Paul McCartney (91 page)

At the photocall in the palace yard afterwards, he dedicated his award to the other Beatles and the people of Liverpool, joking that George and Ringo had taken to calling him Your Holiness (though not speculating what John might have called him). He summed up his emotions as ‘Proud to be British, wonderful day… and it’s a long way from a little terrace in Liverpool.’

May brought the release of his first album since the poorly-received Off the Ground in 1993. The title, Flaming Pie, was borrowed from a skit John had written for Mersey Beat in 1962 about how the Beatles had supposedly acquired their name. ‘It came in a vision. A man appeared on a flaming pie and said unto them, “From this day on you are Beatles with an A.”’

Having agreed to release no new songs while The Beatles Anthology was coming out, Paul had a backlog of titles like ‘Little Willow’, the tribute to Maureen Starkey, and ‘Calico Skies’, written on Long Island in the aftermath of Hurricane Bob in 1991. Trawling through the Beatles’ oeuvre for the Anthology had also made him want to recreate their old spontaneity and sense of fun in the studio. To that end, Flaming Pie, co-produced by Jeff Lynne, included his two recent collaborations with Ringo, ‘Really Love You’ and ‘Beautiful Night’, as well as guest appearances by Lynne and Steve Miller. His son James debuted as a professional guitarist, playing lead in ‘Heaven on a Sunday’.

The album was a commercial and critical success, Paul’s first in the US Top 10 since Tug of War, 15 years earlier. In Britain, it reached number two, kept off the top spot by those newest ‘new Beatles’, the Spice Girls.

Yet the highest accolade his country could grant and the new bounce-back in his career seemed equally beside the point now that every waking moment was a line from ‘Yesterday’, written so lightly 30 years ago: ‘There’s a shadow hanging over me’. Linda’s latest bout of chemotherapy had left her too weak to accompany him to the ceremony, by which she too was ennobled as Lady McCartney. Before he left for the palace, she gave him a watch inscribed ‘To Paul, my knight in shining armour’.

Flaming Pie held its own clues to the underlying heartbreak. Linda’s cover photograph was a black and white head shot in which Paul looked atypically gaunt and haunted, more like his brother Michael. In the credits she was listed only for background vocals, as if she lacked the stamina to play keyboards any more.

The video for ‘Beautiful Night’ turned it into the most uplifting of love songs, acted out by a young married couple against a panorama of nocturnal Liverpool. A band performance by Paul and a gang of teenagers, plus Ringo, segued to a McCartneyesque family sing-song around the piano. But here and there were hauntingly sad glimpses of Linda, her golden hair all gone, aiming her camera from inside an old-fashioned red telephone kiosk.

Standing Stone, the classical piece on which Paul had been working for almost four years, along with everything else, was now finished at last. The final stages of rewriting and refining put an extra edge on the anguish he was suffering, for so much of the score had first been drafted when Linda was still well.

As always strictly compartmentalising professional and personal matters, he said little about the situation to his collaborator, David Matthews. But Matthews’ then wife, the American musician Jean Hasse, became friendly with Linda and knew the magnitude of what she and Paul were dealing with. ‘At that stage,’ Matthews recalls, ‘he had the greatest confidence that she’d get better.’

The 3000-year-old monolith on his Scottish farm had inspired a 75-minute symphony which, in Paul’s own half-modest, half-hubristic words, was ‘an attempt to describe the way Celtic Man might have wondered about the origins of life and the mystery of existence’. David Matthews had been his amanuensis for most of the composition process, but towards the end he’d sought help from four other noted classical arrangers, Steve Lodder, John Fraser, John Harle and finally the great Richard Rodney Bennett. ‘He used to call us all his Politburo,’ Matthews recalls.

For all this committee-input the music was entirely Paul’s and, for Matthews, ‘a remarkable piece of work… It wasn’t just a collection of short passages like pop songs; it had an inner cohesion and themes that repeated themselves all through.’ Although a choral work like the Liverpool Oratorio, it told no explicit story and utilised only a small part of the epic poem Paul had written alongside it. Here, too, the best possible outside help had been mobilised; on Allen Ginsberg’s advice, he asked the award-winning poet and librettist Tom Pickard to act as his sub-editor. However, the poem would appear only in printed form as a commentary on the music.

