According to John Waters, life is nothing without obsessions... but until you begin to flaunt yours, you don't deserve them. I have always been an obsessive person, but I must confess that by this point most of the objects of my obsession—Patty Hearst, office supplies, the Beatles—have been done to death. There remains one obsession, though, which I long to deserve: Linda McCartney.
At 14 I discovered just how much I could obsess about the Beatles, and Paul was my instant favorite. When I won an album from the local radio station, I gave my name as "Paula," and recorded the event in my Beatles notebook (which mostly consisted of which Beatles songs were played on the radio each day). Because Paul was a lefty, I trained myself to eat, throw, and gesture left-handed. So naturally I grew up mocking Linda Eastman (as I always referred to her), the untalented but tenacious woman who married the man I loved. When I gazed at my Band on the Run album cover, I blocked Linda's picture with my hand. When I went to a Wings concert in 1976, I squinted the whole time in a vain attempt not to see Linda behind her bank of keyboards, sneered at her silly stadium gestures and bat-squeak harmonies. I even blamed her, unfairly perhaps, for the fact that Paul became more and more prone to rock cliché. (As a solo artist, he really let those oooh momma's fly.) My appreciation for Paul's solo records peaked with an enthusiastic review of Back to the Egg in '79 for my school newspaper; when Paul recorded "Ebony and Ivory" with Stevie Wonder, I dumped him for good.
No matter what, though, Paul stayed married to Linda. In fact, he was the only Beatle who stayed married; the others dumped their first wives for some version of a trophy bride. Linda outlasted Maureen Starkey (the hairdresser's assistant who married Ringo in 1963), and she certainly fared better than the harshly cuckolded Cynthia Lennon, whose only act of revenge on John and Yoko was publishing her autobiography, A Twist of LennonŠ twice. And although she was constantly mocked as some kind of useless appendage to Paul, Linda got more mileage out of her career as a photographer than Patti Boyd Harrison, for example, got out of modeling: Forbidden to work by George, Patti hoisted a skull-and-crossbones atop their spooky mansion, then left him for Eric Clapton. Linda even started a vegetarian food company that, before it went out of business, briefly outsold Paul's records.
Rock's Linda has been the butt of cheap jokes ("What do you call a dog with wings?" "Linda McCartney.") and the object of a studied non-recognition. Many Years From Now, the official McCartney hagiography, draws an affectionate portrait of Linda as a dedicated mother and photographer, but it has nothing to say about her role in Wings. Rolling Stone's Women in Rock encyclopedia doesn't even mention her; and there certainly won't be any tribute covers of "Cook of the House," or "Seaside Woman" —her solo(!) reggae(!!) single under the name Suzy and the Red Stripes. Linda seemed to mock herself as well, displaying through the '70s and '80s a series of horrifying haircuts and preening "rock" poses that both mirrored and distorted Paul's own public image. Her appearance, as well as her breezy lack of musical talent, had to be a joke. She certainly seemed to take it all in good-natured stride, though; she just kept producing those kids, taking those pictures, and getting busted for pot. "I got all this slagging," she said in a 1976 interview, "It never really brought me down much, though."
What about Paul's Linda, though? John and Yoko may have had their Double Fantasy, but Paul and Linda lived a double reality, which, like any image that is doubled or traced over, stands out in cartoonish relief. Mr. and Mrs. McCartney transmogrified into a grotesquely cozy parody of a rock marriage: As his sturdy, sloppy, good soul and helpmate, Linda made it possible for Paul to wrap himself up in a hermetic middlebrow cocoon. Although songs like "Another Day," "Jet," and "Band on the Run" shine with the poppy brightness McCartney is so good at creating, what's with the album's worth of unforgivable songs about songs ("Rock Show," "Silly Love Songs")? For most artists, this self-referential genre is lightning before death; McCartney somehow hung on.
Worse, Paul even stopped being interesting as a rock star. Seemingly eventless (except for pot busts), Paul and Linda's public image stretches on and on in a flip-book of goggle-eyed grins and thumbs-up signs. Throughout the '70s, the various members of Wings morphed into each other: Jimmy McCulloch replaced Henry McCullough, and Joe English replaced Geoff Britton. Denny Laine looked more like a McCartney than Paul's own brother. By any measure, and certainly when compared with John and Yoko's extravagant public life, Paul and Linda's bland double reality is almost completely without historical or moral reference, until they finally started coming out as animal rights activists. If this is reality, give us back our fantasies of how rock stars are supposed to live!
But the recorded-in-his-living-room quality of Paul's post-Beatles work, while often banal and irritating, can be charming as well. In "On Literature and Art," Camille Paglia traces the Beatles' output through its Early, High, and Late styles: "At the end of that tripartite pattern," she writes, "major artists revolt, resimplify." I listen to Paul's first solo album (as I did every day for two weeks while writing this), and besides being charmed all over again by its simplicity, I hear something else. McCartney, for the first time, here addresses a real person - Lovely Linda, not Lovely Rita. He leaves behind the idealized love that he warbled about through the '60s ("And I Love Her," "Here, There, and Everywhere") and sings, to his earthy new mate, "tonight I just want to stay in and be with you." McCartney, pop music's compulsive observer, now turns his gaze on a real person, Linda, who in turn is and can be nothing but herself—the Cook of the House.
