions
like, 'How did it sound from where you were sitting?'; 'Where were
you sitting?'; 'Did the lighting effects work?'; 'What did you think
of the new songs?' (always a scary question, because it implies
you're familiar with all the performer's material, which I rarely
am). Then there are their stories, like how they changed the order
of the songs at the last minute, all kinds of musical-technical
stuff that I have to pretend to understand and always, of course,
always, Paul asking, 'Isn't Lin great? Do you believe our Lin? Did
you ever think you'd see her doing that? And doing it so well? She's
a born performer, our Linda is!' It was by far the most enthusiastic
I had ever seen one performer being of another who had shared a
stage with him. It looks faintly patronising in print; in real life,
it is nothing but supportive, and totally heartfelt.
What surprised me was that I was alone with them the
whole time, and that when I left them, they were alone together. It
was not that they gave orders to seal the room after I entered - it
was simply that outside of Linda's family, they had no friends. This
was New York City, the 'tour of the year', Linda's home town, and
there was no one back there but me. I may boast from time to time,
but this is not one of those times. I was their only friend in New
York. (Well, there were John and Yoko, but that is a whole other
story. I don't think they were there that night.) I'm sure there
were lots of friends in London (I'm guessing who might have been
backstage in London), like Paul's contemporaries in other bands;
there probably were more friends in Los Angeles, because the
McCartneys had lived there the year before while making Venus and
Mars; but Paul had never spent much time in New York, except, since
1969, with Linda's relatives, and poor Linda's old friends were her
friends no longer. It was kind of sad.
(By the time they toured in the 80s and 90s, there was
indeed a 'New York circle' with backstage entree - mainly people
they knew from summers in East Hampton; rich, self-made businessmen,
for the most part, like Ralph Lauren, Lome Michaels, Jann Wenner,
Ron Delsener, and performers like Paul Simon and Chevy Chase - but
in 76 no one except me, or so it seemed.)
For a moment, Paul was called away and there were just
the two of us. I got to ask Linda how she really liked doing this,
and she said it was getting easier. Not that she liked it, but that
it was getting easier and that it was what Paul wanted. Then she
lowered her voice (I don't know why; there was no one to hear her)
and told me Paul's father had died earlier in the year, but they
couldn't go to the funeral because it would have 'caused problems'
and the European leg of the tour was just beginning that day; she
wanted to know if, to my knowledge, they were being slammed for it.
I told her no, not all that much that I knew of, but they had taken
a bit of heat; then Paul came back and, as usual, set the agenda for
the remainder of the conversation.
Paul's father, Jim, had died at the age of seventy-three
in March, after suffering long and painfully from arthritis, leaving
behind, besides Paul and his brother Michael, his second wife, Angie
(twenty-seven years younger than Jim), and Angie's daughter from her
first marriage, Ruth, then seventeen. Paul subsequently became
estranged from Angie and Ruth McCartney, and mother and daughter are
now based in the Los Angeles area, where they operate a successful
multimedia company. It seems that at one point Paul felt that they
were making money from the sale of memorabilia from his father's
house in Liverpool; they say they have tried unsuccessfully to
re-establish contact, and I am inclined not to judge either side in
this very complex business. What matters to me is that Angie and
Ruth, who'd known Linda since she married Paul in 1969, both adored
her for the right reasons. It bolsters my theory that only people
who didn't know Linda didn't like her, and that anybody who did know
her saw her fine qualities at once and became an admirer.
'Linda and Paul and Heather came up to visit us just
after they got married,' says Angie McCartney.
They stayed for a couple of days, and then I took them
to Manchester airport and they flew out to the States. I was a
little bit in awe of her, because when you're English
working-class, all things American seem to be very exotic, but she
was very warm and very friendly. Heather and my little girl got on
like gangbusters, playing with their toys and racing around the
back yard.
Linda was very down to earth, she was sort of, 'Let's
go straight into the kitchen, let's make soup, let's make tea';
she made herself very much at home. They were only there for a
couple of days, and Jim's health was very bad, so I was
preoccupied with him. I must say, Paul and Linda seemed to meld
together very quickly, and that was a time in his life when he
needed comfort and strength; there was the acrimonious breakup of
the Beatles and all that. And Linda was always totally behind him,
totally supportive. Even then, just after they were married, it
seemed as if she was providing him with something to lean on. I
know it was hard for her, we'd heard that people were hanging
around outside the house in Cavendish Avenue and throwing things
at the car when she drove out, stuff like that.
I started asking Angie about an anecdote in one
biography of Paul, which quotes an interview with George Harrison's
mother, who claimed that she saw Linda being almost abusive to
Heather, and punishing her by withholding food. Angie interrupted me
with a decisive, 'No! I never heard such bullshit in my life!
Abusive to Heather? That doesn't sound one bit like the Linda I
knew. Unfortunately, once people have said these nasty things and
they go into print, there they remain, don't they? Linda is the one
who took abuse. Everything you read in a review of the band, there
would be some snide crack about Linda.'
What did Angie who had known Paul since 1964, when she
married his father, think of all that?
It was on his insistence that she was in the band. She
didn't want to do it, she wasn't confident enough. It was a
transitional stage in his life, forming Wings, going off to play
universities unannounced, 'Can we play in your community hall
tonight?' Things like that, just for the band to get their chops.
And Paul wanted Linda beside him in the band, he loved her so much
and wanted her support; that bond between them was growing, and
that was to be a part of it. Linda was so strong - she had the
capability to be not just a wife to Paul, but a mother, a lover, a
pal, a buddy and even a member of his band.
To us in Liverpool, it was clear that she was breaking
the mould of that traditional working-class marriage, where the
wife stayed in the kitchen. She became the epitome of the true
American woman, with freedom and choices and everything else. But
it didn't detract from her being the Mum, the wife and the lady in
the kitchen. She was able to manage those roles and so many more,
 and wonderfully, I think. Extraordinary woman. A gem.
Was she snobbish? What about the stories of her ordering
gourmet food from Fortnum and Mason in London when she stayed with
you, and embarrassing you?
Again: 'No! Not at all. When she'd come and stay with
Jim and Ruth and me, she was very, very flexible, very generous,
very good-natured.'
I read to Angie from the book I'd mentioned before: 'On
a few occasions, Jim and Angie went to stay at the McCartneys' farm.
They were forced to sleep on dirty mattresses. In addition, says
Angie, the whole place was so dirty and unkempt, flies and other
insects continually fell off the ceiling into people's dinners.'
'I've read that,' Angie replied. 'I never used the word
"unkempt" in my life. I had told an interviewer that we'd gone up
there and they were living a tough-guy kind of life. Paul got us
brand-new mattresses and laid them down on the floor of the garage,
which he'd just washed - there were only two bedrooms in that house.
Ruth slept in Heather's room. And I had said there were flies in the
house and Jim wanted to get a fly-swatter and kill them all, but
Linda said, "Oh, leave them alone, they have a perfect right to
live, like the rest of us." Jim said, "Oh, OK" - and that turns into
a story of flies falling into the food! That does piss one off.'
When Jim died, on 18 March 1976, Angie called Paul and reached him
at a London hotel where he was holding a press conference, on the
eve of the European part of the world tour.
I called Rose, his housekeeper, first, and she told me
where they were. I'm sure it was the Royal Garden Hotel. And
Paul's PR person came to the phone and I told him that I must
speak to Paul, I can't tell anybody else what I have to talk to
him about. He came to the phone and I said, 'I'm sorry, son, it
just happened.' He sounded so shocked, he sort of yelled, 'Are you
sure?' and I said I was, and I'd call him later. He was absolutely
and totally in shock. We'd all expected it, but it's always a
shock, you know.
We talked later about the funeral and about him coming
to Liverpool. They were going to Paris to start the tour and he
asked me what I thought. I said, 'If you throw everything away and
come up here for the funeral, it would just be a circus. It won't
bring your Dad back, and he was always so proud of you and your
music, you go on with what it is you're born to do.'
So Paul and Linda went off to Paris. It was so much
more sensible. Can you imagine what mob scenes there would have
been if he'd come? There would have been thousands of fans and
hundreds of reporters and all kinds of pushing and shoving and
unpleasantness added on to the reason we were all there. So then
the papers didn't get their pictures, but instead they got revenge
by criticizing them for not going to Jim's funeral. People will
always criticize. You can't win, you know?
So it seemed for Linda. Reviewing the album Wings at the
Speed of Sound for Rolling Stone in May 1976, Stephen Holden finds
nice things to say about Paul's musical gifts, and even about Paul
and Linda's love for each other in 'Silly Love Songs'. But when
Linda steps out, she gets a non-home-made pie in the face: writing
about 'Cook of the House', which is proud, ironic and funny, Holden,
after dissing Linda's singing ('colorless, amateurish'), finds that
she is politically incorrect as well. 'Those with feminist
sympathies will also detest this celebration of scatterbrained
wife-in-kitchen coziness.'
 Sometimes you see something and think, 'That says it
all.' Well, in any context, that says it all; that says what an
easy, open and waiting target Linda McCartney was in the mid-1970s.
So that recalling that quote here would not embarrass the author of
it, I called Stephen Holden, now a powerful, brilliant music and
movie critic for the New York Times, and asked him what he thought
today of what he had written then.
'Oh, I was being bitchy,' he said. 'The review is what I
thought of the McCartneys then. It was the prevailing opinion.'
Did he mind it being rehashed? 'No, it's what I thought
then. They were seen as so insular. Unconnected.' Then he referred
me to a recent interview with the intellectual trouble-maker Camille
Paglia, which compared the recently killed (along with husband John
F. Kennedy Jr. and sister Lauren) Carolyn Bessette Kennedy to 'the
very annoying Linda Eastman in the Paul McCartney saga. In both
cases, you have an outgoing, warm, pretty boy who takes into his
life an often petulant, very Private woman who is introverted to the
point of neurosis.'
And so it goes on. Dear reader, do we still, after all
this time, all these pages, believe that, for women, Linda set a
poor example? Scatterbrained? Petulant? Introverted to the point of
neurosis? (If we are to believe Linda on the subject, and why not,
she told the BBC for the bio-documentary that she had indeed been 'a
bit shy and introverted' until she began taking pictures.) On the
other hand, was it wicked to be 'in the kitchen' or 'very private',
or to embrace 'cosiness'? Was feminism about hating those aspects of
another woman? Is it still about that? Was there a deep fear that
women would abandon the struggle to be fire-fighters and CEOs and
fly back to the pudding bowl? Was Linda going to lead that
counter-rebellion?
What the hell was she doing wrong? We still ask that.
She gobbled up Paul - it all comes back to that.
And, golly, who is not in awe of Paul McCartney, for
mostly the right reasons, but if we thought he was perceived as
'outgoing, warm, pretty' all those years ago, do we think that was
or is an accurate portrait? I would think the man himself would find
it patronising, or be amused that Camille Paglia thinks of him, to
this day, as a Beatles-doll.
'Warm' is a key concept here. Paul was not warm, is not
warm - wonderful, perhaps - but warm not. Charming, radiant, smart,
gifted, good, a fabulous husband and father, but warm is
problematic. Again, the irony of public-private, of what is seen, of
what you are meant to think and of what is really going on. Linda
was the warm one, Paul the clever one. If you knew them, you knew
that. But from a distance, Paul was everything and Linda was, as the
shotgun-mouthed Ms Paglia says, cold and 'introverted to the point
of neurosis'.
'Linda was very, very pro-active in their social life,'
recalls Pete Townshend, who was a close friend. 'When they were
driving through this town, she was the one who used to get him to
come and visit, even made a couple of surprise visits. She was the
one who would call me and then put him on the phone, and we would
talk. Then he would be open and entirely accessible, but it was
Linda who was always reminding him that he really had friends, that
he was likeable as a person, that he could reach and be reached . .
. she was constantly there with the idea that there is love between
people when the tape stops running and the curtain is down. She was
so centred - I think self-possession was her main character
attribute, wasn't it? Maybe this marriage was more about Paul than
about her, but you know, I don't think so.'
Ah, surprise visits! That brings us to one of the most
extraordinary surprise visits of all - the night Paul and Linda
dropped in on John and Yoko, with whom things were, at the time, on
a very rocky footing.

Chapter 14
'John said to me, "Oh my God! Paul and Linda are downstairs. Can you
handle that?" and I said, "Yeah, so? What's the problem? There's
nothing to handle. They're your friends, send them up."'
May Pang
What of the relationship between Linda and Yoko?, many
have wondered, as if there were some fascinating matter waiting to
be revealed. I rather think there was none - sorry. It was more a
question of whatever Yoko/John on the one hand, and Paul on the
other, determined their relations to be at any given moment. Not
that Linda couldn't or didn't think for herself (which need hardly
be said about Yoko), or hold her own opinions, but the women's
relationship, however manifested, followed the party line. There was
always too much at stake, too intense an emotional field, too much
that had gone by and was still being dealt with for it to have been
otherwise.
Linda had become the second, and lifetime-it-was-hoped
partner of Paul McCartney, whose first partnership, with John
Lennon, had been one of the most important in modern history.
Nothing involving the two men separately could ever equal, in its
significance to the world, what had existed between them; but they
had chosen their life-mates, and two other very public partnerships
now existed for everyone's delectation. Neither carried the weight
of the Beatles, of course, but that immense legacy was not about to
vanish simply because the legal, financial, creative and marital
status of the old team had changed most radically. What Paul and
John were going to do without each other was, after (roughly) 1970,
and by default, as interesting to the public as what they had done
together.
Although both men appeared to dismiss their erstwhile
partnership as belonging to some past era about which they retained
only a distant and dispassionate interest, they fooled no one, and
certainly not themselves or their wives. And each admitted,
eventually, to having had profound doubts about his ability to ever
do anything worthwhile again, as they hovered around the scary age
of thirty. A powerful 60s mantra, inspired in large part by the
Beatles and the universe that came into being after the big bang
that they made, ran: 'Don't trust anyone over thirty.' How must it
have felt to have fathered that sentiment, and to see it come true,
but with you now on the wrong side of that arbitrary great divide?
It was not easy.
Came the women to the rescue. Yoko seems to have
believed, from early in 1968 onwards, that John without the Beatles
(and with her firmly at his side) was better than John the Beatle,
and she is a very persuasive person, as time has proven; Linda found
herself with a Beatle who was one no longer, and whose sense of his
own worth, in the aftermath of that very high ride, was going down
the tubes. She had to convince him, and did, that, with her help, he
could do it alone, and this new team, Linda saw at once, required a
very solid front. There were many aspects of Paul's life after the
Beatles that Linda was allowed to define, but when it came to John,
and by extension Yoko, it was all up to Paul. She knew this both
logically and intuitively; if she ever had any doubts, her father
and brother were there to reinforce Paul's primacy in that area.
The two women had a few things in common, none of which
made them in any way especially compatible: both came from rich
families, both were raised in Scarsdale, both were vaguely members
of New York City's creative community, both left New York and found
true love in London, and both married Beatles. So much for the
similarities; they did nothing, to put it mildly, to make Linda and
Yoko soulmates. The differences, too many and too obvious to list,
weighed much more heavily; in any case, if identical twins had
married Paul McCartney and John Lennon in 1969, the way in which
their lives would have had to change would have estranged them
forever, putting them on opposite and opposing sides of the fence.
It was not up to them, but was a function of the choice each woman
had made. They stood by their men until the end.
If John said something snide about Paul's solo albums
(which he did with unprofessional frequency), then John/Yoko went on
the Paul/Linda shit-list. If John's lawyers caved in to Paul's on
any of the many disputed items they were always at war about, then
John came off the list. If Paul sold more records and tickets than
John, he went on the John/Yoko shit-list (or at least he went on to
John's, and off; it's hard to believe that the McCartneys were not
generally viewed by Yoko with suspicion and distaste, and vice
versa).
This is confusing, I know. It's confused me plenty over
the years. If it can be summed up, let me try it this way: Paul and
John loved each other always - they could be envious, hostile,
bitter and disappointed, but they always loved each other.