Because it was Paul, even this most mystical and cosmic of themes bore an unmistakable personal signature. The passage about human evolution, for instance, was entitled ‘Cell Growth’, the basis of every day’s anxiety about Linda. And at the end, an andante passage called ‘Celebration’, supposedly about the EMI centenary, was really yet another dedication to her, involuntarily touched with sadness: ‘Love is all that matters in the end/ Whatever time I have to spend will be with you.’

Standing Stone was premiered on 14 October with a gala performance at the Royal Albert Hall by the London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Lawrence Foster. With the CD version came a new portrait of the standing stone by Linda, this time in colour, silhouetted against a threatening Kintyre sky. It topped the classical music charts–even registering on some American pop charts–but its 75-minute length was an awkward one for the concert-stage and it would not be performed live anywhere near as often as the Liverpool Oratorio.

October was a month of triumphs for the McCartney name, albeit underlaid by continuing sadness and anxiety. After five years’ preparation, Paul’s authorised biography by Barry Miles was published in a characteristically classy hardback edition. Titled Many Years from Now–a quotation from ‘When I’m Sixty-Four’–it was an immediate bestseller, though many readers wondered why he’d chosen to end it before the Wings era, so omitting most of his years with Linda, with a brief coda about John’s death.

In the same week, Stella’s first collection for Chloé was shown in Paris with the help of her ‘mates’ Kate Moss, Naomi Campbell and Yasmin Le Bon. Paul and Linda were both seated beside the catwalk: he in the novel position of applauding someone else, she still with close-cropped hair, the result of prolonged chemotherapy, which gave her face a new gentleness and repose.

True to family principles, Stella’s clothes made use of neither fur nor leather and, despite their exalted mannequins, were designed for ordinary young women who wanted style but not to be shackled by it. The rave reviews were led by the famously particular Anna Wintour, editor of American Vogue. ‘This is one designer who shows that you can have it all,’ Wintour wrote. ‘She’s sexy and modern and truly her own person… The Stella look is that of the girl who, when she gets dressed, puts on her favourite pair of Manolos, a T-shirt dress she wore in high school, then rifles through her grandmother’s attic for a spare family tiara.’ It might have been a description of Linda onstage with Wings in the Seventies.

As 1997 ran out, the disease that had made Paul no longer the most envied of mortals suddenly seemed to be striking all around him. George had discovered a lump in his neck which was diagnosed as throat cancer, the result of a lifetime’s heavy smoking his Indian mysticism had never checked. After surgery and radiation treatment, he was pronounced in the clear. Not so fortunate was Derek Taylor, the Beatles’ former press officer–recently re-enlisted to work on The Beatles Anthology–who died in September from the same cause.

On 19 November, Standing Stone received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall (where once Beatlemaniacal stomping had shaken crooked the portraits of classical maestros on its walls). Afterwards, Paul took Linda to Arizona for the best therapy of all, her horses.

At Thanksgiving, her first husband, Mel See, came over to Tanque Verde for a barbecue, bringing his partner, Beverly Wilk. Softened by what Mel had done for their daughter, Heather–and the realisation of how short life was–Linda was friendlier to him than Beverly had ever seen her. He apologised for his failings as a husband and she did the same for having borne him ill will all those years. ‘The two of them made their peace,’ Beverly remembers. ‘Mel was always glad they both got to say their sorrys.’

Christmas marked the second anniversary of Linda’s diagnosis. Along with protracted bouts of chemotherapy, she had endured a bone-marrow transplant and tried numerous homeopathic remedies and alternative therapies, stopping short at swimming with dolphins, as one well-meaning friend recommended. She had even given up pot, even though it was the one thing that dulled the pain and the terror. Now there were grounds for cautious hope based on the fact that when talking about her cancer, her doctors did not use the dread word ‘aggressive’.

Paul’s Christmas gift to her was a pair of Shetland ponies and they held a large drinks party at which even the reclusive Spike Milligan made an appearance. Mary McCartney had just become engaged to a young television producer/director, Alistair Donald, and Linda was already starting to plan the wedding, scheduled for late 1998.

In March, she and Paul were back in Paris, with Ringo and Barbara, to see Stella unveil her spring and summer collection for Chloé. The show was another huge hit, squashing murmurs that her October debut had been beginner’s luck and that Chloé were only employing ‘a big name–in music’. Every journalist who asked Stella to name her greatest fashion influence got the same reply: ‘My mum.’

