Paul McCartney (89 page)

As an interviewee he gave the same good value as always. But juxtaposed with archive footage of the London Palladium or The Ed Sullivan Show or Shea Stadium, his articulacy, candour and humour were the more striking. It seemed hardly possible for someone to have gone through all that, and infinitely more, yet ended up so very normal.

At the close of the final documentary, each of the three summed up what the Beatles meant to him. Ringo, surprisingly, showed the most emotion. ‘It was magical,’ he said, choking back tears. ‘There were some really loving, caring moments between four people… a hotel-room here and there… a really amazing closeness… four guys who really loved each other…’

‘[The fans] gave us their money and their screams,’ said George, ‘but the Beatles gave their nervous systems.’

The final–and, perhaps, best–judgement came from the one whose nervous system was apparently still fine.

‘To me,’ said Paul, ‘the Beatles were always a great little band. Nothing more, nothing less, for all our success. When we sat down to play, we played good.’

‘She radiated hope’

There was to be a second superstar named McCartney. On 1 May 1995, Paul’s youngest daughter, 23-year-old Stella, graduated in fashion design from Central St Martins school of art and design in London. Her graduation fashion show made international headlines, everything in it was bought by the super-chic Tokio boutique and orders came pouring in from top British and US stores like Browns, Joseph, Bergdorf Goodman and Nieman Marcus.

Stella had known exactly where she was going since, as a small girl, she used to creep into her parents’ communal walk-in wardrobe and spend hours studying Linda’s don’t-care-that-much clothes on one side and Paul’s care-very-much ones on the other. She’d designed her first jacket aged 13 and three years later was interning with the Paris couturier Christian Lacroix, creator of the puffball skirt, as he prepared his historic debut collection in 1987.

From her Sussex comprehensive school she’d gone to Ravensbourne art college in south-east London, then on to Central St Martins, her studies punctuated by further high-end placements with Vogue magazine, Betty Jackson and Joseph. Unusually, too, she served an apprenticeship with a men’s bespoke tailor, Edward Sexton, whose premises had formerly been in Savile Row, a few doors from Apple, and who made the suits worn by both Paul and John on the Abbey Road album cover.

Her designs struck a genuinely new note, mixing extreme femininity and sexiness with the formality of classic men’s tailoring–plus, now and then, the defiant bagginess or wild incompatibility of pattern she recalled from her mother’s stage-wardrobe on Wings tours. Stella herself struck an equally new note, waif-like yet voluptuous, with eyes whose pedigree couldn’t be doubted, and a talent for networking ditto. The media coverage of her graduation show was not due solely to the presence of her proud father, who composed a song, ‘Stella May Day’, for its audio soundtrack. Her clothes were premiered on the catwalk by three supermodels, Naomi Campbell, Kate Moss and Yasmin Le Bon, all donating their services for nothing.

There were to be no more prodigies among Paul’s children. Stella’s older sister, Mary, now 26–and more than ever like a reincarnation of her namesake grandmother–had turned into an accomplished photographer, yet seemed uninterested in public recognition, preferring to work at MPL and take charge of Linda’s photographic archive.

When a son had come along with Linda’s straw-coloured hair but Paul’s cherub face, his family had naturally wondered whether musical genius might strike a second time. But James McCartney had grown up seemingly more interested in sport–and with an adventurous streak that caused his parents some moments of high anxiety. In 1993, when he was 16, he went windsurfing with three friends on Camber Sands, off the Sussex coast, and triggered a full air-sea rescue alert after being (mistakenly) reported to have lost control of his surfboard and be helplessly drifting out to sea. A few months later, he overturned a Land Rover he was driving on the estate and Rye’s fire brigade had to be called to free him.

Paul did not try to steer James towards music, as his own father had steered him. He was too much aware of the pressure on Julian and Sean Lennon to emulate John and the feelings of inadequacy which Julian especially–the sad inspiration for ‘Hey Jude’–had suffered in consequence. But a home that pulsed with music and thronged with great musicians and superb musical instruments had an inevitable effect. By his mid-teens, James had started teaching himself piano and guitar (proving to be right-handed on the latter) and aged 17, only three years later than Dad, he wrote his first song.