Paul never loved Yoko, and Yoko never loved Paul. She
tolerated Linda and in fact could be most cordial and gracious. She
wrote an appreciation of Linda in Rolling Stone after her death that
was - not surprisingly -kind and generous and said all the right
things. However, I do not know what John thought of Linda as an
entity separate from Paul, or if he did indeed think all that much
about her in that context. He knew Paul loved and needed her, and
that she was an exemplary wife and mother, but I suspect he didn't
expend much emotional energy on the subject.
Linda went with the flow according to Paul. I know she
participated to some extent in ascertaining what the McCartney Mood
of the Moment was vis-a-vis the Ono-Lennons but, once it had been
settled on, it was identical to her husband's. In public interviews
and private conversations, they spoke as one.
John and Yoko had moved to New York from London (which
John would never see again), to an apartment on Bank Street in
Greenwich Village. They began to cultivate the art community, and
the art community, which had not been terribly distressed when Yoko
left, now welcomed her back as an important artist, a major
celebrity, someone to know . . . whatever she wanted. Prominent
anti-war activists were also high on their list of collectables.
In 1973, the Ono-Lennons left the Village and headed
uptown, to the Dakota apartment house on Central Park West, one of
the oldest, finest and most fabulous residential buildings in New
York. A fortress of a structure, it was built in 1882 around a
central courtyard and houses many rich and famous tenants in its
ninety-four apartments. (Yoko now owns two joined-together flats and
maintains offices on the first floor; she does not own a dozen
Dakota apartments, as rumour and legend say she does.) There are
several levels of security a non-resident must penetrate to gain
entry. A visitor must check in first at an outer desk, which is
under a massive archway leading from West 72nd Street into the
courtyard, and then again at an inside desk. Ex-husbands, ex-wives
and ex-partners of all sorts have at least as difficult a time
getting in as ordinary strangers.
Picture then the unpleasant thoughts that must have
passed through the minds of John and Yoko as they sat in their
bedroom on the night of 17 December 1975, chatting with their close
friend, photographer Bob Gruen, when the doorbell rang. John had
recently learned that he would be able to stay in America,
permission granted reluctantly by the authorities after a surprise
drugs bust in England (on the day of Paul and Linda's wedding), a
night-time raid on their Bank Street apartment (where a clever
attorney got them out of trouble) and the couple's general
undesirability in a country whose government had suffered a
disastrous defeat in Vietnam, because, it was claimed, peace-nuts
just like John and Yoko had (somehow) made it impossible for the
military to wage the all-out war they had in mind. Gruen recalls,
There was a big flash of paranoia when the doorbell
rang. It was like, 'Oh my God, who can that be?' In the Dakota,
every visitor gets announced from the desk downstairs, so when the
bell on your apartment door rings suddenly, it's a real fright. It
wasn't just a little paranoia - they were very scared, very
nervous.
They said to me, 'Go see who it is, don't open the
door until you know what's going on,' and I went to the hallway
and I heard what sounded like kids singing Christmas carols. So I
called back to John and Yoko, 'Don't worry, it's some kids from
the building singing carols,' and when I looked through, it was
Paul and Linda. They were singing 'We Wish You a Merry Christmas',
very cute, kind of adorable, just standing there singing.
I said, 'I don't think you're looking for me; come on,
I'll take you into the bedroom where John and Yoko are,' and they
kept singing all the way in. You know, you read about all the
animosity between them, about how the Beatles' wives don't get
along, but they all seemed like giddy old school chums. Hugging,
patting each other on the back, the guys were like high-school
buddies who hadn't seen each other in a long time and really liked
each other. The girls were very chatty and pleasant. If you didn't
read the magazines, you wouldn't know Yoko and Linda were supposed
to hate each other, they were getting along just fine. They all
went into the next room to look at Sean, who was just two months
old. [Yoko had had two miscarriages since she'd been with John;
this was the first of their babies to survive.]
Paul told them about the pot bust in LA and how they'd
been denied a Japanese visa, and how much he and Linda wanted to
go to Japan. John and Yoko really loved Japan and went there a
lot, so they talked about that. It was all pretty general, nothing
about any business between them, and then when they got up to
leave there was lots of hugging and kissing, general holiday good
cheers. It was so fascinating seeing the two of them together like
that with their wives, and everything totally pleasant.
After they were gone, John and Yoko were saying, 'Wow!
 Do you believe that?' And they seemed to be so happy about the
visit. Whatever fights were going on between their lawyers, they
knew each other too long and too well not to be glad about seeing
each other.
In fact, Paul and Linda had seen John a few times in
1974, when he was separated from Yoko and living with May Pang, a
vivacious easygoing woman who had met John Lennon when she was
working for Yoko as her secretary. (May has written about their
stormy affair in Me and John, co-authored by Henry Edwards.) The
McCartneys had first met May in California, but the two couples
became more relaxed with each other later that year. 'John and Paul
were always one-upping each other, like brothers,' remembers May,
now married to record producer Tony Visconti.
John and I had our own apartment on East 52nd Street,
and we went to see Linda and Paul at the Stanhope Hotel. The first
time they ever visited us in New York, the doorman called up and
spoke to John, and John said to me, 'Oh my God! Paul and Linda are
downstairs. Can you handle that?' and I said, 'Yeah, so? What's
the problem? There's nothing to handle. They're your friends, send
them up.'
In January of 1975 John said, 'I have something to ask
you. What would you think if I started writing with Paul again?�
My mouth fell open, and I said, 'Are you kidding? I think it would
be terrific' That was the last time John and I were ever together
before we split up. Yoko called him that night and told him she
had a method to help him stop smoking, and that he should come
over to the Dakota. I told him I didn't like him going over there,
and he said, 'Stop it!' He was yelling at me. 'What's your
problem? I'll be home by dinner, we'll go have a late dinner, and
then we'll make plans to go to New Orleans and see Paul and
Linda.'
But when he walked out that door, I knew something bad
was going to happen. When he came back, he was a different person
about Paul. It wasn't the same. He was saying, 'Oh, you know how
when Paul and Linda used to come and visit us? Well, I couldn't
stand it.' Obviously, something happened on the other side of
Central Park. Right after that, he was back with Yoko. We split up
for good in February, 1975.
I didn't see Linda and Paul again for a long time. It
wasn't until 1989, at Paul's 'Buddy Holly Party' in London, and
Tony had been invited because he had worked with the two of them.
I went over to Linda, and she didn't recognize me. I said hello to
her, and she said, 'Oh, hi.' I said, 'It's May, remember John and
May?' And she just went 'Huh?!' She threw her arms around me and
hugged me, she said, 'I've always wondered what happened to you! I
always liked you so much!' She'd read my book, and she said, 'I
know it's true what you wrote, I know what you've been going
through, I support you, and I'm so glad you've married Tony. We
love Tony!' She was so nice. I told her that John had wanted to
write again with Paul, and she forced me to be the one to tell
Paul that. I said, 'Can't you tell him?' She said, 'No, I want it
to be you,' and she brought Paul over and said, 'Look, it's May!
And she wants to tell you something that John said to her.' And so
I told him, and he looked very pleased to hear that.
When we were talking about my book, Yoko's name came
up, of course, but [Linda] never said anything negative about her.
She sort of indicated that Yoko was not one of those people that
she welcomed with open arms at all times, but she didn't say it
 outright.
Something of a mystery hovers over the rekindling of the
friendship between the McCartneys and Ono-Lennons in the mid-1970s.
It is definite that the last meeting of the two couples took place
at the Dakota in May 1976, when Paul and Linda were in New York
during the 'Wings over America' tour. As John told Playboy, Paul and
Linda came to visit, and they watched an episode of Saturday Night
Live on which producer Lome Michaels announced that the NBC network
had told him that he could offer the Beatles the standard fee of
$3,200 for an appearance. They thought it would be funny if they
hopped in a taxi at that moment and just showed up at the studio
while the show was being broadcast, but decided they were too tired.
That's a famous anecdote, which Paul also told his biographer, Barry
Miles.
But then, Lennon tells Playboy, 'That was a period when
Paul just kept turning up at our door with a guitar. I would let him
in but finally I said to him, "Please call before you come over.
It's not 1956, and turning up at the door isn't the same any more.
You know, just give me a ring." He was upset by that, but I didn't
mean it badly. I just meant that I was taking care of a baby all
day, and some guy turns up at the door.'
One wonders what period John is talking about. After the
merry holiday visit, during which Linda described the Los Angeles
pot bust that had occurred in March 1975 (indicating they hadn't all
seen each other for nine months, at least), the McCartneys returned
to England and went into the recording studio to do Wings at the
Speed of Sound. A European tour began on 20 March 1976 in
Copenhagen, and the stateside leg started in May, so there could
hardly have been any meeting between 17 December 1975 and May 1976,
which, in any case, is acknowledged to be the last time the two ever
saw each other. It is possible that Paul came bopping up to John and
Yoko's apartment (without Linda and with a guitar) a few times
during the 1975 Christmas season, because he was so excited about
the surprise visit described by Bob Gruen. John could not have been
making it up, but it just seems so very odd ...
Paul finally got a visa to perform with Wings in Japan,
where eleven big concerts were booked for January 1980. For a
musician who was so very eager to play in that country at last, as
he had told the Lennons back in 1975 (Bob Gruen remembers Paul
saying to John and Yoko that it was his dream to go back there, ever
since he'd gone as a Beatle), he sure wasn't too cool about taking
advantage of the chance when he was finally cleared.
'It took hundreds of lawyers thousands of hours to
negotiate with a very slow-moving, unsympathetic Japanese government
to let this convicted drug felon into the country,' says Gruen, who
discussed the Wings 1980 Japanese fiasco in detail with John and
Yoko when the headlines announced that Paul had been put in prison
in Tokyo for attempting to bring marijuana into Japan. 'And when
they finally let him in, he walks ui with eight bags of pot right on
top of the clothes in the suitcase he's carrying. What was he
thinking? John said Paul probably just never imagined that anybody
would open his bag. He was a Beatle. Nobody every opened their bags
or searched their personal belongings. Beatles don't get that kind
of treatment'
They don't? After arrests in Sweden, Scotland and
California, the McCartneys must have gathered they were not quite
immune from government curiosity about their drug of choice. What is
most amazing, as Gruen points out, is that it had taken five years
to turn the Japanese authorities around; how brazen it was for
someone, even Paul McCartney, to enter a country committing the same
'crime' that had kept him out for so long.
Linda, as noted earlier, had been terrified what might
happen after Paul was taken into custody. She told me in the summer
of that year,
If I'd known what Paul was really facing, I'd have
fallen apart -they told me he might be detained for a few days or
weeks, and people caught with less pot were in Japanese prisons
for years. Well, they made sure I didn't hear the word 'years'. At
first I thought he'd be out the next day, that it would all be
taken care of with a fine or something. Then the days went by,
with the kids and me in a Japanese hotel, and we didn't know what
was going to happen. What was happening! I was thinking they might
be torturing him. I didn't know what to tell the kids; James was
two years old and he knew something was wrong. Paul and I hadn't
spent a night apart in ten years, and now he was in jail. I almost
couldn't deal with it. But of course I had to.
The Japanese tour was cancelled; the band members went
home with rather bitter feelings towards their boss. Wings 'just
kind of wound down' during the year after Paul's nine days as a
guest of the government, according to guitarist Laurence Juber.
George Martin was brought in to produce Tug of War,
but he didn't want to do a Wings record, he wanted to do a
McCartney record. There was certainly no more touring planned; I
got the impression that Paul and Linda didn't want to put that
kind of pressure on the family any more.
The feeling was: it's another decade, let's change
gears. You know, Wings really had been a band. Paul and Linda were
the bosses, but there was always a feeling that this was a
collaborative effort. There was an openness to group
communication, and I think that was reflected in the way the music
came out. Each Wings album tends to have its own identity because
of the changing personnel. But at that point, it didn't make sense
to do another one. It certainly didn't make sense to George
Martin. Nor to any of us, really.
That spring Paul and Linda made the album McCartney II
at home. It became number one in the UK charts, and encouraged Paul
to start putting his own name on the package once again. But he and
Linda did not do a concert tour until 1989.
'We'd been pretty much on the road for almost ten
years,' Linda said to me in August 1989 at the Lyceum Theater in New
York, where rehearsals (and one concert for special fans and
friends) were held for a world tour that was to start in Norway in
late September. We sat in a box in the empty theatre one afternoon,
while Paul did interviews backstage and Linda handled a string of
reporters, one at a time, on her own.
'Once I didn't have to play in public,' she remarked, 'I
rather got to enjoy fooling around on the keyboard. I taught myself
some things, and Paul would always have some things to teach me as
well. I'll do this tour, you know, but I'd rather be on the farm
feeding horses and taking pictures.' She told the same thing to
every writer who asked her, as if she wanted to make it clear, if
people still hadn't got the message, that she had never, and was not
about to, beat Paul over the head to get herself on stage.
'Paul needs that dose he gets from an audience, and he's
getting kind �f restless,' Linda went on. 'We talked about this a
whole lot; Paul knew I needed to be convinced that this was the
thing to do. The kids are kind �f grown up, and that makes a
difference. After the John-thing, we wanted to lie low more for
their sake than for ours. There were death threats. Some nuts, but
we had to take them seriously. We have so much more security around
us now, our lives have really changed. We have security that you
don't see, you know what I mean? I hate it, I hate all that, I don't
like to talk about it.
'Anyhow, he's ready to go out there, and I'll go with
him, we all will. I expect it will be fun. You'll see, we're going
to do a great show.'
The John-thing: 8 December 1980. The McCartneys were at
home in Sussex when Paul had a phone call from his office telling
him that John Lennon had been murdered, on the pavement at the
entrance to the apartment building where he lived.
'God, it was horrible that day. I remember everything,'
Linda said, as we talked on the back terrace of her house in Long
Island in 1992. 'I'd just taken one of the kids to school, and Paul
was home. I drove into the driveway and he walked out the front
door; I could tell by looking at him that there was something
absolutely wrong. I'd never seen him like that before. Desperate,
you know, tears. I can see it so clearly, but I can't remember the
words. I just sort of see the image. It's like a picture. Like it's
a snapshot. Soul's camera.
'And then he told me what happened, and we were both
crying. Later, we sat there with the kids watching it all on the
telly. God, it's a weird old world, isn't it?' Linda paused and
looked around. 'Oh! Look at that female cardinal - see her, under
the tree? Sort of a green and a red with an orangey beak?'
'She's not as gorgeous as her boyfriend,' I said.
'But when you look at them through glasses, they are
beautiful. Even those blackbirds, if you look when the sun's on
them, they're metallic blues and browns with yellow eyes. They live
here, the chipmunks, and the squirrels and the birds. This is their
house, really.'
I tried to bring the conversation back to Linda's
memories of the day John Lennon was killed. 'I was reluctant to call
you in London,' I remembered. 'So I called your brother and asked,
"Are they all right?", something stupid like that. He said, "Of
course!" I wondered how it could be "Of course!", but what could he
have told me? You must have been freaked out, I didn't know what to
say to you.'
'But it was lovely of you to call my brother. Freaked
out? Slightly. It was awful. Can't you imagine? Paul was in so much
pain. Then he started wondering if he was going to be next, or if it
would be me, or the kids, and I didn't know what to think. At least
Paul and John had been on really friendly terms at that time - they
had talked on the phone about John's son, and they were laughing,
and Paul felt good about their friendship.
'Boy, people sure fuck up this world, don't they?'
Linda and Paul had gone to New York to see Yoko soon
after John's death. 'We all cried so hard, you know, we had to
laugh,' Paul told the Sunday Express. 'Yoko wanted to get us
something to eat, and she mentioned caviare. We all said, "Let's do
it!" Her houseman brought it in, mumbling, and he backed out and
there was the caviare tin with just a little bit in the bottom. Her
servants had eaten it all! So I said, "Ask for some wine." Sure
enough, when it arrives there's like a quarter left in the bottle.
They've had all the wine too! We were all just hysterical, and the
relief was indescribable.'
It was not to be all giggles between the widow and the
McCartneys from that moment on. In the spring of 1981, Yoko told an
interviewer that Paul had hurt John more than any other person. Paul
did not take too kindly to that statement. In 1985, when the
Beatles' song copyrights went on the market, Paul claims he was
relying on Yoko to retrieve the catalogue for both of them, but that
she let the deal slip through her hands: Michael Jackson ended up
with the Beatles' songs, for $47.5 million - Paul was furious.