During the visit, the McCartneys had lunch with Paul’s tailor, Edward Sexton, who’d been part of Stella’s training. Sexton thought Linda had lost weight, but seemed ‘buoyant’ and, despite all the chemotherapy she’d been through, her hair was starting to grow back again.

It was an illusion. Her latest examination showed that the cancer had become aggressive and metastasised in her liver. There was no more hope.

Life kept an appearance of normality for a while. At Hog Hill, Paul was just finishing a second album with the young producer known as Youth under their alias of The Fireman–as before, recorded only on pagan festivals like the Summer Solstice and Hallowe’en. This album, Rushes, was not merely remixes of old Wings tracks but original ‘sound-collages’, and Linda also took part. ‘I recorded her talking about her horses, even outside, galloping past on horseback,’ Youth recalls. ‘The album was all about Linda, though I didn’t realise until later.’

Though he knew she was gravely ill, the subject was never discussed. ‘I just got this incredible vibe of melancholy. One day in the studio, Paul started singing an old song of his called “Let Me Love You Always”, and it was obvious who it was about and what he was thinking.’

Linda also recorded songs she had written for what she and Paul acknowledged would be a posthumous album. One, ‘Appaloosa’, celebrated the breed of speckled American horse she loved most. Another, ‘The Light Comes From Within’, was a belated bite-back at her detractors down the years, tinged with Dylan Thomas’s ‘rage against the dying of the light’: ‘You say I’m lazy, you say I’m a hick/ You’re fucking no one you stupid dick’.

Otherwise, she faced the inevitable with stoical calm. She had already made her will, nine months previously, and now looked to a future she would never see, discussing the further development of Linda McCartney Foods with its managing director, Tim Treharne, choosing work for a new exhibition of her photographs, even making arrangements for the first Christmas Paul and the children would have to spend without her. It was perhaps the most poignant of all the echoes of his mother: while dying of the same disease, Mary McCartney had made sure he and his brother Michael would have washed and ironed clothes after she’d gone.

To provide long-term security for Linda’s first and most vulnerable child, the title of a cottage on the estate was transferred to Heather’s name. The date of Mary’s wedding was brought forward to May–though, alas, even that would prove too optimistic.

She wanted to be in the place where she was always sure of complete privacy, so at the beginning of April Paul took her back to their simple, secret hideaway in Arizona. Just before they left, she took part in a photo-session with her friend, Chrissie Hynde. When they parted, Linda held back from her usual loving embrace, which told Chrissie she was saying goodbye for ever. ‘She didn’t want to be sentimental about it. She didn’t want to be sad.’

She kept up her anti-vivisection campaign to the last, spending £8000 to free some beagle puppies who’d been bound for the laboratory. Her final call–literally as the airport-bound helicopter powered up–was to her old animal-mad crony, Carla Lane. She told Carla only that she’d be away for five days and then would be wanting even more ‘rescued’ chickens to run around the garden. With Paul calling to her to hurry, she suddenly and uncharacteristically added, ‘I love you, Carla.’

At Tanque Verde, it became clear that she had only days to live–clear, that is, to everyone except Linda, who continued to go out riding until 15 April when her strength finally failed and she had to take to her bed.

Paul was faced with the decision of whether to tell her how close the end was, and decided against it. ‘I talked it over with her doctor and he said, “I don’t think she would want to know. She is such a strong, forward-thinking lady and such a positive girl that I don’t think it would do any good.”’

She died in the early hours of 17 April 1998, aged 56. ‘The kids and I were there when she crossed over,’ Paul would remember. ‘They each were able to tell her how much they loved her. Finally I said to her, “You’re on your beautiful Appaloosa stallion. It’s a fine spring day and the air is a clear blue…” I had barely got to the end of the sentence when she closed her eyes and gently slipped away.’

The international media were still totally unaware of Paul’s Arizona home and he was determined to keep it that way. The statement he issued via Geoff Baker, which was unquestioningly broadcast and printed around the world, said Linda had died in Santa Barbara, California, 400 miles to the west. ‘Santa Barbara’ had always been the code used at MPL whenever the family were vacationing in Tanque Verde.