Although all four children had their ups and downs with their parents, the only real source of anxiety was Heather, who by her late twenties still remained unsure what she wanted to do or who she was. She certainly had not lacked love or security. Paul never made any distinction between her as his adopted daughter and Mary or Stella while Linda always gave her the firstborn’s dividend of affection and attention. Yet despite their efforts to raise their brood with as much normality as possible, the McCartney name could not but hang heavily over all of them.

It hung heaviest over Heather, who had been teased and bullied about it far worse than the others at her various schools and was least equipped to deal with it as an adult. In truth, she was very much like Linda at her age, a rather dreamy, folksy young woman with none of Stella’s drive or Mary’s efficiency, quite happy to spend her time around animals. Over time, she’d come to dread the initially blank look on the faces of people she met and their instantly-blossoming reverence on learning who her father was.

When she was 25, this lost and overwhelmed feeling triggered such a crisis in her that Paul asked several people, including the nutritionist Peter Cox, to recommend a psychologist who might help. In the end, it was Heather who took the initiative by checking herself in to a clinic in Sussex, but the underlying problem remained unresolved.

She’d never seemed to have been damaged by Linda’s divorce from her biological father, Joseph Melville See, which had happened when she was barely two. ‘Jojo’, better known as Mel, still lived in Tucson, Arizona, pursuing his work as a geologist and anthropologist with none of the California wanderlust mentioned in ‘Get Back’. However, Paul and Linda’s purchase of their Tanque Verde property, just a few miles away, had brought him and his lost daughter little closer, for Linda still felt some residual bitterness towards him and kept their social contacts to a minimum.

Then in 1988, at the end of a family holiday in Tanque Verde, Heather suddenly announced that she didn’t want to go home but to remain in Tucson and finally get to know her father. A delighted Mel invited her to stay with him and his partner, Beverly Wilk, for as long as she wished. Beverly, a terse but kindly woman, made no objection. ‘She was a very nice person–just like her mother was.’

The visit did create a bond between Heather and Mel, opening her eyes to the passion for anthropology, archaeology and indigenous art that had taken him away from her when she was a toddler. Along with his huge knowledgeability–and formidable physical toughness–he was a thoroughly nice man who, as Beverly recalls, ‘never said a nasty word about anybody’. To Beverly, Heather often seemed like a fugitive: she used an alias throughout her stay and was wary of strangers. One day, she got into a panic after drawing some money from a bank and forgetfully signing her real name.

Mel See’s special anthropological study were the Huichol Indians from western Mexico, whose culture dated back 15,000 years and survived largely intact. He had co-produced a much-praised film about the Huichol, entitled People of the Peyote, and made regular field trips to their communities in the remote Sierra Madre mountains, accompanied by Beverly. On the next one, Heather went with them.

She spent several weeks living with the Huichol, wearing their brilliantly-coloured clothes, sharing their food and being introduced by the omniscient Mel to their age-old ceremonies and exquisite religious paintings and bead-patterned masks and ceramics. No one asked or cared who her adoptive father was; everyone accepted her for herself. It was therapy that money couldn’t have bought.

Afterwards, she felt confident enough to move out of Mel and Beverly’s and acquire a flat in Tucson, evidently meaning to settle there. But after two years, Mel told her firmly it was time to go home. She was so much happier when she returned to Peasmarsh that Linda had to concede he’d finally come good as a father. Inspired by the Huichol’s bead-embroidered bowls and jugs, she decided to become a potter–an occupation widely practised in the Rye area. She moved into a cottage on the estate and, a runaway from her surname no longer, set up her own company, Heather McCartney Design.

Paul and Linda had celebrated their twenty-fifth wedding anniversary in March 1994 and, other than during Paul’s imprisonment in Tokyo in 1980, had never spent a night apart. They and their four children were an exceptionally close and united clan who showed one another affection and said they loved each other in a way that Paul’s Liverpool family, though no less loving, seldom did. When one of them was driving off somewhere, all the others would line up outside the house to wave goodbye. And, grown up and widely different as the children now were, they still needed and relied on their mother as much as they always had.