In 1988, the year the Beatles were to be inducted into
the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, Paul was aligned on one side against
Yoko, Ringo and George on the other, in a dispute about recording
royalties. He signalled that he didn't want to appear with the three
of them on a stage accepting this great honour - then he said he
might come after all. It was very big news that Paul might not show
up, and I phoned Linda every day in the week preceding the event to
find out how the land lay. I don't know,' she said one time. 'Paul
doesn't feel like pretending everything is just fine, when they're
all getting up a legal case against him.' The next time, it was, 'We
might come, we haven't really decided.' ft was left at 'might' until
the day of the ceremonies, when Paul's office faxed a statement to
the Hall of Fame board saying he regretfully could not go through
the hypocrisy of smiling for the cameras with three people who were,
at that moment, his enemies. His absence was extremely noticeable,
as one might imagine. (Neither did Diana Ross join the other
Supremes, reportedly because of some fit of temper, so two of the
biggest stars being inducted that night weren't there.) I was kind
of stunned; I had really thought Paul and Linda would come to New
York after all.
The next morning, I had a 'casual' phone call from Linda
at my office at the radio syndication company, MJI. 'Hi,' she
drawled. 'So what's happening?'
I answered, 'You were sorely missed last night. I wish
you had been there - by the way, I taped the whole show; would you
like to hear it?' 'Hmm, maybe. Paul? I have Danny on the phone, he
taped the Hall of Fame thing last night. Do we want to hear it? Oh,
Paul says yes.'
Not entirely unprepared for this call, I had a cassette
deck close by, with the tape cued to Mick Jagger's terrific speech
inducting the Beatles. 'OK,' I said, 'here's Mick. I'm going to hold
the mouthpiece of the phone next to the tape machine.' I played Mick
Jagger's thing, which was followed by enormous applause. 'Could you
hear that OK?' I asked. 'Yes, he's great,' Paul said.
'OK, now everyone is standing up and George, Ringo,
Yoko, Julian and Sean are coming on stage. I'm putting the phone
back near the deck.'
'Uh-oh,' Linda said.
Ringo and George bantered a bit - George drawing a big
laugh from the audience with, 'I don't have much to say because I'm
the quiet Beatle. It is unfortunate that Paul's not here because he
was the one with the speech in his pocket.' The phone receiver I was
holding over the cassette deck seem to grow a bit chillier in my
hand. Then Yoko stepped up to the microphone.
'I wish John was here. He would have been here, you
know. He would have come. He was that kind of person . . . etc. etc'

Now the phone receiver seemed to turn distinctly icy.

'Umm, could you hear all that, guys?' I asked, trans-Atlantically.
 Paul answered with some rather unkind words about Yoko,
and left Linda and me to pick up the pieces.
'I guess we missed a big night,' she said, clearly with
no regrets. She'd been thrust for a moment into the Beatle-hell that
had engulfed her new life as the consort of Prince Charming nearly
twenty years ago, and the memories were not pleasant.
'That much bigger since you weren't there, my dear. You
and Diana Ross.' I had to bite my lip to stop myself adding
something about 'prima donnas'.
'Diana Ross didn't come? How can they have the Supremes
without Diana Ross? Well, maybe we better not get into that. Goodbye
my love.'
Click.
The whole Rock and Roll Hall of Fame thing would have
become a non-issue with the passing of time, but for the induction
of John Lennon for his solo recording career in 1994. His first
records, post-Beatles, were the three albums he made in 1969, all
with Yoko, thus making him an eligible nominee; artists become
eligible for the Hall of Fame twenty-five years after the release of
an album with their name on it. Lennon would be the first person to
have been inducted twice into the Hall of Fame, once as a Beatle,
once as himself; as a member of the nominating committee, I was wary
of that precedent as a real can-of-worms opener. I also truly felt
that his inclusion was in large part a sentimental one; he was,
after all, a martyr and the first entertainer in history to be
assassinated. I do not mean to question his stature - he was
certainly one of the most brilliant and important men in the second
half of the twentieth century, a wonderful songwriter, a true
celebrity. I just happened to wonder if these past years defined a
real 'rock and roll' career, and I saw some handwriting on the wall
that contained the names of a married couple very dear to me, who
would certainly feel that this honour should come their way as well,
and as soon as possible.
Of course, there was no one who could make John's
induction speech but Paul himself, and he was persuaded to do it
with vague reassurances of his own imminent induction. And so, on
that January night in 1994, there was a re-lighting of the flame, as
Paul, Linda and Yoko sat together and chatted away amiably, with
Paul at one point putting his arm over the back of Yoko's chair and
laughing genially at whatever it was she was saying. His speech
inducting John was as full of love as it indeed ought to have been,
and when Yoko came out to accept the statuette, and they embraced,
there was not a dry eye in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf
Astoria. After the ceremonies, she had a small get together at her
apartment in honour of the McCartneys.
I wondered when 'it' was going to start, and sure
enough, 'it' began but a few weeks after that night, with a phone
call from Linda. 'So,' she asked, 'is Paul going to get into the
Hall of Fame now that John is in?'
'Paul is already in,' I said (and would say to her many,
many times again).
'Yes, but John is in as a soloist. What about Paul's
solo career?'
'Linda, permit me to be blunt. John is in because he's
dead. Do you want Paul to qualify by being dead?'
'No, I just want to see him inducted, as he deserves.'
Linda was working her half of the partnership. I was on
the nominating committee, where I was assumed to have some 'pull',
which I didn't, only opinions.
Some variation of this little interchange between Linda
and me on the subject of the Hall of Fame occurred with dismaying
frequency. I had no answers, except to reiterate my belief that John
Lennon was already in because he had been murdered. When Neil Young
became the second person to own two statuettes, one for his solo
career and one as a member of Buffalo Springfield, Linda turned up
the heat. Neil was very close to the McCartneys (he spoke at Linda's
memorial service in New York in June 1998); being a friend made the
Hall of Fame Business worse, not better.
One time I found a little phrase to use in my argument
that has come to haunt me. It's one of the most terrible things, in
retrospect, that I have ever said to anybody. 'When Paul gets into
the Hall of Fame, Linda, you will be the Widow McCartney.'
Paul got in six months after Linda died; she never knew
that this dream was coming true, and Paul, on the night of the
ceremonies, was feeling - as I interpreted it, knowing Paul a little
and having worked the induction ceremonies backstage for several
years - somewhat bitter towards the whole institution of the Hall of
Fame for depriving Linda of this moment. As if it were in anyone's
control. Daughter Stella McCartney, aged twenty-seven, the rising
star of the international world of fashion as chief designer at the
House of Chloe in Paris, was Paul's 'date' that night, and he called
her up to the stage to share the moment with him. She wore a white
tank-top shirt that said 'It's About Fucking Time', which I'm sure
would have been Linda's exact words. Stella's 'statement' had to be
blacked out for TV transmission.

Chapter 15
'I'd see her at the studio, and I'd notice one sock would be down
and the other pulled up, and she had this handbag that must have
been twelve years old; she was always kind of a shambles, you know?
And I thought that was so cool: here was a woman who could have
anything, and she probably never had a manicure in her life.'
Chrissie Hynde
On a summer's day in 1984, my housemates Susan Blond and
Roger Erickson and I piled into Roger's neat Alfa Romeo and drove
from our beach bungalow in the Sagaponack neighbourhood of East
Hampton to Linda's brother's house a few miles to the east. Susan,
Michael Jackson's publicist, had just flown back from the first
dates of his world tour and Paul was most interested in knowing
everything she could tell him about Michael, at that moment arguably
the biggest star in the world. He was also fascinated with the Alfa,
and how I'd managed to get myself into the tiny cavity that served
as a back seat. James frolicked on the lawn, and a pleasant time was
had by all. As always, since around 1982, Linda had greeted me with,
'Have you gone veggie yet?', and as always I told her that I was a
little more veggie than the last time we had seen each other and
that I was getting there, gradually. That made her happy.
During our visit, Linda suddenly asked me if I liked
bacon. Was this a trick question? 'Mmm,' I replied, trying to duck
having to give a direct answer, 'I've enjoyed it in the past . . .
it's been a while, I think. I'm trying to remember when I had it
last.'
 'You can admit that you like it,' she said. 'I have a
reason for asking. They're making vegetarian bacon now, and Paul and
I are really interested in someday putting out something like that
and making it available to everyone. So I wish you'd try this.' She
went into the kitchen and came out with a stack of cartons of veggie
bacon. They were made from something called TVP, or textured
vegetable protein. Sounded yummy!
'Try this,' she insisted, 'and you'll never eat real
bacon again.' We put the bounty in the little space that remained in
the boot of the car and were starting to drive off when Linda, who'd
been waving goodbye to us with Paul, called out, 'Just a minute!'
and dashed back into the house. She came out with her arms full of
more vegetable things disguised as meat. 'We're getting on a plane
in a little while and there's plenty here for my brother and his
family. Besides, I didn't give you enough; here, take these,' she
said.
'Oh, they've got so much, Lin,' Paul pointed out, as I
mumbled something like, 'Gee, the boot is kind of full, what with
the car cover, and Roger's cleaning fluids, and
'Well, here,' she persisted, 'you hold on to them,'
dumping the boxes into the 'back seat' so that only my head rose
above the ocean of packaged food. We waved goodbye anew, or at least
Roger and Susan did, because my arms were nowhere to be found. When
we got home, we stuffed the freezer with as many shiny little boxes
as it would hold, where they stayed for days, unopened.
'I know Linda is going to call to ask how we liked this
stuff,' I said from time to time to my friends in our bungalow. 'We
have to try it.' We'd pass around one of the packages, examine it
with great interest and put it back in the freezer. Finally I
decided, 'Let's do it!' Roger and I unpacked the 'bacon' and stared
at it, blinded by its orangeness and perfect symmetry. Into the pan
the strips went; as they fried, they turned a deeper, different
shade of orange and stayed perfectly flat, never curling or
crinkling or even making much of a sizzling sound. Except for the
colour, and a vague crispness, they didn't look too different from
the raw product; they tasted OK, if a bit weird, but not at all like
bacon.
'What did you think of that frozen food?' Linda asked
when next we spoke.
'Very impressive!' I responded.
'Now you keep eating that, even if you don't go
completely veggie for a while,' she advised, 'because every time you
do, that's one less animal that had to be killed so that people
could eat meat. Let me know when you run out, and I'll have more
sent to you.'
That was the idea behind it all - eating this 'bacon'
was saving the life of a pig. It would have been better if the food
were fabulous but, meanwhile, it was a pound of flesh not
slaughtered.
We had been given a prototype of what would become, six
years later, Linda's own line of frozen vegetarian food. The quality
of TVP-based foodstuffs, by the time Linda put her name on the
packages, did improve a great deal, the range of products grew
vastly and Linda's revolutionary culinary idea, vegetarian food
disguised as meat, became an enormous success in Britain. Like
McDonald's, they're now counting sales in the billions.
Tim Traharne, the food entrepreneur who helped Linda
start her business and now runs it for the family, says about the
first batch of frozen dishes given a public launch, 'I can only
flinch at their crudeness, compared to today's products.' And he's
talking about the stuff they came up with in 1990 - you can only
imagine what that first 'bacon' I ate was like, before six years of
research, development and taste tests. Then again, maybe you cannot.

It's understandable that Linda could gladly accept a

gradual move towards vegetarianism on anyone's part, for she and
Paul did not go the whole hog (so to speak) into a meatless and
fishless life all at once. There is an oft-told story about the
family having a leg of lamb for dinner in Scotland one day, when a
lamb either came into view frolicking in the grass outside the
house, or wandered into the dining area -there are various versions.
In any event, at that moment Linda and Paul supposedly forswore meat
forever. This incident is said to have happened in the late 1970s.
When Linda's foods were about to be launched in the US in 1994, the
accompanying promotional literature claimed that the McCartneys had
been strict vegetarians for twenty years; in one interview, Paul
says that started when Heather was six and Mary a tiny baby, which
would have been around 1969, but members of Wings recall a
Thanksgiving dinner with real turkey, and meat and fish were
certainly being served aboard the flotilla in Half Moon Bay in the
spring of 1977.
Then there's the big caviare controversy. If, as we've
seen, the McCartneys were eager to partake of Yoko's caviare when
they visited her in early 1981, they cannot have been orthodox
veggies at that time. In fact, Paul told an interviewer they had
continued eating caviare even after they'd given up eating fish,
because 'we thought it's only eggs, OK. Until we inquired into it
and someone said the mother sturgeon gets slit head to toe. We said,
"We thought they milked her." That stopped caviare.' Milked?
This is not to quibble, and not to question the extent
of Linda's and Paul's total commitment to the right, as they defined
it, of all things with a heart not to be eaten by humans. One night
Mike Fisher, my companion at the time, and I arrived at a party for
the McCartneys given by Linda's brother, John, and his wife, Jody,
at their home. I had some CDs to give Linda, and my favourite
shoulder satchel was then a soft, dark blue plastic, insulated and
marked with the brand name 'Petrossian', a famous importer of ...
caviare. Linda was in the entrance hall as I arrived in an elevator
full of guests, and she lost no time in embarking on a major
harangue: 'Petrossian! Caviare? Do you know how they get caviare?
They cut the mother open, from one end to the other. They cut her
open! They take out her millions of eggs, and that's what caviare
is. Oh, that's horrible, Danny, how can you carry something from
that horrible place?'
Over Linda's shoulder, her daughter Stella looked at
Mike and winked.
'I'll get rid of this, I promise,' I told Linda, and
went into the room where people were putting their coats and hid it
under the bed. I still have the bag - it's great for keeping iceberg
lettuce sandwiches cold, and the Petrossian logo has long since worn
off.
One brings up the subject with caution and, it is hoped,
some sense of humour, but for Linda this was no laughing matter, nor
is it now for Paul, who is the very dedicated keeper of the flame.
As a couple, they were the world's most prominent animal rights
activists and advocates of vegetarianism; as an individual, Linda
McCartney was purely, totally, famously and successfully a protector
of all species not human. Directly and indirectly, she probably
saved the lives of more animals than any person in history, at least
in the history of the West.
Her name in Britain is now synonymous with frozen
meatless food; there is even a dog food marketed there that is
'Lin-tested', with a little icon of her face on the package; a cat
food is on the way. There are celebrities who are passionate about
animal rights, and their passions are commendable, but somehow I do
not think that a picture of Bea Arthur or the B-52s on a bag of dog
food or a package of frozen 'sausages' would be very meaningful.
Linda really was the 'animals' saint', as activists have called her.
'When she died, the animals of the world really took a hit,'
comments photographer Dave McGough. 'There is no one to take her
place.'
I think Linda was born to be the animals' saint; as a
child, she brought home injured animals and was more comfortable,
and more fulfilled, with her horses and even with the birds and
tadpoles that she would sit watching for hours in a woodland area
near her house, than with many of her own species. Motherhood,
career, marriage and family diverted her energies, and she was a
brilliant success in those areas, but I think her kinship with all
non-human creatures was simply dormant for about twenty years; it
manifested itself as her children needed less nurturing and started
going full-force in the early 1980s. For the last ten years of her
life, it was total and, amazingly to all who watched her, growing
all the time.
Laurence Juber, who was a staunch vegetarian at the time
he joined Wings in 1978, recalls that the McCartneys were
'transitioning into being full-time about it when I first met them'.
While working with them at George Martin's Air Studios in London, he
would buy loaves of bread, bags of bean sprouts and other non-animal
delicacies for Paul and Linda, which they accepted with enthusiastic
interest. 'One day Linda wasn't at the studio and I gave a bag of
stuff to Paul, and the next time I saw Linda I asked how they had
liked it. She said, "Uh oh, you shouldn't have just left that with
Paul. It's not in his nature to remember that there's a bag of
groceries in the back of the car." Sure enough, she went to look
inside the car and there was a container of very gooey bean sprouts
in the back seat. It wasn't strictly vegetarian back then. That's
the way most people start - they certainly came the distance, didn't
they?'
