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‘Hi, Honey!’ she said brightly when she got Carla on the line, sounding so well, perhaps because of her medication.
‘Hi, what are you doing?’ asked Carla. Linda explained that she and Paul were getting ready to go to Arizona; it sounded as if their car was at the door. (Carla heard Paul in the background saying, ‘Come on …’)
‘Now, listen, I’ll be away for five days,’ she said. ‘Have you got any more chickens?’
‘Of course, I’ve always got hundreds of them,’ replied Carla, referring to the chickens at her animal sanctuary.
‘When I come back, I want you to bring me some, OK? About seven.’ Carla made a note of it. This sounded optimistic. After a pause, Linda let her mask slip, saying suddenly: ‘I love you, Carla.’ It was out of character for Linda to express herself so emotionally, and when Carla put the phone down she sat and thought about it. ‘Now that hit me hard. She doesn’t talk like that … I knew that something awful was about to happen.’
Sir Paul and Lady Linda flew to Tucson at the end of March, driving from the airport to their desert hideaway, turning right off East Redington Road, through their unmarked metal gate, and down a dusty track to their little tin-roof house by the wash. Neighbours in this lonesome desert community heard that the McCartneys were back, and that Linda was poorly, but nobody made a fuss. Mel See received word that Lin didn’t want to see anybody except immediate family; the children were at the house with Paul. It was springtime in the desert, beautifully warm in contrast to the English winter, but not yet too hot. The wildlife was up and about, the javelinas rooting for the fruit of the prickly pear cacti, rattlesnakes slithering out from under rocks after their hibernation. The cottonwood trees down by the wash had shed their blossom of cotton ball buds across the trails; the saguaro were coming into bloom, big white flowers opening up in the spring sunshine. The really big cacti were already ancient when Linda was born, and they would stand here solemnly after she had gone. Paul and Linda rode out together while they could, enjoying the wilderness.
Around the end of the first week in April, Linda’s liver began to fail. Doctors warned Paul that his wife only had days left. One doctor suggested he warn her that she was about to die. Paul chose not to, believing Lin wouldn’t want to know. On the afternoon of Wednesday 15 April 1998, Paul and Linda went for a last desert ride. Paul had to put a hay bale down for Linda to step up on as she climbed carefully into her saddle. As they rode gently along the trails a rattlesnake crossed their path. The sun was setting as they arrived home, just before 7:00 p.m., smouldering red over distant Tucson, its last rays streaming through the sentinel cacti. The desert night has a timeless stillness, the stars very bright. When the sun rose on Thursday 16 April, Linda felt too unwell to get up and spent the day in her bed, a gentle breeze blowing through the house as the sun warmed the tin roof, and the red-tailed hawks wheeled overheard looking for prey. She slipped into a coma. Night again, the last night. The darkest hour comes before the dawn. The children told their mother they loved her. She became restless around 3:00 a.m. Paul got into bed with Linda and told her she was on Blankit; they were riding through the Sussex woods; ‘the bluebells are all out, and the sky is clear blue’. By the time he’d finished the story his wife was dead.
26
RUN DEVIL RUN
IN MEMORIAM
Although she had spent her married life with Paul in England, Linda McCartney died as she was born, an American, and her funeral was a characteristically American affair. A few hours after her death, on the morning of Friday 17 April 1998, Linda’s casket was driven down the desert road from Tanque Verde onto the freeway and into Tucson - past strip malls and apartment complexes - to the Bring Funeral Home, where a private service was held and her body cremated. Paul and the children then flew directly back to the UK with the ashes.
News of Linda’s demise began to reach the media almost immediately, with journalists going first to Paul’s press officer, Geoff Baker, who deliberately misinformed the callers that Linda had died ‘on holiday in Santa Barbara’, Santa Barbara being a codename used within MPL for when Sir Paul was in the USA privately. He had no particular connections to Santa Barbara. As Geoff knew they would, reporters descended upon Santa Barbara and began a wild goose chase for the family and a nonexistent Californian death certificate, the subterfuge giving the family time to get home and scatter Linda’s ashes, which they did at Blossom Farm and High Park in Scotland, where many family pets are buried.