Then, early in 1996, it was announced that Linda had breast cancer, and she became my icon. I had just been diagnosed with breast cancer myself.
I guess I figured that Linda, married to a man worth $500 million, would get the best care possible. And that Linda, like me a vegetarian, would seek out the treatment most compatible with a preference for holistic medicine. If Linda stayed healthy, I reasoned, so would I. (When you're healthy, 35, and diagnosed out of the blue with cancer, nothing makes sense: So soon enough anything makes sense.)
At the time I was traveling once a month from Boston to Chicago to see a doctor who treated cancer with both conventional and alternative therapies. I fantasized that Linda would become a patient at the same clinic. I imagined us chatting while our chemo drugs dripped. Paul would run out to buy us magazines and more pot.
Sometimes I substituted a lesser fantasy, that Paul would simply call me on the phone to get my opinion about my doctor. In my family, "Linda McCartney" soon became shorthand for any complicated fantasy about crossing paths with a celebrity.
Fantasies notwithstanding, I marked off each month of treatment with dread. In six months I would be done with chemo, and then what? Would the cancer, held at bay by six rounds of poisoning, jump out from around the corner and get me again? I wouldn't go to support groups and could hardly speak to the other patients at the clinic. I was sure they'd all started out like me, with treatable cancer, and that they were all going to die. The pale, pale woman with cancer in her liver who walked around with a portable morphine drip—I couldn't look at her, her pain scared me too much. The tan, cheerful woman with recurring breast cancer who played golf every day—I was sure cancer would eventually come back and cancel her game.
But Linda McCartney—I wanted to know the size of her tumor, whether she was getting tamoxifen or methotrexate. Was she trying acupuncture or homeopathy or Chinese herbs? Was she eating dairy? fat? fruit?
Linda kept quiet about her cancer. I was the one who ended up in the newspaper, interviewed by the Boston Globe for an article on alternative cancer treatment. The day the article came out I got 10 phone calls from strangers. All that year the calls kept coming from people who told me their sad cancer stories, unloaded their anxiety on me, asked for reassurance that they were doing the right thing. In a sauna one day, a woman recognized me from my photo in the Globe and told me all about her cancer, her treatment, her surgery, her scar. A week later she showed up where I worked, wanting to tell me more. I wanted them all to go away and leave me out of it. I didn't want to be their cancer icon.
But Linda remained my icon. Linda was rich, she had connections, she could have anything she wanted. So naturally she would live. Then, one Sunday afternoon this past spring, my father called to let me know that Linda's death had just been announced on CNN. "I thought she was okay," I whispered. "No," my father said emphatically, with the authority of the news junkie, "her cancer spread to her liver." He thought it was just Beatles news.
I hung up and sat on the edge of my bed looking at my knees for a long time. If Linda's cancer had spread to her liver, what was mine doing? I didn't even know where my liver was. I imagined Paul crying, sitting on his bed, looking at his own knees. I tried to distract myself by scavenging information about her death from the media.
I found nothing much in print, however. The rock press, which had indeed slagged her for so many years, was now calling her "Lady McCartney," praising her to the skies for being half of rock's most enduring partnership. Even Yoko had some sisterly words for her in Rolling Stone. In a revisionist haze, Yoko wrote of her and Linda sitting around in someone's living room, holding hands with their men while the guys talked shop. (What they had in common besides their husbands, Yoko wrote, was that people made fun of them.)
Searching online for details didn't help, either. Unlike novelist Kathy Acker, another hard-on-the-ears woman with breast cancer, Linda chose not to publicize the details of her struggle to live. Acker's last days are documented on the Web, but the day Linda died, the first thing I found online about her was this:
The world was saddened today to learn that the wife of ex-Beetle [sic] member John [sic] McCartney had died of cancer. Linda McCartney was a vegetarian and had written a cookbook. If you want to discuss this now, or more prurient matters, our girls are standing by. Click it baby! http://www.FONE-SEX.com
I quickly left the Web and returned to People magazine. Though I'd once covered up Linda's face on the album covers, now I scrutinized her image. I wanted to know everything, everything about this woman: How did she die? Did she know she was dying? These were questions I couldn't bring myself to ask a support group, but maybe I didn't really want the answers. Maybe I needed to keep a safer distance from pain and death. Whatever the reason, I was waiting to be enlightened by a woman I was getting obsessed with.
Linda McCartney was my laminated, untouchable good luck charm. It was (perhaps) her fate to marry Paul and therefore to enter my consciousness; it was (perhaps) her fate to have cancer. If she hadn't existed, I doubt that Olivia Newton-John or Betty Ford would have been my cancer icon by default. Some vestige of my teenage jealousy resonated enough to make Linda important to me as an adult. I picked Linda because she was absurd but real. And she never posed naked with her husband on an album cover.