'Gradualist is a good way to describe the way they got
into it,' remarks Chrissie Hynde, a very close friend of Linda's and
Paul's and an outspoken animal rights activist.
I think Linda did it the right way, and went public
with it very effectively. You know, I would do phone-in radio
shows and women would call in and say, 'I'm a vegetarian and I'd
like to convert my family, but my husband is a real
meat-and-potatoes man.' And I'd say, 'Well, then leave him.' That
was always my take on it, probably a little bit hardline.
Linda's approach was, 'If your husband is a
meat-and-potatoes man, don't tell him. Slip him a veggie-burger
and if he says it's delicious, say, "Good! Well it's healthy
too."' And she got all those women who read her cookbooks and
bought her food to do just that. What she was up to was not
primarily about the beauty of vegetables, or the science of
nutrition, but about saving animals' lives. If she could do that,
 her goal was accomplished.
She was always telling me how many dinners she had
sold, how many units of non-animal protein, and what the
equivalent of that was in terms of animals' lives. I don't think
she ever saw it in any other terms, not in terms of a business or
her personal success in marketing food, or that she herself had
done well, but that every time a cookbook was sold, animal lives
were saved. And she'd call in for the latest sales figures, and I
think she'd just get on a horse and go for a ride feeling great
that someone became a veggie that day.
It was Hynde who encouraged Linda to come out from
behind the cookbooks and the frozen foods and to establish herself
as a vocal and active spokesperson on behalf of the animal kingdom.
'She was the least pretentious person I've ever known,' says
Chrissie, who first met Linda in 1983.
I got a baby present, some clothes, when I had my
first child, and it said, 'Love - Paul and Linda and the kids',
and I'd never met them. I was just amazed. Well, about a month
later I was rehearsing and Paul was in the next studio; it wasn't
easy for me, but I walked over to him and said, 'Gosh, thanks for
the baby clothes.' He looked a little embarrassed, and he said,
'Oh. My wife.' Then I met Linda a few weeks after that, and I
liked her instantly. I'd see her at the studio, and I'd notice one
sock would be down and the other pulled up, and she had this
handbag that must have been twelve years old; she was always kind
of a shambles, you know? And I thought that was so cool: here was
a woman who could have anything, and she probably never had a
manicure in her life, and she obviously just didn't give a fuck.
Then, I hadn't talked to her for a few years, but she
sent cards and I knew, from being a new mother, that it can take
up all of a person's time taking care of one kid, and she had
four. She was being a superlative mother and, for me, that was an
inspiration. I had been very anti the whole American nuclear
family thing, I was such a product of the Vietnam War, but when I
saw how nurturing she was with her children, it was obvious that
that was the right thing to do. When her children were getting old
enough that they didn't need that much nurturing, we began to talk
on the phone more often, and most of that was about animal stuff.
I'd been thinking about starting something really big, like the
vegetarian answer to McDonald's, and one day she called me and I
went straight into it. I knew that the one way to get her
attention was to imply that she was a snob, because that was the
last thing she would ever be, or wish to be.
I said, 'Listen, McCartney, why don't you get off your
high horse and do something? We're starting a revolution, and you
should be part of it.' I knew she'd be horrified if anyone thought
she was above the cause. And she stammered a bit, and she
answered, 'Look, no one wants to hear what I have to say, they
just want to see me standing next to Paul when he gets awards.' I
told her, 'Wrong! People are so impressed with fame that they
don't care why you're famous. You've got a voice and you can use
it, and people do want to hear what you've got to say. And whether
they like it or not, you've got the voice, and you can do whatever
you want with it.' She just happened to get me on a day when I was
on a tear.
She was reticent, and I understood why. She'd been
preoccupied with her family until then, and the press and the
public certainly hadn't made her feel as if she had any great
 contribution to make on her own. She'd always been portrayed as
jolly and up and optimistic, all peace signs and good-natured
stuff, but I said, 'Come on, get your fist in the air, no more
mister nice guy, this is serious stuff.' Soon after that, she and
Paul were at some premiere, and there was a picture of them and
Linda had her fist in the air! And the caption was about her. It
said something like, 'Linda McCartney, seen here with her husband,
punches the air.' I thought, 'Whoa! I'd better shut up, I don't
want to inspire her to do that again.' But I knew the energy was
there, and she probably just needed a kick in the ass to say,
'Yeah, you can do it.' Because we both had this intense
appreciation and love of nature, and we felt how noble animals
are. To me, the whole animal kingdom is God's link to
man, and it will give you all the answers. But Linda and I never
had discussions about religion and we never talked about God. It
was always Man vs. Nature.
By the end of the 1980s Linda's first cookbook, Linda
McCartney's Home Cooking, was published. Although she was performing
with Paul on his first world tour since Wings had broken up, she
clearly had her own agenda, and being one of her husband's back-up
musicians was not her main concern. The kids were still with them on
the road, but James was twelve, audiences were no longer scary, the
critics had long since said everything condescending about Linda
that they could, her photographs were being acclaimed at museums and
galleries around the world, and now she had a passion and identity
of her very own.
Not that she was at all indifferent to Paul's success on
the road, or to her part in it. 'The crowds have been incredible,
and if it carries on like this it'll be great,' Linda told me in a
phone call from Madrid in November 1989. 'Although you do forget
where you are. When you leave a country, you feel like you're still
there. I think we went to Italy after Germany, I can't remember.
During the day, you know where you are, but then you come to the
halls at night, they're all the same. Even though I love seeing the
excitement in people's faces, and their happiness at being in the
same room with Paul. And I'm still amazed at the way they carry
people out of the audience after they've fainted. I counted sixty in
Paris.'
'You counted them?'
'Well, I know the set pretty well, and I can do more
than one thing at a time, in spite of what you may think.'
Since I was doing a story on the tour for the syndicated
radio show I was writing and producing for MJI at the time, I put to
Linda the usual cliche question: 'What are you looking forward to as
far as the United States' leg of the tour is concerned?' She was off
and running.
'Well, Paul is definitely just playing to all his fans,
and I love the idea of him just doing that, and of course I like
coming back to America, but you know me, I want to get my point of
vegetarianism across, Danny.'
'How are you doing that?' I asked dutifully.
'Well, my cookbook which - do you have one?'
'No, you said you'd send me one. But I wrote about it
anyhow.'
'Bestseller.'
'Congratulations!'
'I will send you one, I'll bring you one personally. I
want to talk about things like that myself, because that's really
all I'm interested in: no slaughter of animals and no experiments on
animals. That's what I'm about. I don't want to drive people crazy
with it, but you know me, I'm just outspoken that way. If I believe
in something, I'm gonna say it. And what it's about is, if you love
animals and don't want to eat them, this is a very non-cranky way to
do it.'
'I see that the tour will be in California at
Thanksgiving, and then you'll be in New York?'
'Yes, and that will be a turkey-less Thanksgiving,
because turkeys shouldn't be murdered!'
'Now, Linda, you promise that this will be non-cranky? I
mean, the press, Paul's fans, they've stopped hitting on you; now
you're telling them they're murderers?'
'Well, that's what it is, isn't it? And I'm showing them
a nice way to stop.' Linda went on to tell me that they'd been to
the Prado that day and it was fantastic: 'Bosch, Goya, El Greco,
Breughels, Velazquez. Oh my God! We go on in fifteen minutes! See
you next year in November.'
Of course, it wasn't perceived by everybody as
non-cranky. All the backstage catering on the tour was vegetarian,
naturally, but the crew were told that as long as they were part of
the McCartney organization, they were not to eat meat anywhere. No
sneaking off for real sausages, or the job was in jeopardy. There
was some resentment on the part of the 'real men' who hauled
equipment and drove trucks, and there was no doubt some illegal
consumption of sausage. If anyone got fired for that, which I doubt,
it was certainly not publicized; the bosses would indeed have seemed
cranky, and people who work tours cannot risk being seen as
trouble-makers, but the point was made. 'This is a vegetarian tour,
like it or leave it.'
It was, as I said to Linda, and as her friends certainly
noted, brave of her to challenge the world on the subject of food
just as she was becoming 'acceptable'. The girls who hated her for
marrying Paul must have got over that in the intervening twenty
years, and the guys who hated her for presuming to be in Paul's band
had realized, it was to be hoped, that there was nothing to get all
that upset about. Experienced musicians had known that, although she
appeared to be amateurishly playing keyboards with only one finger,
as Paul told Chrissie Hynde in a wonderful interview he did with her
for USA Weekend in November 1998, 'You can't play those instruments
[Moog synthesizers] with more than one finger. Well, you can play
with as many fingers as you like, but only one will register. She
was synthesizing a whole orchestra, and that's really difficult to
do. She learned it all, and she did it all, and she took it kind of
seriously.' And as Pete Townshend says, Linda's voice was integral
to the sound of Paul's music after the Beatles, whether or not most
people knew that.
In any case, the mockery had died down by the time Linda
decided to hit the world over the head, albeit nicely (at first),
with the 'Go veggie!' motif. It was, after all, courageous of her to
provoke the public all over again, but she had long since realized
that she was not going to do well in popularity contests. Popularity
was her husband's province, and it was not only unattainable for
her, but not very desirable either. So what? It was nothing compared
to what she believed in, which was essentially a complete reordering
of the relationship between humans and animals. I made the mistake
once of asking her about the requirement that the road crew 'go
veggie' for the duration of the 1989-90 world tour, and told her I'd
heard some of the guys were complaining that the McCartneys were
being 'a pain in the butt' on the subject. 'A pain?' she replied,
fixing me with a look that was both anguished and shrivelling. 'Let
me tell you about pain! Do you know what kind of pain ... etc.?' The
annoyances borne by humans were as nothing compared to the suffering
of animals - nothing; not in those exact words, but certainly as a
doctrine, this was the mantra of the last decade of Linda's life.
If Chrissie Hynde convinced Linda that she could say
something and do something to promote the cause of animal rights, it
was Dan Mathews who showed her what there was to do, and exactly how
very effective she could be. Smart, handsome, funny, creative and
totally dedicated, Mathews works at People for the Ethical Treatment
of Animals (PETA), one of the more radical ('We're theatrical, but
not violent,' he cautions) animal rights organizations, and I first
met him in March 1989. He was organizing the first Rock Against Fur
concert in New York, and after talking to him for a while on the
morning of the concert, and being totally charmed, I asked him if he
knew Linda and Paul, or if they knew of him or the work PETA was
doing. He said he didn't know, but that he would love to be in
contact with them. I called Linda that same day and told her there
was someone fabulous I had just met who was doing animal rights
stuff and that I thought they would adore each other. I gave her his
phone number. She lost no time in contacting him. As Mathews recalls,

It was right after the Rock Against Fur concert and we

were having our department heads meeting, when the secretary burst
into the room and said, 'Dan, there's a call from England, and she
says it's Linda McCartney calling for you.' Sure enough, it was
Linda. She said, 'Hi, Danny told me about you, and I hear you're
doing great things and it's not just fur, and by the way, are you
veggie?' She was asking me if I was veggie -1 answered, 'Well, if
you only knew. Of course.' We talked for about ten minutes, and I
told her some of the things we were doing, undercover exposes in
slaughter houses and fur farms, and she was very enthusiastic.
Very casual, almost as if we'd been friends before she even
called, and then at the end of the conversation she said, 'If you
ever get over to England, please come and see us; here, take our
number down, it's just for friends, but please call.' Here was
Linda McCartney calling me, sight unseen, giving me her home phone
number.
I was going to England a month or two later, and I
called, and they invited me to their house and said they'd have a
car pick me up at my hotel in London and take me to Sussex. Well,
everybody knew I was having a heart attack because I was going to
visit them, I was going to see these mega-celebrities. But I never
felt intimidated, mainly because of Linda's tone in that first
phone call, that mellow voice. So simple, so direct; she'd heard
about something she thought was cool, and she wanted to help, and
called. She was as interested in us as we were in them.
It was a two-hour drive, very beautiful, and we went
past the gatehouse up this long drive, and there's Paul and Linda,
standing side by side, their arms around each other and waving
with the other hand, all smiles on the front porch. I guess I
thought the house would be bigger and more sprawling, but it was
just a comfortable size, and we went right into the kitchen, where
it seemed everything happened, and she asked if I wanted a cup of
tea or coffee, then she fixed it. No maids, no servants, none
whatsoever. Paul was so sweet and smiling, their eyes were so
 enthusiastic and they actually seemed to be excited that I had
come to visit them.
They explained their motivations to me, it was
important for them to do that. Linda's was purely from the ethical
issue of animal cruelty, whereas Paul was more concerned with the
environmental impact of the meat industry and there were things
about that which really upset him. He was being very supportive of
the Friends of the Earth organization at the time, he was planning
to give them a special prominence on the upcoming tour.
Eventually, their attitudes came to be nearly identical, but at
the beginning, she was interested in one aspect of the humane
movement and he was into another part of it, and they reinforced
each other over the years.
Paul's never been afraid of the more radical stuff
we've done. There was a concert promoter once whose wife worked
for the Ringling Brothers Circus, and they saw that PETA had a
booth at the show and the guy said to Paul, 'Do you know about
these people? They dumped a ton of animal manure on the Ringling
Brothers' corporate headquarters in some kind of protest,' and
Paul replied, 'Whatever works. Sometimes you have to do that kind
of thing.' That told me a lot about Paul. He's never been afraid
of the more radical stuff.
The McCartneys joined PETA in campaigns against General
Motors, L'Oreal cosmetics, Gillette razors and meat in general. In
the Midwest, the pork lobby learned of the association and 300 pig
farmers in Iowa returned their tickets to Paul's concert. It was
front-page news in the region, with protesters at the concert
carrying signs saying, 'I Wanna Hold Your Hoof and 'Paul, Don't Have
A Cow, Man!' Paul and Linda loved it.
Mathews remembers,
When they were on tour, I would hook up with them. In
Florence Linda and I had a press conference, and she urged Italian
women to honour St Francis of Assisi and stop wearing furs. I held
up a fur coat, and she spray-painted it. It was all over the
papers. In Paris, L'Oreal had just stopped their animal tests, and
Linda had been a big part of that campaign, so Linda and I and
Cliff, my lover at the time, did this photo opportunity with Cliff
dressed as a rabbit, and we opened a giant bottle of champagne and
challenged other companies to join L'Oreal.
Paul was often busy doing his thing to publicize the
concert, and I always sort of felt that Linda and I were like Lucy
and Ethel, going off to do these things while Ricky [from the
extraordinarily successful American 1950s sitcom, I Love Lucy] led
the band. She would say that he had to do whatever it was, but
'Let's do this.' You know, it was practical. She did it with him,
she did it without him.
One of Mathews' favourite memories of Linda is of
walking round her house with her one day and emptying the live
mousetraps.
When I got there she said, 'Oh good, you're just in
time, we've had some mice in the house and I want to go check out
the traps.' She had these little cages where the mouse can get in,
and then the cage closes but the mouse is not injured. She'd check
them every day, take the cages with the little mice and get in the
car, then she'd let them out at the edge of the forest. It was
part of the routine - get the papers, make coffee, check the live
mousetraps. No grandstanding, just a normal part of her life.
You know, never once did I see her snap. Never once
 did I see her roll her eyes at somebody. And she was never one of
those fake air-kissing people. She was a breath of fresh air in
any world, but especially in the celebrity world. Linda already
had some baggage, what with marrying Paul and playing in the band,
and then she did what she thought was right and fought for what
she believed in. Nobody has done what she did, it's made her an
icon in the humane movement. People, especially women, are told,
'Oh shut up about animals, there are more important things to
worry about than animals,' and Linda changed that. She spoke up
about it when nobody that prominent was saying anything, and she
helped initiate a change which will be a permanent one. She
popularized something that was almost unimaginable before. She
became effective and respected, and I thought that was pretty
great, and it had to have been encouraging for her, after all
she'd been through. And she stayed involved until the end of her
life - two weeks before she died, she faxed us asking for
vegetarian cat food recipes. There was such a thing, it had just
been developed.
