During the divorce with Heather Mills, some stories about Paul and Linda's relationship came to light that deserve to be discussed. But before that, a little (big) review of that relationship.
Philip Norman: On 10 April, to mark the first anniversary of Linda's death, her friends Chrissie Hynde and Carla Lane staged A Concert for Linda: Here, There and Everywhere at the Royal Albert Hall, with proceeds going to her favourite animal charities. A week earlier, in a nice coincidence, Mary had presented Paul with his first grandchild, Arthur Alistair.
Howard Sounes: 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.
Danny Fields: This whole subject, which as you have seen did not interest Linda in the least, has several interesting aspects. Her mother was very active in the Federation of Jewish Philanthropies, and was quite accustomed to being both Jewish and elite her entire life. It was indeed possible to be both, and quite impossible for Louise Sr. to be anything else. And here's an irony: Paul McCartney, upon the birth of his first grandchild, Arthur, in April 1999, a year after Linda died, said to several friends at different times, 'He's a very clever little lad. His mother is Jewish and his father is Christian, so he chose to be born between Passover and Easter.' How, this is astonishing and quite lovely. Mary, Paul and Linda's daughter and the mother of little Arthur, is of course one-half Jewish. ; Paul doesn't say 'hair, he says, 'His mother is Jewish'. We now have Paul being more upfront about Linda's religion than Linda ever was. No one had ever heard him describe his children as 'Jewish' before - Chrissie Hynde thinks that now that Linda is gone, Paul is cherishing everything about her even more than he did during all their years together. Including her religion of birth, which she cared about not at all.
Philip Norman: The concert, later shown on BBC television, featured Elvis Costello, the Pretenders, George Michael, Marianne Faithfull, Tom Jones, Sinéad O'Connor, Des'ree, Lynden David Hall, Chris Elliott, Johnny Marr from the Smiths, Neil Finn from Crowded House, Heather Small from M People and the South African choir Ladysmith Black Mambazo. [...] Paul himself was not scheduled to perform but, buoyed up by the homage of his fellow musicians and the waves of Linda-love from the 5000-strong audience, he decided to close the show, backed by the Pretenders and Costello. He dedicated his set to 'my beautiful baby and our beautiful children, who are here tonight' and added a proud mention of his week-old grandson. Surprisingly, he didn't open with any of the Beatles, Wings or post-Wings songs he had written for Linda. Instead, he chose Ricky Nelson's 'Lonesome Town', a piece of saccharine American pop-the kind the Beatles would ultimately annihilate-which the two of them had listened to thousands of miles apart, when it came out in 1958. The lyrics were self-dramatising teenage drivel, typical of their time. But there wasn't a heart that didn't ache for him as he sang:
Maybe down in Lonesome Town
I can learn to forget.
A month later to the day, he was at the Dorchester Hotel in London for a further tribute to Linda. The occasion was the Daily Mirror's first Pride of Britain Awards to people who had performed acts of heroism, faced up to fearful challenges or in some way 'made a difference'. Paul was to present a Linda McCartney Award for Animal Welfare to the crusading vegetarian Juliet Gellatley. One of the awards for 'outstanding bravery' went to 24-year-old Helen Smith who had lost both legs and both hands to meningitis, yet managed to lead a fulfilling life, studying biology, even learning to play the piano. She was introduced by another symbol of triumph over disability, the model and charity campaigner Heather Mills whose left leg had been partially amputated after a traffic accident in 1993. (...) Heather's autobiography, Out on a Limb, published four years earlier, had created a sensation. It described a horrendous upbringing in the north-eastern town of Washington by a feckless mother and an unloving, cruel father, in which she witnessed habitual domestic violence, suffered sexual abuse, engaged in pretty crime and spent some time with her younger sister, Fiona, in a local authority children's home. When she was nine, her mother ran off with another man, leaving her and her two siblings at the mercy of her father, who was subsequently imprisoned for fraud. She recounted how at the age of 13, by then living with her mother in London, she had run away from home, first getting a job with a funfair on Clapham Common, then living rough, stealing food from supermarkets and sleeping in a cardboard box in the hobo-city under the arches at Waterloo station, with alcoholic tramps urinating only inches from her head. At the age of 18, while working as a waitress in a Soho club-just around the corner from MPL-she met a businessman named Alfie Karmal, ten years her senior, who encouraged her to take up modelling and to whom (at her own suggestion) she was briefly married. After she had suffered two ectopic pregnancies, Karmal sought to cheer her up by sending her on a skiing holiday to Yugoslavia. The gesture backfired when she fell in love with her instructor and refused to return home. As a result, she was there when Yugoslavia splintered into its pre-Communist Balkan states in 1991 and numerous vicious civil wars broke out. Having come to love the region and its people, Heather set up a refugee crisis-centre in Slovenia and accompanied food and medical convoys into neighbouring Croatia where the suffering was even worse, often under fire and with the dead and dying all around her. With her return to London came the episode that would change her life. One sunny Sunday afternoon in August 1993, she and her then boyfriend, Raffaele Mincione, were walking from De Vere Gardens in Kensington towards Hyde Park. As Heather crossed the intervening main road on a pedestrian crossing, she was struck by a police motorcyclist travelling at speed-part of a convoy rushing to answer what later proved to be a false alarm from Princess Diana at nearby Kensington Palace. The impact tore off her left leg below the knee; as she lay on the ground, she could see her severed foot a few yards away, with traffic swerving to avoid it. In hospital, more and more of her leg kept becoming infected and having to be amputated, to the point where she feared she might lose the knee also. At this time, a female social worker paid her a visit and, in the guise of kindliness, warned that she must prepare never to be attractive to men again. 'If I lost my arms and my legs, darling,' Heather replied, 'I'd still be more attractive than you.'
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SachbücherI was asked to write Paul and Linda's story in the same way as I wrote Paul and Jane's... So here it is.
