Paul McCartney (92 page)

The ploy was only revealed when reporters and TV news crews descended on the alleged scene of the tragedy for follow-up stories. Santa Barbara’s sheriff’s department possessed no record of Linda’s demise and no death certificate in her name had been issued by the local coroner. Even when the Arizona Daily Star belatedly pinpointed the correct state, Tanque Verde was not mentioned and Pima County’s coroner would not officially confirm the issuing of a death certificate, such details being protected by Arizona’s privacy laws. This led to reports that police were investigating a possible case of assisted suicide, for whose ‘assistant’ they clearly wouldn’t have to look far.

Paul then issued a second statement, admitting his subterfuge but still trying to protect the family sanctuary: ‘When Linda died last Friday with her family around her, it was in a place that was private to her and her family… In an effort to allow the family time to get back to England in peace and in private, it was stated that she had died in Santa Barbara. The family hope they can maintain this, the one private place that they have in the world.’

Geoff Baker dismissed the assisted suicide story as ‘complete and absolute rubbish’ while Dr Larry Norton, contacted by America’s Cable News Network, said that to his knowledge death had been from natural causes.

Early in May, a small group from the Society for the Preservation of Ancient Buildings had permission to visit Hog Hill Mill and inspect the restoration work being carried out on its seventeenth-century fabric. The visit had to be cancelled, for that was the day Paul chose to scatter Linda’s ashes over the hillside.

There’s a photograph of them together at that same spot, taken a few years earlier in high summer. He reclines on the ground, chewing a blade of grass; she sits on her Appaloosa in a rather formal orange dress, bareback and barefoot. Never happier.

In all the songs Paul wrote about Linda he showed most of his heart in ‘Waterfalls’ on the McCartney II album in 1980, long before any shadow hung over them: ‘And I need love/ like a second needs an hour/ like a raindrop needs a shower’. His voice, usually so measured, climbs to an unusually high register as if sensing the desolation ahead: ‘And it wouldn’t be the same/ If you ever should decide to go away’.

The boy who lost his mother to breast cancer had got through it by ‘learn[ing] to put a shell around me’. For the 55-year-old father of four, thankfully, there were other means. On the night after Linda’s death, for instance, he didn’t have to face the yawning loneliness of the bed they’d shared almost without a break for 29 years. ‘I thought it would be too sad for Dad to sleep alone,’ his son James would recall, ‘so I kept him company.’

This time, he could admit his ‘total heartbreak’ and give way to the tears that kept welling up. He could talk of nothing but Linda. ‘Wasn’t she great?’ he sobbed down the telephone to her old journalistic crony, Danny Fields. ‘Wasn’t she beautiful? Wasn’t she smart and together and wonderful and loving?’

After returning from Arizona, he went to ground at Peasmarsh, his usual prodigious creative energy at a total standstill. ‘Friends of mine and some of the doctors said, “Throw yourself into your work. Get busy. Do stuff, do stuff,”’ he would recall. ‘And I just couldn’t. So I didn’t do anything. I just let it all happen.’

The few people he saw were mainly those who’d been closest to Linda, like Carla Lane and Chrissie Hynde. His only pronouncement, via Geoff Baker, was to thank people for their sympathy and ask those wishing to pay tribute to Linda to donate to breast cancer charities or ‘go veggie’.

Many went further. In Tel Aviv, Britain’s new Labour prime minister, Tony Blair, took a break from talks with Israeli premier Benjamin Netanyahu to praise Linda’s ‘extraordinary courage’ and ‘tremendous contribution across a whole range of British life’. Blair’s wife, Cherie, daughter of the Liverpudlian actor Tony Booth, added: ‘Everyone has been inspired by the courage Linda has shown through her illness. She brought comfort to women everywhere who are suffering from this terrible affliction.’

Her obituaries could not have been further from the hostility, mockery and denigration she’d suffered from jealous Beatles fans and malevolent media for so many years. Indeed, the tearfully reverent outpourings of newspapers, television and celebrity sound bites somewhat recalled the recent death of Diana, Princess of Wales, even though the two tragedies had nothing but their victims’ blonde hair in common. At the 1998 BAFTA awards ceremony in London, the film director Sir David (later Lord) Puttnam led a standing ovation in Linda’s memory. Jennifer Aniston from the Friends television show called her ‘a pioneer woman’. Candle-lit vigils for her were held all over America, including one in Santa Barbara, California, the ‘decoy’ location of her death.