The last time I saw Linda at her house in Long Island,
we were having a dinner of corn and salad and she was quoting
statistics on how much water and land cattle consume, down to the
gallon and the acre. My East Hampton hostess that particular weekend
was Naomi Rosenbloom, who had actually dated Linda's father many
years earlier. She was utterly charmed by the family - so charmed
that she overruled me when I responded to Linda's dinner invitation
by saying that Naomi and I actually had plans that evening, knowing
that Naomi is not a veggie kind of gal. Well, we could always raid
Naomi's fridge afterwards, and did. 'I didn't love the food,' Naomi
has said to me more than once in recalling that day, 'but that was
the nicest family I've ever met in my life. Those children! The most
beautiful, polite, most naturally affectionate children I have ever
seen in any family - and in a rich family! Because you know they're
usually the worst. How did they do it? You tell me she really was a
famous cook? Well, OK - a famous mother I can see, but...'
Anyhow, I interrupted Linda's agronomics lecture,
interesting though it was, and asked, 'Linda, what do you feed your
dogs?'
'Aha!' she exclaimed. 'Vegetarian dog food! There is
such a thing. They love it - you take soya and mix it with
[whatever] and you start feeding it to them when they're puppies,
and they'll eat it forever, and they'll never care about meat
again.'
'OK, then what do you feed your cats?' I'd seen an army
of felines in the (non-leather) saddle house on their farm, and they
didn't seem all that veggie from a distance.
'Nh,' was what Linda's answer sounded like. She looked
away, sort of covered her mouth with her hand, and said what sounded
like, 'Nh.'
'What?'
'Nh,' she repeated.
'Oh Lin,' Paul said, 'tell Danny that we give the cats
fish.'
'I hate it! I hate it that we have to do that!' she
burst out. She was genuinely upset at the thought.
'Do you stand on the shore of the ocean and think about
all the fish out there?' I asked, incredulous that she seemed to be
so angry at herself for participating in the carnivorous food chain,
however indirectly.
 'Yes, I do,' said Linda. 'But you know, they're working
on a veggie cat food right now. The next time we meet, I hope I can
tell you that our cats have gone veggie.'
Linda never had a chance to tell me that, but by golly,
it is happening.
A great fan of Linda's home-cooking was none other than
the poet Allen Ginsberg, who had first met Paul through Barry Miles
(Paul's and Allen's biographer) in 1967. In 1994, when Miles was
working on Paul's book, Allen came to the UK and was eager to renew
the acquaintance, so a Sunday dinner at the family homestead was
arranged. Miles and Ginsberg both noted how physical and
affectionate Paul and Linda were with their children, who were all
there; 'lots of hugs and touching', Miles recalls, 'more like a big
Italian family than a usual middle-class English one - but then, of
course, they were neither of them English middle-class'.
The crowd sat around the kitchen table, clearly the
social centre of the house, and dined on vegetable lasagne and a
veggie loaf, which the guests found delicious. 'Allen rather
greedily helped himself to seconds before anyone else, and then
polished off the last portion, proclaiming it to be the tastiest
food he'd eaten in a long time. He genuinely seemed to love it,'
Miles remembers, but then, if you've eaten Allen's cooking, you'll
know why he enjoyed it so much. Linda and Allen talked about
vegetarian diets and health problems - alas, they would both succumb
to cancer within a few years.
'Linda behaved as if Allen was an old friend,' Miles
wrote to me on e-mail. 'It's something he sometimes brings out in
people, but by no means always. She touched his arm while speaking,
and Linda indulged her nostalgia for New York, because they were the
only two New Yorkers in a roomful of Brits. Allen liked her very
much, which is rare, because he was notorious for not even being
able to remember women's names - he just blanked women from his
life, but Linda remained there, possibly because she was famous, but
also because they had a rapport.
'When we left, Mary drove us back to town, and I was
very struck by the hugs and kisses between Linda and her girls, and
also the way they unselfconsciously spoke about how much they loved
each other. Linda often came across as strident in public, but in
private she was much softer, vulnerable, open and loving.'
Allen, Paul and Linda saw each other again at the
McCartney home in East Hampton; they wrote haikus together (Allen's
revenge for them serving him veggie loaf?), which sadly are lost,
but, as Barry Miles recalls, they were formal seventeen-syllable
haikus, and pretty good.
Simply as good hosts, the McCartneys had not cracked
open Linda's Frozen Meals, tasty as they were, but served the
freshest ingredients available, usually produce grown on their own
farm. Typically, when they had decided to explore the world of
mushrooms, they flew over a French mushroom expert and went around
the grounds with him, photographing all the local toadstools and
annotating the pictures for future reference; these were divided
into two piles - edible and poisonous - and kept on file.
Food manufacturer Tim Treharne was named by Linda in
1997 as one of the 'main men' in her life, besides her husband and
son, in the magazine Woman's Journal. '[He] heads up my food company
and made a reality of my dream to create a range of veggie meals. We
work well together because he's a good, kind man.'
Treharne was in the meat business and, through his vet,
who was also the McCartneys' vet (although they lived sixty miles
apart), learned of Linda's and Paul's eagerness to market vegetarian
food. 'We met,' he remembers. 'The whole situation was bizarre, in
that we were obviously worlds apart. They were devout vegetarians
and world famous, and I had been in the meat industry for thirty
years and was unknown outside of it. So we were not people that
anybody would logically have put together.'
An understatement but, as novices in the business of
marketing a line of food, the McCartneys were made to understand two
simple facts. First, their name on the package would result in one
sale per customer, but what was in the package would determine
whether or not the customer came back for more. (Treharne used the
example of Frank Sinatra's sauces and Paul Newman's salad dressings;
Sinatra's products were off the shelves within a month, but Newman's
products delivered the goods, and the rest is history.)
Second, and a very bitter pill to swallow, was that
Linda was going to have to deal with the meat industry as it
existed, if she were going to be in the food business putting out
what was not merely a niche product. It was not appropriate to be in
one branch of the industry while being seen to tear down another
part of it. And even more important, according to Treharne, 'the
technology and manufacturing expertise needed to produce Linda's
products was in the very industry she was against, the meat
industry. As she said, she had to learn to "sleep with the devil".'
Research in such critical areas as transportation, refrigeration,
marketing and so on is financed, in fact, by the producers of meat -
you cannot put out a line of frozen foods to be sold in supermarkets
without relying on that (hated) area of the industry. So be it.
Cleverly, Treharne and the McCartneys aimed their
products not at pure and devout vegetarians, who make up only a very
small percentage of the food-consuming public, but at what they
called 'Mrs Slightly Green', a category which accounts for an
astonishing fifty-six per cent of the food market in Britain. Mrs
Slightly Green has to feed a family on a budget; probably has a
daughter who doesn't like meat; and has a husband whose health she's
concerned about who doesn't exercise, is overweight and is very much
a 'meat man' who won't change his habits. So Mrs Slightly Green has
to feed her husband, says Treharne, 'non-meat products without
making him feel "wimpish". She has to give him food he recognizes
and relates to.' As Paul has said many times, most People expect to
see some sort of meat in the middle of their dinner Plate; the meat
comes first, the other items on the plate are complementary. Hence
TVP disguised as meat, and a good disguise it had better be.
On 30 April 1991, Linda McCartney's Meatless Entrees
were launched, in a colourful package with a photograph of Linda on
the front. The six initial products, the names of which might mean
more to British consumers than to English-speaking people from other
countries, were: Ploughman's Pie, Ploughman's Pastie, Beefless
Burgers, Golden Nuggets, Lasagne and Italian Style Toppers.
Linda's bestselling cookbook had preceded her foods by
about two years, so a television and press publicity and marketing
campaign was a natural for the public to digest, so to speak. In a
typical spot, Linda introduces herself and talks about her
meat-eating early years and her conversion to vegetarianism. Some
vivid examples are put in to appeal to animal lovers and all the Mrs
Slightly Greens of the world. '. . . We were behind a truck of
chickens, tightly packed, beautiful chickens, and [then the truck]
turned into a chicken processing plant . . . People [say that] fish
don't have feelings. Yeah, pull them out of the water, they're so
happy, they say, "Hey thanks! I didn't like it in my own kingdom.
You want a few of my friends?" I mean, everything has feelings, who
are we to murder them? It's just something that's in me, I think. I
love life, and nature and animals are life.'
In one of her sweetest vignettes, Linda stands in a
meadow talking about cows and walks over to them, saying, 'Hello,
hello ladies, young ladies, hello! Cuties! Moo!' Then, standing
adoringly next to a cutie, she talks about how she once rode a cow,
how the young ones are taken away from their mothers and how they
give you nice dairy products, in much the same way that chickens
give you eggs. Without seeming to notice that Linda's been standing
there, the cute cow just turns and walks away. 'Goodbye,' Linda says
with a loving smile, as if she knew the cow was not going to be
cuddly with her and she didn't at all care. If a dog behaved like
that, or even a cat, one would expect to see the affectionate human
get a tiny bit insulted, shrug for the camera, indicate, 'Oh, it
doesn't matter, I know she loves me.' But Linda does none of that.
'Goodbye.' It's a cow, it's being a cow, Linda does not expect it to
act like a person, or demonstrate training, or be appreciative, or
do anything cute. It walks away. It's a cow. For Linda, it can be
nothing more, and nothing better; it's quite perfect as it is.
By the time Linda McCartney's Home Style Cooking line
was ready for an American launch, in 1994, there were eighteen of
her products in the English supermarkets. Meals were selling by the
millions, and the industry (and the McCartneys themselves) were very
impressed. Clearly, Ploughman's Pasties were not going to be a hit
in America, where the word 'pasties' is understood to mean those
little adhesive circles that strippers put over their nipples. Nor
is the ploughman associated with nutrition ... as a rule. So for the
US, and with the help of a manufacturer named Fairmont Foods in a
small town in the centre of Minnesota hog-country, nine new
vegetarian entrees were readied: Spaghetti Milano, Lasagne Roma,
Pasta Provencale, Pasta Primavera, Rigatoni Marinara, Chili
Non-Carne, Burrito Grande, Fettucine Alfredo and Bavarian Goulash.
Market research had clearly indicated that dieting Americans, or
those going veggie - even if temporarily - seemed to be in a mostly
pasta frame of mind.
A huge publicity tour, complete with politicians and
Paul, did little to help, and because of some confusion with the
manufacturing company and its new owners, the line failed to get off
the ground. One food reviewer only found four of the nine entrees in
his local supermarket, a bad omen.
There were other setbacks too. In October 1992, steak
was found in a batch of about 3,000 of Linda's Deep Country Pies.
Linda was quoted as saying she was 'horrified', and added that
'there could simply have been a mistake in the packing, or it could
be something more sinister'. A spokesperson for the UK's Vegetarian
Society got the final quote in the Daily Telegraph coverage of the
disaster, talking about 'immense distress' and 'revulsion'.
Nor were the food writers enchanted. The meals were
found to contain a good many calories, one third of which were fats
- a proportion that is severely frowned upon by the gurus of healthy
eating. Linda seemed not to care, admitting that something had to be
done to make these things taste good, and better fats than meat. The
nutrition gurus were unmoved. 'Animal welfare is a proper concern,
but the health of humans is equally so,' wrote Glyn Christian, who
was appalled by the fake-meat concept, in the Sunday Telegraph. 'If
you are to give up meat successfully, it is surely best to reduce it
slowly rather than playing pretend.'
Cruelly, one writer in the Arizona Republic compared
Linda's foods to Paul's music after the Beatles: 'The Pasta
Primavera reminded me of McCartney's album, Pipes of Peace - there
was nothing there, really. Certainly nothing memorable. Creamy, but
mostly bland. The Rigatoni Marinara fared better, like maybe Venus
and Mars. A little spicier. Zesty. Catchy, sort of, like the
clarinet solo in "Listen To What the Man Said".' Clever, very
clever. 'Linda McCartney oozes with the sincerity of the seriously
rich', begins an article in the Observer from 1995, headlined 'LOVE,
LOVE ME DO, NO COW IN MY STEW'. (Sue Whitall in the Detroit News
turned the music connection into a positive, with 'LINDA MCCARTNEY
SAYS HER VEGGIE ENTREES WILL SEND BLAND ON THE RUN'.)
But everyone seemed ready for a reaction that focused
first on Paul, then on Linda. No one believed that 'Linda Eastman's
Home Style... etc' would ever have gone anywhere in the first place.
And on the tour designed to promote the US launch of her products,
Linda gave press conferences all over the country, which were
interrupted halfway through by the voice of Paul, on the
questioners' mike, asking something like, 'How does your husband
like your food?' Then he'd join Linda onstage, the photographers
would go insane and the questions thenceforth would be about a
Beatles reunion. 'Any more food questions?' from the organizers
would be met with more Beatles questions. Once again Linda was
sidelined, even when it was her project in the spotlight, but it was
ultimately to her advantage, of course, that the possibility of
Paul's presence guaranteed a large press turnout for her beloved
frozen meals.
But although it didn't work in America (the first time
out; there are still plans to do a US launch), in the UK Linda's
food line was, and is, a sensation. In 1995 a factory dedicated
solely to the manufacture of Linda's products opened in Fakenham, in
Norfolk. It employs nearly 500 workers and no meat is allowed on the
premises; it is the only completely vegetarian food plant in all of
Europe. A professional bicycling team, the Linda McCartney Pro Cycle
Team, is now on the roads and proud of consuming 8,500 vegetarian
calories per day per cyclist, mostly in the form of Linda's own
foods, of which there are now forty-two varieties. And early in 1999
the billionth box of her food was sold in the UK. At the time of her
death, and in her own right, Linda was one of the richest women in
England. What's more, Linda's third cookbook, Linda McCartney on
Tour, is another bestseller; she is now the most successful author
of vegetarian cookbooks in the history of publishing.
Linda's picture was taken off the front of the food
cartons, at her request, when news of her cancer was made public.
There is now a picture of her, with her hair short and dark as it
grew back after her chemotherapy, on the back, a quote from Linda
and assurance from the McCartney family that 'this product meets
with Linda's ideals for a great-tasting quality product'.
'Everything Linda stood for is in the name on that
package,' says Tim Treharne, managing director of Linda McCartney
Foods, now owned by her family, who still approve every new
development in content and packaging. 'This was a tremendous
achievement for her. She had become more comfortable with it over
the years, and I saw her go from being "Paul's wife" to being Linda
herself. She was her own person, and with her ideas, and all of us
working together, we succeeded beyond anyone's dreams.'
 Dreams that began, I suppose, when she discovered that
there can be bacon, or almost bacon, with no blood shed. Everything
grew from that.
'We're coming to America to launch my frozen food line,'
Linda called to tell me, early in 1994. 'We're going to start with
supermarket chains in the Midwest - soon it'll be everywhere.'
'Wow,' I said. 'That is so great. It means I'll get a
chance to taste it.'
'You haven't tasted it? Well, maybe because you can't
get it there yet. But you are using my cookbook that I gave you, and
Mike is using it too?'
'Oh, religiously,' I fibbed, as I grabbed a copy from
the kitchen cookbook collection, where it had sort of languished.
'We going to try Aubergine Fritters tonight! Hey, honey, what's an
aubergine?'
'It's eggplant, but it's not a good time to buy it now.
Did you actually ever use my cookbook? Those recipes are really
good.'
'You've honestly cooked Sauerkraut? Come on.'
'They've all been tested and tasted, that I can promise
you. Listen, I�m going to send you some of my frozen food.'
'You know, I have such a small mailbox. The mailman
folds everything, CDs, everything. Maybe it's not a good idea.'
'Well, soon you'll have them in your neighbourhood . . .
what?'
'D'Agostino,' I answered; the name of my local
supermarket.
'I'm going to make sure they're in every D'Agostino.
I'll call you when we're in New York. Do you like Mexican food?
There are two Mexican meals.'
'I can't wait, but mainly I can't wait to see you.
You'll give my love to Paul and the family?'
'Paul's right here, I'm sure he wants to say hello. Oh
... he's waving hello, it looks like he has to run somewhere. Well,
I love you. If you go veggie, you'll live longer and I can love you
for a longer time.'
'Goodbye my darling.'

Chapter 16
'Her decision was that she was never going to be apart from him, and
I think that was the smartest and most amazing choice.'