Linda’s death was a major news story, partly because it came as a surprise to journalists, who had gained the impression she was successfully fighting her cancer. Friends were also taken aback. Carla Lane heard the news on the radio at Broadhurst Manor in West Sussex. It was a shock, followed by another shock three days later when the postman delivered a posthumous gift from Linda of antique glass beads Carla had admired. ‘I can’t guess when she posted them or who posted them, I’ve no idea. But they came.’ The children also received gifts from beyond the grave.
Paul invited Carla and Chrissie Hynde to Blossom Farm, where the women found the widower in a sorry condition, roaming around his estate looking at things Linda liked, talking constantly about her, exhausted. ‘Paul was just haggard. I mean, he sat there like an old man, lost,’ says Carla. ‘He was shattered.’ Another friend invited to the farm was the animator Geoff Dunbar, who’d recently suffered a loss. ‘My mother died four days before Linda, so it was like a double hit. I spent a bit of time with Paul and he was racked with grief … He sobbed like a baby. So did I.’
Six weeks later, Paul gathered himself together to lead a memorial service for Linda at St Martin’s-in-the-Fields on Trafalgar Square. Born into a Jewish family, Linda had lived her life without religion for the most part, invoking God only rarely, when she saw animals mistreated, for example, and in extremis. In death she would be honoured in two great Christian churches, in London then later in the month in New York. Paul attended personally to the details with the same professionalism he brought to his concert performances, selecting the music and briefing everybody who would be called upon to speak, sing or play an instrument. Rain was falling as he led his children into St Martin’s on Monday 8 June, a large crowd of press and public gathered around the steps of the church. Though Linda had never been popular with the British press or public, her passing had occasioned expressions of respect and even affection, while the bereaved family were naturally to be pitied. Press photographers caught images of Stella leading a distraught Heather McCartney into church, the older sibling’s face contorted with grief. The 700 mourners inside the church included, above and beyond Paul’s relations, the first public coming together of the three surviving Beatles since Ritchie married in 1981. George Harrison was himself now fighting cancer. There was no Yoko. Other guests included MPL staff, musicians who had played with Paul on his records and on stage, and friends such as Brian Clarke, Dave Gilmour, Billy Joel, Sir Elton John, Carla Lane, Twiggy Lawson, Sir George and Lady Martin, Spike Milligan, Michael Parkinson, Sir David59 and Lady Puttnam, Eric and Gloria Stewart and Pete Townshend.
When everybody was assembled, George and Ritchie sitting alongside the McCartneys, John McGeachy, a Campbeltown mechanic who’d played pipes on ‘Mull of Kintyre’, appeared on the balcony, clad in tartan, playing the tune of Wings’ greatest hit, continuing to do so as he descended through the church and down into the crypt, the pipes reverberating through the building. This was Paul’s idea. The Brodsky Quartet performed arrangements of hymns and songs, including ‘The Lovely Linda’. Actress Joanna Lumley read the poem ‘Death is Nothing’. LIPA students sang ‘Blackbird’, which had been Linda’s favourite song of Paul’s; Carla spoke about Linda’s devotion to animals, and everybody sang ‘Let It Be’, after which Pete Townshend told what he intended to be a light-hearted story about Linda setting her cap at Paul in the Sixties. ‘The story I told at the memorial was that Linda had once - quite tongue-in-cheek - told me she was going to marry “one of the Beatles”,’
explains Townshend, adding that Paul put him right after the service. ‘Paul has never been angry with me over this, but did tell me after the memorial that he had pursued Linda, and she had never pursued him.’ This was of course the opposite of what everybody else said.
In a highly emotional address, Sir Paul told the congregation: ‘She was my girlfriend. I have lost my girlfriend and it is very sad. I still cannot believe it, but I have to because it is true.’ As he spoke, Shnoo and Tinsel, the Shetland ponies Paul had given Lin for Christmas, were led into the church. Two weeks later, Paul presided over a similar memorial at the Riverside Church in New York, attended by the Eastmans and American friends such as Ralph Lauren and Paul Simon, but again no Yoko. She wasn’t invited.
Paul was little seen in public during the following weeks. To distract himself, he did some light work, hiring the up-and-coming musician Nitin Sawhney to mix a drum and bass version of ‘Fluid’, one of the tracks from the forthcoming second Fireman album. Sawhney lived and worked at the time in one room in a house in South London. Paul came over and spent the evening, chatting with the younger man about his life and interests, including the work of the Indian writer Rabindranath Tagore. ‘In love all of life’s contradictions dissolve and disappear’ was a Tagore maxim Paul had quoted in the liner notes of the Pipes of Peace album. Sawhney reflected that, as a British Asian, he had the Beatles to thank for introducing him to the classical music of his ancestral homeland, via the Beatles’ association with Ravi Shankar. Paul spoke to Nitin nonchalantly about ‘the band’ and ‘John’, knowing Sawhney would know immediately what he meant. He wore his legend lightly, helping the younger man relax.
