Playboy Interview: Paul and Linda McCartney
by Joan Goodman
Once, buck in the mists of the Sixties, there was a partnership that, in addition to being the heart of a legendary performing group, turned out an incredible number of pop standards during a short, unparalleled burst of creativity. Both partners went on to further work and success, but it was their public spats and private tensions, their love and hate, the dynamics that shaped their work during those few years that became the grist for countless articles and books, gossip and, ultimately, mythology.
One of the two, John Lennon, has been dead for nearly four years. The other, Paul McCartney, after a lifetime of parrying with the press, remains an enigma. He had always been the Beatle who talked the most and said the least. In the early days, his friendliness and cheekiness made him an ideal spokesman for the Beatles; but since the group's breakup, his own penchant for sentimentality and commercialism, together with the posthumous adulation of the harder-edged Lennon, have left him with a public-relations image he is unable to shake. He is seen as clever but superficial, even managing to have sounded flip about his partner's assassination ("It's a drag").
After the years of touring and recording successfully with his new band, Wings, which included his wife, Linda, and later producing several solo albums to mixed success. Pun! became even more reclusive, emerging into the limelight only to plug a new song or to be arrested rather spectacularly from time to time for possession of pot.
In the decade before his death in December 1980, Lennon reinforced the public perception of McCartney with often vitriolic and sneering comments on his music. He made fun of the easy, catchy tunes McCartney churned out, seemingly at will. McCartney would job back, . but his tendency to distance himself from the public became more pronounced. When he did speak, he could sound self-serving and slick. Linda McCartney has not fared very well in the press, either: Often pictured as cold and presumptuous in joining her husband's band, she has been described the same way Yoko Ono was—as the interloper, one of the two women who "broke up" the Beatles.
These days, McCartney is once again in the public eye, actively promoting "Give My Regards to Broad Street," a movie he wrote and in which both he and Linda star. He is giving some of the required answers to the usual questions, as he has been doing for more than 20 years. But nearly a year ago, the McCartneys began a series of extraordinary conversations with free-lance journalist Joan Goodman. She suggested to them that they ■ expand their talks and publish them as a "Playboy Interview," to which they consented, and the sessions continued off and on for nearly six months. It is in this "Interview" that Paul talks for the first time in depth about his relationship with John, his reaction to his death, the events surrounding the Beatles' breakup, his feelings about himself and his thoughts on his music with and without the Beatles. Linda, who has always found it difficult to "explain" herself, also talks frankly about her image and her husband's work, as well as her own.
Meanwhile, for the record and for anyone who has been on Mars during the past 20 years, here is a summary of the Paul and Linda McCartney story—thus far:
Born in Liverpool on June 18, 1942, to James and Mary McCartney, a cotton salesman and a nurse, Paul, with his younger brother, Michael, grew up on council estates, where his mother served as a midwife. His father had been a smalltime professional musician and was bent on self-improvement; his mother was, in Paul's words, "madly aspiring for her sons," hoping Paul would become a doctor. When he was 14, she died of cancer. His father continued their upbringing, surrounded by a multitude of aunts and cousins to ensure familial warmth. McCartney says, "We were like a big Italian family, someone always dandling a baby on his knee."
Adolescence was nevertheless a painful time for him and, perhaps, the source of a lifetime process of internalizing his feelings, putting on a cheery face—and sublimating it all into music. At 15, he began writing songs. It was that year that he met John Lennon, through a mutual friend, and later joined Lennon's group, the Quarrymen, named after his Liverpool school. Although untrained himself, McCartney brought technique to the group and to Lennon; his father had encouraged Paul's talent and had taught him harmony. He and Lennon hit it off well once Lennon was assured that McCartney's ability was no threat to his leadership of the group that was to become the Beatles.
By all accounts, Lennon and McCartney were supposed to be opposite sides of the same coin. John was sharp and aggressive; paul, soft and lighthearted. Observers were always eager to characterize and define their individual roles. Yet while Lennon was the leader of the group, it was McCartney who was its driving force. Lennon could be careless, disparaging of the Beatles. As George Martin, who produced virtually all of the Beatles' records, said to PLAYBOY, "Paul eventually became the one member of the group who always took an active interest in everything the group did. John tended to work very hard at his bit, then leave the rest and walk away. George, too. Paul got involved in everything."
In 1969, just days before Lennon married Yoko Ono, McCartney married Linda Eastman, a 27-year-old New York rock photographer who had a young child, Heather, by a brief first marriage. Born in 1941 in Scarsdale, New York, to a successful attorney (and later mistakenly identified as an Eastman Kodak heiress), Kinda became a photographer of ■ rock-V-roll celebrities. She confirmed in an aside to PLAYBOY that when she first met the Beatles, it was John who interested her; but soon she fell in love with Paul, who...
https://www.beatles.ru/books/articles.asp?article_id=1349