In December 1995, Linda felt unwell and consulted her local doctor in Sussex. He said she had a cold, gave her some pills and told her to come back in two weeks. When she did so, feeling no better, he referred her to a London specialist, who found a malignant tumour in her left breast. A mammogram test would have picked it up earlier, but she’d never bothered to take one.

The same illness had claimed Paul’s mother at the age of 47, seven years younger than Linda was now. The devastating news could not but bring with it memories of a 1950s hospital ward… the ominous screens and reeking ether-smell… the horrible truth no adult would tell him, but that he already knew… his father’s shockingly uncharacteristic tears.

But that had been almost forty years ago and breast cancer survival-rates had hugely increased since then. Linda was immediately admitted to the Princess Grace Hospital in London for surgery to remove the tumour. By the time the story broke, she was recuperating back at Peasmarsh. Emerging to speak to reporters massed in Starvecrow Lane, Paul said the operation had been ‘100 per cent successful… the doctors have told her now just to get some rest’.

In fact, the cancer hadn’t been caught in time and had already spread to her lymph nodes. The family spent a miserable Christmas and New Year and early in 1996 she began an in-patient course of chemotherapy at the London Clinic under the supervision of an oncologist from Bart’s Hospital. Paul stayed with her throughout and slept in her room.

None but her family and close friends knew what she was going through and even to the closest she gave little away. One day when Carla Lane arrived at Peasmarsh, Linda beckoned her into the house as if to plan their latest rescue of some unhappy bullock, cat or duck. ‘I have cancer,’ she announced, then, before Carla could reply, put a finger to her lips, went ‘Ssh’ and never mentioned it again.

To make matters worse, many of the drugs used in her chemotherapy had been tested on animals in the ways she so abhorred. Indeed, later that year she and Paul were to receive a lifetime achievement award from PETA, the body most militantly opposed to animal testing which they’d publicised on the New World Tour. But Paul would not hear of her refusing the treatment.

Her illness was also a blow to her crusade for vegetarianism, just after its biggest breakthrough yet. In October, she and Paul had appeared as characters in America’s world-syndicated cartoon series The Simpsons, opening thoughtful Lisa Simpson’s eyes–as their own had once been–to the connection between frisky little lambs and lamb chops. The major benefit of going veggie Linda had always stressed, latterly on the packaging of her frozen meals, was increased resistance to cancer.

Peter Cox, her collaborator on Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking, had since become a vegan, convinced the disease could be triggered by over-consumption of dairy products. Remembering all the butter and cream he’d seen her load into omelettes, Cox couldn’t help wondering if the trouble might have started there.

Throughout this time of private anguish, Paul’s musical life remained as crowded as ever, his ability undiminished to juggle several totally different projects at once.

Since the Liverpool Oratorio, he had hankered to compose a second large-scale classical work, this time more independently than was possible with Carl Davis as a collaborator. The Beatles Anthology gave him time to pursue the idea as he was pledged not to release any new music under his own name during the two years when its three CDs would be appearing. Coincidentally, EMI had asked him to write something to mark the company’s approaching centenary.

In 1995, the publishers Faber & Faber, who had issued the Oratorio score in book form, put him in touch with the British composer/arranger David Matthews as a possible new collaborator. Matthews had once worked with Benjamin Britten, whose works Paul hugely admired, and had also been involved in a celebrated arrangement of Mahler’s unfinished Tenth Symphony.

His first composition under Matthews’ guidance was a short piano piece entitled ‘A Leaf’. ‘He thought in the most extraordinary musical colours, and his ideas were often quite eccentric,’ Matthews recalls. ‘But he was lacking in confidence because of having had no formal musical training. I saw my job as explaining the dynamics of a piece of music–things like the way phrasing works–so that at the end he could feel he’d done everything himself.’

‘A Leaf’ was premiered on 25 March at an intimate one-man show given by Paul at Kensington Palace, the Prince and Princess of Wales’s London home, in aid of the Royal College of Music. The Prince was in attendance and afterwards presented him with an honorary fellowship of the Academy. So never again would the classical music world be able to condescend to him.