Paul’s first public appearance in more than two months was at her memorial service, which took place on the rainy evening of 10 June, a week before his fifty-sixth birthday, at the Protestant church of St Martin in the Fields in London’s West End. The 700-strong congregation included George, Ringo, Sir George Martin, Pete Townshend, Sting, Elton John (now also knighted) and the two Shetland ponies, Shnoo and Tinsel, who’d been Linda’s last Christmas gift. Outside in Trafalgar Square, animal-rights activists from as far afield as France, Germany and Italy held a candle-lit vigil with placards reading ‘GO VEGGIE FOR LINDA’.

The order of service was as meticulously planned and arranged as a McCartney album tracklist. Eulogies were given by Carla Lane and Pete Townshend; the actress Joanna Lumley read Henry Scott Holland’s poem ‘Death Is Nothing at All’ and the photographer David Bailey read, a verse by Spike Milligan. The church choir sang the ‘Celebration’ andante from Standing Stone; the Brodsky Quartet played ‘The Lovely Linda’; a piper from Campbeltown played ‘Mull of Kintyre’; and a student group from LIPA sang ‘Blackbird’, just as Paul had for Linda their very first night at Cavendish, while fans eavesdropped at the front gate.

His address summed up his state of mind very simply: ‘She was my girlfriend and I’ve lost my girlfriend and that is very sad. I still can’t believe it but I have to because it’s true… After she died, I was thinking of her and I thought of her as like a diamond, a big orange diamond, and if you look at all the facets of a diamond, as with every facet you look at, she was greater.

‘She said one day, “If I could save just one animal, that is all I would like to do.” She was the first veggie tycoon… They [Linda McCartney Foods] tell me they have sold 400 million meals, so that is a couple of animals she has saved.’

George and Ringo’s presence inevitably created headlines about the three former Beatles’ first public reunion, as opposed to in the Anthology television documentary and on record. The hymns in which the congregation joined (‘All Things Bright and Beautiful’ and ‘Let It Be’) made it possible to say they’d sung together for the first time since the Apple rooftop concert in 1969.

A second memorial service took place on 22 June at New York’s Riverside Church, attended by Linda’s brother, John, her sisters, Laural and Louise, and Manhattan notables ranging from Ralph Lauren to Mike Nichols. The church had initially vetoed Paul’s wish for her favourite Appaloosa to be present, but relented so long as it was led in by a side door rather than down the main aisle. The eulogies by Neil Young and Chrissie Hynde reduced her old friend Danny Fields to tears which earned a brisk punch on the arm from Stella McCartney. ‘Stop it!’ she hissed. ‘Mum wouldn’t want to see you like that.’

Like everyone who loses their life-partner, Paul now discovered how difficult it is to adjust to solitude. Many times each day he would instinctively turn round to ask Linda something or reach for the phone to call her, then realise afresh that she wasn’t there.

His marriage, once so disapproved of and denigrated, was hailed as a shining example, not only in the pop business but the wider world. Although for most of it he had been the world’s most adored and desired man, there had never been even a suspicion of infidelity on his part. Yet the inveterate perfectionist and secret worrier now berated himself for his shortcomings as a husband. ‘Whenever someone you care about dies, you wish you’d been perfect all the time,’ he would reflect. ‘I wasn’t.’

He was also racked with guilt for not having told Linda in those last days in Arizona what a short time she had left. It affected him so badly that he received professional counselling–a huge step for someone so dedicated to the double thumbs-up.

In July, he returned to LIPA to see the first crop of graduates receive their degree scrolls. During the day, he told his old friend Joe Flannery that Linda was there with him. LIPA’s principal, Mark Featherstone-Witty, had been at the London memorial service. ‘Afterwards, people like Elton John and Pete Townshend came up to Paul and told him what a great thing he was doing for kids in Liverpool. I think that was the first time he fully realised what an achievement the place was.’

Coincidentally that same month, the National Trust opened 20 Forthlin Road to the public as a historical monument ranking alongside Britain’s greatest stately homes. But Paul preferred not to view the meticulous recreation of the simple bachelor establishment he’d shared with his father and his brother Michael. It would have added too many sad memories of his mother’s death to those of Linda’s.

She was with him too, he felt, on 27 September when he drove their daughter Mary in a vintage Hispano-Suiza car to Peasmarsh’s ancient church of St Peter and St Paul for her long-postponed marriage to the TV director Alistair Donald. Mary was pregnant, just as her mother had been with her on her wedding day: it was the best possible reminder that life goes on.