He immediately put me at ease by saying, “I used to live in a place like this years ago and I wrote a track in a room like this called ‘Scrambled Eggs’ and it went on to become ‘Yesterday’. I went, ‘Wow!’ Then he played it on my guitar, which freaked me out as well.
Paul went away having made a new friend.
That July, Paul travelled to Liverpool to preside at the LIPA graduation ceremony, whereby he appeared on stage with Mark Featherstone-Witty to listen to speeches and present each graduating student with a commemorative pin, shaking the graduating men by the hand and kissing the women. He had committed to do this every year and was good to his word, deporting himself like a benevolent nineteenth-century mill owner. Behind the scenes, Featherstone-Witty found his Lead Patron a changed man, however. ‘He had lost his greatest companion, and the meetings we had he was always in tears.’
Backstage at the graduation, Paul shared a beer with an old acquaintance named Joe Flannery, who’d booked the Beatles in association with Brian Epstein in the very early days. ‘You know, Joe, Linda’s there,’ said Paul, patting his shoulder as if to indicate an angel sitting there. That same day, his old home, 20 Forthlin Road, was being opened by the National Trust, who had bought the house and returned the décor to how it looked when the McCartneys were in residence. It was a rare honour to have the National Trust turn one’s childhood home into a museum, and Flannery asked Paul if he was going to attend the opening. No, he said. To his mind, it was his parents’ rather than ‘Paul McCartney’s house’, as it was being billed in the press, and this description of the house had clearly annoyed him. Also, while he’d driven past 20 Forthlin Road many times, he’d not been back inside since he left in the Sixties. He feared it would upset him.
That August, Paul returned to Long Island with Mary, Stella and James. This summer the annual family trip had a melancholy aspect in that Linda wasn’t with them and, worse, Paul and the kids had to sign legal papers allowing Linda’s will to proceed to probate. To avoid UK taxes, the will had been drawn up under the laws of New York, where Linda had been technically domiciled during her marriage, sporadically exercising her right to vote, maintaining her principal investment account with a Manhattan firm, while brother John handled her affairs at Eastman & Eastman. As a beneficiary of the trust, Heather McCartney’s signature was also required on the papers, but she failed to accompany her adoptive father and siblings to the signing on 28 August. Reportedly, she had also arrived in Tucson a few minutes too late to say goodbye to her mother.
Long Island summers had been a feature of the McCartney Year since the mid-1970s and were a source of happy memories. Paul and Lin had watched the kids grow up with their American cousins on Lily Pond Lane, Paul amusing himself beachcombing, painting and sailing his Sunfish on Georgica Pond. They had been content to stay with the Eastmans for most of this time, only recently renting a house of their own. Now Paul bought a summer house in the area, to show he meant to maintain close relations with Linda’s American family. One mile down the road from John Eastman’s residence, in a part of East Hampton favoured by the super-rich, Paul typically bought a much more modest house in the less showy village of Amagansett. The property at Pintail Lane was tucked away in the woods, literally on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, without an ocean view; not where one would expect to find a great celebrity, yet in character with other homes he had acquired over the years.
The McCartney family appeared together in public in Sussex on Saturday 27 September when Mary McCartney married Alistair Donald, whom she’d met at school in Rye and who now worked in London as a film-maker. The service had been on hold for some time because of Linda’s illness, but couldn’t be postponed much longer because, like her mother when she married Paul, Mary was pregnant. Sir Paul walked his daughter down the aisle of the church of St Peter and St Paul in Peasmarsh, having driven her the short distance from Blossom Farm in a vintage Hispano-Suiza he’d owned since the Sixties. James McCartney turned up rock ’n’ roll-style swinging a bottle of Jack Daniel’s, which a church warden confiscated at the door.