Judy Collins
Linda once said that if she hadn't married Paul, she
would have been a professional photographer and would have been
quite satisfied with that as her life's work - as long as she could
have a horse and did not have to live in the city. As it turned out
for her, Linda did indeed get her horse(s) and her house(s) in the
country, but she also married an eligible and famous man and stayed
with him for the rest of her life; raised four children; wrote three
bestselling vegetarian cookbooks; became the world's most celebrated
animal-rights activist; created a line of food products that was
enormously visible and lucrative; performed onstage in front of a
cumulative audience of about ten million people; and... well, you'll
have to read the book to find out all the things she was and did.
 With all that, her obituary in the New York Times of 20
April 1998, was headlined, 'LINDA MCCARTNEY, PHOTOGRAPHER OF ROCK
STARS, DIES AT 56'. It was at the top of the page, and five columns
wide out of six. Still representing the mind-set of the public when
it came to Linda, the headline was, I thought, struggling to be
correct, but patronising and inaccurate. (In all fairness to the
august Times, there was a subheading that read, 'An animal-rights
activist, vegetarian entrepreneur and wife of a Beatle'.) If Linda
were to be remembered as a photographer, then her achievement
certainly went beyond doing pictures of 'rock stars'; but it is
still remarkable that she was identified as a photographer at all,
because that is not exactly what came to mind when one thought of
Linda, the celebrity. Or, she was a well-known photographer, went
the prevailing opinion, until she became Mrs Paul, and became truly
famous being his wife. Always, there was the implication that her
best work was done in her 'freewheeling' days in the late 60s (as in
'Photographer of Rock Stars') and that her portraits intimately
captured the spirit of that era; after her marriage, well, she got
some good pictures of the Beatles, some really good ones of Paul,
and then went on to other things, which were not quite as fabulous
as those shots of Janis, Brian, Jimi, Jackson, Pete and so on.
It is not astonishing that her early portraits have
overshadowed her subsequent achievement - her shots were beautiful
portraits of fabulous people and she was certainly in the right
places with her camera, where few got to go and fewer still took
pictures, let alone memorable ones. Her early talent jumped off the
contact sheets like a genie released from a bottle. What's more,
those pictures are looking better all the time, and the public's
appetite for them seems to be growing as well.
I drove with Linda Stein to Greenwich, Connecticut, in
March 1999, to the opening of a show at the Bruce Museum called
'Linda McCartney's Sixties: Portrait of an Era', an exhibition due
to tour American museums until August 2001. Of course, the local
press was rampant with speculation about the possibility of Paul
being there, but wisely (as ever) he didn't go; instead he sent a
modest bouquet of flowers which was prominently displayed at the
entrance to the exhibition. (He and Linda rarely went to the
openings of the many shows of her work in the UK; they knew all eyes
would be on them, so what was on the walls would get much less
attention than the people standing in the middle of the room.) It
was a beautifully mounted show, the place was packed, vegetarian
hors d'oeuvres were served along with top-shelf spirits, and the
gift shop was well stocked with Linda's books, her posthumous album
and even Beatles memorabilia (there's no getting away from it, is
there?) consigned to the museum by local collectors.
Greenwich, about thirty miles from New York, is one of
that city's richest suburbs by far; the event we attended was a
preview for sponsors and supporters of the museum, which occupies a
large and magnificent building on a hill overlooking Long Island
Sound and is a beloved institution in the town. Which is to say, the
crowd that night was made up of the elite of the elite; chairmen of
the boards of the world's great financial institutions and their
wives were there in abundance. Collectors and connoisseurs
themselves, impeccably dressed and extremely sophisticated, hardly a
bunch of rockers, the preview-goers were ooh-ing and ah-ing like
six-year-olds at Gorilla Jungle theme park.
The local reviews were joyously positive, quoting many
of the guests at the reception. Jane Chase of Greenwich said, 'I'm
really amazed at how talented she was and it makes me sad that she
isn't around to give us those gifts any more.' There was the
inevitable and terribly clever ten-year-old who commented, 'In most
of these pictures, I don't know who they are. But I like the fact
that she does a lot of pictures in black and white.' 'Stunningly
compelling' was the first line of 'local experts review exhibit
favorably' in Greenwich Time, but it was a quote from a curator at
the museum. Photographer Jeff Wignall told the writer, 'It was Linda
Eastman who took most of the pictures before she met Paul McCartney.
In reality, she was a superb photographer.' The catalogue of the
exhibition claimed that Linda had 'earned her place among the great
photographers of the 20th century'. Wow.
Current and subsequent assessments of Linda's work toyed
with the word 'great'; although some were reluctant to grant that
accolade, others did. It's telling, though, that among the more
reluctant was Reuel Gordon, editor of the British Journal of
Photography, who wrote in the Independent, just after Linda's death,
about her 'haphazard approach to photography . . . [her lack of]
affinity with the mechanics of the medium and scant knowledge of
films, shutter speeds and so on', resulting in a lack of
'consistency that separates the good photographers from the truly
great ones'. One begs to differ; Linda knew a great deal about film,
processing, chemistry, light and composition, and studied and worked
on these areas with acknowledged experts. Mr Gordon may not find her
achievement great - that is his opinion - but she had learned her
craft quite meticulously. (And I cannot comprehend what
'consistency' the critic is referring to; Linda, like all
photographers, exhibited and published the images she wanted to,
and, like all photographers, kept the rest in a box, although she
emphatically did not take dozens of shots to get one good one. The
pictures she showed demonstrated a fine grasp of light, processing
and composition, or they never would have been hung in galleries and
museums. I sniff here the implication that she was perhaps spoiled
and indulged because of who she was - it's the same old story. The
article ends: 'Not one of the greats, perhaps, but certainly one
capable of producing striking and memorable images.' How grudgingly
generous.
More interesting to me than the patronising quibbling of
Mr Gordon is the opinion of Lee Fleming in the Washington Post, who
wrote about Linda's portraits in 1993: 'in a contest between work
like that of Annie Leibovitz, which manipulates and plays on public
perception of her subjects, and McCartney's low-key revelations, the
latter's pictures win hands down . .. [her] images reveal something
of the source, not just the surface, of her subjects' creativity'.
Bonnie Benrubi, whose New York gallery handles Linda's
pictures (and work by Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange and Alfred
Steiglitz as well), was working closely with Linda on a show titled
'Wide Open' that went on view just months after her death. Benrubi
does not hesitate to call Linda's work 'brilliant'. She praises 'the
composition, the vision, the kind of clarity and freshness, the
perfection in printing, the overall accomplishment of it'. Benrubi
had known the 60s pictures, but then became familiar with the sun
prints (experiments, almost abstract, with light and chemical
processing), the still lifes, the horses, landscapes and the
pictures of decidedly non-famous people. Her last conversation with
Linda, about the forthcoming show, took place three days before
Linda died: 'We talked about the exhibit; I had no idea how sick she
was.'
 She continues: 'I miss her a lot. I think she was a
great person, warm and trusting, not bothered by silly, small
things. She never seemed to be distracted when she focused on
something and, more impressive, she was able to grow, she really
grew and she never stopped growing. Linda would have been so proud
of that show.'
And in a reveiw in the New York Times, Margaret Loke
wrote that Linda 'never seemed to feel fame's constraining effects
on her life or her photography ... Ms. McCartney brought an engaged,
intuitive and minimalist eye to her black-and-white landscapes and
still lifes of the 1980's and 90's . . . Her photography could be
disarmingly earthy, but her eye was definitely precise.' Ms Loke
found Linda's work 'paradoxically, intensely private . . . the
pictures of sea and sky, of trees and of clouds share a profound
aloneness', and called the landscapes 'quietly elegiac'.
Those quietly elegiac (and very beautiful) pictures will
never be as famous or as widely beloved as Linda's celebrity
portraits, and she never deluded herself that they would be. She
pursued photography because she loved everything about it, and she
knew as well as anyone that there were not going to be many more
Hendrixes or Joplins in her life making music that she loved,
inspiring her to 'get them down' at their creative heights. What's
more, never needing to prove (except to herself) her viability as an
artist, Linda just went on creating, and her output was immense. She
had five books of photographs published, exhibitions at New York's
International Center of Photography, the Museum of the City of San
Francisco, the San Diego Museum of Photographic Art, and of course
her galleries - Fahey-Klein in Los Angeles and Benrubi in New York.
Her 'Sixties' show has been or will be at museums in ten American
cities. In England there were one-woman shows of her images at the
Royal Photographic Society in Bath, the National Museum of
Photography in Bradford and the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London. Her photographs of John Lennon and Paul McCartney are on
permanent display in the National Portrait Gallery in Trafalgar
Square. Her work has been exhibited on the European continent, in
South America and Australia. In 1987 she was voted '1987 US
Photographer of the Year' by Women in Photography. With Brian Clarke
she created stained-glass windows that were widely and extravagantly
admired; for her private delight and close friends, she produced
calendars and date-books and a series of scarves using images from
her pictures.
'She would always send me things she was working on,'
said Judy Collins. 'Beautifully cut velvet scarves, and then the
ones with her photographs of leaves and flowers that she had
translated into fabrics. These glorious things. She was an artist,
you know, all along. This connection she had with her art was very
strong. In a sense, she gets the prize for her continuity in her
work; it was the real thing at the start, and then always the real
thing.'
At very rare moments, Linda took a break from
cloudscapes on the moors and went back to where her career as a
photographer began -shooting stars. The last she ever photographed
was Chrissie Hynde. Chrissie was planning the cover of her 1998
album, Viva el Amor, and called Linda's daughter Mary, now a
successful photographer as well as custodian of her mother's
pictorial legacy.
I wanted a militant-looking thing, fist in the air, as
if we'd won the revolution, and when I talked.about it with Mary,
 she said, 'Well, why don't you call my Mum? I'm sure she'd like to
do that.' I knew Linda hadn't been well, and I didn't want to
bother her, but the next day my manager called and asked, 'Did you
organize a photo shoot with Linda McCartney?' I said I hadn't. She
responded, 'Well, guess what, there's one organized.' I called
Linda and said, 'Hello, my personal photographer!' and she told
me, 'I love this, I love your idea because it's strong, and I love
strong. I've turned down so much work this year because they were
things that just didn't interest me, but this does.'
So I went down to Rye, to the windmill where Paul had
his recording studio and Linda had her photography studio. I was
in my crappy old jeans and Linda had the camera set up, and I
said, 'Is there a mirror or something?' 'Oh yeah, I think so,' she
replied, and she walked me into this little lavatory that had a
tiny mirror and a couple of lightbulbs next to it. Not what you're
used to when shooting an album cover with a famous photographer.
While we were setting up, Paul was in the other studio
recording tracks for Linda's solo album, which he seemed really
eager to get on with, and she showed me her lyrics. Then in
between doing the shots of me, she'd run out and get on the phone,
putting the finishing touches to her last cookbook; she's going,
'No, no, no! Not parsley' - things like that. She was always
working on lots of projects at once, but this time I had a sense
of her needing to finish whatever she was doing just then. After
the session, she told me she was going to the States for a holiday
and would be back in a couple of weeks. I never saw her or talked
to her again.
This was one month before she died. A few days after
the shoot she sent me the contact sheets, and I marked the one I
wanted and sent it back to her. And then the news came over the
radio.
A week later, her photo agent called my office and
said, 'There's a picture that Unda wanted hand-delivered to
Chrissie,' and the next day this package was brought over. It was
the picture - she had instructed her agent how to print it up,
which was exactly how I wanted it, and to deliver it to me, and
there it was. The only message that came with it was, 'Do whatever
you want with this', and it was her last portrait. I think her way
of saying goodbye to me was doing this picture for my album cover.
If Linda was reluctant to rely on words, she was not
troubled by her verbal non-brilliance, because her vision was so
extraordinarily developed. I, on the other hand, like to talk things
to death, which led to occasional little communications battles
between us. One day in 1968 we were walking past the Frick Gallery
on Fifth Avenue, going to meet a musician for a photo shoot in
Central Park. Linda was scrutinizing the sky and the foliage across
the street, when she suddenly grabbed my arm and steered me towards
the gallery's entrance. 'There's a Constable I must look at,' she
said. 'The landscape with Salisbury Cathedral. I want to see
something about the light on the trees.'
'Why?' I asked. 'Why now? You've seen it a million
times. We're late; what do you need to see?'
'I can't describe it,' she answered. 'We have to see it,
not talk about it. We're wasting time; come on, it's free.'
Chapter 17
'The doctors would always say, "She wants to beat it, she's doing
well."'
Candace Carell
In December 1995, Linda called to tell me that a
malignant tumour had been found in her breast. 'I wasn't feeling
well, so I went to the local doctor. He told me I had some kind of
cold, and to take some pills and wait two weeks. Two weeks later, I
still didn't feel better. So we went to London and they tested it,
and it's cancer.' I was stunned. 'What's going to happen?' 'They'll
take out the lump, and we'll see.' 'Could you feel it?' 'Yes.'
'Had you had a mammogram or whatever?' 'No.'
'They just cut it out, and it's over. They told you
that, right?' 'Yeah, that's what we hope.'
Well, Linda lived another sixteen months and died of
metastasized breast cancer on 17 April 1998 at the age of fifty-six.
We saw each other several times in those months, sometimes on the
fly, sometimes laid back, but she never ever mentioned her cancer to
me again. The McCartneys made the diagnosis public, announced a
positive prognosis in 1997, and never talked to the press about the
cancer until after Linda's death.
In fact, the prognosis was grim after the doctors looked
at Linda's lymph nodes when they removed the tumour. Many were
affected. The cancer had spread before it was discovered, but
nothing is or was hopeless, and Linda and Paul kept hoping. They had
the best doctors in London, New York and Los Angeles, and relied
mainly on traditional medicine with an overlay of holistic
therapies. If there was a slim chance that something might work,
short of nonsense like swimming with a dolphin (which the anguished
couple had been asked to consider), they took it. As Paul told
Chrissie Hynde, as long as they didn't hear the dreaded word
'aggressive', they wanted to believe they might come out OK, that
there was a chance - and indeed, there is always a chance.
I approach this subject with great caution. This is for
many reasons, and the first of them is that, I'm sorry, but I cannot
find out everything that happened, every treatment, every surgical
procedure. The records are confidential and locked away, as everyone
would hope theirs would be; the doctors who treated Linda of course
won't talk about it, nor would one ever expect them to; and, what's
more, people who claim they are telling me about the true course of
Linda's final sickness often contradict each other.
Sometimes Paul has said that he knew more than Linda
about the gravity of her situation; close girlfriends of hers whom
I've interviewed say that there was nothing Linda didn't know, that
she in fact knew more than Paul. Some have said that she knew how
fragile Paul was in the face of her illness; his mother had died of
breast cancer when he was fourteen. These are two very, very strong
people, but cancer rearranges things, it seems. Again, what is the
truth? Are we going to play who-knew-what-and-when-did-they-know-it?
Or, will we salute a very brave little group of people who suffered
elegantly and privately, and hoped powerfully?
I have more close friends with breast cancer right now
than I ever would have imagined. My mother had lots of friends and
sisters and there were women all around when I was a child, and I
never heard of one of them having breast cancer. Other cancer, but
not that. Or perhaps it was simply not 'mentionable'. Is it an
epidemic? I ask doctors, cancer specialists; some say no, others say
it's too soon to know. Is it horribly hopeless? One doctor told me
it's among the most treatable of cancers, that there's an excellent
survival rate, especially if it's detected early on. Another doctor
told me it's always very alarming. No surprise here - as anyone
knows who has sought opinions from specialists about an existing or
potential condition.
It struck me that there was a parallel between the way
Linda dealt with her cancer and the way she dealt with the
overwhelmingly hostile reaction to her marriage to Paul. She looked
very carefully at her situation, considered the indignities and the
possibilities, and although there were moments when it seemed she
might go under, she came out of her corner fully expecting to win in
the end. What's more, Linda McCartney, who was certainly not shy
when speaking to the public, who had risked and experienced scorn
and scepticism for her activities and beliefs and who would never
back down in her advocacy of highly unpopular subjects - Linda chose
to keep the details to herself and her husband. She and Paul had
obviously decided not to tell people about her medical progress
unless it was necessary for them to know.
