Sisterhood

Digital Art Collage by Stella Kalaw

When I did a DNA test, there was a surprise. Not the 50% Ashkenazi Jewish side from my dad, but from the 42% I inherited from my mother’s British roots—she was born in a thatched cottage in an English village. The rest is from Norway and northern Germany, I assume remnants of the Viking invaders.

Recently, Ancestry sent me a detailed breakdown of that 42%, showing that my British ancestors all came from around Liverpool. Liverpool, home of my beloved Paul McCartney and the other Beatles! No wonder I’ve always loved them so much, I thought. We’re family.

Twenty-six years ago, I wrote this story about Paul and his first wife, Linda. Today I’m glad to report that my favourite Beatle, who after Linda’s death embarked on a disastrous second marriage, is very happily married a third time.

Not, for some reason, to me. I guess he knew we’re related.

Here’s what I wrote in 1998:

A few weeks ago, on a sunny Sunday morning, I was part of an important annual event, a five-kilometre run and walk through the deserted streets of downtown Toronto. The event benefits research into breast cancer and has been growing steadily. When the starting gun finally boomed this year, 12,000 people began to move.

I’ve done the race before and usually think, while running, about my mother and my cousin Barb, long-term survivors of breast cancer. This year, though, a famous stranger was on my mind: Linda McCartney, wife of Beatle Paul, who died this spring of breast cancer at the age of fifty-six.  

Linda’s death seemed wrong purely on medical grounds; she was vigorous and youthful, a vegetarian with a self-consciously healthy lifestyle. We’ve all seen pictures of Linda and Paul mucking about on their farm in Scotland, with children, horses, and sheepdogs, no visible stress, the freshest air and food possible. And her husband, one of the richest men in Britain, was there nothing he could do? Nothing. Neither healthy farm life and veggies, nor all the money on earth, could save her. What hope then for us stressed and ordinary mortals, living in smoggy cities, eating additive-laced burgers, without the benefit of limitless wealth and fame?

Besides forcing me to reflect gloomily on my own mortality, Linda’s death also reminded me of the great bond we once shared. For some time, Linda and I felt the same way about the same man. In 1964 and ’65, I dreamed constantly, hungrily, about Paul McCartney, and wrote reams of stories about us as a couple, which progressed from him helping me with my arithmetic homework, to us roaring around Europe in his Aston Martin. Mostly, though, we’re married and sitting by the fire, and he is singing to me.

Unfortunately, the closest I came to Paul McCartney was the eighth-row centre of a Beatles concert, where I screamed and waved his picture and he smiled down, right at me; whereas the closest Linda came was that she married him and had his children and lived with him for thirty years. Oh, well. Though she got him, we both loved him. There’s a sisterhood in that. 

I hated her back then, of course, though not as viciously as I’d hated Paul’s first girlfriend, Jane Asher. Jane only wanted Paul’s money and fame, that was sure, whereas my pure love was for his poetic musical soul. But then along came Linda. She was a groupie, we all knew that, a flaky American photographer who insisted, God help us, on singing with Paul’s band, banging the tambourine. It was embarrassing; how could Paul permit it? Linda’s singing was better than Yoko’s, that was the only good thing you could say about it. 

Linda’s music making, and marriage to Paul, didn’t concern me at all once real men appeared in my life. I went through an image change, too, recanting my love for the cute Beatle. It was now clear John Lennon was the interesting one; cool girls with insight and depth of character had chosen John. How could I have been so shallow?

Paul’s post-Beatles records were so ... cheerful. Yes, he often wrote every song on the album and sometimes played all the instruments himself: many kinds of guitars, keyboards, wind instruments, even drums. But the content, over and over, was lightweight, about love. He and Linda seemed to spend their lives in Wellington boots birthing lambs, when they weren’t getting arrested somewhere in the world for marijuana possession. Meanwhile, John and Yoko were doing important things, like lying in bed agitating for peace.

But through the years, as the McCartneys and I aged together, I realized how wrong my impression was of them both. Linda was a strong, idealistic, kind-hearted woman who found her niche as a photographer, made an important contribution to the causes of animal rights and vegetarianism, and went on standing by her man with her tambourine, no matter what we thought.

And I now take enormous pride in being an almost lifelong Paul girl. My favourite Beatle, beneath his occasional sappiness, has a musical heart of breathtaking originality, lyricism, and force. Sir Paul McCartney, with and without John Lennon, has produced some of the most beautiful melodies ever written.  

And while he did so, unlike almost all his rock star colleagues, he remained passionately in love with the same woman. He and Linda fashioned that rare thing, a long-lived, visibly happy and mutually fulfilling marriage. Despite their wealth and goldfish bowl life, they raised their children normally, with all going to local public schools. Their second child Stella, now famous in her own right as a fashion designer, speaks with down-to-earth respect and fondness of both her parents. It’s hard to accept that when she says “my dad,” or when I see a picture of a grief-stricken, jowly man with grey hair, it’s actually the baby-faced boy who sang in my heart so long ago. Yesterday.

On Paul’s latest CD, released last year, there are, as usual, several exquisitely tender love songs. His teenage son James plays a great guitar solo on one track. And there, singing in the background, is Linda.

“And if I only had one love/ Yours would be the one I’d choose,” Paul sings.  

“You and me together/Nothing feels so good,” he sings. 

She seemed to have everything a woman could want, but Linda McCartney died in April, of breast cancer, at the age of fifty-six. This year, I ran for her, and for those who lost her.