Philip Norman: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.
Barry Miles:The last eight meetings were to go over the text, literally line-by-line as Paul had the power of final edit. That way he didn't have to self-censor himself during my questioning. Sometimes it seemed to be just a couple of old codgers sitting there, rubbing out chins, Paul asking, 'What was the name of that chick?' Naturally I put a few things in the manuscript that I expected him to take out, hoping that this would protect other slightly contentious parts. In the event he left in the references to experimenting with cocaine and other drugs and only asked for two changes. One was a girlfriend who he had seen on-and-off for some years right up until the day before his marriage to Linda, who we cut out completely, and the other change was one of tone. Linda had been diagnosed with cancer and throughout the taping of the questions this fact hung heavily over the proceedings. As the book concerned only the Beatles period, with a final section on the death of John Lennon, it was inevitably very much about Jane Asher as well. In some sections, though by no means all, Paul asked for the phrase 'and Jane' to be taken out when I was describing some event they had attended together 'because it makes the book seem like the Paul and Jane story.' I could understand why he didn't want it to seem that way, particularly as Linda was ill, and so I made all the requested changes.
Philip Norman: 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.
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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.
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