When this crisis first came upon them, they divided
their world, and the people in it, into those who had to know what
was happening at all times and those for whom it would serve no
purpose to know. This was not a matter of 'closeness', although
clearly those who were indeed closest, the family and those who
worked for and with them in crucial positions, had to know. It had
nothing to do with affection; in fact, when possible, they preferred
to have very close friends believe that recovery was at hand.
Says Chrissie Hynde, recalling the photo session she did
with Linda one month before her death, 'When she said goodbye, and
that she'd be back in a few weeks, she didn't embrace me like she
always did. I knew there was something going on in her mind, and
when I thought about it, it didn't surprise me that that was how she
behaved when she knew it was going to be the last time she was going
to see me. She didn't want to be sentimental about it, she didn't
want me to be sad, she certainly didn't want pity. She wanted, I
guess, our last memories of each other to be a dynamite photo
session.'
Tim Treharne recalls a phone call early in 1998, when
Linda told him she was losing the fight. There were a lot of things
about the future of her food business that they had to talk about,
and soon, so that continuity would be assured in the absence of the
person whose name and image would be forever on the product.
Me, I got the party line. 'She's fabulous, she's doing
great.' From her daughters, for example: in 1996 there was a huge
reception at New York's International Center of Photography for
Linda's 'Roadworks' show. It was crowded, and of course people were
looking for McCartneys. Mary was in charge, very much so; when I
asked where her mother was, she told me they'd just had dinner and
Mum and Dad were outside in a car, not wanting to deal with what
would happen if they walked in.
'How's she feeling?'
'Great!'
Linda Stein introduced me to Evelyn Lauder (of the
make-up empire), who had donated the breast cancer centre named for
her at Sloan Kettering Hospital, cancer treatment centre of the
world and the home base of Linda's treatment. Evelyn, a photographer
herself, was eager to meet Mary, and so I brought her over. Mary
instantly thanked Ms Lauder for the beautiful and comfortable clinic
where she often accompanied her mother for chemotherapy sessions.
'Everyone loves your mother there,' Mary was told. 'She radiates
hope.' (More than that, Linda was actually thought of by the other
patients as someone who had beaten the disease and was showing them
it could be done. She never said that, but she seemed that way.)
Mary's tone and manner were gracious and warm, like Linda's when she
met someone she liked; Mary and Evelyn were soon talking about
different kinds of 35mm black and white films. Two women, I thought,
so beautiful, so rich, so blessed, and it's goddamn cancer that's
brought them together.
I am very fond of Jody Eastman, Linda's brother's wife,
who seems aristocratically formidable but is really a lot of laughs.
I literally cornered her at a party and said, 'Look, Jody, nothing
on earth is that fabulous; what's really going on?'
'She's doing great,' Jody answered, looking me right in
the eye. 'Great.'
It was from Paul that I learned how things really were.
Paul Morrissey, Linda Stein and I had driven from the compound
Morrissey and Andy Warhol had shared in Montauk to the McCartney
house in East Hampton. Linda McCartney, who had shaved her head
rather than having to see her hair fall out because of the drugs she
was taking, was wearing a bandana. She took Morrissey and Stein on a
tour of edible flowers in the gardens behind the house (I dropped
out after chomping on something quite unpleasant), while Paul was
tending to the barbecue. Courgettes and peppers, I think, but I was
shocked to see Paul starting the charcoals with lighter fluid.
'You? A "friend of the earth"? You're burning gasoline!'

'This is the way to start a fire, Danny.'

'It's a lousy way, that's poison!'
And we were actually having a barbecue argument, just
like any two guys in any garden, each of whom thinks only he knows
how to start a good fire. We were mock-yelling at each other, and it
seemed a good time to broach another subject. 'So, Paul, how's Linda
doing? She looks great.'
'Well,' he answered, 'the first round of chemotherapy
sort of didn't turn out all that well, so we're going to go through
it again, and this time it's going to work.'
That's when I knew the situation was very far from
fabulous.
Prior to her diagnosis, Linda and Paul had been
primarily reliant on orthodox medicine, yet hopeful that
alternatives existed, or might be found. At a 1989 party at the
restaurant Lucky Strike, in New York's SoHo neighbourhood, they were
regaling my baffled room-mate Michael Fisher with theories,
apparently learned rather recently, about the mystical aspects of
the 'water balance' in the human body, how all health concerns were
a function of this water thing, which modern science had completely
- and to its shame - ignored. But, as Paul told Chrissie Hynde in
the interview she did with him about six months after Linda died,
'Everyone's got a miracle cure. And some of them say what you really
don't want to do is go the traditional medical route. I hate to tell
you, I still don't know the answer. For instance, when Stella was
born we had to go the traditional medical route, as there were
complications at the birth. If we hadn't, both Linda and the baby
would have died. So we'd learned that there were times when you need
traditional modern medical science and we opted for that route.'
Threading through the entire course of Linda's illness
and her treatment was the issue of animal testing on the drugs that
were being administered, and the added complication, as if there
weren't already an overwhelming amount, of the implications of her
diagnosis for her advocacy of vegetarianism and the loyal consumers
of her food products.
When she first introduced her frozen foods, Linda
listed, among the benefits of 'going veggie', a reduced risk of
cancer. Other advertisers making a similar claim tend to put it much
more equivocally, as in 'some studies have shown that eating a
certain amount of this cereal may reduce the possibility of getting
some forms of cancer', but Linda had never been equivocal; and what
always mattered most to her was getting people to eat less meat,
thereby saving the lives of animals. To be sure, vegetables are
healthier than red meat, but no food can come with a guarantee of
being anything other than what it simply is - certainly it seems
extravagant to claim that anything will prevent cancer.
Candace Carell had become friendly with the McCartneys
when she designed the disguises they wore to sit in the audience at
George Harrison's 1974 Madison Square Garden concert. They met again
in 1992, when Linda and Paul were in New York shooting footage for
the documentary Behind the Lens; Candace at the time was the
girlfriend of Noel Redding, bassist for the Jimi Hendrix Experience,
and Noel was working with Linda re-creating the photo session she'd
done with the group in Central Park in 1968. The two couples became
friendly enough for Candace to tell Linda that she'd been diagnosed
with breast cancer and was having chemotherapy. When she heard that
Linda was stricken, she wrote her a long letter from Ireland; Linda
in return sent Candace and Noel a scarf and a blanket made from the
wool of their own sheep. (I had once asked Linda if they made wool
from their own sheep; 'No, it's cruel,' she said. 'They nick the
sheep terribly when they're shearing them. We're trying to find a
way of getting the wool without cutting their skin.' I guess they
found a way.) Candace told me,
We talked on the phone a lot. I was always
complaining, and she never was. You know you're not in great shape
when you're getting chemotherapy, but her spirit was so profound
and so strong, and we'd agree that hot baths made you feel better,
things like that, but she never talked about being in pain. I'd
ask if she was eating, and she'd say, 'Are you kidding? I eat all
the time!' She was putting on weight and she didn't like that at
all, but I told her that was an effect of the therapy and it would
pass.
In New York we were both being treated by the same
doctors, and I would ask how she was doing, and of course they're
not allowed to talk about other patients, but the doctors would
always say, 'She wants to beat it, she's doing well.' There was a
period when it seemed hopeful, but then in September 1997 she said
to me, 'I get so depressed,' and I knew from the tone of her voice
that there had been bad news. I'd been carrying on and complaining
as usual, and she said that, and I just got scared. I put Noel on
the phone, and he said, 'How are you, lovey?' and she said she was
all right, she was looking forward to getting a call from Paul,
who was doing a charity concert in London, so Noel told her to
just smoke a joint and that we were thinking of her and loved her.
She didn't tell me what she'd heard, but fighting cancer, you get
very intuitive, you get the message, whether or not it's put into
words.
Candace confronted her doctors with her intuitions about
the progress of Linda's condition, and, again not in words, they
confirmed her belief that Linda had been told the cancer was
terminal - barring the miracle which both Linda and Paul never
stopped believing would happen. What amazed the doctors, inasmuch as
they would discuss the matter with Candace, was Linda's reaction to
bad tidings. 'She was asking them what to tell people,' Carell says.
'And she meant what to tell people who had stopped eating meat
because she had convinced them to! Would they think they'd been
deceived?' Worst of all, Linda worried, would they become so cynical
about the benefits of a vegetarian diet that they'd start eating
meat again?
Linda could deal, somehow, with her own death sentence.
But to think that it might turn into a death sentence for animals
unknown and probably unborn was a thing, one of the few ever in her
life, that she could not deal with.
I would never suggest that Linda was not afraid of
dying, but I do think she was far less obsessed with it than are
many physically sound people. Like everything else in her very
organized and attentive existence, dying was added to her agenda,
and not, if this can be understood, for morbid or self-pitying
reasons, but because it affected so powerfully everything else in
the programme. What would Paul and the children and the animals do
without her, or rather, what will they do? -and let's be prepared.
Plans for the food business, for the photography show, for Mary's
imminent wedding - plans even for the first Christmas she would not
be there for her family and what gifts they would be getting from
her. It looked as if dying was a likely and not very distant end to
this hateful disease; her legacy was to be that the work, and the
love, went on.
The last time I saw Linda was on 19 November 1997 at
Carnegie Hall in New York, at the premiere of Paul's Standing Stone.
My date that night was my dear friend and colleague Bonnie Bordins,
one of the world's great Paul-fans and, when I'd first met her, a
Linda-hater since childhood. Bonnie literally wore mourning clothes
to school for weeks after Linda and Paul were married, and referred
to her as 'Beast Woman', which was not a reference to her animal
rights advocacy. When Linda walked into the party, we hugged each
other and I introduced her to Bonnie. 'This is my friend who wore
black when you married Paul; she really hated you,' I announced, in
my customary way of breaking the ice.
'That's OK, I'm almost over it now,' Bonnie said,
faintly mortified, as I'd planned.
With a great smile, Linda shook Bonnie's hand, pointed
to her dress and remarked, 'You're still wearing black! All these
years, Bonnie?'
I whispered to Linda that I never got to be alone with
her, that we always met at some 'occasion' or talked on the phone
for a few minutes every few weeks, at best. 'Let's do it now,' she
said. We sat down at a little table in the corner, were surrounded
by security guards, chatted about the concert we'd just heard, were
joined by Bonnie and then by Paul, and in less than ten minutes
Linda and Paul were summoned away by someone on their staff and were
out the door. The last memory I have is of her and Paul walking
through the corridors of Carnegie Hall, surrounded by a phalanx of
bodyguards, and of Linda turning around and waving goodbye. We never
did get to talk much that night; I asked her once how she was
feeling, and of course she said, 'Fine.' What else could she say?
There were about 200 people staring at our little tete-a-tete, and
even if we'd really been alone, I think she'd have said the same
thing. We left each other a bunch of phone messages over the next
few months, and talked a few times, always with the understanding
that we'd talk again soon. It was all the usual:
'Hi, how are you?'
'Great, how are you?'
'I think of you.'
'I think of you too.'
'Will I see you soon?'
'Oh, I hope so, we'll figure it out.'
'Goodbye, I love you.'
'I love you too.'
This routine was so standard, just an affirmation of an
old friendship, that it doesn't matter who said what, except there
was always an exhortation to 'go veggie' somewhere in there.
On a Sunday in April, I came back to New York City from
my little house at the beach, the first time I'd been there since
October, when it had been closed for the winter. There was no phone
and the TV sets were wrapped in their blankets, and I had spent the
weekend sweeping away the parting presents of all the little forest
creatures who'd invaded in my absence and eaten some books and the
labels off the canned food. When I got back to my apartment in New
York the phone was ringing, and a gentleman identified himself as
someone from the New York Daily News. I began to tell him I didn't
want a subscription, when he interrupted me and said, 'No, no,
that's not why I called. I wonder if you have any anecdotes about
Linda McCartney?'
'Linda McCartney? Why?'
I had that awful hollow feeling even before he answered,
'Oh my God! I guess you didn't know and I have to tell you this.
She's dead.'
I apologized for being unable to speak to him at that
moment, and called Laura Gross in Los Angeles; she was the producer
of almost everything Linda ever did for television, and in fact we'd
met because Linda suggested that we'd like each other. I wondered if
she thought I should call Paul, and she said by all means, so I did.
When he took the phone, the first thing he said was, 'Wasn't she
beautiful, Danny? Wasn't she beautiful?'
Paul told me about Linda's last days and ended up
consoling me, when I had called to console him. At the end of the
conversation, he said, 'By the way, we've told the press it happened
in Santa Barbara instead of Tucson. Don't want a bunch of reporters
swarming around down there, you know; just a little fib, so will you
back us up on that?'
I did the obligatory round of television, radio and
print interviews over the next few days, the press having been
steered my way by Paul's New York public relations company. For the
first time since Linda had become famous, the media were inclined to
say kindly things about her; it was neither unexpected nor
inappropriate that the coverage was about 'the love of Paul's life',
but if I had something to add to that, I was absolutely going to do
so. I was dismayed to see people who barely knew the McCartneys
being interviewed by the cable networks about their dear friends
Linda and Paul, but all I could control was what I had to say, not
the list of chosen vultures.
Very unfortunately, the decision to place the scene of
Linda's death in Santa Barbara had some rather unforeseen
consequences when the coroner in that city said he had no record of
Linda's passing there -where a memorial service was held, and
innovative scoundrels were charging money to show people 'the house
where Linda died'. The name 'Santa Barbara' was a code word, and not
a very serious one, used by the McCartney staff as a substitute for
Tucson, Arizona, where the family had a ranch - the region was among
Linda's favourites on earth and was where she lived when she briefly
attended the University of Arizona. 'Oh, when will they be coming
back from Santa Barbara?' was the kind of thing people in the
organization would be able to say comfortably to each other, not
having to mind the snoopy computer repair person waiting to tell his
family where he'd spent the day. But very famous people caught in
little lies are automatically going to be suspected of concealing
bigger ones, and at the end of the week the tabloids were theorizing
that Paul's office had misidentified the place of Linda's death
because it had been an assisted suicide. Why else would they not say
where it happened, unless they were trying to cover something up,
and what else would they be trying to cover up but that? (Naturally,
once the press found out that Tucson was where Linda had died, there
was virtual helicopter gridlock over the McCartney ranch and
photographs of their desert home in every paper: just the thing the
family had wanted so badly to avoid.) In any case, I was back on the
air at the end of the week dealing with this revolting speculation.
I had one simple response to the whole matter: Linda had
wanted more than anything to live long enough to be at Mary's
wedding to Alistair Donald, and in fact the date of the wedding was
moved back when it was known that Linda had only months to live. I
cannot imagine that a mother planning for the first time the
marriage of one of her children one would choose to die beforehand.
It makes no sense on any level; furthermore, Linda was not in great
pain at the end and was on the phone that very week, for example to
Bonnie Benrubi in New York discussing her upcoming photo exhibition.
And that was the case I made: 'I have no problem if someone makes
that choice, but I have a very great problem believing that Linda
did; it fits in with nothing we know.' Take it or leave it - and the
whole issue faded away after two days in the headlines, not because
of what I said, but because it so obviously lacked any merit
whatsoever.
It was a great honour to be asked to speak at Linda's
memorial in New York, and I found it touching that the McCartney
office followed up that invitation by inquiring if what I planned to
say was going to be 'original', as opposed, I assumed, to reading a
poem - in which case they wanted to make sure that no two people
were going to use the same literary source. This was pure Paul, the
perfection of all arrangements, and indeed it showed in the
magnificence (there is no other word for it) of the event itself. I
was even asked to call him to discuss what I would say - he
suggested I speak 'from the heart' (and to keep it at three minutes
or less). I assured him that my heart was the only place I could
come from, and not to worry; I had, alas, spoken at many services,
in front of many distinguished mourners, in memory of many beloved
friends. Still, this was the 'biggest' one of all and I was
terrified. Fashion-fright even sent me to Brooks Brothers, where I
hadn't shopped since college days, for a shirt and tie, an alien
costume these many years.