Linda’s death had given fresh impetus to the campaign to raise awareness of breast cancer, a subject hitherto shrouded in fear and embarrassment. In the week afterwards, the UK’s national Cancer BACKUP helpline logged double the usual volume of calls, 64 per cent, from women spurred by the thought that if Paul McCartney’s wife could fall victim, how much more vulnerable were they? In October, Paul gave his support to an initiative by Cherie Blair and former Spice Girl Geri Halliwell to make women ‘enlightened, not frightened’ by taking mammogram tests that can detect tumours at the early stage when they can still be contained.

An interview for the Sun to publicise the campaign included his first public reflections on Linda: ‘As a wife, she was the best that anyone could want. She was there for me all the time. She was comfortable, she was never difficult. She was one of the kindest people.’

After her death, he shrank from returning to the Eastman holiday house in East Hampton, Long Island, where they and the children had spent so many idyllic summers with Willem de Kooning just over the way. Yet he was loath to give up ‘the Hamptons’ with their Norman Rockwell towns and long, white, misty beaches, and midtown Manhattan just a couple of hours distant. So in December 1998 he bought a property in Amagansett, the ocean-front hamlet adjacent to East Hampton. Like all his rural retreats, 11 Pintail Lane was an unpretentious structure, originally two barns, in the midst of forest even more concealing than Peasmarsh’s. His neighbours had no inkling he was there until some local children set up a roadside lemonade-stand and he stopped to buy a glass.

For now, his only work project was completing Wild Prairie, the album of Linda’s songs they’d begun assembling together in March, knowing it would be released posthumously. An accompanying six-minute cartoon she had devised with the director Oscar Grillo was premiered at that summer’s Edinburgh International Film Festival, then put on general release with Robert Redford’s The Horse Whisperer.

The album’s 16 tracks had mostly been laid down in the Seventies during Wings’ globetrotting studio-sessions. Among the newer ones were ‘Cow’, an attack on slaughterhouses with lyrics by Carla Lane, ‘Appaloosa’ and ‘The Light Comes From Within’, that belated broadside at her critics, recorded in the very shadow of death with Paul and their son, James.

Her four-letter words on ‘The Light Comes From Within’ guaranteed that it wouldn’t be played by the BBC, though Paul was so angered by the rejection that he fired the unfortunate plugger who’d tried to get it programmed. However, some airplay was given to ‘Seaside Woman’, the first song she’d ever written, originally put out in 1972 under the pseudonym Suzy and the Red Stripes.

Such was the sympathy for her–and him–that Wild Prairie was respectfully reviewed and made the middle reaches of both the British and American Top 100. With the best will in the world no critic could say it revealed a previously undervalued musical talent but, as Rolling Stone’s Stephen Thomas Erlewine wrote, it was legitimate tribute to ‘a woman who, from all accounts, was kind, generous and loving’.

The previous year, Britain had elected its first prime minister who was an overt–indeed, besotted–rock music fan. That Tony Blair had once sung with a student band named Ugly Rumours and enjoyed playing air-guitar in front of his wardrobe mirror contributed significantly to his landslide victory in the polls. After John Major’s stumbling, sleaze-ridden Conservative administration, Blair’s rebranded ‘New’ Labour seemed like a breath of Curved Air.

This hip, even hippyish, young premier gave the nation’s morale a lift somewhat like the one it had received (also with an incoming socialist regime) three decades earlier. Where the media then had talked about Swinging Britain, they now talked about Cool Britannia and a similar explosion of youthful creativity in art, fashion and design. There was a resurgent 1960s look, especially among men. The national flag became a ‘fun’ item all over again, reproduced on coffee-mugs, kitchen aprons and plastic shopping bags.

The déjà-vu was nothing to the déjà-entendu. The UK’s late-1990s music charts teemed with so-called Britpop bands, heavily guitar-based and singing songs with British themes in unapologetic British accents just like those who had reigned supreme between 1964 and 1969. Now the latest ‘new Beatles’–Oasis from Manchester–made no bones about replicating the old ones with their fringed foreheads, high-buttoning suits and tough-tender harmonies. Their rivalry with Blur, from London, recalled that of the Beatles with the Rolling Stones, although this time, the northerners were the loutish ones. And although Blur had more affinity with the Kinks or Small Faces, the video for their single ‘Parklife’ showed them trooping over a zebra crossing in homage to Abbey Road.