Obituaries: Linda McCartney 1942 – 1998

To understand Linda McCartney’s importance to the alternative community, it’s first necessary to grasp the role of the Beatles. Even though she came along at the end of the group’s tenure, in many ways she (along with Yoko) was a member of the band. Some, in fact, blamed her for the demise of the band. In any event, she would be destined to live the last 29 years of her life in the shadow of the group’s memory, and in the shadow of her husband Paul - even though she was an accomplished person in her own right.

But first, the Beatles.

The hippies didn’t start anything new. Long before the heyday of Woodstock Nation, back in the supposed bad old days of the fifties, “beat” writers like Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsburg were writing about the virtues of eastern mysticism, sexual freedom and marijuana. By the mid-sixties, Tim Leary and Richard Alpert were preaching the gospel of expanded consciousness through hallucinogenics, getting fired from their positions at Harvard in the process. But, to the public, these were all marginal people with limited appeal. It took four mop-top “clean” kids from Liverpool, renowned for love songs that were sappy in the extreme, to bring alternative ideas to the mainstream.

It started in May of 1967, with Paul McCartney’s public admission that he’d taken LSD - an announcement that meant the notion of expanded consciousness through chemistry had hit the mainstream. The following month, just in time for the “summer of love,” the Beatles released Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album that seemed to legitimize, all at once, the drug culture, eastern philosophy, and the alienation of youth. Later that year, when the four traveled to India to study meditation under Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the group was off and running as the standard bearers of hippiedom. The flower children may have been listening to the likes of the Airplane or the Dead, but they were holding up the former Fab Four as their spokespeople to legitimize their cause.

Over the years, since the very public break-up of the Beatles, it’s been surprising to some of us that it’s been sappy Paul McCartney who’s upheld the values that the alternative community holds dear. While it was heavyweight John who was able to articulate and expand upon the ideas of the counter culture, it’s been the often silly and romantic Paul who has managed to selectively incorporate those ideas into a sane and sensible lifestyle. Undoubtedly, this would not have been true if not for the influence of his wife, Linda McCartney.

Over the years, the couple has become known for their vegetarianism and for their work for animal rights. “I’ve always been an animal lover,” Linda told Ladies Home Journal in a 1994 interview, “but I can remember the exact moment we became vegetarians. Shortly after we were married, we were eating lunch at our farm, watching the sheep gamboling outside. Then, suddenly, Paul pointed to the leg of lamb on our plates - and that was the end of that.”

Her vegetarianism became somewhat of an obsession with her and although she had great compassion for animals, she evidently had little patience for people whose diet includes meat. “Linda’s like me on this issue,” Chrissie Hynde of the Pretenders once said. “She doesn’t like meat eaters. To us, if you kill animals for your pleasure, you’re my enemy. I don’t want you around my children and my home.”

She turned her passion for the veggie lifestyle into something of a cottage industry. In 1989 her cookbook, Linda McCartney’s Home Cooking became a best seller. After that, she started her own line of meatless frozen entrees, Linda McCartney’s Home Style Cooking, developing her recipes in the kitchen of her home.

In an age when many yuppie New Agers talk a good talk until asked to contribute their good fortune to a worthwhile cause, Linda took the initiative to use her and her husband’s wealth in a responsible manner. Since the late 1980s, she and her husband have bought several parcels of land in the British Isles, to prevent them from being used for hunting. “She’ll ask if there are houses on the land,” a friend said. “If there are, she won’t buy it. She’ll say to me, ‘Houses equal people; people equal meat eaters. Forget it.’”

Perhaps her greatest achievement was as a wife and mother. These days, when most marriages seemed doomed to divorce from the very beginning, her relationship with her husband seemed extremely close. Immediately after her death, it was widely reported that except for the times when Paul was in jail on marijuana charges, the couple only spent one night away from each other during 29 years of marriage. Of their marriage, one close friend said, “I didn’t see them as the perfect celebrity couple, I saw them as the perfect married couple.”

Her children (three by Paul and one from a former marriage) were raised away from the trappings of privilege and celebrity. They attended public school and were reared in a household, without servants, that accented a simple lifestyle. “What do people really need?” Linda asked. “A roof over their head, food, proudness for their family, a yard where their kids can run around. They need simple things - not big, gaudy things.”

However, all of this came with a price. Being married to one of the biggest rock stars of all time usually overshadowed her personal achievements. In addition to being blamed for the break-up of the Beatles, she was ridiculed by audiences and the press for her performances with her husband’s band Wings, even though it was Paul who insisted that she be a member of the band.

Although she was an established photographer before her marriage, gaining fame for her portraits of rock stars, she later had trouble being taken seriously in that regard. In later years she did regain some success as a photographer, publishing several volumes of her work and having showings at London area venues.

“I think she has been wildly underestimated because of being married to Paul,” British artist Brian Clark said several years back. “I’ve been photographed by almost all the so-called great portrait photographers, but Linda took a picture of me quite recently and I was knocked out. The picture looks so profoundly how I feel. And she got it without any of the usual fuss. There was no big tripod and lights - no bravado. She was just very gentle and soft and she got a picture that lays me bare.”

Evidently, this simple approach was the keynote of her life. Perhaps Linda herself put it best: “My outlook is that little things are the trip. I’m very happy with very little. Maybe that’s why I have so much.”

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