Laura Gross, staying at an uptown hotel, sent her car
for Mike Fisher and me, and we had drinks before heading to the
Riverside church, one of the most beautiful in America, in a quiet
neighbourhood 'way uptown', overlooking the Hudson River. I was
agonizing about memorizing my speech or reading it; an actor friend
told me to memorize it, but others warned me that an actor would say
that and that I should have the assurance of a written text. I also
had, in my little black overnight bag, a two-pint Evian bottle
filled with ice-cold vodka.
The very select crowd of several hundred (Paul had cut
the guest list several times) was awed by the interior of Riverside
Church itself (most, like myself, had never been there), the flower
arrangements (there were something like 400,000 blossoms) and the
gravity of the ceremony, but by the third speaker there started to
be a smattering of applause at the end of each eulogy. Not for me,
and although Paul gave me a thumb's up when I caught his eye as I
was coming down from the podium, I was convinced I had made no sense
at all. 'It's because everyone was crying,' someone told me
afterwards, and I thought, 'Good, job well done after all, they
should be crying.'
I certainly was - back in my seat I broke down, to hell
with dignity, and didn't recover myself until Stella McCartney,
walking past me as the family left the church ahead of the crowd,
punched me in the shoulder and said, 'Stop it! Stop it! She wouldn't
want to see you like that.'
I was one of the first to arrive, in a car provided by
the organizers of the event, at a restaurant called Zen Palate in
the theatre district, where a very small party was held for family
and participants in the ceremony only. The proprietor of the
restaurant greeted the arriving guests standing next to a niche
where sat a statue of the Buddha, to which I made a hesitant ritual
bow. 'You like the Buddha?' she said with a beautiful smile, and I
replied, 'Yes, I love the Buddha, and I'd also love a drink.'
'Ah,' she returned, 'no alcohol, no liquor licence, you
bring your own.'
Mary McCartney, who'd come in at the same time, said,
'Uh oh, Dad is not going to like that,' and summoned Paul's personal
assistant, John Hamill, to remedy the situation as soon as possible.

'There's a temporary solution in my bag,' I told Mary,

and poured three stiff ones for her, Alistair and myself. What a
good idea that had been.
It was truly a party, with a high level of good cheer
and laughter (especially after John returned with cases of wine and
Scotch). I remember most of all looking down the table at Linda's
sister Laura, now married to a fabulous Italian landscape architect
and living near Florence, and being staggered at her resemblance to
Linda. I had the same rush months later at a Linda memorial concert
to benefit animal rights charities, produced by Chrissie Hynde at
London's Royal Albert Hall; Heather had brought me into the family
box to say hello to Paul and to meet Arthur, Mary's son, the first
grandchild, then just a few weeks old. Heather bent over to kiss
Paul, and when she turned around and looked at me, I saw Linda - and
told her so. 'That's the nicest thing anyone could say,' she
responded.
In the summer of 1998, I set aside a corner of my garden
at the beach for white flowers only, as a little shrine to Linda's
memory. I'd buy or plant anything as long as it was white -
something I'd never done before, having been afraid of white
flowers, that they'd never really be truly white; but they were, and
it was great. I told Paul about it and he wanted to know what I was
growing, so I sent him pictures and labelled them; things like, 'JFK
rose, smells beautiful too'. The rose bush came back, by the way,
after a winter planted in the sand behind the house, more beautiful
than ever.

Chapter 18
'Linda had no answers, only her will and her spirit; she helped me,
it was encouraging just to know what she was bringing to this
fight.'
Linda Stein
Linda McCartney's death sent shivers through women all
over the world, whether or not they knew or cared about anything she
had done or believed in - she was famous, she was rich, she was a
strict vegetarian, she had access to the best advice and best
treatment and yet she died of breast cancer. What was to become of
women diagnosed with the disease who were not so rich and could not
command such resources? What was the point of having everything and
living such a healthy life if you could be fatally stricken with a
condition that is thought to be relatively 'easy to beat'? Where was
hope to be found, or optimism, or good sense? Well, if we knew the
answers to those questions, we'd have a cure for cancer, and we
don't.
One good friend of mine went for an examination as soon
as she heard that Linda had died; 'I was overdue for a mammogram,
and that made up my mind,' she told me. A malignancy was found, and
treated, and her prognosis is now excellent. I would think that her
reaction was incredibly sensible, and it demonstrates as much as can
be learned from Linda's example, which is a great deal. Anything one
does is better than nothing - beyond that, I certainly am not
qualified to address the subjects of risk, therapies, survival and
so on. Women have asked me, simply because I knew Linda, what she
did, what the time intervals were, if she did anything wrong, could
she have done it differently, what drugs she had; and all I can say
to them, or to anyone, is that it's something for a woman (or, in
rare cases, a man) to talk about with her doctor. Linda and Paul
fought a good fight, and if there are regrets and soul-searching, it
was an inspirational battle. They never gave up, and what more can
be said? I would like this story to be hopeful, because the
McCartney family was always hoping, and it made those last years
that much the better for all of them, and for us; I would like to be
helpful, but I cannot be specific: every woman is different, and
every health problem is different.
'Did you ever know her to be shy?' asked Linda Stein, a
friend who is battling the disease herself. 'Did she not say what
was on her mind? Did she not have advice to give, and answers to
give? But only when she believed she had something to contribute,
only when she thought it would be helpful to others, if they were
people or animals. She never said anything in public about her
cancer. She would write me notes saying, "My love is with you," and
when we met we talked about green tea and skin moisturizers, but
never about the disease we both had. And we were going to the same
doctors at the same clinic. Linda had no answers, only her will and
her spirit; she helped me, it was encouraging just to know what she
was bringing to this fight. Now I'm here, and she's gone. There are
no answers; Linda's life was her answer, but only to her own
questions.'
The only medical subject I will even go near is the
subject of animal testing on drugs, which became a contentious and
most unwelcome issue for Linda and Paul as they were struggling to
conquer her illness. There were people who had a simply great time
criticizing the treatments Linda was having, because it was likely
that the drugs administered were tested on animals. (As Paul said to
Chrissie Hynde, they opted for orthodox medicine.) And those who
accused the McCartneys of hypocrisy were actually lobbyists working
against the humane movement, trying to embarrass Linda, the world's
most visible animal rights crusader.
For what I hoped would be a sensible and sensitive
answer to the question of animal testing, I asked Dan Mathews of
PETA for guidance; he is by any definition a radical activist. 'I
think most people recognized that assault as a cheap shot,' he
replied. 'Auto tyres contain slaughterhouse by-products. Does that
mean none of us should drive? If you take aspirin, you're using
something that was tested on animals. Should we not take aspirin?
That's not what the animal rights movement is about. It's about
having a sense of practicality, and at the same time taking a look
at mistakes that have been made; it's about finding alternatives to
animal testing. When we find them, and we will, and if they work as
well as anything we have, and we expect they will, then we'll be
ready to make the basic changes. But we have to live in this world
in the meantime.'
In the meantime . . . she's gone from this place.
There's no taking just yet of the measure of her loveliness. From
all the people I spoke to, who were all people who knew Linda at one
time in her life, there was never a sarcastic word, not a sneer, or
even the faintest question-mark over her remarkable goodness, her
selflessness, her lack of conceit or attitude, her energy, her
frankness, the clear and strong picture she had of herself and her
obligations. Amazingly, neither are there any question-marks about
her children, which is a tribute - and one that she would probably
have appreciated more than any other - to their upbringing that was
defined with great care and watched over with great love. And about
her marriage, I think we have heard more said than we can probably
comprehend, so unlikely was it at the start and so incomparable for
all those years until her life was over.
Animals will be spared because of her work, and the
fight against cancer will be enhanced because of the way she fought
it and the assets she brought to the struggle. Although she didn't
survive, others certainly will, and there will be more of them. Her
husband will continue to be part of one of the most amazing and
joyous teams ever to come before the public, for there is much to be
done and he is now carrying two torches - but who better than he in
all the world to see it through? And all her friends, and everybody
who was aware, or will become aware, of what she did, will keep
remembering and learning, and that is perhaps the greatest legacy of
all.
The last time we spoke, there were Linda's standard
questions, and my standard answers.
'Have you gone veggie yet?'
'Well, not yet.'
'You always say that. I'm not giving up on you, you
know.'
'I know. I love you.'
'And I love you. Talk to you soon.'
Epilogue
The point has been made, I think, that people who knew
Linda had very strong and positive memories of her. (Even Blair
Sabol, who savaged her in print twenty-five years ago, recanted - to
some extent). Many who only knew of Linda also had astonishingly
warm opinions of her, as evidenced by the thousands of 'tributes'
posted on the Internet after her death.
Those friends and acquaintances of hers to whom I talked
for this book gave me more wonderful quotes than I could ever use,
or fit into the context of the story at all neatly and yet I would
not want to see them left out, so here are some sentiments that
didn't make it into the preceding chapters, but certainly stand on
their own.
Chrissie Hynde: She always made you feel like everything
was OK, and I thought, well, it made me feel like I wasn't so afraid
to die because, when I cross over, she'll be there. I can just
imagine dying and Linda saying, 'Oh, it's all right, come in. Don't
worry about anything - you know you don't have to wipe your feet.'
Yoko Ono (in Rolling Stone, 11 June 1998): Linda and I
did not meet up and have coffee and muffins in a corner cafe or
anything like that. But we communicated. We communicated in deeds
more than in words. When she was strong I felt strong.
Carolyn Jobson (Linda's masseuse at Roundhill, Jamaica):
There are people who nurture everybody else more than themselves,
they're always very giving. Linda was the most nurturing person. I
was thinking about that, that she was like a sponge, really, and the
whole family was in that special space. She wasn't somebody who
worried about clothes and fixing herself up, she was really down to
earth and I think that was it; she spent all her time looking after
animals, looking after other people, that kind of thing. She was, to
me, the ultimate earth mother. People who didn't know her might have
been surprised that she wasn't like a fancy lady.
She never lost that way of dealing with people -
whatever walk of life you were from, I think she just treated people
the same. It didn't matter, nobody was any more special than anybody
else because of where they came from or whatever. I would just thank
her for what she has done for the animals and say that we're going
to continue the cause. I'm raising my children vegetarian.
I have a friend who's an alternative doctor but who also
practises intuitive medicine, and she's very 'sensitive', as they
call it. I was taking her around Roundhill and I showed her the
house where they stayed. The next day she said to me, 'I've been
picking up Linda's presence very strongly, but it's a good feeling.
I think she's OK. She feels very happy where she is.'
Eddie Pumer (producer of Paul's and Linda's radio
shows): She just carried on telling the truth, loving her family,
her husband, loving the music, being a musician, a photographer,
being totally honest, being Linda; her strength as a woman won that
battle, without a shadow of a doubt. She never went out there
saying, 'You're all wrong, don't do this to me.' She never did. She
just gave it time, and in time everybody understood the truth and
she was the most truthful person; she never bullshitted in all of
the years I knew her. She won because she was Linda McCartney and
she did not sell, publicize, try to push; not at all. She won
because of truth and the love of a family, the love of the music,
and that's what makes her a remarkable woman; as far as I'm
concerned she will remain a very prominent and loved figure. It's
very rare - she was a wholly good and loving person and that's what
won the day. She just carried on as Linda.
Eddie Kramer (record producer): She did something for me
in a strange sort of way which I really appreciate now. I wasn't
sure about it when it was happening, when I went to see them at the
house and they were all vegetarian and she was trying to encourage
me to go vegetarian. And in the vegetarian cookbook she gave me, she
wrote, 'Go veggie, Eddie!' You know she does that to everybody, I
guess, but it was so nice that she did that after I had heart
surgery. I decided, 'I'm gonna change, that's it, no more meat for
me.' I always appreciated that phrase, it always stuck with me: 'Go
veggie, Eddie.' I've been vegetarian for four and a half years now.
She was very special, very, very special. I just loved
her warmth and it's an interesting thing: how does a person be warm
and tough at the same time? She was that. She was tough. You know
she had to be, but what a wonderful, sensible person. The way she
treated her kids, her love of art and photography and music, animals
and the whole package; it was great. I think she just evolved into
this. Do you remember how she was in '68 compared with how she was
in '98? Look at that fantastic upward curve! It was brilliant; look
what she evolved into, she just kept growing, each step of the way.
Dave Marsh (author): I think the key to a relationship
that strong is kids, because at some point, whatever your
differences are, if you have this big thing in the centre of your
life, that's a bond. You know one thing that typically happens with
couples is that the kids grow up, start to go off to college or
whatever, and that's when the trouble happens in the marriage. That
is a very stressful moment; it was for my wife Barbara and me. Paul
and Linda seemed to have escaped even that. The other thing was that
Paul and Linda both strike me as being people who had their
adventures, and then they met each other.
Dan Mathews (animal rights activist): When I heard she
had died, I went outside to the harbour at Norfolk and looked at the
water and listened to the wind and I remember waving goodbye to the
wind. I felt her in the wind, I sort of said my goodbyes then and
there.
Ron Delsener (concert promoter): She was of another era.
She was of the land. I could never see Linda McCartney wearing a fur
coat, I could never see Linda or Paul McCartney using a cell phone,
I could never see Linda McCartney taking garbage and burning it in
the backyard or throwing it off a boat or out of the window of a
car. They were trying to tell people, 'Become veggie, do this, do
that,' and I wish that she had lived long enough because she would
have had her own television show and got that message across to
everyone.
Linda Stein (prominent New Yorker): Sadly, in her death
she's separated from Paul: she's not Linda McCartney, Paul
McCartney's wife; but Linda McCartney, the late, great Linda
McCartney. And I think people were so jealous of her, especially
women. Other people criticized her because they really didn't get
it, they thought that all she wanted was to wave a tambourine and be
onstage, but it was the last thing that she seemed to want. She was
discussing the music of Wings, she was enthusiastic about organic
vegetables, art, flowers, green tea, saving animals and certainly
being a mother. I think that she was devoted to pleasing Paul and
she fed his needs. She's nurturing and that nurturing was sometimes
responding to 'Give me a little Scotch, honey,' or 'Hold my hand';
it was whatever he wanted. But not in a snap-your-fingers, here,
'Jump, honey' way. I could never call it subservient, because there
was nothing subservient about her. If she gave him a glass of water,
she was regal in giving it. She anticipated his needs and she met
them, but not as if she was beneath him in any way or beneath
anybody. That was part of the gracefulness and beauty of her
personality, because she just was who she was.
Judy Collins: Nobody was warmer than Linda. That hug!
Boy, when she hugged you, did you know you were being hugged!
Laurence Juber (guitarist with Wings): Linda really
represented for me an epitome of a certain kind of womanhood and I
think that the things I learned from her are probably the same
things that Paul fell in love with: her strength of character, her
artistic sensibility, her natural beauty and all the things that
those of us who had any direct experience with Linda can really
appreciate - her sense of humour, and then there was that kind of
sceptical aspect to her personality. She had something that I'm
never going to forget.
Denny Seiwell (drummer with Wings): The kids, the love;
I mean, it was just a very genuine thing there. They were best
friends and Linda had some incredibly intuitive ways about her that
Paul really respected. I think the way Paul saw her was the way she
looked at him, as the genius of the Beatles and the writer and the
performer. I think that he looked at her and at her talents and that
he believed she had as much going for her as he did. And that kind
of mutual respect - I believe that was the thing.
Tim Treharne (managing director of Linda's food
company): I'm not a big follower of newspapers but she always seemed
to be Linda McCartney, wife of Paul. In the end, though, in the last
few years, she became Linda McCartney, herself. And I think that was
a tremendous achievement for her. She was her own person.
Denny Evans (in an Internet posting): Having lost my
mother at a very young age, I was constantly searching for role
models. The searching stopped when I got to know more about Linda.
Besides being so extremely talented, she seemed to have the biggest
heart. What lucky people her friends must have been to have known
her personally. I wish I could have told her what an inspiration she
has been to me. I have gone vegetarian because of her and I hope
that others will follow her example. Even though she is not on earth
any longer, I know she is somewhere watching over us, trying to
guide us in the right direction. So, Lovely Linda, I hope you can
hear me when I tell you that you were the most beautiful person
inside and out. Your time with us was filled with happiness, but was
much too short. You left us all so much love, you were one
incredibly amazing person. I will remember you always.