The following month Paul released a posthumous collection of Linda’s songs as the album Wide Prairie, a CD put together with love, but not one that did Lin’s memory any favours. Rather, it reminded the listener of what a dud note Linda struck as a singer, the recordings shrill and amateurish despite Paul’s presence. Linda’s aggressive parting message to the world, ‘The Light Comes from Within’, had been written during her journeys to and from London for cancer treatment, when she was feeling crotchety. ‘It was her answer to all the people who had ever put her down and that whole dumb male chauvinist attitude that to her had caused so much harm in our society,’ explained Paul, who charged his song plugger Joe Reddington with getting this difficult record on air. When Joe told Paul that the BBC simply wouldn’t play it, primarily because of the bad language, but that he’d persuaded the Corporation to put Linda’s more attractive tune ‘Seaside Woman’ on its playlists instead, the angry star fired his plugger. ‘He just threw a wobbler,’ recalls Joe, ‘said: “Get rid of him!” And that was it.’ In truth, ‘The Light Comes from Within’ was a terrible song. Even when Linda covered a lovely old standard like ‘Mister Sandman’, as she did on Wide Prairie, she sounded coarse.
Far more impressive was the second Fireman album, Rushes, slipped out at the same time as Wide Prairie, and similarly ignored by the press and public. Ambient trance music was never destined for mass consumption, but Rushes is music that stirs the soul, showing a considerable development in McCartney’s partnership with Youth. For the second track, named ‘palo verde’ after a tree native to Arizona, Paul incorporated recordings of Linda talking, and her horse galloping, snorting and whinnying in a ghostly 12-minute wash of sound. Paul’s voice is heard assuring the spirit of his departed wife that he will love her ‘always’, the track concluding with six doleful glockenspiel notes, repeated like a death knell. This was unusual and inventive new music, in the same pioneering tradition as the tape loops of ‘Tomorrow Never Knows’ and the orchestral sections of ‘A Day in the Life’, growing on the listener the more often it is heard.
The death of Linda had hit all the family hard. James, the youngest, had been particularly close to Mum and was very upset, while Linda’s eldest was bereft. Always something of a worry, Heather McCartne
y stayed at home much of the time after her mother died, unable to function normally. ‘I could see no reason for living any more,’ she told the Sunday Times a year later, presenting herself as a jittery, insecure woman of 36 who’d never married or had children, living as a virtual recluse in her cottage on the edge of the Sussex estate with her Airedale dog and two cats. Some days she felt so wretched she couldn’t even answer the telephone.
Living up to the McCartney name had long been a source of anxiety for Heather. She had tried to make her mark as a photographer, like Mum, then as a potter, seemingly soon wearying of both pastimes. Now, less than a year after Mum died, Heather attempted to launch herself as an interior designer, making a rare public appearance at a trade fair in Atlanta, Georgia, in January 1999. In Atlanta to show-case the Heather McCartney Housewares Collection - a range of cushions and other household knick-knacks - she brought Dad to help her face the press. ‘I knew that if I felt overwhelmed, he would say: “We’ve got to go now - Bye,” and he would get me out. He has always guided me like that. Protected me.’ Sir Paul sat alongside his daughter as she spoke about her designs, which apparently owed a lot to the experience of going to Mexico with Mel See to meet the Hoichol Indians, not that she mentioned her natural father by name. She referred to Paul as her ‘real daddy’. The next day, Paul and Heather flew to New York, where Heather belatedly signed the necessary probate documents, printing her name in childish, wobbly letters markedly different to her siblings’ confident signatures.
One of Linda’s dying wishes was that Paul should be inducted into the Rock ’n’ Roll Hall of Fame in his own right, and this happened in March 1999 when Paul was carried in on a wave of sympathy for his loss. Stella McCartney attended the New York ceremony with her father wearing a white T-shirt printed with the words ‘ABOUT FUCKING TIME!’ The following month, on 3 April, Dad became a granddad when Mary Donald (née McCartney) gave birth to a son named Arthur. Sir Paul showed off his grandson at the Royal Albert Hall two weeks later during a rock concert in Linda’s memory. ‘He said, “Look, he was born between Easter and Passover, so that’s perfect, because he’s Jewish, because his grandmother is Jewish,”’ reports Danny Field, who visited Paul’s box and was surprised by what he heard the star say, because Linda had shown no interest in her Jewishness. ‘Linda would never have said that.’ Meanwhile, Chrissie Hynde confided in Danny that Paul had laid down the law to her about the line-up for the concert, wanting different acts. ‘No one wants to be around him when he’s not smiling,’ a chastened Chrissie told Danny after a difficult meeting with the great man.